My take since running a proto minja since 1.8

I don't run other racial scouts and my minmatar is squishy. If I fail to plan my attacks, or get sloppy with my tactics then I will die. Scouts rocking cloaks should feel squishy. And yes fitting a minja is terrible compromise.

Fluxes should knock shields out and require a full recharge.

The activation of the cloak is hit and miss. Its slow and I've had issues with activating it while running. Activating it while running should be available.

The ability to re-cloak after an action is necessary. If I am planting REs on a point and the enemy is on their way I shouldn't have to wait 30 seconds before I can re-cloak. I think the timing on the cloak is perfect. I have been caught in multiple occasions where my cloak was about to be depleted and had to decloak in less than strategic places.

Seriously the timers are golden. I can see them becoming terrible very easily through adjusting them for the worse.

Cloaks are amazing. The entire playstyle is different and requires recon and planning to be good at.

Being able to fire my gun while cloaked is not a good bug. I've done it once by accident and then noticed it was repeatable. That need fixed before a QQ storm has cloaks demoted to flaylock status.

p.s.

Scanners are awful now. They need some love.
The noises assiciated with cloaks, albeit a bit buggy, are amazing.

And herein lies the problem. What are you doing dropping a cloak in the middle of a swarm of enemies?!

Before any solution to the 'cloak issue' can be realized, the developer needs to actually figure out what the cloak is designed to be. As it was being discussed, I was under the impression it was being added to the game as a means of giving Scouts a better infiltration role. They are squishy, so give them the ability to traverse a hostile field of battle with more security so that they will not be detected. It was a stealth ability, period.

If the mechanic had been billed as this great offensive tool, then I am pretty sure much of the Community would have voiced out against it. There is nothing inherently stealthy about coming up and ganking three dudes from behind with a shotgun. Anyone adept at flanking should be able to pull that off, without a cloak. There is nothing stealthy about decloaking in a group of enemy, setting off a few remotes, cloaking again in the midst of chaos and then running away. Shotgunning and blowing things up are pretty much the exact opposite of being stealthy. Some might even say it's a pretty cheap approach but 'all's fair'. Honestly, why don't we just expedite the process and give the Scout a teleport ability to boot?

Our friend above is apparently decloaking 'surrounded by enemies'. Nothing stealthy about that either. Now I am not saying that a cloaked Scout should not have the ability to strike from the shadows, but the decision to do so must have consequence. Exposing yourself should have risk that goes with your reward. And the inability to recloak right away seems like a fair trade. You can pick off the lone wolf or straggler (shame on them for not sticking with the team) but you cannot run into the fray of a hotly contested objective and expect to get out alive.

I would much rather see a cloaked Scout be able to hack a Null Cannon without causing it to alert the enemy. That is a benefit of cloaking I can get behind in an objective based game. That puts the infiltrator role front and forward and makes 'The Assassin' a secondary, albeit more risky, vocation.

I feel cloaks should behave more like camouflage, easy to miss if your not actually looking for it but totally recognizable if you are looking for it. Kind of like the Predator's cloak.

I'm not fond of how you're essentially invisible when you stand still cloaked. No one is going to spot the virtually non-existent distortions, especially on dark maps. I feel cloaks should create a noticeable distortion when both standing still or moving without any shimmering, like the predator's cloak.

As for cloaks persisting too well through damage, have to agree with Iron Wolf Saber. It's not fair to the guy who spots and shoots at a cloaked enemy. But it isn't fair for cloaked players who get hit by stray bullets either.

There are some annoying bugs like where players can use their weapons while being cloaked indefinitely and being able to fire shots off before actually de-cloaking.

I want cloaks in Dust514, but they could have done with more time in Santa's workshop getting it right.

Oh ffs, so that's your logic? That's a **** poor train of logic and you should feel bad. "No one has ever done it so we can't do it either because if no one has done it then it must be bad!" That makes absolutely zero sense.

And if it's so incredibly important to you to know of a game that's done it like that, planetside 1 did.

Just because planetside 2 does it one way does not mean a single damn thing in a completely different game.

o7

1) Agree. Fix bugs.
2) Disagree. Painfully easy to spot unless stationary and/or in shadows.
3) Disagree. Blue shimmer. Red reticule. Shoot. Get +50.
4) Disagree. On / Off is sufficiently noisy.
5) Don't know yet, but instantaneous would be bad.
6) Who uses Prototype Cloak? Little point beyond Advanced.
7) No problem here.
8) * Possibly a problem ...
9) Shimmer isn't bound to movement speed; its either slight or severe (lacks gradation).

* Would advise against adjusting cloak fitting costs. Fitting decent gear alongside a cloak is already tough. If a tweak proves to be in order, I'd recommend binding degree of shimmer effect to armor value such that Less Armor = Less Shimmer.

Does this mean that you are only relaying messages that you agree with???

^ this I fully agree with!

As stated earlier in the thread, I also think a small cloak activation cost will make the Rambo rapid cloak -> firing -> cloak (etc) still possible but very inefficient. It would not penalize single use like dropping uplinks, take out a straggler or traverse an area.

In EVE, you can't cloak and are decloaked in the proximity of stations/other ships. Why not make it similar in Dust.

If you aproach a cloaked player and have line of sight, you should see his shevron when he is within half your passive BASE scanning distance. Meaning an Assault player would see the chevron when he directly looks at a scout within 5m. But only if he moves, even if it's ever so slightly. If he's standing still the chevron should disappear.

The hp stacking should result in higher speed penalty for scouts so they become much slower when stacking plates.

Flux grenades should scramble the cloak in a slight manner, meaning the cloak shimmers for 3 seconds like full sprint, and the capacity drains at 1.5 times the amount for those 3 seconds.

Decloaking should always require the switchoff animation before using weapon or equipment.

Exactly....I hate cloaks but it is a part of the game now. Will have to accept it but there needs to be a good balance and some things needs to make sense.

1. You should be fully decloaked before you're able to fire and not while you're in the animation.
2. Cooldown should act like every other active module in the game to prevent cloaking spam and being able to cloak all the time.
Imagine tanks with the cloak cooldown system...you have to use multiple modules to be able to be hardened at all times now. If vehicle mods worked like cloaks, tanks/DS would have constant active dmg mods and hardeners activated. Skill is seen when you choose to activate your modules. Cloaks should be the same way.

3. You should decloak when you take damage. I don't even understand how people can debate this. It isn't a force field.

I have arrived to that conclusion now. If your opinin differs from his, then it falls on deaf ears. If your opinion agrees with his, then that reflects the community lol.

That's actually a good point. But then one must pose the question, why is there a shimmer when you get shot? I'm going with the possibility that when you shoot at someone, you do damage to the actual device that creates the cloaking field. And with that, they should decloak.

why should cloaks reduce hp, people will always find ways to brick tank, and besides, how does a cloak reduce armor/shield hp?

i understand that it could reduce shields but thtat would UP the shield tankers. and armor isnt really a thing that can be reduced since its not really tech, its an object that has mass and used for protection.

but we could reduce the amount of armor plates hp value though

You don't think that being able to cloak whenever you feel like for an entire game (by using an advanced or proto) is ridiculous? You don't think that shooting someone in the act of decloaking is unfair?

As a dedicated Scout since before Chrome, cloaks are easy mode.

You don't have to fit anything past an advanced cloak. 60 seconds is an eternity on the battlefield and for those who have learned to micro-manage their cloaking habits, you never have to worry about running out. There's no risk. Fitting a cloak is a great advantage but there's no sacrifice on the fitting screen either. Reduce our bonus to cloak fitting. I would also advocate for the cloaking device stats being changed. Cloaking times for Std/Adv/Cplx possibly being 20/30/45 secs. with reactivation being 50%/66%/66%. With complete drain you'd have to wait 10/20/30 secs.

The risks the scouts had before 1.8 have mostly been removed due to how lenient the cloak is. Instant on/instant off needs to be corrected. Give it a charge up time when activated as if the suit is rerouting power and calibrating the cloaking device and a cooldown upon deactivation as if the suit is rerouting power to your primary systems again. This will force people to think when to or not to use the device.

As far as I understood the reasoning for having cloaks, they were to be used as a positioning tool. To allow scouts to traverse open terrain with less fear of rifles. Any scout will tell you that any rifle is a sniper rifle. Open terrain between cover was approached with extreme caution and paranoia. Now, I'm against the cloaking device deactivating when taking damage because this will promote "praying and spraying" which rewards luck. I am however thinking that an extended shield flicker effect would help people who spotted a cloaker in keeping their crosshair on the cloaked mercenary. Currently there's no punishment for being seen.

Speaking about forcing mercenaries to decloak. A cloaking device is essentially bending light around you. Flux grenades are an EMP device, Electro-Magnetic Pulse. Light is apart of the EM band. Flux grenades should overload a cloaking device as well as any flash-bang grenade if one ever gets implemented. There needs to be a counter. This would help mercs against a cloaker inside buildings.

Another reasonable expectation while having the cloak activated is having your systems struggling to interpret any incoming data so your prey vanishes from your passive scanner as well as seeing false positives. Additionally, the ability to hack while cloaked should be removed. Having any Wi-Fi while cocooned in a distortion-well doesn't make much sense to me.

Having your cloak deactivate while in proximity to another mercenary, supply depot, CRU or null cannon would add another level of strategy but I see that's being frowned upon. I think having two scouts decloak and having an "oh sh*t" moment because one got too close to the other would be hilarious. It would force you to think of entry and exit points more thoroughly.

Brick tanking scouts are a problem... in a sense. It's their ability to get under your passive and find a superior position. This, coupled with a rifle which is mid-range, is what is more powerful than a SG. It takes the enemy a slight bit more time to find and target. Brick tanked scouts w/o a cloak would be just as powerful. People who brick tank shore up the scouts weakness and yet still have the passive scanner bonuses because the suit's default value has been changed. This one is tricky but changing the HP modules to a percentage based gain versus a flat number would correct this... but the Devs would have to adjust all the other suits accordingly so no other suit suffered. In other words, a time vampire. Another possibility is that the cloak shimmer should be increased so that dampeners can reduce cloak shimmer while plates increase shimmer again, not sure about this one because I have put much thought into it. Maybe just the increase in shimmer with the dampener counter would be enough.

I can activate my cloak and flank some enemies. I would decloak only to kill someone. While, I am killing someone, my cloak cooldown is regenerating. Once I've killed the guy, I can cloak and go flank someone else. With this system, I can cloak anytime I want and stay cloaked for as long as I need. I wouldn't need 60 secs to get away from someone.

With tanks, you have to be careful when you activate your modules..because the moment they are deactivated, you have to wait the entire cooldown time to be able to use it again. I would have damage mods activated anytime I needed them to if I pulled out my tank.