Just a quick guide for people who are a little confused by the gearing changes.
Any left over spots dump into Crit.
Mastery can be better than power especially for classes that rely on crit procs because mastery provides a tiny amount of crit/damage increase per point versus power just providing flat damage increase.
Never stack defense because it only counts for white damage not skill damage
Use either more absorb augments if you need them or if you are finding you can survive the fight fine use critical augments.
Alacrity to at least 7.15%, but don't be afraid to try to go higher - ~2000 Alacrity before guild buff
Critical vs power vs mastery: Critical obviously allows you to heal in bursts better but will probably overheal more often. power allows you to have better average healing though. Mastery is not very good because it doesnt provide enough to be worth stacking. Truthfully best to mix and match power and crit to your liking.
-
Talk to Hyde and Zeek, if you're an imperial they'll be near the lvl 75 mod vendor in the north west area, if you're republic they'll be also near the lvl 75 mod vendor, but south east area.
-
Hyde and Zeek offer multiple quests, 3XX prototype and 3XX artifact. The differences being, the prototype quests reward you with blue armors, hilts, barrels, mods, and enhancements for every spec. While the artifact quest ONLY GIVES PURPLE ENHANCEMENTS NOTHING ELSE. Bioware has said they aim to create the gap between artifact and prototype gear simply by having a purple enhancement vs blue. And that is true for every tier, the only difference between a blue 332 and a purple 332 is simply the purple enhancements, Go ahead and accept the 332 prototype quest and the 336 prototype quest.
-
You have 2 choices here, 332 gear is slightly more optimized with better secondary stats like accuracy, alac, crit, power, mastery, etc. but lower endurance. But the 336 gear has higher endurance but worse secondary stats. I personally run the 336 armor/hilts/barrels/mods but use the purple 332 enhancements so that my gear is hyper optimized. It also matters what content you're doing, warzones only offer gear up to 332 because that is suppose to be the cap for bolster. Currently with 7.1 or 7.2 though there was a bug introduced that doesn't downrank people with higher gear than 332 to 332, but instead to 336. That means people who grind flash points will technically have 1 tier higher gear than the best pvpers. To get 336 gear though requires flash points. Warzone gear is generally also a lot easier to level up requiring roughly 1/3rd or 1/4th the currency flashpoint gear does per level up. From there purchase a single blue piece(typically belt OR wrists) from the vendor with your first bit of currency. Keep it in your inventory because you'll need to upgrade it to what ever break point you prefer, 332 or 336. You can do ops gear if you prefer its just more expensive and takes longer to find a group, plus even for story mode ops unless you have a certain level of gear you generally won't be accepted anyways.
-
So you've chosen one or both modes to farm your gear in, nice. Let's learn how to actually upgrade them. For warzones/pvp it's actually super simple. Just play warzones/galactic star fighter completing the weeklies to get warzone currency. Each tier requires between 40-50 currency per upgrade and you get 50 currency per weekly you finish, 3 currency for a win, and 1 currency for a loss. The weeklies can also be completed 3 times a week per character, reseting daily. Flashpoints are the same thing, you can either complete them solo on a stealth character grinding out something like 27 instances of red reaper or hammer station or complete them like normal through the group finder and the flash point weeklies. Flash points are a little different though, to maximize your currency gain per run you need to equip a ear piece under item rating 300 to trick the game into dropping a blue ear 324 ear piece on every boss. I wore a item rating 240 purple ear piece for this purpose i had laying around in my bank. The reason you do this is when you deconstruct the blue 324 earpiece versus the 324 green gear that normally drops, you get 10 versus 3 currency. With this trick you're looking at 3 flashpoints+a weekly to get 1 item upgrade. And again these weeklies can be repeated per character 3 times a week, and reset daily. It generally takes 170 flash point currency to upgrade your gear.
-
Once you have upgrade your wrists or belt to 332 or 336 go back to hyde and zeek, then MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE QUEST IF YOU DIDN'T PICK IT UP EARLIER(again if you're doing 332, choose 332 prototype, if you're doing 336 choose 336 prototype). Once the quest is activate, simply deconstruct from your inventory the appropriate item rating armor to unlock customizable mods/armors/hilts/barrels/enhancements from zeek. These are bind to legacy but have a 2 hour window before they can be sent to your alts.
-
Relics/Ear pieces = These have a chance to drop purple grade from the gear chests you get from completing warzone/flashpoint/ops weeklies. They have to be upgraded per character and per item, unlike the mods/etc. there is no simple easy way to do it other than grinding. Until you get them though feel free to buy and upgrade the conquest vendor ones to 330(ONLY 330!) using credits/conquest currency. You only upgrade them to 330 because after 330 they become endurance based instead of power based like the higher tiered blue/purple versions.
-
Legendary implants - These are class specific, but require a crap ton of conquest currency, tech frags, and credits to upgrade. You will want to get these asap.
-
Augments - As with everything what you pay for is what you get. For any mains you should definitely have at least the blue 73 augments, for which ones your role needs see above. I outfitted my character ion full blue augments for ~70 million simply because 1 purple augment was about 90 million, and the legendary augments were 1 billion each. I'm not poor, but I'm definitely not that rich and if you're reading this guide neither are you probably.
That's a great long grouping of words to say "I didn't do enough research".
Those bodies in tents at the rave sure looked like they were trying to fight back spread eagle on the ground with bullet holes in their backs.