Nay, sir! Summon not the overpowered heinousness that surely shall invoke the great nerf bat (whose wings darken the very sky).

Personally, I'm hoping the cloak is potent and effective, but takes up the light weapon slot. Combine that with a fix or three to nova knives, and you've got yourself a practical ninja.

What's more, the shotgun user probably also has either a scrambler or an SMG for when the shotgun runs out of ammo. If all you had to begin with was the sidearm, you're stuck reloading instead of switching weapons and finishing a wounded target off. It makes a substantial difference, especially with the scrambler and its teeny magazine.

Define potent and effective? As taking up the primary weapon slot would render it neither of those points in most players books. We'd laugh it right out of existence everywhere outside of random ambush pub matches.

You can kill, easily, with a sidearm. You just have to be a little better at using it than you have to be with a light weapon. The cloaked scout would focus on doing exactly that.

We'll just have to agree to disagree. This vision of cloaking feels kind of silly to me, as for me, I just feel that stealth specialists should specialize in sneaking. They take the time and the effort to sneak behind enemy lines to hack a key objective, and then they move up to take out enemy hostiles.

Most of the uses you mention are arbitrary at best, and can basically all be fulfilled by a non specialist as is.

I think letting someone hop in and out of cloak at will, along with having movement largely unhindered, is the wrong direction to take it.

Potent and effective: cloak is active whenever equipped, with little or no cooldown between uses. User is nigh on invisible when motionless, and visible only as a shimmer or blur when moving. Speed is not limited, nor are running, jumping, etc. Entering and leaving cloak are both silent. Electronic signature is, of course, unaffected, necessitating the use of dampening modules.

All those years of playing team sneaking in metal gear online (attacking team is 100% invisible armed with only knives and a tranq pistol) and hunting down invisible campers is finally going to pay off

Yani:

By "shimmer or blur," I don't mean something sparkly and bloom-enhanced. I mean something like the way invisibility works in, say, Skyrim-- an indistinct humanoid outline.

Sure, people are going to work out how to hunt for those, and fair enough, but there's probably not going to be anything there you can target with a sniper rifle (to pick an example at random).

(Yes, I've been a little frustrated trying to sneak around Manus Peak. Why do you ask?)

Yes, sharp-eyed people with assault rifles will be a problem, as they damn well should. No, I don't agree that this will reduce the cloak's usefulness below a critical level. If it does, CCP can always reduce the shimmer or blur.

As I think I said somewhere, balancing this thing is going to be a kittening pain.

Enough; I've been arguing this off and on literally all day, and I don't even want it in the game. This is just my best shot at a decent way to implement it. What say we give it a rest and see what CCP actually does with the silly thing?

I do wonder, if not with cloaking, when and how CCP is planning (or not) to fix scout? Will it be the scanner device? If so I wonder how effective/ popular it's gonna be.

Curious, why do you think a sniper wouldn't be able to see you yet a guy with an AR would, assuming they were looing at the same spot....

A player doens't need their equipment to register an enemy to take a shot, see movement that isn't tied to a friendly? Fire, kill, maim, destroy.

Unless something was actually done to make it so it didn't render outside a certain distance, it's likely it would be visible to anyone in the map that can see the spot. Harder to get a one shot kill, yes, but not impossible to land a couple rounds into the cloaked body.

All this speculation is annoying. wheres the source stating no cloaking in next build?

Why do you have to wait for cloaking? Why can't you do that now?

See, this is what I mean....cloaking has to be the nubbest idea to an fps. Wait until good players abuse it though...let's see how much players like it then.

A good cloaking device should have a long cool-down time, not work with sprinting and have a short duration - say, under ten seconds when skill is fully maxed. Even then, this level of tactical advantage is gonna hurt FPS mechanics. If ppl rage about red line snipers and tanks now, imagine what cloaking is gonna bring to the game. FPS should be about competitive shooting, not dirty tricks imo.

Then you and I have very different standards for what makes a worthwhile trade.

That's really all I have to say.

I do it now, but it's nowhere near as effective as it could be. Cloaking is fine, so long as you can't run around with it and it has a cool down.

If you don't like variation, DUST probably isn't the FPS for you.

Adapt or Die bro.

Adapt or die? How about get some skill or die? All of you guys are just looking for ccp to help you get better.

People flank all of the time.....there are two different skills dedicated to reduce scan profile and only one to anaalyze it. Now, you want invisibility?

Variety is great but cheap and cheesy mechanics to getting kills ruins the fun factor

I'm sorry I just see no reason to base a build around something that someone can counter by looking at you from 100+ meters away.

If it can't stand on it's own outside of specific favorable circumstances it's not worth using.

Rarity in a game means it's usually not worth doing.

edit:

or it's inconsistent as kittens or heavily tied to random numbers.