I was messing around with PvE missions, and I noticed that I didn't seem to leave cloak when I was just laying down some chroniton mines.

Has it always been the case that the B'rel enhanced battle cloak doesn't drop when you are only laying mines?

It's certainly of limited usefulness, but any toy can be fun in the right situation.

Enhanced Battle Cloak allows you to lay down mines and fire torpedoes without breaking cloak

Along with some captain and bridge officer abilities.

Torps you break cloak for 3 seconds then auto re-cloak.

Mines, deployable turrets, aceton console can all be done without leaving cloak at all

Which would be great if you could use mines in the forward weapon slots. I'd just make a mine boat.

I'm not sure, but I don't think mines place you in red alert either. I'm pretty sure you can deploy a minefield then hot-swap turrets back in there, if you had a tactical boff with a mine pattern like delta 3 or whatever, you could theoreticly hot-swap them too, although I'm not sure how well the power tray would react to this, but it may be possible to set that particular officer's powers up on row 4 or something.

If your flying a B'rel that can fire projectiles while cloaked I'm not sure why you would bother equipping weapons that require you to uncloak.

The other thing is don't mines give away your position big time? I know it reappears when you fire for a moment, but the cloud of enemy mines where you are says to me fire AOE at that place he's got no shields.

High speed deployment for trickery purposes of course is brilliant.

Well regarding your first point, it's possible to fly the B'rel R as a Hegh'ta, the lower shields and hull mean you need to battle cloak earlier. But you can heal yourself while cloaked. This is a much bigger advantage IMHO than firing torps while cloaked for several reasons:

You can't fire energy weapons while cloaked, and if solo, have to rely on Tachyon Beam and CPB which also decloak you for brief periods, unshielded. Also, if you take an all torp build, the GCD for torps is 3 seconds. The period of time you decloak unshielded for is 3 seconds. You're basicly attacking with a high defence value instead of shields, it doesn't take long for this to go horrendously wrong against somebody competent. FAW renders this especially suicidal at the moment.

On the other hand, flying it as a conventional BoP you can battle cloak, get out of immiediate danger, and rejoin the fight fully healed without anyone giving your position away by healing you whilst cloaked, you can also regen your shields while cloaked in this manner, something you can't do when you have to battle cloak in the Hegh'ta, you've rather got to be quick on your shield heals coming out of cloak in that. Lastly, you've got more agility than a Hegh'ta.

You can also pop more of your resists and buffs whilst cloaked, if you use PSW for example, you can hit that just prior to decloaking cutting down somebody's reaction time. With the resists, you're more likely to survive for long enough to do what you decloaked to do before battle cloaking again.

It took me a while to come to terms with the above, I tried several takes on going "General Chang" on people before I gave up. I've yet to be remotely threatened by a B'rel trying it against me, and I found the only players who I could do it to, would've dissapeared much faster had I just conventionally attacked.

Regarding mines, it's my experience that they're not spotted at a long distance, and that it's quite easy to drop a large Chroniton minefield somewhere then lurk waiting for somebody to bumble into it. This is especially easy in Ker'rat and C&H where there are parts of the map that tend to be well travelled. With the frequent proc and lower defence value, you render people ripe for brutal alphas before battle cloaking again, cackling like a madman as you slip off into the void.

Not anymore I believe it's now just 1s as I can park my Cruiser under the middle of a gate at 1.75k down and fire both my fore and aft torpedoes almost immediately.

Note people that's the blind spot and I can hit it with 2 torps and 6 beams. I'm thinking of mounting a DBB or twin torps on the ship. And yes I realise I could hit it with 6 beams from almost anywhere at any angle.

Everything else you said made perfect sense.

That being said I love how cheap and evil it would feel to torpedo spam Feds to death in Kerrat while never leaving cloak.