I hunt the east coast and midwest extensively for whitetail.
a couple things: the most important consideration in deer hunting is finding a spot that produces quality buck. Nothing else is remotely as important. Unfortunately these days it is becoming more and more difficult to hunt anything except public land, which is a disaster. So if you have to pay to hunt, as in become part of a lease, or even give money to a landowner, then that is money better spent than ultra-high grade equipment. Unfortunately even then you will be confounded by trespassers and poachers gleefully ruining all your expensive preparations (for example, on opening day of rifle, I found a week-old bloodstain in the beanfield 30 yards from my stand - a trespasser had been poaching out of my spot before season began, and had ruined it).
As far as a rifle, most anything will kill a deer. what you get is up to you and dependent on the terrain. Without belaboring the obvious, wide open fields call for one type of rifle, 50yd heavy brush shots call for another. For optics, I got rid of all my hunting leupolds as soon as I discovered Zeiss back in the early 2000's. I used to think Leupold's asian "made in America" glass was awesome, but that was due more to lack of experience at the time. For light gathering and clarity, they don't come close. And their CS has taken a nose dive from the good years of the late 90's. I recently had to send in one of my remaining target leupolds for an issue. It took them considerably longer to return it to me than Swaro did when they sent a scope back to Austria for cleaning and repair.
