How much has the surge nerf changed things?

Get any orange pistol. Rip the guts out. Socket it with aim stuff eg. your cast-offs.

I'm torn between crit/surge and power. Alacrity probably won't do much as she's more limited by cooldowns than cast times.

The 4+ daily from northern Belsavis gives the blue staff. Gives weapons for all the companions, including an orange pistol slotted for aim. As has been said already though, cosy up to an armstech or start leveling a crafting alt. Would be nice if they'd merge the techstaffs and electrostaffs together (and techswords with vibroswords). Smugglers and bounty hunters use different stats in their pistols with no major issues.

Like Bowdaar. Rwarrrr.

I went through the same thing in the midlevels. I had a lot of abilities but not many ways to regenerate ammo. Trust me it gets easier. Procs from shielding and, in my spec, energy blast both help a lot. Check out Mirrormusume's (spelling?) excellent posts on bounty hunter powertech tanks if you want ideas for efficient rotations. Just keep a tab open on TORhead for the ability name translations.

Bonus bosses are harder than end bosses atm. Tionese gear has no purpose atm. Simple solution. Make end bosses drop Tionese set pieces. Move the columi drops onto the bonus bosses. It makes no sense to me that the hardest flashpoint bosses drop worse loot than easier flashpoint bosses who drop the same loot as ops bosses.

I think this is a great idea. The whole "DPS should hold back" thing is usually a defence of low output DPS players. Bad DPS produce little aggro. Reckless DPS overaggro. The best DPS cruise along 2% below the tank They should use the resolve bars around portraits (and possibly over heads) for this. At the moment they serve no purpose in PVE.

Just chiming in to say: Yes to same-server LFD tool. No to cross-server LFD tool. Part of the reason I pug is to find good people for my friendlist so I can pug less often. Same-server LFD helps me do this faster. Cross-server LFD makes this slower.

I already have the colicoid power blaster rifle but I'd love to get my hands on one with a scope and stock like some of the esh-kha have (example). Any ideas?

Flavour.

A key shadow defensive ability has limited charges. A big enough pack could theoretically break this down quite fast. That's probably the origin of what you've heard about shadows. I've never had the pleasure of grouping with a shadow tank but they seem to clear raid content the same as everyone else.

I have a 50 PVE tank specced vanguard and a baby guardian. In terms of feel, the guardian is a WoW warrior right down to rage and the names of abilities (stack those sunders). The vanguard plays a lot like a vanguard in Mass Effect 2. Guardians not holding aggro is a complete myth. The ones I've worked with do fine. Vanguards do get a 60 sec CD mortar volley that makes AOE trivial every other pull. Guardians get better survival CDs. Edit: In terms of what it is like to tank in this game, I'd say TBC era WoW after a lot of nerfs to the heroics. The big difference is that almost every mob is ranged so your own movement and positioning will be tested more.