The Man Keeping the Martial Down

[Ignimortis]

For SR games that are really strict about legality/availability ratings, which is more a concern for bio, cyber and weapons, really, there's always the adept/mystical adept. Adept powers don't come with a rating attached, can always be learned and will eclipse cyber when the upper versions / grades are unavailable.

Anecdotally, I've played a "low-key" mystic adept in a SR5 campaign. Concept was more or less a mix of tribal warrior (Sioux) and "combat medic", so an initial 4/2 split of the MAG, with the 2 points going into spell casting of healing type spells and status effect removal, the adept powers going into straight combat prowess, especially boosting initiative, strength and accuracy. Heaviest available armor, variable STR composite bow with speciality ammo, couple of tomahawks and kyujutsu made this the functional equivalent of the razorgirl some other player had.

But SR5 doesn't do the MAG split for MysAds. You get your full MAG for casting and for Adept powers (you do have to buy PP at chargen for Karma, but, well...it's still the best deal you could get). Mystic Adepts are outright bulldrek in SR5, because you only lose astral projection...and gain a full box of adept powers for 30 Karma. Spend 1 PP out of 6 on Astral Perception, voila, you can also see Astral, you just can't go into it. But you can get 12+4d6 initiative on a mage out of chargen even.

SR4 did the split between "powers MAG" and "casting MAG", which made Mystic Adepts rather useless, since 4e was, generally, better disposed towards mundanes with prices, Essence rules (you can have about 7 points of Essence in 'ware, if you balance it really well, like "4.5 cyber and 2.8 bio", because the lower of the two got treated as 1/2 Essence cost), and so on. 4e has lots of problems, but I find that it's the closest to mundane-friendly without just hitting everyone over the head with legality rules.