QUOTE (CrystalBlue @ Aug 1 2013, 06:50 AM)
I'm not going to argue this point here, because it's been done to death. Yes, money does buy a better Decker. When hasn't it?
well, SR4 for one. i never tried out otaku in SR3, but i can tell you for sure that technomancers in SR4 were crazy stupid good in the matrix (non-technomancers could still be quite good, but not nearly as good as technomancers, with the trade-off that they generally invested a heck of a lot less into hacking for their build).
the problem here is that we now have an archetype where choosing that archetype has mechanical penalties attached. it's fine if technomancers and deckers both have cool advantages and are better in different ways. it's not fine if one or the other is just straight up a worse choice all the time, which is basically the case for technomancers in SR5, so far as we have been able to tell. maybe that will change, and if it does, great; i really do hope that i'm missing some sort of amazing thing that technomancers can do to compensate for their much worse start and the agonizingly slow progression that they're going to suffer from.
but so far, every attempt to show that technomancers can do something awesome that sets them apart from deckers has left me feeling very unimpressed. generally speaking, the something awesome they can do is either unlikely to work, or works slightly better than a decker could do it... except that a decker doesn't have to take a bunch of damage to do it.