I was looking at the Runner's Companion and browsing through the variant races and decided to try building a tiger shifter. After playing around with it some, it made me wonder -

Are shifter characters designed for games with higher BP limits (I've seen some posts on Dumpshock about people building characters for games with higher BP limits)? Or is it just me? I know I'm not the best at optimizing, having just started playing and using what I've learned here has helped quite a bit. But it seems to me that the shifters in general aren't really designed for 400BP games, unless you like having just one or two areas of expertise to start with.

Granted, I can see where they have enormous growth potential, but they seem to be weaker than most out of chargen?

Yeah, they pay a lot of points for regeneration, essentially.  It's worth having though...  The real problem with shifters IMO is that they don't really have much use for animal form.  All except, I suppose, the ones who are small or flying animals because it lets them get into places where they're not wanted.  But an animal not wearing armor is going to get shot to death, regeneration be damned, especially because it isn't auto-life like it was in SR3, you have to roll, and if you biff your roll you could still die.

Come to think of it though, a tiger shifter could do the job of tanking that not even trolls can do now.  Normally, a tank troll is kinda pointless -- he can roll 35 dice for damage resistance, but a full auto burst does DV15, which needs 45 dice to be reliably soaked.  A tiger, on the other hand, can have comparable body and armor, but he doesn't much care when he takes damage.  Make him an Adept with full mystic armor, pile on all the armor you can, and then if he takes a few DV, it's no biggie, his Body is so high that he'll regenerate it anyhow.  Though I suppose a bear shifter would do a better job of that, actually, since they have a natural minimum Body of 7(!)

That was my thought. They look to be tailor-made for adepts - toss in Imp. Ref I or II, pile the rest in Mystic Armor, take 2 levels of Krav Maga for the Quick Draw and shoot in melee advantages, and then pump body so they can wear the big armor. I think I'll try again and see what I come up with. Might be an interesting character for down the line.

Well, the troll can feasibly get up to 30+ ballistic soak just in armor alone, with 11+ body dice, they end up taking a few boxes of stun even if they buy hits they knock down 15 to 4 or 5. So it's seriously not -useless-.

Admittedly regeneration is bad ass however, it's one of the reasons vampires cost 100 bp base too.

Not useless, but not as good as a bear, bears have even better body, so can pile on even more armor...

It's the limit of armor, not the body. If you get a heavy milspec armor suit and helmet you're looking at 18/16 + FFBA Full Suit is 24/18 + Full PPP Protection is 26/22 (Can't have two helmets), +4 Mystic Armor is 30/26 + Ballistic Shield is 36/28 + 1 from Troll is 37/29

Now it doesn't matter what body you have as milspec armor is made so well it's Body x3 So in order to wear the suit + the FFBA full suit you only need 8 Body which is easily achievable by trolls or even Orks let alone bear shifters or Tiger Shifters. That's the practical limit of a physad in armor as far as armor soak goes out the gate. You can of course replace Mystic Armor with Orthoskin or whatever and maybe alter the total by +/- 2 but the hard limit for armor is set due to the nature of armor.

So a Shifter, the benefit is the regeneration, not the body in the end. So if you went without physad mystic armor, and without a troll, you're looking at 32/24 conventional Armor as the max anyone can ever wear with the current armor tech available. Even with a 12 body you're still not hitting 45 dice. You could of course roll well and soak it all but you might also roll like crap.

Regeneration kicks in after you've taken that stun (Cuz with that much armor, only stuff that goes against 1/2 physical AND is powerful as all hell has the capacity to do physical damage, or a spell of course which regeneration doesn't heal anyways, so you're looking at MAYBE bad ass lasers) you can regenerate it away. Admittedly with an 11 body and a 5 magic you're likely going to regenerate 3-4 boxes of damage every combat turn but you can still be overwhelmed and taken out.

This is the premise of why Reaction is good, and why you really want to go full defense sometimes. But, with that much armor... even assault cannons aren't that big a threat.

Best way to take out that kind of character is a heavy laser, halves their armor, does ridiculous damage...  Of course, it's a one-shot and doesn't lower the defense pool, so it might be hard to hit.  In which case your solution is to modify the heavy laser for full auto using Arsenal rules   Can you imagine?  Heavy pulse laser in Shadowrun?  Wouldn't be much of a sporting weapon, but it would sure carve that tank troll into a pile of smoking meat in a hurry...