"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." Well, I do agree about the part that in ME2 Insanity difficulty, with each enemy having at least a layer of protection, is kinda pain in the ass, and I do remember playing ME2 when it first came out in 2009, and it is just as bad as you said. But when I played ME2 on Insanity in 2013, maybe because Bioware had patched the game since, grunts' armor and shield can be depleted rather quickly, even in early game with Jacob's share incen + shuriken + trigger tapping = no more protection. "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." Yeah, the dmg, weight and magazine size will get better, but not the fire rate of the weapon. Maybe because I just didn't word my idea right, but my problem with the guns in ME3 lies not in the dmg, weight department but the fire rate of the weapon such as the avenger. The ME2 avenger fire as fast as the geth spitfire with firing sound much better than the ME3 version. So the guns in ME2 generally have better feel to them than those in ME3. "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." This I did. In vanilla ME3, only the DLC gun harrier feels the best, but the problem is that its ammo reserve is too pitiful. So I spent 75% of the game building my shep to get better ammo reserve for the harrier. Even in vanilla Insanity ME3, powers are too OP. Vanguard can just spam charge and nova, Soldier can just spam incen concus shot. SO most of my encounters do not last more than 30 seconds. So I don't even bother firing my weapon. So the actual problem is that the guns are not as OP as the powers, and some of the guns fire way too slow than they should.