EVE New Citizens Q&A

Excellent. Thank you. I just tried with a Prototype and cloak+mwd does indeed work. I would have sworn I had tried it a few weeks ago when that was the only cloak I could handle and it didn't work, but perhaps I was relying too much on what I had read elsewhere and imagined it. There are certainly guides out there that claim only mwd+cloak will work with Prototype. I wonder if a recent update changed the behavior?

In the original post, I suggested one possible means of cloaking as quickly as possible while minimizing the chance of decloaking. A couple of alternatives were mentioned. So, in summary, we have:

(1) Count One Mississippi then cloak.

(2) Cloak after your capacitor drains.

(3) Cloak after you see the "Warp Drive Active" text on your screen.

(4) Use the Log and Messages window.

The general consensus seems to be that (2) and (3) are reliable, commonly used, and sufficient for just about any situation you will encounter outside of a bubble. I've tried both now and each seems very easy to learn. There doesn't appear to be any noticeable difference between the times in which each occurs.

I still see two advantages with (4). First, you can potentially have your cloak command accepted sooner by the server. The question is whether or not this makes any real difference. Second, it is applicable to bubbles.

One potential disadvantage I see, although I can't speak from personal experience, is that your log might be deluged with messages when encountering a camp making it difficult to see the message, or lack thereof, that you're looking for.

I'm not sure it's actually possible to achieve a target lock against a perfect cloak. Regardless of lock speed, it still takes 2 (well, up to 2.99999...) ticks to get a lock - 1 to start it, and 1 for it to complete.

So, starting from gatecloak

Tick 0-1: You click warpto.
(wait for the tick)
Tick 1-2: You break gatecloak.
You activate cloak (command is queued for the next tick)
Your opponent begins to target you (command is queued for the next tick).
Tick 2: You cloak
Your opponent actually begins to target you. They will miss you by a full tick.

All of those above factors could play a role, but only in so much as they might cause you to miss a tick.

The only way it would seem to be possible is if something obstructs the cloak, the cloaker misses one or more ticks, or targeting receives some sort of special intra-tick handling by the server (I don't believe this is the case but could be mistaken).

By the same token, it is not actually that important that you cloak "as quickly as possible". You literally cannot cloak until you hit tick 1, and after you hit tick 1, you have a full second (ignoring latency) to activate your cloak without it making any particular difference to the server. No lightning reflexes required.

Personally? I just eyeball it. A second is a really long time.



"Warp Drive Active" and the capacitor drain both occur at the initiation of a warp command, so for anything with a covops cloak that's going to be fine.

I tend to do more non-covops cloak + MWD work than anything else, in which case you have no such indicator (you're aligning first, not using warp-to). I generally find my own timing and a little help from the velocity gauge to be sufficient for that.