Why should going from Recruit->BM->WH have to be such a balancing act?

[stendarrs]

I was going over the three sets last night as I recently hit 50 with my sentinel and I'm trying to balance stats as I upgrade piece by piece. Am I mistaken or is there no surge on the BM set (excluding ear/implants)? Then, when you look at WH there's surge all over the place!? I don't understand why the pieces don't just upgrade from one tier to the next. Why play switcheroo with all the stats so you're always trying to balance losing one stat from a piece while picking up another? Is it another little metagame? I know it's not exactly rocket science, but I guarantee a lot of people are just picking up whatever pieces they feel like while unknowingly dropping their crit/surge/other values to really low levels while stacking other stats well beyond the diminishing return. Is this just "the way things have always been" or am I wildly misunderstanding something? Edited June 4, 2012 by stendarrs
mispelling

[Schizo_Toast]

Bioware screwed that stats on the battlemaster gear by giving it way too much accuracy. They admitted this before 1.2 came out and said the new gear would fix this which is why the stats on war hero gear is so much different.

[neeman]

Is it another little metagame?

 

My guess has always been that the odd itemization serves as a soft-cap for 2nd tier gear stats. It's expected that players will simply pick up all the BM gear piecemeal in whatever order, leaving them ultimately a full set with a ton of (essentially dead stat) accuracy. The jump to WH, by itself only a move from 58 to 61, is emphasized by trading a lot of the dead stat for DPS stats.

[Daiyukie]

Or just optimize your BM gear and forget about grinding WH until it's actually the (slight) upgrade that it would be from your optimized BM gear. But grinding the Eliminator Cannon is no more fun than grinding War Hero, just more effective use of Comms.