To be honest, you'd probably be better off skipping the level 50 content and heading straight for Makeb and then Oricon afterwards. Oricon will get you some entry-level endgame gear (item rating 156). Whatever equipment you get from level 50 hardmodes will become obsolete very fast.
Once you got yourself some rating 156 gear, you can start doing level 55 HM Flashpoints for Black Market gear and Elite Comms, or alternatively do Story Mode Operations. Though you'll want to stick to guild runs for the latter.
From here on everything is pretty straight-forward. Get yourself some gear, optimize it as far as possible and advance to the next tier.
The 'box' you mentioned comes from third-party software, a combat parser like Parsec (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=674010). These programs read your combat log file and work with the information. Also they're perfectly legal in case you're worried.