Atm I routinely find people with virtually no cloak on in my BT. Their ships are usually of smaller class than mine, but with armaments close to what I have on board. I'm not a PVP-er but this certainly perplexes me. It is as tho they are saying: you can find me but you can't disable me. Well, I can still disable them, just take more energy to do so and I prefer to use my energy for NPC hunting.

My question is this: apparently there are two options to prevent being disabled in a random PVP encounter. One, you put on cloaking so high only people much higher in rank can find you. Two, you forgo cloaking and put on high def instead so that ppl of similar ranks can find you but would pass you on because you are a tough nut to crack. Which one is better?

I routinely go with the first option, installing up to 1600+ cloak. I got disabled probably once in a week, by ships 100+ ranks higher. I'm considering the second option now, seeing that I could probably double my current def setup by uninstalling my cloak.

I'd like to hear comments on this.

i guess its better to go for cloak... cuz if your battle reputation is below menacing, you will be targeted anyway... or 2nd option could be put a ridiculously huge amount of defense... that hitter will just back of if he cant deal more than lets say 30-50 per shot...

Enjoy going full cloak and paying for it. Cost of your repair is cheaper then running cloak modules in the long run. This higher cloak means less attacks. Its false. They find you they will disable you. So make the choice. You can do both. Just be ready to pay for it.

Small ships which hunt NPCs a lot need a very tight ship build. I ran without cloak for ages.

A lot of people don't bother researching cloaking either. The RP goes into more valuable research early on in the game. Cloak's the last thing for me. The only research I'm researching it now is because I've done everything I can afford to install of every other technology apart from base and I want the top tier planet cloak structures.

It wasn't much of a problem either. A hack doesn't make much of a difference to my RP. It's 5-10% of what my hourly rate is.

Put it this way, if you NPC then you want to squeeze every single thing to boost attack, then hull then defence. If there's any room left then scan and cloak are useful but if not then stick I'd recommened what other players are doing at lower ranks.

Scan is also an excellent way to block hacks, better than adding cloaking devices because it has better power to size. The only other bonus to cloak is stopping people checking out your ship if you've got a weak ship, e.g. if you've got high attack and defence but a small hull sticking some cloak in might stop players seeing it but if you've got a good ship then there's little fear from what equal level players think.

btw - just to give you an example. I'm rank 436 and you've got more cloak than me. I've got a Heavy Star Destroyer (switched from rank points ship size to energy a while back) and currentky have 1498 cloak and 246 scan. My attack is around 4600 and defence is 5341 so it's rare anyone at or below my rank attacks or hacks me.

Defence is really important with heavy NPC hunting to reduce repairs. They get really expensive after a while and slow down a large NPC blitz. I'll do 4 or 5 repairs during an NPC blitz with about 4400 energy.

Thanks, guys. Your comments are really useful.

The ploy doesn't work.

I cut down my cloak by 1k and installed more defense. Now I still got hacked and disabled by players 100-150 ranks above me, same case as before. But instead of once a week, now I got attacked twice a day.

Forgoing cloak might seem to be great idea, but maybe my luck is with high cloak.

I only run the cloak that comes extra with my other special mods. I prefer people to see my loadout and think twice about wasting that much energy for a badge. My defense/hull is high enough that the only people who are going to attack are so far above me in rank it wouldnt matter what I do.

Must be a "Darth" thing...

This is the same exact strategy I use. The only time I have ever installed researched cloak mods was for mission requirements and as soon as I can I sell the module. I honestly couldn't tell you when the last time I was disabled by someone NOT significantly higher rank than me (Non-war of course). Usually it's 250-300 ranks above my ~500, and even then maybe once a day.