How serious is the gear gap?

...I said pvp...in aion, rift, wow, AoC, etc, etc, etc...gear determines how well you do, not skill...

I have a fully aug'd WH Mara, and a Sent with like 3 augd WH pieces, and the rest BM, and the difference is noticeable, but not glaringly so. I'd say I perform 10% better on my Mara than my Sent.

Recruit gear? I just felt like I had to close my eyes and lube up. I had good games, a lot of them, but just as many where I would die 13-15 times.

Don't worry you will discover the gear gap when the level cap is raised and republic players run into a brick wall of war hero geared players blocking questing spots

WAR is doing pretty well now, down to 1 US server and nobody will ever go back to it because the gear gap is a freaking chasm.

I have a fully decked out WH and augmented Jugg.
I have a fully decked out BM and augmented Sniper.
I have a recruit equipped Sentinel.

The gear gap between recruit and BM or WH is very very serious for melee toons. My Jugg can (and often does) kill a recruit equipped whatever in 4 or 5 moves. It is brutal. And melee toons (such as my Sentinel) must run into that kind of buzzsaw just to be able to do anything.

Conversely, my sniper did fairly well in recruit gear. He, ofc, got better when he earned some BM and got some augments, but playing an engineer spec is about utility more than DPS so he was able to use range and positioning to stay alive until somebody noticed him and do some damage.

So, yeah, gear gap for recruit gear is horrible. And you take someone who was king of the hill coming out of sub-50 pvp and suddenly make them die any time a person sneezes on them and it will probably make them want to quit. Btw...how's them subs going EA?

It's still nothing compared to back in the day when you had to pvp in quest gear and slowly earn your champion gear through RNG which for some people as myself had extremely bad luck with. Man, that feels like ages ago now.

I'll take a little from 2, and a whole HEAP from 1 please.

Mostly the gear though. I play a gunnery commando in fully augmented war hero - possibly the worst PvP class in the game, and definitely one of the worst matchups against marauders, and I'd be very surprised if you could get me below 50% hp before I smoked you in a 1v1 with your gear.

That's not epeen talking - the tables are completely turned in equal gear.

How much of a difference do you think my sabers (WH main, BM offhand) make in getting DPS out? Cause I certainly don't feel like I'm using a wifflebat on anyone despite having below-average stats in my gear (currently ~1300 STR with a Rakata stim). I never even tried using Recruit sabers, but I think that's the trick for DPS...those items determine flat weapon damage, and DPS classes, especially dual-wields, get an instant boost just from them.

Weapons are really the only major upgrade from BM to WH. Everything else is really pretty minor.

I've wondered off and on, what if they just made it so all pvp tiers had the same amount of expertise? Would that cause scaling issues or something? Seems like it would help decrease the recruit -> BM gap without making recruit gear even better for pve (atm it's better than almost any pve blues).

But to respond to the OP, yes, recruit to BM is a pretty big gap. As a tankassin, I can kill a recruit marauder 1v1 and still have most of my life--almost all of it, if I use CDs. I'm in augmented BM. If the players are bad, a BM can 1v2 recruits fairly comfortably. I don't feel like there's a huge gear gap between me and the war heroes I've fought, just going off titles like war hero and warlord and whatnot. A WH fotm PT will probably beat me, but I can make it a close fight.

In summary, BM vs WH is tough but doable 1v1, but recruit vs BM is a slaughter. The gap gets amplified with every character, because although a single BM vs a single WH has a chance, if you make it 2v2 it starts getting ugly.