If your goal is to solo entirely, Paladin will be amongst the hardest classes to play considering you have no prior EQ experience and this is your first character so you are also starting with nothing.
A good weapon will be your top priority, you will spend a lot of time researching locations where you can hunt effectively. For melee characters the early levels are pretty easy but the mobs scale up faster than you do so once it get into the 30s and 40s it starts getting pretty rough without good gear.
The tunnel is east commonlands is your friend, this is effectively the wall street of EQ where people go to buy, sell, and trade gear. I would focus on raising as much money as you can, selling everything that drops while you level, and focusing on getting a good weapon and some cheap gear to fill your slots as melee are heavily gear dependent characters.
The good news is paladins are durable...you have the ability to single pull mobs for killing. You can root a mob, back off, and heal yourself mid fight. You have lay of hands which is a good life saver in those oh shit moments. It will just be a long slow slog to level solo.
Where paladins really shine is in the late game they are amongst the best in game at getting and maintaining agro on a mob, in some cases they are preferred over warriors for some of the toughest mobs in the game due to their agro (the majority of the mobs are still tanked by warriors due to their abilities to mitigate damage in the end game). The also have items that give them the ability to complete heal which can be the difference between winning or losing a high level raid target if things go sideways.
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