Does the bonder need to be an Adept, or can any awakened apply?

They need a catch up edge? Don't think so, they're already uber enough.

well, in that case, there are 2 main possibilities.

1) your adept players aren't trying, or don't know what to do.

2) you are thinking in terms of versatility.

because quite frankly, there are few things that can beat an adept in their chosen specialty at chargen. it's just when they try to do everything that it hurts.

for example, let's take a fairly standard adept; the dual warhawk combat adept. we will now proceed to min/max him as ridiculously as we can, and see how a sammy you build compares in his specialty.

he's going to want ambidextrous as a quality, that's 5 BP. adept is 5. we also need either aptitude or exceptional agility (can't take both due to attribute limit) so we'll take exceptional agility 'cause it's gonna come in handy in a variety of areas. that leaves 5 BP for some other quality, if you so choose (not recommended). to counteract that, we'll take 35 BP in negative qualities. the specifics don't matter too much, but i would guess some level of addiction to a combat drug (probably moderate addiction), probably an allergy (common mild of course), and perhaps incompetent in a skill or two that we don't plan on using, or perhaps some hacker flaws instead. regardless, we are definitely maxing out flaws in our non-specialised areas.

next, we need a race. we'll go with elf ('cause we want crazy agility, of course). as far as attributes, we'll ditch strength (maybe go with 2), have a decent/good body (4), good will (4), good agility (7), and good reaction (5). int and log go to 2, cha stays at it's base of 3. that's a total of 190, by my count. (max agility is 8 now, remember?) so we're currently sitting on (190 + 30 + 30 - 25) 225 BP... not too bad yet. we'll take pistols (warhawks) at 6, and probably dodge (ranged) at 4 unless we want him to be good at the athletics skill group, in which case we'll probably pick up a little unarmed and use gymnastics to dodge. in any event, we only really strictly speaking need the pistols; that's 32 more points for pistols skill.

of course, i neglected to boost magic and edge, possibly. we'll want a magic of at least 3, so that's a minimum of 20 more points. probably an edge of 2 minimum as well, another 10 BP. that leaves us at 287 BP. now then, on to gear: depending on how we feel about it, we'll either use jazz/cram to get a second IP, or we'll spring for synaptic booster 1 or 2 (since this is a min/maxed combat monkey, we'll go for booster 2... drugs are much cheaper though). that's 32 BP for the booster, and another 10 to bring our magic at least to 4. we also want better agility, so we'll pick up muscle toner 2 and reaction enhancers 2, for another 6 BP. add another 10 for magic 5(3), and you've got 335 BP. going on to adept powers, we'll pick up improved pistols 3 and combat sense 3.

so then, let's take a look at our adept: he's throwing ( 7(9) agility + 6 skill + 3 improved pistols + 2 specialisation + 2 smartlink) 22 dice on the offense, and ( 5(9) reaction + combat sense 3) 12 dice assuming he isn't dodging at all on defense.

and he's got another 65 BP (probably about 5 tops for gear, maybe 5 for BP, leaves only 55 BP more for skills... and *that* is where the adept hurts).

[edit] and this is all in just the main book... i haven't touched street magic [/edit]

actually, his 12 dice defense is without using dodge actions.

and given he also has 3 extra dice on his "who goes first" roll, iirc, he's fairly likely to go before your sammy... which means he's got a pretty decent chance of shooting your sammy right in the face (for money) twice before the sammy gets a chance to shoot back if mr. adept is smart, he's using warhawks loaded with ex-ex, which means he's dishing out 8P damage per hit (and your armor is lowered by either 3 or 4 points, can't remember), plus his net hits (and i would be very surprised if there are not net hits).

it's kinda like the D&D high-level arena fights between casters. who wins the fight? whoever wins initiative.

besides, with agility 7(9), this adept is not exactly totally helpless in non-combat areas either. agility covers a lot of things, after all

so while mr. adept here won't be quite as good as the sammy (and neither of them will be quite as good as a more sane build) in other areas, he's not exactly terrible in many of those areas either.