Is Insanity mode too easy? No replay value?

Play Vanguard and get back to me.

Firstly, stop playing wallpaper if insanity is too "easy". Go out there and face the enemies in the open. In all ME games, if you play as wallpaper it will be easy.

For me it is about doing crazy things, find crazier ways to deal with enemies. If I mess up, I die, if I succeed, great. Yeah, I charge recklessly into battles and in ME:A, the no saving in Priority missions are punishing but I would not resort to hide behind cover forever and take cheap shots - I die, I retry. That is the fun in ME combat.

p/s: Wallpapers (characters glued to cover in combat) should not complain about difficulty.

I'm finding Hardcore hard enough... but your mileage may vary.

Turn off aim assist.

Insanity can be pretty annoying, especially with the story autosaves being in odd places.

Not sure what you're going on about here.  Insanity in the ME Trilogy was certainly easy enough to play on a first playthrough.  On the consoles, there was a lock preventing players from playing ME1 and ME2 on insanity during your first playthrough.  The actual hardness of the difficulty level had nothing to do with it; and many, many people found insanity rather easy.  The only game of the Trilogy where I found the insanity somewhat hard (i.e. died multiple times before getting past certain individual missions was ME2.  Now, I've played it through so many times, I can go through the entire game without dying once.

I'm not yet playing ME:A so I can't say personally how it compares, but most comments I"m reading describe it as being harder than the trilogy overall.  There will always be players who will be able to beat insanity on a first playthrough.  Whether or not you will feel challenged by it on a second or third playthrough depends solely on your individual ability.  Regardless, there is certainly nothing stopping you from playing through the game on a lower difficulty and then playing it again on insanity.

Easy?! I'm struggling at hardcore, especially with no manual saves during priority missions.

I thought Insanity was just challenging enough until I had to repeat half the Kett base for an hour.

I was sorely underprepared for that kind of mission, especially as a Vanguard.

I feel like I'm going to have to min max and use better strategies to make the build work.

Although admittedly the issue was exacerbated by the lack of save game before the Kett boss.

I am playing a vanguard after playing several classes, and it is definitly the best and easiest for me. Enjoying it a lot tho

 Vanguards are special like that. If you master them, it drives you enemies insane, if you dont, the enemy drives you insane.

To me enemy damage vs your shields doesn't seem drastically different than the enemies on ME2 Insanity to begin with, although that one has 1 second shield gate.

What has made a lot of the early game for me seem harder though is that the inability to directly manage squad powers, which makes the squad significantly weaker than in the other games (unless you always played those with auto power use).

For instance, in the most recent "boss" fight (with adds) I did on the story planet, PB was using her biotics on the shielded adds, sometimes when they had a small amount of shields that my Mattock was about to drop... which essentially just caused a small ass amount of shield damage and prevent a nice ragdoll and / or combo.

I don't really want a game that is "impossible."  Really I just want the top difficulty to reward knowledge of the gameplay mechanics... and in a nominally squad-based shooter rewarded squad micro.


I was trying to stick with something that was more or less like Soldier since that is the first class I played in all three of the trilogy, and I think this probably won't be the case. I think setups that start with primers might end up being stronger. That said, I did want to focus on AR's and pistols, and in some sections I felt like sniper might have probably made it easier, if slower, given that a lot of the enemies are somewhat limited in range, and in some encounters they don't seem to want to leave specific areas.

YMMV though, I'm not going to claim my build progression was in any way optimized without knowing the game. Also didn't do too many side quests before the main quest on the first planet, which made me feel a bit undergeared and leveled for that.

No. The difficulty of Insanity mode eventually starts to fall off again and it loses much of it's point if you could only enter it first on NG+ with the current balancing.