If you don’t already know, details of Patch 3.2 Paladin changes has been released by Eyonix two days ago.

You can read it from the source here or at WoW Insider.

If you’re lazy to read I took the initiative of summarizing the changes. Read on:

Holy

1. Flash of Light places a HoT(Heal over Time) effect on any target with Sacred Shield on them. This is somewhat vague, does it mean Flash of Light becomes a HoT on targets with Sacred Shield? Or it adds an additional HoT effect on top of Flash of Light? What if I want a Flash of Light and not a HoT on that target with Sacred Shield?

Rating: 3/5? (Needs more specifics.)

2. Beacon of Light gets a big buff, any heals on a target, regardless of health, heals the tank with Beacon of Light. If you still don’t understand, it means placing a Holy Light on a raid member with 100% HP will still heal the target with Beacon of Light. This is a significant buff!

Rating: 5/5

3. Due to above buffs, Illumination will be nerfed. Reducing Illumination’s mana refund from 60% to 30% would make mana regeneration a issue for Holy paladin. But fear not, adjustments will be made to Replenishment and buffs to MP5 to balance things out (Right… Balance…That turned out well last time.). Gear selection will be affected by this, as CRIT might become a lower priority, let’s leave this to the theorycrafters to crunch it out.

Rating: 2.5/5

Protection

1. Ardent Defender gets some proper adjustments, so that any attack that would reduce the paladin to 35% health or below has its damage reduced instead of while the paladin is at 35% health or below. Also once every 2 minutes any attacks that would kill the paladin would instead set the paladin’s health to a certain percentage.

Rating: 4/5

2. Blessing of Sanctuary will be getting buffed, no details on this yet. But they want to make it the blessing of choice for tanks. So it should be buffed significantly.

Rating: ?/5

3. Block will be changed over time, but for now the effects of bonus block value will be doubled. Currently Block does not provide sufficient mitigation, my friend can attest to that. Boss hits him for 20,000, he only blocks 1500 of it, Block isn’t as valuable as before.

Rating: ?/5 (Needs more details)

Retribution

1. Seal of Blood/the Martyr will be removed and Seal of Corruption/Vengeance will be buffed. Once there is 5 stacks of the debuff, on each swing the paladin will deal 33% weapon damage as Holy, with critical strikes doing double damage. Seal of Command will be reworked to deal 36% weapon damage on every swing, and deals substantially less judgement damage. Finally working on the Seals, but lots to be done here.

Rating: 3/5

2. Exorcism has a cast time of 1.5 seconds but can be used on players again. Honestly, not helpful in PvP as paladins need to be chasing down enemies instead of casting. Would be better if the cast time was 1 second. More like a bandage fix.

Rating: 1/5

3. Art of War makes not only Flash of Light instant, but also Exorcism. Nice idea, considering Art of War procs were not really contributing to PvE DPS. This makes the talent more viable in both PvP and PvE.

Rating: 4/5

4. Crusader Strike cooldown reduced to 4 seconds from 6 seconds, but damage reduced to 75%. Seriously, 4 seconds, 6 seconds, it doesn’t matter. IT’S STILL A 41 POINT MELEE STRIKE, IT NEEDS SOMETHING, A DoT, SOMETHING.

Rating: 1/5

5. Vindication reworked to target attack power. Primarily a PvP talent, this rework only targets melee classes but not magic-users. Would be more useful if it reduced spell power as well.

Rating: 1/5

These are some promising changes, hope they go in the right direction.

For full details on Patch 3.2, check the latest patch notes at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html