Ships & Modules

Because there would be more people using it as the next level coward PvE ship than as a ganking platforms.

Because a jump drive is much better, despite its drawbacks (fuel usage and low range).

Because there are already plenty of ways to make them awesome on the field with a little creativity and effort.


Not to say that they're fine as they are right now, but just tacking on a covert ops cloak will hardly correct their flaws. The BlackOps BS are threading on a fine line between horrible piece of dung and overpowered and random, not thought-out fixes have the potential to be really disastrous.

So many armchair generals.

You can make a Proteus which gets 700 DPS and fits a covops cloak. You can use a BLOPs to drop this monster of a thing on some poor sucker at zero. It has point range bonuses, 60K EHP, and a sig radius like a dessicated walnut.

You could also just drop your BLOPs itself; it is slower, fatter, has BS guns with useless tracking and resolution, costs more, tanks 0-20K EHP more, and gets 0-150 DPS more, unless you have figured out the ridiculous Sin fit which I've got, which actually does 1100DPS. That's a beast.

I can't see why it would be so broken to make BLOPs fly cloaked. In reality, you'd just have people doing what they do now with bomber and recon gangs, except you'd have a bit of tank to go with your gank, and could deliver it all super-secret.

You would see a few people rolling idiotic levels of BLOPs gangs around ganking people (my vote: Shadow Cartel). But they do this anyway with cloaky Proteuses which forego the 700DPS for a 120K buffer tank, and then just hop in gangs via Titan bridge (ie; Shadow Cartel) or the old fashioned way of warping. It is not like having a BLOPs flying cloaked would be the only way you would be able to get about the place ganking people.

For wormholes, yeah, covert cloaking BLOPs would be pretty revolutionary and awesome. It would give you a cloaky-flying heavy hitter which could move about the place unseen stalking, eg, ratting carriers.

The biggest impediment to BLOPs isn't whether or not they can fly cloaked. Nor is it the cost. it is the hindrances which all battleships share, namely sluggishness, giant sig radiuses, guns which don't apply DPS well.

At the end of the day it all comes down to whether CCP thinks cloaky, hot-dropping and risk-free gameplay should be encouraged any further. I, for one, don't see how these things are good for the game health in the long run.

I wouldn't mind seeing a new set of BO ships that were battleships with covert ops cloaks without all the nasty jump mechanics, but to give the current versions covert ops cloaks seems like it would be too powerful. BOs have issues but I don't see the need for the current rendition of them to covert cloak.

I realize I had not weighed in on the actual topic, apologies.

What makes Blops nasty is the bridge and the jump to covert cynos, it has surprisingly little to do with cloaking in general; and I REALLY don't feel that EVE needs -yet another- covert ops get-out-of-jail-free shipclass.

It's already too late, people will always gravitate towards risk free, or AS risk free gameplay as they can get. Low sec is populated with nothing but frigates (mobility, picking their fights), Tech3 ((warp cloaked, ability to disengage / pick targets) I've seen quite a few tech 3 these days running with two warp core stabs) and HAC/BC gangs with 4 to 8 logistics running with them.

Might as well go in for a penny, in for a pound with the black ops, it's would be just another extremely expensive and risk avoidance type ship among many, and for the price of it and its role, it should have that feature.

let the sin's drones cloak
or make a new set of 'covert' drones that can cloak and don't intterupt cloaking, but deal less than T2 damage for it