When does an armouring become more beneficial?

[Bugattiboy]

I have an old 69 armouring in my chest piece that I just can't seem to upgrade because I never to win any rolls whether it be for Underworld, Kell Dragon, or Dread Forged.

 

If I were to use comms to buy a 78 chest piece it would break my 4 piece set bonus. When does just a straight armouring become more beneficial than a set bonus armouring for Watchmans?

[Aelanis]

I don't have exact numbers on how much dps each point of main stat gives you, but I highly doubt that it would be worth the ~2.5% damage buff from the 4 piece set bonus. Assuming ~24 seconds to build up to Zen each time, according to Macedonicus' new guide, that's a 5/8 uptime. I think you'd need a pretty significant amount of strength to overcome that, considering you could probably hit 3200 dps easily in your current gear, under the assumption that you're a mix of 72/75/78 gear. I'm pretty sure that the strength increase is enough to account for a 78 dps loss from losing the set bonus.

[Bugattiboy]

Where is this new guide? And what you're saying is that it'd be more beneficial to use a comms 78 armouring over a 69 set bonus armouring?

[Aelanis]

Here's the guide: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=704248

 

And what I'm saying is that you'd need a lot bigger stat increase to make such a trade worthwhile. The 4 piece set bonus, like I said, is worth almost 2.5% extra dps. That's a huge increase, and far more than 24 extra strength from increasing the armoring, and still way more than 48 if you swap two armorings out for coms armorings. The sentinel set bonuses are really strong, for all specs, especially watchmen, who get a 4% buff to their burns which gets further multiplied through the 6 auto-crits from Zen.

 

So don't trade up. It's not worth it.