friendly fire is such an all-encompassing influence on gameplay that I don’t necessarily agree it nerfs any one merc, even the spammy ones like nader and fletcher.
Yes, you can’t lob nades into enemies mindlessly, but they can’t bumrush you as a group effectively either. Say you are cooking a nade as fragger, you can adjust your positioning to control the optimal movements of your opponents (typically you want one enemy to cross LoS of the other), thus AoE denial can be more effective as well.
Chokes in particular are harder to go through with FF(and collision) on, and thats an indirect buff to AoE mercs.
Shame that isn’t even a thing on ff servers.