Mass Effect 3.5 Does this thread have a soul?

[Arbitrarity]

Speaking of multiplayer, how would I best spec my new Asari Justicar for being able to do well in all three difficulties?

Justicar is inherently not that good in Bronze. Actually, I'd say defensive Justicar isn't very worthwhile unless you have an Adept, Vanguard, or Human Sentinel (or Turian Sentinel, to a lesser extent) to detonate your Reaves.

Anyways. There's one big decision you make as a Justicar; Offensive or Defensive Bubble.
As a defensive Justicar, you get shield recharge (or Radius)/damage reduction/shield recharge and damage reduction. Your objective is to find a nice place to stand and throw down your bubble, so that it covers as many allies as possible. This is pretty much useless on Bronze, since everyone runs around. On Gold, it can be effective on some maps, especially on the hold objectives. Your bubble is an enormous amount of damage reduction, and lets you lay down constant fire with a weapon of your choice.
As an offensive Justicar, you get Radius/Damage Taken/Warp on Bubble. You want to find a chokepoint where enemies will funnel through, throw a bubble there, and run back. Reave spam will then net you huge amounts of detonations. This is, again, not effective on Bronze. This requires some good team positioning, but is really effective on Firebase Glacier and White, and in specific locations in other maps. You may also drop the bubble on a distraction, like a Decoy.
Offensive Justicars have a lot more solo damage, and are more powerful in close quarters (drop bubble, reave gets a detonation). Defensive Justicars have an enormous amount of team utility, and can lay down a lot of fire with good weapons.
You always spec Reave as Radius/Damage Reduction/Damage and Duration.
I prefer getting just 3 in pull, and taking class power to 5 (power duration/weight, power damage/force), then maxing defensive Fitness. I've considered dropping either pull or Fitness 6 for Assault Rifle weight reduction, and using my Revenant X, but its probably not necessary.

Generally, Reave is your go-to. It staggers, has AOE, shreds health, armor, and barriers, stacks on itself, sets up and detonates combos, and gives you damage reduction. Not especially effective against Geth (doesn't give DR, not good against shields), but still sets up combos. Superlative if you have detonating teammates. On Bronze, this doesn't get you much, since enemies die too fast for the DOT to stack up much, and die before you get detonations.
Pull is your solo-detonate tool. Can't do anything with it but on unshielded enemies, but if no one is around, pull-reave kills anything down to health.

Note, of course, that Bronze is pretty trivial. I've had highest score as a level 1 running around with a Carnifex, and contributed effectively.

[Landis963]

When does the Commendation Pack pop? Is it after the weekend, or the victorious Gold match?

[Arbitrarity]

When does the Commendation Pack pop? Is it after the weekend, or the victorious Gold match?

Usually Wednesday or so.
I'm hoping for more Valiant ranks, or Hurricane. Eagle is awful, and Crusader is too heavy to be remotely useful. I'd rather use GPS, Graal, or BW.

EDIT: Yeah, both packs tend to drop at the same time.

[Landis963]

Usually Wednesday or so.
I'm hoping for more Valiant ranks, or Hurricane. Eagle is awful, and Crusader is too heavy to be remotely useful. I'd rather use GPS, Graal, or BW.

Same for the Victory pack, right? Thanks.

[Zevox]

When does the Commendation Pack pop? Is it after the weekend, or the victorious Gold match?

The next Tuesday is when event rewards have been given out so far.

Zevox

[Joran]

WHOOO! Finished my first gold run ever. I want to thank Zevox for the build I basically stole and everyone else for advice and for being generally awesome.

Salarian Infiltrator
Batarian Soldier
Drell Adept
Asari Adept

Firebase Dagger/Cereberus

Got a little hairy in wave 9, where just the Drell and I were alive. There was a lot of running and biotic explosions.

P.S. Does this mean I beat the game? ;)

[Krade]

My first game of the night I ran a turian soldier with tempest X (Heat sink and Clip) and a Phalanx X (Damage and piercing). I'm at 360 cuz I stopped promoting a while ago. My friend was in the 700s. We had two randoms: One past 1600 and the other 500 something. In the lobby, I get one vote to be kicked (not worried because my friend's in with me). I laugh at this and honestly assumed it was the higher guy (we were in party chat), then I continued laughing the WHOLE GAME as I completely dominated the leaderboard (final score I was up by ~50,000). I dropped out of party chat to ask who it was that that voted to kick me and they both quit.

About a minute later, we both get an invite from the 1600 guy and go to play with him (where I find out it was the 500 guy that voted to kick me). So it became him and his friend (who was almost as high as he was) and me and mine where we had cakewalks for a few hours. I switched up my class every game or so to keep it fresh and still ended up on top every game.

Just goes to show, don't assume someone's bad just because you think their loadout is stupid. I've played with the turian soldier a LOT trying every single weapon out with Marksman and found that the Tempest is the best for me (especially with Incendiary Rounds and the Prox Mine to set off fire explosions). I know what works. It just happens to be uncommon weapons.

[SiuiS]

Proxy mines
Fire explosions

Aha! It all clicks into place. thanks!

In me-related news, my filly decided on an impromptu dinner date, so I will be delayed with my gold-ing.

[Xondoure]

So plan for tomorrow includes getting a working mic and then taking a lovely Asari lady out for a spin somewhere gold. Any of you gents fancy on showing us the correct dance moves for this sort of affair?

[Aotrs Commander]

Ignoring shield gate doesn't make it go away. Javelin is horrifically ineffective against Hunters, and there's nothing you can do about it. Even Salarian Infiltrator can't drain their shields in one go. And a number of enemies do care about fire rate; Banshees, Brutes, Atlases, and Ravagers need to be put down as fast as you can fire.
Of course, MP Javelin also has the tiny reserve clip (on top of its absurd weight), and until you get around Javelin V, it's going to remain almost unusably miniscule. 10 shots with clip mod? Really?

Also, in ME3 singleplayer... Black Widow is for killing 2-3 enemies in 1 clip. With slow motion scope, you can dramatic walk into rooms, cloak, shoot everything in the face once or twice, and walk out.

You don't get the Javelin until half-way through the Rannock missions anyway, and the fact you can use it so see hunters without mods makes it useful - more room for other upgrades. I never found the rate of fire of the Mantis - which I used exclusively up until I got the Javelin - to be in any way even slightly bothersome in the single player, so I just really don't see the need for a fast-firing sniper rifle at all. At the price given, I wouldn't give the Black Widow houseroom. I might have tried it if the spectre weapons weren't so stupidly expensive, but I just don't see the need for extra ammo being better than the damage-per-shot out-put.

I work on one shot - often from cloak, followed by, if required an incinerate.

One shot, cloak with a bit of incinerate for good measure.

(On MP on Silver Mode, I can sort of see the point, as my unupgraded Widow wasn't one-shotting much even on a headshot.)

But I was far more interested in the capability of dealing maximum damage to Brutes and Banshees and Atlases in one shot from cloak than worrying about the mid-range target like Hunters, which I really didn't find a problem at all.

Problem is Shepard never engages in fights where sniping is a legitimate tactic (real world style). At least the widow still qualifies as antimateriel...

One shot being good? I agree. It requires you to remove yourself from the sense of time pressure however. To ignore that while you're sniping the prime, his buds are out maneuvering you and you CANNOT fire fast enough to escape.

Now, granted I don't play harder than normal, but I never found Geth to be anything like the threat of the Reapers at all. Hunters and Primes both. I was never worried about the Geth like I was against the Reapers. Hell, I died more times to Phantoms than to Geth. (I think the only time the Geth killed me was during the last Prime engagement on Rannoch, and only because I was insistenly standing like a muppet unloading the Spitfire on it because the latter was there...) I mean, Geth? With Hacking on my skill list? Pfft. Geth were the easist opponents by far.

I've played, like, nearly 200 hours of inflitrator across the trilogy; though yes, half of that was in ME 1, where it's not quite the same, the other half was relying pretty much solely on my sniper rifle for every combat. (I even restarted Evil Idiot Shep last night, and slung across Sniper Rifle, rather than assault rifle on my Adept because it's so useful and at least in ME 1, there are really long-range engagements (last playthrough I killed everything except the Thresher Maws on foot, mostly with my sniper rifle.)

So, yeah, sniping works fine. (Plus, that's what squadmates are for, keeping you flanks clear while I murder all the high value targets, maximum damage per shot at a time.) Patience is a virtue and all that.

Bear in mind how BAD I am at this sort of thing, generally... (Though I'm told mouse targeting is slightly easier than joypad, which my be why I get more milage out of sniping than you do, and with inflitrator's maxed tactical cloak, I virtually always got headshots. (Not so much in MP, mind, where sniping is harder, but on single player, it worked great.)

[SiuiS]

You don't get the Javelin until half-way through the Rannock missions anyway, and the fact you can use it so see hunters without mods makes it useful - more room for other upgrades. I never found the rate of fire of the Mantis - which I used exclusively up until I got the Javelin - to be in any way even slightly bothersome in the single player, so I just really don't see the need for a fast-firing sniper rifle at all. At the price given, I wouldn't give the Black Widow houseroom. I might have tried it if the spectre weapons weren't so stupidly expensive, but I just don't see the need for extra ammo being better than the damage-per-shot out-put.

I work on one shot - often from cloak, followed by, if required an incinerate.

One shot, cloak with a bit of incinerate for good measure.

(On MP on Silver Mode, I can sort of see the point, as my unupgraded Widow wasn't one-shotting much even on a headshot.)

But I was far more interested in the capability of dealing maximum damage to Brutes and Banshees and Atlases in one shot from cloak than worrying about the mid-range target like Hunters, which I really didn't find a problem at all.



Now, granted I don't play harder than normal, but I never found Geth to be anything like the threat of the Reapers at all. Hunters and Primes both. I was never worried about the Geth like I was against the Reapers. Hell, I died more times to Phantoms than to Geth. (I think the only time the Geth killed me was during the last Prime engagement on Rannoch, and only because I was insistenly standing like a muppet unloading the Spitfire on it because the latter was there...) I mean, Geth? With Hacking on my skill list? Pfft. Geth were the easist opponents by far.

I've played, like, nearly 200 hours of inflitrator across the trilogy; though yes, half of that was in ME 1, where it's not quite the same, the other half was relying pretty much solely on my sniper rifle for every combat. (I even restarted Evil Idiot Shep last night, and slung across Sniper Rifle, rather than assault rifle on my Adept because it's so useful and at least in ME 1, there are really long-range engagements (last playthrough I killed everything except the Thresher Maws on foot, mostly with my sniper rifle.)

So, yeah, sniping works fine. (Plus, that's what squadmates are for, keeping you flanks clear while I murder all the high value targets, maximum damage per shot at a time.) Patience is a virtue and all that.

Bear in mind how BAD I am at this sort of thing, generally... (Though I'm told mouse targeting is slightly easier than joypad, which my be why I get more milage out of sniping than you do, and with inflitrator's maxed tactical cloak, I virtually always got headshots. (Not so much in MP, mind, where sniping is harder, but on single player, it worked great.)

This is all true, and is only parable when you understand that I played through on insanity. The only reason I didn't do insanity from the start in ME1 was because I couldnt. so I did the second play on insanity, and when I found out that I upped the difficulty four seconds too late for it to count, I did it again immediately. ME2 is a blur of SMG fire, shotgun blasts and giggles, and the occasional swearing as I pulled out my sniper rifle to deal with harbinger. And now that I think about it, those ****ing armored husks. Most lethal enemy in the game...

ME3 was only ever "hard" on Grissom, where a half-second flip was brutally punished. But I remember finding the javelin. I switched out all other weapons to see if it was worthwhile or not...

It did less than a quarter of a bar to a hunter. About a third to a pyro. And by this point the prime was trying to ride me like a four wheeler. I've pulled it out off and on since, and every time the same result. Huge weight and time penalties for no gain. I am my own ordinance; and as I'm find of saying, "every vanguard is a bomb. But not every vanguard is a smart bomb". So I went right back to my tempest/disciple/carnifex load out (and took armor piercing off the carnifex as it made the disciple redundant). 200% means I'm putting out as much damage a reload cycle as most snipers, but I'm AoE.

On the downside, ME3 now has literally nothing to offer me except multiplayer. I don't have the heart for another play through. Wish I'd thought that far ahead beforehand... Insanity is too hard to be fun, and hardcore is too easy to be fun.
I think you've answered my prior question though; Istanna is gonna be an infiltrator.

Oh, and the black widow/javelin thing works even without cloak (since they both have or lack the same variable). My opinion is that both suck in single player. If I have to snipe, I've got my Carnifex with scope ;)
I am not target demographic though. Too bad they removed any real range from ME2/3.

[Aotrs Commander]

It did less than a quarter of a bar to a hunter. About a third to a pyro. And by this point the prime was trying to ride me like a four wheeler. I've pulled it out off and on since, and every time the same result. Huge weight and time penalties for no gain. I am my own ordinance; and as I'm find of saying, "every vanguard is a bomb. But not every vanguard is a smart bomb". So I went right back to my tempest/disciple/carnifex load out (and took armor piercing off the carnifex as it made the disciple redundant). 200% means I'm putting out as much damage a reload cycle as most snipers, but I'm AoE.

On the downside, ME3 now has literally nothing to offer me except multiplayer. I don't have the heart for another play through. Wish I'd thought that far ahead beforehand... Insanity is too hard to be fun, and hardcore is too easy to be fun.
I think you've answered my prior question though; Istanna is gonna be an infiltrator.

Oh, and the black widow/javelin thing works even without cloak (since they both have or lack the same variable). My opinion is that both suck in single player. If I have to snipe, I've got my Carnifex with scope ;)
I am not target demographic though. Too bad they removed any real range from ME2/3.

I think I found your problem...!

The difference made by being a specialised sniper is ENORMOUS. (Like, with tactical cloak, high-calibre barrel and Operations boosts, it's like 225%, not including stuff from armour.) If you're using on a vanguard, well, no duh it's not going to be as good! Wrong tool for the job and all that.

(You may just not be the sniping sort of person, at the end of the day, you're a very Vanguard sort of fellow and the two are as wildly different as I think they can be!)

You've said the Widow has a higher DPS, but I think you've missed something. Have you only considered DPS PER CLIP? When you include reload time, they are (to my mild surprise, when I crunched the numbers, you six shots per six seconds verses my twice-as-powerful one every four) more or less identical, bar the shouting. But the Javelin doesn't need a scope to see through smoke or cloaked hunters (which is really, really useful in single player) and has a much better penetration out of the gate. (The fire delay - which caused me some second thoughts to start with, is actually generally beneficial, since you can move the sights during the period when the fire button is depressed, allowing you a last-quarter-second adjustment on a moving target.)

Black Widow's advantage is in dealing with shield gate on the higher difficulty levels (I'm not sure at what point it kicks in in single-player, or whether it's just like bronze, silver and gold in normal, hard and insanity, where on the lower ones it only reduces, not negates, the damage) and the slightly lower weight.

[Arbitrarity]

You don't get the Javelin until half-way through the Rannock missions anyway, and the fact you can use it so see hunters without mods makes it useful - more room for other upgrades. I never found the rate of fire of the Mantis - which I used exclusively up until I got the Javelin - to be in any way even slightly bothersome in the single player, so I just really don't see the need for a fast-firing sniper rifle at all. At the price given, I wouldn't give the Black Widow houseroom. I might have tried it if the spectre weapons weren't so stupidly expensive, but I just don't see the need for extra ammo being better than the damage-per-shot out-put.

Now, granted I don't play harder than normal, but I never found Geth to be anything like the threat of the Reapers at all. Hunters and Primes both. I was never worried about the Geth like I was against the Reapers.

Agabw
You do not know the pain of having to shoot Marauders twice. If you did, we wouldn't have any discussion.

Also this

I have never had any trouble affording the Spectre weapons. I usually get one of them (and relevant mods/upgrades) by Tuchanka in a new SP playthrough. There are plenty more credits lying around than I can usefully spend, unless I really really want the aquarium VI.

Finally, SP Javelin does strictly lower damage than Widow. And 3 BW shots does double its damage. When you consider that a single shot from either is overkill (given that time dilation means headshots are trivial), and that a reload-cancelled cloak cycle is right around 3s either way, BW pulls way out ahead. Due to the more discrete nature of its shots, you can also do stuff like above.

Good use of Javelin is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQJb3xuaNVU. Until you realize that anything but Troopers wouldn't die in one shot.

[Aotrs Commander]

Agabw
You do not know the pain of having to shoot Marauders twice. If you did, we wouldn't have any discussion.

During that first weekend event killing the brutes, I did actually play on Silver, and noted that that my Widow was just not doing the job, and I was having more luck with the incisor, because stuff moved around a lot more that I was used to.

Finally, SP Javelin does strictly lower damage than Widow. And 3 BW shots does double its damage.

That's...not what the stats say, neither the in-game bars nor the spreadsheet stats.



I think the other thing is, in single player, I personally think the overkill on flunkies is worth the trade-off for being able to smack larger chunks out of the bosses (since you don't always have missiles to hand...)

I also used squad cryo ammo in SP, which may also have tipped the balance somewhat.




Also, it occured to me the Geth are the galaxy's biggest trolls.

They need one of those head-in-spirally colours (whatever that meme is called) with the leger:

Force galaxy to adopt Thermal Clips

Switch to plasma weapons

[Arbitrarity]

During that first weekend event killing the brutes, I did actually play on Silver, and noted that that my Widow was just not doing the job, and I was having more luck with the incisor, because stuff moved around a lot more that I was used to.

That's...not what the stats say, neither the in-game bars nor the spreadsheet stats.

I think the other thing is, in single player, I personally think the overkill on flunkies is worth the trade-off for being able to smack larger chunks out of the bosses (since you don't always have missiles to hand...)

I also used squad cryo ammo in SP, which may also have tipped the balance somewhat.

Not sure how you think Squad cryo would help improve the Javelin relatively. I'm mostly being super-elitist and saying "that works on Normal/Bronze". (In retrospect, I'm also being annoyed by "I work on the basis if you need rate of fire on your sniper rifle, you're doin' it wrong!" when you're playing on Normal. That's just NOT TRUE on higher difficulties.)

Spreadsheets are MP damage. SP has stats before the multiplayer balance patches, detailed here. Of note;

Javelin Sniper Rifle
- Damage increased from [795.0-993.7] to [1030.5-1288.1]
- Encumbrance increased from [2.5-2.0] to [3.0-2.4]
- Max spare ammo decreased from [9-19] to [5-15]

Yes, you can verify this. Go check ammo capacities in SP vs MP. If you want to argue that damage was modified, and nothing else... I'd say that assertion needs proof.
While technically I did do some approximation (514.1*3 < 795.0*2), it's not to a degree that requires justification.

And knocking larger chunks out of boss health... is the entire point of DPS arguments. And the BW wins there, hands down.

[Aotrs Commander]

Spreadsheets are MP damage. SP has stats before the multiplayer balance patches, detailed here. Of note;

Yes, you can verify this. Go check ammo capacities in SP vs MP. If you want to argue that damage was modified, and nothing else... I'd say that assertion needs proof.

No, no, I'll take your word on that; it would explain the difference between the bars and the spreadsheets (as the former is not double as the spread sheets say.) Okay, the Javelin isn't quite as good as I thought it was in single player.

[Morty]

All those rewards look tempting, but given how frustrating I find playing on Silver a lot of the time, I can't even imagine playing on Gold.
Also, people keep saying how bad the Drell Adept is, but I seem to be doing well with him. Although I admit that Pull could stand to be a better. Maybe it could linger on the protected targets, slowing them down instead of just staggering them.

[Arbitrarity]

All those rewards look tempting, but given how frustrating I find playing on Silver a lot of the time, I can't even imagine playing on Gold.
Also, people keep saying how bad the Drell Adept is, but I seem to be doing well with him. Although I admit that Pull could stand to be a better. Maybe it could linger on the protected targets, slowing them down instead of just staggering them.

Drell Adept isn't bad, we just think of him as outclassed by Justicar now. Someone's gotta Reave. Having played a lot of Justicar, I'm considering swapping back to Drell, because I sometimes have difficulty staying in bubble, and cluster grenades are sick.

Not sure if you're on PC (don't show up on any of the player lists), but you can probably find a FBW/Gold/Geth game somewhere, and those are pretty easy if everyone sticks to the plan. Unfortunately, the formulaic nature of it means that you sometimes get people trying out unusual things there. Generally, look for a Salarian Engineer, and an Infiltrator of some sort. Other roles can vary, but generally, people with Overload are good, and Quarian Infiltrators make things easier.

[Aotrs Commander]

All those rewards look tempting, but given how frustrating I find playing on Silver a lot of the time, I can't even imagine playing on Gold.

I resigned myself to the fact that when they're restricting rewards to Gold, I'm not even going to make an attempt; for one thing I don't think it'd be fair to the other players. (Not that I begrudge them setting a few challenges for the hardcore players now and then, unless they start doing it to the total exclusion of the more casual/flat-out inept players like myself.)



Edit: @Arbitrarity: When I next happen to pop into ME 3 (pretty sure I'm gonna play Alpha Centauri today, as I bought the expansion (well, a new copy that contained the expansion) for a fiver), I'll take a looksee and see if my Shep has any spare cash floating around enough to snag a BW for when I tackle the ending again, and actually see. You[ve convinced me that it's at least worth a look (since my primary criteron for the Javelin was the damage was equal or better than the Widow plus extras (and the BW was not highly thought of the first time the subject was broached way back).)

[Arbitrarity]

Doing all the side quests, I have BW V AND Paladin V on first play through by the end, with full equipment upgrades and custom armor parts. There's a lot of money lying around if you're looking for it.

[Aotrs Commander]

That depends on whether or not I spent it all before the end game... I may have blown it on upgrading stuff or buying armour that I didn't use because it was the end and what the heck.

So I'll have to see if there's any point I've actually got some pennies.

[SiuiS]

I think I found your problem...!

The difference made by being a specialised sniper is ENORMOUS. (Like, with tactical cloak, high-calibre barrel and Operations boosts, it's like 225%, not including stuff from armour.) If you're using on a vanguard, well, no duh it's not going to be as good! Wrong tool for the job and all that.

(You may just not be the sniping sort of person, at the end of the day, you're a very Vanguard sort of fellow and the two are as wildly different as I think they can be!)

You've said the Widow has a higher DPS, but I think you've missed something. Have you only considered DPS PER CLIP? When you include reload time, they are (to my mild surprise, when I crunched the numbers, you six shots per six seconds verses my twice-as-powerful one every four) more or less identical, bar the shouting. But the Javelin doesn't need a scope to see through smoke or cloaked hunters (which is really, really useful in single player) and has a much better penetration out of the gate. (The fire delay - which caused me some second thoughts to start with, is actually generally beneficial, since you can move the sights during the period when the fire button is depressed, allowing you a last-quarter-second adjustment on a moving target.)

Black Widow's advantage is in dealing with shield gate on the higher difficulty levels (I'm not sure at what point it kicks in in single-player, or whether it's just like bronze, silver and gold in normal, hard and insanity, where on the lower ones it only reduces, not negates, the damage) and the slightly lower weight.

Ah, a slip on my part. We are having two separate conversations; objectively, the numerical comparisons between weapons and damage output. Subjectively, our preferences and experiences with the equipment.

Objectively, comparing just the weapons, the black widow is better for prolonged engagements, and the javelin acts more like a traditional sniper rifle (and antimateriel to boot). Adding in cloak and specialization For both weapons, the black widow is still technically superior, but both guns have entered into "too powerful to care", as the battlefield requires a certain minimim threshold and once there, who cares? 133,000 is more than 100,000 but both are soft beyond 45,000 that I stopped splitting hairs.

Subjectively, I focus on team support and acute success. Sniping helped with this in ME1, and even in ME2 to a lesser degree due each defense being eras versus specific weapons. In ME3, sniping as a tactic changed; every engagement became smaller in scope, more a series of attritional combat. There were only two points in the game I found where sniping with a specialized weapon had value over using, say, the heavy pistol.
In ME3 combat, my aims were better accomplished by using an AR, with single shot and powerful rounds, because they served the same function on a smaller scale, where the extra damage was HORRIBLY mitigated by the time between rounds.

In the end, I dismissed ALL sniper rifles for same reason you dropped others for the javelin. They didn't satisfy. And the scope isny a bonus for me; I can see cloaked units myself with rather high fidelity.the distortions are easily picked up on my particular variety of stigmatism.

In multiplayer, this all changes of course.

All those rewards look tempting, but given how frustrating I find playing on Silver a lot of the time, I can't even imagine playing on Gold.
Also, people keep saying how bad the Drell Adept is, but I seem to be doing well with him. Although I admit that Pull could stand to be a better. Maybe it could linger on the protected targets, slowing them down instead of just staggering them.

Gold is often a bit easier because everyone who succeeds on gold focuses on teamwork.

Try hooking up with some playgrounders. You can work out what build to bring via posts here, and then get it done.

I resigned myself to the fact that when they're restricting rewards to Gold, I'm not even going to make an attempt; for one thing I don't think it'd be fair to the other players. (Not that I begrudge them setting a few challenges for the hardcore players now and then, unless they start doing it to the total exclusion of the more casual/flat-out inept players like myself.)

Same thing. Gold needs 2 good players, and on distraction with bullets to succeed. You CANNOT actually harm the team efforts if they go unknowing theyre a three man team plus guest in the first place. And then you could always surprise them by getting a couple solid kills. Contact a group of pc players and work out what you can bring to the field. Even just a simple "I'm an infiltrator, I can run medic and some objectives with backup" would've fine.

You of all people should know the point of a squad is to emeliorate the lackings of any individual.

That depends on whether or not I spent it all before the end game... I may have blown it on upgrading stuff or buying armour that I didn't use because it was the end and what the heck.

So I'll have to see if there's any point I've actually got some pennies.

same here. Newgame+ and bought black widow. Now I'm broke, but gonna give it a swing.

[Dhavaer]

Is anyone else having more serious issues with the server than usual? About 4/5 times I search for a game I get 'Your connection to the server has been lost'.

[Anarion]

I think I found your problem...!

The difference made by being a specialised sniper is ENORMOUS. (Like, with tactical cloak, high-calibre barrel and Operations boosts, it's like 225%, not including stuff from armour.) If you're using on a vanguard, well, no duh it's not going to be as good! Wrong tool for the job and all that.

Disagree. My playthrough was insanity loading a ME2 save and I played an adept with the black widow. It was absurdly fun and felt really powerful. Besides, who optimizes for single player?

Doing all the side quests, I have BW V AND Paladin V on first play through by the end, with full equipment upgrades and custom armor parts. There's a lot of money lying around if you're looking for it.

Yeah I had both black widow and paladin by the end because there were so many credits it was like "sure, why not?"

[Zevox]

Is anyone else having more serious issues with the server than usual? About 4/5 times I search for a game I get 'Your connection to the server has been lost'.

I was a couple of days ago, but I didn't have that trouble today when I logged on quickly to get through a gold game for the weekend mission*. Haven't played much the past couple of days due to picking up Skullgirls though.

*Speaking of, my first outing at that today was a little hillarious. I was playing my Asari Adept of course. My allies were a Human Vanguard, a Krogan Vanguard, and a Salarian Engineer - who may as well have been another Vanguard. Seriously, he was armed with a Geth Plasma Shotgun and was trying to play run-n-gun with it. I never once saw him use Decoy, just Incinerate and Energy Drain. And on top of that of course they chose to start each wave in a spot that is okay defensively on bronze and silver, but not so much on gold - atop the ladder near the start of Firebase White. You know, the spot from which you can attacked from three different angles at once, and will if you're on gold? Yeah, I'm still a bit surprised we made it to wave 3.

Had a better match the second time though, and we made it through. One player dropped out early, but myself, a Salarian Engineer who made proper use of Decoy, and a Quarian Infiltrator managed to take it nicely. I feel bad for the Infiltrator getting the bottom rank of us though - she was instrumental in our success, since all three objectives turned out to be "activate four objects." Yeah, that was some awful luck.

Zevox

[Psyren]

Disagree. My playthrough was insanity loading a ME2 save and I played an adept with the black widow. It was absurdly fun and felt really powerful. Besides, who optimizes for single player?

Someone who thinks Insanity is too hard.

I feel bad for the Infiltrator getting the bottom rank of us though - she was instrumental in our success, since all three objectives turned out to be "activate four objects." Yeah, that was some awful luck.

Yeah, they should grant assist points based on how much enemy fire a Decoy absorbs or something. But the scoreboard is well known to be an inaccurate measure of true contribution anyway, so best not to pay attention to it. (And this is coming from someone who comes in first/second quite a bit.)

[Zevox]

Yeah, they should grant assist points based on how much enemy fire a Decoy absorbs or something. But the scoreboard is well known to be an inaccurate measure of true contribution anyway, so best not to pay attention to it. (And this is coming from someone who comes in first/second quite a bit.)

Oh, I think it's a reasonable measure in most circumstances - it seems to be based on damage done (rather than kills or something), which is in the end the most important part of any match. Given the impossibility of measuring more circumstantial tactical contributions, such as, well, the Infiltrator I mentioned being crucial to our completing the objective waves, I'd say it's a pretty good way to go about it in most circumstances. That particular match just was not one of them.

Zevox

[Psyren]

Is it though? You can get a ton of points for doing rather counterintuitive things, such as allowing Engineers to plant Turrets so you can blow them up, or saving your rockets for the Extraction wave to fire them across the map at clumps of super-enemies as they spawn in (who wouldn't have prevented you from winning anyway.) And when Vanguards top the charts, they tend to do so very disproportionately to their actual contribution - almost implying that the team wouldn't succeed without them when that isn't the case at all.

So no, I don't put too much stock in the points myself. As long as I'm not 4th, or have less than 15-20% of the total spread, I don't worry about the standings at all.

[Xondoure]

Is it though? You can get a ton of points for doing rather counterintuitive things, such as allowing Engineers to plant Turrets so you can blow them up, or saving your rockets for the Extraction wave to fire them across the map at clumps of super-enemies as they spawn in (who wouldn't have prevented you from winning anyway.) And when Vanguards top the charts, they tend to do so very disproportionately to their actual contribution - almost implying that the team wouldn't succeed without them when that isn't the case at all.

So no, I don't put too much stock in the points myself. As long as I'm not 4th, or have less than 15-20% of the total spread, I don't worry about the standings at all.

Not to mention such abilities as decoy seeing as cc can't really be measured.

[SiuiS]

So I just played a gold game. Used my salarian engineer because he involved the least possible amount of moving. It dropped me from the game during wave 2. I thought "pssh, please. I'm a wizard." and reconnected, just after the objective on wave three. We got a full extraction and in not touching the controller again until Tuesday, so we will know soon enough of this counts towards the personal goal.

Something I noticed that's never, ever, EVER happened before though; my decoy suffered friendly fire! Not only did he block my shots, but I took him down faster before I dropped (due to disruptor ammo) than after; a teammate stopped him with the valiant because I stood up to use energy drain at the wrong time. And he ate a missile, almost bungling extraction!

I am... Less than pleased. Though I suspect it will cut down on gold farming considerably.