Will Shadow Strike kill it? - a theorycrafting tool for obsessive N7 Shadow players

After months of it languishing unfinished on my desktop, I’ve tidied up and released my N7 Shadow spreadsheet for Mass Effect 3 multiplayer.

Download it for Microsoft Excel

From the user’s point of view it’s a simple tool to determine how much damage your Shadow Strike will do to any given target on Gold or Platinum difficulties.

It could do far more but my spreadsheet skills are rusty and it was tough enough just to get it in a decent state to unleash on the general public, so that’s all it does for now and, perhaps, forever.

One neat little feature is that it will show you an almost graphical representation of what your target’s health bar will look like after you hit it:



I’m very proud of that because I think it’s quite cool. And if your first thought when you look at it is “why are the Barrier bars shield blue instead of barrier purple?” my reply to you is “".

This is what the UI looks like:


The math behind it is a bit of a hack and I kind of gave up on it months ago, but when I gave up on it it did actually work - so far as I can tell. The mechanics and values involved were gleaned from old BSN, Cyonan's spreadsheets and quite a lot of in-game testing. If you encounter anything weird, test it in-game then let me know the result. It's certainly not impossible that there's a few wrong values or interactions in there that I just never weeded out.

However, having said that, I did use a much earlier version of this to create the N7 Shadow build that I used for my Platinum solo, and that all worked out as expected. So, hopefully not entirely broken.

Download it and try it out so that I feel better about spending the last few hours of my life making it presentable.

Also posted about it in slightly, slightly more detail on my blog.