Tigole Sets Direction for Paladins in BC

A post on the Paladin forums by Evilcarrot draws attention to this article on Joystiq.com. Within, Jeff Kaplan is interviewed and reveals more of the behind the scenes thinking that contributed to the tankadin blues. Here's the relevant bit:

What went into the decision to adding a Paladin choice for the Horde (Blood Elves) and a Shaman choice for the Alliance (Draenei)?

Our reasoning behind that is we had a conflicting design vision going on with World of Warcraft. Our class design goal was that every class had to be completely unique -- really unique mechanics per class. And, we felt like our Shaman and Paladin were pretty unique, but as time progressed in the game, players would become outraged anytime you gave something to the Paladin and didn't compensate the Shaman.

The classes had a totally different vision behind them, but we tried to balance them out all the time and make them equal. It's not fair to the classes, they were becoming homogeneous. We really wrestled with the idea internally and we finally decided that the lore could justify with Blood Elves and Draenei putting the Paladin and Shaman on each side for the first time. We feel like because we made this decision, we're finally free to make the classes be what they were originally supposed to be. We wanted the Paladin to be more tank oriented, that holy tank that heals. And, we can focus the Shaman more on his DPS and utility roles.

This begs the question, of course, as to what will happen to the Retribution tree in BC. Will our damage plateau continue from it's leveling out in the high-50's forcing us to party up for the 60-70 grind? One can only speculate until more information is released regarding our new core abilities and talents.