How deep can we customise our character's stats endgame?

[Kreeshak]

Currently level 31 and rising, having lots of fun. I have a concern though. I am afraid that in the endgame I might have extremely limited gear choices and I will have to surrender to what the game offers. I am afraid the game will force me into certain stats because the lack of variety of endgame gear.

The question is how deep can I customise my character's stats according to my playstyle? Will I be forced to have balanced stats? Can I stack a secondary stat and experiment? Will the game force me to one set of gear or will I have choices?

To be more specific, I am levelling a jedi guardian using the focus talent tree. I am fascinated by the damage sweep does. However since sweep is a guaranteed critical, will the game allow me to have zero crit and heavily stack surge power accuracy? Or will the game force to select 2 pieces with crit, 2 pieces with surge and 2 pieces with power?

To summarize, I believe the freedom of having choices adds to strategy and makes rpg games enjoyable. How swtor fares on that?

[moff]

with 31, surely you have encountered several orange items which contained mods.
these mods show you how deep you can customize your stats, you can do pretty much everything you want, if you have the mods.

endgame raids and pvp do not offer much choise in the gear you get, but they are all completely modded, so you can take them out und put others in. it will be quite expensive but I do not beliebe any other game offers that much possibilities to customise your character's stats endgame.

as far as stacking goes, there is a dminishing returns at some point where its not really recommendable anymore to stack it more. but if you have several stats you want to push and just leave one away (in your case crit chance) i am sure thats absolutely possible and no problem at all.
you just need to get the right mods, which can and will be very expensive.

[conscript]

When you get into actual level 50 sets (Columi, Rakata, etc.) they will have two mod slots for a mod and an enhancement that will determine everything but the base endurance and your base stat on the item. The gear all comes with "recommended" mods, which are usually awful, but you can freely switch them out to other mods with the secondary stats you want. For instance, seemingly every piece of my Vanguard's tier sets come with Accuracy and Defense or Accuracy and Absorpotion as the Enhancement. That is fairly useless since using every single one of those will put me drastically over the Accuracy cap. So right now, I am sitting in full Rakata gear (which uses 58 item mods) but with level 56 Enhancements in every slot since I could buy a ton of the Absorption/Shield (or similar) ones to replace my Accuracy/Defense ones since the bulk of the Accuracy was a wasted stat. As a DPS, you can do the exact same thing with preferring crit, alacrity, power, etc. There is likely a stat that is "better" for your specific build, but you can freely switch mods in and out of your tier gear to match whatever stat you are after as long as you can get extra tokens to buy the proper level item you want, but Columi with commendations, buy the boe ones off the AH, etc.

[jayinjersey]

And according to the Patch Notes...come 1.2 you can even take out those "set bonuses" and put them in other Orange gear.

Which is good cause I still love the Esseles Smuggler chest piece on my JK...it gives him that "I don't conform" attitude.

[gualdhar]

Pre 1.2 the system is kinda lackluster. As conscript said a lot of the gear seems to have really crappy stats. The problem is you can only craft mods and enhancements up to rank 22, and end-game gear currently goes up to rank 25. The 23, 24, and 25 armoring, mods and enhancements are all drops in operations. Its a low chance for one to drop, you get max one per boss (where you'd get 4-8 pieces of gear depending on op size), its not guaranteed to be useful to anyone (example, my last KP run had a boss drop a defense/surge enhancement... who the hell wants that), and you have to roll against everyone in the op (and hope you don't have an asshole there who's just going to put it on the GTN).

[Hellfury]

Really there isnt much customization at all.

-Accuracy is pointless and Rakata has it on each piece... *sad panda*
-Surge caps too fast arround 75% then becomes into heavy DR and its pointless to get more
-Crit rates are humongous, I have 42% and not even tried to stack it.
-Power scales bad but since its the only stackable stat without DR its the one to go after surge cap
-Then you have your main stat but this isnt customizable since u get it as u get gear

So yeh infact there is no customization, you stack surge to 75%, then Power, crit u get plenty alone from gear, and Accuracy the devs dont even know(they say its to kill tanks in PVP in guild summit and I loled...)

[Jalek]

Really there isnt much customization at all.

-Accuracy is pointless and Rakata has it on each piece... *sad panda*
-Surge caps too fast arround 75% then becomes into heavy DR and its pointless to get more
-Crit rates are humongous, I have 42% and not even tried to stack it.
-Power scales bad but since its the only stackable stat without DR its the one to go after surge cap
-Then you have your main stat but this isnt customizable since u get it as u get gear

So yeh infact there is no customization, you stack surge to 75%, then Power, crit u get plenty alone from gear, and Accuracy the devs dont even know(they say its to kill tanks in PVP in guild summit and I loled...)

Yeah I hope they look at accuracy and rethink it's purpose. Also I never get why "special" attacks in games (including WoW and SWTOR) have a different hit percentage than normal attacks. Just make them the same and therefore there aren't multiple hit percentages to worry about.