will orange gear become obsolete with 1.2?

Yeah this would be a shame.

What would be cool is if you gave the ability for crafters to reverse engineer a critted item w/ a 100% chance to turn that entire item into a single consumable item that would apply an augment slot to any existing armor in the game.

And then, make 'every skin' in the game able to be turned into a fully slottable piece by allowing it to be reverse engineered into a schematic crafters can learn to make, then they make an orange version of it.

Honestly, there are some 'awesome' looks in the game that don't even have anything to do with the orange as well. I have some real lowbie armor on a 5th level Smuggler (not the starting set, but some green pieces I got after they started giving me other pieces and it started looking 'armory'). It is medium armor, but it looks like it might as well be light. Just a shirt/vest combo kinda (not the ugly brown one you start with) and some green pants and some 'simple' leather looking boots and 'small' nice gloves.

'That' is my ultimate hope. I want to look like Han Solo (well, I need a fun female equivalent for my characters, maybe some sort of Lara Croft/Han Solo mash-up of sorts), and have 'that' be my armor through the entire game until my hands fall off and I'm dead and buried.

I'm tired of playing these games where there's like fun things to find and wear, until you get to the end, and everyone has to look like the Fox NFL robot. What the hell is with that? Why is being dressed up to look like Ralph's little brother in 'A Christmas Story' ("I can't put my arms down!!!") always equated with l33t d00dz success?

El los noa getto, splaino, por favor?

Guh-Errr

Yeah... so, uhm....save fun OJs! Make more fun stuff! Let crafters make a consumable we can add to Inspiration and Indignation! Use soap! And all that.

Make the augments for armormech types only.

Beef up the other professions for endgame to where they have a bonus that will equal the augment.

profit?

Should have just given us appearance tabs and not worried about the whole mod system, imo.

That's the intent, isn't it? To allow custom visual appearance while maintaining the rarity/difficulty of obtaining the stats.

No, right now (Or, Patch 1.1.4) you could take a purple you got at level 5, throw in the mods from your Endgame Gear, and it's up todate. I don't really like it because it lessens the importance of hunting for gear (And by extension, crafters)

Now, lets say a crafter can craft an Orange Chest piece for a Sentintel.

It has the basic mod slots open (Armoring, Mod, Enhancement).

It has the chance of being critted opening up another mod slot (Augment)

Add on to this, it has the inherent stats of :

35 Endurance
40 Strength
35 Critical
25 Surge

and a level requirement of Level 50.

I know most people wouldn't like it. I would just because it feels right now, crafters (Outside Biochem really) get shafted.

But its hardly that customisable when there are like 10 sets of crafted gear, many of which also look horrible.

No you cant because right now the armour is locked. which is what you are wanting them to make, ie the stuff everyone else dislikes. You are making a very confusing line here. Right now you cannot make a purple piece from level 5 at all the same as end game.

The beauty of MMOs is the ability to add more.

More gear is coming in patch 1.2

Well it means that you hunt for mods instead of gear and that's really equivalent, with the exception that professions that craft gear and not endgame mods are shafted. So I understand the problem but I think your solution is incorrect.

I would much prefer they stick with the current mod system, which IMO works fantastically, and allow crafters that make armor to craft viable modifications or something similar. Perhaps alter the relationship between cybertech, armormech and synthweave. Right now they all sort of fall flat because cybertech doesn't scale to the 50+ rating area and armormech and synthweave generate unmoddable and mostly inferior gear. That's what needs to be fixed, not the mod system itself imo.

Again, changing in 1.2