You've Got a Plan, but you Need One More. Sniperenz guide.

disclaimer: There are more ways this then to play Sniper. In a game with nearly infinite variables, of course there will be more then one way to play.



Table of contents:
1.Understanding what the Sniper does
2.Endorsements
3.Skills and skill buy order
4.Weapons
5.Playing and matchups

1.What the Sniper does
The Sniper is they favorite child of speed and deadly accurancy (sorta). He's a long range AoE spammer/Trapper. He specializes in:

Destroying Bots

Slaying Pros

and depending on your build, Destroying Turrets

His pros and cons include:

Pros:
Long Range
Has a one hit kill (except on gold armor passive 3 tanks)
Three good crowd control abilities
High vertical jump
A great offensive force for pushing
Great at controlling areas.
Decent secondary with the right build
Can freeze people in place and suck the skill right out of them
A decent grapple for when things get bad
Explosive ammo
Very high juice gain
And the mighty AoE nuke FLAK

Cons:
Very low health (dies from the wind)
Slow
Must invest a lot in skills
Assaults rape him


2.Endorsement setups:

Speaking of endorsing things, here's SXD's endorsement guide. It's pretty good.
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=4806

Anyways, here are what I think are the two best builds.

Gold:Rate of Fire
Silver:Armor
Bronze: Clip/Skill Regen

Why?

Gold rate of fire is crucial to quickly breaking bots/turrets/pros. It also makes the SMG a somewhat decent weapon. Armor is incredibly essential because the Sniper dies from anything and everything, although you can use RoF instead of Armor if you don't think you'll be taking to many hits. Now here's part were the choice comes in, Skill Regen bronze or Clip Size bronze? Skill Regen Bronze makes skills regen at a pace of 20%, when silver makes it regen at 25% and gold at 30% so I'd have to say Bronze is the best deal. Skill Regen is good, and having the extra flak/trap/grapple could mean the difference between life and death. On they other hand, there's bronze clip. Bronze Clip can make eliminating turrets easier, make the smg have those few extra rounds to kill someone, and makes your juice rushes better. All in all, it depends if you like to use your sniper rifle for close range, or if you want to be better at breaking turrets and have a better smg.

3. Skills and skill buy order.

Traps: The OMG IT'S SO OP OMG skill. Traps, you guessed it, activate when people step on them, and they freeze people in place. Now, I know some of you snipers run up to trapped victims and grapple them. This is stupid. If you get to close they can countergrapple/deathspin/insta rape you. Just headshot them instead. Oh and make sure that your traps are set up in a distance were tanks can't do things like deathspin you or have an assault instantly rape you. Now sometimes you'll trap and assassin, and they'll tap R3 to melee so you can't headshot them. If they do this, you should pull out your SMG and use flak at the same time (if you have it). Level 3 traps allow to place 3, but placing one eats up half of the skill. Make sure that if you're camping with traps that you place one in all possible jump pad spots and other areas were people can flank you.

Flak: A very underrated skill, flak is the go to for breaking turrets, making people go in a different direction and the sniper's main AoE crowd control ability. Flak, once thrown, damages an area for a time. The damage and area is bigger the more you upgrade flak. Flak has all sorts of uses, just be careful you don't accidentally throw it into a wall and back into you.

Grapple: An overrated skill, grapple is probably good enough at 1. If you grapple someone with grapple 1 and then immediately do the SMG grapple, you got double the grapples (Yay!). You can then just finish them off with the SMG. Ring outs are situational anyways.

Passive: Piercing and exploding rounds. These are mainly for destroying bots, which leads me into the Sniper's juice gain. Even after the patch, shooting a group of 5 bots a few times in the head with passive 3 fills up half of the juice bar, especially if you line it up to headshot more then one bot. Exploding rounds also make supports stop turtling so close to their turrets, and they can make for some fancy multi-kills.

Skill buy order:
Traps 2
Flak 2
Passive 2
Passive 3
Flak 3
Grapple 2 or Traps 3 (If you want, not really necessary. You'll probably make better use of traps 3 with the bronze skill regen build.)
Grapple 3 is a waste of money that could be spent on turrets, juice, ejectors and annhilator.
or
Traps 2
Passive 2
Passive 3
Traps 3
Flak 2
Flak 3
And possibly grapple 2

I recommend the top buy order for Bronze Clip Snipers, and the bottom for Skill Regen snipers.

4.Weapons

Sniper Rifle: A slow shooting sniper rifle with a one hit headshot kill. RoF makes it better for killing bots and turrets, especially with (as I mentioned before) passive 3. You can use it for close range instead of the SMG if you are good enough at quick scoping.

SMG: A fast firing light weapon with a small clip and low damage. Bronze clip endorsement and Gold RoF help it be less of a joke.

5. General Gameplay

Do what the name says and snipe. The range is your friend. Damage falloff makes it hard for classes to counter you unless they're good with their long range weapons. It also helps how slow you are.

You can use flak to make people go in the direction you want them to, like a large group of pros assaulting your base in the opposite direction. You'll learn to love flak.

Pick a lane and control it, kill bots to escort yours, break turrets with flak to get them past them and use your huge juice gain to protect them while they down the moneyball.

Speaking of the moneyball, after the nerf the Sniper Rifle does really low damage to the moneyball. It's probably a better idea to throw flak and use your smg.

The sniper uses the SMG with one hand, so if you position yourself correctly you can aim at people from in between walls. Kinda like this:

| 0 <-Some fool
| -|-
|
|
0 |
|-- <- Sniper


Matchups:



This guy. You hate this guy.

His tiny head, fast movement, and better close range weapons make him a formidable foe. Imagine it like scout vs sniper in TF2. If a good assault wants you dead, he'll make you dead. He can fly over your traps, make you go in a corner, and mess with your mind (if he's good). Don't expect to outgun a close assault with your smg unless you got a few shots on him beforehand. You can try to trick him into running into a trap with your bronze skill regen. Watch out for those bombs and charge, too. Just try to make use of damage falloff.



Look at this guy. HE THINK'S HE'S BETTER THEN YOU. SHOW THIS SKINNY LITTLE PUNK WHO'S BOSS, SHOW HIM WHICH CHILD IS THE FAVORITE/caps rage.

Anyways, 1 on 1 Sniper Rifle battles from a distance can be annoying if you can't keep your head (both literally and in the game). Just make sure that you keep your eye on where the little dot in the middle of the scope is, the bullet's going to go there exactly. As for 1 on 1 close up, it's pretty much the same, whoever keeps their reticule on each other the longest wins. Try to play smart and bunnyhop.



From a distance, the Tank is the sniper's play thing (unless you can't aim and he can). Just put that dot over his head and press the trigger. If he blinds you, try to make use of your knowledge of the map and part of the map you're on and use the edges to make an escape. If he gets close, try to freeze him with a trap and headshot him (DON'T GRAPPLE), or make a nice quickscope headshot/escape.



Like a slow assault with a big gun. He's generally pretty easy. If he gets close, throw a flak and if you can use the SMG wall trick. You should be able to headshot him pretty easily. If he's lvl 3 deployed shoot at him until he undeploys and headshot him while he's undeploying. Make use of damage fall off and range.



Pretty easy. Use your SMG and bunnyhop if a noob assassin is chasing you and trys to grapple you. Use your flak in the general direction of were you think/hear a cloaked assassin. If she gets caught in your trap, SMG and flak her because a good assassin will be meleeing. She's just normally hard to snipe, and since she's a close range character use your close range weapon



The trick is to get them when they're not hiding behind a turret/wall (turtling). Use your explosive rounds and flak to make them stop doing that then pop their heads off. Watch out for their airstrikes and hacked turrets. Hacked turrets have a long enough range to even reach you, so make sure you get rid of those.



That's all she wrote. I'll try to keep this guide updated.

Re: The new and improved guide to teh sniperenz

Also, I forgot the obligatory panda:

Re: The new and improved guide to teh sniperenz

Pandas belong in off topic

nice guide too bad I can't snipe

My tip for the sniper is to use the trap, flak, and SMG a lot. I know a lot of my kills are from assassins that spring my traps. As soon as this happens, I flak them and SMG them. Flak is great for taking out everything. Lvl 3 flak takes out longshots very easily.

Another tip is that your bullets pierce multiple opponents after your passive is upgraded to 2. You can head shot people through bots and turrets, which is fun if you ask me.

All in the guide already.

I thought skill regen was 25/35/50?

But it's a wiki, so it could be wrong...

Cool guide

Didn't read it yet though, just looks cool.

Anyone can edit it dude.

Taking a look at the speed at which the skillss recover from the endorsement guide that one dood put up (with real extensive testing), and then using mathmatical equations to convert them into percentages is were the people that I got it from got it from.

Ya it's a really big fun fest filled with all sorts of colors.

I just realized that. I copied the results of that comprehensive data guide in my evernote even. And I do like that thread.

...

SCIENCE!

For all new snipers, my suggestion is that you spam flak and SMG stuff like crazy. The SMG will do much better at close range, and your flak is great for taking out assaults on really low health. Flak works great for holding up or redirecting enemies for a short time. Even if you don't see anything, I highly suggest you spam your SMG. Assassins are one of your worst enemies, and you can see them if you shoot them. I highly recommend spamming the SMG for this one reason alone.

I didn't know firing a weapon was spamming.

Grec the third



























?

It's a long story, well not really, I'd rather not talk about it.

get BANNED, foo

Nice guide, I main Assault/Sniper so this is really helpful.

Damn, if only I could edit this.

lol

Grec has posted in his own guide with four different names.

Ya kinda sad, huh.

But whatever, it took me time to make this so I'm not going to just abandon my work by not bumping it.