This is a myth that keeps getting repeated, but I've never seen any evidence for it. I could (and have) made a strong argument that no matter how much stamina you already have, stamina is still a better survivability stat than TDR stats like dodge and parry and often better at conserving healer mana as well.

Absurdum ad infinitum is the obvious and valid response to this, Theck. You can certainly argue about what point more health stops being the best thing to focus on, but the fact that there is a point seems pretty obvious. If you got 10x as much health per stamina, I don't think you'd advocate stamina stacking (ignoring the couple self-heals that scale with max health like Second Wind). I think what you're really getting at is that the point where you should stop stacking Stam isn't reasonably attainable with current stats/gear, which is a totally valid argument.

I know Stamina is king, I'm just wondering if its king ENOUGH to be worth to have 2 brewfest trinkets in lieu of the aforementioned trinkets :-)

Yeah, certainly there are some limits on the argument. The absurdum ad infinitum response falls flat because it fails to be a reasonable model. It's far more reasonable to limit yourself to discussion of the amount of stamina that's actually attainable in-game. And my argument is that generally, that value is (by design) far below the threshold we're interested in.

Keep in mind that trinkets are one of the most efficient places to stack stamina. You get 1.5 stamina for 1 point of secondary stat on trinkets; on gems it costs you 2 points of secondary stat for every 1.5 stamina. So you should be switching to stamina trinkets before you start gemming stamina. Hence why I don't recommend trinkets with passive bonuses that aren't stamina.

The question of, say, a Brewfest Trinket vs. Iron Protector's Talisman is more interesting. You're trading 100 stamina for an on-hit dodge proc. I'm of the opinion that it isn't worth it in that case simply because you don't have control over it, making that dodge bonus primarily a TDR mechanism. I feel that way about avoidance in general, but at least with an on-use trinket you can weight the dice in your favor a bit by using it when you need the extra protection most.

A more interesting comparison is Jade Warlord Figurine and Relic of Niuzao. Is it worth dropping a little stamina to go from a normal-sized on-use mastery proc to a huge (~10% dodge) on-use dodge proc? I personally don't choose to do that, but I think you could make a strong argument either way on that simply due to the relative sizes of the procs.

That's an interesting discussion, and I need to think about it further before I can claim to have any deep insight into the method. The first thing that jumps out at me though is that it's going to be tough to make a concrete correlation that way.

While I completely agree with the premise - namely that by increasing your max health, each attack you take is a smaller percentage of that total and leads to less healer panic and more intelligent and controlled healer play - the devil is in the details. For example:

• How much stamina do you really need to make a noticeable difference? Will a healer play differently if you swap a 320 hit gem for a 240 stam gem? Probably not. Stamina is more of a whole-hog, overall gear direction thing. Your healer will almost certainly notice the effect of an extra 50-100k health, but it's tougher to quantify that effect when the difference is only 10k health. Unlike DPS, TDR, or even smoothness metrics, the relationship here isn't strictly linear because human reaction and cognition doesn't work that way.
• Time and mana necessary to heal it up is probably not a useful metric, because it generally doesn't cost extra mana to heal up that extra health. If you were taking a significant amount of overhealing (and almost all tanks do) before swapping for more stamina, then that extra healing is essentially free. In addition, part of the principle being suggested is that the extra stamina allows or even encourages your healer to use mana more efficiently, which suggests that its not an additional mana cost at all, rather a mana savings.
• Perhaps most importantly, we need to clearly define what we're trying to accomplish with such a metric. What are we trying to quantify? Healer mana savings? Reduction in chance of death? We're ostensibly trying to save healer mana, but we wouldn't want to do so if it came with a significant increase in chance of dying. That's why we avoid dodge and parry, after all - they give better TDR, but even if that could be correlated to a reduction in healer mana (which again, is a conclusion that we've mostly agreed isn't strictly true) it comes with an increased chance of death, which we've deemed more important. Ideally we'd look at both of those metrics, and the assumption is that stamina gives both a mana savings and more survivability than the other options.
• Healer variability throws another wrench into the works. Let's say we come up with a good mana savings metric, and the stipulation is that your healer panics and resorts to an expensive heal any time you dip below 40% or any time you take more than 30% of your health in one hit. Those two numbers are going to generate very sharp break-points in your stamina valuation function. The point of stamina that pushes you over the threshold that turns a special boss attack from 30% of your health into 29% is going to be very valuable unless you do some more sophisticated statistical averaging or use some sort of smoothing algorithms. And even then, how certain are we about those two numbers in the first place? Healer A might be well-modeled by 40%/30%, but Healer B might be well-modeled by 50%/20%, and so on.

All of that said, it's encouraging that we're starting to look at what it would take to build a reasonable metric for Stamina. Even if it's just a simple metric, it may have some value, and it's something we can discuss in the hopes that we can refine it and make it better. I just have trouble believing that we'll ever come to a solid way to quantify it, because so much of the value is wrapped up in perception and player reaction, which is so difficult to accurately quantify in the first place. It's an attempt to map feelings onto math, and such pursuits are notoriously unreliable.

It's also important to recognize that when we're discussing Stamina like this, what we really mean is Effective Health. Armor, Guardian mastery, and Brewmaster mastery all fall into the same boat against physical damage (and also have other perks, such as being tradeable for other secondaries, and also providing damage reduction).

That doesn't really affect Prot Pallies, unless perhaps you want to assume you're going to have SotR up for any significant incoming burst. That's actually quite reasonable on something like Sha of Fear. All of the significant burst is during Thrashes, which you'll certainly be doing everything possible to have SotR up for all of, so mastery becomes effective health as well.

That all depends on why you're considering the DPS trinket in the first place. If it's for DPS, then it really depends on how much survivability you can give up in your pursuit of DPS. Trinkets are a good place to make those sorts of swaps since they're easy to switch around between encounters. Though it's also worth noting that a haste trinket might be a better choice, because it gives you as much or more DPS and a lower survivability cost.

For survivability though? Strength is only about as good as parry for us. And I would easily take 1000 stamina over 1000 strength, even with a large proc. While the absolute stat weights are a bit vague, it's not uncommon to treat stamina as 10x as valuable for survivability than parry or more. So while there's a breakpoint, it's going to be fairly high. I'd probably use a dodge trinket over a weak Cataclysm trinket, for example. But pretty much any MoP stamina trinket will be more attractive than a strength DPS trinket.

I feel my comment (which was actually a nod to your previous assertions) was mis-construed here. I put the "enough" in quotes to show the fact that there is a theoretical breakpoint for diminishing value of stamina versus other survival options, but that by and large stamina is the stat of choice. The various reasons for this were discussed above, but I did want to touch on this regardless. Apologies for any confusion, but it looks like it may have started a good discussion, so....

My main concern with this tier for us is the lack of any stam trinkets above ilvl 489. I've been sitting on valor for upgrades, and while I don't see myself using trinkets other than Jade Warlord/Liquid Courage outside of some DPS checks or farm content, I am wondering if it is worth upgrading them via VP.

As discussed, an extra 2-3k HP alone will (likely) not cause a drastic reduction in mana expenditure or healer panic. Would the VP be better spent on an armor item with additional stat allocations to allow for better reforge accuracy and additional armor? Or perhaps a weapon for the additional damage contribution in addition to the stats? Shield was the first item upgraded for me, although I'm equally saddened that there is no shield above 489/502, but I digress. I am just curious what the consensus is on this.

our level 90 Talents are all Spell attacks I guess? (to know how they are affected by hit and Exp.)

next thing, Judgement, it also applies Censure, does this means that it also triggers a seal?

Judgment only triggers SoT.
All L90 abilities are Spell abilities.

MMO Champion is reporting set bonuses for t15 gear on the PTR. At present they're... alarming. MMO-Champion - World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

2-piece - Every time you cast WoG or EF, you get +40% block for 5 seconds per HoPo used.
4-piece - You gain 1 HoPo when you take some amount of damage while DP is up.

Ballpark, with the 2-piece running, it'll take about 28k Mastery to block cap (including buffs). Since we can already get over 15k buffed, it might just be possible to block cap this expansion.

Nearer term, time to get crunching on whether this'll make Mastery more attractive relative to Haste (I suspect it will, but not by enough to make it preferable).

Will it now be possible and/or expected that we keep the 2pc running as close to all times as possible? Assuming that the 40% block is additive (which is a large assumption), we'd be looking at ~70% block for 15 sec after a 3 HoPo WOG. This would be sustainable with near 100% uptime if we use WOG as a cooldown rather than stack BoG as an emergency heal. Perhaps this more frequent use of WOG would also encourage glyphing WOG for the extra damage? Obviously the downside would be a reduction in ShotR uptime, so is it possible to math out the "ideal" amount of uptime trading between the 2?

Also, if anyone WASN'T running Unbreakable Spirit, the 4pc puts that nearly to rest. Even without abusing HA to spam HoPo abilities, DivProt was ~40sec cooldown. So, with the 4pc, that's bonus HoPo influx 25% of the time (assuming it is used on CD and dmg intake requirements are met). Seems to work well with the 2pc in bolstering our 2pc buff and/or ShotR uptime further.

Finally, with the way these bonuses look, would it be prudent in 5.2 to perhaps switch to the Block Value meta gem? It's hard to pass up the armor, but if we are genuinely looking at a near 70% block rate, perhaps it is worth some exploration...