Cloak distortion, or "Shimmer" as some may call it, is the worst thing that has happened to cloaks in the history of FPS gaming; it encourages its use for sniping and camping and not much else. Woe be to anyone who dares move!
You see, the truth is: anything less than perfect invisibility actually stands out like a sore thumb.

The best way to balance cloaks (IMO) is with a very recognizable sound when cloaking and uncloaking, and a power mechanic for how long you can reliably use it (e.g. your basic cloak drains and restores x and y capacitor respectively while on or off), with power use amplified by movement. Taking damage, albeit only while cloaked, should drain power. Cloaks should require an amount of power to activate (a minimum threshold). Attacking should drain all remaining power and uncloak the user if cloaked.

For variants: Covert ops cloaks might be efficient enough to let the capacitor regenerate while cloaked as long as you're stationary. Maybe have a restock-able single use cloak variant (militia would be a variant of this). You might also not be able to move as fast while cloaked (unless you're using a Covert Ops suit?), so there could be a variant for that too. Cloaks that drain more power but also decrease your profile slightly. The list goes on...

Skills should affect power capacity, recharge, movement speed, and maybe even the volume of the sound made upon cloaking.

Finally, cloaks are very CPU hungry things which require fitting sacrifices. Forget complex damage mods, you're sacrificing damage output for the element of surprise (a good crutch for Nova Knives and Shotguns for example).


If a lot of what I'm typing seems familiar, it's because a lot of it is similar to how TF2 handles cloaking; TF2 does cloaking extremely well.


This is, of course, only my opinion. But I think there's enough evidence out there to prove that while "predator cloaks look awesome", "awesome" does not make for balanced game play. I've probably missed a few points too.

Thoughts?