if you have to rank them in order of best soloing ability for sustained experience gain, then for killing ability to make money, how would you rank them?
You really do not want to solo on this server. I'm saying this just experiencing it with an XP bonus. I'm not going to find out what happens when it's over ;p
Downtime is not really what you should look at. Your killing speed plays a much larger picture in soloing efficiency and yes paladins have little downtime if you use the clicky helmut that casts the hp buff but I can kill 2x faster on shadowknight and probably 4x faster on the monk. The reason the paladin has little down time is because you pretty much auto swing and stun chain. Paladins have little else in melee strength in vanilla.
I would say that being a Paladin is terrible at solo’ing. Sure, you can kill blue con Mobs and won’t die. You can heal yourself, but it’s sooooo slow. Basically, you get bash if you have a 1hand/shield or just your 2hand sword. It’s all auto attack. So slow. So very slow. I’ve never played a monk, man they kill fast. Maybe it’s better to kill fast before you take damage. I have played a SK and I wouldn’t say they are amazing at solo’ing either. I have also played a mage. If you have to solo be a mage... good damage/pets/summon items. Amazing!
I saw a pally soloing in OC on agnarr... but i never saw a pally solo earlier than that. A pally could probably solo really well in undead camps, but this all comes at luclin. I think the lack of pallies until luclin is because they really are tier 2 classes. With a fd class at least you can fd until you learn the camps. Thats gotta be worth something.
Honestly even Vs undead Paladins aren't great, slay undead is like 1.5% chance, and usually hits for 10k when the mob has 200hp left. XP is better soloing non undead places, griegs, paw etc.
SK is the most flexible and can take down the toughest mobs. I've soloed an SK to 70 on a live server back during the pre-TSS days, it was very easy. The Paladin has a decent toolkit with Root, Lull and Heals. I soloed my Paladin on Agnarr from 19 to 35 so far. It started to slow down at that point, but that was also due to mob density in Velious and not taking the time to look for better options. Would still be soloing him but I subbed a second account and have been leveling a Bard to play with the Pally. It's still mostly soloing, just with the Bard in tow to speed things up.
