Meiam said:
Not really, you wouldn't always use the same ability in 2/3 at least not at higher difficulty. You generally had one or two bullet ability, so you either just activated that one at first or you would switch based on on the enemy armor type. Then you'd have ability that were only useful for for either shield (overload) or armor (incinerate), so constantly using the same one would be an awful idea. On top of that you had ability that could only be used on enemy stripped of armor/shield (cryo, lift, hacking). You'd have support ability (additional armor, summon bots, charge) and using those on CD made no sense. For example, playing as sentinel in ME2 involved using all your power, overload/warp for armor/shield, cryo/lift once there down to base health (usage differ depending on squadmate, ie if you had access to a warp for biotic combo) and tech armor once the old one was stripped off, plus warp ammo for additional ability to buff weapon. Right away comparing to the new system, you'd have to choose between overload/warp and cryo or lift. Sure once you made the choice you could use them all together, but ME3 weight system made it so you could bring your CD to around 1 second anyway, so if you wanted to play pure ability caster ME3 system was far more viable.
I'll grant that's a way you COULD play, but hardly ever turned out like that. For a start, using abilities on enemies without armour or shields never happened. Once they were at that stage, they were already dead. A handful of shots from an SMG and they'd be down. Additionally, Incinerate was still damned useful against unarmoured foes, lighting them on fire and stunning them temporarily, making Cryo/Lift of questionable utility compared to an incinerate combo.
Otherwise...
Soldier; Always use bullet time. Seriously, the ability to double your bullet output, with guns being by far the most effective method of killing someone? Yeah, no time for anything else.
Adept; On higher difficulties? Warp, exclusively. Hell, warp was even useful against unarmoured enemies too, as it gave them a nice 1 second stagger that allowed you to land 2-3 headshots and instant kill them. All other abilities did not work while armour, shields, or barrier was up. Made them more than a little useless. Lower difficulties you could have more fun with singularity and the likes, but higher... Not a chance.
Vanguard; Charge all day long. Nothing else needed.
Engineer; Honestly, while you'll call your droid support, it was by far the best ability. It would float over to the enemy, knock them out of cover for 2-3 seconds, and allow you to land enough shots to down anything but a boss - and even then you weren't behind by much. You COULD incinerate or overload, but they dealt less DPS than your guns by far, especially with enemies ducking into cover. Could be occasionally useful as crowd control, but otherwise... Meh.
Infiltrator; Why use anything but cloak? Really, it was amazingly useful.
Sentinel; Armour was brilliant. Gave you the extra time out of cover to land several killing shots, and once it was gone most of your enemies ended up staggered - allowing you to either kill them all quickly, or run to cover if there were too many.
ME2s focus on guns kinda broke the utility of the caster classes, especially when 3/4s of your abilities didn't work until the enemy was essentially one shot from dead, even on the highest difficulties. Even then, there were only really two classes that could benefit from multiple ability usage for counter shields or counter armour/barrier - engineer and sentinel. When levelling up I never levelled two skills up evenly. It was always my primary skill to max, and then dump into secondary skills that I didn't really need.
ME3 was admittedly kind of broken thanks to its cooldown reduction. Continuous casting thanks to no cooldown did allow you to use any ability you wanted as the situation demanded, though the fact that a no cooldown option was required to make the system work is... Disheartening.
It could be that Andromeda has a greater need for use of powers than the previous games, but I guess we'll have to wait and see there. Most reviews put it as a decent but deeply flawed game ATM, so if I end up getting it its likely to be on sale. Maybe 3 powers is all you need at any point - which, honestly, fills your coverage of ME2 defence types; warp, overload, lift - maybe there's different mechanics entirely at play there. I don't know.
The loss of ammo powers is both a blessing and a curse though. If they're gone entirely, then yeah, that's pretty poor. If they're back to being weapon mods like in ME1, I'm not too fussed - I prefered the greater variety of ammo types, were they better balanced, and not needing to waste levels on what is really just an equipment system that doesn't make a lot of sense to be a character ability anyway.
