Gear from the Frozen North

Some other folks have written up some great posts about places to look for gear for your Hunter. And after hitting 80 late late Friday night (or should I say morning) I figure I needed to narrow down places to look for great Hunter gear. To help me out, I navigated my way over to Wowhead and started going to town on filters to compile a list of gear I can obtain through quests, instances, etc.

To start, I decided to look up blue items that had a plethora of stat restrictions on them to make sure they would be good for use Hunters. The list I came up with is this. Certain item slots I had to be a little more discerning about, more specifically, which gear would be worth breaking my 4-piece Tier 6 bonus. Losing 10% more damage on Steady is a hefty portion of DPS and any upgrade (or a combination of a couple items) will need to make up that damage difference. My Tier 6 items are the breastplate, gloves, helm, and shoulders. Leggings, bracers, etc are more easily replaced. I only listed 2 items for each slot to keep this list fairly concise.

Helms

• Plunderer’s Helmet – This is an excellent and easily the strongest choice pre-epic for a Hunter. It is loaded with all of our desirable stats, contains a red socket for our favorite stat *wink wink* and has a meta socket to boot. Ingvar the Plunderer from heroic Utgarde Keep carries this beauty along with some other shiny toys for us which I will mention in a bit. :)
• King Dred’s Helm – Coming from it’s name sake in heroic Drak’tharon Keep, it has a plethora of our favorite stats but lacks gems or the meta socket to make it comparable with the aforementioned Plunderer’s Helmet but still a strong choice.

Breastplates

• Hauberk of the Arcane Wrath – This is an exceptional breastplate, especially when you compare it to what Tier 6 provides. This is one of the items I am considering breaking my 4-piece bonus to use, since I picked it up last night. The only downfall I have right now is that my Tier 6 BP is keeping my meta gem active. You can find this bad boy off of Anomalus in heroic Nexus.
• Aviary Guardsman’s Hauberk – Coming in as a zone drop, this is a BoE blue that you can find in Drak’Tharon Keep. Or your local Auction House, depending on who finds it. :)

Boots

• Dragon Slayer Sabaton’s – These great boots drop off of Keristrazsa in heroic Violet Hold. While I probably would have found them more useful with the haste being critical strike rating, great stats combined with red sockets make me a happy Hunter.
• Twin-headed Boots – Perhaps while running heroic Violet Hold to get the previously mentioned boots you might end up grabbing these very solid alternatives from one of the random bosses in the same instance.

Leggings

• Hollowed Mandible Legplates – These leggings are located off of Hadronox in heroic Azjol-Nerub. Take a look at these things and tell me what’s not to love? It seems Blizzard is being awesome about their socket colors and the hardest decision is which gear I will have to skip filling red sockets to met meta requirements.
• Ravenous Leggings of the Furbolg – You can pick these beauties off of Gortok Palehoof in heroic Utgarde Pinnacle. Very strong leather leggings to hold you over.

Gloves

• Gauntlets of the Plunder Geist – These are very strong gloves that you can pick-up off of Prince Taldaram in heroic Ahn’kahet: The Old Kingdom. No sockets but a solid smattering of stats.
• Grips of the Beast God -There were some BoP leather gloves I could have listed here but these were too good to pass up. These are BoE gloves with a *very* healthy chunk of hit rating on them in conjunction with a red socket who’s bonus is more hit rating. Knowing that we need 197 hit rating to reach the cap, 44 is a LONG way to reaching our goal.

Shoulders

• Massive Spaulders of the Jormungar – In case you didn’t manage to get the leather leggings from the same boss, take consolation in knowing you might be able to pick these up instead, as they come from Gortok Palehoof in heroic Utgarde Pinnacle.
• Spaulders of the Abomniation – Coming from Meathook in heroic CoT: Strat, these are another set of excellent shoulders. I chose to list these over the Spaulders of the Black Arrow since those are reputation items covered by Lassirra’s post.

Belts

• Belt of Tasseled Lanterns – These are a random BoE blue that drops inside heroic Gundrak. Great stats with a socket to boot.
• Cord of Swirling Winds – You can find this belt off of Ionar in heroic Halls of Lightning. Solid belt all around.

I could make this post go on and on covering rings, trinkets and everything else but it would be ridiculously long. There are a huge number of solid and viable trinkets to choose from. But I do want to highlight a couple non-raid epic items as well before I wrap this up.

• Sovereign’s Belt – You can find this bad boy off of King Ymiron in heroic Utgarde Pinnacle.
• Handgrips of the Savage Emissary -Cyanigosa is the on who drops these, from heroic Violet Hold.
• Leggings of the Stone Halls – Sjonnir the Ironshaper in heroic Halls of Stone.
• Interwoven Scale Bracers – Keristrasza� in heroic Nexus drops these excellent wrists.

And of course:

Drake-Mounted Crossbow can be found off of Ingvar the Plunderer in heroic Utgarde Keep.

There are a number of crafted items to consider as well, esepcially from leatherworking that are excellent choices. All the items in this list, however, are either BoE or from 5-man heroic instances. No raid items included. I also chose to leave off the new badge items as well, which I should point contains some excellent gear.

If there are any items you think I missed or an outstanding item you picked up such as a ring or trinket you want to point out, leave a comment!