what about some tweak for snipers

Burst

Recoil -45% for 3 secs after 1 sec
Recoil +45% for 6 secs after 3 secs

Would allow for single dps burst with many particles

I love that idea, and i actually suggested something similar to jeff, but so far as i can see, i have been ignored so far.

Either that, or sniper needs some super high DPS weapons with bad DPE's, so only snipers can use them. One really good example of that would be the bule blasters as they used to be, they did massive DPS, but had some of the crappiest DPE's in the game.

Only a sniper would be able to use them effectively, because of sniper's high DPE boost. With cata's, its simply insane, i calculated it out, and with my seige cata i actually get in the 17.0 DPE area. How im ever supposed to NOT power that, i dont know.

ANOTHER problem, is the lack of augs that are condusive to sniper use. A good sniper aug would give range, damage, tracking, and - visibility, and possibly elec regen or something similar. As it is, there are only 2 types of augs that do that, marksman augs, and the sniper chain of augs. On the other hand, SD's dont need to worry about visibility, so they can use a much larger range of augs, including alby augs, zeus augs, etc.

In addition to that, a sniper has to have a huge portion of their augs devoted to visibility, in order to remain stealthy. For example, my sniper has 3 -30% visibility augs and AT23, and i can STILL be seen from ~75 range by BG's, and drones can see me from several K range(which is stupidly broken, btw, its like giving missiles adums radars.)

Stop whining. Do you know how many ppl send ideas and suggestions to jeff every day?

Btw, he mentioned you by name to me when he was working on sniper stuff, so obviously he's taken things you say into consideration.

Shockwave! (graphics used on laser here)

Um what?

I see our opinions differ on aug setups and specializations then Demiser i only have 1 stealth aug on my juju and while yes drones can see me from ~1.5k away it is no problem when the majority of my weapons are ~1.8k-3k away. Whenever i am in a pvp situation or runs i am always yelled at because people can not find me unless i uncloak or shoot my weapons. Keep in mind i use a Primal Zebra Life and a PoT so my vis is still quite high. I find the availability of augs for a sniper quite sufficient.

Although i have yet to test the sniper changes on the Test server since the Beelzebub account seems to be bugged and cannot log into the new test client.

In That case, perhaps additional -visibility augs beyond a certain point become superfluous. I've been trying to get an ada marksman aug for a while now, no success so far

not even any sup range augs...but thats a different topic.

To pip: sorry, I dont mean to sound too whiny, its just what i'm best at, lol...

My problem is that i expect too much from the limited number of devs and admins. I Assume that it is merely a few lines of coding, when i guess it's quite a bit harder than that. Impatience gets to the best of us



Here is a compundium of all the problems with the sniper class, in my mind, currently;

The idea of sustained DPS equaling burst DPS is flawed. At a basic level, shield regen cancels out more of sustained DPS, but at a further level, the longer you are firing, the longer you are taking hits, which means the less enemies you can take out at once.

I was the one who suggested the physical damage beef, but there are a few issues with the idea that need fixing before it could become practical.
1. Physical weapons allmost all suffer from poor range. Since range is the hallmark of a sniper, using a short ranged weapon is sort of like using a high ROF weapon on a SD, it doesn't work very well.
2. In complement to that, Physical projectiles are very slow, in the 80 speed range, i think. This is extremely hard to hit a fast target with when the target goes over 300 speed.
3. Sniper is the DPE class, but this doesn't work out, because physical is the DPE damage type. When you have such uber DPE on a weapon multiplied by the uber DPE mods on sniper, you get seriously crazy DPE's, which mean you can never really reach your full damage potential.

Sniper lacks good augs that give damage and range. A sniper mastery gives 20% range and 30% damage, thats better than most augs, but sadly still not exactly ideal. The next step up would be a demented marksman aug, which would lose you some DPS, or an ada marksman, which would give a very nice boost to all your stats, at a paltry cost of 20-30 bil or so. Maybe some sort of bana aug that gives more -vis and damage at a loss to range, or something like that.

It is true that my team actually just humors me in taking me along on runs. I cannot hit fast moving targets, my shields are puny because i've devoted all my augs towards damage and range, and my damage is still bad despite all the augs i've put towards the damage thing, so i cannot help DPS the uber. I end up just sitting around trying not to die, shooting at the boss for whatever puny DPS i can manage.


Going back to the continued DPS vs burst DPS thing, another problem with that is that you cannot expect your targets to come one at a time forever. You are going to get bursts of enemies, and periods of no enemies at all. That sort of attacking really supports the zerker or SD playstyle, because they can charge up, and when they run into a pack of enemies, they can kill them quickly, and have time to charge up again. Sniper, however, has less DPS for the longer period of time it takes to kill the enemies, then has the same amount of time to regen, except they dont need to regen. That needs to be taken into consideration when sniper is balanced.

Rhino Cannon hits 300 speed at 1.7k range

Indeed

Nabaco's Sniper uses a Primal Rhino cannon from a Rhino I bet.

Not a problem after next patch, you will find that there are many physical weapons with long range.



Will be a bit better when my new weapons come in.



Reaching your full damage potential is irrelevant, if that was possible we would probably have to nerf the sniper skill. The damage done is pretty good and more then enough to take care of high level Ais.



I didnt have any problems chosing augs for my sniper. Sure there arent as many choices as some of the other classes but you only need 1 or 2 augs with -vis so you have 1 or 2 augs that you can chose freely.



That is probably true yes. Sure you can help a bit with the DPS but with a Lion zerker there is basicly no need for any extra DPS and when it comes to spawn control a SD is better. This is why I wanted to do something good with the sniper only cap ship auras so that a sniper in a cap ship would actually be useful.




That is a very hard thing to balance. Multiple enemies will be a problem for snipers and Vultures will always be a big problem too. Not a easy thing to balance.

There are 2 problems with the +Dmg and +Recoil aura

1. Why bring a sniper with an aura that gives a little damage increase when you can bring a fleet commander with a better damage aura and some slaves that can DPS the hell out of any UZ spawns.

2. Alot of end game bosses you need to pump out all the damage you can as fast as you can because they regen really fast, so not many people would want damage at the cost of lower rate of fire.

It would be nice if every class would have a roll to play in runs, but currently Sniper and Seer are left out of the fun at the moment. Please change this voomy , I just dont see the sniper aura as a solution as it would be second rate compared to FC.

Change Sniper Capship auras to +Range and a bit of -Elect Temp. Different than a FC, and makes it useful to bring along. Especially if one engineer and multiple zerkers that need elect.

Maybe the FC aura is simply too good and requires some tweaking.



The idea would be to give you increased DPS and lowered energy usage. The damage boost would have to be big enough to compensate for the loss of rate of fire and more.
Maybe Im wrong but that sounds very useful to me, a zerker would get even better DPS and at the same time his energy bank would last longer.



I cant think of a single situation where a few % of extra range would make any difference. Range is not really a factor for zerkers.