While much neglected, the Shadow Warriors have some great skills that they bring to groups.
They're able to switch between Stances that effectively allow them to bring to the battlefield a variety of tools to harass Destruction.
Early on you're mostly working from a distance - raining doom down upon hapless toons and generally working in the group well. While generally you're static when you fire & dish out dmg - click&fire lag is about 2 seconds with a cooldown, so you can flow with the action.
RvE is pretty much a grind - you'll have to switch stance a lot (with virtually every NPC you tackle). You'll find yourself having more fun with groups and RvR - you'll also have to change stance less often.
While you'll find yourself working from a distance - our role is pretty much supporting the front-line and any incoming. We don't hurt enough to really slow those heading towards the squishies. In this situation the best approach is to use out abilities to reduce the attributes of the incoming and then use [spell]9092[/spell] to hold them for a few seconds and regain the distance.
[spell]9104[/spell] helps reduce the armour - not that effective against tanks but more effective against those with lighter amour.
[spell]9096[/spell] reduces their Init - which in turn is -evade and +crit. Handy when you have a WH in your team.
Our stances pretty much define our approach to battle and early on it's best to focus on a single stance to the optimum dmg & skills.
Stances with Shadow Warriors allow us to enter combat with long-range, medium range or close-quarters skills. The Mastery tree for each of these trees provides Tactics, Skills and Morales. Sticking with a mastery tree gives you optimum unlocks - but also glues you to a stance for much of your experience.
Switching stances involves both risk and cooldown. Risk because changing stance doesn't always switch and there's a 5 sec cooldown. 5 secs is a lot in dynamic encounters.
In the late teens/early 20's you get a good group of skills for each stance.
With the Scout (distance) you get some nice AOE nothing too painful for them but something that affects clusters of destro, Skirmish (mid-range) brings some nice aliments for your foes and Assult (up-close and personal) has a mix of point & directional. Assult brings extra dmg if targets are building abilities - essentially meaning you can harass squishies.
The biggest pain for Shadow Warriors is that each stance needs a different mentality - making it a hard class to play.
To be effective playing the class you need to apply the abilities that each stance gives you to the situation.
While I started out with the Scout Mastery tree - I'm finding later in life that Skirmish offers the best balance of play and some really nice dmg for the stance.
The class really kicks in at the late 20's - you have a good range of skills, abilities and EQ to make the difference.
Your AOE abilities come from Skirmish rather than Scout, with scout bringing more single targer dmg via DOT's.
Assult brings a nice disarm but the pain of switching stance means it's not used as often as it could or should be.
You'll get some nice tactics - with the optimum bing +crit for groups whenever you crit.
At this stage in Scenarios you should be dishing out between 30-60k dmg. Not great but pretty decent.
Defenisvely you're pretty messed up with armour - with bags & mix/match sets giving you the best options.
At this stage you're more use in protecting friendly squishies - generally place yourself within a few seconds walk of them - and you can dish out dmg, pin + disarm. fall-back and help finish-off against most (excl tanks). With an in-bound tank keep your Rank 1 Morale handy. It usually helps buy the squishy some time to heal you & debuff/ail the hostile.
Each stance not only bring abilities but affects your stats.
Scout bring extra dps via Ballistic, Assult gives you extra armour and Skirmish boost your toughness and +crit.
In RvE, the first few tiers you're stuck with attacking NPC's around your level.
In your 20's you can take on a couple of levels above and attack low level champs. In your 30's you can take on champs in their low-mid 20's but you don't really make much cash until you're in your late 20's and early 30's. This makes playing with Mastery Trees difficult and I've even unable to travel due to lack of funds. Essentially you'll need to loot everything to make ends meet.
You'll find yourself dying a lot - esp at first which is a pain - it really reduces your dmg output but I prefer to throw myself in and pin to protect the softer friendlies if it gives them a little longer. They apprechiate it and you'll find yourself with a rez more often than not.
