Mara working on my first run through actually getting into PVE, with a quick question about the gear from the basic comm vendor. I'm working on getting a full set I'm about halfway there, but I honestly feel like my dps is actually suffering slightly with each new piece of gear I put on. Obviously the gear is poorly itemized, I get that, but what's the solution? I obviously wanna be out of 66's before I get into ops right? So is my best option to get the full set with basic comms even though it drops my power and acc and loads me up on crit? I'm specd anni btw.

You may well need to buy more than one of each piece, or a piece from another set and swap the mods and enhancements around. Only the Armour mods ( and Barrels/Hilts ) are item specific, so you could take an enhancement ( with stats you need ) from a chest piece and drop it into boots if the boots come with stats you don't need or want.

First of all you don't want to be out of 66s before you go into ops.

 

A full 66 gear with no items at all that are higher than that, is still more than enough for ALL storymode ops.

 

Also fully min/maxed 66 is better than stock 69.

 

Obviously you should still take all the pieces 69 that are useful to you. In many cases the armoring or the mod are better than what you would have with 66 items, but when it comes to enhancement, all the enhancements in commendations gear are crap and often worse than some enhancements up to 3 gear tiers below them.

 

Commendations gear has only crap enhancements that only stack huge amounts of endurance which gives you only more hp which is useless, but they have will usually give you less of the stats that actually affect your dps than what you had before.

 

You need loot drops from operations to get proper enhancements. Before that it is best to just use the best possible 66 enhancements.

 

Also every piece of gear should be broken a part and not just used as a whole. If you get a new boots only the armoring from it should go to your boots (assuming it is better than the old), since the armoring from boots can only go to boots, but the mod for example in most cases is better to put to some other piece of gear whichever has the stats that make the most out of the upgrade.