So I've played around with Artificing a bit, but can't seem to make anything useful.
I've looked around a bit, and found some neat schematic guides, but I don't know how to learn these schematics, and haven't seen anything in game that suggests how I might go about it. Where do I start, where do I find more schematics?
How does Artificing work
star-wars-the-old-republic
Best Answer
There's a few ways to learn more patterns for your Crew Skills.
The first, and most obvious, is to Learn them from your trainer. As your skill improves, your trainer will have new schematics availiable to you for a small fee. Generally speaking, items that require a higher skill to create will require better materials, be more powerful, require a higher level character to use, and cost more to learn to craft.
The second, and nearly as important, is Reverse Engineering. Essentially, by deconstructing the items you can make, you'll learn to make improved versions. See this excellent question for more details on exactly how this works, but all you really need to know is that if an item doesn't seem great, you can probably reverse engineer it to learn how to make something better.
The third and final way, is to find a schematic and learn it. In general, items that you can learn to craft in this manner can only be learned in this manner. Schematics can be found in a variety of places, including as drops from mobs (including especially rare ones from special bosses), in lockboxes acquired as quest rewards or from Commendation Vendors, world drops, through Mission Skills (I believe Artificing patterns come from Treasure Hunting primarily, though I may be wrong on this one), and if all else fails, you can buy the patterns from somebody else that found them but can't use them over the GTN.