That's all well and good...but want something to really blow your mind? On that Escort you can slot a TSx III and a TSx II. The first inclination is to slot two TSS versions for stacking. Ok, so you give the guy a hard time bringing his shields back. But he can run max power to shields and eat a battery and completely combat your drain. Or an EPtS. Or receive an EPS Transfer from a teammate. Tough but doable and simply forces the target to hit one or two buttons and defeat your strategy. This is becoming more and more prevalent in PvP as many more ships are trying to piggy back on the Premade-popular TSS stacking.

So what alternatives do you have? How about a TSS III and a TSE II? Hit him with the TSS III. He'll immediately go into panic mode and start adjusting power levels and eating a battery or popping a counter such as EPtS. Then you hit him with the TSE II. So you're draining him for -85 to -95 on shields and another -65 to -70 on engines. Now he has a tough choice. Stay static with shields or run away with no shields. He typically can't combat both effectively and goes completely defensive...looking for an escape route. His batteries are on cooldown so that's not an option. An EPS Transfer may or may not be available and probably won't counter that heavy of a dual drain anyway.

So you remove his one or two button combo defense and force him to stop and think. And too much thinking in battle equals death. It's about shifting strategy and appropriate counter strategy to your enemy. Place the onus on him to choose what he'll try to counter or trick him into countering the wrong strategy at the wrong time. Either way you're giving him headaches...

Just thought I'd put my two cents in from a cruiser perspective.

As has been pointed out, people are slowly adapting to countering TSS. I keep an EPtS 1 handy just for that. I never worry about one guy using TSS, it's when the whole team is using it that I really start sweating. But that's a moderately rare event.

The escort pilots that I truly fear are the burst damage gods like Mike or Wildman. People that easily break 400,000 damage in 5v5 cracked planet, several times I've seen them break 600,000. Glad they're in my fleet, lol. I don't know what tricks they use, but my guess is that rather than using a TSS, they use something else that boosts their damage even more. I can tell you this much, they use cannons, CRF, and I've never seen them bother with torpedos.

So my advice would be to use TSS in premades that are using it too, and then a high DPS build for when you're pugging it.

PS. If you're really unhappy with your build, you might want to consider buying a respec in the C-store for 400 points.

BTW i have a question about the TSS-x : is Tactical Team a counter to it? it should cleanse tactical debuffs. TSS-x is a tactical debuff. if it isnt i think they need to make that a hard counter. maybe one that scales. like Tac team I should cleanse TSS-xI and bring III to II and II to I. that would be nice and would give tac team meaning.

No. Its a drain.

According to the big list of counters, it doesn't work on TSS. Though it should. According to all of the threads I've read on it, there is no hard counter to the shield drain.