Lair of the Shadow Broker is a mission available as DLC.
This walkthrough was written with Shepard as an Infiltrator, on Veteran difficulty.
When you install Lair of the Shadow Broker, it actually replaces part of the main game. Without the DLC, Liara gives a few low-impact missions that have to do with her information brokerage.
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Once you're given the option to visit Ilium, you can stop by Liara's office and give her some information from Cerberus regarding the location of the Shadow Broker. When you tell her it's time to go after him, she'll leave her office to go to her apartment. If you still need information from her about Samara or Thane, just use her office terminal.
When you're ready to continue the mission, use the taxi stand in southern Ilium to go to Liara's apartment. You spend most of Shadow Broker fighting well-armed mercenaries, so your front-loaded characters are a bit better for it. Grunt, Garrus, Thane, and Jack have a lot of chances to shine here.
After you meet Tela Vasir, search the apartment to find out more about what Liara's been up to for the last two years. To advance the plot, check the picture on her nightstand, then the Prothean relic in the display case at the base of the stairs.
This leads you to an office building elsewhere in Ilium, which, out of sheer terror of Shepard's presence, explodes when you get close. Once you're inside, pick up 3,750 credits from a locker by the stairs, then go up to the second floor. There's a medical station on the first landing, and 2,500 credits in a PDA by the salarians' embassy.
At the top of the stairs on the second floor, hack the ATM for 6,500 credits, then turn right to find a stash of power cells. Baria Frontiers is on the other end of the balcony.
Inside, you get to fight the Shadow Broker's squad of mercenaries. They're all carrying flashbang grenades, which temporarily screw up your vision and hearing if they detonate nearby, and a point-blank explosion will stagger you away from your cover. The mercs are well-supported by heavies and shielded engineers.
When you reach the stairs, you'll need to put out the fire before you can continue. Having done so with the suppressant system in the nearby maintenance closet, take 1,500 credits' worth of salvage and 1,000 element zero as a reward for your button-pushing. You can also grab 3,000 credits off of a terminal in the wrecked office.
At the top of the stairs, deal with another ambush by the mercs, then check a nearby research terminal for an upgrade to Heavy Pistol Damage. Take 5,000 credits from the wall safe, then go through the next door to find Vasir.
After the ensuing cutscene, chase Liara and Vasir downstairs. There are two groups of particularly tenacious mercenaries on the bottom two floors of the building, so fight through them and head outside for a chase sequence through the "streets" of Ilium.
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The key here is to keep your finger on the accelerator at all times. Crashing the taxicab doesn't do that much damage, and the major difficulty is simply keeping Vasir in visual range. You're not really trying to catch her; you're just trying to still be in the game when you reach a certain point. At that juncture, she crashes her own car, and it's back to ground-based shootouts.
Specifically, you're now fighting multiple waves of the Shadow Broker's goons in the parking lot of Azure. This is difficult because fresh transports show up with each wave, dropping the mercs in at different areas in the lot and forcing you to reposition on the fly. A lot of fights in ME2 can be won by finding the single best place to button up and start knocking bodies down, but here, you're constantly and consistently outflanked.
You've also got Liara on your team. Be sure to spend her squad points. She's already loyal to Shepard, and has access to the now-unique power Singularity, which is extremely useful for the remainder of this mission. It creates a short-lived gravity well which essentially stuns any enemies caught within its field of effect. You probably want to go ahead and max that out right now.
Once the mercs have been disposed of, loot 1,500 credits from a bank terminal, and replenish your medigel using the first-aid kit in your taxicab. Follow Vasir's trail, stoping to loot her crashed car for a Damage Protection upgrade.
Vasir immediately takes a hostage when you catch up to her. If your Paragon and/or Renegade points are high enough, you can negotiate the hostage's release using one of Shepard's most badass lines in the game. Either way, once the hostage is out of the way, it's time to deal with Vasir.
If you're playing a Vanguard, this fight can get really weird. Vasir knows Shockwave and Charge, which lets her teleport around the area while blasting straight through your cover. It can be difficult to draw a bead on her, so don't be surprised if your AI companions wind up doing most of the damage. Keep moving yourself, as her Shockwave can take off a lot of health and shields, and do your best to keep your distance. You can actually get a lot done during this fight if you simply stick and move, leaving Liara and your other AI buddy to carry most of the mail; Vasir only targets them when she has no other option, such as when you're cloaked.
At set intervals throughout the fight, Vasir teleports out and calls in reinforcements. The first wave is just a pair of engineers, which is easy enough to deal with, but the second group has a heavy and a couple of flying turrets. It's almost worth bringing a third character who knows Area Overload specifically to knock the turrets out, as they can be hard to target.
Defeating Vasir gets you Dakat's datapad back, and thus the location of the Shadow Broker. You can use several Paragon interrupts on Liara during the ensuing conversation, particularly if you romanced her during the first game. When it's over, you automatically fly to the Shadow Broker's base: a giant ship surfing a permanent lightning storm, somewhere off in the back end of the galaxy.
The ship's hull is liberally strewn with lightning capacitors. When these take a bullet, they emanate a wave of electricity that stuns and damages anything caught nearby, and the Shadow Broker's mercs have a ridiculous habit of taking cover behind them. Do yourself a favor and abuse this mercilessly on your way across the ship.
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After dealing with a bunch of mechs, drones, and unlucky mercenaries, you'll need to hold out near the entrance hatch until Liara can hack it open. This involves dealing with several waves of engineers, vanguards, and rocket drones, which should be old hat at this point. They don't do anything you haven't seen before, although the drones can be problematic if you don't zap them with Singularity or Overload.
Once you're inside, deal with a few scattered mercenaries on your way to the prison block. Loot the console for 4,500 credits, then speak with Feron. Go further down the hall, dealing with the last few mercs, and loot another 4,500 credits from just outside the Shadow Broker's lair.
After a lengthy cutscene, you and Liara must deal with the Shadow Broker. Use your standard anti-shield and anti-armor weaponry on him, and run like hell any time he gets close. After the first time you manage to get him down to zero, he'll replenish his own reserves and pull out a portable version of the Collectors' plasma shield. Infiltrators can just cloak and sneak around to shoot him in the back, while anyone else is going to have to carefully shoot around the shield.
Deplete the Shadow Broker's shields and armor, then run up to him and land a melee attack. The third time you punch him in the chops, Liara will end the fight for you.
Your reward for dismantling the Shadow Broker's operation includes 45,000 credits' worth of Cerberus funding. After the debriefing screen, you'll end up in the Shadow Broker's base, which turns out to be in the Sowilo system; the three closest planets are actually quite rich in minerals, if you feel like doing some scanning on your way back to civilization.
At this point, you can use the various terminals in the Shadow Broker's base for a variety of options. If you feel like gambling, fund various operations throughout the galaxy; while you have a good chance of seeing a solid return on any mission you fund, there's also a chance it'll fail entirely and you'll lose the cash. You can also read the Broker's dossiers on your teammates, and watch a variety of entertaining surveillance videos of various characters you've run into elsewhere in the game. (Of particular interest: that reporter on the Citadel getting punched out by every alien race that can make a fist.)
Before you move on, be sure to talk to Liara in the Shadow Broker's base. You can invite her back to the Normandy for a drink, which is worth an achievement. Shepard can also rekindle their relationship with Liara if she was his love interest in Mass Effect 1. But then she will go back to the Shadow Broker's base
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If you're following this guide in order, your next Mission will be N7 - Eclipse Smuggling Depot, which is the Mission you got from Aria T'Loak for helping her out.
Up Next: Arrival
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