The Glade 4.0

@Raltar

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Eh. I found thermal clips to make sense, but I read the codex, and I recall those long pauses if I overheated in the original. 10 seconds is a long time when exchanging dakka - being able to continue firing after a couple seconds instead of waiting for cooldown was acceptable to me.

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Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

Except with frictionless materials, the guns never overheated. Ever.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I agree that the leveling is dumbed down. It's not even real time xp gain. You have to finish your mission before it even tells you the experience gain on that planet. You don't get to see how much xp killing that one geth even awarded you. It's all just thrown into a pool and given out at the end of the mission. That is, in my opinion, dumbed down leveling. It basically equates to: do a mission, gain a level. It seems far too under the hood for my taste. I like to see myself as I level up, not just the end result at the end of the mission. At least, that's how it has been for me thus far.

However, I don't find any issues with the ammo system. I like it how it is.

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I think you don't even know what dumbed down means. "Waiting to grant experience until the end of the mission" is not dumbing down, it's granting experience for achieving objectives instead of random killing.

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Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

wish I had more dynamic leveling. feels slow leveling up.

HATE collectors all the way around.

Play a little more and you'll notice a pattern. Every mission grants 1000 exp. Every loyalty mission grants 750 exp. Every random act or small quest completion grants 40 exp, and every dog tag found at the Normandy crash site earns 10 exp. Once you beat the game and import your ME2 character, add 25% to each of those values.

Now you know exactly what you're getting.

Also, every level after 20 only gives one squad point. This means you'll end at level 30 with 50 points to spend. This means you can max five abilities, or divvy up the points as you see fit into a loyalty skill. Plan accordingly.

Completion.

Level 26, one KIA (Zaeed).

Liara and Tali are probably going to have some serious hurt feelings come 3.

I liked Shooter-RPG Mass Effect much better than RPG-Shooter Mass Effect.

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Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

"Dumbed down" is not difficult vocabulary. Granting experience for objectives and not killing is dumbed down, in my opinion. Imagine the uproar there'd be if WoW went to a quest-xp only based system. Killing a boss grants you zero experience. This system just feels so controlled. I don't like it because it feels dumbed down to me.

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Well, I bought it today. And its going to sit on my desk for about the next two months. Well, I'm hoping I'll have time to play it then.

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The Dude abides.

Dungeons and Dragons Online rewards exp at the end of a mission. Not on a per kill basis. That's worked fine for years. I don't think I'd call it dumbed down. In fact, the system in DDO is remarkably similar to ME2. Base experience for completing the mission, plus bonus exp for bonus objectives.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

I love this game. Put 26 hours into it since Thurs evening. I have all but one of the team assembled, and I've done all of their loyalty missions.

I don't have a problem with the XP system, for the most part, its the same thing with the useless abilities pared out.

I *do* hate the clip system. As a sniper, I miss my unlimited shots of face-pwning goodness. I would be fine if the guns could fire without the clips, just at a slower rate or something. Life got better when I got the Viper, but the clip system is still annoying.

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Holy shitsnacks!

You CAN level up midway through a mission provided you get XP midway through the mission. But you are generally only getting the meagar 40xp missions then, the chance of it happening is slim.

*shrug* I don't see how less is better.

XP for:

a) Kills + Missions + Bonuses

or

b) Just for Missions + Bonuses

Regardless, it's mostly personal preference. The rest of the game is amazing, to me. I'm at about 16 hours so far now. I haven't be able to play near as much I wanted to this weekend. I convinced my friend to pick the game up this weekend also. Unfortunately he came over Saturday night, so he didn't want to see any spoilers, meaning I couldn't play.

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Ultimately it's not an issue because you max at level 30 (which you can hit in one play if you imported a lvl 60 char), anyway.

I think I'm around 1/3-1/2way through (just changed to the 2nd disc), and I prefer almost all of the streamlines that they've made for this game. I'm a manual-leveler (I would think most of us here are), but a lot of times it seemed like Mass Effect one had the "deep-RPG levelling system" in place just to make it seem more complicated, or because it was carried over from KOTOR. Let's be honest, they're trying to make this an action-rpg, it should have an action levelling system. I don't want to stop halfway through a firefight and level my characters.

I enjoy a deep leveling system, but I think ME2's streamlined system also works very well for the game it's in.

P.S. I'm playing the Vanguard class (imported my soldier character from ME1) and it is fun as hell. Definitely a more risk-rewards class, but rank 4 heavy charge is excellent.

I chose my lvl 60 Infiltrator though I'm anxious to try out some of the other powers. Finding out how to Arc the various powers was a huge help.

Jesus **** Christ, this game is brutal on Insanity. Krogan are now the bane of my existence. I need to drop Geth Shield power and pick up armor piercing rounds, I think. Would help against Scions and Praetorians as well.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Yeah I'm trying to get Mordin and the Krogans on the way to him are just absolutely ripping me apart.

What I've been doing is breaking their armor down with a liberal application of incinerate, then freezing them with cryo ammo...but that only worked when I could lure them away from the fire fight. You have no idea how many times I had to restart the boss fight when recruiting Grunt. That room is poorly designed to hide from a heavy mech and Krogan...plus the ***** shooting missiles at me. Also, husks now have armor. They still die easy with incinerate, but now it takes two shots since the first gets rid of the armor and the second kills them...but it is really annoying. Especially when you're getting hit from all sides by Collectors. All Collectors have biotic barriers as well. Super annoying.

I wouldn't have beaten the first Praetorian without my cloak, though. It seems to focus solely on Shepard, so I'd hide behind something tossing out incinerates while my squad would be hitting him. Then I'd cloak, run to the other side of the area and my cloak would drop and the Praetorian would start coming after me again. My squad had to do almost all of the damage against it. And you know how that area is. I have no **** clue how I'm going to deal with those **** later when I don't have such a good place to work with.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Husks can be taken out pretty easy by going for the legs.

Yeah, but you have to break through their armor first on Insanity. And they swarm like no one's business. Might not be as bad when I get the 50% less melee damage upgrade, though.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Spent about 2 hours trying to beat the and I couldn't make any progress. And I can't really think of anything else that would help me out here. I'm just not good enough, I guess.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I kept getting raped on Insanity on my way to Mordin, and I figured there's no reason to play thru as Infiltrator again, so I rerolled as a Vanguard. Took barrier as a secondary skill.

The beginning areas are definitely easier.

Little side note, I actually imported my ME1 character again instead of importing my ME2 character. You still get the exp/resource/money bonuses, plus your initial renegade/paragon bonus, plus your "Rich" achievement bonus. Only thing you miss out on is levels and gear. The gear isn't a huge deal, and it will be easy to max at 30 in one game with the 25% exp boost, so I think it's definitely a much wiser decision.

So on my second game, with my lvl 50 ME1 char, I get these bonuses:

+ 25% exp boost
+ 330,000 credits
+ 55,000 of all materials
+ 190 renegade/paragon points
+ 2000 exp (level 3)
- Weapons/Armor/Levels

If you import an ME2 char, you keep weapons/armor/levels, but paragon and renegade points are reset.