Holy as low level PVE?Follow

I leveled holy the whole way with my pally and I had the same problem with the lack of spell damage on plate Items at a lower level. What I did was to try to find any healing gear, and gear with int and get a nice, slow, high damage 2her. I would start off judging Seal of Crusader (for spell damage bonus), put up righteousness (which gets a boost from weapon damage and spell damage), and then holy shock, I would continue to auto attack for a bit until holy shock was up, do that, judge righteousness, and then Hammer of Wrath to finish off the target (if it was still alive).

That set up worked well for me, but was pretty mana intensive, luckily you're an alchemist so you make some potions to boost your mana pool if it is getting low.

A while back I saw someone post that they wanted to use a certain +healing mace for tanking in the mid 60s and I was dead set on proving them that there just HAD to be a one-handed weapon paladins could use that was better than a healing mace in the terms of spell damage. I was wrong. There are surprisingly very few spell damage one-handers that are available to people pre-70, and so your trouble in the 40s of trying to get a decent weapon don't surprise me at all. You will have an easier time leveling prot or ret than you will trying to do shockadin. Besides, the true shockadin has pretty much gone away with the changes in spell damage. I have more spell damage in my healing gear than I ever did in spell damage gear. Don't waste your time.

I would recommend you do some searches in the Allakhazam database (go to Items, then Advanced Search in menu on left of screen). That will help you search for any weapon you want, and how to get it.

I find thotbot's search interface (from thottbot.com) easier to use, but that is up to you.

Finally - just go to WPL, and level to 58 so you can get to OL. Undead are very easy to kill as a Pally. You don't need super gear. Once you get to OL, the gear gets sooooooooo much better. Especially instance drops.