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So I was replaying the first Mass Effect game and I realised that I had never seen this debate before, do people prefer the Overheat system for weapons in the first game or Thermal clips in the last two?

0_o You've never heard that debate?

Overheating. What kind of "technological advance" gives you fewer shots from a dinkier gun?!

Oh, and I still haven't started ME3, since CKII and now X4 coming out, but what system do they use? Thermal clips I'd reckon?

Thermal clips unfortunately, I loved the overheat, gave you a sense of Sci-fi; Guns that are only limited in amunnition by how much heat they can vent and not much else.

With overheat, we might as well go back to Napoleonic-era infantry lines and ranked volley fire.

In the tug-o-war between offense and defense, thermal clips are a counter to ever-increasing defensive regeneration. When the other guy can get his shield up quicker, you need more sustained fire to counter that. A thermal clip puts the weapon back into action much faster, provided you have extra clips to support the thermal load. The advantage there is you maintain offense so that your opponent's defenses never have a pause to recover damage.





Given my experience with Borderlands and regenerating ammo, I'd hope they'd explore a compromise between the two: the weapon will now use disposable heat-sinks, but still have a small radiator so the gun regains fire capacity slowly in non-combat situations. Thermal clips are for the heat of battle (yeah, shaddup) but this shouldn't preclude entropic cooldown via a radiator when the fight is over.

You'd still have a finite number of clips. But, if you hold onto a clip rather than reload, the capacity of that embedded clip will eventually recover its full potential. In this context, reloading a thermal clip is sort of an emergency boost that you can do a few number of times in a particular firefight. Throwing a fully saturated clip out of a gun will most likely destroy it beyond practical use (it's red-hot metal that's been dropped onto the ground, so it's going to be bent out of shape) but you can recover similar clips from the guns of the fallen.

PS: Yes, I realize that this is waaaaayy too much info from somebody who spent 20 minutes thinking over this thread.

I think for the most part I spend more time reloading thermal clips than I ever did waiting from an overheat. And if you count every second without ammo as "reload time" the gap gets even bigger.

As far as sniper rifles are concerned, Overheat is better hands down. The number of times I would run out of ammo for a Sniper rifle in the second ME was ridiculous. Not to mention how much weaker the ME2 Snipers were to the ME1s.