Firing while cloak

Discussion in 'Infiltrator' started by Exitus Acta Probat, Nov 1, 2015.

  1. Exitus Acta Probat

    I just noticed today that we can shoot with the cloak up and it will drop when I squeeze the trigger.

    Is this new or have I been blind the whole time?
  2. Armcross

  3. Bitmap

    IT"S TRUE!!!!! OH HAPPY DAY! FINALLY!!!!!

    I just tested it and it seems that this most asked for feature has been stealth added!
  4. Biddion

    Finally!
  5. DarkStarII

    Wait, this is a thing? :eek:
  6. CuteBeaver

    Don't celebrate just yet. I was about to make a thread about this titled:

    Stalkers, I have some bad news: Push "Fire" to decloak

    Sounds lovely but there are some drawbacks. Let me explain. When you decloak and try to quickly fire your weapon there is a small delay between how the game client works out the "attack" versus "decloak" no longer are those two actions distinctly separated and this causes a delay between actually being able to fire your first shot. (We are talking very small amount of time - lets be clear on this) Its not so bad when using a fully automatic weapon like an SMG or Auto Scout. However its terrible, and noticed when your using something like a Sniper Rifle or Crossbow. I have noticed a significant delay between uncloaking and killing my ambush target. To the point I have been fumbling around trying to pinpoint the issue. Iv even taken apart my mouse I have cleaned it. I suspect this has actually been in the game for a while... I had mentioned this issue to RadarX earlier on Reddit thinking it was a performance based issue.

    So you might just ask : Why not use the manual decloak key Beaver!

    Sadly the new mechanic and internal check Daybreak has doesn't care what key is used initially to remove cloak. It still registers my first " shot " as an "unnecessary" decloak request. This has left me staring blankly for a moment wondering why my crossbow didn't fire. Or in some cases knifing the target "first" and wondering what the hell is going on when they begin to panic and wiggle aboot.

    So yes, Fire Key to Decloak sounds LOVELY (Don't get me wrong It will be FANTASTIC for SMG play) but this is an issue that does affect AMBUSH play. Trust me when I say the last thing you want in an ambush is to give the enemy extra time to react to your presence. Imagine a bar that fades/changes from green to yellow and then to red. The less time you give your prey the safer you are. Anything under one second is green, anything around two seconds is yellow (danger zone) and anything at three seconds is pushing it and your likely to get yourself killed. I feel like if your not expecting these changes your constantly operating towards the yellow area by the time your ambush is finished because your likely to lose some of your initiative during the opener. Edit: I should elaborate on this a little bit. If your opener during an ambush is a "dud" you as a human being also have "human reaction time" and for you to register that something is wrong takes time. So you understand that when your ability doesn't behave as you expect this is what pushes you more heavily away from safety. The delay we are talking about is minimal, whoever you must react to the "issue" and compensate for it, and this usually ends in sloppy kills and with some injury sustained.

    I also noticed last night when I was compensating for this delay.... I was de-cloaking just a tiny bit sooner to try and allow cloak more time to fall off my body so that I could "shoot" my crossbow bolt and follow with the knife. The goodnews : It works. However Its been a struggle to reprogram myself from:

    "Decloak" ---- As fast as possible click fire --- and reflex follow up with the knife.

    When you make a choice for opting to de-cloak sooner (So that you can kill fluidly w/o having to worry about "duds" ) you are trading one advantage to makeup for the shortcoming of another. I'll give you an example of leaping down to intercept a target bellow. You would need to decloak possibly before leaping/ falling depending on the height to ensure you were fully decloaked by the time you hit the ground. Making you far more obvious to enemies who could be observing at a distance as you plummet down. Another example would be an enemy running directly at you - and your about to de-cloak and clothesline them. You would have to reveal yourself sooner (as they approach) to be assured that you would be able to hit them and kill them without taking serious injury.

    For an unprepared stalker who doesn't understand what the heck is happening this makes for pretty frustrating moments. I think this needs to be highlighted because that small window of time is golden for us. Anything that potentially messes with your ability to operate within those ideal time frames will negatively impact your streaks. So crossbow users Beware. Start double clicking on your openers... Or like I have been doing weigh the possibilities of uncloaking a little bit sooner and then follow through with your normal muscle memory attack.

    If your a stalker that has a fully automatic pistol your pretty much laughing at this issue. It wont be a big deal at all. Likewise spammy weapons will hardly notice this change and for the most part it will be helpful for new players who have not yet learned fire to decloak using the typical ability key.

    Ultimately I feel like this will be an excellent change for SMG play. Carry on with the celebrations. I don't want to ruin the happy moment but I also don't want people who primarily stalk beating themselves up over "sloppy" ambushes caused by mechanical issues going on behind the scenes. I think those of use who use the crossbow will just have to adapt to the changes. This will be a learning process but It offers perks as well. OHK knives you can focus more on the activation and stabbing, and less on de-cloaking which is much easier.
    • Up x 3
  7. JobiWan

    I was dying loads last night and tonight playing stalker with crossbow, missing what I thought were point blank shots, cloaking when I should have uncloaked, uncloaking when I should have cloaked, and yeah, I realised tonight why, it's messed up. I need about 20 kills to Auraxium the Xbow and it's going really slow because of this.

    If it's not a bug, why no mention in the update notes? It's a pretty big thing.
    • Up x 2
  8. Exitus Acta Probat

    That's how I figured it out, I kept uncloaking and cloaking when I was trying to fire, so I sat down to try any figure what was happening, that's when I realized that you could squeeze the trigger and the cloak would drop to fire.

    You just need to learn a new rhythm.
    • Up x 1
  9. CuteBeaver


    You know it very well could be a bug... I had not considered this.

    Honestly I'm just so used to having these unannounced changes over the years with regards to infiltrators. I tend to just try and play around whatever "issue" of the month is affecting us. Not going to sugar coat it. This one is pretty frustrating for stalkers but it could be resolved either on Daybreaks end with a code change, or with us modifying our own play.

    I'm not super enthusiastic about relearning to ambush all over again... REALLY I am not. Honestly the LAST folks who should be asked to dig deep and give up lethality in this game should be stalkers....I dislike giving up any advantage when it comes to ambushing... which is risky enough as it stands... However I can't honestly ask Daybreak to scrap this change either. SMG users have been PLEADING for the ability to re-actively fire back towards enemies without having to fumble for decloak. I know this will help those players respond better to threats instead of just falling over and being unable to return fire in a meaningful way. Its also going to help make the new active knives a lot less clumsy to use. This is excellent for a wider range of weapons and would be a healthy change for stalkers ... eventually... Once all the tears and growing pains - or possible bug fix happens :3 **wishful thinking**


    As much as it sucks.... stalkers at least have control over exactly when we make an ambush. We can pick and choose our moments and while it totally blows to have a "dud" when you try and open quickly ... Its not necessarily a guaranteed loss...It is possible to recover. Emotionally I hate this change, ALL of my streaks ended tonight because of it... (Or rather I should be thinking ALL of my streaks tonight ended because I haven't adjusted yet ... )

    What generally happens I start out being mindful of this "delay" and then I get caught up in the moment and have lapses back into hold habits. I forget "You can't do that anymore" and find myself flailing around with a knife opener. It would be nice to get some feedback from Daybreak on if this "dud" issue with "fire to decloak - not firing" is intentional.

    My guess : Not really but its a side affect of the new mechanics they didn't anticipate.

    What I really dislike most is having to dial back my aggressiveness. I have begun EMP therapy with the crossbow. Running Bando x4 and Emping on everything in sight makes me feel much better after a streak ends in a "learning experience". So I guess thats the new crossbow meta. Lol -_-! Honestly when I brought this issue up in TS I got into an argument with another member of my outfit about this change. He seemed to really like it but doesn't use the crossbow or play stalker much at all. Basically I was told (in a nice way) to L2P, and switch to a pistol or SMG and get over it . Of course knowing him it was his strange way to infuriate me into overcoming the issue... Hes crafty like that. Honestly though he was right most players out there will not be able to relate to the problem. I sincerely doubt Heavieside 2 on Reddit are going to care about this issue enough to upvote it.

    I did poke the devs on twitter but got no response, but I did link them here. I guess the next step is an official bug report on the issue tracker. >.> Not sure if we should do that though. I'm going to give it a couple days maybe a week of honest trying to adapt before I get all bug reporty about it.
  10. DarkStarII

    I think it's a bug. I was driving around on my cloaked Flash when I activated the optics, which were thermals. After doing that it uncloaked me. It's rather annoying.
  11. JobiWan

    I remember reading this the other day and I was wondering if it was related.
  12. JobiWan


    Same here. I was trying to fire my crossbow but I was cloaked, then I uncloaked as I fired, but I'd already pushed F to uncloak, which cloaked me, and so on. Very confusing and embarrassing when the intended target just turns round and shotguns you to the face. At first I thought I was just having a bad day or too tired. I was telling my mate that hit detection was screwed because I was shooting people point blank and nothing was happening.

    Then last night I tried to place a spotter while cloaked by mistake and I uncloaked. At first I thought I'd uncloaked because I'd moved for too long, but then started testing it. I tried to adapt by just pressing fire, but that delay is a killer.

    The other thing that makes me think it may be a bug is that the devs get a lot of stick about not listening to what the players want, and if this was deliberate they'd be bleating about it and saying 'look we've listened to what you want'.
  13. Iridar51

    What a nice detailed analysis, thank god we have you. This change seems pretty much like a direct nerf to you and I :)

    Apparently, reddit may have a solution. There are two new lines in UserOptions.ini:
    [General]
    DecloakOnFire=1
    AbilityQueueSeconds=1.000000

    Setting both of these to "0" allegedly fixes the issue. Haven't tested myself. Hope this helps.

    // Probably not a bug, seeing they have new lines in .ini file. But the change could have made it to live unintentionally, that I can believe, happens every other patch. Hence no mention in patch notes.
    • Up x 5
  14. andy_m

    Thanks for that Iridar.

    I much prefer the old way so I've now set those two lines to zero
  15. Navron


    From a programming perspective, I can't imaging that setting DecloakOnFire to 0 solves anything except turning the feature off.

    Also, for the record, that delay affects all weapons. When I tried it with SMGs, there was that "false fire" followed by a single shot, then a spray. It might have been my imagination but it also appeared that SMG spread once it started continuous fire appeared to be what the spread would have been had I been holding down the mouse the entire time.

    In other words, instead of a normal fire on a made-up scale of 0 to 10, it started at about 5. Seemed really weird.
  16. Takara

    Yea this is also an issue on the flash. Apparently aiming down the sight of your weapon or using zoom on your flash also cloaks and uncloaks you. This is MORE than slightly annoying.
  17. Exitus Acta Probat

    I also notice that if I try to throw a grenade while cloaked I will uncloak but no grenade will be thrown.

    I'm trying to get the rhythm down, but I'm just to use to uncloaking first so its a little frustrating... I'm getting better.
  18. JobiWan

    Tried this and it worked a treat, thanks.
  19. Iridar51

    Credit goes to guys at reddit. I look down upon that site, but it's useful like that.
    • Up x 2
  20. Blitzmoez

    I do respect the people that have been waiting for this feature, but I think there should be a option to deactivate it, because it completley ruined the class.

    Here is what I mean: I am used to the oldschool Infiltrator playstyle which has many benefits over the new mechanics IMO. But the biggest problem comes with the fact that if I decloak to engage I decide when I want to press the button, but as soon as I then start shooting the game does trigger a cloaking as well and cloaks be again, which makes me a stupid dancer infront on enemy fire.

    The thing why I dont want to just accept the new mechanic and not use the decloak button anymore is, because it takes ******* ages until it starts shooting. If I do that manually I am way faster.

    I do respect that feature and think it is ok that it is there, and I dont want it taken away from the players that depent on it, but please like the reverse driving, give us the choice if we want to have it...

    PLEASE GIVE ME BACK MY OLDSCHOOL INFILTRATOR
    • Up x 1