Powers, Skill Trees and Active Abilities (Official Thread)

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.