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MASS EFFECT: ANDROMEDA (Here be Spoilers)


RIPPA

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New weekly Apex is an 11 wave bronze.  Nets you an Apex pack too, which is nice.  It's insanely easy.  

I guess I picked a good time to be a dumbass and accidentally reset my Kroguard to level 1.  Super easy weekly, plus 5 level 4 experience boosters from said weekly equals quick return to 20

 

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16 hours ago, J.T. said:

Remnant 6 is a thing that will start being a thing, isn't it?

My favorite part of this is you being mad at a kid for knowing how roman numerals work which no one learns anymore

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9 hours ago, Robert C said:

New weekly Apex is an 11 wave bronze.  Nets you an Apex pack too, which is nice.  It's insanely easy.  

I sleepwalked through the mission with my Shadow armed Salarian Architect and two other players using very overpowered characters.  Laser beam headshots for days.

APEX pack finally unlocked the Carnifex for me, so I am happy.  Now I have to start using and upgrading it to chip away at Pistol Mastery Silver. 

Thank God that kills with the Predator S count towards the Predator challenge in Pistol Mastery, otherwise I'd never build up points because I hate using the basic version of that gun.

You can buy up to three APEX packs between now and the end of the challenge period.  They are 600K a piece, so I am not even going to bother saving up.

Besides, the mission will pop up at least one more time between now and next Wednesday so you will be able to earn an additional APEX pack (if not two) before Celebration Week has concluded.

3 hours ago, RIPPA said:

My favorite part of this is you being mad at a kid for knowing how roman numerals work which no one learns anymore

You are being bitter for the sake of being bitter, old man.

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19 hours ago, Gonzo said:

It's okay. He's been like that since Super Bowl Vee.

Or WrestleMania Triple X.

God, I had to fill in all of the bubbles for Tech in order to have a Rank 6 Profile for Engineer and I had to fill in all but one for the Rank 6 Soldier profile.  Thankfully you only have to have Tier 4 in Soldier and Engineer to earn a Rank 6 Profile for Infiltrator.

Now begins the infuriating task of continuing to grind away and put points into Biotics to level up the Adept profile (which will also level up the Biotic hybrid profiles) and I am about 50% complete with the second playthrough and I am currently Level 89.

If I finish this playthrough without having enough skill points without finally getting all of my profiles to Rank 6, I'm going to be pissed off.

I've kept most of my decisions the same as in the first playthrough, but I chose not to flirt with anyone but Cora and I also decided to bring in the fucking Scourge space rock from Voeld so that Chief Lucan could study it. 

I could not talk myself into sparing Voeld HAL; her ass had to go.

Even Vetra was like, "Good call, boss," but knowing what I know from the first playthrough, the AI was obviously built by the Jardaan and preserving it would've probably been important for the DLC that will not be DLC.

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Randoms were having a contest to see who was the dumbest yesterday.  I had a hard time picking a winner between the following nominees:

#1:  Celebration match.  The other three seemingly don't bother with the objectives.  They die a bunch, on a bronze, and nobody ever pops (though they do occasionally revive each other).  That means I'm soloing a bunch, as I sure as hell ain't reviving em on challenge waves.  One goes AFK around wave nine.  He parks himself in that T junction on the ground between the two buildings - basically where every damn enemy is gonna show up, especially on extraction.  He dies a whole bunch.  I revive him twice, and the other randoms do a few as well.  He never does get back to controller.  Final time he died was just before the extraction timer ran out.  However, he isn't the dumbass nominee.  The actual nominee is the guy that ran out of extraction with seven seconds left to revive the guy that was AFK, meaning neither of them extracted.

#2:  Normal match on Icebreaker.  We get upload for wave six.  I run to the one in the snowfield.   The other three randomly wander around, occasionally shooting a Kett or something.  Eventually one finally figures out we're doing an upload.  And joins me, instead of going to either of the other two open uploads.   Then the third figures it out.  And joins me as well.   I leave em to it and run over to the second upload, which is overrun with Kett for some reason.   They eventually clear the first one.   And join me again.   I abandon em, and run to the final upload.   The other two clear the second and join me again, followed by the fourth who has finally clued in.   The rest of the match is uneventful

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That sounds like fun.

Played several platinums today with solid teammates. I did a metric ton of reviving - the doctor was in the house - but it wasn't so bad. Kept repeating the platinum strike team, and I'm pretty convinced Kett is easier on platinum than Outlaw.

Also convinced that no matter what you might think, if you aren't running the Nova method and you clump up, you're gonna die. Repeatedly. The trick is to remain loose, but still close enough to each other to revive each other when necessary. Enemies clump up too hard on clumps of players, and you can't fight the numbers. The trick is to try to isolate foes without putting yourself on the other end of the map if you're needed or need help.

I also do not see how anyone can use a class that doesn't cloak. The Avenger, God bless her, is made for Platinum. I would like to change the spec a touch, but that would ruin her for Gold, so, no thanks.

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I think I must have had better-than-average teammates, because I breezed right through it. Had to pop once and had to use a couple of ammo packs, but no big deal. I treated the Progenitors as must-kill-immediately targets due to their propensity for shitting out Observers. Weird to use RPGs in silver, but totally worth it.

Got to play Platinum with Idiots last night. It started as me, a guy who does the shield boosts and an Avenger, so I switched to the Krogan Gladiator so I could do some Nova spamming, right? We started with three of us and got through the first wave before being joined by a fourth, someone who was just there to shoot and didn't fit into the plan at all. Whatever. Problems started on activity waves - the Avenger would stay in the pack for a while before realizing "oh yeah, this is my job" and taking off for the objective.

This turned into a disaster on Wave 6 when my shield-boosting buddy went to "help" the Avenger do an upload, leaving me with no one to boost my shields, making the Nova useless and pretty much killing my whole reason for being there. 250 deaths later, and what do you know, we didn't finish the upload. 

There was also a guy trying to do Platinum last night with an I-shit-you-not APEX rating of 25 playing a I-1 Human Soldier. We booted him, but I was pretty tempted to let him do it just so he could see what he got into.

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Teammates were a problem the first time around, for sure.   One had an Apex or 50K+ but the other two were low level/low Apex guys.  None of the other 3 ever figured out "hey, maybe I should go help kill that progenitor over there".   Had to finish wave 5 by myself.   By the time I got the progenitor down on 6,  the 2 low levels were perma-dead.  High level guy went down soon after, and I couldn't clean up the remaining crap, including both destroyers, with no pops, health packs, or RPGs left.

Second time around we finished.   Started a group of 3 with 2 high levels.   Had a room dump, so no clue what we finished with.  That one was still a bit dicey.  Had to pop at least twice, and there were a bunch of deaths overall.

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I played some Platinums this afternoon with two high-level guys and two different guys who had no business being there (less than 1,000 APEX). The 50,000-plus APEX was our undoing. He was an Avenger, who decided there was no reason to fool with the last device and caused us to fail.

Second time, he nearly failed a hack (no prob, I've done it before), but I ran up there just in time to clear the area with about 14 sticky bombs.

Then played a Platinum game with new folk that was one of the most laggy games I have ever played. That was fun.

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It shouldn't be possible to outscore all three other teammates combined on a match where nobody joins mid match.  I did it tonight, though.   Silver Apex with one life to live.   Two of em died on every damn wave, which was responsible for some of that.  I was the last one standing on wave five, and a good five minutes of wave six, which also helped that along.

Weird thing was, none of em was a low level.  They were just crap.  At least I didn't have to revive em.

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20 hours ago, Robert C said:

New Silver Apex mission is an absolute beast.  The only gold that has felt harder than that thing was the first 11 wave one.

I guess I was lucky then,  I sleepwalked through that mission twice with no issues when it popped in my queue on Thursday and on Monday.  My teammates weren't world beaters, but they weren't idiots either. 

There was the occasional revive run to be made, but we all extracted clean both times.

I have learned that anytime I see Dwindling Supplies or Empty Resupply, choosing one of the characters that I have equipped with Remnant weapons takes half of the trouble out of the match. 

I used my Salarian Architect and barely moved from the high point on the map since most of the upload / hack zones practically spawned under your feet.  I used my Remnant Six and a Shadow SR to either defend the zones myself or cover the people defending the zones.

The Boss waves were somewhat problematic if one of the squaddies got point crazy and focused on killing Assemblers to pad his score / earn cheap medals rather than helping the rest of the team take out the Progenator.

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As I type this, there's two guys playing a Platinum One Life to Live strike team mission against the Kett.

One has an Apex of 62, playing a I-1 Human Vanguard. The other has an Apex of 125, playing a I-1 Human Sentinel.

I wish them good luck.

Starting to think Outlaw is a safer bet in Platinum than Kett. Strangely enough, it seems like the Ascendants hang back more when playing Kett, and probably due to game limitations, there's only about one Fiend per game. With the Ascendants, teams usually find themselves finishing off two of them as the last two enemies, which makes things easier.

Ascendants are more aggressive with Outlaw, not afraid to get in your face. The big thing that makes Kett tough are those gigantic Krogan that are the third boss on a typical Gold Boss Wave. Behemoths, I think, but I can't remember their name. That damage bubble they put out is super-dangerous, they can heal themselves, and they take a ton of punishment. They're no fun. And they're a ton more present in Platinum. 

 

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Double post, sorry, but this blows my mind: I have every rare gun and its three variants all up to X. I'm not getting guns in my disappointment packs, I'm getting more rare (level III?) consumables. I still don't have the variants of all of the uncommon guns, but I don't care. I'll continue to get those every once in a while in Reserves packs while I press for more characters. I could finish them off by buying lots of advanced packs, but since I don't really care anyway, I'll stick with Reserves.

I've been playing like mad most of the day, usually Platinum, and I can recall getting only one ultra-rare character all day.

Just played a bit of a difficult Platinum where I was the Krogan Gladiator doing the Nova method, right? Problem is, the guy who was the Salarian wasn't giving me any shield boosts. He was too busy shooting and getting killed. I nearly had to fuss at him about it, but I just cursed my luck and left the group after the game. The other two guys on the team were pretty good, but I was pretty much pointless without shield boosts.

 

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Kett are the absolute worst on Platinum and Outlaws are not much better.  I've had better luck with Remnant because you can adjust the skills and powers of several characters (mostly engineers and infiltrators) to be Anti-Shield / Anti-Armor and Anti-Synthetic. 

There are no other enemy types where you can spec yourself to be direct threat to them like you can with Remnant.

I hate facing off with Kett for the simple reason that Fiends have a thing for making the game crash on Gold difficulty or higher, especially if there is a Behemoth also on the map.

9 hours ago, jstout said:

Double post, sorry, but this blows my mind: I have every rare gun and its three variants all up to X.

I'm not getting guns in my disappointment packs, I'm getting more rare (level III?) consumables.

I still don't have the variants of all of the uncommon guns, but I don't care. I'll continue to get those every once in a while in Reserves packs while I press for more characters. I could finish them off by buying lots of advanced packs, but since I don't really care anyway, I'll stick with Reserves.

Sounds like you are hitting the wall when it comes to weapons.  I am starting to get to the point where inexpensive packs are worthless to me.

I cannot buy Basic Packs anymore because all of my Commons are up to XX and Advanced Packs give me diminishing returns when it comes to levelling up Uncommon weapons and characters.  I'm close to having all of my Uncommon characters up to XX and all of my Common and Uncommon characters are Level 20 now..

I think I am ahead of Robert in APEX rating by two or three hundred points.  I'm sure he'll be back in front by tomorrow morning. 

I mostly buy Expert, Reserve, and Premium packs so that I can continue to tier up my Rare and Very Rare characters and weapons.  I don't have a VR weapon that is above Tier V, so I may start buying Arsenal Packs pretty soon to marry my firepower up with my higher tier characters.

As for the push to achieve High Performance, my Biotic hybrid profiles are up to Rank 3 and the Adept is up to Rank 2.  I'm Level 93 now and am starting on the Elaaden shit.  Cleared the vault before coming to work this monring and have one more data core to acquire before I get that meddlesome task out of my queue.  I'll get that after the outpost is built and I kill the fucking architect on Elaaden again.

I'm told that getting the High Performance achievement via earning a Rank 6 Bonus Stat is even more grindy, so I will stick with Campaign Mode.

The push to get the last three Biotic based achievements will be a cakewalk compared to this shit.  I won't even have to go through an entire playthrough to get that done.  The hardest part will be designing a Sara Ryder that does not look like Robert Gibson.

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Well, I've respeced my two Soldiers to become cheesy Combat Mastery Daily Challenge completion machines, thanks to some pro tips from the Number Two APEX ratting person in the world.

I left Turbocharge at Rank 1 and leveled up Frag Grenade and Concussive Shot to Rank 6.

I took Radius for both and I took Repeat Concussion for Rank 4 of Concussive Shot.

Now my grenades and my CS require Power Cells and I just spam the hell out of those powers to kill crap.  Having to run to the Ammo Box more often during the match kinda sucks, but any redbars on Bronze and Silver caught in the AOE of my grenades or CS tend to die in one shot. 

I burn through a lot more Ammo Packs than I normally do when I play these Soldiers, but that's a good thing since I usually have an abundance of Ammo Packs.

I've caught as many as three enemies with one CS and I'm now that annoying guy that can kill four or five redbar grunts with one frag.

I've gotten two Hate PMs for throwing grenades just as a player reloads and killing the enemy the other player softened up with gunfire.  That practice is apparently frowned upon.

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I have never gotten fussed at for stealing kills, and the Avenger does it fairly frequently because I'm running around all over the map like a chicken with my head cut off. This is a team thing,  I don't care if somebody steals all my kills as long as the enemies die. Never been a score guy. I just wanna finish the mission and get paid.

I don't give a wet damn for guns anymore because the odds are basically really against me now. What I mean is that no matter which $100,000 pack you buy, you have the same chance of getting an ultra-rare. 

Problem with the guns is that I don't see any of the ultra-rares really being super-effective until I get them into high Bulwark and Siphon territory, and that means I'm gonna have to get every ultra-rare gun up to X before I start getting variants. My high UR gun right now is a V, but most are Is and IIs. I still don't have two or three ultra-rare guns. Getting all those guns up to X is gonna define "challenge," much less getting variants up to X, because the chances of getting ultra-rares doesn't increase as you finish up rares. You just get rare consumables instead.

Always best to run anything you can on power cells, because it's crazy to be waiting on the recharge timer if you need to do something immediately. If you're big on power cell use, try running the Grenade Capacity (I think it's called) vest. Gives you three more power cell capacity on everything you use them for. It's an absolute must on the Avenger since sticky bombs and cloaks run on power cells. The extra power cell consumables are still my favorite, because I burn just a ton of stickies playing Platinum.

I played some with the No. 2 guy recently, but I don't think we talked. I had a huge four- or five-game Platinum run late last night with a couple of guys who were around 45,000 and a guy who was at 31,000. The high-level guys were playing tanky shooters and me and the other guy were Avengers playing freestyle on Firebase Zero. I wouldn't say it was easy, but it was the easiest time I've had so far playing Platinum. It took a game, but me and the other Avenger was meshing perfectly on the objective waves - I was where he wasn't, he was where I wasn't. I screwed up first game trying to help him with a hack, and even though I was cloaked, I was still somehow drawing heat. I abandoned the hack and it went super smoothly from there. Lesson learned.

I had a bad run in the afternoon playing Platinums with Melraz because somebody else wanted to be the cloaker and they couldn't get the objectives done. We came to the conclusion that even though there are other characters who can cloak, the Avenger's the one for Platinum because you can throw stickies at stuff without breaking cloak. That's huge in a Hack or Upload when someone wanders in.

I think I enjoy playing "freestyle" more than the Nova method, because you're not as dependent on randoms. Doing the Nova thing, you need someone who can really cloak well and do objectives and someone who can always remember to spam that damn shield boost constantly so the Krogan can Nova. I think the shield boost guys get carried away with shooting shit and forget to do the shield boost, but that character is basically there to support the Krogan first and do whatever afterward.

I swear, I think I had my first guy bail on a Platinum match because he thought we were gonna fail (so did I) and bailed out to protect his APEX rating. He could've dropped, but I definitely think him quitting on purpose like that is what happened. We wound up finishing it, barely. I was a Krogan, but my shield guy abandoned me in the room we were in when things got too hot while I stood around and tried to take out 800 Ascendants with no one to boost my shields. That didn't exactly go well.

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Yeah, my new Frag Grenade / Concussive Shot spam Human Soldiers average about 19% to 20% completion of the Combat Mastery DC per match.  I used to average about 11% to 15% per match. 

Far more effective, at the cost of the odd run in mid-match to the ammo crate for more Power Cells.

I will try to head to the crib around lunch time to see if the Weekend Mission / Item Store Refresh is up.

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25 minutes ago, RIPPA said:

And just to officially show what should have been the DLC

So fucking angry...

GOD DAMN IT I DO NOT WANT TO READ A BOOK I WANT TO FUCKING SHOOT THINGS AND RESCUE THE QUARIANS MYSELF!

Fucking EA.

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19 hours ago, RIPPA said:

And just to officially show what should have been the DLC

So fucking angry...

Fuck that book.  Good thing they chose a writer that I do not particularly care for to pen that dreck.  I'm not a fan of Valente's mythpunk bullshit.  If they'd gotten Drew Kapyrshyn to do the job, I'd seriously have to consider reading it for closure's sake.

Okay, the new 11 wave Weekly APEX mission felt more like Gold than Silver thanks to Glass Jaw; my [sarcasm] FAVORITE [/sarcasm] match modifier.

I have no idea why people want to play these matches as if they were normal. 

As usual you had dudes playing this match as if it were a Quick Match and making the mad dash to be the first to deactivate a Device for the bonus points.  Big Mistake, because we're dealing with GLASS FUCKING JAW, so Adhi grapples will kill you in seconds and you are a sitting duck while you are sitting there like an asshole fiddling with your Omni-Tool.

In the later waves, players were getting [Jim Ross] elevated out of their boots [/Jim Ross] by Berserkers after they started raging. It was almost a massacre.  Our team almost wiped to Berserkers during a (you guessed it) Devices challenge wave when the fully shielded mid-levelers on the squad were getting one shotted by Krogan shoulder tackles. 

The revived then became the revivers as rescuers found themselves in need of rescue after getting the shit beaten out of them while in the middle of performing CPR.

The people in my squad finally figured out that it might be a good idea to protect the person doing the deactivating and that Adhi and Berserkers should be primary targets.

Sadly, we did not get a full extraction.  One dude did not pace himself and burned out his Revives and First Aids before Extraction and he bled out while camping the LZ.  He took a Mulkey bump off the side of a shipping container after getting Biotic Punched by a Pariah.

No one went to revive him after he went down.  We were barely staying alive ourselves. 

We told Kandros that he fought bravely..

I respecced my Human Kineticist yesterday (I have like thirty free respecs saved up) and followed the Stephen King's Carrie build (focuses more on Telekinetic attacks rather than Biotic Combos). 

I have to say that I really enjoy Pulling three redbars at a time, Throwing everyone at the closest vertical surface or off the map comlpletely with much force (or better yet, using them as projectiles and hurling them at an enemy), and then getting back some Barrier strength after the kills.

And she's only Level 20 Rank VI.  I can only imagine how she'll perform once she gets to Level 20 Rank XI and above.  A shame that I might never see that happen.

Ryder Plus is slowly forging ahead to Rank 6 in all profiles.  I'm done with all of the colony shit and am on my way to liberate the Salarian Ark. 

I've also gone ahead and started the Kill Shit With Biotics For Achievements.playthrough that hopefully won't last too long.  This game is trade fodder the second after I platinum this mother fucker.

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I've played Platinums I didn't think were as hard as that Silver. That stip is death. Someone dies, then the person trying to revive that person dies, then another person coming over to help dies. I went into it cocky thinking that as long as it wasn't One Life to Live and I got a shot at reviving, I'd be fine, so I played my usual melee style and didn't fare all that well. We ran into two distinct patches where things just got really, really stupid. Both times, I thought "we could very easily fail this."

Then Robert, Melraz and I played some Platinums and were blessed with a visit from the good-teammates fairy. Both our fourth players were just rock-solid, which is a rarity. Second random was a 25K APEX rating dude playing a human soldier, and everything that got near him had a nasty habit of dying. I'd be like "oh shit, this is gonna suck ... it's dead."

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