World of Warcraft

Holy - Your healing tree. Increases you healing ability and gives you better mana efficiency while casting heals.

Prot- Tanking tree. Increases your defensive abilities and lets you stay alive longer. A tank gets enemies(mobs) tto focus there attacks on you instead of the healer and DPS classes

Ret - DPS tree. This tree increases your 2 handed weapon abilities and gives you more ways to damage.

Level as Ret. you can heal and tank fine until the 50's as any spec (all instances have been done as an offspec with decent gear) Use a 2 handed weapon and go at it. Tanking and Healing you will need a shield. Tanks need the armor while Healers get a caster shield to help healing. Also you can go to a weapon master in any capatiol city and ask them to teach you different weapons. Each city has different things to teach (stormwind will teach you to use 1 and 2 handed swords.)

Yes shields will give you a lot of armor but ret damage is based off of your weapon damage. this means that a 2 handed weapon will do more damage just because it has twice the damage a single handed weapon has. (its a lot slower with auto attacks though for balance but your skills that you have dont care about speed of weapons) Trust me level as ret with a 2 handed weapon until you get higher in level. Paladins of all specs and gear never die because of high armor and heals. your just going to make the game harder and tougher to play inless you always group with others.

Choosing which stats to take is one of the ways you can customise your character in WOW. The stam will give you more health but the strength will give you more attack power(attack power of course will raise damage you do).
Choose which ever you think you need more of. (though with ret strength is your going to be better with in reason.)

I wish they would give a message or update somthing when a question is expanded. that way i wouldn't miss a question like this. :)

PS: Sorry but i dont give my name out to people

This question depends a lot on which style of play you prefer. Do you PvP, quest, raid. All of these are to be taking into account before choosing which spec to go for. As for your weapon selection problem, again, it's entirely up to you and your liking of combat.

lol i asure you nothing is easy to chose are made for tanking choose prot are you made for damage choose ret are you made for healing and supporting choose holy DEPENDS bro

Rep all the way

For leveling your best using Retribution.
Unless you have alot of experience in the game your best using a spec that deals the most damage and allows you to level the fastest.

At low lvls damage is not ur top priority cause ur still lvling and the easiest way to lvl is either prot or ret but if this is ur first character i recommend going ret as the damage is higher and easy all around i wouldnt worry about ur other specs until ur 80

This is the best answer I can give you from what I know of the class and how I personaly like to play:

Level as ret; it has far less downtime and way more dmg (and thus levels faster)
imo, while leveling, Always go for the tree and gear that makes you kill faster and have less downtime, respeccing is for the last few levels or endgame.

when you get to level 75 decide what your endgame spec(s) is/are going to be and chose the gear from quests keeping in mind that spec, this saves a lot of time when you hit 80.

Holy- Healer
Prot-Tank
Ret-DPS (really overpowered :P)

My guy is ghostdude and he is a ret
realm-Muradin

I agree with Megeas.... If you are a lower level you need to try to level in Ret(DPS) you still have some small healing spells u can use to keep your self up. If you are wanting to heal, then around level 65 I would start looking for Healing gear and keep it. You can Dual Spec now, and you can run a DPS/Healing specs while being able to switch back and forth between gear.
For now at level 10 go for the ret tree which gives you the ability to do more damage, thus making leveling faster. I would suggest 2H as they are slower they deal out more damage. Look for Gear and weapons for now that will increase your Strength,agaility, and attack power. Really at this level your not going to be epic, but if you gear right you will zoom through leveling.

range:D

Anchor and fiona will forever tiome

at the level you are, I would go with ret. it will help you a lot, but that's my opinion.

Holy is okay if you like healing...

yes ret is good for leveling, insance burst damage and good for offhealing is a healer suddenly dies in combat. the only downside about being ret is the amount of people b1tching about how overowered they are because they are too sucky to take one down without 4 healers and raid group behind them. nabs. shup and learn to play your class so you can take one down for a change. im a pally and i get killed plenty of times by people who know how to play their class, warrior, hunter, lock, mage rogue. i can kill them all, but also die to them all. its not the class people...ITS THE SKILL!!!!!!!!

Beelzebos-doomhammer-EU. im horde, come find me if you want to try me :)