Paladins...is it as bad as they say?

[Kevin]

I typically start using Sunder Armor instead of Heroic Strike around Lv.22, when Sunder Armor II becomes available.  It doesn't affect rage generation like Heroic Strike, and it's a sort of passive DPS increase :)
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Yeah that was about what I did with Gnolack as well. But around L40 or so I started to use Heroic in instances again as a rage dump when tanking since I had no tactical mastery and the initial damage of the mobs or lack of CC meant it was just best to stay in defensive. I really had not other option for rage dump. No anger management either so keeping it for the next fight didn't really help either.

So since I now had a new rage dump toy for def stance on my no tactical master no anger management build I decided to see just how good it was. Of course I was in battle stance when testing so the damage numbers are higher for both Heroic and Shield Slam than they would have been in defensive but it was nice to confirm what I already knew.

Of course I've given in to the dark side. I'm still 31 protection but I have dropped piercing howl for anger management. I kept 4 points in improved dem shout though I still want the theme to be you can't hurt me or my friends you bastard and while there are better ways to accomplish that than a 31 point protection build I'm not going for the best tank in 90-95% of the situations you are in. :) My personal opinion is that 15 points in protection (just to get defiance and toughness and I would recommend shield spec over anticipation for this) and the other points in arms or fury will allow you to tank 90-95% of the encounters better than my build will. I think I have the advantage on some of the top end boss mobs and on casters since I can silenc and stun them at will. Improved Sunder and Improved Taunt only give me a little more advantage when things go wrong. I even dropped Iron Will after playing with it for a bit. It did help a few times, but it's like paladin damage, it's so unreliable that 5 points in 1H spec are more valuable than it. :)

So I'll stop hijacking this thread now. :)