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Quite a number of you are really close to hitting level cap, or already have, so in preparation for that, you may want to know what to do now. This handy guide has been put together by a loyal listener of ours. A big thank you to Ryyven for working so hard on this.

1. Doing Daily Quests on Ilum and Belsavis
You’ll want to do these daily quests to advance your gear levels. Completing daily quests in the 2 major quest hubs on Belsavis and Ilum reward you with Daily Commendations which you use to buy upgrade from 2 Mission Support vendors there. One sells level 50 Mods, Armoring, Hilts, and Barrels for 8 commendations each. The other sells implants and earpieces for 120 commendations each. Both sell novelty items like speeders as well.
Ilum: There is a Heroic 2+ daily quest that rewards a level 56 epic Enhancement and 3 Daily Commendations.
Belsavis: There is one Heroic 2+ daily quest and a couple Heroic 4 quests. One rewards a level 56 epic Mod and 3 Daily Commendations. One rewards a level 56 purple Armoring and 3 Daily Commendations. A third one rewards 3 Daily Commendations and a level 50 moddable version of companion weapons (best weapons obtainable for companions that use techblades, techstaffs, or other unique-type weapons).

2. Corellian Commendations
Finish up your class quests or side quests on Corellia, or do the repeatable group quests on Correlia for Corellian Commendations. You can buy moddable level 50 mod-able gloves/chestpieces/weapons complete with blue armoring, mods, enhancements, barrels, and hilts. If you don’t need any of the gear, I recommend saving up for the Ancient Artifact Storage Box for 36 commendations. Inside is a random Level 50 Purple piece of armor. It’s random so, you may not get what you or your companions can use, but they’re BOE and you can sell them on the GTN for credits which you can use to get what you need. As far as I know, belts, wrists, off-hand slot items (focus, shields, scatterguns), implants, relic slot items, and earpieces (only Cybertechs can pop in Augments in their earpices) are not moddable.

3. PvP
There’s an open world PvP zone on Ilum, as well as other the other warzones. At this point, you can use gear with the Expertise stat, which improves your healing, increases damage done, and reduces damage received in PvP. That being said, doing the PvP daily quests is a great way to gear up. The stats on Champion PvP gear right are pretty much comparable to what you would get in Hardmode Flashpoints, better than Normal mode Operations, and probably easier to obtain.
If you’ve never PvPed before, you’ll still have the “Complete 1 Warzone” Quest from the PvP terminal in the fleet. Once you turn that in, you get access to Daily and Weekly PvP quests.
The reward for completing the Daily “Win 3 Warzones” Quest is 1 Champion Gear bag which contains 3 Centurion Commendations and a chance to drop a token for Champion gear. The Weekly “Win 9 Warzones” Quest awards 4 Champion bags. You have a week to win all 9, so don’t feel like you need to rush through to get all of them in a day.
The Ilum PVP daily for “kill 30 imps” and the weekly “kill 150 imps” awards 1 bag for the daily and 4 bags for the weekly. They’re slightly buggy now, so I suggest avoiding them for now (unequal imp/rep numbers, lagginess, etc.)
One thing you should be aware of is that you can only have 1000 Warzone Commendations stored up at any one time. Any more you earn over that number is basically lost (for now until Bioware fixes this by sending them to your mailbox or something)

4. Crafting
I’m not sure about how useful crafting is at higher levels. As far as I know, you can only craft gear and mods up to level 49, and it’s probably going to be a lot less time consuming to just do daily quests for the commendations for better mods and gear. You’ll probably get more credits for just completing the quests than from slicing even. So, I guess we’ll just have to wait to see what epic recipes drop in Operations and Hardmode Flashpoints that will make crafting worth it (The “Rakata” gear you sometimes see, for example, uses “Alloy”, which is only dropped from final bosses in Hardmode Flashpoints).

5. Collecting Datacrons
Datacrons for extra stats, sure, why not? There’s also a relic you get from combining Matrix Shards which is tuned for level 50 characters. That’s probably the most worth it thing to get. There are numerous websites which tell you which combinations of Matrix Shards (ie. Red, Red, Blue) will give you the stats you need. One of the resources I refer to is here.

6. Finishing all the bonus series you’ve missed on other planets
Find out how all the planet stories end!

7. Flashpoints
Lots of interesting stories here, some related to the Knights of the Old Republic games, some of them multi-episodal ones. Not the most efficient way to gear up, but they’re a lot more fun, more challenging, and less repetitive than doing Dailies or PvP. Definitely worth your time and effort. Plus, you *may* even find those moddable pants for your level 50 Jedi Consular :p