there's no such thing as a map that's too open for sniper rifles if engineers are dropping walls and comms are dropping armories.
Excellent post. My only solution to keeping the marksman's rifle at this time would be to remove the use of hide with that loadout, or while using that weapon. Currently the conjunction of hide and sniping is what makes the weapon so irritating and rambo-ish. I do agree that it should be kept, and i've always kinda liked it, however if people just snipe all day long and the only way to remove that is to remove the weapon, then that's what it's got to be. However, my alternative is no hide while the Marksmans Rifle is selected OR simply restrict hide with the sniple rifle loadout.
If you want to stop snipers from having hide why not just give the sniper to the rifleman? It would not be out of place for the rifleman to have the Marksman's rifle and there is no need for an arbitrary and confusing restriction on hide.
A rifleman with hide...now why does that sound like the worst thing you could do..? My point is not to take hide away from the scout, but rather let them keep the ranged rifle, without them being hidden half way up a mountain, sniping random people every 3 minutes.
I'm sorry, I made a mistake. What I meant to say was that the rifleman gets the marksman's rifle instead of the scout. Thereby removing the problem of hide + marksman's rifle.
Here's the thing, past 30 feet it'll be a bit shit. like, Engi with SMG 1 would beat it. And up close, it can do that 80, or 60 or whatever damage once, but then a)You've been hit by the recoil hammer and b) You've been hit by the accuracy hammer. Now, if you are close enough that you are licking their face, that won't matter. but if you're say, 10 feet away, getting another 100% hit will be nearly impossible. So after 2 quick shots, they isn't dead, you're looking 5 feet above their heads and you're spraying the whole area. With a bit of dancing around, the 3rd shot will kill them, but you might need a 4th. that's assuming they stand still, and arn't skipping around themselves. and you get what, 6 or 8 pew pews before a long reload? Yet with that scunt rifle, you need 2 shots, any range. And you have to be doing fucking ballet for a good sniper to miss you long enough to even know where they are on a flat but folliaged map. And I love what you say about high priority targets. Newsflash, only 1 class on 1 team has a unique skin. Yeah. You know what would be better than killing high priority targets? 3 people running in and killing all targets to allow walls to be deconned and allow a spawnable APC to rush their com. Do that as a scout.
the scout shotgun in my eyes i see as a group clearer, if everyone is hugging each others back it should be able to kill 4 or 5 guys in 1 reload however you will need to be close and have some cover to pull it off
Ah right, now I get ya. Well, I think riflemen don't really need it seeing as their carbine/heavy rifle hits as hard and quicker. Sure, they don't have a scope, but you hardly need it on an empires battlefield, do you? At least, not with the long range rifles we have. It'd be a bit pointless...i'd rather let scouts keep their rifle but make it less annoying. Sure we could have it shoot doodoo at people instead, but it'd just be better if they couldn't hide with the gun...well, that's what I came up with anyway. Also, yeah i'm still for the shotgun, after my own post before, I convinced myself that the devs had thought this through a lot more than I had to begin with.
You know I love you pick, but hills or higher grounds which are in most maps are where snipers can pick people off even over walls. Snipers are just bad for this mod in many many ways. You don't want to get shot and have to stop doing what your doing to get healed every 4 seconds.
by the same token, you shouldn't expect to be safe everywhere you go at all times just because you're a bit behind enemy lines.
this -- i don't know about the shotgun without testing how it would work, but moving sr to the riflemen is not only not going to fix the scout, but it will also break the riflemen
To be open to sniper fire behind a built wall, the sniper would have to be on a hill with a very steep slope and you have to be very close to the mountain. The only areas I can think of that have this are duststorm and Mvalley. Usually hills are so small, the sniper would be close enough for you to take out with any gun. Furthermore, being able to shoot over cover is an innate advantage to having the higher ground. If you get shot and just continue to do what you are doing without checking around you for enemies, you are going to be dieing a lot, and most of the times not from snipers. Yes the shotgun will suck at range, just as the shotgun pistol sucks are range, but is it still powerful? Yes. You say up close it will do 60 to 80 damage in one shot, but 2 shots, even if some of the bullets miss will still kill a person at 100. Shotgun recoil won't matter because it has a huge cone. Shooting consecutively will yield the same results. We already have the shotgun pistol. If you play with it can cannot get a kill with the 2 shells, you are not playing very realisticly because it is extremely easy to kill in less than 2 seconds WHILE running around. 6 to 8 shells is a lot, plus you get the advantage of still hitting a player when you don't aim directly at them. You say the sniper rifle takes 2 shots to kill at any range? Have you played after 2.12? Right now, it takes 3 shots to kill at a range, 2 if you are lucky enough to get a headshot. Regardless of what some people think, due to the lag and hitboxes, it is hard to get a headshot. Engineers can build walls, and they should on any flat map. It is easy to distinguish the high priority targets. Even if you see the Be engineer you do not know if he has revive or not, unless you observe. In you situation, any good team will have revive engineers to revive their dead teammates after you fail to gain ground, because most of the times, you will fail in a frontal assault. Having a sniper take out the revive engineer will delay them, forcing them to respawn and run all the way back to the front. You're right, you can't do that all with a team full of scouts, but you can't do it with a team full of riflemen or engineers either. Your team is suppose to be balanced. The Apc rush you talk about will usually have one scout in it with sticky stuns to freeze the com vehicle so they other can kill it.
I'm talking un built walls. That is the most common use for cover. Now snipers are also deadly because you don't know what direction your getting hit from, they have hide, silencer so you don't even know when people are dieing around you because of no kill message. I think for game play to run smoothly the infantry range for a kill should be as far as the mowtar can shoot. It makes battles seem bigger and more intense when its required to be effective at a certain range.. If you got people a half a mile away duking it out then you got the battle spread out all over the map with 1 v 1 matches going on instead of squad vs squad.
How to make the shotgun not overpowered and not ramboesque: Give the shotgun the ability to kill in 1 hit if aiming high at point blank, but give it a long recharge between shots, say 1.5 secs. This gives the weapon the ability to kill one enemy quickly who may be looking for a sneaky scout, but not enough power to be able to take down a whole group on your own without assistance. tl;dr: High power, long recharge.
For a shotty to be OP it needs to be used at close range which is what I think makes it not OP. If its hard for you(time consuming at the very least) to get close enough to an enemy to make it effective then it in theory wouldn't be too hard to avoid. Only problem I see is them sabbing a rax and just demolishing everyone who spawns in it with ease. But again maybe the rax needed more defense or maybe sabbing a rax shouldn't take health away, maybe it should just delay spawn time. Or just leave it at making the rax easier to kill, I don't see why it needs to take half your health too.
How will giving the scout a shotgun solve its current problems (ignoring the sniper)? It will be little use for infiltrating bases because as soon as you do something which alerts the enemy (kill someone, get spotted, someone notices your sabotage) people will killspawn back to the base and kill you and repair the damage. The shotgun might allow you to kill more people before you die but you will still die, there is no way to undo your discovery.
