Gemming for Blood

Having seen my guild tanks gem, i'm confused about what i'm supposed to be doing

For blue/red sockets, is it even worth matching socket bonuses, seeing that the bonuses are most often stam?

Or should i just gem everything with fractured amberjewels, with the exception of mastery socket bonuses? I don't feel that gaining 10-20 mastery is worth gemming with puissant dream emeralds/defender's demonseye.


Comments would be appreciated :)
You should gem for the socket bonus only if it's +20 of a stat you want. Such as +20 Mastery, Dodge, Parry, Stamina. Sockets like expertise can be okay, but only if the gems are beneficial.

That's my philosophy, some people go for the socket bonus no matter what, but I believe that pure mastery gems are better than mastery stam gems in given socketing situations.


For my tank set, I gem for mastery.

For my dps set, I gem for strength.

The new gems allow you to match the sockets sometimes by using mixed colors, i.e., orange, green, and purple gems that have some of you major stat and some of another stat.
I pretty much went with this:
http://www.noxxic.com/pve/death-knight/blood
pure master gem for yellow
20 parry 20 mastery for red
30 stam 20 mastery for blue
Please trust Crunchy on this. I've done a ton of testing as well, and now only Gem Red with the Parry Mastery (it's an orange gem) and Blue with the mastery/stamina. Made a world of difference.
As a tank, you rarely have a socket bonus of a stat you /don't/ want and while Mastery is our strongest stat, giving up free secondary stats (especially stamina, which is still very useful) is not a great idea for tanks.

DPS can get away with it because strength is usually more than 1.5-2x better than any possible secondary stat, while for us.
Fractured for yellow (pure mastery)
Fine for red (parry/mastery)
Puissant for blue (stamina/mastery)

If you don't think the socket bonus is worth it, then use a Fractured.