Ok here’s a question - what are your thoughts on Blessing of Sanctuary? For Prot Pallies to self cast only? Or is it something worth taking for Holy? Because I have heard of Holy Pallies taking that.
Can you just top the damn tank? If you need mana you can drink. If the tank is only missing a bit of health then sure, let him regen in between pulls as you regen mana. However, don’t let your tank sit at 50% HP while you stare at your mana bar. Top him off and drink.
The Warlock too, while you’re at it.
With enough healing gear life tap becomes a joke. I’ll throw a renew on u baby so life tap for life.
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As long as im staying above 50% im good. If it falls below that im going to start prioritizing damage mitigation over threat, which could be bad news if there are a lot of adds. Under 25% im popping valuable CDs. But if your keeping the tank above 50, you should be good.
Until you get to that nasty mob that will mortal strike you, or sleep/fear/banish/stun/cc the healer and the tank is at 50% health. Just top the damn tank and minimize the risk of wipes.
I fully admit to be learning, and appreciate the information being given.
I also think I can comment on a few things you posted:
In an effort to be the best palladin I can be, I’ve made an effort to go through various guides and videos.
First, most of them are ret focused believe it or not. Many from the cult of esfand. To the point where ret paladins will sometimes mock other paladins who don’t play ret. Many verbally state how much they hate healing and refuse to heal.
Then, everyone basically agrees that prot paladins cant raid tank, so no guides.
Instead, the prot paladin guides are mostly about how to farm, or how to rek bomb, which worked on private servers, but doesn’t in classic.
The guides on holy, and how to heal, are mostly just about builds, gear, and what different things do. I’ve had to rely on threads like this and discussion in-game to better understand how downranking and +HS works.
I have re-speced way more than anyone should - seriously, the equivalent of a level 40 mount - thank god I got one for free. I found I had to really have these abilities first-hand to appreciate them better.
To answer your question, I am fully convinced that BoS is better than holy shock as a healer. Indeed, it’s one of the recommended builds. I’ve now played with both, and here’s the pros and cons:
Holy Shock: Strong Damage Spell, can be used for range, which is used for Palladins because they lack any range abilities. Also works as a nice taunt/pull when tanking because it’s range. In terms of it’s healing output, it’s kinda pathetic, especially with a 30 second CD. I believe the holy palladins taking it are ones who plan to be PVP focused, the shockadins. It actually is way more powerful as a damage spell than as a healing spell for holy paladins. The healing output isn’t enough to justify a 30 second cd. I’ve tried using it for healing, and just laughed because it does less than FoL does! On top of that, it costs more mana!
BoS: Adds protection, does passive damage, so it is amazing in AoE situations. It’s bread and butter is AOE situations. I’ve personally switched to BoS when the tank does a large pull because it actually makes it easier than spam healing instead.
Honestly, I respeced to holy shock just to experience it first hand, and I see it’s uses, but I keep wanting to get enough gold to respec again for BoS back.
Thus, imo, for healing, BoS > Holy Shock.
Holy Shock is good for PvP shockadins.
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When I wrote the original Healadin thread, with coefficients, gear lists, ratios, etc we didn’t have stickies…so the threads had to be manually bumped.
Once most Paladins realized we could heal, after about 3 months or so, the thread stopped getting bumped. The original math was in that thread…so I think most just defaulted to FoL.
Sanctuary should be raid only unless you are a Prot Paladin.
Holy doesn’t need it nor use it. As long as you have 6 Paladins in a raid, BoM, BoW, Salv, Kings, Light, and Sanc, then everyone will have it.
Just remember in groups you will Blessing of Light your tank, Salv everyone else until they prove they can control threat 
…but Holy doesn’t need Salv.
Paladin healing threat was nerfed very early to prevent Concentration Aura + Heal tanking.
As a result Paladins only generate half the heal threat of other classes.
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I actually had a healer ask if they were letting me get too low before healing. I told them that as long as we don’t wipe I don’t care how low I get before receiving a heal. I trusted them to do their task and we never wiped.
I see a huge problem in telling others how to play their class when they are obviously trying and doing well. Maybe they aren’t playing the most efficient method that your typical min/max mentality player expects. But who really gives a crap? As long as they play half decent everyone in a group should be fine.
Some interesting points but the lack of an instant cast short CD heal is something to think about on a Pally as well. Priests have PW:Shield and Renew if we need to heal on the go, or to help with emergencies. Pallies don’t have that outside of CDs (so those are great, but not something you can use in the same way) and at least Holy Shock can help either as an on the move heal (I see this being necessary in PvP more than anything), or as a follow up after HL/FoL during high damage scenarios. Clearly the damage is really nice for a Pally as well, but since you made the argument for it’s use as a heal.
Although I’m more curious about reading about BoL vs BoS preferences.
Blessing of Light is just additional +healing, on that specific target, at the given coefficient, by what spell you choose…REGARDLESS of Rank.
Blessing of Light is downgraded for low ranks just like spellpower is. If it worked the way you think it does, Paladins would downrank all the way to (Rank 1) of Holy Light
Illumination is the greatest efficiency talent in game. Coupled with the +healing translation of Blessing of Light no other healer is as efficient, scales better, or delivers more throughput.
Er… it’s ok I guess. For 5 points, you get a cost discount equal to your spell critical chance. If you’ve got a ton of critical, this can be decent.
But consider that it takes 5 points to give your 18% cost discount. Priests can get 15% on direct heals with 3 points or 20% on Prayer of Healing with 2 points. Depending on how you’re healing, both of those are better. Likewise, Moonglow is comparable at 3%/point.
More to the point, none of those talents require you invest in critical - which is a horrendously bad stat for healers. Not only do healers only receive a 50% bonus (rather than 100%) on criticals, but even at 100% you’d never reach a point where +critical on gear matches up against equivalent amounts of +healing. Couple that with the fact that higher critical rates are associated with higher overhealing so you don’t even get the mediocre theoretical returns above and gearing a healer for critical is something you’d only do very reluctantly.
Paladins only require 29.5 INT to gain +1% crit, compared to other healers which are double that…as a result most Paladins can acquire +18% crit pre raid. Paladins can acquire +500 healing prior to raid.
They require 54 Int to gain +1%. With Divine Intellect, it could be argued this is more like 50.
As you acquire more +healing HL pulls further away from FoL. Moreover you can further uprank HL from Rank 4…there is no further upranking max rank FoL.
Holy Light doesn’t gain any hps advantage over FoL from additional spellpower - the coefficient and the casting time in the denominator cancel.
In terms of hpm, Flash of Light (Rank 1) ends up being 15.24 hpm @292 hps with your attributes.
If they are raid healing with FoL…then yes they are doing it wrong.
First of all, efficiency only matters when you’re likely to run out of mana. There’s no award for finishing the fight at full mana.
Second of all, raid healing requires a large number of targets be healed in a given time span. It just doesn’t make any sense to try to raid heal with a 2.5 sec (or 3 sec) single target direct heal - which is why no one does it.
You’re a pally… you’re supposed to spam your heals.
Letting a tank get to 30% health constantly before you even attempt to heal is damn frustrating especially when you are a class that is supposed to be spamming.
There is nothing wrong with how you are playing; you are just playing with inexperienced tanks who think they know what they are talking about. When a tank is taking manageable damage, there is no reason to spam heal them.
I find the value for an instant heal serves with its use as an emergency button. Meaning, you want it to be instant so you can instantly save the person. Perhaps with higher gear and ranks it can serve that purpose, but for me, it currently only gives 279 healing which isn’t enough to save anyone. When I cast it on people, I barely even notice their bar move to be honest.
I understand what Valarkin is saying, about how in a raid set-up, you have six palladins and everyone is just handing out all of the blessings.
HOWEVER, and this relates to what I was saying earlier about guides, the advice being given is often quite relevant and true for raids, less true for a level 53 palladin. With my guild or pugs, we are five people, and sometimes I’m the only Palladin, or maybe one other.
Consequently, I’ve adjusted to having a build where I can’t assume there will be 5 other palladins, and instead assume I will be the only one, and for that reason prefer BoS because it helps me more than Holy Shock.
If I need an emergency heal, I will use Bubble the person, which then gives me enough time to do a much larger heal. If it’s a serious emergency, LoH.
In short, I feel instant healing speels with a 30 second CD should be very strong, whereas a weak one loses much of its value for being instant, in a world where you can’t assume other palladins will be available. I agree with what you say about the value of instant healing spells, I just find it too weak to serve that purpose - remember it can only be used twice a minute too!
I’ll bite, but I’ll also accept criticism, and remember I am talking about a 5-man dungeon where I’m the only palladin. Tanks like to do large pulls where they take 5-6 mobs. BoS is basically a passive clevea that reduces both the damage from each mob, and will also reflect the damage back. It makes the pull shorter, and makes the amount needed to be healed, less. That’s why I will pull it switch to it for those large no-brainer AoE pulls, but then switch back to BoL.
Valarkin was also right that in a dungeon you place salv on all DPS, BoL on the tank, and then I give myself wisdom or kings depending on the situation.
If you’re short on healers maybe but most raids take a lot of healers so that certain boss fights are easier, making most of the rest of the raid rather light on healing requirements. Also it’s not like people are taking a ton of damage in much of MC anyway, again outside of certain boss fights or certain mob packs if things don’t go well.
I don’t worry about my health unless I’m at 20%. At that point I might have to burn a big cooldown or something.
I watch their mana for pull rate but beyond that I just let them do their jobs and assume that unless they tell me otherwise, they have a plan.
Did these “tanks” even weild a shield? If not keep pushing the noobs will L2P soon
This response is pretty on point. I began tanking for the first time in WoW Classic and have learned a ton over the past few weeks. My only concern related to this thus far has been when a healer has near full mana and I’m near death. I’ve run with healers where they’ve waited to long to heal to the point I’m milking potions, popping CDs, or dying for no apparent reason. Otherwise, it’s a tanks job to have an idea of how much damage they can take and to only point out heals in situations like I previously mentioned. If i drop to 40-50% health I’m hoping to be juiced back up for precautionary reasons but I don’t expect to be at 100% health at any point during a fight.
Other than the speed of pulling the next pull. Tanks I run with dont care if they end the fight with 1% hp.
As long as tank can tank it all. Healer can heal and dps can kill IN ORDER before healing becomes an issue…you dont NEED to be at 100%. Only time you NEED that is if you know there is a big hit or odd fight mechanic coming up. But if they need to be topped off for trash… 
I know tanks don’t need to be at 100% HP all the time, especially if you know your healer. But in a PuG, I like to be kept at 100%. Not because I NEED to be at 100% or we’ll wipe, but because I have to pay more attention to my health and fast clears require more attention. Rather than just pulling and keeping aggro, I now have to watch my HP and think about using survival cooldowns. Plus it’s annoying when a healer is at full mana and I’m not topped off.
If you leave me at 50% HP, and a couple mobs crit back to back, I’m going to have to hit last stand, shield wall, or pop a potion just in case. Just toss another heal and make life easier for everyone.