Gemming at 85 in 5.0.X

I know this question is going to be irrelevant in 1 and a half weeks but that's one and half weeks away

I haven't really seen anything covering this in detail so I've been extrapolating Rhidach's advice (http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/08/09/mists-of-pandaria-guide-to-protection-paladins/) for gemming at 90 to 85 using this scheme:
Blue: solid ocean sapphire
Yellow: puissant dream emerald
Red: guardian demonseye

Is this sensible? Or is this going to enrage healers?

It seems like we get a great deal of benefit from hit/exp caps and mastery, so that's my gemming preference. I don't know about the rest of your gear, so I can't say what stats you need more of, but I have needed to replace almost all my blue gems to get hit-capped (I'm around 404 ilvl using classic protection gear with no "DPS" pieces).

My gemming priority is currently HitCap > ExpCap > Mastery.

I reforged to reach the hit cap and used a combination of reforging and stamina/exp gems in red slots to reach the exp cap. I can see there is a trade off there between stamina and mastery I guess I'm just trying to work out how to make a judgement about that trade off. Should I be aiming for a certain health target and then going with a mastery dominant gemming scheme? Or just going stamina dominant? Or stack mastery like a madman?

I guess that depends on what you're going to be doing for the next 1.5 weeks ...

If your guild is still trying to clear HDS, some health might be beneficial, but hit/exp cap and mastery should serve you just fine.

If you're just tanking 5-mans and the like, the health you get from your tanking gear will be more than enough.

I'm probably more at the normal mode DS stage so that sounds like I should gem for mastery.

I guess that leads to a follow up question that will be relevant beyond the 1.5 weeks, the guide that I linked above seemed to be presenting the stamina heavy gemming strategy as a general purpose strategy while you seem to be saying that the stamina stacking is more for heroic modes. Is that because of something to do with stat ratings at 85 or a difference in encounters between tier 13 and 14? Sorry for the questions I'm just trying to understand why I am doing the things I am doing.

Aquinar wrote:Should I be aiming for a certain health target and then going with a mastery dominant gemming scheme?

I think that's usually been the philosophy with stamina and tanking - go for a certain level of effective health and then focus on other stats. The idea is to give you a pool of health to avoid being burst down easily, but once you reach that, try to find damage reduction stats that make your healer's life easier. The trouble is, it's always a bit vague how much stamina is enough.

On Rhidach's guide, my intuition is that stamina is often good at both ends of the spectrum - e.g. just starting to gear up as with the new MoP content and also for heroic raiding. Stamina gives you a buffer to cope with mistakes and things going wrong that tend to happen with new content. And you are often not that well geared for the content, so things hit hard, requiring a bigger health pool. With heroic raiding, the same may apply. At the middle of the spectrum, when people are sufficiently geared and familiar with the content, then they may get enough stamina from their gear and can focus on other stats.

Aquinar wrote:I'm probably more at the normal mode DS stage so that sounds like I should gem for mastery.

I guess that leads to a follow up question that will be relevant beyond the 1.5 weeks, the guide that I linked above seemed to be presenting the stamina heavy gemming strategy as a general purpose strategy while you seem to be saying that the stamina stacking is more for heroic modes. Is that because of something to do with stat ratings at 85 or a difference in encounters between tier 13 and 14? Sorry for the questions I'm just trying to understand why I am doing the things I am doing.

Honestly, the JP (Old VP) gear plus Hour of Twilight gear is good enough for most Heroic fights in DS so they're all fine for normal modes. I didn't gem stam into mine, and was able to tank all the fights in H-DS up 'til Spine when the PUG called it.

Thanks very much for all the advice I really appreciate it

Maybe a little late to the party but...new priority as stated above is hitcap/expcap/mastery+parry/dodge. For DS though, you could reasonably stam stack with raid ready gear. The bad stuff is magic damage, so mastery isn't going to help as much as just being able to stay alive long enough, ie. soak damage, for a non-afk healer to top you off.

Definitely not too late to the party, there's a raid on the weekend

For reforging I used the priority you mentioned. For gemming I started with the stamina focused scheme I mention in the initial post. I was a bit concerned about draining healer mana with that one so I started my thread here and after the fine advice I switched to this:
yellow and prismatic: fractured amberjewel
blue: puissant dream emerald
red: fine ember topaz (could have been guardian's demonseye but I figure if you are maximise you should maximise)

The difference between the 2 schemes wasn't really that big to be honest (4K health maybe?), although it *feels* like my damage intake is a bit smoother but it could be my imagination. Like econ21 and Bellanka said in this thread, the stamina from the HoT and (old) VP gear is enough to keep you covered in a normal mode raid and then matches up with my experience so far.