What bee's in your bonnet?

There seems to be, broadly speaking, three schools of thought where it comes to Paladin Gearing. At various points in Ulu's career, I've pursued them all.

Effective Health gearing is the most pervasive. These are the folks who will stick +Stamina gems and enchants everywhere they can. They also tend to aim for uncrushable by the cheapest method possible, so they quite often stack Block Rating, and look for extra mitigation via Block Value. For ten mans and the vast majority of 25-man bosses up to T5, this actually works great. There's rarely any bosses (save for the "big two" of Gruul and Magtheridon) that hit for more than 5k a hit and if your healers are on the ball, you're gonna be fine.

The problems with EH freaks are two-fold. First of all, there's a heavy reliance on non-spelldamage "warrior" gear. A few pieces is fine, but you need to be sure you're not threat-capping your DPS. Secondly, the lack of Avoidance means your healers are going to be constantly spamming high-rank heals to keep you up. In terms of raid set-up, you may want an extra healer to keep your massive health pool topped up, which can hurt the amount of DPS you bring to raids. Also on fights like Teron Gorefiend (or even Gruul in the later growths), it doesn't matter what your health and block value are like, 3 unavoided hits in a row will probably kill you.

Next we have Avoidance gearing. This is just taking things the other way and going for a crapload of +dodge itemization, with some parry where possible. In general Avoidance gearing is worth it for any fast-hitting mob, where over the course of the fight, you will see a decent reduction on your incoming damage.

The downside of focusing on Avoidance to the detriment of EH is that you will eventually have to take a hit. Avoidance is always just a chance to dodge/parry/be missed. Even if you somehow manage to squeeze out 70% avoidance, then sooner or later you'll get an unlucky hit streak, and you'll need to rely on your armor and health to take it. Also, and this is less of a concern, Avoidance tanks are going to find themselves the most mana-starved in farm content.

Finally we come to what is the current bee in my bonnet, Threat. CD has recently recruited a full T6 Bear tank and this has caused me to suddenly pay attention to my threat. I'm naturally a bit competitive and whilst the rational part of my brain accepts I'll never beat her, it doesn't mean I'm not going to damn-well try. So at the moment a few of my red gem slots are at home to Glowing Shadowsong Amethysts and I've recently started using my Illidari Runeshield as my main shield (it doesn't hurt that it has an enormous amount of armor to boot).

As a downside, my health's taken a bit of a nosedive to a stable 16.2k unbuffed, and I'm about 0.8% below uncrushable unbuffed (which is something I always advise against), but it seems to work fine in a raid environment. Although I'm already seeing the DPSers riding Ulu close on boss fights where we don't have many Hunters. I'm just going to have to keep pushing this envelope I guess.

So that's me, what bee's in your bonnet currently?