@ Jaedar: Yeah, I understand what you're saying. I just enjoyed where the story ended up going as a result, but you're right about the encounter itself.
@ Thread
http://social.bioware.com/forum/Mass-Ef ... 444-1.html
This is a Bioware post explaining how the stats of mass effect 3 work. Being something of a game rules nerd, it really bugged me that I didn't know these details. Indulge me in a bit of powergaming theory, if you will, as I try to spell out what this game system means:
See, ME3 has a really cool but also peculiar system for weapons: You can choose whatever gun you want to bring on a mission, but your guns have weight.
You can basically bring as many guns as you want, but you'll get a weight penalty in the shape of higher power cooldown. If you bring fewer weapons, you get a bonus.
I wanted to link this because I've been searching for this information for a while, and there's some intricacies to it.
I've been using the lightest assault rifle and the hardest-hitting heavy pistol for a while now; the combination weighs in at almost nothing, giving me a supposed 190% cooldown reduction. Add to that, I'm using a suit of armor that gives tremendous cooldown reduction, most of my powers provide cooldown reduction, and so on.
A power with a 10 second cooldown as standard probably has around 2 seconds cooldown for me, because I have around 400% cooldown reduction total. To get that down to 1 second, I would need another 500% cooldown reduction.
Clearly there's diminishing returns at work; a 200% cooldown reduction puts me at 3 seconds. Of course, the other way to look at it is in terms of extra power uses per. 10 seconds. 200% cooldown reduction, which is what you get from having a light load (think a handgun and a submachine gun, or a single assault rifle) provides you with 3 power uses in 10 seconds. 400% cooldown reduction provides you with 5 power uses in 10 seconds. 900% cooldown reduction provides you with 10 power uses in 10 seconds.
You can clearly see that every 100% of added cooldown reduction gives you an extra use of the power within the powers standard cooldown timer. In other words, your power-dps scales linearly with cooldown reduction. I'll report back when I can test in game, but if the bioware post is correct, your squadmembers cooldown reduction will be based off of shepards cooldown reduction. If true, that's all sorts of cruel: You can raise your squadmembers dps tremendously with cooldown reduction to your own character, but you can't raise their weapon damage in the same fashion.
The power damage formula, on the other hand, is much simpler..but power damage boosts are much less readily available. It shouldn't be difficult to find about 100% power damage bonus, which will effectively double the power damage, while only sacrificing about 100% cooldown reduction bonus. That'll double your DPS for a linear reduction, so it's probably worth it to get between 50% and 100%, though, again, if you also lose squadmate power uses, it'll be tricky to find out the optimum combination.
Anyway, here's what all this means:
If you want to be a powerhouse in ME3 on the higher difficulty levels, you need to cherry pick your team for the missions, you want massive cooldown reduction on your skills, and you'll want to choose some relatively crappy lightweight weapons. The good news is that this is an incredibly flashy and pretty exciting gameplay style in this game, the bad news is that all those pretty weapons? Not gonna be useful to you.
And believe me, there's a metric fuckton of cool weapons in this game, so that's pretty sad. That's actually what prompted me to go on this tirade...I was annoyed at having a much harder time playing around with the cool toys, and wanted to figure out why. For my soldier-playthrough, I'm definitely reducing the difficulty level so I won't feel as much pain from gimping myself by trying a different, more weapons-heavy type of build.
Had to be done. Love that they made you pull the trigger yourself.
