Prot is pretty amazing for soloing in wrath, or it has been. I leveled to 60 mostly as prot and felt invincible. I’ve switched to holy and that feels almost as good for soloing, playing as a shockadin type. Thing with prot though is you’re almost encouraged to pull more mobs because of how they work, so if you have quests where you can do this you can get crazy exp fast.
Right now everything is balanced around level 80 so once we start leveling in North tend things may come down to earth a bit, but it’s crazy fun at the moment!
The social part is making you join an ACTIVE AND HELPFUL guild that will join you. It’s really the only way now to progress the content. PUGs are very slow and ppl drop before you fill. Guildies will always feel like they need/should stick around even when it takes forever.
You can level as prot…probably a lot faster than your ret friends because you can solo dungeons. Right now a lot of us prot paladins are soloing Shattered Halls in about 15 min (right up to 2nd boss) which nets around 240,000 xp. 900,000xp/hr is a lot of questing!
As Prot you have a talent that converts 60% of your Strength to spell power. So you need spell power; however, Strength is typically the better choice due to this talent.
Your threat generation is still based off holy power abilities for the most part.
Tanks are always sort after, you’ll be fine for dungeons, we do a decent amount of AoE damage so with quests just grab as much as you can handle and AoE them down. That being said, on launch there is no way you’ll be able to pull big with the amount of players about, safer to spam dungeons.