Why craft armor and weapons?

[Geckomayhem]

Just wondering what the real benefits to being able to craft armour and weapons are. If you can just get orange gear to throw upgrades into, won't it always be better to have enhancement skills? I currently have Synthweaving and Artifice between my two force users. When I level my Bounty Hunter and Imperial Agent, I want to decide between Armstech, Armormech and Cybertech. Armstech has barrels as well as weapons, Cybertech has enhancements as well as the "tech" pieces, and Armormech will allow for crafting all sorts of armour. But where is the advantage of being able to do that?

I definitely want to take Cybertech - probably with my Agent. But for the Bounty Hunter, it becomes a toss-up between Armstech and Armormech. Both have their advantages, but Armstech just seems to be more useful across the board. Can anyone speak from experience of either (or both) of those crew skills?

[Serix69]

While you may think wearing all customizable gear will make all other gear obsolete, you have to remember that you will still need the armor plating core parts for each piece of your orange gear, which could be 5-7 pieces every other level, not including the modification and etc slots, where you could be looking at 15-20 parts for a full upgrade.

I personally am synthweaving, and just like everything else, the more you put in, the more you get out. Not only can you make good gear that is already loaded with the stats for its level, you can RE it into blues and purples.

It's all in how you look at it

[Finangus]

I have Armormech on my 50 Powertech. Personally, I think you can get more out of it than Armstech. As a BH, you have, at most, 2 weapon slots. Same for your companions. Meanwhile, you and your companions have 6 armor slots. IMO, that makes Armormech more valuable and personally useful.

[babyback]

There are patterns and such dropping from operations. I've gotten two patterns to craft epic BoE belts. They arent that good but they might earn me some credits and I presume there are better patterns in hard and nightmare modes.

Edit: I'm a synthweaver.

[Geckomayhem]

Yeah, I really like Synthweaving so far, and I'm sure I'll see the benefits of Armormech if I take that up. Operations don't come into my equation, as I will never be able to dedicate time to raiding. But it does sound like crafting gear has its advantages. Just gotta be smarter about it than I have been, as I seem to have burned through pretty much all my credits sending my companions off to get materials, and then reverse engineering for hardly anything back the majority of the time.

Of course, I'm sure low level blues will sell just as well as high level purples. One just has to hope for the right sort of blue procs.

Further down the line, it would be neat to be able to reverse engineer every trained green schematic into its counterpart blue at least. One can always dream.

[shimerra]

I have Armormech on my 50 Powertech. Personally, I think you can get more out of it than Armstech. As a BH, you have, at most, 2 weapon slots. Same for your companions. Meanwhile, you and your companions have 6 armor slots. IMO, that makes Armormech more valuable and personally useful.

Thing is you don't just make items for the weapon slots. And generally speaking in any game if there's a single piece that is most important, at least for DPS, it's the weapon.

[Poodles]

You're generally not making a full set of armor for your level, it's usually 2 items (just like crafting weapons).

The advantage is that the crafted gear is generally pretty damn good if it's for your level. It will also allow you to later twink out an alt as you RE to get blue/purple and then craft those for your alt.

I think in the end though that mods are going to be more powerful and profitable. We'll see though.

[Deleted]

I crafted a belt several times and now i have a belt with 131 cunning! It's better than even hardmode operations items for this slot so it'S really really good. You won't get even close with raiding gear on this slot. Bracers are next thing to craft.

I don't know if Armstech gets something unique that is very powerful and bop.

[ZeroWashu]

For female characters you can go orange very quickly for Sage/Shadow/Etc (Consular) and have three sockets to play with. This only leaves getting bracers, belt, relics, implants, ear ring, and of course weapons. It also has the added benefit of mockery which can be a real blast when you encounter some players. Since I tank as Shadow showing up in frilly clothing and Republic Dancer bottoms tends to have people do a double take, some even have fits. After all I am not roleplaying correctly, well duh, if I wanted to roleplay I would have the full dancer outfit on. Its not like lightsabers hurt.

Cybertech, armortech, artifice, and armstech, to me are the four required. Synthweaving and Armortech are nice to fill gaps that costume outfits don't fill but I can readily buy their products on the GTN for far less than I make selling the pieces that plug into orange items.

Figure it this way, they did this as a near last minute change hence the professions really took it on the chin. Worse the loot system similarly took it on the chin. Got a JK in full Republic Armor at 29 simply because it looks cool and it is fully customizable. Sure it won't work at 50 but our Raid group is already bemoaning the fact it isn't up to par and pointless anyway (as in they now all would rather pvp)

[shadowkras]

I kept hearing how orange gear is much stronger than anything else, and it was true for a while, orange gear from dungeon is customizable and comes with really high stats on it.
But purple crafted gear simply is better for the same level.
I got a saber from athis last night, lv22 to equip it due to all the mods (rating 54). While leveling my artifice though, i researched a purple hilt that had nearly double the stats but required lv23 (rating 68).

So yea, it wastes a lot of credits and may not be worth it when leveling due to the time investment required to do the proper researches (by reverse engineering dozens of itens), but so far, crafting skills proved to me that they are better than dungeon gear in terms of stats alone.
But why not join the best of 2 worlds, get custom gear and add your epic enhancements.

I just dont see a lot of point on armor and weapon crafting, but once i roll a character with those classes i will be able to review them properly.
Though, i had a friend craft me some pieces of armor around lvs10-13 and those pieces were big upgrades over what i had from quests.

[Deleted]

I’ve been pouring money into Crew Skills since getting my speeder training, and I’ve found it so useful to have the epic barrels ready and waiting for me when I hit level able to use them.

I have looked down the line at what guns I can make at later levels and there’s an orange one in there, trainable, but also there’s a green one higher level than it. I assume that when you make that, reverse engineer it to get blue, then RE that to get purple, then make enough of them to get a superior, you are likely to have better than orange gun, with mod slot in it.

Also, I find that some of the green crafted guns are better than my oranges, until I outfit them with mods equal to my level. So for some people it might be faster to simply make the guns, RE them to get blues and go like that as you level up, instead of making barrels. I’ve chosen going down the barrel route because I found a sniper rifle that I really like the look of. If I get crafted guns that I like better, then I’ll switch.

One thing that I’m wondering about, what happens when you RE an Orange gun? Do you get any interesting pattern, or materials? Do you get materials based on what mods are in it at the time, or should you remove all the mods before RE’ing it?

[Teri]

I craft my own (blue, sometime purple) barrels to upgrade the rating/weapon damage of my/companions guns, really increases the damage a lot if you keep them up to date (level 37 commando atm).

Green item's don't seem to sell very well the higher level I get since people likely got oranges in more slots by then using armorings etc to update them. I reverse engineer green weapons I find almost instantly for the crafting mats, I suppose I should level synthweaving/armormech on alts to destroy some greens that just won't sell on the GTN.

[Nathlar]

You're generally not making a full set of armor for your level, it's usually 2 items (just like crafting weapons).

The advantage is that the crafted gear is generally pretty damn good if it's for your level. It will also allow you to later twink out an alt as you RE to get blue/purple and then craft those for your alt.

I think in the end though that mods are going to be more powerful and profitable. We'll see though.

Can anyone pls confirm that Ilum/Belsavis dailies mods/hilts/barrels are better than crafted ones? Soi far it seems like that, so Cybertech does not feel that profitable for me now.

[Deleted]

I have Armormech on my 50 Powertech. Personally, I think you can get more out of it than Armstech. As a BH, you have, at most, 2 weapon slots. Same for your companions. Meanwhile, you and your companions have 6 armor slots. IMO, that makes Armormech more valuable and personally useful.

I can say that Armstech is quite much useless for making pre-Ops/Hardmode-FP gear. I actually was kinda lucky because I got the Mastercraft Purple with the best stats for my Combat Medic quite fast, and it's barely better than my old Orange gun with grade 22 Purple Modifications, and it will be obsolete when I get my next piece of the PvP gear with OP modifications to put into the gun.

Also the stuff you make with Biometric Crystal Alloys is quite much useless unless you want to make very short-lived placeholder items for newly dinged guildies. I'm still hoping that the Purple schematics drops will be worth it, because otherwise this skill is useless.

So, Armortech is certainly more powerful, simply BECAUSE you can make Purple wristpieces and belts with augment slots, considering items on those slots will (at least for now) have any other Modification slots.

[Ghosty]

Also remember that Synthweaving and Armormech will be able to learn patterns for a complete set of unique modable gear from each planet. So if people like the look of a particular set of gear on a planet they will be able to buy a full set from the appropriate crafter.

[Deleted]

I know there's a chart, but too lazy to look for it, but do Armortech and Armstech use the same mission/gathering skills? Scavenging and Investigation? I'm wondering if it's possible to swap the crafting profession later on without the need to swap any of the gathering ones.

[Deleted]

I think armourmech is a big old waste of space.

I hit 50 on monday and am 400/400/400 in Mech, Scav,Underworld.

The only benefit ive seen is it lets me make some armour for my companions, i used a piece or maybe 3 for myself in this whole time to level.

But ive found that they're really only little upgrades, as i leveled i finished all normal quests and did the majority of the 2+and 4 quests and ran each instance when i was within a level or 2 and those along with commendations gave me more that enough armour to hardly ever need my crafting made items.

I assumed before i played at the very least i'd beable to make armour mods for my mod armour to keep it updated but i cant thats a cybertech skill.

total waste of time, and its a waste of time so far at max level, since none of the items i can make are level 50 to he;p me gear for heroics, but i now have the epix schematics so i'll have to see how what i makes compares to gettable gear when i start to get it from heroics, but im relying on other sources of gear to make ALL my armour up to heroic standard. there seems to be a bit of a gap between the level 48ish items and the 50 epic ones that need filling.

and you hardly every get any cool new orange gear schematics, i've had a few but they're few and far between and they cost loads of underworld trading cash to even attempt to get, and when you get them they aren't much different fro mthe gear your running around with.

IMO don't go there, im going to hang in there to see if there is some sort of crafting pass eventually to make it more usefull, because right now it aint.

[JustintimeSS]

Can anyone pls confirm that Ilum/Belsavis dailies mods/hilts/barrels are better than crafted ones? Soi far it seems like that, so Cybertech does not feel that profitable for me now.

The level 50 daily vendor bought items are better than crafted epics by one level, as far as I have seen.

Crafted artifact armor plating/hilt/barrel = 22
Daily artifact armor playing/hilt/barrel = 23

I have bioanalysis and I'm trying my hardest to RE a prototype implant for the artifact schematic to save me from having to save 400 daily commendations but I think the daily ones are still better (unless I crit obviously).

[tripplebooya]

I personally don't think armor or weapon crafting is ever a good choice.
Leveling you can find comparable gear easily, and its foolish to go for best in slot anyway since it'll be obsolete in another level or two.

Taking a enhancement type skill like cybertech or artifice, or biochem is much better

[Deleted]

Yes I will unlearn armstech (and two professions belonging to it) and pick up biochem. Armstech is the biggest crap on earth...