Fireteam is not overpowered. If you play quick play, most fireteams can be eliminated with some skill and patience.
You must use cunning and intelligently engage the fireteam. Head-on duels don’t work. Just like in the original movie from 1987.
Actually, there is a rough difficulty indicator. The more Epic players are in fireteam, the more difficult. Only premade fireteams especially consisting of Epic players deal extreme damage e.g. with “automatic” pistols and pose a significant challenge even for highly-skilled predators.
Some general hints:
- Focus on a single weapon at first.
- Start playing a superior class first like elder-stalker with down range and plasma caster. Its ranged damage is extreme and can down many fireteam classes with a single hit.
- If you have difficulty in finding the fireteam play as hunter-tracker.
- Don’t claim. Use downed fireteam member as bait or eliminate them with ranged weapon.
- Don’t stay cloaked and don’t switch between thermal and normal view too often. Good fireteam member will detect and attack you. Cloaking makes noise and is only perfect if staying stationary. Switching between thermal and normal view creates flash which is visible from a long distance.
- Avoid close combat against full fireteams. Close combat is only halfway safe against single fireteam members. Superior melee weapons: alpha sickle, elder sword, combistick and net gun.
- Hitting enemies is easy with the hand held plasma caster but it has got only low damage. So, don’t put too much training time into it.
- Do not enter buildings with fireteams inside. Just shoot inside with fully charged plasma caster shots.
- Just like all weapons only use them if the tactical situation is appropriate. For example, it’s difficult to hit moving targets with the Yautja bow but it is easy to hit a fireteam member’s head who is trying to revive his comrade.
- Avoid duels.
- Don’t eat boars too close to the fireteam.
- Just leave if all fireteam members are Epic.
The game is very complex. I have played from release and I am not familiar with all of the weapons neither for predator and nor for fireteam. For instance, I did not know that it’s best to drop bear traps on top of fireteam members and not on the ground.
Note: separate created for hints