For those who wonder how I play the DA, here's an educational video, featuring my friend Schachmatt lighting it up with the Claymore, and me getting sync-killed by a Scion. Oh, and there's a flamerless Vorcha Soldier with the Indra (wat?).
Gather round and let’s talk now about the Grenade God, the almighty Drell, to whom all adepts must bow in supplication (yes, even the Fury), and his pimp trenchcoat.
It took me a while to master this class, because he’s insanely squishy (fully evolved barriers give you 450 – that’s less than the base value of, say, the vanilla Human Adept, herself not the tankiest gal around) and doesn’t have anything in the way of avoiding or mitigating damage – no health regen, no tactical cloak, no shield drain, no “oh shit” biotic charge – no nothing, except the trenchcoat and grenades. Lots and lots of grenades.
Well, he might have some tricks up his sleeve, but we’ll talk about them in due course.
Build
Reave is the foundation of your DPS, it’s an awesome power, which serves both as a biotic primer and a detonator. There are various ways to build it, I recommend starting with the most foolproof. First, take radius – the more enemies you hit in one go, priming them for a BE, the more of them will go boom when you chuck a grenade on top of them. Reave is not a projectile power, meaning that it cannot be dodged and hits instantly, without any travel time. It goes through phantoms’ bubbles o’invincibility and banshees’ hands o’denial. It’s totally possible to hit multiple phantoms or a couple of banshees with one cast, priming them to be asploded in a second. If you hit a cluster of mooks and add a well placed grenade on top, you get a killstreak. Next, take damage reduction. The difference in cooldown speed is half a second, i.e. inconsequential, but extra 10% of damage reduction will definitely come in handy on gold and higher. The final evo should be damage&duration – for the additional 15% of damage reduction (that’s 40% total as long as a reave cast by you is active *on something*). That was one of the tricks that I’ve told you about.
Now remember that while offensive effects of reave stack with multiple uses (I.e. if you reave the same target twice, you deal double damage as long as both instances are active), defensive ones do not (in other words, you won’t get 80% of damage negated by casting reave twice). Going from that, you can try another way of building reave – purely offensive, by basically taking the opposite evos at every rank, i.e. duration -> recharge speed -> armor&barriers. You will still get some damage reduction, but not much. This build is not for the faint of heart, but I’ve seen people who make it work.
Pull – on gold and higher this power has very limited use. It doesn’t detonate BEs, doesn’t work on anything that has armor, and to use it on lieutenants (centurions, marauders, phantoms, etc.) you have to strip their shields/barriers first. Plainly speaking, on higher difficulties there are not enough unshielded mooks to justify spending significant points in Pull, and doing the “acolyte –> pull –> reave” routine over and over just takes too much time. Many players skip Pull altogether; I recommend taking 3 ranks in it for that one time you have an unshielded phantom dead to rights. Pull her and detonate with reave. It’s awesome. Otherwise, skip and put the free points in passives.
Cluster Grenades are your main offensive power, the best grenades in the game where all grenades are pretty damn OP. Your circle of “reave –> throw grenade –> reave –> throw grenade –> reave” shall never be broken. Shoot between explosions or on your way to an ammo box for MOAR GRENADES. Build: force&damage (base radius on clusters is 5.4 m, which doesn’t seem like much, but remember that you have two pieces of shrapnel, or three if you take the respective final evo) –> damage combo (don’t believe what it says on the can – that evo doubles the damage to ALL BIOTICALLY PRIMED TARGETS, not only those lifted. They don’t have to be primed by you, either). The final evolution is shrapnel – the bulk of damage from Clusters comes not from grenades themselves, but from BEs that they detonate. It’s better to detonate 3 BEs at once than 2.
Drell Assassin – take all power damage evos, that’s pretty self explanatory (remember – grenades register as a power). If you skip Pull, take the final “weapon damage” rank.
Fitness – all shields. Or take melee damage if you’re into that sort of thing, I dunno.
Weapons - Take something light. DA is not an Infiltrator – for him, cooldowns DO matter. Well, to an extent, say, as long as you’re over 100%, you’re good. So, you can theoretically take rather a broad variety of guns, including the Harrier, the Lancer, the Wraith. Taking something other than a pistol or an SMG means that you can’t put a power magnifier on it though – that’s giving up whopping one third of your power damage (but not BE damage). My personal choice for him is the Talon; if you don’t have it, take the Carnifex or the Pirahna; in absence of any good gold weapons, consider using the Locust. Basically, anything that gives you over 100% in cooldowns, will do. Most of your DPS won’t come from weapons anyway.
Equipment
Permanent Gear – Grenade Capacity, duh. If you don’t have it, use the Commando Package with a pistol.
Weapon Amp – depends on the weapon you choose.
Armor Module – here comes another one of the tricks I was talking about earlier. Use an Adrenaline Mod on him. The Drell have higher base speed than any other character, save possibly the, ahem, sexbot, and with Adrenaline Mod III you will literally outrun bullets. Don’t laugh: it really will be so.
Ammo: Warp, or use whatever you have. But Warp works best
General Tactics
It cannot be stressed enough: if there is anything to reave around you, you must reave it. There’s no reason not to reave something if it highlights on your screen. REAVE ALL THE THINGS.
Because of the abovementioned double damage Clusters do to primed targets, don’t waste grenades on something that is not primed. Reave –> throw grenade –> reave, always. Besides, reave staggers all unarmored mooks (phantoms not included, sadly), so even if something is shooting you right in the face, reave it first to stagger, then grenade it point blank.
Do not throw grenades directly at your target (unless the target is literally at arm’s length), especially if it’s fast and agile like a banshee or a phantom – it’s very easy to misjudge the distance and the clusters’ bounce, and waste a grenade. Aim at the ground about 2/3rds between you and the target. The shrapnel will bounce right into the enemy that is moving toward you.
Be mobile. Drell have no shields to speak of, so staying in one place letting the enemies get a bead on you is suicide. But do not run into the open either, try moving while keeping some sort of obstacle between you and the enemy, blocking at least some of the enemy fire. Because of your squishiness, risky revives out in the open are best left to your more tanky teammates, or infiltrators. Always remember than a team short of one gun is better off than a team short of two guns.
If you absolutely must cross an open space while under fire, run in a zigzag line. Due to the Drell’s speed (and with an Adrenaline Mod) most enemy bullets simply won’t catch up with you. If there’s a pizza delivery objective and you know how to do the pizza running trick, you should take it, because you are the fastest.
Best Maps: Obviously ones with lots of grenades, but less open – White, Ghost, Goddess.
Best Difficuly: Any. He’s a juggernaut, really. He was the first character I soloed gold Collectors with.
Best Opponent: The Geth are the least comfortable for him because of their uncannily accurate ranged attacks and cheating resistance to biotics (bombers and hunters, I AM LOOKING AT YOU). Otherwise, it’s all good.
