Adept in Mass Effect 2 on Insanity – Why It Isn’t Hard
If you browse various forums, including the Bioware ones, you will see many people state how Adept has the hardest time on Insanity mode, the main reason being the fact all enemies have some kind of protection that prevents biotic abilities from being effective. Yet, is this true?
Simply put, no. There is only one thing that Adepts can’t take care of on their own innatively, and that is shields. However they handle care of everything else. Warp is a very powerful skill, which is at the core of the Adept class; it detonates existing biotic effects on enemies for added AOE damage, it stops health regeneration, it’s effective against armour and biotic barriers. The Adept is better equipped than the Vanguard and the Engineer at ripping off things that stand between your skills and the enemies’ health bar.
So why all this fuss about Adept being the hardest class to play in Mass Effect 2 on Insanity? It’s simply due to wrong assumptions. Just because you can’t use Pull or Shockwave on something straight away, it doesn’t mean you are not being effective. Warp does a ton of damage and using it a lot is being an efficient Adept. Having one companion with Overload or using Energy Drain as your Advanced Training skill will solve any issue with shields. Shields will go down in the blink of an eye as soon as you get some upgrades, and you will find yourself AOE pulling and Warping away through enemies faster than you ever imagined.
I found Adept competes with a well upgraded Vanguard in terms of killing speed. You can storm through any mission, or at least handle them without much issues. My two videos below will show you just how effective an Adept can be.
This first video is from Mordin’s Recruitment mission. All enemies posses armour. The common biotic chain I use there is Warp (Miranda’s or mine) > Jacob’s Pull > detonate with the other Warp (from whoever hasn’t used it yet). That’s it. No need for snipers to get the Vorcha on the opposite side on bridges, Pull and Warp take care of it.
The second video is Tali’s Recruitment mission. I chose this specifically because it was full of synthetics with shields, which are supposed to be the hardest enemies to kill for an Adept. I pretty much stormed through the whole thing, and I hope this video will change your mind about this class. I used Energy Drain, which lowers the enemies’ shields and restores your own. Even when Miranda died at some point and I had no Overload, I took care of shields with no fuss.
Well, the thing is “hardest” is a relative term, none of the classes are really that hard, even on insanity, if you know what you’re doing.
I think Adept is considered one of the hardest because to do well you need to coordinate warp detonates with your squadmates’ powers, as well as managing crowd control, while most classes require neither.
For instance, as an infiltrator or soldier all you really need to do is play it like a FPS, i did my first insanity as an infiltrator and i think i used my squadmates’ abilities all of 5 times the entire game. Engineer becomes a little bit more complicated, seeing as you rely on squadmates for a good portion of your damage, but i think it’s still easier because you don’t have to coordinate combos like an adept does… and Sentinels are just easy as pie.
That just leaves vanguards, I’ve never tried one, but i hear vanguards are difficult in a different way, less complicated but very luck / reaction time based.
Vanguard is the class I played the most, and what makes it hard is the high risk/high reward playstyle involved with Charging. It can become one of the quickest classes to get through the game after you get some upgrades though.
I agree on what you say about powers and such. I also hear that especially for console gamers it can be harder to chain cast skills due to the fact that the controls aren’t necessarily as friendly as those of PC users.