Gearing advice needed.

I'm about to finish my 2nd full week back to MoP since I quit back in Nov-ish. I leveled to 90 in this time and geared up enough to run the first 5 LFRs to begin getting gear. I've read all the gearing strats on Avoidance/Control: Haste/Master etc. What I haven't seen a lot of is a discussion on what Tier pieces a tankadin should take or if we should even take them.

I currently have plans to rebuild my guild and start 10m raiding within a month or so, and I received the T14 shoulder token last night from Terrace of Endless Spring. I'm not sure if I should grab the Ret shoulders as it's better itemized for a haste tank, or go for the tank shoulders for the set bonus when/if I get a second token.

Also, by today or tomorrow I'll have enough VP to buy the Shado-Pan Offensive necks, but I'm not sure if I should or if I should bank the VP and use it on something else. Seeing as I just hit 90 recently, pretty much all of my rep is very very low. My profile is linked for a look over for anyone who has time to review it and give any helpful advice.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/f ... cow/simple

Thanks for any advice/help/or time spent looking into this and responding. It's appreciated.

There's a sticky to use for specific gearing advice:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7896

I think the 2 piece T14 prot bonus is rather good: I seem to use CDs a lot in ToT, so having AD up more often is nice. (I've just had to lose the 2 piece bonus and did rather notice the loss.) So I would go for the prot shoulders.

The SPA necklace is a solid purchase and I guess at your gear level, you'll be focusing on raising your ilevel as fast as possible, so you would want to spend your valor on 522 pieces as and when you can. The exceptions might be gloves and legs, which you can get from Nalak, and possibly trinkets (I've avoided the SPA trinkets as I like stamina ones). But generally speaking it's hard to go wrong spending your valor on 522 pieces when your gear level is 470-something.

In terms of T15 bonuses, the two piece is like the name suggests - a nice bonus, not a must have. I think the helm and shoulders are the favored prot pieces. The four piece seems to be a niche thing (for H25 raiders? or others who regularly get pounded to low health).

Whoops! I apologize for posting another thread. I guess I misunderstood what that thread's purpose was.

I'm not familiar with the term "SPA" so I'm not sure what that means. I did have intentions of picking up the 2T paladin bonus, but I was more curious to know if it's better to pick up Ret shoulders due to better itemization, and then pick up the tier bonuses with other pieces, or if I should just commit and get tanking shoulders.

Quick Edit: Theck's most recent post (May 21) makes the case even stronger for Haste after modeling SoI was put in his math. This again means that there's a big question on whether it's much better for a gearing up tank to not worry about tier bonuses and focus on the more important tanking stats (Haste/Stam). I've yet to see any really good discussions on this.

SPA is the faction, Shado-Pan Assault.

As to whether to go with set bonus, or with the best individual pieces, I think you'll find a mixed approach here. Lots of people here have picked the ret chest, and the prot tier shoulders and helm. The extra gem socket on the Lei Shen legs, along with the huge stamina bonus on the 3 sockets means you couldwant to look at those too. Which by default means you won't be going for the 4-piece bonus.

The 4 piece is situationally useful, but it's not going to be game changing. Maybe try for the pieces in LFR and see what you think? If you are doing normal/heroic raiding, you might want to think twice about picking up pieces you might discard later.

Just some thoughts - I don't think there's a right or wrong answer this tier.