rebalance infiltrators

Infiltrator is a class designed to play covertly. When played with intelligence your deaths are minimal. When played like a moron, you will die more than you will have kills.

How do you guys use long range weapons like assault rifles and light machine guns without getting killed by sniper? As soon as there are any skilled snipers, i found most long range weapons useless most of the time. Balance is bad if you need to rely on enemy not having skill(ed snipers).

I already move a lot, though i would prefer to be stationary far more. You know that soldier who is hiding in cover, popping up to shoot the enemy and holding the line? That is what i want to do, but often that is useless because any competent sniper will shoot you.

I listen to make sure I don't hear any sniper shots or cloaking. If I do, I go and find them and kill them. It is almost always and easy kill. If a sniper shoots at me, I serpentine and dodge. I erratically make movements so they can't hit me, and if they do, its because I ran into the bullet, not because they knew what I was going to do. Now, in using long range rifles, that is also pretty easy. All you have to do is watch them cloak, shoot, uncloak, move, and repeat. That is if they are skilled. If they are unskilled, they just sit still for a second. 2,3 easy headshots; bang bang! They are dead. They can typically not move before you have made the shots, unless they were already going to move before they realized they got shot.

Imagine a 48-96 player battle on both sides. They are at a standstill. The sniper is off to the side of them, waiting to take them out as a 3rd faction. A good sniper picks their targets, then shoots, and they make sure their target goes down before picking another. After they have taken down 3 or 4 players, I have found that people tend to notice something isn't right, and their team is just dying to a sniper. At that point, there are now 2 factions who know there is another faction there, and usually the Infiltrator dies to them. It isn't really about how skilled a sniper is, but more about how many they are fighting. The more shots you make, the more noise you make. That noise attracts people, and they sneak up on you and kill you. A sniper doesn't change the battle much killwise, unless it is a smaller battle. I have seen that a sniper changes a battle more by taking people away from the battle and throwing them into a cat-and-mouse style game, except there are usually 3 cats and 1 mouse. Also, in a fight against a lot of people, there are a lot of targets to choose. Instead of being annoyed that you died to a sniper, why not ask yourself why he chose you as his target and shot you?

I'm sorry, but this doesn't make sense on any level.

Whether something is starter equipment or not is 100% irrelevant to the question of balance. And whether something is starter equipment also has nothing to do with necessity to the class.

If standard equipment was what is essential, then you could throw half the meta away. LA and medic don't have Nanoweave Armor by default, yet that's the best suit slot by far. HA doesn't start with Adrenaline Shield, yet that's the best shield. Infiltrator starts with Hunter Cloak, yet Nano Armor Cloak is much better. There are so many more examples like this.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you here, but this is completely illogical.

It's a bug, first and foremost. The developers are working on a fix.

Well, we're arguing infantry vs infantry here (at least I was), so vehicles aren't really part of the discussion. Sure, infiltrator doesn't have any notable AV capabilities, but it can also easily avoid vehicles.

The argument before that was about Jaeger meta, where dying literally loses you the game. Hence why infiltrators would be the #1 choice if you wanted to "win". Nevertheless, infiltrator would also be the best choice if that was the goal on live servers. Of course (and thankfully) basically no one plays like this, but that doesn't change that infiltrator is the easiest class to do well with and to stay alive the longest by avoiding risks.

Players only using HAs for the challenge came out wrong. It was meant in the context of performing the best. If that is the ultimate goal (which was the assumption for the argument) then infiltrator would always be the choice, and HA would only be used if you wanted to "make life harder on yourself". Again, not what's happening in reality, but what I used to get a point across.

Those seem arbitrary at best. And that's also still a significant amount of players.

Thanks to motion detection and some base level awareness it's not impossible for above-average players to chain engagements.

CQC sniping isn't meant as barrel-stuffing range. Being within 10-15m means you're right in the fight, yet have time and space to retreat should you miss. If your opponent has time and opportunity to react and kill you, you were in an unfavorable position (something which shouldn't happen very often when playing infiltrator).

I don't think it's in anyone's interest to make the players suffer under infiltrators just to force a change, especially with the high influx of new players right now. I'm also not calling for some immediate nerf to a game-breaking playstyle, but rather for some tuning on a class that has been problematic for years, yet has always been second to other balance issues. The developers definitely have more important things to do currently, and there are other things that I'd rather see than an infiltrator rebalance right now. It should still be done at some point though.

Doing well with infiltrator is very far from "hyper-condensed competitive play". Anyone has the ability to deliver frustrating experiences to their opponents by OHKing them, decent players can do it in higher frequency of course.

Sure, if you're leaving enough distance to not be shot frequently then Hunter Cloak makes sense. But if you're within effective range of the average enemy (so under 30m if I had to guess), the damage reduction and additional HP help greatly to survive tight situations. It does require some cloak time management, but that's something that can be learned without too much effort really.

The only other confirmed Doku weapons are Assault Rifles.

You kinda misunderstood again what I was trying to say with real combat and took it to a whole different level...but it's ok.

Let's keep it that way then...we are in disagreement. I am not interested in long and pointless arguments anyway.

To say if a class is balanced or not, you have to look at what they start out with. If they aren't balanced, one starter class will do much much better than another, even if their skill level is low. That is why I was comparing starters and not fully upgraded things, and that is why you can't use something that skilled players would use or have access to as an argument for your point about balance. To argue that something is unbalanced, something has to be argued as unbalanced. You can't say that NAC makes an Infiltrator unbalanced when most of the players who play with NAC aren't unskilled players. If they were unskilled players and had access to NAC and they dominated every engagement, then something would be wrong.

The hunter cloak is essential to being able to play a class. That is what I meant. I didn't mean you had to have it to be any good with the class. I meant that the other things were non-essential to being able to play the class. You don't need NAC to play the class.

You say that it is easy to retreat as an Infiltrator, but if the cover is on your side and not theirs, you already had the advantage, which can't be argued as the class being unbalanced. That just means you know how to use it. It is the typical "I have the high ground" situation. If two equal skilled players had the same weapon, but one had a better location, that one would usually win. To argue something is unbalanced, you have to do the same thing to one side that you do to the other. That is basic algebra. Infiltrator may have a -1 and a +1, but HA has a +1 and a -1, you see? Same with the other classes, but I am just using HA as a reference. You can't say that Infiltrators are unbalanced because THEY chose the "high ground." You have to argue what would happen in a situation where each side has basic equipment, had equal skill, had the same circumstances (aka flat ground with no cover anywhere near them), but different abilities. If a default low level, low skill Infiltrator can 9/10 of the times take out a default, low level, low skill HA in an even battle on flat ground with no cover, then maybe you could be right.

My point of saying anything that has to do with "default" or "essentials" or starter" has to do with balance. Things can only be unbalanced if you have the same variables. You can't give a +2 to an Infiltrator without giving a +2 to the other side.

There are so many infiltrators on Miller that sometimes you aim for a guy and you kill an infiltrator between you and him. Everyone is playing the new king of the hill for easy kills... cmon... open your eyes.

Center mass. From boot camp through sniper school. In field conditions it's foolish to count on more than 2moa.

Who said we played on Miller? I mean, so what if there are a ton of Infiltrators on Miller? I have stated that there have been pretty few Infiltrators on Emerald lately. Should the whole class be nerfed just for there being too many on one server? Then, wouldn't it affect the other servers? I had stated I was going to run an Infil only squad. Here are the results.

These aren't actual statistics, but just of what I saw when I ran the thing. First off, I couldn't even get a full squad of Infils. I could only get 5 at max, and 2 of those were on a different continent. What I saw was that we performed well, but we didn't outperform the smaller squad we were fighting. It was roughly 63%-37%, the latter being the enemy, and we still kept losing the point. The good thing about having 3 Infiltrators is that when I was in combat with a dude that snuck up on me and I was low health, my second in command Infiltrator dude sniped him and saved me. I did notice something else: I noticed that I was getting WAY more kills than usual when I was playing with a squad. I was like 50-100 meters away, sniping infantry, and they didn't see me. I was doing pretty well and my 2iC was doing good too. Same with the other non-infils in the squad. However, when we got to the Bio lab, I warned him that sniping wouldn't be as easy. We were fighting at a stand still there, and we were losing the base to the squad we had just fought. They came back, and spawn camped us, and we couldn't win back that. That was like 92%-8%, the latter being us. They also spam taunted us, but that is just TR for you. We started losing bases to that force as my squad regrouped. We lost like, 3. When we got to the 4th base, another group came to help us out. We were at a stand still for a while, forcing them back, and there were enemy snipers everywhere. Well, the Infil squad came to the rescue. It was actually just 2 Infiltrators at this point. We sniped the guys who were getting behind our spawn, then we flanked back to their sundy. They only had 3, so the other squad got around them and blew them up, which relieved the pressure on the rest of their group and they pushed. Not sure if we actually contributed to the battle, but we won that fight, and the next, and the next. We got all 3 bases back, got back to a standstill at the Bio Lab, and then I had to leave. You can judge for yourself if you think an Infil squad is OP or not. I will be trying it again with more Infiltrators and putting them in different fireteams depending on if they are a Hunter, Stalker, or a mix of the two.

What do you think? Are Infiltrators OP, VeryCoolMiller? How about YOU run an Infiltrator squad and we can compare results, since there are a TON of Infiltrators on Miller?

It's against my religion play infiltrator, I don't cheat.

It is still not cheating to play Infiltrator, but you have to prove the validity of my results, unless you just want to take my word for it. I don't even get how you can liken it to cheating if it is part of the game to do so. Are you one of those 6v6 FPS arena gamers, because if you are, this whole thread makes so much sense.

No... I'm not an arena gamer... I simply get sniped, smged, knifed from everywhere and I decided to forumside the frustration to play normal class vs the god infiltrator.

I'm happy to have found other player that share my opinion. Now the problem is to have access to raw data to prove my point of view.

I have no problem with a sniper. I can counter them. It's getting knifed that's ridiculous right now.

I agree. That is why I want a nerf to the Stalker cloak, maybe a watery outline or slight distortion when you look at it, so you don't need a darklight to find it. You need a darklight to easily find it.

This is a videogame, and not a milsim fortunately. In this game if you snipe, you aim for the head.

Sniping is the same thing as being killed by a OHK knife, just from every range instead of within 5m.

That is very wrong. The OHK knives OHK if you hit them in the body. With a sniper, you have to hit them in the head from range, usually on a moving target. With an OHK knife, it doesn't matter if they are moving, because they probably won't notice you chasing them, and if they do, they will shoot at you, maybe aim, and you can catch up. All in all, not the same. Also, with a sniper as I have already said, you have to hit the head. If you are within 5 meters and try to headshot them, you are going to have to flick if they move too much, and then hit the head. Also, you can't OHK from every distance. Only the Railjack can OHK Infiltrators from all ranges.