Mass Effect Players! Toss me a bone will ya?

[Jimmy T. Malice]

-Don't play Vanguard. Biotic charge may be cool, but it'll inevitably get you right into the midst of a group of enemies, and it's not much use if there's only one enemy.

-Scions suck. Use a sniper rifle or the Locust SMG on the blue sacks on their backs to kill them quickly.

-Heavy weapons also suck. There are very few situations when they're actually useful.

-And finally, punch Khalisah Bint Sinan Al-Jilani. Just do it.

 

[DementedSheep]

When you get to a new area try and get all the paragon/renegade points and finish everything in the area rather than jumping around. Apparently every time you get to a new area all the possible paragon and renegade points you can get from it are added to a pool. Whether or not you pass or fail a speech check is based on what percentage of paragon/renegade points you have vs how many you could have had at that point. Hence why it?s possible to always pick the top or bottom answer and still fail. Of course this also means it snowballs and since they give you points for everything under the sun if you want to actually role play in this role playing game and not just stick to paragon and renegade expect to end up failing speech checks. Especially if you?re not importing a character so not getting the bonus points. You can get around this a bit by picking the 2nd evolution of your class buff and using the death mask.

Easiest classes to get into for the first play through are infiltrator or solider. Adept is hard to play on higher difficulties because their powers don't work on armoured targets but they are still very much doable with practice. Vanguard is shit loads of fun, kicks arse and can tear thru levels very quickly but like the adept requires more getting use to. It?s easy to screw yourself over with charge if you?re not paying attention.

You do not need to strip mine the entire galaxy. You get nothing extra for it so don't bother unless you for some reason find it fun. I would recommend ignoring low mineral planets and just briefly mining some planets with moderate or high mineral contents between each mission to stop this getting too tedious.

You can respec yourself but not squadmates (unless you have LotSB) so think ahead when leveling them.

The best DLC is LOTSB

Spoiler

get all you?re squad mates and you?re ship ready before doing the reaper IFF mission. Side quests don?t matter tho.

And thats all I can think of.

 

[theevilgenius60]

At some point on Tuchanka (I think that's it) a Krogan will start giving you lip. You'll be prompted to pull RT, or click the mouse by a red icon in the corner.

Do it.

I don't care if you're a Paragon. Do it.

Amen to that. Also do it in the tower when recruiting the assassin. You'll have a lone merc as you come out of an elevator. Do it. Better yet, bring Jack and then do it.

 

[Derek_the_Dodo]

As everybody else has said, PLAY THE 1ST ONE. Or at the very least watch a playthrough on youtube so you get the basic storyline and you can pick the major decisions that you want when starting ME2 and Miranda's doing the memory check thing.

Everyone keeps going on about being really careful, and watching out that you make the right decisions or else it can fuck up your game but I went through it with no walkthrough or hints of any kind and I did just fine. The "Suicide Mission" at the end is pretty easy to work out the right decisions. Hate me all you want but I loaded a save at the start of the mission if someone died despite my "whatever happens, happens" promise I made at the start of it but only because Mordin, the weakest but coolest character, died though.

I've only played one Shepard through, a soldier class, and everyone keeps saying how certain classes are so much cooler than others. What they don't realise though is there's an option to pick an extra talent in ME2 so I had a soldier with the slam biotic ability which I don't think is strictly supposed to be possible in the ME universe.

As for the renegade paragon crap and having to pick 1 and stick with it, forget it. I didn't and it worked out fine. And of course you're going to do everyone's loyalty missions, why would you bother skipping content?