I have no doubt that a better player than me will be able to balance it better and faster but definitely not in a few hours, keep in mind that our balance philosophy from the start was to stick to vanilla NS2 as close as possible this means working with a lot of limitations.
You are welcome to leave constructive criticism instead of leaving comments like the one above and this
marine/alien balance is incredibly out of whack. Marines with even a single good player can stomp aliens incredibly hard. It was like this before 250, but it's even worse now.
play one game against BIGTICKET and you'll be pulling your hair out in frustration as an alien
This doesn't actually tell me anything I can work with other than me understanding that you pretty much suck as an alien which isn't weird if you are new to the game, when in a situation like that pretty much in any game where you play with a higher skill player you are ought to die a lot and eventually end up losing and there isn't much to do there its not like we will make changes to punish skilled players to appease the rest.
oh i'm probably the best alien player in the game, my average kd is something like 70-2
1) skulks need a point at the start. base skulks simply get murdered by half decent marines, even after the bt patch
2) aliens should spawn in their most recently bought life form
3) railguns are out of control and need a damage/cost nerf. It is not hard for a good marine to hit 90%+ accuracy on railgun, one shotting the entire enemy team as they spawn
Unfortunately there are a lot of problems from the base game that are hard to work around. Combat suffers from a lot of huge swings in dominance (marines dominate the start, then when everyone gets fade aliens push back pretty effectively, then marines get exos and become dominant once again). the new patch has also introduced a lot of problems, especially with the fade, which is now even more powerful unupgraded but woefully underpowered against exos now.
FYI before 250 we had almost 50/50 win ratio on daily basis in some cases it differed by as high as 8% but you need to put into account stacking, running a bad balanced map more often that day, a patch was released and some upgrade for one side didn't work etc.
250 brought many changes to the table and while balance is HORRIBLE right now that never stopped us from working things out and fixing them it will just take time to understand what to tweak after observing stats and A LOT of games.
the game wasnt perfect before 250.. but i wish i could go back to that and i know a lot of combat players would agree! not the fault of you guys at all obviously you didnt take out my double jump or made it so shadowstep only works once, i just miss the days when combat wasnt a mod, but another form of gameplay, you guys don't get enough credit, THANKS!, but please fix the mod
the game wasnt perfect before 250.. but i wish i could go back to that and i know a lot of combat players would agree! not the fault of you guys at all obviously you didnt take out my double jump or made it so shadowstep only works once, i just miss the days when combat wasnt a mod, but another form of gameplay, you guys don't get enough credit, THANKS!, but please fix the mod
I agree, stats wise we hit that sweet 50/50 spot but it still had its shares of problems, I believe I mentioned this a couple of pages back but that is why you see a lot of what I call "duck taping" method that we went with to hold stuff together like the hard-cap on life forms for instance, this was to compensate for the lack of a res model in combat and the fact that if you lose your fade it didn't mean anything other than re-fading as fast as possible before someone else takes that fade slot.
Because of that I suggested to switch to a res model rather than the current XP model ( keep the XP for ranks and possibly buffs or other bonuses ), the gist of it is that you keep your upgrades throughout the round but you lose your lifeforms and of course the res you spent on it this will be experimented with a lot and will take some time to nail down right because we are basically starting from square one.
As far as the changes v250 brought everyone got mixed feelings about it and whatever we will do we can't make everyone happy, so that combined with the new res model may upset some people but I personally feel like we gonna need to pull rank and just do it if ends up making the mod better, we certainly can't have multiple versions out because that is a lot of extra work of maintaining them all plus the experience wont be the same across all servers and that will mess the stats up.
I don't get what you mean by
"i just miss the days when combat wasnt a mod, but another form of game play"
please do explain
oh i'm probably the best alien player in the game, my average kd is something like 70-2
Off to a good start! I have a couple of questions for you: have you ever played competitive matches in NS2? Have you ever played against a competitive player in Combat? If you thought BIGTICKET was strong, you're in for a treat when you meet anyone from nxzl. I, for one, have no trouble playing vs. BIGTICKET.
Besides, I did 112-2, 80-8, 44-0, etc. If only K/D == skill...
1) skulks need a point at the start. base skulks simply get murdered by half decent marines, even after the bt patch
2) aliens should spawn in their most recently bought life form
3) railguns are out of control and need a damage/cost nerf. It is not hard for a good marine to hit 90%+ accuracy on railgun, one shotting the entire enemy team as they spawn
1) Skulks are fine, even better than in b249. No need to buff. Maybe you're not engaging marines properly?
2) That would be interesting, except maybe for Onos and Fades since they're limited in numbers. Marines get to keep their weapons, but not Exos. But what if the player wanted to evolve to something else? Refund or be stuck as a Gorge forever? Or maybe they should be able to switch lifeforms next to the Hive.
3) Railgun exos are actually easier to engage than minigun exos. Get in their faces, they'll have a hard time tracking you around.
If possible could we have the option for two of any exo type instead of someone getting dual miniguns and being stuck with only single railgun, if two players want dual minigun or rail then i don't see why not, as long as the limit of two or more is kept?
1.Its always being maintained we have run into trouble uploading the latest version but will sort it out soon.
2.postponed those plans ( xmenu type stuff as well ) for Combat 2 which will be completely rewritten
3.for now we are only maintaining with small changes anything that would take us a long time we ignore, that time is better spent on the new code base.
oh i'm probably the best alien player in the game, my average kd is something like 70-2
Off to a good start! I have a couple of questions for you: have you ever played competitive matches in NS2? Have you ever played against a competitive player in Combat? If you thought BIGTICKET was strong, you're in for a treat when you meet anyone from nxzl. I, for one, have no trouble playing vs. BIGTICKET.
Besides, I did 112-2, 80-8, 44-0, etc. If only K/D == skill...
1) skulks need a point at the start. base skulks simply get murdered by half decent marines, even after the bt patch
2) aliens should spawn in their most recently bought life form
3) railguns are out of control and need a damage/cost nerf. It is not hard for a good marine to hit 90%+ accuracy on railgun, one shotting the entire enemy team as they spawn
1) Skulks are fine, even better than in b249. No need to buff. Maybe you're not engaging marines properly?
2) That would be interesting, except maybe for Onos and Fades since they're limited in numbers. Marines get to keep their weapons, but not Exos. But what if the player wanted to evolve to something else? Refund or be stuck as a Gorge forever? Or maybe they should be able to switch lifeforms next to the Hive.
3) Railgun exos are actually easier to engage than minigun exos. Get in their faces, they'll have a hard time tracking you around.
I've played with and against you before; I can easily say I'm a far better alien player than you or anybody currently in the competitive scene. As for BIGTICKET, we've played with all the comp players at one point or another. His average accuracy was over 35%, easily over any current competitive player on any competitive team (including archaea/nexzil). He is easily the most accurate player in the game. If you have no trouble playing against him, you're simply lying, as you are not nearly good enough to say that (and, btw, a lot of div 1 players think he's a cheater :P). On top of that, kd is pretty good measure of skill. Like I said, I average ridiculous kds. Those are the norm.
Skulks are still cannon fodder for good marines. 250 hasn't done a whole lot for them, they still have a skill ceiling as high as a crawl space, and in combat you are funneled down long corridors almost inevitably on every map. In addition, you clearly haven't played against a good marine using an exo in combat for this patch. You cannot stop a good railgun exo without an onos (and good luck with 6 of his teammates supporting him). They can easily spawn camp the entire enemy team solo since they spawn in skulk. The new fade simply doesn't have the dodging ability to dodge exos like he used to.
What's your in-game name? These are some pretty bold statements you're making there. I know I'm far from the best, but I have yet to see someone as godly as you claim to be.
When I said I had no trouble with him I was speaking from experience. He's good, but he's manageable.
I haven't played more than 1 hour of combat in this patch because of the horrible balance issues. I'll be back when they're fixed. By the way, one of the only two matches I played as aliens, BIGTICKET had a railgun exo. Pretty good aiming, but as I said before, get on his face and he misses a lot of shots.
Kind of dislike walking into e-penis comments, but first off I'd like to say that pat is indeed a solid alien player. His fading in the previous patch was almost as good as Tocz. Definitely better than the vast majority of the competitive player base.
With that said, I also agree with CiB's analysis of bigticket and his overall ability. His aim is not as good as Dragon's, but it is very good. My beef with him mostly derives from how much he tryhards in combat. But that's a personally preference and not something I'd really hold someone accountable over. He enjoys doing the same, solid strategies to maximize his effectivenes and team's ability to win. That's fine.
To Jibrail and others devs of this mod. I would highly recommend you identify and pick up a small group (5-6) of players such as pat, bigticket, and maybe even a guy who does not share the skill of those two, but plays an absurd amount of combat and knows the nuances of winning the game as opposed to dominating the opposition (Snipo, as it pains me to say). Advice from players like this, as their biases and egos are kept in check, would allow for much greater balance and quicker reaction to making those balances without having to wait and see for a 50/50 balance for too long.
Also, I really hope you guys can push through the update soon. I'm at my wits end dealing with lvl 2 adren vs. EMP right now XD
Thanks for clearing that up Gauss. I too dislike walking into e-peen territory, as it only leads to pointless arguments like this. I'm just looking for some well-deserved respect, which pat will get from me as soon as I recognize him. Stating that you're a god without any evidence won't help, especially when I have a hard time finding an opponent that actually matches or surpasses my skill other than div 1 NA/EU players.
I'm eagerly waiting for the Combat patch to upload successfully to the workshop to see how well I perform with the new changes. So far, pub games have been extremely unchallenging.
We've just published a new version of Combat to the workshop. Sorry for the delay, I kept getting Error 2 while publishing so I had to reinstall my copy of NS2... Here's the changelog!
- Fixed bugs affecting tier 3 abilities for Aliens
- Fixed Alien upgrades being applied with level 2 instead of level 3
- Hid the upgrade structure GUI
- Biomass now scales with player level
- Reduced flamethrower damage slightly
Thanks for clearing that up Gauss. I too dislike walking into e-peen territory, as it only leads to pointless arguments like this. I'm just looking for some well-deserved respect, which pat will get from me as soon as I recognize him. Stating that you're a god without any evidence won't help, especially when I have a hard time finding an opponent that actually matches or surpasses my skill other than div 1 NA/EU players.
I'm eagerly waiting for the Combat patch to upload successfully to the workshop to see how well I perform with the new changes. So far, pub games have been extremely unchallenging.
You're a fine player, I just love making fun of Brazil for no reason other than to say BRBRBR whenever I die to a CiB
Thanks for clearing that up Gauss. I too dislike walking into e-peen territory, as it only leads to pointless arguments like this. I'm just looking for some well-deserved respect, which pat will get from me as soon as I recognize him. Stating that you're a god without any evidence won't help, especially when I have a hard time finding an opponent that actually matches or surpasses my skill other than div 1 NA/EU players.
I'm eagerly waiting for the Combat patch to upload successfully to the workshop to see how well I perform with the new changes. So far, pub games have been extremely unchallenging.
You're a fine player, I just love making fun of Brazil for no reason other than to say BRBRBR whenever I die to a CiB
Stupid question, but is there some place where we can see the changelog for this?
I usually try and make the changelog available in the forum post/news update. As above, here's the changelog for the latest one:
- Fixed bugs affecting tier 3 abilities for Aliens
- Fixed Alien upgrades being applied with level 2 instead of level 3
- Hid the upgrade structure GUI
- Biomass now scales with player level
- Reduced flamethrower damage slightly
i don't know if you guys changed the shotgun or if ns2 guys did because it was fine 2 days ago now its awful. fades are back to OP, i say bring back that overpowered flamethrower marines need something to fight off 5 fades!
Shotguns, biomass, tweaks to flamethrower and GL was made by Greeds yesterday hopefully with no problems uploading it it should be out this morning, lets hope this one kicks the balance back in place.
We've got updates coming out thick and fast!
Combat Version 4.21 is now out - changelog since the last one is as follows...
- Increased shotgun rate of fire to match vanilla b250.
- Fixed carapace
- Removed link between player level to alien armor values
- Reduced EMP effectiveness slightly
ok so I just took this from vanilla NS2 v250, Greeds you might wanna check this for refernce as I told you there were 8 biomass levels I was wrong... my bad!
values are taken from level 10 biomass and level 12 biomass ( maximum ) both with and without carapace
values are health / armor
Changes made in latest version allow biomass for up to level 10 I will keep an eye on stats and see how that changes things, if needed we will enable biomass level 12, except for the onos because we have our own health/armor values and I don't see those changing to vanilla ns2 values because we are trying to keep him less frustrating to play against.
Also I missed this so thanks for telling us
From GaussWaffle:"Vanilla caps it at level 11 because it was twelve potential levels of biomass available, with the first not providing any bonuses. Ten for combat should be fine"
Stats wise we saw a positive change yesterday with 55% marine win and 45% alien win, for today's patch its 51% marine win and 49% alien win from a total of 70 matches as I write this post, I will re-check when the day is over to see the total stats for today but so far its looking good.
So first, I want to applaud your hard work and dedication for keeping this mod alive! Combat in NS1 was the sole reason for me to stick around for so long.
Now that aliens have been fixed, there have been some nerfs to marines that may need to have reviewed. Also, with Jibrail recent post of new health values for aliens, aliens now have increase health, specially skulks and fades.
Per the changelogs, what was the original values for flamethrower damage? Did this affect the ability to reduce the alien's regen rate of energy? Or is that a separate value? If you reduce the damage, then perhaps increase the effectiveness of the flamethrower's ability to reduce the alien's regen rate of energy?
Lastly, I have issues with the statistics for the win/loss ratios between marines and aliens. And per posts from others, it can take 1 or 2 individuals that play either sides to drastically swing the changes of a win for the team. I will admit, it will not be easy to remedy, even if you have exhaustive testing, the edge case players will just throw the data to the floor. Team stacking is always going to be a problem, as marines are just easier to play for new/casual players. Aliens do require more time to play, as the movement for aliens require playing as a non bipedal.
The reduced values on EMP seems drastic, a 25 point reduction:
The EMP reduction was my suggestion, and derived from the change in adrenaline and how it functions. In previous builds adrenaline was just 2x more base energy to work with, and same regen rate. For the purposes of EMP, this meant it would take two EMPs to actually drain an alien of his stores. With the b250 adrenaline being 30% more stores and 30% more regen rate, it allowed for EMP in its previous form to be almost just as effective against an alien with adrenaline as it would be to one without adrenaline. I felt that a reduction in the range of 100% ---> 75% would be significant enough to retain its usefulness against non adrenaline players and adrenaline player alike, while making allowing for it to usually not be an instant death sentence to adrenaline players. As it stands, the 130% reserves would be knocked to 55% with one EMP in this new model. Combined with another consecutive EMP or a flamethrower, and you've got either a sitting duck fade or one which happened to have full energy and now has maybe 10% reserves to try and make away with.
EMP as an ability, particularly in dealing with fades, is somewhat necessary. I'm not keen on personally using it, but I understand its place in combat mode currently. If it turns out that the 25% reduction was too drastic I'm sure they'll change it back. But I'm glad they went ahead and made it, if only just to see its true effects of gameplay
yes what Gausswaffle said, I don' want one marine to be able to hit a button and drain almost all energy specially if there are multiple aliens around, what I'd like to see instead is more marines using it at the same time or in combo with flamethrower to slow aliens and that requires more skill, its fairly OP specially when it recharges every 30 or so seconds. this was also the problem with ink cloud one alien could activate it and it would cover a big area after I changed its color and made it less blinding it can still distract marines but if used at the same spot by multiple aliens its gonna be more effective at least from what I've seen.
I don't think you guys can do it, but similar to TF2 Pyros, it would be fun to add an airblast to flamethrowers. Can nerf the damage; more suited to support....?
you are crazy if you think the game is balanced right now, aura on some fade like tocz thats just going to track you down and rape you, is GG, you would know being an OPd FADE
there are far less good marines, than good over powered fades out there.
Comments
You are welcome to leave constructive criticism instead of leaving comments like the one above and this This doesn't actually tell me anything I can work with other than me understanding that you pretty much suck as an alien which isn't weird if you are new to the game, when in a situation like that pretty much in any game where you play with a higher skill player you are ought to die a lot and eventually end up losing and there isn't much to do there its not like we will make changes to punish skilled players to appease the rest.
1) skulks need a point at the start. base skulks simply get murdered by half decent marines, even after the bt patch
2) aliens should spawn in their most recently bought life form
3) railguns are out of control and need a damage/cost nerf. It is not hard for a good marine to hit 90%+ accuracy on railgun, one shotting the entire enemy team as they spawn
Unfortunately there are a lot of problems from the base game that are hard to work around. Combat suffers from a lot of huge swings in dominance (marines dominate the start, then when everyone gets fade aliens push back pretty effectively, then marines get exos and become dominant once again). the new patch has also introduced a lot of problems, especially with the fade, which is now even more powerful unupgraded but woefully underpowered against exos now.
the game wasnt perfect before 250.. but i wish i could go back to that and i know a lot of combat players would agree! not the fault of you guys at all obviously you didnt take out my double jump or made it so shadowstep only works once, i just miss the days when combat wasnt a mod, but another form of gameplay, you guys don't get enough credit, THANKS!, but please fix the mod
I agree, stats wise we hit that sweet 50/50 spot but it still had its shares of problems, I believe I mentioned this a couple of pages back but that is why you see a lot of what I call "duck taping" method that we went with to hold stuff together like the hard-cap on life forms for instance, this was to compensate for the lack of a res model in combat and the fact that if you lose your fade it didn't mean anything other than re-fading as fast as possible before someone else takes that fade slot.
Because of that I suggested to switch to a res model rather than the current XP model ( keep the XP for ranks and possibly buffs or other bonuses ), the gist of it is that you keep your upgrades throughout the round but you lose your lifeforms and of course the res you spent on it this will be experimented with a lot and will take some time to nail down right because we are basically starting from square one.
As far as the changes v250 brought everyone got mixed feelings about it and whatever we will do we can't make everyone happy, so that combined with the new res model may upset some people but I personally feel like we gonna need to pull rank and just do it if ends up making the mod better, we certainly can't have multiple versions out because that is a lot of extra work of maintaining them all plus the experience wont be the same across all servers and that will mess the stats up.
I don't get what you mean by
"i just miss the days when combat wasnt a mod, but another form of game play"
please do explain
Off to a good start! I have a couple of questions for you: have you ever played competitive matches in NS2? Have you ever played against a competitive player in Combat? If you thought BIGTICKET was strong, you're in for a treat when you meet anyone from nxzl. I, for one, have no trouble playing vs. BIGTICKET.
Besides, I did 112-2, 80-8, 44-0, etc. If only K/D == skill...
1) Skulks are fine, even better than in b249. No need to buff. Maybe you're not engaging marines properly?
2) That would be interesting, except maybe for Onos and Fades since they're limited in numbers. Marines get to keep their weapons, but not Exos. But what if the player wanted to evolve to something else? Refund or be stuck as a Gorge forever? Or maybe they should be able to switch lifeforms next to the Hive.
3) Railgun exos are actually easier to engage than minigun exos. Get in their faces, they'll have a hard time tracking you around.
What happened to the plans for build menu?
If possible could we have the option for two of any exo type instead of someone getting dual miniguns and being stuck with only single railgun, if two players want dual minigun or rail then i don't see why not, as long as the limit of two or more is kept?
2.postponed those plans ( xmenu type stuff as well ) for Combat 2 which will be completely rewritten
3.for now we are only maintaining with small changes anything that would take us a long time we ignore, that time is better spent on the new code base.
Skulks are still cannon fodder for good marines. 250 hasn't done a whole lot for them, they still have a skill ceiling as high as a crawl space, and in combat you are funneled down long corridors almost inevitably on every map. In addition, you clearly haven't played against a good marine using an exo in combat for this patch. You cannot stop a good railgun exo without an onos (and good luck with 6 of his teammates supporting him). They can easily spawn camp the entire enemy team solo since they spawn in skulk. The new fade simply doesn't have the dodging ability to dodge exos like he used to.
When I said I had no trouble with him I was speaking from experience. He's good, but he's manageable.
I haven't played more than 1 hour of combat in this patch because of the horrible balance issues. I'll be back when they're fixed. By the way, one of the only two matches I played as aliens, BIGTICKET had a railgun exo. Pretty good aiming, but as I said before, get on his face and he misses a lot of shots.
With that said, I also agree with CiB's analysis of bigticket and his overall ability. His aim is not as good as Dragon's, but it is very good. My beef with him mostly derives from how much he tryhards in combat. But that's a personally preference and not something I'd really hold someone accountable over. He enjoys doing the same, solid strategies to maximize his effectivenes and team's ability to win. That's fine.
To Jibrail and others devs of this mod. I would highly recommend you identify and pick up a small group (5-6) of players such as pat, bigticket, and maybe even a guy who does not share the skill of those two, but plays an absurd amount of combat and knows the nuances of winning the game as opposed to dominating the opposition (Snipo, as it pains me to say). Advice from players like this, as their biases and egos are kept in check, would allow for much greater balance and quicker reaction to making those balances without having to wait and see for a 50/50 balance for too long.
Also, I really hope you guys can push through the update soon. I'm at my wits end dealing with lvl 2 adren vs. EMP right now XD
I'm eagerly waiting for the Combat patch to upload successfully to the workshop to see how well I perform with the new changes. So far, pub games have been extremely unchallenging.
- Fixed bugs affecting tier 3 abilities for Aliens
- Fixed Alien upgrades being applied with level 2 instead of level 3
- Hid the upgrade structure GUI
- Biomass now scales with player level
- Reduced flamethrower damage slightly
You're a fine player, I just love making fun of Brazil for no reason other than to say BRBRBR whenever I die to a CiB
haha... Or should I say huehuehue? :P
https://github.com/AlexHayton/NS2Combat
I usually try and make the changelog available in the forum post/news update. As above, here's the changelog for the latest one:
- Fixed bugs affecting tier 3 abilities for Aliens
- Fixed Alien upgrades being applied with level 2 instead of level 3
- Hid the upgrade structure GUI
- Biomass now scales with player level
- Reduced flamethrower damage slightly
Combat Version 4.21 is now out - changelog since the last one is as follows...
- Increased shotgun rate of fire to match vanilla b250.
- Fixed carapace
- Removed link between player level to alien armor values
- Reduced EMP effectiveness slightly
values are taken from level 10 biomass and level 12 biomass ( maximum ) both with and without carapace
values are health / armor
Changes made in latest version allow biomass for up to level 10 I will keep an eye on stats and see how that changes things, if needed we will enable biomass level 12, except for the onos because we have our own health/armor values and I don't see those changing to vanilla ns2 values because we are trying to keep him less frustrating to play against.
Also I missed this so thanks for telling us
From GaussWaffle:"Vanilla caps it at level 11 because it was twelve potential levels of biomass available, with the first not providing any bonuses. Ten for combat should be fine"
Stats wise we saw a positive change yesterday with 55% marine win and 45% alien win, for today's patch its 51% marine win and 49% alien win from a total of 70 matches as I write this post, I will re-check when the day is over to see the total stats for today but so far its looking good.
Now that aliens have been fixed, there have been some nerfs to marines that may need to have reviewed. Also, with Jibrail recent post of new health values for aliens, aliens now have increase health, specially skulks and fades.
https://github.com/AlexHayton/NS2Combat
Per the changelogs, what was the original values for flamethrower damage? Did this affect the ability to reduce the alien's regen rate of energy? Or is that a separate value? If you reduce the damage, then perhaps increase the effectiveness of the flamethrower's ability to reduce the alien's regen rate of energy?
https://github.com/AlexHayton/NS2Combat/commit/1a91293b657e851f2981be4f822115c37d97668f
The reduced values on EMP seems drastic, a 25 point reduction:
https://github.com/AlexHayton/NS2Combat/commit/9c8de9f24978736148a3eb31d6b4f3f29688a4f5
Lastly, I have issues with the statistics for the win/loss ratios between marines and aliens. And per posts from others, it can take 1 or 2 individuals that play either sides to drastically swing the changes of a win for the team. I will admit, it will not be easy to remedy, even if you have exhaustive testing, the edge case players will just throw the data to the floor. Team stacking is always going to be a problem, as marines are just easier to play for new/casual players. Aliens do require more time to play, as the movement for aliens require playing as a non bipedal.
The EMP reduction was my suggestion, and derived from the change in adrenaline and how it functions. In previous builds adrenaline was just 2x more base energy to work with, and same regen rate. For the purposes of EMP, this meant it would take two EMPs to actually drain an alien of his stores. With the b250 adrenaline being 30% more stores and 30% more regen rate, it allowed for EMP in its previous form to be almost just as effective against an alien with adrenaline as it would be to one without adrenaline. I felt that a reduction in the range of 100% ---> 75% would be significant enough to retain its usefulness against non adrenaline players and adrenaline player alike, while making allowing for it to usually not be an instant death sentence to adrenaline players. As it stands, the 130% reserves would be knocked to 55% with one EMP in this new model. Combined with another consecutive EMP or a flamethrower, and you've got either a sitting duck fade or one which happened to have full energy and now has maybe 10% reserves to try and make away with.
EMP as an ability, particularly in dealing with fades, is somewhat necessary. I'm not keen on personally using it, but I understand its place in combat mode currently. If it turns out that the 25% reduction was too drastic I'm sure they'll change it back. But I'm glad they went ahead and made it, if only just to see its true effects of gameplay
As for the flamethrower damage, could some detail on what the original value was and how much actual reduction was applied?
you are crazy if you think the game is balanced right now, aura on some fade like tocz thats just going to track you down and rape you, is GG, you would know being an OPd FADE
there are far less good marines, than good over powered fades out there.