Mass Effect Hints

Equipment Tips

• 1 of 10: You mainly gain new equipment (armor, weapons, and upgrades) from killing enemies and looting item containers, though you can also buy equipment from a few merchants in various areas if you have enough credits to do so.
• 2 of 10: The quality of the equipment you get, and that's available to buy, depends on your current character level. Most items have a basic quality index expressed as a Roman numeral, from I (1) to X (10). Needless to say, X-level gear isn't available to beginning characters, and will only show up in loot and shop inventories when you're very high-level (50+). However, the index is just a basic guide, not an absolute. For items that come from different manufacturers -- just about everything besides upgrades -- it's possible that a level IV from one is still better than a level V from another.
• 3 of 10: In order to keep your inventory from filling up, and to get credits to buy new stuff with, you should frequently equip everyone with the best version you have of every item they can have equipped, even if they don't use it regularly. Give your own character top priority, followed by your two favorite squad members, and so on down the line.
• 4 of 10: The best opportunity for doing this is when you're on the Normandy. After seeing that your main character has the best of everything equipped, go down to the engineering deck and use your squad members' lockers to do the same for them. Once you have more than two squad members, this will be the only way you can go through all of their equipment inventories in one place.
• 5 of 10: The ship's requisition officer is also conveniently on the engineering deck, so you can sell him all of your leftover equipment right after you equip everyone. You might want to hold on to certain upgrade items (especially special types of ammo) for future use, but everything else should go. You'll keep getting more (and better) stuff in loot as you continue to do missions and assignments.
• 6 of 10: If you go through that process frequently, you'll probably never even come close to filling up your inventory of unequipped items, which has a limit of 150. You don't ever want to have to convert items to omni-gel just to make room for more, especially since you can get omni-gel in other ways (from some containers and rewards), and you should very rarely have need of it if you're careful in the Mako (see the Mako Tips) and with Decryption Minigames.
  • Credit Limit Note
• 7 of 10: Two other important notes about merchants' inventories are that you can buy medi-gel and grenade upgrades from some of them, plus special manufacturer licenses.
• 8 of 10: Each medi-gel upgrade you buy increases the maximum amount of medi-gel you can carry at once. The amount starts out at 5, and can go all the way up to 10 if you buy all five of the medi-gel upgrades. The grenade upgrades work similarly. (Just remember that the higher upgrades won't be available until your character is higher-level, and they'll be very expensive.)
• 9 of 10: As for the special manufacturer licenses, buying them supposedly allows the Normandy's requisition officer to get a wider variety of goods to sell, but I never noticed much of a benefit. I'd advise you to buy all the cheap 100-credit licenses you find on your first Citadel visit, then forget about getting more until you're at the point where going through the above inventory-purging process gets you several hundred thousand credits more than you'll ever know what to do with.
• 10 of 10: One final note on merchant inventories is that they're sometimes randomly generated when you choose to view them. That means you can quicksave right before talking to a merchant for the first time ever (or the first time after you've been away for awhile and come back), view his inventory, and then quickrestore and view it again for a different selection of items. This is mainly useful if you're after a certain item you know the merchant could have, like a specific type of ammo.

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