[Michael Chandra]

SR5: F10 B9, 14P/-10: 5 autohits, 19 soak dice = ~11.3 soaked. 1 net hit = 3.7 damage.
SR6: F10 B9, 6P (same gun, explosive ammo instead of APDS): 10 autohits, 9 soak dice = ~13 soaked. 7 net hits = 0 damage.

The intersting thing about spirits, and magic in general, is that the designers clearly knew it was unbalanced. And didn't fix it. Deliberately.
I wonder why? Serious speculation only.

OR they forgot to adjust Hardened Armor when the damage codes were toned down.

If you're fine with spirits being 99% invincible to anyone non-magical, then it's fine at your table. To me, it's a problem, but properly adjusting Hardened Armor to be halved already suffices for me.

However, given your undeserved agressive sarcasm, it's clear any kind of different opinion is not welcome here so I will take my leave.

[wraith]

F6 has B5, takes ares pred w/SA and explosives 5p + net hits. Assume 2 net hits. 7p-6, avg 1 hit resist 0 dmg.
F6 has B5, takes ares pred w 3rnd burst and explosives 9p -2 ap + net hits. Assume 2 net hits. 11p-5, avg 5 hits resist 1 dmg.
F10 has B9, takes ares alpha w/ BF and explosives 7p + net hits. Assume 6 net hits. 13p-10, avg 3 hits 0 dmg.
F10 has B9, takes ares alpha w/ long burst and explosives 12p -3ap + net hits. Assume 6 net hits. 18p-9, avg 8 hits 1 dmg.

Well, I guess they broke spirits. I shall ban them any future games.
Seriously though, I don't think I care about this specific issue with spirits.

So I'm curious, given your every reply here has been flat dismissals of how much you 'care' for the arguments presented, what was the point of the OP in the first place?

[Reaver]

back in the earlier editions, Spirits Immunity only applied to weapons. However, you could do a melee attack - called an "Attack of Will" on a spirit to completely bypass their immunity to weapons...

Basically, it substituted your CHA stat for STR, and the spirit resisted the damage with only body...Of course the damage pools, dice pools and target numbers are much changed now...


But food for thought..

[CigarSmoker]

Fire, Air and Water Spirits all get access to Energy Aura so an "attack of will"wouldnt do much good. Low force you better shoot down, high force will burn, freeze or zap you for that minor damage you did.

In game that would mean beast and earth spirits would be kind of "baddies" atm starting at force 6 beast spirits are nice and earth starts to shine in the 10s

[Lormyr]

Spirits cannot sneak, so they make sounds even when Concealed (aka Improved Invisibility).

Sure they can. Default Agility -1. Our tables routinely ask their spirits to do this when enemies with astral perception are likely to be encountered.

The intersting thing about spirits, and magic in general, is that the designers clearly knew it was unbalanced. And didn't fix it. Deliberately.
I wonder why? Serious speculation only.

I'm not convinced that all of them do realize this. Shadowrun has never been a well balanced game.

[Hobbes]

Higher force spirits doesnt scale in the same way as higher "force" fireballs

You want your fireball to give more dmg? Amp it up 2 drain for 1 dmg. That puts a natural limit on how much dmg you are willing to deal.

Want your spirit to be tougher? 1 force only* cost you on average 0,67 more drain.

* not completely fair though, as a higher force spirit will be tougher to summon, and often end up with fewer services. + the drain is somewhat swingy compared to the fireball.

Drainwise a force 9 spirit causes on average 6 drain, the same as a non-amped fireball
Most starting characters will have great problems succeeding on summoning that though.
 

Easier than you think.  Magic 6, Summoning 6, specialization Conjuring 14 Dice.  Up to 15 with Expertise after the first run.  Another + 4 from a Foci in a few more runs.

Use 2 Edge to force the Spirit to re-roll hits.  Regain Edge with Spirit Affinity, analytical Mind, or Reagents (Pick any 2). 

14 dice v. 18 Dice with 18 Dice re-rolling 2 hits is about a 50/50 shot at char gen.  Using whatever qualities/reagents to make the Edge spend a wash.  You do risk a good dice roll by the GM clobbering you with Drain, but a Force 9 out of the gate is certainly a possibility.  Once you get Expertise and Summoning Foci a Force 9 becomes routine. 

Super cheese mode, Spirit Affinity, Analytical Mind, spend all your starting Edge forcing the Force 9 Spirit to re-roll all hits.  Then Summon Force 3s to rebuild your Edge.  A Force 9 and 3 Force 3s, no Edge, probably no Drain (depending on the whims of the GMs dice).  Use the Force 3s as your disposable mooks, bust out the Force 9 "I Win" button.  And it's not like this is a one time shot, it's easily repeatable as necessary.   

Summoning, best PC ability in the game by a mile.  2nd place goes to spell-casting which Spirits can have.

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

Yep, when I called spirits an "I Win Button" upthread, what Hobbes just said is the kind of stuff I'm talking about.

With regards to ItNW, why does it matter that you need Magic to neutralize a Spirit?  It doesn't much, if you look at it from the perspective that there's never been a team of runners that doesn't have at least one Magician, and if your table is the first one ever to be all-mundanes then the GM can just not use spirits on them, right?

Wrong.

The power imbalance goes both ways.  When you need magic to neutralize a Spirit, then the PC who can Summon them automatically wins vs any NPC or group of NPCs unless they TOO have mages among them. In order to keep Spirits from being "I Win Buttons" for the Player, then the NPCs have to have heavy magic backup every time they're supposed to be a challenge.  And if every challenging fight has big bad Spirits to keep Angel Summoner from trivializing the encounter for everyone, now everyone who's NOT Angel Summoner, on both sides, are peripherally relevant.  Both NPC AND PC.  While it's ok for mook NPCs to play second fiddle to the Spirits and the Summoners who control them, it's not OK for players to all be 2nd fiddle to the Summoner just because they're not also playing Summoners.

[Reaver]

Fire, Air and Water Spirits all get access to Energy Aura so an "attack of will"wouldnt do much good. Low force you better shoot down, high force will burn, freeze or zap you for that minor damage you did.

In game that would mean beast and earth spirits would be kind of "baddies" atm starting at force 6 beast spirits are nice and earth starts to shine in the 10s

Didn't say it wasn't risky. But in the earlier editions, that was an option. And the only option mundanes had, as "more firepower" wouldn't work back then because you could never over match their armor back then..

[GuardDuty]

Fire, Air and Water Spirits all get access to Energy Aura so an "attack of will"wouldnt do much good. Low force you better shoot down, high force will burn, freeze or zap you for that minor damage you did.

In game that would mean beast and earth spirits would be kind of "baddies" atm starting at force 6 beast spirits are nice and earth starts to shine in the 10s

Didn't say it wasn't risky. But in the earlier editions, that was an option. And the only option mundanes had, as "more firepower" wouldn't work back then because you could never over match their armor back then..

Even a heavy pistol could still be effective against a Force 4 or lower.  And an orc or troll with a melee weapon could be effective against even higher.  Grenades were also effective, especially IPE grenades.

I know the mechanics of spirits are really unbalanced, but I think a lot of people overlook that spirits are supposed to be nearly invincible to mundanes.  It's not an "oops", it's intentional.  I never thought in the old editions it was really that terrible from a game-balance perspective, since nature spirits were less suited for combat (and limited by domain) and elementals had to be prepared ahead of time, but things have changed I suppose.

[MercilessMing]

Although I dont get why they didnt get rid of their force completely, like spells. Say they start as if they had a powerlevel comparable to force 3, then let the summoners amp up their spirits with 2 drain for +1 on everything

Couldn't agree more, in fact I thought I'd posted just such a house rule, but can't find it now.  I also like the idea, mentioned by Finstersang, that magicians spend character creation magic resources  on getting access to summoning different spirit types, as they do with spells. In 6E apparently every tradition can summon every spirit type, so it would help to have some progression in there.

[Reaver]

Fire, Air and Water Spirits all get access to Energy Aura so an "attack of will"wouldnt do much good. Low force you better shoot down, high force will burn, freeze or zap you for that minor damage you did.

In game that would mean beast and earth spirits would be kind of "baddies" atm starting at force 6 beast spirits are nice and earth starts to shine in the 10s

Didn't say it wasn't risky. But in the earlier editions, that was an option. And the only option mundanes had, as "more firepower" wouldn't work back then because you could never over match their armor back then..

Even a heavy pistol could still be effective against a Force 4 or lower.  And an orc or troll with a melee weapon could be effective against even higher.  Grenades were also effective, especially IPE grenades.

I know the mechanics of spirits are really unbalanced, but I think a lot of people overlook that spirits are supposed to be nearly invincible to mundanes.  It's not an "oops", it's intentional.  I never thought in the old editions it was really that terrible from a game-balance perspective, since nature spirits were less suited for combat (and limited by domain) and elementals had to be prepared ahead of time, but things have changed I suppose.

Are you remembering the editions correctly? The last time "attack of Will" was available; A heavy Pistol did 9m damage.. and that didn't matter as IMNW reduced the power of all mundane attacks to 0... so you could Thor shot a force 1 spirit.. and it wouldn't notice...

Again. I didn't say Attack of Will was a perfect option, but it was an option to address this issue back when spirits were arguably more powerful then now...

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

I quite liked Blight Toxin as a 5e solution to the problem of Spirits.

Any NPC can have a spare clip of DMSO+Spirt-B-GON.

[GuardDuty]

Are you remembering the editions correctly? The last time "attack of Will" was available; A heavy Pistol did 9m damage.. and that didn't matter as IMNW reduced the power of all mundane attacks to 0... so you could Thor shot a force 1 spirit.. and it wouldn't notice...

Again. I didn't say Attack of Will was a perfect option, but it was an option to address this issue back when spirits were arguably more powerful then now...

I'm not aware of any edition where INW worked that way...

In SR1, Immunity to Normal Weapons provided extra successes on the damage resistance test equal to Essence x2 (p. 176 CRB).  That doesn't really directly translate to the other editions, though, because of staging numbers.  (Note: I'm not all that familiar with SR1, but I don't immediately see that spirits have INW in first edition).

In SR2, Immunity to Normal Weapons provided an armor rating equal to Essence (force) x2 (p. 218 CRB).

In SR3, Immunity to Normal Weapons gave the spirit twice it's Essence (force) in armor, and it completely ignored the attack if the power didn't exceed that number (p. 264 CRB).  Same in SR4 (p. 288 CRB Fanpro).

[Tecumseh]

GuardDuty is correct about how Immunity to Normal Weapons was calculated in prior editions.

An attack of will used Willpower for the dice pool and (Charisma)M as the damage code.

[Leith]

Sorry, Im a bit confused.
Leith do you think they are too strong, or do you think they work as intended?

Yes.

The power imbalance goes both ways.  When you need magic to neutralize a Spirit, then the PC who can Summon them automatically wins vs any NPC or group of NPCs unless they TOO have mages among them. In order to keep Spirits from being "I Win Buttons" for the Player, then the NPCs have to have heavy magic backup every time they're supposed to be a challenge.  And if every challenging fight has big bad Spirits to keep Angel Summoner from trivializing the encounter for everyone, now everyone who's NOT Angel Summoner, on both sides, are peripherally relevant.  Both NPC AND PC.  While it's ok for mook NPCs to play second fiddle to the Spirits and the Summoners who control them, it's not OK for players to all be 2nd fiddle to the Summoner just because they're not also playing Summoners.

True... but magic isn't the only way to deal with magic. Just the best way. You can always kill the mage. The main problem with that is that if you do have an angel summoner every game turns into an escort mission. There are also solutions to that, but the simplest one is that the rest of the team, as you say, doesn't want to play 2nd fiddle and probably wont take responsibility for guarding angel summoner.

OR they forgot to adjust Hardened Armor when the damage codes were toned down.

snip

However, given your undeserved agressive sarcasm, it's clear any kind of different opinion is not welcome here so I will take my leave.

My bad. I was just making jokes to amuse myself, not insult people. But they did change the way hardened armor works. They had the opportunity to fix the imbalance and didn't. Assuming it wasn't just a mistake, you've got to wonder why. That's the speculation I'm actually interested in. Saying that the design team are a bunch of screw ups is, while true, a bit dismissive. Maybe they had a reason. I mean it is somewhat thematic that spirits are nigh invulnerable, but it is also way to easy to make Angel Summoner, the best super hero ever.
And for the record: no, I don't have a problem with that.