There is no way to increase your chance at a successful RE. The higher level item you're trying to RE, the lower the chance. This is ESPECIALLY true with the lvl 50 items, such as the one you're working on. Also, blue to purple will be much harder than green to blue, so again, you're just dealing with the RNG of the system. Many people have reported hundreds of attempts before getting a recipe to go purple. I have personally had several in the high level range take 50+ REs to go purple. If you're looking for a SPECIFIC purple stat combination on a lvl 50 item, then you need to be prepared for it to take VERY, VERY long to get.

He's right, the knife is simply a stat stick. For further hilarity, you can completely unequip your knife, and still use all your knife skills. They just do slightly less damage because of the loss in tech power. Unequipping your gun, however, takes away your ability to use all gun skills and is a much larger hit to your tech dmg (at least, this was the case a month or so ago when i was testing it). However, as an armstech and agent, it's still pretty ridiculous that you can't RE these into blue/purple versions. Even as a stat stick, it's analogous to a shield or focus, which has always been available for RE by artifice.

Make piles and piles of credits selling low-mid level purples to the majority of the population that isn't level capped and the alts of those who are.

The dailies to which he was referring are PvE dailies. Faction balance is irrelevant.

Shotguns and vibroknives are just stat sticks. You will get the most out of these abilities by having the best possible main hand weapon. The fact that the visual has you using your shotgun (or knife for ops) is irrelevant to its dmg modifiers. Think of it like a focus or shield for other classes. So yeah, it's irritating that we can't make better versions of them, but it's only that...an annoyance.

A few things: 1) The VAST majority of the playerbase is not lvl 50, and many of those who are are leveling alts. If you are willing to invest the time and resources into it, you will make a varying degree of profits at all levels. It's much easier and cheaper for most people to buy a reasonably priced item off the GTN than to worry about keeping every single piece of gear they have fully modded. 2) Purples you make will be better on-level than orange items with green/blue mods in them. The only reasonable way to get purple mods is from other crafters, and mat for mat, you will either be able to offer a finished product for much cheaper than the mod competition, or will have a much higher profit in doing so. Each piece of crafted armor you could make will require 2 pieces of purple crafting material...the exact same amount required for each purple mod. Realistically, the stuff you make will be flat out better than anything people have while questing. 3) Your friends / alts / guildies will have a much smoother time leveling if they can get some better than average gear along the way. 4) If end-game benefits are your only concern, then that's a bit different. However, there are still armormech/synth patterns that drop out of raids that will still be some of the best stuff you can get, and it's all BOE once crafted, so there'll be a market there to be sure. But as with most any game with a raiding component, the tip top gear will always be rewards for defeating the most difficult content. If that is your goal, then yes, gear crafting professions are not the way to go.

So I've been running a few missions on my slicer since the servers went up, and i'm seeing DRAMATICALLY higher yields from mission boxes than last night. The following are cost --> yield for a handful i've run at different levels since I realized something was up: 870 -------> 1397 1175 ---> 2526 535 -------> 1292 95 -----> 77 295 -------> 414 1250 ---> 2519 1930 ------> 3685 Small sample size, to be sure, but the only mission on which I took a loss was the Grade 1 moderate mission. Beyond that, no box returned less than a 40% profit. And these were all NON crits. Seems like they decided they overdid the nerf a bit. Now we can all get back to talking about how biochem is the 2nd coming

You need to go back to RE'ing the green. The blue you were working off of was the "Critical" version. You want to RE the green until you get "Redoubt" which will add defense rating. Then RE the Redoubt blue until you get another stat you want. Personally, I'm usually a little less critical of my purple stat on lvl 50 items just because of how long it takes to get those max lvl items to proc purple. Unless of course it's something completely useless, like shield rating on a cunning pistol... But yes, if you want to put in the time, you can get secondary stats that are more beneficial to SCORPIO.

Mission discoveries are actually extremely valuable even though it sucks quite a bit when they fail. Discoveries for mission skills (Investigation, TH, UT, Diplo) will guarantee purples of the appropriate tier and can still crit for even more purples. This is along with giving some of whatever else missions of that level can offer. Blue investigation missions, for example, will give 2 purple compounds, 4 blue compounds, and a companion gift of that tier. Purple discoveries tend to give double that. If you need some purples in a hurry, this is a great way to get them, and if you're looking to keep stock up as a full time crafter, this is almost always the cheapest way to keep those purple items in stock if you keep an eye on the GTN and pick them up for cheap. For gathering skills (scavenging, bioanalysis, archaeology) the discovery will give you a large stack of most/all materials in that tier. As an example, the lvl 340 purple scavenging missions have given over 20 of both the grade 6 metal and the compound when I've done them. Many of these materials are so valuable, they make the discoveries a very hot commodity. On my server, Mandalorian Iron (grade 6 purple underworld metal) is so valuable that the lvl 340 UT purple missions sell immediately for anything under 28k each. So you just have to decide when these are worth the additional cost, but for a relatively low risk, the rewards are often quite high.

It's not just bad luck. Vibroknives and scatterguns do not RE into blue/purple schematics. No idea why, but it's been a topic around here for quite a while and nobody has EVER seen it work. Sucks that so many of us wasted a ton of materials to find that out, but yeah...doesn't work.

There are 3 blue versions per green, and 5 purple versions per blue. All the variants are spelled out in the RE sticky at the top of the forum. That'll have all the info you're looking for.

Mission discoveries always return purples. That's why they're good. For what it's worth though, I run investigation regularly for purples, and just got some Ceraglass minutes ago. Companion affection will affect the crit rate on these missions, as will the "quality" of the mission. With a maxxed out companion running Rich missions, I usually see about a 15-20% crit rate. It's incredibly frustrating when you hit a dry spell, but if you keep running them, you'll get what you want eventually. But if you can find some cheap discoveries off the GTN or from your friendly local slicer, you can use those for some guaranteed purples.

Nylasteel (along with every other purple researched compound) is only returned from critical success on investigation missions. Since nylasteel is grade 1, you will need to crit on a grade 1 mission to get it. Your best bet is to run "Fist of Justice" the Rich Grade 1 mission every time it comes up, and wait for a crit. The affection level of your companion running the mission will improve your chance to crit, so keep that in mind when choosing who to send (and NEVER send the ship droid when you're trying for purples...he'll just piss you off by failing repeatedly). That being said, make sure that you have something of value to make once you get these purple materials. At max investigation with max affection companions, I'm seeing this mission crit about 1 in 5 times. So you have to factor that into the value of the items you're selling/making. My server has a pretty healthy appetite for lvl 9 purples at a reasonable price, so I can still turn a profit, but you have to make that determination for yourself. Also, every other grade of purples can be acquired through crafting missions for investigation, which you can find on the GTN or from your local friendly slicer. These missions will be a little more expensive and take a bit longer, but they will GUARANTEE purples as long as the entire mission doesn't fail. If you can find these missions, they are often the cheaper route for getting purple materials. However, no mission items exist for grade 1 materials, so if it's Nylasteel specifically you're after, you just need to keep grinding those missions.

Not sure if this is what you're asking, but color crystal nodes can spawn at any archaeology node in the world. Each spawn location has a cluster of nodes, one of which will be spawned when location activates. So it is possible to know approximately where a node will be, but it can spawn as any of the colors, power crystals, or artifact fragments (or whatever they're called) of the appropriate level for that area.

Yes, knife skills are a major part of operative dmg, but the knife does not function as a dmg scaler in the same way other weapons do. Easy way to test this (which i just did again to confirm) is to go find a mob, and backstab him. Then next fight, unequip your knife and do it again. Yes, you can still use all your knife skills without a knife equipped. The dmg will be a bit lower without the knife because of the loss of cunning, tech power, and whatever else you're missing, but it doesn't plummet. On the other hand, if you try to unequip your rifle and go into combat, you won't be able to use any ranged skills except for Rifle Shot, which will hit for 0 dmg. If you were to equip a very low level rifle, you would notice very low dmg, because ranged attacks (and melee for that matter) scale off the base weapon range on the rifle. Tech attacks do not act this way.