Defensive Stance

[Kevin]

GG, a few weeks ago I switched from my Arms/Fury build to a heavy Prot build.  One of the things I deliberately sacrificed was Tactical Mastery/Anger Management, and my reasoning was pretty simple; it was the same as my reasoning for giving up Mortal Strike and Sweeping Strikes.  I wasn't getting utility out of it.

I have found that in PvE, it's generally not necessary for me to build rage prior to combat -- and on those occasions when it's warranted, there's always Bloodrage or rage pots.  In addition, you're reaching the point with Gnolack where your ability to effectively use charge as a pulling tactic (or even as an engagement tactic following a CC pull) are going to be more and more limited.  Strat and Scholo, for example, are all about aggro range management -- bringing the mobs TO you as opposed to going to them.

What I'd recommend you do before you make any changes to your tree along these lines, though, is simply to try and play mostly in Defensive stance without a lot of stance changes for awhile and see if you really notice an impact which is detrimental to your style of play.  The reality is that so long as you're not making your healer burst into stress-induced hysterics every pull because your health bar is dropping faster than an internet stock price, it's vastly more important for you to be comfortable with your method of generating and holding aggro than it is to nickel-and-dime your talent tree to death in search of The Perfect Build™.  The difference between the approaches you've seen discussed here over and over attest to that.

Side note: last night, Galreth and I were both in the same 10-man run on Scholo.  Even at 57, and making most of the run in Fun Mode ;), Galreth was able to put up a good fight with me for aggro.  The main difference between stances really appears to me to be more about damage and stun than about aggro.
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First I have been a protection spec warrior the whole way through. I didn't put a talent point in another tree until L32 when I started going for piercing howl. I've played full instances without stance switching from defensive. I didn't have tactical mastery until I was L50 and at just 1 point in it, it didn't do much good. So your advice is meaningless I'm very good at holding aggro in defensive stance I can't really hold aggro at all in any other stance, I've tried. Check up in the thread, much of what Ynir does now is based on my advice. So I've only just started playing with heavy stance switching. I'm completely comfortable not doing it all.

Since I haven't seen anything past Sunken Temple as far as instances go you sort of answered the question I was actually asking. I want to know what kind of utility a stance switch will have there. If those points in that tree really make any difference for end game. I enjoy some of the utility they bring, but I certianly don't need it. I want to know how much less utility they will have and if putting 3 or 8 points somewhere else will help. I think that keeping deflection is a good idea.

So what I want is nit picky little advice and opinions. I've main tanked for many of the lurkers, though few of the 60's, unless it was one of their alts (simply because I spread my time around many many chars) and I've never really had any major complaints about my tanking. When something goes wrong I pretty much have known what I screwed up and how to fix it. Yeah, I'm being a little sensitive on this, I know I'm a pretty good tank and your advice pretty much came off as "try to learn how to tank" even if you didn't intend it that way. I've never had mortal strike or sweeping strikes, I know how to live without them. :)