Malleus Operativus Maleficarum is witches

I just tore out the mods and put them in my rakata/orange mod gear. You should be able to get the best armor mods from black hole gloves, boots, and legs (if i recall). Same for enhancements and mods (I also supplemented with war hero). The armor mod for mask and chest will have to wait til campaigner (or you can buy them).

You can also dip into the a light armor chests. The amount of armor you lose is pretty low and since you aren't supposed to be getting hit anyway...

You might find more use from Street Tough than Survivor's Scars. The recent nerf made Survivor's Scars kinda meh but the extra energy and reduced cooldown of Pugnacity is pretty useful. Sedatives is also all kinds of awesome for defending points. For instance, you are stealthed at an objective and some lone hotshot comes up. Hit him with sleep dart and he'll pop out doing 50% less damage for a couple seconds. Half damage plus your heals means he isn't taking that point unless he subdues you with a stun.

I'd go with Slip Away. not only do you have a reduced cooldown for Debilitate but it also when you Debilitate you get an increase in run speed. Good for getting away from threats

I frequently bounce back and forth between Concealment and Lethality on my operative. There are a couple things I found helpful. 1) Dropping Scar Tissue of Exploratory Surgery can help to increase your burst potential. Because I'm always having to drop heals on myself from time to time, getting an Upper Hand from Underworld Medicine almost always means you'll enter a fight with a nice stack. In some instances, you can get off three Wounding Shots in a row. Eats up your energy but it's a nice fat stack of damage and scares the bejesus out of unprepared healers. 2) Dipping a bit more into Scrapper can be interesting. I've played around with something similar http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#701hrbkrMGdZMcZGor00z.2. You'll get more of a boost to your other combat abilities and gain the ability to get some heals out of your Pugnacity. Your Pugnacity already has a nice short cooldown because of you have Street Tough. 3) I've played around with Sedatives in the healing tree. It isn't all that useful in the great melee BUT waylaying a guy about to join the fight or hitting some guy guarding an objective can help out a ton. We have such a long setup chain that reducing incoming damage by 50% can turn the tides. 4) Nice Try is both bane and blessing. As you may already have noticed, it screws up our stealth if the guy gets away.

I love my concealment op now. All it took was full war hero/campaigner-equivalent gear and ranked war zones to weed out the well-geared, overpowered FOTM class players from the non-ranked warzones. I actually backstabbed some poor schmo for 4800 the other night. Eagerly awaiting the return of the 5K damage hits. DPS ops aren't dead per se. They just need optimal gear and undergeared opponents...heck of a design flaw imo

A variety of reasons actually 1) getting a group of 8 together can be a pain with my guild because most of them don't like to PvP 2) The two ranked games I played were all marauders and powertechs. Those classes backed by descent healers just dominate everything...and they don't even have to try 3) They are kind of silly. Why should I bang my head against the wall for differently colored gear that looks horrible no matter what way you paint it. I would play them if I had a group to do so, but otherwise I find them to be a stupid addition to rather pointless pvp

1See #2 2 yes 3 yes; I'm pretty sure with 1.3 the armor type changes based on your armor type for the social gear 4 yes but only war hero and campaigner. The battlemaster/rakata and below set bonuses are stuck to the item 5 augment kits: synthweavers, armormech, and I think armstech. augments: synthweavers, armormech, armortech 6 several locations. you can buy mods from vendors using commendations from the planets, you can buy the mods from players at the auction house, you can get them as world drops, and you can rip them out of other gear 7 yes. warzone commendations are used to by ranked warzone commendations at a 3:1 ratio 930 warzone coms equals 10 ranked). You can only have 2k warzone commendations but many more ranked (i forget exact number 8 Just stuff you pick up as you play. Check out Torhead and Dulfy.net websites. they often have goo info. And of course the forums

I play an operative. lvl 50, pretty kitted out in War Hero/Black hole level gear. I enjoy the character but it can be very frustrating to play. There's definitely a learning curve and gear plays a big role. The assassin is going to have a lot more utility, especially if you are part tank (especially one that self heals).

As you said, both specs have different play styles that appeal to different people. When I was leveling, I did a split between concealment and medicine. I was solo leveling and having the extra heals let me survive harder mobs. plus you don't get your healing companion for quite a while. It's easier to keep your tank/dps companions alive with the heals you get from Medicine. Of course, once I got Lokin, I stuck with my medcine/concealment build because I enjoyed it for leveling. Lethality doesn't really come into its own until cull so I would look at full Concealment or Concealment/Medicine to begin with until you get sufficient level to get cull. Then play with the builds. Nowadays I've been jumping between Concealment and Lethality builds. Lethality tends to do more on-demand damage but Concealment has, in my opinion, better survivability. Special note: be careful with Sedatives. While very useful, it makes the mobs aggro you after the sleep dart wears off. So if you've been sleep darting all the mobs in an area and you have the sedatives upgrade, you'll get a very nasty surprise when all those mobs start running for you (and aggroing everything along the way) after they wake up.

If we are a support class then more effort should have been made to place us in that roll. And to say that we can't be support and have have respectable damage is untrue. Just look at pyrotech powertechs. There's a tank AC that can melt your face off before you blink. Sure they now need to use combustible gas cylinder to do some of their tricks in the pyro tree, but they still have a lot of interesting things going for them, especially if they make use of some of the stuff in the Adv Proto tree. Personally, if this class was not supposed to be super uber damage dealer, Bioware should have embraced the support role more fully. Lethality should have been the damage tree, Concealment should have been a tactical tree (lots of debuffs and utility) and Medicine would have stayed healing. Something like an Air Force combat controller would have been keen. The operative should have been a combat multiplier; now we're kind of dividing by zero.

Gathering skills are the answer. Just send your crew out (or go farm) the materials that are needed to make the augment slots. On my server, price gouging is hitting the components too. By getting the components and selling them at competitive prices, you'll have more than enough cash to buy the augment slots. For instance, on my server a stack of 99 umpari crystals sell for around 300k. With that stack, I can get between 3 and 4 mk-6 augment kits.

If you are stacking power/surge, the BH Mender Boots and Trapper Gloves have the mods and enhancements you want. If you need more crit than power, go with BH Trapper leggings and Mender helm. The BH chest are all kinda lame. The mods, bracer and belt are also pretty bad.