[Aria]

It's clearly a struggle with the new rules but I thought I'd try a dronomancer based on an old SR4 concept.  She's an inteligence gatherer focusing on the 'drone army' rather than jumping in so the submerssion issue isn't really a problem...I'll be the first to admit that this has been created on one reading of the rigger stuff and a couple on the other matrix rules so I've probably missed the blindingly obvious so please feel free to point that out

<<Jazz>>

WIP!  I still have about 10K nuyen to spend but I wanted to check I was on the right sort of route!

[Csjarrat]

only had a quick skim and it seems like an OK start. seems like a pretty crappy way to make a rigger though as you have practically no hacking skills.
i think your char needs to be better at hacking, much better in fact to justify doing the dronomancer over just making a good rigger who is a passable decker.
as it is, you're entirely dependent on sprites to do your hacking which is very edge dependent (you dont have much edge!) and fading intensive. They also generate OS from compilation, take 1hr/level to register and cause you physical damage if you compile at more than level 4 (you really need a decent 5-6+ for the stats and skills to be worthwhile)
I think you've spread yourself a bit thin to accomplish this role as your hacking pools are very low and you're not that great a pilot either.
tbh, if you want a pilot who can hack, build a rigger/decker hybrid. the rigger gets much much better with a control rig and the decker aspect is done better by deckers than TM's currently
certainly until data trails comes out, the old dronomancer is a bit of a thing of the past.

[Aria]

Partly the reason I wanted to see if it was still vaguely possible

I wasn't that fussed about hacking though, I wanted to make a rigger who was passable at defending their RCC from decker attacks and the sprites would be for boosting the drones and possibly defence.  Do riggers really need hacking skills to shine?

[Csjarrat]

nah, the way SR5 works now, you knida need a decker in your group. he should be picking up the slack to defend important gear like RCC's + drone nets. A rigger with some hacking skills isnt a bad call, but decks arent cheap and neither are good control rigs, RCC's and a modded drone fleet.
you could feasbily build a defensively minded rigger who can deck, maybe codeslinger: data spike +2, cybercombat 4 (personas +2) and a good LOG attribute with a basic deck tailored for defense.

tbh though, the liegelord RCC with the extra cyberprogram support of shell + encryption in full matrix defense is probably fine as-is. stand next to some smart jammers or point a directional jammer at the decker and he's gonna be at quite a few
-ve modifiers on his matrix actions. you can always keep feeding him an agent program to cybercombat to buy you some time, but your best defense against deckers is your own decker.
failing that, ramp up the noise with jammers and go full defense.
lastly, you could tool for cybercombat yourself and go kick his ass, but i wouldnt recommend that as it might go horribly horribly wrong.