Well I dont see BoSanc as a mitigation buff, I rather use it for threat/damage in instances where I don't need the extra HP from Kings.

But yes it doesn't scale(yet?) and our threat will be scaling with strength and stamina, so it might really get redundant.

Guys, Sanctuary and its shortcomings have been discussed to death already, both in this thread and the Prot thread. The lack of new ranks so far in the beta is a pretty obvious sign that something new is coming to that slot, and it's probably not worth our time to rehash the old debates before that happens.

Reckoning isn't a get-this-for-every-prot-build talent, but I think its shortcomings are overstated. It's true that uptime for Reckoning goes down a bit as your avoidance goes up, but going from, say, 40% to 50% total avoidance as you gear up is going to reduce Reckoning procs by 15% or less. (Any kind of damage can proc Reckoning, including unavoidable stuff like magic.) Sure, the parry-gib is an issue, but to some extent it's always an issue anytime you have autoattack turned on, and even if Reckoning is up 50% or more of the time, you're still going to be getting parried less than a warrior or druid, who will basically be using a parryable ability on every GCD. Reckoning doubles melee+seal threat when it's up, so even a modest 40% uptime for Reckoning is going to improve your threat more than Seals of the Pure or One-hand Spec.

And even if you want to be ultra-careful about parries for raid tanking, it's still a fantastic leveling/grinding talent with no downside for at least normal-mode 5-mans.

DPS specs will always have stronger damage-scaling than tanking specs. Even in TBC, a prot paladin progressing through raid content will gain spelldamage slower than a mage or warlock. That's just the nature of things.

I certainly think it's a bad idea to try to stretch a tanking spec to pick up Sheath.

But Holy is a much slimmer tree than Ret or Prot; you can pick up every essential Holy talent for PvE healing with 52 points (counting Beacon). That leaves out things like Unyielding Faith and Imp. Concentration and such that might be useful on specific fights, but it includes everything a paladin healer would be expected to bring to raids in general. And I think that's deliberate: It intended to allow a Holy paladin to minor in Prot or Ret, and pick up a good chunk of the raid utility of one of those trees, avoiding the need to have a Ret or Prot paladin.

And yes, you make a strong argument that raids will want a Ret paladin regardless just for the strength of the judgements, but regardless of the facts of current scaling in the beta, do you really think the devs intend for one particular spec to be a de-facto requirement for every raid? I think the intent of the design here is for a raid to require only two paladins: one with at least 20 points in Prot, and one with at least 20 points in Ret. There are benefits to a third paladin -- M/W/K on classes that can use all three, a third aura, etc. But as far as the essential raid buffs, two paladins will get you what you need, and I think the "slim" design of the Holy tree is intended to give you some freedom as to what role those two play.

Now, I think to some degree you and I just aren't going to see eye-to-eye on this, so maybe I'm wasting your time and mine here. But do you really think the devs didn't know what they were doing when they put Sheath just barely out of reach of a 51-Holy build? It looks to me like a deliberate design decision: "Yeah we'll let you get this in a Holy build, but we aren't giving you BoL too." And the recent patch that changed the effect of successive HoTs effect from a pure write-over to a rolling effect seems to me like a pretty strong indicator that they want Sheath to be useful as part of a healing build. Why would a Ret paladin need that kind of functionality from the talent? I'm not disagreeing with the point that Sheath is intended to give off-healing utility to Ret paladins, because obviously it is. But a talent can serve two purposes in different builds, and the rolling HoT effect seems like an obvious attempt to add to that "second purpose".

I do agree that the AP->SP conversion could be overpowered as part of a healing build. But the HoT effect seems (to me) to have been put in that spot very deliberately.

I agree with your reasoning and "evidence". The only problem is that druids already have Flourish. Functionality of Flourish is too close to BoL at the moment; both druid and paladin 51 pointers can't be "the" spells. If we have 2 AoE HoTs either the druid version or paladin version will perform better and that's what mix/max-raiders use, thus rendering the other useless or too situational.

Ok, we could change BoL to work differently than Flourish (priest and shaman 51-talenst are good examples they can be creative) but the problem is that paladins really need an AoE or HoT - or both combined as in BoL.

This leaves us in a situation where you want to change Flourish... oh wait, then Druids don't have AoE heal on short cooldown. Difficult situation to balance.

And yet again, you seem to be fixated on so-called "abuse" and "exploitation" of Sheath. While you are free to speculate on why Blizzard was "forced" to put it where it currently is, I can't imagine how it would have survived even this long if Blizzard honestly didn't foresee off-specs going for it. Let me ask you this: Is there some vested interest in all Holy paladins speccing 51/20/0 or some close variant? Aside from forcing them to pick up Improved Devotion Aura and Kings so the Prot pally doesn't have to? I fail to see the abuse inherent in choosing to spec for more single-target healing power (through more crit and spell power) instead of picking up an anemic AoE group heal.

Or is this whole argument (both here on this forum and elsewhere) some kind of residual Shockadin hate/entitlement protection for full Retribution builds who feel threatened because a healer can pick up some of "their" utility? If so, I'm still pretty sure a full Retribution build will still be desired for his better DPS and better Judgements, so there's no need to try to "hold the other guy down."