Blogiversity.org

 As a retribution [damage] paladin expert, i learned about the 2 other classes in the process. Prot for tank, and Holy for heals, but heres 1 question.... what is the best talent of all??

My paladin never made it past lv 35ish. I spec all my growing characters in whatever way will give them the highest kill speed possible so they will level quickly. I usually max out one spec on my characters, but I did a little mixing and matching on my pally. I spent most of his talent points on the retribution tree to boost his attack power and movement speed. I put a few points into the holy tree to boost strength and allow me to heal while being attacked. I'm really not sure what I'd spec him into if I got him up to 70. 

You cannot really say there is a best spec for a paladin, because all three shine in different locations, and all, with the exception of ret, are really viable at level 70, raid encounters. Ret, at the time being, is not very good dps in long raid encounters, unless the paladin is able to keep their own mana pool up (i think.) Holy and Prot pallies are almost required throughout T5 to T6 content. For example, the Morogrim Tidewalker encounter is plenty easier with a single, or even two, Prot pallies picking up the murlocs, rather than have all your ferals/prot warriors remain in tank gear and do rather shitty dps and have a difficult time picking up the murlocs. Holy paladins, aswell, are almost necessary in 25 man raids. This is because they provide good buffs, auras which are beneficial to certain groups, and do reasonably good healing, provided they are equally geared to the rest of the healers. This is not to say that Ret is a completely useless spec. Ret really shines for leveling and in Karazhan. Everything in Kara is either undead, or a demon, (with a few exceptions), thus a ret pally does ass loads of damage! On top of this, Ret does really well in Arenas, when teams are designed to burn down one target reasonably fast, a ret pally is something you want to get your hands on.

 Yea thats the one thing that a ret pally lacks, they need to keep their mana pool up or theyre basically crap, thats why i carry many mana pots, basic asset to the ret pally. When their mana pool is expendable ret pallies do much dmg on the dmg meters from my experience

Strangely we took holy paladins (2-3) and one dedicated retribution paladin. His DPS wasn't like a rogues, that's for sure, but his raid utility was reason enough to bring him. Give him a windfury totem and he could keep up decently on the meters and kept all the judgements up for us.

 We found protection paladins to just be a novelty. They were nice to have but they weren't necessary or essential by any means. We had a holy paladin who had a decent set for tanking and was just as good at prot as he was holy - meaning he was exceptional. When we were down a tank for Mt. Hyjal he came as prot and tanked all the waves of trash and on bosses he would step back and heal with his healing gear on. It was a great run, but the next week he came as holy and we did the same thing - just with warriors and bears.

I think all three trees are viable, just holy is what you will still find most commonly in raids.

Priests in armor, what's not to like about a holy paladin? I was actually planning to go holy once I hit the 70ish mark on my paladin. Retribution is great for leveling yourself quickly when you have to solo, but once you're at endgame raids, there's so many players that can do damage better than you. Healing and tanking are things people always need though.

Druids are much like paladins. Even though my druid was best at DPS (and actually better at it than all but a couple people I ever met), I spent most of my time tanking or healing. I just had to get used to that fact and spec my armor to cover up my weaknesses in healing. I did great at anything pre-heroic though. Once I hit the heroics I was really missing those fast heals of a resto spec.