Originally Posted by Ethalan
As a Pally, Sheath of Light sounds nice, but your attack power as a Holy Pally is going to be minimal at best. However, the HoT is great, but easily dispellable.
I would much rather go with a 51/20/0 spec, for imp BoP and the stun duration reduction. However, the talent 'Divine Guardian' makes your Divine Shield protect all of your partners aswell, forcing 30% of the damage they take into your bubble of immunity. This is certainly more of a 5v5 spec though. Beacon of Light on only 2 targets would be meh, but on 5 it'd be great. This spec is also the counter to affliction locks in 5v5, due to the AoE healing and the bubble damage reduction.
I also like the Improved Devotion Aura, and how it gives 3% more healing, aswell as the Armor Bonus. It'd be argueable wheather or not to go 53/17/0 with this spec, and get imp. Concentration Aura instead.
Pally's, at the moment, seem to get higher in 5v5 than in 2v2. They can get up there with some 3v3 combos, but they seem to still be planned out as a 5v5 healer.
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My main is a holy paladin (sorry havn't updated my profile in ages) and I have looked into several builds for the expansion and the one that seems to do it for me is 48/0/23 for sheath. While the attack power conversion is borderline useless and the hot is dispellable, that hardly makes druid HoT healing weak as it stands currently. It's also attached to a frontload heal which is what you would be doing anyway so there isn't an opportunity cost. Opponents that choose to dispell it blow a global they would have rather used on something else I imagine. What the sheath build gives you is crit for your team mates on judgement with reduced mana cost and cooldown, additional spell crit to keep up instant holy lights/sheath HoTs and Eye for an Eye for pure comedy.
It probably has a lot to do with the fact that 3v3 is my bracket of choice, but I just don't see a ton of use for beacon of light with its current mana cost in the arena. The talent I would miss most when speccing out of prot would be kings. As it stands, redoubt won't be taken by most, i'm NEVER going to use any aura but concentration, I typically BoP once per match and while imp hammer and stoicism are nice, I tend to be very conservative with my hammer use and typically use it only when a kill can be made as a result, and stoicism is better now than it will be at 80. The only wildcard is as you said, divine guardian. While I can see its usefulness, currently when I bubble I get the greatest amount of my healing done, activating divine illumination and spamming powerful heals. If anything, I would say at this point in TBC my team mates are in the LEAST danger when I am bubbled, and I typically try not to talent around least dangerous situations.
But the fact remains, the loss of kings is a big loss and you will see many paladins speccing into prot to keep it, regardless of how cool sheath sounds. I make no guarentee that I will even use this build, or that its the best for every paladin play style, just looks like it addresses our current short comings the most. Whatever the outcome, I may actually have to respec my paladin more than once every 6 months now!
Edit: oops it is indeed 60% on sheath, behold the limitations of using internet explorer 6.0 at work; nothing functions correctly on a talent calculator!