Why Sniper Buffs Are Pointless

[Aktriaz]

First, lets look at what a Snipers main traits are;

 

+Long range, High accuracy, High Damage.

 

-Usually High recoil, Slow fire rate, small magazine.

 

Snipers are built for long rage attacks, to take out beefy enemies before they have a chance to do anything.

Now, for the reasons why Snipers, even given something of 100,000 base damage, will still forever be outclassed.

 

First off, Damage. How many enemies have over 40k health? Not many, assuming you aren't in late survival, but Boltor Prime users, how much time and ammo do you use killing a level 60 Corrupted Heavy Gunner? Not much, and I'd assume everything else even that late in game doesn't take much.

 

Warframe doesn't reward giant numbers for the sake of giant numbers, it favors the ability to spread that number across a crowd, as quickly as possible.

 

This is why Bows, (and rarely Lanka, which is arguably the best sniper) are still used; because they have at least some crowd-control capability, whether it be from flying bodies or innate punch-through (or both).

 

Give Snipers innate punch-though? Okay, then whats the point of Bows and the Lanka? That's literally the only thing they have going for them.

 

The only way snipers can become truly viable is if you give them a 100-round magazine and a full-auto fire-rate of 15... but then, they're no longer "snipers".

 

This is the reason people are saying that weapons like shotguns, burst weapons, or basically anything that isn't a Boltor Prime or a Soma, is lackluster or under powered. It's not because these weapons are under powered or lackluster, it's because they completely outclassed, and the game is being scaled to challenge people with these godly weapons, leaving little room for anything but.

 

I feel bad for Scott. Anything he does for these guns will be in vain, and nerfing the Soma or Boltor Prime will bring nothing but anger from the elitist-Rhino-7forma-Boltor-Prime community.

 

I have and will still use my Lanka (my favorite and most used weapon), with or without a buff, but I still dread the day when the game puts an impossible difficulty wall in front of me, of which the only key is the "new Soma Prime."

[Deanoa]

I don't think it's much about "making Snipers OP" or "Buffing Snipers to 1-Shot everything".
It's more like making ALL Snipers viable in T4 Survival (for example).

[BrotherIcarus]

And why can't they fully embrace the fact that this is a sci-fi and not real life? Other games have made snipers useful in similar horde gameplay, if the only way to make a sniper useful is to give it a large clip and low recoil then why the hell not?

[Hixlysss]

Bows and lanka would still have a different feel to them, plus probably different stats.

 

At times I could ask "What is the point of the Dera versus the Tetra? Dera is a DPS machine with the right mods, it's clearly better than the Tetra, why does the tetra exist?" sorta thing.

 

We can only hope DE has some plan in motion for the snipers beyond "punch through" to make them more viable. Perhaps a higher chance to crit, who knows. Maybe they will be reworked completely to favor the overall gameplay of running around and moving fast.

[Tarille]

1) "How often do you fight things with 40k health?"

 

Only in late survivals and bosses. BUT base damage increases can mean that fewer damage mods are needed allowing modding towards other useful things like Status chance (A favoured build for the Lanka is a Gas + Electric status build for AoE damage) or making them nicer to use with Fire Rate, Reload Rate, Magazine Capacity, Ammo Capacity/Recovery.

 

 

Give Snipers innate punch-though? Okay, then whats the point of Bows and the Lanka? That's literally the only thing they have going for them.

 

What's the point in bows if snipers have innate punch through?

 

- Pseudo infinite punch through from the ragdolling that occurs from arrows killing things and dealing the same damage to all targets hit by the ragdolling body as it flies backwards until it collides into a wall.

 

- Different mechanics. Bows use a 1 second charge and insignificant reload to fire projectiles that have an arc and travel time. Only the Lanka shares the charge mechanic and does so over a longer period of time and has a magazine that needs to be reloaded. Only the Lanka shares the projectile mechanic though it does not have an arc and the projectile has a different speed.

 

What's the point in the Lanka if other snipers have innate punch through?

 

- It could have more. It currently has the most Punch Through available to any weapon, innately. This can be further improved by the punch through mods allowing far more things (Including enemies) to be shot through.

 

- The Lanka is also a sniper rifle and so will likely be affected by the sniper buffs.

Edited July 13, 2014 by Tarille

[Vaskadar]

Innate punch through + crit would be really great, but limits the snipers overall.

 

If they had high base damage instead of high crit, then they'd be more useful for elemental builds.

[Niryco]

Give Snipers innate punch-though? Okay, then whats the point of Bows and the Lanka? That's literally the only thing they have going for them.

I don't see why snipers can't have innate punch through. Lanka has absurd damage + innate electricity = more crowd control. Bows have travel time and can't punch through but drag bodies along. Also innate punch through does not mean infinite punch through, maybe 1.0 to 1.5m innate punch through which is still no match against bows or lanka as a matter of fact since both has a great amount of punch through. Also what if punch throughs only deal puncture damage, it could make more sense. Depends on how the devs were to balance this, but i can't see punch through being a pure benefit of bows or the lanka.

Edited July 13, 2014 by Jacate

[SquirmyBurrito]

Giving them massive punch through would make them more appealing. Don't know what else to do... buff their status and base damage and nerf their crit rate and damage?

[Hixlysss]

Innate punch through + crit would be really great, but limits the snipers overall.

 

If they had high base damage instead of high crit, then they'd be more useful for elemental builds.

No offense, but I hate how the game only has 2 build options based on your gun for you to be "effective" in the game. Elemental, or crit, both of which revolve around doing nothing but damage. *Sigh. Cries.* Why can't we have more options that let us be good at high levels!

[Taikaponi]

Giving them massive punch through would make them more appealing. Don't know what else to do... buff their status and base damage and nerf their crit rate and damage?

 

Crit is awesome.

[Scherhardt]

No offense, but I hate how the game only has 2 build options based on your gun for you to be "effective" in the game. Elemental, or crit, both of which revolve around doing nothing but damage. *Sigh. Cries.* Why can't we have more options that let us be good at high levels!

 

I remember the time when we got stun mods before blast element replaced them.

Much much fun. Stunlock machine guns damn good for utility.

[The66Monkey]

Paris P head shots are useful in high lvl T4, and with different maps and sniper enemies a sniper could become useful.

also with the new PvP thing in U14 when you start with low health and shield where you need kills to get buffed a sniper could be good.

 

But the big problem with slow fire weapons is that the enemies move so damn irrationally, it is impossible to lead the targets when they are bi-locating and glitching around low-walls and behaving in ways no living thing would act.

[Hixlysss]

I remember the time when we got stun mods before blast element replaced them.

Much much fun. Stunlock machine guns damn good for utility.

God yes, I remember those days, before status chance. I wish more guns made use of the status thing. Low damage, high status chance, yes please. And I mean high base status chance, none of this "Put the 3 event mods on to get 40% status chance." crap. As it stands most weapons come in 2 flavors. DPS or just High Damage and Crit Chance. Those are your options. Use Ogris for high damage, Grakata/Dera DPS machines, or Soma/Dread for crits. Though the Dread can also function as a status chance weapon as well, I love the dread. I can build it ANY WHICH WAY! Status, Crit, DPS. I love it~

[Momoynator]

No offense, but I hate how the game only has 2 build options based on your gun for you to be "effective" in the game. Elemental, or crit, both of which revolve around doing nothing but damage. *Sigh. Cries.* Why can't we have more options that let us be good at high levels!

 

Status build? Try playing with the Tysis. It'll be OP once PvP Rail Wars kick in...

[SquirmyBurrito]

Crit is awesome.

 

I figured the point was to make them a little different from the bows. Bows are crit monsters with ragdoll capabilities. Snipers could be high base damage status blasters with large punch through (sorta solving the issue caused by having a slow fire rate in a game that hurls hordes at you).

[Marthrym]

1) The tilesets are not really Sniper-friendly for the most part... Though a few could give some interesting long range fights.^^

 

2) The legendary perfect aim and 0 aiming time the enemies need to shoot at you the nano-second you get out of cover (only offset by the fact that their guns don't have a perfect accuracy and/or travel time for their projectiles), no matter how far you are for some, AND their incredible awareness and ability to pinpoint your location at any time, even after losing visual, also makes long range firefights kinda... suck.

Snipers use "relocation" to be able to kill stuff without having a hail of bullets coming their way every time they aim at something. In Warframe, this is impossible to do, unless Invisibility/Smoke screen, and even that is far from reliable.

 

3) As OP said, the ability to spread your DPS between crowds of enemies is much more effort and time efficient than picking off moving (rather erratically) targets one by one.^^'

 

4) Stealth is usually a big part of what snipers do. They don't come in guns blazing. They take out particular targets. So they're not really made for a game like Warframe. Which might be the biggest problem with them. I think DE is going to have a hard time making them "viable" or whatever people want them to be... We'd need viable stealth mechanics first...^^'

 

5) We could always give sniper rifles a little something extra, not pure damage, but a big bonus for headshots, coupled with something like a "ricochet" effect. Say you pop the head of an enemy in a crowd. Why not give the projectile the ability to "bounce" and hit another? Maybe with a % chance for it to be a heashot again (increased via a mod maybe?), which would proc another "bounce", and so on. That way, precision would actually be rewarded!

 

What do you guys think? Would it be interesting? "Fun"? Do you have other ideas to make snipers really interesting and competitive?^^

[H3RRD0KT0R]

I really have no idea how will they make sniper rifles more competitive. Giving them more damage won't solve anything, the problem is that the game doesn't give much room for snipers, most of the action happens at close/medium range, where sniper characteristics wont shine.

Even if you're able to cause tons of damage and kill anything in one shot, the enemies scaling isn't based just in stats but also in quantity, when you're surrounded by enemies an automatic, semi automatic with good firerate, a launcher, or any CC focused weapon will always be better.

The sniper role usually takes part in good strategies, but unfortunately warframe doesn't demand much strategy at all.

 

Something that maybe could affect positively snipers would be the rework of Stealth making it viable (and worth). AS of now all the alerted enemies know exactly where you are, in despite of how they got alerted, if this mechanic was ever improved and enemies were only able to notice you when they really see you, then the tactic of sniping enemies at long range would be worth it. That would be still a niche though. 

[Aktriaz]

I don't think it's much about "making Snipers OP" or "Buffing Snipers to 1-Shot everything".

It's more like making ALL Snipers viable in T4 Survival (for example).

The only weapons that are viable at that level are ones that can deal thousands of damage a bullet, and fill the room with those bullets. Snipers weren't made to be "jack of all trades" they were meant to be the "one shot, one kill" monsters, taking out the beefiest of enemies with the greatest of ease. Whats the point if your full-auto hose-of-concentrated-death can not only fill a room full of bullets, but also kills those "beefy" enemies in less than 5 bullets... with a fire rate of 15. As long as the Boltor Prime and Soma exist, Snipers are useless.

[Aktriaz]

And why can't they fully embrace the fact that this is a sci-fi and not real life? Other games have made snipers useful in similar horde gameplay, if the only way to make a sniper useful is to give it a large clip and low recoil then why the hell not?

Heh, your forgetting full-auto fire rate of 20, to go along that big clip and high accuracy.

 

It's not like we don't already have guns like that; full auto, generous clip, low recoil, high accuracy and damage...

 

Oh... wait.

 

The day that we get a Full-auto Vectis with a 100-round drum magazine is the day I fight Lephantis with only a un-modded Spectra.

[Psychosist]

As long as the Boltor Prime and Soma exist, Snipers are useless.

BoltorP/Soma do completely different things than snipers. You can't compare their functions and say one is objectively better than the other.

 

Yes, assault rifles tend to yield higher TTK ratios than snipers do, but every assault rifle's TTK falls off at some point.

 

At level 35 it may take you one second to kill five enemies, but at level 100, it could take you five seconds to kill one enemy with a Boltor Prime.

 

The niche of sniper weapons (hopefully after the buff, anyway) is that their damage-per-hit is so high that they don't fall off in the same way assault rifles do. A Vectis doing 50k crits will take 5 seconds to kill 5 enemies, and obviously is much slower than Boltor Prime. But fast forward to level 100, and Boltor Prime will take 25 seconds to kill 5 enemies, and Vectis will get the job done in less than 10.

 

~ ~ ~

 

Now that's all just numbers on papers, of course. Most of the playerbase probably doesn't do T4 up to level 100, but I felt the need to point out you're comparing two completely different things. Assault rifles will always be "better" early in endgame, but they will greatly suffer from ammo efficiency and lose to snipers in the veerryy late endgame.

[PeripheralVisionary]

Saying what's the point of bows if you buffed snipers is like saying what's the point of having guns whose names aren't the Boltor Prime.  

[Vaskadar]

No offense, but I hate how the game only has 2 build options based on your gun for you to be "effective" in the game. Elemental, or crit, both of which revolve around doing nothing but damage. *Sigh. Cries.* Why can't we have more options that let us be good at high levels!

 

I think damage modifiers, or at least removing them from the game entirely might change the game for the better, but eh... I've got no idea how they could make that work.

 

Really, what should be done, is break up mods into several categories, give certain weapons different mod type capacities, and give reason to throw on reload speed over a damage mod, which, when you think about it, is all that matters at high level play. This means that other mods get pushed to the wayside in favor of damage boosters.

[vaugahn]

I think damage modifiers, or at least removing them from the game entirely might change the game for the better, but eh... I've got no idea how they could make that work.

 

Really, what should be done, is break up mods into several categories, give certain weapons different mod type capacities, and give reason to throw on reload speed over a damage mod, which, when you think about it, is all that matters at high level play. This means that other mods get pushed to the wayside in favor of damage boosters.

 

The way I see it, mods should modify the behavior of an already useful gun, not be essential in making your gun useful.

[TheHeraldXII]

I agree, the damage isn't the thing that needs fixing. Reliability of damage could be increased by buffing the crit chance and reload speed though. You're entirely right in saying that the effectiveness of a weapon is determined how many guys you can kill with your damage, not how high the damage on one guy is. They don't need to become assault rifles, but they could do to be more reliable in a fast-paced enemy-filled game.

[HAYABU5A]

snipers in warframe are for taking down high priority targets with single shots in a field of trash mobs and thats exactly why they desperately need a buff

 

they suffer the exact problem max power strength sonar has, completely unnecessary at low levels yet extremely effective at high levels (well the snipers need the buff to reinforce this)