...seem seriously inadequate in performance. With the new TTK balancing CCP didn't even mention snipers, which suggests that they either think snipers are fine, or didn't look at them at all.
Well, they aren't fine. Far from it.
After playing several matches with a sniper, it becomes pretty clear that the only thing they are good for is taking out militia-fit players.
I used adv. Caldari Commando (dropsuit skill at 3), with 2 complex damage mods, and either Charge or Kaalakiota Tactical sniper rifle (proficiency skill 4).
My performance was approximately cut in half compared to pre-1.8.
There are several factors contributing to this. Apart from the obvious damage mod and proficiency skill nerfs, resistance buffs to heavies, there's also the fact that battlefield is now riddled with either heavies or scouts.
The former are, quite literally, unkillable by a sniper, and the latter are running around cloaked (and even uncloaked, half of them are now brick-tanked slayer-scouts with 700-800 EHP
This needs to be fixed, or snipers will become not only one of the most hated and annoying roles in DUST, but also totally useless.

Although there are multitude of possible ways to fix this, here's one that seems fine to me:

Normal sniper rifles
- buff damage by 10-15%.

Tactical sniper rifles
- damage stays the same
- 5 round clip
- scope magnification equal to that of normal snipers
- in short, make them more like a "marksman rifle"

Charge sniper rifle
- buff damage by 10-15%
- introduce them at advanced level, not only proto variant
- 3 round clip
- scope magnification of tactical rifles
- increased effectiveness against vehicles (still not at 100%, of course)
- in short, make them more like today's anti-material rifles

Opinions are welcome... Unless of course they contain comments like "who cares about snipers", "remove the redline" or "snipers are fine if you use Thale's". Please, refrain from that ****. Thank you.

You want sniper rifles to have vehicular damage ???

Are you serious ??? Being able to shoot the driver of an LAV or turret gunner of a drop ship is not enough , now you want them to cause tank damage .

Silly , just silly .

You want the scope of the tactical to be like a normal , don't you know that tactical's are magnified more than normal sniper rifle's ???

A slight buff in damage is needed like five to eight percent . Or maybe just five and with damage mods , that can be brought up to ten percent and with the prof add fifteen to that once maxed out .

There doesn't need to be much of an increase .

Actually the scope can use some fine tuning . Not like a Thale but somewhat in between a tactical and a thale .

Tactical scope's can become the regular with the magnification increasing to that under the thale's as one goes to prototype , with the thale being the exception just like it is now .

Changing the scope would make sniping more efficient and actually could be a skill set in the sniper's skill tree .
A certain amount of skill points and each level increases magnification . Don't know why that's not an option .