Which, of course, is totally not canon, since the price of an Ares Predator is less than the price of an aftermarket smartlink, so clearly they will, in fact, sell off an Ares Predator any to scum off the street.

Predator? Pan! cavalier deputy is my hand cannon if choice (although the Ruger is now looking tempting)...

ok, i declare myself winner of this game.
i shot harlekin, nothing left to do here.

Halp! I must be doing something wrong with Decking.

As I'm playing a Street Samurai I've managed with hired Deckers so far. A lot of times I've struggled but ultimately made it through. Now I'm trying to get the Dodger to shut down an elevator, and well. Lets just say I fail. Badly. I always use the Attack ESP from the beginning. I use the program which adds extra damage to Icons. I use Medic and even Firewall from time to time. It goes kinda ok until the alarm is raised which it always is. Any advice?

Apparently I'm not cut out for decking - it goes much better with an SMG or Assault Rifle

kill as much as you can before the alarm goes off.
when you die it does not matter as long as you have somebody with doc wagon on the team.
just have dodger revived and the things you killed will stay dead, making the second time much easier

Yeah I died to some Black IC on that mission as well. Luckily I still had the free doc wagon thing from the start of the game, popped him right back up, jacked back in, and it was all smooth sailing.

As far as matrix tactics, I would use both the heal ability and the drop alert level ability on cooldown. I'd also only use the vulnerability program on the big things that take more hits to drop. Using it on the little ones is just a waste of AP, as they drop in 2-3 actions either way. If a fight ended with low health, I'd just chill out for a few rounds to heal back up. The NPCs may say the mission is on a rush, but if your main team has things under control in the real world, you can take things as slow as you want. I never really hit any point where I was in danger of being overwhelmed in meatspace even while taking my sweet time in the matrix.

Remember, you can jack out at any time and be out nothing but some AP in dumpshock stun. So if your decker's cornered by IC, pull the plug and redo from start.

Ah, so if at first I don't succeed, try and try again I always kinda assumed that the alert stayed on though. I'll give it another couple of tries.

Thanks guys.

It does stay on, but the added IC aren't nearly as much of a problem if you're not suddenly surrounded by them.

found an easteregg i did!
Jordan Weisman is in the Game as an NPC!

Ghost of a Grizzled Veteran

I got through that with a lot of backtracking, using degrade on fucking everything, and medic to keep my ESPs up. Didn't bother with lowering the alert level, because it hit alert anyway, but hit-and-run tactics are your friends.

I am having issues with getting the user generated games to show up as playable after i grt them from steam. They simply do not show up in srr only the main campaign shows up. And ideas.

It's fairly canon, given the dead man's switch campaign starts you off as a street-level down and out runner without 10 to your name.

Ah, that did the trick. Don't be afraid to run away to fight another day.

How'd you manage to shoot Harlequin like three hours before you noticed the guy who's been standing at the bar this whole time?

'cause it's probably the backer ability i had heard about.
and i figured out that a close combat statted troll is worthless.
so i made a new one after i had shot harlekin in the face for fun.
not even for profit. i saw him being useless, knew i could not finish it with him and decided to just shoot him.

I actually found Harle kind of useful once I started using his double-slash ability. And mages are beast - fucking lightning ball+heal+manaball=win everything forever

Actually, Harlequin's pretty darn useful if your group doesn't have a melee kill-stick on-hand. He can whip up manabolts or manaballs if you need him to cast spells to make people fall down, if you have a shaman in the group, have Harlequin use his Stride ability one round before you expect to need it, have the shaman Haste him from the get go, and he can run right up to the bad guys and hack them apart.

And, of course, he's carrying a FAB3 shotgun. Unfortunately, it won't actually deal damage to normal targets. But he's not useless.

I did the final fight with my main, Vivi, an Elf Combat Decker/Rigger/Face. I regretted bringing my cyberdeck more than I regretted bringing Harlequin, as if I'd known there was literally nothing to jack into, I would have left it behind and brought a drone instead. I brought Lufta the shotgun-toting ork rigger/grenadier and Jotojunn the Dwarf Haste Bitch. So it's not really impossible, not at all.

The tricks are...

1: Kill the bitch. You know the saying. Geek the slagging mage first!
2: If a Bug Pillar is open, shoot it. It hurts everything made of bug in the area, including the slagging mage.
3: Do not let the Bombardier bugs get you. Run up to them and hack them apart, run away and force them to get close, whatever you gotta do. Just DON'T let them unleash their AoE bug bomb on you.
4: Shotguns. Shotguns, shotguns, shotguns. Also concussion grenades and literally anything else that penalizes the bad guys AP. Flesh-form bugs are still vulnerable to being knee-capped. (Oddly enough, the bitch is not. Don't bother trying to kneecap her, just put the barrel of your boomstick du jour in her face and let her have it.) A Warrior Bug is hilariously dangerous unless you realize it only has two AP and one kneecap crit or two kneecap hits will make it hilariously unable to do anything next round. Bombardiers have three, so good luck.

GTFM was a fucking lifesaver in this game. Seriously. It should be in the manual.

Heh, seriously.

GTFM?

Geek The Frackin Mage, and that's the drekin truth.

Just finished the campaign. Loved it, even though I hadn't put a single point into shotguns up until the last mission. Missing 3 out of every 4 shots is not fun...

I think I'll import my character and do it again.

Ah, yeah. That's great advice.

Except on the last fight. Following it there caused it to glitch out.

Shamans are awesome. Haste, Time warp (Who needs to reduce enemy APs when all their actions cost +3 AP?), Walls (Lightning and wind both drain AP of enemies coming through, making them awesome against melee bugs), Shadow (AOE lockdown OR AOE defensive). Summoning is a bit less impressive most of the time, but sending a force 1 spirit in to soak up overwatch before your melee guy rushes the place is very workable.

I dunno where the summoning is weak comes from. I've kicked much ass with spirits, my own and ones summoned from in-game spots.

Summoning was too unreliable for me to use regularly save for a 1 AP meatshield.

Finished it up as a combat decker. Decking was neat (though I let 'Mr. Artful' do the big hacking part since my assault rifle was way more useful for cover) but there wasn't enough. The game as a whole needed more random runs and such. I'll just have to wait to see what the community comes up with.

Round two, combat mage.

having someone with heal is excellent. He made a second heal spell I had available. And he can deal ok damage with his sword.

I can confirm that behavior. I had a Troll sam on overwatch in one of the Telestrian offices; the shotgun was on the wide scatter ability. When the sam took a shot on overwatch, every character on the screen was hit, and most were out of the line of fire. I shoulda took a screenshot , but I didn't do so in time to catch the scene.

I occasionally summoned spirits who then just stood there draining my AP. Anyone else running into that problem?

The last level would have been much easier if there'd been someone to buy medkits from, during the pre-op gearing up session. Maybe they were there and I just looked right past 'em, but I saw dudes to buy chrome from, guns from, grenades from, drone repair kits from, spells from, yadda yadda yadda -- but no one just selling medkits.

yeah, I caught that too. My next play through I'll probably make sure I have a stash of kits in my, well, stash.

I am profoundly annoyed that you can't save wherever you like. It's 2013 and PCs do not suffer from the technical deficiencies that mandated checkpoint-only saves. There is absolutely no reason for this.

No one else is thrilled about it, either, but I've got to say I'm a little surprised by the indignation around this issue. It's something folks have known about for over a year, now.

Yeah, it'd be awesome if they'd fix it, and I don't claim to know anything about how much (or how little!) effort it would take to do so...but I'm just a little baffled at how folks seem so blindsided by it, when it's an issue that's been griped about since the Kickstarter.

Honestly, I wasn't aware of it until I started playing. I didn't follow the kickstarter closely, and it wasn't like they announced "You won't be able to save!" as a major feature in the kickstarter video, or any of the trailers/alpha footage. (Or if it was in those, it apparently wasn't harped on enough since I obviously forgot it shortly after seeing it)

Eh, it takes care of save scumming to an extent and makes it so your choices and luck are a little more visceral.

Save scumming? If this were a roguelike or something with procedurally generated content, your argument would hold water. This is a single-player, story-based, RPG. Who gives a care about save scumming?

It also forces you to restart an entire scene when something bugs right at the end. Or when something pulls you away before you can finish the scene. I think I've started the Telestrian building scene 5 times now. I'm almost loathe to do it again. I may just start over with another character.

Which might be features instead of bugs to some players, but it's always been my understanding the choice was made from a programming, not gameplay, perspective. For whatever arcane reasons that I totally don't get -- because coding just ain't my bag -- it would've taken them more work than they thought was worth it, to add save-at-will type stuff.

The save issue bugs me, too, but it's not my primary gripe.

My primary gripe is how bloody useless decking is. You have precisely one opportunity to get and use a Fairlight Excalibur, and after that you might as well hock your Excalibur (if you had the money to get it; I didn't,) and all your programs and agents for guns, guns, guns.

Also, you're told you should bring Dodger along on the run. Even though I did, he was absolutely useless. My main was a better decker than he was and a better shooter than he was, and to top it off, there weren't even multiple jack-points in the Telestrian building, so I couldn't even bring him along as Matrix backup. I wound up with him running pistol overwatch and being the healing kit bitch for Jotojunn and whomever else I brought along (think it was Coyote), who were playing crowd control with all those goons pouring into the office. (Mind you, he wasn't completely useless. Three critical hits with his Ares Predator in a row on a big ork gunner made a situation that could have gone very south, very fast, rocket north.)

Another gripe I have: you don't have the chance to bring Coyote or that lady shaman who comes along in the NTSB at the final mission. I thought it would have been nice if I could have tapped them, since they had skin in the game and a reason to want revenge.


[e]The uselessness of decking isn't my secondary gripe, however. It's the fact that summoning is often literally worse than nothing, because those damned spirits go rogue at the worst times, even with hilariously low break-free chances, and then they turn things into a melee-a-trois. Rigging was lackluster, too, but not quite as bad.

Fun trick - if you throw the spirit in deep amongst the enemy, it continues attacking them even if it breaks free, granting you the benefits of the spirit while not having the drain on your AP.

I love doing that.

True, it does still act hostile and will usually target the nearest thing. But it's a problem if your shaman's not close to them, summoned the spirit, had it cast a spell or something on its first turn, the pumped 4 IP into it on its next turn and it breaks free on a 9% chance.

Yeah, that would be an issue. On the other hand, shamans don't suffer dumpshock if a spirit gets blown up.

True. However, if all you require of a drone is that it tanks enemy fire, the rigger can activate it, drive it into the enemy, set it to Hold its position, and then deactivate it. And your drone won't decide it doesn't like you and whip up a high-power lightning ball and drop it right on your whole team, too.

I was playing as a combat decker and I found decking awesome. Not from the efficiency perspective, but from the epicness.

At telarian the final stage, I already had lost two team mates, decking in myself to kill that elevator, only Coyote trying to protect my ass. That was awesome!

At the UB last stage when decking in with the elf girl, same thing. Matrix and RL in parallel. With some decent AI, this might have been a challenge, too

I never quite managed to orchestrate such a scene on the table, although it is so quintessential SR.

Never used much mages, though. Did a run with both a mage and an adept and they were both pretty much useless.

But that seems to be the theme for SR5, too. Fireball is weaker than any grenade, so the problem with the mystic adept is not so much how overpowered it is, but how to find 10 worthwhile spells, when you already have improved reflexes and boost on a weapon skill.

xsansara: I agree. That was the best bit of SRR's Dead Man's Switch campaign: my main character and the girl decking into the 'trix together, blasting IC, two badasses back-to-back, while Lufta and Jotojunn and Coyote made the Bug spirits pay for every single square they advanced with their hit points.

Yogscast features SRR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMm8sRvk1bQ

or more repetitive, if you have to redo several dialogues because you couldn't save afterwards

This.