Overview: I was just about to hit BR 20 before Matterson went down tonight, so I thought I'd take the time to write a review of my experience with playing infiltrator. To begin with, I should say that 95% of my time is spent playing infiltrator. I very much enjoy playing infiltrator; and, despite some crucial flaws which I will discuss, I am really not tempted to play anything else. What little time I spend in other classes is typically a brief stint as engi or heavy to repair a base or clear out a tank zerg. However, when at all possible I solely play infiltrator, both lone wolf and platoon. The other major caveat I want to make before you read any further is: I know my overall k/d is not very good, but don't let that fool you. When I play pure sniper I can get up to 5/6 kd for a session, just like anyone else. Sadly, pure sniper is not a sustainable play style as it seems most of the major battle locations are inside buildings (or domes). Locations like the Traverse are a real joy, because of all the interesting angles and nooks for hiding. The remaining locations where sniping is possible end up with the "hill humping" and that's really no fun for me, because it requires no cleverness on my part. There is exactly one good location and even the battle rank 1 infiltrators can find it. As a result, I spend a lot of time working the up-close infiltrator angle. Am I successful at it? Occasionally, but there's a lot of very frustrated time spent trying to find a location in the magic butter zone between so-full-of-enemies-I-can't-get-out-of-the-spawn-room and ghost-capping. What I wish someone had told me up front: Cloaking is not invisibility - You can't shoot while cloaked (it'd be nice if you automatically decloaked when you pulled the trigger) and you can still be seen while cloaked, especially if moving or if you have been spotted (q button) by the enemy because they watched you vanish. Really the only thing cloaking is good for is crossing open terrain, and even then you can only safely cross short distances. I also recommend cloaking before using jump pads or anti-grav lifts. There is not one best loadout, you need two - You need a bolt-action sniper rifle with a 12x scope for long range sniping (stupid render distance glitch) and a semi-automatic (if you want full automatic go light assault) scout rifle with a 1x/2x scope and laser sight for sneaking around in bases. Do not confuse these. Get used to swapping out every time you see a sunderer. Don't take more than two shots from a single spot - No matter how well hidden you are, some light assault flying around will stumble across you or an enemy infiltrator will pick you off while you are aiming. Really you shouldn't even take two shots from the same spot, but sometimes you really want that kill. The only vehicle you need is a Flash - Make sure the headlights are off (L), and get the cert good for climbing hills. Flashes can take you quickly from one good sniping nest to another. See previous rule. That being said, getting the AMS cert for a sunderer does make hacking vehicle terminals more useful. If you want to kill people, stay outside the base - The only reason to go inside the base is to hack hack hack. You just aren't equipped for face-to-face killing. Avoid it. Your scout rifle does a lot of damage, so you can occasionally kill the lone soldier you stumble across. Mostly, though, you should be converting ammo terminals and vehicle terminals. If you can hack the turrets (especially near the gates) those take priority. Don't forget to drop a mine on a control point or a generator. What works: Within the first five minutes of picking the class, I was hooked. I fell for the predator visual effect (although that honeymoon didn't last long, as I'll explain later) and the headshot bonuses. I felt that this was a class that would require a bit more brain than spray-and-pray that you see in the other classes. I cannot tell you how many times be it close with Nyx or far with the XM98 (which I recently got a gold medal with), that I belly laughed at the the stupid noob standing at a vehicle terminal for 5 minutes or the confused pro who thought the base was empty. I've also recently fallen in love with abandoning guns entirely and hunting people with the knife. I got like 20 kills in an hour this way while riding with the zerg. Epic. It really maximizes the sense of "I outsmarted you" because I took a knife to a gun fight and won. The antipersonnel mines are also amazing to place at control points. What? You want to take B back? Go on in...BOOM...muahahaha. This class is so much fun. What could work better: Everything in this section has been said to death elsewhere, but I include it for completeness. The default cloaking is just that, default. The recharge option is nice, but a duration cert would be nice too. I'm also really confused by the loss of all the cloak options people talked about in the beta. I'd dump a ton into that to add versatility to my game play. I'd love to switch to the dash cloak for sniping and switch to the no-primary long-term cloak for bio-labs. Hell, I'd even be willing to do dagger-only for a long-term cloak. I loved that bit in the trailer with the decloaking infiltrator. Sexay. Also, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make firing a gun initiate the decloaking sequence. It's very easy to forget your current cloaking state as you blink in and out between buildings. The number one thing you could do to make my gameplay more interesting is removing energy use while standing still. I like the challenge of avoiding being seen and the limited duration, but at times it feels suffocating. "If i just had 2 more seconds, I could make it to the next hidey hole" Hacking. There's SO MANY computer terminals in every base already. You really wouldn't even have to redesign anything. I don't even care if hacking them does something battle-wise, reward me with XP for taking the time to do it -- especially since you get more XP for destroying a terminal than hacking it. Oh wow, you plunked it from 100 yards away with your tank. Great job, GI Joe. You didn't put yourself at risk at all to do that. Also, why the heck can't I hack a teleporter? That seems like the most obvious thing you'd want to hack. Knifing. When it works, it's awesome. However, the reach doesn't seem quite right. Not in terms of distance so much as in terms of arc. I really have trouble knifing crouched people and people who are not directly in front of me. I feel like I should be able to harm (albeit less) people standing at my 2'oclock. Also, where's the knife options? At the very least, I'd like to be able to buy a faster/weaker stiletto and and stronger/slower machete. Poison seems like it'd be easy to add -- maybe make it infantry purchasable like grenades? What doesn't work: Certifications. There is a HUGE lack here right now, and much of what exists now is simply not applicable to the weapons we use. There's lots of threads talking about the useless forward grip stuff, etc. etc. I mean, really, a spy with a flashlight? The sensor dart. Granted, I haven't upgraded it, but there's always so much stuff on my minimap that I can't really imagine wanting to put MORE there, especially for a mere 10 seconds. A properly certed flash seems like a superior choice. Also, it's profile looks WAY too much like that of the pistol. I'm constantly scroll-wheeling to it then wondering why my victim got a pimple instead of a headshot. I mean, they are both basically a D-shaped handgun. At least put a radar dish on it or something that sticks out for my peripheral vision. The infiltrator is over-specialized. Really what we can kill is people standing still, bet it with knife or sniper rifle. We're very good at it, but it's a one-trick-pony, for sure. Vehicle hacking (what I want most is being able to disable sunderer spawns) or emp darts (make their reticles shake like a breathing sniper) would go a long way. I'm not really interested in armor-piercing ammo. HOW THE HELL DO I GET SPOTTED BY AIRPLANES WHILE CLOAKED?! Yes yes, I know about the thermal scopes, but seriously. What I'd pay money for: Customized cloaking - the new faction-specific sounds are only the beginning. Why not have biome-specific cloak patterns like you have armor camo? Esamir could get snow glisten pattern, Amerish could get leaf-shadow pattern, bio-labs could get a shimmer pattern that's got more right-angles in it. Climbing - let me buy some hiking boots so I don't have to slum it with the BR 1 hill humpers. At least let me climb a tree or something. I don't want flying like LA have, that'd be OP. Just letting me scale natural surfaces like trees would be PLENTY. I guess it could be a cert, but shut up and take my money.
Interesting read but... I guess you never played Planetside 1 =/ Infiltrator is fun in ps2, don't get me wrong but... It's not an infiltrator. It's, at best, a cool sniper, which in the overall ebb of the fight in PS means you're mostly useless. Infiltrators in PS1 were powerful, cool, hard to master and USEFUL. First of all you could fire from cloak, you basically never dropped it. Firing just made you VERY visible. Staying crouched and immobile would make you perfectly invisible to all except sensor and a specialized implant (think like IR vision in PS2). You were also very squishy. You couldn't use rifles at all, only pistol and knife. On the other hand though you had full access to the whole Combat Engineering arsenal when properly certed, plus the hacking. In PS1 you had to hack DOORs to actually get inside ANY place. If you hacked the equipment terminals, people would basically spawn in pajamas with no way to change out of them. Bases could be hacked with viruses, and to be conquered they required a hacker in the first place (mind you, most of this stuff could be done by everybody since there were no classes, the infiltrator just made the perfect vessel for some of this). And Combat engineering meant you could build C4 charges under the feet of your enemies, wiping groups of infantry at the same time, or vehicles (which you could also HACK stealing them from the enemy), or placing automated turrets outside of contested towers, and on and on. I love sniping, it's one of my favourite things to do in FPS. It's also, in most objective based FPSs, not that useful. In PS2 even more so. As it stands now, the PS2 infiltrator is an unfocused fun but kinda useless class. It has a lot of potential, but they really need to work on it, it's the class that needs it most.
I wanted to immedately post to let you know about the third level of cloaking. There's level 1: Running -- Pretty easy to spot level 2: Standing still -- Much better and level 3: CROUCHING while sitting still -- this makes you almost completely invisible. It's not just that you're a smaller target, but the quality of the cloak actually becomes even clearer. A lot of people don't realize there's that third level. If you ever need to dodge someone who's chasing you, hop around a corner, cloak then crouch somewhere quickly. They'll run right past you 90% of the time or better. There's currently a glitch where, if you crouch first THEN cloak, sometimes it doesn't transition into level 3 cloak. You must get used to cloaking first, then crouching. Give it a shot. ::edit -- The following, I just added. It's a response to your topic:: As for what we need, I agree mostly. Infiltrators need more reason to infiltrate. Right now, we might as well just be called snipers. Hacking gives paltry exp, and that's about all we have. We need more exp for hacking and better things to hack (vehicles). We need more things to cause problems from the inside of a base. For instance, in Team Fortress 2, spy does EVERYTHING right. Spy in TF2 causes mayhem behind enemy lines and playing spy well is like playing a whole different game from what the rest of the TF2ers are playing. He can not only turn invisible for a short duration, but he can disguise as various classes on the enemy team. The mere presence of a spy causes the other team to spend as much time watching their backs/checking for spies as they do attacking your team. This paranoia is the spy's greatest tool. He also sabotages. I thought that's what infiltrator would be like, but it's just not. On paper, being able to hack turrets and such seems like it'd be very helpful, but in the great scale of this game, it's just not. Infiltrators should also have OHKO backstabs with knives. There's no question. If you can get behind enemies in a game where there are 100 pairs of eyes looking all over the place, you DESERVE that kill. If the other shooters allow OHKO knife stabs from any angle (most importantly the battlefield series) then I don't see the problem here with OHKO *back*stabs. You also deserve not to be seen on the minimap while doing it. I say this because right now 1 knife + shooting is much more efficient than 2 knife swings... but it shows you on the radar. Right now, knifing twice is awful... the second stab normally doesn't even register and two swings already takes more time than it should. You can achieve almost the same thing now with a stab + 1 silenced pistol shot which is sort of OK, but I still think we need OHKO backstabs. I suggest an unlockable knife that gives OHKO backstabs and -50% damage on sidestabs/frontstabs. We also need mobility. Cloak's great and all, but the assault jet pack is so much more useful. Assault can get into sniping positions that make infiltrators cry tears of rage. I agree, it'd be great if infiltrators at least had some way to scale surfaces. Lastly, we need C4 as an option to replace mines. Mines are great, but they're specialized for killing infantry. There are so many times when I've sneaked into a base and thought "God... I could really use C4 here. I'd be so much more helpful if I could kill this sunderer" etc. I don't see why we don't have that option. Right now, infiltrator's have two obvious playstyles: 1) Sniper 2) Infiltrating Sniper is heavily reinforced in Planetside. Sniper has all the tools he needs to do well. The infiltrating part, though, is *severely* lacking. Maybe with an automatic scout rifle, silenced, and some more certs, I can play a good INFILTRATOR... but I have yet to see a point.
That's correct. Does that make my opinion invalid? I grant you, what you describe sounds very good. However, having never had those things to miss, the class isn't terrible. It certainly needs some dev TLC, though. Also, a lot of the flavor text needs tweaking. It REALLY wasn't apparent to me that I wasn't invisible until I joined an outfit and my teammates told me over voice chat I could be seen. In my head, I expected to be totally invisible. I thought the outline I could see on the screen was just for my own benefit so I could see where I was.
I agree that the Flash offers this class a lot. BUT I think it could offer us even more with a better Cert progression that WASN'T based on AIRCRAFT "Stealth". (We don't need anti-missile lock, we need a quieter engine & camo for it) Also, its climbing (which this class Needs a lot more of) potential is pretty hilarious already: Regarding everyone who yells "Yeah but it's a Sniper!" .... ummm .... so is ANYONE IN A TANK or anyone behind a Zephyr ... plus their Sniper rounds reload faster or have much bigger projectile hulls than ours and also have huge AOE's making them super-effective against people near doorways inside buildings. & At anyone who mentions Betties/Tripmines in response to Buildings: .... umm have you PLAYED engie? Theirs are cheaper and blow up tanks.
Really enjoyed this post, thanks. I totally agree with you on everything. Now that I have an understanding of the maps and ebbs and flows, I'm at about a 10:1 KD the last several nights I've played. It's fun to out flank groups trying to capture a position. That's my specialty, and normally the only thing hurting me as a BR8 is running out of ammo. <3 Longshot.
I just hit Rank 20 last night as well. What I have noticed: Sniping rocks. For some reason, all the sides, NC/Vanu/TR, line up on hills and shoot each other like it's the revolutionary war. I hide myself and rack up the kills. I am very new to this game, but I find it interesting that each faction does this. Sniping changed the tide of battle two times this weekend, just because they were lined up saying "Headshot us please." I am absolutely terrible at infiltrating. If I see someone in front of me and get first strike, they still turn around and whack me. I have died over 1,000 times in this game already. Of those, about 300 or so were trying to Infiltrate, 600 were trying other classes and failing miserably, and the rest were fatalities while sniping. I have pretty much given up on Infiltration. A lot of my deaths are because I did not decloak before firing. That annoys me. I wish it auto decloaked. I know that skill has a lot to do with it, but I have found that Infiltrating for me at least is not fun because of my cloaking/decloaking. 12 seconds of cloak, 8 seconds of recharging, and normally I'm dead before I get much accomplished. I understand that there needs to be balance in this game, but after a lot of practice infiltrating, I have given myself an 'F' and called it a day. After practicing sniping, I can get headshots on moving targets frequently, near 100% of the time on standing targets, but it really does not seem like I've improved with Infiltration. Bouncing Betty rocks. I can't wait to have two of her. I hate the Scout Rifles. Once again, probably just me, but they seem to hit like BB Guns. I'm not good at using grenades. I will probably just cert into Decoy Grenades. Hacking and spawning a Sunder is an awesome experience when it does not get blasted 30 seconds later. I'm actually improving a lot in that department as well. I also wish that I had some utility against vehicles.
