DUST Search - In Defense of Sniping

Van Aewulf wrote:

First, the need to write this (the original op-piece) is born out of a severe hatred that I sense out there for the class in general. Filter through the forums and read what people say. Just because you don't have a tactic to deal with a long range damage dealer, doesn't mean they should be redesigned to meet your exacting specifications. Saying that you shouldn't need a sniper to deal with a sniper doesn't say a whole lot about what you know about snipers, sad to say.

Agreed that sniper getting sniped is a sign of a bad sniper. Being able to utilize cover effectively is the first lesson in proper, long range sniping.

Because CCP's minimap radar doesn't always register someone sneaking up behind a sniper when out on the field. Have you spent any time out there with a rifle? Or are you in the party who hates on snipers without ever trying to actually be one?

Agreed about LAVs, it's a good point.

Agreed about tanks, it's all about cover. I've dodged many a tank.

Nobody can snipe the pilot out man... what are you on? Do you even play the same game as me? I snipe the gunners.

It's the job of every soldier to recognize the sound of a sniper round. Don't you hear it? Or are you too busy paying attention to other things in the environment to hear it? If you're not wearing enough shield/armor, and get killed in one hit with no logi... then whose fault is it? It's not CCP's, and it isn't mine.

My fit costs me quite a bit more than that and hurts every time I die. The 'real threats' you're talking about are the crap militia snipers who die 7 times a round and get like 5 kills. At best, with a charge rifle, you're lucky to get 10. What? Is an assault rifle at close range need to be effective at long range too? I'm not sure what you're suggesting here, but snipers are long range damage dealers. You want easy targets in front of your face with low armor/shields to mow through? I don't know what you're getting at with that point, but I don't like where it's going. Clarify if you like.

Then hunt the snipers down. I mean c'mon, you're making it too easy on snipers.

Agreed on the charge rifle, it should be a distance related weapon.


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Fivetimes Infinity Immobile Infantry 1086	Posted - 2012.09.10 20:31:00 - [1] - Quote Khabarakh Khimbar wrote: 1. The easiest way to deal with a sniper is to snipe them right back. 2. Assault rifles will tear up snipers in a heartbeat. 3. LAVs are cheap (or free), fast, and practically un-snipable. 4. Tanks. Lol. I think we all can imagine what a tank can do to a sniper, and vice versa. There is no skill (or honor) involved here. 5. Dropships are probably the safest way to deal with snipers. First, I'm going to say that the fact that you felt the need to write this is evidence enough of snipers being out-of-line and overpowered. That we should require special techniques to deal with, when we're sitting there with a minimal investment of ISK and SP, is dumb. Dropships and tanks, they require special tactics because they've paid a lot for a method of fighting, and if they are successfully countered they take a big hit. Even if a sniper is countered somehow, who cares? A single fit is pocket change. You've accomplished nothing but a brief reprieve. Anyway: Only bad snipers get counter-sniped easily. This is one of the least effective ways to deal with a sniper. What kind of clown allows someone with an assault rifle to get near them? LAVs are okay if the sniper is someplace the LAV can get right up to. That's usually hard to do. It's kind of a default move to put your team between you and the targets you're killing. So to get to the sniper, even if he's accessible via a LAV, would require bypassing the infantry and tanks and etc between you and the sniper. Plus, one day LAVs will cost money, so it won't be such a casual thing to get wheels. If a tank is able to shoot a sniper, the sniper was probably not a threat to begin with. Dropships are genuinely the best way to deal with snipers. Notice how the best way to deal with someone packing potentially 100% militia gear winds up being a somewhat expensive vehicle that requires a lot of skillpoints and also requires multiple people to use effectively. Van Aewulf wrote: 6. It isn't my fault you don't post someone to figure out where I'm sniping from. 7. Nerf snipers. No, it's CCP's fault. Infantry have a lot on their plate. There's a lot going on down there. Chastising infantry because they got one-shot by one of the many red chevrons and don't know which of them is the actual threat isn't any better than the sniper being blamed himself. Sniping is too safe, and a large part of that has to do with the difficulty in seeing where the sniper fire is coming from. That's on CCP. Snipers should be brought in line with other roles in terms of power vs. skill required vs. risk entailed. Right now snipers are up there with tanks in power, only where a tank has hundreds of thousands if not millions of ISK on the line, snipers have minimal ISK. Even a mere 6.5k ISK can buy you a rifle and make you a real danger. Van Aewulf wrote: 1. Sniping isn't easy. 2. Sniping takes skill. 3. Sniper rifles aren't overpowered. I disagree with that. Once you get a vague idea of how matches tend to go, where decent vantage points are, etc, sniping becomes fairly routine. I don't play infantry much, but when I do, I am always forced to be more on my toes and otherwise cognizant of the situation. Sniping, by contrast, is pretty relaxed. Sniping takes less skill than most other forms of play, and yet its payoff tends to be much greater. The issue isn't so much that sniping takes no skill, but rather, that the skill vs. power payoff is skewed in favour of power. Sniper rifles can kill people from across the map, or at relatively close ranges. They're quite powerful. I'm not sure if they're themselves overpowered as a whole, but we certainly have nothing to complain about in this area. Except that the charge rifle is clearly too good to be standard quality, of course.
Fivetimes Infinity Immobile Infantry 1086	Posted - 2012.09.10 21:50:00 - [2] - Quote Sarcasm is cool and also super constructive.
Fivetimes Infinity Immobile Infantry 1086	Posted - 2012.09.10 22:31:00 - [3] - Quote RankRancid wrote: But hey,what do I know? I'm still waiting to hear this part. You should make a post where you aren't ranting and being sarcastic and just say things logically and concisely.
Fivetimes Infinity Immobile Infantry 1086	Posted - 2012.09.11 15:15:00 - [4] - Quote Van Aewulf wrote: First, the need to write this (the original op-piece) is born out of a severe hatred that I sense out there for the class in general. Filter through the forums and read what people say. Just because you don't have a tactic to deal with a long range damage dealer, doesn't mean they should be redesigned to meet your exacting specifications. Saying that you shouldn't need a sniper to deal with a sniper doesn't say a whole lot about what you know about snipers, sad to say. Agreed that sniper getting sniped is a sign of a bad sniper. Being able to utilize cover effectively is the first lesson in proper, long range sniping. Because CCP's minimap radar doesn't always register someone sneaking up behind a sniper when out on the field. Have you spent any time out there with a rifle? Or are you in the party who hates on snipers without ever trying to actually be one? Agreed about LAVs, it's a good point. Agreed about tanks, it's all about cover. I've dodged many a tank. Nobody can snipe the pilot out man... what are you on? Do you even play the same game as me? I snipe the gunners. It's the job of every soldier to recognize the sound of a sniper round. Don't you hear it? Or are you too busy paying attention to other things in the environment to hear it? If you're not wearing enough shield/armor, and get killed in one hit with no logi... then whose fault is it? It's not CCP's, and it isn't mine. My fit costs me quite a bit more than that and hurts every time I die. The 'real threats' you're talking about are the crap militia snipers who die 7 times a round and get like 5 kills. At best, with a charge rifle, you're lucky to get 10. What? Is an assault rifle at close range need to be effective at long range too? I'm not sure what you're suggesting here, but snipers are long range damage dealers. You want easy targets in front of your face with low armor/shields to mow through? I don't know what you're getting at with that point, but I don't like where it's going. Clarify if you like. Then hunt the snipers down. I mean c'mon, you're making it too easy on snipers. Agreed on the charge rifle, it should be a distance related weapon. I'm writing what I've written from the perspective of a sniper. I know what I die to and what I don't die to, because I have a decent number of kills under my belt, and I die so infrequently that the times I am killed are fairly memorable. As I wrote, using a sniper to deal with an enemy sniper is probably the worst way to go about it. It's incredibly easy to position yourself as a sniper such that you have a decent view of a high-traffic area, and can only be shot by people who are in the midst of the action. Which snipers generally aren't. Getting to a sniper requires traversing large areas of the map, often-times, and almost always requires making yourself a target to the sniper in question. You also need to contend with the sniper's team, which will more-than-likely gun for you as much as the sniper you're approaching. In short, good luck. I've died 4 times total to people who've managed to get to me without being aware. Twice because Osmon Surveillance has its share of dummies. As for whether I'm someone who hates on snipers without having played one, I have over 1100 kills as a sniper and am probably "above average" as a sniper. You can snipe the driver out of a LAV. You can snipe gunners out of a LAV and a dropship. I never said you could snipe a dropship pilot. I don't know if that's possible. Most people die in one hit to a high SP/good fit sniper. Even during the corp battles, most people died in one hit. Should everyone in the game be required to stack nothing but armor/shield to survive sniper hits? Why not just remove slots and up the default durability of suits then, to save people the trouble? Again, broken gameplay mechanics are not the fault of the people getting killed by them. That's the refuge of tankers and other people who think they're amazing but are actually simply using the flavour of the month gear. My fit as a sniper costs something like 53k. I don't care at all if I die, because I have over 7 million ISK at this point and am using the best/most expensive stuff I'm able to, anyway. And yet in the corp wars, I'm leading the kill board alongside the tankers, yet the tankers have maybe lost a tank or two in the game and thus probably over a million, whereas I -- if I died -- lost pocket change. That isn't right. "Hunt the snipers down" is a worthless piece of advice. As I mentioned, traversing the entire map and the opposing team, somehow not being spotted or killed by the sniper you're fighting, and all to deprive that sniper of a little ISK and a minute or less while he repositions, is an absurd expectation. The sniper loses very little despite the heroic effort of managing to get in range to him and kill him without dying yourself, while you've shut down your entire game essentially to deal with one person. That seems to me a very ridiculous expectation. Snipers should not require anything like that kind of effort to deal with. Sniping should be less effective overall through permanent rifle sway, and have tracers associated with it to make snipers easier to spot and kill. I've covered this in other threads, but I'll say it again. Sniping is as out-of-line as tanks are.
Fivetimes Infinity Immobile Infantry 1086	Posted - 2012.09.11 17:39:00 - [5] - Quote So why didn't you reposition yourself so that you were safe from the enemy snipers and help your team take objectives instead of dueling? The thing countering you in that game was yourself. You decided to go hunting the other snipers rather than shooting enemy infantry. In my own experience, if an enemy sniper seems to get a few kills I'll pop up now-and-then to see if he's exposed and I can kill them, but otherwise I'll simply position myself somewhere safe and wipe out the enemy team's infantry like normal. I've never felt myself constrained in any significant way by another sniper.
Fivetimes Infinity Immobile Infantry 1086	Posted - 2012.09.11 19:37:00 - [6] - Quote Van Aewulf wrote: That's your experience though. If people didn't feel constrained, there wouldn't be such an outcry against the sniper class. People are scared to run around the battlefield because of that powerful bullet coming from the shadows. That's the way it ought to be on a violent, dangerous battlefield. If you're targeting a sniper because he's got a few kills then you're effectively counter sniping, even if it's with an AR or whatever. You're still counter sniping, yet you say it's terrible advice. Which is it man? You do it because it's the effective way to deal with a sniper. You say it's terrible, but how else should it be done? From what you've written, your solution is that CCP should force snipers to the front line. Where the HMG, AR, and tanks can rip them to shreds. That's what I'm reading. I get the feeling like I need to restate this: I am a sniper. It's all I've been doing since a few days after Precursor hit. So when I say I'm not constrained, what I mean is that, as a sniper myself, I do not feel like other snipers are at all effective counters to me and don't infringe upon my ability to play in any significant way. But no, this isn't the way it ought to be, because it isn't a battlefield, it's a game, and the purpose of the game is to be fun. People should not be shut down by we snipers so easily. Sniping should not be something that you can effortlessly get 10 or 20 kills with and only one or two deaths with, despite investing a minimum of ISK and without any serious SP demands. Here's the real bit that is really uncontroversial: If you spent the same SP and ISK on an infantry fit, and played that infantry guy solo, you would not do anywhere as well at hurting the enemy team and winning the game as if you were a sniper. And I counter-snipe intermittently if it suits me. If there are any snipers exposed, I'll kill them. I don't go out of my way to kill them, and will not endanger myself to kill one of them. I don't assert that my shooting of snipers now and then is an effective way to deal with sniping in general, as plenty of snipers go about their business safe from me or any other sniper. RankRancid wrote: I think this is where you and I will differ for ever. I see a big name on that other team and my kill rate goes down. My sole purpose is to find that person and shut their game down. So what if I die a few times. I have had so many mountain goating trips I have 4000 lives in the pocket. I learn nothing from hiding from these people. If tony hasn't killed me so many times face to face he would be able to call me a chicken and he would be right. As you say we are always killing from so far away. Go up to people and say hi. Its not all about reaching out and touching someone. If someone is using a Ishukone I'll make a bit of an effort to kill them. I won't expose myself recklessly, but when I kill Gem Cutter a few times because he's using a rifle that costs more than my entire fit, I do smirk a bit. But, yeah, I am trying to kill a lot of people. My entire point in switching to sniper was to demonstrate how easy sniping is. I don't have any vendettas and don't typically pay attention to who's in the game. So it might be the case that my own experiences are more applicable to your average sniper than your own.
Fivetimes Infinity Immobile Infantry 1086	Posted - 2012.09.12 00:21:00 - [7] - Quote Sleepy Zan wrote: Fivetimes Infinity why haven't I ever gone up against you in a match my Ishukeone wants to say hi. Maybe I'll breake out the Thale even Yeah you have. We were in a corp battle at least once where I killed you several times. Remember that Caldari sniper, near B, the one who was at close range? You tried to hit me a few times with your Ishukone, but when you finally shot me, I also shot you, but you died. I then killed you a couple other times as you were running around. If it's any consolation, someone complained about you over comms. It's why I remember killing you so well.