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Mass Effect 3 Thread.
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Post by
Rankkor
well this sucks =( Spent the last hour and a half doing the update on the Mass Effect 3 coverage, wrote a 12k character post, then my GODDAMN PC SHUTS DOWN >.<
I really need to buy a new one, cuz this is really REALLY annoying. Not only that, doing LFR tonight, middle of the madness fight, PC shuts down, I got kicked.
/sighs.
Gonna update the post tomorrow, right now I just feel pissed off.
Post by
Thror
I wonder where did you get the part that you can use abilities on shielded enemies. In the demo, if you teach Warp to Liara, you can not use it to attack the shields of the last giant robot. When you hover over it in the abilities menu it gives you the classic "can not be used on a shielded enemy". Once you strip the shields, you can warp away at his Armor.
Speaking of which, you couldn't be more wrong in your first post here. Abilities were useless in any difficulty past casual? Yeah, No. You got that reversed. You could shoot through the casual difficulty duke nukem style even if you had no arms and only one foot. On Insane, abilities are a must have. Summoned drones, Overload, Warp, Incinerate, Reave, the right ammo powers and your unique class powers were all crucial. Maybe you just like the funkier powers like Throw and Singularity and AI hacking, and you are right, you could not use those much, but saying that abilities are useless on Insane? No.
Anyway, I played through the demo a few times. Pleasantly surprised with the difficulty of the action, Shepard is so very mortal. I also like how health doesn't regenerate, that is a huge thing. Playing a Vanguard on Insane in ME3 is gonna be so much more insane than in ME2, and that is something to say, considering how Vanguard in ME2 was an extremely high-risk playstyle. Slightly sad about how Vanguards do not get to use the omni-blade, but the biotic punch is only a little less cool.
By the way, I do not find the Nova ability that useful. It strips your barriers (by the way, that is a new thing too and it's pretty cool, you actually do not have a shield when you play a biotic shepard, you have a barrier), leaves you vulnerable in the center of the shooting. Vanguard playstyle is all about maximal cooldown reduction so you can Charge so often that you get to replenish your barriers every time they fall, Nova goes totally against that. It could be useful if you could unleash it on a tight pack of enemies that you ambush in a place with good cower, like clearing a nest of rocket launchers, but other than that, way too much vulnerability. It has a very cool graphic though.
Which reminds me, I noticed that abilities do not have shared cooldowns now. Even squad members abilities. When you use Singularity with Liara, you can still Warp. When you Charge, you can still follow up with a Nova. That's a new thing.
I really like the weight system. It's a cool idea. I will probably be trying to minimise my loadout of weapons in order to get max CD reduction. Carrying only a pistol and a shotgun could be viable for Vanguards, depending on the pistols in ME3 though obviously.
Post by
Rankkor
I wonder where did you get the part that you can use abilities on shielded enemies. In the demo, if you teach Warp to Liara, you can not use it to attack the shields of the last giant robot. When you hover over it in the abilities menu it gives you the classic "can not be used on a shielded enemy". Once you strip the shields, you can warp away at his Armor.
that's strange, I used my biotics against shielded enemies and it damaged their shields. It could be that "warp" is specifically designed to chew armor to pieces (Much like overload is designed to rip shields naturally) and so, these specific "Barrier-busters" must be used against their specific barriers. But the more universal biotics like pull, charge, shockwave ect did damaged shielded enemies (at least it did for me)
Speaking of which, you couldn't be more wrong in your first post here. Abilities were useless in any difficulty past casual? Yeah, No. You got that reversed. You could shoot through the casual difficulty duke nukem style even if you had no arms and only one foot. On Insane, abilities are a must have. Summoned drones, Overload, Warp, Incinerate, Reave, the right ammo powers and your unique class powers were all crucial. Maybe you just like the funkier powers like Throw and Singularity and AI hacking, and you are right, you could not use those much, but saying that abilities are useless on Insane? No.
I guess you could be right, since on ME2 I've only played exclusively Vanguard, and Vanguard skills (Pull, shockwave, and charge) did no damage on shielded foes. I played ME2 on pretty much all difficulties, and on Insanity, unless I was fighting husks, loki/fenris mechs, or varren, I pretty much had to forget I even had biotics in the first place (Save for Charge, I used that one to replenish my shields)
Anyway, I played through the demo a few times. Pleasantly surprised with the difficulty of the action, Shepard is so very mortal. I also like how health doesn't regenerate, that is a huge thing. Playing a Vanguard on Insane in ME3 is gonna be so much more insane than in ME2, and that is something to say, considering how Vanguard in ME2 was an extremely high-risk playstyle. Slightly sad about how Vanguards do not get to use the omni-blade, but the biotic punch is only a little less cool.
Couple of things to mention here:
I played the demo and health DOES regenerates, just not the same way as ME2 instead of having 1 big health bar, you get 5 small health cubes. As you get shot, these cubes start to deplete in order. If a cube gets shot half-way and you manage to kill the enemies, this cube will regen itself back up. However depleted cubes of health can only be replenished by medi-gel.
So there it is. a combination of regenerative health, and at the same time, health management.
And as for the vanguards not using the omni-blade.......... ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I absolutely LOVE the biotic punch. Whereas the other classes (Save for adepts) get a sissy shiv, I can deliver megaton-punches that can send folks flying several yards in the air, Jack-style (Remember how jack megaton-punched those Ymir-mechs when you release her form her stasis cell? well imagine spaming that move.......)
By the way, I do not find the Nova ability that useful. It strips your barriers (by the way, that is a new thing too and it's pretty cool, you actually do not have a shield when you play a biotic shepard, you have a barrier), leaves you vulnerable in the center of the shooting. Vanguard playstyle is all about maximal cooldown reduction so you can Charge so often that you get to replenish your barriers every time they fall, Nova goes totally against that. It could be useful if you could unleash it on a tight pack of enemies that you ambush in a place with good cower, like clearing a nest of rocket launchers, but other than that, way too much vulnerability. It has a very cool graphic though.
To me, Vanguard play-style is "High-risk/High-reward" and the synergy between Nova and Charge does exactly that. I wasn't able to go into detail because last night I wrote the second post explaining the new skills, and my PC shut down when it was almost done (Which is why now I write like 400 characters, save the post ,then edit and continue writing).
But the main thing about Nova, is that it has no cooldown. Lemme repeat that:
IT HAS NO COOLDOWN
Making it PERFECT. On the demo I'd often use charge on an enemy, follow up with Nova, and finish off whatever remained (Which wasn't much) with Biotic Punch. I hardly had to use my shotgun at all. Of course, the extra weight made this play-style quite annoying because charge had a long CD, but on the full game, I'll keep my weight at the min, to be able to spam charge, nova, spam charge again, nova, spam charge again, nova........ you get the hang of it.
Plus, shields reload when you spend 3 seconds without recieving damage, (once you've taken the proper passives) so after using nova, take cover for 3 secs and booya, you can use it again.
and yes, it has a VERY cool animation.
On the demo, on any difficulty below normal, I was able to simply forget about my weapons and go "Biotic Hulk Mode" on the enemy, and enjoy EVERY LAST SECOND OF IT.
Which reminds me, I noticed that abilities do not have shared cooldowns now. Even squad members abilities. When you use Singularity with Liara, you can still Warp. When you Charge, you can still follow up with a Nova. That's a new thing.
are you sure? cuz I vaguely remember that they still do have a shared cooldown. I played on the demo a biotic Adept, and was very annoyed at the fact that due to the exessive weight on the second segment of the demo, I was only able to use 1 skill every once in a while.
Nova is an exception to the norm because as I said above, this skill has no cooldown at all, but as far as I saw, the other skills do have a shared CD. Maybe squadmates are now free of the shared CD. I dunno, I hardly use the powers of Liara or Garrus xD Was too busy being "Biotic Hulk" to care.
I really like the weight system. It's a cool idea. I will probably be trying to minimise my loadout of weapons in order to get max CD reduction. Carrying only a pistol and a shotgun could be viable for Vanguards, depending on the pistols in ME3 though obviously.
its a cool idea, since it allows players to choose what weapons they wanna use, but for Vanguards and Infiltrators, its pretty pointless. Because the Vanguards still have a passive on "Assault mastery" that increases shotgun damage, and only shotgun damage, so they are still built around using shotguns.
And Infiltrators are still built around using snipers, as they still have the time-dilation when scoping, and passive damage boosters to snipers.
For everyone else though this is a good change, as it allows them to use the weaponry they desire. Like a Sniper Adept, or a Shotgun-engineer.
In my case, I'll be carrying my trusty shotgun (Eviscerator FTW, unless they reworked the fugly model of the Claymore) and pack an assault Rifle for mid-range combat or enemies that can't be accessed by Charge (Mattock FTW)
(Done)
Edit: since my PC is acting stupid and randomly shutting down, whenever I write a long post, I'll be writing it one chunk at a time, if you see a "(Continue.......)" on any of my posts, it means that post isn't done yet, and I'm writing more of it on Edit mode. This is to prevent what happened last night, since I wrote a 12k post with more info on ME3, only for my f*bleep*king PC to shut down at the last minute and waste all that work.
Thus, from now on, and untill I get a new PC, long posts will be written one chuck at a time, and when they are completed I'll add a "(Done)" at the end.
Post by
Neffy
Not going to download the demo just to see, but in "Story" mode difficulty (wat), is there a button that allows you skip combat?
Only wondering because of
this
.
Post by
Rankkor
Not going to download the demo just to see, but in "Story" mode difficulty (wat), is there a button that allows you skip combat?
Only wondering because of
this
.
that was just an opinion of one dev (I think that's chirstina norman? ) not something they actually intended to add.
Mass Effect 3 has (Asides from 5 difficulty modes) 3 modes to tackle on to the game.
First mode is
Action mode
. As far as I can tell, this one makes all dialog automatic, you select at first that you want all answers to be paragon, or renegade, and then just go straight to the PEW-PEW. In this mode, you don't take any choises at all, when the game is in dialog mode, all is automatic and you can just use the spacebar to skip it all if you want. No "investigate" or neutral options are taken.
Second mode is
Role-playing mode
, this one is identical to how we've played ME the whole time, you pick the difficulty, you select your dialog options, you configure your talent specs and those of your squad, you do your choices (be them paragon or renegade) and whatever..
Third mode is
Story Mode
. This is for when you don't give a crap about combat, in this mode, talents are auto-assigned by default (And can't be changed) for you and your squad, combat difficulty is always at the easiest possible. and this too can't be changed. All roleplaying is still there since you still have the choices, and all that stuff.
As for the combat difficulty, this time there are 5.
Narrative
: Think of this as SUPER-DUPER-EASY mode, for the ones that don't really care about combat at all and just wanna skip or skim it. In this mode, shepard is all but immortal. At least I stood there and let the enemy fire at me (over 6 soldiers) for nearly 2 minutes and they didn't even scraped half of my shields. In this mode, enemies hit for CRAP damage (even the mech boss didn't even scratched me) but shep hits like a hammer, you will kill everything with just a single shot, and biotic/tech powers can bypass armor/shields/barriers on the enemies.
Easy
: slightly harder than Narrative, this is when you want a mild challenge (since there is absolutely no way to die in narrative mode, even if you stand there and do nothing, not only can enemies NOT kill yyou, your squad will wipe the floor with them. In Easy mode, you are not so undefeatable, and your enemies hit a bit harder. Overall, this is roughly how "Casual" mode was on ME2.
Normal
: This is where it gets serious, this normal mode is (IMO) harder than the normal mode on ME2. Enemies are smart, use tactics, try to flank you, bust you out of cover with grenades, can actually chew your shields and armor quickly, and you do normal damage to them. In this mode, biotics and tech powers are less effective on protected targets.
Hard
: this is pretty much the new insanity mode, in this mode all it takes is like 2 shots for you to die, (gonna be a challenge to be vanguard here xD) enemies are deadly accurate, you do half damage than normal as does your squad, enemies have twice as much health too.
Insanity
: honest to god, this is among the hardest stuff I've done in my life, this is for the true insane, on this mode, I emptied an entire clip of my Mattock Rifle (one of the most OP rifles in the whole damn saga) against an enemy and barely scraped 15% of his shield. You die with 1 hit, unless you are kinda far, enemies are BRUTAL in here, and REGENERATE THEIR HEALTH/shields/barriers/armor if you stop attacking, they have a truly mastermind grasp of tactics and will actively hunt you down. I haven't seen this degree of AI since Half-life 2 with the combine. I have no doubts that this isn't meant for sane people.
Edit: so there you have it, they (sorta) added a button to "skip" combat, since playing on Narrative Mode, will allow you to end fights in litteral seconds. There is a boss on the demo, big-ass mech dude, on Narrative Mode, all it took was 2 shotgun blasts to kill him. And he was a boss.
Post by
Thror
They just enabled multiplayer for everyone yesterday. I spent all night playing it.
IT IS SO GOOD.
I got a chance to experience combat as a fairly well levelled Vanguard, and it's just amazing. I play a Human Female Vanguard, and put my points into Biotic Charge (maxed, generally went for higher single target impact, faster CD, and more barrier recharged), the first passive (increases weapon or power damage, I keep choosing weapon damage), and the second passive (increases durability or melee power. I go for durability as much as possible). I completely ignore Nova and Shockwave so far. And... I kick so much ass! I only carry a Shotgun for maximum CD reduction (in the multiplayer, there are no mobs that would stand on unreachable places), and I am absolutely enjoying the blinking around and close combat kills. I can even kill an ATLAS mech from melee range, solo! That felt so amazing when I pulled it off the first time...
Gosh the multiplayer is just all around fantastic.
Post by
buzz3070
What sucks is that i start finals the week it comes out =(. I am looking forward to playing the multiplayer actually as it seems to be pretty good.
Post by
ElhonnaDS
I just loaded ME2 and my saves onto the BF's laptop, so I can finish my second game (and maybe play a third, if I am insane?)
I know there is a comic for the big choices, but I want the DLC content on all my games, so I will have to import if I want multiple scenarios.
Post by
Thror
I pretty much have to finish ME2 at least once, before ME3 releases :/ I lost all my save files when I changed HDD's. Not that I wouldn't love ME2, but I have already seen everything in it so many, many times...
Post by
Liquoid
What the @#$% have they done to Ashley?
It's like they spliced DNA from ME1 Ashley and ME2 Miranda to make the ME3 Ashley...
Post by
ElhonnaDS
My BF played the demo last night a couple of times, and I saw Ashley. I think she had kind of a Sandra Bullock thing going with that hair.
Post by
Thror
Yeah, felt like I was hit with a frying pan over the head the first time I saw her. Kaidan looks so much more like the original Kaidan. I mean, it's okay for women to get different hairstyles and stuff, but she really does look a lot different. And the weird formal/armor suit she wears looked totally out of place.
Post by
Rankkor
Yeah, felt like I was hit with a frying pan over the head the first time I saw her. Kaidan looks so much more like the original Kaidan. I mean, it's okay for women to get different hairstyles and stuff, but she really does look a lot different. And the weird formal/armor suit she wears looked totally out of place.
well, she IS a spectre, and that armor she's wearing? Official Spectre uniform. Not much different than the one for Tela Vasir.
I've just played the multiplayer section of the demo. Damn that was hard xD specially when paired with other players that are newbies like me :P
Will have to add that to the review, (as soon as my PC stops acting stupid)
Hate that they don't let us choose a race on the multiplayer. =( I've played human far too long, I was hoping to play a krogan, or asari for a change.
Post by
Rankkor
Speaking of the multiplayer, "Yours truly" (AKA: me =D) is among the top 10 players in
Venezuela
JA JA! /flex
Gonna see I can boost that to number 1 player in venezuela.
Post by
baradiel
You asked me to download demo and play with you guys but does the download take hours of time? Is that game a steam game? Please answer.
Post by
Rankkor
You asked me to download demo and play with you guys but does the download take hours of time? Is that game a steam game? Please answer.
well, see, EA got kinda jealous of Valve's "Steam" (Which has provided them an endless flow of money over the years) and now they released their own version called "Origin".
its pretty much the same thing as Steam, except this one is for EA-published games. As for how long the download takes, well, that depends on your internet speed. The demo weights about 2gb, on my crappy speed that took 6 hours, on yours it may take more or less, depending on how fast it is.
The demo is completely free so don't sweat it.
my nickname on Origin is "Shakduhn"
Post by
Thror
So which class do you play in Multi, rankorr? I was playing a Vanguard until level 15, and dude, Vanguards own so much. But then I noticed that Vanguard are kinda considered the ultimate killer class for everything, and decided to go something more difficult. Rolling an Asari Adept now, and so far it's pretty ok. Fairly challenging though, and I can not figure out the right weapon comp for her. Using Pistol/SMG now because I do not want to go very heavy, but it just doesn't pack much of a punch. Maybe if I had a better pistol.
Post by
Rankkor
Well, I got 2 characters, Vanguard lvl 10, and Infiltrator lvl 15. Gotta say, while at first I loved using the vanguard, I tought "I'm gonna be using this class on the main campaign 99% of the time, why not use something different" and so made an Infiltrator.
Gotta say it LOVE IT.
crappy against those damn atlas and SPECIALLY those stupid phantoms, but everything else (Specially enemy snipers) go down FAST.
How did you unlocked asaris? All the alien races are locked for me. All I can use is:
For soldiers, engineers, and Sentinels: Human Male.
For Adept, Vanguard, and Infiltrator: Human Female.
And for the life of me, I can't seem to unlock any of the alien species, no matter how many booster packs I keep getting.
Post by
Thror
You need to get the larger boosters. I already got an Asari Adept and a Salarian Infiltrator. My impressions with Adept are, eh. Well Stasis is pretty awesome and Warp has like no cooldown, but I am investing waaaay too many points into spells and my Fitness sucks, which means I die in like three hits even on Bronze. I also just can not come up with a weapon loadout that would be good for my cooldown reduction. Using SMG/Pistol now but those are both really weak.
Post by
Rankkor
BTW thor, I can confirm what I already said earlier on my review, Biotics and tech DO affect protected enemies now.
On the multiplayer I'd often use Charge against a shielded enemy, and yep, their shields take a large chunk of damage. Of course, biotic and tech that are specifically designed to damage a certain type of protection (Like Overload and Warp) are useless against other forms of protection, but as I said before, the more "Universal" biotics now affect everything.
What's your nick on Origin? add me so we can play a match together, I'm "Shakduhn"
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