Replicated. I don't know the math behind Malice, but I know it works well with AoE damage abilities. Took out some 25-30 ships.

What you're describing is in a nutshell the advent rebel fleet strategy.  The loyals personify the traditional advent battleball, making said battleball even harder to nick with suppression Aura & +2% max shield mitigation(not to mention several fleet wide damage bonuses).  As a result I'd say the loyalists are better at dealing with small fleets of hard targets(fleets composed mostly of capitalships).

By contrast the rebels are *in general* very good at AoE damage, which combined with their ability to revive enemy frigates 10% of the time makes them very strong against frigate heavy fleets.  This trend is further perpetuated by the rebels  having Wail of the Sacrificed, arguably the single strongest AoE in the game.

That said I don't think it's OP.  It's the advent rebel's main new synergy.  try throwing a capitalship fleet(with perhaps some carrier cruisers parked safely on the other side of the gravity well ready to jump away) at them and watch almost every new synergy they have go up in smoke(nothing to revive, no large clusters of frigates to AoE, the large number of targets Eradica can engage may be partially wasted).

Also one side note: try spreading your ships out.   The nature of Malice is the more targets Chastic burst hits, the more damage Malice will do per target .  This means there is a nonlinear relationship(square actually) between the number of targets hit and total damage- which is to say if you can halve the number of targets hit, you reduce malice's total damage by about 75%. 

Sins is a "Real time STRATEGY" game.

This, this piece of awesomeness right here, is a strategy.

It doesn't need fixing, or balancing. And this is coming from a TEC player.

[e digicons]:'([/e]  Those words make me sad and the when I saw that in the patch notes made me not an Advent player. 

Also useful way of doing quick malice mental math:

Each frigate affected by malice & hit by the AoE increases the damage of the AoE by about 10%, each Cap ship 15%.

So a 1000 damage AoE that hits 2 capital ships and 4 frigates can be expected to deal *roughly* the same damage as a 1700 damage AoE would do.

The actual reality is a bit more complicated as it is affected by variance in armor(also the above approximation doesn't account for malice damage going through armor twice) and in the case of advent opponents variable max shield mitigation.  There are also a few other minor ommissions to this calculation BUT This isn't meant to be a precise calculation, it's just useful as it gives a fairly close to the mark mental-math approximation of the effect of Malice.

I know I asked in the post "potentially OP" but I DO really like it. Thanks for the clarification that Malice damage propogation is calculated after shield mitigation and armour.

I like this and don't think it should be nerfed.

A long time ago, the fleet wiping ability combo was [(Animosity+Vengeance)+Ruthlessness+Cleansing Brilliance+(Illuminators+Amplify Energy Aura)]+Malice.  If you combined all those abilities properly, you would end up with preposterously high damage to enemy fleets.

Animosity+Vengeance: while it would have to be used just before casting Malice because it would be overwritten, but it effectively took double the enemy fleet's power and used it against it.

Ruthlessness: increased DPS by 1, but when propagated across the entire fleet, that suddenly became a very fearsome ability.

Cleansing Brilliance: a properly lined up shot can hit multiple targets which will all take full damage from the shot, each one taking 2000 raw damage.

Illuminators [Damage Bug]+Amplify Energy Aura: during primary combat, this would and still is a significant portion of your damage output.  Just before casting abilities, you would fly all Illuminators into the heart of the enemy fleet and let them loose (presuming they weren't already there).

Malice: propagated damage across the entire enemy fleet.  The other things hurt, but this is what made entire fleets pop.

Let's presume for a second that you only had Ruthlessness going for you when you cast this with 50 ships in the enemy fleet.  That's 1+(50-1)*0.3=15.7 DPS for ten seconds.  That hurt, but was only a part of things.  

Let's say you hit five ships with Cleansing Brilliance.  That's 2,000+(5-1)*2000=10,000 damage to afflicted units and 8,000 damage to any units that happened to be hit with Malice but not the beam.

When they nerfed Malice, a little piece of me died.  It's also the reason that I switched from Advent to Vasari as my primary race and why in Rebalanced Races includes a buff to Malice's target count.  That's also the patch that nerfed nano bomb and Missile Barrage.  That was my least favorite patch in the history of Sins.

It really was at the time.  You could perform the combo without it, but dealing thousands of points of damage to every unit the enemy fleet was absolutely brutal.

They changed the autocast so that multiple guardians shouldn't all autocast at once, leaving you at times with 5 shield projections and sometimes none. That said they really made it worse as it will now try to use it outside of combat, unless that was fixed in 0.80.

Only still the best repair cruiser in the game.

so... I was never clear on this... did the Illuminators always have the damage bug (you know, up until they became plastic sporks)? or was it accidentally introduced at some point?