Uhm with these new rifles roofs are the worst spot to be.

They increased the damage and headshot multiplier significantly but reduced the range to compensate.

IWS shitting out anecdotal evidence again.

Sure, I'd buy that, if you could actually get any sort of coverage on them. See, some of the legitimate snipers would actually use the high ground to snipe the drop-uplink off the roof or even kill people that -aren't- on the very edge. With this range change you might as well just ditch the rifle, grab a forge gun, and don the zoom function on your television. Or, even better, get a television/monitor with a built in crosshair.

I'd have stuck with the old stats. More worthwhile to have longer range and the ability to suppress units on the rooftops/kill their equipment then to outright kill them and not be able to actively get them off the roof.

So you want sniper rifles that cannot kill a heavy with two+ magazines?

Sure. I consider removing the nanohives/drop-uplink and starving him out of ammo more of a priority than outright killing the guy and letting him and his logi support to continue to respawn. If the goal wasn't to kill redline sniping then what was the goal, exactly..? A "trade-off" between damage and range? Why not leave an option for the longer range and reduced damage..?

I'm sorry, but if I ever decided to become a sniper and invest a couple of million SP on those things, then the least I expect to be able to do is OHK a heavy with a sniper shot to the head with a high-alpha sniper shot.

Sure, but do so as a -sniper-. An M16 now has longer effective range than a Sniper Rifle in Dust 514. I don't understand why there couldn't have just been a high damage/low range variant added on that could have made everyone happy.

An M16 has a longer effective range than every weapon in Dust 514 (and many many many other games)

Your point?

Also Fiction vs Science Fiction vs Non-fiction.

IWS shitting out anecdotal evidence again.

Sure, I'd buy that, if you could actually get any sort of coverage on them. See, some of the legitimate snipers would actually use the high ground to snipe the drop-uplink off the roof or even kill people that -aren't- on the very edge. With this range change you might as well just ditch the rifle, grab a forge gun, and don the zoom function on your television. Or, even better, get a television/monitor with a built in crosshair.

With the range change there aren't any areas for legitimate snipers to get an edge on the opposition when they take the high ground. It further incentivizes height play and if you actually tried out the sniper rifle in any sort of organized play you'd realize what I'm talking about.

Welcome back. And since this seems like a good idea. How about, the regular rifles have high damage but reduced range,
and the TACTICAL variants have low damage higher range. Cause buffing and nerfing everything THE SAME WAY across EVERY
variant solves nothing.

What do you think Aeon?

Large Railgun Turret 300m
Forge Gun 300m
Baseline Sniper 450m
M-16 Effective 600m

Your quip does little to prove a point of your statement. m-16 has longer range than every weapon in this game. So what?
Maybe we should bring in m-16 in the game; make it so that it would do damage m-16s would do against durabide tritanium armor, isogenetic gel ceramic padding and ion shields complete with a defense suit that can detect incomming shots and does its best to try to deflect them in a very similar manner the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_(countermeasure)

Also https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=176726

Also just because CCP Rattati has numbers and plays the game as much as anyone else here it is still the CPM's job to try to keep his point of views informed, give context to the numbers and his experiences, and keeping on track on making this game better. Letting him change numbers unabated completely would have made him no better that some of your more notoriously bad at balancing devs we have had experienced before. Luckily CCP Rattati does talk to the community and does talk to the CPM.

Also it remains ultimately CCP's game. If they want to nerf sniper range they're going to nerf it; and worse thing hurting the counter argument cases if numbers of sales; kills; deaths and usage are proving the changes were doing much more good than harm bringing them much closer to all the other weapons.

I'd have stuck with the old stats. More worthwhile to have longer range and the ability to suppress units on the rooftops/kill their equipment then to outright kill them and not be able to actively get them off the roof.

But Aeon, destroy uplinks you say? Why that's just so useless. You know it's all about the kills and capping objectives. Tactical planning means nothing in this game versus just mindlessly throwing suits at the opposition in order to promote "bravery" over "cowardice". Really, where are your priorities? Everyone knows a video game is where you're supposed to show your "manhood".

If realistic weapon ranges eere a thing we would get epic bitching that made chromosome "we want closer fights, ranges are too long, I can't dodge an HMG and exploit hit detection avoidance because wobble strafing at long range is an idiot move!" Bitching seem like a polite critique.

Welcome back Aeon.

The sniper rebalance was born from the fact that as a weapon class, they remained the only weapon to have not been touched in anyway since the game launch. With the sidearm and rifles rebalancing also being done in delta (fairly successfully from the feedback we've got) it would've been somewhat remiss to not look at the snipers as well.

There was some serious map and range analysis with the snipers, something that hadn't been done in that level of detail for quite a while. Well known and successful snipers were polled an questioned as to their favourite snipe points and tactics. A large number of such points and tactics had nothing to do redlining either.

What was found is that on some of the maps the power projection of snipers from these favoured snipe points was, put simply, excessive.

Now, as you, me and virtually everyone else has pointed out, this is more to do with poor map design than anything else but any changes required to fix that will need to be part of a client patch rather than server side. Believe me, such map changes are going to be top of the list if such a chance comes.

So a reduction in sniper range was thought, a decent compromise. It forces snipers to come more into the battlefield and give non snipers a chance to counter them with something other than another Thale. To compensate for the range nerf, they were all given a fairly hefty damage increase to keep in line with the increases ehp of suits since the games launch and given a significant headshot multiplier to reward skilful play.

Were the changes perfect? Of course not, they were a product of unfortunate compromise. Were they needed? Absolutely. There isn't another class of weapon in the game that was so dominated by one particular varient of that class ie the Thale, than snipers. We need a broader range of varient use than was being seen before delta, in all weapon classes and it's my belief that simply looking at the kill feed in a match post delta, will tell you that delta has achieved that.