Huh. That seems consistent with memory, although I cannot test the shield explosion part. I did try a dry run last night to see if I could get cryo bursts off of protected targets but I never made it to Dragoons. All I really learned is a level 1 quarian engineer without turret is much less fun to play than I thought.
I've only seen a volus top the charts once, and he was packing some heat. I think an optimized multishot shotgun, and detonated his mine ASAP. Left the rest of us in bad spots to survive though, and I don't like situations where instead of rounding a corner and picking up a team mate, you get more kills.
If you want a more standalone build you'll need the volus adept. The power cool down bonus caps at +200%, and biotic spheres gives you +60%, do you can carry a gun as heavy as +50% and still have decent speed on shield boost. Combat volus engineers are less support and more hit and run. Lot of cloaking, dropping bombs, leading enemies and detonating.
Wow, you're right. What surprises me is that I misread the last evolution. It increases the damage of warp against barriers and armor, but I recalled something about damage boost entirely. Unless the Valkyrie has a unique warp.Not unless there's a base 10% damage increase to affected targets without Expose that the power makes no mention of. The base description only mentions weakening armor, which is a separate effect - and one which Cryo Blast also gets, and gets a bonus to from Frozen Vulnerability at rank 6. Though Warp also gets a bonus to it of equal size from Pierce at rank 6, and neither mentions what their base rate is, so it's impossible to compare them there.