The thing is more than 50% of the time, they can see us while in stealth and can hear us cloaking even like a mile away. Most of the time infil is dead before having to react while cloaked assuming they shoot us first of course. I feel it's a slightly nerf to the infiltrator class. What do you think? agree or disagree?.
Ok! So I was going to assume you were new to the game but then I checked out your forum account and you been around awhile! (We are talking cqc for the next bit) So basically the cloak isn't meant to be a defense so to speak, they are meant to give you the tiniest edge in close range combat, but face to face you will drop because tbh they are probably shooting you before you shoot them and you have less health. What the cloak is for is essentially to be able to flank better and then to disengage from the area with the slight but if confusion the cloak gives you. Nothing more. Now don't think I wouldn't find it amusing for the first 10 minutes of cloaks were totally invisible and silent. You could kill everything! But it probably wouldn't be a good idea. The cloak just makes you stand out less, if you are sprinting up some stairs cloaked and an enemy happen to be walking down them, or ever looking at them, you will probably die. The main skill to playing infiltrator is situstional awareness. Once you figure out where people are you can walk round the back, jump down from above, get a sniping position where you can see them in what they think is cover, etc etc. Because if you are fighting people face to face and with no surprise a lot of the time, you are not using the class the way it is effective. Now for long range (we'll say >50 m), in this case yes! The cloak is a defense but still requires a lot of thought about where you are and who can see you and where from. Again it isn't designed to keep you invisible it is simply to make you slightly less noticeable. Ok no I will give you that at close range it doesn't... The cloak makes you 10x more visible at close ranges than a normal player when you are fighting experimented players. Why is that? Well simple with camo coverage and correct choice of camos and decals you can make an enemy hesitate when they see you in their tower. However when they see s cloaked infi of another faction, it has no colour! They are programmed to just fire on this no matter what so you get shot the instant they see you. Basically, the cloak is pretty much fine. A small buff to our invisibility might be nice and shouldn't be game breaking but won't help much. Removing faction colours from cloaks unless dark light is on them would get us team killed more but would get the element of surprise back. Culling the range of auto turrets down to 25 m would make flanking a bit easier again since we won't have as many esp engies out and about But again, all is fine.
The only reason stalkers can use a cloak "defensively" and then "offensively" actually has more to do with other game mechanics then cloak itself. Deep cloak is the only really useful state we have. Cover presents the element of doubt. Stalkers don't have a sound tell which always gives away their presence so cloak can become more useful and less noticeable for both offensive and defensive purposes. Indeed the ability to control your farts is worth more to me then the pitiful visibility reduction cloak offers us while moving. The other advantage being you cannot be spotted and this in itself hinders the enemies ability to track you very effectively. The closest thing your ever going to get with cloak using SMG / ghost or scout rifle, is to take a corner, break line of slight, and quickly crouch down and deep cloak. I call these counters - when you know the enemy is greedy and your planning to jump him once he gets past you. These can easily backfire, and not many people use them because its extremely situational. When you get good at counters, stalker play does tend to open up, allowing you to chain ambushes back to back and bait enemies with more confidence providing a more aggressive form of stalker play. The difference of course with stalker your not always pumping out the farting sounds. Its much easier to use cover and create doubt. Its harder to perform a counter with hunter and almost impossible for NAC because the cloak/recharge time is just so punishing. Ezaroo was also dead right in explaining how cloak used to work, and the advantages we lost when the developers changed everything so ambiguity no longer existed. Disguise camo can buy you at least a bullets worth of hesitation if you want to go that route. Its effective when you break line of sight quickly but will not stop anyone for more then half a second. I still love my fancy lumifiber and hard-light but there is a slight disadvantage to being fabulous.
Cloak is really bad when you think about it as a go-to ability for stealth. Consider motion spotter tools to be infils' main ability, not cloak.
