HeartlessWanderer

It's not a bug, it's just Liara's health in this game. Her only weakness, really, since with the proper upgrades her power recharge times and Singularities in particularly let her toss out powers very rapidly. She's capable of throwing Warp almost immediately after catching something with Singularity, meaning she can self-fuel her own biotic explosion combo attacks, on very short notice. She can also fire multiple Singularities very quickly. As such, they balanced her as the squishy mage, the glass cannon. It makes her a bit high-maintenance and less-useful on higher difficulties but she can be handy if you take an active hand at utilizing her powers.

I believe I saw something along those lines somewhere in the ocean of various hair mods in this bunch here: http://www.nexusmods.com/masseffect3/mods/425 It's a mishmash of male and female hair mods so you'll have to go through it and see if anything looks good for your purposes.

To clarify: a voluntary donation is considered a different kind of transaction legally than a direct offer of money for a mod, which would count as "buying" a mod as a "product," the kind of thing that would make companies crack down on mod development in general. Hence, it's not allowed by any modding community site with a measure of good sense. Fan projects are a legal gray area and often rely on developers and publishers voluntarily opting to relax their view of what's necessary to protect their IP, so in turn, a modding community needs to be mindful of what might be seen as harmful by the company. If I might ask (and I know I'm late to the party but Tali's picture is a source of annoyance for me) what exactly needs to be done in Photoshop to make this viable for a mod?

Okay, so here's the thing. I'm a member of a fairly-popular YouTube channel, called BrainScratch Commentaries, that does commentary playthroughs of games, and my Big Project right now is a straight playthrough of the Mass Effect trilogy. For Mass Effect 3, since the quality of the product BioWare put out is a major talking point, I thought I'd use that playthrough to showcase mods, with emphasis on showing how they can improve the experience of the game (through things like Expanded Galaxy, Recalibrated, BackOff, Ashley Legacy Project, and other restored content and texture mods) without massively changing the spirit of the game's general creative direction (so stuff that's blatant like MEHEM is out). My aim is to pile on a mod configuration that hits Mass Effect 3 sort of like KotOR 2's Restored Content Modification. That's not so much an issue--I just need to install things in the proper order, and most of that stuff comes in the form of DLC mods that are easily dropped into the DLC folder without risking the integrity of the installation--but I'd also like to use A.L.O.T. (the big collection of high-res texture mods) and I'm wondering if I should expect to be able to run the game with those textures AND record high-quality footage through Open Broadcaster Software (OBS). My aim is for 720p footage at 30fps, since my monitor is only 1360x768 to begin with and I don't have enough space on my external hard drive to keep a 60fps HD playthrough of a game this long. I know I can do this with a few texture upgrades in and I know I can do it with a modded version of the vanilla game at max settings. So, here's my question, for anyone computer-savvy enough to answer it. With the following setup: CPU: AMD FX-4300 Quad-Core Processor GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 Motherboard: MSI 760GM-P34(FX) (MS-7641) ...Can I expect to run Mass Effect 3 with all of the A.L.O.T. texture packs installed and still record without a hitch in OBS? Or should I keep it strictly to character models and leave the environment textures alone? Another concern is "are textures even worth it for environments in 720p?" This is one I can't really answer since I have no way to compare them, but I'm happy enough with ME3's environment detail that I wouldn't really shed any tears if I only retextured characters and armor.

Yeah, and the result of that was that Insanity mode was a pain in the bum to play because everything had shield/barrier on top of armor on top of health. Everything. So powers became relatively useless for two-thirds of every encounter in a mode where staying out of cover for naught-point-zero-two of a femtosecond was typically a death sentence. Once you've upgraded individual guns in ME3, they can get just as generally powerful as they got in ME2, they just start out with less kick. Doesn't stop ME3 from having the same issue ME2 did where certain DLC weapons make the early stages of the game hilariously easy (that stupidly accurate N7 shotgun comes to mind--I've actually been killing Cerberus shield troops by shooting them through the "mail slot" with that thing). The other balance concern here is that the only thing limiting your weapon choice is your class and its weight capacity concerns. You're free to equip a class with weapons it previously had no business using, meaning your Vanguard can also be a pro sniper and so forth. The key to making the most of your weapons in this game is figuring out relatively early which ones you're going to be using money on and upgrading those ASAP. More of a problem in a non-DLC'd and non-modded game, really, since in a vanilla game without DLC weapons and without Expanded Galaxy's import weapons chest, you have to acquire the game's better weapons as you progress and yeah, the early-game weapons are fairly pitiful. BioWare tried to hit a middle ground between ME1's inventory system and ME2's less-cumbersome but relatively brainless-feeling upgrades system, and to an extend it works, but you do have to think about how you use your guns a lot more than even the first game, where you pretty much just had to dump credits into the latest and greatest and only mods themselves really made you think. I suppose it wouldn't be too hard to mod general gun damage output to be a little higher, but balancing that properly with everything else in the game might be more of an overhaul job. Thoughts?

I don't mean general hand problems throughout the game, but specifically this one that occurs when Shepard is in an officer uniform. This happens regardless of any mods installed. http://i916.photobucket.com/albums/ad9/SolarisParadox/Shepard%20Hand%20Problem_zpsde2ztmgg.png It's distracting that she suddenly decides she has the hands of an eighty-year-old who's been punching a brick wall for several hours whenever she changes into this outfit. It's also weird, because other women in Alliance officer uniforms don't appear to have this problem. Is there a fix for this, and if there is, where can I find it? Searching Nexus hasn't borne fruit on this one yet. If there isn't, could someone make one, or is it impossible?

Agh, never mind. I've been looking into other casual outfit mods and it seems the neck-seam problem is present in all cases where Shepards neck gets to connect to her bare shoulders. It's an issue with MaleShepard as well. Just an oddity in the way Shepard's model works, I suppose. BioWare really needs to quit cutting corners on models and animations. >_>;;

So there's a pretty cool, fairly subtle mod for Female Commander Shepard on Nexus that I quite like. It's called the Buff Female Shepard Body Mod, and its basic effect is to make FemShep's body appear more physically fit, in keeping with the idea that she's a marine who's gone through intense training. Arguably this makes certain shared animations between herself and MaleShep more awkward (her arms look a touch weird during one particular shot at the Defense Committee meeting), but it also makes other scenes look more sensible (most notably whenever she's doing something physical with James Vega... fistfighting and pull-ups, I mean). The mod also has a casual outfit replacement mod to accompany it, which replaces FemShep's armored combat fatigues with a tank top that includes both clean and "dirtied" textures for the opening sequence. The mod hasn't been updated in over two years, and it still has an issue: the neck seam is very visible whenever Shepard is in either her underwear mesh or the tank top outfit. I'd like to request a fix for this, since it appears the original creator may not be available or inclined to work on it. I think this can be fixed without modding the actual buff bodies meshes, though. I suspect this a model mesh issue and not a texture one, so I'd be inclined to think tweaking FemShep's neck mesh to better fit with the buff bodies mod would be simpler and less intrusive on the modder's work. The reason I think this is a mesh issue rather than a texture one has to do with how lighting hits the neck seam and how in one of the Buff Body Mod page's images, the back of Shepard's neck appears to slightly separate from the back of her torso, just a tiny bit. Altering Shepard's neck mesh would probably affect other female NPCs the same way the buff body mod does, but since you don't really ever see them with unobscured neck seams to begin with, this may not be a problem. Of greater concern is how one of the player options widens or narrows the neck, but I don't think this actually affects where the neck connects to the body model. It may be easy to work around that niggle if the neck can actually be edited. I could just be talking out of my bum on this one, but it would really be a cool thing if someone could do this. I lack the expertise to do so myself, but as mods go, I would think it'd be one of the simpler and less time-consuming mods to implement, and it could be used as a starting point for any other mods that attempt to increase FemShep's musculature to any degree, since it's unlikely her shoulders and back would change much even if, say, someone wanted to amp up how much ab she has showing.

If you have an Android mobile phone with a data plan, I recommend using an app called FoxFi in the future to update Origin. This will allow you to USB-tether or hotspot your connection, essentially using your mobile connection in place of a wireless adapter or general Wi-Fi. Data plan limits make this ill-suited to regular use, but most mobile data plans should be both large enough and fast enough to handle something small like an Origin or Steam client update. The PC-side program can be found here and you'll find direction to the appropriate mobile app on the site, I think: http://foxfi.com/ This worked well for me during the short period when I upgraded my desktop's GPU but found that its bulk covered the slot occupied by my previous internal wireless adapter. It also works as a pass-through for a mobile phone connected to a wireless Wi-Fi adapter just as well. Just note that the free version of this program interrupts your connection every so often, but in most cases these interruptions are spaced far enough apart that an Origin download should finish before it happens. All you need do is manually re-start the connection on your phone. It's just a minor inconvenience to get you to pay the (small, to be honest, and one-time) cost of buying a license for it.