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[d4eaming]

I am finding it very frustrating that I keep missing major paragon and renegade dialogue options because my Shepard is multifaceted and makes almost equal hard-assed choices as good choices. My paragon is slightly higher than my renegade, but they are close to equal, so I can't get any of the difficult choices. Lost Zaeed's loyalty because Shepard isn't a jerk that will let people die horribly, but also isn't good enough to convince him to remain loyal. Can't do a speech for Tali, because he's not been nice enough. It's incredibly frustrating that playing an even-handed Shepard is cutting me out of choices.

I get why. I get it. You need a high "pursuade/intimidate" skill through paragon/renegade. But it's still frustrating. I'll have to play again and change Shepard's personality just so I can experience those options.

I didn't have much trouble with this in ME1. I missed very few paragon/renegade options, even though Shepard was nearly balanced, with 75% each way. I got Wrex's and Saren's "impossible" dialogue options.

I won't necessarily mind playing again- I like my Shepard, and his personality. He's even changed since ME1 and taken more paragon in some cases because of a change of attitude through gameplay toward certain situations. I like that I can see the character evolve. But I'll have to play him differently than he really is to unlock some of those choices.

...venting, I guess. I usually hate the save/reload thing, but this makes it almost tempting, if I wouldn't lose so much game time over it, as I would have with Zaeed (since I went into his mission unspoiled and made in-character choices, sorry bucko, you might not make it to the end).

[ViciousCargo]

I hear you. Paragon/Renegade is annoying. And for certain choices the game more or less forces you to be either completely paragon or completely renegade. Stupid, I know.

[PsiFive]

d4eaming wrote...

I didn't have much trouble with this in ME1. I missed very few paragon/renegade options, even though Shepard was nearly balanced, with 75% each way. I got Wrex's and Saren's "impossible" dialogue options.

You may have already found this out but just in case I'll go ahead and apologies if I'm covering something you already know. The problem here is that while the ME2 morality system looks very similar (minus the Charm and Intimidate skills) they actually work very differently. Paragon and renegade options in ME1 became available based on how many points you were able to put into Charm and Initimidate: if a conversation option says you need 5 points then it's greyed out below that score. Easy, and if you miss it you just go back to a older save and go get more points or reassign them. 

Nothing so simple in ME2 as there is no Charm or Intimidate skill to play with and each of the blue and red text options is set to be greyed out below a preset percentage rather than a preset number of points in a skill that no longer exists. People think, not unreasonably, that this means the percentage full their Paragon and Renegade bars are, but unfortunately it ain't the case and so there are a lot of posts round here along the lines of "I heard I need 70% to get this conversation and my bar is nearly a hundred percent and I didn't get it, WTH is going on?"

Here's how it goes: the percentage is nothing to do with the bars but is how many Paragon or Renegade points you have as a percentage of how many you could have got up to the point you're at based on what game areas you've visited, missions and quests you've initiated, and conversations you've had. So for example, up to the point where you land on Freedom's Progress to investigate the missing colonists for The Idiotic Man the game will think you could have been awarded a maximum of 30 Paragon points and a maximum of 36 Renegade points. You can't have got both since most of the oppurtunities to earn Paragon points come at the expense of Renegade points and vice versa, but if you played completely Paragon you'd have 30 points and maybe a few Renegade points at the start of Freedom's Progress, and if totally Renegade it'd be 36 points and maybe a few Paragon.

There aren't any blue/red text conversation possibilities at this point in the game but imagine there is one getting off the shuttle and it's a moderately tough one - 50% for Paragon and 50% for Renegade. What that would mean in point terms is that if you have 15 or more Paragon points you'd get the blue text option and 18 or more Renegade points will tenable the red text option. If you have 15 or more Paragon and 18 or more Renegade you would of course get both options, but if you had, say, 16 of each then you'd only get the Paragon response and the red text would be grey. It's probably not impossible to have 15 and 18 points at this stage of the game (actually it's absolutely possible, but I'll get on to that later) but despite that being 50% of each the Paragon and Renegade bars would not be 50% full as they reflect the growing number of points accrued rather than the all important percentage of possible points.

Thus the first rule of ME2 Morality Points Club is you don't bother about those bars around Shep's face in the squad screen.

Now imagine that our imaginary conversation awards you some points for using either of those choices. 5 of each seems to be pretty common so let's use that. The game is keeping track of how many points it's possible to get of each, effectively two separate theoretical high score counters that it compares to your actual number of points every time it needs to. After our imaginary conversation these would go up by 5 each to 35 Paragon and 41 Renegade. If there was another 50% for each conversation after that you'd then need 18 or more Paragon and 21 or more Renegade because obviously you couldn't have 17.5 or 20.5 points.

Now let's look at it in terms of the all important percentage. Our player who had 16 points of each for the first 50% conversation had percentages of 53.3% for Paragon and 44.4% for Renegade, which is why he or she got the blue text but not the red text. If he used that blue text s/he will now have 21 out of a possible 35 Paragon points, or 60% Paragon. Not only will the player easily pass the percentage test to get the blue text in the second 50% but their percentage has increased. The bad news is that having been unable to use the red text before the game now says that the player still has only 16 out of a now possible 41 Renegade points, which is only 39% and getting worse. Worse still, there are probably points to be had from this second conversation too, so the number of possible points is always increasing while you may be unable to improve your actual number of points. This is why when you start missing red or blue text it becomes increasingly harder to catch up, as in the case here. And note that despite the player now being 60% Paragon and 39% Renegade the bars still show only a thin sliver of blue and red right at the very bottom.

Thus the second rule of ME2 Morality Points Club is you DO NOT bother about those damn bars around Shep's face in the squad screen.

But as I hinted at you can get your scores up even early on, and in fact you can get them well over 100% even though that sounds impossible. Actually it's not because the game considers only the points on offer during play when calculating the maximums for the purpose of working out your percentage. If you imported a ME1 Shepard you get a proportion of the morality points from that game brought into the new ME2 system, up to (I think - going from memory here) a maximum of 119 each of Paragon and Renegade. Half full bars in ME1 are enough to get those 119 points of each by the way, although these 119 points translate only as about an eighth or so full on the bars we don't bother about in ME2. And because as far as the ME2's simple formula goes at the start of Freedom's Progress our player who'd got 16 Paragon and 16 Renegade points would have ((119+16) ÷30) x100 = 450% Paragon and ((119+16) ÷36) x100 = 375% Renegade.

450% and 375%? Suddenly those two imaginary moderately tough 50% conversations look ridiculously easy, don't they? Not only that but the penalty for not using the Renegade option in the first one doesn't hurt you enough to miss the second one. More boring maths again but supposing both imaginary 50% conversations were played the same way as before we'd get the following after the first one. ((119+16+5) ÷35) x100 for using the Paragon response in the first conversation, making 400% Paragon. And ((119+16) ÷41) x100 because the Renegade option was unused by choice this time, making 329.3% Renegade. So you'll still easily get both red and blue choices in the second imaginary 50% conversation. But see what just happened? Both percentages went down, even the one you'd used and got a few more points in. Percentages really suck.

So the third rule of ME2 Morality Points Club is DO NOT bother.... so, sorry, we've covered that. The third rule is that even when you have something that boosts your percentages to well over 100% it still tends to get eaten away over time even despite earning more points, so it's best to handle difficult conversations with high percentage requirements sooner rather than later.

It's worth mentioning that a big disadvantage of using an ME1 character is that you only get those bonus imported points once - the damn thins disappear in all NG+ plays. This really really sucks. My first ME2 game was with an ME1 Shepard and I got both red and blue text options all or very nearly all the time, but I imported the new ME2 Shepard at the end of the game and immediately began to struggle and miss conversation options, and for the reasons I just explained I rapidly fell behind and eventually stopped getting either blue or red. Yes, back then I had no idea how the ME2 system worked and was sitting there looking at filling blue and red bars and wondering why the f*** my Shepard wasn't being allowed to say saintly/badass stuff that was fine to say in my first playthrough.

Now I know, and I know that as far as the game is concerned an NG+ is not using an ME1 import, even if the character did start in ME1 way back when. Learned all this in the forums since then, and also learned there are some other tricks that can be used for when you don't have those nice, fat ME1 import bonus points. There are basically two tricks, one to use skill points to give yourself a permanent bonus and the other to use equipment that gives a temporary bonus. There are two such pieces of equipment: the Death Mask you can buy from Ratch on Tuchanka which gives you a 10% bonus for as long as you have it equipped, and the Inferno armour which is DLC and also gives 10%. You don't actualy have to be wearing them as afr as I know, just have them equipped. So if you do Miranda's loyalty mission, run up to your cabin to equip either the Death Mask or Inferno armour, and then go do Jack's loyalty mission, you should get the 10% temporary bonus when you're pitched into the resolving Miranda/Jack fight as soon as the mission's over. Inferno armour is better IMO because it's available as soon as you're off Lazaus station while the Death Mask you have to wait until you can visit Tuchanka. Inferno is a complete set of armour which means you can't stack the bonuses by using the Death Mask as well, which is a pity.

Of course forget to equip it and it's no good to you, which means IMO the bonus you get from putting points into a skill that gives a bonus is better. The one you want is the passive but always on power that comes with each class: Biotic Mastery (asepts), Technical Mastery (Engineers), Combat Mastery (Soldiers), Assault Mastery (Vanguards), Operative (Infiltrators) and Defender (Sentinels). Each of these powers gives their respective class a 20% morality bonus at rank 1, 40% at rank 2 and 70% at rank 3. When the powers evolve in slightly different directions at rank 4 you can either stick with 70% if you think it'll be enough or pick the evolved option that gives a 100% bonus. If I don't have an ME1 import I'd go for that and, since I believe it does stack, add Inferno/Death mask as well. But even without equipment the eveolved passive class power can boost points enough that it's possible to get through the game and get all the options you want if you're playing a mostly one or the other, and should be easy if your Shep is near entirely Paragon or Renegade. 

So the fourth rule of ME2 rule is put points into the class skill, and preferably evolve it to the 100% morality bonus form, before you tackle the tougher, higher percentage conversations, and consider using equipment that gives a further bonus when you do.

And of course you can simply cheat. A kind of cheat is to follow a script that maximises desired points, though obviously this comes at the expense of killing role play deader than setting Urdnot Wrex on it after telling him that role play slept with all the fertile females. A more RPG friendly and cheaty form of cheating is give yourself a heap of percentage boosting extra points using either glitches or the Gibbed Save Editor. The first glitch is at Lazarus station just after you and Jacob meet Wilson andheal his leg. Mechs come in, overload the crates to blow up the mechs, and cue a conversation in whic you can get 4 Paragon points or 4 Renegade points or 2 of each. The glitch is that if you save at this point you can reload the save and the convesation repeats for more points, but being a glitch extra points you get here add to your total but are not counted towards the maximums the game uses for percentages. You can do this any number of times.

The same thing happens on Samara's loyalty mission if you kill Morinth, though only for Paragon points. Once Morinth is dead talk to Samara and ask if she's ok. You get 2 Paragon points and she asks if you want to leave. Say you'll look around first and you'll find you can actually repeat the conversation infinite times and get 2 more Paragon points each time that the game doesn't add to the maximum possible number. No save/reload required, but only 2 points at a time and in the middle of the game.... :-(

Both glitches are very time consuming and immersion breaking, especially the Samara glitch because of where/when it occurs. Personally I cheat a hell of a lot these days because I've done it properly plenty of times since I got into the ME games last Christmas, and these days I just want to have fun and role play it without the constraints of ME2's morality system. I used to use the Lazarus station gltich in preference to losing immersion in the middle of the story, but once I downloaded Gibbed and found it lets you and however many points whereever whenever in not much more time than it takes to read this sentence I do that more or less right after character creation instead.

Cheating yourself extra points is just my choice and not a recommendation. Cheat when you get fed up with worrying how many points you've got and that you really can't keep track of that all important percentage, not before would be my final rule of ME2 Morality Point Club.

Sorry for the text wall but HTH

[Get Magna Carter]

d4eaming wrote...
I didn't have much trouble with this in ME1. I missed very few paragon/renegade options, even though Shepard was nearly balanced, with 75% each way. I got Wrex's and Saren's "impossible" dialogue options.

I did have a problem in ME1 though it did not concern persuasions.
Dialogue options available for Shepard was limited to force players to be "consistant" but these tended to reflect how Shepard feels like about aliens based on how paragon or renegade they are - but paragon/renegade is based on many things (so cold-bloodedly gunning down a human who had been supporting the murder of Turians is considered evidence that Shepard dislikes aliens)

My second Shepard was a tough no-nonsense type (i.e. renegade) who liked aliens (and considered Wrex her best friend) but, because she was renegade, she was repeatedly "forced" into xenophobic statements.

My thrd shepard was a xenophobe who was kind and compassionate to fellow humans but disliking aliens - the sheer number of being-nice-to-human statements made her paragon and thus repeatedly forced to say how much she liked aliens