I'm curious. What is everyones favorite adept powers. Or perhaps even the most useful. Personally, I'm gonna say that I heart Killing Hands. There's not much cooler than exploding someones face with a well placed pimp slap!

I've found the combo of Killing Hands and Distance strike to be rather effective. Who needs a gun?

Improved Ability
Increased reflexes
pain Resistance

Killing hands is one of the powers that really gives the adept a niche, letting him deal with things like spirits much more effectively than a sammie. An adept's real bread and butter, though, is the improved ability power, applied to a combat skill. Combat being based on dice contests, having up to six extra dice is a huge edge.

Agreed. Especially with unarmed combat, it gets pretty sick.

I found that Improved Ability Unarmed and Improved Attribute: Body and Mystic Armor make for a ass-whooping combination.

Killing hands can be hilarious. Personally, I like to imagine Killing Hands as Hokuto no Ken style goodness. But, it's a bit expensive so I usually don't take it unless I have a very strong and specific need for it.

Improved Ability is my workhorse. While it can be fun to apply it to a combat skill I see it as a really cheesy way to max out Stealth and/or Athletics. I regard the .25 per extra dice rate to be a real steal. Stealth is a workhorse, so IA stealth +6 for only 1.5 points is a workhorse.

I think that Pain Resistance and Mystic Armor are both rip offs. If you want to be able to soak most impact damage just be a troll and conserve your magical power points. Pain Resistance used to be something I might conider but I generally think it's a better use of resources to get that through the Edges/Flaws system if I can. Furthermore, I find that if you aren't making a tank style character damage in Shadowrun tends to be either/or. Either you take no damage because no one was shooting at you or you take a lot because you landed in the line of fire, so Pain Resistance wouldn't really be helpful unless you took 10 levels. These days when I play Shadowrun my character usually takes no damage because I always hide, run away, and generally try to avoid confrontations.

While Improved Reflexes is undeniably powerful I find that it's also rather expensive. In the past I've gone totally without it and had a slow as dough character in exchange for a bigger investment in stealth, athletics, and potentially creative means of circumventing obstacles (eg. Great Leap).

Ultimately, I think it's usually a waste to buy something with physad powers (like pain resistance, or the ability to have a really high body score through Improved Attribute), if you can get it with Edges and Flaws or Race. Save your magic points for things that you can only get through magic, like starting with 12 dice in stealth.

I always think of "Fist of The North Star" when I think of Killing Hands. Spinning Mind Control Kick and all that.

Kinesics.

I'm a big fan of Improved Reflexes, Improved Ability: Pistols, and Sensory Enhancements: thermal graphic vision and magnification. Nobody ever expects to be dropped at sniper rifle range by an elf with a pistol, and 10 dice for a pistol test is nothing to sneeze at, either. My current PC has, after his insane quickness, improved reflexes 4, and assorted edges had a total reaction of 14, and a total initiative of 4d6+14! Attunement, along with a laser sight, give bonuses equivalent to that of a smartlink; this bonus also has the nifty side effect of also working in conjuntion with the Adept's "sensory enhancement" ability to allow shots fired from a heavy pistol to rival a sniper rifle for effectiveness at sniping. (My GM is allowing this PC, interestingly enough. I did't expect him to; however, he seems to be happy just because I actually wrote out a history for my PC instead of making him an unnamed combat monster).
Of course, one cannot go wrong with the combination of "Silent/Delayed Strike" (or whatever it's called), Killing Hands: Deadly, and Improved Ability: unarmed combat if you're doing wetwork. The ability to do full unarmed combat damage against someone twelve hours later by merely brushing against them makes it very easy to neutralize a target, especially if he shakes a lot of hands. (Polititcians beware!)

But the maximum range of pistols is 50 meters.

I really like Delay damage silent, and eiditc memory (however it's spelled) and multi task. I have an infilatrator assasin with those, three dim memory, facial sculpt, and melanin control. Uses infusion for distance strike. That with delay damage silent is just mean, especially if you also have killing hands (he has light only for now). Just picked up commanding voice too. Now THAT one is fun.
One of my PC's in the game I run jsut picked that up. SHe's an elven face, with some light cyber. Charisma's something like 15.

Oh, I want to mention that last week I had a character who was actually able to use Missile Parry.

Missile Parry is one of those useless sounding powers that I never take, but in this case I took it just to be in-character, since I was running a character based on Sho Kosugi in "Revenge of the Ninja".

Well, lo and behold, someone threw a hand grenade at my character. After years of playing Shadowrun, I finally got to see Missile Parry come in useful for flinging back grenades.

This got me thinking...even Suspended State might be useful. It would enable you to remove your metal objects and mail yourself into high security areas while being perfectly happy and quiet. Does the SR world still have parcel post?

The problem with suspended state is that there is no canon method of deactivating it.
It is described as a "meditative" state. Howveer, it activates automaticly if unconscious from a deadly wound. Presumably, it can be turned off manualy when the Adept isn't suffering from a deadly wound. But nothing says that.

Really bad then about suspended state: Waking up on the autopsy table after a botched run.
Worst thing about suspended state: not waking up on the autopsy table before they strt wieghing your internal organs.

Even worse: Waking up inside a box as it's being cremated.

Guns and other mechanical devices really need to get their own static initiative numbers

Realistically, some people just move too fast for the guns to keep up mechanically and the system should work accordingly.

You're kidding, right? The rates of fire of automatic weapons in Shadowrun are incredibly low in comparison to real life.

I'll wait for one of the gun-gurus to post specifics about this, but IIRC firing six shots in (around) three seconds with a revolver (not even a semi-auto) isn't anything like a record.

We can have house rules for rusty single action revolvers with so much crap jammed in the mechanical parts that it takes 3 seconds of struggle to get the hammer to fall.

Not by a longshot. There's a clip (I think someone even posted on here, a month or so ago) of the world champion fella drawing and emptying two old revolvers in like a second and a half or so. Crazy stuff.

I don't know about 2 revolvers, but there's this thread where Jerry Miculek's feats are discussed once again. He fired 6 shots out of a .45 ACP revolver, reloaded it, and fired 6 shots again in 2.99 seconds. That's 7 Initiative Passes in one Combat Turn for a mundane human without ware or drugs...

I shouldn't think semi-automatic pistols will have any trouble either. SA-made-FA pistols IRL have cyclic RoFs usually well over 1000rpm, which means it would be mechanically possible for them to fire at at least several hundred rounds per minute in semi-auto. This goes for semi-auto rifles as well. Unless you get over 10 Initiative Passes per CT, I wouldn't worry about that.

Burst fire is simply fully automatic fire with a limiter that stops firing after 3 (or perhaps some other amount IRL) rounds have been fired. Taking into account the time it takes for the trigger mechanism to start the 3-round cycle again, any BF-capable weapon (apart from perhaps shotguns) should be capable of firing 30 rounds per CT without trouble.

If you want to play around with absolute rates of fire, just give each FA-capable weapon one cyclic RoF per minute, divide by 20 to get RoF per CT, and divide that by the amount of init passes in a specific CT to get how many rounds a character can fire with that weapon in one init pass.

EDIT: Curses, foiled again! I want my time machine back!

I'm with the people who said Delay Damage and Killing Hands. Kinesics is also awesome. With Cool Resolve, you get a helluva good face.

I'm a big fan of the pain resistance. It's crazy how quickly target numbers get out of hand when you start taking damage. Especially in melee. Also, I recently got counterstrike for the first time and it definitely comes in handy.

From what little I've picked up here, I'm sure my choices would change if I had access to the SOTA:64 powers.

It's not exactly a power per se, but Centering is pretty cool.

Alright, Here I am.

I'm sure at least some of you have heard me post about my Adept Nightshade. Most of the people that I play with think that adepts suck (most of this is from running under a previous GM who thought this). Well, frag them. They've all started to realize that adepts CAN be good. I almost specifically play adepts, but, i've played about everything else as well. I just can't get over how good they are (and i'm playing Second Edition where the powers all cost more and are less effective than in Third Edition). Well, be that as it may, I play adepts to show them how good they can be. And now i'll list off my favorite abilities.

Traceless Walk: no one can hear you move, and you can get past alot of security this way (my GM likes inventive security, what can I say?)

Increased Ability (Stealth): because 12 dice in stealth is just too cool.

extra dice to throwing Weapons and Missile Mastery gives you the ability to carry around a deck of cards or something and always be armed, but never questioned.

i've recently been taking Astral Perception, but, that's because Our mages never pay attention. And, on that note, I also love Incresed Perception, extra dice to perception checks

But, I must say that Adepts are really only in their best when using unsarmed combat (something i forgot to remember when making this character >_<)

And one more thing. On the note of those saying that the powers cost too much, You can always Initiate to get more. And, why not take the edges and be a troll? who says you can't be a troll adept? and, Being about to take the equivelent of Wired Reflexes 3 withought paying the cash or loosing essence is a real big plus to playing an adept IMO.

Does anybody take Quick Strike? I'm making a hand to hand Adept and it sounds pretty good.

In all my silent way hand to hand assassin adepts Quick Strike is a must. The ability to act first no matter what anyone else's initiative is great! Couple that with Killing hands and Improved Ability Unarmed (or specialized in a martial art technique) can be devastating. Using the counterstrike power as well so that on the defenders attack phase (after yours of course) can damn well take them out in a hurry.

It has a huge drawback (only when uninjured), and costs too much for my liking.

I'll probably sound like a broken record, but...

Killing Hands, Improved Ability, and Counterstrike. Normally favoring Counterstrike over Killing Hands.

For some reason, I feel like setting up a random number generator, assigning all the powers a number, and just spinning the wheel, so to speak.

And if I were a horrible person (and actually, you know, played Shadowrun instead of wishing I could), I'd consider using that as the mechanic for adepts who awaken during the progress of the game.

Or at least a mechanism for one-shot NPCs. 'Cause, not every adept gets to be the Distance Strike Delay Damage Killing Hands monster. Some of them end up being motorcycle specialists in the middle of a tribal village in the boondocks that hasn't even seen one.

And I _know_ I'm talking out of my ass.

I see it more like the powers manifest with what the adept - to -be does the most. What they put most of their effort, their will into.

Geas: Must bend over and present asscheeks at target