Tymus said

Hi all,
I just wanted to hear some feedback about the chestguard options I have. Right now I have three sets of customizable chestguards, one of which is Trooper only. I have Aric and Elara as companions, so I'm working to keep them as protected as possible, just like me. I'm obviously wearing the Trooper only chest piece, since the other two cannot, despite being troopers. However, it's not a "standard" trooper chestguard. It, and the chestguard I have on Aric, is a jacket that makes my character look more like a Rebel Trooper from A New Hope than the Trooper from the Hope cinematic or the Clone Troopers. It protects just as well, but doesn't project the image of trooper. So, the question is this: is protection more important, or image?
(Note: I have decided to go the protection route, and gave the nice "standard" chestguard to Elara. I'm interested, though, in the general view of Trooper players about this subject.)
Thanks,
Tymus

That's absolutely true, but what's awesome in SWTOR is that you have customizable equipment in the game. This means you can grab any armor and/or weapon with armoring/mod/barrel/hilt/color crystal/enhancement slot and just fill those in, add an augment slot at an augmentation station and voilá, you look like a scout trooper but dish out damage like mad! And even have set boni from Black Hole endgame gear! And a cool-sounding and -looking weapon you remember obtaining from the bonus series on Tatooine!

So while great stats are great, you can always replicate or improve them by adding or switching mods to your customizable gear. That might not entirely be true for belts and bracers. I'm not sure. I haven't seen non-set armorings in endgame. Mind you, I haven't even touched endgame since 1.3, alas.