Mystic adepts were one of the first things people jumped on as unbalanced in SR5, and it's easy to see why. Priority A (mystic adept) is almost as good as priority A (magician) plus priority B (adept). The only ways they fall short of that are by having to pay a token extra amount of karma for their power points and by not getting astral perception or projection.

A more subtle issue is focus. If you try to build a mystic adept who can do everything, will he end up mediocre all around and not actually that impressive? I decided to give it a shot -- there's definitely a lot of careful balancing required, but it wasn't crippling. I think a summoning-focused magician is still a more powerful and flexible build, but this guy turned out to be pretty impressive.

There are, of course, many ways you can build a mystic adept. Since adept powers don't support spellcasting or summoning very well, I went with a combat adept who uses spells and summoning for buffing and utility:

Edit: the Missions "hot patch" errata increases the cost per power point to 5 karma, and that's expected to become official errata. The character below was modified to account for that.


On offense, Fade has great initiative and ~20 dice with automatics (varies a bit depending on whether Attribute Boost is in effect). For most targets, he can either split his dice pool with multiple attacks or make a called shot (Vitals) to boost DV without bumping into the accuracy limit. He's also good at unarmed combat with shock gloves, but that's definitely secondary. Finally, he has Control Thoughts as a completely different attack angle.

On defense, he's good but not great -- until you add in the sustained spells. Fade can keep Armor, Combat Sense, and Improved Invisibility sustained on himself via foci and Focused Concentration. They'd all be at Force 1, with more hits allowed via either reagents or Edge. That can give him 18 dice on defense (with potentially 11 more dice via dodging and full defense), armor of 20, and opponents suffering blind fire modifiers. His body is only 3, but between the defense dice, armor, and magical healing, that shouldn't be a big concern. Fade also has a spell defense pool of 5.

Outside of combat, Fade has solid perception and sneaking (mostly from attributes rather than skills), can summon weak spirits for their powers or general utility, and has a large and flexible array of spells. He's actually quite a strong caster, but his drain resistance is only moderate. That's tough if you're trying for big combat spells, but most utility spells work just fine with minimal drain and possibly a few reagents.

Did I miss something? I thought Mystic Adepts can pick physad powers and 1 category of 'mage stuff' so either sorcery, or enchanting or conjuring. But not more? Or is there an option to have more than 1 area?

That actually might be balanced. But no they have the full mage package except astral projection/perception/

Ah sorry, I was thinking aspected magician

The Missions "hot patch" errata changes the cost per PP for mystic adepts to 5 karma, and that's expected to become official errata. I updated the sample character to pay the extra karma -- he dropped one attribute point and one skill point he had paid for with karma, plus the qi focus that was granting an extra level of Improved Ability (saving both the bonding karma and karma that had been converted to nuyen to buy it).

He loses a die from attacks and one from drain resistance, but overall the changes are pretty minor. The increased PP cost does help some -- it means you have to spread your chargen resources even thinner for a type of character that already has issues with that.

Could you detail how you spent Priorities and Karma on this character? I tried to re-create him, but I seem to be doing something horribly wrong, because the numbers just won't add up.

Sure. Priorities were:

A: Magic (mystic adept)
B: Attributes
C: Resources
D: Race (human)
E: Skills

Karma was spent on:

30 karma for 6 power points (then -1 PP for Essence loss)
10 karma for 1 attribute point (raising Cha from 1 to 2)
4 karma for Focused Concentration 1
4 karma to bond two Force-1 sustaining foci
2 karma for 1 skill point (Sneaking 1)
-25 karma for negative qualities (Code of Honor, Spirit Bane, Prejudiced)

Magic A comes with two skills at 5 (in this case Spellcasting and Counterspelling), plus the 18 points from priority and 1 from karma for the total of 29. Augmentations and gear should add up to just a hair under 140k.

*phew* Thanks chummer, for a moment there I was worried that I totally screwed up the formulas in my Excel char sheet.

Very interesting build, indeed.

Good build, but I'm not much seeing the overpowered-ness. I see a character with no social skills who defaults with 1 die, who is also a bit more focused in his other skills. He's great at shooting automatics, can hold up in a fistfight, and is good at throwing around spells, but I'm honestly not bothered by this build because it's so focused.

Also his Logic of 2 isn't doing any favors for Drain rolls. Since he's Hermetic, his Drain rolls are even lower than average. So yeah-I'm not seeing the big problem here at all.

+1. Seems like a not-that-great mage, with some combat ability that's a little too reliant on sustained magic and low body. No offense to the original poster, but this build doesn't seem that impressive at all. I will admit that I'm the player-type that sees characters with few skills as kinda boring...

No character can do everything -- this character certainly needs to team up with a Face. The balance issues I see are:

• With his sustained spells up (which takes 1 turn of prep and can be sustained indefinitely), he can outfight any sam or adept. I see that alone as a significant problem -- mystic adepts shouldn't be the kings of personal combat.
• Even with such a strong combat focus, low-Force spells and spirits give him lots of other capabilities. He can heal and remotely scout (via spirits) -- those are things a sam could also do well via first aid and a bit of rigging, but it's starting to be a stretch for the sam. Imagine if the sam could also fly, see through walls, and control minds.

The Logic of 2 is unfortunate -- that went down from 3 with the increase to 5 karma per PP. Chargen for a mystic adept is definitely a balancing act, and the points are stretched thin.

A well-built mystic adept isn't a god who single-handedly breaks the game. It just looks to me like it's a very strong option during chargen that overshadows sams and adepts in particular.

Indeed... Gotta have me my skills. My Cyberlogician had 84 skills, My Merc has 53 or so, and my current MysAd has almost 50 (I think) of them, though not at high levels, and 13 of those are languages that he knows (rather than being on chips). Skills are king, in my book.