Wildstar - New Player's Guide to PvP Gearing

---Leveling---
While leveling via pvp has been nerfed, it can still be a lot of fun. If you want to be the most effective you can be in PvP at your level you should probably head over to the PvP vendors in your faction's city and talk to the NPC that has the title of Leveling PvP Gear. This gear will help you the most because it has two special stats:
PvP Power - increase your damage against other players PvP Defense - decrease the damage you take from other players
---For 50's---
Congrats on reaching level 50! (Please note that the following is based off my own limited time and research into the new WS: Reloaded patch and may not be 100% perfect, please assist if you know more stuff)
Step 1 : Head over to the PvP vendors in your faction's city and talk to the S2 PvP vendor. At the very top of this shop is the Season 2 PvP gear that is purchasable with gold! Select the Assault / Support tab then get everything! (I believe the total cost is around 1 Plat, note that you get this much from about 2 games)
Finding things: If you don't know where something is in the city, speak with a guard, they have lots of options. Note: If you have any Prestige you will probably want to buy a couple slots of Prestige PvP gear at this stage. Weapon being a priority.
Step 2 : Get your contracts and quests. In your factions main city you want to go to the contracts board and pickup some pvp contracts. Most importantly you only want to pickup the ones that you're going to be able to do, so if you see X Arena wins or Finish a Warplot but you don't plan to Warplot or Arena then dont get those.
Note: The Tier 1 contract is repeatable and rotates between a couple
Complete a battleground - win or lose
Get 20 kills / assists - doable in most battlegrounds (unless its a full stomp)
Earn 500 Prestige - this one is the money. This counts for the PvP bags that you earn from queuing up so always hold one(two if not PvP weekend) of the 300 Prestige bags in reserve. If you get this contract just open a bag and then hand in the contract right away and get a new one.
Step 3 : Queue for PvP! Press 'N' and go to the PvP tab. Now queuing for random Battlegrounds will net you bonus loot so you probably want to do that. If you plan on playing for awhile don't worry about hard queuing for the ones that fulfill your contracts, they will come up.
Step 4 : Upgrade to Prestige PvP Gear. Slowly purchase all the gear slots for Prestige, this should only take a couple hours. The one thing that you don't want to buy are the PvP Enhancers as they only add rune slots to your gear! Yes, they do not increase the stats of the item AT ALL. They also drop from the Win / Loss bags you get from each BG and you'll likely have extra soon enough.
Step 5 : Get runes! So the last stage of the gearing game is to put runes in your gear. Now while this may not seem important at first runes can give you a TON of stats and the people you've seen doing Godly damage in PvP are likely fully runed. While there are not a lot of guides out there currently for runes here's how they generally work.
Mini Rune Guide
Most slots have a corresponding Fusion rune, these have cool effects such as Full Strength (Chest) which increases your Vigor and Lifesteal based off your current HP. You'll probably want to figure out which Fusion rune works best for you in each item.
Next you have Base runes, Normal sets, and Class sets.
Class sets: These runes give you a rune set bonus but only look across one item and cannot stack (e.g. an Assault Stalker could use Garroter runes in an item to get cool effects). You can only use one of a type and quality of rune at a time but you can use the same rune multiple times at different qualities. This is a bit complex but basically you can use a purple level rune of crit hit chance and an orange level rune of crit hit chance in the same item but not two purples / oranges. Note that oranges count as two runes towards the set.
Normal sets: Just like class sets only you can benefit from them more than once (or so I've heard).
Base runes: Use as many as you like, no set bonuses though.
If you liked this guide please let me know, also you may like some of the other guides I’ve written:
New Player’s Guide to….