Just dinged 50. Gear... um... wow.

The reality of the system: if you can spend 3 hours grinding for PvP gear, you'll get a bag for the WZ daily and you'll be able to buy a bag with commendations. And there's also the weekly.

Its not hard at all. Its just not instantaneous unfortunately. Just go join a warzone. Win or lose, you get commendations for bags.

Pretty same for my guild. I'm slacking as much as I can before reaching to level 50 and then I'll roll an alt.

Spend...

about six days, if you just want to do the dalies that give the mods as quest rewards..

spend about six days doing Freeing the Fallen (Belsavis; provides a rank 22 mod of your choice), Poisonous Strategy (Illum; provides an Enhancement of your choice, rank 22), and Old Enemies (Illum, provides Rank 22 armoring of your choice).

You will have gear that is at least passable and roughly equivalent to Centurion PvP gear (yes, you are missing the 8% expertise that Centurion would get you, but you have about 16% more endurance, and about 12-18% more DPS stats, completely overriding its use anyway) to PvP in.

Amount of effort required:

20 minutes for six days.

If you really think expertise is worth it (i dont, but thats a post for another day when i have time to write a wall of text complete with math to show why Expertise is the biggest illusion in SWTOR) you can also spend WZ comms, while leveling, to get level 40-something PvP weapons. These weapons have a level 46 blue enhancement in them with expertise on it, that can be removed.

Put these in your oranges.

Bam, you have 6% expertise.

For the last several days, (as a m arskman sniper) i switched from using my full PvP set (All champion except earpiece & legs - which are still centurion, and belt and bracers, which are far superior rakata items - 10.45% expertise) to using my full PvE set.

I GAINED 1920 HP for this switch, about 200 cunning, 6.4% crit, and 42% surge.

I haven't lost a single but of survivability, but my damage output has roughly doubled.

TLR below:

hit the GTN, get level 50 purple (rank 22) armoring, mods, and enhancements in your gear, or do dalies if you dont have the cash for the GTN, and youll be fine. You wont be top of the heap but it isn't that bad by any stretch.

I don't understand people arguing that WoW had a gear grind. It did, but TOR's is a lot worse.

• You could buy a starter set with gold.
• You had access to gear with large amounts of Resilence cheaply and without restriction. So you'd give up some offensive stats, but you weren't simply target practice.
• You didn't have to buy commendations with commendations in order to get access to the intro set of gear.

The entire system is incredibly punitive to anyone that's just hitting 50. I said the same thing as the OP when I hit 50.

You join Warzones to get commendations. You'll get rolled by scrubs and can barely help your team, but you'll have commendations (this is where WoW starts letting you buy gear). Unfortunately, these commendations aren't any good. You need to buy better commendations. So you buy Mercenary commendations, but you still won't be able to buy any gear directly. You need bags. Once you buy the bag maybe you'll get a piece of gear that you don't already have; but you'll probably just get some new commendations. Once you get a bunch of these commendations, then you can buy a piece of gear.

Do the Dailies..

3 wins a day.


and if you had 6 bags when you turned 50.


pvp gear is easymode.


ive been 50 for 3 days on this char and i have Chest, gloves, 2x Relic, Earring, Pants

a tiny preview of why i dont think the Expertise is what it is really cracked up to be.

Take these two items:

http://knotor.com/items/612567 - PvP boots

http://knotor.com/items/588031 - PvE boots

notice, the mod and enhancement slots are filled with IDENTICAL items, the only difference between these two items (other than set bonuses - not relevant for this discussion) is the (currently locked) armoring slot.

The PvE armoring is:

57 cunning, 41 endurance (rating 136 armor)

the PvP armoring is:

30 cunning, 29 endurance (rating 136 armor) + 48 expertise (which it incorrectly quotes as 1..75% @ 50 - only true if you have zero as it suffers from a pretty harsh and complex diminishing returns formula)

thats 27 cunning and 12 endurance lost PER PIECE.

It's actually even *worse* on belts, bracers, and implants.

From a full set (incl belt, bracers, implants) you can easily add up more than 300 of your base stat (cunning in this case) and ~200 endurance - which, for me at 50, is actually more than a 12% increase in HP.

Expertise is an illusion.

If you wear (here's the important part) equivalent item-level gear, the extra stats on the PvE gear more than make up for expertise. You will have more than the 12-13% expertise can buy you in defense in extra HP, you will have more than that in extra dps (or healing) stats.

Expertise gear artificially deflates your stats and tries to convince you it replaces them with expertise, but the math doesn't follow along.

The best example i can come up with is a republic Jedi Sage named Tangier on my server (Port Nowhere). She PvPs i n the slave bikini with PvE mods in it. She regularly posts 450-550k damage and 100k+ healing with a 50 to 0 or so kill/death ratio.

Obviously the loss of expertise is really hurting her.

Well, they could always add lower expertice mods that people could add to their existing gear so they could at least have some of it so they don't get stomped so bad...just a thought.

I for one am maxing out my toons on commendations and pvp from late 40's->50 so I can get some bags when I ding. Should make it a little easier, though I'm used to pvp grinds (Ugh, vanilla WoW) so it shouldn't be too big of a deal.

With WoW, there's a few things players can do to minimize their own damages. They can queue for random 40 man BGs where their own individual shortcomings are pretty much moot. They can also queue for Tol Barad - same thing as the 40 man thing, but twice as rewarding and potentially 60-80 players.

Also, in WoW, you have 10-15 man Warzones. These diminish your individual contributions, as there's more people on the team to support your patheticness while you're gearing up. Your win rate will be closer to 50% in WoW than it will be in SWTOR while you're a 50 noob.

In this game, you have only two recourses.

1. Fight 2v1 vs. Imperials with gear. (if Republic)
2. Farm Crates for 2-3 hours per day (if Imperial)
2. Queue for 8 man warfronts, where given the small number of players on the team, you will drag your team down much more than you ever could in WoW and earn the disdain of people on your team if, in the end, your stats don't compete.

Because your luck relates to everyone else.

Also looking into buying some orange PvP weapons and stripping out the enhancements with expertise on them to cobble up a ghetto set, if thats your th ing, though see above as to why i dont really believe expertise is worth it if you have access to acceptable equivalent item level PvE gear.