Dear diary...

This thread serves mostly to entertain my thoughts of keeping track of the things I discover as I go. I am not a writer and it will probably be not useful to anyone with two braincells. It´ll probably be embarassing to look back at, like old children photographs kept by your parents under the old cabinet brought out at the most opportune of moments to embarass you in front of all your friends. :gasp:

Having become hooked  on the multiplayer last night, here are a few thoughts and observations on what I did and should do for, during and after The MP matches.

Starting / Things I wish I had done / used / known from match 1:

• Make sure you play the tutorial and finish all the given tasks so you get a free advanced packet from the store.
• Make sure to check the store for loyalty packs. A Rare weapon like the falcon makes the progress to silver quite feasible as long as you have a decently experienced class to put it on ( level 10 roughly worked for me, so i could hold my own and not be carried )
• Check your control scheme! Lots of new buttons to use. Dodge/evade is an extremely important and most importantly: FUN! to use move. it allows you to get over the map much much quicker if you use it for movement and it will save your lives tons of times. I haven´t used it for the first 20 matches and after rechecking my controls, it transformed the game for me.
• You can safely assign sprint and mantle to the same button, allowing easier access to more keybinds.
• By Default, ALT allows you to switch your Weapon hand. So, by using this, you can now use Cover left and right handed. This key is mandatory to maximize your firing time and your use of cover.
  
• Get used to not be able to reload cancel your way to victory. This one is painful as you wait for your Apex member to reload his widow. I always suffer an anxiety attack in MEAMP from reloading.
• Aiming while jumping will cause your character to hover for a few seconds. This will allow for all kinds of nasty surprise maneuvers.
  

Multiplayer / Lobbying:

• if you don´t intent to play another match, it´s best to leave the loby before heading to the store. Otherwise, your lobby could fill up with players waiting to start and they will be waiting on you.
• Check your ready status once in a while, to make sure it isn´t you the lobby is waiting for.
  
• Joining a game in progress should reward you with the credits for the entire run. For Apex Missions, completing an already started mission, should allow you to finish the mission requirements just as much. So apart from helping your fellow N7/Pathfinders/Apex members it should in theory also benefit you. Sometimes, I had to play a mission twice and I still haven´t found out whether that´s a screwup from the servers or from my side.
• If the entire team is dead, don´t leave. You need to return to the lobby in order to get your rewards.
• Overall MP seems to be more stable than it´s ME3 counterpart. I only had one crash in about 10 hours of gametime.
• Lag / Latency / Delay: The higher the felt latency to the host, the more and weird effects you will experience, including Rubberbanding, reload and ammo counter bugs ( Sometimes reloading but not getting a full clip or being able to fire your weapon without ammo being reduced ). The higher the latency, the more difficult the game will become for you.
  
• Bugs are really weird, on a human soldier, without being near an ammo box, it filled up my grenades to 2 and my concussive shots to 5, without any ( for me at least ) discernable reason.
• Apex Rating and diccifulty. I am close to Apex 3500 ( 26. March ) and I have just about most commons maxed at 10. If you see an Apex 500 joining your silver-difficulty mission without consumables, consider your chances of being successful. It feels kind of disappointing to feel that other players are just there to be carried. A low Apex rating is not the end of all knowledge, so if the player is low apex, check if he brought a high level kit. A maxed out common class still packs enough punch for Silver.
  
• Shots fired will be stopped by your teammates. There seems to be no innate armor/material piercing properties on any of the weapons. Even just the handrail of a cover will prevent the widow from scoring a headshot.
• Prestige / Bonus Stats: Not worth grinding. The first level of bonus shields is a 1% bonus. Take it as a bonus, but it´s not worth playing a specific set of kits to grind a particular bonus to a stat as it is so miniscule.
  
• Movement: You can mantle backwards over cover and you can also climb walls facing backwards to the obstacle with jump. This is really nice.
• Sync kill animations can be interrupted by using cobra RPGs or by dealing enough damage to with your regular gun.
• You can use a First Aid Kit, restoring your shields and health, during using an objective.
• You should be able to flip the info on cards you get from packs to see what stat increases.
  

Communications/Audio:

UI / Interface

• It´s horrible, confusing and overly complex. Everything seems to be burried under an additional layer of clicks. I will probably get used to it in another ten hours of gameplay, but it´s a painful growing process.
• Missons selector for the Apex missions: On first login you should probably check which missions you want to do. Take note of the modifiers listed. Most missions have modifiers which make your favourite kit useless. For this reason alone you should probably have different kits available ( melee specialist seems to be important here, since most missions I have seem so far seem to favour that. ). If you don´t like a particular mission, you should be able to throw one of your strike teams at it. You can get the rewards once only.
  
• To activate booster, go to customize character and navigate via the top 4 icons to the section which allows you to put booster on. Make sure you confirm the selection. It´s more easy to miss than you think. Or at least I think? Cogito ergo fail.
  
• Why in god´s name do I have to confirm my skill selection AGAIN after I explicitly select "Confirm selection and exit". There is a "confirm" right there in the name of the button, right. RIIIGGHHHTTT? :amirite:
  
• Why does "inspect trait" under strike teams only allows you to close the window with space and why does it not listen to escape? Come on people... That took me 2 minutes to figure out, because I´m dumb like that.
  

Store / buying packs:

• Reward packs are shown in a different tab on the top. Don´t forget to claim them. I only mention this, because I managed to sail right past them for a few missions, because the UI is so incredibly clunky. ( I blame Bioware, because otherwise I´d have to accept responsibility for me being a daft fool of poor eyesight )
  
• Basic packs have a pretty decent change of dropping uncommons. I´d guesstimate between 25%-33%. Since the consumbale carry capacity increases ( cobra capacity and the likes, that allow you to pack more of them on a mission ) are uncommon and can be grabbed just by sheer number of basic packs you are buying, the old strategy of buying basic packs until all commons are maxed seems to hold validity and is beneficial to grabbing the most essential item upgrades as well.
  
• Maxed common guns do pack a punch and will probably better than a level 1 or 2 uncommon gun. However, to me the effectivity of a weapon to me is mostly based on how well I do handle the weapon itself. I got an uncommon alien assault rifle that was able to charge up to a three shot burst and I disliked it massively.
  

Gear:

• Gear is not dropping from packs from the store anymore, but you are buying those from mission funds gained from APEX missions. They seem to have only one rank instead of 5 or 10. This removes a bit of clutter from the packs at the same time it will artificially hinder your progress by gating it behind another mechanism to grind gear.
  
• Thermal Clip storage capacity: Haven´t gotten overly much usage out of it on either bronze or silver. It´s nice to have but it´s porbably too niche to have a decent use. Currently, spending ammo pack consumables if you really need ammo and can´t move to a box, is way better.
  
• Juggernaughty Shields: Probably the best equipment to get. The shield increase is nice to have and the melee buff makes melee kits extremely strong and it´s even good on ranged kit to get rif of the occasional adhi gnawing at your leg.
  

Consumables

• You ramp them up quite quickly, since they drop plentiful from basic packs. Use them frequently, or you will just have an overflow of them lying around.
  
• Level 1 and 2 consumables ( like ammo, weapon rails, etc. ) seem to be both common, however, level 1 consumables still drop more frequently. So one thing of those is still more common than common. :sure:
  
• Ammo can prime for tech combos. Single shot weapons like the Widow do seem to be lot less likely to prime ( essentially never ), while rapid fire weapons do it quite reliably.
• While their primary damage increase might not be that noticeable, the secondary effects of cryo and disruptor ammo are really useful, preventing a lot of damage.
  

Helpful / informative Threads

• bsn.boards.net/thread/7149/grind-max-manifest-breakdown?page=1&scrollTo=486298 - maxed manifest calculations
• 
  

Miscellaneous

Mission funds: As far as I understood, mission funds buy the permanent gear which used to drop in packs ( Warfighter Gear, Shock Trooper, Stronghold, etc. ). So, the companion app allowing for a few more mission funds is probably nice to have. Shame the Apex companion app is for smartphones only. Why there is no HTTP version of this, like the ME3HQ is beyond me. However, your own ability to clear those apex missions on bronze, silver and Gold will probably increas faster than the rank of your Strike teams. So, if you are an avid MP player, you will probably not need to bother with the Strike Teams at all. Update ( 28. March ): If consumables top at a certain amount ( like ME3MP were the maximum amount was 255 ) and get replaced by another consumable, this might be a great way to get boosters instead of consumables. So, grinding Mission funds with strike teams and buying the consumables might be a good way to get those topped up.

Strike teams: It´s nice to have two strike teams, but bronze missions do not respawn as fast as one strike team can go through them. It´s probably best to have one strike team grind all the bronze missions until they can take all the silver missions, so your second strike team can take the bronze missions and so on. It depends on how frequently you can pay attention to those missions. The less you get to assigning those missions, the better it is to have more strike teams early on.

Power cells: Power cells are the new grenades. Also they power additional abilities like the Turian Ghost Infiltrator´s booster pack from Mass Effect 3 MP. The sentinel in MEAMP, for example, drops temporary barriers with power cells and I think there are a lot other abilities keying of powercells - basically limiting their use between pickups from an ammo box.

Ammo boxes:  An ammo box has 2 lines of 4 bars hovering in it´s display. The left bar is for ammunition / thermal clips. The right one for energy cells.
- There is no cooldown for picking up ammo from a box, but there is a cooldown of indefinite lenght for picking up powercells from a box. So you cannot spam grenades from your kit next to an ammo box.
- There is no cooldown for ammo pickups. On a host where you experience high latency it might happen tha a quick run-by with an empty weapon may not entirely refill your ammo.
- Every charge of thermal clips refills one quarter of your ammunition for both weapons you are carrying.
- Likewise, a charge of the Energy Cells refills a charge of every power based on Energy cells ( Human Soldier with Both Grenades and Concussive shot evolution that keys of Concussive shot off of energy cells, or similiar. )
- Ammo storages are personal. Another person cannot "steal" your ammo or grenades like that was the case in ME3MP. Especially annoying with the bugged ammo boxes on Hazard maps.

Soldier:
- Grenades are powerful, but can stagger, damage and even kill yourself. If your position is overrun by enemies, it might be worth to use grenades to blow yourself and the enemy up and hope for someone to revive you in time. Cheap man´s kobra launcher.
- Turbo Charge: With Soldier´s passive and specced corretly, you can even squeeze out two shots of a single shot weapon. On activation it reloads your thermal clips. So, with a widow you can take a shot, pop turbocharge, pop another two, reload, pop two more before it runs out.

Sniper Rifles:
- Quickscoping is a bit slower than I am used to, but works mostly as fine as in ME3MP. The targetting reticule will always appear at the center. If you predict this, you can take shots quicker.
- The Lanat is a nice weapon, however, offhost the spin-up can be quite nasty to work with. it seems that it forgets to spin up half the time after firing a shot or reloading. I think this is again because of the delay messing up your timing expectations.

Explosive Weapons:
- Weapons like the ME-37 Falcon seem to not be profiting from headshots. The explosive detonation seems to deal always the same amount of damage, no matter where you hit your target. I recommend aiming for center mass.

Enemies:
- Adhis ( Raiders ) are opportune targets. Assuming the waves are still built using a score budget, adhis die quickly and cost more than a regular soldier. If the waves are built without a score budget, adhis should still be shot first. Being caught in a hold is a death sentence if heavy units are nearby and you are dragged out of cover.

Game experience/ Progress:

Game 1: Ran into a bronze match. Unknown map. Unkown everything. Didn´t even bother to do the tutorials ( because I was unable to find the big giant "START TUTORIAL MISSION HERE!" right under the achievements. Don´t ask me how, I´m good like that... ). However, having nearly 1K hours in ME3MP: "What could possibly go wrong?". Wave 3, hack objectives. Running to the objectives and interacting with them, my teammates get picked off one by one because they are not anywhere even NEAR the objective. My avenger 1 does not do enough damage to clear the thrid objective on my own. I finally go down to. Lesson learned: Stay together team!
Game 2: Ran into an ongoing game. Wave 3 versus Kett on some unknown firebase. HAHA! NOW I´M GONNA ROCK! I´m coming team for the objective to spew forth damage on my level 2 soldier with his weapon "that is deadly when fired on full-auto"! Sprinting around the corner I find myself facing an ascendant. With his bubble shield. He´s looking at me, i think. What is this orange box around me? Why is the world shrinking? ARGHHHHH!!! My first run-in with the Kett and I already hate them. Mission fails.

At this point in time I am seriouslyhaving second thoughts on two things: First, my remarkable skills of cheesing my way through gold games running Top-of-the line weapons might have not been as good as I thought. And secondly: I think the Elkoss combine is a lying bunch of drekheads selling subpar guns and their advertising is too good to be believable.

Time to take a breather. Discover the starting "loyalty" pack from ME3 and it turns out it contains a ME-37 Falcon assault rifle. This bird of prey is a rare weapon and it´s classification as an assault rifle is an optimistic misnomer, seeing that it fires grenades. I have fond memories of that weapon from ME3, so I put it to the test immediately.

Combined with the Turian Soldier, the Falcon allows me to more than pull my weight in bronze. Albeit the grenades have a nasty pull to the side. Who made these nerf grenades? Anyway, with a bit of practice, even far away and moving targets can be hit quite reliably. The explosion radius is extremely nice and can take out two or three enemies at the same time. Since it does not have friendly fire, unlike the Soldier´s Grenade, there seems to be no downside to spamming this baby.

At level 10, I transition into silver. People play objectives much more coordinated, having gotten their bearing on the map. Overall it´s a much better gaming experience, since the enemies now can stand an additional shot or two and you need to adapt your style of play once more. Lingering on bronze for too long is just as bad as going for silver too early.

Discovering finally the fun and power of the evade move on my jetpack, I ascend myself into a zen like state were I spam one game after the other. Helping teammates, being helped, hunting enemies and ammo all blends into one really enjoayble mash of a gaming experience. The movement is fluid, the gameplay dynamic enough to not be boring, enemies are an enjoyable mix of stationary and moving, not overly unfair apart from a few exceptions. I´ll probably stick around for  another 1000 hours on this horde mode.

Reaching Apex rating 3.413, including one advanced pack and 2 loyalty packs, buying only basic packs:
12 uncommon drops for increasing capacity of operation consumables ( now at a maximum of 5 each )
12 uncommon drops for characters
14 uncommon drops for weapons
0 uncommon drops for weapon mods - these seem to not drop in basic packs despite their rarity being uncommon.
No rare or ultrarare characters
2 rare weapon drops


Update ( 28 March ):
After finishing the Commons, I have tried buying a mix of the 50K and 100K packs. I currently do not know if there is any rare weapon I would really like to have and use regularly - and the weapon modifications seem to drop too rare to be worth buying the advanced packs.

It FEELS like, from my limited experience, that the 50K packs offer more money´s worth. Might just be that you get them faster with playing on Silver difficulties. I also think that if you aim for the ultraraes, it´s probably being better to buy the 100K packs, but you might receive a few rares´ less than buying the 50K packs would provide.

Otherwise gameplay has become much easier with more people knowing the maps. However, with not being able to switch over character as easily, due to the slow leveling process, it feels more grindy than before, playing the same class over and over until you get it to a decent level.

Also, long distance combat seems to be prelevalent, with snipers being overly represented in the fighting population, compared to the run&gun combat madness style from ME3MP. Maps being bigger makes this a logical choice. There are only 2 maps where I feel that sniping is not the superior way of handling things and even on those 2 sniping is at least equally good. I also haven´t found a single decent assault rifle or shotgun being comparable in firepower. Which is a shame, I really dig Assault Rifles.

So overall, it feels way more pidgeonholed than ME3.

On The equip side of things I got the Isharay, which seems to be the Javelins replacement, albeit much easier to use as it does not have a firing delay. I got the salarian operator and the Dhati - the N7-class Kett shotgun. Both seem to be ok. The Dhati on Level 1 though is not quite the one shot mook killer I estimated it to be - it´s very unprecise for a single projectile weapon. Unless ME3 where it was quite easy to get headshots even with spread-pellet weapons, this one seems to be firing where it wants to.

Update 02.04:

Asked a few contacts who added me ingame for some reason or who added me from these forums for games - got either no responses ( can´t blame them, Origin is terrible ) or only wanted to play Gold. Have only been playing silver so far, on the grounds of not having enough equipment and wouldn´t be able to pull my weight. Turns out, I jumped into a public Gold lobby where everyone was below a 1000 Apex rating and the match was a cakewalk, with me and my Isharay I coming in second. People didn´t even bother to put on boosters or bring level 20 classes. All it takes is a black widow I or Vanquisher I on any kit and camping on a roof to be successful. I am pretty disappointed. There really is no progress curve to this game.

I don´t know if I am just down from having read what others wrote on the forums, but I think I´m done with Andromeda mostly. The multiplayer is not anywhere near fun as ME3MP, because 1) There is currently no variance in kits. Everybody´s a sniper. 2) Enemies require nowhere near the special attention as they did in ME3MP ( Sync kills being way easier for them, they moved in more aggressively as the Dragoons, special abilities triggering like the flying collector Praetorians, yadda yadda... ) 3) Part of the content blocked behind and artificial equipment gate ( Gear being release on Bioware´s whim, further limiting maybe fun builds ) 4) Consumables and character kits being bland and mostly not having and effect on gameplay. 5) Boss Enemies ( Hydra and Destroyer in particular ) do not feel like a thread. There is simply no pressure. And so on and on...

Not even Singleplayer can pull me back in. It simply feels wrong - the open world makes mass effect feel like an MMO - NPC´s just standing around, like braindeads, instead of well designed hubs, makes me want to tune out. NPCs during conversation have their idle animation played, making me feel like I´m not even there. Sound Design is quite bad, what should be dramatic lines are delivered without feeling, music choices are strange and it simply doesn´t feel epic. In Mass Effect I always wanted to wander into the background scenery and explore. Now, since I can, I have found the result to be lacking. It´s driving around for 30 minutes to get to an objective and the Nomad honestly makes me want the Mako back.

There are some positive aspects - but the core design, for me, is flawed to the point of being unsalvagable.

TBC... ( probably not )