Back at tanking in cata - what's my gem priority?

I suck at writing short questions, but I'll try. With my hunter and mage being pretty much maxed out as far as possible without having the time to raid atm, I figured I'd get to work on getting my pally back in shape.

Armory: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...laiia/advanced

I've only tanked a couple cata dungeons so far, with decent success - mostly to test the water. Given that my gear is, well crappy (mostly quest gear, this toon has no luck in dungeons), getting threat isn't an issue, keeping it up however is. With barely over 1% hit I seem to miss way too much to keep damage up and gain enough holy power to make the shield effective.

But before I start reforging and gemming for serious tanking (turn dodge/expertise/crit to mastery where mastery is missing) and swapping out gems, I have a question about what should I prioritize for my prismatic sockets??

I haven't added my BS sockets yet, cuz I weren't sure what to stick in them. Some people tell me just throw mastery in everything, others say it depends on what stats are on the pieces already. I weren't sure if I should drop some mastery/hit gems in there to get up to 4% hit which seemed to be a comfortable level in LK, or if I'd be better off using a hit trinket over the stam trinket (though the strength proc isn't remotely as useful as the mastery for tanking). Same with the relic (which is awful yet still better than the one I had from LK), not sure what's the best choice for gem.

Obviously my waist is from ICC and the gems haven't been touched since Cata launched. Mostly because the new gems won't go in a 264 item anyway. I need to rework the enchants too (most are just whatever my enchanter could do at the time), but I wanted to get my head around the gems first.

I found a good balance is with 1 stam trinket + 1 avoidance trinket and then gemming for mastery. Yellow/prismatic:40 mastery, red:20parry/20mastery, blue:20mastery/30stam. You don't need any more stam unless you go for some hardmodes.

Trinkets: 1 stamina (one drops in stonecore), 1 mastery (porcelain crab (throne of the tides) is awesome, or the tol'barad exalted with the magic resist use)

Gems:
Blue - Mastery + Stamina
Yellow - Mastery + Stamina
Red - Parry + Stamina
Prismatic - Mastery + Stamina
Meta - either the 2% armor or 1% BV (the BV one will gain in value faster than the armor one will as your gear gets better.)

While you can probably use pure mastery in yellow and parry+mastery in red in the first lot of 5 man heroics, there is a lot of burst damage in the zul heroics where a slightly larger healthpool works wonders.

Talents:

Drop Hallowed Ground, put two points in Pursuit of Justice. Then get the 50 mastery enchant for your boots instead of 30 stam + movement speed. Take the points out of Rule of Law and Eye for an Eye, and put two into Improved Judgement and two into Guardian's Favor (or leave two in Rule of Law, I just love having the ten seconds of HoF and a 3 minute CD on Hand of Protection). Being able to use judgement with a 30 yard range is pretty awesome, especially as it places a stack of Censure (from seal of truth) on the target.

Thanks for the responses. Always afraid someone will go "omg wtf are you doing?!" whenever I post links to any of my characters lol.

Atm I'm mostly concerned with the "old" heroics, since that's where most my friends are at, but I have to actually get geared for them first. Zul can wait till I get the gear for it.

@Pyrea: I get what you're saying with the talents, I haven't actually looked at them after I hit 85, other than just sticking pts in as I leveled, so thanks for taking a look at them even though it wasn't the point of my question. Pursuit of Justice is one I had in the pre-Cata build, I just hadn't decided yet which prot talent to skip in order to get the pts for it. Rule of Law I chose to help with threat. Though crit chance isn't the most reliable way to do it, atleast it helps a smidget. Hand of Protection - I've extremely rarely used it, except for the few times when I get lose mobs eating the healer, Hand of Freedom I do love though.

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Originally Posted by Pyrea

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Meta - either the 2% armor or 1% BV (the BV one will gain in value faster than the armor one will as your gear gets better.)

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How does that work - the BV meta gem I mean? Always thought Block Value is the amount that is blocked, but since 4.0 the block amount is always 30% and cannot be changed. There isn't even block value or block rating on any of the gear anymore (since it's mastery now), and strength no longer affects the block amount. Did I miss something about the cata stat changes?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by metalbunny

How does that work - the BV meta gem I mean? Always thought Block Value is the amount that is blocked, but since 4.0 the block amount is always 30% and cannot be changed. There isn't even block value or block rating on any of the gear anymore (since it's mastery now), and strength no longer affects the block amount. Did I miss something about the cata stat changes?

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Except when modified by something that say it changes the block value, like eternal meta giving 1% block value, so 30% becomes 31%.

Block value as a stat doesn't exist anymore to modify the 30% value. But that doesn't mean there aren't some things added that can modify the value.

Things that can change the amount you block:

The meta gem +1% to 31%
Holy Shield (paladin) +10% to 40%, 41% with the block meta (changing in 4.2)
Critical block (warrior) +30% to 60%, 62% with the block meta

The block value meta gem becomes better than the armor one for paladins about when your parry, dodge, block and miss (which is 5%) chances add up to around 75-80%