That's a very subjective question. To be hoenst, it depends on whether you want to level quickly or level slowly while you take over a part of the game's gear economy. Case in point, another thread asking about Biochem viability has 30th force users complaining that their 150 Synthweaving score wasn't helping them. They were getting better gear from junk quest rewards, so why bother with Synthweaving? Umm... At that Synthweaving score, you're getting access to level 21 gear. Of course that's inferior to your 30th quest rewards. I refrained from bringing up that my 17th SI has the same Synthweaving score as their 30th characters. Gear viability is all relative. If you're talking about gear for your current level, using Blue / Purple crafted gear will always be superior to quest drops and commodation token purchases. Having said that, it takes a significant amount of time and credits to boost your skills. It takes effort to get them around your own current level. If you want to just quest to your heart's content, then crafting will be worthless to a large extent since you won't be maintaing it to an appropriate skill level. Yet if your goal is to let yourself level slowly while being the most effective that you can possibly for your level, then crafting is a great route to go.

You were just having some kind of anti-luck day. Trust me, I've had that with certain crafting recipes. For your reference OP, I got x2 RE Blue patterns on some 19th Synthweaving armor last nighit. The 1st was after RE attempt #1 and the 2nd was after RE attempt #4. I hope the RNG system likes you better today. It's always frustrating when it feels like the game is mocking you.

To this day, I've never even known someone who had a Biochem character. Yes, I know they exist. I once even saw one farming jungle beasts on Dromond Kaas for crafting parts. However I'd say that this profession is amongst the minority of players. Every person I've talked to has gone Cybertech, Artifice, or Synthweaving. Yet I've met tons of Slicers. They were a dime a dozen. Whenever I saw somone ask for money making tips on Dromond Kaas, there was always at least one person who openly mocked the player for being "stupid" enough to not include Slicing in their crew skills. It was coming to the point where many people autmatically chose Slicing as their 1st crew skill on each character they made because there was no reason not to. That is the core issue about why Slicing got nerfed. Whether or not Bioware handling the revised Slicing correctly doesn't really matter for this discussion. Since Slicing was THE crew skill of choice and made all of the NPC vendor prices a joke, Slicing was knocked down. To this day, I've never heard Biochem consistently refered to as THE crafting crew skill of choice. With that in mind, I doubt that Bioware intends to do much to penalize Biochem in the near future.

Every server economy is different, so look at your own for answers. However on my server, NO ONE is selling T2 (15th) lightsaber crystals or anything higher level (on the Empire market). As a result, I shipped over some cash and raw materials from my Synthweaving main character and power leveled my alt's Artifice level. Now I'm selling standard Blue grade T2 crystals for 1.5k credits and Yellow color crystals for 3k credits. With minimal effort, I've now got a massive income coming on for my two 17th characters. Look for holes in your market. For example, I may be forced to power level up Biochem on a new alt. At the moment, there are x2 Implants selling on the entire Empire's market. They're only Green grade and in the low 20's. I know that people could be rolling in cash if they were selling Implants, yet no one is. As a result, I may have to break into the lower level Implant market to supply the server (and to make a nice little profit).

The default sell prices are just moronic. On the one hand, it tries to place 13th Blue leg armor which I can easily sell for 1k at around 300-400 credits. Then it tries to place my alt's Hilt 4 items are around 700, though I'm lucky to get 400 credits. Just ignore all of the defauly Market pricing. If you examine the current selling prices on your server and use common sense, you should know where to place your item's initial selling value.

Someone linked a screen shot of an Augmented 50th lightsaber that they had built in another thread. It was normally a Blue grade item before they had any crafting adjustments to it.

Umm... Add a crafting item to Slicing? I thought that Slicing is the only source of making Augment pieces. As a Synthweaver, I've learned just how powerful it is to add Augments to my crafted gear. Once people get high level and start pumping out 50th crafted gear with Augment slots (after crafting crits), people will be desperate for Purple grade Augments. Augment added to Purple grade lightsaber (from Artifice)? Check. Augment added to Purple grade armor (from Synthweaving)? Check. Etc etc.

Yes and No. At 50th lvl, a devoted Artificer can create pre-built Blue grade lightsabers for people. If you reverse engineer them, you can learn to make Purple versions. Then if you crit on your Purple crafting, you can have a Purple grade lightsaber with an Augment gear slot. Augment gear will always be better in the terms of raw stats. Once people make their own lightsabers at 50th, you'll see a lot of people using the same lightsaber models for their superior game stats.

When a player is crafting non-Orange piece of gear is made, there is a rare chance for a crafting critical to occur. This adds an "Exceptional" prefix to the Green / Blue / Purple piece of gear. You insert Augment pieces into these Exceptional gear pieces, since the Exceptional prefix adds a bonus Augment slot to that item. Orange modifying gear can not get Augment slots. That's the intentional drawback of the item system. If you want to use Augments, you need to craft / buy those Exceptional gear pieces. These gear crafters are also who you're going to sell your Augments to. My traditional armor making character gears out my force users and often buy Augments when I see a decent one for sale.

In another thread, I read about someone soloing a Hard Mode version of Black Talon for their rare crafting materials. However I have no idea if that's possible or very feasible.

On my server (The Razor), I had the completely opposite effect. I've been specializing in the low to mid teens levels of force user armor (with Blue and Purple pieces). While I normally have a base level of sales every 24 hours as new player characters and the alts of higher level characters purchase some of my gear which helps to cover specific holes in the flow of armor. Another character has been cover the T2 (15th) lightsaber / blaster crystals for the server (through Blue and Purple pieces). It seems that after Slicing got smacked down, a horde of high level (and rich) slicers decided to start power leveling some alts. Probably because they want some new crew skills while they wait for Bioware to potentially "restore" slicing in the near future. Almost over night, my entire armor selection for all x3 force armor types and nearly all of my lightsaber crystals instantly sold. I was frankly in a bit of shock. While I welcomed the credits, I barely had enough raw materials in my back stock to refill my Market window. All things considered, this post-Slicing environment has been great for me. I refused to take that skill initially since I knew that it would get clubbed by Bioware sooner or later. As a result of expanding my crew skills in other areas, I'm making a ton of money. While I would have made far more money if I had pushed Slicing in a short term credit grab, I'm personally happy about where I've ended up.

There is currently a LARGE debate about which armor crafting system is superior. Do you make standard armor pieces through Synthweaving and Armortech? Or do you use Cybertech to upgrade Orange gear pieces? At the moment, no one know how the end game scene will look. Orange upgrades will be more versatile and will allow you to have max gear stats every 2-4 levels are you hit a new Mod tier. Standard armor pieces are normally made around every 6-8 levels per armor slot location (with the exception of multiple belts and gloves per tier). Therefore your armor strength will fall behind in the short term with traditional armor. What's the drawback to Cybertech armor? You have to constantly make upgrade pieces for each Orange armor piece. Add those all together and that's a lot of items. It gets even worse when you realize that you need all Blue pieces in an Orange armor to equal a single piece of standard Blue armor. That's a lot of Blue pieces from Cybertech! Then this gets even more expensive when you start looking at making things at a Purple item grade. I started Cybertech on a character, but later switched to Synthweaving. All things considered, I prefer to make a single piece of Blue or Purple armor for my personal use. It also makes things easier to keep my auction house stocked.

Power is a universal base damage and healing increase. At around lvl 17, +6 Power equals about +1 or +2 points on my base melee weapon damage.

Slicing is a cash farming skill. That has been it's only purpose. People take it as a non-crafter as a source of income. Each crafting type has a gathering skill to get your common and uncommon crafting components. Then you have a mission skill which gets your rare crafting components. There are countless guides on this forum, the SW TOR Wiki, and countless other locations that go into depth about each crafting trio.

Thank you for the response as I was bumping the thread.

Shameless Bump #1

People use the auction on The Razor, but we're spotty at best. Why? Most of our server doesn't craft. Apparently they use Slicing or make items in only a few qualities. Ear pieces from Cybertech? (Maybe one of two sellers on the entire market which make high teens to low 20's gear.) Implants from Biochem? (I finally saw my 1st piece ever on the auction last night. But 6k for a Green lvl 24 piece? Wow... And they're only selling one, which still makes it the only Implant on the entire market.) Energy Crystals from Artificing? (You know things are bad when no one is selling anything beyond lvl 7 Green grades on the entire auction. It's even more sad when it inspires me to power level an alt's crafting and take over the market.) I could keep going, but you get the picture. That's the state of my server. It sounds like things are similar on the servers of other people are well. It isn't that people don't use the Galactic Market because it's "difficult". They ignore it because it's a "waste of their time". If people want cash, they grind Black Talon and use Slicing. While I won't deny that the current version of the auction system isn't the easiest to use, that isn't the core issue that we're dealing with.

I don't play WoW, so maybe I just don't know the terminology people use over there. Yet no matter what people want to call them, I simply can't find a master list of item special abilities. For example, what does Alacrity actually do? Surge? Etc etc. Thank you in advance to anyone who can link me a forum post or a guide on another site. I've spent far too much time hunting for this and it's starting to get frustrating? After all, there is little point in making items if I don't even know what they do.

You need levels of Social to purchase Social armor (Orange built) from the Social vendor. As far as I can tell, that is its' only purpose.

OP: The dust still hasn't settled. People keep jumping to lower population servers to avoid 30 minute (or more) server que times. With this in mind, I wouldn't particularly try to search for the "perfect" server since that server may be the one with a 2 hour que time during prime time hours. Look amongst the servers that were added yesterday. They're all much lower population, but that currently makes them potentially more familiar communities. Time will tell to see how things develop.

That is an eternal debate. Short Answer: The answer is subjective. I personally used Cybertech and dropped it for Synthweaving. I've been much happier since. However others have done the exact opposite and are now happy with Cybertech. Take that for whatever it's worth. In the end, I think that the key issue is all about the Blue and Purple gear. For an Orange piece to equal a crafted Blue piece, you need to have Blue upgrades in every item slot. This same situation applies to Purple gear as well. On the one hand, some people swear that they're seeing better gear performance from Cybertech. (I didn't, but that's another subject.) However it also means get x3 Blue or Purple upgrade pieces instead of x1 Blue or Purple armor piece.

Lightsaber crystals don't upgrade. You have to make new ones. Therefore the Pre-Order crystal colors look neat, but will ultimately be replaced by around lvl 20+ since they just don't have enough +stat benefits.

You have to read the forums, read the item part descriptions, and understand how MMOs think. It's not very user friendly, but it is what it is. As a Counsular, your Primary Stat is Willpower. All of the +Willpower & +Endurance pieces are what you'll want to use (in addition to any special +stats).

Lightsaber 101: Hilts give you base +stats and your Weapon Damage Rating. Upgrading your hilt increases your lightsaber damage. Mods give you your general +stats as well. You mod choice and your hilt choice are the primary source of your +stats. Enhancements will give you a bit of +stats or +special ability. Good to keep upgraded, but not the bulk of your lightsaber value. Color cystals influence your blade's color. They also add either +stat or +special ability (at higher levels). From a stat perspective, they add about as much as your Enhancement slot. Artifice makes your Hilt and Crystals. Cybertech does your Modification. Slicing covers your Enhancement. Or you can buy these pieces from the token vendors (which are available after you leave the starter worlds).

That's ironically funny. I said that exact same thing about Cybertech on my SI tank and happily switched to Synthweaving. Each to their own.