The above is exactly why crafted gear is inferior to dropped gear. The cost is beyond absurd. Unless you have multiple toons all in guilds, all hitting conquest weekly, plus millions of extra credits to buy mats, you'll never be able to craft a full set of gear. Plus you don't just need to worry about armorings. You need mods and enchantments too.

Once I saw those costs I focused on crafting for augments, augment kits, and pots. With those you don't need to waste rare mats trying your luck at a higher level schematic.

Crafting hasn't been the optimal way to get everything of max level for your character for a very long time. That has only been possible with lower level gear. 6.0 is no exception. The forgotten items to craft 258 gear used to cost 50 - 250 million credits each so mats for 306's are at least better than that.

As I said in a prior post, I learned all the barrel, hilt, mod, enhancement, armoring, earpiece, relic, and implant 306's outside of the lethal A mod and worthless relics. Total cost was 3 billion credits (not 10 billion). Since that time I have made 9 billion credits from crafting. Based on that simple result, crafting is worth it. Is it worth it for everyone? No. Do I recommend learning every possible pattern? No. It was no different in prior game updates either. Note: the cost would be far lower now. When I learned everything the mats were double or triple the prices of current market value. The cost to get into these is steep though. Some of them I learned an upgrade the first time and a few took 16 to reverse engineer successfully. Altaholics could learn a few for free in a few months time with conquest rewards.

Outside of the above, there are also craftable set gear and tacticals. 1 million credits to get them and as long as it is one of the desirable set bonuses or tacticals can sell for 20 - 40 million each. Far above the cost of mats. These, like the augments are so popular they are usually listed at volume pricing. An hour or so sweeping Mek-sha nods will net you millions of credits worth of mats or provide whatever you need for crafting outside of the matrix and embers.

Keeping to the original post topic, crafting can be worth it. It is ideal or perfect? No. Does it make you wonder whether any of the development team actually does any crafting? Yes. Is it worth it to everyone? No.

Crafted gear being inferior is just not true (except earpieces for some reason). Since you should be aiming for accuracy to 110% (for dps), then the alacrity goal, and then everything else into crit up to the diminishing return it does not make sense sacrificing crit for power until you hit the DR - and the crit DR is high. There is a good guide on Vulkk specific to operative gearing that holds true with other dps classes (with targets adjusted per the class/spec).

swtor-60-lethality-operative-guide

If you have plenty of time on your hands and want to run flashpoints over and over again to get your gear more power to you. Outside of the repair bill it would be the free route to gear. Obviously, if your broke in game that is your only option. If you are not broke, don't have the time, or don't want to run a gazillion flashpoints then crafting (by you or a friend) or buying the pieces you need from the gtn are a good alternative. As far as flashpoints being faster that's just bonkers. The drops in flashpoints are random. When that fails and you get nothing you can spend tech fragments. Those purchases are random too. You will do flashpoint after flashpoint and get nothing usable. Over and over and over. I don't know about you, but credits are easy to make in this game and I'd rather spend credits and do what I like doing in the game instead of running hammer station 50 times.

There are some crafted-only setbonuses and tacticals and some are useful enough that it's worth crafting them.

However, basic 306 gear (armor/weapons/mods) just isn't logically worth the time/effort to craft.

You might be able to make money selling the basic 306 gear, but that's due to people either:

1. having massive credit stockpiles and no time to actually play the game

or

2. being idiots

I suspect that [2] is the reason more often than not. Same as people paid millions for the 258 left-side gear pieces after onslaught launched and made them useless for level 75s.

Sure the gear itself is equal on power to what you get elsewhere, but people are also factoring in the time and credits to obtain the gear. Crafting just isn't viable for new or returning players. After two months of playing and crafting augments I'm just hitting 100 million credits. 30 times that amount to craft end game gear is just crazy when a single hammer station run can drop six or more items.

The fact is the developers made bad design choices when it comes to crafting that make the gear you can obtain there much worse than what you can get elsewhere. If you're an established player with the capital to invest, sure, it's going to be profitable and can likely be your main source of gearing. But for the rest of us crafting is only useful for arguments, pots, and augment kits.

You obviously only do story content or are too ignorant to know any better.

Void Singer is the last person who should be called uninformed about crafting.

Sure the gear itself is equal on power to what you get elsewhere, but people are also factoring in the time and credits to obtain the gear. Crafting just isn't viable for new or returning players. After two months of playing and crafting augments I'm just hitting 100 million credits. 30 times that amount to craft end game gear is just crazy when a single hammer station run can drop six or more items.

 

The fact is the developers made bad design choices when it comes to crafting that make the gear you can obtain there much worse than what you can get elsewhere. If you're an established player with the capital to invest, sure, it's going to be profitable and can likely be your main source of gearing. But for the rest of us crafting is only useful for arguments, pots, and augment kits.

This is me, right here. ^

Never was poor, in fact usually did better than most credit-wise before 5.0. Well, I just got back to the game after that break with about 150 million credits... And it goes so fast.

I worked my crafters up from 600 to 700, then started to look at the mat requirements it is absurd.

I just had to be honest about it, and realized running Vet Mode Hammer Stations in a group was more efficient than doing it any other way, meaning getting gears.

Yes, it's an immense PITA dealing with the RNG of 20 different types of useless mods potentially dropping, but, when considered next to spending BILLIONS of credits on schematics etc., which most people can't afford to do anyway... Well, there's one option here. Hammer Station Spam.

I even find augments ridiculous I don't see why they had to make crafting so overwhelmingly convoluted and complex, btw.

***Does the tedious activity of crafting really need to have combination mats that themselves need combination mats to craft?

My god the tediousness of crafting now is just stupid on top of being absurdly expensive making it rendered completely useless for 99% of the population.

So it's broken. When only a minuscule part of the population are capable of enjoying such a normally widespread activity as crafting on a MMO, it's broke!

Another big thing that needs to be fixed. Crafting.

I did a spreadsheet to help me calculate augment costs if I were to buy some or all of the mats. It takes 468 T1 mats, 234 T2 mats, and 96 T3 mats to make a single augment. It's typically not profitable to buy mats from the GTN since they cost 5k or my e each more often than not. Since you pretty much have to buy solid resource matrix (since embers can be produced from grade 11 mission), you'd have to rely entirely on crits for profit.

Having to craft up the tiers is tedious and ultimately to "play" crafting you need multiple toons. The only saving grace to the system is it blocks out potential competition because most people won't bother!