So I have been thinking about how to make Infiltrate more viable while preserving its original flavor, and I came up with this:
Guerrilla Tactics Cooldown: 60s
Replenish all Toughness and enter Stealth for 8s, gaining +25% Movement Speed. Gain +30% Damage during Stealth and for 5s after. Attacking ends Stealth.
Elite and Specialist kills reduce cooldown by 0.25s, to a minimum of 30s. Such kills grant 1s of Stealth, up to 8s total, and may Suppress nearby Enemies. After Stealth ends, they instead extend the post-Stealth duration by 0.5s, up to 8s total.
Note: For legal purposes, I waive any rights to the ownership of this idea and you are free to use it as you see fit.
Stealth in general doesn’t belong in a game like this, it used to be somewhat effective when the game wasn’t throwing 20 ragers at you lol and even then it was considered a toxic ability to bring.
Not a fan of increased cooldowns on the class that gets timed buffs after ability use. Temu shroudfield vet is actually quite fun to play. I would go the other way: reduce the cooldown and reduce potency. I would really love to have stealth switched with the 90% thread reduction. Suddenly the toughness reduction skill would make sense to use, but keep the suppression on start and end. The cooldown reduction could be a plain reduction to 20s cooldown or cooldown reduction on kill.
It would still be temporary. I imagine a good player could bring it down to 30 seconds in around 10 minutes on high difficulties, after maybe 3-4 uses. I think it fits both the class fantasy and the name of the ability, since Veteran already focuses on killing Specials and Elites. So giving him an option to play more aggressively and stack Toughness regeneration stacks up close with a melee weapon, instead of being forced to pick off a few enemies with a gun, could open up a new playstyle.
The current ability is just too unreliable for building those stacks and actually staying in melee. You pick off one enemy, then hope the aggro does not instantly snap back to you, because if it does, the whole thing falls apart. That is why I think this version raises both the floor and the ceiling. A weaker player will not get huge value out of it, since suppression is no longer guaranteed and they will likely not max out either the Stealth window or the visible-duration one, but a strong player can really capitalize on Elite and Specialist kills.
It blends in just fine, if you use it as you should (a tool that helps you to reposition to do something urgent). There is no “toxicity” inbuilt in stealth on itself, if somebody use it with malicious purposes it’s human problem, not the skill’s. And that problem won’t go away with stealth removed. I’ve played with dozens of people using shroud or infiltrate, I don’t remember any problems I had with them.