Cyber: Costs money, you lose essence. The magic point you lose in this can be considered "Spent" if you like, but there are other drawbacks to this. For one, you become harder to heal. Second, several skills and abilities (like attribute boost) are based on your magic rating, which is now lower. Third, you have to pay Karma on any further increases to magic as if you hadn't lost any magic at all.

Cyber can also be detected with a simple assense or cyberware detector. There is no means of detecting an adept technologically, and it is more difficult to suss one out astrally than a cyberhound. As far as I Know, there is no way to determine what powers an adept has.

Gear: any gear that isn't cyber can be used by an adept without trouble. since it can be added equally to both sides of the equation, it has no effect.

Magic: Again, Equally added to both sides. A mage can cast and sustain any spell they want on the adept. Heck, a mystic adept can do it themselves.

Resonance: apples to oranges, mate. name ONE THING that you can do with resonance that you can do with adept powers, or vice versa. (OK, you can increase your hacking pool. Resonance adds directly to it for the technomancer, while an adept can increase teh skill with IA. As far as I'm concerned, ot is a good thing that technomancers are better at hacking than adepts.)

The advantage to being an adept is concealability, access to powers unduplicatable by cyber, unlimited potential, lack of need for money for upgrades, no need for surgery, always active, undispellable, unjammable, unremovable badassery.

Which stores? Not my LGS. They said their distributer actually laughed at them when they tried to pin him down on a date.

No, you can't.

SR4, p. 187, under Adept Powers: The maximum level for any adept powers is equal to their Magic Attribute.

I should also note that there are a bunch of things that have been fixed that aren't listed in the errata -- we normally limit the posted errata to issues that effect mechanical issues, understanding of mechanical issues, problems with game world information, or real world factual updates [mistakes in the credits, etc]. Generally not listed in the posted errata are typos, small organizational changes, image fixes, etc.

You know, honestly the best conjurers I've seen in SR4 have been Hermetics. Binding spirits is such a big, powerful, and dangerous deal that I have yet to see any character seriously run into the Charisma cap for max bound spirits. Even twinker conjurers usually just have 1-3 spirits that they focus on. Drain from binding is so large, and so random that twinking a conjurer is more about minimizing healing times than it is about rolling the most dice to resist drain.

Honestly, the twink conjurer appears to be a Dwarf Hermetic that specializes their Medicine skill in Magical Health. I don't think that there really are any "no brainer twink strategies" anymore. Twinking is actually kind of a lot of work. So far, everything that people have put forward as being a "no brainer" has generally been not all that great.

-Frank

Gives a good reason to have Magic at 6 actually.
F12 is an extra power over F10. Not sure if it is worth it, but would be a likely possibility.

A F12 Spirit of Man w/ Optional powers of Innate Spell - Stunball and Innate Spell - Heal, Innate Spell - Mob Mind and Fear is a very dangerous character.
B 13, A 12, R 14 S10. All others 12, except Initiative is 26. Guess who goes first.

Rolling 24 dice to cast their F 15 Stunball. Talking average of 8 hits for 23 damage stun to a 15 meter area. Can up the F if needed to cover larger area. Rolling 24 dice on drain resistance test, 8 hits on that means no drain. 14 boxes of stun available, so overcasting to 24 is very doable, taking on average 4 stun.

Can also heal anyone in the party without taking drain, fully of all physical damage.

Mob Mind should be obvious. You don't even have to beat your opponents, they join you.

Fear is even worse. 24 dice vs opponents willpower. Max of 10 or so. You will be running from them.

Heck, if they feel like going old school on you, they can punch you, base DV 5 S, but rolling 24 dice on the attack test.

This is the major flaw with a linear system.

Fire spirit guards can engulf you, rolling 24 dice to "hit" and having a base DV of 12. Same with any spirit with elemental attack. Looking at 20 damage vs vehicles. That is enough to get through the everything but the Citymaster. If you manage to get 1 net hit over the city master then you can blow that to smithereens too.

And if you run up against something really formidable, like a tank, have no fear. Give the spirit of man Innate Spell - Powerbolt.
F24 Power bolt, Drain of 13. Rolling 24 dice to cast and then 24 to resist drain, you get a base DV of 32, and end up taking 5 boxes of physical damage. Judging by the stats in the book, I seriously doubt we will see anything that can take DV 32. Except maybe the GD with their F = Excessive spirits overcasting spells on them.
If for some reason you find someone who has excessive magical shielding, use an elemental manip spell to pound them, it is only 4 more boxes of damage.

This is seriously sicker than I thought.

Oh yeah, final note. Magic 6 + Summoning (Aptitude 7) + Specialty in Spirits of Man + F3 Summoning focus for Air, Earth, Fire & Man can easily be gotten by starting character. Oh and F2 power focus. Plus any mentor if you have them.
18 dice to start on the summoning test, 20 vs man, + any edge.
Spirit gets 12. Averages 4 hits, for a total of 8 Physical drain.
Roll 10 dice for drain resistance (can't afford 6 and 6) to get 3 successes.

So for the low cost of 5 physical (First Aid 5 + Log 5 = 3 successes dropping it to 4 Phys) that may or may not be able to be healed by the very spirit you summon, (can you Heal drain with magic) you can have all of this major ass kicking as a starting character.

Pretty sick. Imagine what a dragon or initiate can do. By the RAW, playing or using anything other than magicians is for suckers.

I've been away for a bit, so could you help me out by pointing me to where it was clarified what kind of action it takes? I don't see this in the errata, and it is one of the things about Boost that I send in a question about. The other thing was whether the amount you can be Boosted by is capped by the levels of Boost you have.

That should answer your questions blakkie

Or if you're a Shaman a high Charisma to go with the high Will and not take drain in the first place.

Quickdraw is a simple action that includes both drawing and a attack that would normally be a simple action all by itself. Although the wording of the text implies it is about ranged attacks i personally don't see a problem with extending that to a melee attack, with an appropriately sized weapon.

I don't calling it a "nerf" at all. I never expected to be able to exceed augmented max for an attribute with it. *shrug* Even it taking a Simple Action is way better than it being a Complex Action, and without it being spelled out that was just as good a guess. I really didn't expect it to be a Free Action.

Good luck with that. Even a Force 4 spirit has a perceptible chance of delivering 8S drain. At that point, you'll average taking no drain if your Willpower + Charisma is 24 (which it isn't).

Conjuring is intensely random. There is no such thing as a character who successfully summons every time, nor is there a character who doesn't take drain sometimes.

-Frank

I'm not so sure that a spirit can take "Innate Spell" multiple times to load out different spells.

Italics mine:

This states that whenever you take Innate Spell, you get just one spell. This part is easily agreed upon.

There's nothing there that says you can or can't take any individual optional power multiple times. Obviously there's no use in taking any other optional power more than once, so it becomes a question of "lack of precedent" versus "possible interpretation."

However there isn't anything explicitly forbidding it either. You may choose to read into it what you want, but the RAW by itself certainly does not rule out multiple Innate Spells. *shrug*

Probably this week as the PDF is ready and only Battlecorps and DriveThruRPG need to be co-ordinated as replied by Adam and Rob on this thread.

Lookit that, Blakkie is agreeing with me. Where's my red pen?

Just out of curiosity, would it be possible to clean out the errata thread of anything that's been corrected, whether or not it's listed on 1.3? I just skimmed through all 16 pages, and while I can see that many of the posts in there have been addressed, a large portion of the posts involve those minor changes that wouldn't be listed under the above criterion.