Replace "rifle shot" in his post with "overload shot." this is what he meant to say.

Okay, I really can't stand reading this in the forums anymore. Its driving me nuts, Why does everyone open AB>HS>BS why the hell would you waste your ONLY other skill that applies acid blade with the 12 second cooldown RIGHT after you already applied acid blade? Personally i find that it works MUCH better like this: AB>HS>shiv>lacerate>lacerate>AB>BS>shiv>lacerate by this time you've hopefully gotten a TA regrant from collateral strike, and you can refresh your stim boost, and after this i mostly improvise, trying to make sure corrosive dart is on them, and applying acid blade whenever possible. my overall point is this: you can begin a fight with 12 seconds of acid blade uptime, followed by 50% uptime of the DoT after that. Why does everyone seem to love wasting their backstab so early? another reason to save it is if you get pulled, knocked back, or your initial target dies before you've gotten into your rotation. in a situation like this, you can just acid blade and backstab another target, I guess i just feel like tons of people are wasting the dps gain they can get from acid blade. And with our constant nerfs we NEED every bit of dps we can get. tl;dr: DON'T HS>BACKSTAB

The deployable shield has nothing to do with it. I get this message on my operative when trying to kneel for explosive probe. Something else is going wrong.

The only thing lethality ops use TA for is stim boost and cull. From one perspective, seeing as this is the shared tree with snipers, who have no TA mechanic, you should need it less. In addition, the sniper version of cull not only has a channel time, but a 10 second cooldown. Instead of limiting OPs with the channel and cooldown, you're limited by fewer TAs than other ops and the 10m range that operatives get with cull. The spec isn't designed to cull spam.