your gear, is largely defined by it's i-level. or ilvl if you're level 70 (and a subscriber...which i'll assume since you're posting here) have access to gear up to ilvl 242 but. it's not really worth worrying about that. at level 66 you can equip blue ilvl 220 gear. normally this does not have mods. and can be purchased very cheaply on the GTN. Heroic missions also drop this lvl gear. from lvl 220. there is crafted 228 gear. basically this is the stock crafted gear, reverse engineered to be purple, and is ilvl 228 then you're into galactic command. from T1 you'll get 228 greens, or 230 blues, or 230 purples. you can also get 230 purple crafted items. in T2 it's 236 gear. and can also access ilvl 240 crafted gear. and in T3 it's top end of 242 gear in purple. but can also be 242 in blues i think as well. so what does all this mean. not much, and again, don't stress. in galactic command, you'll fairly quickly get 230 blue gear. this is perfectly fine for most SM Ops. Heroics, Vet uprisings. and any other generic content. like Flashpoints. or whatnot. if you're in 230 blues. set bonus gear is the next logical upgrade. run SM Ops. you'll get gear tokens that can be exchanged for 230 purple set bonus gear. 2pc, 4pc and 6pc grant a bonus aspect. normally more damage, better healing/tanked. etc. if you're in 230 blues/purples. and feel stuck. can buy 240 crafted items. pvp weeklys, and conquest grant some of the harder to get mats. same with Ops ...and i think master FP. 240 crafted items. are great for left side items. ear, implant, relic etc. can also buy item mods. these can be pricey. but often times guildmates, or crafters will trade mats for them. at parity, or cheaper rates. in terms of item mods. depending on the item (armor vs weapon) it'll have a barrel/hilt or an armor plate. then potentially a mod, and enhancement. plus... weapons get crystals. tunings, are purely cosmetic as far as i know. there is some overlap in terms of which mods are actual upgrades. crafted mod. vs enhancements. sometimes there's no improvement in stats. so there's wiggle room to strategically upgrade. like the 240 crafted lethal mod is the same as the 242 crate drop lethal mod (this may be wrong. but there's examples like this. off the top of my head i can't remember them. but if you're close to BiS maybe look into this. if not...don't sweat it) all that being said. which stats you want in your gear, vary by class. or your specific build. you'd have to research your specific class. to get an idea of the best optimized load out of stats. but... unless you're hard core into raiding Ops. it's not worth seriously worrying about this. for dps. 110% accuracy. 40/60 ish on crit. some alacrity is the misc baseline. in pvp. unranked pvp you get bolster. I think it puts you to 230 ilvl. although could be wrong on that. maybe it's 228 ilvl. or 234? not 100% sure. but basically. if you don't have that min lvl of gear it'll boost you up some. but other people can obviously be well beyond that. so. it's entirely possibly you're getting outclassed on gear. PvP enthusiasts often times chase gear hard core. but in pvp. your class spec. and what utilities you have chosen. how quick you are to respond, how knowledgeable you are of your class. and if your team works together make a lot more difference than a bit of gear/stat increase. so again. worry more about learning pvp. than gear. and gear will come in time. if you're dying in groups or Ops. read up on the Op. it's much more likely you're doing something wrong, or not familiar with a Op mechanic or standing in stupid. there are sites with reviews of Op dungeons, and most flashpoints/uprisings. learning the fight mechanics along with your class and what it should be doing in those situations. should alieviate this. I've done every SM Op in 230 blues. several in 220 blues. ...am i doing the most dps possible in that gear. no. but i'm fine. and the Ops are complete-able in those gear ranges. item mods can be removed from most gear. sometimes crafted gear, or loot drops from heroics don't have mods. but anything with mods should be removable. set bonus gear. the bonus part is tied to the armoring. but save the armor shell itself. as you need that to upgrade via the galactic command upgrade dynamics. you can also give mods you've grown out of to your other characters via legacy storage/legacy gear. so... is your main in 230 purples now. could conceivably pass along 230 blues to an alt. moving to 240 gear? get a command crate with a duplicate item... take it anyway. strip the mods. and use them in other gear slots. or for other characters. hope some of that helps

why do people post this crap in the new player's forum? if you sub, contact support. why come here looking for attention

as far as i remember, the current top end crafting mats aren't added to the jawas for several months. like 6-8 seeing as it's only been 2 or so. this is sorta just petulant whining. plenty of things to do with jawa junk. and lots of ways to get crafting mats. if you absolutely abhor having jawa junk laying around. just sell it on the gtn.

I appreciate this post. as a fellow decoration junkie, I too wish there was some better source of cartel certs. that being said. the slot machine, isn't that great of a way to get them... i guess it just remains, a sort of inevitable way to get them.

to answer some of your questions. gearing: don't worry about it. I honestly don't know why so many people freak out about gear in this game. The question is, what do you want to do? if the answer is... stuff other than top ranked PvP and hardcore NiM mode progression gearing is dirt easy. how easy? well. at lvl 66 you gain access to ilvl 220 welfare blues. so all your old gear is outclassed the instant you ding 1 level. once you hit lvl 70. you can partake in galactic command. what's galactic command? 1 menu. 1 exp bar. do stuff, you get cxp. fill up that exp bar you get a loot crate. it will have 3-4 items (5 now with cmd tokens) 1 will guaranteed to be gear. there's 3 tiers. the tiers of gear in crates are determined by your cmd rank. 81 is the threshold from T1 to T2 181 is the threshold from T2 to T3 (or maybe it's 91 & 191 ...i forget) but basically. you get 20 or so cmd ranks. you'll be in a mish mash of 230 blues and purples. at which point 98% of the game is perfectly doable. don't like RNG loot crates. well. Ops drop gear tokens to turn into purple set peice gear. PvP pays out widgets to buy the tokens Ops would drop. every time you fill up that cxp bar. you also get cmd tokens. you get these a lot. These are currency to convert the ops gear token into actual gear. Can also buy cxp boost consumeables with them. Don't like Ops? well. don't sweat it. Can do anything in the game and earn Cxp. Lots of activities pay out cxp in really good amts. PvP, GSF, uprisings, even farming heroics all pay out cxp. How fast you earn it depends on what you're doing... how much you care to "grind" at it. vs. what you really want to spend your time doing in the game. ...people bash their head against a wall moaning about a grind, while they could be playing... hell can redo solo story content for cxp. most anything in game, progresses you along that single cxp bar. to get the crates. sometimes the RNG is annoying. and you'll drive yourself crazy if you stress over ...trying to get a specific item from RNG. just go with it. you'll realize nothing is stopping you from playing the game. And if you're gear is lagging. there's a **** ton of crafted gear that's hella easy to supplement your gear with. as well as the Ops items and PvP gear option. when 5.0 hit. they cashed people out of their crystals. now any vendor that used crystals as currency sells their stuff for credits. there's no pvp gear anymore. and no more Ops gear vendors, like their used to be. there are new token vendors. added back very recently, but they're in a different spot. i don't quite get the back handed complaining about having to subscribe to post on the forums. cause, jutst as a heads up. Ops. and galactic command, are all gated to paying customers. So if you're not planning on staying subscribed. don't really worry about gear anyhow. look into crafting. STAT

normally the regular quest tracker, quest turn in icons light up for mission box turn in areas. (the tracking aspect can be turned on via the L or quests menu. the map/mini map legend markers for stuff on the map. are toggle-able via the map (m) itself) as a general rule, if you're doing heroics, the Heroic terminal is normally near the spaceport. if these are event quests, know that if the time is up on the event, all the event turn in/npcs disappear

Some other misc advice. short names, or anything that even remotely mimics something common will be gone. Some tricks I've used. Foreign language words. the more obscure the language the better. a friend of mine, often makes characters that have names, that are curse words in serbian. I have a flame spec bounty hunter named Aish Tamid, which is a jewish concept of "eternal fire" I have other characters with native american words for things. Or names from the bible... "Jael" is one of my favorites. But if that doesn't work. I tend to go with sounds, that stretch into longer words. My newest bounty hunter, I wanted to make her a cyborg, in robot part armor. I kept thinking of Mechs or mechanical names. But nothing I wanted was available. Then I blended it with a feminine name. that toons name is Meklinora ...but in a certain sense. having a sound you like. just play with that, add some stuff to it, morph it into a name somehow. If you're dead set on a certain name. can do tricks with ascii characters. you'll have to look up the alt code ascii codes for those symbols. but generally speaking.... a fancy squiggly B is avail by holding down alt, and hitting a series of numbers to generate that symbol. this can make it a pain in the *** for people to communicate with you, but if you absolutely have to have a name. it can be an answer. Also. use the random generator. understanding that it only generates random strings, not available names. I've gotten quite a few mmo char names from random gen names i tweaked a little.

Can spend your time whining about a system they aren't going to do away with. Or benefit from many of the new changes to it, that make the system, pretty easy to excel in

it's unlikely the majority of people will go nuts with the bonus. 200 cmd tokens, isn't insignificant. this will prevent that extra 100% from being too prevalent. plus the general ignorance of lots of people not even knowing it's available. I don't see why people need to be paranoid. It is what it is. it's a cxp boost event. meant to help people advance in cmd rank, in advance of the roll out of the new daily area/Op boss.

free 2 play. is the 1-50 story content. nothing else. You'd have access to the story, planet quests, and flashpoints, and some PvP. strongholds and GSF subscribing, even for a single month will grant you access to all expansion content up to date. So... all expansions up through kotet. lvl cap of 70. but no access to galactic command/Ops this is the swtor reddit link for FAQ on f2p vs subscriber ...might be a tiny outdated with 5.0 gating Ops to subscriber only https://www.reddit.com/r/swtor/wiki/f2p

as a general rule. don't listen to people whining and complaining about this or that class. If you've never played that class before, even if it has been changed/nerfed you'd have no way of knowing. And often times, it's tiny changes or max optimization 2nd place over another class. So it's not like any class, can't do what it's supposed to do. If the idea of a class appeals to you try it out. If one class over another feels boring to you. Don't force it. You could also try doing something other than gunnery. Gunnery by and large is the ...simplest of commando specs. but also. not all classes play the same and as others have mentioned, a lot of classes don't really come into their own until they acquire key utilities or spells. I know lightning sorc can be really annoying until you get some of the mana efficiency abilities that make going balls out with lighting more doable... I'd personally recommend the healer comp. what little speed you may gain from running a dps comp. you tend to lose having to stop to heal yourself after every fight, or nearly dying after larger mob pulls.

it's likely the best will still be Vet Uprisings. Vet fractured can be completed in 8-10 minutes. for a base of (i think) 1040 cxp. 250% boost ...if you add onto that. the 100% cmd token boost. legacy boost. dvl victory boost, daily bonus, or whatever else. can be anywhere from 2600-3700+ per run. 15k+ -- 22k+ an hour can be done with as little as 2 people. but prob faster with 3 dps 1 heals If you have a stealth class, or decent companions. Master mode quick runs on (short) story chapters seem to be paying out really high cxp as well. not sure on the time it takes though.

it depends. the 100% is references as the static, default amt. so.. if you did something. and it paid out 1000 cxp. that's the 100% If your cxp boost equation was. 100% + 250% event bonus. then you'd be at 2500 or 250% of normal. now... if you had 100%-base + 250% event + 100% boost thinige. then you'd be at net gain of 350% of "bonus" so... 3500 total cxp. or in a more game centric sense/example every time you do a warzone, you're likely to ding a lvl. (as 1k cxp from a warzone... isn't that uncommon) if it's base +event+ boost+ whatever extra (dvl bonus etc) OR probably similarly. every fractured run will be at cmd rank. ...or at least that's what i'm curious to see if is possible, as that will be *******. dinging a cmd rank every 8 minutes or so. etc

also. as another idea/feedback. if we're going to be netting a cmd crate every 30 minutes or less. Is it possible to bump up the default stash/storage of the cmd stash even at current levels, I horde a little too much in my cmd stash, and often worry about going over the limit. mainly it's schematics, i need to dbl check if i have already, and don't want to waste the time dbl checking it so often.

As just a little shout out. Please add those bundles of unassembled components to the GSF daily and Weekly as well. ps. GSF always appreciates any and all attention you give to it.