Changes are a coming

Its been a while since I posted on any of the changes to our class for 4.0.1 and Cataclysm. While there have been some rather big changes mostly its just number tweaking.
However this little nugget from GC has popped up into the epic Paladin Tanking thread currently running on the O-Board's.

While we still have grave concerns about players being able to fill every GCD, we also don't want to change paladin tanking so much that it is unrecognizable for long-term paladins. Therefore, we are going to try Crusader Strike on a 3 second cooldown for Protection only. Hammer of the Righteous will have the same cooldown. This will allow Protection to fill in almost every gap in the rotation and not be waiting so long on every cooldown, which should help the rotation feel more active. It will also allow Inquisition and Shield of the Righteous to sometimes be up at the same time. That change is pretty significant and will no doubt invite all sorts of theorycrafting on the right way to manage Holy Power. We still have additional grave concerns that once paladins can have both Inquisition and Shield of the Righteous up simultaneously that they will feel underpowered and therefore frustrated whenever they lack sufficient Holy Power for 100% uptime on both. We'll just have to see how that feels.

Its nice to see that they are at least willing to go back on their word and re work the class to make the players happy and prove to ether us or them whether this change will work or not.
The reduced gaps in our rotation is something I welcome a lot, while I am fine with having some gaps we were reaching points with very large spaces of nothing.
I now wonder whether CS will be nerfed again to compensate for the increased use or If they will find another way to balance around it.

The Great GC also postef
While we still think an off the GCD interrupt isn't an essential tool for a tank, we also don't think it's going to break anything for paladins to have one either. Our eventual solution is to let Vindication's ability to let HoJ interrupt also take HoJ off of the global cooldown. That change will require new tech, so it's not something you're likely to see anytime soon, but you can know that it's in our long term plans. Again, we don't think the interrupt issue is a critical problem that must be solved today. The rotation one in the previous paragraph is a bigger deal.
This Is a very nice little not, while It might be a while off the fact of having an interupt off the GCD even at 40sec CD is very appealing. The other up side to this is that after the class redesign they are relooking at abilitys that they said we would never have. While I wouldn't hold out on it this could mean that at some point a gap closer of some kind may still be up for consideration.

I am very happy with how the class is looking going into this expansion, with rotation holes filled and WoG useful we are looking very well off. My only wish now would be for a med length CD to generate HoPo at some rate, but that's probably something we can live without.

Look forward also to a big long awaited post coming from me in the next few days.