Sniper questions/discussion.

I've been trying to figure out how to play the sniper correctly.
Honestly, I cannot figure it out... all his attacks are so 1 vs 1 based that it is impossible
to progress in later levels without extremely good items.

Has anyone some good experience with this class? It's fun but the reload
mechanic just doesn't seem to be worth it for me.

And for the whole reload thing, his main attack is pretty weak if you ask me.
If you would compare him to a bandit, it's just laughable really.

 

Yeah, I haven't quite figured out how to make the Sniper pull his weight. Rather squishy and only shoots once every second or so, even if you spam the attack key. The powered up attack skill, that first one, that seems to be his only method of crowd control as that appears to penetrate enemies, but that skill involves standing still for several seconds doing absolutely nothing. That just ain't a luxury you can afford till you passed the 5th level and have practically broken the game with your items.

 

I don't have any issue with the Sniper, but it's true it can be tedious in later stages if you don't bath in good items...

I'm usually kiting, backflip, hold down Steady Aim, release at 50% or more, it usually one hit kills the pack of mobs.
Just try to buy Crowbars whenever you can, it helps a lot.

 

He seems based on focused and methodical gameplay, lining up the perfect shot and not rushing your attacks.
Unfortunately, this game does not work well with that kind of play, since the enemies bum rush you and you need to advance ASAP.
I can see him being a good support in coop, since if the other players can draw the aggro, he has plenty of time to charge his snipe.

Does attack speed even help him at all...?

 

No attack speed dosent help lol.
I usually just do what Vizjun does and it works well. Bosses try to charge to 75% and release it or 100% if you can.
He takes a while to get used to. Just know when you can take a few shots.

 

I played sniper for quite a while last night, since I really like him and wanted to make it work, but I feel like he has some serious problems when it comes to actually being effective.

First and foremost, he has only two damaging abilities, one of which is hardly worth using most of the time due to how slow it is compared to its relative lack of power. His mobility is serviceable, but it doesn't give him much for the kind of cooldown it has. I feel like steady aim is both the strongest part of his kit and the best balanced at the moment, but the rest of his skills don't really serve to back it up very well in his current state. His spotter is useful for bosses, but most of the time it'll just mark something in the middle of a big group of enemies that you can't actually hit without plinking through a horde of lesser enemies with your basic shot, pausing both to shoot and reload every time.

All in all, I think he's almost there, but he needs some tweaks. There are two areas I think I would probably look at first. First off is maybe giving some incentive to use his spotter more often, such as possibly reducing the damage falloff for each enemy pierced by steady aim while it's active. Second would be that I think far too much of his power is tied into his active reload, mostly for his basic attack. It is extremely time-consuming for a damage bonus that you practically need to have on every shot you fire if you actually want to have any real damage output, and even with perfect reloads, he still has very little pushback on the attack, it's not quick enough to keep anything away from you, and he has no other forms of crowd control to keep enemies away from him for the huge amounts of time it takes to charge up a shot to deal with a group of enemies, or even to just fire your dinky little basic shots to whittle away at a crowd.

 

Maybe the knockback could depend on reloads. Small for a crappy/no reload, medium for purple-section reload, large for a perfect reload.