Bye, Bye Vindication!

Well last night Ulu and his Mage cohort, Ebil played some Arenas, about 29 all things told, with our normal 40% win rate. Still, we're having fun and slowly getting to useful ratings (over 1k team rating thanks to the assistance of my higher-rated Ret Buddy, just under 1k personal rating).

Ironsoul really helps Ulu's burst damage and I think I've found a good mix of Resilience and DPS gear so that I can survive a decent amount of focussed fire and put out a solid amount of hurt.


And then this morning, I woke up to find they were nerfing Vindication:

We are in the process of completing a hotfix that could go live as early as this afternoon that will make the Paladin talent Vindication no longer reduce Intelligence or Stamina from the target it is applied to. The talent will continue to reduce Agility, Spirit, and Strength as it currently does. We felt this change will help balance the ability out, especially in the lower arena brackets where they are very prominent, while not being a negative impact on a Retribution Paladin’s PvE dps.

Once this hotfix is live, the tooltip will be incorrect until we can update it in the next content patch.

Why with Ret is it always a hotfix for any other class it's ok to let them dominate an entire arena season?
Increasingly it felt like someone playing against a Ret-Pally really only had 60% of their health bar because Vindication took away 20% from the start and then Hammer of Wrath kicked in when they had 20% left. This change was something we could confidently hotfix and would have a minimal to no impact on the PvE side of things.

Thanks Blizz, along with Eye for an Eye, that's 5 points I can move from PVP talents into PVE ones. *sigh*

Now I appreciate their logic, I can even appreciate why they felt it was "safe" to hotfix now, since it will have a negligable impact on Ret PVE performance, but this is the latest in a long line of nerfs of Retribution Paladins since 3.1. Exorcism, Eye For An Eye, Hand of Freedom and now Vindication and Hammer of Justice (yep, the interrupt part won't work on players who acquire stun immunity via Diminishing Returns).

Now, We've got the carrot of promised changes to the Paladin combat system in "the next content patch" (I'm willing to bet that gets shifted to 3.3 rather than 3.2), but right now the constant niggling nerfing of us feels like a death by a thousand cuts. Of course the Schadenfreude of members of other, as-yet-unnerfed classes doesn't help (I'm looking at you Rogues, Discipline Priests and Resto Druids).

Our burst damage is ok, but nothing to write home about (I'll never call out the silly 9k crits of my Mage partner). We have two stuns, one on a talented 40 sec CD and one on a 6 sec CD. Ok we can use Seal of Justice, but that just seems to be a fast ticket to diminishing returns.

More and more in arenas I feel like I'm just there to keep my Mage partner alive whilst he does the killing. If that's the case, I might as well go Holy.