The pressure difference was fireteam sided during the trail and when the game released the community reported as such. They had infinite ammo, healing, gear resupply and could run and gun most of their missions down in 3 minutes. Predator felt oppressed the entire game, no high point of power just constant damage taken unless you played it super far back behind cover and poked the entire match until you all in after getting 1 knock down on an out of position marine.
Illfonic rebalanced the damage so that the Predator took less in trade and so felt less threatened, alleviating the pressure on one side, but they just perpetuated more of the same gameplay - the Fireteam runs and guns and the predator is face tanking shots the entire game but this time it isn’t as effective.
What I think they should have do instead of adjusting damage numbers is remove around half the ammo the fireteam has at maximum (spawn and carry at any given time). That would give the fireteam a power spike in the early game when they have all their guns fully stocked but encourages them to be conservative in their playstyle or run out of ammo and be MUCH weaker in the late game. High powered snipers and shotgun secondaries with fewer bullets than ARs would be ammo inefficient, 1 shot killing the AI but only being able to fire each weapon a maximum of say 30 times so you literally wouldn’t be able to run a full team of them - you would run low on ammo killing AI and be vulnerable until you resupplied if you missed any shots on the predator. Both the Predator and the fireteam feel a sense of pressure at different times and thus also get to feel powerful at different times.
With that, the Predator could still pick at the fireteam from a distance in the early game as the more successful Preds did prior to the 1.06 patch and they would take damage for being out in the open for more than a few seconds but they would KNOW that the fireteam cannot keep up that pressure forever and that at some point, they would eventually need ammo. The predator could destroy ammo and encourage wastage of bullets by weaving in and out of them until eventually the fireteam have to fight the Predator using their secondary weapons or knives. That gives the fireteam an early game advantage while it also encourages them to play the slow game and curve out into the late game, where the Predator has an advantage.
This naturally pushes the game more towards the movie experience, the fireteam shows up as badasses kitted out with enough firepower to rip apart anything they might encounter but if they are wasteful, shooting at every stray branch until they find their foe, they will find themselves out of ammo when the foe ultimately finds them. They need to take things slow, make their shots count.
With this ammo efficiency question giving players more to think about in their loadout I would think we would see more diverse choices or better counterplay to specialized teams running cookie cutter builds.
Secondarily;
If that failed to vary the playstyles I still would still refrain from direct damage/resilience changes to the predator and fireteam and instead would have implemented movement penalties for gear weight. The fireteam is largely considered hyper mobile, able to bunny hop diagonally backwards away from Plasma Caster shots while returnign fire. This mobility is especially noticeable when the predator attempts melee attacks with their somewhat clumsy animations that pause it’s movement and allows the fire team to create distance.
For an idea of the level of weight I personally think equipment should have, the largest sniper rifle in the game and the Light machine gun would apply an 8% speed and jump height debuff for carrying either on your person. For med and ammo pack gear options, each another 5% debuff. The G-ROW and other assault rifles at 4%, the same penalty for most shotguns. For the minigun (the slow when in hand is pretty perfect as is, wouldn’t change it but) even when stowed on your back it should cause you to take a 10% debuff from the sheer weight of it. Grenades and other smaller gear 2% debuff each. In total with all the heaviest gear in the game, a character could have their speed and jump height slowed by 30%. A significant penalty that natively quicker, less durable classes might be able to deal with but a tankier, doubly slow Support fully kitted out with a 50 cal and a minigun WILL fall behind if the team needs to sprint. They will NOT be able to easily jump out of the way of plasma caster explosions aimed at them, they will have to soak more of the damage with their class ability and if the yautja manages to self destruct, the sprint out of the area of affect will be a lot less certain if you cant trust your geared-out self to make the jump over an obstacle someone else with lighter loadout did. You will actually feel heavy and it will affect your decisions making from loadout screen to extraction.
With these two changes, one fairly simple and one more in-depth but still doable with no change to gun-play, models, animation (other than playback speed) or damage, you would see many players stray away from the high damage low capacity sniper rifles, away from the pure DPS light machine guns and onto better feeling, less sluggish, faster paced weapons and the fireteam would feel more stranded in the jungle than they do now without affecting their ability to kill the predator if they are managing their resources well as a group.
If any of you read this far without abandoning my rambling, thanks for your time.