Quick question, how many health points does Symbiote actually gnaw into your health pool? And how often does it gnaw at your health pool once it starts
Straight up, you need to be a good player to get use of this. It's a farmer or pointholder tool. Sustained average gameplay aside, if you can run a game session at 1-2kpm then consider it. If you struggle to hit 1kpm, then you'll fight the thing instead of getting a benefit. The main benefit is that it frees up a suit slot. It doesn't stack with nanoweav so that slot gets freed up. If point holding, flak is often substituted. If farming, ASC, possibly others. One super obscure loadout: Pair it with Bionics, particularly on an Engie than gets more from ASC. Bionics mitigates the gnawing effect of Symbiot. Because you only have 100 in your health pool, the most it can take from you is 99. So at full gnaw you'll be 1 health and 900 Shield. This seems like a nightmare for an EMP grenade and it is, but no worse really than running Bionics by itself.
It's actually bugging at the moment. As long as you don't resupply, it never starts draining health. But if you do resupply, it won't stop draining health even after receiving enemy fire
I highly not recommend to use it with bionics implant, it cannot drain from your shield, but this health gnaw interrupt shield regeneration and sometimes it have very bad timing. I think what the only reasonable use of this implant is for a medic with nanoregen device just to equip granade bandolier and be able to carry 4 revive granades.
In my opinion it just isn't useful under any circumstances, outside of just screwing around with it for fun. It doesn't offer more than nanoweave and while as said above it opens the suit slot for something else, it does take an implant slot anyway. It's just one more thing to think about and won't make a difference where nanoweave wouldn't have been able to either. Better to take implants that allow the user to survive or avoid combat in ways which aren't already covered. Battle Hardened for example is a great and universal implant for infantry.
if you normally run with regen then running symbiote as second implant is a good choice if you want more all round survivability using flak armor. after all rockets and C4 are common in infantry fights almost as much as gunfire. getting 20% more effective HP vs firearms and 50% more effective HP against explosives is pretty good if you want to survive a long time.
