Ret or prot?Follow

Im at level 29 debating whether to respec to ret, but I am worried about losing my shield and the extra armor it gives. Would it be worth respeccing for solo play?

You will find it more efficient to level as Ret. Most quests ask you to kill x amount of z or something similar to that. Sure being Prot will give you the edge when you have to kill mobs that are in packs of 4-5 but usually this isn't the case.

It used to be that aoe grinding as a Prot Pally was a great way to level up but blizzard has increased the amount of experience given by quests now so that isn't the case meaning that a Ret paladin will usually complete these quests quicker than his Prot counterpart.

Retribution until outlands would be the way to go. You can still tank most pre outlands instances as Ret and the most important "oh $hit" spells will still be there for you to use.

Note: Prot won't be that far behind Ret so, at the end of the day, if you do in fact like Prot more just stay with it. Think of Prot as the middle ground between a fast levelling Ret Pally and a slower levelling Holy Pally.

My vote = Go Ret.

You are able to do cool things as a Prot, but Ret is faster.

If you want to be Prot at 70/80 - go for it. No reason to do it from 1 - 80.

That said, do what you ENJOY.

I'm in the boat that says to go Ret.

Going Ret, you get Pursuit of Justice, much much earlier than you would if you went Prot (you have to wait till the 70s before a proper Prot build will get you deep enough into Ret to get PoJ) and that alone cuts 15% off of your travel time, hence, 15% you arrive at your destination sooner, hence 15% less time spent on travelling, more time spent killing.

As Ret, you will kill single targets MUCH faster, and your survivability is still pretty high, that you're not going to die in any normal fight. You can still take on 2-3 mobs and easily survive, you might have to pop a healing light or two, but otherwise, you should be good, even against 2-3 same-level normal mobs.

2-Man Group quests can still be done as Ret, quite easily in fact, all the way into the 70s.

Prot truly doesn't start to shine until you get Holy Shield at the very least, I'd prefer to wait until I had Avenger's, Shield of the Righteous and Hammer of the Righteous. Without these tools, all a Prot paladin can do is throw Consecrate and Judgment, along with their Auto-Attacks... that doesn't sound too fun to me, and it sounds like it'd take forever to kill anything. Sure, you could do 5+ mobs at once with no sweat, but a lot of quests don't even require you to do such.

If you do go Ret, just follow a couple easy steps and you'll be great:

1). Use a 2-hander as Ret. Always, Always, Always. I can't think of any time you should ever touch a 1H weapon or a shield.
2). Load up on +Strength. -of the Bear or -of the Tiger earlier game, when possible.
3). If you got a guild, don't pass up Scarlet Monastery's quested 2h axe. That is one sweet weapon and will last you quite awhile.
4). Go for Slower Weapons. A 3.5 speed weapon will hurt more than a 2.6 Speed, even if they both have the same DPS numbers.

If you do those, you will have an easy time leveling as Ret. If you want to tank endgame, you can switch to Prot at 78, some of your starter gear is Lv78, and you have enough talent points to deck out the Prot Tree and get most of your tools, and get some practice, there are a few elite quests in Northrend that a Prot Paladin can solo with mild difficulty at Lv78, to give you some practice if you've never tanked before, look into doing those.

^^
This.

Ever since they not only reduced the XP required to level, but also increased XP gained from quests until Outland (IIRC, they only reduced XP needed in Outland, but didn't modify kills/quests?), everyone knows that even moreso than Vanilla, Quests = Levelups.

The faster you get quests done, is the faster you will level. How do you get quests done faster? You travel faster (Pursuit of Justice), you kill the specific mobs asked for (Ret kills 1-2 mobs faster than Prot does), and return to the NPC (again, PoJ).

Prot leveling was good back in the days where grinding out 5+ mobs at once in the time it took a Ret Paladin to kill 2-3 earned the Prot Paladin better XP/hr while rested. It was most likely used by people who allowed Rested to build up (those leveling Paladin as an alt) and then would take their Prot Paladin into some area where there were large numbers of mobs to be found, and AoE ground them down for massive XP/hr.

But now, with quests giving more, and PoJ helping with travel times, any Ret is going to utterly kill a Prot pally's XP/hr, especially if the Prot pally run out of rested.

I keep preaching Pursuit of Justice, because I know first-hand just how much travel is involved in getting up to Lv60 (there's very little travel in Outland/Northrend as compared to Vanilla), especially in the late 40s to early 50s stretch where quests routinely ask you to go between Feralas, Tanaris, and Hinterlands (and Darnassus if you're Alliance). All of that travelling utterly kills your XP/hr, and unfortunately, many of those quests are chain quests, and some of them open up multiple quests later, but you have to do the chains... I kinda wish Blizz would shorten some of those, but oh well.

Damage mitigated by a shield at low levels is pretty insignificant. The armor value alone isn't exactly useless, but it doesn't make as much of an impact as one might think. Also, at lower levels both your block % and block value mean that unless you're grinding on large packs of mobs, a shield is little more than a pretty (or not so pretty) accessory to justify why you're stuck using a lame 1h weapon. There was a time in the evolution of WoW where grinding large groups of mobs was a very decent way to earn xp relative to other options. With the increase to xp given out as quest rewards, that changed. IMO, the only thing that ever made leveling prot worthwhile was the option for AoE grinding, but that's taken a back seat to being able to burn through single mobs (or small groups) as fast as possible to get the quest done and turned in.

I tried leveling as prot a few times on the way from 1-80 with my pally. With the exception of the 77-80 stretch, all of those attempts met with a fairly quick trip back to the trainer to respec ret. It was just too tedious for my liking. Leveling prot is also more gear dependent than leveling ret. If the ultimate goal is to go prot for end-game content, you can respec as you approach 80 when you've got easy access to suitable gear so you can start to get a feel for it. If you're thinking more in terms of enjoyment factor, that's an entirely subjective question.