Can someone please, in the simplest of ways, explain the new gearing system and how to get new gear?

The gear system works so that you get new gear based on your current gear rating (which you can see in your character sheet). No matter what you do in the game wether its doing dailies, Flashpoints, PVP, GSF etc you get rewards and these mostly contain gear. The gear comes in form of shells which are modable or unmodable, mods, enhancements, hilts, barrels and enhancements. You get all that from rewards. The idea behind this is to quickly put on the highest rating gear so that you get higher gear from next rewards.

 

For example when you do the Onderon and Mek Sha story you get a full set of 268 rating gear. What people do then is go farm Flashpoints. You get gear from every boss, reward at the end of FPS and reward from weekly or groupfinder. All those rewards contain gear in the form i described above.

 

In the end you will have a full inventory of gear pieces, like shells and mods. What you need to do is always equip the highest rating and go do activies again to get more rewards. In case of you having 268 gear the rewards will be 270 gear. When you are 270 gear the rewards will be 272-274 etc. This includes getting relics, implants etc. All the gear is legacy, even left side so once you done all weeklies on your toon you just send it over to your next toon and equip the gear and run the activies again.

 

This is the main system to get gear, beside this is also the Renow crates you get, they also contain gear based on your rating. Lastly there is a vendor on fleet selling random gear, a special vendor selling rankom unique gear and vendors with set bonuses. These vendors are there to fill in the gaps at the end when you are 306 rating and cant get what you miss. You pay with Fragments, which you get also with rewards or with disintegration of gear. When you swap your 268 gear for 270 then you need to disintigrate the 268 stuff for fragments and other mats.

 

When you reach 306 then you start to min/max the stats for your specific toons. Keep in mind that you can basically use the same gear for all classes (in case of same role) you just need to adapt the weapons as some have single sabers, dual sabers etc.