What do you mean "useless spells and skills"? Can you prove that they're useless? Afaik they are all useless, perhaps you just don't like them for a particular reason? Astral Combat may be in an odd state but I think it is fine to take it anyway and a friend of mine did just that on his new character. Artificing seems fine to me. It may be an unusual choice for a shadowrunner but I think it can be fun and I've used it myself. Any skill or spell is a good choice if the player finds it entertaining.
I think it would be ideal if this person had a form to fill out so we would all know what type of help he is seeking. I think it would help a lot if we knew where he put his karma, as you said. What I would suggest is to tell him that you like his character and give him encouraging feedback. If you think something doesn't add up, tell him, but I would avoid making absolute statements about the value of any particular item, spells, attribute, etc because it is highly subjective.The only skill that strike me as fairly odd is Medicine, I'd probably inquire about that instead of telling him to remove it. The attributes don't really bother me either. I think the best approach is to point out areas where he broke the rules and provide positive feedback, then ask what kind of help he would like.
Of course I can prove that they are useless. Useless means that you never need it or you can easily replace it with a better tool (which you already have). Manabolt is better than astral combat, increase charisma is difficult to use (gives physical drain 5), so it's very seldom usable in the beginning. Later very useful. Without preparations alchemy is useless, fireball and ball lightning are similar, so use only one of them => gives more options to survive in different situations if you replace e.g. a ball lightning spell with a physical mask.
However, the most severe problem with this build is low dodge pool (total 5). And also very low initiative without the increase reflexes spell (often only a single phase). And because typical enemies in the beginning are archetype characters, for example a street samurai from the rulebook kills him very fast (geek mages first). He should always use increase reflexes and improved invisibility and skulk behind covers (can the new player play like this?). And it's still very difficult, because even with a full defense, improved invisibility and good cover, the full-auto strike can hit him easily. And so the gm should take this into account, and maybe use weaker enemies, which is a problem, because the other players have planned the builds such that they survive against archetype characters. As I said, fit the character to the table and other players.
So, I think that in this case I would still say something like that:
1: Drop str to get higher int or rea
2: Bod 3 is better than bod 4 (more points to rea and int)
3: Ball lightning and fireball overlap, select only one of them
4: Increase charisma is useless, because F8 is difficult and gives physical drain
5: Alchemy is useless without preparations (select some or dump the skill)
I have found that the medicine skill is much better than e.g. astral combat (which is easily replaceable by more better stun bolt), because with it you can accelerate the recovery process, which is useful for example if you want to heal the stun caused by alchemy preps (or ordinary drain). Or it's possible to replace higher bod with low bod, high medicine pool and better armor. It is useful skill, if your log is high enough. For example with log 9 (increase logic needed) and medicine + specialization you get on average 4 dices (even more with a good medkits) more to your recovery tests => which means that bod 1 with this skill recover on average faster than bod 3. This is one way to survive with bod 1 or bod 2. In this build it is useless (too low dicepool).
