Musings on resistance gearing and magic EH

I first used the term 'magic effective health' (henceforth EH in this entry) in this post on my guild forum. If that particular phrase hasn't been uttered elsewhere, I'm sure the concept has. Anyway, I won't get into the details of that.

I've been thinking a lot about resistance gearing lately. I have a lot of resistance gear, am capped for Nature, Arcane and Fire, and building up Shadow and Frost, and have dedicated sets for elementals, melee casters, pure casters like imps, and resist-all fights. I haven't been thinking about getting resistance gear. I've been thinking about min/maxing EH.

Based on the math I did, 1 resistance is the equivalent of 40 health on average. This rate varies considerably based on your current health and resistance level:
Now for the juicy bit. What I've mostly been doing is thinking about the 40hp/r rate when tossing up between stats on certain fights. If I'm against a fire caster, I'll take the 15 resistance on [item]Onyxia Blood Talisman[/item] over the 57 stam on [item]Commendation of Kael'thas[/item], since the equivalent stamina would be around 60. Of course, at higher levels of resistance (which I will usually reach), the equivalent stamina would be considerably higher than 60. The gist of this is that resistance is much more important than stamina.

Now for the fun part: directly comparing stats when the resist cap is reachable. Example: leg enchants. 10 nature resistance (ZG) vs. 40 stamina (LW). If you're trying to get NR caped (such as for Hydross), then the hp/r rate will probably be over 100. That means that the NR enchant would be more than twice as good as the 40 stamina. Does that mean that one should use the NR enchant hands down?

Hmm...

What's baking my noodle right now is this: If we reach the resist cap by using these resistance enchants (eg Arcanum/ZG legs, Outland reps head, armor kits, shield enchant, prismatic gems) instead of stamina, then padding the rest of our gear with stamina (for the sake of simplicity we'll assume our foe is a simple caster), then this might not be optimal.

Why? Well, what if in sacrificing stamina for these small amounts of resistance here and there, our EH is lower than it would be by using stamina enchants and more resistance gear with high stam and resistances? It's counter-intuitive that the better enchant might not actually be better. Of course, whether or not this is the case is dependent on the gear available in the game, and a thorough study of possible combinations of gear/enchants is not something I have time for right now. It's just something I'll have to think about.

if you aren't resist capped though, resistance enchants are definitely worthwhile!