Hey guys
I've struggled to understand how Wired Reflexes could possibly be worth it's essence (and nuyen) price. From a balance perspective we can compare it to two other things, Synaptic Boosters and the Increased Reflexes adept power. I'll be focusing on the adept power for a number of reasons. First, magic and cyberware are parallel aspects of Shadowrun and thus can be (for balance sake) quantitatively comparable. Second, Essence and Magic hold a bunch of similarities including (common) starting numbers (6 max mag, 6 starting ess), difficult to increase (initiation), etc.
Increase Reflexes (level 3) only costs 3.5 PP which is really not that much points. Especially because you can 1. grow your beginning number of PP at character creation through items, initiation (Depends on DM), etc, 2. be a full magician with 12+ spells as well as having other adept powers.
However level 3 of Wired Reflexes costs 5 essence. 5 ESSENCE. That's ALMOST ALL OF IT. Sure, you can reduce it with superior grades of cyberware, but it's already at an incredibly high availability rating making it near impossible to get at anything higher than Betaware and certainly not at character creation. Additionally the cost is HALF of MAX nuyen. This means you're limited to practically no other cyberware, as well you have 50% less nuyen to do everything else you wanted to do with your nuyen-focused character.
The quantitative magic equivalent would cost 6 spells and 5 PP.
I don't get it.
My personal solution as a DM is to reduce the essence cost to the same essence cost as the rating and the nuyen cost of level 1 by like 5%, rating 2 by 25% and rating 3 by 40%
What's your thoughts/opinion?
