Power build and play strategy in mass effect 3 - Radius/Range vs Damage?

Question

As I've got more into the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer and experimented with various different characters and powers I've noticed that many powers evolution trees often include choices between damage and radius/range.

Grenades are a good example of this but also lots of the biotic and tech powers such as Overload, Incinerate, Carnage, Warp etc.

Personally I've mostly tended to go with damage upgrades over radius but I'm wondering if that is a little short sighted. Are there certain power builds where it would be better to go for radius?

Can anyone describe some good power builds and play strategies they've used where favoring radius/range is more useful than favoring pure damage?

Answer 1

Going with damage vs radius depends highly on what you intend to do with the power. If you are a power spammer you may want to rely on a bread/butter high damaging power to spam so you maintain usefulness against those high tier units such as atlas, banshees, geth primes, etc. Example powers I like to choose for more damage:

• Warp
• Incinerate
• Carnage

If you prefer to be a support or use your powers to augment your weapons, you may want to use high radius for crowd control. For example:

• Overload (I love to use it for the stun effect)
• Cryo Blast
• Stasis Bubble (almost a no brainer for stasis)

Just to add a little tidbit from the overload page on the wiki to show its awesomeness:

Overload is highly effective in Mass Effect 3's multiplayer as a crowd control power when fully upgraded along the Chain Overload/Neural Shock path. Place yourself at the entrance to a room enemies are charging through and spam it on the first one to appear.