BioWare details Mass Effect 3 upgrades guide

BioWare has posted a helpful guide on how to "maximise" Mass Effect 3's upgradable powers.

Mass Effect 3 senior designer Manveer Heir provided detailed information on the mathematical formulae BioWare uses to calculate how bonuses are applied to players' stats via the developer's forum.

BioWare's systems remain similar to those used in Mass Effect 2, Heir notes, although were previously kept hidden from the players. Until now.

Heir said he was now making the information public "to allow the hardcore RPG player to maximise their potential and know what is happening" behind the scenes.

"We realised this would be a very small percentage of people that do this," Heir added, "so instead of confusing people and trying to explain everything in game with complicated formulas, we do the math in the background, give you guys the results that matter and let you make your choices from there.

"The truly hardcore can read this, hopefully helpful, forum post to understand everything further."

The information is reproduced in full below.

Formula 1 - Normal Power Upgrades

"The vast majority of powers data upgrades fall under this, such as damage, force, and impact radius. Most notably, power recharge speed (aka cooldown) does NOT fall under this formula.

New Value = Base Value at Rank 1 * (1.0 + Sum of all rank bonuses + Dynamic Bonuses)

Base Value at Rank 1 is simple. Whatever damage (or whatever is being upgraded) is at rank 1 of that power is the base value. This is what all the percentages are off of.

Sum of all the rank bonuses are the bonuses of every other rank that you have bought added all up. So if Rank 3 upgrades damage 10% and you bought Rank 4 evolve that upgrades damage 15% and at Rank 6 you bought the evolve that upgrades damage 25% then the sum of the rank bonuses are 50% (add all three numbers). You only add in rank bonuses for the stat you are upgrading that you have bought. Note, this value is expressed as a floating point number so 50% = 0.5. 100% = 1.0.

Dynamic Bonuses are from things like your passives and weight capacity. So you could have 100% bonus total by having a 70% bonus from weight capacity, 10% from wearing certain armor, and 20% from your passive power. Note, this value is expressed as a floating point number so 50% = 0.5. 100% = 1.0.

So why do we calculate it like this instead of just taking the current value and multiplying it by the upgrade amount (like 25% for example)? Balance is a big reason. If the upgrade modifies the current value, the upgrade is more useful for players who have a higher value from things like passives and all that. This means powers can quickly become overpowered or an upgrade is useless for some players and ridiculously powerful for others. This becomes hard to balance and manage. So all upgrades go off of the BASE value (and the base value is calculated before any passives, armor, weight capacity, etc stuff is accounted for).

Formula 2 - Recharge Speed Upgrades

Recharge speed (aka cooldown) use a formula called divide by bonus sum. The formula is as follows:

New Value = Base Value at Rank 1 * (1.0 / (1.0 + Sum of all rank bonuses + Dynamic Bonuses))

The definitions of the values are the same as above. So if recharge speed is 10 seconds at Rank 1, the sum of your rank bonuses is 50% and the dynamic bonuses total at 25%, using the formula above what you find is the value is 5.7. Only recharge speed is calculated using this formula. Also, it should be noted that Henchmen power recharge speeds are always double what Shepard's recharge speed is (there may be one or two execptions, but those are close to double). This is to stop the henchmen from being overpowered.

Formula 3 - Hard Value Bonuses

This formula is used for stats that are expressed as percents. So, normally if you are upgrading something like Force, that is measured in Newtons. So you are upgrading 25% to the base 100 N of Force. However, what do you do when the stat you are upgrading is Weapon Damage Bonus, like many of the passives have. Weapon Damage Bonus is expressed as a percentage.

So Rank 1 Weapon Damage Bonus may be 10%. If we say at rank 2 the Weapon Damage Bonus increases by 50% what is the correct result for total weapon damage bonus now. If you used formula 1, it would be 15%. But that goes against what people expect, because you are increasing a percent by a percent. Instead, you expect the numbers to add together. So a 50% increase to 10% should be 60%.

Because of this we created a different formula for these sorts of stats. This just makes the numbers work like what players expect. The formula is simple:

New Value = (Base Value at Rank 1 + Sum of Rank all rank bonuses) * (1.0 + Dynamic Bonuses)"