Thoughts on the 3 skills/4 favorites, plus a "Jack of all trades" NG + Insanity build video

At first, when we found out about the concept, I was a bit skeptical.  I mean, in ME2 and ME3, with the global cooldowns, I generally used only 3 or 4 powers, usually the best ones that particular class had to offer.  With the return of individual cooldowns, though, I was kinda looking forward to something a little more akin to ME1, even if the cooldowns needed to be a bit longer for balance reasons.  I wasn't thrilled with the idea that MP was influencing the SP campaign in such a drastic fashion.

I decided to generally keep quiet and judge for myself once the game came out, and for most of my first run I basically built out one set of 3 powers that I stuck to for every situation.  This led me to a "generalist" build with Energy Drain, Incinerate and Throw for a good combination of shield stripping ability, armor damage, and throw as a fast-cooldown pure detonator.  This worked really well on Hardcore, and I found that I was "ok" with only having 3 powers.

By the end of my run, however, I had enough points to start filling out a few more skills, so I started kinda experimenting.  After beating the game, and starting NG+ on Insanity, I settled into a set of 3 favorites tailored for different situations, with ways to help mitigate the automatic cooldowns associated with switching favorites.  

The first was another generalist build, replacing throw with concussive shot for more damage per hit, the second was for the high armor bullet sponges like Fiends, taking advantage of extra damage from burning given by Incinerate, the armor debuff from Cryo Blast, and the ROF and Damage boosts from Turbocharge.  With enough points left over, I set up a third favorite with a more biotic bent, with Singularity (specc'd for shield damage) and Throw to detonate combos, as well as Energy Drain.  ED was there mainly to reset Singularity's cooldown, taking advantage of Omni-Vents in the Auxiliary systems tech passive.

I mainly use Favorite 1 (my generalist build) for most random encounters and standard fights.  Favorite 2 gets a decent bit of use, though, with the Fiends, Nullifiers and other high-armor enemies.  I haven't tried using the 3rd Favorite too terribly much yet, since I really like Tech in this game, but I can see some pretty good potential for other random fights.  Powers cool down quick enough, for the most part, that switching profiles doesn't really slow the pace of combat down.  If I'm in my Biotic Favorite, and I start getting into trouble, I can disengage a bit, switch to my 1st Favorite which is more geared towards defense, get a good cover spot and pepper the closest enemies with gunfire for a few seconds, then my powers are online and I can go to town.

It's added a flexibility to combat that I really like, while at the same time forcing me to think about which builds I want to put together instead of "Pick these 6 OP powers and roflstomp everything."  I honestly was ambivalent about the profile/favorite system going in.  But now that I've played around with it some, I think I'm enjoying it more than the OT's systems.



And here's the video breakdown of the build I summarized above if anyone's interested, with a nice little encounter showing the build off, with me switching back and forth between Fav 1 and 2 during the fight.