1. Its short time and the need to recharge, even if not moving while invisible (this ain't Cloak and Dagger from TF2). 2. You are still visible to anyone who pays attention / you light like a bulb when someone has INFV. 3. Your camouflage flickers when you are hit. 4. When you cloak and especially when you decloak, you play a loud noise. Your camouflage also doesn't silence your footsteps, so pretty much anyone can hear when you're around. 5. You have to decloak before doing anything (attacking, hacking). So if you were designing a game with an invisiblity in it, and you wanted to give it some weak points for it not to be OP, you would use some of these, right? SOME. Not ALL of these. I've never seen a camouflage as weak as it is in this game. It'd be nice if devs removed one or two of these weaknesses. It's high-tech cloaking, right? It sacrifices much of your shields to even work, right? Then it shouldn't be as weak as it is now.
And the TF2 stealth is also completely invisible regardless of how quickly you move, whereas in this game you can still be seen even when not moving and crouched.
This has been my argument for stealth from the beginning...Most people have balance issues with stealth. In WoW you can stealth indefinitely but not while in combat, you are completely invisible unless somebody gets close to you. In GW2 you can stealth in combat but the trade-off if the limitation of up to 10 seconds, and it is also completely invisible. Tribes Ascend has a stealthing infiltrator as well, however, it is more of an explosive stealther rather than a sniper. The limitations are that you appear when hit, when you jetpack, when you shoot, and when you're detected via emp/jammer, and also it has a duration that is tied to your jetpack energy. Oh yes, it has footsteps as well but that is easy to avoid with skiing. The biggest difference between the two is that one has a sniper, and one has a pistol, disc fusor, and sticky explosives. It is because of our sniper that we can't have good cloaking, it would be too OP to be able to be invisible and shoot people from a distance...However it also means our up close abilities such as hacking and our recon dart just don't make any sense. It's like they put the Tribes Scout and Infiltrator together but nerfed the infiltration aspect hard. IMO it would be nice if we had a "distance stealth" for the sniper and an "up close" stealth with just a pistol or like a sticky gun as mentioned above. The three most noticeable weaknesses make it well, too weak: Sound of stealth Visibility Duration With the sound of stealth and short duration together, you basically can't use stealth up close or behind enemy lines because you will be heard TOO often. If it had a longer duration, the visiblity would be okay because you would have more time to hide, and also the sound would not be heard as often. If you kept the sound and duration together, but were also fully invisible, it would allow a player to know you're around and be cautious, but also give you the chance to not be seen instantly. Finally, if there was no stealth sound, it would be the weakest buff but it would allow the infiltrator to actually be sneaky rather than a "HEY GUYS I'M HERE". Now a lot of people will probably shout: "BALANCE MAN BALANCE!" and I agree, balance is good but right now it is better to infiltrate as a light assault because your jetpacks are quieter. Overall, I feel that the games above did a pretty decent job of having limitations and strengths. Right now cloak does not feel strong, to me, it just hides me off the minimap.
I actually think the biggest weakness of the cloak, especially for newer players, is the over confidence that results from having it. I've seen a lot of Infiltrators run around enemy bases, popping a few heads, thinking they were some kind of untouchable spirits of death; then I bring up my NV equipped flare and ruin their day.... or I wait for their predictable pattern of hitting generators in main bases and pop in for a visit when the symbol begins to flash... or I listen in the field and hear the repeated shouts of "enemy engineer/heavy assault/aircraft/heavy tank". Cloak is incredibly powerful, especially when you learn its limitations, but it isn't and should never be god mode. The strength of the Infiltrator for killing is their ranged weapon (minus the TR). The cloak is a supportive tool of the class, not its focus.
Not everyone is content with the cloak being a supportive tool of our only real weapon class (and thus being shoehorned into the role of sniper), nor should they be. Even while sniping, it is definitely not "incredibly powerful" unless you're using low graphics settings, and in close quarters it has no value whatsoever outside of hiding from enemies who don't already know where you are, for a mere 12 seconds. You're absolutely right about one thing: the greatest weakness of our cloak is that it convinces the people using it that it's doing anything at all. Unfortunately, it isn't, and I'm honestly kind of shocked that it's managed to convince you otherwise too.
I've used it behind enemy lines, waiting for enemy pilots and vehicle drivers to get out to repair their vehicles in what they thought was relative safety. I've then used it to escape the area and relocate, in situations which would have resulted in likely death for any other class. I've used it to scout, where no other class could have been able to "poke" their head out to get a lay of the land. I've used it to sabotage, and safely extradite my self to other locations without drawing fire (always keeping in mind someone might have NV). Most importantly, I've used it to scan for enemy snipers in preparation for their removal/neutralization. ---- So, that is pretty much why I consider it "incredibly" powerful. The HA shield isn't that powerful, the eng. turret has tight fof, the medics aoe heals less than direct, and the Infiltrator cloak doesn't make someone into an anime ninja.... only the LA has a special that could be considered gold (but then it and c4 is all it has).
As a Light Assault you could destroy those vehicles, escape to areas where nobody could chase you, and still have access to a silenced weapon which would remain the primary contributor to hiding your presence from enemy players. Getting around with Hunter Stealth is only a benefit because it prevents you from being spotted - you're still clearly visible to everyone even though it lets you pretend otherwise. Sabotage is impossible when the only two things our class is capable of are killing players and hacking objectives which can be easily and immediately un-hacked by enemy players, who have a far easier time switching to Infiltrator than we do entering their base with infiltration tools so weak that we might as well be another class entirely. It's also worth noting that due to the design of this game, scouts who survive are wholly unnecessary, and those one in every ten highly visible players who actually die for their actions have still contributed just as much as you have by spotting snipers who are actively killing them. In both cases, Sunderers make these actions irrelevant. Sniping and counter-sniping should not be the two most important things this class can do, let alone the only two.
They should remove the cloak sound, it seems entirely unnecessary balance-wise and goes against the theme of the class(stealth).
They should keep everything how it is except add complete invisibility. It really wouldn't be THAT much of an advantage for those who know how to use it, it would just make the class suck a little less.
Personally, I very rarely play an infiltrator because I don't feel that their abilities warrant the use of their class vs another that can do similar things but with better support roles. I definitely want to make sure everything stays balanced with the class when it comes to buffs, however. Because, as I'm sure most of you would agree, an overpowered cloaking, sniper class could become ridiculous or otherwise just make players lose track of the team goals in lieu of just trying to get tons of kills. That being said, I'm not going to pretend that kind of stuff doesn't already happen with many things and blame the game balance completely on what one class or vehicle has over the others. I feel like they could do quite a few things to help balance out the Infiltrator. None of these are necessarily things I think should definitely be added, rather, just ideas of things that might help. 1) Change the sound of the cloak/uncloak: Instead of having a loud... sound (I don't know what to compare it to) maybe change it to a light wind-like sound that's less noticeable, but can still be heard by attentive players. 2) As others have mentioned, make the cloak last indefinitely or drain slower while staying still. 3) Make it so the cloak will auto-disable when firing. This is just my preference vs having to disable it every time you shoot. It would basically have the same functionality as the current one, without the hassle of having to hit an ability button and then shoot. 4) Give the infiltrators better CQC weapons (I'm looking at you new SMGs). I don't think they should get anything that can 2 shot people like the whole shotgun thing, but having some kind of automatic that didn't have a terrible clip size or slower than would be desired for CQC would be great. Even if they got an automatic pistol with decent damage it'd be something. 5) Another thing people mentioned: Make it so the cloak adds complete invisibility. I would add with that, though, that when getting hit, or perhaps when you lose 1/4 or more of your health, the cloak disables for a second or two. 6) Give different variants of cloaking certs. Maybe one type is like what I mentioned above and drains slower or not at all if you're still, but you keep the current "reflective camo." Another could give complete invisibility, but only last for a few seconds, etc. The whole "take less damage but drain energy faster" cloak is kind of a joke, IMO. It's like a much weaker HA shield that you can't take aggressive action while using. These are just a few things that I believe could help, mainly pertaining to cloaking, that I don't believe would cause a huge balance issue. I can't say having all of them would work, (especially some in combination with others) but I honestly don't know because I didn't really think about every aspect of the game when coming up with these. I don't consider my opinions to be infallible or anything like that. There are obviously more things focused on other aspects of the class that could be changed and/or otherwise improved upon. These are simply some ideas I wanted to throw out there.
Our cloaks are louder than a light assault jetpack! A jet freaking pack is almost silent! I guess, someone at dev team got beaten by infiltrators. We gotta collect their nicknames and never snipe them. Never! Or they will 'nerf' something else, like make infiltrators unarmed or auto spotted.
Its easy.. stealth is ****** up. You can say what you want, but on high settings, cloaked infils light up like a ******* christmas tree. Also to people who say cloak is great, you yust need to use it to hide.. why the **** would i need stealth while hiding behind a rock or tree.. stealth should be usefull when trying to get into place, not when your behind ******* cover already..
A easy way to balance stealth and the "so feared stealthed sniper" Pretty much there is no way to balance a sniper and an infiltrator with cloak, so break it into 2 sub-classes. Remove the ability to cloak when you equip a rifle, instead, give the class the option to use the Drifter Jetpack with the rifle or the cloak with the pistol. There, it is balanced. Now you can either keep the sound or remove the shimmer when standing still, shimmer when running makes sense. Duration should be until canceled and no actions should be able to be performed while cloaked. LAs do not really use the drifter since it has no upward thrust, and we really could use it to get down from places when we snipe.
I don´t see the Problem with the cloak. If someone is looking for youhe can detect you, but if he doesn´t expect you he will not see you unless you **** up. Yesterday a MAX just walkred right trough me while is was thinkging "Oh ****, don´t move please let him not sse me".
Before down time I managed to "infiltrate" a airtower and make all the way up to the landing platforms with my extended ammo dual burster max, and blew up a few planes heading to the tower to repair/rearm. Does that mean that the Max is the good chose for infiltrating a heavily guarded base?
as a note i dont think you flicker when shot, so much as you will still do the sheild going down animation when your sheild hits 0 (which admitidly is only a few hits)
That only works as long as you dont kill anyone, but after you´ve killed several people inside enemy base they´ll surely start looking for you and wise players warn their teammates like I do.
Yes and the Problem with this is? You shouldn´t be able to uncloak, kill somenone, cloak and be invisible so none can spot you. What is the Problem with that?
If nobody spotted you killing someone, why not? If they did, why aren't you already dead? Even a 100% invisible cloak would still be visible as you were taking damage.
