Just wondering something, since the SR4 main book seems to have left out alot of the SR3 adept powers (And probaly a number of mage powers). Do these abilities (as presented in SR3 main and MITS) simply no longer exist? Or do they simply carry over as is? Since I've noticed about half these powers havent been 'converted' over at least in the main book. As well as certain things such as centering as applied to adept abilities, and I'm abit confused as to the ability of regular adepts to have a mentor spirit (Which they were allowed to have to a certain extent in MITS)

I'm mostly asking as I'd like to remake Jurgen at least as close as I can in SR4 since I did very much enjoy the character in question. Yet some of the ablities he possesses in SR3 dont appear in the SR4 main book's adept ability table etc.

From the main book we have a really good idea of what Fanpro is deciding to do with Sr4.  They want to get rid of a lot of the clutter, a lot of the things that were pretty redundant or did not really mesh with the well-balanced system they have going now.  So, for one thing, they made magic a matter of attributes.  If you are a shaman there is no real difference between you and a regular hermetic.  In fact, both of you summon on the fly, both of you summon practically the same spirits (shamans get beast, hermetics get fire, and otherwise its the same).  You both can take mentor spirits, but under the positive quality of mentor spirits it requires you to be a magician or mystic adept in order to gain a mentor spirit.  There is no reason that a physad can not worship Hippo, or whatever your Mentor spirit was, but you don't get any bennies for doing so.  In addition, right now at least, there are a lot of missing powers because they got rid of a lot of fluff.  You want to be more capable in stealth, you don't take traceless walk anymore, you just add more dice to stealth.  Simple.  You want to hurt people more in melee than you add critical strike, or additional dice.  If you wanna do physical with your fists... than welcome to the single point costing killing hands ability.  Otherwise, especially with the opening in this beta, there will be no houserules and thus no custom powers/guns/etc I'd imagine either.

You can also wait until the first expansion book, Street Magic (http://www.shadowrunrpg.com/products/product.php?i=26004&title=Street+Magic), comes out in a little bit.

Personally, I always thought it woulda been a good idea to open up Mentor Spirit to mundanes. Sorta like a patron thing, for RP. Just think it'd be neat.

You can still follow/worship/idolize a mentor spirit if you're mundane.  No need for game effects to get the RP element you're wanting.

Zealot!

Yeah hopefully the new magic book wont take too long to come out. In the meantime I suppose my runner will just have to snipe people in the groin instead of the head in order to vent fustrations