[Malathis]

I've played a fair amount of SR2/3, but have only lightly read through some of the SR4 books, but have an oportunity to play in some SR4 games. A friend is going to be running some season 2 missions.

My loose charachter concept is an AR hacker with skillwires, his primary roll is to support teams entering facilities, opening doors, shutting off survalance, security drones, etc. The skillwires he would use to add in whatever skills he needs for the job, and to switch skills on the fly after he eventually builds a collection of skills. I'm not hardset for or against technomancer or hacker.

Was just hopeing for a bit of advice before I delved too deep into creating the character, key skills I might want to get or key 'ware, would a technomancer or a hacker be better?

If it helps at all, the concept was inspired by rewatching the show Dollhouse.

[ArkangelWinter]

The one thing I will say, you're gonna have an issue with skillwires if you go technomancer. You can take the essence hit, but that drops yout Resonance as well, hurting all of your Technomancer abilities. There's an Echo you can learn after initiating/submerging that lets you run skillsofts without the implants, but until then you'll want to use sprites to fill in skill gaps.

As a hacker, you could come out the starting gate with your concept (and probably more optimized), but you're losing the long-term benefits of Submersion and sprites.

As far as 'ware for computer types, I'll leave that to someone more knowledgeable.

[UmaroVI]

You want hacker. Technomancers are very much specialists and especially not good as AR hackers. I would check out the Combat Hacker archetype from my sig/ the sticky as my starting point.