So, I finally started my insanity adept run through. I just finished the first place you fight collectors. (Name omitted for spoilers.)
At first I was struggling a little bit, and my first thought that warp being effective isn't necessarily the problem as much as it's long cooldown is. I felt really naked while recovering from a warp cooldown, and using it really was not fun. I realize that if I maxed it out, I'd be able to really blast people with it, and even kill them with a couple uses of it after
Basically, if you max out warp you can use it like a heavy weapon, but that's boring.
So I was curious about how well I could play without using it at all. The answer? So far, pretty well. I've been using abilities I have fun using and have only been using warp (and heavy weapons) on bosses/scions. (Well okay, I do use a single warp on krogans sometimes, but that's it =o)
Here's the breakdown of how my fights have been going.
I switch garrus and zaeed to sniper rifles in cover on either side of me. (I try to find a nice safe place, ideally a high place with a balcony and only staircases to get in, but if not that then a long chest high wall.) I use garrus' overload or zaeed's grenades depending on whether the enemies have armor or shields. Then if nothing is naked yet, I help out with my SMG or heavy pistol to finish stripping something.
Then I hit that enemy with pull. Then I hit him with pull again. And again, until he floats into my sniper perch and he gets double noscoped. If the naked enemy is behind cover but near the edge, I flush him out with singularity and then use lift on him. If the enemy is behind cover where I can't curve a singularity close enough or if he's in a high place I can't reach, I hit him with shockwave, which usually flushes him out for the pull chain. (Shockwave is great because it ignores terrain completely! It goes through every kind of cover imaginable.)
Usually by this point something else has lost it's shields from my allies, so I do the same thing to drag someone else up to me. I find that (with my rank 2 warp) dragging someone up and having my enemies kill them is faster than warping them twice and waiting on the cooldowns.
What's more important, if I get rushed by a dog or krogan, I'm less likely to be caught in the middle of my cooldown, since pull has a much shorter one. This means I can react with a singularity in their face (which slows them down for a good 6 seconds) and retreat to safer cover, while zaeed or mordin burns off their armor. Coincidentally, rank 2 singularity stops an armored enemy for almost exactly as long as rank 2 cloak cloaks you. So if one enemy is on you, it's just as useful as an escape tool. (Then when I'm safe, I warp/use team skills, and shoot them in the face until the armor is down, then I use pull and let my team finish it off.)
Of course, the only time stuff gets close enough to me is when I have to use bad cover. (Really close to the enemy.) Usually I'm far enough away that any charging enemy is naked by the time they get to me, which means I can keep them CC'd till they get finished off.
Of course, if I'm somewhere with cliffs, I just throw them off once they're naked.
I will say that these strategies break down when my team dies, but then I just rez them, and I have yet to run out of medi-gel. Even if I did run out, I could just pull stuff to me and melee it to death fairly quickly.
I may kill things slowish compared to other classes, but I rarely die. (Most of my deaths were from a certain spot where two scions attack you in a square area where you can't get out of shockwave range, and I got through that with my collector beam and my heavy pistol.)
It's the ultimate "Low risk - low reward" strategy, and I never ever run out of ammo. In fact, I go through entire fights without firing a shot, sometimes, especially when there's cliffs around. (And once garrus has squad AP ammo, it'll be even better.
So I COULD spam warp and never do anything else if I maxed it out, but I don't have to, and I'm not struggling very much at all for not doing that. I'm having a lot of fun and not struggling much even on insanity. Slightly less optimal than an infiltrator, perhaps, but effective enough to get through insanity without stressing me out, and I would argue it's more effective than mindless warp spamming. (Or at least very similar!)
Oh and husk rushes are hilarious. I just stand in a singularity and melee their armor off.
Modifié par Soruyao, 03 février 2010 - 05:09 .