Mass Effect 3 M.Player on Gold...have you survived?

[RJ 17]

Last night I took my first few shots at playing a few gold difficulties in ME3's multiplayer with a few friends of mine. We managed to beat Giant and Ghost, and I'm just wondering how my fellow Escapists are doing with the challenge of the gold maps. What maps have you beaten? What tactics do you use? That is, anything specific other than "run for your frickin' life and take a few shots whenever you can".

There were 3 of us. We managed to beat Giant by ourselves but we picked up a random (From Ireland! ) for Ghost. But yeah, the three of us were playing Quarian Infiltrators (the Irish guy on Ghost had a Salarian Engineer) and we picked to specifically fight against the Geth so we could all use Sabotage on them. It definitely helps, hacking the Pyros can really cause a nice distraction, and if you've got a Geth Prime's shields down the Pyro can do some real damage to him.

That was the gameplan, at least, and it worked up until about wave 4 or 5. After that it became "run for your frickin' life and take a few shots whenever you can." Those Geth Hunters are a bunch of psychopathic crack-heads now! Good god, check the patch notes and you'll see they actually buffed the hunters. They're soooooooo frickin' fast now, it's ridiculous! Seriously, you could have all possible avenues covered to where you and your squad are holding out, but within 10 seconds you can have 5 hunters running around your area and seriously messing up your face. Be that as it may, we still struggled through and beat 2 stages, making it to wave 10 on a couple other attempts before I had to call it a night.

So yeah, Sniper Squad: White (called that since we all changed are armor to white and looked like a bunch of storm troopers running around) against the Geth was our strat. What's yours? Any prefered base/class formation/enemy you prefer if you're taking on gold?

And on a side-note, anyone else disappointed with their Victory Pack and Commendation Pack? I was. I got seriously hosed. From the Victory Pack I got a frickin' Locust SMG, and from the Commendation Pack I got the Crusader Shotgun. Yeah...this shotgun is worthless...absolutely and without a doubt...especially if you've already got the Geth Plasma Shotgun (which I do) which has far more stopping power, better accuracy at range (you can literally snipe people with it), and can actually been fired from the hip with a decent degree of accuracy. The Crusader has pinpoint accuracy up to about 10 feet in front of you, then it spreads out like a traditional shotgun. Don't bother trying to shoot from the hip, you'll kill nothing but gnats and mosquitoes. Annnnd yeah, it takes about a full clip to kill one Cannibal. (My weapons test for this shotgun was on Silver difficulty against the Reapers. 1 charged geth shotgun or 2 regular blasts is enough to kill a cannibal, took 3 to 4 shots with the Crusader to bring one down. And as the gun's description specifically tells you: the pinpoint accuracy doesn't leave room for error. So unless you're exceptional at predicting which way those wily enemies are going to suddenly turn or roll, you're going to be missing a lot. And since it takes 3 to 4 shots to kill even a basic target anyways, it just makes the shotgun very ineffective.

>.> both of the friends I was playing Gold with got the Valiant sniper rifle...the only weapon out of the bunch that I actually wanted. From what they said it's pretty sweet.

So yeah, I feel like I got royally screwed.

Oh yeah, and as ineffective as that shotgun is, at least it weighs as much as a frickin' Widow. Oh wait, that's another bad thing.

 

[Terminate421]

Yes, twice in fact. I blame my experience with Gears of war. I know how enemies work and was able to kick some ass.

 

[RJ 17]

Yes, twice in fact. I blame my experience with Gears of war. I know how enemies work and was able to kick some ass.

Having played plenty of Horde Mode games myself, I felt like I was well prepared for this game as well.

 

[Tohuvabohu]

I 3 manned a gold game a few nights ago with my friends. Firebase Bronze (I think that's what it's called.) with a human soldier, salarian engineer, and myself as a Krogan sentinel. We were fighting against cerberus.

We did have another person with us. But he turned out to be worthless and got his ass handed to him at least 5 times in wave 1. He left during wave 2 after dropping 5 more times.

Luckily the rest of us were able to finish off the game. Best tactic: Keep moving.

Because Firebase Bronze has a pretty solid circular structure, it's not too hard to continually run in circles, forcing every enemy behind us then picking a temporary spot to hunker down at. But, it DID take us around 40 minutes to clear the game... Some waves just seemed to go on and on and on. And getting attacked by 6 phantoms at once was also pretty troublesome.

But, we did finish it. Full extraction. Took every ounce of teamwork and coordination we could muster. Felt good man.

Random but: Has anyone noticed that the Shockwave ability seems to have a tendency to outright stop working? I almost never play a human adept because this happens to me ALL the time.

 

[Elijin]

I dislike the arbitrary speed boost to all enemies in gold. It's really jarring, the amount of times I've gone to take a shot at someone near cover, and they just suddenly arent in my scope anymore because their speed means they dont telegraph movements, and entirely skip some animations is just stupid.


Also, the whole 'Any amount of shields will block a sniper shell, without any bleedthrough damage.' Fuck!

 

[RJ 17]

I 3 manned a gold game a few nights ago with my friends. Firebase Bronze (I think that's what it's called.) with a human soldier, salarian engineer, and myself as a Krogan sentinel. We were fighting against cerberus.

We did have another person with us. But he turned out to be worthless and got his ass handed to him at least 5 times in wave 1. He left during wave 2 after dropping 5 more times.

Luckily the rest of us were able to finish off the game. Best tactic: Keep moving.

Because Firebase Bronze has a pretty solid circular structure, it's not too hard to continually run in circles, forcing every enemy behind us then picking a temporary spot to hunker down at. But, it DID take us around 40 minutes to clear the game... Some waves just seemed to go on and on and on. And getting attacked by 6 phantoms at once was also pretty troublesome.

But, we did finish it. Full extraction. Took every ounce of teamwork and coordination we could muster. Felt good man.

Random but: Has anyone noticed that the Shockwave ability seems to have a tendency to outright stop working? I almost never play a human adept because this happens to me ALL the time.

Afraid I haven't even touched the Adept yet, so I really don't know about Shockwave's ineffectiveness.

As for Gold, yeah, that's pretty much all you can do. It's impossible to have your squad pick a corner and hold it the entire game. You can have your "preferred starting point" for the beginning of each wave, but it inevitably boils down to running from spot to spot, picking off a few here and there before moving on.

But I gotta say I'm damn impressed that you beat Gold against Cerberus...because yeah, those frickin' Phantoms attack in swarms and all hell can very quickly break out when you've got 4 or 5 of'em flipping around between you and your squadmates. Like I said, the Geth Hunters themselves are a complete pain in the ass, but at least they can't insta-kill you like the Phantoms. But the Hunters are sooooooo fast now and just relentlessly aggressive.

I really need to get my Quarian Engineer up to 20 so I can start using her on Gold...the turret ability is very, VERY useful in slowing down the exalted march of the enemy forces.

 

[RJ 17]

Also, the whole 'Any amount of shields will block a sniper shell, without any bleedthrough damage.' Fuck!

Fuckin' A, I hear that. I HATE the god damn damage cap in gold! Widow Headshot against full shield bar: takes out the shields in one shot. Fair enough, I suppose. Widow headshot against a single segment of shields: takes out the shields with no further damage. So god damn lame!

 

[tendaji]

Only against Cerberus so far, I've had a ton of training from the beta that they are basically no longer a threat against me anymore. Reapers rape my team on Silver so I'm afraid of what they do on Gold, and Geth love pyros WAYYY tooo much

 

[Cronq]

Hah! It's a miracle if I get a semi-competent silver group. Not saying high N7 level means you're good, but having better equipment and a few unlocks always helps, and N7 lvl 16 players with level 16 soldiers just aren't ready.

 

[RJ 17]

Only against Cerberus so far, I've had a ton of training from the beta that they are basically no longer a threat against me anymore. Reapers rape my team on Silver so I'm afraid of what they do on Gold, and Geth love pyros WAYYY tooo much

I can't see getting past the Cerberus Phantoms, THOSE guys mess up my team even on Silver. Reapers are tough, but we don't have serious problems with them on Silver...I'd HATE to go up against a swarm of Banshees on Gold though...yeah, that's not gonna happen. As for the Geth, as I mentioned in my OP: We had 3 Quarian Infiltrators with Sabotage. It's not as effective as it used to be, but it's still a very big help. If nothing else it acts as an effect geth stunner attack, and yeah, hacking those same pyros that you hate so much can be VERY useful when you've got 3 of them melting the face off a Prime.

 

[Tohuvabohu]

As for Gold, yeah, that's pretty much all you can do. It's impossible to have your squad pick a corner and hold it the entire game. You can have your "preferred starting point" for the beginning of each wave, but it inevitably boils down to running from spot to spot, picking off a few here and there before moving on.

But I gotta say I'm damn impressed that you beat Gold against Cerberus...because yeah, those frickin' Phantoms attack in swarms and all hell can very quickly break out when you've got 4 or 5 of'em flipping around between you and your squadmates. Like I said, the Geth Hunters themselves are a complete pain in the ass, but at least they can't insta-kill you like the Phantoms. But the Hunters are sooooooo fast now and just relentlessly aggressive.

I really need to get my Quarian Engineer up to 20 so I can start using her on Gold...the turret ability is very, VERY useful in slowing down the exalted march of the enemy forces.

It was stressful as hell for awhile. But our combined group balanced each other out nicely. My friend as a human soldier equipped with a falcon could repeatedly stagger phantoms while my salarian engie friend drained their barriers. And as soon as their barriers dropped, I'd bowl their asses all over the place with my Krogan melee.

I haven't touched my Quarian engie in awhile. I simply love Overload/Energy drain too much. But that sentry turret is pretty great... perhaps I should give her a try on Gold next time.

Reapers though, are super stressful to fight on Gold. In later waves when Brutes, Ravagers, and Banshees begin outnumbering cannibals and marauders, it really is absolute madness against them. I think the most Banshees we killed in a single wave was probably around 8 of them during an objective wave. I'm in no rush to repeat that nightmare.

When it comes to which enemy force wipes us the most, it's definitely the Geth. Those Hunters really want you dead more than any other enemy unit in the game. Then again, I never faced Geth with several quarians before.

 

[DustyDrB]

I think my survival rate on Gold is higher than it is on Silver. I'm thinking that's probably because people who play on Gold really have their shit together. That's my experience, at least. I just find the time usually sticks together and plays their role well.

 

[tendaji]

Only against Cerberus so far, I've had a ton of training from the beta that they are basically no longer a threat against me anymore. Reapers rape my team on Silver so I'm afraid of what they do on Gold, and Geth love pyros WAYYY tooo much

I can't see getting past the Cerberus Phantoms, THOSE guys mess up my team even on Silver. Reapers are tough, but we don't have serious problems with them on Silver...I'd HATE to go up against a swarm of Banshees on Gold though...yeah, that's not gonna happen. As for the Geth, as I mentioned in my OP: We had 3 Quarian Infiltrators with Sabotage. It's not as effective as it used to be, but it's still a very big help. If nothing else it acts as an effect geth stunner attack, and yeah, hacking those same pyros that you hate so much can be VERY useful when you've got 3 of them melting the face off a Prime.

Well the great thing about Phantoms is that they can be put into Stasis, so have an Adept with the Stasis bubble, and Gold is incredibly easy cause you just removed a major threat from your gameplay.

 

[RJ 17]

Snip

Yeah, having a quarian sniper squad all equipped with either a Widow or a B. Widow is definitely very effective against Geth. But at the same time, the sentry turrets the Quarian Engineers chuck out act like mini-road blocks...Banshees in particular just can't seem to figure out what to do with them. They start screaming and charging and----OH LOOKY! A little floating toy! I wanna stare at it for 3 minutes! Really effective at slowing those tall freaky bitches down.

Only against Cerberus so far, I've had a ton of training from the beta that they are basically no longer a threat against me anymore. Reapers rape my team on Silver so I'm afraid of what they do on Gold, and Geth love pyros WAYYY tooo much

I can't see getting past the Cerberus Phantoms, THOSE guys mess up my team even on Silver. Reapers are tough, but we don't have serious problems with them on Silver...I'd HATE to go up against a swarm of Banshees on Gold though...yeah, that's not gonna happen. As for the Geth, as I mentioned in my OP: We had 3 Quarian Infiltrators with Sabotage. It's not as effective as it used to be, but it's still a very big help. If nothing else it acts as an effect geth stunner attack, and yeah, hacking those same pyros that you hate so much can be VERY useful when you've got 3 of them melting the face off a Prime.

Well the great thing about Phantoms is that they can be put into Stasis, so have an Adept with the Stasis bubble, and Gold is incredibly easy cause you just removed a major threat from your gameplay.

And see I was actually wondering if Stasis would work on Phantoms, I thought they had that thing that negates tech and biotic attacks, but yeah, if Stasis does work (in my opinion it's the most overpowered power in the game) against them then I can see Cerberus being the easiest group to fight. Really the only HUGE threat from Cerberus are the phantoms. Atlas' are a joke, Nemesisesasises spend the entire match just running around like a bunch of blind meth addicts, Engineers can get sneaky with their turret placements, but so long as you're paying attention to where you're going they shouldn't get the drop on you......unless your fighting an Atlas that's walking down a tight corridor and upon destroying it you see a turret sitting in the hallway behind where the Atlas just was and it opens fire on you....yeah, that kinda sucked xP. Centurions are just annoying with their smoke grenades, but not particularly challenging.

The more I think about it (and with the knowledge that Phantoms can be set in Stasis), Cerberus might be the easiest to fight. Pretty much any Geth other than the regular troopers can royally mess you up, same goes with Reapers. But as I mentioned, the only huge threat from Cerberus are the Phantoms with their ninja flips and insta-kills.

 

[Swyftstar]

I 3 manned a gold game a few nights ago with my friends. Firebase Bronze (I think that's what it's called.) with a human soldier, salarian engineer, and myself as a Krogan sentinel. We were fighting against cerberus.

We did have another person with us. But he turned out to be worthless and got his ass handed to him at least 5 times in wave 1. He left during wave 2 after dropping 5 more times.

Luckily the rest of us were able to finish off the game. Best tactic: Keep moving.

Because Firebase Bronze has a pretty solid circular structure, it's not too hard to continually run in circles, forcing every enemy behind us then picking a temporary spot to hunker down at. But, it DID take us around 40 minutes to clear the game... Some waves just seemed to go on and on and on. And getting attacked by 6 phantoms at once was also pretty troublesome.

But, we did finish it. Full extraction. Took every ounce of teamwork and coordination we could muster. Felt good man.

Random but: Has anyone noticed that the Shockwave ability seems to have a tendency to outright stop working? I almost never play a human adept because this happens to me ALL the time.

Afraid I haven't even touched the Adept yet, so I really don't know about Shockwave's ineffectiveness.

As for Gold, yeah, that's pretty much all you can do. It's impossible to have your squad pick a corner and hold it the entire game. You can have your "preferred starting point" for the beginning of each wave, but it inevitably boils down to running from spot to spot, picking off a few here and there before moving on.

But I gotta say I'm damn impressed that you beat Gold against Cerberus...because yeah, those frickin' Phantoms attack in swarms and all hell can very quickly break out when you've got 4 or 5 of'em flipping around between you and your squadmates. Like I said, the Geth Hunters themselves are a complete pain in the ass, but at least they can't insta-kill you like the Phantoms. But the Hunters are sooooooo fast now and just relentlessly aggressive.

I really need to get my Quarian Engineer up to 20 so I can start using her on Gold...the turret ability is very, VERY useful in slowing down the exalted march of the enemy forces.

I actually finished my first Gold with a sentinel spamming the hell out of shockwave. The annoying thing about shockwave is that you have to put points into radius and range or it will just fly right by enemies or stop short right in front of them. It sucks because you have to forego more damage and I think biotic explosion strength but I find the power to be useless otherwise. After you increase the radius and range, cast warp and then you can stay behind walls and objects, totally avoiding behing hit, and just spam shockwave over and over while only showing your face to cast warp from time to time so you can get some more biotic explosions. It comes in really handy if your position is getting rushed. You can just stay behind a wall spamming it to keep them at bay while your teammates pop out for quick sniper shots or other powers.

 

[Kevlar Eater]

Finished a gold match against Cerberus in Firebase Dagger a few minutes ago. I was playing as a Quarian Engineer, my group was made of a Drell Adept, a Turian Sentinel and a Salarian Engineer. Thankfully, the distractions us engineers deployed mostly kept the phantoms off our flanks while I did all the chilling/freezing so everything was easier to kill.

One thing I was happy about: We didn't get any objectives where we had to defend an upload area. Those are just cruel on so many levels.

 

[Tohuvabohu]

I actually finished my first Gold with a sentinel spamming the hell out of shockwave. The annoying thing about shockwave is that you have to put points into radius and range or it will just fly right by enemies or stop short right in front of them. It sucks because you have to forego more damage and I think biotic explosion strength but I find the power to be useless otherwise. After you increase the radius and range, cast warp and then you can stay behind walls and objects, totally avoiding behing hit, and just spam shockwave over and over while only showing your face to cast warp from time to time so you can get some more biotic explosions. It comes in really handy if your position is getting rushed. You can just stay behind a wall spamming it to keep them at bay while your teammates pop out for quick sniper shots or other powers.

The issue I'm having isn't that the shockwave's distance and radius is too short. It's just that it utterly stops working. Matches start off fine, biotic exploding this and that, pushing enemies aside here and there, but at some point, It will just completely break and do nothing at all. A friend of mine says this happens to him too.

As in, I can stand in front of a crowd of enemies in a narrow hallway, and cast shockwave. Watch the shockwave pass straight through every single enemy, front to end, and have absolutely no effect. Even if I hit them with warp, or are currently suspended by singularity. It's as if I'm casting nothing at all. And that's no exaggeration either, this really happens!

I've noticed every ability has a chance to fizzle out and have no effect on enemies (Probably latency or hit detection issues.) But the shockwave problem seems to be something else entirely. There's no other ability that will just go pfft and stop working entirely.

Glad to hear that didn't happen to you though. I'm really not sure what causes this happen, but it's happened to me more than once.

 

[boag]

Been through a couple of maps, still need to do the rest to earn the achievement, and I am still far an along away from the Krogan Gold Challenge

 

[RJ 17]

One thing I was happy about: We didn't get any objectives where we had to defend an upload area. Those are just cruel on so many levels.

Yeah, those are a huge pain in the ass. My group tried Firebase Dagger and was doing pretty damn well...until the Wave 10 objective popped up as a "Defend the Circle" objective that was conveniently placed right next to the enemy's primary spawn...yeah, we didn't stand a chance.

The issue I'm having isn't that the shockwave's distance and radius is too short. It's just that it utterly stops working. Matches start off fine, biotic exploding this and that, pushing enemies aside here and there, but at some point, It will just completely break and do nothing at all. A friend of mine says this happens to him too.

As in, I can stand in front of a crowd of enemies in a narrow hallway, and cast shockwave. Watch the shockwave pass straight through every single enemy, front to end, and have absolutely no effect. Even if I hit them with warp, or are currently suspended by singularity. It's as if I'm casting nothing at all. And that's no exaggeration either, this really happens!

I've noticed every ability has a chance to fizzle out and have no effect on enemies (Probably latency or hit detection issues.) But the shockwave problem seems to be something else entirely. There's no other ability that will just go pfft and stop working entirely.

Glad to hear that didn't happen to you though. I'm really not sure what causes this happen, but it's happened to me more than once.

Like I said before, I haven't played an Adept yet so I really can't speak on the Shockwave issue, but I can talk about how other things just straight up fail to work. This included Ops Survival Packs and Medigels...can't tell you how many times I've used either one of those and it's had utterly no effect, I'm either still sitting at 1 health bar when the Ops pack fails or I'm still just laying on the ground when the Medigel fails.

Then there's the fact that straight up sniper bullets apparently have a tendency to become ineffective. There's been countless times when I'd be shooting at an Atlas or Banshee or Brute or standard geth trooper only to have my bullet hit'em right in the chest and get absolutely no damage delt.

I think it's safe to say that there's still plenty of bugs in the multiplayer...like the way the Reave sound effect continues playing through the entire frickin' match if someone uses it even once.