* Power Ranks Don't Affect Combo Damage *

If only there had been a way to identify and rectify this before the game shipped.

How do we know that this is not Working as Intended™?

Worked that way in ME3, but this could be just part of the one-clip-a-mook design of MEAMP.

Great finding. I am not spending more than 1 Point in Throw from now on.

Multiplayer and the whole combat system is worse than ME3 i especially dislike the absurdly long cooldowns on some powers. It is so bad that i end up saving my powers for some tougher situations and end up not using them at all because of the better save this power till i really need it mentality.
Also the guns are so weak and the combos are worse.
They removed the best primers (warp and reave) from the game and made solo triggered biotic explosions much harder to achieve. In ME3 i barely played SP in the first month after launch this time arround its 10 h MP and 70 h SP. ME3 you had asari adept that was gold viable without any fancy weapons from day one in Andromeda i look at the power sets and it looks like they intentionally made all of the starting characters bad, well i guess infiltrators have advantage in cloak but again stupid cooldowns mean i spend most of my time uncloaked.
If this was done by the same team that made ME3 MP it must mean that the people with good ideas have left the company.

Thanks for confirming this! I thought this was already the general consensus, but it's nice to see concrete evidence.

Personally I don't see this as a particularly negative thing though, unlike other people here seem to do. I like that rank 1 powers are still equally effective at combos, and that if you choose to upgrade them, you do that because you want those specific primary effects, not because you just want to buff combo damage and don't give a shit what the powers actually do.

I suspected this might be the case, but thanks for the confirmation. I really need to re-evaluate the points in Throw.

I like having Throw on a faster cooldown to Detonate Ammo Primers, but I'm really considering going 5 Ranks in Barricade now.

How is this fine? If you combo with a sig and shockwave on a human adept and you are not able to kill a bronze enemy with that(yes it is possible but not always) how is it a good thing that damage not applys to combos? It should do that because with a stronger biotic shockwave and with a low shockwave the combo shouldn't be the same.

I think its a bad thing, because combos are bad and it is the same when you level up.

Firstly, let's keep in mind that whether combos deal enough damage in general is a completely orthogonal issue to whether their power scales with the ranks of the powers used to make them, alright?

To answer your question, I prefer the idea that powers are used mainly for their primary effects, and combos are just the icing on the cake, something you take advantage of to optimize your efficiency.

In ME3, combos were often the primary reason to use powers, to the point it hardly even mattered which powers you used.

My hope for MEA is that the developers will buff powers by emphasizing their primary effects, and if they buff combos, they focus on something else that pure damage (i.e. different forms of CC and debuffs). If combos don't scale with power ranks, I feel like I have more freedom to choose evolutions based on what I actually want those powers to achieve, instead of having to worry whether my combos are effective or not.

Combos should be boosted through specific evolutions and passives, which is already the case (and again, whether those bonuses are good enough is not what we're discussing here). In addition I'd suggest the same thing I suggested for ME3 a long time ago: we should have equipment and boosters that boost combo radius and effectiveness.

I just tried a 1 Throw, 6 Barricade match.  I immediately went back to 6 Throw, 1 Barricade.

It's just more suitable to my playstyle, but I can see either one being totally valid, and maps themselves can favour one or the other (many more choke points on Zero than Icebreaker, for example).

I suspect I'll be going back and forth between those builds constantly myself. They're both great, just play differently. And Barricade is still super useful - even if somewhat more situational - at Rank 1.

Right now I'll be keeping Barricade at Rank 6 for a while simply because the weapon buffs make killing armoured targets noticeably easier with the crappy weapons I mostly have.

Some quick low-rez MSPaint Skills, wanted a closer look.
Well this explains why combos are terrible. Ill be sure to pass the note along.