Recently I had a look at some Reckoning armories. There’s 44 rogues in top 200 2v2 teams currently, with 41 mut/prep specs between them.

This is the most popular prep/mut spec, which accounts for ten of the 41 specs. It takes Imp Kidney Shot, 2/3 Find Weakness, and (surprisingly to me) Initiative.

I experimented for a while with taking bleed talents in an attempt to make a dent in plate teams, but it never really worked very well. Even fully talented, rupture is a fairly small component of your damage.

The second most popular spec, used by 4 rogues, trades Imp KS for Focused Attacks (which would be my preference for 2s) and Initiative for Serrated Blades. Then there’s 3 with Imp KS and Serrated, 3 with FA and Initiative, and the rest is a long tail of people trying out weird stuff like Deadened Nerves, which I’m still very much in love with!

So it seems like the only arguments people are having are Imp KS vs FA, and Initiative vs Serrated Blades, which are both about 50/50. Glyph selection looks much the same as ever:

Your cookies, I cut them.

After having had a few weeks to play some live games, though, I’m pretty satisfied with what turned out to be very even-handed changes to paladin healing. Paladins haven’t disappeared from SK, they still have a number of viable comps to run. Blizzard didn’t outright kill any of the specs, quite the opposite – as far as I know this is the first season that paladins have had a viable healing spec in every tree.

The old repentance spec of S5 has become 32/0/39. Since you can’t feasibly get Infusion of Light with any of the nice ret stuff, you push even deeper into ret to pick up Art of War and Fanatacism, which means you get an instant FoL on your judgement crits (instead of HS crits) and your judgements crit at a reasonable rate. Some people take Seal of Command for the guaranteed crit versus stunned targets, but I haven’t found it that useful.

You still get the ret utility you know and love – most importantly Divine Purpose and Repentance; but Sanctified Retribution is also a lot stronger without the specific aura requirement. Judgements of the Wise has actually been buffed and now returns a huge amount of mana (25% of base) every judge. Pursuit of Justice and Vindication are both still amazing.

The deep holy alternative has become 49/22/0. The protection talents they’ve changed up in 3.1 are amazing, with Divinity and Improved Devotion Aura increasing your healing substantially and Stoicism + Improved Righteous Fury increasing your survivability noticeably. Having a second Sac in the form of Divine Sacrifice is absolutely amazing, and makes a lot of double DPS or CC-heavy compositions a ton easier.

This also gives you the throughput talents in deep holy, such as Judgements of the Pure, Holy Guidance, Infusion, and Light’s Grace. Enlightened Judgements (increasing range to 40 yards) is also pretty useful now that Judgement is your only real way to keep people in combat or snipe totems. This spec feels a lot like the TBC paladin – you do have to drink, but it’s usually possible to set up opportunities to do so. 40 second HoJ is nice but doesn’t give you nearly as much CC potential as repentance does.

Which brings us to the dark horse of the collection, 20/51/0 deep protection. It sounds crazy until you actually look at the control possibilities and raw healing power of the available at the bottom of the tree. You get a 20 second HoJ (!) along with a 3 second silence and a daze on your Avenger’s Shield (30 second cooldown), which also increases your damage contribution. You get undispellable Divine Plea that refreshes on melee hits. You get a bunch of free stamina from talents like Sacred Duty (and some passive defenses like Ardent Defender) and then you convert that stamina into spellpower via Touched by the Light. You end up with a huge amount of spellpower, and although your crit is lower than the ret subspec when you do crit you’re looking at 8.5k flashes (10k+ on a warlock or mutilate rogue!).

The huge downside to the prot spec is, of course, the complete lack of any sort of instant healing. The new Aura Mastery helps here, and part of it is just adapting to the playstyle, but it’s a limitation and it makes the spec a lot weaker when you’re tanking a melee who can interrupt. Which, in a way, is also a lot like TBC!

I hear actual ret and prot paladins aren’t doing too badly, either.