It's not that enemies are getting "smarter at being able to avoid snipers"

It's that there has been an increase in health for any suit running armor plates. (combined with)

Proficiency Skill +15% damage versus armor only (instead of flat damage to both shields and armor) (combined with)
Damage Mod Decrease getting 12% damage from 3 of these mods instead of 24% (combined with)
Gallente Map Packs designed to be unfriendly for snipers (combined with)
No Adjustment to the Sniper Rifle in an unbelievable amount of time to keep the weapon up to date. (combined with)
Sniping in a Heavy Suit for a 10% bonus to sniper rifle damage. It feels almost forced. (combined with)
Stealth Removal of Sniping Locations without warning or patch notes (combined with)
Easymode Attack Drop Ships for high rate of fire splash damage anywhere you want it. (combined with)
Cloaks and 1500hp Heavies pick one miss a lot more than normal or waste your time chipping away (combined with)
Reduced AV Grenades in both damage + amount carried. Used to be decent drop ship defense (combined with)
Increased Drop Ship Health so much so that you can't even carry enough AV grenades to kill one! (combined with)
Fog of War /ON to no longer see what your squad sees. Waste time scanning over teammates(combined with)
Z-fighting enemies render invisible against certain surfaces, what a huge waste of time (combined with)
Removal of Mountains forcing snipers to relocate to more ground level or obvious positions. (combined with)

I can keep coming up with stuff to show you how the game has changed, and not in favor of sniping. I'm probably missing a few easy ones I could have pointed out. Oh well! Nice talk.

Well if that's the case, how about a proposition?

Attack a Heaven's Lost Property district. In the PC, do absolutely nothing but snipe with the Sniper Rifle. If you place 3rd or higher with it, I'll pay you 60m as well as another 36m to cover the clone pack.

But if you place lower than 3rd, then you have to pay me 50m, as well as make a thread saying that you were wrong about Sniper Rifles being viable.

How's that sound?

1. That was about the general community's view on snipers, we mostly hate them and think of them as Cowards not wanting to risk anything in a fight, or indeed to get off their butts to go and hack something.

I am very glad the sniper rifles are where they are now. I have spent far too many games during all the Beta stages and all the various builds having 2-4 enemy snipers camp the entire game up high, With no means for me to do anything about it short of calling in a dropship.

The main issue for my Sniper hate in Dust is the map designs. Most maps are "a bowl" With high Ridges mostly inaccessible peaks, high buildings and Towers With the same qualities and not least the possibility to fire out of the redline.

So here is what I will suggest to Balance the snipers and give them a serious tactical role:

- Buff damage seriously, I'm talking 50-100%
- Reduce rate of fire With 25 - 50 %

And most importantly:

Reduce range to about 200 meters.

These changes will award good aiming skills, as it will be more important to land those shots. It will also remove much of the mentioned hated behavior With People setting up camp somewhere and have LOS to way too much of the Battlefield.

The range change will still make them superior to any other gun (don't get me started on forge guns...) and my most important point: This will reward tactical movement and re-positioning. A sniper is IMO supposed to follow the Squad, provide cover fire or Lock Down a certain chokepoint or objective. He is to be a smart player that knows how to re-position himself and Call out intel.

It seems like most of the suggestions in this thread comes from People which are mostly comfortable With setting up camp somewhere and just rack up the kills, far out of harms way, for that, you will never have my or any other competitive FPS players support.

Get Gud.