First of all i want to know if i am really the only one that is bothered by the fact that direct combat spells are now completely useless? I wrote and heard a lot about how much quicker the combat rules are, but regarding magic nobody seems to see the same problems as i do. So maybe i am too focused on the problems, maybe i have overread some important section in the core-book, so please help me out.

Secondly i need to know when the SR5-errata will follow as a download. Will it be released when the german SR5-core is published? Will there be a notification from Battlecorps or Drivethrough for all buyers of the PDF-version to update or download the changes?

Thank you

How are direct combat spells useless? So far, I do not share this assessment.

SR4: Spell power of 6 and 4 net successes cause 10 damage. Result: Enemy stunned. Drain (F/2)-1 = 2
SR5: spell power of 6 and 4 net successes cause 4 damage. Result: Enemy tired? Drain F-3 = 3

The good old fashioned stunbolt stuns no more, except your enemy is already half asleep or drunk. Drain is the same, so he gets 4 damage while you might get probable nearly the same effect on your mage. Pretty useless to me and not worth the eventual stun.

Direct combat spells aren't useless, they're just no longer godlike and exploitable to be even more godlike.

Dealing damage in this edition can be quite hard. Direct combat spells bypass the two-attribute dodge roll, and the easily improved Body and Armor soak roll, making them much more reliable in terms of dealing any damage. The trade-off is that they don't tend to deal much damage all at once unless you take exceptional measures.

This makes them unlike indirect spells and guns, which tend to do a whole lot of damage far less often. If you run a damage-per-action analysis, they're still actually quite good. And at standard Force levels they tend to be a minimal Drain risk, which means that you can hit things over and over and over again without really injuring yourself.

Further, with Reagents or Edge, they can really put the hurt on something without increasing the Drain risk (though it may become Physical in a hurry -- but 2P Drain isn't exactly a nightmare to soak).

The reality is that they have a niche, just like any other spell or gear. They're no longer always the best choice in all situations. This is a good thing.

This.

I would have liked them to still do maybe force or at least half force damage but just give them way more sting in the tail for the caster (i.e much more drain than elemental spells). That way you can still achieve your one cast stun but you would only do it when stunning must be the only option, rather than it being a low drain replacement for physical damage that can just be followed up with a cap to the head at the end of combat.

I am sorry to disagree, but the "niche" your are talking about is not visible for me. Is it to finish off somebody that was already hurt? I think you know as good as i do, that SR5 is even more deadly than SR4 and as least the way we play, you don´t have the time to wear down an enemy slowly. Mages still are low on physical attributes and don´t handle damage very well. I think most of the time "glass-cannon" is a viable term for them. If they don´t "cannon" anymore, the mages are useless and limited to buff and support. This might be ok for players that prefer to play mundanes, but for every player of an awakened, it is a kick in the face.

Dealing damage in SR5 is absolutely no problem, it is even easier than before. Dealing damage with magic, THAT is a problem.

It's for people who are proving to be exceptionally difficult to damage. When your target has wired reflexes, titanium bone lacing, and full body armor with a helmet, trying to sneak damage past his 14 dodge dice and 30 soak dice might seem a little difficult compared to the 3 dice he has to resist a direct mana spell.

Machiavelli. I gotta side with Epicedion and Smash on this issue. Indirect combat spells were overpowered in 4(a). They bypassed armour and any form of dodging and caused less drain than the elemental direct combat spells. That was simply put overpowered. Indirect combat spells were nobrainer choices.
Maybe they've been hit too hard with the nerfbat in 5th ed., but they needed a nerf. Personally I would simply have increased their drain to equal the other direct combat spells, or maybe even one point higher, but that's me.

What shall I say... I love to play mages. Still I think the change to direct combat spells was a good and necessary one. Like it has allready been pointed out, combat spells in SR4 were a no-brainer and simply overpowered.

It's changes like that, which make playing a mage so much more tempting to me, as you finally need to know when and how to use your tools. Magic is still very powerful and with non-mage chracters, I fear direct combat spells more, than their indirect counterparts, as there is not much I can do to avoid them.

SR5 is not more deadly than SR4, it simply is deadly in another way. It is based on the asumption, that it is hard to actually hit someone, so you are hit less often. When you are hit though it really hurts. That is what knifes, guns and indirect combatspells are for. Direct combat spells go around that. They are easy, almost guaranteed and thus lesser damage. The typical tank (or brickwall or whatever) build, wont be easily damage by guns or indirect cs, they will however be vulnerable to direct combat spell. In said case, these "useless" spells, as you call them, deal more damage, than most other means and that is only one example.

Like it has been pointed out multiple times now: Direct combatspells, are deadly, in their own way.

Know how to use your tools.

I totally agree that the spells were overpowered in SR4(A), but like it was in the past, they have changed one bad thing for another. Like you said direct combat spells were so good, that no sane player would have chosen indirect ones. They could be dodged, could be resisted with armor AND had more drain. But SR5 just switched the points. It nerfed the direct ones to a point , that make them worse than they had been in every previous edition, while it gets more difficult to hurt anybody with indirect spells. So what is left for the mage? The role as a supporter that need to hide behind everything more than ever? Sucks massively. Of course i hit the tank with 3-4 damage. And with what will he hit me? With 10+ successes damage. Thank you very much. Great niche. I don´t think that they will change that in an errata.

The enemy will roll Willpower of 3 for one expected hit and take an expected 3 damage, not 4. The magician expects to take no drain because no 5e magician in their right mind would exist with Willpower + Logic/Intuition less than 9.

How to use this tool:

1) Choose a mana direct combat spell. The last thing you need is to oppose 12 dice and do zero damage.
2) Pray for good weather. Not only can the GM rule that the environment makes your targets invisible, but moderate rain/fog/smoke removes 3 dice from your pool, resulting in one less damage. Hope they don't take cover, use flash bangs or smoke grenades or turn off the lights or else you're not casting that spell.
3) Pray they don't have a magician, because every three rating points in Magic + Counterspelling lowers your damage by 1.
4) Don't be drained or injured. Every -3 in modifiers lowers your damage by 1.
5) Don't sustain spells. Three sustained spells lowers your damage by 2.
6) Avoid background counts.

How to be proactive:

1) Choose Exceptional Attribute (Magic) for Magic 7
2) Have Spellcasting of 6.
3) Specialize in combat spells for +2 dice.
4) Have a mentor spirit give you +2 dice to combat spells.
5) Have a good team leader. She might decide to direct your actions. For every 9 dice she gets, you'll expect to have +3.
6) Use a bound spirit to aid sorcery. Every 1500 nuyen you spend gets you 3 extra dice.
7) Have a rating 4 combat spell focus.
Spend Edge to get exploding dice and ignore the limit.

So 7 + 6 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 3 + 4 = 27 exploding dice dice, for 11 expected hits, minus 1 (for their 3 Willpower) for 10 damage. That was easy.

ummm... you haven't looked too closely at *indirect* combat spells yet, have you?

seriously. look at them.

you can dish out damage in an area with indirect combat spells that has an AP equal to force and your hits beyond 3 increase damage. no dodge roll is possible.

for added fun, in situations where you can afford to take a large amount of stun drain, you can use reagents on high-force castings (to set the maximum successes lower than or equal to your magic, don't want to take physical drain) so you get things like 12+ damage with -12 AP in a 12 meter radius. with a good drain resistance pool and some edge, you might not even take much drain.

you have plenty of cannon in there, plus a crudload of utility. and of course, last i checked, magicians get hands at no added cost, which lets them use guns just like everyone else, if they need it.

In play so far I'd say yeah direct combat spells look pretty bad. They may have been over nerfed. Sure there may be a time where I'm like oh noes we can't hit the super ninja so i'll hit him with this direct combat spell for tiny damage and that is useful, but that will be rare enough where I think it is safe to say they aren't really worth there drain.

This is how combat pans out for us. Any PC with a gun shoots and the victim is dead or close to it, PC who took the brawler archetype(using multiple levels of critical strike) hit somebody for moderate damage, high damage with the bow, mage nicks multiple people and risks some drain. Yeah the mage looks bad in direct combat. Still overall the mage has a bad ass bag of tricks so I think its a really big add to the party. With indirect spells the mage has the option to go big and match gun damage but he will likely be taking some serious drain if he wants to match any of the bigger guns or even pistols with specialized ammo.

And you think Dumpshock would know that?

The German SR books have no effect on the US books, they are published by two different companies.

Usually it works that way. You get an e-mail when the PDF is updated, and have 7 days for 7 new downloads. If you miss that window, you write to Battlecarps or Drivethru, and they can open up your downloads again.

The fluff and fiction have long held that, by and large, the most effective and efficient combat spell a mage has access to is "Gun." I call it a good thing when the rules swing more or less that way.

Considering that last I knew the errata were being compiled by a freelancer on his own time because noone at Catalyst was even interested in putting any out...

In 4th edition direct combat spells were more reliably effective than firearms, were all but irresistible if you didn't have a counterspeller nearby, and most mages could go on casting all day due to low drain.

In other words, with minimal investment a mage could reliably out damage a street sam for very little investment (Barring the street sam carrying heavy weapons).

In 5th edition, street sams reliably out-damage mages (barring spirits). I have absolutely no problem with the dedicated combat characters being more effective at hurting people than the spellcasters.

Agreed, but having said that there's no reason a mage shouldn't be able to be combat focussed. A mage specialised in flinging around fire should be pretty effective.

I'll still be flinging powerbolts around at tanks as well.........

Really, the mage's niche there is more in elemental AOE combat spells and illusions than just straight mana-based combat spells.

Right up until the enemy pulls out spirits or dual-natured creatures, and the mage goes to town.

a mage specialized in flinging around fire *is* pretty effective. they get to use their "do almost everything" skill (which will, most likely, be maxed, on account of... well, it's the skill you can use for almost anything except for conjuring spirits, enchanting stuff, and hacking).

their dice pool will likely be comparable to the decked-out street samurai if they really build for it (specialize in combat spells, get yourself an appropriate focus - power or spellcasting(combat) are both options - and max out the skill and your magic attribute. you can fairly easily start with 18 dice for combat spells, and that isn't exactly awful. particularly since 12 of that dice pool applies to so many other actions you'll be taking.

Indirect spells quickly outpace Street Sams for armour penetration, While direct spells ignore defenses entirely.
Indirect spells also often boast secondary effects such as setting their target on fire, melting them with acid, or electrocuting them with lightning.
Mages also get area spells, which at high forces outclass grenades and even at low forces are quite effective at bringing down mobs (or setting them on fire).

A focused combat mage can easily match a sammie in battle, just in different areas. Also, nothing stops a mage from carrying a gun as well as their spells, something most Sams can't match.

Spell Defense doesn't use magic, you only get to add the allocated dice from your [counterspelling skill level] pool. That 's an SR3 type pool that only refreshes at the beginning of the mage's next turn.

IMO SR5's spell defense rules are among the few rules that are a flat improvement compared to SR4 (where there was no reason not put full spell defense on ALL allies in LOS at ALL times). It didn't use magic dice in SR4 either, btw - people tend to overlook the difference between spell defense and dispelling.

Honestly, thank you for the math, but it doesn´t make the reality better than it is. ^^ We seldomly have "if the enemy doesn´t move and everything runs perfectly, he might drop" situations. But if these rare occation happens, YEAH combat-spell.

Because obviously you need to one-hit-KO every goon you meet.

It has absolutely nothing to do with that Draco18s, and you know it.

Clearly it does, because if a spell used to do 10 damage (and one-hit-KOs) and was "good" and now that same spell does 4 damage (and does not) and is therefore "bad" clearly the measuring stick is being able to one-hit-KO the opposition.

Funny... I see the measuring stick as one thing not measuring up to something of similar capability. *shrug*

And that capability is...?

A Direct Spell should be about as effective as an Indirect Spell. Currently, that is not the case. Sadly, It was not so in SR4A either.
But then, most of My Magician Characters rarely use Combat spells to start with, so... *shrug*
Case in Point, my Current Magician Character (SR4A) is capable of FAR more damage with a Gun than a Combat Spell. So why would I ever choose a Combat Spell over my Gun?

Yeah... that has never been the fun-part of magic, no matter if overpowered or not.

Thanks for pointing out my mistake that Counterspelling doesn't use Magic rating. Believe it or not, I made that mistake on my proofread edit. Trying to think of too much at once.

But hold the phone! I made another mistake. I forgot to add the six exploding edge dice. That bumps the dice pool up to 33 exploding dice, so let's expect 13 hits to be conservative. BOOOOM!! Or you could get the initial result without having to spend the 1500 nuyen on the spirit or having the elf tell you what to do.

A better way would be to roll the 27 dice, spend 300 or so nuyen on reagents to ignore the limit and spend the Edge to reroll failures. With 9 hits and 18 failures, rerolling those would give an expected 6 more hits for a total of 15. That troll is going to SLEEP.

So now that I've gotten all of that entertaining comedy out of my system, the change does make the combat mage less dangerous and requires a real commitment to focus on combat spell dice pools if maximum damage is the goal.

A player wanting a do-it-all magician has three skill groups to work with on top of Assensing, Astral Combat, and the other must have skills that runners need, like Perception. On top of that, maxing their drain attributes is a must in this edition. Players wanting a magician face have two more skill groups on top of that to consider (Which is why this popular character type doesn't work for me personally). Telling them that to be combat oriented they need high Agility, Reaction, Intuition and Firearms is a bit much since they start the game with fewer attributes and skills than mundanes to begin with and cyberware isn't an attractive option.

Real combat characters get more initiative passes, deal more damage on every one of those passes, dodge better, and soak damage better. On the flipside, there are ways around it, but I think some GMs would be unhappy with them. (Oversized dice pools, extreme alchemy, initiating, overpowered foci, etc.)

"Just as effective" measured before resisting, or after? And if after, against what type of target? If before, then you're doing it wrong.

Quick and dirty analysis:

Force 6 (X)bolt (12 dice) vs average joe (W3): 3 damage, 3 drain

Force 6 Lightning Bolt (12 dice) vs average joe (B3, R3, I3, Armor 12) -- 2 net hits, 8P -6AP: 5 damage, 3 drain

--

Force 6 (X)bolt vs average troll joe (W3): 3 damage, 3 drain

Force 6 Lightning Bolt vs average troll joe (B8, R3, I3, Armor 12) -- 2 net hits, 8P -6AP: 4 damage, 3 drain

--

Force 6 (X)bolt vs upgraded joe (W3): 3 damage, 3 drain

Force 6 Lightning Bolt vs upgraded joe (B4, R6, I4, Armor 15) -- 1 net hit, 7P -6AP: 3 damage (stun only), 3 drain

--

Force 6 (X)bolt vs upgraded troll joe (W3): 3 damage, 3 drain

Force 6 Lightning Bolt vs upgraded troll joe (B10, R5, I4, Armor 15) -- 1 net hit, 7P -6AP: 1 damage (stun only), 3 drain

--

Force 6 (X)bolt vs street samurai joe (W4): 2-3 damage, 3 drain

Force 6 Lightning Bolt vs street samurai joe (B5, R9, I5, Armor 18) -- 0 net hits, 0P -0AP: 0 damage, 3 drain

While that's nice to see the math, that wasn't actually the question I was asking.
I was asking a game design question: where is it that these spells should be doing comparable damage?

I just wanted to add my tabletop experience with a shadowrun 5 magic user and spells. I've played five or six sessions with some veteran SR players who are playing non-optimized builds and I think that the mage has been coming up short. He was feeling pretty useless in combat and decided to pick up a direct damage spell in order to help his lightning bolt spell (give them wounds to lower their dodge pool). While he's only used the spell in one fight so far he already seems to regret his decision to take it.

Even his indirect spell seems underpowered (don't even get me started on his armor spell!). This seems to be mainly down to his inability to limit their dodge pool (and his poor rolling in comparison to mine). He can't perform any kind of burst, and aiming is less useful than with a gun since spellcasting is a complex action. In addition is the threat of drain and sustaining spells. I believe he rolls 11 dice for attacking with spells and I don't think he'll be able to increase it for some time. The real shame is a lack of fetishes to temporarily increase dice pools like in past editions, reagents upping limit is only really useful in high drain situations.

He realized pretty early on it was just stupid to try and sustain the (useless) armor spell he had, 3 or 4 more armor dice don't seem worth 2 attack dice. You are much less likely to shrug off damage in this edition, meaning getting hurt will almost certainly start the slippery slope towards death. And while I like it, it places a real premium on things that keep you from being hit or make the other guy easier to hit rather than anything to do with damage.

The worst part is that there is no simpler way to raise his attack pool, especially for those times it really matters (like a main guy from the 2nd sprawl wilds adventure who killed him, forcing him to use edge). He only ended up with one edge which he just lost so that isn't an option. And it's not like he min-maxed to get that, he just wanted an elf mage with 6 magic.

His only options for raising his pool are to increase spellcasting skill (12 karma for 1 dice?) initiates AND increase his magic (35 karma + 13?), get a focus (a lot of nuyen on top of bonding) or possibly specialize (given his archetype he certainly wouldn't specialize in combat spells). The biggest problem seems to be if he were using a gun he could upgrade the gun, ammo, accessories, or augments in addition to skills/attributes, but the only equivalent for spellslingers are expensive foci. This niche used to be taken up by learning higher force spells and using fetishes. It's not like I want him to wipe out every encounter on his own, and it's not like the rest of the team made combat monsters that make him look pathetic. The problem is that a gun just seems better than a spell.

Even in theory the gun wielder seems more effective:

A force 6 lightning bolt with 11 dice is 3 or 4 successes on average, but the bad guys seem to nearly always dodge it. Actually my player seems to get more grazing hits than anything else making it unfortunate that the stun effect of his spell needs to do damage to stun them unlike shock gloves or the like. I've only thrown opposition from printed sources as well (sprawl wilds and the core book) so it's not like these are guys with huge dodge pools. Even if the mook only dodges his average 2 or 3 successes he still faces only 7 damage, though the armor piercing is great at high force (the risk of drain also goes up though) . A ganger mook rolls 8 dice against force 6, so takes an average 4 or 5 damage with a (minor) stun effect. Whereas with a max-power (the weapon the mook has) and the same pool of 11 semi-auto burst for the equivalent action means an average of 1 more net success, so 9 damage against 13 dodge pool means is close to 5 damage on average.

I find these pretty comparable, especially given the stun effect. The gun user has easily available explosive ammo however, not to mention smartlink would be cheaper than a focus. He also hits more often since he removes dodge dice with bursts which gives him more opportunities to injure his opponent thus beginning the injury modifiers earlier. Also background count and sustaining remove dice from the magic user, and there are not similar penalties to the gun user.

Sorry for the rambling.
cliff notes: Yeah, magic seems too crappy in combat.

That's always been the case.



I'm not sure anyone can make a non-optimised magician for combat and then complain that their bad at combat. Taking manipulation and making the opposition shoot each other is probably your best option anyway. Yes you can optimise guns for combat but I don't see how that's any different. Straight up your mage friend could specialise in combat spells, get a mentor spirit and a force 3 spellcasting focus for not a huge karma cost for an extra 7 dice and keep a bound spirit around for an extra few when you really want them to count.



What opposition mooks average 4 dice for defence checks? Maybe your mage needs to invest in elemental AoE spells? No dodge allowed. Maybe they should focus on making the other guys jobs easier? Focus on spirits do do all fighting?

Being a magician is not about being awesome at everything anymore. It requires specialisation. That I think is a good thing.

Notable, the Armour spell and Mystic Armour power have been indirectly nerfed as, due to shifting damage and armour values, a much higher roll or Rank is required for it to be effective. Now, it needs to give 9 armour to be equal to an armour vest, against 6 before.

You can think that is good or bad, but you cannot argue that it isn't different. That said, a Mage who doesn't devote himself to combat is SUPPOSED to be worse at it than the street sam who does.

A focused combat mage has a serious edge on a street sam in terms of flexibility.

A street sam has, what, 8 offensive combat skills (Firearms group, melee group, throwing, heavy weapons), with optional archery on top of that for total flexibility. ignoring one or more of those skills reduces their flexibility.

A combat mage has one specialization of one skill. with the right spells that can be melee, ranged and heavy weapons, lethal and non lethal, plus is more concealable than any gun unless you're being assensed.

Now on to bonuses: A street sam can get +2 from smartlink, +1 reflex recorder, and up to +4 in attribute boosts. A mage has theoretically unlimited bonuses from a focus, though granted they have to pay through the nose for them. On the flip side, that bonus is to all their combat skills (A smartlink will only help a sam with range weapons, reflex recorders need to be purchased at 1 per skill.)

The main advantage Street sams have is higher damage output. A missile launcher is unmatched by any spell a normal caster can muster, no lightning bolt is as hard to dodge as a full auto spray. The combat mage pays for being able to throw everything into one skill by needing to do so to match damage with conventional weapons. Everything has a price, remember?

I want to be clear here, this is a mage who is 'not devoted to combat' (by not having a focus or specialty I guess? what else can he have other than those and the spells?) being worse than a guy a skill, an attribute and a basic pistol.



Perhaps armor was too powerful before, but it used to actually stop bullets. Not all the time, but it made small guns less of a worry. That you would need 9 successes (at force 9) to be as effective as force 6 with 1 success in editions before 4th does mean that armor is a lot less powerful a spell than it was.

At force 6 you're dealing damage just under most heavy pistols (6P, -6 AP) with an indirect spell. Odds on your average runner mage has skill 6 and magic 6. that's 12 dice. To match up our 'guy with a skill, an attribute and a basic pistol' has skill 6 and attribute 6 as well (your comment specifically disallowed aiming aids).

That's not a minor investment, and the guy with the pistol can ONLY use his skill for his pistol.

You used to be able to soak low level firearms with the armor spell a lot better. While playing the game it has become clear that you take damage from being hit far more often than in SR 2-3, which is what I meant to say. soaking a poor shot from a poor gun happened a lot more before. Without staging and with the high base damage on weapons you will take some damage from nearly every hit (every hit for many characters), this was not the case before.




To be clear, he is non-optimized for combat only because he lacks a specialty (+2 dice), otherwise he should be useful. This isn't a 4 magic 3 skill kind of guy. I am not saying an optimized gun user is better, I am saying a similar gun user is better. He wants to play a mage, and mentor spirits seem like a replacement for totems for shaman so I don't think it is something he would do. Also, that 7 dice would only make (on average, but his limit doesn't have room for too many more) him equal to a guy with a slightly better gun or ammo, say an assault rifle with explosive and choosing not to long burst for whatever reason.




The numbers are all from the core book and the lowest level ganger therein.

I'd just like to see mages be as useful with magic (at a risk of drain) as they would be with a pistol when in combat. Having played the game, it seems clear that they are a bit underpowered.

I'm not disallowing anything, I'm pointing out that those aiming aids put a gun guy over the magic guy. I showed the numbers for a force 6 with 11 dice, and a guy with 11 pistol dice is right there with him BEFORE ammo, augments, or bursts, all of which are cheap than foci and readily available. Not to mention that is with a basic pistol. Those 11 dice are easy enough to get with the lowest level ganger's skills, just use explosive ammo and you made up the difference. So you don't need a guy with a skill, an attribute and a pistol, I was wrong, you need a mook with a pistol and some ammo.

Maybe my experience is weird, but after a half dozen fights, the mage seems much less powerful than he should be. Not just less powerful than he would've been under 2nd/3rd, but also than the other runners, neither of which are optimized either. One is a decker with smartlink and a gun skill. At other people's tables are the combat spells useful? Or are mages better off using manipulation and puppeteering every time? Or just summoning spirits? It's not the mage who is underpowered, it is the spells since he could just summon spirits or use aoe even though his conjuring is lower than his spellcasting.

And can that pistol skill also let you fly? control minds? heal? Defend yourself?

Is there ammunition that sets people on fire? covers them with acid? hits everyone in an area with no chance to dodge?

The pistol skill can do one thing: shoot people with pistols.
The spellcasting skill can do pretty much anything.

So lets factor in ammunition: Ares predator with Stick and Shock vs mage with lightning.

Force 6 is 6P -6 AP.
Predator is 6S -5 AP.

Both have identical elemental effects.

The pistol guy has +1/+2 dice due to smartlink, with otherwise identical investment. That's a fairly minimal difference. Start factoring in range and you will find that the mage begins to pull ahead.

With both using a complex action (semi-automatic burst-standard spellcasting) the effective difference is 2-3 dice (factoring in AP difference). Not inconsiderable, but considering the flexibility of the spellcasting skill that's an acceptable difference.

There's a certain amount of deferred power in the magician, since he can more easily jack his dice pool up over time. A Force 6 Spellcasting (Combat) Focus only costs 24,000 nuyen and 12 Karma. They're harder to get than gun mods, but also better. 12 dice can become 18 in a hurry (or 14 or 15 in a bit more of a hurry), and far less expensive than the Agility augmentations.

So a mage with Magic 6, Skill 6, Specialization, and say a Force 4 Focus will be rolling 18 dice (for an average 6 hits), which takes a normal person Agility 6, Skill 6, Specialization, Smartlink (online of course), and +2 from augmentations (at least 40,000 nuyen) to pull off.

And don't forget that with that you can throw anything from a 5 damage Stunbolt (probably drain-free) to a Force 12 Ball Lightning (15P -12AP blast, probably needing to lie down afterwards) that will turn everyone in a large room into soup.

You are right that they are comparable. The mage has a risk of drain, and throws a few less dice. However, he does have access to a huge number of other tricks as you point out. The problem isn't with the mage, I have sidetracked myself in all thses posts with some minutia. The problem is that this same mage would be better off summoning even though his conjuring is lower than his spellcasting, using manipulation magic, or even using aoe spells. Not just sometimes but all the time. I've just realized after a few sessions that it wasn't just the way the dice were coming up that made the mage weak in combat. It is that indirect and direct combat spells are too weak. They are weaker than all of his alternatives. If he used a submachine gun on long burst and upped his gun skill from 1 to 2 (less karma than a focus) he might do better in combat than he does using combat spells. He would need gas vent 3 for the recoil, but he could also use a premium ammo and smart goggle system.

(ingram smart gun, 5 pool from skill and attribute + 1 for smart system, explosive ammo, 9p -1ap, long burst gives 2 recoil with str 3 character, 3 dice averages 1 hit, opposition mook ganger rolls 2 to dodge with burst modifier so you do hit less often, but if you hit at 10p -1ap he gets 13 dice to resist average 4 hits takes 6 damage instead of 4)



I don't think I realized how the new (to me) linear cost made high level foci mroe tenable. I'm only left wondering if the direct and indirect damage spells aren't underpowered compared to spirits, aoe, or other magic like manipulation. I think a focus and that 6th point in spellcasting will help him a bit, but by that point the hacker with a gun might have the ares alpha he wants...

I see no problem with the most effective weapons in the world being good at what they do.

Magics main advantage to my mind is the secondary effects. Name one person you know who won't be hindered in a fight if they were set on fire.

Chargen Devoted Combat Mage goes something like Magic 6, Spellcasting (Combat) 6 (, +2 from a Mentor Spirit, +3 from a Power Focus (or +4 from a Spell Focus, but the Power Focus helps in ways you'll see in a moment), along with the Summoning pool to get a decent spirit to help fight, Alchemy 4-6 with a Combat or Health specialization (Health for things like Increase Attribute, Increase Reflexes, Heal, and so on), and a spell and preparation selection to back that up (including area indirects, as well as Manipulations and/or Illusions for battlefield control).

That's 19 dice for Combat spells, 15 for other spells, something like 13+ Conjuring dice, and 13-19 Alchemy dice (with Alchemy (Health) 6 ( and a Combat Mentor Spirit, its 17 for Health and Combat, and 15 for everything else)...

In any case, part of the value of Lightning Bolt is its control effect and the Matrix Damage it deals (great way for the mage to cooperate with the decker to deal with an enemy rigger...); these things can make it a lot more valuable than straight damage. If you're not a Mage truly built for combat, you should be worse than a guy with the same skill rating and the same attribute rating using a gun, because that attribute and skill don't have as much versatility.

(And on an aside, that build-stub sounds awesome and now I want to figure a character to fit it)

It will be out a few years after the errata to Bogota! is released. The errata will be called SR5a, and will be available for download for the low, low price of $20.

Chuck Norris

Before, a spell could potentially do 10 damage and one-hit KO a goon (remember, hits, not just net hits, were capped. Someone casting a Force: 5 spell needed 5 hits, plus the target getting no hits, to do 10 damage) - just like a heavy pistol, except that the heavy pistol got two shots. If a combat spell, at best, can only do a few boxes of damage, especially when firearms damage has been increased, then combat spells are no longer a very useful option. In other words, they have been hit too hard with the nerf bat. Especially when spirits and mental manipulation spells, which were always more potentially unbalancing, have been left relatively untouched.