Started playing scouts during the beta-test, they were "gimped" no question of it, started off doing extremely high damage then someone whinged and it got heavily nerfed; scouts were then 10x harder to kill anything with.
Current scout is level 14, his longbow skill is 14 and I will be keeping it specced so it is equal to my level permanently. I'm wearing a set of placyercrafted leather armour which I spellcrafted myself on another char, basically has a bunch of dex, quick, longbow, and thrust boosts on it and has been enchanted. So in total my longbow skill is 14+3.
Now, the last time I played a scout I had thrust as my secondary skill and was really ticked off that I did absolutely squat damage in melee - not even *plausible* damage, let alone decent. Seemed speccing the skill was a waste entirely at that point, but that was quite a long time ago now. My speccing this time around was heavily influenced by that although I've since seen the game has changed significantly.
So this time around, I haven't specced thrust at all since level 1, it's still 1+1 and will remain that way till I hit 20; at that point I will be respeccing from shield into thrust and thats solely because it'd be nice to do a little more melee damage for the rare occasions when I need to. I'd like to kill things in close-quarter combat a little faster. My shield is specced to around 8 and I believe stealth is somewhere around there too, I did initially spec shield as my secondary and no stealth because I wanted to avoid damage in melee as much as possible - it's worked nicely, I don't take a beating, but the trade off is when I have to resort to fighting with my gladius its slow, I still have the advantage and do more damage, but its annoyingly slow.
With my current spec and gear I kill yellows in no more than three shots, the first being a critical, more often than not I kill in two. Blues are 1-2 shots, greens are always 1 shot, oranges around 3 shots, sometimes 4. In each and every case the mob is *always* dead before it gets near melee range, I outright kill with the bow.
When I reach level 20 I'll be respeccing the points in shield and I'll be making my secondary skill stealth, tertiary thrust, and finally using the remainder in shield; but I certainly have no complaints about damage as far as PvE is concerned, and the character isn't gimped in any respect of the word because hes out soloing constantly and outdoing quite a number of players you'd assume to be more damaging classes. On a sidenote, the downtime is beautifully short, I can't wait to get my next level as I then get tireless which decreases it even more, chaining yellows solidly for 10-15mins before having to rest for around 15 seconds is definitely my idea o good experience gain. :)