Strategies for an Adept on Silver/Gold
Been playing an Adept all the way to level 20 and I'm having lots of fun. But, when I hit Silver / Gold level, I'm starting to wonder what's the real use of an Adept.
Most people say that crowd control is the way to go. But, the problem is that MOST of the ennemies are either shielded or armored and it becomes pretty hard to pull, singularity or even stasis anyone. The first waves are pretty easy, but once hitting wave 5, it starts to become harder and harder to control anything and just throwing warp/reave hoping I don't get anything close.
Removing shield with a SMG or Assault Rifle weapon help, but, still hard to get anything done fast enough. I find myself relying heavily on my teammates to start the job so I can finish and "steal kill" everything.
A character I like to play with is the Drell because of its biotic grenades helping a lot with shielded and armored ennemy, but the low amount (3) of nades AND the low shield is a bit of a gamble since anything can pretty much one shot my barrier.
So, does anyone have tips on playing an Adept on silver/gold level and been successful with?
Keeping in mind my favorite is the Asari Adept:
First off make sure your stasis is rank 6, specced for bubble; this is very important for huge/prolonged crowd control. Yes this spell has no affect on stronger armored oppenents (besides the phantom of course) but this is not the point of crowd control. You must use your crowd control to stop as many of the little guys as you can from targeting your team as they focus fire on the big guys. Once the big guys are taken care of you can move onto the less deadly little guys.
Now that we have the most important part of an Adept covered, we can move on to something else. When it comes to damage you should realize your weapons will be practically useless in silver and gold. You will only need them to kill off a few wounded enemies. Your damage will completely stem from your powers and creating as many biotic explosions as you possibly can to wreck the enemies shields and armor. Also if you are carrying weapons that reduce your power recharge at all you are weakening yourself. You should be capped at 200% and never look back.
You seem to be worried about kills as an adept when you should be focused on winning. I get more points as an adept from assists then I ever got from trying to kill enemies as I throw out large amounts of AOE damage at the enemy. And really you get more money from winning and that's all that matters.
Here's how a basic gold wave goes for me and my team. I'm in front with my adept keeping up stasis on any enemy I see so as to never let them take cover or fire upon anyone. Everyone else targets the enemy and drops anything that walks into my bubble. Of course our infiltrator is in the back picking them off one by one. Next are the big guys, kiting them as fast we can we fallback one bottleneck at a time. Me throwing down a wall at the entrance keeping the little guys from interfering with my team picking away at as many banshees, brutes, atlas, or primes as dare face us. Ravagers are handled by the infiltrator and I like to put a bubble at the Ravangers feet to kill the swarmers that pop out.
Adepts are an amazing class, very powerful and a must have for any silver/gold team.
Updating my answer now that I've played the Asari Adept quite a bit (and also was on a few 4 adept squads):
My build at level 20:
Stasis: Max rank (Stasis Strength, Bonus Power, Bubble)
Warp: Max rank (Damage, Lasting Damage, Pierce)
Throw: 3 ranks
Asari Justicar: Max rank (Damage & Capacity, Power Damage, Pistols)
Fitness: 5 ranks (Durability, Shield Recharge)
The only change, after my next promote is to drop rank 6 Asari Justicar and take Rank 6 Fitness for more durability.
Stasis - Stasis is great on unarmored targets, especially Phantoms and Nemesis. You can stun them in place while the sniper of your team shoots them in the head. Having bubble also gives you plenty of targets to trigger an biotic explosion off of.
Warp - This is your bread and butter skill. Spam this like no tomorrow on everything.
Throw - Due to the insanely fast recharge on this skill, you can use this to cause a biotic explosion off of warp, and if the enemy dodges the first one, just use it again since it recharges so fast. Throw will also cause the shields of guardians to be knocked aside for a few seconds, which is handy.
Weapons: I use the N7 Eagle, its an automatic pistol that fires pretty fast and does decent damage, and it doesn't weigh much. With the -30% pistol weight, you can actually carry around a Carnifex (has to be upgraded to 3 or above though) and still retain 200% recharge speed.
Tactics: Spam warp, follow up with throw for biotic explosion. Rinse, repeat. On a team with 4 adepts, this strategy is almost unstoppable. I was on a team with a drell adept, human adept, and 2 asari adepts. The asaris were spamming warp and throw, the drell was using reave, and the human was using shockwave, we could take down a banshee in less than 5 seconds and everything was dying left and right to biotic explosions.
Out of the 4 adepts, my favorite has to be the asari adept now that I've played around with it a bit more. Its now a toss up between her and the salarian engineer as my favorite multiplayer characters.
Playing an Adept on Silver/Gold is all about biotic detonations. It's a lot of fun and does loads of damage when done right, but it can depend on your team's composition. Done right, a Brute dies from two biotic explosions, and a Banshee takes about four, and you're likely to get some kills on nearby smaller enemies as well.
An Asari Adept is probably the most flexible, since you can easily cause detonations on your own with Warp + Throw, as well as provide some crowd control with Stasis. The Drell Adept is also good if there is another biotic on the team to detonate his Reave. The Human Adept is a somewhat weaker, since Singularity doesn't work on shielded targets while Stasis does, and the range of Shockwave is somewhat short, making it hard to detonate distant enemies.
With an Asari, I recommend putting ranking all your biotics to full (the damage of biotic explosions depends on the rank of the powers involved), 5 points in Justicar, and the remaining 3 in Fitness. Make sure to take the points that increase damage from detonations as well as the stasis bubble for crowd control.
Keep your loadout light so that you have the shortest cooldowns possible. You should be able to bring a light pistol and an SMG while staying on +200% recharge speed, though you won't be using them all that much.
Your basic strategy should be to lock down dangerous enemies like Marauders, Phantoms, Combat Engineers or Geth Hunters with Stasis, and alternate Warp and Throw on the larger armored enemies to take them down quickly with the resulting detonations.
Also, look for opportunities to synergize with your team. If there are other biotics on the team, try to either detonate their biotics or set up your own combos so that they can detonate them.
If there is another Adept on your team, try having one be a Drell with area of effect Reave to set up as many detonation opportunities for the other Adept as possible. A Drell + Asari adept combo done right can literally cause a biotic detonation every two seconds. If you have two Asari, make sure to organize yourselves so that one is using Warp and the other is using Throw. Otherwise, you will just mess up each other's combos.
Finally, note that this detonation-heavy setup isn't that good on Bronze, since enemies tend to die before you can detonate anything. On Silver/Gold though, it's very powerful.