this irritates the crap out of me... Being sci officer.. all my kit attacks bring up the exposes. I never use my expose attack unless there is more than one since is the split beam thingy. Because of the targeting.. I might miss one... so someone needs to pick me up lol...

As it is, it feels like engineering and tactical officers have the least number of useful abilities for ground pvp. Science officers really do rack up the exposes and have some of the most useful buffs/debuffs. I hope they nerf them a little bit, or make the other careers just as potent in their own rights. After all, how hard can it be to balance 3 classes....

Not using secondary attacks because there isn't an expose is also a mistake. Those attacks add significant damage. I've beaten players or survived much longer than I should have, because they were too hesitant to use their secondary attacks. Shoot, I had a full team of 5 feds keep me stunned, knocked down, held for over 10 seconds without killing me when I was caught alone, cause they didn't want to fire without that expose (5 using secondary attacks on one target is instant death, so why wait 10 seconds).

The smart thing to do is frontload your exposes (however many you want to use on a particular target given the situation). If you get lucky, exploit. If not, burn down the target with your strong attacks. Your expose abilities have a cooldown anyway (well, aside from the ridiculous 3 attack), so might as well use that damaging secondary attack and let it's cooldown tick down while you wait for your expose attacks to return.

Not using that secondary attack is a huge damage loss. Sometimes you miss an exploit opportunity, but on a team, someone will usually have their exploit ready or almost ready.

I'm still leveling my engineer, but my tactical is Captain 9. For a while I felt like I made a bad choice going tactical because it seemed boring in ground combat and not so useful (and I love ground pvp). Tactical gets some great resistance buffs and debuffs and good damage buffs. Tactical is also more likely to invest skill points in those ground weapon skills which do have a large effect. Tactical isn't as shiny and noticeable as sci and eng, but they can put out a LOT of damage. When I'm playing my engineer, I keep feeling like I need to upgrade my weapon, but when I look at it, it's about the best I could have. There's just a big damage difference.