Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupari!

[Jayngfet]

Actually, you're not standing on the Crucible. The Crucible is that giant round thing over your head, the center of which is emanating that beam shooting down the Synthesis pit.

When it gets destroyed, the bulk of it is still hanging bareassed in space (to borrow a phrase from Aethyta.) So the fact that there are no dramatic explosions where you happen to be standing is reasonable.

...of course, you don't get to see bits of it fly off into space either.

The crucible is destroyed. You don't feel it on the spot where you're connected, you don't see it when you look out the window the game conveniently provides you. There's no visual evidence that anything just happened.

As Shepard shakes off the human-slaying poison, no worse for the wear. As Shepard's head rebounds off a Krogan that actually gets knocked back with a look of surprise on it's face. As Shepard catches the falling door and holds the blast bulwar for his friends. As Shepard stands in front of the holo terminal, reading about interstriated metal wire to be inserted into the musculature, and improved response time chips designed to attach to and enhance the nervous system's response times. As Shepard lays into the Ymir or Atlas mech, first two knuckles resounding again and again, shattering it's reinforced steel playing. As Shepard engages inhuman reflexes, shattering a reinforced steel free-hanging blade wih a casual backfist. As Shepard stands, burnt to hell but functional, holding in intestines and whatever else, gun in hand, shuffling towards the citadel beam. As Shepard outperforms a lifelong dedicated sniper who can calibrate fine weapons systems beyond the understanding of a supercomputer. As a krogan übermensch slams Shepard to a wall with bone-crunching force, forearm across the windpipe.

Shepard didn't exactly hit very hard, and everyone involved looks more embarrassed than surprised, and that's how everyone I know interpreted the body language involved. The holo terminal deals with stuff to be done, not done, and that's stuff decided by Shepard. The mechs prove nothing, given that that's obviously not the intended way to handle it and the same trick can be pulled in a number of games about baseline humans. With the citadel beam the entire way he's damaged is nonsensical anyway given what he's wearing and how it's damaged. When Grunt hit Shepard, he obviously didn't expect Shepard to actually die, given that he keeps talking. Shepard didn't exactly expect to overpower him either, given that he pulled out a gun that he had nowhere on his person instead of just making a fist.

I'm missing a bunch of them, because I can't recall the specific incidents well enough to make a point.

Actually, no. There are tens of thousands of reapers. Capitals alone. EVERY star system in the game is occupied by reaper forces at that point. That and just given the timeline laid out (admittedly, you need DLC for this which is bad design) there are at least ten thousand capitals IFF the reapers make a single capital per cycle.

Hackett outright tells you that Earth contains the majority of the reapers by that battle. There are a few left over, but what you see in that battle is basically most of what actually exists. If the DLC makes it any better, I have no idea because I refuse to buy into it on sheer principle at this point.

Not to mention the assumption that reapers don't take heavy losses in any previous cycles. We know that reaper busting weapons existed previously, since there's a dead reaper to prove it. If it's one per cycle they're at best breaking even every time, given that even the citadel is able to make a soverign tier gun(That conveniently never fires once no matter how many times it would have been convenient) in a couple of years or less. If it's one, then that's still indicative of a slow loss of numbers rather than a gain, unless every single cycle pre prothean is full of wusses.