With the recent nerfs to cooldown reduction, the one ability that suffered the most is Veteran’s Infiltrate. While it got a pretty nice buff where one of the sub talents got absorbed by the base ability, the cooldown reduction make it so you can’t get a decent value out of it. Infiltrate can now be used offensively even less than before.
For those who don’t play it, Infiltrate has always been the ability mostly for revives and objectives. One of the main “techs”of Infiltrate is the fact that underhanding Frag Grenades doesn’t break stealth, meaning you could even save people completely surrounded by dozens of armored melee enemies.
While Infiltrate restores toughness on use entirely, it’s much weaker than Voice of Command in terms of survivability due to higher cooldown (especially with 2 charges talent) and no golden toughness and enemy stagger. Voice of Command can be occasionally used to instakill Chaos Spawn, Plague Ogryn and Daemonhosts near ledges, especially if combined with Krak Grenades.
Now Infiltrate is also weaker than Exe Stance, which is kinda nutty in normal missions with the constant 10% toughness regen, considering Exe Stance’s cooldown can be completely offset by the skill of the player. Exe Stance’s survivability is almost as good, if not greater than Infiltrate in certain cases, especially for ranged-heavy playstyles.
My suggestion is that if the Veteran saves a downed player during the duration of Infiltrate, it restores 50% cooldown. If you do an objective during an Infiltrate or within 10 seconds of using it, it restores 20-30% cooldown. This would reinforce the main purpose of the ability, while also rewarding players who don’t use it selfishly as a weaker version of Voice of Command or a way to speedrun missions. All numbers are of course tentative, so it’s up to the devs.
Feel free to suggest your own fixes that could help this ability.
I think it should reward killings, as the voice lines imply they are gonna “enjoy this” I can hardly imagine the loose cannon or the cadian “juicy throat” referring to how they enjoy auspex minigames or unsticking their teammates from the floor .
A lazy fix would be to steal Zealot Pious-cut-throat homework, but make slightly changes so it looks different and zealot can keep their grades:
Or some variation of this - ?% Ability Cooldown Regeneration for Xs after X enemies killed by grenades, increased effect based on enemy armour/type.
I’m not against them buffing player assistance tho, I just don’t see the way you suggested it being a very good pick. Say if your team is doing good, you are using this for the 4~8 auspex activations on average per mission, assuming your team even lets you do all of them, then maybe assist someone off a ledge once, that’s 9 times you triggered CD with assists in the mission (and 8 of them in the same/few rooms).
Maybe an aura/perk that counts all assists and kill-assists?
There’s a chance that “underhanding Frags not breaking stealth” is actually a bug, similar to how Zealot’s Shroudfield previously allowed two hits instead of one, if you time the press of a button right in the middle of hit animation.
Interestingly enough, doing the same with Kraks DOES break stealth. So maybe it is intended. But the fact that there’s no mention of it anywhere on the skill tree (Frag Grenades or Infiltrate descriptions), just feels strange.
So if it actually gets fixed sometime in the future, this ability will be so bad and so one-dimensional that it will probably be better off removed completely from the game.
I always want to use it and then like 3/4 of the game its actively just ok woosh and then what. I guess it does come in handy when everyone is dead for cheesing…enemy attacks literally stop when the last player stealths. But gold toughness makes it hard for people to die at all.
At the very least it should give intangible property on activation and for like 2s afterwards so it could reliably be used to at least flank and perform somewhat differently than ‘zealot stealth with no big hit but you get more sneak’. Intangible is the ability to ignore enemy collision, I think Shade has it in VT2.
Supression on unstealthing is also useless, it’s a weaker version of VOC stagger that only affects shooters. Forcing Veteran to run into a pack of Gunners to supress them for something like 3 seconds is stupid and closer to roleplay than an actually useful feature.
I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a decent use out of this feature. I mostly use stealth for melee focused builds to get that additional damage reduction and for the previously mentioned objective-centric playstyle. You can do events with power cells almost on your own, for example.
I really like the voice lines accompanying Infiltrate though. But funnily enough, I’ve literary NEVER heard some of the female options playing Stealth. Shows how many people play that ability.
The upgrade that lets the player have 2 charges should not increase the cooldown IMO. It’s not powerful enough on its own to justify that downside. Other than that maybe it’s fine since it has a longer base duration and duration of the reduced threat upgrade compared to zealot’s stealth.
Always possible, but I will point out that I’m pretty sure it has worked this way since the talent trees were introduced, I’m pretty sure I remember seeing it mentioned all the way back when, and several times since. Agreed it should stay either way.
Shroudfield’s double hit during one use of stealth was always working too.
By the way, I’m pretty sure “double hit” is still present in Vet’s Infiltrate. You can’t get value, because the additional damage is small, but if I’m correct they fixed Zealot’s stealth double hit only to preserve it on Veteran’s ability.
As I see it, the 2 charges node is mandatory. Since stealth has longer cooldown on average than other two abilities, most of the times you “save” both charges for one clutch. 2 charges is perfect for things like carrying power cells without any help or reaching a teammate that went down far from you.
With one charge only you have to first reach the teammate without stealth, which is not always possible due to enemies present. You use one charge to reach the destination, and then press Stealth again to ensure the save/objective done.
With only one charge you have to choose. Do I want to save the ability for the revive animation, or do I use it to reach the teammate? While it’s not a bad decision making by itself (aka requires some degree of game knowledge/skill), the ability is just way too weak right now to force these kinds of dillemas on the player who just want to help the team with objectives, instead of farming scoreboard damage like most loadouts do.
Zealot’s shroundfield has both shorter cooldown due to their class mechanics and more damage. The duration is shorter, yes, but I think it’s way stronger than Vet’s Stealth.
I think it’s fine that 2 charges impose a cooldown penalty. But considering that playing 1 charge, at least in my opinion, is way weaker, the cooldown for base ability is way too high right now.
I don’t really want to rebloat Vet with sub nodes but I agree infiltrate is kinda screaming for a cooldown sub node like Zealot’s new FotF node. Like 20% cooldown reduction if you kill X enemies within Y seconds of leaving stealth. I think that could let you feel a lot better about using it aggressively without worrying as much about being caught out when you need it for a clutch. I just feel too encouraged to sit on Infiltrate at the moment. That’s why I’d prefer it to not have a trigger like you suggested in the original post. I want to use it pro actively not just reactively and the former should be incentivised so the ability doesn’t just get reduced to the latter.
At very least they could take the base cooldown down to 40 seconds and the Overwatch penalty down to +25%.
For as much as I believe Veteran right now it’s busted, I believe that the node should activate even when allies in coherency kill the specials, to be more in line with the other class CDR nodes.
I don’t think adding a subnode is a good solution.
Stealth is the only ability which I personally think requires two nodes out of three. Without 50% toughness damage reduction it’s way weaker as a combat ability, and 2 charges is a must for me personally too, although in case of 2 charges that’s debatable I guess.
90% reduced threat talent is just bad, awful, trash. I’ve tried it with Hellbore builds and boss backstab build with Bolter. This node’s only use is to give you SOME immunity while you finish up doing servo skull puzzles.
The problem is, if you’re doing objectives without your team in close proximity, enemies will still target you even with 90% reduction…
Not only Exe Stance and VOC are stronger in most cases, but they require less points to reach their full potential. Exe Stance’s team-wide enemy highlight is a nice addition, but it feels like an add-on, rather than a must-have. VOC’s revive is just for roleplay I guess, since 50% more CD is just too big of a detriment in high level play.
Yeah I mean having the cooldown reduction on whatever condition built in might be fine. I’m a little wary of giving too much cooldown to a stealth ability especially with the significant duration of infiltrate. I would prefer an offensive condition regardless.
Krak Grenades didn’t deserve a buff in how many of them you can carry. This I agree.
But they deserved a fix to how a spare grenade spawns and attaches itself to enemies. The fact that additional grenades now don’t drop on the floor anymore is a huge buff to boss damage and killing armored packs.
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