TLDR: Allow cloaked ships to pre-overheat modules, so they don’t have to shift-click when they decloak.
Right now, you can’t overheat things while cloaked, which means if you’re in a tense situation where you need heat immediately (like just jumped through into gatecamp and need to crash gate, or just about to gank someone, and need overheated DPS) you have to decloak, wait about a second or so for the server to realize you’re not cloaked, overheat and then click the module. What ends up happening is that people decloak, shift click to overheat, and then click the module. However, since the server didn’t register that they were decloaked when they shift-clicked to overheat (despite them seeing their ship start to decloak/hearing the decloak sound), it rejects this request. A moment later, when they click to activate the module, the server now recognizes that they are decloaked and allows them to activate the module cold. Now they are stuck with a cold module for an entire cycle.
This timing game feels more like a Street Fighter combo than Eve Online, and it would be amazing if you could pre-overheat modules while cloaked. If the intent was to prevent covert ops ships from zooming off at overheated MWD speeds, you could simply disallow it for the first 5 seconds of cloak.
It really shouldn’t. A game with EVE’s lag and timing issues should not have a situation where success depends on perfectly timing your clicks. Not allowing you to select overload mode while cloaked is poor interface design, not a reasonable balance decision.
and that’s about it. between lock times and lock delay you have well over a tick to decloak heat activate. only people it negatively effects are the ones who are freaking out and panicking. and since you already have surprise on your side that’s plenty balanced.
I wouldn’t mind a design-based limitation, but if it’s going to be by design, I would like it to be longer, like 3-5 seconds, so it’s clear that by design, your first cycle is not supposed to be hot.
It’s more about making the gameplay more predictable than dedication to a hot start.
whats wrong with it being clear that you are not supposed to be able to mess with you mods until others can mess with you? there is already a 5+ second delay on all but a few ships before you can lock. there does not need to be an added one on top of that added to heat.
basically your target can’t pre-heat because he doesn’t know you are there its reasonable that you can’t either
Don’t forget that the locking itself often takes more than one second, so you should be able to turn the heat on before you can actually use your modules.
Good points about the reactivation delay, so a heat delay wouldn’t make sense outside of tank and prop mods, and that’s mostly going to apply to when crashing gate. However, the simpler solution is probably just allow people to preheat while cloaked.
The point is that it’s poor interface design, not a balance factor. In theory, if everything works perfectly, you can overheat instantly when you press the decloak button. The difference, in a perfect world, between readying overheated modules while cloaked and overheating them as soon as you decloak is nonexistent. Either way as soon as you activate the module it is overheated.
The problem comes in because EVE is not a perfect game. It takes time to press buttons, server lag can cause the game to fail to acknowledge your overheat request because it hasn’t processed your decloak request yet, etc. So you have a situation where you should be able to do something, but poor interface design prevents you from getting the game to do what you are telling it to. And poor interface design is always something that should be corrected.
Not true at all. You can fly around with your modules prepared to overheat at all times without any consequences. You don’t need to wait for a target to appear to do this.
You can have all your modules preheated before jumping, and the session change resets them because that information isn’t passed from one session to the next.
Please read the full conversation. The parts i have been responding too have all been about heating with an active cloak. No one seems to be against it for gate cloak
You can preheat before you cloak, once the preheat is on its still considered a dormant mod while the cloak is on. Only noticed it cause I was messing with a way to capture exploration frigates before they warp off after I decloak.