DUST Search - Remove Dampining bonus on cloaks

SgtMajSquish MLBJ wrote:

Garrett Blacknova wrote:

what's the drawback for fitting a Nanohive? How about a Repair Tool? Is there a negative to balance out Active Scanners?

The balance in all these cases - THE SAME DRAWBACK WITH THE CLOAK - is that you can't have the equipment out and active while ALSO having your weapon drawn. The other balance is the fitting capacity on your Dropsuit. And yeah, maybe - MAYBE - a couple of the Scout suits have more PG and CPU at each tier than they really should have. Maybe it's a little too easy to stack Prototype modules and a cloak on just the Advanced suits in some cases.

Oooh, I know! Maybe because cloaking is so powerful, they should add the drawback that when you're moving, you have a blue shimmery effect so people can see you! And just in case people still have trouble, there should be at least a faint shimmer when you're staying still. But if that's not enough, how about they also make sure an enemy's crosshairs still turn red when they're on target.

...wait a minute... this sounds familiar somehow...

There is no drawback at the moment. You can switch to your weapon and fire before the cloak even turns off.


Author	Thread Statistics \| Show CCP posts - 0 post(s)
Garrett Blacknova Codex Troopers 4729	Posted - 2014.03.31 12:27:00 - [1] - Quote Considering how poor a job the cloak does of actually hiding the cloaked player from enemy vision, the profile dampening is really the main benefit of using a cloak, and to be truly effective, that will need to be used in conjunction with dampening.
Garrett Blacknova Codex Troopers 4729	Posted - 2014.03.31 12:29:00 - [2] - Quote Virtual Riot wrote: Cloaks don't bend any waves outside the visible light spectrum. Provide a source from DUST which confirms this. EVE doesn't count, its cloak mechanics are different. We aren't the same kind of immortal as a Capsuleer, and while much of our tech is based on the same principles, the details behind certain items are different enough that the cloak could easily have a similar change in functionality when used within atmosphere and a gravity well.
Garrett Blacknova Codex Troopers 4729	Posted - 2014.03.31 12:53:00 - [3] - Quote Virtual Riot wrote: Garrett Blacknova wrote: Virtual Riot wrote: Cloaks don't bend any waves outside the visible light spectrum. Provide a source from DUST which confirms this. EVE doesn't count, its cloak mechanics are different. We aren't the same kind of immortal as a Capsuleer, and while much of our tech is based on the same principles, the details behind certain items are different enough that the cloak could easily have a similar change in functionality when used within atmosphere and a gravity well. Well obviously I can't say one way or another for sure because this is based in a fictional, highly advanced universe. But if indeed scanning equipment uses some sort of electromagnetic wave to detect things, then the usual counter to this is to coat the target in a material which absorbs electromagnetic waves, instead of refracting them. Not really something you can activate and deactivate on will. The usual MODERN technique for dealing with electromagnetic sensors is to use a coating which absorbs rather than reflecting (not refracting) MOST OF THE WAVES, not all of them. Another approach is to construct the stealth vehicle with angles that are designed to reflect the majority of the sensor's radiation in directions other than where a sensor is likely to be. Even using BOTH of these approaches, stealth planes are frequently picked up on radar, because while this REDUCES their visibility, it doesn't completely hide them altogether. Even modern stealth technology REDUCES THE PROFILE OF THE STEALTH ITEM. Why would a futuristic powered solution be so different?
Garrett Blacknova Codex Troopers 4732	Posted - 2014.03.31 13:19:00 - [4] - Quote Virtual Riot wrote: So what, when a scout activates his cloak, he simultaneously coats himself is a more absorptive material, and his suit transforms to construct angles that disperse waves? I'm not gonna argue semantics, my post was really more about balance than arguing how a cloaking device would work in a futuristic civilization. Also re-+fract ri-êfrakt/ verb verb: refract; 3rd person present: refracts; past tense: refracted; past participle: refracted; gerund or present participle: refracting 1. (of water, air, or glass) make (a ray of light) change direction when it enters at an angle. I can use refract if I want to Edited quote to remove offensive language. Thanks for that. Refraction is where light ( or other electromagnetic wave) ENTERS an object and an angle. Reflection is where it REBOUNDS from the object rather than passing through it. Refract only applies when the light is passing through the object, NOT when it's bouncing off the object. The definition you provided is correct. Your use of the word is still incorrect. Before trying to use facts to prove someone wrong, make sure your facts don't prove them right instead. As for your attempted argument, no that wasn't even remotely relevant to what I said at all. I said that modern stealth technology makes stealthed objects less visible to scanning devices, and asked why a significantly more advanced stealth technology should be expected NOT to do the same thing. I never suggested in any way that the cloak uses the same mechanism as modern stealth to achieve that result. So pretty much my entire response to your post is "lrn2ingrish".
Garrett Blacknova Codex Troopers 4734	Posted - 2014.03.31 13:32:00 - [5] - Quote Virtual Riot wrote: Yes modern technology does makes things less visible to scanning devices. But here we are talking about a device, which upon activation, both bends light waves around itself, and makes it less visible to scanning. But only upon activation. If you expect technology in the future to work in a similar fashion as it does today, this seems highly unlikely. If you expect technolog in the future to work in a similar fashion to how it does today, then you expect scanners to rely primarily on electromagnetic radiation. Light is a form of electromagnetic radiation. A device designed to primarily distort light around an object to conceal it should reasonably be expected to have a similar (though lesser) effect on other forms of electromagnetic radiation. Hence why it reduces your scan profile by such a small amount while reducing your visibility significantly more (but still not rendering you properly invisible)
Garrett Blacknova Codex Troopers 4734	Posted - 2014.03.31 13:43:00 - [6] - Quote Virtual Riot wrote: I see your point, and it is a valid one. But only if it is indeed based off bending the waves, and not some form of invisibility. Like a million tiny screens that project whatever is behind them from a million tiny cameras. Yes, because ultra-advanced cameras must, by definition, be incapable of picking up any wavelength of electromagnetic radiation that operates outside the visible spectrum, and similarly, an extremely advanced videoscreen wouldn't be capable of projecting those wavelengths in addition to the visible light. Yeah, pretty sure we can rationalise that version of cloaking to work just as well as any other.
Garrett Blacknova Codex Troopers 4754	Posted - 2014.04.01 04:12:00 - [7] - Quote Magnus Amadeuss wrote: Real life analogies do not belong anywhere near a game unless it is a simulation. Dust is not a simulator. Also, I agree with the OP, the cloak has only advantages to fitting it, no draw-backs. It needs a draw-back, not just less advantages. Real life analogies have PLENTY of place in a discussion about the technological background of a device and the lore describing how it works. That's what was being discussed when bringing real life analogies into the mix, so it was relevant to use it. As for the balance thing, what's the drawback for fitting a Nanohive? How about a Repair Tool? Is there a negative to balance out Active Scanners? The balance in all these cases - THE SAME DRAWBACK WITH THE CLOAK - is that you can't have the equipment out and active while ALSO having your weapon drawn. The other balance is the fitting capacity on your Dropsuit. And yeah, maybe - MAYBE - a couple of the Scout suits have more PG and CPU at each tier than they really should have. Maybe it's a little too easy to stack Prototype modules and a cloak on just the Advanced suits in some cases. Oooh, I know! Maybe because cloaking is so powerful, they should add the drawback that when you're moving, you have a blue shimmery effect so people can see you! And just in case people still have trouble, there should be at least a faint shimmer when you're staying still. But if that's not enough, how about they also make sure an enemy's crosshairs still turn red when they're on target. ...wait a minute... this sounds familiar somehow... Pretty sure the cloak is fine with the drawbacks it already has. RKKR wrote: We also have brains to realize that having 2 items for 2 different slots for dampening that also happen to increase dampening more effectively than the 1 item that increases precision is unbalanced in a GAME. Which one item is it that you're thinking of which can help detect dampened enemies? I count 3. Also, for DUST, a cloaked and dampened Scout SHOULD be invisible to scanners while the cloak is active - it has a time limit, remember? Combine the timer with the fact that YOU CAN SEE THEM and the fact that YOUR CROSSHAIRS TURN RED IN CASE YOU'RE HALF BLIND, and there are plenty of hard counters right there provided for EVERYONE WHO PLAYS THE GAME. And that's before considering that if you want to dampen enough to be hidden from passive and active scanning, you need to be sacrificing the tankiness which is what people mostly complain about when it comes to cloaking. Cloak dampening doesn't hide Scouts well enough on its own to negate a good scanning build, so if you're fighting a brick-tanked Scout, a good Scout who isn't brick-tanked will see them coming from any direction, while everyone else can still see them, but only from in front.
Garrett Blacknova Codex Troopers 4800	Posted - 2014.04.02 13:49:00 - [8] - Quote SgtMajSquish MLBJ wrote: Garrett Blacknova wrote: what's the drawback for fitting a Nanohive? How about a Repair Tool? Is there a negative to balance out Active Scanners? The balance in all these cases - THE SAME DRAWBACK WITH THE CLOAK - is that you can't have the equipment out and active while ALSO having your weapon drawn. The other balance is the fitting capacity on your Dropsuit. And yeah, maybe - MAYBE - a couple of the Scout suits have more PG and CPU at each tier than they really should have. Maybe it's a little too easy to stack Prototype modules and a cloak on just the Advanced suits in some cases. Oooh, I know! Maybe because cloaking is so powerful, they should add the drawback that when you're moving, you have a blue shimmery effect so people can see you! And just in case people still have trouble, there should be at least a faint shimmer when you're staying still. But if that's not enough, how about they also make sure an enemy's crosshairs still turn red when they're on target. ...wait a minute... this sounds familiar somehow... There is no drawback at the moment. You can switch to your weapon and fire before the cloak even turns off. I just reinserted the relevant portion of my post, since you didn't actually include any of its content. With that back in there, I'm sorry, but your comment seems like it's not really addressing any of the points I made. You can switch to your weapon - triggering an immediate decloak sound (which to be fair, I agree with turning the volume up for) and an immediate decloak animation. The animation takes long enough that you're still harder to see than normal for long enough to get a couple of shots off, but you're more visible than you would be while remaining actually cloaked. The immediate sound trigger, which comes BEFORE you finish swapping the cloak out, is a giveaway that there's a cloaked enemy nearby. If it was a little louder and more obvious, then it would be a good indicator that it's time to start looking for that (now more obvious because they're decloaking) blue shimmer and opening fire. Not seeing how "you can't activate cloak with your weapon out" and "you can't keep cloak active after pulling your weapon out" are less of a drawback than the "you have to swap away from your weapon to place it" drawback on REs, Nanohives and Uplinks or the "you can't use it while also having a weapon ready" drawback on Active Scanners and Repair Tools. Also not seeing how you can argue that glowing bright blue isn't a drawback for an item you're meant to be using for invisibility.