As we already know (and have complained about), combat magic took a pretty significant hit in SR5. I've been thinking about some way to bridge the gap between a mage throwing a fire spell and a guy shooting a heavy pistol (or even an assault rifle, maybe!). I was considering house ruling in some kind of indirect combat spell fetish or even a focus that added it's rating to the base DV of a spell. In game it would look something like Henry Dresden's blasting rod or staff, basically, obviously magical at a glance. What I have so far is that each fetish/focus must be tied to a specific element, and they cap out at force 4. (Thus, a guy with six magic can throw out a base 10P fireball, with -6 AP. About on par with an AK-97 with APDS, but trading reliability and sustainability for concealability). Still trying to figure out what a good price/availability for such an item would be.

Does anyone else have any ideas along this line or suggested changes to this idea? Lastly, has anyone run a combat spell focused mage in SR5 successfully under RAW?

I would put such a Focus at around (Forcex4)R Availability, put the pricing at around Forcex12,000 nuyen with a Forcex4 bonding Cost at a rough glance.

Wasn't fireball's drain in SR4 Force /2 +5 or 3. I don't recall.

So in either case you are looking at 8 or 9 drain for a F10 fireball.

In SR5 it is F-1. so 9 drain for F10. Not a huge nerf there. The biggest nerf was probably to stunbolt.

LOL at the thread title, not to be confused with combatfetish.com, LOL. NSFW!

So how are weapon foci in the new edition? Back in SR 2 and SR 3 they were pretty pan-ultimate. A dikoted nodachi weapon focus wielded by a troll was seemingly more effective than a lot of the ranged weapons you could get including missile launchers and the like. Have they also been nerfed?

Weapon Foci will be making a comeback in 5th edition, since Melee weapons are no longer obsolete to guns, now that you can only make 1 attack/round the fact that Melee is a Complex Action matters far less. We will be seeing Blademaster Adept concepts making a rise, I am already planning out a Dual Blade master concept myself. seems it might get a lil expensive going for 2 high level Weapon Foci.

Is that Harry's secret cousin?

*checks it out* That... is actually pretty awesome.

Gorramit, I had to check that out. Why?!?

Well, Dikote™ doesn't exist as of SR4 (like skinlinks don't exist as of SR5), save for the SR4 2050 roll back book...

i don't really consider mages to be in a particularly bad situation when it comes to combat. it now actually involves some risk if they want to cast a spell... that's not a bad thing. direct spells have been nerfed pretty hard. that... well, they might have been nerfed a bit too much, but i'm still not inclined to think it's a bad thing. i think someone actually did a comparison and found that it was worthwhile against targets that are slightly above average in soaking damage vs using a gun.

and indirect combat spells got a pretty nice boost. great AP, and the area ones work like grenades (dodge test? what dodge test? man, next you'll be wanting your armour to work well against this stuff).

so uhhh... yeah. not really feeling a ton of concern for mage's combat viability. they really aren't hurting badly at all.

Jaid- My only issue with combat spells is that I can load a heavy pistol with ADPS ammo and do better for no cost to the character besides using illegal ammo. I would think that since indirect combat spells cause drain, they ought to at least perform better than a 800 nuyen pistol. At least without risking physical drain.

You are neglecting all sorts of things in that comparison.

You have a much better range than that pistol.
The pistol runs out of ammo.
The pistol can be spotted and taken away from you by anyone with a MAD scanner, or who pats you down, or who has a high perception - and that is before it used.
Your indirect combat spells have better AP than the pistol - even with APDS - and without risking physical drain.
Your indirect combat spells do elemental effects, which the pistol does not.
Your spells damage beings with resistance to normal weapons.

Do you REALLY need them to be MORE powerful? I don't think so.

True. But most firefights take place in pretty close range in SR, at least in my experience.
So do spells. Your ammo just happens to be your health.
Magic potential can be spotted before AND after the fact, and that can only be mitigated with post creation karma expenditure.
1 extra AP is not worth 2 damage
There are weapons that can do elemental effects, but you're right. This is a pretty good point.
Pistols with APDS ammo can damage spirits up to a decent force. For higher force spirits you might want to consider assault rifles/banishing/hand grenades/running away.

So, I guess the question is does a range advantage that's not often useful, slightly better AP, and elemental effects balance out leaving behind evidence, a 25% damage penalty when compared to pistols and an almost 50% damage penalty compared to longarms, and using your stun track as ammunition, or potentially your health pool if you want to get rid of the damage penalty?

yeah, but with magic you can also be a tool box of other goodies too. And in a few of the novels they mention the best combat spell a mage can have is gun.

Definitely NOT safe for work.

this. a thousand times this.

tell you what though... as soon as i can use my pistols skill to make myself and/or other people/objects levitate, control people's minds, change people into different shapes, detect my enemies, grant myself a bonus superior to having the absolute best initiative-enhancing 'ware, instantly heal people (note: the healing is instant, you sustain it to make it permanent, not to make it happen), and do all of the other things that magic can do, we can revisit this 'problem'. until then, i feel like magic not being the absolute best solution for everything is not something i'm going to shed a tear over when it is already one of the best solutions to almost anything you can possibly name, with the exception of using the matrix (and even then, it's been pretty clearly shown that adept hackers make normal hackers look like chumps).

Double post - sorry

So all of your firefights take place at less than 5 meters? Seems a little odd to me. If it is further than that, you are going to start having range penalties. And you've never fought outdoors? If you have, 60 meters is not far at all.



No, it just seems similar. Ammo is used every time you fire a gun. That is an absolute fact. Your health does not decrease every time you cast a spell. Your health has the potential to decrease. And, if you make your character correctly, and don't overcast, you should almost never take drain. For instance, a starting character can have 11 dice to resist drain. Cast Lightning Bolt at Force 5. So you have a limit of 5 - in order for that to be an issue, you are going to have to be rolling more than 15 dice on average. You now have to resist a 2 DV drain - with 11 dice. What are the odds of you rolling only 1 hit on 11 dice? Very nearly zero. Which means that on average, you are going to be shooting that lightning bolt every turn with no ill effects, and never running out of ammo.




Yes, but BEFORE you use it, it can ONLY be spotted by other awakened characters - which make up a fraction of the population, and some of them don't have astral perception. EVERYONE (including drones, and other unmanned scanners) can spot weapons - AND there is no post-creation process to make guns hidden.



Thank you - it is.



What do you consider "decent force"? How about Force 6 Fire Spirit - which any starting summoner can bring. It has 12 hardened armor. I shoot my pistol at it, and it dodges using 16 dice. How many successes do you think you are going to have - given that probably aren't even rolling that many dice? Let's be generous and say you roll 1 more successes than it does. Now it has a Hardened armor of 7. Your DV is 9 - it gets 4 automatic successes, reducing your damage to 5, and now it resists with 14 more dice. But again - you probably aren't even going to hit it.

With a manabolt - you roll your dice, it rolls only 6 dice, and however many extra successes you get, it does damage - period. LOTS better.

And if your answer is - well, if you only have a gun, you should consider running away - then how does that make your argument look when if you have magic you can banish it and or kill it with spells (which ignore its immunity - as well as its ridiculously high Reaction+Intuition?)

Not only that, you have to actually reload weapons - no reload time for combat spells.

Also - no recoil for spells either.

Spells are also completely silent (stunbolt, manabolt, etc)

And as the previous poster said, you can already have your magic do everything else in the game - is this really such a detriment to you that maybe guns are a little better than your spells? If so, by the way, you can buy a gun. A mundane gunslinger doesn't have the ability to just buy a spell.

It seems like people want a mage's damage to fall into some impossible region where the following are true:

1. The mage is always better off using spells than guns or at least pistols (which they very well might be with their skill, but that's often ignored, so oh well)
2. The mage should not be as effective or more effective in combat than the street sam, at dealing damage.
3. The drain should be high enough that people aren't throwing super high force spells around, but drain on combat spells should not be such that a mage would be crazy to use them and it needs to be less than instant victory spells like manipulation. Also, drain doesn't matter or it's absolutely the most important thing (depends on who's doing the assessing)
4. The mage should only do enough damage that it takes two rounds to knock out a target, otherwise, they'll outshine the sam, especially since the mage can more easily attack multiple targets.
5. The mage should be able to do enough damage that they take out a target with every combat spell, otherwise it's more effective to just mind control and suicide a target or use any of the other spells they might have in their arsenal.
6. The mage must be able to hold their own in combat and shine, but being on the same level as the dedicated hacker or other non-combat specialists is not acceptable.
7. The mage is the most powerful, magicrun. But decreasing their power is not-acceptable. But they should be rebalanced so they don't outclass everyone else. But the rebalancing should be done without them losing anything.

Well, those conditions cannot be met and it seems like everyone's trying to fix the catch-22. If a mage is always better off using a spell than a gun, it means the spell does more damage than a gun or at least than a pistol. Which means it's probably in the Assault rifle range, so the mage is on par with the sam and that's unacceptable, because why would you play a Sam?

Honestly, let the mage be worse at combat and only be situationally better. They've got a lot of other things to be good at. The face or hacker isn't complaining when they have to grab a pistol. Sure, a combat focused mage should be better than an average grunt, but there are spells for that, specializations, foci, etc.

Well, between a combination of sustaining foci, and various spells, along with a gun, a mage can become a better gunslinger than the street sam. (and we won't even discuss a mystic adept)

This... My current MysAd (SR4A) is stupid effective due to spell selection. Unfortunately, he only has two Combat Spells. One for Spirits (Spirit Bolt) and one for Living Beings that acts like a concussion grenade that has no drift (Blast, Stun Damage Only). He has 1 fewer Dice for Combat spells as he does for Shooting a Gun. His Direct Damaging Attack is a Shiawase Tactical 73 (Assault Rifle) heavily modded. His magical wins are not because of damage, but because he thinks out of the box, and slings some pretty potent Environmental Mojo. I DO NOT outshine the Samurai in Damage output (hell, I don't even outshine the Combat Mage in Damage Output), but I tend to get many more victories due to coming at problems from unexpected angles. Anyone can shoot a person... Magical Innovation, on the other hard, is often much harder to counter.

wait, wtf, did they completely take fetishes out of the core book? I can't find them....

Yep, fetishes are currently non-existent in SR5, just like skinlinks.

Maybe we'll see them in a magic splat book, provided that they're not considered "too powerful" like the skinlink.

Well in that case I can't really argue too much for them one way or another. As I recall in SR4 it was a flat -2 to drain? Would we be able to go with that model?

No, was a +2 to your Drain Resistance dice pool for a limited spell of that school, and you couldn't cast said limited spell without the fetish.

And you could learn a non-limited version of the same spell for the same 5 karma it cost to learn the limited version.

All in all it seemed rather balanced to me.