Having played this class since the very beginning I sometimes look back on it and wonder has much actually changed? Yes there are new talents and abilities of varying degrees of usefulness but at the core of it all we're more or less the same class as we've always been in terms of a group setting with some incremental improvements to our solo play.
Rewind a bit to the Molten Core days and how most paladins were a bit taken back that they couldn't melee like they had been doing up to that point in a group setting, their gear being Lightforge at best (still a hybrid set with an assortment of helpful stats for meleeing and spot healing) they weren't the best equipped to be healing but being in melee was too much of a liability. That was a substantial shock to the community and the fault really lies with Blizzard's encounter and dungeon team. This realization spawned the trend of min/max raiding in WoW. A quote that's been passed around for a while "if you have a heal spell you will heal" began to surface and make sense to raid leaders.
During this transition from meleeing first healing second to healing first and waiting to heal again second, the gear began to change as well. I know that both Lawbringer and Judgement sets underwent at least two separate revisions both for individual pieces as well as set bonuses. Crit and other melee stats were replaced or diminished by more intellect and healing bonuses to better fit the new paladin Blizzard was molding (some would title this reference the cleric but I'll refrain from such naming conventions here).
Fast forward a bit to Blackwing Lair and Ahn'Qiraj and the paladin has drastically embraced the role of healer and nothing else in instances (some would further comment that even in PvP this applied since a paladin doing damage was not optimal for victory the majority of the time). Strangely both Judgement and Avenger's weren't quite the healing set to the joy of some and distress of others. It is here where a rift formed between those still clinging to how the class once was and those fully accepting where the class is headed. This conflict still rages today.
The decisions made in the armor sets in addition to the paladin review that introduced some interesting (while short lived) talent specializations gave some hope that there would finally at long last be some of the old brought back.
Enter Naxxramas. The tiered armor set here for paladins was so amazingly one-dimensional it made many players sick. Blizzard had essentially created the ultimate healing set for the class and once again, just so we wouldn't forget, restated what we are: healers. The poor protection paladins (if there were any) and struggling retribution paladins were for the most part forced to take warrior items for their specialization.
Present day Burning Crusade offers another avenue for paladins and that being the tank role. The gear is there the talents/abilities are there (both need tweaking) and it's the best it has ever been for that group of paladins. Although we face stiff competition from warriors and feral druids Blizzard has recently stated that they "aren't happy with the current state of paladin tanking" and want all three classes to be on the same level. This is good news but I wouldn't hold my breath considering the track the class has been running on over the last few years.
Finally one of the biggest topics of discussion among the paladin community is the viability of the retribution tree and how it fits in with the tank/healer hybrid Blizzard has labeled us as. It seems that it can't possibly fit at all in its current form, which is a very big problem for Blizzard that will have to be addressed. The root of the problem lies with a class that is designed to have the lowest damage output (which is still too high according to Blizzard posters) while still having a tree devoted to boosting damage a small amount while sacrificing durability and healing power that the other two trees offer. Specializing retribution now just isn't attractive at all compared to the alternatives. How they should go about fixing the logical problems of having a damage tree for a class that isn't supposed to be focusing on dealing damage is not an easy endeavor, but I will post my thoughts on it next time.
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