I remember from Star Wars Galaxies once you hit 90 the only way to survive pvp and pve missions was to have a full set of 35's. Does Swtor have that kind of thing or do you just have to get the special gear at 50?

There's a few different end game tiers at 55. For starters, when you hit 55 and do the Oricon storyline, you'll get a set of rating 66 (believe under the new numbering system it's 158) gear. This gear is good enough to do SM ops with (especially now that it seems 95% of the people running ops are really overgeared for all the story mode stuff). From there there are 3 main tiers and a few sub ones (I'm talking about PVE gear only, PVP gear is separate).

 

Basic (rating 69 under the old numbering system, think it's rating 162 now) that can be acquired with basic comms from flashpoints or drops in SM ops (there's 2 sub tiers, Arkanian which have set bonuses and usually better stat distributions and Black Market, which is the comm vendor ones). The next step up is 72 rating (168) acquired with Elite comms (from Operations or Hardmode 55 FPs) or from HM Terror from beyond and HM Scum and Villainy (also SM Dread Palace and Dread Fortress last 2 bosses can drop a random piece). The comm stuff is called Verpine, the operations drops are Underworld. Same as before, the Underworld stuff has set bonuses and usually better stat distributions than the comm versions. There's Kell Dragon after that, which is rating 75 (no idea what the new numbering for that is) which drops from Nightmare TFB and Nightmare SV.

 

The final comm gear tier is bought with Ultimate comms. This is called Oricon gear (comm version) and Dread Forged gear (operations drop version). Ultimate comms come from level 55 operations, same as Elite comms. The difference between them is the set bonus and stats again like the other sets. Dread Forged is better statted. You get dread forged gear in Hard Mode Dread Fortress and Hard Mode Palace.

 

Just added in the new patch is rating 186 (which I think would be like rating 82 under the old system) gear which drops from Nightmare Dread Fortress. It's like Kell Dragon, there's no comm version.

 

Usually how most people gear is by buying gear pieces as they can with comms and then swapping out the mods inside the piece when they find better ones. The enhancements on most comm gear are really really awful, to the point where it's sometimes better to downgrade a higher tier enhancement to a 168 one from an operations drop because the stat distribution will be better. Tanks seem to have the worst time with this, as a lot of the tank comm gear pieces have useless stats on them like alacrity, so literally any other enhancement would be better.

 

Hopefully that answers your question. You don't need to be fully kitted out in Oricon+ gear to do most of the ops, it's only really when you do HMs and Nightmare that you really need to min-max.

That actually explains it perfectly. Thanks heaps. Now these ops are available for the Pub side right? Edited April 26, 2014 by Vinnymata

Correct. The fleet usually will have people looking for ops in general chat, if I were you I'd try to get in a few pickup groups off of there.