Powers, Skill Trees and Active Abilities (Official Thread)

Sorry to dissapoint, but drones dissapear if you switch profiles...

Unless you meant playing as an engineer with annihilation/nova/charge

Seeing how long the CD times are in base state, I think the shortest one will be able to make them with profile bonuses and gear amounts to 6-9 seconds. Which would be OK (ME1 had even longer CDs), but with 3 powers at a time limit, it seems that even with a power-focused profile you are going to be shooting 80% of the combat time.
Which also gives me an impression that Favourites/profile changing is not meant to be an in-combat thing, since changing to a power-focused profile is only going to make you weaker - weapon damage gets lowered and abilities are unavailable for their CD duration. Doing it the other way around - changing from, say, engy profile to soldier, seems to be more viable as you get the main bonus of increased weapon damage right away, and a lot of combat powers are limited by charges instead of CDs. Still, most likely drones/turrets/singularities are going to be re-set/destroyed if you switch to a powerset that doesn't have them bound.

Not quite, in ME3 an adept could biotic combo via Pull + Throw with 1.2 seconds CD each. It looks like Bioware wants to somewhat limit power spam, which all things considered I agree with.

But I don't think we'll be shooting 80% of the time, because the nature of combat is changed. With many more opportunities to move around the battlefield, I imagine a lot more time will be spent maneuvering around -- at least on higher difficulties -- rather than sitting behind cover and taking pot shots.

I'm not really sure what they're talking about because changing favourites is the only way they've shown that you can switch profiles during combat. Every other time they have changed a profile or loadout has been at a terminal of some sort.

And switching favourites during combat definitely puts powers on cooldown. I doubt this changes if the favourite you switch to is the same profile.

That depends on your loadout, since you could theoretically make two rapid combos by using a primer (e.g. singularity or annihilation field) that can either prime multiple enemies and/or survive a detonation, and then follow up with two detonators.  There's also the fact that there is greater opportunity for cross-class detonations than in ME3, so you could prime shielded or armoured targets with a tech power (e.g. overload or cryo beam) and then detonate that with throw or lance.  And that's assuming no biotics can prime protected enemies.

You're right that it won't quite be the BE-fest that ME3 was (and I'm going to miss warp and reave as all-purpose skills) but IMO there are enough other benefits with the new loadout flexibility that power heavy playstyles should still be very viable.

Don't forget that abilities that consume your shield/barriers and have no cooldown will probably be available immediately after switching profiles, the two I know of that can do that are Biotic Lance and Nova. I think there is potential to be taken advantage of, there.

Imagine a tech skill taking yoir shield. How awesome woul that be?

E. G. Flamethrowering something until you're out of shield, energy drain and perform a tech combo, flamethrower again!

Good news: the flamethrower tree is in the OP! Just under the January 4 heading.

Bad news: apparently no shield-use evolution.

I kinda feel like the poo-pooer of ideas in this thread sometimes :/

Nope, aside from power armour.

I believe I read somewhere in the twitter thread (waaaaaay back) that, when activated, they work for the next X thermal clips. Don't rememberhow much X is though.
Also, wonder how this works with overheat systems.

what i'm more curious about though, is how they will work on clipless weapons like those with beams and the vintage heat sink.

+1

I'm sure someone will post something about it on youtube.