For the most part I like the balance decisions in the latest patch.
The only gripe I have is the ridiculous price of the pipes:
It's not about "X weapon is overpowered", it's about "X weapon is overpowered compared to Y, Z, and A weapons". If you have 14 balanced weapons, and 1 overpowered weapon, then in essence the game only has 1 weapon since that weapon will be used every time (except for sh*ts and giggles).
Weapon balanced is not about making the game harder, it's about making every weapon as useful as every other.
I agree with this statement and it's precisely why I think the pipe bomb price
must be lowered, or preferably have the demolitions discount on pipes increased. Before the pipe bomb was a real bang for the buck, now it's a monumental waste of money, especially nwo that grenades have been buffed.
I always shoot for sirens and husks as soon as I see them.
I have noticed, my score is pretty low on my server when I play with friends, usually 200 or so by the end of the game. That is usually because I go 9mm and xbow and shoot sirens, husks, FPs and scrakes, ect. I use the 9mm while I wait, but usually we have 2 good commandos that do the trash clearing. I do enjoy playing this way, even if I don't have the massive kills I used to have when playing commando all the time. I have always enjoyed sniping in games, that and being a medic.
It's good that you do that, but there are several oversights to this:
1) That tactic is only feasible most of the time on wide, open maps where demolitions is already ineffective. In smaller maps like Biotics Lab (which is my favourite map), sirens tend to pop around corners. Since corridors in such maps are limited in length and you need to place pipes such that you're not in the detonation radius yet close enough to function as last line defences, the pipes are placed relatively close to the front line.
This means that when a siren is spotted, she's already right in front of a berserker, firebug, commando or support. She generally doesn't open her gob unless she's within attacking range, and since you can't:
a) cancel her scream attack by killing her while she's screaming, or
b) prevent her from screaming when you
do kill her,
this means that quite often when you see the siren, you're
already too late to save the pipe bomb. Note that I'm
not saying that it's impossible to kill a siren before she makes a noise.
2) You could place pipe bombs once you see something that needs to be blown up by the pipe like a fleshpound or scrake as someone else mentioned earlier, but again, this just isn't feasible on CQB maps:
a) corridors are narrow, and since you can't clip through your teammates a la l4d, quite often you might prevent teammates from backpedalling and get them killed
b) if a fleshpound is spotted, your job as demo is to kill anything that will distract sharpshooters from doing their job; if you are ****ing around blocking teammates' movement trying to place a pipe bomb, you'll only end up blowing yourself up as the fleshpound comes within triggering range and removing yourself as an extra gun to remove distractions.
3) Unfortunately, you too are human. Just because you aim for sirens and husks doesn't mean that you can guarantee that you'll be able to save the pipe
most of the time. If a siren pops around a corner in Biotics Lab you only have a split second to dispatch her before she destroys the pipes, and that's discounting the high % that there will be other zeds in the way, as well as whether there are more immediate threats in your vicinity, like ninja crawlers that spawned from under the floor.
I had another point but I completely forgot what that was.