Slicing had augments, now they make augments an important part of the game and take them from slicers.

Now I can go do slicing missions and barely make anything off selling the mats on GTN. And the lockboxes dont seem to give much of anything either.

Am I confused here? I am no pro slicer, but I was expecting to have it be worth my time atleast, but right now it now. Any other skill would probably make more money for me than slicing from what i can tell. Maybe its the market on my server but slicing mats sell for next to nothing, and im talking about the lvl 400 missions.

Am I missing something here or is slicing now just total ****?

On my server, blue slicing items are worth next to nothing (except to vendor), but purple slicing items are in the same range as purple Treasure Hunting and Underworld Trading items.

Additionally, you get quite a lot of recipes from Slicing. This spruces your profits compared to TH and UT, even if you are just vendoring them all.

On top of that, if you pick a crafting skill that can make augments, you get a double whammy profit. Augments generate additional profit over the raw materials on my server. And if you crit, you get 2 of them.

You can still farm Lockboxes in the open world for pure profit, which TH and UT cannot do.

You can still send your companions on Lockbox missions which at least break even on cash (green and blue lockboxes from criticals even things out) and then make a profit by selling Mission Discoveries (or use them yourself!).

So no, slicing does not suck now.

I am averaging roughly 40k+ an hour with slicing on my server.

I send my companions out on either all 5 or 4 of the 5 slicing missions. Whenever I get a slicing recipe, I always chuck it on the AH for 70k.

It all depends on what missions you send your companions on. Some missions are more reliable than others.

I have an updated spreadsheet with 20 samples of each basic slicing mission (missions that don't require discovery). The missions in blue are Republic only and the missions in red are Empire only. Hope this helps!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0All_c6kucoRHdGVBUXZPWGEzNGdjNHpvVDBIckJpWVE&output=html

EDIT: Only missions that yield lockboxes were tested.

I didn't have a slicer "before" so I can't compare.

I only have a 25 level toon with slicing at 400. I don't actually play that character, but I send him on as many missions as I can, the reloggin thing sucks, but it is very worth doing.

I don't lose money from the lockboxes, I make some with them, but the real thing is getting the discovery missions. Some sell quite nice, and I keep the TH, UT, and Archeology ones for my artificer and synthweaver.

I find slicing so good that when I start my next alt, with Armomech as crafting skill, I'll take slicing with her (instead of UT). I won't have an idle companion at any time.

Given the lack of population on most servers, I would say Slicing is the ONLY tradeskill for which you can reliably make money from.

You get a (small) credit gain for every mission, on average, and you occasionally get those crafting missions like UT 340 or Bioanalysis 300, which sell for a decent amount of money, depending on tradeskill, and of course, on how dead your server is.

*** are you going to do with most of the other tradeskills, given your (quite probably) dead server?