Returning player, haven't played since just after launch. I keep hearing to get orange shells and upgrade the mods every few levels, but I can't find any I can purchase. The ones on GTN go for way more than I currently have, and the ones at the fleet vendor are for level 70+. Is the Cartel Market my only other option? I was hoping to find some legacy bound ones, but if I have to go character bound with my high amount of accumulated cartel coins, I don't mind. Just curious what my best option is. Thanks guys!

Orange shells is an archaic term now. All moddable gear used to be orange in colour, but now moddable gear shows the colour of the mods it's equipped with.

 

The cheapest moddable gear you can get is from the adaptive armor vendor in the supplies section of fleet. You can get cheap character bound moddable gear, or (slightly) more expensive legacy bound gear as well as moddable weapons/offhands if you're missing one.

Thank you for this!

Trying to watch your gear rating and manually updating gear is not really needed anymore (*) as the game has gotten a bit easy and is generous with gear drops. Whenever you receive an armor piece or weapon that has a green up arrow on it, equip it (replacing your currently equipped item) irrespective of the stats on it and your Discipline (‡). Keep doing this till your character level reaches 75 and your iRating (shown on your character screen at top left) crosses 302-304.

 

MMOBits, SWTORista, and Vulkk have detailed gearing guides. Gearing is less complicated, and less random (except for Amplifiers, and certain bonus sets) in the current version of the game compared to the last several years.

 

If you want to get set bonus gear (for the purposes of doing harder group content like Operations,) you might want to read up on the Discipline-specific guides at Vulkk or Merlyn and pick your set names before you reach 75. Then, any set bonus pieces that you get through the game can be saved (for level 75) even if their iRating is less than the top value of 306 at the time they dropped; you'd be able to upgrade them to 306 later. Gearing up Solo by SWTORista.

 

Caveat for paragraphs 2 and 3: Everything is going to change come December, so you need to decide if you want to read and follow those guides; I'd advise not.

 

(*) Used to be a chore in the early days.

 

(‡) That's not some "dumbing down" of the advice or anything. Putting those things on will increase your iRating which then determines the iRating of the gear you get as loot and so on. Upward spiral. Many people call it the Vertical Gear Progression in 6.x of SWTOR. You only need to do it once and on only one character on a given legacy (= server). This will be followed by a Horizontal Gear Progression which is only needed if your character will go into the harder group content.

Edited October 22, 2021 by mike_carton

Orange shells is an archaic term now. All moddable gear used to be orange in colour, but now moddable gear shows the colour of the mods it's equipped with.

This isn't quite right. All orange gear was moddable, but the reverse wasn't true:

* Back in the day, a random mob dropped a purple moddable shirt on Dromund for my Assassin, who desperately needed better chest armour to help take on a Bounty Contract target for the BBA event. On her way back to the target with a big stim singing in her veins, she killed some random mob who dropped that purple shirt. Blind chance, but I appreciated it.

* The Westar pistol that Corso gives to a romantic female Smuggler somewhere later in his companion story used to be green and fully-moddable.

* One of the Cartel Market not-pre-modded Assault Cannons was purple rather than orange.

The cheapest moddable gear you can get is from the adaptive armor vendor in the supplies section of fleet. You can get cheap character bound moddable gear, or (slightly) more expensive legacy bound gear as well as moddable weapons/offhands if you're missing one.

<Adaptive Gear Vendor>, in the first bay counting clockwise, on the extreme left as you go into the bay. And yes, that vendor is the cheapest easy way to get moddable gear. (With sufficient Social rank, you can get the social-vendor armour sets that are fully moddable and only 300 credits per piece, but no weapons.)