well, no. taking something that is too strong and nerfing it until it is too weak obviously won't ever lead to balance, no matter what archetype you're looking at. why would their former level of power have anything to do with how much power they *should* have? if we were to somehow come up with an objective way to quantify the power of an archetype, and we decide that the ideal is to have 5 units of power, it doesn't matter whether something has 1 power units, 6 power units, or 100 power units, the desired target is to hit 5 power units. taking something that has 9 and then nerfing it down to 1 doesn't average things out to 5 power units and make something balanced, it just takes something that was too good and makes it suck, leading to needing to make it better than it's new state.

regardless of how powerful technomancers were in the previous edition, the proper target was to make them about as good as anything else provided the same level of commitment is made. now, we don't have any objective method of quantifying things such that we can point to a given archetype and say it has 1 or 5 or 10 power units, so the best we can hope for is to get things fairly close... but either way, how powerful they were before has absolutely nothing to do with how powerful they should be now; how powerful they should be now is the same regardless of what they were like in a previous edition.

Was just trying to say that if technomancers were properly expensive for the power they probably wouldn't've been gimped so much.

Well, I do hope for an errata'ed priority table, because this is where the problem lies, isn't it?

However, I just noticed that astral projection has been taken away from an aweful lot of people.

I am somewhat divided on that. Yes, it cuts down on the number of occasion when the magic people do their reconnaisance thing and the rest twindles their thumb, sort of like the same problem the Hackers have. In our troupe, we have 3 awakened characters and not one of them can astrally project. Still, they do magical recon by summoning spirits and having them scout out the location. So the TM does the Data Search and places some drones, the face (and everyone else) does some legwork and the mage (MysAd) summons an air spirit to scout out the magic defenses. Weirdly, this works out well. I do remember Sr4 runs that started with a botched astral recon, usually due to a player mistake, unsettling the whole plan (not necessarily a bad thing). Still, I can force Bad Things by GM by ruling that the spirit was caught and the astral signature traced with a ritual, if it is part of the plot.

Now to the downside. It takes away alot of detail. The spirit will never make a dare to press through a mana barrier, it will not be curious about weird background count and it will only tell what I, as the GM, allow it to tell. The Astral World, worked out with such detail, is now rarely used, if at all.

Yes. I read more negative comments on technomancers and their karma cost than the opposite.

And why compare any character to another really is a better question.
but mystic adepts were a choice if augmentation was not high your list I guess.

depends on perspective, i guess. mystic adepts, so far as i am aware, have never had it. neither did regular adepts. prior to SR4, aspected magicians also did not have it, if i'm not mistaken.

so from my perspective, unless they take it away from regular full magicians, they aren't taking it away from anyone =S

Without spells grounding through active foci, and with even more retarded possession enemies, astral projection is more of a hindrance than a help these days anyway.

Indeed. I don't recall Astral Projection ever being available to anyone except full magicians, even through metamagics.

-paws

well, some spirits can allow it. great form guidance spirits being one example from 4th edition.

Shamanic and Elemental Adepts had it, not sure if that was SR2 or SR3.

SR2. I think they could get away with it given their much more limited lists of things to cast. Where a 'sorcerer' could cast every spell out there(and damn good), the Shamanic/Elemental adepts were generally only casting 1 or 2 types. (Of course, Shamanic adepts could 'game' it a bit, a Wolf shaman adept could cast both Combat and Detection spells while summoning Forest spirits, but even then that locked them out of the other 3, still pretty limited). Hermetic adepts could only ever cast 1 type and 1 type only, since each element was linked to a type(save Health, which they could never cast as I mentioned.)

So giving them Projection? IMO it worked. I don't think though, anything else had the ability to project besides those two, and the Shamanic/Elemental aspected folks haven't been around since 2e. Part of my brain remembers some Astral Adept around somewhere(an adept that worked pretty much in astral space) but I think that ended up being a houserule muddling with actual rules since I can't find it in either the Grimoire or MitS.

I stand corrected.