I'd assume they're also regularly hit with 10 or higher DV assault rifles? Because base DV 6 + 2 ExEx (if all mages have power foci, all ranged should have ExEx) + 5 wide narrow burst (again, all should have RC 4+) + net hits is at least 14 hits. Granted, you get armor, but you should still be taking big shots there too.

Yeah, doable as a 400 BP character. The question is whether that's a reasonable opponent each time you face a mage. As some people said above, I would love it if every mage we face had a rating 2 power or spellcasting focus. Ab-so-lutely.

Once our party mages got bored bonding them, we'd start selling them, greatly increasing our pay-off. But that would greatly increase the loot of a run....

If you're facing off against 400 bp teams each time you encounter people, you're going to quickly gain a *lot* of stuff unless the enemies all have good contingency plans that get them out....

A target of most mana spells will never know who hit them with it unless there's something special about the situation, like the target also being a mage who happens to make a perception test to see it out of the corner of his/her eye, the casting mage has a geas that requires V/S components when casting (haha, D&D terminology, but still applicable ), etc. (Yes, there are rules for handling noticing a spell being cast. I'm talking about noticing it otherwise.)

And as far as it being an advantage over automatic weapons, it would depend on the number of targets. Only one? He's not going to know that it was an automatic weapon any more than he will have known it was a mana spell. He'll be dead before the report reaches him. (Assuming one-attack kills in either case.)

And if the mana spell doesn't kill you, yeah, you'll know that you feel like utter crap and be in pain all the sudden, but only someone familiar with magic and spells is likely to automatically realize it was a spell, and even then they won't know where it came from unless they've figured it out through other means.

Arguable; true; argueable; true.

Mana warps range from 7 to 12 and voids from -7 to -12, but this does not mean that there cannot be something worse. The mana static spell discription imposes no inate limitations on the amount of interfearance it can create.

While background count is an area phenomon and area spells cannot be cast on an individual, personal versions of area spells do exist. Physical barrier has Armor as its personal counterpart and Silence has Stealth. Likewise, area spells can be moved anywhere within the caster's LOS and they can be anchored to movable objects. And then we have cyberzombies and other Hazing characters from previous editions who are, themselves, walking background counts.

One could rule that the background count doesn't extend far past the character's aura, which may or may not give him an absurd level of magical immunity depending on how you rule it (this ruling would also effect the ease of casting Wreck Sun and Wreck Moon successfully from the surface of the Earth) or one can rule that it takes a while to build up the count as was the case with Astral Hazing in pervious editions.

Good point. The force of sustained spells are reduced by the rating of the BC but it says nothing about the force of instant spells.

So... an unprocessed ball of hot gas undergoing natural nuclear fussion would be about OR 4 so that gives our Wreck Sol spell a threshold of 2. LOS, Physical, and Very Restricted Target give us a -1 drain modifier. Overcast a force 10 the magician must resist 4DV physical and 11 boxes of damage are pretty much guarenteed.

Winternight thought small.