Fighting a Deviant monster of any level will give you two tickets of that level plus a random amount of tickets from the same or lower levels. Forging a piece of equipment requires a single level 1 ticket, and you need one ticket of each level to level up a weapon or piece of armor to max.
This means that to level up a full set of equipment from one of the deviant monsters to max level, you may need to hunt the same deviant monster anywhere between 20-30 times depending on how lucky you are. Ranking an armor set up to at least level 6 will unlock an additional two skills for that armor set. None of them have gem slots, but all of them have skills that work well together. Example: Silverwind has Evade Extender and Evasion+2 in addition to Crit Up, while the Dreadking set has HG Earplugs + Attack Up. There's even some sets of armor that help a lot with gathering and farming talismans.
EDIT: And in case you didn't know, every deviant monster has ten levels of quests associated with them that get progressively harder as they go along. It starts out just being normal hunts, but you also have capture quests, quests where you'll be interrupted by other monsters, quests where you have to kill other monsters in addition to the deviant, quests where you can't bring any items with you (supply items only), and quests where you need to fight two of them and the second one will spawn in if you take too long to kill the first one.