Paladin Cooldowns - Reactive vs Sustain
Wall of text incoming. This might be a bit rambling, but I've recently changed my ideology towards the tanking cooldowns Paladins get. My initial thought was the same as most paladins - tanking cooldowns are there for the moments of "oh crap" where you need to stop yourself dying, and some of them can be more frequently pressed than others. Here's the survivability cooldowns Paladins get (not counting Fight or Flight which should be popped constantly anyway):
Sentinel - the biggie, save it for when you know a boss or pack is going to start putting out a huge amount of damage, or to mitigate a single predictable hit like Mountan Buster.
Rampart - a baby sentinel, its duration and cooldown give it a huge potential uptime. Pop this frequently on trash packs and whenever you expect large incoming damage and Sentinel isnt available.
Convalescence - Somewhat underrated, I rate this as second only to Sentinel and HG. When you know you'll be dipping low on health for a sustained period, this is vital.
Hallowed Ground - Your healer is dead/afk/disconnected, otherwise engaged, or someone pulled 8 trash packs onto you, or you need to give your healer a break to save the raid, or there's an incoming Mountain Buster and you have 100 health.
So those four are the big ones. They need to be saved. You have to use them proactively to mitigate specific things, or reactively when a huge amount of crap is hitting the fan. However, the other cooldowns are very much different -
Bloodbath - A small amount of incoming healing. Never enough to save you from anything, but has the same cooldown as Fight or Flight which buffs your damage. Should optimally be popped at the same time.
Foresight - Looks good on paper but this equates to about 5% less damage taken due to how the game factors defense. It can stack okay with other cooldowns but it's merely a minor damage reduction on its own.
Awareness - A lot of big boss abilities can't crit, so this is mostly about smoothing out incoming damage from minor sources. Crits seem to be only +50% in this game, so this mitigates less damage than you'd think, but can help prevent the need for spikey healing.
Bulwark - Quite how good this is depends entirely on your shield. It might be a cooldown barely as good as Foresight, but it could almost be a mini Rampart. Either way, the long cooldown and short duration make -this- the ideal "uh oh, Rampart and Sentinel are down" reactive cooldown.
What I found though was that whilst some cooldowns got a lot of use, like Rampart, and some cooldowns like Sentinel and Hallowed Ground were less used but vital to save, I would be finishing most of my runs with barely any uses of Foresight and Awareness. I'd got them macro'd together to make a kind of "ghetto Rampart" to pop when Rampart was down but I realised two things - firstly that both of these cooldowns make such a little difference when popped that, whilst they help, they wont save your life in a pinch. And secondly that saving a cooldown purely to use in between other cooldowns when they're not available makes it barely used.
What I've started doing now... is basically keeping Awareness, Foresight and Bloodbath on cooldown, macroed in to various rotational things so they happen without thinking. I've found that in dodgy situations you -need- Sentinel, Rampart, Convalescence and Hallowed Ground available. But the others... it feels like popping them much much more frequently whenever you're taking ANY kind of damage results in being proactively a lot sturdier.
Obviously popping one on a single hippogryph in AK is pointless, but you often never truly know when the crap is going to hit the fan. Keeping the minor tanking cooldowns used frequently even on easier packs is going to result in less panics, and probably a higher health tank if things do go bad. Plus less overall mana/spikeyness to heal.
I pop Awareness on cooldown on bosses and trash packs, I pop Bloodbath every time I pop Fight or Flight (basically on cooldown too), and I pop Foresight every time I pop any single other cooldown at the same time as bonus defense synchs well with flat reduction. I don't feel I've lost any versatility in having potentially one less emergency button, due to how easy it is to rotate the others. A Foresight wont save your life as an emergency button, it's too insignificant, but thought of as a "passive" skill that makes you take less damage over a run in general, I find it more appealing.
Even on Titan Hardmode, rotating Rampart, Sentinel, Convalescence and Hallowed Ground was enough, because in most cases a Virus and/or Sacred Soil would be up and thus a personal cooldown could be saved for the next one. I've seen some tanks advocating using Foresight + Awareness as the mitigator for one Mountain Buster, but it feels very inadequate. Defense is so meagre a stat that people do runs to AK in Bikinis nowadays, and the big abilities wont crit.
TLDR - Foresight, Bloodbath and Awareness are not cooldowns designed to be used against the big hits. Use them frequently regardless of how good or bad you feel a pull is going, as they contribute to your overall self-sustain.
Any other tanks taken a similar mindset? Holding off on using Foresight/Awareness/Bloodbath was just making me never use them. Now I pop them constantly on everything and feel like a much much sturdier tank overall.