It’s impossible to maintain Shield of Righteousness without enough haste, and yes, I get it—people stack haste because “that’s what the meta dictates.”
But where’s the choice in that? Shouldn’t a spec be both playable and enjoyable without being dependent on a single stat?
I wanted to build a Protection Paladin focused on crit and mastery to maximize parry and block. On paper, it should be the tankiest setup possible.
But no—without sufficient haste, you can’t keep Shield of Righteousness up, and without it, you just get crushed.
It’s frustrating. We have four secondary stats, yet we’re forced into choosing just one. Why can’t we play our specs the way we want? At the very least, make alternative stat builds viable.
If you could disregard haste, vers mastery would be tankiest, as parry does nothing vs magic busters and dots which are the most common tank busters. My advice play divine purpose and bastion of light. You can afford to drop a point in resolute defender to grab bastion and you can either not play resonance or zealot’s parafon for purpose. I know i have 19.5k haste but even in full haste 590s with 14k haste it was bing chilling on sotr uptime. Haste is still ridiculously good past sotr uptime as the more haste you have the longer you can keep up shake of heavens as templar and do more sotrs/wogs inside shake of heavens (sotr/wog proc an empyrean hammer per cast, 2 if you have shake active).