Warfare & Tactics

there are a range of cloak modules - cov-ops lets you warp under cloak

The cov-ops module has a massive CPU requirement (10k) and all cov-ops ships give a 96%+ reduction to this depending on skill. There are also ordinary cloaks of various flavours that fit on all ships but don't let you warp under cloak. These can still be useful.

All of the cloaks impose penalties of some sort though - mostly not letting you lock ships straight away after uncloaking. The non cov-ops ones impose big speed penalties for moving under cloak

all that said:

they aren't some great panacea.

I use my cheetah mostly for being nosey. It's also great for watching gates,stations etc. for war targets and that sort of thing. When you have probes out and are focused on the scan interface it's nice to be cloaked too - one less thing to worry about (although if you are somewhere dangerous you still should be watching d-scan)

One reason you might want an ordinary cloak on your Drake is if you want to move about low-sec then the MWD+cloak trick works with an ordinary cloak (make sure you practice first!) and is very useful.

If you want to do anything useful you are better off without it more often that not. judicious use of d-scan, Safe spots and other bookmarks are far more use if you want to be attacking other people

Increasing skill level in cloaking will reduce the penalty, but it is still significant. If you train cloaking to level 4 (almost no one goes to level 5), then you will have a 12 second delay before you can BEGIN to target someone. In addition, you get a 40% scan resolution reduction, which almost doubles the time it takes to lock on once you can begin. In general, this makes a non-black ops cloak pointless in PvP.

The black ops cloak would only have a 6 second delay and no scan resolution penalty, so they can be somewhat useful in PvP, theoretically (although you do have to be in a covert ops type ship to use them).

For PvE in w-space or in low-sec, a cloak COULD be useful if someone is trying to scan you down and you don't want to just run to the nearest gate/wh. The lock on delay is not nearly as significant in PvE, so it is livable.

Yeah, that :).

Well, technically, there are rigs that reduce the targetting delay after decloaking (the targeting systems stabilizer). And you can use sensor boosters to recover the lost scan resolution.

But fitting those will end up gimping your fit even more than the cloak.

Unless you're KevLor1 then learn to follow quotes

Stand the f*ck back bro, I got this.

T3 ships can fit a cvt ops cloak and allow you to do more damage as well as having more HP than a Recon, but typically fitting the sub system to allow this, gimps the over all damage out put. The Drake can still manage a pretty good PVP fit, while fitting a cloak, but as others have said it reduces your targeting speed even if you leave the cloak offline.

Thanks Jack i'll take a look at that.

Hung

I'd like to make an amendment to this, sitting at 0 at his warp in is great, it allows you to bump him out of alignment when he decloaks you giving you more time to lock and scramble him.(yay for my armchair admiral sense going off!)