I returned after a 10 year break so i realise the mechanic is not new, just new for me. Its not a whine so please dont say get gud ect. Just want to find out as much as I can about it.
If its not already clear from the title of the thread its about fighters uncloaking a Cloaked DST just after jumping a gate. So specifically I would like to know when the change happened. (I dont think it exsisted 10 years ago, at least it never happened to me). What were the reasons for it and what were the arguments for and against.
A little over 10 years ago (early 2016 it seems) the Upwell Structures were added, so if you haven’t been playing you’ve missed the strategies that came with it.
Decloaking ships is a valid strategy to catch slower aligning covert ships or ships that use the MWD + cloak trick. The latter are aligning for 10 seconds cloaked before dropping their cloak and instantly warping, so you have up to 10 seconds to fly to their location to decloak them.
Decloaking is a skill and good frigate pilots can do it in that time.
However, structure fighters move different than regular ships, they are much faster at full speed so if you have an Upwell structure with fighters near a gate you could set up a gatecamp which makes it incredibly easy to decloak any ship that attempts to pass through. Too easy.
And decloaking is not an agressive act, so people could do the same thing in high sec space and then gank the decloaked ship with near zero risk as people cannot legally attack your fighters there and your ship (structure) is safe while you do it.
This resulted in complaints.
As someone who has neither been victim of these strategies nor has used them, I think those complaints were valid.
This strategy was then patched out by specifically removing the ability for fighters to decloak ships:
I realize that in my post above I did not talk about regular Carrier fighters.
I do think those can still be used, not in HS as Carriers cannot enter there, but elsewhere. The Carrier is at risk then though, so there’s counterplay to this.
That really is very kind of you. My case is the latter in low sec. Yes I was pretty bummed by it but i know its not going to change so i just wanted some insight. Out of interest how do these fighters advance towards the ship even though it hasnt been locked and has cloaked. Its counter to every other occasion when you cloak.
When you drop gate cloak in order to activate your own cloak you are visible for one tick.
This is the moment you would give your interceptor an ‘orbit at 500m’ command, which then makes your ship move towards the ship you wish to decloak. And because it’s an orbit command and not an approach command your ship keeps moving the same direction even if they immediately cloak afterwards.
So if you cloak up, make sure you move away from that spot as soon as possible, which in a MWD cloak trick ship is hard to do because you’re slow.
While I haven’t used fighters, I bet fighters use the same mechanics when it comes to approaching the last seen spot of a cloaked ship with the orbit command.
While the orbit fails, the ships do continue straight towards where the cloaked ship was last seen, and likely decloak it if it doesn’t warp or move away fast.
To be precise they continue going forward. Period.
Same thing when you orbit a wreck and salvage it, when it disappears your ship continues in a straight line. It just flies forward (not specifically toward a location or anything).
So if what you orbit disappears (while your ship is still flying towards it instead of already orbiting it in a circle around it) or is blown up the ship continues to fly forward (which coincides with its last location) and if you were orbiting it at any distance (and was actually on that orbit) then the moment the thing you orbit disappears or is destroyed then the orbital path is broken and the ship continues to fly in a straight line (the same direction it was facing at that moment).
Fighter can be more than 15k m/s fast and accelerate almost instantly, they are larger (collision radius) and you can launch up to 4 squads at once. Thats why they work so much better than an Interceptor for example. You just have to learn to use the controls very quickly, but that can be trained.
Up until 2017-ish, I exclusively used a blinged dramiel to decloak and like to think i was good at it. Also came back after break recently and the same dramiel today, costs more than a fitted carrier incl fighters, it was maybe 1/6 of a carrier back then. That’s before considering abyssal mwd, that would finally put it to the speed of fighters.
There were some changes to carriers over time, mostly around targetting and dedicated sensor array mods, but most are inconsequential for decloaking. Biggest thing is, it’s just cheap af compared to any other practical solution, and you do not have to care about gate guns 2 shotting you if your logi misses a cycle or smth.
Fundamentally there’s no difference in execution . In a blinged frigate, i would spam approach the moment you appear, and have mouse button bound to max thrust (+ on kb or whatever the default is), to never stop decelerating when you cloak … since you yeet from 0, the 1st tick aligns you perfectly to direction, then you just need to make sure you never stop. If you want to be lazy, you use orbit instead of approach, which for some reason does not stop you once the target cloaks, but also can send you bit off so it’s arguably worse.
For fighters, it’s the same - you put carrier there, align it out or just sit if baiting. Put fighters out, select all for control, and as soon as someone appears, you send them to orbit at 500 . Since their collision box is quite high, you get very good result even if they are not straight. Since they have stupid inertia for their size, you can also keep them moving/spread out, they will change direction pretty much instantly.
edit to add 1 more thing if not obvious, but the decloaker only moves in your direction (or his fighters), they never have to target you in order to move on top of you, that’s why cloak tricks etc do not work against it per se. Cloak (esp covops) still gives you a bail out card tho, as you can’t be targetted instantly by fast tackle.
