[RHat]

Shinobi:  Hermetics can grab Cerebral Boosters for Drain resistance, along with a Pain Editor so they can keep on casting at full Stun drain.  Which is nice.  Logic does need to get it's implications in things like maximum foci back, though.

[Shinobi Killfist]

Yeah and shamans can be elves and get a similar drain stat boost with no magic loss, so to me at best that's a wash though honestly i see it as a Shaman win.  and while yes not everyone wants to play an elf, but not everyone wants to play an augmented character.  And the number of foci is an almost pointless add with the new rules on addiction, when it was x2 magic it had some play, but you will hit x1 magic with a 2 logic. 

[RHat]

Hermetics can still get a slight Drain advantage - 9 attribute instead of 8.  Augmentation is one of the chief advantages to Logic traditions, and nothing is going to be able to change that.  And if you put Logic into the focus addiction formula...

[Mithlas]

Yes, charisma is a better skill stat than logic.  Logic has more skills, but most of them are either not high value or tied to another archetype so you wont really be using them much.

Then in the great design fail of 5e and to a lesser extent 4e charisma just does a shit ton more for magic than logic.  Every single thing in magic that is tied to an attribute is charisma based. Hell even arcana the freaking study of magic got switched to magic because shamans might not be perfect.

Arcana was a Logic stat in 4E. Spellcasting (standard or ritual) and counterspelling doesn't touch the mental attributes until drain (when they're effectively equal for comparison consideration). Summoning is really the only thing that's very heavy in charisma. Astral Combat is and was Willpower.

You may not like hermetics, but a really good mage is one that doesn't have to use magic for everything - sometimes that means Logic for first aid, sometimes that means Charisma for fast talk.

In the end, I think the decision should be made for fluff/character reasons instead of pure numbers - the other factors tend to balance out, anyway.

[RHat]

Mithlas, you DO realize his complaint is that the other factors DON'T balance out in SR5, yes?  Logic lost a lot of it's importance to magical stuff, which is an issue.

[Shinobi Killfist]

Pretty much, that.  Yes, it should be made for fluff reasons, and I still made a hermetic in the one game I get to play in instead of run.  But I knew mechanically I was shooting myself in the foot.

 And while one component of astral combat is willpower(the to hit even though logic is astral agility?) the damage part is charisma.  Without a decent charisma astral combat is pointless as a few net hits on nothing damage is still nothing.  While its not the best option, Shamans at least have an astral combat option.  It is the rare hermetic with enough charisma to have astral combat as a viable option. Astral combat is like the perfect example of where they went wrong. They had the opening to make logic the to hit or maybe make mental the limit not mental or social and charisma the damage, that would allow a degree of balance for the mage types. Honestly though to make astral combat viable the to hit probably needed to be magic and make the damage willpower, spirits very quickly scale past the point where you can effectively hit them. 

A quick balance would have been spirits are charisma based, minions(watchers)logic based.  The resist your totem flaw thing could logically go to any stat, but if it kept with charisma give Arcana logic for everything but initiation.  Intuition is hard to work into this one, though in my experience it just ends up being the burly meta stat, and hey it does get astral perception stuff. If they go with 3 stats again, a more fluid for many of these things would work IMO where it is your traditions stat that works for the various items.  It lacks flavor, but they took away the majority of the mechanical flavor in 4e with the universal magical theory idea. 

[firebug]

A hermetic should still have Charisma unless they've given up on having bound spirits (which is dumb).  Logic is used for defending in Astral Combat though; so shamans may hit harder, but hermetics will be harder to hit.  Not that astral combat matters much anyways.  If you're fighting something on the astral, you're probably better off either just running away or using a mana spell instead of investing in an entirely different (and terribly niche) skill.

Logic is also used to resist mental manipulation spells and all illusion spells.  Seems pretty useful to me.

Also I disagree about logic skills being useless and charisma skills being needed by all.  I see a lot of characters made with either LOG or CHA as a dump stat.  LOG is useful because knowledge skills and first aid can be extremely beneficial, at least as often as the times your low CHA character absolutely must make a Con roll and can't just let the Face do all the talking.

Still, I feel like the fact that elves are so incredibly easy to pick (only need metatype D or higher) and give such a significant bonus to Charisma is upsetting.  It has likely always been this way, so I'm not asking that to change.  But Logic does need something so it doesn't appear to just be worse at first blush.

[Michael Chandra]

It's not as if you need massive amounts of bound Spirits, so isn't 3 Charisma plenty? They're near-500 nuyen per service so quite expensive. My brother doesn't even do Binding with his Missions character, the mountie considers it rude.

[ProfessorCirno]

The biggie that keeps getting overlooked is in the defenses and pre-run usefulness.

Plenty of spells are defended using Logic.  All your wireless items are, too - do you want to be That Guy who let the corporate security crack their commlink so they could overhear all the plans?

Charisma is good for facework and drain, certainly, but that shaman is also going to be the one who reveals your locations to security when they mark his commlink and trace his location, then is the one to fireball the rest of you when the wagemage takes over his feeble and puny illogical mind.  Not to mention how useless they are when it comes time for non-face legwork with their low low knowledge skills and low arcana. "Hey shaman, what do you know that could help us out?"  "Uh, I like the Earth?"  "Wow, super useful!  Hey mage, you got anything?"  "I'm basically a walking encyclopedia when it comes to absolutely everything that could ever involve magic."  "Well how about that, a thing we can use!"

In my experience, to add to this, shaman tend to put all their eggs in one basket - yeah, charisma goes sky high, but will lags behind a bit.  Hermetics on the other hand I notice tend to go more equal on will and logic and end up with better defenses all around.  It also gives dwarves a decent niche.

[Cowdragon]

The biggie that keeps getting overlooked is in the defenses and pre-run usefulness.

Plenty of spells are defended using Logic.  All your wireless items are, too - do you want to be That Guy who let the corporate security crack their commlink so they could overhear all the plans?

Charisma is good for facework and drain, certainly, but that shaman is also going to be the one who reveals your locations to security when they mark his commlink and trace his location, then is the one to fireball the rest of you when the wagemage takes over his feeble and puny illogical mind.  Not to mention how useless they are when it comes time for non-face legwork with their low low knowledge skills and low arcana. "Hey shaman, what do you know that could help us out?"  "Uh, I like the Earth?"  "Wow, super useful!  Hey mage, you got anything?"  "I'm basically a walking encyclopedia when it comes to absolutely everything that could ever involve magic."  "Well how about that, a thing we can use!"

In my experience, to add to this, shaman tend to put all their eggs in one basket - yeah, charisma goes sky high, but will lags behind a bit.  Hermetics on the other hand I notice tend to go more equal on will and logic and end up with better defenses all around.  It also gives dwarves a decent niche.

LOL! This is awesome. Making a 2 person Shadowrunning team with a buddy. You may have just changed my mind from Hermetic to Shamanic for my mage dude.

[Shinobi Killfist]

The biggie that keeps getting overlooked is in the defenses and pre-run usefulness.

Plenty of spells are defended using Logic.  All your wireless items are, too - do you want to be That Guy who let the corporate security crack their commlink so they could overhear all the plans?

Charisma is good for facework and drain, certainly, but that shaman is also going to be the one who reveals your locations to security when they mark his commlink and trace his location, then is the one to fireball the rest of you when the wagemage takes over his feeble and puny illogical mind.  Not to mention how useless they are when it comes time for non-face legwork with their low low knowledge skills and low arcana. "Hey shaman, what do you know that could help us out?"  "Uh, I like the Earth?"  "Wow, super useful!  Hey mage, you got anything?"  "I'm basically a walking encyclopedia when it comes to absolutely everything that could ever involve magic."  "Well how about that, a thing we can use!"

In my experience, to add to this, shaman tend to put all their eggs in one basket - yeah, charisma goes sky high, but will lags behind a bit.  Hermetics on the other hand I notice tend to go more equal on will and logic and end up with better defenses all around.  It also gives dwarves a decent niche.

There are plenty of charisma defense tests in the game as well.The hermetic ends up with 6-8 more skill points in knowledge skills which is something, but not altogether that massive. On a side note I've never seen a shaman go low/average on willpower.  It might not be 5 because you only have so many points but it generally seems to be as high as hermetics take it.

[Longes]

The biggie that keeps getting overlooked is in the defenses and pre-run usefulness.

Plenty of spells are defended using Logic.  All your wireless items are, too - do you want to be That Guy who let the corporate security crack their commlink so they could overhear all the plans?

Charisma is good for facework and drain, certainly, but that shaman is also going to be the one who reveals your locations to security when they mark his commlink and trace his location, then is the one to fireball the rest of you when the wagemage takes over his feeble and puny illogical mind.  Not to mention how useless they are when it comes time for non-face legwork with their low low knowledge skills and low arcana. "Hey shaman, what do you know that could help us out?"  "Uh, I like the Earth?"  "Wow, super useful!  Hey mage, you got anything?"  "I'm basically a walking encyclopedia when it comes to absolutely everything that could ever involve magic."  "Well how about that, a thing we can use!"

In my experience, to add to this, shaman tend to put all their eggs in one basket - yeah, charisma goes sky high, but will lags behind a bit.  Hermetics on the other hand I notice tend to go more equal on will and logic and end up with better defenses all around.  It also gives dwarves a decent niche.

I mean, it's not like we live in 2075 and can just gooogle data search stuff, right? Besides, facing skills are usually used more often than magical knowledge. And also make more impact than magical knowledge.

[ProfessorCirno]

I mean, it's not like we live in 2075 and can just gooogle data search stuff, right? Besides, facing skills are usually used more often than magical knowledge. And also make more impact than magical knowledge.

Computers is also a logic skill 

The use of knowledge skills IS game dependent, I'm not going to argue that.  They aren't useless, either, though.

There are plenty of charisma defense tests in the game as well.The hermetic ends up with 6-8 more skill points in knowledge skills which is something, but not altogether that massive. On a side note I've never seen a shaman go low/average on willpower.  It might not be 5 because you only have so many points but it generally seems to be as high as hermetics take it.

It isn't just more skills, it's also better.  Pretty much all the magic based skills would be academic ones (unless you can find a way to explain why your knowledge of spirits and magical tradition fall into hobbies  ).  As far as will goes, most hermetics I've seen are dwarves, so they tend to cap Will instead of Logic - Will 7, Logic 5.  Funny enough, going dwarf could also give you rather ample charisma, or at least ample enough that you can have a healthy enough stable of spirits yourself.

Look, I'm not saying Hermetic is better, and I'm not sure why people seem to be thinking this save this forum's weird obsession with needing ONE RIGHT POST ONE WRONG POST.  I'm saying that Hermetic has a bunch of advantages that tend to get ignored.

[Shinobi Killfist]

It isn't just more skills, it's also better.  Pretty much all the magic based skills would be academic ones (unless you can find a way to explain why your knowledge of spirits and magical tradition fall into hobbies  ).  As far as will goes, most hermetics I've seen are dwarves, so they tend to cap Will instead of Logic - Will 7, Logic 5.  Funny enough, going dwarf could also give you rather ample charisma, or at least ample enough that you can have a healthy enough stable of spirits yourself.

Look, I'm not saying Hermetic is better, and I'm not sure why people seem to be thinking this save this forum's weird obsession with needing ONE RIGHT POST ONE WRONG POST.  I'm saying that Hermetic has a bunch of advantages that tend to get ignored.

Sure I get that, and logic ties into first aid which is a bit less table dependent.  Logic is useful, but if I were to look at the stats on their own I find charisma to be more useful overall before we get into what effects your magic. As a quick example you pointed out how logic defneds against illusions, and hey that is great  but charisma handles the defense against most social skills, want to not be intimidated that is willpower+charisma.  And  while this is table dependent, we bump into social skill attacks far more often than illusions. Or attribure only tests like judge intentions or composure vs memory.  Again judge intentions and composure come up more otten than memory does in my experience.

And then once we get into what effects your magic it is almost all charisma, though as you point out knowledge skills will be tied to logic more often for things like magic history, threats etc.  On the magic side its actually what I would consider really bad game design, because if you are playing a mage things like can I con good or will I be good at first aid are secondary concerns.  Your primary concern is your magic capabilities and not evenly balancing those two is just crap game design.  I don;t want to overstate it, this doesn't break the game or anything, but when deciding to play a mage there should be solid mechanical reason to play a hermetic instead of a Shaman and Shamans vs hermetic.If you have to go outside magic to start to justify it, you already failed.  The fluff tries to indicate they are equal choices when it comes to magic, the mechanics should support that.

So yes, logic does things.  It just does far less for mages than charisma does.  And if you are going to create a system with a logic tradition and a charisma tradition that should not be.

[teknoide]

Cram + psyche are good for mage too. And with high logic, you can easily beat the addiction test.