Originally Posted by Shha

Why do you say "unneeded expertise". Unless you really cant find a way to get rid of expertise (which agreed can happen, but is mostly a temporary state), the worst that can happen is that surplus expertise gets converted to mastery.

In case of those boots (assuming 40 str socketing, and 20 str 20 hit socketing - i chose the latter because for a lot of setups you need the hit, or can reforge it to crit somewhere, and if you cant then its very close - you can make own math for 40 str socketing !). Reforging i go after my own with mastery reforged to crit on massacre ones.

Massacre Threads MTB

STR 30
Crit 2
Exp 171
Mastery 44

Now assuming crit = 0.65 and mastery =0.4 of str roughly according to simcraft that ends up being around 171 exp vs 11 STR. If the expertise is REALLY useless and you cant reforge it off, then true the MTB can be better. But even reforging to haste at 0.2 SEP, makes Massacre Treads better.

Sinestra neck is certainly better then Nefarian one, its not that clear cut over Alakir. It definitely is a better choice then boots simply because of added socket and higher item level (not the case if we talk about boots). But even then the math ends up being :

+55 STR +128 Mastery +55 Crit vs 143 Crit 143 hit.

Assuming that hit can be generally converted to mastery on your gear we can shorten it to

+55 STR vs 88 Crit 15 Mastery

at 0.65 Crit SEP and 0.4 Mastery SEP its actually 8 SEP behind Alakir neck. I can imagine some setups where it would be better though.

Still its an ongoing myth about sinestra neck being so good - mostly from the time when only other choice was nefarian neck (which in this calculation would be 55STR vs 103 Mastery which is clearly better for Sinestra's).