eternalsinners

What are the most important attributes for hunters?

Agility is number one. No questions asked. That doesn't mean you should switch items because one has a single point of agility more if you are sacrificing other stats, though.

Stamina, Intellect, and Spirit are all of some benefit to hunters, although most will favor Stamina over the other two. Some hunters argue that a hunter should not get hit, and thus more HP is irrelevant, but more mana lets them fight longer, so they try to get intellect. If shots didn't trigger the 5-second rule that halts mana regen for 5 seconds after a successful "spell", spirit would be superior for hunters.

Later in level, you will start seeing other qualities on equipment. Agility is good because it increases your Attack Power and your chance to crit. There are items that specifically increase one of those two factors, and are important to your damage output. There are also +hit% modifiers that make you less likely to miss.

While usually the last thing hunters look at, defensive attributes like armor and chance to dodge are of some limited benefit. Agility also increases your chance to dodge and parry, as well as your armor.


How does attack power, chance to crit, and chance to hit work?
What is DPS?

Attack Power (AP) and crit chance increase your damage in different ways.

AP increases your basic DPS by 1 DPS per 14 points of AP. Note that DPS stands for damage-per-second, and is a rate, not an amount per hit. So your attack power will scale to give slower weapons the right amount more that they should do. This has some ramifications regarding abilities that use weapon damage after these modifiers, such as Aimed Shot and Multishot.

Crit chance gives you better odds to get a critical hit. Items that affect this increase it by 1%, usually. A crit will deal double damage, or if you have the Mortal Shots talent, x2.3 damage. A large number of crits creates "spiky" damage that can steal aggro early in the fight, and hunters that focus on "crit gear" will often have lower basic DPS since they lack attack power, but critical chance is another important way to increase your overall damage output.

Note that agility increases your ranged attack power by 2 per point of agility (and 1 for melee), and roughly every 53 points of agility increases a hunter's critical rate by 1%. This crit rate conversion is specific to hunters, and is the worst of all the classes in the game. People speculate why, but nobody has come up with a reason that really satisfies why it is nearly double (or half) that of any other class. (Rogues are 29, other classes are 20.)

Chance to hit affects your accuracy. Loosely speaking, you have a 95% chance to not miss an even-level target. (This is actually based on the difference between your weapon skill and the target's defense skill, so higher level creatures and warriors with lots of +defense will be missed more often.) Adding 1% chance to hit adds to this 95%. There is some cap on your hit rate; you can not get 100% chance to hit.


English translation? How should I decide which gear is better?

1 AP = 1/14 DPS (pre-crit)
1% crit = 1% of your tooltip DPS, or 1.3% with Mortal Shots
1% hit = 1% of your tooltip DPS, until you add 5 or 6%.
1 agi = 1/7 DPS + 1/53 of the crit line (roughly 6 agi to 1 DPS)

By tooltip DPS, I mean go to your character window and mouse over your damage and use the number that gives you. So if you had 150 DPS listed and no Mortal Shots, 1% crit and 1% hit would add 1.5 DPS...which would take about 21 AP or 10 agility to equal.

1 agi is also good for 2 armor and about 26 agi is 1% dodge.
1 int is 15 mana.
1 sta is 10 HP.
1 spi is 1/4 mana regen every 2 seconds.