Originally posted by: nanobreath
Yeah was gonna say that int and spi effect mana regen now.
EJ is your best place to find out about stats and which is more important etc. Though I don't think they have a comprehensive list, though it isn't very difficult. They really all effect each class the same, just different classes get more benefit from one effect or the other. Esepcially when you take talents into effect. Just read whichever class forum you're interested in.
Blizzard is trying to homogenize the gear around and that usually means trying to push stats onto other classes, but some still don't care about certain stats. Mages don't care about spirit as all it does is raise your mana regen where other classes get a bonus from it via talents or abilities.
There's also a couple not-so-etched-in-stone rules that you typically follow for mana regen. As a class that has extra bonuses from spirit, you typically want to go for spirit over strict mp5. For classes with no spirit bonuses (Holy Paladin, Restoration Shaman), you typically want mp5 for your regen. Balance Druids fall in the same camp as mages as they do not care about spirit. All Moonkin regen factors from talents are based on intellect. This is also somewhat true with mages as Evocate will restore a static percentage of your mana pool (a long time ago it used to work with spirit (+500% I believe) but that got changed).
When it comes to determining the other combat related stats such as hit, expertise, etc, you typically need to look at your damage and class mechanics and how much of it is affected by the stat in question. For example, Enhancement Shamans are one of the few classes that it is considere imperative to cap hit chance and expertise (to 0 dodge, not 0 parry). This is affected by the fact that 50% of the Shaman's damage is physical and also very importantly, quite a bit of spell damage is done via procs (Maelstrom Weapon, Static Shock), so your attacks must land to help boost these. Also having 50% of your damage come from spells pushes another two areas of importance... being spell hit capped and also pushes having Stormstrike land every time or you may suffer from the lack of the +24% nature boost ( with the SS glyph ), which all of your spell damage is nature related. Then there's the Retribution Paladin, which unlike most melee classes has absolutely no preference on hit and actually, all of your gems should be strength (you shouldn't ignore hit, but it should never get a preference over strength).
I've been tempted to write some combat simulators, but well... I'm lazy.