Major features: 

• Weapon stats & progression overhaul. All weapons feel like deadly sci-fi weaponry, and are alternatives to each other, while having unique "personality", giving the weapon selection screens an actual purpose.
• Enemy AI no longer unnaturally pin-point accurate. Enemy accuracy depends on their weapon's recoil, their movement, and your movement.
  This greatly changes the ways you can move around, and control the battlefield.
• Player class loadouts changed to add more choices of the weaponry that complement your playstyle (or the ones you simply like)
• Weapon VFX and SFX changes - weapons should look and feel far more powerful and deadly.
  

New V1.0 release, and a new accompanying video!

Details:

The core of the combat in vanilla ME2 and ME2:LE (sitting in cover) is primarily enforced by enemies' ability to deliver incredibly precise full-auto fire, regardless of distance or weapon used. In stark contrast, your own weapons do almost no damage (barring few exceptions) while having nowhere near the accuracy of AI enemies. This makes weapon-heavy classes such as Soldier feel very underwhelming to play, especially after the magnificent gunplay of ME1:LE - which is what inspired the creation of this mod.

This mod aims to fix this by:

1) Introducing enemy AI accuracy penalties for various in game actions
Enemy accuracy will suffer when they:

• Sustain automatic fire (their weapons also have recoil)
• Are moving
• Are trying to hit a moving target
  

This means that a moving enemy trying to hit a moving target with automatic fire will be about as accurate as you'd expect. You'll catch a stray bullet here and there but they won't shoot every round through the same hole in your armor anymore. As a counter-balance to enemies hitting less, their weapon damage and initial accuracy has been increased where appropriate.

This also means that an enemy who took their time to aim from a supported and covered position will be slightly more dangerous than normal.

Further, the enemy reaction time (time between spotting and starting shooting) has been increased from gamer-level reaction times, to something more fitting within the gameplay flow. The reaction time (aiming time) also now differs according to weapons the enemies are using - they will aim faster with lighter, smaller weapons. 


2) Weapon Re-balancing
A detailed weapon catalogue with new stats and note-worthy changes can be found here. The text descriptions of weapons in-game have also been updated and mirror the document's contents. (The doc contains some small notes I'll keep out of game text files)

Sum up:

• Nearly all weapons have re-balanced damage output to make them viable through entire game. The practical damaging ability (aka fieldtesting, aka reloading each weapon locker checkpoint 20 times) of each weapon has been thoroughly tested through entire game, and should feel fair and balanced throughout.
• Nearly all weapons’ recoil, accuracy and rate-of-fire values have been reworked, they should "feel" much better to use.
• All weapons have much more clip capacity and spare ammo reserves, making thermal clip management (mostly) a non-issue, and enabling more sustained fire when you need it. Shotguns in particular have anywhere between 100-400% more clip capacity and spare ammo, where appropriate, making them a viable primary weapon.
• A crouch mechanic is enabled and gives a slight accuracy boost when used (currently hardcoded to Left Ctrl = make sure to unbound this key from any in-game binds to make it work). It’s also usable when in tall cover, benefitting from the cover accuracy bonus as well! (Make sure to not be actively aiming and firing for crouching to work in cover)
• On a more personal note, all burst-fire weapons have been converted into standard full-auto weapons. I don’t like burst-fire mode in video games.
• All in-game weapon text has been modified. It now gives accurate weapon stats information, and reflects changes done with the mod. 
  

3) Weapon SFX/VFX work
Guns should look and sound the part!

• Gunshot sound improvements - multiple ME1 gunshot sounds have been mixed into the clips used to compose ME2 gunshot sounds at runtime, bringing a bit more thunder to your futuristic armaments!
• Muzzle flash fixes - ME2's automatic weapons had incorrect muzzle flash timings. This has now been fixed and muzzle flashes will correctly play for every shot, both by you, your squad or enemies.
• Reworked tracer effects - ME2's default tracers were incredibly slow, and not spawned for all shots - every 3rd shot was skipped, as well as 4 out of 8 shotgun pellets. Tracers now spawn for every shot and pellet (yours, your squads, and enemies), and their spawning position and scaling logic has been re-done to appear blink-of-an-eye fast. 
  

Combined with the damage re-balance, the overall feeling of gunplay is significantly improved. Check out the video!


4) Player's loadout
In order to give all classes a diverse selection of weapons to use, following changes to player’s loadouts and classes have been made: 

• SMG and Pistols have been merged into a single "Sidearm" category, which is a slot in every class’s loadout. This means you can choose between a Shuriken and Carnifex as your sidearm, regardless of what class you play.
• All player classes can now carry assault rifles as their primary weapon. This also means the Revenant machine gun is available to every class in the game.
• Because regular weapons are now much more reliable and dependable, for gameplay balance (and aesthetic) reasons, Heavy Weapons have been removed from all player classes. You cannot pick up and use the ones found in missions either - except the Grenade Launcher at the start of the game, which will be usable until you get to Freedom's Progress. 
• Squadmates that could only carry SMGs and Pistols (now the same slot) have been given a new appropriate weapon type.
  

An alternative version of the mod with Heavy Weapons present is available. Be warned, heavy weapons have not been modded or rebalanced in any way.


Minor QOL Changes:

• Normandy fuel efficiency greatly improved. It’s not a space Lada. Full fuel reserve will last you roughly a dozen trips between systems, as opposed to, like, 2. I don’t think “running out of fuel” is really a thing that a Mass Effect game needs.
• Doubled the initial probe capacity of the Normady (60). The upgrade further stacks upon this (120), reducing the number of stops you have to make at a gas station.
• Shepard’s sprinting stamina increased both in (doubled) and out (tripled) of combat, for a total of 8 seconds of sprinting in both cases. Stamina regeneration and re-sprinting time is unchanged.
• Some loading hint text has been changed to more accurately reflect new gameplay possibilities.
  

Known issues:

• Crouching is hardcoded to my preferred key, Left Ctrl. On Gamepad, it's hardcoded to Left Stick (L3). I’m investigating options how to make it a normal bindable key within game options, but tools to do so are limited. A viable alternative might be to bind it to the “Walk” action in the control binding, if it’s possible. For now, just make sure to unbind Left Ctrl from any in-game keybinds for it to function normally.
• There are reports of crouching causing heavy stuttering when used in conjuction with other mods, particularly ones that add more clothes or armor. If you experience this, please use Bugs tab to report it, along with a list of all mods you are using, to help narrow this down.
• Due to heavy weapons being removed, all heavy weapon research and purchases are a waste of resources for now. Avoid buying or researching Heavy Weapon upgrades in the game, until I can properly remove them. In addition, trying to pick up a heavy weapon will bring up a text saying that no squadmates can use this.
• Some reports about weapon loadouts breaking squadmates in Freedom's Progress. I am recommending not to use any other mods alongside this one until after you finish Freedom's Progress.
  
  

Roadmap (aka Wishlist)

• 0.9 alpha : All present weapons in the game re-balanced to be viable and fun to use in the new combat system with changed AI. Initial public release.
• 0.95 beta : Tweaks and tuning according to community feedback and see how people like it (this is where you come in! Feel free to participate using the Nexus comments.)
• 0.98 beta:  Porting over an original Coalesced mod into a new ME3Tweaks DLC mod format.
  This enables mod merging and using other mods alongside this one.
  
• 1.0 full release - Rework of the audio effects and muzzle flashes to bring the weapons MUCH closer to the ME1 counterparts in their look and feel, as well as text descriptions and loading hints in the game to match what’s actually in the game. At this point I will consider the mod “complete”. -- WE ARE HERE --
• Future ?: Introduce new weapons in the game as modding tooling matures, greatly increasing the choice of your arsenal. I would like to see this happen but depending on the state of tooling and community interest, might or might not happen. 
  

Note on difficulty
The game been balanced for a tough-but-fair experience on Insanity difficulty, but due to the nature of weapon and AI changes, the overall difficulty of the game is somewhat lowered, especially after acquiring most of the weapon damage upgrades. If you think the game is difficult enough, or even too easy at Insanity, this is probably not the mod for you.

If however, you think that higher game difficulties are not more "difficult" per se, just more artificially frustrating, (or you simply believe that things should die when shot) this might be the mod for you.

Note on balancing
Almost 10 years ago, I made my first publicly released modification - Mass Effect 2 mod called "Hybrid Combat". I have since not only gotten a job in video game development, but also made a ginormous modification for ME: Andromeda, "Hardcore Weapons" which involved over 100 hours of tuning and balance. I take my balancing work more seriously than most - but, this being said, I do have my personal preferences and favorites in the game's weapons, classes, and playstyle. Some amount of bias is unavoidable. If you think anything is obviously out of balance or needs additional tuning, feel free to reach out with suggestions!

Credits and thankyous: 

• d00telemental for LECoal.exe tools used to make original Coalesced mod!
  
  • https://github.com/d00telemental/LECoal
    
• Mgamerz and the rest of ME3 Tweaks Discord team for helping with porting the mod to M3T, as well as helping me with modding of some of advanced features in general! You guys are awesome!
• Herobrine24 and their Easy Armor Stats for teaching me how to do colored strings in weapon description fields
  

-- Changelog 1.0 --
 - Tracers spawning, scaling and positioning logic fixed
 - Tracers spawning for every traced shot (including all 8 shotgun pellets, all shots from automatic weapons, and all NPC shots)
 - Weapon muzzle flashes timing fixed. Muzzle flashes are now always considered "relevant" and always rendered for all NPCs.
 - Weapon Wwise soundbanks modified. Multiple ME1 gunshot sounds mixed into ME2 ones, giving them more thunder and "heaviness" to the sound.

Old changelogs: