A Paladin has one main role and other smaller roles. The main role of any tank in a group is to protect the casters and healers. Their other roles are chanting and fighting. Unlike Armsmen and Mercs Paladins chants are there to enhance your group and this is why paladin make good grp characters. Paladins can use there chants to heal, guard and make the group tougher. Paladins also deal out damage. Not as much as other classes would but you can't sit on your ass and chant all the time. So you bash monsters in.
Generally that's the paladin's role in combat. Maintain chants, protect the weaker classes and fight.
Soloing is different for the paladin. Paladin's need to choose their targets like other classes. It is best to go for mobs that are weak to your weapon. In combat paladin's should 'twist' their chants. Chants work on pulses. You have a chant on and every 3 seconds (not sure exactly how long) the game checks to see if your maintaining the chant or not. If you are it keeps repeating the check, and if not it will stop. So if you change a chant the old chant will linger while the new one starts. Twisting chants allows you the best of all your chants.
In combat I mostly twist between heal chant and damage add chant. So in combat I'm fighting, I usually keep the damage add chant on all the time. I then twist to heal chant and back to dmg add chant. After 5 secs the chants can be used again and I do the same. I always have dmg add this was and also get a X amount of health healed depending on what heal chant I am using.
You can 'twist' chants in grp combat but the difference between twisting and not twisting is minimal so there isn't much point.
