While I agree with Boomer that stealthers are totally underpowered and useless right now, his "fixes" for DL are a tad extreme. If you look at it from a cloakers point of view, DL is cheap in the fact everyone has it and it is VERY hard to move about in most situations without being spotted by the naked eye, let alone by DL. From a grunt's point of view, there are WAY too many killwhore stealthers who only play as a cloaker to get knife/boomer kills and flaunt it like a trophy. I'm on both sides of the fence here, and both sides have valid points.
However, the fact everyone can get DL as an implant with almost no downside is pretty lame. A few suggestions come to mind to balance DL a bit.
1) Make it so that there is a 5-10 second timer before DL can be DEACTIVATED. This would ensure that there is no random DL flickering, and that DL would ONLY be used if a stealther was suspected. A LOT of good stealthers plan their movements carefully and spend time slowly sneaking into a base/tower, only to be ripped off by a BR6 with a JH who happened to flick on DL for no reason.
2) Another change would be to take DL off the implant list entirely. DL could now be an equipment cert for 1 or 2 points, and would require you to carry a small pair of goggle in your inventory, about the size of a box of ammo. You could still bind DL to a single key, and flick it on and off at will. The balance here is that certs are being spent on it now, and it will take up some inventory space.
3) My final suggestion actually has nothing to do with DL, but is an idea to give the cloaker a valid role again. Right now, ANYONE can do what a cloaker can do, aside from actually cloaking. When I think of cloakers, I think they would be the ones to do the best job laying traps or hacking consoles. Perhaps give cloakers the benefit of silent hacking, and take away the red laser that the REK gives off when you're in an infil suit. Perhaps also allow the infil suit to report enemy positions on friendly radars. By this, I mean that when a cloaker is behind enemy lines, he can use his suit to make enemy soldiers and vehicles show up on all friendly radars within a certain radius. Maybe 100m or so. A cloaker would kind of be like a mobile interlink now. Of course, it would take between 20-30 seconds to complete the uplink, and you would have to be still. Also, the infiltration suit would now be bumped up to 3, or even 4 cert points because of this benefit.
Now these are just my suggestions, so don't flame me if you can't make a legit counter-suggestion to any of these. I do agree DL should be put into check somehow, but not totally gimped.
|