Can a shield dedicated paladin have essence of temperance and essence of forditude up at the same time and still benifet from both?

Yes, but to some degree it's a wash.

I heard one Virtue lets you cast Sanc on others, I think it was Hope. I'm not talking about the sacred rites mind, the straight out -co sanc 'target'-

Is this true? Or is it like Shaman's, where it is possible to empower them to heal others (also heard by rumour, not first hand!) and its another switch that needs flipping on. Hope sounds like a cool virtue to have, but the only one's I've ever had were Fortitude and Temperance (Grurk empowered! Suck it Duracell!)

Edit: I was a two-handed ded, and my melee skills were awesome. I definetly benefited from both essences being up. The helpfile doesn't seem to mention Fortitude reducing defense anyway, does it?

Yhorian.

Ala, I commune sanc, and my whole group gets sanc. And so on and so forth.

Sacred Rites will allow you to sanc your group. Having the Hope virtue does not make it so that you can commune sanc on other people without using Sacred Rites.

I've also never heard of anyone ever making a shaman able to use their sanc and stuff on other people. Wouldn't that put healers to shame?

Couple things that weren't hit yet...

>Is this true? Or is it like Shaman's, where it is possible to
>empower them to heal others (also heard by rumour, not first
>hand!) and its another switch that needs flipping on.

The code definitely does not support this at present time.

>Hope
>sounds like a cool virtue to have, but the only one's I've
>ever had were Fortitude and Temperance (Grurk empowered! Suck
>it Duracell!)

Hope's way underrated in my opinion. For group vs. group fights especially it's probably the supreme virtue. (Depending on circumstance, Charity is also in the running.) For mostly-solo paladins, it still brings some pretty neat tricks to the table.

>Edit: I was a two-handed ded, and my melee skills were
>awesome. I definetly benefited from both essences being up.
>The helpfile doesn't seem to mention Fortitude reducing
>defense anyway, does it?

It doesn't; nonetheless, there are definitely situations in which you could want, for example, just EoF up and not the sampler. I could scheme that up for just-EoT as well but not very realistically.

I would use both when I had them, and it seeemed to help me "some" with tanking and "some" with offense, but obviously not as much in either case as if I'd used them separately.

Was I really any better off than if I'd just skipped both?