Yeah, the Fading levels look like they could us a 2pt reduction almost across the board.

But if you reduce the fading on complex forms, that might make technomancers almost as good as deckers!

Interesting tidbit: At one point, playtesting feedback was that Technomancers were so insanely good that no one would ever play a Decker.

This is why there's lots and lots of playtesting.

so....

the ability to progress meaningfully with both karma and nuyen, the ability to purchase augmentations that will make them massively superior in the meat world and help greatly with survivability and offense against things that are immune or highly resistant to hacking, and starting off with incredible flexibility in deck attributes and programs while the technomancer would have to initiate dozens of times to compare... none of these things struck your playtesters as having any value at all?

to the point where the only good technomancer abilities cause enough fading to make them something you should avoid using unless you are absolutely left with no other options?

...

i'm just going to have to hope that someone in charge looked at the initial round of feedback, made adjustments, and then decided that they didn't need to send the modified results back to be playtested for some reason. and that said person will never ever again be in charge of making any important decisions at CGL.

don't get me wrong, 4th edition technomancers were crazy strong in the matrix, and i get that there was a lot of effort put towards making that count for something in 5th edition. i even agree that technomancers need to be dialed back from what they were in 4th edition. but this 5th edition version... it's just... awful. i dunno, i'm left to hope there is some sort of ridiculously amazing thing they can do that i'm just not seeing yet, because right now i just look at them and i think the exact opposite of what all the playtesters said... from the perspective of being effective, i don't see any compelling reason to be a technomancer right now. unless of course you're assuming 500 karma worth of advancement or something like that.

Maybe karma in these playtesting games was passed out like candy from a parade float?

Well, I'll be quick fixing the Fade values by dropping them all by 2, that makes CFs attractive to use again and helps the TM do their stuff more often. I do like they are differant in angle for what they do compared to Deckers.

In either case though TM or Spellslinger the Edge spend should be done witdue caution, but I do believe that channeling greater powers beyond your capacity to handle should also sting. otherwise it really does become Magic Run, because all of the Ross in having those weird powers don't exist.

Technomancers as written in SR5 are beyond lousy. In this new Matrix where deckers have a razor thin margin of error before shit comes crashing down around them, the margin of error for technomancers is non-existent. The only abilities that give them any edge whatsoever have Fading values that make them suicide to bother with.

But I think the thing that bothers me the host is the retcon where nothing can be slaved to their bio-commlink anymore. That is by far the worst thing that could've been done to gimp a technomancer. They're not even worth keeping around anymore. And I will be SUPER PISSED if that gets released in the next Matrix book as an echo, because that is something TOTALLY LOUSY to be spending 13 karma on!

As a side rant: I have a feeling that most every problem needing to be fixed for technomancers will involve some echo, which turns them back into the mega karma sinks that they were back in SR4, what with having to submerge over and over again. This is not tenable, and goes back to some of the same design flaws that should've been fixed in the transfer to the new edition.

A more elegant fix was suggested by another poster here: treating technomancer powers like adept powers. You get some analog to Power Points based on Resonance, and you can buy up abilities that way from a list of them. For .5 or 1 Resonance Point, buy the ability to slave things to your node, for example.

In fact what's wrong with so many of the echoes is that they're criminally overpriced and only marginally useful. Compare to the metamagics adepts and magicians get, in that not only are they useful, but they get better over time based on initiate grade. Many of the echoes need downgraded to something that can be bought with these theoretical Resonance Points, and the actual echoes you get made more substantial. +1 to Firewall is nothing I would waste a submersion echo on, but I would consider buying it in chargen with RPs.

Wow, I went a little off-topic here. My apologies.

Edit: Damn. The more I think about it, the more I think I just fixed technomancers...

not sure if that fixes them, but they definitely need something to make them work. it's pretty sad that one of the best echoes is the one that lets them actually use a program, for example... something that is costing the decker a few thousand nuyen costs the technomancer hundreds of karma...

Tell you what. I was ruminating on this after I posted while I was at the gym, and more ideas have taken root. I might write these up into a more comprehensive technomancer fix and post them up in a separate thread (as to quit hijacking this one.)

The Horror.

Obviously I was not a Playtester. I would have the opposite opinion.
While a Technomancer is Good, a Decker has the potential to blow them right out of the water. At least in my character creation comparisons, anyways. *shrug*

Programs doe not cost thousands of Nuyen each, any more, they are relatively cheap.

yes, i know.

it's a few thousand nuyen for all of the programs. together. every single one of them. i thought that was fairly clear when i made the comparison of the technomancer needing to spend hundreds of karma, which is not the case if we're talking about only one program.

My Mistake... I misunderstood.