On having baseline Kings in 3.1.0

Okay, so in amongst the changes to ret in 3.1.0 this is the one that stood out the most to me:

• Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins.

I'm feeling neither here nor there about it to be honest. I mean, I liked bringing Kings to raids, it sure helped in securing a raid spot by default. I even liked seeing in trade chat 'LF1M for Naxx prefer ret pally'.

So with an extra five points it opens up some possibilities! Well, lets call it seven considering that the standard ret pve build already has two talent points leftover 'to do what you please'. Hmm.... but the question is, where are the points going to go?

If you put those points back into ret the build will definitely have more PvP tools with talents like Vindication, Eye for an Eye and Divine Purpose to choose from. Although, none of these will directly increase your damage output. I guess to help out the tanks you could go with Improved Retribution Aura, but I dunno, an extra 56 reflective damage from two talent points is pretty meh.

What about the holy tree? Sigh, nothing good there either.

So that leaves prot. Blizz are making big changes to the Prot tree to streamline it, which makes you wonder how that's going to look. Also, something has to replace the gaping Tier 1 talent hole that Kings (and Improved Kings) leaves behind in the tree. It would be cool if they moved Divine Guardian within reach of Ret, I wouldn't mind dumping two spare talent points in that talent for raiding!