...which any PC can do with 'wired 3.
Since which edition do any of the other roles (besides Muscle - i.e. Face, Magician, Rigger, Hacker) get Wired 3??? ;-)
Well optimization in 4e and 5e included getting 2 extra passes. While wired 3 is a bit more than any role got, the rewards are much higher now as it is pretty much necessary for getting acceptable defenses.
Faces in particular are somewhat famous for how absolutely trivial their 'ware and nuyen costs are, which is why the 'meta' builds in SR5 pretty much have a face running muscle toner 24/7. I didn't get a good look at drugs, but if drugs are as good as they were, the requirements go lower.
The point being, sitting at 2 majors 1 minor is so good that it basically is the 'peak' of combat capability, and its trivial for every role to get. And we have seen metas where it was more expensive than this to get good at fighting and faces and deckers made the sacrifice. 4e comes to mind immediately, the essence buy in to survive combat was 4 with almost all of your nuyen budget and faces went in on that because being able to survive a fight is too high value.
The issue here to be cognicant of isn't that non-samurai can get good at fighting mind, is the 'baseline' combat package is way too high value compared to the 'specialist' package. 6e essentially set it so that for 200k and 3 ess, which is not as big a price as you think, you can get damage immunity. As opposed to 5e, 4e, and 3e where the buy in for combat cability was way more granular (though in different ways, 5e had basic combat capability essentially at 2 passes and a quality, while 4e required you to hit some odd 30 soak) because things past the minimum buy ins mattered. There is no equivalent of going 'past' that barrier, your either unable to fight because you can't full defense, or you are able to fight in 6e because you can.
You play a hacker because they are the best role in the team for searching the matrix to gather information, one of the best roles when it comes to legwork and getting the lay of the land, getting blueprints and patrol schedules. They can snoop camera feeds and commlink communication, open maglocks, control elevators, turn off alarms, control lights, edit out the team in real-time as they walk pass a security camera, control sensors, hack enemy drones and automated sentry turrets and turn them against their owner, ... the list goes on and on.
In order:
Legwork: Faces can do this just as well. Also it isn't generally worth specializing to google. The fact agents are gone may make this somewhat better but faces can trivially do this through contacts.
>They can snoop camera feeds and commlink communication
Snooping Camera feeds still isn't good in 6e from what I saw. Same with comms.
>open maglocks
They are still worse at this than lockpicking.
>control elevators
Very niche. Especially because if you are physically sneaking using an Elevator is a terrible idea and if you are socially sneaking you should be able to legit use that elevator. I mean it isn't hard to climb 3 stories in 3 seconds and sneak at the same time with SR's system.
>turn off alarms
Once an alarm has went off turning it off is low utility. While you can probably turn off physical button presses it isn't really possible to stop all comms communication in a building.
>control lights
This was never very useful (it is more overt than just sneaking normally and in combat isn't as good as just tossing thermal smoke and firing via ultrasound) and literally has been nerfed this edition via edge changes. If you are trying to block vision, just use thermal smoke, especially as 4/5 metatypes do not care about darkness.
>edit out the team in real-time as they walk pass a security camera
Stealthing around a camera is better at avoiding detection and lower risk than trying to hack the camera. Against the corpsec camera operator I am only being resisted by some odd 5 dice, hacking the camera has more risk, its literally harder than just not doing it.
> hack enemy drones and automated sentry turrets
Or you could just shoot them.
The payoff for hacking is extremely low for the level of effort, especially because 6e keeps trying to prevent the main benefit of hacking, remote access, from being a thing. Like if you have to physically sneak into a building anyway to get a chance to hack cameras... you can also just sneak past the cameras. Cameras are just a perception test on a wall, if you are good enough to sneak past the corpsec operating them they don't do anything besides let the corpsec be in more places. Unless I missed something hackers still lack any real proactive power plays to make. So much of what the decker does is just strictly inferior to doing the things without hacking.
This isn't to say hackers need to blow everyone away forever with what they do. Faces don't. Its just that they lack a high point where a hacker is definitely more useful than what any other archetype can do in a major way. It isn't that hackers are incompetent or transparently terrible, unlike Samurai they DO do something different than other PCs and have changes in their outcomes. It is that you probably would want to be literally anything else before a hacker.
Like if a Samurai is just a slower, larger, gas guzzling car with less seating and cargo room compared to a face, the hacker is the same but at least they are physically smaller so sometimes you can squeeze into a parking space you normally couldn't.
Don't know if that metaphor made sense but that is a good way to think of the opportunity cost of roles. Not just 'what can I do?' but 'what COULD I be doing instead?' A hacker CAN turn out the lights, but they COULD just 100% turn off vision for anyone who doesn't have sensor based vision which is way stronger AND cheaper to do. A hacker CAN loop cameras, but they COULD just sneak past the cameras at much lower risk to themselves and the team.
I will reiterate again though I didn't go too in depth with the matrix. I just confirmed hackers mostly had the same capabilities they had in 5e, and their buy ins didn't get low enough to really allow sub-roles, and because its harder for hackers to be capable physically due to the massive nerf to gear in 6e (specifically things like worn armor) we can be pretty sure they are going to get worse from the edition they were at their weakest in. They probably play and feel better, but in the terms of
THE META they are going to likely be as sidelined as they were in 5e or more so.
Which is better than 4e's "If you aren't a rigger/hacker hybrid who mostly just uploads software to stuff, uses drones that out soak all but the most min-maxed samurai, and never rolls their own skills you aren't meta because hacking is too potent, broad, cheap, time consuming, and impactful" but, you know, isn't ideal either.
I suspect hackers are going to have more fun this edition than samurai just because the matrix seemed way less soul crushing than 5e's. But this thread is about
THE META. And on top of that if a character type is TOO low powered that does affect how fun they are at the table. I can't say if hackers will fall below the '5e pure adept threshold' when they actively aren't enjoyable to play just because you feel too wimpy to contribute to scenes or have cool moments compared to everyone else, but I can say with quite a bit of confidence they are, in fact, not a very strong archetype in 6e.
