I've been playing around with some EH calculators, and it seems that the armor works out more in my favor, especially factoring in talents and the meta bonus.
I'm inclined to drop a profession and pick it up, but I'm wondering if the general consensus is that its the right thing to do.
I'm a JC, Engineer and love engineering.
The utility items; jeeves (repair bot, bank access), portable mailbox, worm hole traveling thing, auction house access in Dalaran, etc... are awesome. I use them all the time and could never give it up.
IMHO, the glove enchant is icing on the cake.
i was a engineer from BC when those goggles were godlike till whenn i hit 80 and got the lvl 80 goggles and was like....This thing is a total peice of Crap the 800 armor to gloves is nice but it is NOT worth Dropping JC or BS for imho im a Miner.JCer now and have found it to be a great money maker and alot of stam which i like so imho the 800 Armor isnt that great in my opnion
Well, money making shouldn't be factored in at all. I'm looking at it from a pure raiding utility.
I was an engineer in BC too for the Sunwell goggles. When engineering lost all true utility and I could see that as Wrath approached, I power leveled JCing. However, I'm strongly thinking that 885 armor is worth more to me then 60 stam (both unmodified).
On fights predominated by physical damage the armor is gonna win out if time to live is the goal.
I admit the enchant is really nice. I'd love it myself but..
ToC has a decent amount of magic damage flying around, so I am stacking stam over armor most of the time.
With the new epic gems The Engineering Glove enchants give about 700 more EH over 18 stamina. But in my opinion that doesn't make up for the fact that if you use multiple gear sets such as an avoidance set, threat set etc that you also have a benefit for those sets instead of just for EH. And with all the non mitigable damage in ToC that is what really makes me want to go for JCing.
imo stick with jc / bs, the effective health provided by the 800 armor may work out to be more, but on fights with large magic dmg spikes it's going to be useless, whereas the stam from jc / bs will be hugely useful.
Likewise if you have a dps dualspec or similar, then you'll gain more from jc / bs than what you would engineering.
In saying that, if you had engineering and were thinking about dropping it for jc / bs, I would likewise say to not bother lolz, it really just comes down to personal preferance and imo they are all on par with each other.