Sacred Shield, How I Love Thee

Sacred Shield is one of those little abilities that most protection paladins forget about, but is one that makes us unique and even more durable than we already are. It's a thirty second or one minute ability (depending on whether you talented it) that procs a little damage shield whenever you get hit, at most every six seconds. It's basically free EH that gets added to all the EH we already have. As priests have known for years, but never tell anyone, damage absorption rarely overheals, because it is pre-emptive. The only way it wouldn't get used is if I don't take any damage for ten straight seconds, which is highly unlikely.

The reason most protection paladins forget about it is that we were so used to holy paladins casting it on us for so long. Since it's thirty seconds, holy paladins would often cycle through the tanks, popping one on each. In fact, if you have a holy paladin healing you, you shouldn't cast it, because it overwrites (as far as I can tell) and theirs is better than yours. So, we largely forgot about it. I'd throw it up in instances and occasionally ten-mans when there isn't a holy paladin, but otherwise, it was unused.

Patch 3.1 changed all that, though it didn't change most of our habits. Now, paladins can only throw up one sacred shield at a time. That means, unless you have a paladin directly assigned to you, you're not getting it. Finding out who is healing me is why I hang out in the healing channel, and it's even more important that it used to be. It is now our responsibility to shield ourselves and if we're not doing it, we're missing out on one of our best abilities.

We can talent the ability too, so it is less of an annoyance. As I've mentioned in other posts, little 30 second cooldowns are generally annoying, but we can talent it to 1 minute, which also improves our absorption and our Divine Sacrifice ability to boot. This one is strong enough that I don't really mind it, and I've got a nice little macro I use so I can either cast it on myself or choose a focus for it in cases where I want to throw it on someone else:

/cast [target=focus] Sacred Shield; [target=player] Sacred Shield

Overall, then, Sacred Shield is a wonderful ability, exactly the kind that a tank needs. Unless a holy paladin is assigned to heal me, having a reactive shield gives me more survivability in any fight where I won't be one-shot, which, as far as I can tell, is all of them.