Stealth-breaking stealth

gabbo1928

There is a recent issue I have noticed with Nightblade characters. In some circumstances, if you cloak while standing, then crouch while already cloaked, it takes you completely out of stealth. I haven't been able to isolate the exact contributing factors that cause it, but it does seem to happen quite often when I'm cloaked and then crouch as I'm passing enemies. So, pretty much the exact moment you would NOT want to come out of stealth.

From a logical standpoint, there is no reason for this to happen. I suspect it is a byproduct of a recent (intentional) change that takes you out of stealth and uncloaks you in certain situations like swimming.

As for why I would crouch while already hidden, my main uses a speed stealth build based on Night's Silence (no speed penalty when crouched) and Darloc Brae (restores resources while crouched), so I benefit more from crouching because the resource gain offsets the magicka drain of using the cloak. I typically cloak to quickly enter stealth when needed, then crouch after to get the resource buff. It was never a problem before, and it seems to have happened around the same time that swimming started removing stealth.

This is on PC NA.

Gabriel_H

The intentional change to take you out of stealth when swimming was a bug fix for something dating back a couple of years.

Nigthblade cloak isn't stealth, it's invisibility. So it's in essence a different mech than crouched stealth.

There were some updates to skills that come off when you enter crouch stealth, but I don't specifically recall this being one, but I'd have to find the relevent patch notes.

Edit: Had a look this skill wasn't mentioned. Try casting cloak, then crouch, when no one is around, and see if the cloak buff falls off. It may be an issue with crouch over-riding the buff.

katanagirl1

Cloak works differently now in a bad way, it seems really broken compared to before, if you are close to an enemy when cloaking it almost always fails. I use a slightly different gear setup but just stay in crouch and hit cloak when I get close just in case if I feel I need to do so.

I don’t use crouch the way you do, so I cannot comment about the particulars, but the cloak change predates the swimming change by several months.