Balance Problems in 1.09

We've referenced the balance problems introduced in the latest patch here and there, but I wanted to start a more detailed discussion on the offchance Bioware still has enough staff on the MEA team to do another balance pass. Feel free to add/discuss/disagree etc. but I think we're late in getting this conversation started, so here we go.



* Overall Platinum Enemy Comp: the enemy comp in MEA Platinum is even more slanted than in ME3, leaving certain kits that excel against those enemy types (Scrapper, Avenger, etc.) much more powerful than kits which are meant to deal with other enemy types more effectively (Kineticist, Gladiator). To analogize, if vanilla was balanced around bronze and made gold a poor experience, 1.09 was balanced around gold and left Platinum a poor experience. It's not that hard with the right setups and strategies, but the kit selection feels overly narrow as a result of the enemy comps and the way kits were designed.


* Krogans, generally: the Krogan rage racial passive used to provide Krogans extra tankiness because they had a reliable means to regenerate their large health pools, while other kits didn't. This made attrition less of a factor and allowed them to withstand extra hits in every encounter. Now, Siphon weapons provide this benefit to literally every other kit, and its effectiveness dwarfs the modest regen of the Rage tree. And that's on top of the fact that it's harder to rack up a large kill streak on Platinum.


* Tanks in Platinum: for the most part, because platinum's difficulty increase was achieved by ratcheting damage to the extreme (compare to ME3 platinum), kits with abilities geared towards tanking don't really work. The one defense power that is useful is Shield Boost, and mostly because it frequently refreshes the shield gate (inb4 BW nerfs the shield gate refresh interval rather than fixing everything else). Kits with abilities like charge don't have enough tankiness to function as designed, particularly the Kroguard. As a result, players are turning to kits with cloak or stealth grid to survive by dumping aggro, which makes the experience for the non-infiltrator teammates that have to bear the aggro dump really shitty.


* Caster Classes: these are really off now. The highest damage power-based builds are all combat classes with high damage grenade powers - frag grenade, concussive shot, flak cannon. The other caster classes - Krogan Engineer, Architect, Kineticist, etc. - can't put out enough power damage (including combo damage) to outpace weapons even without any weapon passives. This was somewhat muted in gold, where spike damage was closer and spike damage was more useful, but with platinum's emphasis on sustained dps, powers need another pass overall, and the cooldown-based powers that focus on damage in particular need significant damage increases (whether from base, lower cooldowns, or higher combo damage, or preferably all three) to compete on Platinum with flak/nade spam and weapons-based builds.


* Balance of Weapon Variants: ignoring the issues regarding the loot pool and obsoleting vanilla versions of the weapons, the variants aren't at all balanced. Siphon is the best by a large margin. Unfortunately this is probably a fundamental design problem - concussive will always be marginal on Platinum because it requires enemies to be grouped closely when the host happens to kill something with a headshot, and I just don't even know why they thought bulwark would ever have a niche over Siphon. But at least BW should be aware in case they have any ideas to even them out.



As you can probably tell, I'm skeptical that any of this will ever be adjusted, but may as well put the problems on a silver platter for BW.