Cloak is not useless

Discussion in 'Infiltrator' started by Loui5D, Mar 17, 2013.

  1. Loui5D


    While this may be a isolated incident it proves a point, the cloak is not useless.
    • Up x 3
  2. m44v

    You don't need a cloak for walk past inattentive enemies, never saw the camel camo videos?
    • Up x 1
  3. Dcrd

    You could see some videos with people doing the same with shotguns before, they whined that shotguns are OP, now people say it's about the cloak. Actually, it's about 20fps guys and blind idiots. You could do this with any class. Also notice that as soon as he was spotted by a guy who's rig allows him to play in this fight with a reasonable fps, he dies immidiately.
  4. GSZenith

    more or less this,
    on gu4 launch day went in knifing/bolting 15ppl at crown without ever being shot, not cos cloak worked but cos everyone ran <20fps and couldn't keep up with bunny with shotgun.
  5. Dr. Euthanasia

    Hunter Stealth can only be judged fairly in circumstances where you are being looked at. In these circumstances, your only ability to control how effective it is, is to stop moving entirely. Even when you do this, you are not rendered completely invisible. This means that your skill in using the cloak cannot guarantee a desired result, while your opponent's skill in seeing through the cloak has no such limit and is fully capable of detecting you even when you use it to its maximum potential.

    Every competitive player will make value judgments on their equipment based on a comparison between the worst and best case scenarios when using it, the probabilities of either occurring, and then finally comparing that result to all other available options. While this is obviously a simplification, it's still a decent outline of how metagames develop. With that in mind...

    Best case: You travel undetected for 12 seconds, allowing you to reach a tactically advantageous position before a fight begins, or reach a tactically significant objective such as a vehicle terminal or turret without drawing attention. Even at night, outdoors, and with only a single onlooker, this outcome is still uncertain.

    Worst case: You are detected immediately and shot. The cloak prevents you from retaliating, leading to you starting the fight at a massive disadvantage. This can occur regardless of your own actions and becomes increasingly more likely in the presence of several factors completely beyond your control, such as the time of day, environment, and number of onlookers. The greatest factor by far, however, is the skill at detecting cloaked targets possessed by each one of those onlookers, which is something which you cannot evaluate in any way until it's too late to matter.

    Now compare that to the Medic, Engineer, Heavy Assault, and Light Assault. All of their class abilities work exactly as expected. None of them punish you for using them, much less for using them correctly. Is it really surprising that outfits only allow at most one Infiltrator per squad into their operations, and much more commonly one per platoon or none at all? The greatest skill that an Infiltrator possesses is his ability to avoid situations where he is forced to rely on Hunter Stealth, and the only advantage he brings to a squad is the ability to hack terminals, which does not scale in effectiveness with multiple Infiltrators. The former isn't even class-specific. Anyone can sneak around effectively if they actually put some effort into it, and the cloak is at times worse than useless for this purpose - at least other classes don't make noise when they want to become hard to detect.
    • Up x 8
  6. Anvildude

    Very true.

    Also, apparently the NC are starting to learn the Girraffe Camo trick, because they're using it right back at us. There've been quite a few NC that I thought were VS wearing an odd camo. Buggy Friendly tags don't help either.


    But yeah- these sorts of runs are more about enemy inattentiveness than any real skill the cloaker has. I do admire his target priority, though.
  7. bebbly

    I know this is a pretty beat up horse, but I still don't see how just making them completely invisible is overpowering,

    Just scrap this "predator" bollocks and just make it completely invisible.
    It is only 12 seconds (really 10 with a fade in and out), noisy, locks shooting.

    All they need to do, is make us shimmer a second when shot.
    As a bonus it would also get rid of the whole low/high setting problems too,
  8. Dr. Euthanasia

    They could make the fade-out take longer too, and increase the extremely-close-range volume of the decloaking noise, so that it's less practical to use it as an unfair ambush tool.

    ...But I absolutely agree, and I've been pushing for this exact thing to happen for a very long time.
    • Up x 1
  9. Skeith

    imo they are saving something for the infiltrator revamp

    im from the enclave and we have some dev in our outfit and they pretty much agree that currently we dont have a role in the game
  10. drNovikov

    Giraffe camo. Btw, after developers fkd up the cloak, I infiltrate as a heavy assault. No cloak at all.
  11. OldMaster80

    That's exactly what I mean when I say Infiltrators are the less important class of the game. To capture a base you need medics, you need ammo and repair, you need firepower. But you never need an Infiltrator. Sometimes one can help, but two Infiltrators in the team are already too much.
    Of course playing the Infiltrator, both as sniper and as cqc assassin can be fun, and IT IS actually fun when your enemies are so sleepy they don't even feel your presence (quite rare, as Hunter Cloaking device last only 10-12 seconds regardless the cert level).

    They should introduce the Stalker Camo Suite, brutally nerf all in-game vehicles radars so our recon darts can eventually mean something, fix and improve our two specific grenades (EMP in particular) and possibly design some kind of Infiltrators-only goals inside bases (like cutting off the power supply or jamming the communications array).
    Then we could start talking about infiltration.
    • Up x 1
  12. drNovikov

    Leave my vehicle radars alone!
  13. drNovikov

    Leave my vehicle radars alone!
  14. Ztiller

    Of course not. The cloak is amazingly effective. It's not perfect, but it doesn't need to be. However, if you think you can convince these people that, you're in for a surprise. Trust me, i have tried.

    Every time something have a higher skill requirement than the general other classes, there will be players whining about how it is UP. That's the way it have always been, in every game.

    That can be said for almost every stealth class in every game. You simply do not benefit from having too many, because it overly-alerts the enemy.

    TF2, for example. Having more than 2 spies will just lead to the enemy going Pyro a lot more to counter you. Usually 1 spy is the strongest.

    And in Global Agenda, the common layout was 1 Robo, 1 Recon, 4 Medics and 4 Assaults. IIRC. Despite this, nobody ever claimed that the recon was UP. As a matter of fact, a good recon was the most feared enemy you could face.

    Despite this, you only ever brought 1 recon to an AvA match. It's inherit in the Stealth classes themselves. They do not stack their strength on eachother like other classes do.
  15. OldMaster80

    Ok, then they should replace the recon dart with alternative tools that are not somehow replicated by vehicles upgrades: holographc projectors, communications jammers, improve hacking tools to scramble and debuff vehicles, EMP darts whatever that help us to be the spies and saboteurs we're supposed to be.
  16. drNovikov

    A shield diffuser and a deployable radar / jammer pylons would be very nice. Recon dart shoul make no sound and should stick to vehicles, decreasing lock-on time 4 times and spotting it and everything near it on a minimap.
  17. Dr. Euthanasia

    It doesn't "overly-alert" anyone. The reason that multiple users of a stealth class in one area is discouraged is because every one of them is punished if even one makes a mistake. You can still work together, the risk of detection simply scales with the number of participants.

    Oh, so it's okay for you to reference other games with stealth classes to prove a point, but the instant I do the same thing, they're suddenly too different to be compared.

    One spy can't sap two turrets in two different locations.

    Recons were still consistently useful. An Infiltrator in Planetside 2 is less useful than any other class during a base defense, and less useful during an offense once the enemy terminals have been hacked and the area they're in has been secured. Of course, you're going to dismiss this as a matter of me being a bad player because you think that sitting in a corner with a silenced bolt-action rifle is a meaningful way to contribute to a squad's objectives, but I wouldn't want to ignore one of your so obviously infallible arguments just because I'm tired of hearing you repeat the same tired statement over and over again.

    And yet, you always brought that Recon. The stealth class scaling poorly with numbers was part of the justification for it being independently strong. There is no comparison to the Planetside 2 Infiltrator here. The class is weak, and plenty of outfit leaders acknowledge this. In close quarters combat, the only kind which matters on foot, our stealth is a liability. We have no powerful utilities to make up for this like the ability to revive dead players or toss the ludicrously powerful concussion grenades, and there are no objectives in the game that we have even a slight advantage in taking - not that the class would become good even if there were, mind you. All that would do is convince more people to begrudgingly toss an Infiltrator player into their squads to hack special terminals during base assaults.

    You know how the Recon got bombs? The ones that were powerful enough to kill everyone caught in the blast radius when stacked? Those were a feature that made you want a Recon in your squad. They could clear heavily entrenched capture points for your team and either force the enemy airborne or outright kill them. Alternatively, you could have your Recon serve as a proper assassin because the team sizes were small enough and the respawn penalties great enough that killing one player actually mattered. Once again, the PS2 Infiltrator has nothing like this. Nobody cares that you can kill someone in a single bullet from 500 meters. That person will be back in seconds even without a medic and he's got ten allies covering for him in the meantime. If he's outdoors, there's a good chance that he's not defending anything which matters anyways. If he's indoors, someone with a shotgun will do the same job far more easily. You have no explosive power sufficient to kill all ten of those people simultaneously (unlike every other class in the game, so even if you did it wouldn't be unique), much less to destroy their spawning location, and you can't even get close to them without being seen - at least, not in a way which is made significantly easier by playing the class you picked.

    This class suffers from being something worse than useless. It's purposeless. All the skill in the world won't change that, and the fact that I'm good enough to succeed with a pistol as my primary weapon, a base shield disadvantage, and a class ability which doesn't work but still punishes me regardless of how I use it, is nothing more than a self-imposed handicap for all the good that playing Infiltrator does me.
    • Up x 3
  18. DemoniWaari

    Why do I get this feeling that this thread will now be Ztiller VS Dr. Euthanasia from now on?

    Anyway. The cloak isn't bad imo, it works, but it could work better. Though I don't care about that really, but what I do care about is the fact that there isn't all too much you can do with hacking at the moment.
  19. Dr. Euthanasia

    The thread? Please. This whole subforum is me vs. Ztiller. One thread may die and be forgotten, but we'll find each other in a new one and the fight will start once more. I'm not backing down until things change or the people in charge prove that they won't.
    • Up x 4
  20. DemoniWaari

    Yeah... that's true. I should've said "this thread too" and then maybe it would've been more correct. Though it's amusing to watch you two argue about it *grabs popcorn*.