My god, the UI for selling and buying in this game, who the designed this mess?
Latest nVidia drivers were supposed to address memory crashes on the 1080s, my 1070 still does it if I hit ESC while on the Tempest. Fine when I’m planetside. Weird.
People just want a little, tiny bit of balance so a couple choices aren’t WAY better than everything else. This is not about min maxing to the 1%, it is about many skills not working well with others.
These things don’t really change on normal either, it is just so easy that you can basically do anything you want and not have it matter much. Lance could heal the enemy when you hit them with it on normal and you could still complete it with Lance.
Yes, i know it “works” on Normal but something not instantly making you have a heart attack in real life when you use it on easy in the game does not mean the game is balanced.
It is 100%, completely impossible to either balance any game or talk about balance when the counter is “it works on normal so it must be fine.”
Is it really so wrong for people to wish bioware had spent even the smallest effort trying to make skills be useful and work together logically? Is it so wrong i’d like to play on a level higher than normal and have build variety?
But these menus were in the tutorial stuff.
How? In beginning of the game, I didn’t have any skills yet. I don’t remember it teaching me anything about a Favorites menu. Maybe there was a message somewhere that I missed? Or maybe it showed me an empty menu somewhere at the beginning of the game? I’ll allow the possibility that I don’t remember it from that long ago.
I am level 50 on my first play through. I have respecced many times because that is what I do in games like this.
My build has settled on Tactical Cloak, Energy Drain and Charge. Mostly because of Bio-Converter Augs and the synergy with the 6 point Tech Support skill of Life Support.
The profile thing is a nice try, but I stay with the Explorer profile and my three active skills. At level 50 I still don’t have all of the passives that support my build maxed. So a profile change does nothing for me outside of changing Explorer to Vanguard or something like that. IMO, the game does not really support using the profile system to change active skills. You just don’t have enough points to do that.
I don’t recall the specifics, but it comes up at some point early on - I think it tells you to check the tutorial menu for more info? A tootltip maybe? Either way, there are two sections in /Game/Tutorials/Combat/ (Profiles & Favorites) that tell you how to use them.
You missed the point. MEA has branching on its passives, some of which are designed to support aoe skills, some have duration or cdr, etc. Most of the evos are designed to work with a particular set of skills within that tree while being useless for the others. I don’t know about you, but unless it’s a utility skill/spell I’m not going to use an unsupported spell on the enemy when my spellbook is full of others that are stronger. Plus, as I said, Bioware supported this feature narratively. They outright sadi that Sam can overwrite your biological abilities on the fly so I don’t see why you’d have to be locked into passives.
A clue? How about you go sentinel, slot in ED, Incinerate and detonate both with Lance. It covers shields, armor and all enemy types. This is what I mean with faffing about, you switch profiles to target different enemies in each pack when you don’t have to. Also, your biotic setup has only 2 biotic skills so you’re effectively wasting 1/3 of your biotic profile’s passives. Your tech profile doesn’t have any constructs so you’re throwing away all the construct passives. Please at least tell me that you’re wearing a suit of armor with general damage type bonus and not either biotic or tech.
Well I mean you’re on playing on normal, everything works there. What you’re doing is not adapting to situation, you’re just killing enemies in style because it looks cool when they get blasted by biotic combos. That’s what I mean with faffing about. There are several builds in MEA that work versus everything and work well, and instead of doing that you’re switching to suboptimal loadouts that aren’t even better at the job they’re supposed to be the best at.
Normal is the default and presumably intended baseline difficulty. If less options work at a higher difficulty that is something you are giving up by choosing to play at that difficulty when there is no need to do so.
Yes but it still isn’t balanced in normal, the game is just so easy that even the worst abilities work decently enough to let you pass.
How do you balance a game when balance is considered fine if you can finish the game on easy with an ability?
Honestly, knowing that there are these better, stronger combinations out there seems like a bonus to me, not a bad thing. When I first start playing, I just take abilities that sound cool. Freeze someone? Bonus, I’ll take it. A grenade? I love throwing grenades in shooters, gimme that! Energy Drain? I lower their shields/health and get my shields back? Sweet! So those are the three abilities I went with. Since I didn’t know about “Favorites” and being able to switch, I maxed all 3 of those out by level 22, and then started putting more into passives, like Sniper Rifle, which is the weapon I use the most.
Now, what your posts are telling me is that I play around with some other abilities, I won’t have as hard a time in the game as I’m having now (I’m playing on Hardcore difficulty). That sounds awesome! I hate it when a single player game is “balanced” so much that whatever you pick is about equal, so it doesn’t really matter what you pick.
I’ve been squinting when you and others mentions specific powers and abilities, because I obviously don’t want spoilers on what the best combinations are. Obviously playing the game and experimenting is a more fun way of finding stronger abilities and combinations than just reading it from someone else’s efforts on a message board. The fact that there ARE stronger combinations out there seems like a great thing to me, it means I should experiment more and try to find these combinations. Right? If, for example, you were saying well, I give this game 10/10 on balance, because there’s literally dozens of excellent combinations in the game that work really well on Insanity, then I would likely view that as a negative. Like what Bethesda did with Oblivion where they always balanced the world to be right around where you were in ability, so it always felt kind of even whether you were fighting a super impressive foe or a small foe. They got better by not over-balancing the game in subsequent games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim.
I might not find these “two or three” super combinations you guys mention in this playthrough, but it seems really cool to me to know they are out there, that if I experiment and find them, I could be a badass.
My Ryder builds robots, cloaks, and snipes bad guys from a distance. She also cracks jokes all the time and the entire universe hates her, except Drack and Peebee.
SAM: “Pathfinder, is it really necessary to provoke this individual?” Yes, SAM, yes it is.
Bateau
I appreciate your explanation as to how the game works, and I know you may find this hard to believe, but I already understood all that. I understand the synergies that come from specializing in a single skill tree and that I am giving up “efficiency” by mixing classes. But all I can say, and this is my final word - you can say what you want after this - I don’t care about being less “effective” or not maximizing my skills/damage or whatever. I just want to have fun. If that means “faffing about” and “blasting people” with biotic combos because it looks cool, then that is fine with me. That is exactly the reason I choose it because I have never played a biotic character in ME and I wanted to this time. And I’ve always loved the cloaking ability so I chose that. And I’m having a great time doing it! You keep going on and on about how I’m not playing “effectively” and how my build is less than optimal. I’ll repeat, I don’t care!
And as for me “missing the point”, well, you’re describing yourself. You have yet to answer the question I keep asking you. So I’ll ask it one more time - WHY should I care? If I can play with a “sub optimal” character and have fun, why does that matter? You have yet to give me a reason as to WHY I should care. I keep asking you WHY I should care and you never answer that one question. When you can answer that question, then maybe I’ll listen to you but right now, I don’t care. Go and play your optimal best build, and I’ll just keep faffing around enjoying myself with my sub-optimal build, sniping from a distance, cloaking when in danger and needing to make tactical moves, blasting biotics and controlling the battlefield.
So it would be balanced in normal if the worst abilities didn’t work to let you pass? I thought balance was about making all abilities work? Isn’t your complaint that all abilities don’t work really well in Insanity, that only certain skills and builds work well, therefore the game is unbalanced? But if they all work in Normal the game is unbalanced? You can’t have it both ways. You seen to be contradicting yourself :)
How about because you don’t want to support amateur hour game design?
Also, your level of enjoyment is not in question here, only how Profiles are implemented in the game.
Grifman…
As i’ve said multiple times, my complaint is the following:
-Abilities that barely work
-Abilities are very bad
-Abilities that have minimal, or no synergy with other abilities/passives
I will say it again, even if you can finish the game on super easy mode with X ability, it does not mean it is balanced.
I will ask again why you are so interested in making sure the game is not balanced and that there is no build variety at higher difficulties due to balance issues that you can safely ignore at super easy because the game is super easy?
And again, by your logic pull (or any other ability) could do absolutely nothing and still be balanced because you could complete the game on normal.
I have to wonder whether you feel the same way about other games? Diablo 3 for example? If it works on easy, but becomes useless on torment 1, is it fine?
Interesting to switch between these planetscapes and some earlier game landscapes - like Gothic 3 and Skyrim. Technology marches on…
I do think that any landscape which accommodates a mount or vehicle struggles a bit to capture a sense of exploration for the on foot player. Cool content 20 seconds apart on horse or Nomad-back is a lot more spaced out than cool content 20 seconds apart on foot.
I keep getting all these consumables as loot. Has anyone ever used those? I always forget to, since you have to go into the menu to use them, which is hard to remember in the thick of battle, when you’re trying to dodge attacks or aiming at people. If they wanted us to use them so much, I wish they’d been able to bind it to a controller button somewhere.
It’s just Tab on PC. Easy to turn on the fire bullets or the shield recharge. It does pause to let you do it too.
Had no idea. The game really does an amazingly bad job on stuff like that (the profiles too).
I really really haven’t. I don’t think they take up inventory slots though, so I don’t worry about it.