Rise of the Hutt Cartel coming April 9th!

[Tecknik]

And why should I use elite war hero gear and not Arkanian gear if they are removing all expertise?

You should use the best PvE gear you can until you can buy the new tier of PvP gear as a general rule.  You get a certain amount of Expertise for free from Bolster even with PvE gear and since no "old" gear (War Hero, EWH) has Expertise you want to wear your best gear.

The trick is to upgrade carefully to get to max Expertise (2018) while keeping a good amount of primary and secondary stats.

At least that's what I've found so far.

^ This.

Wearing full raid gear yesterday in all WZs I did, I was at 1950 expertise, thanks to Bolster.  Prior to this when I wore full PvP gear (old stuff), I was at 888 entering the WZ and around 1200 after Bolster.  

I was the top player in all WZs I did last night.

Seeing as how the patch notes only state they lowered the Bolster effect of empty slots, this should still be the case.

[Tbone]

And why should I use elite war hero gear and not Arkanian gear if they are removing all expertise?

You should use the best PvE gear you can until you can buy the new tier of PvP gear as a general rule.  You get a certain amount of Expertise for free from Bolster even with PvE gear and since no "old" gear (War Hero, EWH) has Expertise you want to wear your best gear.

The trick is to upgrade carefully to get to max Expertise (2018) while keeping a good amount of primary and secondary stats.

At least that's what I've found so far.

^ This.

Wearing full raid gear yesterday in all WZs I did, I was at 1950 expertise, thanks to Bolster.  Prior to this when I wore full PvP gear (old stuff), I was at 888 entering the WZ and around 1200 after Bolster.  

I was the top player in all WZs I did last night.

Seeing as how the patch notes only state they lowered the Bolster effect of empty slots, this should still be the case.

That would explain how I was getting MELTED in PvP the past week in certain matches. The ones I played today went well, though. I used Partisan/EWH mixed. I refuse to remove my white crystals. If they need to replace them with Power ones, I will make them do that.

[Tbone]

Ok, read some more on the expertise crystals. Apparently if you have exp crystals, then it thinks your whole weapon has expertise and doesn't bolster that weapon - hence removing the crystal. However, I think this means that if you have at least Partisan level weapons, it would be more beneficial to keep the expertise crystals in.

I spread my mods and enhancements over all of my gear, so I'm pretty much screwed. What a stupid stupid system.

[Zooey]

Moved to new Dev Tracker thread.