Malice + Chastic Burst = Potentially OP BOOM?!

You should try the Marza's level 6 ability and stick it in a group of 100 frigates. Enjoy the fireworks.

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.

We've been going on about this combo for a long while, throw in fracture and it's even more of a party. I wouldn't call it OP, however, it's just Advent synergy being Advent synergy.

The Marza and Ragnarov are also capable of such mass destruction, even by themselves.

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%. 

This.

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.

This damage is still diminished by shield mitigation and armor twice. (I believe the 30% is of the actual damage taken, not the total received. When the ability takes effect and does the actual damage, that amount of damage is also affected by the mitigation and armor of the target). Its certainly a good combo but it will never reach anything close to that level of theoretical damage due to the large amount of damage reductions that gets into it.

Honestly malice was really lacking as they gave it a big nerf early on, if it really proves a problem all you have to do is reduce the target counts of malice slightly.

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

Malice.... ah... brings back memories.... of DESTRUCTION.

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.

well, to get more accurate, the average frigate armor (3) will mean you do only 87% of the dmg, so I imagine if you subtracted 2 frigates from Bilun's formula, it would account for the double armor, but still not the shield mit.

obviously, capital ships have more armor and then there's armor upgrades, so this gets further away from the real result the further the game goes on.

Using the above example, i wouldnt expect to do more than 1500 damage

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.

well, a bit of history:

the launch version of basic Sins had Malice + Cleansing Brilliance as a fleet destroying combo... and until you got cleansing brilliance, you could combo Malice with Vengeance (I believe... was a long time ago)... got target capped and all kinds of nerf-dom. Malice hasn't been the same since really.

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.

Lets be realistic:

1. Cleansing brilliance is a level 6 ability so its not worth waiting for.

2. Talking about how armor affects abilities is a thing of the past thanks to fracture.

3. Straight out of the box malice + chastic burst is brutal.

Until we see how the vasari fair i'd say advent late game fleets are insanely god like with ships like the domina now working properly and shield projection getting fixed to be more efficient. As a result it seems like they just got 2 new utility cruisers.

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.

'tis true

Not sure I agree.  Fracture should certainly be included in the discussion(as a counterpoint to malice being affected by armor twice) That said, later in the game it's not like Fracture is going to be reducing armor to 0.  Armor is stil a factor with fracture- just a significantly smaller issue then it was previously.

'tis also true.  Honestly while I don't think Chastic burst in general is OP, I do think you get a bit too much of the damage right out of the gate(45% of rank 4 damage at rank 1).

Well the advent has always had an amazing late game- with the domina fixed this is certainly a bit more so.  How was shield projection made more efficient though? I seem to have missed that change.

That said, with the addition of titans, I suspect in general it may be necessary to make sure all factions have access to some anti-AoE tools(as many titans have strong aoe potential).  The advent is pretty good in this regard already.  The Vasari are decent but no great)(repair cloud & tough ships).  The TEC in general only have hoshikos.  TEC loyals also have their titan's shield other ability which is a phenominal AoE-counter if their titan is present.

All in all though I think TEC needs more in the way of AoE counters(maybe rework Ciel's Enbolden to this end?).  

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.

Ah, that would explain why I haven't noticed- too habituated to turning off Shield projection autocast- they could implement perfect ability use ai and I'd never notice  

Oh certainly.  I was only pointing out that it's the closest thing in the TEC arsenal to an AoE counter- which isn't really what it's best suited to, regardless of how amazing of a ship it is.

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?

IIRC, there were actually two damage bugs.  One was bizarre and found quickly while one was pernicious and took a while to figure out and prove it's existence.  The first IIRC was that their beam duration was longer than their cooldown or something and somehow that led to extra damage output.  The second, I think was a problem with the game code itself where ships not being hit by beams would still take damage from them after being hit.  It was really bizarre..  Maybe they were the same error, but I thought they were separate.

To answer your question though, I'm pretty sure it was there from the beginning.