With Star Wars: The Old Republic, the BioWare team has already announced and had been beta testing Combat Styles but another big update that’s coming in update 7.0 is Legendary Items. This will complement Combat Styles in letting players customize their characters even more.
Legacy of the Sith, the upcoming expansion, will introduce legendary items like earpieces and implants that have legendary bonuses. These bonuses would only appear on these items but will be similar to what you would have gotten before by collecting sets of items and getting set bonuses. So in this new update these kinds of bonuses will only happen on legendary items and will not have said bonus. So you won’t have to wear a whole set just to get particularly helpful bonuses, letting you wear different items in order to customize how you want to play.
Legendary Items will be adaptable, as you’ll get them at a lower item rating and upgrade them over time. Instead of having to replace all your pieces of your current gear as you get better items or better bonuses, you’ll be free to just upgrade your Legendary Items and increase the rating.
Because Legendary Items are going to replace set bonuses and change the way items work, they won’t be that difficult to obtain since they’re designed to last. Current set bonuses will be phased out, with current set bonuses deactivated on level 76. The stats will still apply to your character but the set bonuses will be gone, so you’ll want to grab some Legendaries. The new system is flexible since you can mix and match pieces individually to customize your character.
This is only the introduction and BioWare promises more details on itemization going forward. For more, you can read this official update post at the SWTOR site.