@Robby:
You shouldn't need more than 8 abilities. If you're spamming more than that you're just not choosing your best stuff. Thats enough for a heal, 2 buffs, 4 different regular kinds of attacks and a super move. And if its a non buffing character, 8 attacks. And then you hae three other guys in your squad with another 8 each. Pus everyone has access to their own items wheel with another half dozen slots of stuff on them. How much more variety do you need at any one time?
I've always played Dragon Age on consoles, so it boggles my mind that people complain about "only 8" slots. I can understand that in DA 1 if you're a fire mage and you also want oil slick in your repetoir, since those options flll up fast, but… under what circumstances do you really need more than 32 abilities (plus items) in any one confrontation? ANd even then you can still freeze time and manually select one of the other not-hotkeyed abilities.
I shouldn't? You're talking to someone who grew up on Baldur's Gate with it's 6 member parties and a plethora of abilities available.
Besides, DA3 encourages you to specialize, but when you do, you're forced to choose between abilities. It makes you invest points into abilities you'll end up rarely using thanks to the slot limitation. I don't want to have to choose. I don't want to be limited. The only reason you can choose 8 only is the limited number of buttons on a joy pad and Bioware being lazy enough not to even put in a radial menu to choose skills from for PC version. So no, you can't choose them manually.
DA:O had an expandable quick bar, and also all skills accessible thanks to radial menu.
DA2 had a limited quick bar but also a radial menu where you could choose any skill.
DA:I has limited quick bar and NO radial menu to choose skills from. You can't even switch the skills in the quick bar during battle. Sure, you can switch them between fights, but why should you have to? It's a pain in the ass, not to mention time consuming. It's a serious design flaw for someone who likes to play an RPG on PC. From my perspective, the battle system devolves with each game. Of course, from console player's perspective it might seem the system is becoming more optimized with each game. Nothing wrong with that, either.
But we're getting side tracked here. ME is a 3rd person shooting action RPG and with a lesser number of skills for each class it naturally won't have the same problem as DA.