One of the most difficult things for the MP is that most of their defences stem from single-target hostile nanos. In any situation where there is more than one attacker, MPs are very weak. MPs are also traditionally relatively weak against weapon/perk attacks, because what tools they have are debuffs that aren't effective in an environment where capping hits are so key and so common.
There are two things that change this:
Shield of Zset, which gives enough evades to get decent survivability... but at the cost of nearly all effective offence.
Sacrificial Shielding, which ramps up defences and gives some specials blockers... which helps with the capping hits.... but at the effective cost of all the debuff defences due to the recharge... thus giving good weapons/perks defences while stopping tools used against casters.
The reason so many MPs end up using SS and being in recharge a lot of the time, is because that multi-attacker weapon/perk defence is so beneficial
What's really needed for the MP is some kind of effective defence against weapons and perks that works against multiple attackers. If the DtN and DtP implementations mentioned by FC in the MP changes for rebalancing get implemented, then there's a fair chance that things will seriously improve.... it all depends upon the details of the implementations and, regarding DtP, how the new pet stats will look.
Alongside this, the implementation of cool-downs instead of recharge to control frequency of casting stuff from the same nanoline, should mean that MPs should be able to open up to use a wider range of their tools a little more effectively allowing them to defend better across the whole pallette rather than closing themselves into one type of defence or another.
In theory, there's a lot in the announced implementations already that could make big differences to the MP.... the devil's in the detail though.
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