After months of it languishing unfinished on my desktop, I’ve tidied up and released my N7 Shadow spreadsheet for Mass Effect 3 multiplayer.

Download it for Microsoft Excel

From the user’s point of view it’s a simple tool to determine how much damage your Shadow Strike will do to any given target on Gold or Platinum difficulties.

It could do far more but my spreadsheet skills are rusty and it was tough enough just to get it in a decent state to unleash on the general public, so that’s all it does for now and, perhaps, forever.

One neat little feature is that it will show you an almost graphical representation of what your target’s health bar will look like after you hit it:

I’m very proud of that because I think it’s quite cool. And if your first thought when you look at it is “why are the Barrier bars shield blue instead of barrier purple?” my reply to you is “:(“. And also “because it’d take a lot more messing about with conditional formatting and this stopped being fun a few months ago”.

Instructions

This is how you select which rank of a power you’ve chosen:

If you didn’t take a rank, select the blank option at the bottom. The same goes for weapon addons etc. I didn’t bother to write in exclusivity for weapon addons so you can technically combine ones that you can’t in the game, so don’t do that.

All power ranks are selectable, but only the ones that affect Shadow Strike do anything. Only the weapon mods etc that affect Shadow Strike are included, so if you’re using something else, select the blank option from the list.

Once you’ve chosen your loadout, this is where you switch to see the results:

I know it’d be fab to have more options, like how much damage your melee does and stuff, but I basically got to the point that the damn thing worked and was fed up with it. So all I’ve done is literally make it presentable and kick it off into cyberspace. If I feel enthusiastic about it again one day I may add more, but who knows if ME3 MP will even still be around once Andromeda launches? And who’s going to want to min-max their Shadow Strike anyway?

Notes

In terms of the math and mechanics, I used values and mechanics from the various wonderful theorycrafting repositories on old BSN. Where things were uncertain or didn’t seem to fit with what I’d observed in-game, I rigorously tested them until the numbers made sense. That is why, for example, the Power Magnifier is an additive bonus but the Omni-Blade is multiplicative.

This was, however, something I did partly for fun and partly from sheer bloody-mindedness, and I never quite finished it. I tried to make sure it was all working properly but, honestly, the way I approached the math-fu probably wasn’t the best, so it might be broken. If you try something and it doesn’t work out in-game, let me know. I did use an earlier version of this spreadsheet to prepare my Platinum solo with the Shadow, and tried out (and thus verified) quite a lot of different build variations based on the spreadsheet – so at least back then it was working properly.

In theory the ‘Totals’ box at the bottom of the GUI tab should be accurate, so if you’re weirded out by a result you can always eyeball the expected damage values of Shadow Strike against the base HP values of the target and see if it seems to make sense. Note that the interaction of the DoT and the various armor/shield bonuses does make some things a little bit unexpected.

Have fun!