Obligatory Note - technique refers to your personal ability to do something, juxtapose your skill levels which makes it easier to have no technique, like an Omega.
It’s been too long to remember if cloaking used to be a higher-tiered item and less used, because now it seems you can get it quickly as a new-Omega-clone. But, there’s a lot of videos that incidentally talk about interesting and good tactics for staying alive, that have nothing to do with a cloak.
So let’s chat about it’s actual usefulness?
First, where does it need to be used? And where does it not need to be used?
I’d think hunting, and PvP it will definitely serve a purpose, however, I think defense and gatecrashing it will not?
For defense, there are plenty of tactics for survival in spite of cloaking, so does cloaking offer any advantages to jumping through gates or is that activity no different than as if you were not cloaked?
You can use cloak defensively while you land on a gate camp. You align ship, cloak, then when have proper speed/angle, decloak and “instawarp” . The gankers won’t have time to lock you mostly. Oh forgot that y need to mwd before cloaking or you won’t reach warp speed required
hu ? no, it’s just that inty with cloak are useless.
inties can’t covert cloak , so the cloak is completely useless most of the time. The only moment it is not, is when the gate is camped by fast locking ships : it allows you to take distance from the gate if it is not dirty.
in LS there are very few insta lock, because those can be destroyed by gategun (there still are but those need remote sebo and remote repair), so the 2s align is almost always enough.
When you can fly an interceptor you usually fit it for an align time of under 2s making the “mwd-cloack-trick” obsolete.
If you can warp in under 2s, the chance you get caught - even by instalockers, are very slim. You will probably increase the chances to get caught in such a ship when you try to cloak before warping…
Edit: Just think of situations where it’s beneficial not to be seen, @Alistair_Atreides. When hunters don’t even know you are there, how would they be able to hunt you? Staying cloaked as much as possible is the biggest defence you can have.
We had a guy once that tried to use the MWD+Cloak-Trick with a Blockade Runner.
So in general:
If you can warped cloaked: do it.
If you can’t warp cloaked & also can’t warp fast: the MWD+Cloak-Trick is an option. Especially with slower hulls like Industirals & larger combat ships.
If your ship can be fitted to warp within under 2 seconds, attempting to do the MWD+Cloak-Trick probably gets you killed more often than not when doing it. It also slows you down.
