Blessings, schmessings...

Ah, the Paladin pet peeve... Five minute duration on our blessings. It's pretty sad that we have to have Buffahoy to remove major class-designed annoyances. The developers must've been well aware of this when designing the class, so the annoyance is intended by design, just think about the intention Improved Salvation-talent if you don't get what I'm talking about. If you don't understand the underlying design intention with our blessings, here's a simple rundown on it:

The blessing system is essentially a manual aura with increased versatility at the cost of manual labor.

As with many things with our class, the execution is poor. Player Dart is spot on regarding blessing duration/costs:

Arcane Brilliance:
Effect: 31 Int
Mana Cost: 3400
Duration: 1 hour
Target: Group
- mana cost per person per minute: 11.33 mana

Prayer of Fortitude (Rank 2):
Effect: 54 Stamina
Mana Cost: 3400
Duration: 1 hour
Target: Group
- mana cost per person per minute: 11.33 mana

Gift of the Wild (Rank 2):
Effect: armor 285, 12 all attributes, 20 all resistances
Mana Cost: 1200
Duration: 1 hour
Target: Group
- mana cost per person per minute: 4 mana

Blessing of Sanctuary (Rank 5):
Effect: reducing damage dealt from all sources by up to 24
Mana Cost: 135
Duration: 5 mins
Target: Single
- mana cost per person per minute: 27 mana

Increasing the duration of the current blessings at no additional mana cost to 15 minutes would put the mana cost per person per minute to 9.

Elinia follows up with a good response in defense of the five minute limit, similar to what I used to say when I defended the five-minute blessings:

...If you make blessings (or totems for that matter) last an hour and cost 3400 mana, you loose that ability to swap them in and out. There's a reason you have numerous blessings and a reason shamans have numerous totems. You aren't meant to use just one.

Dart reponds with the issue that finally ran me over to be critical of blessings:

First of most blessings are not situational, they are static. Main exceptions here are BoP and Freedom.

And here is the biggest underlying problem with the entire blessing system: there are little to no incentives to switch blessings. There aren't enough short-term blessings in the likes of Blessing of Protection and Blessing of Freedom. Once again just like everything else with the Paladin it looks good on paper but the execution is poor. I wouldn't care one bit about the five minute duration if it had a better justification behind it. Remember the developers response in Uther's Hammer post?

Currently the duration of blessings are set to 5 minutes. Many feel that this is too quick of a time, as blessings must be re-applied often in dungeons or on raids. However, if these buffs last longer, we would have to increase the Mana cost of them (Comment: not true, as Dart proved above). With that being the case, buffs have to be balanced so that they are useful, but they will not drain your Mana supply every time you get brought back to life or someone in your party needs to be re-buffed. This is especially important in the Battlegrounds where dying is immanent and you need to balance your mana between buffing and healing.

Simple solution, developers: Give us 30 minute duration blessings that have an increased cost along with the ones we have now, specifically meant for PVE. Would that be too hard to implement, really? We have so many PVE-only skills so that giving us a couple of more isn't that bad. Either that or give us more situational blessings, such as an BoP but for magic damage and so forth.

You know what the interesting thing about that response from Uther's Hammer is? A CM's response at Comicon:

Hey guys, not sure how many of you were at the Comic Con, but I had a chance to talk to the CM's (and honestly was disapointed) about their knowledge of the class.

BUT I did talk to a PR rep and they admit that Paladins were not designed for PvP BUT PvE and that the class needs serious help in PvP.

This was the most disturbing remark considering PvP is a type of server they have always supported from the beginning. If this was the case, they should have listed this from the get go saying Paladins would be horrible on PvP servers.

Seems to me the developer response of trying to justify the five minute blessings as being "essential in Battlegrounds" is not an honest answer.