[SebC]

I've decided that the combat in ME2 sucks (at least on insanity).

- squad mates pop-up even when they shouldn't, thus killing themselves
- the way to keep your squad alive is to keep them way out of the action (AI selects target based on proximity, so you make sure they're behind you)
- you pop out of cover your shields drain really fast (so you don't), and your powers do lots of damage and there's ammo limits, so you don't shoot much
- you can curve powers around objects but your squad power hit or don't depending on if you have line of sight or not, so it doesn't matter where you put your squad. I actually lost them behind a door once and I still had access to their skills
- geometry is goofy when you zoom in: you line up zoomed out, zoom in for accuracy and then you can't see the guy anymore
- the only guys who present any kind of challenge are the guys who charge you, the rest are just tedious, because you can sit behind cover forever looking at your target and they pretty much never hit you
- even guys who charge like the heavy mechs are pretty tedious, it's not a matter of managing your cooldowns so that you can hit 'em with everything before it gets to you, you beat him by finding a place/object to hide behind and making sure he never gets to you.
- powers do lots of burst damage
- are there infinite enemy spawns?
- make acquisition range larger for you and your enemies: really sucks being able to see a guy and not be able to target him with your talents
- spoiler: for the Garrus mission, he kept dieing until I figured out where to put my squad so they wouldn't shoot at him

IMO for ME3 they need to fix a lot of things

- go back to unlimited ammo, maybe make heat sinks special like heavy weapon ammo and medi-gel, you can use them if your weapon overheats put normally you wouldn't
- require squadmates to have line of sight to have talents hit so you have to keep your squad close
- turn talents back into disables/crowd control/debuffs (like stop regen, disable weapons, knock down, lift etc) and have weapons do most of the damage
- more enemies that charge/flank
- make it so if you're looking out of cover you will get hit, just less than if you're totally exposed, make it kill or be killed in order to make players shoot
- much longer acquisition range
- better AI targetting so that they'll go after your squad instead of letting you absorb all their firepower
- better squadmate AI i.e. survival first (only come out to do damage if shields health are above X%)
- lengthen cooldowns on individual talents so you have to think about what when you use talents, make global cooldown shorter than talent cooldown or eliminate global cooldown entirely: it's way more fun having multiple talents when you can use them simultaneously.
- reduce enemy health and damage to balance out other changes

Having played over 20 hours of insanity now, I have to say that ME1 insanity combat was a lot more fun (until you get totally overpowered at high levels and nobody can ever get a shot at you - I played as an Adept for my Insanity run and once you get high enough between singularity, lift and stasis it's easy to juggle almost any number of enemies once the cooldowns get short enough).

So far the best combat in ME2 is right at the start where it's just you and your pistol and the mechs are charging you!