I'm a big fan of using loot ranking systems that boil down all those stats like Agility, Stamina, and Dodge Rating into a single number. It's an imperfect estimate of the value of gear but it's a big help when piecing together an outfit. I prefer Emmerald's high gear lists for bears and Toskk's DPS method for cats.
Those websites do a great job providing lists of gear by slot and I'm embarassed to admit I've spent many hours retyping data from them into spreadsheets and fiddling with outfits. But that's a lot of work, I'd rather just have something in-game that let me sort through my bags. Enter the Pawn addon, a nifty little mod that lets you create custom loot rank skills and then show their values in an in-game tooltip.
What's great about Pawn is that it lets you define your own custom scales. I've cooked up Pawn ranking scales based on Emmerald's high gear lists and Toskk's DPS valuations for my gear. You can use these scales too by opening up the Pawn UI and clicking %26quot;import%26quot;
( Pawn: v1: %26quot;Emmerald high gear%26quot;: RedSocket=54.38, MetaSocket=81.57, Health=0.2553, ResilienceRating=0.0001, YellowSocket=37.2062, Agility=6.7975, DodgeRating=4.4352, BlueSocket=53.2234, Stamina=4.3389, ExpertiseRating=1.6959, Armor=0.5934, DefenseRating=2.7932 )
( Pawn: v1: %26quot;Toskk%26quot;: ArmorPenetration=0.2375, RedSocket=23.94, FeralAp=1, Strength=2.266, MetaSocket=110, HasteRating=1.4463, Agility=2.9927, ExpertiseRating=1.964, BlueSocket=11.97, YellowSocket=19.82, HitRating=1.964, CritRating=1.8583, Ap=1 )
Lots of caveats of course. Pawn doesn't allow values for +armor or +weapon damage, so they're missing from the scales. The Toskk scale is relative to my current gear with 3700 attack power, 42% crit. And you need to watch for procs and set bonuses yourself; Pawn doesn't calculate those.
Still, it's handy to have an in-game way to quickly compare items. Now if only I could tell Outfitter to create an outfit optimized against one of these Pawn scales :-P
Unfortunately, my real problem now isn't in picking the gear with the best stats. It's doing all the constraint satisfaction. I've got enough T4 and T6 gear now that it's a hard choice whether to keep one set bonus or another. On top of that I have to maintain crit immunity, keep a meta-gem (or not), and make sure my bear gear generates enough threat and my cat gear has enough survival. It's gotten to the point where gear upgrades seem more like a chore than a pleasure.