Yep its a filler to be used when i cant get close and personal with them.

trace... interupt on grapple(geting kb) trace.. interupt on rocket charge trace... quell trace... electro dart do i have to say more

PT sux at heat managment at low lvls. Latter its geting much better especialy for pyros and adv prototype.

Depends how mob attacks are classified if they do a lot ot tech/force PT threat generation plumets due to reliance on shield vents to keep dpsing.

QFT decent player can compensate for 1 maybe 2 bads if enemy team is not very good. But he cant be everywhere and he cant carry entire team.

oh hi jes my grappling hook was missing you

The problem is that entire game was made with those shield limitations in mind. Tanks would became nearly immortal if we were able to shield any type of attack. We need tweaks that will 1st make our game play more fluid 2nd make our total dps comparable to other clases within our mana pool. Curently its lower than most other clases while we also are unable to sustain it for extended period of time. The second issue is causing most of the threat problems. Shield tech has quite high opening threat then its suddenly and rapidly droping once we have to keep our heat under control. Considering lack of threat meters its easy to out agro a tank who doesnt have a stable dps output. In pvp its even worse cos if someone is able to outlast our medicore "burst" then our sustained dps is nowhere near win scenario. In same time most common clases in PVP have much higer damage cap(mercenary) or sustained dps(sorcerer).

Yes unfortunatly shield tech is starting to struggle due to how our "mana pool" is tied to our shield procing. Basicaly in pve enemies that do a lot of tech/foce based attacks cause us to lose threat, in pvp tech/force attacks are soo common that we are forced to rely on vent heat to kill peoples. In extened ecounters we are reduced to grapple,quell,taunt bots that hit like wet noodle. We still retain our utility but its hard to kill anyone with rapid shots.

Judging from recent threads shield tech tree is starting to be in urgent need of some tweaks to make it more efficient in pvp and pve. I was predicting it to happen in terms of pvp long time ago and it seems that pve guys are also strugling with shield proc based limitations. I would like to make 3 suggestions. 1st give us 5% per point bonus to surging flames. To counter 10% surge nerf. 2nd empowered tech has additionaly 2% per point chance to vent 8 heat on damage sharing cd with shield vents. 3rd heat blast now its a passive ability: every 5s you get 1 stack of heat blast. Using rapid shots witll consume all of the gathered stacks, venting 3 heat per stack, deling 1/3 of current heat blast damge per stack and if ion cylinder is present large amount of threat per each consumed stack.

Hard to say on nightmare lands. Usualy if i see a PT he is a pyro.

Thats quite possible. After patch geting a demolisher medal is much much harder for iron fist. I am not sure how bad its for other clases/builds but iron fist got hit pretty hard by this nerf. We are crtiting a lot but our max damage is relativly low and at same time our total alpha is hard caped in pvp because we have to rely on geting hit by attack that can be shielded. I have respeced to pyro to test how that change affect it and performance hit is much less noticable, another nerf like this and i am afraid shield tech will be reduced to guard bot because more and more specs/clases has their ehp extended beyond our "mana" pool. At same time i have found out that my usual total damage done is a bit higer crossing 300k more offen.

Yep mar is in very serious need of revmap. Once we get expansion and some new skills/cd even naga might not be enough.

Finaly somone in BW realized how gamebreaking this bug was in pvp.

Damage is still way below the amount the mitigation should reduce it if base damage would be a tooltip value. I think the problem is that at some point the damage got nerfed to the ground, in same time no one bothered to adjust talent trees or fix tooltip display. 25% increase on tooltip value would net a not to bad increase on dps for 1pt talent. Prototype cylinders would still be a bit meh compared to what other stances get from it. Currently the 25% talent is pretty much not worth puting points in it if you get deep enough to prototype tree to get retractable blade or to pyro tree to get missile.

Yes i am aware that the dps base value is higer than base hps value otherwise we would have immortal healers issue. The main problem is that its hard to determine even rough base values and the disparity on dps clases. Without ability to check them we can't estimate how much expertise advantage on healing is closing the disparity bewen dps and healing. It also doesnt change the snowball effect on healer stacking. You have also opened another cans of worms aka sustainablity of dps vs sustainablity of healing and burst vs ehp.