In the #1 official SWTOR Podcast Hosts Eric Musco and Brooks Guthrie interviewed Bioware Developers, Daniel Erickson and Damion Schubert.  I’ve ripped the important bits pertaining to Group Finder and Gearing.  The entire transcript can be found here.

Eric: Speaking of systems that we are going to be able to iterate on, why don’t we talk a little about 1.3? 1.3 is our next content patch that is coming out, why don’t you guys talk a little bit about what players can expect to see in 1.3?

Damion: 1.3 is, well, it is the group finder patch. That’s not the official name, but really that is our top priority. We have some other features that we are going to go and put inside of it but really this is us really getting a group finder to you guys as fast as humanly possible.

Brooks: I am super excited about group finder because that is one of the biggest things that I have run into in lower game is finding groups and actually being able to run those flashpoints that I get. For players who have maybe never used a group finder before, and I know we have plenty of those, what is that actually going to look like in the game?

Damion: It is fairly simple and basically what we want to do is to give you a really simple front end that you can use as well as those give you the ability to fine tune your choices a little more so the really simple approach is you open a group finder you choose what role – tank, heal or DPS – that you are willing to fulfill and you can choose multiple if your class can fill multiple and then you choose what kind of content that you want to do and that content is going to be flashpoints, heroic flashpoints, operations although story mode operations only for now and then world content, the planetary content where you basically say I want a quest on Belsavis.

Then if you hit select from there, then it will try to find people who want to do that stuff. Now if there is a particular dungeon or particular planet that you want to do by default what it does it gets you to the level of appropriate flashpoints for you. If you really want to the quest in the Mandalorian Raiders flashpoint for example you can go and unselect everything else and just say, “Hey, I just want to sign up for that.” And the group finder will try to find other people who are looking for that content as well so that is a great way for you to target certain quests that you want to accomplish. We felt that was important in our game because of where the game is right now where people are trying to clear out their quest logs and accomplish certain goals in certain places.

However, if you play the random game, especially for flashpoints and heroic flashpoints, and you just set yourself purely random then like yeah we are going to throw a cookie at you. We are going to give you, I forgot what the itemization guys ended up offering, but you are going to want to try to do a random dungeon day I believe. The patch is also mostly going to be a features patch. It’s going to have a slightly shorter development time than the last patch and it is going to be content light, but it is going to have a heavy focus on a couple of key features that we felt were really important to be giving to you guys.

Daniel: You are also getting the next part of Legacy, which we had a little in-game advert going for that beforehand, which are your character perks, which is that is all about the uniqueness of your character how you want to play each individual character. Hey, you know what I want to actually get my speeder early. I want to get more XP from PvP. I want to really sort of shape how I am going to play this guy. I have already played another character maybe I want to see different content but I want to be able to just mostly do that content and still get my character up at the same rate which brings a lot of exciting stuff and although Legacy will keep going after that and we will continue to expand it, those are really the two biggest thematic concepts that will be there for the players.

Damion: And then we have two key itemization features that are coming to you guys that I think will be really good for the end game players in particular. The first is augment tables and what this is going to allow you to do is to allow you to add an augment slot which is the slot that crafters get for free whenever they get a critical hit crafting item. It will allow you to use item modification table anywhere in the game to add an augment slot to any piece of wearable gear armor and get that augment slot so that will pretty much allow all of our gear at the end game to be equivalent to each other, which will solve a lot of the itemization problems that we have had in the past.

The other thing that personally I am excited about is adaptive gear. Adaptive gear is the ability for some gear, in particular social gear, to morph its armor rating based on the skill of the wearer the short form is that, yes, you can now tank in a bikini. I know that is important to some people. It also means that things like the – was it the pilot outfit – the sand trooper, the sand person outfit all of those things in particular on the social vendors as well as the armor on the collector’s edition vendors and the security vendors all that stuff will be able to be worn at end game, especially when you combine it with the augment table technology.

Brooks: So how does one exactly role play a body type four Sith Warrior Juggernaut tanking in explosive content? Anyone know how that goes?

Eric: I think he just explained it.

Daniel: Did you just refer to the bikini as explosive content?

Brooks: I may have! And I think that I how he explained it.

Eric: I think it is self-explanatory.

Brooks: Yeah.

Eric: So basically it seems like you are making the changes towards basically allowing a player to look however they want to accomplish any goal they want to, I mean, if someone wants to tank in a bikini. You know, some people want to tank and look like they are Darth Vader fantasy have just being in tons of armor and being able to take a lot of hits. Whereas other people, for some reason, want to tank in bikini.

Daniel: Well a lot of it is about giving people goals and a lot of those goals tend to be being able to make yourself an individual. Being able to do something that is a little above and beyond so it is never going to be as easy as it is to just go get your end game gear cause you are still going to need your mods, you are going to have to do that stuff, right, but if you want to take the extra step to say, “Hey, I am not just going to be the guy who got this stuff. I am going to be the guy who is going to go in and show off in the raid” or “I am going to be the guy who is going to go in and punk you in the warzone wearing this ridiculous outfit.” There is definitely a player base that is a great goal to set up for.

Damion: And it has always been the goal of the itemization team that the mod system eventually become the ability for you to preserve and keep whatever appearance you wanted really and these two pieces of technology are really the two largest remaining steps that we needed to get to that place or I think there are still a couple of more things they want to do but I think with this piece of technology they are pretty much almost there.

Eric: So if you are that guy who has an entire bank bay filled with orange gear… like me. 1.3 is made for you?

Damion: Correct.

Eric: Awesome, awesome, well do you guys have anything else to add before we wrap it up.

Damion: Not yet, not yet. 1.4 is shaping up to be quite an impressive patch as well. I can’t wait to talk about it, but that is not this particular podcast so…