Ideas on how to balance the sniper

I play tank as well and I really couldn't give a **** about higher bodyshot damage if that keeps the noobs from rapid firing me and gives them less opportunities to HS me.

How does that scare you? If they indeed rose the amount of damage the shot did and durasticaly lowered the RoF. Instead of 5 body hits almost instantaneously killing you, it would probably take 2. Once you get hit by that first shot, you have time to take cover and get a bead on where it came from.

Maybe increase the damage of head shots. That way it would instakill blackjacks and still take out the slimbots with the explosive round. It's not as if you can really do anymore damage with a head shot to a pro. It's one shot kill regardless unless your an overcharged tank with gold armor. Even than, your down to a sliver.

Not true. A tank with silver armour and passive 3 can survive a headshot quite comfortably without overheal. And I don't think the headshot damage should be modified.

An overall damage modification would almost overpower the rifle, though. It would in a sense being doing the same thing assassins do making every class require gold/silver armor to survive a front grapple. I don't know if they were planning on bringing the front grapple down in damage or not but that would most definately compound the issue.

If you lower RoF and increase the headshot damage, it would invariably increase the reward of said headshot. While a lower RoF and higher body damage would have the same issue of people not aiming as the sniper. Snipers are supposed to aim for the head, not the effin foot.

I would be a fix to people rapid firing all over the place and then score some random headshot, which is my main concern. I am a crappy sniper myself, but with the MNC sniper I can still score headshots by just spamming in the general direction and praying. That's what I think is wrong.

HS should already OSK, so that's rather pointless. Although it would make using deploy as a gunner even more worthless than it already is.

Why? Bodyshot dps should be the same with lower RoF.

If you keep the same DPS, it would mean an extremely powerful shot depending on the rate of fire. 4 shots is generally enough to take down any pro. So if-so fact-o, the single shot took the same time as 4 shots, it would be a single shot body kill. Again, missing the point of a snipers god complex of head shotting. How many people are proud of getting stomach shot kills, or leg shot kills? You brag, The pro sniper brags, about head shots and only head shots.

Lock this thread already... :|

If the sniper gets out of his spot he can no longer kill your team. So you're doing your job.

That said, I'd hazard that you're doing it wrong if you can't assault (the action, not the class) a Sniper successfully.

If they're camping in their spawn they're practically useless in most maps (not to say relatively easy to kill).

That said, if the team's are balanced the fighting should be happening roughly halfway through the map. Considering maps aren't very big, it's not too hard to get to the enemy sniper from there.

The skill requirement to quick scope and headcrab are also far from the same.

Also, this is a good example of how you don't know the game. Bombs aren't used solely to kill people. They're the most powerful area of denial tool in the game right now. You can use it over barriers and around corners, where a sniper can't hit you. You can use to lock down a spot the sniper wants to go through and pretty much guarantee he can't get past.

On top of that it's very high damage, often a one hit kill, has a huge radius, particularly at lvl 3, recharges very fast, can cause a lot of knockback for ring outs and requires virtually no aim.

This is the exact antithesis of everything the sniper does. The sniper requires pin point precision, direct line of sight, has the lowest health in the game bar the assassin, and the closer he is to the target, the exponentially harder it gets to aim and the higher the punishment should you miss an increasingly complicated shot.

Grenades are stupid simple to lob at your opponent, can be used indirectly and behind cover.

Because you're not good enough? That seems to be the issue now.

If you're dodging a competent assault/gunner's grenades/mortars you're not attacking, and they can move in while firing, at which point you either fall back, or get fucked. Either way you just lost your perch. It's called suppression fire.

Incompetent gunners and assaults will just lob easy to dodge things mindlessly.

As does every skill every class has. Again, you just gotta be better, which you don't seem to be.

Or you're just not nearly as good as you think at this game? When the rest of us can get equally high scores with any class and deal with the sniper just as well, it would seem to point out that the only stable variable is you.

Because those classes can just as easily kill you back within seconds, if not faster, if we're talking about body shots.

Vs. The Tank:

The scoped sniper rifle does 225 damage per body shot.
The Tank has 700 to 1000 default health (depending on level of passive skill)

It'll take the Sniper 4 to 5 body shots to kill a Tank.

The Tank's railgun does 149 damage.
The Sniper has 300 default health. He has no passive bonus to his health.

It'll take the Tank 3 shots to kill the Sniper.

BOTH weapons have the same exact fire rate (1.0), and the railgun is just as accurate outside of very long ranges (0.01 spread against the scope sniper's 0.0).

Blow for blow, the sniper loses. And that's his prime target.

Let's check the Gunner, even though the Gunner should be exploiting indirect damage:

Gunner has 700 default health, and no passive bonuses.
It'll take 4 body shots to kill with the sniper (225 damage per shot)

The gunner's mortar does 90 damage per mortar. Considering no gunner worth his salt uses less than lvl 2 passive at any point (and really should have lvl 3 ASAP for dual minis and triple mortars), it does around 180 - 270 damage. It takes 2 rounds of mortars to kill a Sniper.

Now, a Gunner's mortars do have a slower fire rate, 1.5, so we need additional maths (for stupid Gunners who sit there and trade blows, instead of exploiting the AoE).

So, by default, Sniper will take 4 seconds to kill a Gunner (4 shots x 1.0 fire rate). Gunner will take.... Drum roll please.... 3 seconds to kill the Sniper back (2 shots x 1.5 fire rate).

And, again, these are the sniper's PRIME targets and they both can outdamage him with body shots. Wanna check Assault too? Even though Assault should NEVER be trading blows with a Sniper due to his much higher mobility and indirect fire capacity? Sure, let's.

Assault has 500 health. It'll take the Sniper 3 shots to kill the assault (again, 225 damage per body shot).

Sniper has 300 health. Grenade Launcher does 150 damage per grenade. Takes 2 grenades to down the Sniper.

They have the same fire rate.

Again, the Sniper loses.

I didn't comment on body shots because they're a null point. All classes except Support (which, again, is equally fucked against any class at a range since he has NO ranged option whatsoever) and assassin (which really shouldn't be visible at that range anyways) can outdamage the Sniper doing body shots. They also have enough time to run for cover if need be unless they were in a terribly exposed position to begin with. And lastly, all of the aforementioned except the railgun can be used from behind cover, unlike the sniper rifle.

So if you're getting killed by body shots it's your fault.

Maybe to you, because you seem to be quite bad at it. It takes me about the same effort to kill them as to kill everyone else.

Unless my team is just hanging back camping... Then it's simply a pain to move anywhere as I'll have 3 and 4 enemies on me all the time. But that's not a class balance issue.

Sniper is fine. You seem to be living of this fantasy where every sniper is an omniscient perfect quickscoping headshooting sentient machine of perfect efficiency. That's an aimbot. Actual human skill has physical limitations. Requiring Snipers to headshot only to be at the same killing capacity level of every other class (all of which are really fast at killing each other) is stupid, as that would require an absurdly higher level of skill from the Sniper to be simply average.

Your issue seems to be more that YOU don't know how to effectively counter snipers, more so than classes themselves being unbalanced.

Well, maybe the bodyshot dps on pros would be a little bit less to accomodate for the fact that you do the damage up front and you need less reloads. Obviously the numbers should be tweaked a little. I don't want bodyshots to be as devastating as headshots, I was never saying that they should be.

You still haven't really adressed why higher bodyshot damage and lower rof would be a problem, assuming the numbers are tweaked correctly. The exact numbers would be subject to testing, but I just think that a sniper shouldn't fire as rapidly as he does now. Snipers are about careful aim and making shots count. Not about machinegunning the heck out of people at any range. It makes headshotting way to easy for people with average aim and it makes good snipers absolute killing machines with 4-5 OHKOS in 3 seconds.

Increasing the sniper damage from 225 which is about 80% of another sniper and assassins HP which is almost OHK bodyshot (Unarmored) would result in over 300... This will make them capable of OHK bodyshot those classes. If you are thinking lessen the magasine by two rounds and increase firing damage by 50% (to compensate for those two rounds) then that's 337 damage which is ENOUGH to OHK the lighter classes. This would also lower the firing rate by 50% firing two shots every third second, with gold RoF the firing rate would increase 30% resulting in 1.05 bullets a second, thats the standard firing rate and two shots = one dead non-armored assault with 500HP. While now they can take 3 at a slightly higher firing rate.

Lowering firing rate and increasing the damage wouldn't really change much would it...? Except the firing rate.
Unless these numbers also increased headshot damage by 50%. Jeez-us. :|
My numbers are not fact, and can be tweaked, it was just how I imagined it!

I don't really have a problem with the sniper OHK bodyshotting the weakest classes without armour. If you really insist on playing sniper or assassin without armour, you're just asking for it. There are so many things that oneshot you already (charge, bomb, shotgun, a bunch of grapples), I don't really see how this would be a problem. Playing unarmoured sniper of assassin is a big gamble no matter what. Assassins shouldn't get bodyshot on a regular basis anyway. They have a cloak for a reason.

*edit* If oneshotting unarmoured sins and snipers is really a problem, the damage could always be set to 299 or something. Like they did to the tank railgun that just barely needs a 3rd shot on snipers. D:

What people demanding nerfs to the sniper class don't seem to realize is that killing the smaller, quicker moving classes can be enough of a PITA as is if they're not retarded and don't stand around waiting to be headshot, and actually know how to move to make life difficult for a sniper. Nerfing the class to make the larger, slower classes harder to kill would make this even worse.

Plus, seriously, if you're having massive amounts of trouble with snipers on any map other than maybe Grenade 3, you're not doing it right.

And as already mentioned and ignored a million times, you don't need to even kill a sniper to prevent him harassing your team, keeping him occupied is enough. Not that killing a sniper is that difficult in the first place if you're not horrible.

None of those one-hit kill them from across the map without the need for the pin-point precision of an headshot. Getting ONE body shot is relatively easy. Getting an headshot, or three body shots in a row, not so much.

So essentially, you want to fix the nonexistent problem of body shooting sniper (see my previous post as to why it's non-existent), by making it easier to one-shot classes, deliver more damage with each shot, and essentially favoring worse snipers.

Erm... Yeah... Sounds like fixing a leaking pipe with a chainsaw.

Zjees, will someone start actually reading my posts? I never said that bodyshotting is a problem. I said that rapidfire is a problem because it makes headshots way to easy. Miss a shot? No problem, got a new one comming right away. My proposal is to reduce the RoF to make headshots more skill dependent (i.e. you actually have to aim and make the shot count, like in every decent shooter) and to compensate increase the bodyshot damage to not nerf the sniper's bot killing power. And if one hit bodyshots on unarmoured assassins are such a problem, make the damage 299. That should be reasonable enough.

I just feel like, in the current state, snipers require way less skill than it does for any other pro. This issue seems to be with the fact that they can spam fire 4 rounds in a second into a pros leg and kill them no matter what class or endoresment. It just seems like if they gave him a bolt action rifle it would put him on the same skill required playing field as any other pro. He has a scope and superior range which still gives him a huge advantage over any pro.

Why increase body shots for bots. Why do you aim for body shots with bots anyways? Increase headshots. It won't change pro vs pro but make the sniper an effective lane controller too. Plus it forces players to aim for the head rather than promoting firing at legs or chests.

There are a lot of semi-automatic sniper rifles in games too that fire as fast as you can click. So the argument of other games doing it, is moot.

Considering how failsafe most other moves in the game are, I don't see a reason to cripple the sniper rifle's rate of fire. If the Sniper is missing you have enough time and warning to get out of there. If he's just spamming shots then he's not really an issue as he won't hit the side of a barn anyways.

225x4 = 900.

Pretty sure that with passives and/or endorsements that isn't always killing tanks or gunners.

The two classes most concerned by snipers.

What sniper in their right minds just shoot randomly at walls around pros? How many have you seen that won't actually hit a pro? Their rate of fire makes the sniper incredibly accessible making it a great noob stepping stone. No class should be like that, all classes should require an equal amount of skill. Bringing down the RoF will force people to actually aim for head shots instead of just spam body shots for quick, easy kills.

It works well on the Xbox because it's not as easy to aim. But I can pull off body shots and head shots easy from near and far range with quick zooms, especially with rate of fire. I miss my close range head shot? ****, who cares, just jump back and try again. If I had a penalty for missing, that would give me incentive to actually take better aim.

To stoned penguin. I must have been playing plenty of crappy tanks and gunners with no endoresments because they would drop from 4 shots constantly. Plus, that's easily remedied with a silver clip and bronze rate of fire. Your still popping off shots like nothing and you got the extra 2-3 blasts in your clip to finish them off.

*edit*

The sniper has great close range defenses too. But they are rendered obsolete by how incredibly easy it is to aim the rifle at someone and spam fire them to death. I could probably just easily pull out my SMG and chip them down throwing flak and ice bombs. But the rate of fire doesn't make it necessary when I can just constantly bounce around taking pot shots easily hitting any pro, including assassins.