Gear: Hunter

Requirements

Obviously, the gear you need will differ according to your spec. However, I believe one must at least obtain most of the following requirement in order to venture safely (at least, safely enough to have a decent chance to survive more than a few minutes) into Karazhan.

  • Health Pool: Around 7000 hit points, unbuffed.
  • Mana Pool: 6000 mana points is decent enough.
  • Attack Power: Pretty dependent on talents. Roughly, 1500 Ranged Attack Power for SV, 1650 for BM spec (both including Aspect of the Hawk), and 1800 RAP for MM (including Trueshot Aura).
  • Hit Rating: Your chance to hit L70 targets should be nearing 5%, at least. SV have hit improving talents, so 2% is good enough. Converted into hit rating, you'll need around 80 or 47 if you're SV specced.
    • Note: Hit rating for raids should be evaluated against level 73 mobs (like most bosses are) and with a weapon skill of 350 you need 9.0% hit rating to never miss a shot. For hunters that have taken Surefooted it will increase hit rating by 3% (3/3 points) so you need to have 95 Hit Rating to never miss. Dwarfs however using a gun only require 48 Hit Rating to never miss.
  • Crit Chance: Depending on spec, any non-SV hunter should have at least 20% chance to crit, or nearing 30% for Survival.
  • Agility: Only a requirement if you're SV - at least 700.
  • Weapon Speed: This might sound funny, but you really do not want to have a weapon that is too fast. BM hunters should not have an overall attack speed faster than 2 seconds, other specs should have weapon speed around 2.5 seconds (after quiver speed boost). The reason for this is, that a weapon too fast will make it harder for you to use a proper shot rotation, thus reduce your overall damage output.
  • Pet Abilities:
    • Avoidance (rank 2) is very important for raiding, as it gives your pet an improved chance to survive in boss fights.
    • Cobra Reflexes is recommended for boosting the pet's damage output.
    • Since pets won't be taking any direct hits (i.e. they will not tank), Armor Class should be neglected in favor of Stamina. Hence, teaching your pet the highest possible rank of Great Stamina is recommended.
    • Elemental resistances are encounter specific.

Gear List

Following are different lists of items that are considered good enough to use for raiding. Those lists do not inform you how to combine your gear set, but what are your possibilities. It is up to you to figure out the piece of gear you are missing, to complement yourself in order to meet the above requirements.
The following items are from various sources - Instances, heroic instances, quest rewards, crafted and rare drops. I have intentionally omitted epic drops, as those are harder to acquire.

Mail Armor
Leather Armor with Agility
Weapons

I've also provided a list of gear obtainable through PvP. Bear in mind that PvP gear is focused on burst damage, while raiding requires sustained damage.

PvP Armor
PvP Weapons

Enchants

Obviously, an integral part of gearing up is having enchants on all your items. As a general rule of thumb, a hunter should take enchants that grant him Agility, Attack Power or Stats when nothing else is available.
This includes the usual enchants from Enchanting, a Glyph on the Shoulder slot, a Scope for the Ranged slot, an Inscription on the Head slot and some Leg Armor on the Legs slot.

Agility boosting Enchants
Attack Power boosting Enchants
Item Enchants

Gems

If you have socketed items, you must socket them with gems. Quality is important, so if you got a real good piece of gear, use a rare gem for it.
If you can, attempt to get the socket bonus, although don't kill yourself if you rather improve some other stat that does not match the color. As a rule of thumb, stats worth improving via gems are Agility, Hit Rating, Attack Power and Crit Rating.

Gems

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