Ret finally has AP > Spell Power modifier, prot has shield bash, and with crushing blows being taken out, prot pallys with finally be able to stack just stam, making them as good as warriors nearly. Holy on the other hand has seen less of a major change as the other two, but the new talents with the aoe heal and the "prayer of mending" style of shield is nice as well. But that talent is shared between the three.Retribution in PvE:
As we have seen, and what some people are complaining about, retribution paladins becoming raid mana and hp batteries. This comes from the new ret talent Judgements of the Wise, a fix to the previous talent Sanctified Judgement. This makes us the "melee shadowpriest" offering the same if not more AP that spriests can return. Since it works of judgement damage, the AP>Spell power conversion talent really boosts this, as with watching many videos of rets doing solo grinding, they rarely have to drink. Also another great change in pve, not pvp in my honest opinion, is the fact that our gear is now simply strength stamina. An example can be found here. This allows us to have an easier gearing up process in early raiding, such as was the problem in Burning Crusade, while most classes could go in with their dungeon blues, ret had to have its tier sets just to perform well in the beginning I.E. Kara, Mag, and Gruul. After these however more dps plate came around, making it a tad easier. Still, the mana problem comes into play, this has been fixed with the new Judgements of the Wise talent, and now our abilities cost % of our mana rather than base costs. A PvE spec I have made can be found here (using the current beta build).
Retribution in PvP:
My favorite thing about my paladin :), and what I am looking forward to the most in WotLK. What made me really excited was this video on YouTube. Even though I'm sure it will be toned down for live, this shows a decent change in how we will work, and a show of new abilities, and things that have been fixed. One of my favorite changes is in the department of Hand of Freedom. If you do not know about the Hand and Blessing system, it is now something giving us the ability to keep Might while using Freedom, or on our teammate while using Sacrafice, and HoP. With the new talent Art of War. This will allow us to be able to counter rogues and other stunning classes such as Mace MS wars, and other Paladins. Thus saving us a trinket we can save for another cc that can
be alot worse. Another great change is Avenging Wrath, while losing 10% damage and giving 20% to healing, no longer causes Forbearence, giving us a chance to either Divine shield and Avenging wrath to either heal or continue being offensive, or gives the chance to be defensive with DS and then come out offensively using AW. Once again, another great change is the AP>Spell Power change, and that Spell Power will be included in our gear now. Thus increasing our total damage output from seals, and give us an opprotunity to be a decent off healer in arena and other pvp situations. If you watch some videos on YouTube you will see that we are now healing for half of our hp with every Holy Light, and it only gets better as the spell power scales with gear (woot :P) so we will not see a replay of what happend at level 70 in BC where our Holy Light was a waste of mana, and totally worthless. With Judgements of the Wise as well, we can easily return our mana, meaning we wont go oom easily after a few heals. Here is a PvP build I have made, waiting for live to see how it actually works.
