SWTOR Gearing Guide for 3.0

SWTOR Gearing Guide for 3.0 (Level 41-60) by waktivist

This guide assumes that you have a low or mid-level character that you are leveling up, and that you want to get from where you’re at to being in viable starter gear at level 60 in the simplest and most economical way. This is not a comprehensive guide to all your options, just a short list of things that are on the critical path to getting from A to B the easy way. I will assume that you are at or able to get to level 41, with at least seven pieces of blue quality level 41 armor and a blue quality weapon and offhand.

From that baseline, here is what you can do to get to 60 and geared up.

Save Your Basic Commendations. Take the commendation rewards from every mission that you do, and save ALL of your Basic comms to spend on your starter gear at level 60. You will not need to buy any more gear from level 41 on, if you follow the tips below, so you don’t need to take gear rewards from any quests, HEROICs, or flashpoints that you run, and you won’t need to spend any commendations to get any more gear.

Go to Makeb at Level 47. As soon as you hit level 47, go to Makeb, pick up the GSI bolster on the orbital station (also available at any taxi stand on the planet), and level through from 47 to 55 there. Your blue level 41 gear will be good enough to see you through to 47, and thanks to the bolster you won’t need to do any gear upgrades from 47 to 55. You can get the Makeb quest from the holoterminal on your ship at level 47. You may want to spacebar the cutscenes from the intro to avoid minor spoilers for Chapter 3. Again, save all your Basic comms from Makeb to use at level 60.

Run [SOLO] Forged Alliances at Level 55. As soon as you ding 55, return to your ship and pick up “Prelude to Shadow of Revan” from the new mission terminal there. This will lead you through a solo version of the Forged Alliances story line, which will give you a full set of orange gear filled with 162 rated green mods (including mainhand and offhand). You also will get 300 Basic comms from this story line in the form of three Large Basic Commendations Boxes (be sure you have enough room under the 1,000 limit before you click the boxes to claim the comms). Like Makeb, the [SOLO] versions of the FA flashpoints have a bolster effect, and as an added bonus you also get to summon a beastly companion droid that will tank and kill for you, so you will be fine running this story line no matter what you’re wearing.

Finish Chapter 3. At this point you can circle back and finish your Chapter 3 class missions on Voss and Corellia, which will be a breeze since you now are far overleveled and overgeared for them. You will want to finish Chapter 3 before moving on to Rishi, so that you can complete the new class mission there.

Play Through Rishi and Yavin. After you finish Chapter 3, continue with the SoR story line, which will lead you to Rishi, and then to Yavin. The planet quests will reward you first with a full set of 168 rated gear, and following that with a full set of 178 rated gear. Those sets will carry you easily through to level 60.

At that point, it’s up to you how to gear up and proceed with the endgame.

You can craft your starter set or buy it with your saved Basic commendations. A full set of starter gear from the Basic vendor (level 60 entry level gear) will run you 1,300 Basic comms. Green 168 rated relics of all types now are available from ordinary crafting patterns at level 60, and the blue and purple varieties should become relatively cheap as soon as the supply from crafters builds up a bit.

If you are short on Basic commendations and feel undergeared for the hardmode flashpoints at level 60, you can easily get more Basic comms from level 55 group finder dailies and weeklies, as well as from running the old level 50-55 dailies and weeklies on Black Hole, Section X, Makeb, CZ-198, and Oricon.

You also could run some alts through the same 41-60 path as above and transfer the substantial number of Basics they will earn to your first character. There is a <Basic Schematics Vendor> on Fleet that sells schematics which are unbound, meaning you can buy them with one character, drop them in the legacy bank, then pull them out on another character and return them to the vendor (before the 2 hr refund timer expires) to transfer the comms from one character to another.

If at any point before level 60 you are close to the 1,000 comm cap for Basics, you can use the transfer trick to shuffle a few hundred off to an alt, so you don’t lose any as you continue leveling or farming.

Once you have gotten your higher tier 192 or 198 gear sets, you can pull out the mods from your 186 rated starter set and put them into legacy bound shells to save comms when gearing up future alts with the same main stat. If you have legacy bound weapons as well, you could wind up spending as little as 300 comms to get 186 earpieces and implants only for your future alts.

You also may want to pull out the mods from the 162 / 168 / 178 rated sets you got from FA / Rishi / Yavin and put those into legacy shells to use on your companions for future alts. These sets will go nicely with the legacy bound mainhand and offhand companion weapons you get from the two new planets, and with one set for each main stat you can cover all your companions except the droids.