stats and gear advice please

I have just decided to start playing my tankadin again after a long break from tanking I was wonder if gemming stam and mastery is a good way to go to give heals to time react to incoming damage or should it be straight haste and if it is straight haste to we look at ret gear or still prot gear and what if prot what stats should I be looking for

It depends on what gear you have access to and what content you're doing. You didn't include an armory link so we can't tell what you're doing. I'm going to assume you're starting from nothing.

Top priority is 7.5% hit and 15% expertise. That 15% can be rough to hit, but this late in the expansion there's plenty of options to get there.

After that you want haste. As much of it as you can get. If you play correctly (check out the posts in basic training, as well as Theck's theorycrafting posts) it will smooth your incoming damage. Yes, this means you'll want a lot of ret gear.

Dodge and Parry are not dependable stats; there's almost always better itemized gear for any slot that has dodge/parry on it. When gearing up you're looking for hit/xpt/haste/mastery -- and mastery is by far the lowest priority.

In general you don't need to gem for stam unless you are doing content you undergear. If you are trying to get started and have to subject yourself to tanking lfrs, it might be worth wearing some stam trinkets and hybrid gems to avoid the "lol i have more hp than tank boot his ass" mobs.

You may also want to lay off the amphetamines.

Good luck out there. There's a lot of research on this board; read and internalize it and you'll be fine.

He's right. Protection Paladin in a nutshell:

The current Prot Paladin gearing strategy is to reach 7.5% hit and 15% hard expertise cap. We do this so that we never miss and the boss can not avoid our holy power generating abilities.

After that we gear haste to reduce the cooldown of our Holy Power generating abilities through the passive talent Sanctity of Battle to maximize Shield of the Righteous (SOTR) up time.

We do not gear Mastery because usually our SOTR is innately strong enough through the mastery we will acquire through gear. SOTR can reduce physical damage by ~40-60% depending on your gear level. Most all of the "Fatal Strike" abilities that bosses do are physical damage, so SOTR works against them. And it is these "Fatal Strike" abilities that are usually responsible for killing a tank. So have SOTR up during periods of high damage intake. It greatly reduces ANY physical damage attack, whether boss auto-swing or "Fatal Strike" ability.

Dodge/Parry is avoided because this type of damage reduction is based purely on chance, whereas we can guarantee mitigation with SOTR. So if you have any Parry or Dodge, you want to reforge out of those into hit, expertise, haste.

I should also mention that haste adds more ticks to the duration of our Eternal Flame and Sacred Shield talents as well.

In addition to all of the above, if you get an upgrade of 10 ilevels or more, take it, even if it has crit or avoidance. Set bonuses are an exception, of course. The extra strength, stamina, and armor are worth it. The stat priority is only relevant to similar ilevels.