Ship shields are extremely responsive to the mouse button, turning on or off with any mouse click. The phase cloak has a different behavior, due to its cooldown. If you attempt to cloak while on cooldown the attempt fails, essentially dropping the mouse click.
Battle is hectic and filled with bright flashes, so the visual feedback on phase coils is not always visible. So what do I do? I mash the mouse button. Bad things are happening and I gotta get that cloak up ASAP, after all. What happens next? The phase cloak goes up, and then it drops immediately.
The game is not always responsive to cloaking requests, but it is ALWAYS responsive to decloaking requests. Does this annoy anyone else? It's gotten me killed quite a few times.
I'd like to see a slightly friendlier system to phase ship lovers. A simple solution is to queue up the request. Once the player asks to cloak, the ship should do it at the next opportunity. This way the button request is always accepted, you click an odd number of times to be cloaked and an even number of times to be uncloaked. It's very easy on the muscle memory and it lets players get the most out of their phase coils.