Maybe I’m missing something with all the talk about Stratuscloud. Nikoul cannot go below B1 it is true. But the low vis zone applies to every trooper except the one who activated it. Poor and Low visibility zones also work differently than I think is supposed here. MSV won’t remove the -3 visibility mod (EDIT: wiki for the MSV equipment page says it will reduce the mod for a poor vis zone EDIT 2: I realized the reason for my confusion is that the low vis zone caused by a Nimbus or Nimbus + zone is still imposed on MSV troops, as these are apparently "special" low vis zones), although you will still be able to ignore camo or mimetism if the other trooper has them. If I missed something can someone please explain how this combo is supposed to work?
Mostly Null results benefit the ARO piece (the active player has chosen to spend orders attacking you, so a result where that fails is a win for the reactive player*). Stratuscloud reduces the likelihood of the Active player succeeding, this in turn increases the likelihood of the Reactive player succeeding (due how FTF mechanics work) while also increasing the likelihood of Null results. This is why, BTW, that it took the community so long to embrace the active use of Nimbus. * The exception is where someone was Moving across an open area and throwing dice at the ARO to reduce the likelihood of dying. But that's a risky option, so it's not a bad thing to encourage. There's other similar ones but largely they're all functionally edge cases.
Stratuscloud doesn't have the Reflective trait, so MSV does cancel the -3. The one it doesn't cancel is Nimbus, since Nimbus does have the Reflective trait.
MSV does reduce the penalty but not for the reason listed here. The wiki page for visibility zones implies that the penalty is suffered by all equipment that requires LOF and specifically mentions MSV2 in the case of a zero vis zone. However, the page for Multispectral Visor specifically says that it does reduce the penalty to 0. The reflective trait is not mentioned except in the case of a white noise zone, which is outside the scope of this thread. This kind of cross referencing and rules clean up is the kind of thing I hope N4 addresses.
You are slightly wrong here. MSV reduces the penalty solely for the the effects stated in the MSV rules. Visibility zone rules present the general scenario, and MSV presents an override to that scenario. I guess you didn't read the actual rules (paperback or PDF) so this seems weird to you. It is really good to at least scan the rules from beginning till the end to get the idea how rules are laid out. If you try to learn the game just by reading the Wiki, you will be confused quite a lot. That said, I don't disagree with you in regards to cross-referencing and rules needing a cleanup. N3 rules are laid out way better than N2, but there's still lots of work to do to make the ruleset more palatable.
I think contextualizing my comment correctly would make my point clearer. The reason I bring up reflective and nimbus is because Stratuscloud has historically been compared to Nimbus a lot. Nimbus generates a Saturation Zone and a Low Vis Zone. However, Nimbus has the reflective trait, which is why MSV does not cancel the penalty of the low vis zone by Nimbus but does for Stratuscloud. Nothing in my original comment is incorrect.