Physical Adepts are useless

[Rudedog]

Or rather anything a PA can do, a sam, mage, rigger, or shaman can do better. I've tried every melee focused build I can think of. They all get you dead almost instantly vs more then one opponent especially if they are on overwatch. Even buffed to the nines you go down like a man who brought a knife to a gun fight... because you did. With healing nearly useless against automatic weapons and the added crippling disadvantage of melee range vs overwatch, its virtually impossible to kill a target with melee before he and his buddies mow you down. Sure, as a high strength troll you do nearly (NEARLY) as much damage per hit as a shotgun, but you will not survive long without the cover you can't have while still attacking. Pain resistance helps a little, but it's not even close to enough and is far too deep in the chi tree. It takes a wopping 90 karma to equip this turkey and it doesn't even make you immune to first teir pistols much less high end shotguns, and that's without even factoring in critical hits!

So how to make magifu characters actually viable? What I would like to see is an AP+ chi ability relatively early in the tree, an tiered deaccuracy buff against ranged, and a much improved damage reduction ability. Hell, how about the ability to catch bullets? If you plan to punch people to death you better have a plan for what you will do against a firing squad or you might as well get a corp desk job.

[Emil]

Melee is awesome and a fun way to play the game, just make sure you add a lot of points in body. The cyberware that let's you dodge the first attack against you for a few rounds is a great way to boost your survivability as well. I've played through very hard with my melee and I never had any problems staying alive.

I recommend that you invest some points in dodge and biotech as well, and also make sure you have these support spells in your team if you want to fully take advantage of your melee - heal, accuracy, armor and haste buff, You've to take in mind that your melee is often placed in the open and close to the enemies and will often get focused because of that..

[iamaneviltaco]

The secret is trolls. I got str and bod up to 8, currently, and unarmed about the same. willpower I've currently got at about a 6. I found the exact opposite of what you're saying. My troll is the heaviest hitter in the team by far, and has been consistently since the beginning. As well, with the huge hp and high wil giving a pretty fair chunk of damage resistance, I never really have to heal him, either. Hell, I take out 2 bugs a round right now, and I'm only 2/3rds of the way through the game.

Seems way more interesting than the pure quickness samurai I ran last time, there's an element of YOLO in playing a troll adept. I don't think I've once taken cover with him.

[Telemak]

I have finnished this game with a troll physical adept. A living armored tank nice to play. Body++, no cyberware, shotguns and magical at the end. I agree to say physical adept is not polyvalent. If you are looking for a utility man, you'll lost the ability to make enough damage in close combat. I have compromised it because of campain needs and fun.

[Skree]

I play a elf physical adept and have no difficulties whatsoever. She dodges almost all the time any attack, and kills whatever tries to go near her. She uses the hand forgedkatana to strip enemies of APs, with a monstrously high critical hit ratio.

I also let her throw a fireball or two, i mix the phys adept with mage build, and the result is utter destruction of anything that moves. Or doesn't.

[Chekita]

I dont think PA are useless at all, but im sure they are more difficult to play early in the game, since you will take more dmg. I dont like the idea that a build can only be done with just one kind of race, like: melee is just for trolls, ranged is just for elfs, etc, cuz the game would be pretty boring this way. One thing that happens in some cases is that players tend to choose these kinds of easy builds because the story doesnt take into account more possibilities, paths to choose, and challenges.
One story i played, for instance, you could only go through if you had strenght or decking, and that is for the second scene! No problem having a path that you can only use these 2, but in the beggining you need to take into account that not every player makes his chars the same way, and they should not, cuz it is boring.

[soggof]

I'm currently playing a physical adept and it does feel a weak design. While all other classes are very characteristic with unique key abilities and skill trees (samurai: weapons, mage: spells, decker: matrix, shaman: summons, rigger: drones) and each point spent on their main trees improves the character, Chi Casting feels like two or more distinct skill trees where merged together. Unarmed? Killer Hands is great but you can't use Chi Focus/Chi Onslaught; melee weapons? Killer Hand and Mana Fist are useless, Ranged? Counterstrike.
Hopefully in the future the class will be fixed/expanded because at the moment, while Chi Casting can be useful as a secondary skill tree, I don't think the Physical Adept deserves to be a standalone class.

[Jormundgand]

Originally posted by fossa0:

I dont like the idea that a build can only be done with just one kind of race, like: melee is just for trolls, ranged is just for elfs, etc, cuz the game would be pretty boring this way.

My first playthrough was with a troll which was initially a samurai turned decker -- I also have a dwarf decker turned samurai/mage. I think most of the complaints about "this build is not viable" is really due to people not getting the character system.

[Rudedog]

My first instinct was to build a adept mage. That quickly morphed into an adept/mage/shaman for the buff spells. Pretty soon I realized that I was many orders of magnetude more efficient at killing enemies if I stood back and sniped them with a rifle while thowing spirits at them. After that I never tried to melee an enemy again. Since then I've tried to build starting adepts (they are viable until you encounter a pile of automatic weapon weilding guards) and 200+ karma adepts (using trainter UGC). The advanced ones die spectacularly fast against similarly leveled enemies. With any other build type (minus deckers for obvious reasons) I can school 3-4 enemies easily. With an adept I'm lucky to drop the first enemy before his buddies fill me with holes. Perhaps it's just my playstyle sucking with adepts, but I don't think so. I think cover and range penalties are just that important and when the adept gives them up, he dies.

[ZippyTheWonderMoonrat]

You guys should check out the great physical adept huge changes that are used in SME Utna's chi casting ugc (available in the workshop). It's a total reworking of Adepts. I recently put in my ugc Kill-city Detroit (though it's a random encounter to get the powers and sort of hard to come by at this point).

but ya in my experiences, if you are using a adept with like 10+ strength and 7+ chi casting they are deadly. Some of the adept runners in my ugc do like 60 hp damage a turn or more.

[Rudedog]

Utna's CC helps a lot, but even it isn't enough. Your Str10, Chi7 character will have spent a minimum of 115 pts on just those two plus prereqs and 142 if you give a 7 body (which is pretty minimal), and 199 with a 7 in your choice of unarmed or armed. Even then you will be good in corridors (where you have LOS from some other source) but mages and riggers will wreck your drek unless you pop up right on top of them..

[Hereticjon]

Orc PA ran wild on Dead Man's Switch. Just focus focus focus, buff with haste (shaman ally is a must) and you will be fine. Make sure you have some nice armour and some heal kits. Spend some of the money you save on weapons and crap buying medkits and don't play like a complete dummy. buff up, have someone else open the door and then run and faceroll everyone. If you focus str and all of your close combat/unarmed and chi casting you will consistently crit for monstrous damage.