should i drop awareness/IR for second wind?

[CarnivalNights]

You have equilibrium. There's zero point in second wind. That's complete redundancy.

Keep Flash for the times your berserk pacifies you and you need to grab enmity. It also doesn't break combos.

[Metalwrath]

Second wind is garbage.Awareness is especially handy for bosses that hit like a truck.

[dspguy]

I'd drop flash for Second Wind in certain circumstances. I used to be a proponent of flash. Personally, I still like it. It does one thing no other useful CC ability does: something to use a GCD on when pacified. But besides that, I like it when pulling a group of mobs. Instead of needing to blow a lot of TP on OP while gathering mobs up, you could use flash which will hold hate long enough until you can just OP all of them. But, i'm not too concerned about CC abilities in expert dungeons.

In A1S, flash has no purpose. By the time you are pacified, you won't have a need for flash. Use Second Wind.

In A2S, the only time I like flash there is when the 4 Jagd Doll spawn. I position myself between my 2, hit flash, run through one of them, then OP both as I position them. Without flash, there are times when I hit the first one and then even though I land something on the 2nd, it still smacks the WHM once due to latency or something. That's a corner case.

In A3S, haven't found a use for flash.

IMO, most of the time, SW > Flash.

[Whiston]

Contrary to what's been said here so far, I still find second wind to be incredibly useful, and awareness to be as lackluster as ever.

For anything that requires adds picked up en masse (dungeons, A2, etc) then flash is useful, otherwise I typically drop it and sub in mantra.

For something like A1, I take internal release, provoke, convalescence, second wind and mantra. After tank buster, I have mantra up for a bit extra regen strength, then also use second wind at an appropriate moment to recover some health. Equilibrium isn't useful here since I am not leaving deliverance, and this cooldown set allows my healers to DPS the rest of that phase while being self sufficient in my hp. In the seven weeks I've cleared A1 since release, I have never received a crit in that part if the phase, which gives awareness an effective value of zero. That isn't to say you can't be crit there, but if the crit rate is so low (and by nature, unpredictable) then the value of that cooldown drops.

[SpookyGhost]

You have equilibrium. There's zero point in second wind. That's complete redundancy.

Second wind is garbage.Awareness is especially handy for bosses that hit like a truck.

Equilibrium's heal can't be used in Deliverance. That's why you take Second Wind.

In any situation where you're not taking Flash, you should be taking SW + Awareness. There are even some situations where you're better off replacing Awareness with Mantra, as Whiston said. I personally still use Awareness in A1S because there's times where I don't want to be crit and Oppressor crits like it's going out of style.

[FallenWings]

Second Wind(Universal) > Flash(Situational) unless X situation where Flash is more useful than Second Wind. Examples off the top of my head, T13 OT Picking up Phase 2 adds before they become targettable and A2S where in W7 you can pick up both Jagd Dolls and save Wrath Stacks for an extra IB/A GCD to get into position faster.

Other than that, its good to get into the habit of just using Overpower and positioning correctly for it.