Post by H3Knuckles
Agility is your main damage stat as a Hunter; your auto-attacks, your pet's auto-attacks and many of your abilities damage is calculated using Attack Power, or Ranged Attack Power, which are derived from Agility.
Weapon damage is the next biggest; Besides your auto-attacks, basically all of your ranged abilities will use weapon damage in whole or in part to determine their damage. DPS is a good general guideline of the power of the weapon, but the calculations use a randomly generated value between the weapon's minimum and maximum damage values, so you want to pay more attention to base damage. The easier way to look at this is that for comparable weapons (ie, those of a similar item level and having similar DPS), the slower weapon will have higher damage values to do the same damage per second as a faster weapon. The higher damage values will produce stronger hits with most of your ranged abilities, so you want stronger weapons, and given a choice you want slower weapons.
Stamina only really affects your and your pets health meter lengths. This is useful of course, but should take a back seat to raising your damage stats.
Critical strike chance, Mastery (this one only after reaching level 80), and Haste are the 'secondary' damage stats. The relative strengths of them vary depending on which specialization of Hunter you are playing, but they will always come between Agility and Stamina.
Hit has a cap, meaning a value beyond which you receive no additional benefit, which if I remember correctly is 6% (the actual rating needed to reach 6% varies by level, but you should be able to see the percentage in your character pane). Used to be you wanted it as close to cap as you could reasonably get it, above and beyond stacking damage stats, but I'm not sure that is still true.
The best piece of advice I can give you is to read the thread stickied at the top of this Hunter forum titled "Helpful Threads" and use the links contained therein to find threads which are guides on how to build a good hunter. They will tend to focus on max-level group Player Versus Environment content, but most of the advice still applies to leveling. Just a warning, but people on this forum can be snarky or rude at times to newcomers who post topics asking questions that could be quickly answered by searching the site, especially if it's in the same forum your posting to.
Also, read the guides in the Hunter and PVP forums at
Elitist Jerks for even more in depth advice. If you want to look up info about pets, or even just superficial things like seeing what color combinations are available for a given pet type and what level and where the tameable mobs with that "skin" are go to
PetopiaPS. Turtle's not a bad leveling choice being Tenacity, the toughest pet talent tree, and having a defensive family skill. But leveling these days is pretty forgiving, so if you aren't fighting Elites (enemies with silver or gold dragons around their portraits) feel free to try pets from the other pet talent trees (Cunning, Ferocity), or even just another Tenacity pet with a less defensive family skill. Also, if you join a group, make absolutely sure you have the pet skill Growl turned off autocast (that is, you want its icon border to not be animated) unless you are asked to have the turtle tank.
Post by Magician22773
or better yet,
www.warcrafthuntersunion.comNo elitist jerks there, just friendly people and good information :)
As to mastery: it's nice to have but not that important. Haste, haste, and more haste after you max your hit rating to 8% (or a tad over, so you have some playroom for if you get an item with a lower hitrate on it but otherwise superior).
Agility determines damage per shot, haste the number of shots (more or less).
No, no, and more NO.
Hunters have haste breakpoints. Rather then spell them out for you....as posted, WHU has them all listed there for you. But the basic idea is, you are looking for a specific point of haste where your regen shot, (such as Cobra Shot), provides enough focus regen so you can keep your other shots (such as Black Arrow and Explosive shot) on cooldown (using them every time they are avalaible).
Because of the cooldowns of these shots, just stacking haste becomes a wasted stat, until you reach the next breakpoint. Anywhere in between the breakpoints, you are not gaining anything. You always want to reforge into either crit if you can, or mastery if you must.