Defensive Stance

[Kevin]

Alright, I have a warrior question that now seems like a decent time to bring up since you are talking about dropping Shield Discipline.  My question is to if Improved Shield Bash is still worth the 2 points then?  It seems to me that the 6 second interuption from a normal Shield Bash is probably fine in most situations.  The silence being cast by the Improved version may generate even more hate though.  So thats my basic question, does the talent Improved Shield Bash cause Shield Bash to generate more hate because of the silence or is the hate the same without the talent?
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I don't know if it causes more hate, but I don't use it much for hate, I use it for the utility it grants you. I don't have to worry about timing it, it seems to work on critters that don't have mana but still use abilities to snare or poison or whatever you that unimproved can't do (I can't be sure on that though since sometimes those mobs don't use the abilities anyway), and if you want to move a mob around you can bash them and start moving them immediately since they can't switch schools (and mobs after 40 generally have 2 or 3 schools of spells) to just cast something else. So that is utility that I am using way to much right now to want to give up.

I also figure that if I drop just the 3 points in tactical mastery I wouldn't have any need to drop shield disciple so I would really want to still have the points in it then.

Right now if I give something up it looks like the order they would go would be tactical mastery, last stand, improved bloodrage, shield discipline. Though that hinges on seeing if there are more arguments for the versatility of TM. If I drop more than that I might as well really change the build around and either go deeper in the fury or arms tree. There are some good benefits of things like anger management for a turtle (the passive in combat rage generation) and other skills in those trees.