Yeah, wonderful. Let's make encounters even more random.
You already have four different tanking profiles, with five different damage profiles on your weapons. Not to mention three weight classes of suits. You have to process that information in half a second, because otherwise you start opening fire on a shield-tanked RR heavy with your armor tanked assault with a mass driver.
And then you suggest to also add the ability to have part of your interface disabled into the mix. So you try to use the flashbang, only to have the enemy protected against it. And then he throws his own flashbang and disables your vision because you decided that you can avoid your own flashbang due to knowing when to look away, while smoke is much more of an issue for you.

If anything, we need *less* randomness on the battlefield. Not more.

P.S.
I have never seen that grenade spam that everyone is talking about. Even if people did do that all the time, it would be better than this stuff.
With grenades at least you know that everyone can potentially throw one at you and that they are all countered in the same way.

But why the HUD upgrades are a counter to the same racial technology ???
I mean why Amarr would create the only thing that can disable their own weapons ???
Why Occultar filter (Amarr) is against flasher (Amarr)?

Grenade spam is a real problem.
Just look how the 6 vs 6 tournament has ended : Endless Locus Spam.

Grenades are just too powerful.
They OHK.
We hve 3
They can be cooked.
They are ressuplied pretty fast.

When was that tournament?
I believe a 6vs6 tournament would be currently kind of hard, due to lack of corp battles.

Anyway, it doesn't change my main point. We already have enough randomness in encounters..

I've got nothing against a flashbang or something (No radar disabling or **** like that, though, because that's what the scan attributes are for), but giving it a dedicated counter module is hilariously stupid.
*If* there's a counter module, it would need to counter *all* of those four effects.

I can see you didn't grasp the purpose of HUD ugrades and HUD AA ("counters"). Please read again my second post, I made some Edits to make it clearer. Plus, it is NOT a module.

Yeah, you want to give those counters their own slot and add a cooldown.
So there's even more randomness, because now a player who you know is invulnerable to flashbangs will suddenly be affected by them anyway. And you won't even know how long you have to wait, because there's three tiers of each device.

Your thought is interesting and your point relevant.

Even with a HUD upgrade, any duster would be affected by 3 other tactical devices. A countdown to HUD AA would only add randomness, or at least complexity, to their use.

No one would like having to count in his head while he rushes a strategic point to be sure not running out of HUD AA. That's why what you said here has to be take into consideration.

Then which use could we do of basic / advanced / prototype HUD Upgrade ?

I got an idea which I think would content both you and me, by lowering randomness while leaving HUD upgrades level up interesting.

What about a slightly delayed HUD AA ?

Meaning, the basic HUD upgrade would start its HUD AA only after a short time into the related tactical device AoE. While the prototype version would not be delayed at all. Like:
Basic HUD AA - Needs 3 seconds to completely adapt to environment change (both entering and exiting an AoE).
Advanced HUD AA - Needs 2 seconds to completely adapt to environment change (both entering and exiting an AoE).
Prototype HUD AA - Needs 0.3 seconds to completely adapt to environment change (both entering and exiting an AoE).

What do you think ? It would work exactly like your eye adapting itself to light. That could work out pretty fine on the battlefield, while being realistic and clearing most randomness as well.

Now that sounds better. Though 3 seconds is a lot - That sounds more like militia tier.
It should be more like 1.5, 0.8, 0.2. Remember that a disorientation of 0.2 seconds can kill someone in this game.

I have two additional ideas:
- Give the devices activation delays (e.g. you plant the Flasher and it activates after a few seconds, similar to an uncooked grenade)
- Make affected areas easily visible at a distance
- In addition, allow the effects to persist after the duration, with a slowly dispersing effect. This means that, for example, the smoke bomb will fill a room with smoke for 20 seconds. Once those 20 seconds are over, people can mostly see through it, but the smoke is still visible to people who pass by and allows them to know that there might be a fight going on.

This has the following effects:
- Players have time to decide to run away when a device that they aren't shielded against appears
- Players who are shielded can make the tactical decision to run into an affected area, because it marks a fight. This also allows players to use the devices in order to pretend that there's an assault going on, which causes a diversion. Hell, you could have a coordinated team that throws smoke in five different places and prevents the enemy from knowing where to counter the assault.