I'm not saying make cloaking a scout only thing. Just make them better at cloaking than everyone else since they'll have additional traits tied to their suit. The only other option would be to give the cloaking equipment a crazy high CPU/PG cost while scouts have a fitting reduction, or an additional efficacy bonus for scouts with cloaking. Everyone with an equipment slot is going to have access so scouts need something to give them a clear advantage.

I don't think I follow @MacDoc.

You seemed to be saying that it does matter in your post.

yeah i was saying that a scout doesn't benefit much from armour plates cause they slow you down and give little improvement to scout survivabilty. A scout is still paper thin with armour plates.

At the risk of sounding patronising here, you said the shield penalty would favour armour tanking, and then pointed out that armour tanking isn't good for stealth. So how does it favour armour tanking?

sorry i am horrible at communicating sometimes.

I was saying that if your shields are completely wiped out every time you activate your cloak then it would put shield tanking at a dis advantage. So if you have a scout suit that favors shield tanking and has a lot of high slots ,ie. minmatar, then your kind of screwed over. where as a suit that favors armour tanking and has a lot of low slots does not lose tha much. And since armour tanking on a scout is some what useless then most people would stack dampners instead.

In short. shield tanking is better for scouts since there is no speed penalty, but if a cloak wipes out your shields and you were stacking extenders... your poop. So in terms the suit with more low slots won't get that much benefit from armour tanking but they can stack dampners instead. So shields would lose their a portion of hp while armour won't lose as much. And suits that favors armour can stack dampners while suits that favors shield can't stack as much dampners.

does this help?

Should only be for scouts. I have enough problems with forge heavys not rendering when I'm flying my dropship, the last thing I need is invisible ones, just waiting to materialize in my blind spot, proceeding to two/three-shot me.

Shield dropping or drain for cloaking is extremely unbalanced to minmatar and caldari.
The only cloak effecting for dropsuits should be frames. The same way profile is.

As has been discussed earlier in the thread, shield-tanking is now the only viable option for scout survival. Adding the shield penalty balances this, so that Gallente isn't left in the dust.

Since we are all throwing out idea how it works...

* Duration of 30/60/90
* Cooldown of 60/90/120
* Avg cpu cost, higher than avg pg cost
* Shooting, sprinting, hacking, and taking damage deactivate it. (perhaps proportional cooldown to time active)
* No change to scan profile. (Your body is still physically there so stuff bounces off you just the same)
* No loss of shields

Where are you getting that scouts *have* to shield tank? Armor tanking is a hell of a lot more beneficial to a scout atm as far as I can tell. It gives you more health than a shield module and requires less cpu. The speed loss is negligible since our minor speed increase does little to help us. Not to mention the higher pg requirements (which I agree it should need) will most likely make stealth easier to equip on a Gal scout since the cal scout will probably have less pg than the gal.

but gallente aent left in the dust. they have low slots which can hold dampners and currently the only scout that can break the scanners theshold.

minmatar may have more hp but gallente have more stealth.

bring it.... i love a friendly forum argument.