Paladin Cooldowns - Reactive vs Sustain

[Sapphidia]

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.

[IndigoHawk]

This is similar to how I use those cooldowns ... or how I would use them if it was worth the effort.

For trash, I use Rampart all the time, and sometimes use Convalescence. I sometimes use Bulwark to get more shield bashes (for dps, not tanking).
For bosses, I rotate through Rampart, Bloodbath, Convalescence, Foresight, and Awareness. I save Bulwark, Sentinel, and Hallowed Ground for when I need them.

I agree it's probably better to use more cooldowns on trash, but it can be hard to care, especially with a skill like Awareness. It's one of the most boring skills in the game.
Putting those cds on macro to use them more often is a good idea. It doesn't make you that much sturdier but it's better than nothing.

If you wanted, you could use Sentinel and/or Bulwark on trash, too. Save Hallowed Ground for a real emergency.

[Lumines]

Paladin cool downs are best used NOT reactive at all but instead preemptively. Good Paladins will pop it BEFORE a huge hit comes to mitigate it and make it easier on healers, average Paladins will use after they take huge hits and hope they don't die as the healer brings them up. Convalescence is most effective when popped with either Rampart or Sentinel. Awareness is actually REALLY good, pop it when you're pulling lots and lots of trash in junction with Bulwark and you'll have very very steady incoming damage when dealing with group pulls.

I macro Blood Bath and Flight or Flight together and they are used on CD.

I wouldn't use Awareness + Bulwark on CD as they shine most when doing AoE pulls, you don't need it for single target shenanigans. Just pop them whenever they're up and you're about to do a group pull. Bulwark also has the advantage of helping you out if you're low on TP. Shield Swipe is a nice cheap move that can space out your TP usage, Bulwark gives you more of that!

I have Rampart, Sentinel, and Convalescence macro'd together like this:

/ac "Rampart" <me>
/ac "Convalescence" <me>
/ac "Sentinel" <me>

This way, depending on cool downs, Convalescence will always have one mitigation CD to pop with. At the same time, you also won't blow right through both Rampart and Sentinel and are still able to rotate it.

[Lucke]

I just pop everything at once. I really never use Rampart, Sentinel, etc. on trash. Trash dies so fast that I don't get much efficiency out of those DEF boosts. I pop Rampart, Sentinel, Bulwark, Fight or Flight on bosses one right after the other. Then I use Rampart and ForF when they're ready. I save Convalescence for when I'm critical or eat a heavy damage attack. I never die on trash if I don't pop my DEF boosts on them, even if we get adds. That has more to do with good healers and powerful DDs though.

[Sapphidia]

To further add to my post, I also tend to use macros where possible. I've found that good use of a "wait" command also makes them efficient in weaving stuff between GCDs. My Fast Blade macro looks like this currently:

/macroicon "Fast Blade"
/ac "Fight or Flight" <me>
/ac "Fast Blade" <t>
/wait
/ac "Bloodbath" <me>
/ac "Awareness" <me>

This will keep Fight or Flight on cooldown, and will weave in a Bloodbath or Awareness every time they're up, but -after- the Fast Blade. This ensures the cooldown is weaved between Fast and Savage Blade's GCDs and doesnt delay the Savage (Going FoF->BB->Fast pushes the fast back a half second). I'm still experimenting with whether I prefer Awareness as part of that, or popped manually, but as said I found that when I was popping it manually I was using it once every 5 runs somewhere. Awareness has a really large uptime (25 secs every 120 is a lot for a cooldown) so having it here will mean it's likely to be popped on large pulls anyway, and will always be popped early in a boss fight to prevent any spike damage forcing healers to spike-heal early on.

I also have two macros for the cooldowns, the first looks like this, and is my "Oh no, big incoming boss attack" macro:

/macroicon "Sentinel"
/ac "Sentinel" <me>
/ac "Convalescence" <me>
/ac "Rampart" <me>
/ac "Bulwark" <me>
/wait
/ac "Foresight" <me>

The purpose of that is to pop my BEST cooldown, in order. Each press will work through the list. It will also try to pop Foresight along with every press, so you get Foresight + (whatever) if it's off CD. Foresight is very meh on its own but nice with another cooldown. Hammering the button will pop everything in sequence of course. I then have the following other Cooldown macro which I use on Trash:

/macroicon "Rampart"
/ac "Rampart" <me>
/ac "Bulwark" <me>
/ac "Convalescence" <me>
/ac "Sentinel" <me>
/wait
/ac "Foresight" <me>

Similar to the above macro, this one pops my current most "efficient" cooldown. I'll use this on trash packs whenever i want to reduce my incoming damage but don't necessarily want to waste the Sentinel or Convalescence on something minor.

I've found the above macros vastly reduce the amount of keybinds I need to fiddle with in combat (though I still have stuff on separate keys if needed). Having Fight or Flight, Bloodbath, Awareness and Foresight just happening on their own without having to think about it means that I just get so much more use out of them.