Back from the theorizing:

I build such an myst. adept for my round and she kicked ass. She dodged everything the four players were throwing at her and was summoning high-level Air spirits at leisure. They did have an explicit anti-mage in their midst, who would Banish her spirits, otherwise, those would have taken the group apart. Also, I opted for no sustained foci, otherwise that would have been a serious liability.

They finally killed her by running her over with a car (at that time, she was out of Initiative, due to some coordinated burst fire, so no Gymnastics, wounded, drained and also down to one Edge. But being run over in a car, after just having summoned a F10-spirit was too epic an end to prolong the fight even further).

The whole fight was 6 turns and got much applause from the players. Never told them, she had no Karma, though Just cheated in some money for a Qi-Focus (for max Reflexes) and a bound spirit to start with.

Broken rules or no, SR5 is a lot of fun to play.

BTW: kill Breakdancer (our group-slang for high-Dodge chars) with lots of bang and/or magic and/or something that you are really good at (e.g. driving cars) and a little patience

best way? from half a mile away with a Silenced Sniper Rifle, better to not let them have a chance to dodge.

My wife's adept has Danger Sense lv 4 and Combat Sense lv. 2.

I suspect she might dodge...

,,, And now I want to make a character who's Qi Focus for Danger Sense is Spider-Man's head - maybe with the "Spidey Sense" lines as Combat Sense.

Does a Qi Focus trigger a shamanic mask effect like spells can?

Because having a shamanic mask of spidey would be awesome

It's actually +8 initiative, +4 dice... Noticed this last night.

I see. That's even more powerful than I thought.

So now you can have +8 with this spell, +4 with Increase Attribute (Reaction) and +4 with Increase Attribute (Intuition) for a total of +16 Initiative and five initiative dice? You can then add Combat Sense spell and Combat Sense adept power to become Chiun from The Destroyer? (Maybe you need crazy high Willpower or Improved Ability (Gymnastics) for that.) Reaction and Intuition are also part of the inherent physical and mental limits.

This seems really strong.

1. you are allowed dodge to AoEs at -2.

2. combat sense and danger sense= adept rarely, and I mean RARELY ever gets surprised.

That's actually an errata issue. There's no defense test in the area/grenade rules, but then elsewhere it says you get -2 dice for defense against area attacks. The expectation (reference) is that the mention of -2 dice will be removed in errata, and there's just no defense test.

Wouldn't that make Indirect AoE spells way more powerful?

Considering they act like grenades and grenades are considered rather powerful in this version of the rules, it's not surprising.

Personally, I think AoEs shouldn't get a damage upgrade based on net hits. Since AoE spells are equally powerful from one edge to the other, the damage shouldn't really change based on where you land the thing, as long as the target is inside. Were I to GM, I think I'd house rule AoE spells doing F damage resisted normally (Body+Armor+Enhancement) with net hits on the spellcasting test only reducing scatter rather than staging damage up.

For AoE spells in the new style, don't you only count the net hits after the initial 1-3 hits for placement toward damage anyway?

IE, Roll 1 - 3 hits just normal damage, possible scatter depending on if its 1,2 or 3 and only then anything over that would be applied to damage?

That would account for a fair amount of the hits right there if your worried about aoe spell damage ramping up too much.

Ah, just re-read the threshold rules. I was initially under the impression that you calculated with all the hits as long as you beat the threshold, but now I see that the hits used to meet the threshold aren't included. That's a lot more reasonable and am generally OK with it. Thanks for clarifying it for me!

Don't you mean the CyberPope?

It's an insect spirit boys... get the FAB III!

Reed Richards, Ben Grimm and their pal Scruffy the Janitor back in their college days before Reed met the Storms were known as the Fab 3.......

The problem with indirect AOE combat spells are not really the net hits. Try multicasting as many as possible: once your mage is powerful enough to manage those spells' drain at higher power levels, they will inflict enough damage and have enough AP on their own without the need for additional net hits (which you don't need anyway since the spell can't be dodged). Moreover, the spells' radius should be high enough to compensate for dispersion and - icing on the cake - the drain is guaranteed to be stun damage.

The similarity with grenades should stop at the dispersion; IMO it should still be possible to defend and completely dodge an indirect AOE combat spell.

if you can dodge a 7 meter fireball (radius? I forget) you can dam well dodge a grenade lol

Grenades can indeed be dodged, but since SR5 uses the termal-detonators from Star Wars... who knows.

I don't think the idea people shoot for in the dodge test is to dodge the area of effect but to reduce the effect the blast has on you. Make your self small, use whatever cover there is, drop prone, feet towards explosion point etc anything but just sit there like an idiot and soak 16Dv -2 AP from a grenade with pretty much no options to defend your self.

same difference, if you can dodge AoE magic attacks you can dodge grenades. personally, with the nerf combat magic got, I am quite ok with the no dodge them bit (dodging still reduces damage by net hits possibly) but you still get hit.

This exactly. Dodge should be used, maybe at some sort of penalty as you really are not going to be full on dodging the effect rather just trying to reduce the exposure to this, to help reduce the effect a bit. You are still being hit by it to some degree.