Basics of Gear
Basics of Gear
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7.7 is here, check out the latest from Laashka for those new Dynamic Encounter Achievements!
The gear system in SWTOR can be some what straight forward at first sight. This looks better than that, more of this must be better than that. Your gear is essentially a puzzel and we have to fit the right parts together to build out to the final stats that we want to/need to have for raiding. Gear in this game can be worn by any class. There is no restrictions for armor, so it is possible as a Damage class to accidently (or purposefully) put on a piece of tank armor. There is virtually no color coding to distinguish tank gear vs damage gear, forcing us to read through the stats to see what each item is.
Here is a high level overview of how gear functions and what you want to be paying attention from your gear.
Accessories will not have gear shell options and only appear as fixed gear.
To start, we will notice that gear we have collected as we are leveling as well as gear we use for end game has had a number of different stat lines. Lets talk about these mean and what you want to be focused on.
Gear (which is broken up into Weapons, armor and accessories) will have an item rating. The general "is this better" comparison is the item rating of a piece of equipment. As an example, a light saber with an item rating of 320, is better than a light saber with an item rating of 318. Gear has 2 variations in the game.
Gear Shell - This is a piece of equipment that may show a relatively low item rating (8) but have the ability to insert "mods" into it to increase its item rating. These gear shells are very versatile and were the go to for end game content in the 6.X expansion. While they still exist, they can only attain a total item rating of 340 (which is good enough for any content currently in the game). The game will give you a gear shell early on via a side quest and explain this is more detail. Many call this "Mod-able Gear".
Gear Shells will show "Item Modifications" at the bottom and include very limited "key Stats" until modded.
Once we Modify that gear (CTRL + Right Click) that shell can be fitted with the listed modifications to enhance its item rating.
This means that these pieces of gear can grow with you as you level or gain access to higher level modifications.
They are good to hang onto, as they offer versatility in your stat building.
Fixed Gear - Here we have items that cannot be changed. These drop all throughout your leveling experience as well as in the end game and is currently the only way to achieve the max item rating of 344.
Stats on gear come in a few different flavors.
To start with, the basic "damage, survivability, support" overview that was added in 7.0 is junk. Ignore it and open the details to see what your gear is doing for you. I am not sure why these number exist and are largely meaningless and not a good overview in my opinion.
Opening the details here show the panel below as well as a large amount of information to scroll through. The games attack and damage mechanics are complex and the detailed information in this panel explains how it all works or rather "rolls" on your characters stats to see what happens.
The game does a pretty good job of providing tool tips for each detailed stat item. Scroll the list and read up if you want more information.
Stats on gear come in a few different flavors and can be thought of as "primary, secondary and tertiary".
Mastery and Endurance are what we call "Primary" stats. The higher the mastery, the more damage you will deal. Endurance is your health bar, more HP per point of endurance. These stats typically scale proportionately with gear score and are not stats that we try to "build to" a certain number. More is better.
Power and Defense are our secondary stats. Each piece of gear will have one or the other (if they have both it is augmented). DPS/Healers want gear with Power. Tanks want defense. These secondary stats are primarily what separates out tank gear from dps/healing gear.
From a DPS/Healer stand point, there is never an instance where you will want defense in your gear.
Tanks on the other hand, gain power through their augments (making them super important) and will have both stats. Tank's have the most reason to and should as they gain experience with content custom build their stats to the content they are running. For example, even on harder Master Mode Ops, there are bosses I will swap out and take more power vs defense to help push phases faster.
Tertiary stats (Critical, Alacrity, Accuracy, Shield and Absorb) are the main stats that we focus on as we build out our gear.
Critical - Increases the chance that your attack will deal increased damage and determines the amount of that increased damage
Alacrity - More alacrity leads to shorter ability cool downs and faster channel times. At certain "break points" alacrity reduces the games global cool down (the timing between button presses). Some subclasses have passives that increase alacrity. This is largely why some subclasses have higher or lower alacrity recommendations.
Accuracy - Increase your chance to hit your target. All Bosses in the game have a 10% defense chance. You have 100% base accuracy, meaning that at base you have a 10% chance that the boss will dodge your attack and you will miss. To compensate for this, we build up to 110% accuracy making all of our attacks hit. Even at 109.99% accuracy you can miss a huge attack and lose massive amounts of dps.
Tanks get 110% accuracy for free, meaning that tanks really get more stat points vs dps/heal specs (2694 hidden extra accuracy stat points to be exact) As such Tanks should NEVER put accuracy into their gear.
Shield and Absorb go hand in hand and can only be used with an equipped shield in your offhand. DPS/Healers, do not build into these stats. They will not work for you.
Shield increase the chance that your shield will activate and shield an incoming attack.
Absorb is how much of that attack is absorbed by your shield.
Building all of your stats into shield and having no absorb makes no sense.
Recommendations for all tertiary stats is listed on each class's guide.
Wait, what about presence??? I do not believe I have ever seen this on a piece of gear. This is how effective your companion is and as such irrelevant for end game raiding.
Rarity
Rarity
Green (Premium), Blue (Prototype), Purple (Artifact) are the most common gear options you will find in SWTOR. Rarity has an impact on how that piece of equipment will distribute its stat points.
Lets take an example to see what the difference actually is.
If we compare Green to Blue to Purple for a lightsaber at item level 330 as our example. We would notice the following:
The tertiary stat is the same on all 3 gear pieces.
Mastery, Power/Defense, and Endurance values are different.
As a DPS, what we will notice as we move from Green to Purple gear is that our HP drops quite a bit. Green gear has higher endurance, but lower Master/Power. While the extra HP may look nice and we can get cautious seeing "better" gear taking our HP down, this is the game design. You are trading off HP for Damage as the rarity improves. Green is heavily Endurance focused, Blue becomes rather balanced and purple shifts quite a bit of the endurance to master/power.
Damage is our job and the shift to Master/Power is needed for top performance in the DPS category.
The story for tanks is not dissimilar. Green gear for tanks starts with quite a bit of Endurance and shifts to Defense as the rarity improves. This leads to quite a bit of controversy on how to best build tank gear.
Blue gear seems to be a good balance between HP and Defense at first glance, and definitely can be. There is no loss of shield or absorb stats between a 340 blue vs purple, so it can be customized to a greater deal than DPS gear (who would never under any circumstances choose HP over Damage) [EVER]. There is certainly an argument to be made in the "HP vs Defense" debate.
Gearing at end game is primarily reaching item rating cap and finding gear that has the tertiary stat that you need to reach your target level. For example Accuracy needs to be 2694 or higher. Having a large pool of gear to sort through to find the tertiary stat that you need is helpful, and much easier to do if using the Hyde and Zeek gearing method discussed in an upcoming chapter.
Each subclass has specific tertiary stats that are in each piece of gear. The chart below shows which flavor each class has.
Special shout out to the creator of this resource. As shown the game tries to force feed you gear with fixed tertiary stats for your class. It can be helpful to play or have other classes on your character (as the loot type can be changed to attempt to get other flavors).
An example. Say I am playing sniper. Sniper gets the targeter's gear. So I cannot get accuracy chest pieces. But lets say that my gear recommendation is to have 4 "enhancements" with accuracy. (or 4 armor pieces with accuracy).
If I also make my sniper a mercenary, I can swap my loot to a mercenary dps class and loot accuracy chest and legs.
Interestingly enough, healers cannot loot accuracy gear. I more and more recommend accuracy in healing gear at end game. We are very stat saturated and healers have plenty of time to dps and can parse out meaningful dps (assuming their shots hit, which accuracy solves).
Tanks get far more stats as their relics and have raw stats in them (which I prefer), giving us an extra boost to our stat pool.
Augments are super important. They are where all of a tank's power comes from and account for about 25% of your total stat points. You will be weaker, have less health and parse much lower if you do not fully augment all 14 pieces of your gear.
Accessories
Accessories
Legendary Implants come from the Technological Advancements quest and will give you access to the vendor. It is a length process, but required for raiding. Swtorista has a great guide on them here. There is largely 2 best in slot legendary implants for each subclass. These can be augmented
Rakata Relics and Ear can drop from Veteran Mode or Master Mode Operations and can be augmented.
Tactical - There is largely one best in slot tactical for each class. Tank's tend to have a bit more versatility in which tactical they are using. Another great guide for how to get tacticals by Swtorista here.
A brief rant on skill tree choices, legendary implants and tacticals.
It makes no sense to me why we have most of these options at all. We are largely locked into which legendary implants and tacticals we choose and most of the available ability tree points are pick this one, its just stupid not to...not all but a large portion (and how about adding the ability to put loadouts on the hot bar so I don't have to dig through menus to swap between fights, I can put Tacticals on the hot bar)
I think it really stupid to tie tertiary stats onto our legendary implants. Get ride of the dumb idea all together and give us 3 spots for tacitcals, or just get rid of tacticals, turn them into and give us 3 legendary implants spots (again with no stats).
The available options that are not considered BiS are so niche that they do not get used and are only a trap for new players.
I could go on, but this is a guide not a forum post :D.
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