This is the same question i posed several pages back, but its because of the very reason you stated that this is even a possible confusion for people. The T11 chest piece for ret has 301str, crit/haste, while the prot chest piece has 341str and mastery/parry. This is direct exchange of an inferior secondary stat for mastery, and after reforging you still end up with 80-90 crit rating as well, while gaining 40str in the process.

Using the stat weights for your gear, everyone's weights being slightly different, this is most likely a flat dps increase just from the large quantity of STR gain. This is just by comparing the 2 pieces of gear stat to stat, the loss of the ret 4pc then takes its toll, obviously giving the ret piece the advantage. However, assuming you lose the 4pc ret and are already wearing 1pc of the prot set, is it possible that a 2nd piece of the prot set (thus netting you the 2pc prot bonus of 10% CS damage) would off set this loss? The obvious choice based on stats alone is gloves, you lose haste to parry, but gain 20str in the process, this seems like a dps loss and ruins the option of using the pvp gloves, the pants have 40 more str than the ret pants but have no usable ret stat, while both the shoulders and helm have less STR than their ret counterparts.

I'm not sure how to model the 10% CS damage properly to get an accurate dps increase from the set bonus, nor do i know what 4pc ret is worth to compare it to, but gaining dps at 1 slot (chest), and most likely losing dps at a 2nd slot (gloves, legs, shoulders, helm) means that 10% CS damage would have to be only marginally better than 4pc ret to be of higher dps. It's unfortunately beyond my scope of math skills to give any reliable numbers, but hopefully someone else will be intrigued enough to help me in that regard.

Do you mean using the PVP gloves combined with another PVP set? Otherwise I wouldn't understand the set bonus...
What about using 4T11 (helm, shoulder, chest and legs) combined with only the PVP gloves?

By "set bonus" he is referring to the 5% CS damage you get from the gloves. You don't need another PVP piece to get that bonus.

4pc T11 + vicious gloves is a perfectly viable (and arguably BiS) setup at 359 item level. However, Redcape just pointed out that at 372 item level, the tier gloves pull back ahead of the PVP gloves, so that is no longer the case once you're talking heroic gear.

Personally, now that my guild has started clearing heroics, I'm going for 4pc T11 + the shoulders off of halfus (they are crit/mastery). This is the best combination I could come up with.

Can you tell me please, why resfreshing Inq at 3 HP will be better then at 2? During 20 sec of Inq you can easily score enough HP for 1 TV and new 2 stacked Inq.
Sorry for my english.

Not only you lose on secondary stats but you lose on itemization as well. Halfus shoulders > T11 shoulders and is probably our best offset piece.

I have a piece of crazy behaviour that may help us on AOE fights.

Currently I use 2pt10 (yes, t10) for raiding because 5% more damage is superior to every preraid option and even better than 1 epic + 1 blue. Once you have two 359 epics you are generally better off using the 359 epics for health if nothing else. However, the key bit is that 2t10 still resets the CD on DS. This also resets the CD on CS, but it only triggers if you actually cast DS. On AOE fights where DS damage is really relevant this means that 2t10 is actually much better than any cataclysm option so far. The only hardmode I have completed is halfus but I was able to actually heal about 80% of a healer by DSing constantly while the whelps were up and do really immense dps since DS does 10k damage / target and about 2700 healing / target. This means DS becomes a 100,000 damage cast that heals for 27k on the lowest health raidmember and is cast every 3 seconds or so (with the 2pt10). Since wings double dips the damage and healing I was actually outputting a ludicrous amount of healing in the early going - theoretically I could easily top 15k healing/sec during wings (while absolutely maximizing my personal damage) but that fight is hectic enough I am not sure that really happens.

I don't know if other hardmode fights have AOE phases that would warrant using this technique but it is certainly a powerful tool to keep in mind. Because 2t10 is so much better a bonus than 4t11 you actually lose very little single target dps while wearing it, something on the order of 350 on pure single target. Not the standard for sure but if the AOE phase is the important phase then this will be useful to have this in the arsenal.

Note: The new glyph of TV actually has the effect of the old glyph of DS (+15% DS healing, boosted to 40%). This is clearly a bug but we all have the TV glyph so it isn't like we can avoid abusing the bug.

Nice tip, this can be useful on Maloriak too if you're having trouble with Vile Swill / Aberration DPS.

Expect this to be hotfixed real soon. Once stuff is brought up in EJ they usually do

I wanted to update a detail in the OP and needed input from an alchemist:
Cauldrons provide a [Flask of Battle]. Now this is obviously not the same as a normally crafted flask. Mixology states that the bonus only affects flasks you can make. First thought, Flask of Battle would not be eligible, however a Flask of Battle applies the same buff as a normal flask (in our case, [Flask of Titanic Strength]). As such I would like to confirm functionality.

Question:
If an alchemist able to craft a Flask of Titanic Strength quaffs a Flask of Battle, does the buff last 1 hour (or 1.5 with first level of Chug-a-lug), or does it last a full 2 hours due to Mixology?

Note: In the default UI a Flask of Battle with Chug-a-lug-1 at 90 minute duration will display as 2 hrs, because it's more than 1 hr and 1 second. Do not be fooled into thinking this is a true 2 hr duration.

The flasks that come from the cauldrons are getting extra duration due to mixology. For my guild with the first rank of chug-a-lug the alchemists are getting 3 hour timers. I keep forgetting to check the stat boost for correct function there. I believe it was not working properly when we first got the cauldrons but it was fixed in a patch (at least the timer portion of mixology)

On the topic of 4pT11 rotation, does anybody happen to know of a way to configure clcInfo to refresh at 1 HP and apply at any HP if it falls off?

Now this might have happened at the same time the patch went through but learning the Cauldron pattern from the guild rewards vendor seemed to fix the mixology bonus for me. Before learning the pattern (with 1st rank guild perk on duration) I was having a 90 min duration on guild flasks (despite knowing the individual flask patterns) after learning it, and currently, guild flasks are lasting a full 3 hours on my character.