For all sorts of real life reasons, I am not going to have the time to get into Ulduar or much of the short term future content for a while, and really build out the gear on my character.
So.. given its likely that I will run the "big stuff" very rarely and become more of a casual player.. what is left to me to improve my character ..
I mean anything at all APART from changing out gear in a big way..
So tweaking my spec or switching to arms or regemming slightly etc..
I have taken all sorts of varied advice and read this forum a lot to get to where I am and its working pretty well..
I still dont understand why the armory shows my stats so low when in game they are far higher.. (crit is 35% and AP is close to 4100 for example) but I am pretty positive that I am not quite well balanced enough on my gear or spec or something to get the max possible DPS out of what I have already.
As the poster above points out - drop all the resist and "+ all stats" gems. You have 30 expertise and only need 26, so you can break the socket bonus in gloves and swap out the 2nd gem for +16 str. You can also drop some hit, wouldn't be a big deal - so feel free to break that bonus (with another +16 str). All-in-all, you really only need 2 green or purple (up to you) gems to make your meta work, socket bonuses don't matter as much. Trying going for full Str gems - should see bigger numbers.