Paladin (Skills List / Talent Calc. (9095))
Upcoming changes to paladin's talent trees
Not every talent tree has those clickable abilities at the 11, 21, 31, 41 and 51 spots. We might eventually give Protection and Holy and 11-pointer and we have some ideas on what we would like to do, but mostly we want to see if there is anything they are really lacking that filling the hole could solve.
A taunt is not a particularly interesting talent. It's a button you ideally never want to push and often when you have to push it, it's because someone else in the group messed up. This is why we are leaning towards just giving paladins a brand new ability to taunt, but I'll announce it for sure when we are sure.
Paladins received more changes to core mechanics than any other class in LK, so I would not be at all surprised to see changes to their talent trees over the next few patches. Holy, IMO, is likely to see the most work. (Source)
Leveling as Holy + buffs in Patch 3.0.x
That’s a bit of a misinterpretation, though I suspect I don’t need to point that out. The Holy paladin is a healing spec. If you take that spec, it’s with the expectation that you are giving up some other strengths in order to be a good healer. We don’t want leveling to be horribly painful for you, but to be honest, I don’t think it is. My answer was more that if you find leveling as Holy (or Protection or Discipline or whatever) too slow, then you do have the option to respec. Many players do. Shadow is probably the most common case of a spec that is used to level even by players that fully intend to heal.
You also make it sound as if we somehow broke existing gameplay here. Healers have never been exceptionally fast at leveling (and neither have tanks for that matter). We think we made things a little easier with the changes to spellpower and similar adjustments for tanks, but I would be surprised if your relative (for your level) dps actually went down between BC and LK.
Also, you are still going to want multiple sets of gear even with this change. Once you hit level 80 and get your stuff gemmed and enchanted it is going to be better for one role (healing, dps, PvP) than for others. The spellpower change makes healing gear better at dps (and vice versa) but it doesn’t mean they become the same thing. (Source)
I don’t actually think Holy paladins get different and substandard treatment. You did get hurt by the Ret nerfs, and as I said, we intend to compensate you for that. It will be in the next patch, which will be before the 3.1 Ulduar patch. I think it’s exaggerating the issues in order to make your point to describe the Resto druid, Resto shaman, Holy priest or Disc priest as fast leveling specs. I’m not even convinced they are faster than Holy paladins (and if they are I don't think it's from their dps). Many druids level as Feral and many shamans as Enhancement, so I don’t even think the issue of Holy paladins needing different gear from their dps spec is completely fair.
Some classes and specs level fast, and in many cases that has more to do with their mechanics (often stealth and travel) and not their dps. But there have always been players willing to level as just about any spec, and they are all viable. It has never been our goal to make all specs and classes level at the same rate. We’re not advocating re-specing constantly in order to level up but still run as groups, but if you choose to play that way, you’ll probably find enough quest rewards to be able to build multiple sets of decent gear at once. (Source)
Holy Guidance requiring 5 points while the similar Ret/Prot talent only require 3
We'll look into this. I do want to caution players in general that we aren't necessarily trying to make similar talents identical across specs. Sometimes it depends entirely on the spec or the rest of the class. You can think of many examples of talents that one spec would love to have, Sheathe of Light maybe.
