Darklight should be removed

The camouflage already has more downsides than upsides. It has a delay when you try to fire, which ironically can cause you to lose engagements even if you got the drop on someone. And any seasoned player can spot you if they look hard enough. So I don't see why this attachment needs to be in the game when players can already deal with infiltrators without it. It's literally broken to the point it's light pieces walls, making the idea of even hiding pointless.

The most valid complication of dark light cited in these discussions is always that "it pierces through walls" and we've never gathered evidence regarding how significant that complication impacts combat in standard gameplay. No new major problems with darklight are ever introduced in these topics. If that's really the only indisputablely broken aspect of the utility, then it is actually pretty stable.

Everything is buggy to some degree in this game, some in implementation, some in feel. Tolerate the bugginess? no. Throw it out due to minor bugginess? no.

Players who assume that "stealth" means "invisibility" should be removed, with a shot to the face while sitting in a darklight beam.

Try and use an LA for a while. LA can do stealth gameplay, but they have to use movement, terrain knowledge and situational awareness to do it.
Then return to the infil and use that stealth as you should: to make yourself hard to notice while moving from cover to cover. Not as an ability that allows you to sit completely invisible 5feet away from someone and expect to get away unscathed.

Darklights are a blight, FOR THE USER. You replace omniversally good items like a lasersight to find a single class using a single ability, and you only need it for idiot Stalkers anyway. And that darklight SUCKS. Imagine having a limited range on your vision of around 15m, imagine that you only get to spot enemies on about 30% of your screen. Thats the suckiness you are using to try to find a Stalker. AND YOU STILL MANAGE TO GET CAUGHT??!!!??!!

If anything the darklight should get a buff so that it creates a local flash effect when you aim it at an enemy, obscuring the edges of your character and making it harder to aim/judge distance.

Edit: as for losing engagements because of the uncloak time. The latency system hides you long enoigh for that not to matter and if you "get the drop on someone" but they spot you during the uncloak then you didnt have the drop on them.

As for darklights through walls. Its an annoying bug, but it doesnt allow the darklight user to spot you. So first a darklight needs to accidentally light up an infil through a wall, then another player who isnt using a darklight (or if he is he isnt looking that far ahead for infil sogns) needs to spot it. Then the darklight user, who doesnt know he's spottting anything with his limited range limited cone darklight, needs to keep his darklight long enogough on the location that the second guy can aim and fire, or at least see which way the infil went.

It's hardly worth calling a minor bug. It's broken, and from what I have read. The developers unfortunately cannot even fix the bug. But even if they could. There is no logical reason for the attachment to exist. It has no place other than to counter one classes ability.

Well that is an interesting idea on how to play the LA. Never really thought of every playing an LA that way. But that is not what I wanted to talk about in this thread.

The darklight only makes it even harder to sneak by players who already can spot you without it. It's just salt on the wounds at this point of any infiltrator player. One of the big aspects of infiltrator is to do exactly it's name. Infiltrate, and we can't do that if we cannot even utilize our class ability that is supposed to help us do just that.

In my stalking experience if you sit still and do not move at all, no ADSing, no twisting, no following the guy running past you with your reticle, then most of the time no1 ever sees you.
Deep cloak is exactly that, and its almost invisible, ive had many many enemies run right through me whilst ill sneak into their base.

Just remember that your lagged on their end, so you have to stop moving 2-3 seconds before they can see you just to ensure you arnt still moving when they look. This is the hardest part to get right, i simply dont move unless there is no chance at all of being seen.

On the flip side, its almost impossible to find a single stalker infil without DL assistance if they are good.

PS2's Cloaker is hard to be found even while it is moving. Darklight is necessary.

"Countering one class's ability" sounds like a perfectly logical reason why it has value in existing. We can argue whether or not that is a justified reason but that's not necessarily the argument you're making.

But the class can infiltrate and its various cloaks do help it in accomplishing its goal. The existence of darklight alone doesn't stop you from moving around an enemy base incognito. The blustering often unimaginative ways that people attempt to employ cloaking, treating it more like full-out invisiblility rather than temporary visual camouflage, is what causes the effort to come undone dramatically. All darklight does is reveal the status of the normal Infantry unit that one should be treating onerself as when it is directed at a target.

If at all the dark light should be improved.
You need to give up a valid generalization for a specialization, that is not even good.
If it would be any good, people would use it on their main weapons.
But almost nobody does that. If you see a darklight, it's probably on a pistol.
And even on the pistol you are seriously gimped. It gives no benefit whatsoever.
You need to turn it on/off all the time or every dumb**** in the vicinity can see where you are moving.
If it is off you cannot spot cloakers.
If it is on you either cannot sprint and have to crawl towards your destination, or have to aim at the friggin ground, so if you really spot some cloaker you are probably dead before having aligned your aim to its head...
The cone is small, not very bright and doesn't go very far. Often I have not seen a cloaker in bright situations despite using a blacklight. At night its ok, but at day it is not very visible.

Most stalkers are stupid. They spot, or move near enemies. If you stay still nobody can see you, unless you decide to camp on a sharp edge with a bright background on it... Which would be stupid again....

Its funny tho isnt it, DL is a problem because it 'counters a class ability' yet the EMP grenade, available to only the infiltrator actualy disables everyone elses ability, drains energy of shields, jetpak, proxy heal; kills medic bubbles; and disables engineer turrets, all with 1 throw and a quite large AOE.
Thats not to mention that it also drain infils cloak energy, detonates explosives, kills spawn beacons, kills motion spotters, and removes a players HUD.
O and as a bonus, it can do all this through walls...

A 6m range 30degree flashlight revealing infils is a major problem tho.

So an item that counters 1 class ability is a problem.
An item that counters all class abilities is apparantly not.

I think Demigan makes a good point about learning from stealth play the LA way. Relying on the cloak and not being caught in the beam of a darklight whne sneaking past people is not something to do unless you have no choice.

I know it is a ball ache to experience how easily you can be spotted nowadays (I play stalker infil as well as LA) but working your way around planetmans and coming up to them from behind is a good skill to learn with or without a cloak to help you. I generally stay as far as possible from baddies when infiltrating even with the cloak (and only crouch walk whenever they are around if I have to move at all). In that way the cloak is a major additional advantage but not the only thing I rely on.

IDK if the darklight shining through walls is a bug or not. I heard somewhere that you can Q spot people inside buildings as well (or you could at one time). Unless I am wrong about that maybe it is part of the game and just another hazard to be aware of.

Has anyone seen any bug reports? I haven't checked myself.

I love it when suckers run a Darklight on their primary, or even have it out at all. Everytime I see that massive beam of "Please pre-aim my skull around this corner and chain headshot me before you are even on my screen", I smile a little inside knowing just how easy the kill I'm about to get is going to be.

It is. Cutting off the light beam at solids is no different from shadow casting (non-trivial calculation).

Yeah, you used to be able to.

Back way long ago, proper spotting was in the game but it was expensive and caused potential issues with performance. It was also broad and allowed for indescriminate spotting of a group of people in the distance with a few presses. To fix the issue, the developers reduced (outright eliminated in the beginning) the effect terrain geometry had when it came to the spot code and they lowered the sensitivity of the cross section tested. Sped up the process real good but allowed for spotting people through terrain if you looked right where they were through the wall.

Supposedly they recently introduced new spotting code that blocks "through terrain" shenanigans. It's still a bit of a dice throw at times whether the spot actually goes through or not in my opinion.

You still can spot through terrain, but YOU have to be truly dead-on. Thats why you can spot a vehicle or player at random sometimes. I sometimes use it to see if someone is around a corner or hidden behind something specific, but its not exactly reliable.

The darklight has to be the most useless attachment in the game. It isn't hard to see cloakers anyways and it only takes a few seconds to swing your knife at common stalker locations on the point. I'll never understand the players who put one on their primary. All that does is make your enemy know when you are rounding the corner which gives them a free kill. A laser sight on a secondary is always better than a darklight.

What should be removed from the game is the ability of cloaked infils to cap points. They cant hack turrets, terminals or generators whilst cloaked - so why can they cap points?

Even though I am arguing against DL.

I have scratched my head wondering this exact same thing. I much rather be able to hack vehicles than ghost cap.

Darklight is garbage, basically a free 'shoot me' indicator for other players. It's singular use is to spot stalker infs that are hiding near a point.

If they removed it, next to nothing would change. It needs a buff in my opinion, it should momentarily blind any hostile target you shine it at, to make it more competetive with the Lasersight which it replaces.

If there werent flashlight, you could hold a single point with 2-3 infils with stalker cloaks.

What about grenades? or just shooting until you hit something? That's hon you used to stumble acorss Infiltrators before Darklight was introduced.