I had an idea that I haven't really seen presented, so wanted to see what other people thought. Personally, I love the haste build and I would hate to see it go away.
I think one of the biggest developer hangups when it comes to how good haste is, is the fact that people will throw aside actual tier pieces for an offset piece with haste on it. I'm sure a lot of design time goes into set bonuses as well as art for those pieces and if they are considered "worthless" to a large chunk of the player base, then they have failed in their design. This brings me to my first suggestion:
Make the set bonuses something that scales well with haste. At the very least make the 4 piece very attractive to haste builds. Even if the tier pieces themselves don't have haste on them, it would still be worth getting 4 piece in order to get the bonus.
The other objection is that Protection Paladins will take all the DPS gear. I don't really see that being the case. I'm not seeing a lot of "ermagerd, they took our lewts" type of complaints from plate dps. We won't be taking any gear with crit on it (yes, we can, and they can be upgrades, but for the most part it wouldn't be necessary to) and we only share a desire for haste with ret paladins and frost dk's to my knowledge. Having to compete for a piece of gear with only two other specs does not seem that bad at all.
The only other reason i can see the developers objecting to haste builds is pure pride. It seems, based on previous blue posts, that they intended haste to be useful, but that it shouldn't be something that was stacked by tanks. The wanted tanks to benefit from raid buffs, etc. that affected haste, but that was it. Now that Protection Paladins are actually stacking the stat in excess because it's so good, they don't like it because they don't like to admit their design is flawed. It's understandable. They put a lot of hard work and passion into creating this game and don't like to be surprised by "design flaws". The only solution to that is constructive and intelligent discussion. We need to somehow make them see that even if this haste thing isn't intended design, it is good. We are not OP because of it. We aren't able to exploit the game in any way because of it. Let's try to get them to see this unintended design is a good thing, even if it does need a shift in thinking and a few tweaks.
I imagine some optimized number for this then haste will still be stackedPaladin
To stave off the controversial Protection haste issue, we are making a chance to Grand Crusader to proc from dodge and parry at 30% instead of CS and HotR at 20%. This will improve dodge and parry slightly for active mitigation purposes without negating the +haste slant that many paladins have taken.
Playing since '04
Its designed to make parry/dodge less shit, but at current (almost unavoidable, no pun intended) levels of parry/dodge, its a slight nerf and when you're in the off tank position, its a quite significant HoP + DPS nerf.
That said, the only reason we'd want to hit a sweet spot for this is if we ran out of moves to use (I can't see it beating out haste for pure HoP gen), but it will at least make Dancing Steel a much more attractive enchant