Powers, Skill Trees and Active Abilities (Official Thread)

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds

I have it all planned out:

Step 1) Play as Scott and focus on an engineer/soldier hybrid.
Step 2) Play NG+ as Sara and level up my psychic ninja talents.
Step 3) Play NG++ as God

I only want to ascend to the ranks of the divine after 2.5 completionist playthroughs. Any less time, and I won't feel like I earned the raw, destructive power to smite my enemies in any number of creative and visually appealing ways haha

Very interesting. I am going to miss Reave but was never a huge fan of biotics. No AR may suck to but find it likely that either Turbocharged or Marksman could effectively replace it.

The big question is it looks like some theories are right that the profile skill is accessed separately. Likely the down d pad. But what is telling is that tactical cloak and charge aren't profile skills. So what replaces them for infiltrator and vanguard?

Also anyone know what that biotic shield was? Backlash?

*insert "you must construct additional pylons" joke here*

I would sure hope so but I'm very sceptical. With no level cap and seeing all those +50%, +150% bonuses all over the profiles and stuff, I expect an easy mode even on highest difficulties very fast in the game...

I guess, but the utility of biotics has see-sawed throughout the trilogy. In ME1 they were OP so they watered them down in ME2, where their lack of utility against protected enemies really hurt their appeal.

For me, ME3 was a good balance. Protected enemies were still resistant but combos made up for that. Now, without warp and reave, it's going to be tough to prime biotic explosions on protected enemies unless you want to play a CQC character.

I'd linked to an album with all the powers in one of my previous posts, but that was probs pretty easy to miss so here's another:

imgur.com/a/6OTix

Jus so you don't necessarily have to scroll through them all, here's Lance:

Hard to say considering they merged it with pull, could be if you just tap it (firing just throw)

She use the two abilities in the video. Pull only lift and then pull to you stuff, then you use throw to throw them away.

Yes. Pull is the first ability, throw is the last one, you can see throw flash and then both pull and throw go into cooldown when the cannister+raider are thrown.

Some observations from the gameplay trailer.

Warp is gone. RIP Warp. On the one hand, Warp was a boring power. On the other hand, it was very useful, since it was a debuff, a primer, and a detonator. (And don't say that Lace is the new Warp, it shares nothing with Warp other than being a detonator. Neither is Annihilation, that's a returning ME3 multiplayer ability.) What does this mean? It means that pure biotics users will once again be in a serious disadvantage against shielded or armored enemies, since there'll be no way way to prime these enemies with biotics in ME:A.

Happy to see the clever Pull + Throw combination where a held enemy is thrown against other enemies. I guess it remains to be seen whether this is actually useful on any of the higher difficulties or just something that looks neat.

Passive abilities rely on spending points in a given tree branch. I guess this makes sense, since I'd only max out weapon passives from the combat tree and ignore the humdrum powers otherwise.

No more tech combos? Overload, at least, seems unable to prime a combo. It's possible we'll only have fire/cryo/biotic combos, if that's the case. Maybe not.

No more headshot decapitations. Too bad.

Interesting biotic teleport(?) (non-power based, likely a dash upgrade) happens a few times throughout the video. For example, just before the hammer smash. Possibly a profile-tied passive ability?

Overall, looks good. As long as we don't run into ME2 "biotics are useless on higher difficulties" again, in which case tech will be the tree of choice for Insanity playthroughs. Let's hope Bioware manages to strike a good balance this time with how useful biotics are.