GSF Needs Stealth

[SavingPrincess]

For one of your "Escape" options, close range fighters (i.e. scouts) should have the option to choose "stealth."

 

This would greatly balance out a lot of things in this game. A "stealth" enabled scout could be used to counteract gunships, and used to keep defensive bombers honest. Sacrificing an escape option (like Do-a-Barrel Roll or Reverse Thrusters) would keep it from becoming overpowered. Stealth should break when an attack is made, but not during a "missile lock" phase.

 

This one change alone could change the entire scope of GSF and make it more fun for everyone.

[okiobe]

Stealth capable ship coming in June if I remember right. It is in the dev road map blog.

[Morgrid]

..No..

[Zharik]

For one of your "Escape" options, close range fighters (i.e. scouts) should have the option to choose "stealth."

 

This would greatly balance out a lot of things in this game. A "stealth" enabled scout could be used to counteract gunships, and used to keep defensive bombers honest. Sacrificing an escape option (like Do-a-Barrel Roll or Reverse Thrusters) would keep it from becoming overpowered. Stealth should break when an attack is made, but not during a "missile lock" phase.

 

This one change alone could change the entire scope of GSF and make it more fun for everyone.

 

Mostly agree... but I would argue for game balance's sake, that you must decloak for about 2 or 3 seconds before you could attack at all. This would give the target a chance to notice you as the red triangle suddenly appears behind him. A cooldown of about 30 seconds or so before you could cloak again, maybe more. And this should take the engine slot, so they would be vulnerable to missiles. (and no distortion field option)

[SavingPrincess]

Stealth capable ship coming in June if I remember right. It is in the dev road map blog.

 

Yeah, it would suck if it's a whole other ship... when it really should just be an option for close range current fighters.

[SavingPrincess]

Mostly agree... but I would argue for game balance's sake, that you must decloak for about 2 or 3 seconds before you could attack at all. This would give the target a chance to notice you as the red triangle suddenly appears behind him. A cooldown of about 30 seconds or so before you could cloak again, maybe more. And this should take the engine slot, so they would be vulnerable to missiles. (and no distortion field option)

 

2-3 seconds is a LONG time. I don't see why this would be the case, if you decide to missile lock someone, they're going to notice even if you're in this theoretical stealth, and you'd be decloaked on your first blaster bold fired. Again, this would be a hard-counter to the turret style gameplay everyone (except for these seemingly AMAZING scout/fighter players on this forum, who are 'gdlk' and deserve everyone's respect and adoration /sarcasm) is seeing right now.

[SavingPrincess]

..No..

 

LOL, great contribution. Aren't you the same guy that thought people were running into things to prevent you from getting those precious kill points? xD

 

Care to elaborate why you think it's a bad idea (especially considering as someone else pointed out, it's already coming)?

[Zharik]

2-3 seconds is a LONG time. I don't see why this would be the case, if you decide to missile lock someone, they're going to notice even if you're in this theoretical stealth, and you'd be decloaked on your first blaster bold fired. Again, this would be a hard-counter to the turret style gameplay everyone (except for these seemingly AMAZING scout/fighter players on this forum, who are 'gdlk' and deserve everyone's respect and adoration /sarcasm) is seeing right now.

 

It is just a life expectancy thing. If you are a gunship or bomber who is parked defending a satellite. How long would you last at 400m under all out fire? And realistically a bomber cannot get away, period - so that is a death sentence without being able to LOS the attacker.

 

Now to address the lock on part. If the stealther can use sabo probes, parked at 400m behind the target if he gets a lock it will land, and then the stealther can simply follow and blast away. The target may assume that some other attack is locking and he has a second or two to break it. I was just looking at this being labeled OP. Heck, drones are labeled OP and they MELT.

 

Now.. I was agreeing with this idea overall...

[SavingPrincess]

It is just a life expectancy thing. If you are a gunship or bomber who is parked defending a satellite. How long would you last at 400m under all out fire? And realistically a bomber cannot get away, period - so that is a death sentence without being able to LOS the attacker.

 

Now to address the lock on part. If the stealther can use sabo probes, parked at 400m behind the target if he gets a lock it will land, and then the stealther can simply follow and blast away. The target may assume that some other attack is locking and he has a second or two to break it. I was just looking at this being labeled OP. Heck, drones are labeled OP and they MELT.

 

Now.. I was agreeing with this idea overall...

I'm agreeing with your agreement

 

But you're illustrating my point. Right now the game is "who can make the most effective turrets the fastest" in both Domnation AND Deathmatch... The idea is we want these gunship players (i.e. me) and bombers (i.e. also me) to have to stay awake during the matches. You should not feel "safe" in any class of ship. Right now my K/D ratios when I fly a gunship or bomber are ridiculously high, and I'm not very good. Having a stealth optioned ship would make me more nervous playing a turret, and encourage me to play a dog-fighting ship more which in turn would be more fun.

[ptwonline]

Stealth is going to frustrate a lot of players. It's going to lead to sneak attacks and quick kills, and if there's one thing people loathe is feeling helpless...like they can't fight back.

 

It will just be one more rock-scissors-paper measure/countermeasure that will have to happen, sapping another round of fun out of the game.

[Verain]

Stealth could be done a few ways. A full vulnerability to missiles isn't really one of those ways.

 

 

First, scouts and strikes should NOT have stealth. Interceptors should. Whole class for that.

 

Second, you need to limit stealth in some ways compared to the ground game. Without a turdlot of snares and stuff, EVERY ship in this game is a lot more powerful than any ground character. I mean that objectively AND relatively. So scouts can already escape from most encounters- you have almost no time to shoot an escaping scout who can go from 3km to 10km in seconds, often while you are still turning. Engine components only exacerbate this. Even strikes and gunships can escape a bead, and even BOMBERS can be evasive enough to not take much damage. Limitations? There's plenty. Stealth could fail to hide at 5km, or sats could see stealth, or many other things.

 

Third, to limit burst, you mostly just need to watch rocket pods and burst laser cannons. Nothing can burst as hard as a flashfire built for it, and if an interceptor can do that job, that's probably a mistake. If you are limited to a reasonable set- light laser, laser, quad laser, heavy laser, for instance- then you won't be able to guarantee moderate hull damage just for queueing fight.

 

 

 

 

 

I definitely want stealth ships. I main rogue in WoW, and I played scoundrel in this game until the nerf made me unsub (obv back for GSF). My ground characters are scoundrel and assassin even now, and a stealth ship would pretty much give me a permanent erection whilst playing, contact a doctor after four hours.

 

 

But it does have to be balanced.

Edited February 8, 2014 by Verain

[Zohkar]

Now if you gave it a cloak in place of a shield, then I could see this vehicle still being very dangerous but if spotted easy to kill as well. It would still have all the maneuverabilty of that class ship it belonged two but it's weakness would follow most stealth class ships of no shield capabile abilitys. As a gunship pilot I mostly get destroyed by scouts as is, having a stealth scout would make it even harder then it is for me against some of the veteran pilots I have encountered.

 

Personally I think dampening needs to be re-worked because being spotted at max range even tho I have max dampening would probally increase my chances at survival against maxed out scouts. Should be no reason if my dampening is 11,500 meters someone outside 3,500 meters should see me unless they had the counter to that which is sensor range or communication I believe. Granted I know there where issues in beta test with dampening, but it should be looked at.

 

*Edited to what I thought it should of been which is 11,500 meters not 7,500 meters that I first put in. This changed the range that it could be spotted to 3,500 meters or further with sensor range.

Edited February 8, 2014 by Zohkar

[Zharik]

Personally I think dampening needs to be re-worked because being spotted at max range even tho I have max dampening would probally increase my chances at survival against maxed out scouts. Should be no reason if my dampening is 7,500 meters someone outside 7,500 meters should see me unless they had the counter to that which is sensor range or communication I believe. Granted I know there where issues in beta test with dampening, but it should be looked at.

 

Dampening is borked because there is no way to defend against a GS who can shoot you but can't be seen... this ironically is exactly what is being discussed here...

[Verain]

A solid poster here (Armond?) IIRC claimed that dampening is working as stated. That's not been my experience, but maybe we tested at different times, as we got different results.

 

I think that a gunship sniping from an undetected location would be frustrating, and the inability to upgrade detection on a strike hurts that. That's probably why the nerf. There's plenty of workarounds beyond the 15km minimum, such as:

 

 

-a HUD radar, as games in the 90s provided and this game absolutely should.

-different icons for different ship classes

-an alert for someone charging railgun within range- this EM pulse is so intense you can see it at ludicrous ranges, why not make it the thing that disturbs dampening?

-an alert from your ship comp when enemies are shooting near you, instead of having to visually sight them. R2, do your job!

-companions with specials that are game changing in minor but important and conditional ways, such as "you can always detect ships within 15km". Other ideas include "your missile lockon doesn't break for .5 seconds if a target breaks line of sight with you, "I call out when a railgun scope is charging and sighting you", "I call out if a scout is trying to sneak up on you", and "targets within 2km suffer -5% accuracy, targets within 800m suffer -10% accuracy", and many others.

 

 

If an interceptor opened on you with quad lasers point blank you would take damage, but you could still fight back. I think that's probably a decent goal.

Edited February 8, 2014 by Verain

[Ramalina]

TL: DR version

When it comes to scout stealth the Magic 8 Ball says: Prospects dim, mechanics broken.

In flight combat, lack of situational awareness = death. Upgrade your hardware and the death is just more expensive and more embarrassing.

Teamwork and communication WTFPWN both flying skill and hardware in flight combat. Irrationally failing to use them is a great way to get clobbered.

Beginner pilots should fly defensively at first and gradually be more aggressive as they get better (unless they really like respawning)

 

Full version:

What exactly do you mean by close range fighters?

Compared to a gunship pretty much everything is close ranged.

 

Pre-bomber release, scouts were considered to be a tie with other gunships in the "gunship hunter-killer" role.

Been away skiing for week so I haven't seen how much bombers have changed that yet, though I imagine it makes teaming up to defend a friendly satellite safer for the gunship, without requiring much in the way of brain power or cooperation on the part of either pilot.

 

Away from sats it's really just a matter of situational awareness. The ignored and unnoticed gunship is deadly, the gunship that you see before it sees you is going to spend a lot of time running for its life or it will die.

 

Unless of course teamwork enters the picture. In which case you need to counter it with teamwork of your own.

 

Really gunships and bombers have an easier learning curve for players that are bad at flying, communicating, and working as a team. Close range scouts, which pretty much means heavy scouts with clusters and burst cannons, fall in a similar category except you do need to know how to fly at least a bit.

 

For what it's worth, at some point the Department of Defense commissioned a study about what leads to tactical victories in warfare (meaning you win the battle independent of whether the war a whole is won). The conclusion the study came to was that hardware isn't nearly as important as people submitting budget requests would have you believe.

 

Effective leadership + information/situational awareness + element of surprise = victory in almost all cases.

 

There was a form of stealth in GSF in the form of sensor dampening upgrades. You couldn't see a fully upgraded gunship with stock sensors until it was within 6000m of you. With a baseline scout with sensor upgrades this could be pretty much completely countered, so no problem right? Teeny tiny problem. SWTOR players are so incredibly bad at teamwork in GSF that gunships were brokenly good, so they just disabled sensor damping at ranges of less than 15km. This doesn't bode well for the future of stealth in the game. There are already components that have 50% or more of their functionality broken, basically because too few people wanted to play recon ships in a recon role.

 

We're fine with healers getting 0 kills in flashpoints, ops, and wzs, but god forbid that anyone not be competitive in the most kills/most damage e-peen contest in GSF. Go figure.

 

Oh, another note on the heavy scouts. Prior to the patch they were somewhat broken in terms of offensive power. If you're wishing for a return of the DF + BLC 2-3 shot you can probably forget about it. It was a justified nerf. That said, the scouts are still quite deadly in good hands. You have trouble now with winning head to head passes (as should have always been the case), but if you can get behind someone and at close range then they should be in for a very bad day. As a scout pilot, you need to be using your brain to figure out how to use the scouts superior speed and maneuverability to get into a position that favors you instead of the enemy ship. Given that all the other ships have to try to do the same thing with less speed and maneuverability if you're having trouble in the scouts the only solution is practice.

 

I'll also re-offer the advice that I once gave in the forums for a combat flight sim that is MUCH harder on new pilots (think needing to write down a 34 point checklist just to start the engines), "Cowardice is possibly one of the most valuable traits for a beginning pilot. You can't do anything when you're dead, so the very first priority is to avoid dying. Once you've done that, you can have another go at doing something else, say for example blowing up a target. If you're dead, you can't even try, so do whatever it takes to stay alive, even if that means screaming like a little girl and running for it as soon as your RWR (radar warning system) lights up."

 

Fly defensively as a beginner. As you get practice and hardware upgrades you can gradually get more and more aggressive without spending most of your time as space confetti.

 

*Edit: If you're falling asleep in your gunship and bomber, then just switch to your strike fighters. After all in the ship descriptions it does say that they're the best suited for dogfighting (which some how works out to worst performance in every dogfighting parameter that matters, but hey, just helps you stay awake right?).

Edited February 8, 2014 by Ramalina

[SavingPrincess]

*Edit: If you're falling asleep in your gunship and bomber, then just switch to your strike fighters. After all in the ship descriptions it does say that they're the best suited for dogfighting (which some how works out to worst performance in every dogfighting parameter that matters, but hey, just helps you stay awake right?).

Heh, if I sacrificed the purple points to play in a gimp'ed ship... well then HOW WOULD I GET THE PURPLE POINTS?!

 

I currently don't like the way points are distributed, as they don't promote team-work... but that's another thread.

 

The way it works currently, is I see the other team's lineup... if they have lots of gunships, I have to choose a gunship. If they have zero to one gunships, I choose scout, so I can have fun playing.

 

ON TOPIC: I'm not saying adding stealth to scouts wouldn't come with a penalty. Possibly reducing the overall engine power pool by having a "stealth engine" option or making it the "escape option" or a combination thereof. I just like the idea of introducing a hard counter to "who has the most turrets" gamplay that is plaguing GSF at the moment.

[Verain]

Interceptors will fill that role. It is not a scout job. The scouts have the best in a lot of other fields that the stealth ships will not, including max speed, maneuverability, and top dps.

 

No way in a thousand worlds they deserve stealth.

[RebekahWSD]

Impossible! No ship that small has a cloaking device!

 

 

 

*Sorry. Someone had to say it.*

[dancezwithnubz]

Interceptors will fill that role. It is not a scout job. The scouts have the best in a lot of other fields that the stealth ships will not, including max speed, maneuverability, and top dps.

 

No way in a thousand worlds they deserve stealth.

 

interesting to note that Scouts are seemingly already built to be the counter to Stealth interceptors: Targeting Telemetry 'removes cloaking effects'.

 

Gunships should never have been given dampening sensors. they should be a T1 scout only option. imho.

[Zharik]

Gunships should never have been given dampening sensors. they should be a T1 scout only option. imho.

 

Difficult to put kitty back in bag...

[Verain]

Gunships should never have been given dampening sensors. they should be a T1 scout only option. imho.

 

It's clearly a gunship thing. Especially given that it sucks.

[NathanielStarr]

No to stealth. Why do Bioware want cheap kills instead of real player vs. player contests?

[Altheran]

I saw lots of assumptions about the deadliness of stealth ships, comparing with Scouts, them using Sabotage Probe...

 

But their weaponry has been hinted by Kuat Drive Yards, and it says that the systems of the "Infiltrator" project induce critical errors with secondary weaponry...

 

And if you build a Infiltrator prototype without missiles and the right third component on the panel on the right (not Merr-Sonn, not Czerka), your prototype will not explode

 

[Ravenschild]

For one of your "Escape" options, close range fighters (i.e. scouts) should have the option to choose "stealth."

 

This would greatly balance out a lot of things in this game. A "stealth" enabled scout could be used to counteract gunships, and used to keep defensive bombers honest. Sacrificing an escape option (like Do-a-Barrel Roll or Reverse Thrusters) would keep it from becoming overpowered. Stealth should break when an attack is made, but not during a "missile lock" phase.

 

This one change alone could change the entire scope of GSF and make it more fun for everyone.

 

Stealth is already there with sensor dampening. All they have to do is apply it to scouts.

[Zoom_VI]

Stealth is already there with sensor dampening. All they have to do is apply it to scouts.

 

Dampening hardcaps at 15km due to concerns with dampened gunships. The stealth ships will have a literal stealth component that will be used like a operative uses stealth. However these ships are not coming anytime soon, the most recent addition should be the third class of strikes, scouts, and gunships, which for the first two classes will be "command" ships with a "command" component that does commandy thingies.

Edited February 8, 2014 by Zoom_VI