You need to live with the following:
- People who DO NOT play paladins think paladin aggro is some amazing thing.
- People who play shadow knights complain that paladins get aoe aggro when in fact a shadow knight can tank better aoe than a paladin. (for a longer period of time)
this post is a little sensational. lets be honest here, basically everything in the game pre-overgrowth was killed with a paladin as the main tank (bango) and that was before runic2 was changed. it is possible. paladins are entirely viable.
they just pale in comparison to the insane scaling of shadowknights. jraul, xach, versul, zorr, any endgame shadowknight can just do spam lifetap for an entire raid fight and heal themselves for as much as a cleric will and have zero aggro problems.
also, SK r2 worked incredibly well with ae damage, which was a huge thing when i exped. ranger runic2, necro runic1, whirlwind shadowstaff, abstraction, whatever. i fondly remember pulling all 4 talon packs and both masters, hitting versul r2 and my rangers r2 and doing 20,000 dps but alas, those days are behind us. these days, it's still fairly useful in normal situations and also, they are better ae tanks than paladins just based on tab-terroring, very easy to do. paladins can do ae blind and stun every 36 seconds for ~1400 ae threat (no r2), sks do double that with one terror.
if anything, paladins are bad because they don't scale well, because their threat never catches up to dps, in fact it only gets harder, meaning they have less time to actually use their tools: self heals, hot, whatever. if they COULD heal, ie. if heals gave aggro, it'd be a whole different ballgame. you could literally fix the class imo with that one change.