You'll only get Augment Recipes from Sliced Tech Parts missions. I still get them all the time. Bad luck or poor mission choice for you.

I've had a few power crystal recipes from crew skill missions. They are not common at all. It's been a while so I can't remember if it was Treasure Hunting or Investigation....

While it is hard to factor in, I imagine that a lot of people will be willing to pay a little more than the difference between non-augmented and augmented variants of ugly orange gears. Situation: You are wearing full Columi or Rakata and want to retain set bonuses while still having a full set of augments. Only solution is to add augment slots to every piece. Situation: You want to wear some of this snazzy new social gear that adapts to your level while still having a full set of augments. Only solution is to add augment slots to every piece. How many other situations are there where the only option is to buy augment kits to add augment slots to the item?

I don't agree with your analysis. You are assuming that nobody is going to craft more than one of an item. In the case of Armstechs, blue quality mats like Dallorian Alloy are very very cheap. So Armstechs are far more able to just craft custom weapons until they crit and then crush the extras for augment kits than any other crafter with their custom items. It's a case of looking at the whole economy of the craft and not just one thing.

The usage of Twink is much older than that. At least from early Everquest days, if not earlier.

Only if you have legacy level 10 (or 20). Which is not really going to happen on your first character.... Next patch, crafters will be able to make custom wrist and waist items. Until then, it's either legacy or rare world drops (which people charge a lot for).

Moddable is enough! Normally I just use the chin-strap and goggles one. But the microphone thing would be better if I could mod one up.

It is currently the least useful skill for level 50s. But that doesn't make it useless. It was only with the most recent patch that you could make Epic Scatterguns and Vibroknives. The level 50 ones are comparable to the Tionese ones. I do an ok business selling those. They require both Dallorian Alloy and Ultrachrome. You need Dallorian Alloy to craft the level 50 custom weapons. This is undermined a bit by them having the exact same graphic as the level 20 custom weapons. Hopefully bioware will fix that up so they are worth making. Gormak Energy-Cell Alpha Wave Inhibitor, used in fighting the Nightmare Pilgrim use Dallorian Alloy. Far better to farm the Enriched Durasteel and Dallorian Alloy for that than to farm 30 daily comms a week with your entire raid! The biggest downside so far is that it is WAY too easy to get Investigation Mission Discoveries and the market is bloated with them and their products. Between myself and my brother, we have 4 Slicers. Most of the stuff goes to me because I have one of each crafter while he only has a couple. At least a third of the discoveries have been Investigation ones (from launch until now). Bioware needs to fix that.

You could look at it that way. Basically it goes like this: * You can reverse engineer nearly anything of the type of items your crew skill can make. * You can reverse engineer nearly anything you can get a schematic for into something better. * There is a very limited set of items in the high end of the game that can be reverse engineered into a new schematic.

Read the item descriptions carefully. You are way less likely to get dismounted being hit while riding a tier 3 bike than a tier 2 one and that moreso than a tier 1 bike. Having to fight off the guys that dismounted you (or ride all the way around them to begin with) all of the time slows you down a lot Of course, don't feel like you have to spend your money all at once. If you are poorly geared or failed to have enough money to buy all your level 50 skills, those are certainly a higher priority.

The enhancements from the heroic dailies that give daily commendations are exactly the same as the artifact quality ones you can reverse engineer as an artificer. That's the good news. The bad news is for Cybertechs, because the Mods for tanking from Freeing the Fallen on Belsavis are far better for tanking and arguably better for dps as well. Despite being the same item level as the best a Cybertech can craft (outside of Operation recipes of course). It is possible to get better enhancements from vendors though. The Tier 1 gear (Tionese, Columi for pve and Recruit, Battlemaster for pvp) are not too hard to gather commendations/crystals for and are of a higher item level than what you can craft.

It's slightly more complex than that. I personally have about 600 ultrachrome on my Armstech, despite using them anytime I even felt slightly like using some. The only reason the investigation recipes are up for as much as 3000 is because nobody wants to sell them for less than the vendor price. It's a lot more like "If you saw a field full of cupcakes and a field full of dollar bills, but you'd just eaten 500 cupcakes, would you want to walk into the field full of dollar bills or the field full of cupcakes." I know I don't need any more damn cupcakes. There are at least a couple possible fixes for this. More "useful uses" for grade 6 investigation purples would be a nice one. Not have slicing biased heavily towards investigation missions would be another. Also, the OP should be posting in suggestions, not crew skills if he actually wants to make a suggestion.

Part of the "problem" with the way crew skills work is that your critical rate is lower and your failure rate higher while working on orange, yellow and green missions. Your critical rate is also lower while your chosen companions affection is less than 10,000. This is pretty harsh when you are starting a new character on a new account. Doing Rich missions doesn't actually help you get more criticals (and thus more purples). I would recommend running missions that have gone grey for a higher chance of getting the purples. Those also tend to be the quicker missions, so you'll have more chances to get a critical result. It's also a good idea to not worry too much about crafting purples until you have gotten your second companion (at the end of the dromund kaas since you are a sniper). That lets you quest and craft at the same time.

There's your problem. You're expecting to roll everything with a dps companion. Gear your healer companion a bit and use him and hard fights become doable.

Not entirely correct! The non-custom Legacy gear is Legendary quality, making it better or equal to Epic gear for at least 4 levels. That's pretty darn helpful imo. Also, there are two sets of custom legacy gear you can buy from the same vendors you get your birthright and inheritance legacy gear from, with the exact same appearances. Every impression that the devs have given so far is that some method of adding augment slots to any gear will be coming with patch 1.3. That shouldn't be too far away from the PTS now.