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.

It's found in either the Imperial or Republic daily areas on Belsavis. In addition, I've come across some pieces just outside of the southern republic area with the lizardman aliens (sorry, name escapes me atm!). From what I can tell, it's a random spawn that can replace any given node. So if you want it, farm the hell out of every metal node in the region and one may respawn as an Enriched Durasteel node. I've seen more than one in the same area at the same time, so it's not limited to one spawn per area. It just such a low rate that you rarely see one much less two (especially when people rush to farm them!).

On my server, blue slicing items are worth next to nothing (except to vendor), but purple slicing items are in the same range as purple Treasure Hunting and Underworld Trading items. Additionally, you get quite a lot of recipes from Slicing. This spruces your profits compared to TH and UT, even if you are just vendoring them all. On top of that, if you pick a crafting skill that can make augments, you get a double whammy profit. Augments generate additional profit over the raw materials on my server. And if you crit, you get 2 of them. You can still farm Lockboxes in the open world for pure profit, which TH and UT cannot do. You can still send your companions on Lockbox missions which at least break even on cash (green and blue lockboxes from criticals even things out) and then make a profit by selling Mission Discoveries (or use them yourself!). So no, slicing does not suck now.

Target of Focus Target. Currently, in encounters where you are changing targets a lot, there is no way to keep track of who a particular target is attacking. Oh, and this too! There isn't any point in having a tooltip if it gets hidden by your other windows (in Moveable Secondary Window mode anyway).

Yes. One method is to raise your social level enough to buy pants from a social vendor you can wear (there is usually one on each new planet from Nar Shadaa onwards). There is also the pilot's pants from fleet commendations (space combat missions), although those require some social level as well.

There are also no alignment required relics from level 50 flashpoints, hard modes and daily commendations. It's a pain levelling up without relics (excepting the matrix cube).

You seem to be missing the point. It's right there in the thread title... It's fun! It's entertainment seeing how the other half lives. etc.

There is no lying here. You just don't know how to read it. RESEARCH AVAILABLE = You could get a schematic from reverse engineering this. NO RESEARCH AVAILABLE = You have reached the best schematic you can down this path for this base item. No message = You can never get a schematic from reverse engineering this.

As far as I can tell, Enriched Durasteel has nothing to do with Cybertech in 1.2. It is used by ArmsTech to make an item for fighting the Nightmare Pilgrim.

My guild has beaten Black Talon, Boarding Party, Foundry, Kaon Under Siege and False Emperor on Hard Mode. We've yet to attempt Battle of Ilum and Directive 7. Our goto group is Powertech tank (me), Juggernaut DPS, Marauder DPS, Operative healer. While some fights were more difficult with all melee dps, none were wipe 10 times difficult (not even wipe 5 times difficult). The only time we've beaten this droid boss in Lost Island (even on normal mode!) is when we brought a Sorceror healer instead of our Operative Healer. It was even easier with a sorceror and operative healer both. Watched a few video guides of "oh look how easy this is to do", they all had sorceror healers. My impression from this and other posts about the topic, is that if you bring melee dps, you almost need a sorceror healer to help handle the spike damages (both on tank and on the group) by bubbling everyone. I'm sure it's possible to clear this stuff with my groups regular composition. I'm also sure it's harder than compositions with ranged dps and sorceror healers. What class your tank is probably doesn't matter as much (an assassin tank may have some small advantages here with 10m interrupts and their tech/force power 5 second immunity in emergencies, but that kind of small difference is acceptable).

You can't anymore. It let's you do the cast time, then tells you that you already know it.