Mass Efect: Biotics and Renegade?

The Game Room
1

Just got Mass Effect, and I have a coupla questions:

I started playing a goody-two-shoes Paragon Soldier, and well… I got a little sick. This guy’s so polite it’s frightening. While I do enjoy shooting people, it’s actually pretty easy once I got hang of it. I mostly only get caught by the odd enemy popping up close and can’t switch to a better weapion in time.

However, I thought Biotics looked neat and thought about switching to an Adept. It seemed fun, and I wanted to experiment with jumping into combat, tossing off Warp, hitting Barrier to restore shields, then throwing somebody, and finishing off the pitiful survivors with my 1337 pistol skills.

Should I go renegade? I won’t be playing a real bad guy, mind you, so not every choice is a renegade one, but rather a pretty hard-bitten dude who’s out to save the galaxy and not inclined to chit-chat. He’s not here to solve all your problems along the way: he’s a soldier on a mission, not the Second Coming of Christ. Will this work? Can I get enough Renegade points?

Also, Renegade and Paragon points don’t actually “fight” each other, right? You can increase in both?

2

I don’t have the game but everything I read about it indicates that it’s two separate sliders so you can be a level 2 Paragon and a level 4 renegade with no worries (I saw a guide that says you can unlock a total of 6 of the ten possible reward levels depending on your choices)

Reading the bonuses I don’t think they’re that important to break role-playing just to max Renegade unless you’re going for the Renegade achievement. Even then you only have to get 75% of the bar filled.

5% Opens 2 Intimidate ranks, gives 1 free point in Intimidate
25%Opens 2 Intimidate ranks, gives 1 free point in Intimidate, 10% Weapon Powers cooldown
50% 1 health regeneration per second
75% Achievement: Renegade, Opens 2 Intimidate ranks, gives 1 free point in Intimidate, 5% damage/duration on all weapons and powers

3

To be honest, I’d advise sticking with your paragon soldier for a bit until you get some of the gun achievements. Once you have those you can level those guns on an adept renegade. I went adept from the start and it’s fun, but I’d say ever so slightly more difficult than a soldier.

4

Biotics are way fun. I recommend Lift, just so you can shout “pull!” before shotgunning your floating opponents.

If you’re only a couple of hours in, it’s not too late to switch to Renegade effectively. Later, tho, there are some choices and situations where, if you don’t have a high enough score in either Paragon or Renegade (and the appropriate Charm/Threaten skills), then you basically won’t have a strong enough personality to get your way in the situation. So don’t waffle for too long, if you want to be able to affect some key parts of the story.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t originally set out to make my character a Renegade - there are just certain NPCs in the galaxy who want to be assholes, or get in your way when you desire a quick end to the conflict. The dialog choices for (the female, at least) renegade-ish path are brusque and often sarcastic, but they’re almost never outright evil (as in, say, Knights of the Old Republic), so it’s much easier to go that route if you, like me, tend to play with your conscience guiding the buttons.

5

Yeah, Renegade is not being evil so much as having no regard for rules and regulations. Not to say that there aren’t a few opportunities to be fairly brutal, but there’s nothing really deeply twisted like in KOTOR, such as when you get Zaalbar to kill Mission by manipulating the life-debt he swore to you, and then he flips out later and you have to kill him too.
I don’t think it’s possible to max out both Paragon and Renegade, but they don’t cancel each other out either. It’s just that there don’t seem to be enough moral decisions available to fill both meters.

One thing I didn’t like about Mass Effect is that it was basically impossible to use a sniper rifle if you didn’t have the skill for it. With the other guns you wouldn’t be very good, but you still had a shot at hitting something. But with no sniper skill, you couldn’t use the scope, which was just stupid. Maybe they patched it for the PC version, I dunno. I played on Xbox.

6

I played a soldier on my first (and currently only) playthrough.

The sniper rifle is a wonderful weapon.

While it’s not very useful in a firefight, it’s great for taking out armartures, colossus, and rocket turrets from a distance (and typically, you can peak behind a hill to do so, so you can hit them but they can’t hit you). Also, with the Spectre grade sniper rifle and upgraded ammo rounds, one hit pretty much kills every other enemy out there. Of course, I never bothered with heat dissipation for the thing since the point isn’t to use it in a situation where you don’t have time for cooldown after overheat.

I think my next playthrough will be an adept. That is, if I ever get around to playing it again.

7

Thanks. I’v been playing through the super=-nice Paragon Soldier, finally getting Heavy Armor. How can I check my achievements, so I know when to concentrate on other weapons?

Second, is combat meant to be this random? Sometimes I can get through certain fights easily, at other times I get trashed in seconds, depending on how crazy/suicidal the enemies are. I keep getting surprised when they abruptly break cover and charge me like a mad wildebeast (except the Krogan: that’s normal for them). When they run around randomly shooting everything it can, ah, surprise me.

I’ve been goig around the early missions. I picked up Liana and moved on to finding Benezia at the corporate world. Then I will head back to Citadel, take care of some loose ends, and move onto Feros.

Does surveying worlds help any? I mean, does it get me more money somehow? I know landing and finding stuff can be good, but I’m not clear on how it all helps.

How high a Decypt and Electronics do I need? I’ve been pumping them ASAP so I can access stuff, but I still frequently find stuff I can’t open, though I’m up to medium in both with various tech-oriented NPC’s.

FInally, I have a weird PC issue. Mass Effect occaisionally causes my video to cut out. I have no idea what causes this. I thought it might be a heat issue, so I opened the case and stuck a room fan blowing on my PC (and clearing out the dust). It seems to happen a little less often, but still sometimes. When this happens, the video just drops instantly. No stutter, no graphical glitches, no slowdown. Just instant black screen. And the video signal is stopped cold, not crashing - my moniter is all like, “Hey Hommes, what gives, I gots no signal?”. The sound will keep playing, though, so the CPU and all is good.

8

Surveying is necessary to complete “find a certain number of x” sidequests. Also, you get money and experience for finding the things, so surveying gives you money and experience. Also, surveying is necessary to find some abandoned ships (they tend to hang around asteroids) and other sidequests who’s locations won’t immediately appear unless you survey. However, you never have to survey to finish the game.

It’s been a while, so I don’t remember. However, you should be able to advance the cursor down any skill bar without buying a new level to see what powers get unlocked so you can figure out where to put the points. I advanced those skills to the point where I could open anything in the game.

What graphics card are you using, and does it have a timeout reset? When I was playing Galactic Civilizations II on my PC (note that I played Mass Effect on XBox) a while back I discovered that my ATI card’s utility program set up a timeout that if the card didn’t respond within x number of seconds, it would reset the card. Needless to say GCII had some weird glitch that would trigger the timeout, and my video would disappear, but the game would still run. Of course, I really couldn’t do much since all I saw was a black screen. So I had to force-quit the game and restart. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, and I discovered the solution through trial-and-error. I disabled the reset feature, and never had a problem after that point. I don’t know if that’s your problem, but hopefully it gives you an idea of where to look.

9

Ah… I have a Nvidia 7800 GS (256 MB). I’ve never had this happen before, so I’m a bit puzzled. Even very hardware-intensive games haven’t caused this trouble. Unfortunately, the latest NVIDIA drivers seem to be locked in idiot mode, and won’t let me change things.

On that note, anyone have some good over/underlocking software?

And where can I check my achievements?

10

NHancer is the best IMHO. EVGA has good little utility too though, but I think you need to register with them to download it.

I’m still waiting on Bring Down The Sky to be released for the PC so I’ve been avoiding the main quest missions. I’ve been killing time with the side quests and man, the stories attached to them are usually pretty good for side quests, but the repetitive nature of the areas kills them. I need me some BDTS!

11

Like I said, only if you have the skill. My first playthough was as an Infiltrator. Even though you can’t put any points in Sniper Rifles until you level up on Pistols a bit, it still counts as having the skill. I eventually maxed out Sniper Rifle and used it the same way as you, and as often as possible.

Later I played a Vanguard (still working on that playthrough). They don’t get access to Sniper Rifle skill at all. That’s when you get the problems I was talking about.