Oh, and one last thing Re: Face+Mage meta.
Social Stealth vs Physical Stealth. Physical Stealth didn't just get hit with the nerf bat. It got hit with one of those cool giant nerf sniper rifles that never actually work.
Basically there are two ways to conceal your illicit activities on a run: Blend in, or not be seen, basically either con+etiquette or sneaking. Both have/had their advantages. It is fully possible to switch between them (Sneak in, stash your big gear, put on suit. Or slip away, hide, put on body armor) but if you planned to do that you still leaned social (Its harder to gear up than to gear down once your actively sneaking about) and most PCs leaned hard one way or the other.
Social Stealth allowed you to proactively use your stealth to directly influence your environment, but required you to have significantly less armor than other runners and use smaller, worse weapons, and the environment could more easily influence you, and you were much more isolated from the team. Physical stealth allowed you to go in with full kit, a holdout pistol was equally subtle as an HMG to a physical stealth pistol, because you don't gotta make palming tests if no one ever sees you at all, and you could carry a satchel full of breaching charges, some jammers, whatever. You also could more easily support other team members because you could stop what you were doing at any time to do something else. But you couldn't as easily change your environment, you had to avoid it.
SR6 SIGNIFICANTLY affected the balance of power here in 3 major ways:
1: Most DV comes from net hits now. This means smaller weapons are much better.
2: Armor is much less useful. This means both the fact social stealth isolates you and strips you of defenses no longer is as relevant. The cost is way lower when there isn't meaningful difference between social armor like bodysuits and actioneer, and samurai armor like full body armor or sleeping tiger. Before you were dropping enough soak for handguns to realistically 2 shot you on hit, now your likely not even losing edge generation when attacked.
3: The merging of firearm skills means its really easy for a face or mage to go from their handgun to a full AR or shotgun ahead of time. You can, in essence, 'plan for loud' at no opportunity cost as a social PC. A physical PC meanwhile can't invert this: They can use handguns and the like, but they don't automatically get their utility.
Riggers, Samurai, and Hackers lean towards physical stealth. Samurai for obvious reasons (Big guns and agility scores of 12 make you the lovechild of TF2's Heavy and Batman), Riggers likewise (Hard to palm a rotodrone under your shirt, better to sneak about with flyspies and then 'go in hot' with drones later). Hackers are physical stealth less because they physically sneak around and more because hackers work remotely, in spaces they control, and 'project' themselves without social cover to other spaces. So a hacker sitting in the back of the van or in a secure room inside a facility plugged into something they shouldn't be may as well carry a shotgun with full body armor for protection with like 5 smartgun platforms covering every door.
Faces use social stealth for obvious reasons. Mages likewise gravitate towards it because A: Charisma is a mage attribute while agility isn't even used by them for combat, and B: A big advantage of magic is you don't need big guns to do lots of damage and you have a samurai hiding in your pocket at all times in the form of spirits.
So this increase of power in social stealth without meaningful physical stealth power increases is another strong indicator we will be in a face+mage meta.
