...you're trying to say that the Scout should be able to go up against combat focused suits...

That's not it at all. In a head-to-head the scout should not be successful, but they should be able to defeat medium & heavy suits in ways that create tactical advantages and not brute-force. The scout wins via surprise attacking from an unexpected angle, or through a tactical advantage, not through having the dps/tanking capabilities of assault and heavy suits.

What I'm really saying is there should be VARIETY and complexity to the gameplay, in a way that makes scouts fun and cool to play but not overpowered.

I can guarantee you that cloaks will help that immensely.

2. Jetpacks. Players can equip jetpacks which allow for bursts of flight (maybe around 10-30 seconds) with a significant cooldown. You can fight while airborn and manuver in all 3 dimensions (i.e. you're not limited to only hovering at a fixed altitude). Your sig profile will go through the roof though when using it (like a Micro Warp Drive in EVE) and you'll be vunerable to being locked and killed by swarm launchers when you're in the air with your pack activated (and possibly a few seconds after it deactivates as it cools down). Again, this adds a lot to the game in terms of creating a 3D battlefield, gives tactical dimesion to gameplay and really opens things up for creative, sandbox gameplay. It would also help differentiate Dust 514 from it's competitors and bring the sci-fi element to life (instead of being like WW2 in space). Like with the asension cables, this module would be designed to be for the scout suit, although it might be possible to fit on an assault suit with significant compromises and excellent skills; heavies shouldn't be able to equip these.

The scout suit was made useless almost a year ago when the speed got nerfed. You can't have suits with real specializations and then cry that scouts are too fast to hit and heavy suits have too much armor. You now have COD's redheaded stepchild of a game.

Oh and don't fool yourself into thinking a couple crap modules will suddenly make the scout worthwhile again. They need a full rollback to the old gameplay including strafe speed and every single suit having the ability to tank. Yeah..scouts used to be able to tank with speed and very quick shield recharge delay.

No. I'm in favor of short burst jump packs for quickly traversing hard to reach places, but no jet packs.

You make some good points about speed tanking. I wasn't playing the beta that early so I can't comment on how it was. I wonder if the relatively laggy network code from the very early days combined with server-side hit detection really did make the scout suit unintentionally overpowered back then? Perhaps nerfing the scout's speed was a dirty/temporary hack to balance the game while CCP was trying to optimize everything and balance it? I wasn't there so it's just a hunch. Now that the lag has likely improved and if they implement client-side hit detection (with a check on the server to make sure it's close), boosting the speed back might be less of a concern?

I also think having stasis webifier modules available to counter speed tanking might be a necessary prerequisite to returning the speed to it's former levels. I'm not sure if it would make sense to deploy the webber as an AOE sphere that slows enemies down in a 10m radius, a deployable module (like proxy mines) that create a stasis field on the ground, something you aim and lock onto someone, or something else.

This does sound like an interesting idea though.

I am genuinely curious why you think the modules I suggested would be "crap." In my mind, they seem fun and exciting, but obviously not many others are agreeing with that sentiment.

So what specifically do you dislike about the jetpack? Are you concerned it will be overpowered? too prevalent?

Scouts weren't just hard to hit in the E3 build. They were impossible to hit. They could actually strafe around in HMG fire and take no damage. Yes, this had a lot to do with hit detection, which has improved but is not great yet.

I could see a small boost to scouts strafe speed as a reasonable solution to the scout usefulness issue, but this would have to be done very carefully and not with the typical nerf/boost hammer approach that we have seen so many times. The way the TAR was handled recently is the perfect example of how a boost to strafe speed on scout suits would have to be handled. Give them a tiny boost, look at the change, and tweak away with tiny improvements until it is just right.

As far as your ideas for modules are concerned I think the main reason you're hearing so much opposition from so many of us is that there are just too many ways to abuse said modules. Currently getting into a hard to reach spot requires team work and a drop ship. Adding in a grappeling hook &/or a jet pack would take away that team play requirement thus making them too powerful.

The grappling hook idea seems particularly OP since scouts would just hide above doors in little rooms and use breach shotguns with stacked damage mods to wreck any and all who entered. Since our explosive weapons don't have a large enough blast radius to kill someone on a ceiling (if they are shot into the room from outside of it) there would be no way of dislodging the scout, thus making that pathway unusable. <-- In our current maps 3 scouts could lock down a control point in a building indefinitely.

Its great that you're trying to think of ways to add a more vertical element to the game but we have been talking about both of these ideas for quite a while here (see other posts) and have yet to come up with a way to make them fun/useable/not incredibly over powered.

The grappling hook idea seems particularly OP since scouts would just hide above doors in little rooms and use breach shotguns with stacked damage mods to wreck any and all who entered.

Essentially jump packs would open up opportunities for tactical maneuvering with sudden bursts of speed such as quickly retreating from a dangerous situation or jumping to hard to reach places. One could argue that jetpacks would do the same, but I think they would necessarily be slower because you would have to be able to control your trajectory in-flight while with jump packs you just point and jump. I also don't think an extra 7-27 seconds of flight as an infantry unit is necessary or even all that helpful. It's just more time before you can get back behind cover and someone can shoot you down. That's another concern I have about jetpacks: people using them because they can and not because they should. Honestly I just don't like the aesthetic of a bunch of idiots hovering around over the battlefield making themselves easy targets.

tl;dr
Jump packs = Useful
Jet packs = Novelty

So would a high speed impact with a ceiling kill you?

So would a high speed impact with a ceiling kill you? I believe it should. Let the bottle rocket mercs fly, I think this is the best reason someone could come up with to spec into swarms. Btw how would you fire your gun if you are controlling your rate of ascension or the angle of thrust? When Super Dave uses his jet pack it takes 2 hands.

I can see your point, and the jump pack does sound cool but is maybe too overpowered? What's the counter to it? If you can essentially teleport to wherever you want within a large radius almost instantaneously, how are people supposed to kill you?
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The jetpack could easily distract a group of people as it circles overhead. Also, don't forget that you can use weapons while jetpacking. If used in the right hands you could could be really devastating by attacking from unexpected angles, raining down mass driver rounds on an enemy position while they're trying to lock and kill you. Meanwhile your teammates sweep in from the flank and take them out.

It will be weak in open areas so you'll generally want to keep your altitude low to avoid being swarmed, but in big buildings and tall complexes it would really shine, going from platform to platform, ducking into cover to avoid incoming swarm fire, bypassing ladders and choke-points.

+1 for jump packs - or as an alternative, a skill that can be trained to increase jump height a little. Not a lot, but enough that one would be able to clear those ledges and platforms that are currently just a bit too high up.

Also, *slightly* increased strafe speed for scouts, *slightly* better backpedalling speed, *slightly* lower fall damage and possibly other *slight* improvements to mobility skills.

And definitely, definitely a decent improvement to scanning related base values. Having the same scan range as all the other suits is so counter-intuitive. At the very least, up the base scan range on the Gallente scout suit, since it's description and slot configuration suggests it's supposed to fill a recon/spy role.

True, but that also sounds more like an assault role and I'm looking at it from a scout's perspective. The topic of the thread was "giving scouts a purpose" right? You can use weapons while jump packing too, you're just not in the air as long.