Last night I did 3 play throughs on the demo on insanity first on Adept, then Vanguard, and then Sentinel. I attempted to max out cool downs for key powers. I did this by buying up the carrying capacity increases and the level 2 power upgrades (reduce cool down by 25%).
ObservationsMost of this will be talking about the Salarian Homeworld
- There were generally more and more aggressive cannon fodder enemies but thank the maker only centurions and engineers had shields. The fact that they got this awesomely right is a massive upgrade for caster classes. This restored most of the fun factor that was stripped away in ME2 insanity. This by itself makes me not care about the kind of pointless grenade power.
- I loved playing Adept, especially in the opening sequence which may have had artificially low cool downs because it was a tutorial level. Once I tuned the powers for the best cool down, the combo that I could get the combo from femshep and Liara was breathtaking. I was able to fairly easily play through insanity with this pair and Garrus. It was awesome having a 7 second singularity + a 4.58 singularity. Even with my overloaded Adept I was able to just about endlessly CC and warp bomb the hell out of my enemies. Only shielded enemies posed a significant nuisance. Vs a centurion, with maxed out Garrus overload I could strip down to the last bar of shield and could usually almost immediately land singularity by firing a shot or just directing my squad to fire on him for a a half second. The turret engineers on the other hand were a fun challenge to beat because they had massive shields and good suppressive fire from the turrets. It kind of reminded me of fighting Armatures in ME1.
- Even though I played Vanguard a lot in ME2, I had the hardest time playing it on the demo. I died a lot more. The longer cool down of my powers really impeded my effectiveness. Also my defenses seemed about as thin as the Adept which combined with my overloaded character made it challenging to properly test charge. 20 second charge == me teh suck:)
Maybe I can develop a better rhythm for doing charge+nova. But after playing Adept I found the additional difficulty of the Vanguard a pleasant surprise. It seems reasonably balanced. By the time I can build a maxed out version of each char I expect them both to be nice. I plan to replay Vanguard and see if I can improve my skills.
- Like ME2 Sentinal was kind of easy mode for Insanity. Having both Overload and Warp made defense stripping easy. The tech armor made it much easier to survive and move about. It really helped to completely max out Liara cool down.
- Grenades were mostly useless due to only having 3 the whole demo. I am sure they are great for boss fights or the like, but in normal fights I found that through using good power combos I didn't really need them.
- You get experience instead of credits for overfilling medigels which strongly encourages you to get through the level without using medigels. As a side note you have no idea how happy I was to see an exp message during game play. I hope this means no more Level Complete screens:)
- The health bar was nicely done. It works kind of like the health bar in Dark Souls where it has 6 segments and if you take enough damage to drop past a segment then it only regens up to fill that segment. This combined with the medigel exp makes the game reward good game play and cumulatively punish mistakes which is, IMHO, how it should be. This is far better than the cheasy hide under cover for 5 seconds and all sins are forgotten.
- The combat scenarios were challenging in a fun way where I had to figure out how to break down the defensive combos like the engineer/turret combos. This is a far cry from the boring hide behind cover, overload, shoot, pull, warp sequence of ME2.
- Enemy grenades were tough annoying instakills but fair because I had time to dodge them.
- Game lets me move around a lot more easily.
- Cover system is better but still sometimes dodgy and broken. In some cases when I hit A to take cover I would roll and pop up to die to enemy fire.
- Firing guns seems a bit less laggy. The Mattock is still the best gun but it feels slightly nerfed.
- It still is a bit too costly (in terms of taking damage) in my opinion to do a lot of shooting as an Adept.
- I was able to get much larger reductions in cool down for the Adept than the other classes. For example I could get warp down to something like 10 (or 12) seconds for Adept and only 18 seconds for Vanguard and similar for Sentinel. I don't remember the exact numbers but the Adept is quite a bit faster even when overloaded
- I looked everywhere for the weapons upgrade station/loadout area so I could remove all those damn weapons. I'm bummed that I couldn't explore the weapon upgrade system and use the cool sounding upgrades that I found during the demo
- Liara is insanely more powerful than my best build. I was easily able to get her singularity cool down to 4.58 seconds and her warp down to 8 seconds. I didn't find much use for stasis because I could just chain cast singularity off her and then bomb with my warp or just let squads shoot stuff to shreds.
- There is some merit to the argument that having Liara kind of makes you being an adept a bit redundant but I still found it a lot of fun. 2x singularity is crazy fun. On the other hand feeling like a wimp compared to Liara kind of sucks, even though my Femshep loves her:) I think I'll get over this pretty fast tho, especially when she can take my shep to bed:)
- Garrus was also pretty nice. His grenade power is implemented the way the custler grenade should have been. It just has a really long cooldown. I would loved to have seen biotic grenades slowly regenerate over time (like say 2-5 mins per grenade)
- I am happy that my squadmates usually don't die stupidly anymore and the the new ability to revive them by going to them and not having to spend a med gel is awesome.
- At first I found a lot of the later evolutions in powers a bit uninspired but some of them had some cool and subtle interactions. I would like to see more what I can squeeze out of this system with all the various upgrades.
ConclusionPlaying as a caster class is ton more fun in the ME3 demo. While the game has a few warts left in cover and gunplay, overall I loved the improvements to combat, especially for the Adept.
Modifié par Aurellia, 11 février 2012 - 06:32 .
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