The gear I'm happiest with is the crafted gear, if you've trained 2 schools as you came up, check out the crafted gear in Celestia, it will give you critical, damage boost and critical block in both schools, if you only concentrated on your main school check out the gear in Wintertusk.
Remember that ALL gear is a comprimise in some way, the gear with the highest health will come at the expense of power pips, the gear with the highest power pips usually has lower damage boost.
For my balance wizard, I crafted the Balance/Life gear from Celestia and with careful selection of wand, athame, ring and pet, I get +15% accuracy (this is nice when your spells are at 85% anyway), +75% damage, 130 critical and 120 critical block. What I lose out on is power pips and resistance, but most fights don't last long enough to worry about it.
I did not like the crafted gear from celestia it was too limiting I like the wintertusk gear best. You can craft hat, robes, boots, anthem and ring and you get good boosts from it.
As the previous poster said it really depends on the person. ME personally I like the gear out of waterworks (level 60 instance). TO me it seems the most balanced across the board. I have seen some folks do some things piece meal in that they will use lets say the crafted helm so that they get another blade, and then use the rest of the waterworks gear. If you are really a dual school wizard then getting gear that helps both schools would be good.
As using life as my main I would recommend just getting the farmed level 60 gear in waterworks. It took me 4 tries to receive them, though it will take you longer I just got super lucky. It takes most people 6-10 tries to get their stuff if you do waterworks every day or every other. Along with the lifeblade wand or any other 30+ critical wand you should have around 120! I use vengeance along with it, though rarely but i usually ALWAYS critical!
