You may want to look at engineering before investing time/mats in blacksmithing. As a leveling profession for palladins, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better match. Dynamite, gernades, and the trinkets give you range and AoE CC (Area of Effect, Crowd Control) that you won’t get from your abilites for many, many levels.
Also, get all three secondary professions (cooking, first aid, and fishing). Fishing, at least on my server, is bizarrely lucrative. Cooking will give you stat boosting food, and is very cheap for the rewards. First Aid reduces your downtime, even as a class that can heal itself, especially as DP (Divine Plea) and replenishment are high level abilites.
On fishing…there’s a server event every Sunday afternoon. Fishing tournament in Stranglethorn. For a set period of time, special fish spawn, and you have to be the first to turn in a set number (think it is 40) to win. There are other special fish that you can turn in for prizes…including a hat and boots with great stats for low levels. These items are very popular with battleground twinks.
Battlegrounds are instanced areas of the world reserved for PvP activity, and they are divided into brackets by level. The first bracket, 10-19, has only one BG available to it, Warsong Gulch (WSG). The brackets go up by 10s from there (e.g., 20-29, 30-39, and so forth). A “twink” is a character designed to be the best it can be for its bracket. So, in the 10-19 bracket, a twink will be a level 19 character with a talent spec optimized for PvP, and the best item and item enchancement (enchantment, armor patch, etc.) for every slot. Twinks are usually financed by the player’s higher-level character, because equipping one is very expensive (anywhere from hundreds to thousands of gold). A twinked character will almost always rip through a non-twinked character, especially at the lower levels.
And they did nerf twinks in 3.1 (I think) by making high-level enchants require a certain character level to take effect. F’rinstance, it used to be that the high-level “sugardaddy” toon would get the twink gear enchanted with some insanely over-the-top enchant that increased attack power by +1000 or something and it made twinks cut through regular toons like a hot knife through butter. Now, high-level enchants have a minimum character level for the effects to work, so those lvl 19 ubertoons can’t run around with an attack power that dwarfs Mt. Hyjal.
It was cause for much QQ on the WoW forums. Cry more, twink! Lern2play without training wheels!
It looks like you’re happy with your pally so I’d like to offer up this little bit of advice. Pick a play style and go with it for a long period of time. When I started my first Pally I tried to be everything. Even with only one talent spec, I held onto gear for all three play-styles. Never selling anything kept my bags completely filled and made my life hell.
When I finally dropped my pally and started a mage it was so much easier. one set of clothes and easy decisions when I find new gear. “Is this better than what I’m wearing? No? Sell/AH!” That and plenty of bagspace kept me from returning to a city to sell things off.
Incidentally, twinks also cause fairly severe inflation in the value of equipment at particularly the 19th level, but also any level ending in, say, 6 to 9, relative to equipment for levels ending in 0 to 4. Which led me to do my shopping for my priest at levels 20-21, and to plan on waiting until levels 30-31 or so to buy my next set of stuff off of the AH.
Something to keep in mind, though… Once you hit about level 70 or so on a hybrid class (any class that has a tank and/or healer spec, versus one that only has DPS specs), you are going to want to start collecting “off-spec” gear. You will always want to prioritize upgrades for your main set, but (for example) if a quest offers no rewards that would be good for your main spec, but does have something that would be good for an off-spec, pick it up and hold on to it.
But, again, this is something you don’t have to worry about for a long time–just keep it in the back of your head for the future.
(Of course, I’m also coming from the position of someone who was playing her Prot Warrior before the latest round of buffs. Back in BC, at level 70 I was wearing my DPS set for all of my dailies–I’d only wear my main set when I was actually tanking, because it would take me ten hours to kill mobs with it on.)
ETA: In response to Tom’s comment, yup, any BIS (best-in-slot) item for a 19 twink is going to go on the auction house for about 200g, minimum.
Meh, the BoA gear makes up for most of it. And the only way to make WSG fun is to play it at 19. I do miss my leg patches, but, meh, it was mostly health any way.
From my point of view, PvP gear for a level 19 twink takes about 4-6 hours to get, and if you get bored with twinking you’ve got a solid leveling set. PvP gear for a level 80 toon takes as much time and dedication as a raiding set does, and makes you have to play in the never sufficently bashed arenas; and once an arena season ends, it’s junk compared to the next season.
Addendum: Play it at 19 as a twink. It absolutely blows to be in the 10-19 bracket of WSG untwinked. That experience is, in fact, why I ended up making my twink a twink.
I happened to be on the alt in question (a Blood Elf Mage) on a WSG weekend (Odesio: every weekend features a specific BG, where playing in that BG awards you bonus Honor) and decided to check it out, as I never PvP’d on my main. I got so sick of dying every two seconds that I decided to twink her just a bit. Then a bit more. Then I just said “screw it” and started full-out twinking her (including switching from Tailoring to Engineering to get the goggles and other fun stuff). The particular fun part was that she was my highest-level toon Horde-side on that server at that time, so I had to finance all of it just using her. (Let’s just say the Darkmoon Faire vendors were my very good friends.)
Unfortunately, she’ll never have the Heirloom gear unless I get around to leveling one of my Horde alts on that server all the way to 80. I do have another Mage (Undead) there now who’s in her low 40s, but I doubt she’ll even see 60 any time soon.
Heh. I’ve somehow managed, probably by letting my paladin sit here and there while I played alts, to get her basically permanently in the blue. I can now play her all day and never see a purple XP bar. The little indicator that shows where it’ll turn purple isn’t even on my screen - it’s somewhere deep into the next level. I’ve got her almost to 79, so I’ll probably never see a purple bar on her again until I hit 80, and then it won’t matter.
Paladins were my favorite class in Diablo II, and I would have played one in D&D had I gotten the chance - I always got stuck playing arcane casters because nobody else wanted to do it. (There was a good reason for that, I eventually discovered coughDM badly misinterpreting the rules in such a way as to make most casters utterly worthlesscough) So naturally I picked a paladin to start with in WoW.
Well, if you start with the thread that is linked in the first post of the other thread (here it is: World of Warcraft questions - The Game Room - Straight Dope Message Board ), that might be easier. I started that one back when I was brand new to the game, and my main character also happened to be a paladin. The first few pages are mostly me and my beginner questions, so they might be helpful to you.
Your XP bar disappears the second you hit the level cap. If your remaining XP on your bar at 79 is rested XP, you won’t see purple again 'til the next xpac.
I figured it was something like that. I’m actually currently at lvl 78, three and a half blocks away from dinging 79. As I have the next five days off from work, I expect to hit 80 in the next few days
Then I’m gonna go back and solo all those instances I skipped while I was leveling, just for the achievements. Maybe I’ll see if anybody wants help with them. And I’ll start grinding rep with some of the factions that I’m already close to Exalted with. And finish exploring, and doing old quests that I missed to work on the Explorer and Loremaster titles …
To add to previous comments; You can only ever have two full levels of rested xp. It takes 8 hours in an inn to gain one small bar. There are 20 bars per level, thus 160 per full level, and just under 2 weeks to gain full rested xp. But remember you don’t chew up rested xp with quest completion, only when you kill a baddie. So you’re two full bars will last you longer than 2 levels (assuming you don’t get more rest), I’d guess 2 full blue levels worth will push through nearly 3 levels.
