3.3.3 Holy Paladin end-game PvE guide [Outdated 4.0+]

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NOTICE: This thread is entirely OUTDATED as of 4.0.1.

As thorough as Lightrain's old thread was, Holy Paladins have changed vastly since 3.0.8. We have new itemization, gemming, reworked glyphs, and most of our spells don't have quite the same uses they used to. As such, I think it's time for a brand new thread. First off:

Leveling

Go here. Or get ready to press the holy shock button a lot. Or LFD.

Spells

Flash of Light(FoL)

Besides being a good, extremely mana efficient heal spell, which is unusual for a short cast-time spell, FoL is also useful because it gives you a HoT when combined with SS (explained later). It's a good spell to use for light damage on tanks or (especially) raid damage. It won't cut it during heavy raid damage or while healing a tank in harder content though, for that you need your powerhouse spell.

Holy Light(HL)

This is your big heal spell. You can't spam it constantly like we used to, but be ready to use it early and often, and be ready for a few mini-spamming sessions during the worst raid-wide damage. You'll also be focused primarily on this spell when healing tanks in harder content. Just watch your mana if you get too trigger happy with this one! Some advice about using HL versus FoL: You're much better off casting several FoLs than waiting for someone's health to get down to 40 or 50% so you don't waste a Holy Light. HL is really for those times when FoL simply does not do enough healing.

Holy Shock(HS)

This is your instant heal, for when someone absolutely needs to have a (small) amount of health returned instantly. It heals for an amount somewhere between FoL and HL. Ultimately, if everything is going right, you won't be using this too often, especially because of its cooldown, but keep it somewhere on your action bar, or give it a keybind where you can get to it quickly and easily, because you'll always need to fire off a Holy Shock on someone quickly at some point, it can be raid saving if you find yourself in a position to need it. A crit from HS can also proc Infusion of Light (explained later) which can make it even more useful. This is also the only heal you can count on having available while moving.

Beacon of Light(bacon)(BoL)

Fantastic and necessary spell. Do not raid without this on your tank at all times. It's even better now that overhealing will transfer to your beaconed target. This is why even when you think you're in control, you throw FoL's at random raid members who might even only be missing 300 health. So your tank is never without a steady trickle of healing. This spell basically means that even when you're a raid healer, you're a tank healer.

Sacred Shield(SS)

Another one that belongs on your tank at all times. The mitigation isn't fantastic (though you'd be surprised what a high spell-power holy paladin can do with this), but it also allows FoL to give your tank a HoT. You should be casting FoL on your tank every 12 seconds because of this HoT unless doing that will result in the death of a raid member.

Lay on Hands(LoH)

This is your best 'oh snap' button. Giant, instant heals on someone who needs it. Glyphed, it also gives you a few more options. If a healer besides yourself is about to run OoM (out of mana), cast this on them, and you both get a big boost. If you're about to go OoM, cast it on yourself to get an even bigger boost. Be careful with this, though. You won't be able to bubble afterwards if you self-cast LoH. Both of these last two ideas are very viable uses for LoH, but I have to say I personally always keep this spell off cooldown for use on tanks. If you're confident you won't need to use LoH for your tanks though, you can be a walking mana potion for anyone who needs it.

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Aura Mastery(AM): Doubles the effectiveness of one of your auras for 6 seconds. Mostly useful for resistance auras on fights with some kind of magic damage. It will mitigate an insane amount of damage on those fights. This can also be used to prevent silences on the few fights where that pops up. Other than that this doesn't have too much use in PvE, really. Although a bit of extra armor on Devotion aura never hurt anyone.

Judgements of the Pure(JotP): Not exactly a spell, but an effect gained through talents. 15% haste for free is Godly. Get this up early and keep it up.

Cleanse: Basically does what it says. Prioritize healing over cleansing for any non-fight gimmick debuff (IC Fusion Punch comes to mind as a gimmick debuff that goes off ASAP), but cleansing debuffs when you get the chance helps your raids hugely.

Infusion of Light(IoL): A talented effect that procs off HS crits. Makes your next FoL instant cast or gives your next HL an additional 20% critical strike chance. I wouldn't count on it, but you can force a proc using Divine Favor(DF) (which is probably the only reason you'd use DF), an ability gained through talents which allows your next HS, HL, or FoL to crit for sure. It's off the GCD, so you can make a macro which uses it as well as HS on a target, then you can cast your (now instant) FoL on them as well, for a handy secondary 'oh snap' button. This effect can potentially allow you to cast two healing spells while moving, in case you need to.

Divine Sacrifice(DS)/Divine Guardian(DS): A group of talents in the Prot tree that some builds will take and some won't (I'll cover builds later) which cause two separate effects. The first, Divine Sacrifice, basically works as a party-wide Hand of Sacrifice (covered in the next post) in that it actually damages you in place of your party members, that breaks if your health drops below 20%. The second, Divine Guardian, simply mitigates, without transferring to you, 20% of any damage your raid takes for the duration. Note that no matter what happens with the Divine Sacrifice effect, the Divine Guardian effect will continue. Because of this, you may want to make a macro which cancels the Divine Sacrifice effect immediately and just gives you the raid-wide short-term Barkskin. Since 3.3 it cancels below 20% health, so it can't quite kill you on its own, but it can leave you down below 20% health, so watch your own health very carefully when you use it. If you use it during heavy burst damage (such as a Fester exhale) it can drop you down to 20% and then the hit you take can finish you off, instantly. Bubbling while using this can be a good idea, if you choose to keep the Divine Sacrifice effect.

Divine Illumination(DI*): An ability gained through talents that halves the cost of your spells for 15 seconds. Great for when things get crazy and you absolutely need to spam HL as quickly as possible. Try to get Bacon refreshed during this point as well, since it's a mana-eating spell, too.

Divine Plea(DP): A fantastic mana regen spell, if you're responsible about it. Some fights have times when you'll be able to make use of this spell (usually fights with separate phases and breaks between phases, Mimiron is a good example), other times you'll be doing easy raids or you'll have plenty of healers and you'll get a chance to use this, and if you use some other cooldowns, it can be possible to heal through this. Pop Wings(AW) and a +spell power trinket while you use DP and you can usually heal through it alright. But just remember you can't use AW and bubble within 30 seconds of each other, so don't plan on using bubble and expect to successfully heal through DP at the same time.

Seal of Wisdom: This is the seal you should always be using. The glyph for this seal is the most useful to holy paladins out of all of the seal glyphs, and judging with this seal up is actually going to be a slight net gain of mana, even despite the cost of judging. This is because the tooltip effect of the seal can and does proc from judgments. You can also get ridiculous amounts of free mana by standing in melee range of bosses while using your instant casts.

*As opposed to this DI. Try not to mix those two up. On the plus side, though, casting Divine Intervention on someone when a wipe is assured will prevent you taking a 10% gear durability loss.

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A few more spells at your disposal:

Hand of Freedom(HoF): Mostly good for PvP, but it does have some uses. It can be used on the kiter on Rotface, for example, should your kiter have to go through the big slime puddles. You won't use this on very many encounters, but it's handy to have when you need it.

Hand of Protection(HoP): Good for all of those trigger-happy DPS. This spell will temporarily negate all of your target's aggro. So if a DPS overaggroes and needs help right away, throw this on them. Not only will they become immune to physical damage, they will instantly lose all of their aggro, meaning the tank can most likely pick the mobs right back up. It's important to note that a person will get their aggro back after this spell fades, but after 10 seconds of forced inactivity (less if it is manually canceled, of course), your trigger happy DPS isn't still going to be at the top of the aggro meters. Oh and, of course, do not cast this on your tank. You will cause a wipe. ~~Also remember this gives your target the Forbearance debuff.~~ Ret tree changed, and LoH got nerfs from Battlegrounds for some reason, so this point no longer applies. It still happens, but it no longer matters. This spell can also force some debuffs off of your target. Really heavy-hitting bleeds, or Saurfang's boiling blood being two prime examples. (Using this on the boiling blood target will prevent Saurfang from getting a big chunk of blood power)

Hand of Sacrifice(HoSac): More or less does what it says on the tooltip. If the damage is going to be really heavy, it's worth bubbling while this is active. This is a great one to put on your tank when either you can't heal them at all or you're worried you can't heal them enough. Fantastic for Maexxna's global stun after she's enraged, for one example. A very handy spell to keep in mind for a tank healer. This can also be used with DP and beacon for a cheap, gimmicky way to sort of get your heals at 100% while using DP. Example: FoL heals for 6k, only damage is on MT (who is beaconed). HoSac him, heal yourself for 6k, which also heals your beacon for 6k. Suddenly, FoL is a 12k heal for 12 seconds.

Hand of Salvation(HoSalv): A bit like HoP, but has different uses. HoP is best when a DPS pulls aggro at the start of a fight and a mob is liable to run everywhere. Pop their threat down to zero, watch the mob run back to your tank, and success! HoSalv will gradually remove threat from a target, but will actually remove threat from a target. As such, it's much better for late in a fight where a DPS is just creeping up in threat on a tank. If you are late in a fight, and a DPS has several hundred thousand threat on a boss, and you cast HoSalv on that DPS, it will absolutely destroy their threat. Problem immediately and permanently solved.

Hammer of Justice (HoJ): Primarily a stun, which is very useful for various trash you might find. A good example of its use would be Saurfang: Single target taunt a blood beast to bring it to you, and use this spell on it. Your DPS get six seconds of free nuking, and by that time someone on the other end of the balcony will have probably picked up aggro. Even on targets that can't be stunned (bosses) this can function as a spell interrupt. An example of this use is Jaraxxus: The stun won't work, but you can stop Fireball casts with this spell. HoJ does require that you be fairly close to your target, so it might not always be available, but since you should hopefully be in melee range anyway you should get some decent use out of it.

Holy Wrath (HW): This spell has because pretty useful on ICC trash. The tooltip is pretty self-explanatory, so no need for a lot of detail here. HW does NOT have the same 'interrupt on targets who are immune to stun' effect that HoJ does, so don't try to use it for that purpose. Also keep in mind this suffers from Diminishing Returns with other Holy Wraths and with Prot Warrior Shockwaves, so after two or three in a row HW will cease to function as a stun.

Turn Evil: Another spell that is seeing more use on ICC trash. As always, be careful with fears, as you might send a mob running straight into a pack of mobs you haven't pulled yet, but there are places in ICC where the trash is spread out enough not to matter. Also note that absolutely any amount of time spent feared at all will interrupt spell casting. Spamming this on an NPC who is being DPSed down will prevent them from casting even if it doesn't send them running. This fact is extremely useful if the Valkyr trash after Deathbringer creates healer essences during the fight. Even if the healer is being DPSed down, keep mashing your Turn Evil button and they won't be able to cast at all.

Talents

Basic cookie cutter up until ~~before Ulduar hardmodes~~ heroics spec:
51/0/20

This is your first cookie cutter spec. Back before gearing went from 187 -> 245 without steps in between, and crit was useful, it was a lot more valuable. Healing 25 man naxx with no major aoe's but 17k mana used to be pretty ideal for this build without DS/DG but with lots of mana restoring crit, but now you can go from heroics to ICC 10. As such this build has a small niche as a leveling/just starting heroics build, but it really doesn't have all that much of a point to it anymore. Do not going around using this build in serious business raids.

Cookie cutter after that:
51/17/0+3

This is the cookie cutter build (roughly) for the build that you'd really start using after you've gotten some badge gear from heroics. You'd take this part prot build over the 8% crit and run speed increase you get from ret for a few reasons. One is Divine Sacrifice. When the raid damage gets crazy, such as it does in late-game hard modes, you pop Divine Sacrifice. There are several other reasons why this sub-spec Prot build is useful to the raiding paladin, and Caean has outlined them very thoroughly and clearly in his post directly below mine. You can put the extra points towards some combination of filling out Imp Bow, Imp Dev aura, or Blessed Hands. I recommend filling out Imp Bow and Blessed Hands. Imp Dev Aura is probably slightly more useful than Imp Bow, but the 6% healing is brought by Resto druids and prot paladins, and the Dev aura healing buff is brought by prot paladins as well. Imp Bow can only be provided by you and a resto shaman. Resto shamans are rare and if your raid already has you they may be unlikely to have another holy paladin. On the other hand, I've yet to see a 25 man without a prot paladin and/or a tree. Although if you're in a regular group without either one, you might want to make some adjustments.

Note that there is a point in BoW here because I needed to put it into something to get down the holy tree. It's in no way a necessary recommendation.

For reference, this (54/17/0) is what your spec should look like if you have a prot paladin or resto druid in pretty much all of your raids. If you've decided to go with a sub-prot build, and you are positive you'll always have one or both of those classes, you're in the unique position of having a 100% set-in-stone holy paladin build.

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Glyphs

Holy paladins get quite a few choices for major glyphs, I'll list a few of them, their effects, and my personal thoughts. (Note: these are ALL going to be major glyphs. I'll cover minor separately.)

Beacon of Light: This glyph is good for two reasons: 1. You save mana on recasting Beacon several times, and 2. You save GCDs when damage starts getting out of hand and you have to heal more. Definitely a contender for one of your glyph spots.

Cleansing: Don't bother.

Divinity: This was better before 3.3, when you could use LoH on yourself for a gigantic amount of mana without triggering forbearance. It still does give a nice chunk of mana but if you're careful about only refreshing beacon when it needs refreshing then Divinity doesn't give you as much mana as glyph of beacon does.

Flash of Light: Not a bad glyph if you're undergeared and farming heroics, since FoL spam can carry you through there. When Crit-based mana regen got nerfed, though, this glyph got nerfed too. And crit has always been an unreliable source of increased HPS. I don't really recommend it for raiding.

Holy Light: Fantastic for raid-wide damage. If your DPS is close together (which your melee will always be) this glyph can make you a very effective raid healer. A bit less useful for five mans though, but it can still come in handy there. I use it and recommend it for raiding, though. If you're ever going to get assigned to raid healing duty, this glyph is mandatory. It's probably still mandatory, even for pure tank healing.

Holy Shock: Basically a PvP glyph. If you find you need to use HS more than the cooldown will allow, something is wrong with your healing style. I don't recommend it at all for PvE builds.

Seal of Wisdom: This glyph can be brilliant when you're undergeared, and is still brilliant when you aren't. It's also brilliant because SoW can be such a huge source of mana regen throughout a fight. SoW typically accounts for a ton of my regen (on mana gained charts I at least refill my entire mana bar once from this spell), which is made even more awesome when you consider your mana is 5% more efficient with this glyph.

Because GoSoW is better than GoSoL, and because Seal of Wisdom itself is better than Seal of Light itself, GoSoL is not a good choice of glyph because you can't have two seals at once, and you should always be using SoW. In a vacuum, GoSoL is actually a very nice glyph, I just don't recommend it because it's mutually exclusive with a better glyph/seal combination.

And those are what I consider your only real choices for glyphs as far as Holy Majors are concerned. I personally recommend SoW, HL, and Beacon.

Our minor choices aren't too fantastic. Half of them are based on buffs, one increases damage against undead, and the other is totally pointless. Picking up glyph of Lay on Hands is basically mandatory considering what your other options are. Otherwise I'd say pick up the one for Wisdom. Occasionally you'll be expected to do a greater buff besides Wisdom on the paladins in your raid, but no one else will be doing greater Wisdom, and you'll at least want to not have to self buff every 10 minutes. The Kings one can come in handy but really hardly matters. If you're buffing before trash, then who cares if your mana is at 85% instead of 90%, and if you're buffing before a boss you're going to make sure you drink up to 100% regardless. I actually recommend taking the 1% damage glyph simply because we don't have three really useful minors and since you'll hopefully be judging and meleeing as often as you can get away with it you'll be able to squeeze a minute amount of DPS out for your raid.

Enchants

For the most part, look at what other spell casters do, and look at our stat priorities, and it should be pretty obvious. Common sense also applies: 800g enchants on an ilvl 187 piece are probably a no-no. One enchant that may not be obvious though is Tuskarr's Vitality if you didn't take PoJ. It might not be immediately obvious but a PvE healer loves a little bit of extra run speed, especially considering how abyssmal your other choices are, and especially considering how bad holy paladin healing is while moving. When choosing between spellpower and int, choose int. Black magic is not a very good enchant. Haste procs tend not to be very good for any class that can realistically hit important haste soft-caps. At the very least, it's nowhere near to being worth the cost that it is.

Professions

Generally, the more customizable the better. This is because the usual spellcaster bonus stat on WotLK profession bonuses is spellpower, which is worse than int. For this reason, JC and BS are the best possible professions. Gathering professions are all bad, enchanting, Inscription, and LW are roughly comparable. Alchemy is an interesting one. Apparently Mixology makes Distilled wisdom grant an extra 20 int. The downside is that you actually have to have the damn pattern. If you choose to use Flask of Frostwyrm then Alchemy will be roughtly the same as most of the other crafting professions. Tailoring has a decent mana restoring enchant to your cloak, at the cost of the usual haste enchant. Engineering is mostly notable (for a PvE healer) for a haste cooldown enchant on your gloves. Since haste procs aren't terribly useful to us (going very far over the soft-cap doesn't do you a lot of good, and you don't want to rely on a temporary buff to be above it) engineering can be slightly disappointing, if also greatly amusing.

Professions aren't a huge part of being a holy paladin though. You can do just fine without JC and BS. I got Kingslayer and started working on hardmodes with Enchanting and Mining for example (although I've since dropped mining for JC).

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Stats and gems

First and foremost, Intellect is your number one stat in importance, hands down. This is because holy paladins are somewhat unique among healers in that we rarely have throughput problems, but often have longevity problems. We also have a talent that multiplies it and another that converts it to spellpower, and an unusually large amount of total mana pool based regen options.

The question 'How should I gear?' implicitly assumes you have choices in the matter, and there are two ways you have a choice in how to gear: The actual pieces you use, and how you fill the gem slots/how you enchant those pieces. For the actual pieces you use, it's important to understand how spell caster gear is created.

All spell caster gear will have int, stamina, and spellpower on it. After that, there are five secondary stats, of which two will appear on any given item. These stats are: Haste, Crit, mp5, spirit, and hit. Spirit and Hit are essentially useless to a holy paladin. The instances where they make any difference are few and far between, and the difference they make is insignificant. You can look at these two stats as trash stats. However, it's important to distinguish a useless stat from a detrimental one. If you have a blue item, and something with spirit drops in ICC 25, I can pretty much guarantee that the ICC drop will be an upgrade, despite the fact that it has spirit. Of the other three stats, haste is best, followed by mp5, followed by crit. This means you're looking for items with haste and mp5 first, followed by haste and crit, followed by mp5 and crit. Note that haste diminishes in effectiveness once you hit the soft cap* but since Holy Light should be your main heal in difficult content, and since you aren't always fully raid buffed, haste will still be a useful stat after this number. Against this priority system, you should also be balancing the raw numbers of each stat, including intellect. Something with 20 haste, 20 mp5, and 40 int is not as good as something with 60 crit, 60 mp5, and 80 int (completely made up numbers), despite the fact that the priority system I outlined says it would be.

Since 1) the size of the heals is not really a limiting factor to holy paladins, and 2) spellpower is found on absolutely all of your gear except maybe some of your trinkets, spellpower requires no conscious attention at all.** You should get plenty of spellpower automatically just from the gear you get.

*The haste soft cap is the point at which your GCD is reduced to one second, after which it cannot be reduced any lower. For holy paladins, this is around 676-ish (since latency changes how fast you can cast, as well), fully raid buffed. The two spell haste raid buffs are: a 3% general haste buff which a ret paladin or a moonkin bring automatically, and a 5% spell haste-specific buff brought by a shaman's wrath of air totem. Resto and elemental shamans will use wrath of air automatically, but enhancement shamans will not unless specifically asked to, since they use a melee haste totem, and it's a DPS loss for them to supply Wrath of Air totem. Also, if a shaman is expected to bring nature resistance for the raid, they cannot also bring wrath of air.

**The exception to this rule might be when you're just starting heroics and have greens and blues still. Heroic fights are much, much shorter than raid fights, so you don't have to worry about your mana pool lasting nearly as long, and when you're in greens and blues it's entirely possible that you will have throughput problems, especially if you have a bad healing weapon. If you're struggling to keep everyone alive in heroics, some spellpower gemming might be the way to go.

Biogoo's math about haste after the softcap

Worth a read by well geared paladins. Explains how haste diminishes in effectiveness as you get more of it, as well as supplying numbers for haste soft caps without certain raid buffs.

As far as gems go, Int gems are king, unless either A) the socket bonus is fantastic (which is almost never the case) or B) you need something that isn't a pure int gem for your meta. Obviously, epic gems are better, and JC gems are best, but don't waste ~~thousands~~ hundreds on an epic gem for a crap piece of gear. Insightful Earthsiege Diamond is our best choice for a meta, which requires one gem of each color. Many paladins I've seen use one prismatic gem in the slot with the best socket bonus that a pure int gem couldn't give them to reach the gem requirement for this meta. You could also use this and this to reach your meta requirements. Obviously when you have bad gear just get the blue versions of these gems. The worth of a prismatic versus a green and an orange is extremely close, so just go with whatever costs the least gold.

There are basically two flasks to choose from. Flask of Distilled Wisdom is the best all around flask, but you might choose to go with Flask of the Frost Wyrm if you really struggle with mana. I don't recommend elixirs here because I don't agree with them in general. For progression raiding, you don't want something that cancels on death, and for farming raids, who gives a damn if you have a flask or not? No one slacks more in end game PvE than healers in farm content.

A small discussion on judgments

Judge as often as possible, for several reasons. One is your JotP buff from talents, giving you 15% haste. Another is the Heart of the Crusader debuff you might have if you're sub-specced ret. This increases the crit chance against whatever you judge by 3%. Also, if you use SoW* and JoW, you can get a lot of mana back from judging something. It's worth doing whenever you get the chance. Keep in mind though, that 'as often as possible' means if absolutely no one will need cleansing, healing, or a mitigation cooldown within the next 1.5 seconds.** There are many advantages to judging, but none of them, nor all of them put together, are worth letting a raid member die, under any circumstances. Remember your first job is always to heal.

*Using this seal is also a good reason to melee things if you can, since you get quite a lot of mana back from doing so. Just try not to do something stupid like stand in an AoE or forget to heal someone. As a rule of thumb, you're usually safer away from a boss, though some fights aren't like that. Basically, meleeing things for mana with SoW can be a very helpful thing to do if you know the fight and you pay attention. If you don't know the fight or you just focus on getting mana back, you'll get yourself and several raid members killed. Healing is still your first priority, unless you literally don't have the mana to FoL and you're out of cooldowns. I would strongly recommend against doing this for fights you haven't done before. DBM isn't psychic or sentient. No addon can tell you for sure if you're putting yourself into some kind of unnecessary danger.

** Judgments are technically considered melee attacks. Your haste will not reduce the GCD they trigger. You're stuck with the full second and a half, which can seem like a very long time compared to one second when your tanks are getting pummeled.

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Healing Assignments

If your raid doesn't go with the 'healers press buttons when someone's health bar is not 100%' approach (my personal favorite), you're going to have some kind of assignment, which is usually going to fall roughly in one of three categories.

Single tank healing: Most likely this is going to be a main tank (MT), or a fight where an off tank (OT) is taking very heavy damage, meaning your assignment is going to be taking a lot of damage. Don't wait for your tank's health to go down before healing, if he's at about 75%, Holy light, if you can anticipate a hit coming, Holy light. In later content where avoidance is so important a tank's health can be a little bit all over the place, so you have to pay attention. In terms of spells put SS and beacon on your assignment, and keep the FoL HoT on him/her at all times, unless taking the time to do any of these things would make your tank dead. While doing this you can either 1) precast HL and cancel at the last second constantly if your tank is taking really spiky damage, you aren't too confident, or you don't have the mana for: 2) Spam FoL around the raid on people that need it (basically raid heal) with beacon on your assignment, and just keep an extra eye on the one person you're really responsible for, being ready to start HL spamming when he/she takes a lot of damage, cleansing your tank, etc. Your third option is to put beacon on an OT you aren't assigned to and just focus your casts on your actual assignment.

Raid healing: You don't have Wild Growth and Circle of Healing, so don't heal like you do. A Holy paladin raid healer is already acting the way Blizzard says all healers will in Cataclysm: you do not have to get everyone's health to 100%. More accurately, you cannot get everyone's health to 100%. Not when the damage is severe enough. Leave that to people who have AoE spells. What you can do is keep people alive long enough to receive an AoE heal. A holy paladin's raid healing strategy is pretty much summed up in the word triage. See who's going to die soon, either because they have a big, ancitipatable hit coming, or because their health is simply very low and there's a lot of damage flying around, and heal them. When the hit is over, or their health is far enough from zero that they can take a tick of two of whatever damaging AoE there is, leave them alone. Your job is done. All you're trying to do, is stop people dying long enough that the classes that excel at AoE healing can worry about getting everyone's health to 100%. As a last point: Keep your main tank beaconed while doing this. There's rarely a better raid member to use it on, and it's too good of a spell not to use.

Two tanks: You'll most often get this in ten man raids with two healers, since beacon is probably the best designed spell in the game for keeping two people alive very easily, and the other healer would be assigned to raid healing. Since you can only beacon one of them spreading heals around the raid really is a bad idea at any time, unless both of your tanks are fine and the raid healer(s) is desperate for help. Otherwise, there are basically two ways to heal two tanks, and which you use comes down to how heavy the damage is. If the damage is light, put beacon and sacred shield on the target that will be taking less damage, and keep the FoL HoT up on that person, while healing your unbeaconed assignment directly. If the damage is heavy, still keep beacon on the target that will be taking less damage, but put SS on the target you'll be directing your actual casts to. The reason for this is that if the damage your tanks are taking is fairly light, you can probably get away with FoL spamming, which is better than using HL if you can generate sufficient throughput. If you're FoL spamming the tank with SS on him/her, you're constantly clipping the HoT and it's doing pretty much nothing. Hence on light damage you leave SS on your beaconed target, FoL them once every 12 seconds and let the HoT do its work while you are free to spam FoL directly. However, if you're doing content where FoL spamming won't give your tanks enough health, you can put SS on the target you're healing directly and you'll be unlikely to clip the HoT since you'll be throwing HLs and not FoLs.
Spellpower versus Int stacking

Spellpower stacking is not viable in the WoW sense of the word, which is 'optimal.' svirve did some math later in this thread here which shows why 'gemming for throughput' actually reduces your throughput over the course of a fight. This is why I didn't include builds or gems or tips on healing a spellpower stacked paladin.

But just to be clear: There is no benefit to stacking spellpower and predominantly using Flash of Light over stacking int and predominantly using Holy Light. If you really, desperately want to play a spellpower build, however, it doesn't in any way instantly turn you into a giant crater of fail. I've met paladins who are intelligent people and who do fairly decently in raids who do this. Just realize that the way you are setting up your character is definitely not the best way to go, and on harder content it really begins to not even be viable in the strict sense of the word.

Being heroics-ready

This is a link to a profile of a holy paladin pretty much at the minimum for safely healing heroics, made by valundar. If you're pretty confident and you have a good tank you could get away with being less geared, but otherwise this is a pretty easy set of gear that anyone should be able to heal heroics with, with the exception of H ToC and the new Icecrown heroics. If you've never healed before this is the absolute worst your gear can look like before you do heroics.

Questions are also welcome. The point of threads like this is to try to prevent getting 15 different topics per week on 'ololol i bought holy pala from ebay, how i heal?/'

Update: No changes, just changed the name to '3.3.3' since absolutely no paladin changes were introduced.

Update again: Ditto 3.3.5, but I'm too lazy to change the title.