A lot of people are unfriendly toward the scout class, but when you play it, who are you? Do you snipe and warn your team of inbound enemies? Or do you sneak into the enemy base and sabotage and take out prime targets? Personally, I prefer the latter, it's like playing Metal Gear: Solid. Really takes me back.
Personally, I go for the infiltrator/spotter. Unless you are well into their lines you cant gain any important intel, and sniping is basically useless.
You can cause amazing amounts of havoc with sabotage. But with a scout rifle, god forbid, you might give them a bruise!!
The scout is suppose to be all of those, but because the devs won't listen to me when I tell them to add bullet drop, armor piercing sniper rifles, sniping is looked down upon by the uptight elitist empires players. Honestly, if you don't want us to snipe, just remove it. Nerfing it like a sack of potatoes is like insulting all the snipers in the world. Fuck Shotgun, you guys know it will be a bitch to balance, but no, you are all like zomg sniper r teh sux, anything is better. But no, you guys don't think so fuck it!
You are the elist, if you didnt mention you are the only one that wants the sniper rifle, especially with those bullet drop asf.
This is a team based game as stressed countless times from what I noticied, so a scout should be able to sabotage and snipe at the same time depending on your choice. In terms of sniper staying I agree with hamster, shotgun will be hard to balanced, it will promote people to lock down a barracks and will promote rambo even more as people already sneak behind lines than go on a smg2 rampage already now imagine a shotgun that unless its nerfed, the shotgun will autokill point blank range. As for the sniper to be looked down upon at all is ridiculous, if you help your team out and snipe than you are a good scout, and must be skill as it requires more skill to use a sniper than shotgun and thats for any game out right now.
2 things. 1. If people do manage to get behind enemy lines and kill people, good for them. If you get to a rax behind enemy lines as a scout, you will die from 1 person constantly respawning to kill you. People who rambo usually don't live very long. Also, if they take the shotgun, they will still be vulnerable at range. 2. One of the main reasons that snipers are going to be removed is because it many people agreed that super long range combat did not work very well in empires. In order for the scout to have the advantage he has to be far enough away that he cannot take ground. If he is close enough to do something else useful, A rifleman would be better suited. When the scout has the range advantage, he is an annoyance to both teams. To his own by taking no ground and to his opponents by killing them with no way to fight back. This is especially useless for his own team because both teams will likely have a spawn close to the front, negating almost all advantage in killing slowly while not being killed. This really came to light after the release of 2.0. Before 2.0 the scout rifle did not zoom very far and was not completely accurate while zoomed (and nf's looked like a penis). After this point it was decided that it would be removed and was nerfed in preparation.
That still doesn't explain why its just super nerfed and not removed. + my sniper rifle has bullet drop, 1 hit capabilities, but each round is loaded individually. Scouts need a ranger skill to accurately compensate for bullet drop. He can kill engineers repairing defensive structures to help his team push forward. With armor piercing capabilities, they can take down enemy tanks on the verge of death. Its absolutely perfect
The scout rifle is fine as it is. Doing about one third of a guy's health kind of makes him useless against other infantry.
I only play scout for the concussion grenades, so I take SMG1, accuracy, speed upgrade and enhanced senses, find people behind corners, throw concs at them, then rush them.
From my experience in empires, snipers are used more for support than for killing, because once you hit someone with a sniper rifle, they get paranoid and hide under cover. This gives your team a chance to advance with less firepower focused on them and take out the clueless enemy who didn't see you coming because they were too busy not getting shot at by the sniper. Snipers also force riflemen to take cover every now and then instead of outgunning everyone else who tries to take them out. not saying that they have a major fear of actually being killed by the scout, but they become weakened as they take damage and it forces them to go get healed. Overall, the scout is not ment to be a combat class that goes around taking heads left and right. It is used as a support class. IMPORTANT: the whole issue with teamwork and coordination does not matter here, all of these things happen automatically, nobody needs to tell the scout who is a priority target, and the scout doesn't need to tell anyone when that person went behind cover to get healed, because all of these things are obvious to the competent player. by the way, I hate the scout rifle because its harder to hit the far away scout than it is a closer rifleman, even though you are more likely to kill the scout, the precious time it takes to kill a scout, someone else is taking advantage of that.