So we have to pause the game and manually select things every time we want to change a spell or weapon? Ugh that is going to get old in like... 5 minutes.

Edit: LOL I think i know where they got the 300 hours of gameplay from. Changing equipment adds an extra 200 hours of quality gaming!

If you read the in-game help (something that everybody should do), it's explained that when you are in the favorites menu, you can choose an item and then press a key from 1-8, and the item is hotkeyed.