Multiplayer Balance Changes ~ General discussion

Yea, breaks immersion a bit when you launch someone into orbit, watch them fall for 12 seconds and bounce back up like nothing happened with very little damage. Space magic?

I think one of the best ways to buff Rage would be to give Krogan a proper charging melee attack like in ME3MPer. Although I admit rage does need to be buffed anyway, I have only played Krogan a couple of times but was so underwhelmed by the level 1 vanguard.

The point that y'all are missing is jetpacks. C'mon guys, this IS 2017.

When I read this all I can think about is biotic lance and how I hoped it would be the same as the N7 Slayer palm projectile thing (I can't remember the name).  That was one of my favorite risk reward weapons (combined with BC shield recharge).

My Huntress is spec'ed for BL and shield restore mele but I don't use it that much as BL doesn't do the damage that I can get out of a mele or sniper shot.

Fortunately the paltry combo damage (among other issues) is being addressed in the upcoming update. There is a somewhat cursory discusion about it in Bioware's latest Twitch video.

The patch notes show definite effort, and will constitute a significant quality of life improvement for most kits. If nothing else, we're likely to see a greater variety of kits and guns running around at level 20, being played for fun rather than prestige.

That said...
Scrappers overall are squishier, which is not really something the game needed(given that they were dominating playnumbers more due to the frustration and disappointment of skirmisher and caster play, respectively, leaving marksmen as the only other rewarding playstyle outside of a small collection of high-performing guns). Admittedly, Barrier Drain and Saving Barrier were arguably the two best talents in the game, but I truly don't understand why the Kroggaurd needed a 17% nerf to his already embarrassingly weak shields, given that he had neither of those talents. Never understand why ME devs have always been convinced that melee should be squishy, that durability is the logical tradeoff to CQC damage, but it does seem like they're doubling down on it. Why, of all the things to faithfully translate from ME3, they picked that... I do not know. Give us some more talents where we can pick between gun damage and melee, or power damage and health(or vice-versa, of course)!

AA is more of a glass cannon, now, but she's a hell of a cannon, and the possibilities of overlapping AFs are intriguing. Do two Draining Fields stack, for example? Will say that cutting the durability on a class with a <10m engagement range seems like a poor choice, although the huge increase in combo damage suggests that she'll utterly melt anything within that range, so I'll reserve judgment.

Long-term balance hope is that, with guns and powers now being viable choices, they'll roll back the 1.05 melee nerf.

So I've been playing quite a few games today. All in all this is obviously a step forward despite some oddities as I've said elsewhere.
Some interesting facts about some of the guns I've been using today:

*Mattock still sucks: what they did with this patch was bringing the old damage model back, which was terrible on its own already, the catch is that you can now fire at 400 RPM or some shit, basically spam fire, mag increase to 20 rounds helped. However bad accuracy for sustained fire (spammy spammy in this case) prevents from landing most of your shots to crit spots, thus it still takes 1 entire mag to kill one thing, but it's more annoying than some other weaps because you have to spam fire instead of just hold the trigger like any other weapon.
My recommendation will be buff the hell out of this thing and reduce the stupid 400 RPM to 200 or something, keep this gun a slow RoF gun, but with great damage.

*Ruzaad shotgun has a real nice buff, one shot at point blank is usually enough to kill most basic unshielded enemies on Silver (in gold, expect to use gun AMPs), however is a bit inconsistent and only works in very close range. As a side note, technically the Disciple has more DPS than the Ruzaad due to its mag capacity, it out-dps the Ruzaad by almost 100%.

On to other stuff:

*Power combos feel awesome. They actually kill now.

*I have the feeling that the off-host critical spot for NPCs is still not fixed.

*This is the first time I've being using a Krogan (was trying krogan eng.) for more than one match in a row, and I gotta say, they feel squishy AF. What gives? they're Krogan, they're supposed to be quite strong, it doesn't help the fact that they move at the speed of slugs either. I have more survivability with a basic human character than with this guy.

*Disconnects are still a thing. Annoying AF.

*Fiend sync kill BS. As soon as he gets on range (if he even needs to be on range, that is) he sync kills you. Jesus fuck, could be tone down a notch this? GEE

Dunno, created magma/kett/gold last night and lobby was filled in 5 min maximum.