Well, there are alot of things about the magic system that don't make sense to me. I would be interested in what other people think:

1. Instruction is pathetic. As its governed by the "double-success" mechanic the most it will ever do is make learning go 10%-20% faster. That pretty pathetic. By "double-success" I mean that the successes you role on instruction are then just re-rolled as extra dice on the learning test... so effectively the teacher needs to role successes twice to have any impact on a student. On average a skill 6 instructor will add only 0.333 successes for the exorbanant $$ he charges.

2. The cure disease/antidote spells suffer from the same double-success mechanic. A rating six first aid kit will flat out add 6 dice to the body check. But a cure disease/antidote spell will only add as many dice as you have successes. Definately not worth the drain... especially for antidote, as for a LOT less drain you can use an increase body attribute spell to give the same number of bonus dice. Its easy to use this for short acting poisons where you can just sustain the increase body attribute spell till the poison check. For diseases the permanent quality means that you can move onto other things rather then sustain the increase body spell for a few days.

3. Just how are insect spirits/shedim so hard to ferret out? According to the rules masking ONLY helps with assensing. A simple detect magic spell will reveal they are spirits with 100% accuracy. Yeah, a spirit could fool you in casual encounters... but there is no way (according to the rules) the spirit would get past any sort of magical security check point. Especially given how paranoid folks must be about insects/shedim I would think that detect magic spells are VERY common these days.

4. Analyze devise is useless as writen, as only net successes after overcomming the objects resistance threashold are used. It wouldn't be that bad with clubs/swords... but for a pistol you need 5+ successes (I'm guessing a threshold of 4). Trying to use it on anything like a computer is hopeless.

5. Clairvoyance allows you to change your point of vision to any part in range... but it isn't clear if you need to have LOS on your new vision point or not. If you don't need LOS then this is the only example of a spell that can bypass barriers.

Pel

#4: Depending on the type of weapon and it's options it is more likely a 3. Notice that electronics are included in Threshhold 3.

Motorized vehicles tend to start at 4 (the book's example gives a motorbike as a 4, which makes sense given the apparent default of modern vehicles to be Matrix "ready"), although hanggliders and such would be more like 3 (owing to their advanced materials). The book doesn't give an example of how complex it has to be to rate a 5 or higher.

But yes, you definately need to be throwing down serious dice to try pull off understanding complex constructs. Remember this spell allows you to use non-Defaultable skills as though you have the Skill, seemingly overcoming the Incompetant flaw. That's some serious power.

They'll probably roll the idea together with background count, Toxic "domains" would now be nothing more than an aspected background count that hurts "normal" mages and helps toxics.