Spirits of Nature have the best overall melee numbers of the spirits listed in the BBB, having both a bonus to Agility for landing the hit and a bonus to Str to raise the DV (base damage). All the spirits are pretty serious stuff though, especially once they reach Force 6 and up. Spirits also get any Skills they now at level Force.

Spirits as written in the BBB also have an insane Init so once they hit roughly Force 6 they are almost always going to go before and surprise the PCs/NPCs, even the Init tweaked ones, unless the PC/NPC uses a point of Edge (and the spirit doesn't us one, they get Edge = Force).

Fortunately the spirits only get 2 Init passes (out of the highest possible of 4 passes), but by then they'll have likely done some serious mayhem and are damn hard to get rid of outside of banishing.

Oh, and no there are no Domain limitations anymore.

That's a good way of looking at it, and incredibly illustrative. A Force 6 Spirit can be consistently summoned by a magician opponent of category 3.

A category 3 opponent rolls about 9 dice on actions, and that will summon a force 6 spirit. A Force 6 spirit in turn, is a category 6 opponent. That means that the 300 kg gorilla in every tactical situation is always the spirit(s). Much more so than the game deisgners probably intended.

-Frank

So are you arguing for or against spirits being overpowered. So they can deliver the unholy smackdown and that's the weak ass way to use them. Yeah, I feel better now. Not only can they rule all in combat, but I can also use them in a ton of other ways. Usually being the swiss army knife type reduces your direct combat effectiveness.

And also on that astral signature thing you keep railing on about, virtually all activities a mage does will leave a signature. A force 5 stunball will leave as much of a signature as a force 5 spirit using a service. Now a currently active spirit has a link to the summoner which can be followed back to the summoner, but ok make sure you dont leave your spirit behind while it still has services. Normally just from the spirit preforming a service those who come afterwards can't track squat. Oh wait they can at 3 successes can see the signature and maybe recognize it if they see it again and hey at 5 successes they know what magic effect was used to make the signature. I may be missing it but the track down and kill the mage from the signature alone part I'm not seeing yet. All the watcher and pegging a signiture form a distance tactics in the world are fine and dandy, but they don't seem to apply to summoners in particular. Any mage doing any magic activity is just as vulnerable to it. So you minds as well use you big guns for all situations brute force or otherwise, the spirits you summon.