Stalker cloak facts and analysis - An unsolvable conception problem?

Stalker Cloak could use some perks for dealing with objectives. Maybe hacking a capture point to push the timer slightly... so we don't have to stay in a predictable room waiting for the inevitable flashlights once the first guy bites it. Stalkers don't even have the tools to sustain our presence at capture points. A few kills and your dangerously low on ammo. Clearly we are not meant to hold up against multiple targets in combat, let alone wave after wave enemies from Zerg. The current meta encourage infiltrators to try these insanely suicidal tactics. However small fights simply don't exist like they used to. Realistically you can't make the impact in a large fight anymore with regards to point captures, unless your working with a squad or platoon... You arrive and flip the point, AWESOME <3 but no support is handy to back you up. Only friendly tanks circling the base like vultures looking for an easy meal.

Cloaking inconsistency is another HUGE issue. I can't tell if the player I am fighting is on low settings or ultra. I tend to treat everyone like Ultra, but recently even fully stationary, deep cloak has been detected and I mean ALOT. Not just BR100's with eyes like eagles. I take careful consideration NOT to put myself against crazy backgrounds, or against the skyline but still even, middle of the field I get insta-gibbed by passing infantry who should have had absolutely no idea i was there. I gave them no reason to even look in that direction, let alone ADS and open fire in under a second. Its as if cloak wasn't even applied to my body. I used to play on Ultra (Currently on High) I don't want to call hacks on people, and I tell myself its probably bug related more then anything. However cloaking can't honestly be trusted and that really sucks. I can't describe to you how incredibly frustrating it gets to do everything right - and I mean absolutely everything and just get destroyed. Thankfully you all play infiltrator so at some point you know exactly what I am describing. The worst part for me is your never going to understand why either. If you ask how they spotted you they either tell you to L2P or don't understand your trying to figure out what happened. Its not the fact they killed you... its the fact everything you trust and believe in has just been proved invalid. While some people are cool about explaining the bug, or even what they saw which tipped them off most won't.

But the fact is cloak is riddled with bugs. So much so I have been logging out and taking breaks lately. Remember those hit detection issues? It was taking me 3 on average crossbow bolts to kill people... Detection issues, and cloaking issues will keep happening and this leaves a player feel powerless at times. Honestly you can't NOT get ticked off when it does happen to you. I can totally identify with some of the original posters gripes indeed.

Is stalker useless? No, but it could use some love. I also think that its okay to talk about situations like these and admit they happen to all of us. Yes learn from your mistakes... but you have to admit after patch days things get messed up. Accepting it - and not taking these defeats personally can help. Patches always have caused problems. **** look at engineers hit boxes when they are on their turrets. Its broken all over again. What else that was previously fixed has become broken again I wonder? Given the amount of times I have personally stopped and taken tea breaks lately since the Valk came out I honestly wonder if there are new bugs with cloak or old bugs which have resurfaced.


Edit: Stalker cloak is still my love, but pretending like everything is magical and fine isn't true.

TLDR: **Hugs OP** Don't give up just take breaks when it becomes intolerable. I understand you, and I have moments where everything is awesome, and then moments I cannot honestly hit the re-spawn key because I feel so incredibly emotionally mixed up. Its confusing and its frustrating, and buggy and just - disappointingly shocking.

I like the stalker cloak

So after making the post above I did some testing. The previous reloading bugs which make weapon magazines visible are still a problem we have to contend with.

However there is a resurface of an older much more un-controllable bug. I tested this tonight on high graphics settings and it was possible to see my friends weapons by shifting my position around him. This bug was originally reported by Rhoxer months ago but was fixed ... or so we thought. Even linear details on my crossbow streak glossy ribs across the landscape. Reloading the xbow is fairly safe. Its only when enemies move around your location, goo-ey lines appear on the weapon itself which blatantly give away your position. The lines distort every manner of background type. Its better to avoid all rooms and walls while this bug exists. For other faction specific weapons its even worse the outline is much more obvious and you can clearly see the guns entire shape. Nothing will save you from detection in these cases. Your never going to know who can see the globs of your weapon, or if the bug is even triggered until your dead. However it does trigger fairly consistently and would explain allot of confusing situations since the latest patch.




Edit: Keep in mind, the helmets are fine its just the weapons which show up.

Also keep an eye out for darklight issues. Apparently an outfit member has reported somehow keeping the darklight on his secondary when he switched to his primary. He could see infiltrators but they don't seem to react to him. He fixed it by re-deploying but essentially he was walking around with a perma-light for a few minutes. We tried re-creating this bug, no luck, given hes a pilot my first guess might have something to do with rumble seats when ejecting from the Valk. They have been dropping each other off places lately. This one needs more testing.

Sorry I apologize for judging you even though im no better.Forums make me hate on ppl for no reason my bad

One simple answer, why any infil will get a place in my squad over any LA....

INFORMATION

The biggest boon to ANY team in ANY battle!

Be this information in terms of simple tool useage (RDD and Spotter) or the old school "Q" method or even the more advanced comms standards used in organised play.... this is the Infiltrators mandate!

Not "ROFL ir invismable and r killing enemy with pistol LOOOOL".... your not going to get a good KD like you would with a heavy, your not going to earn certs like a medic, but what you are going to do is help your team survive that breach by giving them the information they need before the breach comes!

Dont get me wrong, if your a Beaver you can rack up some serious kills with this spec.... but not many people are a Beaver.... and learning the way of the Beaver will take you some time (trust me, im trying).

Try going knife only. Fixes everything on the list minus random events.

You don't need to. I'm perfectly know the feeling.

You spend several minutes moving like a paranoiac rat, freezing on the smalled pixel moving on your screen to check it's not someone that could see your movements, you make you mind boil while looking at the radar extrapoling everyone's trajectories to not cross them (including allies which are often even more dangerous than foes!) when you move from a brush to a crate, you stress, you makes crazy new escape plans at each 5m you walk, you keep your finger far far far out of that ability key to prevent any temptation to turn it off (which will just shout "hey, hear my nice cload sound! bring flashlights now!" at 100m around)... and finaly, you are about to be able to do something uselful...

Someone enters, do something, like testing its recoil, landing a mine at 5m of your position, runing straight toward your position... or worst doing something that don't ******* understand how it could have screwed you and... blam! You're free certs. You didn't do anything wrong, you would swear it. Everything needs to be done again from nothing.

After five attempts likes this, a whole new event even happens to you: you start to hear the sound of your head banging against the wall, your teeth clenching to not make your neightborhood hear your curses toward SOE, becoming crazy when asking yourself if there is not something you just don't understand at all in the system... things like that.

I'm past beyond that now.
I just had too many times where at the end I felt like I just wasted my evening.

PS2 is a game. I'm playing it not to proove something, but only to have fun and relax from my daily work.
Stalker play just failed too often to give me that, so it's over for me with it.
I won't get back at it unless SOE do a serious work on it to regain trust from me about its reliability.

Still I really think the stalker is way the Infiltrator class should be and I hope SOE will do things for people who still using it.

****king dam*n it! This explain a lot!
Thanks for sharing... I feel more enlightned now... and I'm a VS.

Try an engineer with a recon bolt crossbow.
I play this sometimes when I do not want to go for real fight, and people keep sending me tells saying they just love it.
An infiltrator can't spam recon by itself... and engineer can, and he gives even ammo to other while doing so.

Usually when I'm using the stalker cloak I just sit around waiting for minutes until I'm 100% sure that it's safe to take someone out, and then when I do someone randomly comes around a corner and kills me anyway. Infiltration and taking out from behind doesn't work in this game due to the large amount of people constantly moving around a base. As the OP said, it's impossible to be certain that you're good to go for a kill unless you have a spidey sense. To make matters even worse, even crouched movement is going to make it very easy for everyone to see you, there's almost no point in doing it, with running you always have a bigger chance of making it. Far lower visibility for crouched cloakers really would help.

I could sum the three enemies of stalkers:
- Mind-blowing bugs
- Having too many things that can sentence you to death even if you played perfectly, compared to other cloaks/class
- Lacks of a true objective for infiltrators. Hacking just don't make enough a difference. People don't even bother to put guard on hackables things, or just blow them up and don't care to repair them, even for xp.

Your kidding right?

The crossbow bolt is absolute total and utter RUBBISH compared to the RDD! It lasts 10 seconds has a miniscule range and removes any use of a secondary weapon aswell as leaving your engineer spamming useless darts instead of manning his turret or using his primary.

If an engineer is doing his job, the Infiltrator can spam away just as fast, giving a better scan area, greater scan time and more scan per dart with less downtime for the class giving the recon.

If you think the xbow darts are even close IN ANY WAY, to the RDD you are very.... VERY wrong!!

The only use for them as i can see is if you want to take Spotter and still have some sort of firable ranged recon.

For example, you would use the spotter to cover the building your squad is in and the darts from the xbow to cover advance areas your enemy could take. I have tried this, it works to some extent the trouble is, it simply isnt worth pulling the recon darts as they are so poor and take you out of the battle. I wold rather take a scope and use "Q" from a good posistion.

Sure, infiltrator can do better. IF they are supported by an engineer and IF they accept to play full support while playing a class that is not described as support instead of fightning.
The engineer do better recon by itself, because it can go forever without help, and it's a support class from the start, so engineers are not as keen as think it's boring to spam recon bolts.

I'll say all depends if you speak of an organized squad or a PU squad.
I go in battles with my engineer as a PU. I make other PU have a recon they can't usualy dream of. Cause I need nobody else to do it and have the minset for.

Frustrating, but to be expected. Not making mistakes isn't a suit of armor to ward off the reaper.

How snide, when I cloak I expect to be hidden. If I am not making moronic choices about my hiding locations its not unreasonable to expect concealment....

If a friendly steps behind me and draws fire - that is another story. Unexpected things happen in battle and all you can do is risk management. That part of your statement I understand. The same thing goes for expecting enemy paths and whats drawing their attention. However when your core ability is malfunctioning what do you do? How do you operate? Its frustrating, its confusing you never truly know who is going to see the glitch and open fire. Especially devastating when your down to only using a secondary weapon.



Showing others that it happens to all of us, can help calm down some of that frustration and come to terms with situation. The original post drew attention to the fact he was experiencing problems with cloak. It forced me to take notice that I am not the only one experiencing these concealment anomalies and maybe I should check for bugs... Seems that we have an old one which just wouldn't stay dead literally re-appearing this patch.

Seeing Stalkers from the visible side of the spectrum I can safely say that Stalker cloak works far more often than it doesn't. But I agree with you in the squashing of bugs so issues like your screenshot don't pop up.

My issue is more that the idea "I think I did everything right, therefore I shouldn't die" is a frighteningly toxic line of thinking. That way leads madness and tears.

Is all I want to get across.

Sorry Inex.

I misunderstood your point slightly. Your right we can't control the battle around us. This discussion reminds me of the time debris killed me in the middle of a field sniping. You have to laugh it off sometimes. While friendlies can be a determent, they also can save you. We just remember all the times allies screw us over more vividly.

I did notice the OP citing concerns about the time it takes to get into position. For me start up time isn't an issue. I sprint around when the coast is clear or when I can break LOS and lose my tail. So long as the cloaking sound isn't going on and off and no radar is present your pretty free to do as you wish. Consider that moving too slowly is actually a detriment in some cases. The enemy knows you have not moved very far. When you sprint around its harder to keep tabs on your location. Of course battle dependent. In a zerg style fight sprinting around could be a death sentence. You never want to be surrounded by enemies unless you can't help it in squad play or have an awesome hide spot. I really think the OP should try being a little more fluid with movement.

I feel better to see that someone can understand me, CuteBeaver.

You're right telling however that sometimes, you better run than move slowly.
I did it as part of "risk management" pretty often: Sometimes you just better run and cross fingers than try to go at the next point slowly, because the battle is evolving too fast around and you'll get even more chances to have something unpredictable happen to you the longer you stay in the area.

However, Stalker still, IMHO, taking more time to position than any other class/cloak: even if we can run, the have to stop often to regenerate energy or just wait for some enemy to pass by.
And also, if it's right that nobody can control everything on the battlefield, and that every class dies to unpredictables events... Stalker still have more kinds of unpredictable events that can made it killed stupidly then other toons IMHO.

I cannot foresee how easier would be the Stalker gameplay without all the bugs.
I just know that currently, it is just too frustrating for me to keep playing it.

I have easier time to C4 a valkyrie with a LA than to get a 3-kill streak with the stalker, and I have ten times more training with Stalker than with LA... that's too much of a gap with a class, the LA, that already complain to not be loved enough.

PS: appearently some fix get out on stalker cloak today, so I'm going to try again tonight to use it.

Well put it this way - with the bugs my enjoyment has been cut severely.

I think you might want to give it another try when the bugs are fixed. I am pretty sensitive to cloak bugs because I push myself into really dangerous places with the bolt knife, and move quickly almost similar to SMG play sometimes. So I am very reliant on people passing me by and cloak actually working. Once they do I get the jump on them. For me thats how stalker cloak works. When cloak is broken you start to notice your streaks get cut shorter by a noticeable amount. Example: I haven't been able to pull any 20+ kills streaks like I normally would since the Valk launched. Reason being: Roll the dice on concealment enough times someones going to notice you. The bug is especially likely to go off when enemy walks around your hiding location. Sometimes your lucky and can kill them, however most times your just outgunned. Ambushing requires you to pick the moment. Not both parties to be surprised by each other.



Heres a fun game. Count how many times the bug could have ended me in this video lol... This was shot when there was no bug. Makes a good example though of how dependent Stalkers are on a working cloak.

Since the patch I usually get around 6 to 8 kills in a decent streak when things are going my way. This of course does not mean I don't randomly die like everyone else when leaving the spawn room, eating cookies, or making pancakes by falling from silly places. The point is lifes allot harder right now then it used to be.

I think I am going to be allot more conservative now and go back to hiding in trees bushes until this bug is fixed. Avoiding rooms in bases and switching to SMG when I have to be indoors. This bug previously was one of the most aggravating ones we faced and it makes sense my lifespans been typically cut in half given how close I am to targets. I Just hope they fix it sooner rather then later. Rohxer is already making a bug video of this as well as radar issues which pop'd up.

Ok, I'm currently testing with the recent fix... this is quite better, but still not what I think it should be

I have played with stalker some. Not a lot but some. I like making a difference in a battle but as a stalker I found that hard to do, at least until I started picking my targets. I found that if I wounded an enemy they would panic. Their friends would hunt for me instead of fighting each other, everyone would go change gear to hunt for me. 1 cloak and I made chaos of a defense line. Even better in big battles where medics are reviving everyone. I just pick off the medics and the tide of battle will turn. Your role as a stalker is to make them feel fear. If they are always watching for you the LAs and HAs will be a to push in. Best is when there is a team. Now that is real chaos.

No worries. I usually expect a harsh reaction to that opinion because there are enough voices on Forumside convinced that PS2 is a single player game where not making mistakes is supposed to guarantee perpetual victory.