Why overheating weapons (ME1-style) should be considered for MEA

This reminds me of Halo: Reach's Plasma Repeater, which starts off firing at a high rate but after a second starts slowing down to a very low one, but never stops. You have to manually vent it to reset.

I think a weapon like that in ME:A would be unique and interesting.

Isn't the answer obvious? It shouldn't affect a disciplined shooter, so artificially capping the rate of fire to prevent overheat is just needless hand-holding for a professional. In other words, there would be many situations where firing in quick succession is ideal to bring down a target (or multiple), but still wouldn't overheat the weapon, whereas this would be impossible if the RoF was capped to prevent overheat. It would just be counterproductive.

While I definitely agree with you from a gameplay PoV, it wouldn't actually make much sense lore-wise, since the weapons fold up when stowed. Not very conducive to venting.

Yes, a lot is done for the sake of weapon balance. I don't have a problem with this in most cases. It makes the game fun and have variety it wouldn't if certain weapons were just plain better than others in every way. Scifi games have it easy for balance since they can make up whatever guns they want and therefore they can give them different properties that naturally provide more variety and balance.

For instance, it makes perfect sense that high RoF weapons would have less damage on average, because they would need to have a lower velocity and therefore less heat generation if they actually wanted to have an acceptable amount of shots per clip. It also makes sense that powerful weapons have low "ammo" capacities, since they generate more heat and fill heat-sinks faster. That kind of thing is cool to see.

Those are very good points which I somehow never really took into consideration. Personally, I hope we get a mix of overheating and thermal clip weapons in ME:A, and this would definitely provide a good reason to use thermal clips over overheating weapons given the exploratory setting.

As for revolvers, I believe rotating thermal clips was the premise for the Piranha shotgun.

About Element Zero 's idea for replacing the thermal clip ejection animations with manual venting: I've always wondered why we couldn't do this in ME2/3 (I mean, I know why - gameplay - but you know what I mean). Why a thermal clip had to be ejected instead of cooled, I don't know. There were definitely inconsistencies between gameplay and how thermal clips should work, and I hope they fix them in ME:A (though I'm not holding my breath).

- You should be able to vent your weapon and slowly regenerate available shots. Slower than ME1 weapons, but still. Would be especially useful when out of clips, since you're not out of ammo.
- Clips really should be shared universally across weapons, as is stated. This would translate into having not just a spare reload count instead of a space "ammo" count, but also a global reload count. So reloading one weapon takes away your spare "ammo" for all of your other weapons. In other words, at the extreme, one shot of Claymore would be equivalent to 100 shots from a Typhoon. That's how it's supposed to work, though that would get very annoying for gameplay, especially with single-shot weapons, so I can see why they didn't do it that way.
- Tying in with the above, you would never reload your weapon and get fewer than full shots, because a new clip is a new clip. So you should never have a weapon with 30 rounds per clip having 142 rounds spare, since it's not a multiple of 30. Unless you're reusing a partially-spent thermal clip (which you aren't), reloading it would give you another 30. This inconsistency actually annoys me and I'd prefer if they did away with it.

There actually are healers in ME3MP: Volus with Shield Boost It's actually very good support. I wouldn't mind having that in SP in ME:A, or rather, one of my squadmates using it, probably.

On the topic of how useful overheating weapons are in ME3, they're extremely useful for casters, particularly. But especially the Collector SMG, because unlike others, it starts regenerating ammo cooling off immediately upon releasing a trigger instead of having a delay like others. This means you can fire, cast a power, and you'll already have those shots back. Alternatively, firing it in bursts means almost never overheating. As long as you don't completely overheat it, it's as close to continuous fire as you can get.