Zvex

Yes, exactly ... so much fun with cautious POI clearing in the stealth mode is gone ... piles of trash do not make sense, a lot of content feels to be thrown through a window. Stealth clearing was more time consuming but also more fun, that is why often I was choosing stealth. Now I use only one comfortable option: machine gun/shotgun/magnum + a bunch of ammo = first person shooter with zombies. I have tried my best to keep some niche for stealth stuff in my game playstyle ... but without luck, I have started to ignore stealth completely. My conclusion is that stealth more or less is broken.

I agree that the stealth is broken right now, the most of points were brought there already: 1) there is a separate tree with lot of skill points, if you choose it - you loose the ability to use the most efficient open combat perks, so you need something to compensate it or the investment is highly imbalanced in the worst way for you. 2) it takes a lot of time to play stealth, it takes a lot of skill and attention from a player, playing stealth was a challenge in earlier versions as well, because a single mistake could wake the whole floor and you could get into a challenging open combat trouble ... so it had enough of downsides already. What you got for that is that you spend less ammo, which usually is not that big deal, actually - the game is made to give you opportunities to get enough ammo in one or other way, especially when the brass stopped being such big deal after we got tokens-brass conversion (too much "cheese" there, if you ask me). 3) you actually can't play stealth now, it is not even challenging, it works just unpredictably. Now it is a "tool" which can work sometimes, you need to struggle to try your best to make it work, and sometimes it will ... in current state this "tool" in terms of points should be free for players who like to be masochistic sometimes and spend their precious time (every hour makes you closer to the horde moment) to perform some weird non-standard kills sometimes when it will work. I saw these arguments about "cool" light-dependence. If you are quietly walking around the room, the light on you should not wake up a zombie that is over the wall. The only thing which should matter is noise there, otherwise it just simply feels like a bug, especially for new player. As for killing a sleeping zombie ... if he gets a bolt into a head without being woke up, it should minimize the noise, I don't see troubles in that - there are many ways in this game to make the noise already, such as these piles of trash that are everywhere. We need pros/cons for stealth gameplay style. But we have cons only ... simply at least because you are forced to change from stealth to open style constantly, which is a real struggle, making that open fight style your primary anyway, moreover, your open style is weaker due to loss of points. We can also add on top of that stealth being useless at horde nights, this is where the most combat challenge must come from, not the POI clearing. I am more or less ok with everything said, as long as I have red cross on the stealth perks in my mind, which means "do not touch, it is a trap for fools" ... the bad thing is that the new player can be unaware and will be highly disappointed with his skill points investment.