1428 réponses à ce sujet

[Graunt]

Kroniker81 wrote...

Graunt wrote...

Flash_in_the_flesh wrote...

This way you can call all sleep, fear, stun, hold, paralyse, petrify, freeze, etc. powers in all RPG systems offensive. All of these are CC but yes, incapitated enemies are easier to kill. That's all. They are not damage dealers.

And the majority of those only stopped enemies where they were, they didn't group them up even more.  You could sometimes mass sleep/stun/paralyze etc groups that were already close, but it didn't exactly draw them together into one nice little area.  And notice I didn't say Singularity was a "damage dealer", I said it could be used offensively.  What do you not understand about that?  Does admitting such hurt your argument about biotics in ME2 somehow?

Singularity in ME 1 does not really group up. The enemies fly around in erratic circles and even with Carnage you cannot hit them all most of the time. Lift does not really group up, the enemies fly at a certain velocity straight up. If you are in a room with a low ceiling they tend to even scatter even. Compared to that spells like paralyze or hold person were even better since they nail opponents to the spot so in terms of Mass Effect aiming it would have been easier to wipe the floor. Bastion Stasis Mastery does that in fact but it is not available to all and not all want to choose it for their Sentinels or Adepts.
Heavy enemies like Geth Armatures are affected only slightly by these powers but it can still buy you 2-3 seconds at least so they remain useful. Still Engineers are more effective against them but that is fine.
As I said it's a good concept to make certain classes stronger against certain enemy types and vice versa.

Enemies swirl around and continually converge enough to where you can hit them all with explosive shots/area of effect abilities.  Please don't say it doesn't do that when it does. Doesn't matter that they aren't sitting still the entire time.  I'll concede that lift, throw and singularity were mostly used for defensive purposes with the occasional damage component, but singularity had more offensive potential than the others except on very specific stages.  I don't list stasis because after 1-2 playthroughs with it, I found that it was pretty useless in just about every situation other than threshers and the last fight.  One point is all I would ever dump into it since I normally didn't play to level 50+ on the first playthrough anyway.

Modifié par Graunt, 07 février 2010 - 11:55 .

[dsanchez12]

I enjoy being a biotic even on hardcore because sometimes it is difficult if you aren't like when you have to fight a lot of husks at once because you can easily devour them with throw and singularity

[Soruyao]

Amioran wrote...
No, people as you don't get it simply because you clearly have not understood what the OP is talking about and yet you continue acting and replying as if you do.

Just the phrase "because it's DEAD WRONG" explain by itself that you have grasped nothing at all of what we are talking about. In fact there's no debate on the fact that what the OP is talking about _cannot_ be "dead wrong" because it is a behaviour of the engine, so its status is not debatable. It is a _fact_ that the majority of Biotics don't work on armored opponents. You cannot contest this, what you can do is only express the opinion (or not) that what you experience is to your liking or not. Yet, instead, you continue debating the usefulness of Biotics to justify something that YOU are making out from the debate, but it's not there and nobody is arguing about it, namely:

Alright, you were a lot more civil than the other guy so I'll respond in kind and explain my stance a little better.   People have been saying multiple times in this topic that

1. You need to spam warp constantly to succeed at insanity.  
2. You get artificially shoehorned into using one and sometimes two situations in every situation.  
3. Spamming warp is way more optimal/easy/faster than using a varied playstyle, even through it's less fun.

I disagree with all three statements, but I will give you that 3 is the one that is most likely to be a little true.  However, if it is true, the difference is negligible.

a) Difficulty: nobody is talking about the Adepts in concern to an enigmatic gameplay difficulty change. Everybody with a little of skill can play Insanity with an Adept without problems as it is. All this talk about you an others that can play fine on Insanity have _nothing_ to do with what the argument is about and yet you continue of talking about it as if it is a key component of the debate. You talk about it as if the fact that you can play Adepts in Insanity by itself prove that we are wrong, but, yet, nobody ever mentioned increased difficulty as proof of the fact that Biotics don't work as they should. Nobody is concerned about this because it's an issue _you_ created. How you cannot comprehend this simple thing is beyond me, really. 

I wasn't just saying that I can play as an adept on insanity.  That alone would prove nothing because many people on the other side of this debate have been saying the same thing.   What I am saying is that I can play insanity as an adept without using warp on infantry and use my other abilities consistently and succeed at insanity just fine.

It's different.   People are using warp as a crutch and not having fun because of it because they think they'll be a lot weaker in insanity if they don't constantly spam it.   It's not true, and I can say this because of first hand experience.

Use of Biotics: nobody ever said that Pull or Throw cannot be used. I repeated every single time that you can use them. The difference is that the scope of these skills changes in higher difficulties because there's an _external_ imposition that forces you to use them in certain situations only. The fact that you can use squad members to strip defenses to then use the skills don't change this fact. All the examples about how you can use them easily or not, how much you use them and whatever are all arguments good an fine; a shame that they don't have _anything_ to do with the discussion whatsoever. So please stop talking about this things because you are completely missing the point. Can you use them when _you_ want to? No. The rest is only dust in the eyes to justify something that nobody is arguing about, apart you.

I will give you that certain defenses (especially armor) affecting biotics doesn't make a whole lot of lore sense.  I agree that it's an artificial change that increases difficulty.   However, I can't think of any better ways to increase difficulty for an adept without being cheap.  (One hit kills and enemies that take a million shots to kill.)   Insanity mode didn't make the game harder for adepts because nothing was ever free to shoot back at us, except for the fact that snipers would oneshot us.

It succeeds in raising the difficulty and causing adepts to have to rely on their squad's abilities a little better.

I can say that if I want to throw someone off of something, very soon after I have decided that, they're going off that something.   The difference between normal and insanity is that they might get to shoot at me a little before they go.  Is that a bad thing?   Maybe, if you're using infiltrator's broken one shot one kill gameplay as your ruler, but it's very hard for me to call that challenging.   It's like insanity mode - lite.

c) About "Warp Spamming". Here the fact is that this is a single player game, luckily. I say luckily because this give players the freedom to use skills also if they are not the most effective given the situation. If this game was a PvP you would use only Warp (and maybe Singularity) with an Adept because other Biotics lose completely their role and scope and are, given the aforementioned change, highly ineffective in comparision with Warp. Since Throw, Pull and others become finishing moves more than controlling skills (see my reference on how a _real_ control skill works, i.e. controlling _high treath_ targets _as fast as you can_ and _when YOU want_) they assume another role that its in direct confrontation with the utility of Warp/Reave. It is obvious, however, that these last two are infinitely more powerful as damaging skills than the others (because they are made expressedly for this role), so the most efficient way to play an Adept would be spamming Warp/Reave. The fact that in a Single Player game you have the luxury to be as ineffective as you want doesn't change this fact, i.e. doesn't change the fact that Biotics in higher difficulties changes their role from controlling skills to finishing moves. All this talk of the fact that you can use them and you use them everytime have _nothing_ to do with this, whenever you like it or not.

Here is another point I agree withyou on.  This is a single player game.   For insanity, a class needs to be good enough to get through a mission with minimal to no deaths and a reasonable speed, and it needs to be fun.   I think a lift+throw adept fits all of these criteria.  (Though even if it didn't, I would keep playing this way because it is a million times more fun.)

BUT, I also disagree that spamming warp/reave is the most efficient way to kill enemies.    This is because lift and throw have the shortest (non-ammo power) GCDs in the game.   If you can kill someone with just a lift and a throw, then you will spend less time in your GCD than if you killed them with two warps.   Now, if a single warp can kill someone with no defenses and full health, that logic doesn't stand, but I'm highly skeptical that this happens.

Sometimes though you can kill someone with a single well placed lift.   In this case, that lift was a better choice than warp even if warp would have oneshotted the target, because you're going to spend less time in GCD and be able to throw out more powers sooner. (And if an enemy suprises you in a flank, being stuck in your GCD for even a second can be the difference between life and death.)

Any time I am fighting outdoors, lift+throw is instant death.  Even if an enemy survives me throwing them, they will have landed miles away and won't be bothering me again ever.   When I'm fighting indoors and if there are no pits to drop people in (This is VERY rare), lift+throw does pretty sizable damage.    These are the few times I could see someone spamming warp, or at the very least doing a lift+warp for a direct damage explosion.

So, you see, you continue to reply to things that you have not understood, for this people act this way towards you. If you had the humility to first try to _really_ understand what the discussion is about instead of making remarks that concerns other aspects not taken in consideration (because they are not meaningful for the discussion), maybe you would have grasped that what you are talking about it's wrong, not per se, but given the true motivations and arguments of the OP.

I would argue that what I am saying is actually very related to the topic at hand.   This is a topic about balance, optimality, and fun.   I feel that people are playing in a way that isn't fun and also likely not optimal, and then complaining that the class itself is neither fun or optimal.  (Though I will agree that adepts could likely be the weakest class, tied with maybe vanguard.   This isn't because adepts are weak though, but because the other classes, especially infiltrators, have way too easy a time of it.)

Am I being very humble?   Maybe not, but neither is anyone else in this topic.  Why should I be the only one with humility here?

You cannot compare Oranges and Lemons thinking they are the same just because they are both fruits and become angry if people tell you that you are missing the point completely. You are, in fact, missing the point completely.

They might not be the same, but oranges and lemons are very similar!  Not only are they both fruits, but they are also both citrus. They also both use colors from the same end of the color spectrum, and are very close in frequency, and are used in drinks and dishes in a very similar way.   They're not the same, but they are virtually interchangable.    But now I'm just being silly.

I also want to point that I have spent quite a lot of my life immersed in the nitty-gritty of WoW's PVP balance discussions.  I watched every word that was spoken in the beta threads when the death knight class was being created, and every discussion the devs had explaining why they were making every change they made and what the reprocussions were.  (I mention the death knights first because that was when the devs first decided to start explaining what goes into their balance decisions in detail, rather than keeping them hidden from the players.)

I am no stranger to balance and optimality and theorycrafting related discussions like this.   I think if WoW's playerbase were playing this game, and it had a PVP mode, they'd do the math and warp spammers would be killed repeatedly by adepts with builds specialized in other ways.   (Part of this is because most players would stay behind cover until their shields fully recharge, which means that CCing someone while their shields are down would be the difference between killing someone or waiting until they pop out with shields fully charged for another attack.)

[GUNSTAR H3R0]

I like biotics but it takes a different role. I usually have a biotic in my team to do some crowd control, like samara ill use pullfield alot to take hords on at once along with throw field. They're usually one of the supporters while i dish out damage with my sentinel. Then i have one tech or part tech with overload to dampen with me

[Roxlimn]

Soruyao:



I think your argument along those points are convincing when you look at it from your POV, but you must understand that for Amioran and others, using Pull and Throw appears not to work very well. I'm not sure why, but that appears to be the case.



Amioran:



I was going to respond in detail. I still can, if you like, but Soruyao has most of it covered. Even on my Sentinel playthrough, I was using Throw about as much as I used Warp. It takes a while to get used to HOW to use it, but when you realize what it can do, it's pretty fantastic.



Throughout this thread, I see guys telling me that Pull and Throw are useless. Well I'm finding them very useful on Hardcore, and I can imagine they will only be more useful on Insanity. The reason for this is that both Pull and Throw remove cover. They're also both conditional insta-kills, and you can actually Throw a guy to death if his Health is low enough.



This is preferable to Warp in some cases because Warp does not remove cover, it doesn't go around corners, and it doesn't mitigate fire nearly as well. It does do a lot of damage, but you can do damage with your gun - in many cases, Warp is redundant with a good weapon.



Playing Sentinel/AP ammo and Adept/Energy Drain concurrently on Hardcore, I find that I use my guns to strip defenses with Adept, then use my powers to kill (or CC to death, if you prefer), whereas with Sentinel, I use powers to strip defenses, then use the gun to kill.



At this point I would like to ask you: do you know how to aim Throw? This is not a put-down. I'm not trying to belittle you. I noticed one poster saying that Throw can hit cover. This is nonsense. It can miss, of course, and if your target moves, your arc can change and it can hit cover, but most of the time, you should be able to hit a target behind cover with Throw, and moreover, you should be able to direct the hit so that the target moves out of cover - into your line of fire.



You do this by off-targeting. It doesn't work well with Warp because Warp doesn't track so well - it moves pretty much like a rocket. Pull and Throw move like boomerangs. You aim the power by placing the targeting reticule near enough the target so that it highlights, and then direct the arc of the power by placing the reticule off-target in the desired arc. If you wish to Throw the target left, then you place the reticule off-target slightly to the right (and usually slightly above so it curves above cover).



With Throw and a Sniper Rifle, you don't need to wait for the target to pop out of cover - you usually pop him out yourself.



Of course, the Sentinel also has Throw, which is why I've been using it so much. Both Adept and Sentinel with Sniper Rifle are fantastic alternatives to Infiltrator and Soldier sniping.



For Adept, Pull is an additional advantage. It doesn't track nearly as well as Throw, but it tracks decently well. Moreover, Pull allows everyone to target whatever it Pulls. This allows you to Pull non-defended target out, ask your mates to kill the target, and move on to whatever else is on the field, certain that your target is dead. Way more effective than Warp. With all my cooldown bonuses, Pull and Throw come online so often that I'm a Pulling Throwing madman wreaking havoc on the enemy line. I find that I don't use Warp nearly as much as I used to because Warp only slows me down once the defenses are stripped.



If I find a nice clump of enemies, then I use Warp for the explosion effect, but I'm pretty much using nearly all my biotic arsenal. It speeds up combat fast, it's effective, and it's fun. This has made me want to respec to try out a Pull Field Adept or a Throw Field Adept. Heck, I'm curious as to how an Evolved wide-angle Shockwave might work! It's all quite interesting.



By no means am I using only Warp, and far from slowing my down, using Pull, Throw, and Sing speed up combat unbelievably. You should try it out. If you find that it's not speeding combat for you, post your problem and I'll see if I can find out if that's how it is with me as well.

[Graunt]

Warp does not remove cover, it doesn't go around corners

Neither does pull, despite the mass informormation about it doing so.  It will only grab someone that is partially exposed no matter what, exposed enough that a bullet would hit.  Singularity is the only ability that will truly grab someone that's completely covered.  And to sum it up for you, don't talk about how biotics "may or may not" work in Insanity.  You really should not post until you have relevant experience.  You and other posters with the same off rails logic need to stop posting about how to remove protection so that biotics work.  We already know how.  The problem is you can't use most of your biotics until that's done and that's literally 80%+ of the enemies virtual health bar.

Modifié par Graunt, 08 février 2010 - 06:49 .

[Soruyao]

I also want to add that there are certain situations in which throw will do enough damage to finish off an enemy's shield. In those cases, you absolutely want to use throw instead of warp even though it would do less damage overall because you will be able to follow it up with lift or throw very quickly.

I only say this because I had one of those big camo+shotgun geth cornered me in a little room earlier, and I slammed a throw in his face which stunned him for a moment and finished off his shield, then the next throw knocked him down. I walked up and elbowed him to death. If I had warped, he likely would have killed me while I was waiting on the cooldown.

Also, throw and pull can indeed pull people out of cover that you can't see at all. Sometimes you can't get the angle right, but it definitely happens a lot. It takes a lot of finesse and practice to do well.

(And of course, shockwave can knock someone down from behind any cover. It's the ultimate coverflusher. It ignores all scenery, so you can knock someone out with shockwave, and then get the pull in and either shoot them or throw them off something.)

I want to triple underline how incredible singularity is against targets with defenses again. If you put a singularity in someone's face, unless they're a boss, they won't advance on you at all (or be able to duck/cover!), and their gunfire will be reduced by about half. I just got heavy singularity and it makes shotgun enemies a complete joke. It's kind of like having two drones hitting an enemy at once.

I love it when a krogan tries to charge up a ramp towards me and I put a singularity on his face. I can pretty much ignore him as long as I refresh the singularity every 15 seconds or so. It's the only ability in the game that genuinely works as CC on targets with defenses. (Well, if you count a snare/root as CC anyway.)

-edit-

With all due respect, I prefer to play Mass Effect to enjoy
myself, not to prove or disprove the arguments of people I don't know
over the internet. If you find that my experiences on Hardcore do not
translate to Insanity, then feel free to ignore it wholesale.

QUOTING THE FUTURE!     I can vouch for this guy in that he hasn't said anything yet about hardcore that doesn't work just as well in insanity.  You just need to be more careful while you do it, is all.

Modifié par Soruyao, 08 février 2010 - 07:44 .

[Roxlimn]

Graunt:



With all due respect, I prefer to play Mass Effect to enjoy myself, not to prove or disprove the arguments of people I don't know over the internet. If you find that my experiences on Hardcore do not translate to Insanity, then feel free to ignore it wholesale.



Singularity is not the only ability that allows you to strip cover. I've done it with Throw against enemies that were completely in cover. In fact, I prefer to use Throw to remove cover because Singularity occasionally misses. I'd upload a video, but it really is unnecessary. Just target Throw like I told you and you'll be able to see the effect for yourself, firsthand. No special skill is necessary. It's easy.

You and other posters with the same off rails logic need to stop posting about how to remove protection so that biotics work. We already know how. The problem is you can't use most of your biotics until that's done and that's literally 80%+ of the enemies virtual health bar.

Untrue. On a per-power count, I estimate that an Eclipse merc requires 2 uses of unboosted level 2 or 3 Overload to overcome Shields. The same enemy requires a little over 2 uses of otherwise unboosted Heavy Warp to remove all its health, plus some change. Of course, with +percentage powers, this changes. Towards the end of the game, you can get rid of a slight majority of the health of one enemy (on Hardcore) with just one Heavy Warp and then remove the rest with gunfire, but by the same level, you're one-shotting Shields with Area Overload.



As far as I can tell, using the numbers on the powers as a way of "guesstimating" actual numbers, the YMIR Mech has twice as much Shields and twice as much Armor as Health. That makes the YMIR Mech's Health about 20% of its total virtual HP. Apart from bosses, nearly every other enemy in the game has a greater proportion of health to defense.



If you can refer us to where you are getting this 80% figure (preferably a game file), then I'm prepared to retract my estimate in lieu of figuring out why Warp does such a bad job at damaging Health.

[sgrzadka]

Graunt wrote...

Warp does not remove cover, it doesn't go around corners

Neither does pull, despite the mass informormation about it doing so.  It will only grab someone that is partially exposed no matter what, exposed enough that a bullet would hit.  Singularity is the only ability that will truly grab someone that's completely covered.  And to sum it up for you, don't talk about how biotics "may or may not" work in Insanity.  You really should not post until you have relevant experience.  You and other posters with the same off rails logic need to stop posting about how to remove protection so that biotics work.  We already know how.  The problem is you can't use most of your biotics until that's done and that's literally 80%+ of the enemies virtual health bar.

actually IT DOES dont aim directly at them, curve it....

[baller7345]

Ok, first off I sense a little hostility here when it comes to the adept...yeah well moving on.



Has anyone ever stopped to think that maybe the adept is not a class that is supposed to be dishing out epic amounts of damage and killing everything with head shots. The adept along with the engineer and maybe to a lesser extent the sentinel are the support classes. Every RPG has them and of course they aren't going to be combat power houses but in the right hands they can be deadly.





The soldier, infiltrator, and vanguard may be able to kill everything quicker but not everyone wants to play as that type of character. For those that do then fine you get the bonuses of power but lose the uniqueness that the abilities of the other classes bring.

As for the support characters, (a.k.a. the classes that seem to get the most flak for being unusable when compared to the combat classes) you need to look at it differently. Once you come to terms with the fact that you won't be dealing damage out the wazoo you should start seeing the things that you can do. For instance while its true that once you get to the health bar you have probably already won the fight not every enemy is going to stand out in the open for your teammates to shoot. In this situation the adept can just force the baddies out of cover. Yes I know this won't excite those who want to be able to kill everything but lets face it the adept is now a support class and if you don't enjoy that then don't be one.





Now onto the bigger issue and that is shields, and yes there are a lot of them on insanity. However, what hasn't been addressed (from what I've read) is that there are also a ton of barriers and almost every mech has armor. Warp happens to work against both armor and barrier, especially barriers. If we compare that to the engineer, who is on the other side of the spectrum, then we find that while the engineer has stuff to deal with armor and shields the barrier is a major stepping stone. The point is that every class has weakness and that the adept is no longer the god it was in Mass Effect.



Bottom line it comes down to what you like. Some people like playing support characters for the added complexity it adds to combat (i.e. thinking things through) while other people prefer being the combat characters for the added sense of power and efficiency that they offer. While the adept may be "weaker" than the soldier if you prefer to play a class that can use its teammates to their full abilities while hardly firing a bullet then you might want to play the adept; however if you want to kill every enemy as quickly and as efficiently as possible with less help from you teammates then play a solider.



p.s. micromanaging your team is a must with support characters.

[baller7345]

Something i forgot to address is that while many of the biotic powers don't do a lot of damage to the shields of an enemy they do hurt some. On insanity any and all damage matters and I've found myself throwing Mordin's incinerates at shields and barriers just to quicken the process.



I'm not saying that bullets don't do it faster I'm just saying that they still do something.

[Kroniker81]

baller7345 wrote...

Ok, first off I sense a little hostility here when it comes to the adept...yeah well moving on.

Has anyone ever stopped to think that maybe the adept is not a class that is supposed to be dishing out epic amounts of damage and killing everything with head shots. The adept along with the engineer and maybe to a lesser extent the sentinel are the support classes. Every RPG has them and of course they aren't going to be combat power houses but in the right hands they can be deadly.


The soldier, infiltrator, and vanguard may be able to kill everything quicker but not everyone wants to play as that type of character. For those that do then fine you get the bonuses of power but lose the uniqueness that the abilities of the other classes bring.
As for the support characters, (a.k.a. the classes that seem to get the most flak for being unusable when compared to the combat classes) you need to look at it differently. Once you come to terms with the fact that you won't be dealing damage out the wazoo you should start seeing the things that you can do. For instance while its true that once you get to the health bar you have probably already won the fight not every enemy is going to stand out in the open for your teammates to shoot. In this situation the adept can just force the baddies out of cover. Yes I know this won't excite those who want to be able to kill everything but lets face it the adept is now a support class and if you don't enjoy that then don't be one.


Now onto the bigger issue and that is shields, and yes there are a lot of them on insanity. However, what hasn't been addressed (from what I've read) is that there are also a ton of barriers and almost every mech has armor. Warp happens to work against both armor and barrier, especially barriers. If we compare that to the engineer, who is on the other side of the spectrum, then we find that while the engineer has stuff to deal with armor and shields the barrier is a major stepping stone. The point is that every class has weakness and that the adept is no longer the god it was in Mass Effect.

Bottom line it comes down to what you like. Some people like playing support characters for the added complexity it adds to combat (i.e. thinking things through) while other people prefer being the combat characters for the added sense of power and efficiency that they offer. While the adept may be "weaker" than the soldier if you prefer to play a class that can use its teammates to their full abilities while hardly firing a bullet then you might want to play the adept; however if you want to kill every enemy as quickly and as efficiently as possible with less help from you teammates then play a solider.

p.s. micromanaging your team is a must with support characters.

And the next one who did not get the point of this thread.

[Amioran]

Soruyao wrote...

Alright, you were a lot more civil than the other guy so I'll respond in kind and explain my stance a little better.   People have been saying multiple times in this topic that

1. You need to spam warp constantly to succeed at insanity.  

 
Nobody said it (or if someone did is because they have understood anything, no matter if from one "part" or another). It is only a matter of being more "efficient", only this. You can beat insanity without ever using Warp as an Adept if you have a proper squad, but the fact that you need a "proper" squad and/or skills is per se an imposition. But I will talk of this aspect later.

2. You get artificially shoehorned into using one and sometimes two situations in every situation.

More simply: you are given an _external_ imposition on how to use biotic powers that is not dependent on the role or scope of the skill. This is a thing that should not happen. Increasing difficulty should not change the role of a skill. 
 

3. Spamming warp is way more optimal/easy/faster than using a varied playstyle, even through it's less fun.

True, but only in part. As I said you can also not use Warp as an Adept and make the class work, the problem is not this. The problem is that you are forced to use some powers only when certain conditions are met, and these conditions are not within the boundaries of the role and scope of the skill. For example take Hold Person: the role is to immobilize an humanoid creature. You know that the limitations are the mental check that must be passed and the fact that the spell works only on humanoids. These two are impositions, yes, but are within the role and scope of the skill. An external imposition would be if at higher difficulties the spell didn't work on creatures that wear armor. This restriction would not be in the boundaries of the scope and role of the spell, it would be only an external artificial imposition that will change completely how you can use the spell. What's will be worse, then, would be that _all_ the control spells would be given the same impositions. You see, as it happens in DA:O (and others RPGs) is that every CC spell has a restriction but then there's always another CC spell that can work on _that_ restritcion. This makes the system balanced. If you instead create an external imposition that breaks the rule making ALL OF CC SPELLS not work on certain terms, you break this balance and in so doing you make control skills useless (or better, you make control skills change their role).

This is the focal point, the difference between a restriction that is within the scope an role of skills/spells (that it's individual and balances one another) and a restriction that is _without_ the scope and role (that is absolute and breaks the correlation of skills and so the balance between them). When this happens the way the skill/spell works changes without a "proper" motive, the role is altered and the usefulness of before is no more; the skill/spell becomes something different but the problem is that the "empy space" it leaves is not taken by anything else. This happens, alas, with Biotics in ME2 on Insanity, and this is the motivation of the debate.

I disagree with all three statements, but I will give you that 3 is the one that is most likely to be a little true.  However, if it is true, the difference is negligible.

You say it's negligible because you _adopt_ countermeasures that make you work with the skills. The problem is that you should not have the need to do so. You should be free to use the skills the way you like within the role and scope of them, not to force yourself to find a way to make them work outside of the way they should behave.

I wasn't just saying that I can play as an adept on insanity.  That alone would prove nothing because many people on the other side of this debate have been saying the same thing.   What I am saying is that I can play insanity as an adept without using warp on infantry and use my other abilities consistently and succeed at insanity just fine.

And yet why you suceed? You do because you take the proper squad to circumvent the fact that you cannot use those skills as you would like to, and because you make them work in a way that it's _outside_ their role. This difference is fundamental. I (and others) never said that you cannot use them and that an Adept is forced to use Warp, I only said that to make the skills work you have to abide to some rules that should not be necessary if there was not an external imposition. Every external restriction forces the player to behave in certain ways to have the possibility to use the skills as they should be used, and this is nonsense.

To use Pull or Throw you have to first disable protections on _all_ enemies in insanity. The problem is this: if you don't have a mean to remove the protection for yourself or the squad you _cannot_ use skills that should be able to being used _everytime_ you want to remove high treaths targets, being them CC skills. If this simple rule is broken then CC skills lose their primary role and become something totally different. The fact that you can adapt and make them work outside their proper role doesn't change the fact that they are no more CC skills for an external imposition.

It succeeds in raising the difficulty and causing adepts to have to rely on their squad's abilities a little better.

No. It would be as you said if the skills would behave as they should. As it is now you are forced to use certain squad members or spam for yourself Warp. I already made an example and I will repeat it now: you say that the change make you rely more on squad members. If that's so, tell me, what happens if you for example choose Grunt and Jacob as squad and you don't spam Warp? How far will you go?

You see, you are _forced_ to use certain combinations to make almost all biotics works. This don't make you rely on squad members more, but only on a proper composition of them if you don't want to spam Warp for yourself. If what you said would be true you should not have the imposition of chosing the proper squad (or skills) to succed, but you should be able to use whatever member/skill you like to and go on adapting yourself to the challenge. This doesn't happen, so the imposition only restricts your choice of skills and/or squad members.

If CC skills would behave as they should (as it happens in lower difficulties) you could play with the squad you like chosing the skills you like more since you have a way to always use the skills you like more. This doesn't happen in higher difficulties. If you chose a squad that has no means to strip defenses and you yourself chose to don't spam Warp you cannot use your skills. This makes no sense.

Modifié par Amioran, 08 février 2010 - 12:33 .

[Soruyao]

Okay, so it's 4am, so forgive me if I'm not totally clear on what you're saying.

What I'm gathering from your post is that it's not as much the playstyle or how gameplay actually plays out, but the principle of the thing. The fact that you can't use any power on anything at any time and have it always work?

True, I would probably never form a team that was only jacob and grunt. This doesn't bother me much because I'm not particularly fond of either of them, but I can understand why someone might be annoyed that they can't just throw any team together with no thought and have that team work and be fun on any difficulty setting.

But if I choose to always have someone on my team who can warp or overload (basically, as long as I have a team that's miranda/x, I'm fine), then I never have to use one of my own GCDs on warp, and I can constantly throw people off of things.

I pose a counterquestion: Is it a good thing that as an infiltrator, I barely even noticed when one of my squad died? I didn't need them at all. I felt no need to pick any particular character for any particular mission. (I had mordin around a lot though because cryo blast + melee is a great way to finish off rushers.) Should people and classes favor certain squadmates for their abilities? I say yes to this question.

Not only does being an adept make me use my squad more carefully, it also influences my decisions about the squad I put together. I fill a role that is specialized and that has a weakness. I bring people who fill a role who can fill in that weakness. Isn't this a tried and true RPG convention?

What if we think of adepts as finishers and people who take down defenses as openers in the same way we think of healers tanks and dps in other games? You wouldn't want to form a team with only dps in a game with healers, but does that mean you don't want your main character to be a dps?

However, I will give you that most biotics aren't CC in this game. CC in general doesn't exist in this game. It's about openers, finishers, and the couple of classes that get to completely ignore the whole setup because they're overpowered. Adepts are most fun when they're played as finishers. These adepts fill a role where everything they do kills something, and they do need someone else around that can set em up so we can knock em down. Lift+throw is a freaking guillotine in the right hands, and when you kill someone with it, it just oozes style. (Its all about the shrieks. I play adept for the screams.)

BUT, adepts do have singularity, which is CC, and in a game that doesn't have much CC and relies so heavily on cover, even the tiniest amount of CC is incredibly powerful. It and arguably the combat drone are the only CC that work through defenses, which makes it invaluable. When I hit a guy who's behind cover with a singularity, they are forced to stand up and in place for as long as 10 seconds. When I follow that up with a burst (like 1.5 to 2 seconds worth, at most!) from the geth pulse rifle with warp ammo, and I sometimes start to feel like I don't even need squadmates. It's especially nice because once their defenses do go down, the singularity autolifts them and sets them up for a throw.

I still think that infiltrators being too powerful is the whole problem. People play it and think that's how insanity is supposed to be and get mad when they play a class where you actually have to plan out which squadmates you take on a mission and use their abilities properly throughout that mission.

TL;DR guide to having fun on an adept: Bring miranda, garrus, thane, tali, zaeed, or samara along for every mission depending on what it is, and use a random squad member for flavor in the other spot. Don't spam warp.

Modifié par Soruyao, 08 février 2010 - 12:49 .

[Roxlimn]

Amioran:

If CC skills would behave as they should (as it happens in lower difficulties) you could play with the squad you like chosing the skills you like more since you have a way to always use the skills you like more. This doesn't happen in higher difficulties. If you chose a squad that has no means to strip defenses and you yourself chose to don't spam Warp you cannot use your skills. This makes no sense.

The same limitation is imposed on Concussive Shot for defenses other than Barrier. The same limitation occurs with Shredder Ammo, and AI Hacking.



Pull and Throw's CC qualities are too powerful to allow to work without resistances, especially at difficulty levels that are supposed to be difficult. Powers like Overload also behave differently at lower difficulty levels. Namely, Overload is not as useful, because there aren't as many Shields that you need to strip. Reave behaves similarly.



The Adept is not advertised as being very flexible or being great acting solo. That is the role of the Sentinel. If you're looking for that, the Sentinel is a better class choice, by design.

[Flash_in_the_flesh]

Roxlimn wrote...

The Adept is not advertised as being very flexible or being great acting solo.

Adept is advertised as an ultimate CC. Can you do any other CC than singularity hold on insanity for the most of the game? No. Does singularity makes Adept any better at CC than any other CC class on insanity? Definitely not. Even engineer's drone is better.

Btw. no class is being advertises as being great acting solo, so what's the point of using this argument?

Modifié par Flash_in_the_flesh, 08 février 2010 - 01:13 .

[Roxlimn]

Flash_in_the_Flesh:



Actually, the Sentinel is. Check out Christina Norman's video again. Of all the classes, I think the Sentinel is best equipped to solo the game. The Infiltrator is great, too, but that's because of how much damage his sniping does.



Again, I can't say much about Insanity. The entire game is not Insanity. Much of the game was designed to work at levels Casual to Hardcore. As far as I can tell, it does work as advertised at those levels. I AM using CC powers for most encounters. And yes, Singularity is actually pretty darned spiffy as movement control powers go, even against Drone.

[Kroniker81]

Roxlimn wrote...

Pull and Throw's CC qualities are too powerful to allow to work without resistances, especially at difficulty levels that are supposed to be difficult. Powers like Overload also behave differently at lower difficulty levels. Namely, Overload is not as useful, because there aren't as many Shields that you need to strip. Reave behaves similarly.

No, they are not too powerful. This is simply untrue. They are not more powerful than Cloak or Slow Motion. This has been proven countless of times already so stop that fallacy please.

[Roxlimn]

Kroniker81:



There s no flaw in the logic, so it is not a fallacy.

There has been no proof to any effect that either Tactical Cloak or Adrenaline Rush are superior powers in and of themselves, and in any case, it has no bearing on whether or not other powers are too powerful or not.



Pull Field's wide area CC effect for seconds on end mean that you can shoot enemies without giving them the benefit of cover, or even covering fire, for that matter. This essentially means that they are dead before they hit the ground. Even more powerful, having Pull affect an enemy at all means that you can use Warp to trigger a Warp Explosion, dealing Heavy Warp damage to every enemy in a 5 meter radius - the most powerful general damage AoE effect in the game.



This can allow you to sweep three or 4 enemies at an instant, where you would otherwise need a good amount of time (say, 16 to 20 seconds). There has been no input from you or from others about this at all, leading me to suspect that you don't know Warp has this property, or, having not used it much, you don't know how devastating it really is.



The thing that really makes Adrenaline Rush or Tactical Cloak powerful are the guns. Without the Widow or the Vindicator, or the Viper, or the Revenant, they are not really all that strong.



Do not presume to tell me that proof exists without showing me. If the proof exists, and it has been proven so many times that you can call it "countless," then give me a link or at least a thread reference. I see a lot of hyperbole and juvenile boasting, but no proof.

[baller7345]

Kroniker81 wrote...

baller7345 wrote...

Ok, first off I sense a little hostility here when it comes to the adept...yeah well moving on.

Has anyone ever stopped to think that maybe the adept is not a class that is supposed to be dishing out epic amounts of damage and killing everything with head shots. The adept along with the engineer and maybe to a lesser extent the sentinel are the support classes. Every RPG has them and of course they aren't going to be combat power houses but in the right hands they can be deadly.


The soldier, infiltrator, and vanguard may be able to kill everything quicker but not everyone wants to play as that type of character. For those that do then fine you get the bonuses of power but lose the uniqueness that the abilities of the other classes bring.
As for the support characters, (a.k.a. the classes that seem to get the most flak for being unusable when compared to the combat classes) you need to look at it differently. Once you come to terms with the fact that you won't be dealing damage out the wazoo you should start seeing the things that you can do. For instance while its true that once you get to the health bar you have probably already won the fight not every enemy is going to stand out in the open for your teammates to shoot. In this situation the adept can just force the baddies out of cover. Yes I know this won't excite those who want to be able to kill everything but lets face it the adept is now a support class and if you don't enjoy that then don't be one.


Now onto the bigger issue and that is shields, and yes there are a lot of them on insanity. However, what hasn't been addressed (from what I've read) is that there are also a ton of barriers and almost every mech has armor. Warp happens to work against both armor and barrier, especially barriers. If we compare that to the engineer, who is on the other side of the spectrum, then we find that while the engineer has stuff to deal with armor and shields the barrier is a major stepping stone. The point is that every class has weakness and that the adept is no longer the god it was in Mass Effect.

Bottom line it comes down to what you like. Some people like playing support characters for the added complexity it adds to combat (i.e. thinking things through) while other people prefer being the combat characters for the added sense of power and efficiency that they offer. While the adept may be "weaker" than the soldier if you prefer to play a class that can use its teammates to their full abilities while hardly firing a bullet then you might want to play the adept; however if you want to kill every enemy as quickly and as efficiently as possible with less help from you teammates then play a solider.

p.s. micromanaging your team is a must with support characters.

And the next one who did not get the point of this thread.

It wasn't that I don't get what this thread is about it is simply that by this point the thread is no longer about the original post instead its simply fallen into an endless argument.  As to my post I was simply stating that biotics can still be fun, which was one of the original posts complaints, if you like that sort of class.  If this doesn't follow the thread's topic then I'm sorry for sounding like an idiot.

[Flash_in_the_flesh]

Roxlimn wrote...

Kroniker81:

There has been
no proof to any effect that either Tactical Cloak or Adrenaline Rush are superior powers in and of themselves, and in any case, it has no bearing on whether or not other powers are too powerful or not.

Please mod the game and play an adept on insanity with biotics working on shields. Then play infiltrator and soldier on insanity. Then come back talking about biotics being overpowered.

Modifié par Flash_in_the_flesh, 08 février 2010 - 04:14 .

[Roxlimn]

Flash_in_the_Flesh:



All in good time. For the moment, I'm enjoying my run on Hardcore with the 4 classes I've selected. For the sake of variety, I chose Revenant for the Soldier, Widow for the Infiltrator, and Sniper Rifle for both Sentinel and Adept.



I have not been spamming Warp only, and indeed, it seems rather counter-productive to me. At the very least, you could pick Reave or Energy Drain as your extra power and spam that, too. Apart from that, I've been using Pull and Throw to fantastic effect, as I've said. It makes fights easier and faster.



Comparing Adept to Soldier, I have to confess that the level of difficulty really depends on the mission and encounter type. While I'm a little short on gun variety with Adept (since amended because I now wield the Viper), I'm rarely in a position where I'm pinned down by gunfire. After you strip defenses en masse (especially Shields - those are real easy to bring down), the battlefield essentially belongs to the Adept. Cover is no defense against my biotics. Pull someone who's got a friend nearby and detonate him with Warp. Wow. It's really good.



A Soldier can kill things really fast and from a good distance, too, but it's hard to take down multiple enemies at once, and if you charge on ahead to trigger two or three spawning triggers, you can get caught in dangerous crossfires. You really need to have good aim with this class and the Infiltrator. Adept? Not as much.

[Amioran]

Roxlimn wrote...

The same limitation is imposed on Concussive Shot for defenses other than Barrier. The same limitation occurs with Shredder Ammo, and AI Hacking.

Are they CC skills? They are not. The role of the class is the same? No, it's not. While the same impositions happens the class that has the most negative impact from it is the Adept and the skills that have the most to lose from the restriction are CC skills. Damaging skills also if limited by restrictions keep always a factor of usefulness since their role is more "direct". Damaging skills are less concerned on time limitation, treath of the targets and liberty of use. This has to do, again, with the role the skills have.

Pull and Throw's CC qualities are too powerful to allow to work without resistances, especially at difficulty levels that are supposed to be difficult. Powers like Overload also behave differently at lower difficulty levels. Namely, Overload is not as useful, because there aren't as many Shields that you need to strip. Reave behaves similarly.

I suggest you to try to mod the game and try for yourself if what you say is true or not. Every class should have a role. You can think that the CC role of a Wizard/Adept is overpowered compared to a direct damage one, but this is a thing that concerns the intrinsic classes' roles and their usefulness. It has nothing to do with skills or spells individually. The Adept should control the battlefield without external absolute restrictions; if you think this role overpowered or not is a thing that has nothing to do with the fact that this is how the class _should_ work, apart the fact that in reality it's not true what you say.

The Adept is not advertised as being very flexible or being great acting solo. That is the role of the Sentinel. If you're looking for that, the Sentinel is a better class choice, by design.

Yet it is advertised as being the "Wizard" class of ME2, capable of controlling the battlefield without restrictions. If they delivered on this nobody would have cared if they are the "best" class or not. If the role is fulfilled the rest doesn't matter much.

I never talked about being able to "solo" the game with an Adept. It was an example to explain that all the talk of the Adept being more dependent on squad members is a lie. Why you continually turn the argument around for the sake of trying to be right? Try please to understand of what I'm talking about before making remarks that have nothing to do with what I'm discussing.

Modifié par Amioran, 08 février 2010 - 05:19 .

[Roxlimn]

Amioran:

Are they CC skills? They are not. The role of the class is the same? No, it's not. While the same impositions happens the class that has the most negative impact from it is the Adept and the skills that have the most to lose from the restriction are CC skills. Damaging skills also if limited by restrictions keep always a factor of usefulness since their role is more "direct". Damaging skills are less concerned on time limitation, threat of the targets and liberty of use. This has to do, again, with the role the skills have.

Nonsense. You don't like how biotics perform at the higher levels simply because you have a preconceived notion of what they ought to be like, not because they're functionally ineffective. I can't speak for Insanity, of course, but certainly, on every other difficulty level, they retain potency and power.

Just not the way you'd like.

I suggest you to try to mod the game and try for yourself if what you say is true or not. Every class should have a role. You can think that the CC role of a Wizard/Adept is overpowered compared to a direct damage one, but this is a thing that concerns the intrinsic classes' roles and their usefulness. It has nothing to do with skills or spells individually. The Adept should control the battlefield without external absolute restrictions; if you think this role overpowered or not is a thing that has nothing to do with the fact that this is how the class _should_ work, apart the fact that in reality it's not true what you say.

Don't deny what I say. SHOW me. Tell me the numbers. Show me the money. I can tell you the power count and instances in which I used the powers and the guns and so on because I'm playing the game and I'm paying attention. I could probably upload videos, I suppose, but there's no need. Biotics aren't hard to use since the auto-targeting is significant. Just do what I said and you'll find that what I said is perfectly so - just as I said it.

Your belief is that encounter-winning CC powers should remain unchanged form difficulty class to difficulty class. There is no reason that that should be so other than your wanting it to be so. Just because that is your preference doesn't make it fact - that's just your opinion.

I've played enough biotics on Hardcore to know that applying Pull, Sing, and Throw Biotic powers to any situation in which they have an effect is devastating. I can try out the mods after I try out Insanity, but quite frankly, I could be burned out by then. In any case, you can mod the game so that it functions like you prefer. Doesn't make it right - it's simply how YOU like to play.

Yet it is advertised as being the "Wizard" class of ME2, capable of controlling the battlefield without restrictions. If they delivered on this nobody would have cared if they are the "best" class or not. If the role is fulfilled the rest doesn't matter much.

I never talked about being able to "solo" the game with an Adept. It was an example to explain that all the talk of the Adept being more dependent on squad members is a lie. Why you continually turn the argument around for the sake of trying to be right? Try please to understand of what I'm talking about before making remarks that have nothing to do with what I'm discussing.

Firstly, I tracked and followed that line of argument from its inception. Soruyao makes the point that stripping defenses on Insanity is easily manageable - particularly dealing with Shields, which Adepts are weak against. You present the counterpoint that this limits the kind of squads an Adept can move around with. That is not a valid counterpoint because Adepts were never advertised to be flexible or capable of going solo. If that was not your point, then please explain further.

Secondly, Adepts were never advertised as being able to control the battlefield "without restriction" at all levels of difficulty. Requiring the player to strip defenses is simply a binary form of resistance, as opposed to a probability-driven resistance model. All enemies become more resistant to gunfire the higher level you go. It only seems fair that they should also gain resistances against non-damage powers. And it's not like it's all that hard to strip resistances anyway.

Seriously, what's the problem? I've been using Biotics other than Warp to good effect and I'm having fun with it. So is Soruyao. Are you incapable of having this kind of fun just because the way resistances work in ME2 are different from what you thought they should have been? It's not hard to do. It's effective. What's the problem?

Could it be that you can't figure out how to use non-Warp biotic powers on Insanity effectively, and don't want to believe that others can?

Modifié par Roxlimn, 08 février 2010 - 05:39 .

[baller7345]

Just wondering but has anybody played an engineer before coming to this thread or did you just switch over to the infiltrator/soldier/vanguard because the adept and the engineer both share many of the same weakness in that they can take down two armor types but one type is very hard to take out with their skills alone. Also comparing the two classes you see that many of their abilities don't work on enemy's that have shields, armor, or barrier. For instance A.I. Hacking doesn't work on anything shielded neither does cryo freeze but I've never thought that they were useless. So why does the adept get all the flak while I've seen nowhere near this much hate for the engineer. It intrigues me and I know it doesn't really go with this particular post but I figure it can be answered by one or two posts so it isn't really worth a new thread for.

Modifié par baller7345, 08 février 2010 - 06:29 .