Offensive abilities (especially biotics) feel much less powerful and fun than they did in ME3, and t

The fact that the Acolyte was a Rare was retarded. It should have been an Ultra-Rare, and the Scorpion should have been Rare.

That said, I agree with the rest of your post.

I miss all the grenades from me3 that aren't in this game. They were all great. You are right about the increased cooldowns, not a fan. And the abilities do feel a lot weaker, also combos don't sound as good as they did in me3. For example when I use salarian infiltrator energy drain is basically only good for getting some shields yourself. The actual shield stripping ability they have is piss poor compared to in me3. And no biotics currently come close to the stuff you could do in me3, you could decimate with biotics in me3, currently you can do ok with it but nothing like you could in me3. Drell adept for example had a ton more damage potential than any biotic in this game at the moment. Or probably any class that had warp (even excluding the incendiary glitch).

I've just been playing infiltrators mostly and spamming stickies and that's viable on gold. Incinerate maxed even fired from cloak on the other hand does minimal damage. Definately does not make me want to pick engineer etc and take him for a spin on gold.

There definately was a massive power creep in me3 though as the game got older and the dlc characters and guns got released. But when I played heroes like drell adept, salarian infiltrator and asari adept even in gold in the beginning of me3 their actual abilities felt strong, they did significant damage. Proxy mine and ED were both really good, he wasn't just a cloak and nade spam bot. The drell was but the combos he could set off were insane.  Stasis field was really good for the asari.

I like this game but in many ways they've taken steps back from me3 as far in my opinon. I honestly think a lot of the combat was better done in me3 exluding the new movement which is really good.

The snipers are as strong as in the last game. Cloak too allthough I guess the cooldown is overall longer so you'll have it up slightly less. But pretty much everything else seems to have been nerfed. Shotguns, no great assault rifle, powers definately are weaker. Infiltrator sniper is by far the easiest way to do gold at the moment, pretty lame how far ahead they seem compared to some of the caster classes at the moment.

In the last game you also had great lightweight weapons for the caster classes like carnifex, paladin and even guns like wraith with the right mods wasn't too bad in terms of power and weight. Unless you luck out with a hurricane or something you're gonna have a hard time getting a good lighweight gun in this game. ( I have the talon and it's not as good as a paladin or the original carnifex was for casters imo). People say equalizer is good but that's debatable on gold imo.

I hit 15 on my adept and I felt the same way. I started working on the krogan engineer and I feel like I'm doing much more even on a lower level. I'm thinking about maybe trying the human adept with the Viper X to see if it helps.