Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It's a really sweet ship, but it has one glaring issue that greatly detracts from the joy of flying it, which really irks me.

All other specialist cloaking ships have a role bonus of cloak reactivation delay reduced to 5 seconds. This applies to CovOps frigates, Stealth bombers, Blockade Runners, Recons (the bonus isn't explicitly listed but is still in effect), T3 cruisers with covert reconfiguration subsystem, and even Black Ops battleships!

But the Stratios doesn't get any cloak reactivation bonus at all.

This is a major pain in the arse because it means that after gate jumping you have to wait a few seconds and hold gate cloak because if you move straight away then you can't cloak for a few seconds. This obviously sucks big time since it gives anyone camping the gate much more time to get a bubble up and/or orbit the gate to decloak you.

I don't see any justification whatsoever for the Stratios to be the only ship penalized in this manner, so I respectfully suggest that it should get the cloak reactivation bonus to bring it in line with all other specialist cloaking ships.

Edit: I just noticed the Astero has the same issue, so same points apply for that.

Deactivate cloak before you land on the gate

Jump through

Warp and activate cloak

Profit!

I have never had problem of getting shot at even if i decloak my hauler mid warp to activate tank in case of smartbombs.

If you wont do that, just wait 5 more seconds on the other side of the gate.

why would you approach the gate?

If you warp to a gate at zero you quite often don't land within jump range. What follows then is a period of several seconds where the autopilot enters an 'Approaching the gate' phase prior to jumping, naturally during this time you are vulnerable to attack.

Also I wasn't suggesting the 15 second cloak reactivation delay made the Stratios underpowered, since it's such a minor issue that I don't think it qualifies as a balance consideration at all.

It does however result in an odd and rather cumbersome mechanic. With cloak reactivation delay of 15 seconds the amount of time you need to decloak before gate jumping, or hold gate cloak for a few seconds after jumping, is largely dependent on how busy the system or grid that you are jumping into is, and therefore how long it takes for the session change to occur.

The amount of time it takes for a session change to occur being dependent on system load is a meta-mechanic (i.e. it is a behaviour that is a server side-effect rather than a behaviour intentionally encoded into the game logic). While meta-mechanics do frequently impact in-game behaviour this is an effect that is generally to be avoided wherever possible, largely because it's immersion breaking, but also because out-of-game side-effects can be hard for players to counter with in-game techniques.

In this particular case the need to decloak early, or hold gate cloak after jumping, and the amount of time you need to allow for this, is difficult to determine when one may not know how busy the system/grid is that you are about to jump into, and this is exacerbated by the fact that the cloak reactivation delay is not made visible to the pilot anywhere in the UI.

So it seems to me that a good solution to this would be to reduce cloak reactivation delay on the Stratios from 15 to 10 seconds. That would still be twice as long a reactivation delay as any other covops vessel, but it should be sufficient for the reactivation delay not to be an issue on every single gate jump.

Alternatively modify the cloak module to that it goes flashy red during its reactivation delay period so that the pilot knows when it's safe to reactivate it.

I personally don't have an issue with altering the recloaking delay. I've run into several situations where I decloak too early and cannot immediately recloak (usually with covops or blockade runners, which already have the shorter recloak time).

From my perspective, I'm trying to figure out what it changes in the overall game, and honestly don't see the issue.

Why aren't you holding cloak on the other side of the gate? Not supported.

One other thing to keep in mind. This is more for the frigates as there really isn't an equal T1 ship to compare to the stratios.

All things being equal, the primary difference between a covert ops and an astero is the cloak delay. Otherwise both are pretty close in capabilities.

starting from sratch you can have a noob flying cloaked in an astero in ~7 days. A covert ops will take ~23 days.

making the two equally capable would really slap the T2 variants in the face.

No.

The way to prevent having to approach longer than necessary is this:

Warp to 0 (don't use the jump button).
right click when you land with cloak deactivated and use that jump mechanism. I have noticed that it works more efficiently than the jump command which will sometimes approach and break your invuln timer.
/themoreyouknow

Thanks for that tip, I'll give it a try.