Greetings all! So I've been seeing alot of talk about the Infiltrator class and I wanted to share my thoughts! I really like this class and the playstyles it brings, (except for CQC "sniping") this is my opinion/suggestions... First, the cloak: 1a. Give a delay on firing coming out of cloak. (Like the minor cloak implant) 1b. Give a delay for recloaking. (Similar to the wraith flash) 1c. Quiet the sound of cloaking and uncloaking, IF, you must mess with the sound. (I've seen suggestions to make it louder! Which I disagree with completely. Cloaking is meant to be stealthy) 1d. (Not completely set on this one) Quiet the sound of pulling out a knife when cloaked. (Be it an added benefit to an implant, like deep operative, or given passively to stalker cloak.) 1e. Visibility. Allow the Infravision implant to pick up their cloak, as a final lvl 5 benefit or at the start. This Would make the Sidewinder implant a bit more worth it. I like the idea of IR picking them up but also lore wise, like the cloak suppressing infls heat signatures. (I play on low settings and have trained my eyes to look for distortions. So I don't have much for this area except for tips… Always be on your guard, this is a war! Head on a swivel and guns read.) Second, weapons: 2a. Long range Sniper rifles should OHK any class, (except MAX, obviously) including HA with overshield on. That is the purpose of the rifle! 2b. Short range "Sniper rifles aka CQC. Remove them from the game!.... Or, if we must… change all Sniper rifles that only use 1x-4x scope, to long range Sniper rifles. OR some, like the TR's KSR-35, could work well if changed to a scout/battle rifle but remove the ohk if changed to that kind of rifle. (The idea of CQC "sniper" rifles boggles my mind… if you're that close, are you really sniping? Don't get me wrong. I enjoy using my TSR-42 and KSR but they are no Sniper rifles, CQC "Sniper" rifles are just glorified battle and scout rifles and IMHO have no place in planetside 2.) 2c. SMGs. With the changes above to cloak, I think it would change the way these work just a bit. 2d. Anti-infantry mines. The only thing I'd change, give all factions a claymore that stands upright and give TR a mine like Bouncing Betties/proxy/ F.U.S.E. mines that lay flat. Claymore are the hardest hitting but are exposed way more than the others. (The colors alone…) So players could choose higher damage but exposure or lower damage but more discrete. That is what I think of the current topics about Infls. What do y'all think? Am I way off and making them OP or too weak? P.s the recon darts' hit box needs to be looked at. I have to shoot next to it or under it instead of the dart itself.
This all sounds pretty good. However, while I too dislike CQC Bolt Action Rifles, they shouldn't be removed. They are someone else's playstyle too, and they can have their place in the game. Its just that you can't react in time to fight them. Having a 1 second bootup for weapons after decloak, marked by a nice energy readying sound when the timer is over, should help that. If that doesn't fix the problem, then we should make the weapons harder to use. Maybe they should have bad handling, constant sway, and/or no optics. That would definitely make them harder to use, which is a better alternative than removing someone's cherished weapon. Everything else looks fine to me.
I don't know about those changes. I absolutely hate having to play against infiltrators, but the problems seem more systemic to me. The nature of the game is that you don't want to die, and you want to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible. For infantry, that means out-ranging most weapons, being invisible and hiding behind your team's meat shields so you can farm kill after kill with an OHKO weapon. Stalkers are good, yes, but the travel time is somewhat prohibitive. they're annoying but as best as i can tell they're not as powerful as they seem, at least not without SMGs. The other issue is that the only reliable counters to a cloaker (that arent vehicles) are other cloakers. counter-sniping an invisible enemy in the far distance with good cover is time consuming and risky, so why bother when you could farm medics and heavies in the midfield? Stalkers can get in and massacre them, but the travel time for two or three kills are a waste when you could just farm heavies like everyone else. changes to cloak times and visibility would definitely help deal with short range bolters, but they would cripple less optimized cloaker builds like stalkers trying to ghost cap or hack terminals, or any build using a pistol or knife without a ridiculous investment in implants. I'd comment on SMG infils, but at my peasant rank i'm not allowed to even try them, so i cant say how good they actually are. Ideally i'd want infils to be worth twice as much EXP when you kill them. That way there would be an economic incentive to counter-sniping and to making long trips to remove dug in cloakers, and hunting down a well hidden SMG cloaker would be worth the time and risk of them redeploying like cowards. hopefully that would cause the problems with cloakers to largely solve themselves. Otherwise, why not flip the damage profile of sniper rifles? The highest skill shots are at the longest ranges, but they do the least damage. If you can land multiple body shots on someone at 800m you deserve the kill anyway, so why not make the rifles do their max damage at long range and be less effective in CQC? i know i've gotten more than my share of cheap undeserved headshots hipfiring with the daimyo...
