The Paladin class will get three new spells in World of WarCraft: Cataclysm: Blinding Shield (level 81), Healing Hands (level 83) and Guardian of Ancient Kings (level 85).

With my main character being a Blood Elf Paladin, I have to say I am happy with these new spells and look forward to trying them out in closed beta.

Personally, I love Healing Hands. In events like Marrowgar, where everyone must stack, you are faced with healing the tank, but a few players are taking damage with the spikes. Or when Marrowgar goes into Bone storm mode everyone is taking damage, and the tank isn’t in an immediate danger. It’s at that moment when the Holy Paladin wonders — do I chase the tank around and keep healing him just in case? Or should I help heal the allies that are dying to the flames? That’s when Healing Hands comes handy. You can heal the raid and at the same time continue casting your holy light spells on the tank. It is like insta-casting Divine Hymn on automatic-mode (minus channeling), while casting your normal Holy Light, Flash Light and Holy Shock rotations. Only 15 seconds cooldown? I’m game.

Guardian of the Ancient Kings rocks. It’s similar to Lay on Hands, except you don’t need to target the tank, off-tank, or the healer that is about to die. Have you been in that situation where you are healing yourself, and suddenly the tank gets a massive jolt of damage, and before you get to target him and get to find and push the lay on hands button, the tank is gone and you auto-lay on hands because the tank died in a mere split milisecond?

Guardian of the Ancient Kings will automatically heal the most damaged ally — in this case the tank. A very good failsafe, while you get your next heal spell out to safeguard the tank. Is it reliable? Not entirely, there’s a tiny chance a nearby player has less health. While it’s not a pet and has no pet UI, it’s surely going to look gorgeous to summon this spirit. Below you can see a quick video of the Resurrection spirit in WarCraft III to give you an idea of how Guardian of the Ancient Kings might look like.

When I saw Eadric the Pure in Trial of the Champion I was amazed at his ability to cast a blinding holy light that stuns you if you don’t look away. It’s something I hadn’t seen before in a boss encounter, except for Yogg-Saron. In fact, Eadric’s spell was a silent preview of what Paladins would get in Cataclysm. That’s going to be named Blinding Shield. In a sense we can call this a slight crowd control. It stuns mobs, which means they stop casting. Helpful when a caster is nuking a raid or party member, or even the paladin tank.

A setback to this spell is when mobs lose aggro and go past the tank, they are not exactly looking at the tank so they won’t get blinded. Still, this spell has its use clearing trash. It’s unknown if bosses are immune to it. It might be a good question to thrown at the developers in the upcoming Twitter Dev Chat.

Read the Cataclysm: Official Paladin Class preview below:

Blizzard Quote:
In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm we’ll be making several changes to class talents and abilities across the board. While this list only outlines some of our plans for the paladin class, we want to give you a look at the new high-level abilities and an overview of how the new Mastery system will work with each talent spec.

New Paladin Spells

Blinding Shield (level 81): Causes damage and blinds all nearby targets. This effect might end up only damaging those facing the paladin’s shield, in a manner similar to Eadric the Pure’s ability Radiance in Trial of the Champion. The Holy tree will have a talent to increase the damage and critical strike chance, while the Protection tree will have a talent to make this spell instant cast. 2-second base cast time. Requires a shield.

Healing Hands (level 83): Healing Hands is a new healing spell. The paladin radiates heals from him or herself, almost like a Healing Stream Totem. It has a short range, but a long enough duration that the paladin can cast other heals while Healing Hands remains active. 15-second cooldown. 6-second duration.

Guardian of Ancient Kings (level 85): Summons a temporary guardian that looks like a winged creature of light armed with a sword. The visual is similar to that of the Resurrection spell used by the paladin in Warcraft III. The guardian has a different effect depending on the talent spec of the paladin. For Holy paladins, the guardian heals the most wounded ally in the area. For Protection paladins, the guardian absorbs some incoming damage. For Retribution paladins, it damages an enemy, similar to the death knight Gargoyle or the Nibelung staff. 3-minute cooldown. 30-second duration (this might vary depending on which guardian appears).

Next you will find a list of some of the paladin spell and ability changes, followed by our intentions for improving each talent tree for the release of Cataclysm. There will be further changes, but those revealed below should offer some insight into our goals.

Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

  • Crusader Strike will be a core ability for all paladins, gained at level 1. We think the paladin leveling experience is hurt by not having an instant attack. Retribution will be getting a new talent in its place that either modifies Crusader Strike or replaces it completely.
  • Cleanse is being rebalanced to work with the new dispel system. It will dispel defensive magic (debuffs on friendly targets), diseases, and poisons.
  • Blessing of Might will provide the benefit of Wisdom as well. If you have two paladins in your group, one will do Kings on everyone and the other will do Might on everyone. There should be much less need, and ideally no need, to provide specific buffs to specific classes.
  • Holy Shock will be a core healing spell available to all paladins.

New Talents and Talent Changes

  • We want to ease off the defensive capabilities of Retribution and Holy paladins slightly. We think the powerful paladin defenses have been one of the things holding Retribution paladins back, especially in Arenas. One change we’re considering is lowering Divine Shield’s duration by a couple of seconds. Having said that, Retribution does pretty well in Battlegrounds, and Battlegrounds will be a much bigger focus in Cataclysm since they can provide the best PvP rewards. Furthermore, the healing environment of Cataclysm is going to be different such that a paladin may not be able to fully heal themselves during the duration of Divine Shield to begin with, so this may not be a problem.
  • We feel Retribution paladins need one more mechanic which involves some risk of the player pushing the wrong button, making the rotation a bit less forgiving. In addition, we want to add to this spec more PvP utility. Right now the successes of the Retribution paladin in PvP seem to be reduced to either doing decent burst damage, or just being good at staying alive.
  • We want to increase the duration of Sacred Shield to 30 minutes and keep the limit to one target. The intention is that the paladin can use it on their main healing target. That said, we would like to improve the Holy paladin toolbox and niche so that they don’t feel quite like the obvious choice for tank healing while perceived as a weak group healer.
  • We want to add to the Holy tree a nice big heal to correspond with Greater Heal. Flash of Light remains a fast heal, but will be more expensive to justify the cast speed. Holy Light will be the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light needs to be changed so that its benefit is letting the paladin heal two targets at once, not letting the paladin get two heals for the mana cost of one. It’s intended to save GCDs and targeting time, not mana.
  • Holy paladins will use spirit as their mana regeneration stat.
  • Protection paladins need a different rotation between single-target and multi-target tanking. Likewise, we’re looking to add the necessity to use an additional cooldown in each rotation.
  • Holy Shield will no longer have charges. It will be designed to improve block chance while active, and will continue to provide a small amount of damage and threat.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Holy
Healing
Meditation
Critical Healing Effect
Protection
Damage Reduction
Vengeance
Block Amount
Retribution
Melee Damage
Melee Critical Damage
Holy Damage

Meditation: This is the spirit-to-mana conversion that the priest, druid, and shaman healers also share.

Vengeance: This is the damage-received-to-attack-power conversion that all tanks share.

Critical Healing Effect: When the paladin gets a crit on a heal, it will heal for more.

Block Amount: We want to keep the kit of the paladin as a tank who blocks a lot. So by contrast, the warrior tank will sometimes get critical blocks, but the paladin will absorb more damage with normal blocks.

Holy Damage: Any attack that does Holy damage will have its damage increased.

This concludes this Cataclysm preview for the paladin class. The development of these changes will continue to evolve in the coming months. Please be sure to provide any feedback and thoughts you might have on what was covered here.

UPDATE: Here’s a bit more clarification on some of these changes. Also, please keep in mind that this is merely a preview and we’ll still have more to go in testing up to and including any other changes that aren’t listed here in the preview.

We’ve updated the Flash of Light reference to make it a bit more clear in the original post as follows.

Flash of Light remains a fast heal, but will be more expensive to justify the cast speed. Holy Light will be the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light needs to be changed so that its benefit is letting the paladin heal two targets at once, not letting the paladin get two heals for the mana cost of one. It’s intended to save GCDs and targeting time, not mana.

In addition we’re changing the paladin heal design to match that of the other healers. Holy Light is the middle heal. It’s very efficient, but not particularly fast and doesn’t have a lot of throughput. Flash of Light will be the faster heal that costs more mana. (Currently paladins sort of flip the model around by having a fast, efficient heal.) Holy paladins can talent into an additional heal that is like a giant Holy Light. It might take three of these big heals (or two crits) to get a tank from death’s door back to 100% health.

Currently on live, Beacon of Light is a tool that allows paladins to target more than just the main tank. In Cataclysm if it just doubles their healing, it is going to be overpowered. We have two ways we might handle this and we’ll experiment to see which feels better. The first is that Beacon only works on some heals, such as Flash of Light or Holy Light (but not the big one). An alternative idea is that Beacon increases the mana cost of a heal cast on a beaconed target, since you’re essentially getting a double heal. Under this model, Beacon itself would cost no mana.

Also on the live realms currently, paladins have huge mana pools and massive throughput. The trade-off is that they are excellent single target healers and much weaker in other roles. We want paladins to be slightly more interchangeable with other healers. In Cataclysm, you should be able to have a Holy priest on the tank and a Holy paladin on the raid. We’re not sure we’ll back off of the current healing roles completely, but we definitely want to add more breadth to those whose roles are currently too narrow.

As for the Guardian of Ancient Kings. First, it’s important to understand that this is not a pet nor does it have a pet bar associated with it. Second, it’s also not meant to last for very long. So, it’s not a pet in the traditional sense. It’s a friend in need when you need it, but not a permanent companion.

Share your feedback with the Cataclysm developers at the official forum thread