Bear with me here, I know next to nothing about high end PvE. I'm mainly a PvPer (I generally hate raids) but the PvP armour looks terrible, whereas the PvE stuff looks pretty good.

 

Basically, my questions are: how exactly do you get these gear sets? Tokens from hardmode instances, or from things like Eternal Vault? Secondly, how long would it take to get Columi, Tionese or Rataka gear sets? Are we talking days/weeks/months/years?

 

Thanks.

with a bit of dedication you can get full columi set in a week, ofc if you clear operations aswell might go faster, and depending on if you do hardmode ops aswell less time.

 

in general it doesnt take taht long, it depends if you do all the flashpoints every day (would take roughly5 hours) you will get full set really fast.

If you do normal ops where the loot distribution is done by some weird algorithm nobody really understands it simply depends on your luck. If you do hardmodes where you can actually assign loot to those who really need it, it might just take one run.

Rakata stuff is from hardmode/nightmare operations only (except for ear, 2x implants from daily and bracers/belt which can be crafted).

 

All the columi pieces except for belt and main hand can be obtained from last boss of specific hardmode flashpoints. Getting Columi pieces this way is alot faster than doing dailies/weeklies for the columi tokens to buy them since the cheapest columi piece starts with 56 tokens and you earn 1 columi token per day via dailies and 3 columi tokens per week via the weekly.

 

If you are interested to know what drop what, check out my list here.

 

http://dulfyforce.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/hardmode-flashpoint-drops-empire/

Clear both normal mode ops in a week (puggable), and you should have most of your columni set.

nice advice