Upcoming Ret paladin PvP nerf

I'm attempting to post this early since the Ret community felt totally surprised last time.

We are looking at some way of making Avenging Wrath and Divine Shield mutually exclusive. This may be through Forbearance, if we can reduce the Forbearance duration through a hotfix. The bubble is intended as a defensive measure. Yet bubble+wings currently is used a lot in BGs and Arenas and helps contribute to the feeling of being destroyed by a Retribution paladin while you are unable to respond.

My apologies to the Ret paladins who already feel picked on. We are really trying hard to not overdo anything but even the last round of pretty severe nerfs didn't seem to do enough to Ret's dominance of PvP.

We are also sympathetic to the notion that if Ret can't do insane burst damage, that the spec might need other tools to be viable in PvP. We're exploring this now, possibly though the missing 11-point Prot talent, possibly through other avenues. We'll let you know when we've made a decision here.

I don't know exactly when this change will go live, but I didn't want you to return from trick-or-treating and be shocked that we didn't announce it, since that seemed to cause a lot of damage with the last nerf.

I'll leave this post unlocked for now, assuming the responses stay intelligent and we don't get too much flaming or trolling.

Q u o t e:
It's no surprise that your "pretty severe nerfs" didn't have any effect on Paladins' PVP dominance, because they did absolutely nothing to address the problem in PVP. Taking away our mana regeneration hurts us over the long haul, but you did virtually nothing to stop Paladins from being what they were in a short PVP encounter.

That was a major point we were trying to tell you back when the JotW nerf went into effect, that it was unnecessary and doesn't actually address the core problems the community was addressing with the Paladin.

We lowered Seal and Judgement damage, changed Divine Storm (earlier) and changed Hammer of Wrath. Those all should have lowered PvP burst damage, and they did.

The JotW nerf was done because a paladin could use all their buttons quickly then go on to another opponent with no down time. On bosses in PvE, they could hit every button that was up and still have mana left to be very high on healing meters. So we do think the mana regen was too generous in both PvP and PvE cases.