Why are qi-casting adepts so much worse than their counterparts

[Heau]

I could go on and on about all of the things I find underwhelming with adept builds.

I played 2 adept builds, fist in DF and sword in HK. In the DF run, my punches were so unreliable(low hit%) in the early game that I diverted from adept for a while to invest more into melee combat and even used a fair bit of essence by the end of the game because qi spells felt irrelevant besides the passives.

On my HK playthrough, I was adamant on pushing qi casting 10 on a dwarf through the extended edition and even that fell flat and hit 9/9 by the last mission.

By contrast, I did 3 runs with cyberclaws, one run with cybered sword and all felt leaps and bounds stronger than qi casting.

My gripe is:

-You get better defence by going dodge than by going qi casting.
-You get better offence by just leveling strength/melee/weap skill 1-2 points higher, than you do with the qi casting bonuses
-Adept utility is AP neutral or AP negative whereas cyber utility is AP positive(wired reflexes #1, hydraulic jack #2).
-Manafist damage is awful and the fact that it cannot be used on a move+attack for 1AP is really problematic. The only thing half decent with adept is qi focus. But if you qi focus a target, odds are he's already stunned so you wouldn't want to use your leftover AP on manafist as you get more effective damage by rolling the dice on a base attack for the crit AP dmg on a different target.
-It feels like you would need a 500 karma game to make the cost of going adept negligible in the bigger picture.

Anyway, my general question to those familiar with PnP is, is this also generally the case with PnP or is it the outcome of game design decisions that's making qi casting so weak relatively to other options for same combat style?

Also, is there really any point to going deeper than adept 5 for qi focus? What I got for qi 6,7,8 really didn't feel like they were worth the karma.

[fauxpas]

So, basically what you are complaining about is having to branch your stats while using a hybrid build?

Adepts are ridiculously powerful when built properly but they were never meant to focus solely on thier magical abilities, and if you don't invest on str, dodge, and wespon skills you are going to be underwhelmed.

[Heau]

Originally posted by fauxpas:

So, basically what you are complaining about is having to branch your stats while using a hybrid build?

Adepts are ridiculously powerful when built properly but they were never meant to focus solely on thier magical abilities, and if you don't invest on str, dodge, and wespon skills you are going to be underwhelmed.

Wow. I didn't neglect melee skills. I'm not that stupid. It's not like the stat system was overly complex either.

I am complaining that my 9 str 8 close combat 7 melee, 8 willpower 8 qi casting with all of his essence intact is substantially worse than my 10 str 10 close combat 7 cyber cyberclaw or my 9str 9 close combat 9 melee 5 cyber street samurai who had their essence sucked dry, both of which have excess karma compared to the adept to gain more defence through dodge than what was gained through 8 qi casting. Not only that, but that it was weaker all game for diverting a bit of karma into qi early on.

I complain that there has never been a game situation where I thought "I'm glad to have gone qi casting over a 1 essence cyber build". Or that everything but Qi Focus is largely irrelevant in the qi casting tree.

[fauxpas]

Never was an essence purist but you are forgetting that you are trading nuyen for karma in the case of cyber builds.

I still don't see your point, adepts are just fine as is.

[Zadok]

It's weird how Qi Casting inspires ineffective builds so frequently. You are not the first to complain! It seems to be counter-intuitive, also rather different from the TTRPG.
Even so fauxpas is 100% right: Qi Adepts are among the most powerful characters of all if build properly. Highest damage in the game.

[Heau]

It wasn't ineffective per se, just not better in any area than any of my melee builds that saved the 72 karma I threw in Qi in my last build and put it elsewhere. In particular, the fact that there are more spells (and more frequently used by AI spells) that are avoided through dodge rather than through willpower is certainly part of the problem. If I had to rank my damage carry builds in power, mostly based on HK rules it'd look something like

1. full-auto rifle is in a tier of its own
2. Cyber claw melee with shock gloves
3. Cybered street samurai (melee or unarmed)
4. Pistol/Shotgun/Sniper that doesn't abuse full-auto
5. Adept variants
6. Monofilament / Mage (moving equal to or above adept if you have a utility that can cast ley line replacement spell)
7. SMG/Rigger

And while I didn't do purist on my first unarmed adept build in DF, If you go adept and burn all your essence to the point where you can't slot anything and forego the use-ability of your few spells, it's more or less making the point I'm trying to make that adepts just feel like a weaker version of a stronger build.

[Zadok]

Qi Onslaught is the melee attack a Sword Adept builds upon. It needs Qi Casting 6 in DF (and 7 in HK), so that's a bunch of extra karma needed over regular melee. Hence the standard melee side of Your build is weakened, just as You describe. To not suffer those drawbacks it becomes vital then to save karma elsewhere.
Hence I'd recommend to...

...not max out Qi Casting. Perhaps there's a way to make higher Qi Casting work, but generally I wouldn't recommend that. In fact a Fist Adept could use even lower Qi Casting, possibly even stay at Qi Casting 1. A Fist Adept can't use Qi Onslaught after all, as it is a melee weapon attack.

...limit the Melee Combat skill. Qi Onslaught basically renders it redundant. My Adept did not have it at all. It would still be useful situationally, but Your Qi Onslaught remains the same anyway and that's the main thing. Of course a Fist Adept still needs Unarmed.

Moreover Qi Onslaught is unaffected by essence loss, being an attack rather than a spell. As You found out already Qi Casting alone doesn't really justify not getting cyberware - it's likely weaker overall. So a fully cybered Adept might work best. That approach would not work at all in the TTRPG.

In DF I found the Sword Adept and the Summoner most powerful. It's an uneven comparison however, since "Summoner" only describes a part of the build and is compatible with other things, like rifles. Rifles are top class no doubt, but I would say that's because they are most cost effective and thus very versatile - not because they necessarily hold the most power. Pistols might have been the most fun though.
In HK I truly loved what I dubbed my "Ninja", using Razors & Shuriken. Wrote a guide for that one. So yeah, I agree on cyberweapons definitely being powerful, but I didn't finish enough characters to make a meaningful tier list for HK. I think the Adept is still very powerful, but the Summoner is nowhere near as good as in DF. Then again getting a Totem along with minor Summoning is great! A full Summoner is probably not worth it though. Nerfed for good reason, but overnerfed sadly.
Overall I found pretty much all options viable! Okay, I was a bit underwhelmed by DF Riggers, Conjuring is mostly support of course and I'm not sure what to make of HK mages yet. In any case SR has a rather respectable balance in my book.

[di eshor ribly]

With respect to comments putting riggers down... you get two combat drones, a pistol (or cyberweapons), a bunch of cyber, and voila: you have a character that has 1-2 ap (adrenal pump) and two 4-ap drones that can flank and fire from multiple angles - some of which have full auto capabilities.

One of my personal favorites was a rigger/decker with the monofilament whip, two drones, and a cyberdeck. The pc's role was to pull enemies out of cover and let their toys shred 'em.

[Heau]

@Zadok to avoid quoting all, I'll try to address items in order,

So yeah, Qi Onslaught on 7 didn't feel like it was worth because pure essence builds already suffer on hit %. Maybe with something like 10 str / 10 close / 5 weapon spec / 7/7 Qi, Onslaught becomes more than marginally better than Qi Focus but as with every other ability that lowers hit chance for higher potential throughput in the game, they are really only very powerful if you can maintain very high hit chance after the penalty. Like say Qi focus hit is on 75%, Then Qi Onslaught's 60% hit chance becomes a mere 20% damage increase, on average, on one ability per turn. Throwing the 26 karma that it costs to go from Qi 5 to Qi 7 into 2 strength if you play races that can go past 9 will probably average out more dmg. So maybe with the 6% hit eye and a lesser investment into the weapon specialty (because Qi focus/onslaught overflows above 100% crit) in order to get higher close combat for very high hit chance might gain an edge. Anyway the tradeoff for qi 5 is the cost of going from weapon 5 to weapon 9 which doesn't provide 50% crit but nearly so and on a more flexible attack/movement scheme since then AP is used 1 point at a time.

I would always grab killing hands for an unarmed street samurai but I wouldn't consider so few points into qi casting an adept in spirit anymore than I consider each and everyone of my HK characters with spirit summoning 3 a shaman. At this point it's just a matter that it costs fewer karma to get 3 strength worth of stats.

The Qi abilities only add 50% crit as far as I could see. The game isn't difficult enough to where I would've done the math on crit per weapon skill increase but I'd expect crit cap on Qi abilities to be around 5 points in the weapon skill. I definitely would've taken 2 points off weapon skills if I could've on my most recent build. I think I went 7/7/7 before jumping from Qi4 to Qi5 and realised too late.

Ah thanks for the TTRPG comment. I was glad you bumped in the thread since I figured from your many other posts that you know the PnP game and lore a lot. I think I played PnP once about 20 years ago. I figured there was probably something to a videogame design decision at stake in why the Qi spells felt so much weaker as purist.

And Rifles, I haven't tried the build I used for my 3-man HK run in DF. I think the change in difficulty settings from DF to HK probably made rifles most broken in HK because you can have nearly 99% hit on full-auto with all cyber and the cobra aura (not available in DF). And since the first hit takes cover out, once you get the late game 7-hits full-autos, you do like a reliable ~65 damage for 2 AP to any target at any range with any level of cover. So I'm almost certain this is the highest damage dealing build in HK. i.e. I put Rifles on top from HK rules for sheer power more than versatility. I certainly enjoyed the pistol build a lot but I think monofilament was the most fun, despite feeling much weaker. I'm probably going to try a monofilament/SMG or shotgun build with high dodge next.

Interesting fantasy idea with the shurikens. I never played around with throwing weapons. They look underwhelming and Dietrich made a bad job at selling them to me. Plus in HK, by the late game, there are so many grenadiers that the big throwing(5) perk you can catch on the side becomes more of a liability than a bonus.

I also found all options to be viable. The games aren't challenging enough to make a weaker build completely non-viable, especially not HK which sadly has the most fun build options because of weapon and cyber choices.

Originally posted by di eshor ribly:

With respect to comments putting riggers down... you get two combat drones, a pistol (or cyberweapons), a bunch of cyber, and voila: you have a character that has 1-2 ap (adrenal pump) and two 4-ap drones that can flank and fire from multiple angles - some of which have full auto capabilities.

It wasn't so much putting riggers down. They're viable. But they are just weaker and particularly far less reliable than other builds. In HK on 9/9/9 your combat drone has about 70%-75% hit chance at optimal weapon range and the utility drone just has terrible accuracy no matter what. Hit chances are even less reliable in DF because of difficulty settings differences. All other builds can achieve far better accuracy and thus more reliability. There's nothing quite like missing 3 coin flips and leaving a target alive on low health on the first turn as a mean to take substantially more damage. Reliable stuns and reliable kills, especially on early turns, act as major defensive bonuses too by thinning the herd.

Hell my last Rigger run in HK, I got the bug where I obtained Racter's equipment copies towards the late game so my rigger had the rig adjustment gun for the end game and extended edition and it still didn't feel quite as strong as other builds.

[Duuvian]

I gave Gaichu shurikans (the item, not the ability) and they were way better than Dietrich's.

[frowningmirror]

Uhhh most Physical Adept builds are insanely strong in SR: HK.

[frdnwsm]

Qi adepts are fine, done properly.

Qi casting 7 is all you need; gives you bonded spell and Qi onslaught.

Plenty of Karma left; I grabbed Str 8 and close combat 8, and got the best sword in the game, Distant Storms. I also got 8 ranks of Unarmed combat, and grabbed Blood calls to Blood, aka the Vampiric Dagger.

Get 3 ranks of Cyber Affinity and you can get Jolt Alert and the Magnetic arm. Pick up a few ranks of will and mage spells and you can get Heal 1 and Armor 1. Now you are all set to wreak havoc on all and sundry.

[frdnwsm]

Sorry, Armor 1 is Conjurer; still doable though.

[frdnwsm]

Also, definitely grab the shock glove. While Distant Storms is good at AP stripping, if you also invest in Unarmed Combat, you will have access to an astonishing number of AP stripping attacks. Leaving 2-3 foes asleep due to AP loss is fun.

Get Jolt Alert for your own character. It costs NO essence so even spell casters can use it.

Qi onslaught sucks; -15% hit probability is terrible. Qi focus is OK, though.