Active abilities in ME:A (Updated)

I'm a little concerned with only having 3 active abilities, but if you look back at the original Mass Effect, the difference is not as jarring as I originally thought. If you exclude weapon, armor, and first aid skills (since it looks like these are mostly handled through weapon and armor customization in MEA), then the actual active skills for each class upon a first playthrough look something like this:

Soldier: 0
Infiltrator: 3
Vanguard: 4
Engineer: 5
Adept: 6
Sentinel: 7

So for people who enjoyed the more gun-heavy classes in the trilogy, 3 active abilities is actually pretty par for the course; abilities and combat prowess are just more diffused across different game systems rather than being focused on skill trees. But for players more accustomed to the "caster" types, it's probably going to be much more noticeable and jarring. I happen to belong to the former, so I'm not too concerned but I can understand why others are dreading this.

I'm going to give it a chance. If they use things like armor and weapon crafting to diversify player customization and then focus on fewer but more impactful and unique powers, I will be content.

I agree with your general point but I'm curious as to how you arrived at 0 active abilities for the soldier. Immunity, adrenaline burst, marksman, overkill, assassinate and carnage aren't really skills that you can replicate with weapon or armour mods/upgrades because they aren't designed to be on all the time. They still have to be activated.

With that in mind the numbers are probably more like 6s for soldier, infiltrator and vanguard. Plus you can have a bonus power as well.

You and me both (also love my casters - don't play melee or gun only classes at all...hell, I don't even play tech-classes in Mass Effect (I play adepts mostly and I played the Vanguard to check it out, but that's it)

3 Skills is BLAND and unimaginative (can't even recreate the old classes with that, you lack room for the skills! Not even the Soldier (IMHO the most boring class) can be replicated like that!)...having to constantly rotate skills is also kind of funky (call me boring, but I like a build that can tackle most stuff (with only switching a few skills here and there for fun, to shacke things up) and not builds that say have problems when going up against something like the get (no overload? Well, this just got harder - unless you want to give up one of your go-to powers (in my case stuff like warp, shockwave and push or pull)?))

greetings LAX
ps: I would have no problem if you could basically face role through the game on easy with 6 or more skills on individual cooldowns (which you need if you can't command companions, you need to prime your own explosions, if you can't do so via the companions (same if you want them to trigger stuff you set up))...because on normal, hard or insanity (or whatever the other difficulty options are called) you will still not face role (remember that space bear or how many shotgun shots the enemies in the trailer could take (damned bullet sponges, they will not go down in seconds, even if you spam all your skills on CD!))

Great news indeed! This was my single major concern with what we knew of ME:A so far. I hope they explain soon* how it works.

*Soon in actual human terms, not in BioWare dev-speak.

We will have 4, then! (I wanted 16  )

When we get our N7 ranking or pathfinder title.

yeah just saw that myself actually jus tcome up on my feed I assume they'll go into detailon this in the 15/20 minute vid that's being planned we shall see though.

Maybe people will finally learn not to whine when they don't have all the information.
Who am i kidding?...

When's that due to show? Do we have a date for the next big trailer?

greetings LAX
ps: Still want more skill slots (I want the flexibility )

No it does not. Being interested in the game is no excuse to all the complain here, and trying to imply that they are using "misleading or inaccurate footage" is just another way of jumping the gun because again we don't have all the facts about how the system works or that Bioware is lying about it.

Sure i don't know how the system will really function (i also would like more than 3 powers) but i will reserve judgement until Bioware explains how it works, not before.