I dislike how common Faraday was before the minor nerf, and it was particularly good against shields. Here is the change from two months ago:
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HP 1700 -> 1600
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Reload time 2.6 -> 2.7
There was talk of tweaking how EMP works. I wrote the code for it to check its viability but would rather not mess with balance too much at the moment, especially to change a system that seems to be working.
Current EMP works by decaying at 4% per second and stunning the target if it has over 100% EMP damage. This means that a 0 second stun takes 100% of the unit's health to achieve, while a 2 second stun takes 108% health. Stun timers are set by controlling how much overstun is possible with each weapon. The issue with this is that, for most weapons, once a unit is stunned you are just-about guaranteed to stun it for the full duration. Stacking EMP damage is pointless.
The new system makes weapons able to be configured so that they require significant amounts of damage to raise the stun time. Most of the ways you might think to do this don't make sense within the system of break its invariants, so it takes a bit of mental refactoring to see what to do. One solution is to make weapons deal less damage for all EMP damage they would deal over 100%.
I don't want to apply arbitrary modifiers to all EMP weapons, but there are ways to make it non-arbitrary. For example, the parameters could be set such that all EMP weapons reach their maximum stun time at an effective pre-modifier 200% EMP damage. For example in a weapon with 1500 and 2s EMP time hits a 1000 hp unit it would be stunned for 1 second, and if it did 2000 damage it would stun that particular unit for 2 seconds. The EMP times for units with little EMP damage could be increased with this change.
