Soloing up a Paladin

Levelling up my Paladin has not been fun. Level after level the going seems to get slower and despite good weapons and reasonable gear, the process has been very slow. I prefer my rogue. I do enjoy my feral druid when the mood suits despite her awful gear, but not so much the paladin. Why play one then?

First reason: I am a jack of traits and my ultimate aim is to have a level 70 of each class topped out in all the professions. (I fear that my engineering gnome mage may present issues here, but that's much further down the line.)

Second reason: DH plays a mage and our duo needs a tank to hold the aggro. My feral druid, even in days gone by when she had excellent gear, couldn't quite manage it and my rogue can't manage it at all. When playing his mage, I tend to spend my time running back and forth aimlessly, or so it appears. A paladin is ideal with the added bonus of healing powers, so it's the best gal for the job.

Third: Paladins are popular. There must be a reason why. I am determined to discover the way of the tankadin. I hope blindly that all will be revealed when she rides out on her shiny white horse at level 40. Rides out imminently, I should say. She's level 39 and three quarters.

My chief dislike has been the drinking. I dislike the waste of time between every single fight. She can take on a mob of three, which is nice, but then she has to drink. A lot. The drinking is costing me a fortune in and of itself. Both in the beverage purchasing department (an issue which will be resolved when she's old enough to play with DH's mage) and in the loss of time and time is money. I was at the verge of abandoning her all together, even though she's so close to a major landmark event, simply because I couldn't put up with how slow the leveling goes. Instead, I decided to try a experimenting a little more and alas, me thinks I have found a reasonable solution.

She can keep both her health and mana bar above 90% end fight if the following condition is met and her play style plays along. First: take on singletons that are the same level or a level or two lower than she is. Second: play to minimize expenditure. This can be done as follows:

• Use the Blessing of Wisdom buff and whichever aura is most appropriate.
  
• Start with 'Seal of Crusader' as she runs into melee range
• Hit Judgement, which is immediately followed by Seal of Justice
• Let her fight for 10 seconds whilst Judgment finishes its cooldown
• Judgment again, immediately followed by Seal of Wisdom
• Let her fight for 10 seconds whilst Judgment finishes its cooldown
• Judgment again, immediately followed by Seal of Light
• Let her fight for 10 seconds whilst Judgment finishes its cooldown
• Judgment, immediately followed by Righteousness (if there's time left)

Watch the health bar of the opponent. As soon as it gets to 35%, hit Consecration to hurry along the last bit. For things that tend to run at low health, use stun as soon as they start running, thereby keeping them inside the consecrated area and they're dead before stun has elapsed. At the end, my paladin is between 90 - 95% of both health and mana and can immediately go into the next fight. The fight itself is still a little long (32 - 48 seconds against a steady 18 -23 seconds for my rogue in a similar fight), but at least there's no 10 - 15 second wait inbetween. I plan to shorten this time by investing in an extremely good one-handed weapon whilst plunging talent points into one-handed weapon specialization. Watch this space to see how that goes.