A class that one hit kills while invisible at a distance is killing the fun.

Like the ability to reliable counter invisible enemies with termal sights?

When nearly everybody equips a countermeasure for one special thing, it's save to assume that that thing makes taking that counter necessary. The majority of people run around with flashlights under one of their guns, does that mean that the light gets overused and must be nerfed? (Not that it works on close distance anyways).

And even if they got instantly wasted by vehicles - learn to play issue on their side, with some awarness they could be able to avoid getting shot at by vehicles

ah yes. The un-killable infiltrator thread....again. Look, we've all been over this a billion times by now. The devs just need to restore the thermal optics to their original function and the problem is solved. It would also bring back smoke launchers and grenades' as being useful again.

I think the biggest issue I have is latency with processing and how this affects me vs cloakers.

We all know PS2 is client side and heavy on CPU processing. My CPU is not the latest and greatest and I find at times (especially if I've been playing a long session) that I see things happening a fraction of a second behind others.

My experience is by the time I see a cloaked decloak and shoot me, it's already too late to react and I'm instantly killed. I know for a fact many people have this same experience.

Cloakers have a vast toolkit to go in hand with almost perfect invisibility. Unless I'm running a top end rig ( and tbh. I've watched streamers who do, must be nice to have 0 latency hit detection), I'm never going to be able to successfully counter infil. With this vast toolkit, there need to be checks and balances.

Reduced hitpoint pool for cloakers is a non issue, since they get to choose their fights and 9 times out of 10, are initiating.

Loss of explosives? Cloakers have access to mines and sticky grenades. So while they cant really take on vehicles, they are not without tools to dmg maxes and light vehicles.

Access to full auto weapons, and hard hitting pistols. Not to mention one shot abilities at all ranges we with bolt rifles or ohk knives. There need to be an offset here (again, lower hitpoint pools are negated by choosing your fights)

Even nano cloak gives them additional arms resistance making them tanky in a way.

The argument is that if the cloaker is good, you would die anyway regardless if you can see them or not. That's a fine statement, but there needs to be substance behind this. I've gone on some pretty rad killstreaks as a cloaker simply due to the fact I can drop on people out of near perfect invisibility. I'm not the best player in the world by far, imagine what the best players can do as infil.

Balance this around skill, like is suggested for every class. If the infil was going to kill me anyway cause hes a good player, then prove it. Infil should have to offset their toolkits but having to wait after decloak to take action. The cloak allows them positioning that is almost impossible to achieve at times. To offset this, you incur a 5 second wait time before you can take any offensive action after decloaking.

This would both prove good cloakers really are good players in addition to allowing average Joe's rigs having just a second longer to react to infiltrators initiating fights on unsuspecting players. It's a win/win in my opinion and allowes those that cloak to prove their skills.

I don't have problems with cloakers who decloak within range that I can hear them decloaking. Many times I'm able to respond to the sound and kill the infil before they kill me. I also get a lot of free kills from infils just trying to run around me cloaked but I see them. I think an interesting adjustment would be to make decloaking infils show up on the minimap briefly, something like 1 or 2 seconds maybe.

Long distance snipers are more in need of some balance adjustments imo. I think they should still have a visible shimmer even at sniper ranges. Right now they are actually invisible. I think the time delay between uncloaking and being able to fire a sniper rifle or the OHK knife should be increased slightly - something like half a second or so for the knife and 1 second for the sniper (would need to test to fine a good adjustment). I'm not sure if this would work in Planetside 2, but I think some sort of indicator on snipers might be a good addition (in Halo for example, I think the snipers give off a kind of shine reflection or something). And/or maybe a slight toning down of sniper rifle kill potential - like a little less bullet velocity on all one-shot sniper rifles like bolt actions and Daimyo.

Also, the OHK knife needs to be louder in addition to a slight increase to time between when you can uncloak and when you can fire. A nerf to rechamber/reload speed would also be a good target for toning down sniper rifles kill potential.

Reload speed is slow enough IMO, at least for the Railjack. But a change in rechamber time would be fine to me, but mostly for those CQC sniper rifles.

As for the OHK knife, I can vibe with that change. The thing is, in big fights, if you die to it once, you shouldn't die to it a lot again. What works for me is either getting killed once by a knifing Stalker so I know they are in the general area or my teammates getting murdered by one. Also, if you bait for them to attack you, you can outrun them and keep dodging their swings while someone shoots them. Or you can swerve the swing and blast them, then run and swerve another one.

I'm thinking like pretty small adjustments, not anything too major. What I would do ideally if I were in charge of balancing, would be to set aside an hour or two for some playtest times (notify everyone in game to participate and reward players certs for their time to attract people) and record a bunch of metrics to see the impact of the changes to fine tune it to tone down snipers overperforming too much.

I get killed all the time as an infil. I decloak, the heavy instantly 180's and 1 nanosecond later I'm a ground ornament.