Pub cloakers are broken, please fix soon.

[Nockm]

I've been playing pub this weekend and it's become clear that the small cloaker is overpowered.

Here's all the cloaker ever does in base:

• Walk into base through the gaps.
• Cloaks through enemies and touch the flag.
• Rep incoming enemies.
• Make a kamikaze kill. (Given the small size+invisibility you'll often get multiple kills before you die.)
• The above often buys enough time to reset the game timer, which is hardly deserved because it's so easy to do.
• If the cloaker fails, it simply attempts again and again for as long as it likes.

The problems I see are:

• It's small and invisible; takes the attention of more enemies than it deserves to take it down.
• Requires only a single pilot, unlike an LT - absolutely no teamwork required. Anyone can unspec and single-handedly screw up a fun basing game for kicks - which is exactly what some people do repeatedly.
• Pilots of even lesser skill can buy further reps+rockets, as if it wasn't overpowered enough already.

Just so it's not a pure whine, here's some possible changes:

• Make the cloaker big again.
• Remove the ability to rocket/rep/cloak (yup, it's overpowered enough to not even require to cloak despite its name).

If anyone else feels the same let me know, thanks!

[project dragon]

If there was some way to make the route into fr longer for cloakers so that defenders have a better chance of getting them, but keep the holes into fr the same for bombers, it would be interesting. Maybe +1 shipsize everything (that would be awkward).

[Nao]

I totally agree with this, eventho I don't play pub in TW that often, the main reason why I quit the pub is because of these cloakers

[Steep]

I would like to see weasel have a level 2 bullet so it still can be used as last resort to get flag but weasel will have hard time to kill anything.

But really removing even just rocket would help a lot.

[Nockm]

One more thing:

The cloaker settings have been in effect for a while now, yet I never complained about it before. I assumed it takes a good cloaker pilot to take flag alone; I often hear people saying 'nice work', etc. when one takes the flag and I thought the same.

However, I played cloaker for about 5 minutes (my team was playing badly and the opposing team had total control) and it was embarrassingly easy to reset the flag timer time and time again. It wasn't like the enemy was clueless either, there was some TWLB regulars in the flagroom hunting me too. Just follow the walk in-rocket-rep-kamikaze recipe, rinse and repeat.

I mentioned this to glavitik who decided to give it a go (he wanted to see if it's truly that easy) and he immediately reset flag for his losing team without breaking a sweat. If anyone thinks cloaker isn't overpowered then I encourage you to give it a try.

[Mobey]

Most of the time there isn't enough people actually basing to shut down the cloakers. There was a game a few months ago where pub was at full capacity, there were six of us on a private freq once, one terr and five cloakers and we repeatedly took flag and kept the game going for well over an hour, I think we maxed it at an hour and half before someone won. Five cloakers vs. six sharks and two full pub freqs, granted it was fun for us but really frustrating for the two pub freqs.

TL;DR- They are overpowered and kill the game when population is low but at full capacity it's a whole different ballgame. I suggest removing the rocket and limiting the number of cloakers at peak time.

[MegamanEXE]

Haven't we had the small x for a while now? I've only noticed problems ever since the new map came out since there are a lot more holes for xs to go through, meaning more paths for them to follow to shake off pursuers.

Nothing irritates me more than xs that go on a priv by themselves and do nothing but interfere with the basing game.

[WillBy]

Not even lts, mega?
On a serious note, weasels are hardly overpowered. 2 level one bullets kill a weasel. So if a teams terr just strays some bullets in your way, it's either death or you have to go the long way around. Even more difficult is how to manage a lancaster on flag. Level two bullets are 1-hit KOs on a weasel, making fighting them virtually impossible. 1 semi-experienced lancaster in the flagroom is enough to stop all but the best weasels (cough cough). If they're sitting on flag, theres no way the cloaker can get them off without being shot.
So weakening the weasel is not the correct way to proceed, because they aren't the problem. the problem is somewhere between terrs not warning about cloakers, sharks mining flag (ez tks), and no lancasters on team to destroy them. It's really not that difficult to hold a flag...

[Hulk]

willby posting what he thinks cause all he does is play weasel 24/7 in pub like a faggot.

[Steep]

williby
Have you really never witnessed how a bit laggy weasel rockets thru everything thats on its way? rep + bought rep + shot + quick recharge shot + buy FC shot.. is really quite too much. And if you say the problem is terrs not warning for weasels or players not playing lancaster, how long you are going to wait for the players to fix this if they havent done it a years time?
On sidenote, i remember this guy Lintu playing in weasel for some time now, first he used cloak but doesnt need even that anymore to be pretty hard to kill with all the little holes he can escape and the multifire thurst shots coming from distance is like lancs bullets altho they kill with 1 hit.

[fiS]

with THRUST and bullet ability, it does NOT need a rocket. not even a repel. the repel is great if you're playing weasel, but yes, it's overpowered. if you're fighting as wzl in spawn even, you can easily dodge any ship with a little bit of skill without rocket/rep.

remove rocket and rep, keep its small size and L1 bullets.
maybe redue the fire-delay, because if single bullet you can shoot 2 bullets within like 2 seconds.

[WillBy]

Rude, hulk. In fact, what are you even contributing to the conversation here? Obnoxious trolls...
Steep, have you ever noticed a jav does the exact same thing? And weasels dont start with repels, in fact most of the time they dont. So what you just described there would cost 400 pubbux for one possible flag grab. On top of that, as I already said, weasels have a relatively low energy, and a single bullet from any ship is enough to stop it from bulleting for several seconds if they are cloaked, and if they aren't cloaked than a second hit shouldn't be any problem for players. Oh and the reason players haven't fixed this yet is because they figure its easier to come a whine on the forums.
Fis, I agree that rocket is unnecessary for the most part, but I know none of you have ever been stuck coming up along the side when all of a sudden a levi terr with 3 other turrets comes along. They see the easy kill in the low-energy weasel, either one stray bomb, or any of the ships trash it with, again, a single bullet. If only you had a way to quickly move away from that wall...
As for recharge, that's hardly the problem. Weasel recharge is no different other ships. The REAL problem would be energy consumption per bullet... 700 per bullet, and weasels have 1100 energy, meaning two bullets in only 300 energy recharge. If you change it, either rockets or recharge. Also, bring back !buy brick!

[Jerome Scuggs]

increase flag reset timer by like one second. a good team can clear out a weasel but there's always a weird laggy jupey gap and the flag timer gets reset anyways.

a one second difference would let wzl's still catch a bad team off guard while preventing attentive teams from getting screwed

[Nockm]

I agree, a good team can clear out a weasel but that's the problem - it diverts far more attention than it should. You could have someone sit on the flag or hunt it down, but the cloaker could just avoid that hunter and kill someone else, then hide. Basically the cloaker can do whatever it wants.

My opinion now is that it should have its rep removed: it's already tiny and able to cloak, what more evasive countermeasures does it require? At least it would retain its offensive capabilities (floating+rocketed bullets), but not make it temporarily invincible (which is key to what makes it able to reset the game timer so easily).

Anyone else agree with that? Please +1 if you do.

[roxxkatt]

trade rep for stealth

[Mobey]

cheese please GTFO forums, you really didn't read what anyone said did you? trading rep to give the cloaker stealth would make it even more overpowered, that's just common sense.

I like jerome's idea of increasing flag reset timer by a few milliseconds or even a full second.

[WillBy]

Not a bad idea jerome, but the timing for flag resets is already inconsistent.
I'd also like to point out, weasels that reset the flag timer extends round times, which makes fewer people get less money (proportionally to time spent), slowing inflation.

[meddi]

I, personally, feel that balancing the weasel is the most pressing and formidable task faced by TW operators and staff members.

[Subterranean]

...but the timing for flag resets is already inconsistent.

I also noticed this as well. I've seen the flag reset within milliseconds of it being touched. And other times I've seen the flag take 3 seconds or more to reset. I also agree that cloakers need to lose at least 1 advantage. It is annoying as a terrier to have the same weasel rocket+rep+buy items etc. over and over at you. I could be wrong but weasels items seem to be cheaper to buy than having to buy portals to avoid such attacks as a terrier.

[MegamanEXE]

Not even lts, mega?
On a serious note, weasels are hardly overpowered. 2 level one bullets kill a weasel. So if a teams terr just strays some bullets in your way, it's either death or you have to go the long way around. Even more difficult is how to manage a lancaster on flag. Level two bullets are 1-hit KOs on a weasel, making fighting them virtually impossible. 1 semi-experienced lancaster in the flagroom is enough to stop all but the best weasels (cough cough). If they're sitting on flag, theres no way the cloaker can get them off without being shot.
So weakening the weasel is not the correct way to proceed, because they aren't the problem. the problem is somewhere between terrs not warning about cloakers, sharks mining flag (ez tks), and no lancasters on team to destroy them. It's really not that difficult to hold a flag...

Haven't replied in a while since I've been doing IRL stuff but here goes:

Your point is that "it's not difficult to hold a flag" and "people can kill cloakers anyway." In reality there's a big difference between theory and practice.

In THEORY, what you said is true, cloakers shouldn't be a problem for a capable team, and should be little more than a nuisance.

In PRACTICE, cloakers can fly into the FR, reset the flag timer, and escape with nigh impunity. They blend in on radar since they look like all the other blue dots, and escape detection by many players in an active game because of their cloak. You're effectively saying that people that are screwed by cloakers just "need to get better." But if cloakers are as easy to stop as you say, we wouldn't be on here talking about how hard they are to stop, would we?

The other major problem is that cloakers divert a team's resources from the flag game to killing the cloaker. Again, in theory, you say that cloakers are easy to stop if people pay attention to them. The problem is that when people start paying attention to cloakers, they stop paying attention to the rest of the basing game. Cloakers are very hard to hit with anything short of a Terr or Lanc because those are the two ships with double-fire, meaning a wide area-of-denial against cloakers. If all the WBs and Spiders on one team are trying to hit a tiny moving target, then they aren't focusing on stopping the enemy team trying to get in. The point here is that a team that is caught up in fighting a cloaker is automatically at a disadvantage, because part of their team is dedicated to shooting the cloaker instead of other, more important targets (like enemy Terrs.) Like people have said before, cloakers are far more trouble than they are worth.

Which all boils down to the main problem: Cloakers ruin basing by giving one team (or even one person) an undue advantage over the flag. Why help your team overcome the enemy team through a concerted teamwork effort when you can just hop in an X and reset the timer? Once one person gets in a cloaker, someone else gets in one to counter them, and pretty soon you have 3-4 cloakers simply marauding the base and flag.

One other minor (but annoying) problem is that their spread shot means that they can fire from a hole at the bottom of mid and score kills without any effort. If anyone flies down to stop them, the cloaker can just back up through the hole and run away. It's not as game-changing as the cloaker stealing the flag, but it's pretty bullshit anyway.