A Ray of Hope

From Ghostcrawler, around midnight last night:

Our eventual plan is to put Divine Shield on a shared 30 sec cooldown with
Avenging Wrath. We also plan on changing Divine Shield's attack speed penalty
(which isn't really much of a penalty) and have it apply to all damage done
while the bubble is up.

Divine Protection would no longer have the attack penalty, but since Prot
paladins typically talent out of that penalty, it won't have a big effect on
tanking (though obviously that talent would need to do something slightly
different).

All of this assumes that preventing AW from being used with DS actually
makes the Ret tree a little more balanced. We'll need to monitor that a little
bit longer first.

We are going to go ahead and change the mana drains to a percentage of mana
so that Ret paladins don't lose so much larger a percentage of their mana than
casters with 15K mana.

If you didn't hear that, it was me exhaling a huge sigh of relief. I don't know what he means by "eventual plan" (next week? 3 patches from now? next expansion?), but this is at least a signal that the dev team understands that Forbearance on wings is not the answer to limiting the shining immune god-paladin.

As Siha mentioned in her post yesterday about the current state of paladins (which was a lot more elegant that my topsy-turvey rant on Forbearance, I might add), this habit of double-talking the paladin community is very distressing. I know my view is skewed since I'm a paladin-for-life and haven't seen the situation through any other lens, but when the community at large cries out in unison about paladins being overpowered, untested hotfixes are applied to live realms. When the paladins complain as one about an issue, the devs and community managers respond with statements like "we're looking into it" and "it's an issue that's currently being tested," with no action taken. I'm overdramatizing it, but gosh do I feel like a second-class citizen right about now.

Why can't the 30 second lockout be hotfixed in? Why was Forbearance on Avenging Wrath so important to get hotfixed in? When exactly will the lockout replace Forbearance? I want some answers, dagnabit.