As it stands, scouts can fight so effectively that they don't need cloak. They are entirely effective because they have the ability to see the battlefield clearly while engaging the enemy. Cloak now incentivizes scouts to use it as little as possible as their ewar is their greatest asset, and using it to hide in their blind spot is more effective than hoping to not see a shimmer. It is used as a defense tool for running away/hiding, or as an assaulting tool to run strait at an enemy. My proposal is aimed at making it for defense/intel gathering, which is ideally the scout's roll.

Essentially I want to make scouts be scouts. Scouts have INSANELY powerful ewar, and bonuses, and they arguably need these bonuses in order to make the role distinct and viable. However, I believe that putting a limiter on their ability will be the best way to let scouts be fun and different. The cloak is the most convenient way to do it as it only involves changing a few parameters. If cloak duration.recharge is too powerful, then those numbers can be changed (10/20/30 seconds, +50% recharge time, etc). The specific numbers are less important than the idea itself, and if you have a better idea, I'd like to hear it.

I was around when the cloak was first brought up. Scouts did not want to lose their nanite injectors or active scanners (for spin scanning) just for a cloaking device, they demanded a second equipment slot. You choose not to use a cloak on your scout because your scout is perfectly overpowered without it - you do not have to make a choice between combat ability and ewar wallhacks that is the problem - meaningfully addressing this would take away the ewar wallhacks while scouts are in combat mode and return the crazy ewar abilities only while in the non-combat cloak mode.

This is not a meaningful disadvantage to scouts. They can get by without cloaks due to powerful ewar, in short if you are 'good' a cloak is a disadvantage to you, rather than being something the defines the role. A cloak hurts more than it helps at high skill levels. What Ceej's proposed change would do is force scouts to make a plan, attempt to execute, and then fade once executed so they can re-evaluate engagement options rather than being able to perform re-evaluations in the middle of combat.

No, it wasn't it was to make scouts have a deficit, the delay before firing (which is being increased) is the attempted fix for 'insta-kill cloaking'. A scout should be able to find and murder people - they should be forced to re-evaluate after that single target. The could certainly be a minimum duration of cloaked time necessary before you get the ewar bonuses. In regards to 'taking away bonuses', no one needs the ability to see 40-70m+ with high precision at all times that is blatantly overpowered, it is compounded by allowing everyone in your squad to also see these people. As soon as spin scanning was fixed *everyone* jumped over to scouts (in particular the cal scout).

THATS THE ****ING POINT. People shouldn't be playing scouts as light assaults. They should be scouts who take targets of opportunity when available. Assaults should be the main "I want to ****ing shoot people" platform.

Most of this looks good, i like the proposed changes to the profiles of all the suits, and I like the normalization of scan radii idea to make range amps useful for all.
I'm not sure how I feel about removing direction arrows to the minimap, but minor. I thought scanners were fine before the 1.9 changes
As an assault with max precision and dampening, I don't like the idea of tanking mods adding to my profile because I fear using HP mods will negate my skill investments, and that an assault shouldn't be punished for using HP mods beyond the existing penalties, but hopefully the profile debuffs will be minor for these modules. Also, will ferroscale and reactive plates also have the debuff?