Weapons with Open Mods vs. Found/Earned Weapons

[Yutryannus]

Hi there, I am a new player still getting my feet wet on my journey in the main campaign for the story. The question is; are Weapons (lightsaber for example) that have open modification slots are better than ones found/earned in the campaign? The reason I ask this is that on my Sith Warrior character I had just leveled up to reach a mid level mod vendor, and I bought a few mods to make my lightsaber do more damage, endurance, etc... And the funny thing is not long after that (maybe two or three missions later) I received a lightsaber with only a crystal mod slot, but it blew the stats on my fully modded lightsaber away.

So my question is are the weapons with mod slots worth the mod upgrading or should I just save my credits wait till I receive a higher lvl one either through random chance or as a mission completion reward?

[SteveTheCynic]

There are multiple things going on, and you've mentioned only one of the differences.

 

Roughly speaking, the "strength" of gear is determined by its "rating" (this is on the tooltips for the gear, and for vendor mods, goes up to 210 for level 65 mods on the fleet). There are some variation according to the "colour" of the gear (that is, the colour of its inventory icon and its name), with "higher" colours offering, sometimes, slightly better stats than lower ones of the same rating.

 

Mods, too, have a rating.

 

When you compare two items at the same "requires level X" value, a green one will have a lower rating than a blue one, with the "purple" (magenta) being higher again, and the true-purple being higher still, and the sort of orangey yellow being even higher. For below-level-60 characters, Heroic missions drop crates of *blue* gear which will be better than the green mods you bought on the fleet at the same required level. The same is true of blue or purple stuff that drops from defeated enemies.

 

Crafted mods are blue or purple, and are stronger than fleet-bought mods because those are only green, except for the toppest sub-70 tiers, where the purple crafted mod is requires-68/rating-228 instead of requires-65/rating-220 like the blue or requires-65/rating-210 like the green.

 

But the key point to take away is that ultimately only the rating matters, until you get into "minmaxing" your gear, which is a waste of time if you aren't doing "end-game" group content, but requires you to put care into the *balance* of stats.

[Big_Marser]

This question is a tricky one.

 

At first, earning loot from story progression may be soon better than your modded custom weapon/armor. Yes. Despite on that, keep that orange (or maybe violet) one in your inventory. In fact, the loot is mostly knitted for your class, helping you doing storyline and some beside stories.

 

When it comes to more difficult stuff, like heroics or low level PvP, story loot may not help you. At least the blue loot from heroics is needed for that. Those stuff outnumbers the green loot for some levels. And that again is the same point for the mods. Vendors sell you green stuff. But to get blue mods that are very advanced to the green ones, there is no vendor and I don't remember any loot for blue modifications. So for that you can do 2 things: purchase blue mods from GTN selled by other players - or craft them by yourself. All crafted items are blue and in most cases with slightly better values than looted ones of the same item level respectively loot level/toon level. Additionally, all of this jabbering counts to violet stuff against blue stuff.

 

To craft mods you need a Cybertech handworker for modifications and enhancements.

To craft armorings you need a Synthweaver (stuff for Jedis and Sith) or a Armormech crafter (stuff for non-force toons).

Additionally, weapons and off-hand stuff can hold a crystal (no matter if the weapon is green, blue or whatever), crafted by a Artifice one.

And also additionally, all items can be extended with augments for a specific item augmentation slot. This one is sometimes prepared in items and can be improved to higher levels as well. Augments can be crafted by Armormechs, Armstechs and Synthweavers.

 

As I wrote, this for all is not very needed for you story progression. But if you want to do more than story or you come to your level cap and do endgame stuff, this comes in handy. Thats because unmodable items have a strict allocation of values. Building in mods you have a more advanced way to design the values of every armor/weapon part. So maybe you want to add some more endurance and damage reduction for a melee damage dealer? Well, do it with mods. :-)

[JediQuaker]

Simple answer - use whichever one gives you the best stats. If you're not a tank, don't use gear that has tank stats like defence rating, shield rating, etc.

Use the one with the fixed stats until you find a better one, or until you can buy/rip better mods for the moddable one.

 

The nice thing about the moddable lightsaber is that, if you particularly like the "look" you can keep modding it to keep it's stats up without changing your look. You can also rip mods out of other moddable lightsabers, if you find one with better stats that you don't like the look of.

[Yutryannus]

Thank you all for your replies. I do appreciate it a lot. Like I said, for now I am a newer player and I am just focusing on the main campaign and I am still learning about crafting. I don't have enough credits to really even look on the Galactic Market at the moment. To give you an update on my progress, I ended up doing the flashpoint Boarding Party solo, and I didn't have very much difficulty at all with my lvl 42 Sith Warrior, if fact after I was done with the whole mission I was at lvl 51 (XP boost). Now since I have some credits at my disposal I am trying to focus on crafting and since some materials are rarer than others I guess I will have to look at the Galactic Market.

 

To answer another part of the question also, at the moment I am still just doing the campaign but I am looking into doing some cooperative flashpoints with others, in the near future. From looking it up and talking to others online, most guild or other players, aren't excepting any new guys until at least lvl 60. Thanks again for helping me out.

[JediQuaker]

By the way - you can get mods for your armor and weapons from vendors on the fleet.