The words "Dust" and "tactical" being used in the same sentence... it makes me die a little inside. I saw another thread about this before and I'll share my opinion again, Dust is not even close to tactical. It has the tactical elements of any other shooter, and some planning with fits/counters (again, in many other shooters) but when it comes to the gameplay I agree that the main thing that holds it back from being tactical is the amount of damage you can take before dying. I don't think players are punished enough for making bad decisions in the heat of the moment for it to be considered a tactical game.

I was able to do a lot of stupid things without dying thanks to being in a well tanked suit and against lowbies (SP)/people with bad aim. I believe that truly tactical shooters are harsh on players for making bad decisions, not giving people the chance to turn around after being shot several times to get behind cover and be auto-healed up afterwards. Examples: Rainbow Six Vegas, Socom, The Last of Us.

Though I believe I saw a quote by CCP at one point stating that they weren't planning for Dust to be a tactical shooter. I've still seen people argue that Dust is a tactical shooter so I thought I'd share.

This game has about as much punishment as any other run of the mill FPS game. Nothing really setting it apart from your average shooter in that regard. ISK loss, w/e, good players can run proto and not lose isk; and even then downgrading to adv to gain isk is still easy enough. Running into a group of enemies alone doesn't really count IMO, because that's a poor decision that better be punished in any shooter but in Dust you've actually got a chance at making it out alive if you're exploiting whatever is broken at the time. I watched a few vids of Diggy simply sprinting through groups of enemies dropping RE's, thanks to the time to kill in this game he was able to get a lot of kills by doing that.

Staying together > Lone Wolfing, again, that's something that's typical for any shooter.