Gear quality only affects primary and secondary statistics, not tertiary.

Purple, blue, and green gear all have the same amount of the tertiary statistic.

Only mastery, power, and endurance are effected. Still important, but not relavent to these guides.

Mastery, power, and critical all have diminishing returns. This means that the more of the statistic you have, the less benefit you gain from adding more of that statistic.

For DPS classes, adding critical is more beneficial than adding mastery or power up until a certain point. For some classes, that change happens as early as 2,500 Critical.

For more information, including class specific details, I highly recommend Sinrai's Charts.

Bosses in SWTOR have a 10% defense chance, which means DPS players need to hit 110% accuracy to avoid missing any attacks.

A missed attack is not only missed damage, but often negatively impacts your other damaging abilities that interact with each other.

This is the most important statistic for any DPS player.

In 7.0, the magic number to get 110% accuracy is 2,694 accuracy points.

Alacrity can be very complicated. I will attempt to explain it here in as simple a way as I can manage.

More speed is always better. But SWTOR works on a Global Cooldown (GCD system).

The default GCD is 1.5 seconds, meaning that after using an ability, you have to wait 1.5 seconds to use another ability. (Some abilities ignore this, but not many damaging abilities.)

Alacrity can reduce your GCD, but the game rounds up to the nearest 10th. So if you have enough alacrity points for a GCD of 1.31 or a GCD of 1.37, your actual GCD will be 1.4 seconds for both.

Therefore, in order to not waste statistic points, we want to get just below your goal alacrity GCD.

However, GCDs are effected by other things, such as game lag, server lag, and user error. Therefore it is recommended to add a slight buffer to your alacrity points to ensure you consistently hit your goal GCD.

For a more in depth explanation, check out Merlyn's Alacrity Guide, which goes into much more depth.

These guides will include an alacrity buffer already - no need to add more! (buffer = 250 above threshhold)