Sniper Rifle - Add A 'stance' Mod Slot

[Lloathe]

Snipers will be getting buffs this year. Personally, I believe the only real problem with sniper rifles is their lack of 'role' in what is typically a “mow down the entire room with automatic fire and four pressing” game. I believe it will take more than just generic buffs to bring sniper rifles into play.

 

Note: Some snipers need to be brought into parity with the others, but that is irrelevant to the discussion here.

 

A word on role. As the sniper's role is priority targets, dead aim needs to be added as a base stat to all sniper rifles with varying percentages to differentiate the weapons. In addition to this, sniper rifle swap speed should be significantly increased so as to promote weapon switching to deal with crowds. In most games, the slow swap speed would be part of the deal, but Warframe's horde style gameplay invalidates this, in my opinion.

 

I propose a new mod slot and category, similar to how melee stances were introduced. This slot will 'augment' the ammunition of the sniper rifle, giving the weapon a unique twist. Like stances, this slot could give mod points or take them. I don't feel like this aspect really matters.

 

A couple things. Each one of these mods will have some 'unique' effect. They will also have a 100% chance to proc some type of effect. This proc is independent of it's normal proc effets. This means that the weapons will roll normally for status, in addition to always procing the listed effect.

 

Note: Unless otherwise stated, the effects listed below will NOT apply to any additional targets from punch through mods.

 

Special Purpose, High Explosive

3 meter blast radius for 75% damage

90% blast damage

100% blast proc

 

Special Purpose, APC 'Penetrator' (Armor Piercing, Corrosive)

Infinite punch through

100% armor ignore

90% corrosive damage

100% corrosive proc

Note: The proc here isn't really useful for the sniper user unless he switches weapons, but his team could take advantage of it.

 

Special Purpose, Mark IV 'Vortex'

Target becomes the epicenter of a localized micro singularity. All targets within 10 meters are rag dolled to the point of impact.

0.5 sec duration (possible interaction with weapon status duration mods?)

90% bonus electric damage

100% electric proc

 

Special Purpose, Mark VII 'Plagas'

Target is infected with a parasitic organism that immediately travels to the brain and takes control of the target while also multiplying inside the host body. On death, the target will explode, infecting all targets within 5 meters with a weaker parasite.

[Essentially, primary target gets a 'nyx chaos' stun and mc effect, where upon death secondary targets will be infected. Can not jump a third time]

8 sec primary target duration

4 sec secondary target duration

90% viral damage

100% viral proc

Note: Status duration mod for the weapon should interact here

Note #2: Punch through would not infect additional targets, just the first one

 

As you can see, the sky is the limit for these “Special Purpose” mods. I thought of adding a specialized precision type, but really, every round out of a sniper should be 'precision.'

 

All numbers are ARBITRARY. I may be good at math, but I am not going to sit here with a spread sheet and figure out the PERFECT numbers. That is DE's job. They get paid for it. If you think the numbers are too high, or too low, great.

TLDR - focus your critisims on these points

New mod slot for sniper rifles.

-Unique effect to each mod.

-Guaranteed proc of some kind, on top of it's normal chance to proc effects.

-Dead aim added as base stat for all sniper rifles.

-Decreased weapon swap speed to promote use of secondaries / melee to deal with groups.

 

 

[Otenko]

I've always wanted to see a faster weapon swap speed in the game. The way it is now doesn't really let you switch between weapons during combat very seamlessly. Because of it, it also makes automatic weapons more desirable because they're much easier to use at all ranges compared to Snipers/Shotguns.

 

The mod ideas are pretty interesting twists on existing proc effects, so it'd be cool to see stuff like that. All of the snipers have pretty high proc chance already, so it seems a bit redundant to have these mods. Although, it would allow snipers to maintain "blast" procs while taking Radiation/Viral and other such combinations.

 

Having Dead Aim be a stat on every sniper feels a little odd to me though. It makes sense that snipers should have a bonus like that, but the Vulkar having Dead Aim on it seems like it compensates for the Vectis and Lanka being better weapons overall; it makes the Vulkar more appealing in the midst of other generally more appealing snipers. I'm all for the inclusion of it for all snipers though. I like the incentive of using zoom on snipers. I feel as though it encourages using the sniper like an actual sniper as well as gives a decent damage increase for those shots that don't crit and/or don't have multishot applied which slightly alleviates that problem.

 

To balance Dead Aim between snipers, I feel like having a higher magnitude of zoom should be proportional to the Dead Aim bonus. Basically, hitting a target with a weapon with high zoom (i.e. farther away) would likely be catching it unaware and thus imparts a damage bonus. As far the relative multipliers of Dead Aim,  Vectis already has a good bonus on it from Charged/Primed Chamber so it'd probably wouldn't need Dead Aim as much as other weapons. Vulkar's Dead Aim seems like it's in a decent spot at the moment. Although, would the syndicate mod's effect be replaced? I wonder if Lanka should even have Dead Aim, considering its already high base damage as well as its usage of Heavy Caliber causing no detriment to the weapon.

[Lloathe]

The idea behind the proc is a control factor. with the chance of a proc spread between 3 base types plus 2 elementals, each proc has a 1/5 chance WHEN you roll a proc. Having a guranteeded proc with each shot as a unique factor to the ammo type will help. Very low rate of fire, higher need for control of the proc. Granted, the lack of ability to control which proc happens when, or at least the realative chance is another topic altogether. If there was some way to control that, say similiar to how you control which elemental combos you get... again, that would be another topic.

 

Faster weapon swaping in general would be good. The idea of high fire rate weapons for certain enemies (hi nullifiers) and slow, hard hitting weapons for others is very much so a mass effect idea and one that should be copied, in my opinion. Dead aim amount linked to zoom could definatly work. I pretty much agree with your assessment of dead aim.

 

The vulkar being subpar is specific to the vulkar and not snipers in general. The vulkar needs to be brought into line with the others, or whatever tier system DE has envisioned. When it comes to groups of objects, I find it better to balance the group around where it should be realtive to other groups. In this case the groups are weapons. Then it becomes easy fix individual problem children like the vulkar.