Why are the best crafted items are so weak?

progression raiders dont need it, any more than any one else does. a big part of an MMO is improving your character. It doesnt matter if there is or isnt any content that requires the improvement, many people want to improve their character to be the best it can be. there is no reason that that option cant be available to both raiders and non-raiders. you will still have you wings of the architect and the like. you will still have your titles. I raid, I already have these things. there is absolutely no reason not to make the best gear available to different paths. it wont make your achievements any less meaningful.

If this game would be a sandbox, not a theme park I would agree with you.

Here's my problem with BiS Gear only being granted to those who have already cleared the hardest tier content.

THEY DON'T NEED IT!

They've already cleared the hardest tier content, why do they need an improvement on the gear they did it in.

This is because this like most MMOs puts Gear Progression as the reward for Content Progression - that is you get the best gear AFTER you have cleared the hardest content.

Think about that for second.

It makes absolutely NO SENSE AT ALL!

All The Best

They do but only when BW introduce the next tier of BiS gear.

I don't know what the fabled set boni you get from those sets are, but it does seem highly unlikely that the classes were designed with those set boni in mind. Auto-crits, free power uses or whatever it may... those are things one usually handles with critical rating or alacrity rating. If you have a problem with a character frequently running out of power during fights, you forget what the guides say, you get them more alacrity and sacrifice some mastery (or power, but my characters don't usually invest in power in the first place).

Ivanhedgehog is right. Progression is always the point of the game, regardless of what you do, you want to have a sense of getting better at it. That is why it is perfectly normal to desire better gear. It's not like anyone wants to take a privilege away from the raiders, but there should be alternate means of progression which may lead to different results.

224 may be seriously over the top for anything but nightmare mode operations. But with 220 gear... with 220 gear you can do hard mode flashpoints smoothly and make up for undergeared team mates. In tactical flashpoints it makes it easier to carry a group of inexperienced players through. The thing with that is: If you're the only 65 in a tactical flashpoint you will be tanking, no matter whether or not you are tank, damage dealer or healer. If you use an aggro drop it depends on your class whether it actually sticks. For Eternal Championship I'd like to have a shot at the 15 minute sprint, which is out of my reach so far.

I earned my Eternal Hunter and consequently Eternal Legend this morning and most of the gear which I used for came from Eternal championship - I did it four time with different characters yesterday and bought four pieces of 216 Eternal Championship gear with it and used the Exotic Isotope Stabilizers toreverse engineer and craft a relic; I still had to buy four Exotic Isotope Stabilizer and three Strategic Resource Matrices, though.

But without
a) at least one, better two (one ranged, one melee) level 45+ companions (the best companion of all my characters is influence 32, this morning I used a influence rank 21 companion)
b) decent 220 gear
any attempt to get the sprint achievement is merely a good way to get myself killed needlessly.

The thing with the best gear is, of course, it doesn't last. When they add the next five levels they'll hand out "rating 228" green quality items as normal quest rewards for the main storyline and you'll be able to buy 236 gear for common data crystals. I can't even remember what rating my first gear set had, back when I did try operations. Was Rakata gear 156? What was Columi again?

back in the day when Moria was end-game in LOTRO you had to have a certain type of gear (Radiance) to be able to do the real end-game group content. So instead of Gear being the reward for doing content you need the gear for, gear was the key that unlocked the gate to that content.

In SWTOR if you could by current BiS gear a mix of Glowing and Radiant Crystals and it was only when your gear rating reached a certain plateau that you could enter NiM content that would make much more sense.

It would also mean a lot more players would be likely to engage in that end-game content. Many players don't bother now because they know they'll be getting kicked from groups for being under-geared - because a lot of groups require you to already have he BiS gear to run the content that awards BiS gear - another aspect of the current system that makes no sense at all.

Using gear as the gate to end-game content makes a lot more sense in my opinion.

All The Best

If your schedule doesn't allow you to run ops in your guild and you hate pugging but still want the set bonus, I'd advise you get the pvp set. It's perfectly fine for everything other than HM/NIM ops and basically you can get it for about a week, assuming you just play 2-3 wz a day, basically only doing dailies and weekly.

First sentence of the bit you quoted - my schedule doesn't mesh with the raiders. By the time I'm available, the raiders (no dedicated raid teams, just the people who do raids) are already half an hour or more into their thing.

How is this thread still alive I get it its a theme park so crafting does not matter much.

Correction: crafting doesn't matter much to you.

To some of us meaningful crafting is an essential component of an MMORPG.

All The Best