Hi, been watching/listening some old GDQ's while playing games lately and absolutely loved the Mass Effect run to the point of considering learning it myself(soon™), somewhat confused about the soldier class though as the run seems to spend alot of time in combat on say the Saren fight or the Thorian battles and i'm wondering if going soldier /w singularity starting off at Therum in the planet order to pick up Liara(i'm asuming biotics are just as broken in the speedrun as in the casual playthrought.) and saving Kaidan on Virmire would make up for the increased cutscene/dialogue length(as far as i understand Liara makes certain post mission stuff slower) with more damage overall due to marksmans long cooldown? As far as i understand it marksman with a pistol beats assault rifles by a small margin. Sorry again, i just couldn't stop thinking about this after watching the 2018 run the second time.

Singularity isn't sufficient to "knock down" most of the harder enemies (they resist the lifting effect i guess?), which is really important for the saren fight because if he gets up on the wall he resists all damage. It also matters in a lot of other areas-> lift and throw will deal with asari that try to knock you down on benezia and thorian, but singularity won't.

Also, the soldier class doesn't actually deal more damage than the vanguard. The one point we normally spend in the class talent for vanguard gives 5% weapon damage; spending the equivalent point in soldier class talent doesn't affect weapon damage at all. Since we really only get enough points to fill out one weapon tree and pistols are both the best weapon type and available to both, there's no difference there. Vanguard also has warp which lowers damage protection on enemies (damage protection basically is just a flat decrease to damage; if an enemy has 40% damage protection, they take 40% less damage than they would with 0% damage protection. If we cut that in half using warp, they only take 20% less damage rather than 40% less damage, which is a significant dps increase).

The main advantage they have is that they are much better at tanking damage, but that doesn't really matter. Now for NG+ it's probably a lot closer, and it's possible soldier may be faster as being able to make use of assault rifles in certain situations is helpful.

Also, it's been a while since AGDQ so I'm not 100% sure on this, but I'm pretty sure I had an awful gun for most of the game, which is really the biggest determinant of damage by a longshot. I'd recommend checking out my record run for a better idea of how quick most of the fights usually go.

Also, in case this came off as really aggressive, I didn't intend it to be that way, just wanted to explain the reasoning behind the decision of playing vanguard as best I could.

This was literally all i needed to know, many thanks! Also don't worry about the perceived aggresiveness, stuff like explanations are basically talking at someone rather than with, so it's pretty normal to feel weird about writing like that if you aren't used to it.