Balancing Act

My gearing up for my new Paladin is going quite well. He's now got epic Helm, Boots, Shield, Legs, Gloves, 1H Weapon, Belt, 2x Rings and Neck.

So I've just got to sort my Cloak, Libram, Shoulders and Trinkets. The majority of those will probably be coming from emblem rewards, so the randomness of drops isn't much of an issue any more. He's now upto about 27k HP Unbufed, and 29k with self-buffs. A big improvement from the 22k he started with.
The only thing I've got to watch for is the Defense Cap. I've had to switch alot of my +Stam enchants and Gems for +Def again. The sooner I can get rid of those the better, as it will mean even more HP. Emblems are my freind in this matter.

So, with that in mind, I've been trying to run as many Heroics as possible. It would seem that I'm becoming easier to keep alive, as there haven't been as many wipes as there were when I first began my tanking career.
I still have a little difficulty maintaining my aggro against a 1-1 DPS'er. Particularly Ret Pallies and DK's. They've often pulled aggro from my main target when I've had to switch targets to taunt them off a healer / squishy.

I'm not totally sure if this is entirely my fault. I've always been a believer in the "You taunt it, you tank it" philosophy. Overaggro is no ones freind. And since when did Omen stop being a 'required' addon?

The overaggro'ers are usually fulyl epic'd or raid-DPS spec'd. So maybe they're just used to their tanks being uber threat generators, who couldn't lose aggro if they fell asleep mid-fight. But I'm not one of those... yet.

So for now, I'm quite happy with the way things are going.

For the sake of emblems I also tried doing some healing in my Offspec. This was a mixed result. Generally the healing was fine, but I found myself /OOM too often, and my action bars weren't configured quite right, leaving me missing out on some of the important stuff, simply becaus eI couldn't find it quick enough. Having said that, my attempt at healing HoL wasn't a total failure, the place was cleared. Although repair bills were probably higher than people expected them to be.

After the healing run, I re-jigged my action bar, equipped a few cloth and leather healing items, to help boost my SpellPower and Intell, and made a few macros for the important abilities like Beacon of Light. I think the macros still need tweaking a bit, but it felt much more comfortable using them.

Healing was fun, and brought back memories of the good-old Kara days. When my previous Pally was one of the guilds main healers. The mechanics are mostly the same, but Beacon of Light takes away some of the required concentration on the tank, when I remember to keep it up.
A little of the frantic whack-a-mole healing has been lost though, and that used to be alot of fun in itself.

I'm planning on sticking to the tanking first though. Once I've got a full tanking gear set, I'll look at picking up an epic healing set. If un-needed stuff drops during my heroics I'll obviously pick it up. I've already got epic legs for that set. But I won't be investing any more money into it at this point.