I find there are so many abilities/skills, I don't have a good sense of how many I should be using. I feel like it's easy to spread skills too thin and pick up too many redundant abilities.

I'd be interested to know how people are solving this.

as a sword and board engi i primarily use flame hammer (the first you get) / shield bash/storm burst and overload. I also have one point in ember hammer for breaking shields. And the slowing and heal bot.

But yeah it's easy to get lost, but just pick stuff you like. Like i picked up fire bash and didn't like it so i just respecced that point.

All the ones i have i use. But i also just don't go around putting points in every god damn box. But i have 5 skills i actively use in each encounter.

I play a cannon build engineer using 9 skills. Blast Cannon is the only direct damage and the rest is bots and passives. I made a few characters before that one and tended to get lost with all the skills whenever the situation became stressful. So I decided to make a "Keep it simple, stupid" character, and it helped a lot.

I'm at the end of the story (Veteran) and have very few problems.

Though I think Berserker were more fun to play, may look into making an equally simple build with that class.

I have a level 28 Berserker on elite. I only use 2 skills which are Shadow Burst for healing and Stormclaw for crowd control. All of my other skill points are used for passive skills (Blood Hunger, Shred Armor, Frenzy Mastery).

I've got a level 21 Engineer and I have only put points into the forcefield, flamehammer, Heavy Lifting and Bulwark.

That said, I've not come across a single spell. What's up with that?

@SensuousLettuce said:

I've got a level 21 Engineer and I have only put points into the forcefield, flamehammer, Heavy Lifting and Bulwark.

That said, I've not come across a single spell. What's up with that?

that's weird i have all my spell slots filled. Engi NG+ veteran

Level 54 Berserker. I mostly use two spells (switch with tab) and occasionally 3 others that are cast by hitting a number (2 of which are buffs).

Flame Hammer and Heal Bot. The rest are in passive skills. I'm only level 31, so that may change.

I have a level 57 outworlder. As a rule, I prefer passive skills, so there are literally no extra skills on my hotbar beyond the potions. Otherwise I only use the initial ability that they out on the right mouse button, which they just nerfed, so I may need to invest actual points in abilities, because up until now the Gaige was devastating

Level 22 engineer using great weapons using flame hammer, the stomp that slows and burns enemies, spider mines and force shield, i also use the gunbot and healing bot which i have upgraded to return mana to users, got a bunch of passives to generate charges and shields and the passive that increases attack speed, lately ive been putting points into the passive that heals you when you consume charges.

I find that while the setup is fairly complex to look at with 6 buttons for active skills, it works out fairly easy to run efficiently needing only the mouse buttons 1,2 and 3, woth 4 being my heal bot which stays up quite a while and 5 being my gunbot which is on a long cooldown, the rest of the work is being done by passives.

edit: also this build works great with sword and board when its required as none of the abilities require a 2 hander, only a melee weapon and the passive shield absorbs much more damage while you have the 1 hander and shield equipped because of the higher armor level

Discovered Tremor. It's bad azz! Increases 10% damage taken to all enemies + other stuff. Really potent.