Critable orange gear undermines intent of removable epic base mods

you are getting 2 gear pieces with augment slots, I dont since Im not a synthweaver/armormech/artificer let me get it too else its not fair

isnt that what people are screaming about everything else?

yeah but the belt and bracers is JUST for us, the augment slots on the other oranges are at least stuff everyone can wear.

This is a really good change, although my gear as a bounty hunter will still look like I've put together random parts from a junk yard. But I've really missed the option to customize your armor/weapons like this.
Next up: a way to convert medium/light armor to heavy armor so I can look cool as well.

As for orange gear critting; the level 50 orange heavy armor crafted by armormech looked just like a lowbie crafted armor. No epic-ness. Bulky, bent, dirty junk-yard armor. I think I'd prefer looks over an augment slot, considering that augments can be pretty weak. If there was a +64 crit augment I'd be all over it.

You may prefer looks over augment slots but I guarantee you that is not the view of most of the people that actually have the endgame gear atm, myself included. You are also not taking into account that it is an augment slot on EACH armor piece, making the net bonus you'll be missing out on HUGE if you decide to go for looks over stats. 1 Augment slot on each piece of orange armor with a +20 crit augment in it comes out to +100 crit, you honestly think having +100 crit on your gear is weak and something you can just get by without so you can look cool?

They need to either allow crafters to acquire schematics of any current gear(empty shells if need be) through reverse engineering or something, or allow them to add augment slots to already existing armor, otherwise this entire change is pointless and we'll just be trading one pigeon hole for another.

Oh wow! A whole 2! We should just stop trying to get them to fix this and allow more customization for endgame gear so we all don't look the same. Instead of us all wearing 1 set of gear, now we can wear 2 different sets of gear so only half the people you see will look like you!

No, no one is crying over how fair/unfair the crewskills (aside from Biochem) are. That's just the perk you get currently for being a Synthweaver/Armormech.

Right, but at the same time everyone will be forced to get their armor from a Synthweaver if they're Jedi/Sith or an Armormech if they're Smuggler/Trooper/BH/Imp Agent. Once again forcing people to wear certain items and tada, we're back to where we are now. Letting orange items crit is not how you fix the issue of everyone wanting to be a pretty little snowflake.

My take on the whole crafting matter is as follows

• Crafters should be able to reverse engineer anything (within their profession) with a chance of learning the schematics.

• Customisable schematics should be learnable via reverse engineering either prototypes or artefacts. Either that or increase range of armors available from schematic drops.

• Set bonus’s must somehow be available to crafters (attached to the armouring is a good suggestion, perhaps an epic drop schematic). If raid gear is the only set with bonus's, it is immediately more desirable than anything crafters can provide

• Improving the crit chance/learning schematic chance needs to be increasable (via more than affection). LOTRO did this perfectly by allowing you to add a rare material to your crafting which boosted your chances of critically crafting that item. I’m sick of bad luck and not being able to improve the odds.

• All top tier and PvP stats need to be extractable so you can put in armour you actually like the look of

• Schematic drops seem to be from a very small table. I have over 50 custom speeder 25s, custom speeder 40s and the hotrod. Guess what, so does everyone else. They are worth nothing and only useable by cybertechs ( I havent bothered to look but I dont think there is anything special about them compared to the ones you can buy, making them very pointless).

This system has great potential, but it is in its infancy and needs to grow quickly

How so? Being able to craft BiS with 30 skill (crit on some cheap as dirt orange newb vest) doesn't make a profession over-powered. It makes it worthless as everything 30-400 becomes pointless.

Couple ideas that could fix the issue,

1. Make augment slots permanent, this keeps someone from crafting a single piece of orange gear and using it from 1-50 since if they put a lower lvl aug in there they are stuck with it, this also helps stabilize the market and doesn't make certain crafts "useless" after someone has collected the look they want.

2. Add augment slots into t2/t3 raid/pvp gear, its the only way too balance orange craft gear imo, so you can still have the look you want but its not superior too raid gear.

I don’t see why it shouldn’t be superior to raid gear. Especially since you would have to HAVE the raid gear already to extract the mods to put in your custom gear.