Divine Shield

[Arnulf]

Yet another 'I give up without even trying scenario'  I haven't played my paladin much, but I can look at the mana efficiency and yep, Paladins are right on a par with everyone else on mana efficiency and not far behind on healed per second

Your real heal is 2.5 seconds, but that IS doable as a secondary healer. 

- The best holy talents for healing are all within the first three tiers, so you can easily get other useful talents

- going INT/STAM like a proper healer plays BIG TIME into your strength... being hard to kill.  As does making your heals more effective.  I come up against paladins in BG that have enough mana for like two or three heals and that's it and I'm always totally confused.  INT is tremendously important as a pally, it's like 3 health for every mana. 

- spiritual focus + concentration makes you the ONLY healing class to never lose casting time, which partially offsets your time to heal, again this plays to your strength of being virtually impossible to take down.  It also lets you heal yourself WHILE you tank or PvP, something I think is infinitely more valuable than having like 0.5% more DR or whatever piddly amount paladins have with the aura they tend to insist on using.  This also means you can bandage while you bubble so you can regen mana during that time, rather than heal, because you don't HAVE to be bubbled to heal.

- In PvP people will focus on healers ... unless you're a palading because you're a pain in the ass to bring down.  You can contribute huge as a healing pally. 

Pallys make good healers, you just haven't tried.  The best thing is, that it fits into whatever else they want to do, as there are fewer than 20 talent points required to be pretty decent.  Really 14 points can make a pretty good pally healer.  INT/STAM makes sense anyway for a pally, concentration + spiritual focus rocks for a tanking pally and PvP pally

Also in PvP, using blessing of light or blessing of wisdom plays more to your strength of 'outlast the opponent' than the amount of damage that blessing of might offers.  Especially if you are healing others (something that seems quite rare, and usually I'm  horde, so that makes me happy).  I know I haven't played a paladin much, but I know which types of paladins I dread coming across most, and it generally isn't the kind who think they can beat me down with their uber-DPS.  It's the kind that heal their teammates, and 1 on 1 take 3 minutes to kill because they have 9 lives and 5000 mana.
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Good points. And I acknowledge them. I will certainly try a holy build.

To clarify my intentions: if it came over as someone who's complaining about his supposedly sucky class, then I want to state that this is not the case. I like the paladin, just my experiences as 1on1 PvPer and main healer are like that I cannot cut it. But that's just me. I have experienced, on the other hand, that with me in a party, PvP is a fun experience and we can wreak havoc on enemy groups.

Also all my observations are from a level 60 character.