Thank the Light: Ghostcrawler on Prot Paladin Haste

Recent blue posts have acknowledged the problem I've had with Prot Paladin gearing this expansion.

This is some fairly esoteric stuff, and even though Paladins are probably the most popular tank class (well, them or DKs,) most people don't tank, so I'll give some background:

Mists gave Prot Paladins a passive that Ret has had since Cataclysm: Sanctity of Battle. Because Paladins are a long-term resource class, nearly all our abilities have cooldowns - using the CD to keep us from casting or striking every global CD. Sanctity of Battle shortens the cooldowns of those important abilities relative to our haste, mirroring the way that a Rogue, for example, gets extra energy with more haste (a Cataclysm change.) With ability cooldowns as our "resource," haste lets us fit more button-presses in a minute, just as it does for those with short-term resources.

The weird thing, then, is that because of the change to "Active Mitigation" tanking, Prot's need to generate Holy Power so we can cast Shield of the Righteous more often becomes paramount to survival.

The odd consequence of this is that after hit and hard-capping expertise (to make sure our abilities connect and thus grant our Power,) Mastery and Haste share our third priority spot for secondary stats. With role-neutral Mastery and Haste as our chief uncapped stats, we actually wind up preferring what would usually be considered DPS pieces instead of "tanking pieces," which have the two stats that are strictly for tanks: dodge and parry.

I have a necklace, for instance, from hitting exalted with the Klaxxi, that is expertise and haste. I passed up a dodge/parry one to get it, and that seems super wrong. Worse still, with the current gearing system, there are plenty of pieces in LFR that would be upgrades but that I'll never see because they're not "tank" pieces.

Ghostcrawler has seen this, and help is on the way: They're going to reevaluate some of the systems, likely nerfing Shield of the Righteous (and compensating elsewhere) to encourage dodge and parry over haste. They still want haste to be useful, but they don't want us wishing for DPS gear and sighing at all the useless dodge and parry on our tier sets.

I appreciate the desire to make non-traditional tank stats viable, but stacking haste on a tank - and a plate one, no less - is just plain wrong. Bring on the changes, hopefully as of 5.2.