WOW Paladin changes on WOW patch 3.0.4

A lot of hints and news on the upcoming wow patch 3.0.4 have been dropped on the forums recently, so like other  writers have mentioned on and off, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw it on the PTR in the coming weeks. Before we get ahead of ourselves too much though, there was a lot of neat wow Paladin changes announced by Ghostcrawler yesterday. A lot of it is simple stuff we've sort of expected would happen, but there's still some interesting new stuff in there.

• Divine Shield: Penalty changed so that all damage done is reduced by 50% instead of an attack speed penalty.
   

Interesting Paladin changes wow , and admittedly a needed one. I think Retribution Paladins being able to go immune and use the entire range of their special abilities at full damage was a bigger problem recently than their actual damage. Yes, even with the cooldown on Divine Shield. Their damage was way, way overpowered before, but it's more in line now and I would rather see this change than another hit to their overall DPS.
 

• Sacred Duty: This talent no longer affects the attack penalty of Divine Shield and Divine Protection, but grants additional Stamina.
   

Again, good. While this means that Protection Paladins still suffer the the -50% damage 'debuff' or Divine Shield, that really shouldn't matter at all. Divine Protection is our bread and butter in groups, and it hardly makes a difference soloing.
 

• Avenging Wrath, Divine Shield, Divine Protection and Hand of Protection have a shard, 30-second cooldown. The Forbearance effect is no longer triggered by Avenging Wrath.
   

This is good! This is what I believe was the plan originally, but they couldn't hotfix this large of a change, if I understand correctly. I wish they had pushed this change a bit earlier, but we'll live. My only concern is that Hand of Protection is on the same shared cooldown. I suppose it makes sense from a PvP perspective, I can understand why