Wrecking ball adept?, Umm... overpowered maybe? Options Track this topic Email this topic Print this topic Download this topic Subscribe to this forum Display Modes Switch to: Outline Switch to: Standard Linear+

[Jhaiisiin]

So I was going through character concepts. I tend to overfocus some characters just to push their limit (don't we all?). I ended up making a dwarf adept whose sole purpose in life was to open holes. I'm posting this to find out if I made a mistake somewhere, or if this is legit and thus overly powerful. Any insight will be helpful.

Race: Dwarf

Attributes:
Body 6 (8)
Agility 4
Reaction 3
Strength 6
Charisma 2
Intuition 3
Logic 4
Willpower 4
Edge 3
Essence 5.4
Magic 5 (Point not lost due to Gaes, see below)

Skills:
Unarmed Combat 4
Clubs 2
Pistols (Semi-Auto) 1/3
Dodge (Ranged) 3/5
Gynastics (Tumbling) 2/4
Perception 2
First Aid (Combat Wounds) 2/4
Pilot Ground Craft 2
Trowing Weapons 1
Athletics 1
Leadership 2

Qualities:
Adept
Toughness
Quick Healer
SINer (legal, non-criminal SIN)

Cyberware:
Bone Density 2

Adept Powers (Here's where it gets interesting):
Killing Hands
Attribute Boost (Strength) - 4
Smashing Blow - Gaes: Must move at least 2 meters before striking the object. Walking is not sufficient to meet this requirement.
Penetrating Strike
Inertia Strike
Elemental Strike (Blast)
Critical Strike - 4

Okay. So overall a decently rounded character stat/skill wise. It's when we get to unarmed damage that we have a problem.

Base damage on the character is at (Str/2+1)P from Bone Density. Now let's max this out here because of the abilities.
* 4 bonus points of strength from Attribute boost
* +4 damage from Critical Strike
* +5 Damage from Elemental strike (our game has assumed Magic as the force, as an adept can't have a Force rating on Elemental strike, and the book was nonspecific as far as we could find)
So that brings base damage to (Str/2+12)P, or 17P base, WITHOUT successes.
Smashing blow takes that to 34P without adding successes against any barrier. Assuming 3 successes, that's 40P regularly against a wall, door... basically anything that gets in the dwarf's way.
So far, it seems that nothing short of Reinforced concrete (16 armor, thus 32 dice of soak) will stand even a chance of resisting the damage done by this character.

Did I go wrong somewhere?

[DTFarstar]

How is elemental strike giving you +5 damage?

[Jhaiisiin]

Elemental Effect Blast gives the following benefits:

[Fortune]

What rule are you using in order to Geas that Magic loss due to implants?

[Critias]

It sounds like it's perfectly legal, in a game where the magic loss/geas rules are being misread, and you've house ruled a .5 cost adept power to add 5 damage to unarmed attacks.

[Jhaiisiin]

First, thank you for all the critique here. I'm really glad to see we may have overlooked/misunderstood/misread some stuff. This is greatly appreciated. Now on to the answers:

We house ruled because there were no clear indications on precisely how elemental damage "enhanced" killing hands. Does it convert all your damage to the appropriate type? If so, how do you handle the knockdown bonuses of Blast? Does it add damage? Does it take away? How is it handled. Using [Magic Rating] as the force for determining damage seemed logical enough. We're perfectly open to alternatives though.

And it looks like the Gaes rules were being misred by the lot of us. I'm guessing we dragged in the old SR3 way of doing Gaes where you could take one to prevent magic loss.

So let's mod this slightly. Drop the magic to 4, lose the gaes, and pull Inertia and Penetrating strikes. Assuming [Magic Rating = Force] for purpose of elemental damage (until we sort that out) that drops damage a little.
New Damage code: (Str/2+11)P or 16P Base, 32P base against barriers, 38P with average number of successes. I mentioned damage codes after pulling elemental damage entirely in my last post, and it's still way up there.

[Glyph]

You interpreted it incorrectly, because elemental strike only gives you the secondary elemental effect.

Also, even assuming your Strength is boosted by 4 (requiring 4 successes), you will still only have a modified Strength of 10, divided by 2 to get 5, +1 for the bone density, +4 for the critical strike, for 10 base damage, 20 against physical barriers.

So you can punch through walls really well, like Tarantula's number-crunching exercise could climb very well. Is that so unbalancing? He's certainly far from optimal purely in melee, compared to builds with more combat dice and initiative passes.

[Jhaiisiin]

[GentlemanLoser]

Just a few thoughts on this.

I'm of the opinion as well that you get the full elemental effect, and not just any secondary it might have.

So an ES (Blast) attack would be a physical attack (regardless of Killing Hands) and treat Impact Armour as 1/2 (Which makes Penetrating Strke the poor cousin).

On top of this, you get an increase to knocking people down. I would also sub the Adepts Magic stat for the 'Force' of the ES Blast, but this only applies for the Knockdown test, not an addition to Damage (or Breaking Barriers).

The GM might give the ES Blast Strike a little AoE, and simulate the breaking of glass/knocking over small objects with each punch, but ES doesn't convey any AoE to the Unarmed Attack.

[Karaden]

Part of your problem is the elemental strike, it doesn't add any damage whatsoever. Read carefully

[Jhaiisiin]

[Fortune]

[Karaden]

Eh, ok, I was bored. Here is a mystic adept I was working on...

[ Spoiler ]

Metarace: Troll - 40
Bod:9 (9) - 40
Agi: 4 (6) - 30
Rea:5 (5) - 40
Str: 9 (11) - 40
Cha: 1 (1) - 0
Int: 4 (4) - 30
Log: 1 (1) - 0
Wil: 3 (3) - 20
Ini: 9 (11) 3 passes
Edg: 1 - 0
Ess: 5.1
Magic: 5 (4) - 40

Qualities:
Adept - 5
Aptitude (Unarmed) 10
Toughness 10
Sensitive system +15
Gremlins 1 +5
Sensitive Neural Struture +5
Incompetent (software) +5

Skills:
Unarmed Combat (Martial Arts) 7/9 - 34
Dodge (Ranged) 4/6 - 18
Throwing weapons 4 - 16
Athletics 4 - 40
Survival 1 - 4

Knowladge:
Meditation 1
Safe houses 1
Chinesse 2
Japanese 2
Monk Traditions 3
English N
Pressure Points 3
Martial Arts 3

Adept Powers: 4 points.
Improved Reflexes 2 - 3 points.
Killing Hands .5 points.
Critical Strike 1 .25 points.
Atribute boost (body) 1 .25 points.

Bioware:
Muscle Toner 2
Mucle Augmentation 2
Reflex recorder (unarmed)
Equipment:
Weapon focus (gloves) 2
Armor Jacket
Few k worth of other stuff.

2 BP to bond the weapon foci and a lame little 2 BP contact.

So lets see what I get..

Base damage is str/2P, which goes to 5.5P Then I get an extra 1 for critical strike, so 6.5P

Maybe not as impressive as your character's damage, but you have to take into account that I get 18 dice to attack with, whereas you get 8. I also manage to attack three times as often as you, not to mention being able to close the distance to my target quicker. May not be able to beat on walls like you can, but your ability to do that is quickly going down.

*edit* heh, wasn't expecting you to be awake to respond, oh well, suppose it is a good comparison at the least.

Oh, and I'd agree, use the Adept's magic as the force, nothing else really makes sense.

[Magus]

So what is the correct and SR4 way Geas are handled? No more voluntary geas to offset essence loss?

[Fortune]

[Magus]

Well that ties off that munchkin game. What about voluntary geas to get cheaper PP costs? Does this cost BP at chargen?

[Critias]

The rules for Geasa are covered in Street Magic, and can explain it as well (or better) than any of us. :)

[Magus]

[Whipstitch]

I just about always come away pretty unimpressed with strength based melee adept builds these days. I've really come to the conclusion that melee is best left to stun weapons and monowhips or cybered dwarf, ork and troll wrestlers who can still have the points for other tricks. Especially since cyberlimbs are capable of pretty beastly stats now and they can add to the armor and condition monitor as well as the Ultimate Champion optimization which grants +2 to unarmed tests per cyberarm. Of course, it's also perfectly possible to create an adept with optimized limbs that are pretty mean, but then you just start investing too heavily into what really amounts to a secondary skill at best in shadowrun.

[mfb]

even if you could take a voluntary geas to offset magic loss from impants, you wouldn't be able to geas just one power and make it work. you'd have to run two meters before using any of your powers.

[Tarantula]

My take, is now that you've gotten how your abilities and such hashed out, he really is a weak character. He's a mediocre damage soak, and no extra ips means not much damage output. Not to mention being absolutely not stealthy in the least. And he isn't even that great at punching through things. (Attribute boost is pretty pathetic)

[GentlemanLoser]

How about (Don't have augmentation yet, so this is just very rough...) a Mystic Adept (with only one point in Sorcery, for spells sustained thorugh foci), with a tricked out cyberarm (Max Str) and PP spent in Killing Hands, Max Critical Strike and Elemental Strike (Sound).

Buy only Killing Hands and Ele Strike, with the remaining points spent in Critical Strike, up to Max. If you can fit in the essence loss alongside a Cyberarm, get some Bioware (thinking of Bone Density to get the plus to Unarmed Damage).

As high an Unarmed SKill as you can afford (With obvious specialisations), and get your cyberarm as a Weapon Focus (If possible?).

With Sound strikes, you ignore your targets armour (laugh at Penetrating Strike!) and if you do more Damage than your targets Willpower, you not only take them out of comabt for three rounds, but you also double thier wound penalties if you don't! (Laught at Lightnings -2 Dice and resistance roll!).

Not very sublte, and don't try it versus Mages who like to cast Silence. ;)

I wonder how much you could trick that sort of Unarmed Damage up for.

1 Essences worth of Adept powers can net you +4 Damage from Critical Strike, so any Cyberware needs to give +4 Damage or +8 Str to be worth the trade off...

The Mystic Adept point of Sorcery is just there for things like increase reflexes, attribute, deflection, armour. All the potentially nice sustainables. ;)

Plus counterspelling.

[Whipstitch]

Mystic adepts are absolute crap if all you intend to do is mix in a tiny bit of sorcery. It's simply too expensive and inconvenient to be practical for a lot of reasons. For example, you can only start out with 2 spells per point of Spellcasting, you won't have the dicepool to consistently meet thresholds. This isn't even going into all the foci you'd need and the issues you'd run into when facing wards. You're really a lot better off sticking to minor conjuring and taking a decent counterspell pool as a mystic adept. That said, taking a point or two of sorcery, learning a spell and just having a force 3 or 4 Spirit of Man cast it for you can be pretty useful, but that's really best done with great utility spells like Heal that don't need to be sustained rather than self buffs.,

[Stahlseele]

now that there are actually written words for this you can switch off feeling in your power-arm and just hammer away for some time . . if you hack at something long enough it WILL give . . ok, you have to meet a certain minimum damage . .
but a troll with STR15 redlined to 30 with pain editor and things that let him deal with stun damage better . . or something that further strengthens his arm will do tremendous damage over time ^^

[GentlemanLoser]

Whip, rather than spend an expensive 2 PP on increased Reflexes, a Mystic adept could with a magic of 1 over case at force 2, and with a good enough sorcery skill easily get +1 I & IP. Bind that to a Foci and suffer a physical drain of 3.

If you can squeze out Magic 2, you can overcast for the max +3IP. in exchange for 5 Magic worth of PP.

Any extra armour/deflection would just be gravy. As long as you could afford the foci! ;)