You’re asking the wrong question.
It has to do with having some mana sustain vs having no mana sustain.
this but also the sheer power this gives mut rogues is craaaaazy. sure it helps us all but +3 weap dmg on dual gutrippers is NUTS
Setting aside the argument of whether MM (or ranged in general) hunter is actually a good idea in the current environment, let’s compare the two options. For both Electromantic Devastator (chain) and Insulated Leathers (leather), I’ll assume the hunter is only wearing legs + boots, because the Blazewind Breastplate blows the set options out of the water and the 3pc bonuses are terrible either way.
Electromantic Devastator 2pc provides: 11 agi, 19 sta, 19 int, 1% hit, and 52 AP.
Insulated Leathers 2pc provides: 21 str, 17 agi, 22 sta, 1% hit, and 1% crit.
You’re fundamentally looking at the 52 raw AP from chain versus the 1% crit from leather; conventional wisdom is that 1% crit is “worth” about 29-30 AP, which puts the chain option ahead by about 22 AP worth of parse weight. The extra 6 agi on the leather claws back about 18 of that, and Expose Weakness gives you another 2 AP (40% of the 6 AP difference). But that still leaves the chain options as very slightly superior. It’s really close, though, and I doubt you’d have much luck parsing the difference in real-world conditions.
That math is probably different if you intend to wear the 3pc. But, again, you shouldn’t wear the 3pc, so the point is largely moot.
EDIT: Ah, shoot. I forgot to account for Lion here because I’m apparently dumb. You get an extra 20% of the 6 agi gap via Lion, which is probably 1 or 2 agi, depending on rounding vis-a-vis your stat total. And then, again rounding-dependent, possibly another 1 AP via Expose. That probably does put the leather about 4-5 AP ahead of the mail. But I’m still not sure that’s a parseable difference in real world play, especially given the… um, “other” challenges faced by ranged hunters in the current phase.
Doesn’t int help?
Blizzard painted themselves into this corner by adding lion and expose weakness. It means Hunters get 21% more agility and 2.4 AP per agility. So 1 agility on gear is equivalent to 2.9 AP plus some amount of crit.
There is literally no way for them to itemize for ranged hunter other than agility and hit.
Sure, int isn’t bad per se, but when you have int INSTEAD of stats that affect AP or Crit, then it makes the gear less good.
Int does nothing for Hunters.
Ssshhh, you’re not supposed to correct the forum trolls. You’re supposed to blindly agree with them, or troll them back.
Stop proving them wrong 
int isn’t really helpful unless the fight is going to be very short, at which point it becomes both an aid and a hindrance.
for example, as a hunter, my rotation is simply a macro inverse of consumed by rage buff. i dps until i oom then swap viper and lose 17% rs damage. more int extends this phase but also extends the viper uptime.
so if the fight is like 60 seconds or less, the mail gear 3 piece pulls ahead. leather is better in all other situations
Hunter scaling. If they made it agi hunters would be way too strong. So, another hunter nerf as per blizzards weekly hunter nerf quota.
That shouldn’t be a problem yeah? Warriors are doing the same.
To punish hunters for having +% agility. I can’t think of another reason thats such a constant lol. They should never have had +AP as a stat in the game to begin with but its part of classic wow.
I will 100% acknowledge that there is both threat gear and mitigation gear for tanks.
That having been said: Who the heck is this Shockforged plate for?
- It’s not particularly great for healing in comparison to actual healer gear.
- Even if Shockadin ended up as more than a meme, standard caster gear would be better.
- You have more armor than if you’re wearing cloth, for sure. Main issue here is that PvP is so bursty right now that it’s barely a factor. As for PvE, you don’t really want to be taking hits in the first place.
- Additionally, it’s lacking in stamina. This is in line with caster and healer gear, more or less, so I’ll give this a pass, but it does bring me to the next issue:
- It’s devoid of anything but stamina, int, spell damage, and crit. This wouldn’t be an issue, if Shockadin wasn’t designed around getting melee crits to reset Exo & HS CD, and critting with HS offensively to reset its CD and refund its mana cost, which leads more into an issue with rune design than gear, but it kind of goes in tandem with this set:
- Running Sheath of Light instead of Infusion of Light, with threat/damage or mitigation gear on your belt will give you more spell damage than Infusion of Light with caster gear; will give you strength to actually do damage with your melee attacks while trying to proc Art of War; will give you agility, giving you higher melee crit to proc Art of War; will give you far more stamina, to survive a bit longer in this bursty as hell PvP, at the expense of a smaller mana pool, which you may very well die before exhausting.
Sorry to go off on a diatribe into the issues with Shockadin. My main point: Shockforged plate isn’t really good for anyone, even the meme role it has a set bonus attributed to. Where was the quality control on that plate gear?
I agree with the second part; there’s a lot in early versions of WoW that are really confusing from a design perspective. From listening to several hours of interviews with Kevin Jordan before Classic was released, however, it seems like a lot of the game design, mechanically, was a ton of trial and error, assumptions made about how the game would be played, and course correction over years that couldn’t really be done on a patch-to-patch basis. It took until TBC for hunters to only get 1 AP per agility instead of 2, and til WotLK for shamans to get AP from agility at all. Not to mention that agility increases dodge and armor chance for everyone in Classic.
It would probably brick the game in absolutely insane ways to try to retrofit later changes to main and secondary stats in SoD to be more digestible like they are in Cata and later, or even in Wrath, without reworking pretty much every single numerical value. This is probably why they only do it - outside of a couple insanely egregious instances - on a per-expansion basis, when they don’t really care about the old gear being completely broken.
Cookie cutter itemization rears its ugly head. Time to homogenize the classes some more.
And it’s in Cata where they fixed classes like hunters and warriors wearing leather by introducing Armor Specializations that increased your main stat by 5% if you wear your intended armor type in all slots.
Maybe a fix for itemization would be to add a book that either gives shaman 1 AP per AGI or a book that gives hunters RAP for strength