User blog comment:RiftJargon/Preparing for Mass Effect 3/@comment-1882063-20110516215723

One problem with your premise of setting up ME3 in your favor, is that we don't know what actions will be helpful or harmful for Mass Effect 3. I suspect that being perfectly paragon or perfectly renegade won't lead down the easiest path to victory. Maybe, the "wrong" people were killed or allowed to live. We just don't know. That being said, having a lot of different Shepards provides the most number of options. As for difficulty, you can probably just ramp up the difficulty as appropriate rather than start at Hardcore or Insanity.