Holy[]
Holy Paladin's are incredibly strong healers, arguably the best in BC, I would say that Shamans beat them out just because they bring slightly more utility. But along with Shamans, Holy Paladins are the healers you want to stack your raid with. There is a beautiful efficiency and efficacy within the holy tree, an alert player that knows when to be conservative and when to pull out the stops will work the best with this class. The first 52 points you spend when holy are always going to be the same. (41/11/0) The remaining 9 points can go 1 of 2 routes, your goal being to bring as much additional utility to your raid as possible.
Improved Blessing of Might/Seal of the Crusader Build
- Provides Improved Might and a Raid Wide Crit bonus.
Improved Concentration Aura Build
- If you have Improved Might and Improved Seal of the Crusader already, this brings Improved Concentration Aura
There's actually a 3rd option for paladins who lack gear and can run against mana issues but still want to provide seal debuffs for their raid.
Everything you need to know about being holy you can find in this thread.
Prot[]
What I would recommend for talents; (0/48/13) Not a be all, end all spec. Read below for considerations.
Debatable points; -Guardian's Favor is a great talent, I would argue that Prot has too many other useful talents to pick this up. Possibly a good choice once content is on farm. -Spell Warding, only useful against mobs that cast spells. Feel free to invest these points elsewhere depending on content and the progress of your raid. -One-Handed Weapon Specialization, Ardent Defender, and Deflection. Between these 3 talents I think it is fair to drop 2 points for other talents. The weapon spec helps with threat and the other two help with mitigation. So depending on where you are on progression you could lose a bit of threat generation or defense. However, as previously stated, I would always keep a majority of these point specced and only take 2 of these 15 out for other things. -Improved Seal of the Crusader provides a 3% crit buff for your raid. Nothing huge but possibly worth while. If your raid is bringing a ret pally they should be bringing this not you. -Vindication may not work on bosses but it helps paladins regen with seal and judgement of wisdom which is why you will often see 1 point placed. Source: https://github.com/ccshiro/cc-buglist/issues/479
Common mistakes
-Blessing of Kings is an important buff but hopefully your raid has a holy paladin bringing it, holy is the spec with extra points not prot. If not you probably don't have enough paladins to use kings anyways. I would almost never recommend prot speccing kings.
-Stoicism is purely a PvP talent, do not invest points here.
-Seal of Command is not for tanking
-Pursuit of Justice is a great movement talent but as a tank we will not need to be running as much and the boar's speed enchant is more efficient for a protection paladin. Here's why; Boar's speed provides 9 Stamina and 8% move speed. The Fortify Boots Enchant only provides 12 stamina and it would also cost us at least 2 talent points to get 10% move speed. So at a cost of 3 stamina and 2 to 7 movement speed we can save 2 to 3 talent points. Given the amount of desirable talents in the prot tree a reasonable player will conclude that Pursuit of Justice just isn't worth the cost.
In some instances prot paladins choose to go deeper into the ret tree to grab sanctity aura.
https://legacyplayers.com/Tools/Talents/#DZVhtIb0dMgoxVfx0bcz