Emmanuel Lusinchi popped by the official forums last night to give us a little more detail on the plans for revising the modification system:
The current situation with end game gear and item modifications isn’t final and, in fact, many community members like yourself have correctly guessed at what our plans to correct the current design are.
Since this is a fairly important issue to many players, let me disclose more details about what is currently in the work regarding purple items and mods:
– All partially moddable purple items will be made fully moddable again, allowing the removal of the armoring, hilt and barrel.
– The set bonus of end gear purples (PVP and PVE) will be transferable to custom items.
– Some item modifications will be restricted to a certain item type. For example, some item modifications will only fit on helmets, while other will only fit on chests, etc.
As usual, the caveats about unfinished work apply, but this should give you and the community a very good idea of our intentions. We are serious about making custom gear an entirely valid alternative to end game gear and we support the players’ ability to customize their appearance all the way to (and including) end game.
Sounds like it should work out nicely… I was killed in PvP by someone wearing the slave bikini costume last night..so there’s already folks customizing a good deal of gear (my smuggler has had the same chest armor for like 20 levels now, just keep upgrading the mods). But, this should be an improvement at end game.