Starting Out...

The most difficult part of playing a Paladin is deciding what you are going to do with him/her.  Do you want them to heal? Are you going to be a meat shield? Do you want to pound on things with your Garfrost's Two-Ton Hammer? This decision is going to effect how you play the game up to level 40, which is when you can achieve Dual Specialization.  Here are some reasons as to why you would want to start off as any one of these.


Holy

1. Ability to heal instances.
• This really is the only plus to starting out as Holy.  You won't have the damage output of Retribution, and you won't be able to handle as many mobs as Protection.  Once you hit level 18-20 you can start queuing up in LFG and probably get into dungeons almost instantly every time you queue up.  And lucky for you right now leveling through dungeons is the most efficient way to level. 

Protection

1. Ability to Tank instances.
• Like Holy, once you hit level 18-20 you will be selected for dungeons almost instantly. Making it another very time savvy way to level.
2. Take on large amounts of mobs, AOE grinding.
• But unlike Holy you can take on a few more mobs. So for those kill x amount of mobs quest, you can round them up and take them all out very quickly.

Retribution

1. Ability to hand out a bunch of damage.
• With Ret you will be able to take down mobs a lot faster than you would has Prot or Holy. But with Ret you do not have the damage mitigation, big word that is crazy important at end game, of Prot.  Because of this you are unable to take on multiple mobs at once, but you will be able to go through single mobs much faster.
2. But with Ret being the DPS spec of Paladins, you have a longer wait time in the Dungeon queue.

So as you can see, each tree has their benefits to a starter Paladin.  Because of the way that dungeons hand out experience, I would suggest either going Protection or Holy to hit 80 faster, but if you don't want to worry about letting anyone die (Holy), it happens, or losing mobs to overzealous DPS (Protection), it happens, Retribution is a viable option.


Good luck with whatever path you take, and starting with my next post I will break down how to utilize each tree.