Mobius Kaethis wrote:That is a fair question. How can we make snipers an asset in their core role while still making it fun for all the other classes. Snipers in real life aren't designed to be fair or let their enemies have fun. This is why we occasionally see players calling the sniper rifle UP; they want a realistic one shot one kill weapon. The down side of this, which you hinted at is that making snipers more powerful would also make it much less fun for every other class.
Others have proposed increasing sniper rifle damade but giving their rounds travel time bullet drop and windage affects. I would have no problem with this at all. A one hit kill sniper rifle that was a challenge to hit with would seem to be more fun for snipers anyway. The only downside is that CCP has already said they have no intention of adding more realistic weapons physics to the game, citing something about hardware constraints. I'm not a programmer so I'm not going to take up the challenge of battling with the devs on that one.
Personally I think adding a constant sway that can only be stopped by holding your mercs breath, an action which would use up stamina, along with increased damage and lengthened reload times would increase the snipers utility at long range killing while still allowing for other pkayers to have a good time.
In both of these cases snipers should light up on the radar of players in a certain radius when they fire. Those guns are loud after all. I feel like there should be skills/equipment to help counter this effect to some extent though.
Additionally I feel that the snipers need to have an increased risk. It is all fine to shoot people from far away but that distance itself should be the only barrier to people attacking you (or height should you get onto a building). The artifical redline stopping players from flanking and killing snipers has got to go. I know it is there to protect spawns. I was there when MCC camping was a very real thing (REs tossed from the MCC netted me many a kill in those matches where my team got redlined) so I'm not proposing a removal of the redline. It would simply be better for everyone if there was more of a reason to not stay in it such not recieving WP or kills while in the redline or a timer that forces you to move out or face clone termination.
I do realize that neither of the weapon modification solutions does anything for increasing the snipers usefulness in high level games. I'll have to think more on that one since you don't like the idea of making the sniper have the additional role of ewar deployment specialist.
I would except a constant sway or slightly minimalized one if your skilled into the sway reduction. If it incorporated a breathing mechanic that used up stamina. I suggested in previous sniper related threads of using deployable cameras to expand their intel capabilities. Concerning the other poster who mentioned the role of the sniper I can agree with you that the sniper has some already defined roles on the field but they can be further enhanced and accentuated to make the sniper a wanted or even necessary asset in higher tier combat.
Moving onto sniper rifle optimization damage wise a head shot bonus increase to the current multiplier would be a good start. Having variable scope zoom on the rifle and of course render/hit detection fixes would help. I would also suggest a reduction to the aiming dot since it can be very large in comparison to our targets which makes it light up when the target is actually not hitable (of course if variable scope zoom is brought in this will be a non issue).
Finally more assets to be able to use as both regular infantry and specialized snipers such as
-Binoculars to find targets (also has built in variable zoom)
-New modules to extend our ammo size similar to vehicles
-Deployable cameras (probably will be handled with personal drones once they make an appearance)
-Deployable small turrets
-Single target long range precision painter (could just be incorporated into the binoculars)
-Smoke bomb
-Frag grenade (scramble visuals, stronger versions can be used the same way against vehicles)
-Poisonous rounds that sap both shield and armor steadily (stronger versions do ithis for a longer duration). Can equipped them to an equipment slot, only have access to 6 and can fire them once chosen on the weapons wheel. Can also be fired from any weapon, these rounds do not cause immediate death nor do they have a high dps when they initially hit targets or stick to targets.