Defensive Stance

[Darian]

I'm on a PvE server, I've spent my whole career as a main tank and I'm used to the play style.  I'm wondering if I would be better served putting talents somewhere else though.
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GG, a few weeks ago I switched from my Arms/Fury build to a heavy Prot build. One of the things I deliberately sacrificed was Tactical Mastery/Anger Management, and my reasoning was pretty simple; it was the same as my reasoning for giving up Mortal Strike and Sweeping Strikes. I wasn't getting utility out of it.

I have found that in PvE, it's generally not necessary for me to build rage prior to combat -- and on those occasions when it's warranted, there's always Bloodrage or rage pots. In addition, you're reaching the point with Gnolack where your ability to effectively use charge as a pulling tactic (or even as an engagement tactic following a CC pull) are going to be more and more limited. Strat and Scholo, for example, are all about aggro range management -- bringing the mobs TO you as opposed to going to them.

What I'd recommend you do before you make any changes to your tree along these lines, though, is simply to try and play mostly in Defensive stance without a lot of stance changes for awhile and see if you really notice an impact which is detrimental to your style of play. The reality is that so long as you're not making your healer burst into stress-induced hysterics every pull because your health bar is dropping faster than an internet stock price, it's vastly more important for you to be comfortable with your method of generating and holding aggro than it is to nickel-and-dime your talent tree to death in search of The Perfect Build™. The difference between the approaches you've seen discussed here over and over attest to that.

Side note: last night, Galreth and I were both in the same 10-man run on Scholo. Even at 57, and making most of the run in Fun Mode ;), Galreth was able to put up a good fight with me for aggro. The main difference between stances really appears to me to be more about damage and stun than about aggro.