Help me suck less

[Toned]

I ran prot 3 ele and resto till I had enough gear to go prot/ele x4. You may want to do the same with your paladins do prot + holy + 3 ret till your rets get more gear.

You still have 4-5months before Cata you have plenty of time to do whatever you want :P

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Here's my lazy-ass gear-up-your-paladin-group-without-pulling-out-your-damn-hair strategy:

• Do not worry about buying scrolls of enchanting off the AH yet. No, really. They won't make enough difference at this point to care about and you'll just be replacing the gear you enchant with better gear anyway, costing you twice as much. Exception is when you can enchant your own gear and you have the mats. You do have an enchanter, right? If not, go make one now. You won't regret it.
• There are a few things I would buy from the AH that maximize your money spent there as you won't get anything better for a long time. (Will go over the gearing stuff later.)
• Don't sweat being unable to completely clear a heroic. As long as you can kill the first few bosses, you'll gear up and make money while doing it.
• The dungeon finder is on 15-minute cooldowns, so you can do something else for the rest of the 15 minutes if it's a hard one like HoS/HoL/FoS/etc.
• For your tank, I would get your Argent Crusade rep up to revered quickly so you can get the Arcanum of the Stalwart Protector. Also get Hodir rep up for Greater Inscription of the Pinnacle. This will get you good enchants and will make money in the process.
• For your rets, get Ebon Blade rep up to revered (should be easily done by finishing all their quest lines in Icecrown) for Arcanum of Torment. Also get Hodir rep for Greater Inscription of the Axe. Again, will get you good enchants and will make money in the process.
• IMO, do not target specific gear in instances with a few exceptions (noted below). Target getting badges instead.
• Get some Drums of the Wild. It will help more than enchants and they're cheap, especially if one of your guys is a LW.
• Make sure you're running a good aura mix. I usually run AF/ret/fire/frost/shadow while killing and switch ret for crusader aura when traveling/dailies. Also make sure you're covering all 4 blessings.
• Yes, they're nerfing pally cleanse next xpack but they haven't yet. Put cleanse on bars so the same button causes 1 to cleanse 2, 2->3, 3->4, 4->5. Spam it when you get poisoned/diseased/feared/etc. and it'll help a ton.

Next, for starting gearing up, I _highly_ recommend the following:

• RUN, DO NOT WALK and go repeatedly farm Ahune the Frost Lord for The Frost Lord's Battle Shroud for your rets and Icebound Cloak for your tank. EASY as hell, just kill the hailstone (use Seal of Light x5) and then keep moving and DPS the core when it comes out.
• Go to the AH and get Darkmoon Card: Greatness x4 for the rets. Do dailies (as noted above) until you can afford this. Helps greatly and you won't replace it anytime soon.
• Hit LFD for a random heroic. If it's one that's easy for all-paladin groups to do (DTK, UK, CoS, first 2 bosses in UP, OK, Nexus) then go ahead and do 'em. Skip bosses that are slow or a pain; you're just here for badges and cash from drops.
• If you get a hard heroic or one that you can't do or that takes forever, just LFGTeleport() back home and LFD for a specific dungeon (see next).
• While your heroics are on cooldown or used up, LFD for Pit of Saron normal. Ride around the right side past the first two casters, jump off the little point of land hugging the right edge, aggro the first and second skeleton laborers and pull them down to the lower level. Kill them and wait for the two drake riders to path back away from the middle. Ride past the torch and swing wide to avoid that skeleton laborer and hug the left side by the edge of the pit (careful, you can't get back out easily if you fall in) and ride up the steps to Garfrost. Put up Seal of Light, pop Divine Plea x5 and go to town on Garfrost. Strafe everyone a few steps to the side when he throws rocks and chase him around while he builds weapons for you. Disenchant tons of caster staves and leather stuff and enjoy your new Ring of Carnelian and Bone and Garfrost's Two-Ton Hammer upgrades on your rets. LFGTeleport() out and requeue for Normal PoS again and repeat. Takes about 3 minutes per run depending on gear. Repeat ad nauseum until your rets are all upgraded. Socket STR gems and enchant with Berzerking if you can afford it or Greater Assault/Massacre if you can't. This is your badge farming run when other things are on cooldown.
• When you get bored/tired of PoS Garfrost runs, queue normal ToC. Farm this for Banner of Victory for your rets (drops off Paletress) and Black Heart for your tank. You can queue these individually if you have trouble (see below for my strats).
• Buy the Libram of Valiance/Libram of the Sacred Shield as soon as you have enough badges. This should be your first badge purchase.
• Get 2-pc Liadrin's Conquest Gloves and Chest first.
• Get Helm of Thunderous Rage x5 next (by then you'll have enough +def that it won't help to get more).
• Once you can do it, LFD for PoS Heroic and kill Garfrost once a day for the plate bracers for the rets.
• You can run normal FOS for the legplates (as I see you've been doing) and the bracers but it's not very time-efficient. Just depends on what you want to spend your time on.

Finally, for specific instances, I did the following (assume heroic unless otherwise specified):

• Garfrost(normal) is noted above.
• DTK: Kill the Soulmages first. Stun with HoJ to prevent pools. Start on left or right edge of hall so you can move out of pools easily. Run Seal of Command on trash for extra AoE. Skip the frost mage boss if you can't kill him using Seal of Light. If you can pull the individual raptors out of Dred's pen before him, you can kill them and make the fight a lot easier. Just remember to keep whoever has grievious bite topped off on health. Last boss is a cakewalk with any gear level.
• UK: you've done this so grats and keep it up.
• Gundrak: Will be hard to kill colossus until you have better gear. Use Drums of the Wild for resists. On Sladran, face all pallies the same direction and stack them up. WHen he casts poison nova, strafe entire team left or right to avoid it and continue DPS. Shouldn't take more than one nova before he dies. For Colossus, face/stack all paladins and pull golem. When he changes to elemental, strafe left->back->right->back and keep moving out of the pools. Keep seal of light up for heals. The second transition will be the hardest because you'll probably be out of room and or unstacked because of him moving around on you. Do your best. The other bosses are tank n spank with the last boss just requiring you to move quickly away from him when he whirlwinds.
• Nexus: easy instance. Seal of Light on mage boss, kill the frost bitch first. Go back to entrance and around right side to elemental boss. Pull a plant up to him for extra HoTs, stack under his feet and tank n spank. Kill Chaotic Rifts and tank n spank Void boss. Keep jumping on dragon boss while keeping rets to the side; cleanse everyone when she roots you to the floor.
• UP: Kill first two bosses. Stupidly easy with Seal of Light. Don't forget to cleanse off disease from abominations. Port out and requeue next when done with the first two as you won't kill Skadi until you get better gear, probably. If you want to try him, pull all mobs down to the doorway where they spawn and tank them there. You won't get hit by frost there. When ready, kill dragon in one pass and start killing him. WHen he whirlwinds, bubble and heal if needed, then finish him off. Last boss is stupid easy after killing skadi.
• CoS: Make sure you turn Meathook away from the rest; otherwise, tank n spank. Turn Seal of Command on for Salramm. The rest is just tank n spank, just remember to keep Mal'ganis turned away from the rets at the end.

I'm sure there's more but that's the basic routine I followed. Once you've finished most of the above, you'll have enough gear that you can start changing things up and taking on stuff you couldn't do before.

[OzPhoenix]

Here's my lazy-ass gear-up-your-paladin-group-without-pulling-out-your-damn-hair strategy:

• RUN, DO NOT WALK and go repeatedly farm Ahune the Frost Lord for The Frost Lord's Battle Shroud for your rets and Icebound Cloak for your tank. EASY as hell, just kill the hailstone (use Seal of Light x5) and then keep moving and DPS the core when it comes out.

Must be nice to have a <100 ms latency.

I don't know about US players, but Ahune is essentially unmeleeable for all-Pally teams here in Oz I reckon.

For one, being all melee means putting not a single point of damage on him in P1. In P2 which lasts only a short time, you'd need to do massive DPS to knock him down even halfway (he's got like what 850-900k health?) before re-doing P1 (Part 2).

The other issue being with 250-350ms latency, by the time you've reacted to the impending spike in P1, and moved, the server has already calculated you to have been hit by it I reckon, because even with constant movement I couldn't avoid getting almost continuously spiked.

If Ahune is a doddle for an under-geared team of all-melee then I'll be fairly surprised.