Stealth cloaking and equipment changes coming to DUST 514 in Uprising 1.8

An extremely important role in DUST 514, equipment can turn the tide of a battle.

Putting down a ‘Drop Uplink’ creates a remote spawn point for your team and using an ‘Active Scanner’ reveals nearby enemies to your squad. Putting down a ‘Nanohive’ restocks ammo and using a ‘Nanite Injector’ revives a downed clone. ‘Repair Tools’ are used to repair team mate’s armor and Remote Explosives to destroy unsuspecting vehicles or clones. With these tools of the trade being so important CCP is always trying to balance equipment and introduce new types.

Launching on the 25th of March, Uprising 1.8 will see a balancing pass for almost all Equipment and also introducing a new piece of equipment, the Cloaking Field.

CCP Remnant, a Senior Game Designer for the game gave a brief summary of 1.8’s equipment changes in a recent devblog:

• Cooldown times on active scanners have been increased. Scanner functionality has also been improved to do snapshot scans in order to stop “scannerinas” from doing 360 degree spins.
• The range on repair tools has been reduced.
• Drop uplink spawn times have been increased.
• Nanohive nanite supply has been reduced.
• The Cloak Field will be available in 1.8.

The changes to Nanohives and Drop Uplinks are due to players “spamming” deployable equipment, mostly on or around objectives in the Domination game mode. Not only was this annoying to fight against but also sometimes caused severe lag if done in a enclosed place, which isn’t fun at all.

The change to the Active Scanner was made because unless you sacrificed some slots on your suit for Profile Dampener modules then the enemy could see you almost everywhere you are, which gets rid of flanking tactics (unless you’re a scout who naturally has a lower scan profile and generally use Profile Dampeners.)

The changes are also to make the new skills for Logistics Suits more beneficial and require more specialization to use a piece of equipment to its maximum potential. This change has raised some eyebrows for some logistics players; some believe CCP might have over nerfed the Logi.

The changes for Logistics Suits are as follows:

Logistics Role Bonus: 5% reduction to PG/CPU cost of equipment.
Caldari Logistics Bonus: +10% to nanohive max. nanites and +5% to supply rate and repair amount per level.
Gallente Logistics Bonus: +10% to active scanner visibility duration and +5% to active scanner precision per level.
Minmatar Logistics Bonus: +10% to repair tool range and 5% to repair amount per level.
Amarr Logistics Bonus: 10% reduction to drop uplink spawn time and +2 to max. spawn count per level.

Check the following page for equipment stats and cloaking.

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New Equipment Stats (click for larger images)

Time for my favorite part; the cloaking field. This piece of equipment renders the user almost completely invisible and is easiest to fit by Scouts which get a 15% reduction to PG/CPU cost per level with 75% at level 5. This was the long awaited buff Scouts were waiting for. Finally we could be invisible electronically and now physically which would give our role more meaning and options. There was just one problem; CCP’s original design allowed a few shots to be fired before decloaking you. This appeared extremely OP to a large amount of the community including the CPM (Council of Planetary Management). The change even had me–a dedicated Minja (Minmatar Scout typically wielding Nova Knifes)–second guessing the balance of scouts with the cloak. After much feedback from the community CCP changed the cloak to be more balanced.

CCP Remnant summarised the updated design in the blog:

– The cloak field is a piece of equipment.
– When the cloak field is selected, the cortex is raised and you press fire to activate it.
– Once activated, the cortex remains on-screen. Switching to any other equipment, weapon or throwing a grenade will deactivate the cloak.
– The amount of cloak "shimmer" is increased as you move. When standing still you will be invisible, but when moving you will be noticeable to an extent. While cloaked, you will have no chevron or health bars, but the enemy reticule will flash red if you run past it.
– When in use, the cloak field’s energy depletes slowly over time.
– Cloak can be manually deactivated by pressing fire or switching to a different piece of equipment or a weapon.
– Once deactivated or the cloak field runs out of energy it will start to recharge.
– You cannot reactivate the cloak field unless you have at least 50% charge.
– You can only fit one cloak field at a time.
– You do not decloak when hacking an objective or vehicle.
– You do not decloak when jumping or falling.
– If shot while cloaked, hit VFX will still be displayed.
– When cloaking and decloaking noticeable VFX are played.