For those of you reading Reddit, you may have noticed two very hot topics on a new type of sunderer module. I am referring to the SDI (Spawn Deployment Inhibitor) which prevents enemies from spawning into a base. Overall I am downright annoyed by the concept of a vehicle doing what I feel should be OUR jobs. Personally I feel infils should be the class encouraged to travel to adjacent lattice lines, and compromise these bases in some manner. Otherwise what is the point of our class? (beyond sniping) Ultimately If adjusting the overall enemy spawn potential of a facility is now a possibility for us to muck around with I feel it should be accomplished through hacking. Another point I'd like to make.... a vulnerable position in a base should be PLANNED and put in a location that is as balanced as possible. Allowing an attacker to drive in and plunk one of these SDI's down sucks for the defenders. Attackers could place the SDI in a location that would be nearly impossible for a handful of defenders to re-secure. I'd much rather the terminal / computer console /whatever we need to hack, be predetermined in a very specific locations that can't be abused as easily. What do you guys think about this concept? Am I being over sensitive as seeing this as a missed opportunity to enhance hacking? Sometimes when we are close to a problem our own personal bias creeps in. I know I have been pushing lattice connections for years now, with very little to gain from it. It feels, as a dedicated stalker, I don't have the tools to do my job as effectively as I should. I run out of ammo while "holding" a point down. Darklights eventually come out, and at best hold for a little while and you pester the capture point in short bursts of time... then retreat when its too risky. Eventually the enemies leave, and you end up playing tug of war with the nodes clock. Desperately trying to keep it from ticking back down to 0:00 before your allies show up. The possibility of delaying, or even removing (temporarily) the problem of being swarmed with a hack job, is too lucrative to pass up. While I don't like the idea of 100% stopping all enemy spawns, I do like the concept of a short block of time which would prevent massive redeployment. (Easily fixable with a counter hack) I think the concept of trickle could work, maybe also adding extra time to the respawn rate of enemies in the facility who die while the Terminal / SDI thingy is hacked. Another thought entered my mind as well. How can Daybeak encourage more of us infils to actually make those connections in the first place? Starting a good fight can be a painful process.... I know for me the cloaked sunderer will be an effective way of coming back for "round #2" and keeping that point in contention. These thoughts have been on my mind these past few days and I felt I needed to ask others on this subforum about it. The closer we are to an issue... bias ... (no matter how hard we try to prevent it).... will creep in. Its far better to brainstorm as a group.
Hacking is probably the last useful thing to spend certs on for any class skill at the moment and i fear it will stay like that till the dawn of PS2. Hacking jump pats would be a nice thing, adding more terminals for Infiltrators to hack (the opposite was done...) or some hackable console that would prevent people from spawning (or get the respawn timer up maybe?) like you suggest. But nothing of this things will be implemented, they prefer to make the entry to the class even worse, with upping the prices for the standard BASRs and other shenanigans like our bugged cloak that will never get fixed or making it more visible for everyone, adding hard counters like the flash light. It's just to much now, if you don't have top notch aiming this class is at a point were it makes no sense to play it, the only thing it's good for now is spotting and there are alternatives for that also. I really love your enthusiasm, but we had that discussion already and like everything else it gets ignored by the PS2 team so there is no point to brainstorm anything here.
Honestly there aren't any reasons to play infiltrator anymore except for a motion spotter and to hack those 1-2 terminals/turrets every few bases...I would've long switched to other classes if I wouldn't love the concept of the infiltrator. But the devs don't give a single **** about us so I don't really see a point in discussing anything. Cloak is really weak and broken right now, the darklight bug is just the finishing stroke. CQC and sniping are niche roles and usually don't do much in bigger fights. Stalker is out of ammo fast and after a minute or two there are already a few people with darklights out and hunt you down...it's a playstyle to annoy people at best. Did I miss anything? Infiltrator would need a MAJOR overhaul but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
we still have the power of speech, we should take every opportunity to let the devs know we are not happy with the infil right now and that we deserve the same attention as the other classes the problem is how to do this without whining and to be taken serious by the community and devs
It's an interesting proposition. I definitely _would_ enjoy this. But even with inf as one of my two primary classes, I don't think this should happen. Or rather, I don't think it can happen with the current state of game balance. Planetside 2 will never stop releasing new weapons. They can't. They're too lucrative, and the game's bottom line is something that can't simply be ignored. What this means in practical terms is that class-specific role differentiation is continuously eroded, and as such, it's difficult to justify handing any specific roles within the meta to any one class. In the case of your specific request, infiltrators aren't the cloakers from PS1. They aren't at enough of a disadvantage in direct combat to justify handing them additional utility, especially critical utility. Yes, they have 10% less effective health and 20% less shields. But cloaking is not an insignificant advantage in a game where initiative decisively wins most 1v1 encounters. And infiltrators are not lacking for deadly weapons. SMG's are incredibly lethal as short range hipfire bullet hoses. The higher damage tier SMG's are incredibly lethal as short-medium ADS weapons. And infiltrators have unideal but viable medium-range automatic weapons in the form of the automatic scout rifles (some of them whisper quite, like a suppressed Artemis). This is in addition to the combat utility of sniper rifles. And even looking purely at the Stalker Cloak, pistols in PS2 are incredibly powerful. The default 44 remains an incredible damage dump with a lot of damage per magazine. And the Blackhand has a 0.05 stationary crouch ADS CoF, a projectile velocity of 550, and relatively low bullet weight (off the top of my head, correct me if I'm wrong). It's viable as a semi auto sniper rifle out to a very long range. In short, infiltrators aren't close-range combat monsters, and they're def not winning even bullet trades with competent HA's, but they definitely have very sharp teeth. If anything, engineers are more of the non-combatant utility class, which is probably why they're getting the AM rifle instead of infs. Planetside 2 just isn't built around the concept of Advanced Hacking as it existed in PS1, even if it would be cool. We'd honestly need to see a whole other class at this point, as even the Stalker is so muddied by constant creep in pistol power that it can't really be compared to the PS1 cloaker. Honestly, a whole lot of things were simply ruined in PS2 from the start by the lack of hard specialization. You can't really have the kind of role diversity that you saw in PS1 if everyone can pull anything at any time.
