Best Class for a Tali romance run?

Are you playing all three games, or just ME2, or ME2 and ME3?

Class does not matter if you only care about the dialogue. If you want to actually take her on missions, then...


In Mass Effect, you always need Decryption and Electronics to unlock everything. Tali has both of those talents. Having a tech Shepard would make Tali redundant, so you would want Adept, Vanguard, or Soldier.

In Mass Effect 2, Tali is kind of useless for most of the game. She is really good against synthetic enemies since she has AI Hacking, but you have to put points into her Combat Drone which is terrible because of its 30-second base cooldown. And one of the best missions for her would be her own recruitment mission which is rather unfortunate. She does have Energy Drain which is a good anti-shield power, but you have to unlock it and Garrus' Overload is better. So she ends up being good on her own loyalty mission and Legion's loyalty mission. She can be good on the Overlord DLC and maybe a handful of N7 missions. Tali tends to be a waste in ME2. She can work with any class, although Adepts tend to do better with Warp-bots like Miranda and Thane, at least in my opinion.

In Mass Effect 3, you again get Tali kind of late which sucks. ME3 Tali works best with tech characters, most notably the Engineer. Her drone cooldown is much better, although I prefer just using her Energy Drain. Although for Tali's Energy Drain to work best on Insanity, you need to spec it for max damage, keep her in her default outfit (+25% power damage), and have her use pistols with a Pistol Power Magnifier mod (Citadel DLC required). With that setup her Energy Drain can fully strip the shields off elite enemies in the game (Marauders, Cerberus Engineers, Cerberus Centurians, Geth Hunters, Geth Shock Troopers). She will not be able to fully strip the shields off enemies in the Citadel DLC (CAT6 mercs).

I do not think Tali has ever been that good of a squadmate in any of the games, although I like her somewhat as a tech companion in ME3.

Medium armor and not really wanting to replay as a vanguard or a soldier really narrows you down to one option - Infiltrator.  It is, however, also a somewhat tech-heavy class and, as a result, is pretty redundant with Tali... still, I have done a few insanity playthroughs with the infiltrator and have used Tali effectively with an infiltrator on any of the missions in ME1.  I just tend to use a biotic as the other squad mate.

In ME2, Tali is not that strong.  Infiltrator Shepard's incinerate, however, will detonate her Energy Drain effectively... and her cooldown on her energy drain is not nearly as long as her combat drone.  The drone is quite useful for distracting atlases and primes... enabling Shepard to take them down with the SR or other powers and combos (with the second squad mate) without being under heavy fire from them.

In ME3, she works quite well with the Infiltrator.  She is one of my preferred squad mates for the infiltrator on the final missions in that game.

I am pretty sure you don't have to bring anyone to missions to unlock dialogue. It may be that in some cases a line is different if squad mates came for missions (especially in ME3) but bringing squad mates to missions will not change anything significant (not sure if that's what you meant).

That said, I don't think it's super important to always optimize squad mates in ME (even playing on insanity, I always go by who I want to hear the comments from, rather than gameplay). But if you do want to optimize gameplay, RedCaesar covered everything pretty extensively, I think.

In ME1, if you just like the look of medium armor and don't mind technically "cheating" a little, you can equip medium armor with any character. Just make sure, the medium/heavy armor you want to equip is in the uppermost position in you inventory list. Now, in your currently equipped armor, go to one of the mod slots. do two very fast double clicks on the top mod slot. The first double click will equip that mod and send you back to the normal inventory list. The second double click - if done fast enough - will equip the new armor. THe game will ask you if you want to keep the mods on the new armor, click whatever you want, abd your character will wear the new armor, no matter if it was meant to or not. You could even equip turian armor on a human, etc.
That way, you could play a sentinel or an adept but still look cool (and not like you are wearing a swim suit ).