The better S2 upgrade item?

[adenosine]

My nibtank:
The World of Warcraft Armory (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Anetheron&n=Guanine)

I've been doing as much PvP as I can stand trying to get honor to buy an upgrade when S4 comes out. Unfortunately, that amount is about 2 BGs every 3 days. I was thinking either about getting the shoulders or the shield to try to improve my gear.

From my current shoulders, the s2 ones would be
+4 str
+26 stam
+1.2% crit
+405 armor
-.86 avoidance

on the other hand the shield is
+17 stam
+855 armor
-.95 avoidance
-.82% hit
-3 SBV


I can't really tell which one is the better item. Both give me decent stamina and armor bonuses at the cost of avoidance. The shoulders would add to my threat due to crit rating, but I'd lose threat with the shield. Right now I'm leaning towards the shoulders just because I've read many places that tanking shoulders are hard to come by and I'd lose 'less' going with them. However, I get less armor boost from them and am unsure if that 450 armor would make a big difference.

[Tatt]

Personally I would go shoulders, I think you would lose too much of too many stats swapping the shield right now.

[adenosine]

I've decided on the shoulders, partly because I already had the marks for them and I didn't need to get any more honor.

I'm wondering the best way to gem them. The stats in my first post assume that I use 12 stam gems like my current shoulders. However, I could use +8 def gems instead, and then they'd be looking like

+4 str
+2 stam
+1.2% crit
+405 armor
-1 def rating

Is it better to try to build a 'balanced' item like this, or just say that the shoulders are about EH anyway and that the loss of avoidance is fine because of the stam and armor gains?

[Tatt]

I would go stam and finish grinding rep for aldor to get the better shoulder glyph, that way you would be improving both your EH and avoidance. Best place I found to grind aldor rep was demon place east of Area 52, drop rate an marks and fel arms seemed pretty high. Or just do your SSO dailies and trade all the scryer crap you pick up for aldor stuff.