Why light assault is a better infiltrator than an infiltrator

This continues to be my favorite example of just how powerful a Light Assault can be at Infiltrating an enemy base while severely outnumbered:



I can't prove that this is a likely occurrence, but it does demonstrate just how bad our cloak is by comparison. Once the guy's jetpack got him behind the main attacking force, he had free reign to stab people in front of dozens of their teammates, and nobody even tries to stop him. We could never get even two steps past the wall of flesh gathered around that base. Not without using an ESF or drop pod, which is not a sustainable means of travel like the LA's jetpack.

Back to the stealth, Plague Rat, I think you're far too afraid of people appearing from cloak in a close-quarters position and using that to execute people. It's extremely easy to make that exact sort of gameplay inconvenient or even impossible by tweaking the cloaking noise and fade times to a point where entering and breaking cloak becomes impractical in the presence of another player. At some point, we have to be reasonable and start blaming the enemy player for being too inattentive to notice an Infiltrator breaking cloak right next to him, rather than pointing fingers at the Infiltrator himself... who is honestly using a tactic with a good chance of getting him killed. The stealth mechanic I'm imagining would exist to get us past our enemies, not on top of them. Then, if killing them was our intention, we would have to approach from behind, fully visible, and start shooting.

I can think up an appropriate tool-based counter to our stealth if you're willing to take what I just described and give me a list of conditions that it needs to meet in order to achieve what you consider balance.

This is already done. Cloak farts ike a cow, while jetpacks are silent. Jet, freakin, packs! They have jet engines built-in! They spit jets of fire! And they are silent.

Starting with what would make sense isn't the way to go

But how the video above states, the LA is better at infiltrating than the infiltrator, nobody looks above them because 90% of the danger comes from the front or sides in PS2

And since the cloak should make the infiltrator balanced though he has less health and no real CQC capabilities like shotguns, at least the cloak should be decent

Sorry for the late response. I drew the short straw and had to work on a Saturday and then it ended up being my turn to cook. (so sorry if this seems a little stream-of-consciousness-ish, wrote it in a hurry)

Well firstly I think we need to stop using jetpacks as our measuring stick for what we feel we should have. When even the devs admit their game has balancing issues and have admitted there are upcoming tweeks to classes, and I recall jetpacks mentioned in particular right around the time they were talking about the liberator hotfix, so that shouldn't be the level of utility everyone demands, or even uses to emphasize a sense of disparity. (maybe they'll make them louder) The irony of this situation is that it’s the infiltrator complaint that all someone has to do is pay attention to spot us when the counter to the light assault is exactly the same. Quiet jetpack or not, all you really have to do to spot a light assault is look up. As Zombo pointed out 90% comes from the horizontal plane, but eventually that 10% is going to force players to into the habit of doing this, because otherwise it's really our own faults isn't it?

Also, I kind of find it funny that it’s fine to blame inattentive players for getting what’s coming to them, but at the same time it can’t possibly be the infiltrator’s fault when they get spotted through their cloak. Most times folks don’t even seem to consider what they might have done wrong and how they can do it better next time. Nothing is ever that one-sided, so the fact most infiltrators take that attitude and that any successes are just dumb luck just bothers the hell out of me. I hate defeatism.

But on to the cloak concepts.

One of the problems I’m having here keeping straight which iteration of the cloak and counter we’re talking about here. So I’m going to do my best to try and define what exactly are my issues.

Issues with the cloak:
1) Balance can't be based on a player’s hardware. This is particularly related to the sound issue. Your suggestion to make the de-cloak longer and possibly louder still requires you to be located by sound on the fly. We as a class are in possession of weapons that can kill in a single bullet, so even if it was a full second, your would-be victim still has to locate his attacker in under a second, because if they happen to be carrying a bolt action rifle, that's all they'll get, and they shouldn’t have to own a 5.1 surround headset to help them pin down the location before it's too late. Others may be in a situation where they can’t turn up their volume particularly loud. Pretty much, if you can’t do it with mono sound, it’s not enough.

2) There has to be a duration. I don’t believe in anything having an unlimited duration, and the second anyone gets something like that it becomes the new measuring stick. If infiltrators get unlimited cloak, why not LAs with unlimited jetpacks? Jetpacks cost fuel, a cloaking system has got to drain some kind of battery. I’d rather not see the two classes engage in any more of ‘nerf them, buff us’ sinkhole relationship than it is already.

3) There has to be some kind of a tell to let enemies know an infiltrator may be in the area and to start searching for them before any actual damage is done. And it can’t just ben when a cap point starts flashing or a generator gets compromised because not every fight is centered around bases. Without some kind of preventative measure, or some way of at least being alerted, it severely puts a limit on what growth we might expect from the class in the future. For example, should we get C4, what chance is there of you being noticed and spotted while you cross a field to before you de-cloak and shove a few bricks of C4 up an MBT’s tail-pipe that doesn’t involve a paranoid individual waiting behind tank for just such an attack? Or standing about in a fire-fight with their “I See You” goggles or whatever on.

Other potential problems:
Friendly fire. In PS2 your teammates see you as your enemies do. The only indicator of your presence to an ally would be the blue triangle, which doesn’t exactly provide a sense of distance or depth, so there is a good chance that while you’re infiltrating during a fire fight that you’ll be shot or even run over by your own teammates. On top of everything else this would require a revamping of the game’s IFF indicator system to provide some kind of selective silhouette that only allies can see.

The hard-counter:
1) Has to be available to all players/classes at no penalty to them. No resource cost. Doesn’t take a utility or tool slot. No cert cost. Always has it regardless of loadout. You don’t have to specialize in any way to deal with any other infantry tools or tactic, this shouldn’t suddenly change for the infiltrator. This is also important to keep a healthy environment for new player which is an MMO's life-blood. If for example you needed to spend certs on the counter, that would leave a new player incapable of dealing with an infiltrator with this cloak. And I find a more exclusive option to be on par with something like requiring special bullets to penetrate a heavy assault’s shields, or to damage a MAX suit’s armor. It’s just don’t see something like that being supported in the current metagame, and a change to it revolving around one class would leave things a bit lopsided.

2) Has to be limited in its effectiveness, but at the same time able to reliably find infiltrators. For example, something like HRV from blacklight, would be a step too far because it would essentially make spotting pointless because you’d be able to locate and identify every player in a set area, not just infiltrators. It’d have to be something in a cone or radius that doesn’t impair their ability to fight other non-infiltrator players, but at the same time inconvenient enough that they wouldn’t want to have it on at all times, otherwise the cloak itself is useless.

In the end, I still think a hard-counter is the wrong way to go, and the necessity of one can be avoided by attributing penalties to this shield to make it a more highly specialized tool. Last night’s FNO gave me an idea for a true invisibility shield without a hard-counter but it’ll probably take me a while to get it into text form and see if it makes any sense.

Just one comment on the post above: You don't need a 5.1 or better headset to locate someone. It helps, but it's not required.
Assuming a 2-channel headset you can differentiate between left and right. And you can look to the front. If you hear something slightly to the left, and you don't see anything, chances are it's behind you, and to the left.

Not a perfect way to do it, but it is a way.

Sure enough. I guess that point can be more or less disregarded. I was thinking more of the people with laptop speakers or folks with hearing issues. Stuff like that, audio, and varied hardware setups, not to mention the sheer amout of audio that can be going on at any one time and drown it out are sometimes why developers try to avoid purely audio cues to the player. Most of the games I've played with cloaking enemies in the past have always had some visual element to their detection as well, but yeah, for the sake of conceptualization we can toss that one by the wayside.

I would take decloaking having an animation that includes visual clues, such as a flashing or shimmering lights IF our cloak did not have a timer, and it was 100% invisible to the naked eye, even at high settings, when crouching and not moving. For standing up or walking, have same level as we have now. Increase the shimmer two three times when running.

The reason that I attribute an Infiltrator's failures to his opponents and not himself is because for the cloak to be even slightly useful, it's required that someone is looking at you. The optimal level of cloak which we have control over still isn't good enough to fully hide us from a sufficiently perceptive enemy - we hit a wall while they get to keep going. It should be obvious already, but we measure an Infiltrator's skill not by his ability to press F and go invisible, but his ability to mitigate how often he needs his invisibility in the first place. Unfortunately, nothing about that is a class feature, and the Light Assault's capacity for vertical movement makes him far better equipped to do the same thing than anything we have to work with.

You can't fairly say that people should learn to look upwards to find Light Assaults without acknowledging that watching their backs for enemy Infiltrators is fundamentally the same thing. We have to take the same entrances to an area as every other common threat in the game, and I don't believe that anyone should see us coming from those directions. Light Assaults get the 10% while we get the 90%? Better that they get 10% and we get 0% since we're supposed to be the best class for the job, at least until we've reached a proper flanking position and have to break cloaking to actually do some work, of course.

Regarding our access to bolt-action rifles, that's really not a fair argument to make. If we can break cloak on someone and they're standing still, it really wouldn't matter if we were breathing down their neck or standing on a hill three hexes away - they'd still be killed instantly from their perspective. Sniper rifles are horrible close combat weapons, and if that isn't true, then they need to be rebalanced until they are. Cloaking shouldn't be balanced around them either way.

Limited duration's fine, but only under one of two circumstances: Either the cloak is perfect regardless of how you're moving, or the cloak drains energy much slower when you're standing still. Motion-based visibility is a mechanic designed to encourage hiding while a fixed-duration cloak places equal value on a second spent hiding and one spent sprinting at full speed. The two cannot coexist.

Finally, I don't think that a passive means of detection is necessary at all. As you said yourself, this game takes place on a massive scale. If the Infiltrator needs to break cloaking to do anything, and if we make the cloak sound very obvious within a short distance, he'll be plenty visible to an onlooker while getting into range of his unaware target. If that target was somehow alone, they would already be highly vulnerable to flanking tactics - especially in a tank - and it certainly wouldn't take any kind of cloaking device to sneak up on them. We're trying to make the Infiltrator sneak around better than everyone else here, not worse.

LA don't get unlimited flying because they can shoot and throw explosive from the sky. We can't shoot while cloaked because this would unabalanced: being sniped by someone that you can't see would be frustrating. That's why the Stalker suite would solve part of Infiltrators problems: longer cloaking, but limited insta-killing abilities.
Imho current cloaking setup is fine if you are a sniper, because it makes possible to find a good spot and relocate quickly by decreasing chances to be spotted at the same time. But for close quarter combat and real infiltration the thing that we must uncloak every 10 seconds is pure ****. In some bases this is not even enough to run between covers: how do they pretend us to sneak behind enemy lines, scout enemy positions, hack something and cause havok, if our cloaking device can't even last enough to hide us while getting close to a target?

To be clear, I do not pretend Infiltrators to be able to run 100% invisible full time while shooting and throwing grenades, but we definitely need to have a choice between the Hunter cloaking device (good for sniping) and the Stalker (good for infiltrating). That would be 100% balanced: only pistols, knives and explosive, we could still be spotted with Q, radars and detection devices, we would again need to stand still or crouch to recharge the capacitor, and we still wouldn't be able to shoot while cloaked. Without mention that NRV and Thermal would still be able to make us more visible. The Stalker would never turn us into killing machines, and imho it would be more balanced than a flying soldier with assault rifle throwing C4 and grenades from the sky.
I has been working for a decade in PS1, why doesn't it have to work in PS2?

My point about the light assault was that the counter, looking up, requires nothing on the part of the player but doing just that. Nothing obscures their approach, if anything it's all the more blatent because there is no cover in the sky. My point was you can't say that the light assault has it so much better than the infiltrator because you can spot the infi with the naked eye if you look for them, when it's even easier to spot the light assault... all you have to do is move your mouse and they look like any other soldier… just you know, imitating a clay pigeon. And with a sizable percentage of people play light assault, I feel like people shouldn't be looking at me like I have three heads when I suggest this, because at this point it’s no different from scanning obvious sniper nests as you pass through areas.

My issue is not with having to watch your back for an infiltrator, it's that with a perfect cloak you can't just quickly scan a roof line or glance up every now and again when you're by a tall structure and watch for an odd shadows of a jet-packing LA, or catch a glance of something abnormal at your screen edges. So you have to dedicate yourself to watching your back for an infiltrator, because otherwise they only way you'd know they were even there is when the damage was already done, or at best, the last possible second. Unless of course you grab whatever location device you have and basically camp the back entrances and gennys, because I seriously doubt every infiltrator with this invisibility will be good enough to make sure they're close enough to an enemy player to make absolutely certain that their cloak sound was heard before they drop it and start hacking terminals, blowing generators, and dropping mines every which way. Yes, infiltrators are supposed to be sneaky, but this is a near complete denial of opportunity to your opponents to do anything to prevent your approach unless someone drew the short straw and gets to be a dedicated backdoor/generator minder/tank *** watcher, but because people go where the combat is, that won’t realistically happen. Seriously though, how often do you find someone diligently watching over the generator rooms at tech labs or amp stations?

I also don't see how you can write off bolt actions as an unfair argument. Maybe you haven't tried using them for infiltrating before, but I have. For a time I used a silenced NC SAS-R for close range infiltrating. Enemies standing still doesn't play into it, you land a shot from that thing, your TTK is 0. And this isn't like sniping, at close ranges like that doesn't, scope sway and, shot drop, and bullet velocity, and all those factors that balance the one-hit-kill don't even play into it. You de-cloak and the second that crosshair touches their head they're a corpse, because you’re close enough that the movement that throw off a sniper barely matter up close. If it weren't for the slow fire rate it'd be the most OP weapon available to an infiltrator. Decloak, kill, recloak, evade. The only reason I stopped was because I couldn’t always reliably disappear between shots with the current cloak and I have to wait at least a second between shots. If the cloak was true invisibility with no risk of being spotted by an observer while I find my opportunities, even doubling the length and sound of the cloak transition, I will tell you right now, this is all I would do.

OldMaster hit the nail on the head with what I was going to suggest for this. By equipping this particular cloak, the primary weapon slot is locked. No sniper rifles, scout rifles, or SMGs. Just your pistol and knife. On Friday Night Ops (either this past Friday or the week’s prior, I don’t recall) they were talking about new pistols coming in the near future including heavy pistols, machine pistols, and revolvers, as well as more customization options for secondary weapons. With that in mind I really don’t think this is too terrible of a sacrifice for the ability it gives you, and with more pistols on the way it opens up the door for the armies that don’t care for their current secondary weapon designs (VS) and a variably of play style while infiltrating.

I'm still iffy on unlimited durations, even when stationary but I don’t mind it being particularly long. So let’s say it works on a percentage of the battery. At max rank it would probably be something like a drain of .55% per second while stationary (180 seconds) 1.25% while crouch walking (80 seconds) 1.66% while walking (60 seconds) and 5% per second while sprinting (20 seconds), and an additional 5% every time you jump, but you are totally invisible at all movement speeds. A total recharge would probably be 8-10% regenerated per second at max rank (10-12.5 seconds). The idea is not to let the shield burn if you can help and hiding occasionally to let it recharge, thereby still actually requiring some measure of stealth like skill on the player’s part instead of charging full speed through a base unrestricted and totally invisible. With this I probably wouldn’t expect cloak transitions to be any longer or louder than they are now… maybe with a few electricity arcs following the infiltrator for half-second after but mostly because I think it would look cool.

Damage should either cause the cloak to flicker, or drain the battery (and give the source player a hit indicator) Player collisions would either cause a substantial cloak distortion for a few seconds, or flat out turn it off.

As for detection, here’s my suggestion for this without a hard counter: footsteps can still be heard and enemy units will hear an intermittent directionless static if infiltrator comes within a close range of them (Like 5m,) and receive static visual static interference around their screen edges if the infiltrator is within this range and in their line of sight (maybe like 7m). Simply because I maintain that if I’m THAT close to someone, there’s no tech in this universe that would keep someone’s presence from being noticed, and trying to be stealthy doesn’t involve rubbing up against the people trying to kill you like an overly affectionate cat. The cloak should also take on a subtle lensing effect when within the cone of a weapon mounted flashlight (probably around 10m) and IR gunsights (up to 15-20m maybe) because of the proximity to the light/IR source, but are otherwise just as invisible. This, I think, gives any player a chance to recognize and possibly even find an infiltrator in the area if they aren’t careful, yet without immediately giving away their exact location, and actually make hunting down an infiltrator somewhat entertaining for the unequipped, with other players able to pick up tools (flashlights and IR scopes) to make it easier if that’s their priority, but not a necessity. This also still demanding a degree of tactical thinking from the infiltrator and penalizing them for getting too close to an enemy player. I probably wouldn't even mind an unlimited stationary duration if it worked like this.

Also just a humorous side though: They’d have the redesign the IFF indicator system to show the infiltrator as some kind of silhouette to their allies because a floating blue Dorito doesn’t exactly provide an idea of depth, and I can only imagine the friendly fire and hit and run issues it would cause.

The video shows the opposite.

Because people always remember to look up. If you think looking up is a sufficient counter, I would give up my entire ability to cloak for this sort of action.

the game is allready favoring players with better hardware to spot Infiltrators, with low graphic settings they are almost invisible the whole time, with medium or high, they are visible like a glass bottle

It's allready balanced on the players hardware, if someone can only play the game at low settings, he wont EVER see a cloaked infiltrator, because they are a b*tch to spot with low settings, as it should be when they are cloaked

PS1 infiltrators did just fine with an infinite cloak, also you still can see infiltrators with a NV/IR scope just fine, and almost every LA/Engi has one with them

and it's not like an infinite cloak would make us able to shoot everyone while being invisible, we still can't shoot without making us vulnerable with a LOUD sound, that is, yet LA can shoot out of the sky and plant c4 like crazy while the person on the ground has no idea where the shots come from, there is no "above you" indicator on incoming fire

you have the "enemies in the area"/no activity/enemie platoons in the area on the map, regardless of an infiltrator being cloaked or not
also, bases at the border, where capping is possible, SHOULD be watched at all times, just no one does it because defending is not done at any time in PS2 right now: you dont get points for un-capping a base that has been attacked

bases not at the front line cant be captured anyway because your faction has 0% influence there

running up to a tank and placing 2 C4 to blow it up, good job! just that with a limited cloak it will be almost impossible
also C4 costs infantry points and you can carry a maximum of 2, even IF they should give infiltrators C4 that means they can destroy a maximum of 2 damaged or 1 completely fine tank in one run, giving it almost as much infantry point costs as the enemies tank cost, sounds balanced to me

i allready have people shooting at me even when cloaked with the normal cloak as it is right now, it is a problem and remains a problem for infiltrator, yet it's also a problem for every other class since people are just so triggerhappy

giving people who are invisible a silhouette mught help, but for people to understand it it should be glowing in the factions color

You litterally have no hard counter against a LA if he vanishes on a roof you can't reach, EVER, except you are a LA yourself
how is that balanced?

also show me a hard counter for someone flying a liberator when i am a medic running over a field to my teammates

PS2 doesn't work this way and never will, also infiltrator still has to decloak to actually hurt you or hack something or do anything usefull, so it's a hard counter to watch the map carefully

generators and points are blinking allready before they are hacked, btw

thats IR/NV scopes, makes your max range 50 meters, and people can see infiltrators just fine, while having it on at all times is a bothersome thing

Yeah I watched the video... it show's what exactly? That giraffe camo on a VS is OP? First off it’s a VS. Find me a video where a player does that and they’re TR or NC and I MIGHT reconsider, but I doubt it. VS armor is the most overlooked because of its dark army color which only shows in limited amounts due to the surface area covered by the camo. If you notice the video title. It’s joking about giraffe camo. He RARLY even uses his jetpack save to make the initial jump off the crown tower. The point of the video is he walks up the TR, head on, and shoots and stabs them because they can’t recognize him in giraffe camo. How can you watch this video and think this is something only a light assault can do? I’ve done that on my infiltrator. I've done that on my engineer. But even then, that’s a MINOR concern. Most of their kills are against HAs reloading rocket launchers, trying to get locks on AA, or vehicles, medics with their tools out, or people he walks right up to the TR face-to-face, that can’t see that he’s VS. The moment someone does see him that isn’t trying to heal someone or shoot a lib, vehicle, or isn’t camping a spawn room, the guy dies and respawns. And even when there are many players on screen the guy is careful to place an enemy player between himself and the firing line. Which only saves him long enough to kill one person trying to revive a teammate. If you want the argument made, find a real example, not a lucky streak highlight reel involving a VS showing off how the other armies can’t see their purple through the camo.

I’m not saying we don’t need a better cloak, or the LA don’t need their jetpacks adjusted, we’re talking about a perfect invisibility cloak that Dr.E wants and how it would imbalance the game. And you got it reversed on the hardware issue, the complaint with the current cloak is that they’re EASIER to spot with lower settings, appearing as a shadow as opposed to a distortion… soo yeah.

PS1 also had other ways to spot them that this game doesn’t have. That’s the point of this, we don’t have those things. And this game isn’t PS1, it’s PS2, and it’s going to continue to develop in its own independent path, otherwise they would have just released a graphics overhaul for PS1. We have to work with what we’ve got. And what we got doesn’t give us what we need to deal with a perfect cloak with no weaknesses and unlimited duration and until PS2 evolves in its own way to accommodate that, anything more is just wishful thinking and pining for features of PS1 that would be overpowered in the framework of PS2.

NV scopes aren’t going to do the job. It’s a weapon scope that limits your vision both peripherally and in depth, and lowers your movement speed. Do this anywhere but a secluded area and you’re a target to anyone who’s NOT and infiltrator. On top of that, only a small number of players are going to have them, which gives an infiltrator complete immunity to any player without one specific load out. An entire class, that can only be detected if a player so-happens to have a single piece of equipment. That doesn’t sound wrong to you? At least in PS1 you could take a dark vision implant and it wasn’t dependent on your weapon scope.

I think you’re confused as to what a hard counter actually is. A soft-counter means that it’s based on skill or even luck. Even when disadvantaged, you still have a chance to overcome a skill or ability though a use of tactics, dumb luck, or a skill-check. A hard-counter leaves no chance for this. It's the scissors thrown to counter paper. Once it’s thrown there’s nothing you can do. It’s an automatic, “I win” button. A hard counter is: Player A fights player B, who uses skill B that makes them hard to kill, but when player A uses skill A, it totally invalidates skill B. Skill A is a hard counter to Skill B and cancels it out. Hard counters are used sparingly in development, usually for high end features of a game at a great cost of resource or expense on the part of the user, because it leaves little to no room for a metagame to evolve around the mechanic, and why I maintain that hard counters are bad things, especially requiring such for something as innate to a class played by such a large percentage of players.

Your examples aren’t hard-counters. The light assault goes onto the roof. You can’t follow. So… what you stand there next the building and do nothing? Denying you the most direct approach doesn’t deny you further options. Move back, get an angle where you can see onto the roof. Go around the building. Throw a grenade. Get to cover and wait for them to get close to the roofline, then apply bullet to face. They don’t disappear from the game world, they’re still there. This is when your problem solving skills come into play, unless you want the game to think for you. They are still just a player standing on the roof. There is still something you can do about it by employing other tactics. It’s a soft counter. You’re disadvantaged but not incapable. A hard counter would be if you had a button that suddenly forced the LA off the roof.

And I’m just talking about the infantry game here, but if you want to talk about liberators, okay. Liberators to be effective cost a heft cert investment. On top of that the cost a lot of resources. They can be attacked and destroyed by ESF, Skyguards, Burster Max’s, I.E. people who make a similar investment, BUT they can also be attacked by people with no such investment made by HA dumb fire rockets and the ever present AA phalanx turrets, which any player, even your medic, can utilize. Because of the sizable investment to pull a lib, its long cooldown to spawn another one, and the requirement of multiple players to operate, it’s stronger against most players on the battlefield.

Back to the infiltrator. You have the cloak by default. You paid nothing for it. You can invest certs to make it better, but overall any player can turn the game on, spawn as a infiltrator and use it immediately at no cost to them. This is because the cloak is what’s called a baseline ability, it’s the default. Anyone can use it without penalty or special requirement, so anyone should be able to counter it without penalty or special requirement, but an application of skill, finesse, tactics, whatever. To make the cloak or even a LA’s jetpack analogous to a liberator, you’d only be able to spawn as a infiltrator or LA once every 10 minutes, and to operate your cloak or jetpack you need another player to follow you around with a turn-crank generator to power it in exchange for assist XP from your kills, and every time you cloaked or used the pack it cost you infantry resources, but the cloak would be perfect, and the LA’s jetpack wouldn’t affect their firing accuracy.

I’ll somewhat concede the point on the C4, since it does cost the resources. But for the rest, for game balance, the defensive option has to be either stronger or easier than the offensive. The offense is the one that has to make the effort and the push, they’re the one with the ball rushing for yardage. And this offensive option of a cloak offers mere trinkets as its counter only utilized by a few players much to their inconvenience. That guy in the tank should have at least a chance of knowing the attack is coming before it does. Remove that and all they get is a decloak sound, a death and a loss of their resource investment with next to no chance of prevention. Against a light assault, again, it’s as simple as looking up unless you’re the fool that parks your tank right next to the structure, in which cause, again going back to inattentive players getting what they deserve.

The guy says at the start of the video that he isn't using giraffe camo - he's just as gloriously purple as any other VS infantryman.

Personal experience overwhelmingly favors the Light Assault's ability to go undetected by taking a vertical approach over the Infiltrator's ability to go undetected by taking the front door while slightly transparent. Our cloak is not effective enough at mitigating the huge disadvantage we suffer from being forced to take the same routes as every other infantry unit. This is also not a situation we should ever be caught in, unless we walk straight into the line of fire and get shot or bump into someone on the enemy team.

You can only spot Light Assaults who you have uninterrupted line-of-sight to. Stop thinking of fully cloaked Infiltrators as existing within someone's line of sight - they won't be rendering at all. Once they break cloaking, you can catch them in the exact same way you could catch anyone else. The whole point of this suggestion is to make it impossible for your average player to just see you on the approach.

If your aim is so fantastic that you can guarantee a first-shot headshot on someone using a minimum 6x scope on your bolt-action in close range and while they're moving, I still wouldn't make balance decisions around players like yourself because the target audience here is not demigods.

I don't check out FNO, so you just made my day by saying this. Locking out primaries is totally acceptable, though - it really doesn't matter how powerful your weapon is when you use it on an unaware target, so I couldn't care less.

Works for me. I can't imagine a situation where I need to hide for longer than 3 minutes anyways - there are plenty of unvisited corners in any base to sit and recharge, although I suppose that would leave us vulnerable to the all-seeing Flash radar.

I could live this this, too, with one exception. No static based on whether the Infiltrator is within their line of sight. Make it happen regardless of where we are in relation to the enemy. Letting people know that we're very nearby is fine, but giving them a direction to spray their bullets is too much of an advantage. Any intelligent person should have a good idea of which direction we're coming from if we screw up this badly anyways.

This would be great, but I'd happily die a hundred deaths to friendly fire if it meant having a cloak like what we've established here.

wrong button.

Giraffe camo or not, simply showing up where the enemy doesn’t expect you can often yield similar results. Most infi and LA videos I see are like that. I don’t even own any camos and I’ve gotten those kinds of streaks a few times. Does a LA have an easier time of this? Sure, for now, but eventually people are going to start looking up. I refuse to believe that we as gamers are incapable of adapting to that.

I’m not going to argue that our cloak isn’t flawed for this purpose, but I will state that if you’re taking the same path as the rest of the infantry, you’re asking to be spotted to begin with. Most players take direct routes to their objectives and if you try to do that with the cloaks current state, it’s no wonder people get spotted so easily. The winding side path will always be less traveled than the straight road to the enemies front door. I wouldn’t even find that behavior acceptable with a total invisibility cloak, that’s stealth without requiring stealthy actions.

See but the light assault once they commit as there and apparent. Once you break cloak, you do your damage and a second later, recloak. The added capability for evasion is the major point of contention. A smart user wouldn’t be a suicide infiltrator that pops in, reveals themselves, and waits to be caught, never use their cloak again. They’ll vanish evade, abuse it as thoroughly as they can to maximize their kills and XP gain.

Unaware targets quickly become aware when shot, but stand no chance with a 0 TTK weapon. If there's still a chance, even a disadvantaged one, it's fair. But see, should have clarified. The SAS-R is the scope-less bolt action for the NC. I use rail sights. Much easier to land headshots with them. I’d hardly consider myself good either, probably just north of decent. I mostly just goof around and sometimes crazy stuff like that just seems works. Which scares the hell out of me if someone better than me was actually trying. Seriously though, one infi to another, if you haven’t tried out that scopeless BA, give it a trial, it’s awkward but a pretty interesting way to go about it. Also for the new pistols... want... revolver...sooo.....badly....

And recon darts. But with how cluttered the maps can get around bases, it’d probably be quite the pain to find the exact location of your map dot amidst all the other crap going on. Not to mention you could be on a different Z-axis as well. It’s a tell but not a give-away. My main issue with the 3 minute thing was that if you could just hide unlimitedly, it would make back-capping far too easy. Also I maintain that nobody should be able to go AFK to take a piss in the middle of a fire-fight and have any chance of coming back alive… I totally did that in blacklight…. I’m a bad person…

I kind of wanted the direction thing to be kind of alike a hot vs. cold thing, and would cover something like a 150-degree cone in front of you, so it would be very general. But yeah that particular one can go, and I’d still be okay with it.

Only if you record them all, speed it up, and play it to the Benny Hill theme.

This isn't always an option, which is one of my biggest issues with base design in general. How do you get inside a Tech Plant as an Infiltrator while the shields are still up? It was really nice of SOE to put the shield generators outside, but that didn't change the fact that there's only two entrances to the place which are practically right next to each other. In a lot of situations, every entrance is going to be covered in enemy players no matter what you do, and we still need some way of getting past them.

I'm confident that this could be balanced with a fixed-duration, complete invisibility cloak. All it would need is a very long fade-out timer, short duration, and long recharge time. Enough to get you from point A to B, and then leave you stranded there to do whatever you intended to. This one would have to let you keep your primary weapon, though.

Three shots with the Manticore and one knife doesn't leave my targets enough time to fight back already. The very idea of a scopeless BAR sounds wrong to me, though. Like I said before, better to "fix" that than balance stealth around it.

The thing about recon darts is that people don't just throw them around without an immediate need for them. A Flash lasts forever so long as you visit it every few minutes to keep it from deconstructing, so you're far more likely to encounter one sitting in a base without much traffic in it. It's a problem I can live with, but I still find it way too easy to use for how powerful the effect is.

Coming from someone who also played Blacklight, the fact that you get a "bullet hit" notification on cloaked targets is more than enough to pick up a player whom you can't see, I assure you. We'd have it even worse, since we become highly visible whenever we take damage while the Blacklight guys get nothing but a little crosshair X and a dull thud to let them know we were shot.

I can see it already: "Dr. Euthanasia, TR/NC Double Agent Extraordinaire"

I think for the tech plants the point is for it to be extremely hard to do so with the shields up. Especially since the spawn room is outside the base's main structure. Otherwise a few skilled infiltrator's could get it, set the the genny to blow, and then the SDU is vulnrable. If they can pull that off then then at minimum an attacking army would need is a tank or two on the outside and a few folks to farm the spawn room while your blow the SDU at your leisure, cap base, end of story. I think that's the oddest part of the tech plant and amp station is that the spawn rooms are so disconnected from the main structure, but it's possible that the upcoming addition of tunnels could change that whole scheme. But for the most part I don't think they want us able to skip a major step in getting to the SDU. But we'll have to wait and see what future patches bring.

Potentally, or even a second or two of the current cloaks transparancy that ultimately fades to invisibility. SMGs and scouts maybe, but full sniper rifles should probably remain locked, just because at that range all the stuff that counter-balances the sniper one-hit-kill isn't really present beyond shot speed. I think that one would have to be it's own seperate cloak more oriented on combat functionality, like maybe a very short duration and recharge, but allows for faster movment and it terminates quickly with a bright flash and a loud abupt tansition sound (like an electrical explosion) with the catch of a small cooldown (3-4 seconds) until you can restealth. Letting the infiltrator decide if they want to be a methodical sabatour or an ambushing ninja with a blink cloak.

I was thinking more about evasion that fighting back. usually if someone gets the drop on you, and your turn to fight, you're dead already. But if you just want to get away, a LA can still try jet-pack evade, a medic can throw up their aura and move laterally, a heavy can throw up their shield, and a engineer... can throw an AP mine and take you with him... i suddenly realize a lot of my stratagies revolve around spite... If you have a TTK at all, there's always a chance.

True enough but unless you're on the base alone the actual combat force is just as likely to blow up the flash for the sake of getting 30 easy XP... or maybe that's just me. Indoors it's less likely but if you can get close enough to it they don't have a lot of health or armor. A grenade or AP mine will take out 2/3 of their heath if you shoot the mine to set it off. That'll blow it if you soften it up with a few silenced pistol rounds first. A bit of a pain now, but if we got c4 i'm confident we could deal with it without too much trouble.

Yeah but you also had distortion from motion in blacklight, so once you hit them they could either stay there and die or move and you can still more or less track them. The cloak concept we're working with is still full invis even while sprinting. I think it would largely depend on whether damage causes the cloak to flicker or remain invisible but with an impact to the battery.