Shiva Arms: Practical or Just Fun? Options

[maine75man]

I've always had a thing for characters with extra arms. Don't know why but I do. My question is are there any good way's to build a character around the Shiva Arms meta-quality in 4E.

[UmaroVI]

One of the interesting things about the six-armed shooter is that you end up not actually needing to be better than passable with guns in the first place; stat+skill of 6 is fine, you really just care about getting modifiers.

Udoshi, I'm curious what modifiers you had in mind. The ones I managed to dig up were:

Red Dot Sight
Tracer Ammo
Specialization
TacNet

My thought was to make a Technomancer; use a TacNet CF to get a 5+ rating Tacnet, have tricked-out drones that can stay on it, and hopefully have teammates who are willing to jam a pile of sensors on themselves to be able to run a rating 6 TacNet or something. You only need to be meh alright at shooting on its own to kamurder people, and you can still be a decently good hacker (although you probably say screw rigging and just have pokesprites do it for you).

[Udoshi]

Udoshi, I'm curious what modifiers you had in mind. The ones I managed to dig up were:
Red Dot Sight
Tracer Ammo
Specialization
TacNet

The Red Dot Sight + Tracer was INDEED the bonus I was thinking of. Unlike smartlinks and laser sights, the red dot sight has no provision for not working while double wielding. Thank you, bad writers of Gun Heaven.
Synch or Sideways can give you another +1.

And you want to run your Tacnet 4 on a commlink that is commlinkmod Optimized for a Tacnet. That will give you a 'rating 5' tacnet. Unfortunately, it comes with its own drawbacks. In order to get the full bonus, you need 7 members on the net, each contributing 8 channels. That means You(1) and each of your six guns(6) just needs 8 channels, and you're good to go. A Smartgun System comes with a Camera(1) and a Laser RangeFinder(2), and its camera is explicitly spelled out as being able to take vision enhancements (4a 322), and the mod(arsenal) works exactly like the accessory.
Under 4th rules, cameras dont have any limit on accessories, under 4A, its equal to their rating. You can work around this by installing a higher rating camera, using the camera upgrade mod once you run out of accessory space, or the expensive option of Pilot upgrading your smartgun. Rating 1 is enough to get the job done, because drones have special considerations for contributing sensor channels.

Past that you really need to work to eliminate dice pool penalties from Wounds, from Cover, from Range Penalties, from Visibility Modifiers, and pretty much anything else.
The trick isn't getting good dice while multigunning, its keeping it constant enough to hit.

Suppressive Fire does not care about blind fire, right? O.o
Also, 4 Arms==2 Troll-Bows . . *runs*

Doesn't actually work. Two gunning is simple actions only. Guess what suppressive fire is?

on the magical side, a multi-casting mage adding the full rating of his Force: 4 power focus and mentor spirit bonus to each of the spellcasting tests.

That is how it works, yes. Fortunately, there are provisions for only one focus applying to a given test. So you cant have a spellcasting and a power focus helping at once.

And Irion specialization is a dice pool modifier, as per the following rule
The FAQ just utterly fails to follow the actual rules, once again.

4th Anniversary page 120: Specializations add 2 dice to any tests made for that skill when the specialization is applicable
to the test.
Note how it does not increase your skill by two.

[UmaroVI]

Yeah, the importance of negating modifiers might make Adept an attractive choice for Adept Centering.

I'd forgotten Synch and Sideways, good catch.