you sir, are awesome, preach on. ps. snipers seem fine in pvp thus far (playing marksman only)

Yes and no. If you are going for full balance and do this, you still have to consider 4 piece set bonuses from pve / pvp gear. How do you make this transferable between the gear so that the choice to use orange gear over purples is purely cosmetic, and does Bioware want the choice to be cosmetic?

The amount of whining and stupid in these threads is overwhelming. Biochem is currently by far the best raiding profession by miles, and will still be after the patch because of the extreme cost effectiveness of reusable stims / adrenals. If you are raiding using adrenals on every boss pull, and you wipe ocasionally because of progression and various bugs you encounter, you are spending hundreds of thousands if not over a million credits a week on consumables currently if you aren't biochem. Even one adrenal a boss pull becomes extremely expensive quickly. It simply isn't sustainable in it's current form. The nerfs going through are great, and necessary, and anyone who thinks otherwise isn't actually thinking the impact on the game through. Also, for the record, there will be more nerfs, in the form of a CD on adrenals in bossfights for everyone, so that you aren't forced to bring 4 a fight. As opposed to crying about everything you might be better off making a constructive post listing out the perks that each profession currently has access to and how it could be more clearly leveled out from a pvp / raiding perspective. Just sayin'.

No, I'm saying IF the math is worked out beforehand, some people will use one and some the other. If the balancing isn't done beforehand, a large number of players (see everyone who rushed to pick up biochem for stat maxing) are going to kneejerk drop all their tier pieces and put their rakata / columi mods into orange gear to get the extra augment slots. Same with pvp.

I don't think it can be just bad luck. It's either scripted that way or bugged to happen that way. A little over half of my armstech t2 discoveries are +presence.

Oh I'm not too worried about it overall, everything will be slowly balanced out. Just saying that if an augment is implemented on every orange slot, at the same time you can jack armoring mods out of purple items (aka your rakata / columi gear) then most people will be using the orange gear. The only incentive that currently exists to keep using "tier" pieces is the set bonuses, and a lot of them are god awful. They will need to be rebalanced to be compareable for everyone to the bonus to stats from augment slots to make the gear competitive.

no real pve / pvp player will give up 168 of their main stat to look different

Currently, no. You can craft orange weapons with biometric alloy that can crit and get an augment slot. Currently that does nothing for you becuase you have no access to the top end barrels. Also schematics for lvl 50 items are, for all basic purposes, non-existant. However, in the future, you will be able to take purple barrels out of top end weapons, meaning the best weapons in the game will be the oranges with an augment slot and mods from a rakata weapon. Is that of personal use to you since you could just buy the weapon from someone else and get biochem? No. If you are desperate to be armstech though, then that will be your "endgame" crafting, purple 124 weapons sell ok, and purple weapons for lowbies / alts is where the market currently is if you are smart about what you make / sell. Generally speaking though the profession is crap and of no personal benefit to you compared to what you can get from other professions, and doesn't look to be even after they make their sweeping profession changes in the next content patch!

I play on your server, and your problem comes almost entirely from the fact that you are a jedi, and that makes up less than 1/4th of most servers. Unfortunatly, being part of the republic isn't popular, and its always going to be more lonely unless they add free faction transfers, and even then it will probably still be pretty darn lonely.

The amount of whining and stupid in these threads is overwhelming. Biochem is currently by far the best raiding profession by miles, and will still be after the patch because of the extreme cost effectiveness of reusable stims / adrenals. If you are raiding using adrenals on every boss pull, and you wipe ocasionally because of progression and various bugs you encounter, you are spending hundreds of thousands if not over a million credits a week on consumables currently if you aren't biochem. Even one adrenal a boss pull becomes extremely expensive quickly. It simply isn't sustainable in it's current form. The nerfs going through are great, and necessary, and anyone who thinks otherwise isn't actually thinking the impact on the game through. Also, for the record, there will be more nerfs, in the form of a CD on adrenals in bossfights for everyone, so that you aren't forced to bring 4 a fight. As opposed to crying about everything you might be better off making a constructive post listing out the perks that each profession currently has access to and how it could be more clearly leveled out from a pvp / raiding perspective. Just sayin'.

I've only seen schematics from crits from the 340 slicing missions and even then, I've only ever gotten synthweaving schematics, pretty convinced that schem's for other professions don't drop from it

there are a few people in my guild who have made over a million credits on slicing, and the ones who started out with slicing originally and caught on early have made millionS. thats very believable.

assuming there is any unavoidable damage in end game pvp, you are probably going to have to / want to take balistic dampeners, for the points the damage reduction seems very very strong

Slicing nerf is ok. My guildies rolling around with 1 mil + credits aren't very happy about it, but you can still make a profit off it, just much much slower, and I'm not losing credits on more than say 10% of my missions (you could probably make that 0% if you aren't testing to see which missions bring the most credits) The missions / schematics you get still sell well, and if you max compaion affection the crits / efficiency still isn't that bad. Overall it is still one of the better professions, and most people will want to level with it to make money and then drop it for another mission profession when they hit max level.

no real reason to, still getting 500-1k credits a box, and more on crits if you do the right missions not going to be pulling in 100k + credits a day anymore but its not going to be losing me money sending companions to do other things like another skill would be I'll probably keep it til I hit a million credits and then drop it and pick up investigation like my original plan