I was saddened to see the changes to the Deep Operative implant that are planned. I main infiltrator, and while I believe the current live iteration of Deep Operative can be improved on, it's far from weak. This implant is equipped 100% of the time and does help the stalker infiltrator a lot. The planned version will ruin this implant for stalkers and be marginally useful for non-stalkers. For a stalker, getting into position is much easier than escaping after a kill. These changes only punish the already lackluster stalker by not only taking away the passive 30% reduction in cloak visibility, but forcing the stalker to be out of cloak to receive the benefit. So here is my proposal. 1. Make the planned changes into its own implant. Since the test changes seem to want to promote infiltrators to not be in cloak and to kill. This would be much more beneficial for non-stalkers as they are the ones most likely to be making use of the kill feature that's built into the test version while also keeping the current Deep Operative for stalkers. 2. Add these features on top of the current iteration of Deep Operative. These would keep the (allegedly) weak version of cloak while also promoting stalkers kill and not be in cloak. I personally like option 2 because it promotes stalkers to be riskier and more tactical to receive the benefits but also not punish stalkers.
I rather rarely play infil, but I use the DO implant and health regen when using stalker. If DO was given a buff/change, I'd have it be the way it is currently on live, but have greater benefit when sprinting. I understand that it would be not be fun at all if infiltrators could barely be detected by darklights, but the PTS version is far worse than live's and would never see any real use.
So why would this tactic not work for Stalkers: 1. Spawn. 2. Wait 12 seconds out of cloak in Spawn room or somewhere near sundy that seems safe-ish. 3. Proceed to benefit from DO until you get hit. 4. Withdraw to safe place. 5. Re-enable DO, repeat cycle. I do think there are a couple of problems with DO on PTS though, as follows: 1. Self-inflicted damage (from falling, mostly) should not break the DO effect. 2. The rank 5 effect is useless unless it at least lasts until you die, not until you next take damage. Personally, I think DO will work well to keep a crossbow or blackhand stalker from being counter-ambushed while they're positioning, and they're the best at avoiding damage in the first place. For a stalker that likes to mix it up in CQC, it's going to be harder of course, but with the right approach you should still be able to attack before getting hit and hopefully make a kill before having to withdraw... but really, use a Blackhand at least, it's much better.
