I'm GMing my first Shadowrun adventure for new players, and one of them has conjuring skill group at 4 (she's very similar to the occult investigator sample character from the corebook), so I can assume spirits will be a part of the game. I don't expect to include many magical opponents in the adventure so my question is: how powerful spirits really are, assuming they are force 3 or max 4 vs standard grunt opponents.
The rulebook makes it look like they are very powerful against normal weapons, which is my main concern.
I don't want this adventure to look like: encounter 10 hostile gang members. summon spirit. command: destroy the guys. 5 combat turns pass: entire gang dead. The rest of the team goes for a smoke.
But on the other hand I don't want to include a magician with each and every oponent as it won't be very realistic...
Are spirits really that powerful? Would a group 3-5 standard heavy-pistol-armed grunts stand a chance of defeating one without magic and without dying in the process?
And the main question: spirits have many powers. If a player has e.g. one service from the spirit, could that service be: kill those 10 guys, and then the spirit uses engulf, exotic weapon, confusion, accident and any other powers as many times as necessary to kill 10 guys? Or is it: one service = engulf this one guy in fire, end of service?
Because the first way seems really powerful while the second option sounds rather limited.
And summoning a spirit of 3-4 force seems like a rather easy and painless job, it only requires one complex action and force 4 spirit has low chances of getting 2 hits, which means usually the player will have to resist like 2-4 drain max from one summoning. Force 3 spirit will almost always have 1 or 0 hits on the test.
How would you play spirit combat?