The new gearing system introduced with 7.0 has been widely criticized, and is also considered by many players to be rather confusing, with a number of new currencies and upgrade paths present for different types of content. Here’s how you can get the best gear, and what content you need to play for it - and when.
Maximum Item Rating in 7.0
Throughout 6.0, players had a clear goal with gearing in mind - hit Item Rating 306. After that, you could worry about fine tuning your set bonuses, mods and augments. Things in 7.0 have been complicated a bit, but also simplified. Sort of. The maximum Item Rating in 7.0 is, for now, 334. However, this isn’t simple to achieve, nor is it really needed for most of the content. After 6.0’s approach to rewarding all activities with essentially the same access to high-end gear, this new expansion is changing things completely by tying certain tiers of gear and gear-upgrade currency to specific content. Leveling gear through level 79 will bridge the gap between 6.0’s cap of 306 and the lower tiers of new gear, with progression designed to have players land on IR 320 when reaching level 80.
Getting gear in 7.0
When you reach IR 320 with this very first set of “Conquest Gear”, called Decurion, you will step onto the path of new gearing in 7.0. Here, increasing your item rating relies less on actual drops (though these are still involved) and more on farming specific currencies needed to upgrade the gear you have. Essentially, it is broken down into four categories. Conquest gear is capped at 326, with a future update increasing this to 330. Through completing Conquest objectives - and generally speaking any content throughout the game world, with a focus on solo activities or easier content - you will earn Medals of Commendation, Aquatic Resource Matrices and Decurion Isotope Stabilizers. You will use these resources, and credits, to buy Decurion gear and upgrade gear pieces you already have. Gear above Item Rating 306 won’t be moddable at all, in order to “streamline” this upgrade path - you won’t be swapping out individual mods, but entire gear pieces. The way this works is that from Gear Vendors, you can buy the actual pieces of armor, with a fixed IR cap - in the case of the conquest vendor, 320 - which will then introduce upgrade stock for the Upgrade Vendors. When you buy one of these upgrades, it immediately replaces your equipped item rather than dropping in your inventory. This is important to note because it has caused no small amount of headache for players finding out the hard way - when you buy an upgrade, like a bump up to IR 322 of your Decurion chest piece, the new item automatically and completely overwrites the previous, which is irretrievably destroyed - dye modules, augment kits, augments included. In the case of weapons, this also means color crystals and tunings. That - and the fact that the weapon outfitter has been delayed to 7.1 - means blinging your weapons in 7.0 isn’t really worth it. You’ll likely be running with the stock Decurion weapon design until 7.1 is released if you are keen on gearing. You can bite the bullet and stick to your 306 weapon, as the stat differences are not huge and some testing has shown that 306 gear is better in bolstered (sub-80 capped) content. This will torpedo your item rating though, making the gearing process much slower. For lightsaber-users, it might be worth taking out your color crystal and packing it over into the upgraded weapon each time, but that will be a credit sink and a risk of forgetting before buying the upgrade. So, how do you get the currencies for these upgrades? Right now, the best course of action is to farm Flashpoints - not much has changed in this regard. The difference compared to 6.0 is that the rotation system means that you won’t be grinding Hammer Station, but rather the selection that is available in the Group Finder that week. It is possible to access all Flashpoints at all times, but not all are included on the Group Finder, and playing these via the GF adds bonuses that make gearing much faster. The idea is to ramp up the difficulty from Veteran Flashpoints to Master Mode Flashpoints as soon as your gear allows, and eventually move onto Operations - here too going up the rungs of the difficulty ladder as soon as your gear allows it. As opposed to 6.0, where doing any content would eventually let you completely kit yourself out, the difference being time invested, in 7.0 you really only can get the best gear by doing the hardest content. If you are serious about gearing, where it was possible to “coast” along before, you now have to get into high-tier raiding to max out that item rating. Relying on team recruiting via Fleet Chat is possible, but we strong urge players to join active guilds with established Ops groups to make the process as painless as possible. In the initial, Veteran Flashpoint stages of the process, you can also add to your Aquatic Resource Matrix farming runs some Heroic and Weekly missions in order to shake things up a bit. PvP gear, called “Thyrsian” gear and bought with a different currency, Thyrsian Production Accelerants, is farmed differently and its stats are also optimized differently. You currently cannot upgrade Thyrsian gear upwards to the maximum Item Rating - that is only possible with Ops gear. Additionally, avid PvP players have noted that, due to the way stats are bolstered in PvP, running with IR 306 gear is somehow better. If you ask us, PvP/Thyrsian gear can be flat out ignored entirely. Can you gear effectively in 7.0 as a solo player? Not really - it is possible to acquire the resources to max out your Conquest gear with just Heroic and Weekly missions, but it will take a while, and there is only so far you can get with that upgrade path before reaching a dead end that means you either settle for IR 326 and wait until future updates bump up the IR cap for Conquest gear, or dabble in group content after all.
Legendary Items
Legendary Items are 7.0’s replacement for Set Bonuses, which are no longer operable after you pass level 75. You can still wear the Set Bonus gear, but simply won’t benefit from the effects of said bonuses. The same role as Set Bonuses, previously spread across items you’d equip in your various armor slots, is now shouldered by Legendary Items. The driving idea here is simplification, while also giving players more options. With Set Bonuses, you needed many pieces of the same Set to achieve the more interesting tiers of the Bonus, so usually you’d need to have one full or near-full set equipped, possibly alongside one piece of Amplified Champion. This means the majority of your gear would be serving the purpose of one bonus effect. With Legendary Items, one such item - going into the Implant slot - will yield a full bonus. Some are direct mirrors of pre-existing Set Bonuses crammed into one Implant, while others are new entirely. Since you have two Implant slots on your character sheet, you can equip two Legendary Items at any given time and enjoy the benefits of two bonuses. To get Legendary Items, you will need to complete a mission for a new NPC on the Fleet, who is hanging around the same area as the various 7.0 gear vendors. A snobby scientist, he’ll make you wait, and then he’ll make you complete a swath of various activities across the game to charge a “Neuro Key”. Completing this mission will give you access to the Legendary Item Vendor - you’re not actually getting one for the mission itself. Here you can purchase Legendary Items for the price 100 Medal of Commendation, 6500 Tech Fragments, 20 Aquatic Resource Matrix and 25,000 Credits. The same price applies to upgrades, which work the same way as with other gear.
