Just tried the new indulgence from mortis trials for Infiltration - make teammates also invisible, and make you fight without losing stealth. And the part about not losing stealth after hitting or shooting sounds so cool for this feature to be in the base ability.
Right now you play 2 ways with Infiltration:
Use it 1-2 times total during a mission to save a teammate or do an objective with much less risk. And sometimes if you want to run to a downed teammate, you can be blocked by a horde, and you cant even do anything about it except trying to push them all away (and lose all stamina).
Use it in front of big pack of enemies or a boss, and then immediatly lose the stealth state to gain buffs from all the ability enhancement perks you took from the tree (like +10% base damage for 5s after ability use, Infiltation’s own enhancements, etc)
I think these ways to use Infiltration are quite lame, and every time i have a mood to use stealth, i think “uhhhh maybe Voice of Command again?.. its much easier and safer and cooler and powerful…”
Maybe there are better ways to buff the Infiltration? i really like the ability, but i just never feel too much engaged in taking and using it.
edit: Been discussing it in dt discord, and there was an idea for creating a big smoke cloud on use for like 20-30 seconds. You would make all the aggroed enemies turn to your teammates anyway, but at least make the shooters not shoot them.
And by the way - smoke grenades are also lame right now, they just dont work if you dont take all the grenade enhancement perks from the tree.
I mean, I use infiltrate as a ‘go in’ tool. It suppresses every enemy near you on ‘pop out’, being a smaller effect VoC shout, and if you take Low Profile you basically keep invisibility for an additional 10 second as nothing besides the enemies directly in front of you will target you. This lets you be hyper aggressive so long as you keep track of ‘your timer’, actually functioning the way Zealot wishes it could where you pop into the back-line, deal with everything, then run back to your team with time to spare.
Or, in the builds I take that focus more on crit/reciprocity, I take ‘Hunters Resolve’ for ‘Zealot levels of DR’ for 10 seconds instead. 50% DR after poping out is nutz, and when combined with Iron Will makes you just as functionally immortal as shout does for most things. This allows you to be more ‘front line’ like your second point, while still weaving yourself into the thick of things with the stealth part. It also functions a lot better as a ‘panic button’ where in once you get pushed past Iron Will range, you pop it, sprint to a better position/back toward your team mates, then pop out ready to fight even better than you where doing before.
It rewards tactical use, especially given it’s longer CD, so while it isn’t for every build like shout is (since golden toughness is still broken AF and the fact you knock everything including Ogies down is still insane), it’s still very usable in ‘normal game’, just requires one to use it appropriately.
I think people sleep on infiltrate and that it doesn’t actually need any buffs. It’s just that VoC is overtuned and easier to get consistent value from.
That said, dropping a free smoke when you initially activate it would be pretty cool.
I’ll be the one infiltrate hater here, whenever I use infiltrate on vet I feel like a weaker zealot. Shroudfield is just so insanely powerful and the extra time you get from infiltrate isn’t worth it.
With shroudfield, you can go invisible to lose targetting for a very short time and pack all of the damage from infiltrate into 1-2 heavy attacks which instakill enemies. The camouflage from infiltrate perk, to get enemies to not focus you when you reveal yourself, also tends to hurt your team if they aren’t good enough or aren’t prepared for it in the moment.
I agree that infiltrate needs to be buffed. The smoke cloud is a cool idea, maybe it could be more like the ranger veteran ult in Vermintide 2. There’s no reason to use infilrate over shout currently. Somehow, it’s still better than Executioner’s Stance though lmao.