Why should you be able to PvP to get PvE gear?

All you have to do is 7 days worth of dailies on Ilum and Belsavis to get a full set of epic level 50 mods and an epic earpiece or implant. These are much better than anything you loot from normal mode flashpoints and will gear you properly for hardmodes. Or like the other poster said in here grind PvP until you get champion gear.

Yeah, because asking for professions to have some sort of worth at 50(like Biochem does) is asking for 7 years worth of updates at launch. Fanboys are really starting to get on my nerves.

I just did this using only missions and buying mats from the GTN and it only cost me roughly 150k-200k. So pretty much nothing if you are 50 and doing your dailies.

Lol this, Corellia and Belsavis are probably the most walled in restricted planets I've ever played in an MMO to date. If you don't follow the path good luck getting where you need to go on those planets.

The only "neutral" relics that I know of come from matrix shards and you can only have 1 so you're pretty much shooting yourself in the foot if you don't commit to either getting Dark V or Light V and will only be able to have 1 relic equipped.

They drop off of bosses in operations and the last boss in hardmode flashpoints.

Fortunately, Cybertech has other applications like you stated(speeders and ship mods) so people will still buy stuff from you. As for mods, I have seen players put up epic level 50 mods that seem to have the same exact stats as those rewarded from the dailies so there is a chance you will catch players that want all of their mods right then and there instead of doing a week's worth of dailies and buy them from you. So there is definitely a use for Cybertech atm. I honestly am making all of my money through underworld trading and selling the metal I get from that so I am just going Biochem to save myself money as I use a lot of medpacks and stims. If they do a rework of Armormech sometime down the road I will definitely want to go back and relook at it as I originally wanted to make armor.

My personal opinion, drop Armormech and pick up Biochem. Armormech is useful for crafting 2 things at 50: wrists and belts. Everything else is worthless whether you want to PvE or PvP. For PvP you want gear with expertise which Armormech cannot craft. For PvE you can buy epic level 51 Armoring(126 rating) for 8 daily commendations each(you get 25 a day if you do both Ilum and Belsavis dailies) and you get an epic level 50 Enhancement and an epic level 50 Mod from 2 of the heroic quests each day in these dailies. So basically you can fully mod out a single piece of orange armor per day that is better than any epic you can craft while making money doing it from the quests. As for the wrists and belt, you can get epic rakata recipes from your trainer that require a BOP drop from the last bosses in hardmodes and bosses in operations. These would be the only thing worth making. Personally after I make my belt soon I am dropping Armormech completely and picking up Biochem. I can either make some money on people's ignorance of the dailies for a little while or I can get a reusable medpack and stim and never have to spend money on them again. I really hope they rework most of these tradeskills because most of them are worthless at 50.

Your best bet is to make barrels if you can make epic 126 rating ones, and even then odds are people won't buy them if they have half a brain. Epic weapons won't sell to 50s unless they haven't been 50 for long and will immediately regret spending the money and vendor it once they find out about dailies. The problem is that it is free(well actually you GAIN money for doing it this way) to simply do a single day of Ilum/Belsavis dailies and get a full set of epic level 50-51 mods for your weapon/armor(Barrel/Armoring(126 rating), Enhancement, and Mod). The only thing you actually would need to buy from another player would be a color crystal weapon-wise. You can fully mod out a single orange piece once a day in epics just from doing these quests so it kinda makes armstech and armormech worthless for level 50s. Wish I knew this going in, I would have just gone Biochem.

Is that really all it costs? 300k is NOTHING at 50. I spend 300k+ a day on underworld missions, repair bills, and stims and I make it all back and then some through selling underworld metal and doing my Ilum/Belsavis dailies. I am actually making more money every day than I spend(currently at 1.6 mill and make about 100-200k a day). I would rather see them buff up the other crafting professions to biochem's level rather than nerf biochem but atm most of the others are almost worthless at 50. I'm an Armormech atm and I can say without a doubt that the only 2 pieces worth making at 50 are wrists and belts. Helms, chests, gloves, legs, and boots are all worse crafted than if you simply buy an orange from a vendor and do your dailies to mod them out. You can completely mod out a single piece of armor in level 50-51 epic mods per day just by doing your dailies. The same goes for weapons. So basically the only thing worth crafting from Armormech is wrists and belts as there are no orange moddable versions. After I make myself my Rakata belt and Rakata wrists with the biometric crystals from hardmodes/raids I am without a doubt dropping this worthless profession and going biochem(especially now that I know it's only 300k). You get a reusable 60m buff that is better than what you can buy from a vendor and a reusable stim pack on the same 90s cooldown as normal stims so you'll never have to buy a stim again. That is much better than crafting epic chestplates hoping some idiot is dumb enough to buy them and doesn't know about his dailies.

This is actually the best way I know of getting social points. I leveled with a partner to 50 twice in beta and both times we were both roughly 75-100 points short of social 7 when hitting 50. It has changed slightly since I hit social 6 in beta but it hasn't really changed that much from what I see. Personally I like that there aren't a lot of conversations in the later flashpoints. I don't want to have a drawn out conversation with every boss before I kill him, I'm just killing him for loot and don't really need to hear his life story before I do so. Esseles and Black Talon have too much dialogue and not enough actual fighting imo. The rest of the flashpoints still have enough so you get what is going on but focus more on the combat rather than talking to someone every time you go around a corner and I like that a lot more but to each his own I guess.