Yes, as I have mentioned before Blizzard's way of balancing the classes comes in the form of nerfs. Part of this is understandable, it is far easier to nerf a class or two than it is to rescale all the content to keep things challenging.
I do regret though that Blizzard can't test for this sorts of issues in beta more often. I fail to see how Blizzard couldn't see how strong paladin healing had become.
I suspect we will see further changes to paladin healing in a patch or two to come. Some of it may end up being relaxing some of the nerfs they just did a bit.
Last night I ran part of Arkatraz with a protection paladin, and we were talking afterwards briefly. He mentioned that changes in 2.1 may have adversely affected how much mana he can regen mid fight (even when his mana/health bar is not full). Can any other tanking paladins confirm or deny this?
Getting back on topic though, I wish they would do what they would just revamp the priest talent trees. Especially holy and disc. They are horrible. I know Blizzard has said they won't do any more tree overhauls, but imo both shaman (enhancement especially) and priest are in dire need of some talent tree attention.
Blizzard has failed to define what the goal of the priest's discipline tree is, imo. Holy is stronger and quicker heals, with some healing utility thrown in (some of which is worthless). Discipline is about....? More stats, a better bubble, and a some utility? The problem is there is too much overlap between the holy and discipline trees. Both increase your use of spirit, both attempt to address priest fraility, both address spell crit chance and potency of holy/disc based attacking spells, both address spell and mana efficiency, etc...
One other problem is the lack of solid/desirable 41 point talents for both holy and disc (the later I guess would be ok if you were a pvp priest.... maybe).
Another problem is that to be an effective priest healer you must spec into both holy and disc. This is not something that's just ok to do, it's a must. I am not aware of any other healing class in the game has this issue:
- Holy paladins focus on the holy tree, and can dabble in another tree of their choosing if they wish.
- Resto druids, focus on restoration and can dabble in another tree of their choosing if they wish.
- Resto shamans, focus on restoration and dabble in another tree of their choosing (though perhaps in their case they may want to invest 5 pionts into the bottom tier of enhancement to get 5% more mana).
My point here is this: rather than address the elephant in the room (Priest's talent trees and spells are not designed well), Blizzard remains adamant that they are fine.... and then proceeds to nerf others to be where they think they should be with respect to the priest class.