I've been looting a boatload of the blue, 15 purity augs from the T1 and T2 zones. So I'll assume that T4 drops the violet. And from what I read, we must turn in four of the violet essences to the quest npc in the City of Bronze in order to select an emblem for our chest armor. I'm wondering if we can receive same/similar stats by substituting an emblem from a previous expansion.
Same stats no, similiar yes, ..............tried both the rallying, and the new ILLdaera in glorious armor. Seems Sony has restricted these emblems in the same way at they did previous emblems. IE: in cultural armor, they do not increase to posted stats, rather with a full set of cultural, they remain in the 50% range.
Emblems only give full stats to raid armor. The only way in which cultural armor is treated differently from any other set is that even if you have the raid version of the type 17 augment (Phantasmic seals in the current expansion) then it is still treated as group armor per the base armor type.
Considering the emblem mechanism, its rules are : - group gear (including cultural, as it can be done without raid elements) will grants the relative Max of 70% of the optimum Max. - raid gear will grants the relative Max of 100% of the optimum Max. - each visible armor grants 10% of the relative Max, except the 8th and last which gives 30% in order to get a full relative Max. - the Breastplate fix the kind of eligible armor kind : origin (group or raid), tiers (T1, T2, ...), expansion (VoA, HoT, UF, ...). Each of the 3 parameters must be the same as the BP to be taken in account. - each piece must be worn (in bag, won't be taken in account). - stats are reduced to the lower integer.