I've done some testing with the bug, and it strongly seems like it's damage reduction is not tied to bugs with health drain. With that in mind, it looks like it has two modes of operation: 1. After you spawn, you won't have the health drain at all while you still have the damage reduction bonus. 2. After you re-supply, you'll have the damage reduction but you'll get a health drain timer that doesn't reset upon taking damage. So, my question to you Roxxley is: Do you think it's fair to just keep re-deploying and avoiding the health drain trigger altogether? Personally, I feel it is fair because it takes active measures to even activate the timer and even then it will bring a large disadvantage (unbearable without tier 5). Whereas not having health drain basically makes it a nanoweave armor without all the additional resistances.
Too be honest they should just redo the Symbiote implant and call it something like "Adrenaline" '20% resistance to small arms damage'. But with no bite because that's why almost nobody uses the implant in the first place. The Trade-off would be it takes an implant slot and it's not as powerful as Nanoweave armor but in response you could say carry ammo bandolier and carry 'Adrenaline' with some other implant and still be pretty effective.
I suppose that the health drain might not be necessary to balance it either. It's already a bit less inclusive with resistances than nanoweave armor
Yeah, it looks like there's a way to avoid bad effects but restraining from resupplying or being revived is a bit dumb. Anyway, I moved back to being a stalker for my mag-scatter purposes at least for now and probably won't be using symbiote as much. Even if it and some other implant bugs were fixed, I feel that my sidearm primary non-stalker cloak experiment has reached a conclusion after 20 000 kills and now it's time to go back to old with a freshened perspective. E: I said earlier, that the bugs with cloak were too annoying, but after playing stalker again it doesn't feel like they're as annoying as the ones on other loadouts. Probably the dumbest one is the darklight bug in biolabs that makes every cloaker flicker -.- but at least this time I'm much more prepared to do business without cloak and can expect less from it. I do hope that devs turn their bug hunting game back on, before releasing the bulk of new features (and bugs)
