Making a Mounted Paladin

[Master Thrower]

Hello play ground, in an up coming campaign starting at level 8 I will be playing a paladin (by choice strangely enough) and I wanted to go for the classic warrior on mount look. I was thinking of entering either cavalier, or wild plains outrider. Or maybe even some use of the devoted tracker feat.
Suggestions on builds, race, PrC, feats would be fantastic.

Books- PHB,DMG,MM 1,3,4,5, CW,CD,CadV,CA,LM,DrC. Thanks!

[Soranar]

Hello play ground, in an up coming campaign starting at level 8 I will be playing a paladin (by choice strangely enough) and I wanted to go for the classic warrior on mount look. I was thinking of entering either cavalier, or wild plains outrider. Or maybe even some use of the devoted tracker feat.
Suggestions on builds, race, PrC, feats would be fantastic.

Books- PHB,DMG,MM 1,3,4,5, CW,CD,CadV,CA,LM,DrC. Thanks!

You're not making is easy. The best options for paladins come from spells or swapping weak class features for stronger ones. All of those options are in various splatbooks that are not on your list (mostly Complete Champion and Champion of valor, + some other minor options in unearthed arcana).

Without access to battle blessing (and spells that mimic pounce), I don't recommend spellcasting at all so, at best, you want 5 levels of paladin and you can dump Wisdom altogether. Too bad you can't get the extra feat for doing so.

For the same reasons paladin is hard to optimize with your books, ranger isn't so great either (again you're missing a lot from Complete Champion and Champion of Valor) so I wouldn't bother with it. You can't swap your abilities for mounted combat related ones and your limited ranger spells are of no use either.

With all of this in mind you might as well go for the cavalier PrC. It will stack just fine with the paladin features you do have and your charges should be truly devastating. Besides the feats required for the class you'll want the following:

-divine might (gets multiplied on a charge and it works against anything so you might as well use it)

-Dragon mount (or steed, I forget) : it's allowed since it's in draconomicon. Dragon mounts are superior to regular ones in every way (dragons have full BAB,d12 hitpoints,x6 skillpoints and they fly) and they get identical progression than regular mounts (basically the only cost is the feat itself and some roleplaying).

STATS

STR (third stat, 13 is your minimum so you can get power attack)
DEX (dump, not that useful in full plate)
CON (second stat, you need to be hard to kill to tank)
INT (having a positive modifier can be useful, if only for roleplaying and filling out some key skills)
WIS (dump)
CHA (main stat, required high for high saves and dragon mount requirements)