Mass-effect – Can ammo powers override other powers as combo primers (or block them)

mass-effect-3mass-effect-3-multiplayer

According to the Wikia page on Mass Effect 3 power combos, ammo powers (incendiary, disruptor, and cryo) can prime combos as rank 1 powers in multiplayer mode (emphasis mine):

Note that for purposes of combo levels, multiplayer Ammo Bonuses
always count as rank 1 powers. This is in contrast to single-player
ammo powers, which use their respective power rank for the sake of
calculating combo level.

A consequence of this is that ammo powers are sub-optimal combo primers, since at most you'll only be able to do half as much combo damage as you would be able to do by using a rank 6 primer and a rank 6 detonator instead.

My questions are,

  1. Can ammo powers override any existing primers that already exist on a target?
  2. Can ammo powers prevent other powers from priming a target, if the target has already been primed by the ammo power?

Best Answer

According to this comment in the MECoOp Reddit thread "Ammo power interference", there are two types of combo primers, "biotic" and "tech". Biotic and tech primers can both exist simultaneously on a target, but they can only be detonated one at a time by two different detonators, and the tech combo apparently always detonates before the biotic one:

Ammo powers that prime are considered tech primers. Tech primers layer over biotic primers, so a detonator hitting a target affected by both will detonate the appropriate tech combo. If the target is then detonated again, a biotic explosion will occur.

So ammo powers won't override biotic primers, nor will they prevent biotic primers, but in order to detonate both primers, the target must be detonated twice, and the tech combo will always trigger first.

However, I'm not sure if ammo powers will override other tech primers, such as incendiary ammo overriding a rank 6 Inferno Grenade on a target. The same commentator said that

A target can only be primed with one biotic and one tech primer at a time (most recent takes precedence if a second primer of either type is applied to a target already affected by a primer of the same type).

According to that, it seems like a rank 6 primer such as Inferno Grenades could override an existing incendiary ammo effect on a target (it's not "blocked" by the ammo power), but it's not clear to me whether it's also true the other way around.

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