Was difficulty nerfed in general?

I've cleared it with all 20 with an adept with the stasis glitch and a shotgun as well. But generally you got to cheese it save all 20. Maybe solider or vanguard can do it straight, but I don't think anyone else can put out enough damage to without a glitch.

First playthrough is though because of little intimacy with the options you have to stun or debuff your foes.

For example, husks are made easy with biotics. You can fairly easily neutralize them with singularities, or with push or lift. If they get close, stop shooting and use a melee attack on them; they fall defenseless, and than you can use your guns to finish them off in the ground.

Against the geth stalkers, weapons are ineffective; they are way too fast. Best option is to use powers, for than you will hit regardless their speed. And against geth in general, throughout the trilogy, best opening option is to use AI Hack; when you bring a foe to your side, everyone around will read it as the closest enemy, and turn to it to shoot. So you get free shots while the foes fight among themselves. Frequently, when your hack subsides, you'll have already won and only have leftovers to clean up.

On ME2, the issue is to use the proper ammo type for the situation. Against shields or robotic foes, disruptor is king. Against biotic barriers or armor, go with incendiary. Against unprotected foes, anything works, but incendiary will also both stagger and apply damage over time, so,  best option. It also  negates vorcha and krogan regen, making them much easier to handle. It may sound taxing to keep changing ammo type mid flight, but that's the reason I use them on my quick slots. This will help you immeasurably.

Also, always prioritize targets. Number one priority for shotgun wielding foes that close the distance to you, for they will force you out of cover if they reach you, and the long-range enemies will go to town on your uncovered ass. If you focus-fire and take those out of the game from afar, you can than use cover at your leisure and pick the rest one by one. First priority to approaching krogan, biotic commandoes and than flamethrower vorcha, though Its rare to see more than one of these at once. So the tip is that when a new wave of enemies show in the minimap, bring the power wheel up to pause the game, assess your priority targets, and take the most dangerous foes from the fight ASAP.

Last trick: keep focused. It's common to new players to scatter fire between multiple enemies as they get in and out of cover. But that approach hurts you, it gives time for their defenses to recover and they end up taking more resources to go down. Choose your enemy, picking those that threatens to your ability to control your position first, and than take them out of the game before moving on to the next target. It's very effective to choose a foe, strip its primary defense with a power (overload kills shields, incinerate or warp destroys armor), than apply a power combo detonator to kill it instantly. Also, one enemy less means one less gun points at you.

If you try the trilogy again, give these tactics a go. Normal will be a breeze, and soon you'll want to try to ramp it up...

Regards .

Wow what a thorough and in depth guide.  Some things like changing ammo type I learned through trial and error.  But since I started a new playthrough as a Sentinel the information on biotics is golden.  I really didn't know what powers like Warp did.  Some powers are self explanatory like Lift and Throw.  I also didn't know that biotic's works on those annoying Geth that jump around.  I did first start to notice in ME2 that when I had a biotic on my team like Jack or Samara they had no trouble with Husks.  About the enemies taking cover they do love doing that, but sometimes they take too long to stand back up and try to shoot.  What I do is throw a grenade to flush them out.  Once again thank you for the thorough explanation, I started a new playthrough as a Sentinel and will follow your advice.

Grissom Academy's "open rooms" are easily cheesed from just outside the doors.  For the first room, you have a clear shot t the mech and a lot of the Cerberus guys will work their way to you so you and use cover in front of the door.  Between you working from cover outside the doors and the biotics students working from above, the room gets thinned down quite quickly.  All you might have to watch out for is the occasional turret that may still be active when you enter the room.  The same sort of strategy works for the second room... and you don't even have a mech to worry about.  Easy peasy early levels and the Mattock.

You also have to do it on a lower difficulty, or early enough in the game. Since enemies scale with you, doing it too late on Insanity can leave YMIR mechs with armor.

We are, you thought correctly.

That said, never cheesed on regular starts as well. Not that I'm above it, it simply never occurred me, though rather I prefer not having to.

Fair enough.  I've done two ME3 first start, non-import, insanity runs (i.e. you start at Level 0) on the Xbox 360 (using new off-line profiles which effectively zeroes all achievements).  For the first one of those, I was really blocked at Grissom and I didn't want to reload an earlier save, so I had to figure out a way to get past those two rooms with a very squishly, essentially powerloess character... that's when I discovered using the doors as cover and really appreciated how much plot armor those biotic students have (well, before Prangly eats its since Jack isn't there in a non-imported file).

Ugh, I hate recruiting Garrus...closing the stupid shutters (just one really) is where I die over and over.

Might be what I've done wrong when I've tried using the Cain.  I usually don't research it until later in the game since it burns a lot of HW ammo to use it anyways.  Another factor is that I find the M-77 Missile Launcher method to be very reliable at virtually all levels and difficulties.  The only problem I've had with it was my run in LE where, as I said, for some reason the mech I had lured up top decided to completely lose interest in fighting me after it took down both squad mates.  I was even shooting it in the back as it walked down the hill and it never turned to face me.

I am currently playing the Arrival dlc, on insanity, and I believe it's been nerfed. Compared to OT, the fight in front of Object Rho with wave after wave was easy and when Kenson calls in the YMIR mech, it didn't even appear.

Ofc, this could be a bug too but regardless, I felt the fight was easier, because the pyros and some of the other guards didn't close in and flank me like they used to in the OT.

Yeah I think I missed  at least 1 flamethrower guy maybe 2 during the 5 wave fight as I think on the origibnal I normall yget attacked by 3 or 4 of them yet on my playthrough I thin konly attempted to attack me. The Ymir mech attacked me though but I took care of it by uppercutting it's head off and watching it go nuclear as usual.