Utility

Today's river of tears focuses on utility.

All paladins bring a blessing and an aura. Beyond that they bring whatever mediocre function they have based on how many talent points they placed in whatever spec they chose to be doomed with.

Holy : Half of these talents have nearly no effect on your healing. Some of them just straight up dont belong (Holy Strength?). You're competing against Chain Heal/Earthshield, Hots/NS Heals, Circle of Healing, and of course the standard 1.5/3.X sec heals. Your utility is your blessing and your aura. Most of the time your aura is useless/inconsequential. You don't have Innervate/Rebirth, Mana Tide/Windfury, or an incredible assortment of heal spells that can be chosen for different situations. You have two heal buttons and a third you'll never use. Mana that tends to run out slower but no abilities that help you use it in as effective a manner as other classes.

Prot : MT or bust. Even then you're going to need a warrior to thunderclap, and someone to expose/sunder. Melee dps on an unsundered boss is ridiculously poor. If you choose to be an offtank, you'll find yourself being completely useless except for clearing trash. Your healing ability is gimped and all you can do is tank. Your dps is below awful and the group should already be LF Feral Druid. Its never advisable to turn a healer into a tank, most additional tank situations require as many healers as you had before. So a progressing 10 man group is sometimes going to have 3 healers + prot paladin healer on single tank bosses if the prot paladin is offtanking. This will place a lot of responsibility on your 5 DPS members. JUST GIVE IT 120% GUYS, MAKE UP FOR THE PALADIN SHOULD HAVE REROLLED DRUID! I see a lot of prot paladins rerolling deathknight if their tank tree allows for decent dps as well(as a DPS/Tank hybrid, I assume so).

Ret : After fighting the stigma of a thousand years of RETLOLOL you can bring your 25 man raid group 3% critical, judgement refresh, and a weaker ferocious inspiration(with shorter range to boot!). As horde your grass is very green, and you'll find that your dps can rise to respectable levels with seal of blood. As alliance, you're going to find yourself rationalizing your raid spot with the said utility, when its likely an additional heroism would do far more for your raid's dps than your 3% critical. Your grass is also decaying and being used to fertilize the horde grass.

Basically, people are trying to find the least awful spec to bring paladins into raids for, and they're all fairly bad. Some guilds just have paladins outside buffing the raid so they can stack 5 resto shamans and a few holy priests. In the name of progression, all things can be rationalized away.