The absolute best end game armor you can get is full Campaign gear with the mods removed and put into Orange Augmented gear with epic level 49 augments in each piece. For optimal stats you should mix and match pieces between Campaign and Black Hole gear but keep the Armoring from the Campaign gear in your orange armor as it provides a set bonus. Here is a list of the gear progression for a level 50 that should help you out: -Orange Gear with Corellia Commendation mods in it/Quest Gear/Normal Flashpoint Gear. -Crafted Epic Gear/Orange Armor with the Armoring/Enhancements/Mods in it from doing dailies on Ilum/Belsavis. -Tionese Gear. -Columi Gear. -Rakata Gear. -Rakata Gear with Black Hole Mods in it. -Campaign Gear. -Augmented Orange Armor with Campaign Mods in it. As for getting your current gear up to par. You'll want to start doing daily quests on Ilum, Belsavis, and The Black Hole on Corellia. The Heroic 2 on Ilum will provide you with an epic level 49 Enhancement every day, the first Heroic 2 on Belsavis will provide you with an epic level 49 Mod every day, and the third Heroic 2 on Belsavis will provide you with an epic level 49 Armoring every day. Doing all the quests on these 3 planets daily will provide you with Dailly Commendations that you can use to buy epic level 50 Armoring, Hilts, and Barrels, as well as Rakata Earpieces, Implants, and Campaign Relics. They will reset every morning so you can do them day after day until you get all the gear you need. The ideal setup would be to put 1 epic level 50 Armoring in each piece of your armor(since you didn't mention if you had orange boots/gloves I would make sure you got some of those to use as well) as well as a level 49 epic enhancement and a mod. It will take a total of 5 days to get your armor fully modded out like this(6 if you want to mod out your weapon as well). After you have this gear you'll want to start running Hardmode Flashpoints(except Lost Island) and Story Mode Eternity Vault and Karraga's Palace Operations for Tionese/Columi gear. You are going to want to replace 4/5 of the pieces of your current armor with Tionese/Columi gear so you can get the 4 piece set bonus. You can pick 1 piece of gear that you currently have though that you like to put the mods from the Tier gear into since you don't need 5 pieces for the set bonus. If you want a full gearing guide there is one in the Flashpoints/Operations section of the forums but this is the basics of it.

And yet you forget that you can get Black Hole Commendations from content that isn't even in the Tier progression? The Corellia dailies for the weekly are 1-2 mannable, including the Heroic 4, take less than an hour, and give you Black Hole Commendations. That is easier, less work, and more rewarding than Tier 1 Hardmode Flashpoints. I am in a full Rakata/Blackhole mix right now and I absolutely think that this is a good idea IF they add it to the weekly. Getting Black Hole Commendations from the Dailies or per Flashpoint would be a terrible idea but getting 4-6 from the Weekly wouldn't hurt anything and actually get more people running those Hardmodes again so people that are trying to run them for gear can actually have people to run them with.

I'm gonna have to disagree with you. The fights are more difficult due to mechanics but the gear requirements aren't that bad. My guild will bring in anyone that is at least in full Columi and we clear Story Mode in 1 night for BH Comms and to get those people some Rakata gear so we can bring them to HM. Hell we even did an alt night in there a week ago where we brought our alts in and anyone that couldn't make it earlier in the week. We had a lot of trouble(due to the fact that my Shadow alt is in a mix of tanking Rakata mods, Corellia commendation mods, and daily mods with no set bonus as a DPS spec for that night and we had a Sage DPSing in Columi Healing gear). We ended up downing the first boss even with that setup before we found someone to replace my alt.

First of all you'll want to drop the crit/surge relic altogether and pick up a power one. Crit will just increase your chances of hitting harder(and not that much since odds are you are already close to the DR) and surge has a pretty strict DR so if you are at or above 75% there is no point in using a relic or adrenal for surge. Power will guarantee you a damage increase for the entire duration when you use that relic. Secondly like the previous poster said you'll want to use your Proc Relic and the Matrix Cube for most fights for the best DPS unless you know the fight is going to be a burst heavy fight and then i would swap the Proc Relic for an on use Power Relic.

I don't think you get the concept of Tiered raid content. Eternity Vault and Karraga's Palace are Tier 1 Operations. Explosive Conflict is the first Tier 2 Operation. Storymode of EC is more difficult than EV and KP Storymodes, requires more gear, and drops better gear. It is intentionally not on the same Tier as EV and KP. Just look at the drops: Story Mode EV: Columi Tokens, Tionese Commendations. Story Mode KP: Columi Tokens, Tionese Commendations. Hard Mode EV: Rakata Tokens, Columi Commendations. Hard Mode KP: Rakata Tokens, Columi Commendations. Nightmare EV: Rakata Tokens, Columi Commendations. Nightmare KP: Rakata Tokens, Black Hole Commendations. Story Mode EC: Rakata Tokens, Black Hole Commendations. Hard Mode EC: Campaign Tokens, Black Hole Commendations. Now this is how I view how the progression is intentionally going(only the colors indicate the order): Story Mode EV Story Mode KP Hard Mode EV Hard Mode KP Nightmare EV Nightmare KP Story Mode EC Hard Mode EC

At least full Columi for Story Mode, full or near full Rakata for Hardmode. More gear is obviously always better as well so if you're having trouble don't hesitate to get more Rakata from EV/KP.

Odds are we won't see the level cap get raised until they at least make their first expansion. That is how it is usually handled in these types of MMO's. However they did say that they will be adding more of our class stories in content patches down the road and not just in expansions but that doesn't mean a level cap increase.

The servers there feel full because they aren't mostly spread thin among too many servers. It was like this at the start(I was on a dead server that had 3 guilds total that were attempting raid content, we even had to share some guys between guilds on our faction just to make sure we could raid that week) until they finally added server transfers and then we had an influx of players to recruit and pug from. My point is, although SWTOR does have more subs than Rift, it also has more servers with no way of moving off of those servers that are dead. At the moment I am not on a very good server populaton-wise but it is nowhere near as bad as some servers right now. This game desperately needs to have controlled transfers(off the dead servers and onto the standard population servers) and then begin shutting down/merging the dead servers to prevent players from spreading out so thin again in the future. It was necessary to have the amount of servers we had at the start but it was handled very poorly by Bioware when people started leaving the game in mass after the first free month like any other MMO. It has just been getting worse and worse since then. A few months ago my server had anywhere from 80-90 people in the Republic Fleet during primetime, now we have maybe 40-50 if it is a good night, mostly around 20-30. At the start of the game we had multiple instances full. They need to begin damage control and get these transfers out asap or this game will keep bleeding out.

Are they banning these idiots that keep necroing 2 month+ old threads?

My point was towards the cost of moving removing mods from gear(which is the part that I quoted). It is there as a money sink at all levels, especially 50, as you are thrown money at ALL levels of this game. My example of how you make 300k a day off dailies at 50 was exactly that, an example of one of many easy ways credits are being introduced into the economy at high rates. The need for money sinks is not level specific because you make money at all levels. The point is that the fee to remove gear, the training cost, the cost of speeders, even repair bills are all there to regulate how many credits are in circulation to ensure that things don't get ridiculously inflated by the sheer amount of credits we get throughout the game. If you aren't carelessly wasting your money you will have enough to get your speeder and training at the level you unlock them, if you are spending your money at every given opportunity then that is your tradeoff and you should have planned better.

Yes your class quests are over, it sends you to Ilum now to open up the daily quests there to get gear for Hardmode Flashpoints/Operations. You can also go to Belsavis and do the Bonus Series to unlock the dailies there as well as Corellia's dailies in The Black Hole area.

To suck up funds is the EXACT reason for it. It is called a money sink and they are crucial in MMO's, especially MMO's like this where money is practically raining down on you. A lot of people are so rich right now because there was next to no worthwhile credit sinks prior to 1.2 and even now there are barely any. If there weren't any credit sinks you would easily see a messed up economy as bad as SWG's because there would be constant credits coming into the economy(you can make 300k+ a day per character by simply doing daily quests at 50) with no way to remove them(trading credits from player to player doesn't remove the credits it just moves them). It wouldn't be long before you saw items selling for 100 million credits that currently sell for 100k credits.

Buy the Campaign Combat Tech Rifle instead, the barrel and mods on it are more aim heavy while the Cannon is more endurance heavy for some reason. After you buy it just strip out the mods and put it in an augmented orange cannon and you'll have a better gun than the Campaign Eliminator Cannon. Min-Max damage won't be affected because it only takes the rating and the type of weapon the barrel is in into account so once you move the barrel to an assault cannon you'll get the same damage as you would with the Eliminator Cannon. For specifics: Campaign Eliminator Assault Cannon: Color Crystal: 41 Critical Rating Barrel: 146 Weapon Damage/Power Rating 57 Aim 60 Endurance Mod: 41 Aim 53 Endurance 32 Critical Rating Enhancement: 45 Endurance 22 Critical Rating 57 Surge Rating Campaign Combat Tech's Blaster Rifle: Color Crystal: 41 Power Barrel: 146 Weapon Damage/Power Rating 68 Aim 49 Endurance Mod: 53 Aim 32 Endurance 41 Power Enhancement: 27 Endurance 41 Power 57 Surge Rating

This will be viable to get you into Storymode Eternity Vault, Storymode Karraga's Palace, as well as all Hardmode Flashpoints except for Lost Island, if you use the mods/armoring/enhancements you get from doing Ilum/Belsavis/Corellia dailies. Once you start getting Columi and Rakata gear though you'll want to replace it with those for the set bonus as you cannot transfer it from any gear below Campaign. You can keep 1 piece of gear and put Columi or Rakata mods in it though since you only need 4 pieces of armor for the set bonus, not 5.

First of all casual =/= baddie that can't manage their money. Second of all, if you don't have enough credits to buy all of your training(including speeder), and a speeder at 25, 40, and 50 you are doing it wrong. On my first character leveling up I had more than enough credits for all of my training and actually bought multiple speeders at 40. I hit level 50 with 600k left over after training(and a speeder) to spend on whatever I wanted. On my alt I had 400k. I used orange/quest/flashpoint gear my entire way up with commendation mods so I didn't waste money on crafted gear, I didn't touch crafting until level 50, I didn't play the GTN until 50, I leveled solo the first time and with a partner the second. I didn't die much at all aside from some flashpoints. I never touched PvP or Space until level 50. I even skipped 2 planets worth of side quests and still had all of that money. The only way I can think of you not having enough credits for your training is if you either never loot anything you kill, delete stuff instead of vendor it, carelessly waste your money on crafting or buying leveling gear from the GTN/other players. In other words if you can't afford what you need because you wasted your money or were just too lazy to loot then you should be blaming yourself, not the game.

That's because noting special is happening with SWTOR right now aside from the 400k subscriber loss. The legacy update was mainly just a few crafting tweaks, some mostly fluff legacy unlocks, a new 4 boss operation(although they do have actual mechanics now so it is a step in the right direction), a new flashpoint, a new world boss, a new warzone, class "re-balancing", and finally opening up the combat log. That is all normal stuff to be happening in an MMO content patch, some of which should have been in the game since launch like the combat logs. 1.3 is looking to just be a server-side group finder, a few more crafting additions/tweaks, server transfers, and if we're lucky some useful legacy unlocks. None of that is really news worthy.

Stopped reading after this because I really don't think you have played the game for very long. I have been playing SWTOR since I got into beta in August so 9 months now and this is what I have found about your opening statement. 1. The "story" pretty much ends at the end of this game's very short leveling process unless you plan on rerolling 7 times, rarely playing your level 50 characters, and then quitting the game and waiting for them to add more. The "story" at level 50 consists of the same drawn out annoying voice overs that you hear over and over and over again through daily quest grinding and operation/flashpoint farming. Many of which are no different or extremely similar to what you have already seen leveling up(there are only so many ways they can voice over a quest to go kill 10 mobs). 2. The "choices" effect pretty much nothing but minor dialogue choices, a few quests, companion affection(which can be maxed out quickly regardless with just gifts), and a little slider on our character sheet that pretty much does nothing for you. No matter what choices you pick the outcome and general content of your story will remain vastly unchanged. Very few quests may have an extra step or one less step but the outcome is still the same. Even the lightside and darkside alignment doesn't mean anything as of right now. It doesn't effect your story in any way(nobody will look at you any differently as a Dark Jedi or a Light Side Sith), it only gives you access to titles, access to the few items that are actually alignment locked, and an ability to heal yourself through your companion if you max out your alignment(which in of itself encourages you to not make choices that you want but rather always pick 1 alignment side to max it out). 3. As far as this game wanting to immerse you in the Star Wars universe I think they have gone with the opposite direction. I felt MUCH more immersed in SWG than I have ever in this game because unlike here, you had much more freedom. SWTOR is a heavily instanced, linear, heavily restricted, heavily scripted MMO. You have the illusion of choices in dialogue at the expense of choices everywhere else(character customization, classes, factions, species, etc). Not that it is a bad thing for most, a lot of people like the Themepark on rails feel because freedom in MMO's overwhelms them which is why WoW is so popular and probably why they went with a strict Themepark style for this game as well. On top of the lack of freedom you have the gear art style of the game which has gone a long way in removing the Star Wars immersion. A lot of the gear leveling up is fine and good with the feeling of Star Wars, however once you get to level 50 that immersion is gone. The majority of the endgame gear looks like it was designed by people that have never seen a single Star Wars movie and think we are instead playing some kind of strange game that involves Robots, Space Samurai, Bug People, Peacocks, and Toga wearing hippies. They have heard us on this subject though and said they will be changing the art style to something that is more of a Star Wars feel, which is good. 4. Finally for the adventure comment. This game does not in any way encourage you to adventure. From the minute you make your character you are on rails. You go to planet after planet exactly where your story tells you to go. The planets themselves are very static and generic, there is pretty much nothing on a planet that isn't there simply for a quest or datacron. If you go off the path you'll either find more npc's that you'll have to kill later for a quest, a barrier preventing you from going somewhere, a planet that is too high level for you where you can also not get quests until you have your class story up to that point, or if you're lucky a datacron. The way the game is made is that it highly encourages you to stick to the strict path that they have written for you, not adventure out on your own. I am personally playing this game now for the operations and hoping they add more content to do when I am not raiding at some point to actually make me want to continue to log in when it is not raid time. I'm not going anywhere any time soon but I also find it hard to log on to the game when it is not time for my guild to run an operation. I find this game to be a pretty standard Themepark MMO at best and that is what I am playing it for. It is lacking in some places(I guess due to Bioware's inexperience in MMO development) but that is understandable for an MMO that is less than 6 months old. I can only hope that they add more content that will keep my interest when I am not raiding.

Ilum daily Heroic 2 Rewards an epic 22 Enhancement. Belsavis' first daily Heroic 2 Rewards an epic 22 Mod. Belsavis' second daily Heroic 2 Rewards an epic 22 Armoring. Daily Commendation Vendors sell epic 23 Armoring, Hilts, and Barrels for Daily Commendations. Any higher is all from Hardmode Flashpoints and Operation gear/drops.

You're confusing play style with player skill. Not all casual players are bad at the game just like not all hardcore players are good at the game. You see more hardcore players being the good ones because in general they put more time into learning their characters and fight mechanics which is a big part of "player skill" in MMO's but that doesn't mean casual players aren't just as capable of doing the same exact thing. You're complaining because they are making the operations too hard for bad players, not because they are making them geared towards hardcore players. If they were gearing them towards hardcore players they would be making it so you couldn't clear the place in a few hours. It's simple, if you aren't clearing the new content you either don't understand the concept of raid progression and are going right into a Tier 2 raid without being geared enough from the Tier 1 raids, or you(or your raid members) are simply not good enough to clear it. That has nothing to do with casual or hardcore play styles. You can clear raids in just a few hours, this game is about as casual as it gets.

Yeah sorry forgot to mention my comments were for PvE DPS. For PvP you want to favor burst DPS more than sustained DPS so on-use will be better there.

Yeah I use my matrix cube even over my Rakata on-use relic with an augment slot in it. People did the math a little while ago for DPS over time on fights and it came out to Proc Relics > Matrix Cube > On-Use Relics.

If you're a DPS Commando use the on-use power relic and B-B-B matrix cube until you get enough daily commendations(200) to buy the Campaign Energy or Kinetic proc relic and replace the on-use one with that.

You get gear from the previous tiers(in this case HM Flashpoints, Storymode EV/KP). You aren't just going to jump into HM Ops and get Rakata Gear unless you have people carrying you. You get experience for PvE by again, doing the previous tiers. You know what else exists in WoW that is garbage? Idiots that refuse to progress through content and feel entitled to be carried through harder content and given gear for doing essentially nothing. I'm sure the people here didn't kick the OP because he wasn't in Rakata gear, they kicked him because he was in PvP gear jumping right into a HM Ops. That shows me 2 things: 1. He has little to no PvE experience since he has no PvE gear. 2. He will not be as good as someone in PvE gear because his gear is optimized for PvP, not PvE meaning he will most likely need to be carried. I know if I pugged Ops I would have kicked the OP too. I would gladly take someone in full Columi, or even a mix of Columi and Tionese gear. They also do not owe the OP an apology(although the guy that wouldn't talk to him when he asked was a dick, he should have at least told him it was because of his gear) for the OP not doing the research to see that he is skipping content. It's not a hard progression path(unless you have an overgeared raid that can/wants to carry you): Dailies/Crafted Gear > HM Flashpoints/Story Mode Tier 1 Ops > HM Tier 1 Ops > HM Tier 2 Flashpoints/NMM Tier 1 Ops/Storymode Tier 2 Ops > Hardmode Tier 2 Ops.

You'll still need crafters to put the augment slots in the orange gear in 1.3 so crafters will still be requires for BiS gear.

It is absolutely faster than clicking and more efficient and all you need to prove it is simple logic. What do you think is going to take longer? Moving your mouse curser from one ability to the other and checking to make sure that it is in fact on the ability you want to hit before you click it, or simply moving your finger slightly and pushing? Even if you practice at clicking every single day it will always be slower than simply pushing a button that you don't even need to look at, you are simply doing more actions by clicking than key binding. That's like saying if we had the ability to think and have our character perform an action that key binding could be just as efficient. Those players that you know are probably great players, I never said that great players can't click, but that doesn't change the fact that they could be even better if they weren't using some of their skill to overcome a handicap they are putting on themselves.