Infiltrator buff ideas from a heavy

Get of that high horse, it doesn't suit you very well.

We're about as lethal at long range as a LA is close range(or max).
Personally, I find it almost easier to do well with a shotgun in close with my engineer(which lacks the jetpack of the LA), with a half-assedly certed shotgun, while my bolt action snipers have as many certs as they need to reach maximum sniping potential.

Yes you -can- kill people at ranges they can't really retaliate from(generally outside).
But at that point, any infiltrator is vehicle food anyway. And arguably, so are most infantry.

I don't know what server you're playing on, but at least people on my server(miller) aren't bad enough to make the bolt action much good in CQC(which you include in what you call the effective range of a bolt action).
Tip: It's not.

What you don't seem to get is that what a lot of people "complain" about is that our main class ability(the cloak) is both lackluster and broken.
If you took LA jetpacks and gave them the hunter cloak certs, LAs everywhere would drown the forum in tears.
Even assuming the cloaks will work properly one day, the current ones are very meh.
Hunter cloak is locked to 12 seconds duration regardless of how many certs you spend(and after fully certing it, it recharges at half the time of an uncerted one, 12 to 6 if memory serves). By comparison the LA jetpack will both last longer -and- recharge faster while certed.
The nano armour, when active(drains fully in 6 seconds or so, recharges in 18 I think when fully certed) makes infiltrators suddenly be -on par- with the other classes, and only when it's active(and yeah it cloaks you for a whopping 6 seconds at most - except neither cloak really is stealthy).
Hell, if it was functioning like the HA Cloak it'd be better(as it absorbs extra damage, rather than reducing yet still taking shield hits).

What's worst, there were a lot of cloaks up to tease people in the beta(6 I think). Only 2 made release.
And then SOE says MAXes and LAs need to get new toys before infiltrators?

To compare perks and abilities of those 3 classes(yes I know I've left HA, Medic and Engi out):
Inf:
-hacking of terminals(situational use)
-recon darts(any class can do it with a flash radar, so it's technically not a unique thing)
-dysfunctional cloaks(not very stealthy, + they get very little from certs upgrades)
-sniper rifles, really only works at long to extreme ranges. Any other range, any class can stand toe to toe(or dare I say have the advantage over the infiltrator) if they chose the right weapon. And if people aren't sheep, hitting them can be rather tricky.
-Gimped shields

LAs:
-Best mobility of -any- class in game. This is a -massive- advantage. They're also the only ones with alternate routes of approach to a target. Unique for LAs.
-Shotguns: the god of close range combat
-Carbines: About on par with LMGs and ARs in usefulness.
-Can carry explosives to handle just about any target(infiltrators can only go AI)
-No shield ****.
-Has synergy between it's class ability(which works properly) and it's potential loadout(like aerial bombing runs with C4 etc).

MAX
-Very high armour, allows for MAX crashes("unique" to MAXes)
-No shields(but again, lots of armour)
-Great close range weapons(especially the NC MAX does well in this area)
-Arguably best G2A weapons in the game
-Sprint, allowing it to use it's great CQC guns where they're in their prime. Or flee when "**** hits the fan".

Out of these, only the infiltrators have a class ability that isn't working properly. It's also the one with the weakest upgrades by certs. Moreover, least health of -any- class in game.
For the hacking, yes, hacking terminals can be useful. What people on this sub forum have asked for isn't a gun with doomsday devices for ammo(well maybe some did), what we want are more things to hack.
Like a generator that when hacked turns an entire facility dark.
Or a door, opening up a new route of assault.
Or abandoned vehicles.
Or to hack gens faster. This wouldn't be OP either, as anyone can still overload them.
(and nobody calls it OP that only engineers can repair them do they?)
And so on and so forth.

Maybe you noticed I didn't mention sniper rifles just now.
That's because they're fine as is. Yes someone don't like that it's possible to become durable enough to barely survive a headshot from the high-damage rifles, but that's a discussion for another thread.
What a lot of the people posting here want are more infiltration-based things to do, and to stand a -fair- chance in CQC. Or to reward sneaky infiltrators for being sneaky.

If you want a more in-depth post about the cloak itself, there's multiple threads where it's discussed. Go find those.


If you instead want to stay here, claiming infiltrators are fine, then tell us why.
How did you circumvent the issues with the cloak not working properly, or having less shields than other classes? And make it infiltrator specific if you could. Because simply not being in someone else's LOS to remain stealthy makes the entire cloak moot(and any class can do that, not just infiltrators).

Or better yet, justify why we have less shields. We don't have better weapons for ranges where the shield value matters.


Ok, that was a rant and a half.
I should stop posting things right before bed.

Ztiller would just tell you this anyways, so I might as well. Go and watch his videos here and study his playstyle rather than asking him for an explanation of it, because you're not going to get one from him. I'll try to explain it myself, but words can only do so much.

Essentially, he runs away. He puts everything in-between the people looking for him (or at him) and abuses the fact that Hunter Stealth breaks spotting to make people lose track of him, and eventually, lose interest in finding him altogether. It doesn't matter that the cloak is highly visible, because it still makes the user less distinguishable as a member of any particular empire. Many people will mistake him as an ally, and those who don't still have to deal with their allies being in the line of fire and their target very quickly disappearing behind some obstacle.

When Ztiller does manage to shake his opposition, he's usually located in an area where the rest of his allies are not likely to be for a very long time. Enemy players feel safer there, and are more willing to dismiss the sight of an Infiltrator who doesn't demonstrate any obvious hostility. This allows him to pick off targets almost in plain sight of their allies with a silenced, close range Bolt Action sniper rifle, and most of them are none the wiser for it.

An effective Infiltration method which involves not being caught simply does not exist in this game. That's what I take issue with, and that's what I'm trying to fix. At best, we can walk in the back door and nobody will be there to look at us when we do so, but that's neither reliable nor improved by being an Infiltrator.

Let's see. Engineer, engineer, engineer. Do i smell vehicles here? I did believe we were talking about Classes.

Also, that leaderboard only measures Overall xp. Meaning that the more you have played, and the more money you have paid=The higher rank you get. Hardly reliable. Add to that the fact that the infiltrator is probably the most difficult class in the game, and you might see my point. Few can manage it, but those who do are unmatched.

Alternatively you could look at score per minute(assuming you can sort by this value), look at people who don't have engineer as most played(although these days you really don't need to be an engineer to stay alive in vehicles - nano auto repair), then you're mostly left with HA, some Medics and some LAs.
If infiltrators were that brilliant at anything except very long range(where they're the best, I agree), how come people play HA or LA etc.

You say infiltrators are the peak of lethality if played right, yet this is true for -any- class, really. If you're good enough to dominate with the infiltrator, you'd just as easily dominate as the other classes. Besides the very long range sniper rifles, there's really not much about the infiltrators that make them somehow more lethal than the other classes.
Better weapons? Nope.
Better ability? I wish.
Better consumables? The useful ones aren't even unique(decoy and emp grenades are very underwhelming).

So it leaves me rather curious. What does infiltrators have that makes them the most lethal class?
'Cause it ain't the cloak.

The first ranked infiltrator is #48 on that list. Even if we took out all the engineers he wouldn't make the top 10.

So, if you top the leader boards, you are abusing vehicles and if you don't top the leader boards it's the fault of ranking algorithm?

Oh wait... you'd never make an argument like that...

Personally I'd like to see XP gain through use of the recon dart. For example, tagging an enemy vehicle or having an enemy die within your spot range could give a small bit.

Can they just improve our infiltration?
In terms of sabotage.
A speed increase would be nice while out of cloak, but outside of that, hacking is being very one-offish.
Find vehicle terminal, hack, spawn sunderer. Drive it somewhere relatively safe. If it's broken already then forget it.
Otherwise just walk in, trip the generator anyways or sit *** on the capture point till you're good to go.
Go to hack turrets for offense, they're destroyed anyways. Forget about it.

Don't see need for insta knife kills like this is halo or something. Just pull out the SMG.

Because it is the hardest class to play. Infiltrator requires a special skillset. The other classes are pretty much the same old regular FPS shooter-classes that hasn't changed for the last 10 years. That means more people can play them, and play them well.
The infiltrator takes time to learn. Time that most people are not prepared to take, and rather whine on the forums.

Their ability to Oneshot enemies, without giving away their position, gives them an unmatched ability to wreck defenses. So yeah, we do have better weapons. The ability is extremely effective if you can use it. The majority can obviously not. And that is a conclusion i can draw from the seeming fact that 90% of the people playing infiltrator says the cloak is terrible, while 10% loves it.

What makes the infiltrator lethal is, as stated above, its ability to wipe out an entire entrenchment in seconds, without the enemy even knowing you are there. If you do it right, you can visually see the confusion that happens when a defending force stumbles upon a large pile of dead friendlies without a single sound coming from the area.

No other class can kill as quickly and as effectively, as a Infiltrator with a Bolt action. One infiltrator can bring down a whole defense, if player correctly. No other class comes close to that lethality.

So a light assault can't cert into a supressor? When an infiltrator kills someone with a suppressed weapon it doesn't show up on the kill log at the top-right of your screen?

I've never seen any infiltrator wipe out an enemy squad. I've seen engineers go all suicide bomber on an AMS sundy with tank mines and literally bring some base assaults to a screeching halt. What would you do as an Infiltrator? Just shoot the newly-spawned people? Nothing stopping them from getting inside the sundy and the driver moving it like 20 feet in one direction behind a building/crate and ruining your dumb sniper streak. Your anti-personnel mines that you'll place next to a generator to kill off anyone hoping to bring it down? I got Flak Armor certed and Medkit as well, so I survive just fine and pop the medkit, or as a medic just use the ability that heals me while in use.

Then there's people who cert up to Nanoweave 5 and bring the instant-death headshots to another screeching halt. The smart ones will have medkits on standby and duck behind cover and use the medkit and inform the squad/platoon of where they were shot at from, so you'll have a potentially large group of enemies actively hunting for you and knowing you're there. You can never bring anything to a screeching halt except for one person, and vehicles/air craft do an even better job of that. One Magrider/Vanguard/Prowler can keep some spawn buildings locked down while someone else goes to cap a nearby point and flush out everyone in the now-flipped spawn room, right into the sights of an MBT. No Infiltrator can create that kind of havoc.

Anything you can do as an Infiltrator (uncommon longrange headshots aside), I can do better and do more as a Heavy Assault.

Sure he can. But good luck hiding from the enemy for long. A infiltrator headshotting an enemy leaves absolutely no trace whatsoever. The enemy is just watching their teammates drop dead one by one.

Did you heard the part where he said "Not effective at long range?" The Bolt action is effective between 2-400m.

The Pump-action shotguns was released like 3 days ago. They have not been balanced yet. And if SOE knows anything about marketing, they will be. Yeah, it is a powerful gun. But it still doesn't onehit-kill full health enemies.

Of course you haven't. Because that's the point of infiltrators. They aren't seen. I have cleared out numerous entenchments in seconds, and i'm not even using the SMG. The infiltrator is a support class. Your job is to make sure that that AT-mine engineer can make it to the Sunderer as easily as possible. If you're trying to go rambo, there is no wonder you are hating the class. Maybe that is the difference between you and me? I actually think before i act. Yep, you have flak armor. That means you don't survive my sniper rifle.

The Nanoweave 5 people is an extreme minority and hardly ever bothers me. If someone survives, i just finish him off, or disappear. Judging from your attitude, you run up and try to knife him or something, and then blame the class. The infiltrator is not a brute-force class. If you're trying to play it like one, then you might aswell start whining that the Heavy Assault didn't have a jetpack to save you after you jumped out of that aircraft.

You make a lot of bold assumptions, all of them wrong. It is not entirely uncommon for me to single handedly change the course of an entire battle.

You evidently cannot. But you speak for yourself.

Why don't you Prove it? Start by destroying 2 Vanguards, 3 lightnings, 1 sunderer, 4 defense turrets and killing ~10 enemy infantry soldiers in 5-10 minutes. One life.

You're kidding right? Infiltrators are unseen? Even when I decide to throw enemy Infiltrators a bone and play on medium/high, I have no problems tracking the distortion field. Whenever I hear that noise that I can, will, and have heard over the sounds of MBT/Lightning shells going off nearby when at Ti Alloys, I chase the Infiltrator down to kill them. Why? Not because I see them as a threat, but because I see them as perhaps the easiest kind of kill in the game. In fact, sniper infiltrators often display such horrible situational awareness that whenever I flank one or find one hiding behind a rock, I just laugh a little to myself and kill them, knowing I won't make their mistakes.

I've died a few times to a sniper rifle wielding Infiltrator, but those numbers of times are far less than some weapons like the T9 CARV, HEAT shells, the Repeater or SMG. Hell, even the shotguns are what fills up my deaths-by-chart more than sniper rifles. The only guns that have killed me less as a Heavy is the Magshot and the Beamer. The former because it's pretty rare to see an NC whip one out against me and the latter because it's a glorified ******* flashlight.

No other class gets a ability that doesn't work. No other class gets a tool that doesn't credit them, is ignored. No other class gets a long range weapon that has no impact on a battle.
It doesn't bother me that you think yourself an elitist that can tell actual infiltrator what they need to do. It bothers me that you want the class to stay this way while everyone else gets all the newer stronger ****.

Infiltrators are supposed to be extremely lethal mono on mono, fear provoking even. Here's the harsh truth, they ain't, and you aren't proving anything by running fearfully each time your back-capping/spawn-camping attempts fail.

Sure. We all see infiltrators now and then. However, you obviously do not remember the ones you didn't detect.

And yes, occasionally you get detected because of the sound. But it is still a minority of times. When i'm infiltrating, i don't even care about the sound, because it is so minor. All this talk about how people can find and kill infiltrators because of the sound is ridiculous. It happens now and then, but it is not something you can rely on.

Then maybe you have been lucky, or perhaps you just don't remember them. I guess on the latter. The 4000 player-kills that i have accumulated with my snipers certainly noticed it.

The cloak works. But it is not a guaranteed success. The Heavy Assaults shield protects you, but it is not guaranteed to save you. The cloak does make you harder to hit. That is a guarantee. The HA shield does give you more health. Guarantee. But if you are looking for a "Tap F to win" button, you're playing the wrong game.

By your definition, the only weapon that have an impact on the battle is Explosives that can destroy sunderers. All other weapons are completely meaningless, according to you.

No, what bothers you is that i laugh at how ridiculous all these claims are. I don't have a problem with people making rational suggestions. However almost all suggestions here are laughable "Gief win pl0x" suggestions.

I don't have a problem with people wanting the Stalker Cloak to cater to a new playstyle. But i do have a problem with amateurs wanting the Stalker cloak because the "Hunter cloak is useless!!!! Q_Q!."

Oh, and what new toys did all the other classes get that we didn't? SMG? We got those. Pump Action? We didn't, for a reason. Is there anything else the others have gotten, that we haven't?

Infiltrators are still the most lethal class, if you do not play like a moronic berserker. Unfortunately, most people do. And then they blame the class.

But i can tell you that inbetween decimating a whole tank line and defense, and inbetween 45-0 killstreaks against annihilator squads, those guys have been pretty darn distracted.

If you can't do it, that's fine. We all have different playstyles and skillsets. But don't scream that the class is useless, or bad. It isn't. If you think it is, the real weak link is not someplace that you will like to hear.

You based your entire argument on the player's mindset and cloak working. Look at it, the thing is bugged to hell! You can't ******** your way out of that fact.
You act like Planetside 2 is still pre-roadmap well here's a news flash for you, we're not, we're living in here and now.
Tell me *exactly* what the Infiltrator has that noticeably better than other classes and that other classes don't have already. Tell me why I shouldn't be Infiltrating with a Engineer with claymores instead?

And it works.

Apart from the Lowsettings bug, it is perfectly fine. And the low settings but is annoying, but certainly not gamebreaking. Makes things harder, but not impossible. Other bugs plague me much worse.

Yep. I'm living here and now. And i'm succeeding with the infiltrator, here and now.

So, lets see. Apart from the Cloak, recon tool, hacking tool, one-hit-kill long range weapons, all of which contribute to making the infiltrator the deadliest enemy on the field?

Really, if you need me to tell you how to infiltrate with better the infiltrator than with the engineer, then you are a pretty lost case. You think it's ****. I don't. Plenty of other players love it. Plenty of people hate it. Probably a given result given the high skill-requirement for the class, and people having a hard time acknowledging their own shortcomings.

Maybe it just isn't for you? Judging from what you have written, i would say the Heavy Assault fits you better.

Don't forget 500 health. The breathing mechanic is a necessity, it just needs to be toned down and not effect 4x and lower scopes.

If there's an infiltrator around that doesn't shoot people, it will remain undetected yes. But I have yet to see a sniper/infiltrator who actually shot be able to keep doing so without being chased off or killed, or really manage to keep up with the shooting of heads.
And if there's no such infiltrator in Miller, I have doubts that they even exist.

The cloak -doesn't- work as intended. They changed it to give low settings people a chance at seeing them, but what really happened was that it made the cloak not fulfill the role it plays on high settings, where it's still not brilliant.
What's worse is that the cert upgrades are very lackluster for their cost.

Now -if- you got a 45-0 streak against an annihilator squads, well done for you. But that's more telling of their inability to do their job properly if one singular infiltrator managed to stick around for long enough to pick off 45 "unsuspecting" people.

Right, which one of my videos do you want me to link to? The one where i kill 25 guys in under 3 minutes, completely undetected?

They have confirmed that the Low-settings shadow is a bug, and they will fix it. It's not a nerf. As much as this subforum loves paranoia and conspiracy theories: No. It is not a nerf.

Or perhaps that infiltrator just knows how to do his job well? On this subforum, if you do something right, your enemies suck. If you do something wrong, the class sucks. No wonder nobody ever improves.

Why do I even bother trying to explain anything to you? You're off in your own little world of Infiltrators actually being deadly. I don't notice Infiltrators very often? Please, I notice Light Assaults with their silent jetpacks and lethal shotguns only slightly less than the noisy as hell cloak. If I didn't make alts and stuck purely to VS, my Playtime as a Heavy Assault would be well into the 4 day range with Infiltrator close to that amount of time as well. Infact, those two classes are the only ones I play with any regularity at all on my VS character. I might pull Engineer or Medic if the support is needed.

I know how to handle Infiltrators as a Heavy Assault and the other way around because they are my two most played classes and as such I have the most experience in dealing with and countering. Especially when I'm a Heavy Assault and going after Infiltrators, I turn it into a game to see how long it takes for me to find and flank them, before promptly shooting them up with my Pulsar LSW. Once I get 100 cert points saved up, I may end up slapping a Laser Sight onto my Beamer and use that while hip-firing because snipers are that predictable for me. Sure I'll be putting off the Forward Grip for the Pulsar LSW, but it'll be worth it anyway.