Kaffis Mark V wrote:
Also, one more note: I recommend hitting the space port on your starter world after a few levels so you can jet up to the Fleet and pick up your gathering skill(s?) early. I'm not sure if Archaeology or Slicing will provide any opportunities on the starter worlds, but I was able to Scavenge off most of the Strong or higher droids on Tython, and I presume Bioanalysis would find the Strong wildlife similarly productive.
Gathering nodes doesn't require a companion, so you can use it before you get access to yours. Knights can even send their first one out on some missions or crafting errands before getting off planet; I know Consulars and Smugglers get their companion pretty late in the process, so you'll pretty much have to wait until you're actually done with the starter world to do more than gather with those.
However, I got my gathering up to the mid-20's, and dug up enough materials to skill my cybertech up to the second tier of recipes and get blue mod recipes reverse engineered from about half of my first tier, all without setting foot on Coruscant or spending money on missions (well, except for the mission I sent Qyzen out on to make a piece of droid gear to thank Furio for some augments he made for me).
In addition, just visiting with the crafting/harvesting/mission trainers on the Fleet to get their codex entries got me most of the way through level 5, lol.
I can say that archaeology does indeed come into play on both coruscant and dromund kaas. Not so much in the beta (as most nodes would show up on your minimap and in game, but you couldn't "mine" them). But 95% of those seem to have been fixed.