everything nice and dandy, but where is the scalability of the inf class? How many infs you need to hack the base? 1? 2? 3? How many Ztillers, Torokokills or Mustardes can farm a tower at a time? 1, out of 100 people participating in that meatgrinder. Too bad there are dozens if not hundreds of other infs logged in, with not enough skill and nothing class specific to do. And how much time is required to even reach sufficient level of skill? Too much for most (in other words it's unattainable)
Like piloting then? High skill ceiling but an absolutely amazing place to be if you manage to break through and reach that level. Infiltrators will remain a high skill class for those who can reach up to those heights and are willing to put the time and effort in. For everyone else it is learning, practice and more practice. The class is fine. The skill ceiling is high. Any changes made to accommodate the lesser skilled players will make the higher tier players full on god mode. To steal the terminology from another game, most infiltrators are bronze league heroes who believe they have grandmaster level of play.
I hate being that guy, but from the looks of your stats, you play heavily as a true infiltrator (noting your high kill count with the blitz but low sniper rifle kills). Many complaints in regards to the infiltrator stem from sniper becoming more and more less effective. Any medic of engineer that has half a brain rolls NW5, which are my main targets when sniping due to ammo supplying, vheicle repairing, reviving and repairing. So my next atrgets are heavy damagers, HA now all seem to run NW5 in addition to their shield, once agin making sniping them take more shots. LA shake more than Micheal J Fox and have jetpacks, making head shot more difficult. So I am relegated to counter sniper which a tank does better.
Sniping is less effective because you can choose to fight from a very long range where you can kill players but they can't kill you. It's still pretty powerful in the right spots. The only thing they can do to make the better is to let more spots on the body OSK. And good players would start owning hard if chest shots started to become OSKs
I don't know about high skill ceiling and all that, but I do quite well with an SMG. No more or less than I do with other classes. As far as running and gunning goes. I don't have god like skillz and such. Once turrets/terminals have been hacked/destroyed. I pull a radar flash, switch to Med/HA/Engi and proceed to humiliate try-hards and blow stuff up. the combination of killing and support/utility will be more profitable and enjoyable. That's what the class is reduced to. That's what we don't like. At least LA has C4 and can blow stuff up.
Only time I snipe is to counter snipe or scare off lock on users or engineers in AV turrets. I don't always need to kill them. I just need to make them back off. Which is far more valuable for my squad than headshot kills. Keeping the armour safe is invaluable in any push. I've said it before the infiltrator is situational. Long range, medium range and close range. Need a loadout for each and the pure sniper class is just a myth. You snipe, you engage at medium range with a scout rifle while providing recon for your team via darts or you go heavy infiltrator and get inside the base messing stuff up, hacking terminals and turrets, blasting the enemy armour from the rear. Don't get hung up on sniper, it is just one side of this swiss knife of a class. If anything they should let you know from the start that the infiltrator is heavy cert investment requiring 3 different loadouts (which can be specialised again with ammo pouches, grenade bondaliers, bouncing betties, med kits and so on, thank Higby we have 6 loadouts now) plus a minimum of 2 different Flash loadouts to be anywhere near a successful class. The infiltrator requires heavy investment and a steep learning curve to become successful but perseverance and dedication to always being open minded and willing to learn, the class will open up new ideas and tactical approaches towards combat for you.
Good players do not miss. Exceptional players never miss a headshot. Lowering the bar to let good players get OSK with body shots is just a really bad idea. Sniping has its niche. It's just a very small niche which is unfortunately given a very large gun from the offset leading players to believe this is the defining role of the infiltrator class. It is just one nuance of the very versatile infiltrator class.
I agree with you completely. What I was saying is that many people who pick up infiltrator try sniper and have difficulty and either do not stick with the class or do stay with it but do not adjust their pplay style. This is why many complaints are a single mind set. Personally I do quite well sniping, getting kills, making HPT peel away, and spotting them. Playing infiltrator as a CQC class is much more difficult to pick up due to the limitations imposed such as the ineffectiveness of cloak(mainly its noise) and lower health of the class. Not to say infilitrator can't be a CQC, just more challenging.
Murdock, I see you are well on your way to completing the infiltrator challenge. Keep it up and let me know when you get there so I can add you to the list! (The list that nukabazooka and I made in February, of which we remain the only two members... sadface) To the OP, I hear ya. Nanoweave is my biggest gripe. The cloak was fine on release, got screwed up when they made you an opaque ghost on low settings, and was further borked by the IFF. I'm having a lot of problems using it to good effect, and trust me when I say that I know the limitations of the cloak and how to use it. But in-spite of the issues, infiltrator is still my most enjoyable and fun class to play. I just see all of our bugs and weaknesses and try to wade through it to land that massive kill farm (and help my squad win their objective). Larolyn, while I agree with you that infiltrator is a powerful class, it definitely has shortcomings. And even if I agreed with more of your opinions, I can't really say that I understand how wounding someone (which makes them stop shooting my allies) is MORE valuable than killing them. Sorry, but you completely lost me there and I would be greatly amused by reading a post in which you try to justify that position to me. And please, stop handing out advice on scout rifles and 2x scope bolt actions when you don't even own those weapons (unless you unlocked them on a secret mystery alt). I'm not even going to touch the discussion between Dr. E and Asktera. Sorry guys but that went back and forth too many times for me to find a good point to intervene. Just agree to disagree All I will say is, every time I don't play infiltrator, I feel so helpless. Sure, I can mow people down with my LMG, or revive my teammates. But then when I need ammo, or want to swap to a max, or an engineer, I look at the blue infantry terminal and feel sad. It just stands there taunting me. And all the infils on my side run by it, completely uninterested in hacking it. And then I look at my minimap and realize there are no darts active, and I don't know what I'm up against. I try to breach a room only to find out that it is empty. Or worse, that it is full of dudes waiting for me! After that, I walk outside to catch my breath and shoot rockets at some aircraft. Off in the distance is some dude repairing his magrider. I just look and wait for him to finish repairing so he can glide over and blap me. (perhaps a little dramatic but you get the idea. I feel powerful as an infiltrator, limitless. Everyone else lives in a little box where they can do their job. I have range, I can hack terminals and pull anything I want, and I have vision on my minimap. Bugs and all, it's still the best class in the game).
Piloting has the same problem, there are threads about piloting having a learning curve akin of a slippery vertical wall, and that new players can't learn anything because they get gibbed the moment they leave the warpgate. So now flying is an exclusive club for the elite, do we want the same thing for the infiltrator? Thankfully I get the impression that we don't want that, this discussion seems to boil down to if the current infiltrator is useless or not, while still agreeing that the class needs improvements. I think we should agree to disagree and keep prodding SOE for that damn infiltrator update. Having the skill to get headshots is not relevant when players use NW, you said in other thread "just get closer", I used to say the same thing until I understood that for defeat NW5 you have to get well into the effective range of automatic weapons. Also I would argue that OHK with bodyshots wouldn't be a bad idea, pump shotguns already do that, if boltactions could OHK at pointblank range, then it would be just a pump shotgun with a terrible ROF. It will help new infiltrators to not be free XP at close range when they can't buy a SMG.
Thank you everyone for this discussion. I can see that some people are awesome with the infiltrator and feel that there is little wrong with it, I guess I'm just going to have to disagree with you. My main gripe with it, you see, is not that you cannot use what you have effectively (although it is difficult) but that the very aesthetic of the class is counter to its purpose. It seems silly to me, it's like they went along a checklist of how to make the class more obvious. I will not deny the usefulness of the radar dart, having used it to great effect myself recently. Just last night I managed to get a 7 or 8 kill streak (which may not be good for some of you but is good for me) using just darts the pistol and sometimes my sniper rifle. I hacked terminals with which to resupply, I hacked a turret and blew up a sunderer with it, I kept my faction aware of enemy location with the radar darts. So no one can say I'm not doing my job. However, there's always that one guy, the one guy who instantly sees you and headshots you despite the fact that you are cloaked, crouched and a reasonable distance away. It's very annoying. Then there's the MAXs who seem somehow more able to pick me out than any other class, and can follow me anywhere - especially in the case of the ZOE MAX, which is an issue I will not touch upon, merely that it is better at doing this because it is fast. - Braddigan
I'm not going to piece-meal quote and reply again - we are just seeing different things when looking at the same details. What I will say is that most of your counter-post had the assumption that I am perceiving the infiltrator as bad at doing things - this is not true. What I am saying is that it is bad relative to other classes. I am also saying that there is nothing the infiltrator excels at relative to other classes. In skilled hands the class does "fine". By this I mean it functions at killing infantry (it doesn't really do anything else). It doesn't do this as good as other classes in general, however. Neither does it have an effective role it plays outside this - hacking is relatively poor compared to healing, repairing, vehicle destruction, etc. I am not saying the class is useless, and unlike that fellow here says (the one who keeps sprouting on about how good he is and that only good people understand), I am more than capable of playing the class as it is. I do, however, like other people realise that the class is under-performing and comparatively weak (even if it is functional). Hell, even you realise this yourself: Thus, I don't get why you arguing this. If your point is that the class can kill we already know that (although snipers might disagree!). If your point is that the class performs just as well as any other class then I respectfully disagree - and the stats will back me up.
I go to sleep and come back to this. Maybe I shouldn't have bothered. And what a good little convert you've become. Tell me, how does it feel to know that even your idol has finally admitted the legitimacy of our complaints? Is it so wrong for me to show discontent with this class? I know how weak it is, and my ability to overcome that handicap does not influence my stance here on the forums. This has always been the case, and while I've been improving and adapting just like everyone else who hasn't outright quit the game, people like you and Ztiller could never simply comprehend that a good player like myself might actually disagree with them. My expectations of this class are aligned with roles that its name and description support. It cannot perform these roles effectively enough. The fact that you can enjoy the class a certain way by lowering your standards and refusing to compare its effectiveness with every other class in the game does not make you right, nor does it give you the right to call me deluded. I'm sure you must think that I don't actually succeed with the class because I don't play it "the right way", but if so, you're wrong. I play to every strength this class has - the difference between you and I is that I then look back on my accomplishments and find them disappointing. Apparently I need to say this again: if you want to prove that my arguments are weak, point out their weaknesses. Your ability to make arguments which you find similar by ignoring relevant details that go against them does not diminish the strength of mine. Aimeryan and myself actually had counter-arguments to what you said. Where are yours? As a career Infiltrator, I watch the effects of my hacking become undone in under a minute regardless of which base I'm visiting and how large the enemy force happens to be. The only exceptions to this that I ever notice are when my team occupies the area, thus preventing enemy players from reversing the damage despite the fact that they could do so easily if they went unopposed. I said this before and while you quoted it, your reply ignored the statement itself. The most effective way to deny assets to enemy players is to occupy them with infantry. If they are not occupied, it doesn't matter that the asset was hacked or destroyed, because anyone with the intent to reverse that damage will have the freedom to do so. You don't need to defend dead/hacked terminals or turrets as an Infiltrator - you just need to defend them. So you believe that you have control over where the enemy players move? Whether they maintain their turrets and leave them undefended? Unlikely. You're simply taking advantage of situations which arise completely of their own accord, and whenever that doesn't happen, you can do nothing about it. I used to kill Heavy Assaults with their shields up all the time using nothing but a Manticore, and the only reason I stopped was because I hit Auraxium with it and moved on to the Commissioner. Does that make the Manticore an objectively better weapon than both LMGs and shotguns, or does it simply make me a better player than all those HAs I killed? Why do you suppose SOE is concerned with making a close-quarters cloak if Hunter Stealth is apparently all we need? Could it be that the Infiltrator is uniquely suited to long-range sniping and does not possess tools which give it a significant advantage in close-quarters stealth already? Also, what is the Infiltrator's "considerable" combat prowess relative to? From my understanding, every class in the game has access to SMGs and a higher total health pool, not to mention shotguns. And yet for all these disadvantages, it doesn't require you to play Infiltrator. At the risk of sounding just as negative and bitter as you expect, that sounds like a worthwhile tradeoff to me. The relative number of vehicle-based radar devices compared to darts which I encounter in-game agrees with me, at least. We're wrong yet you can't be bothered to explain how beyond chanting "I can do it, so can anyone!". Yeah, you can do it. We want the ability to do more, and I guarantee that these new and frustrated Infiltrators are going to think the same. You'll have to excuse me for not settling with a mediocre class, but me and my toxic attitude are here to stay.
I have to wonder, Dr. Euthanasia. It's probably been posted somewhere on the forum already, and if so please link to it by all means, but if you were given complete control of the class as a whole, of any buff/nerf, additional weapons/tools, etc, what would you do with it? I'd like to add more things for the infiltrator to do personally, but SOE don't seem keen on adding these things, doors for example. So let's say you are limited to just messing with the class, that's how SOE seem to be limiting themselves, after all. - Braddigan
Well, for starters, here's a thread I made back in January. Most of it is still relevant, although it alludes to the low-settings cloak being much less visible than high, and was created before SMGs existed. I've learned a lot more and made plenty of other arguments since then - to the point where it might be better to just revisit the idea with a new thread - but I'm still an adamant believer that good stealth gameplay in a competitive game like this needs to be binary. You, as an Infiltrator, should be able to know when you've given someone a chance to detect you, and it should be possible to avoid doing this while moving around. Right now, anyone looking in your direction could potentially see through the cloaking effect. That needs to stop. 100% invisible stealth under controllable circumstances, with counter-play that does not allow enemy players to find you by accident (unless you make a mistake) is a must. One thing that probably wouldn't earn me a lot of support is that I would hardly even touch weapons. Right now, the Infiltrator has a lot of redundant guns, even entire classifications of them which are simply never used because they either cater to roles we don't wish to perform or fail to meet the same standards set by their peers. The one thing we don't have, though, is a role which requires a specialized weapon not already in our arsenal. At most, a silenced NS pistol to bring some equality to the factions might be useful, but I'm sure that wouldn't be Infiltrator-only. The only other thing I mentioned is already in this thread, but sniper rifles need to interact differently with medic revivals (and hell, maybe even respawn timers), because keeping people out of the fight is the most useful thing that a sniper can do, and it's too easy to marginalize that right now. The last thing I can really say which doesn't involve adding content beyond the class itself is that we still need the ability to sabotage more of the objectives that already exist. People say that C4 would be too strong even with our current stealth, and while I certainly think they're overstating the effectiveness of the cloak compared to the simple act of sneaking around, they aren't exactly wrong either. My standing idea for dealing with vehicles (since SOE is adamantly opposed to making them hackable) is a small, sticky time bomb that draws attention to itself and can be disabled by enemy players. It's something that forces drivers out of their vehicles to deal with it, that can be protected by the Infiltrator if necessary. Obviously, it would have to be immune to damage and strike a nice balance between having a duration long enough for people to notice it, get out of their tank, and survive a fight with the Infiltrator, and short enough that they couldn't just drive away behind cover and disable the thing without giving the Infiltrator a chance to catch up. At the moment, the only other sabotage idea I can think of is that we could use something to shut down base generators without going through the whole "overload and defend" process. Something temporary that would let us take down the shields for a short period of time without calling unnecessary attention to ourselves. Unfortunately, without changes to the bases themselves, there are some locations where Infiltrators just won't be effective no matter what we do. The complete lack of hackable objectives in some small outposts, for instance, isn't something I could influence with the restrictions you outlined. Oh, and one last thing before I go: I wouldn't do anything to give us more recon. Frankly, I'm baffled by SOE's decision to add two new recon devices to this coming Infiltrator update. The tools that we already possess reveal minimap positions - there is no information more valuable than that short of literal wallhacks, and the RDD is so all-encompassing that it's not like we suffer from its short range or duration to the point where an alternative would be necessary. If anything, counter-intelligence is something we could use instead, like a jamming device or suit slot which directly opposes the effects of the RDD and Scout Radar. It hurts our class more than it helps to flood the game with easy-to-use information gathering tools without giving us an answer to them.
I can agree with pretty much all of that. I actually thought about an idea where getting sniped would add 20 seconds to the respawn timer...but only at the location where you died. You could respawn normally at another base, but could make your way back. This wasn't just sniping however, I thought about this for any death at all. The game kind of cheapens what it is to get taken out of battle, especially in biolabs you can be back in the thick of the fight in seconds. Medics exacerbate this greatly, but it's justified because, well, they're medics. Sniping could be nice as a counter to their actions. Phew, I think I'm going to have to go on some kind of infiltrator training course, I currently use my cloak way too much because I fear the ever prevalent scout radar. - Braddigan
There's really no way to win. Cloak too little and you get caught by scout radar. Cloak too much and you make noise, can't fire your weapons in a pinch, and get caught by radar darts anyways. It's great for getting to the outside of bases without being seen, and for sniping of course, but if you want to do anything inside without the enemy team knowing about it, you almost have to ask their permission.
To stop us from wasting more time repeating the same arguments that have been said many times before using different words, I'll simply say that we'll have to agree to disagree. You look at the class and see something that is failing you and needs an overhaul in mechanics, and I see something that is working well but just needs a few tweaks & bug fixes. Apart from that, I think we agree on the point that matters - it'd be nice to have more things to do. Our feelings on how necessary having those objectives differs, but in the end neither of us will argue against having more goals to pursue.
