User blog comment:Draen1/How do you use your squadmates?/@comment-68.102.180.51-20120514005303

Squadmates viability was remedied somewhat in ME3 simply by virtue of giving them all upgraded health and shields. In ME2, on anything higher than normal difficulty, my squadmates spent a lot of time dead during firefights because they were so fragile. I'm glad that was remedied to some degree in ME3.

Two other things I think would have helped is to decrease the cooldown time on squadmates powers. It makes no sense whatsoever that Shepard's cooldown on any given power is one thing, and a squadmate's cooldown for the same power is 4 times as long. The other thing that would help is if the squadmate AI was better at identifying which powers would be more effective against an enemy's defenses. For instance, if an enemy is shielded, Garrus would know to Overload it instead of using Concussive Shot, and conversely, if the enemy is unshielded, he would know NOT to use Overload, but that Concussive Shot would be much more effective. Another example would be Liara throwing out Singularity or Stasis on something like Geth Primes or Geth Pyros, whereas Warp would be more effective, especially is their shieds are depleted and they're down to armor. Some kind of system that tells squadmates 'Shields = Overload, Energy Drain,' etc...

With that said, I usually leave squadmate powers on and let them go nuts. They don't use them very effectively half the time, but it's still fun.