Originally Posted by
Holtzmann
Lots of possible reasons:
Because Exorcism is instant-cast and limited by a resettable cooldown, thus giving Paladins better ranged damage. Because Judgment isn't a throwaway damage skill that occasionally procs Divine Purpose anymore and instead got turned into a Holy Power generator with a damage component. Because Censure itself lost its interaction with Judgment, so you don't get bigger Judgments on a target with Censure stacked on it and without that interaction Censure itself is a fairly inconsequential DoT. Because Retribution ramp-up time was reduced considerably. Because Retribution doesn't lose quite as much damage running Seal of Justice anymore.
It could be due to any of those reasons. Or some other we haven't been told. Keep in mind that there's no developer vendetta against Paladins: it's in Blizzard's best interests that the game is as balanced as possible. All those solutions brought up in this thread have probably been at least theorized, if not actually tested internally before being discarded for one reason or another. And no, they can't tells us everything that's been right or wrong about an idea and why it's not implemented because we'd both pick on their words until the original meaning was completely lost and having to document every little thing like that for public consumption would slow things down even further. Blizzard's development process is iterative, and even if we don't see what they're doing behind the curtains, it doesn't mean there aren't things being done. And they have to look at things on a much better picture than we do. That implies doing a lot of things we on the ground thing are stupid, for the sake of balance or internal consistency to reduce bugs and make sure the system scales properly as the game evolves. Big changes like the ones in Mists come at a price, you know?
Speaking of bigger pictures and big changes, we can't just look at Judgment or Censure in a vacuum. The damage that was lost in one place has to turn up somewhere else. The procs that it provided will have to go somewhere else as well if they are to stay in the game. It's the same argument people who don't want Inquisition don't seem to grasp: even if the sources of damage are switched around, the damage itself has to remain constant. And Judgment being silenced is still not a big deal. It's not a proc-based ability. There's no window of opportunity to use it. Someone who silences you delays your Holy Power generation for a few seconds (which I'm sure is enough to end an Arena match), assuming Judgment isn't on cooldown (and it should be), but if you do make it through you're only 1 GCD away from all the damage you would have done and HP you would have generated with it if you hadn't been silenced.
Is that unacceptable to you? Well, then you're in your right to lobby for all non-healing Paladin spells to be exempt from silences. While you are at that, ask for that for Enhancement Shamans. I'll not be grabbing a pitchfork to join you in the siege of Blizzard headquarters for it, as I still don't think it's a big enough a deal looking at how things will be in Mists (as opposed to how they are now), but I'm not going to make any effort to stop you. After all, I don't have anything against something that would let me hit more buttons unhindered.
As for my qualifications, I did play Arena quite a bit on various classes (Fire and Frost Mage, Marksmanship Hunter, Arms Warrior, Holy and Ret Paladin), but I stopped before reaching high ratings because I'm in an awkward timezone for my server so I could not find reliable partners, and because I found Arena to be a merry game of "whoever uses their cooldowns in the wrong order loses". You can disagree with me on that, it's an opinion that's not up for discussion. I would much rather play Rated Battlegrounds instead if one is starting up and I'm online. I like having to think in terms of objectives as opposed to a cooldownapallooza-style deathmatch.