WOTLK non retribution levelling

I am looking for some advice on a small issue I did not found an answer to while reading and searching the forums.

I am in a highly competitive guild which aims for server firsts, also in WOTLK. I have always been the MT healer as well part time off tank.

I ended up with a full T6 set of protection and holy gear but no retribution gear whatsoever. Everywhere I read about paladins going retribution to level, tanking in retribution gear, healing in retribution gear.

What would be the best tree to level doing a mix of instancing and quests considering I want to use the T6 holy or protection set.

I personally thought using the holy set and below build so be able to kill some quest mobs and heal easy 5 mans.

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=sEA0g0zhVz0xzZZVf0x0G

A good protection based build where I can solo quests reasonable fast with and tank 5 mans would be welcome.

Final dilemma, which tree/gear will be faster to level, thinking DPS, (holy/protection) ?

Any comment with or without a sample build is appreciated.

You can spec ret while wearing prot gear and do pretty well while leveling.

Ret gear trades defensive stats for crit and hit. The AP values are pretty close. I suggest you give that a try.
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Majiben
If we wanted Ret to be a joke, we would have just left the tree as it was, and maybe kicked it a little for good measure. -GC

I forgot to mention the 360 heroic badges, get some pure retribution gear with that ?

weapon, should be ok as raid planted torch of the damned from bt in my bags as a joke some months ago. The item just kept dropping and dropping.

Level as ret. There is literally NO reason to if you had t5/t6 tanking gear which will basically last you until 80.

The only thing you can do better as prot is solo elites and tank instances. It's helpful but not necessary in the least. Killing guys in half the time will make up for it.
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I'm only T4-Badge and I'm trading out to keep my Defence up. So far just about all group quests are soloable (there is only a shaman in DragonBlight giving me an issue). Most of the kill X creatures are way easy if I don't have too much competition for the mobs, and sometimes even if I do have competition in the area I still manage to get through quickly multi mob tanking.

I am leveling through questing though, as of last night I just poped the important step of 75, Paly Shield Bash here I come (SoR)

I'll be 78 tonight leveling as prot... I must say once you have shield of the righteous, I don't see any dps issues lol.

Plus, as prot, you can simply get all the mobs in one huge group and tank them all at the same time... it's a different strat, but in the end, I'm quite sure prot will allow you to solo elites and kill x out of y quests a lot faster.

As for gear... about to ding 78 where I'll finally be able to use rep gear, other than that, I only found 5 upgrades so far out of mostly badge gear... funny thing is my T5 shoulders is the first thing I replaced via a rep reward from the Nexus...