Kigurosaka Laaksonen
DUST University
Ivy League
106
   |
Posted - 2014.01.14 16:21:00 -
[1] - Quote
This got zero response in GD while badposts grew into threadnaughts. This is the best idea concerning scouts and the philosophy behind this idea is the best way for getting content into DUST. Copy and pasted from GD and we can just call the thread in GD dead instead of me waiting for a GM or whoever moderates these forums to move the original thread.
It looks like Scouts will be filling a role comparable to EVE's CovOps ships. The Cloak looks like it will be comparable to a CovOps cloak. Only CovOps capable ships can use CovOps cloaks, and CovOps cloaks give no penalties to movement, reactivation, allow to warp while cloaked, etc. In DUST it looks like Scouts will be the only suit that can realistically use Cloaks due to fitting restrictions.
I would suggest going about this a little bit differently.
 Make the Cloak a module that easily fits, but gives heavy penalties to movement (move much slower, no sprinting, no jumping), reactivation, scan precision and range, and will break if you use any equipment or shoot any weapon. Maybe proximity to an uncloaked infantry or vehicle or any equipment could break your cloak, similar to EVE.
Add an Improved Cloak that's only slightly better and harder to fit.
Add a CovOps cloak that is class restricted (CovOps Cloaks used to have crazy fittings, and CovOps capable ships gave bonus to CovOps fittings. Now CovOps cloaks are simply restricted to specific ships.) The CovOps cloak could be fitted to a Scout, offer no penalties to movement, scan precision or range, very short reactivation delay, use equipment, more weapons fire while cloaked, something like that.
To balance out the Scout getting an awesome ability like CovOps Cloaks, they would be balanced out with less that average EHP compared to other Light frames, like in EVE, and/or other drawbacks.
Doing it this way will give Scouts a clearly defined role on the battlefield, and will leave the way open for additional roles to be added in the future without taking from the Scout's CovOps role, such as Light EWAR-centric roles, or Medium CovOps based roles (such as EVE's force recon.) Also, this would be more in line with what CCP has established in EVE. I believe that following the patterns established in EVE as closely as possible, only adjusting to make those patterns playable in an FPS, will be to DUST's extreme benefit.
Edit: To emphasize a point, releasing Cloaks and reworking Scouts in this way, and following this pattern for all content releases, will keep the road open for easy and relatively painless future content releases. When I say a relatively painless release, I mean current content wouldn't need to be majorly nerfed/tweaked to accommodate new content. |