World of Warcraft®

I've been playing paladin on and off since early cataclysm but I was always holy. I've now changed to protection to tank for the guild and from what I've seen haste is a viable build separate from the usual mastery build because all paladin specializations now have Sanctity of Battle. So the question I bring is what do you think is better, haste or mastery?

Both are fine, however, Haste is the better of the two, and is quite often the more used, as it both increases DPS, HPS and survivability whereas mastery is only a survivability increase.

Stack haste, use Insight, keep SotR as much as possible. Collect loot.

Haste heavy and Mastery heavy are both near equal in damage reduction (sacredduty.net has the exact figures if you have a couple hours to kill in reading the blog history) with mastery slightly ahead.

That said I prefer a haste build because until you get like 12-13% haste I find the rotation unbearbly slow. I began to notice a big difference in the flow of the rotation around 4k haste raiting.

Mainly though with a Mastery build you'll have a higher damage reduction from Shield of the Righteous and a higher boosted heal from bastion of glory stacks and with a Haste build you'll have higher dps, increased amounts of shields from Sacred Shield and higher self healing through Seal of Light procs. Haste builds also have been snyergy with Glyph of Battle Healer, if that is something that interests you, in a group support sense.

Though to be clear both priorities work perfectly well in content, with Haste doing slightly better in heroics, challanges and 10ms and Mastery doing slightly better in 25ms. Though nailing a solid rotation will matter more than your gearing priority in any content currently in game, shy of heroics raids.

Though I'll let other speak on that as I'm pretty casual.