Krogan Gladiator abilities have absolutely no synergy with each other. What's up with that?

If played correctly, you can easily top score and outkill anyone on Platinum. I consistently have games where a friend of mine plays the Gladiator and I'm the Scrapper. I have to play my absolute best to keep up, he just runs off on his own and murders everything with the hammer. When the roles are swapped it's about the same, she is an excellent character for Platinum. Using your powers efficiently and at the right time is essential, it's not a faceroll Tactical Cloak/Stealth Grid character.

Lacklustre ability to kill if you are bad maybe aren't extremely familiar with the character. The only weakness she has is boss units: Destroyers, Progenitors, Fiends. Hydras aren't on that list due to Nova being the best way to facetank a rocket salvo in the game. On Platinum if you aren't running at least a Scrapper or Operator, you haven't thought about team composition at all. PUGs are bad, but I've never seen a team when soloQing running neither of those.

You are always complaining, how about directing that excess energy into getting more practice in the game you criticise so much?

I'm really curious how to play her in platinum. She's my first rank X UR (and still levelling her atm). She totally wrecks in gold, but how would she deal with berserkers in platinum?

I was thinking her 2 debuffs (1.4x damage) should give her decent weapon DPS (currently using siphon scattershot), and only hammer things that get too close?

Ugh!

Very true, I just got annoyed with the constant complaining from this guy, it got to my head. I apologise to all those that statement offended. I really like the character, it's fun to play, exhilarating when on Platinum, someone talking shit about it from a design perspective just irked me.

You can go full melee build, with time. Get to grips with enemy behaviour, see how they move, where to position yourself. She's not tanky, she's just got an option to negate all damage for a very small window. Most of platinum is dealing with the high burst damage, which Nova is great for. I go Pull 6BBA, Annihilation Field 6AAA, Offensive Biotics 6BAB, Rage 6BBA. The debuff is nuts, the hammer can do in excess of 9000 damage to a pulled target (mostly orbless Ascendants), 7500 damage to the target not pulled (when you are holding an enemy with pull). If you go Rage 6AAA, you get so much DR from killing stuff, but you do 22% less melee damage overall.

She's a monster.

a) The problem with this melee build is zero tolerance for mistake when meleeing. Your melee can easily get interrupted. If the melee didn't finish something off, you're dead when anything retaliates.

You are fully specd into pull which is subject to a recharge time nerf by annihilation field. You attempt to fix this nerf on offensive biotics when you could have gone for more damage. Further you have a much larger proportion of armored/shielded enemies where pull isn't feasible. I run shield powered nova with 1 point in pull. I still get all of pull's utility for the 'fewer number of weaker red bars' in platinum even without pull. With annihilation's shield replenishment, i constantly get my shields back after using shield powered nova. I have all the benefits of a 6 m radius or higher AOE nova with negligible cooldown.

c) Rage 6BBA leaves you so squishy, that i bet you waste so much time/damage output waiting in cover for the right/safer opportunity to attack. I can be way more reckless with my Rage AAB. I provide better support to my squad with 30DR over a 15 m radius, in addition to the 30% shield replenishment within a 8 m radius. My kill radius is higher (15m) for rage trigger. I don't need Rage 6A to save me if my health gets low, because i am already in rage constantly. 

d) I get the 40% damage boost to my Piranha. Do the math on how much damage a Piranha can do in the same amount of time it takes for a single melee animation. Couple this with the AOE damage from shield powered nova, i mix in. I still have the option to use my melee when i feel like the time is right.

e) I always have atleast one squad mate that prefers to hang out near me for the DR and shields I offer. This lets me take even bigger risks and play more recklessly for higher DPS.

f) You may have perfected the art of meleeing in platinum, but your build appears to be completely ill-optimized for platinum. I could outdo your dps/score and better support my squad anyday with my build.

Even if that did work there's no net gain, I feel...  Unless you kill two and even then you're only up 10% while getting shot at.

At low levels: radius pull, melee all the things, shoot off shields.

At X+ (or close to), same, but points into high damage nova taking shield damage.  Strip shields with aoe power, radius pull the two kett units/sharpshooters you just engaged, watch them die.  Very satisfying.

The whole point of the character is the 2m radius melee. That's it. Annihilation Field gives shields on kill and debuffs the every enemy you are in melee range of. Pull is another debuffer and has a weird interaction that almost doubles the melee damage. Nova is anti-stagger and burst damage negation (you need that). Rage is more melee damage and survival, Offensive Biotics is more debuffs and more melee damage/force.

I find going against the character's niche is what turns her from being a fun smashing enemies face build to just another boring power+weapon build. Doing neither really well. It's the same as the Turian Havoc, you see loads of people saying "use no Hover passives". But why? Her niche is AC-130, and I'm doing everything I can to separate her from being another Human Soldier clone. It's like using the Batarian Vanguard with Flak Cannon. 3 other classes do that better than him, but you see build using Flak all the time, when his (albeit dumb and pretty weak) niche is punch detonations all the time.

I have tried Shield Powered Nova on the KroGlad. Sometimes the AF draining field just doesn't proc and gives no shields. Even though I'm the only one around and have killed the thing in range of my AF. Not the edge of my Af either, I'm in the face of the enemy and I'm host. So there is that too. The only way I see a SP Nova going well is with a Shield Boost spammer just following you around. So that's two characters to do the job of one.

Shield powered nova's synergy with annihilation rank 6 A works flawlessly for me. Did you attempt this on some earlier patch?

W.r.t going against the character's niche, what you said is not true in my case for the havoc. I use the Havoc with the full hover passives. I practiced the art of hovering right above ground (not  way up in the sky and getting shot at by everything). There's a higher learning curve to use the Havoc with hover passives on plat. But, i used to do this on gold, so the transition to plat was easier.

The problem with the gladiator melee, the duelist melee, and the batgaurd's melee is that its way too slow for the sh.t-storm that will hit you on platinum. Try playing with three cloakers and you are pretty much gauranteed to drop any time you try meleeing, because everything on the screen will fire at you when the cloakers cloak away. I am not going against the gladiator's niche, I still use a weaker melee, but sparingly, during reloads, for style points, etc! There's a reason you have a choice a or b on the rage tree. 

What you're not getting is that she's a  REALLY REALLY GOOD SUPPORT BUILD on platinum. That's her niche. This is a co-op after all. You have no idea how many games i have carried, keeping pugs alive (staying closer to them), the ones who finally take the jump, muster enough courage to use a non-cloaking, non-loner kit on plat. Support builds can output an insane amount of dps as well, believe me.

can you record one of your games?

Super Pug Nightmare? :dumb: