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Gearing up your Hunter can be a challenging job. There is a lot of gear
out there to choose from, but you will always want to aim for the best
stat gear available for your chosen build. The thing about gear is that
until you reach the maximum level or end up with a very good rare
or epic item, you will constantly be changing your gear out for other
things. In World of
Warcraft you have so many options as to where
you can obtain gear. You can dungeon crawl, get lucky with world
drops, try to barter on the market or in the auction house, or engage
in PvP and try your luck with the honor merchants. There's no shortage
of options.



For the first twenty levels you can get by pretty good on standard and
green gear, but you will want to start looking for rare and epic items
as you level up. Dungeon instances are your best resource for finding
these items. You can sometimes find some pretty decent items in the
auction house. Unfortunately, you have to be one of the Azeroth rich to
afford most of them. For the most part, unless you really have the gold
to waste, you will want to avoid buying rare and epic gear on the
auction house and pursue them in the dungeons.



As a Hunter, you will want to start gearing up with equipment that will
enhance your stats for your preferred talent build.
Agility, and stamina should be your key focus. However,
certain builds
may have you focus on one more so than the other to support your
chosent talent build at times. For example, a Beastmaster will want to
focus on beefing up their armor and agility, as gear the Hunter wears
also enhances their pet's armor. The same goes for stamina. A piece of
gear that increases your stamina also increases your pet's and thus
adds those
valuable hitpoints. On the other hand, a Marksman will want to focus on
buffing up their agility, stamina, and intelligence to aid in dishing
out damage, increasing mana, and survivability. For the most part all
Hunters use these four basic stats. Your build will dictate where you
should focus.



Before you start to gear up your Hunter you should know exactly what
will benefit you. After all, spending 10 gold on a strength based
breastplate would be a waste of money. For a Warrior that would be a
finely tuned instrument of destruction. For the Hunter it makes a nice
suit to be buried in. So always know your stats before shopping around
for gear.

• Strength
  - As the Hunter
  increases his strength he gains an attack power bonus to melee.
  Unfortunately, this doesn't really affect ranged damage so it isn't as
  useful as you might think. This is one of the least important stats for
  a Hunter. Unless of course, you're trying to spec a melee Hunter and in
  turn die a hideous death. Don't say I didn't warn you.
• Agility
  - This skill is great
  for increasing both the armor class and ranged attack power of the
  Hunter. As an extra bonus, this skill also increases the Hunter's
  chance to land a critical hit. This is perhaps the most valuable stat
  for
  beefing up your ranged attacks. Marksmen and Beastmasters
  will want to buff this stat up well.
• Stamina
  - Stamina is a big
  stat with all three schools, but it really aids with the Beastmaster
  where you need to boost your pet every way possible. Enhancing stamina
  will give both of you a needed boost in hitpoints. If you intend to do
  a lot of PvP fighting you will want to boost this up so that you don't
  end up taking a dirt nap at the beginning of a fight. Hunters deal good
  damage, but they don't take a beating very well.
• Intellect
  - Intellect can be used for all three schools for its mana increase,
  but it's a major one
  for the Marksman as you need a high mana pool to dish out all the
  attacks you'll be using for damage. There are also talents available
  that will increase your damage output by a percentage of your
  Intellect. Depending on how you spec you may want to boost this a bit
  more for that alone.
• Spirit
  - This may be the least
  used stat of your basic six. While extra natural regeneration is nice,
  it only takes effect outside of combat. This means that a good supply
  of food can serve about the same purpose, but a little extra through
  stats never hurt. Just don't expect this to be high on your list of
  priorities.
• Armor
  - If you're looking to
  boost your defense then armor is one key stat you will want to boost.
  Beastmasters will need to boost this stat up as it also increases their
  pet's armor.

 

For the first 40 levels you will wear leather armor, but once you
reach level 40 you can acquire the ability to wear mail through your
trainer. This opens up a lot of new options for enhancing your stats
and defenses. Unless you spec for melee combat (which in my opinion is
a waste of time) the difference between dual wielding and using a
two-hander is more of a flavor thing than anything else. For the most
part you should focus your resources in building up your ranged, traps,
and pet features. These are the real bread and butter of a hunter.



When selecting a melee weapon you will need something to beat back
enemies if they get too close or if you're foolish enough to run out of
ammo. You can opt for the two-handers to attack with big swings and
deal a fair amount of damage at the cost of attack speed, or you can go
with the dual wield option. If you decide to dual wield I suggest you
grab two decent attack speed weapons with fair stats and damage. You
can find some decent weapons on the auction house most of the time, but
anything above green will usually end up costing you way more than it
is
worth.



You can save yourself some coin by opting to use green items until
around level 40. This will be perfectly sufficient for both groups and
solo play, unless you intend to take part in a lot of PvP matches. If
that's your choice you may want to work on trying to find some good
blues early. The best place to look for gear like this is first and
foremost the Auction House. The downside is that anything blue or
purple on the auction house is insanely expensive. On my server there
is one level 80 purple Armor Plated Combat Shotgun being sold as I
write this costing over 2000 gold. So unless you're rolling in
mountains of gold you will want to rely on dungeon runs, PvP and Honor
merchants, and raids to gain better equipment.



DPS is going to be an important part of your Hunter so making sure you
grab ranged weapons with good DPS, and if possible, some kind of nice
proc effect is going to be the way to go. Once you reach level 29 I
suggest you start looking around for some of the better Hunter guns (or
bows) at that level. One gun I opted to use was called the Ironweaver.
It's a rare gun that will last you a while. I grabbed
mine off the auction house for 10 gold at the time, but they can also
be found as world drops from certain level 30 mobs. They don't have any
kind of special effect, but they do have decent DPS and a fairly fast
attack speed for its level (2.60). This is by no means the best weapon
out there, but
it is one of many options you can track down as you level up your
Hunter.