Patch When? #1 - Dev Diary - Cloaks

[Haste]

I think we're overselling 'escape cloaks' a little bit here. If you round down the chance to escape combat with a cloak, currently, I'd say you'd end up with a solid 0%. Between the charge times, it being extremely obvious with how long someone's shield stays down, and needing little more than one CD hit to cancel the whole process, it really is a small miracle whenever someone successfully cloaks away from an encounter.

I will say that the idea behind the range restrictions and resulting removal of "buttcloaking" is for us to be able to make other aspects of cloaks better. Being able to cloak a full hour on a snub for ambushing purposes (or anything else where slow flight / being stationary is viable) is a pretty big buff. Of course, Battleships aren't gaining nearly as much here. At slow speeds, cloaks do last a good while longer on average than they do on live.

Looking at the ranges and current weapon ranges (in the test build) I can see us dropping the decloak ranges a little. Though, I will say, I don't really intend for cloaks to allow players to auto-win an engagement by being able to just open up on lighter ships from medium/close range -- that's not exactly what I view as "fun" or "healthy" PvP so I have no interest in enabling it.

Reducing charge times is also on the table, although capital ship shields have a much longer cooldown period in the new build (and are much stronger, but those are details better left to a different post) so we'd have to be careful to not make it too easy to get out with a cloak either (it's pretty hard to notice someone charging if their shield isn't a giveaway, and having to constantly spam the scan hotkey isn't very fun). I'd urge people to remember that there's more changing in this patch than just cloaks, and Battlecruisers can easily end up over 4k removed from one another in a duel.

Quite frankly, though, Aingar and I already agreed a day or two ago that at the end of the day, these cloak changes are a step in the right direction, but to truly make cloaks a fun and interesting part of the game they do need more changes. I'd like to see cloaks that are intended to work mid-combat without a focus on escaping, for example, but with a focus on "evasion". That however requires a half dozen extra restrictions to be placed on them (just cloak next to a lane, hit F3, poof), so we'll have to give that some more thought and it'll definitely not be ready for this patch.

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Edit: One more thing to note, as I forgot: perhaps the biggest buff to cloaks this patch is an indirect one, as work on missiles and countermeasures has made CMs both less powerful (lower ammo counts) and less essential for surviving missile attacks (missiles no longer have turn rates in the multiple hundreds of degrees per second). While that isn't a change to cloaks per say, it makes the opportunity cost of mounting one much smaller, which helps make them worth considering.

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