HotR and CS cooldown

Hello everyone! Recently I leveled a new paladin and tried tanking some instances. One thing I noticed is that the cooldown of HotR and CS is 3 seconds for the tankadin, instead of 4.5 seconds, but I didn't find any talent or spec description which claims to reduce the cooldown. Can anyone share some enlightenment?

Yes, it's strangely undocumented.

I think Blizzard originally gave us the longer cool down, but tankadins did not like the "gappy" rotation it led to, so we were given the shorter one.

Truth. With the 4.5-second cooldown we didn't have a regular
rotation, and one of their goals with the new system was to
not have us throwing in abilities like Exorcism just to eke
out a little extra damage/threat.

They tried the argument that we could use the gaps to Cleanse,
cast a Hand or whatever, there was some howling about cleansebotting
(a little unreasonable, but Blizzard made that bed for themselves
and now they get to lie in it) and so they got to work on a solution.

After discussing a couple other changes which I can't remember
at the moment, they put the 3-second hammer on the test realm,
we made generally contented noises (by the standards of MMO
players) and that's what went live.

HotR and CS share a cooldown and are our Holy Power generators.

On a 4.5 sec cooldown, it would take you 13.5 seconds to generate 3 HP.

On a 3 sec cooldown, it takes 9 seconds to generate 3 HP.

I believe they shortened the cooldown so that Tankadin's could throw out more SotR for threat.


Ret gets a talent to have Haste apply to the cooldown of CS, but Haste is generally considered a low priority for Ret, so they end up with a CS, X, Y, CS rotation, whereas we have a CS, X, CS, Y rotation.

You mean CS, x, miss, miss, miss, CS?