Gems

Sorry for the late reply to the question about gems, RL has been busy and I've not been online in a few days--and won't be back to raiding until Thursday night with the crazy week I have coming up.

As for gems... I went all AP & Crit, with 1 Hit Rating gem. I replaced all of my Str related gems. My Armory profile hasn't updated since 10/16, which was before I made these changes so they are not yet reflected online.

I wanted to use as few hit gems as possible so I figured out how to do my gear and enchants in such a way that I only needed 1

I then used as honor points and DKP to pick up the following:
1 x Bold Ornate Ruby - Honor Points
1 x Gleaming Orante Dawnstone - Honor Points
1 x Smooth Ornate Dawnstone - Honor Points
1 x Rigid Lionseye - DKP
1 x Gleaming Lionseye - DKP
1 x Bright Crimson Spinel - DKP

The three red gems went into my helm, the Grimgrin Faceguard, where I skipped the socket bonus to stack AP. Then all of the yellow gems went 1 each into my chest, gloves, belt, and legs to get the socket bonus on each of those.

It was a nice upgrade across the board. If you don't have enough Honor Points or access to gems through your guild bank you should check the AH. Prices are dropping on everything right now and you can probably pick up some rare-quality gems on the cheap.

Re-gemmed

This week I decided to upgrade my gems. It started out by paying DKP for one Bold Crimson Spinel. Then I realized that I have all of these Badges of Justice in the bank that I'm not going to spend any time soon. OK, I could get Trousers of the Scryer's Retainer over the Cataclysm Legplates I'm wearing now, but I just got the legs, and we are probably only a few weeks off tackling Azgalor who drops Bow-stitched Leggings. When those drop I might want to switch out for the Tunic of the Dark Hour to keep my hit rating up. Besides, I just want to enjoy my T5 leggings while I have them.

Getting back on topic... I spent a few badges on a few epic gems. Specifically, 90 BoJ on 6 epic gems to cut into either Bold Crimson Spinels or Inscribed Pyrestones. I intentionally mis-socketed two items: I filled my Coif of the Jungle Stalker entirely with Bold Crimson Spinel, and put one Bold and one Bright Crimson Spinel in my boots. I lost the +8 AP on the helm and the +3 Hit on the boots. That wasn't a problem as the Enhancement Points of both being socketed as such outweighs the loss of the socket bonus. But since I replaced two Sovereign Tanzanite I ended up losing 12 Stam and therefore 120 HP. This shouldn't be a problem... buuut... for some reason in SSC last night I popped a Fel Strength Elixir which was another 100 HP down the drain, and with no Blessing of Kings my HP fell to 9099 raid buffed--the lowest it's been in months. I was quite disturbed and of course for the Leo fight having low HP is quite a liability. Granted my attack power was also 2004, which is the highest it's ever been (before combat buffs start kicking in) and my crit was sitting comfortably above 30%.

I enjoyed the high AP but decided it was too much of a liability anyway and popped a regular Elixir of Major Strength for the second attempt and kill. I didn't use a Flask because we weren't sure if we were going to Mags or Hyjal next (Leo was the only boss standing in SSC other than Lady V). We ended up going to Hyjal and one-shotting Rage, incidentally.

With my gear re-gemmed I haven't had a chance to crunch the numbers in WWS yet, but the loss of 3 hit was not tragic--my miss percentage stayed below 10%. And being in the high 1900's in AP out of combat made me quite happy.