Oh that's all fine, I'm by no means implying Semi's are better. They play differently, but because of past performance or the rush to a OHK bolt-action there's a bit of a stima surrounding the semi snipers. But they can be a pretty good way to go if one is willing to dust them off, or actually buy the thing in NC's case, and re-learn to use them. That, and it never hurts to have an extra tool in your kit. A lot of the issues you listed you listed are just skills you pick up using the semi. Being able to make multiple accurate shots through recoil in short period is far from an innate skill and comes with practice and useage, as is anticipating what direction a target will move after the first shot panic based on the terrain, or making shots with whatever degree of sway. I've got a friend that's trying to learn them and I'm drilling him to snap shots without breath control at all. It comes with practice and use, but all said and done, if you're just can't be comfortable with the weapon in the first place it's always better to play to your style and strenghts. But if there's one thing I learned from my time sniping or playing an infiltrator in general, it's that every action taken has a chance to give you away. Even your first round fired has the potential to turn five heads in your direction. Having your location given away is ultimately unavoidable, at which point it's just a matter of evasion. With the semi, because it is more noticable, staying mobile is higher up in the order of operations, and the ones unwilling to give up a good spot tend to get dead. It's just very much a different style. Like you stop caring if people know where you're shooting from because you're not going to be there in a few seconds. It leans toward a more aggressive style where most snipers tend to be more methodical, but it feels like it meshes better with mixed squad play, which for me has become a priority because my usual squad has grown addicted to my recon darts. It's not as KDR friendly either, but for me I don't care about that stat so much, and despite more deaths I still tend to outscore my bolt-action performance because it does suite my particular disposition well. But, of course, that won't be the same story for everyone.
Exactly! It all about practice and staying mobile. That how I manage to wreck so many kills without dieing. You got to learn to evade and choose whether is it worth the risk to fire the shots. Also, it is impossible to stay undetected forever, every short you fire regardless of silencer or not is a tracer round. Regards, Natalie
agreed, for squad based play the SA is brilliant, you are the medium to long range poacher and you can force multiple enemies into cover which a BAR just can't do to the same degree, if you get killed you can easiliy be revived and enemies being aware of you becomes less of a problem
I still play "aggressive sniping" more effectively with a bolt action, since I can scope - fire - kill - keep moving, with the bolt action instead of scope - fire - fire - fire - fire - fire - kill - reload + move. Most people will stand still while taking those shots, since the accuracy decreases while ADS and moving. The hardest infiltrators to kill are the ones constantly moving and cloaking until the split second they scope up to fire their bolt action, then continue to move while rechambering for the next shot. When I see an infiltrator with a semi-auto, I just wait until I hear them open fire and go over for the easy headshot while they stand still to land 3-4 rounds on a target. Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe the SASR's have a place, and I use mine on occasion. However the times that I prefer it over my SR-7 is quite rare, and for good reason. And that includes all my time in squad (which is all the time after joining BWC).
That only works if both infiltrator are engaging each other directly. However, when i play, i always conduct a surprise attack on my enemies. They wouldnt even know what hit them until they drop dead to my SA or they dont even know that i have them in my scope. In fact, most of my kills come from unloading my sa at the back of my enemies. Yes i know it cowardly, but that how I work. I rarely engage head on with people especially with people with automatic weapon and flinch mechanism( since im mid range, i am well aware that i am within killing range of automatic weapons too). Maybe one day we meet on the battlefield Mustarde ..but of course, you wouldnt even know im there...Maybe it fortunate that I had yet to stumble onto any good infiltrator during my 21days of playing...
That's fine to prefer the bolt-actions. They're easy to use because they're simple and, for lack of a better word, idiot proof. You aim, you shoot, you get the kill, or you don't. Semi-autos on the other hand require a measure of trigger discipline to maximize effectiveness. The sniper you portrayed is quite the baddie, or hasn't learned to use a semi-auto properly. These are errors inexperienced users make. The quick and dirty of it is that you typically shouldn't rapidly fire more than 3-4 bullets without a pause because beyond that CoF bloom becomes noticable. If you build up too much hitting your target becomes more luck than aim. But you really shouldn't need to fire more than that to begin with, and in the worst case that you're just whiffing shots, knowing when to stop shooting is about as important as knowing how to aim. The thing is any decent sniper, reguardless of what type of rifle they're using, won't open fire unless they actually have a shot lined up. You can assume the first round fired from any rifle is a headshot. So more realistically the semi user would follow through more like this: fire - fire - kill - cloak - whatever. Two shots only seperated maybe by 1/3 of a second, and even a third shot would be well under a second. That makes the lack of movment while ADS is a of a moot point since the only way anyone is going to spot you and zero in for a headshot in that window is if they knew your location before you fired and you're dead reguardless of the rifle in your loadout. But getting the feel of it and using your judement to work with it ultimately become's one of the weapon's strengths by allowing you the option to enage multiple targets in a quicker succession and play a little more fast and lose, whereas a bolt action's a lengthy refire cycle limits these options.
there is a reason why railguns dominated at longer ranges in Quake. Land a shot and you are golden, pewpewpew against an enemy running all over the place is much harder. You don't get bonus points for handicaps you put on yourself so in general opting for the most idiotproof strategy is the way to go.
Though we're not playing Quake, the railgun isn't a great analogy. Quake weapons all have pretty unique profiles, so making such a distinction is impossible. The railgun dominates because there is no other hit-scan weapon with unlimited range to serve as a side-grade. Now, if the lightning gun traded some of it's damage to lose it's falloff and have the same infinite range the RG enjoys we might be more in the neighborhood of making that theoretical leap. You do get bonus points for the extra effort with the semi in the form of versitility. You have more control over the weapon, which means you can exploit more situations. Of course more control means you have the potential to screw up, and so it takes effort to start with because there actually is something there to be learned. It's a bit like driving a car with a manual transmission in that respect. However, once you get the reigns on those extra elements and reach the higher end of the performance-skill curve, the semi can be very much in line with a bolt action, and can even outperform it in situations. Now a bolt action's usage and performance is reliable, consistant, and simple. Most every situation is answered with the same order of operations so it starts out higher on that performance-skill curve. Right from 'go,' you get a decent performance with less effort. But you'll always have the long refire and reload cycles as limiting factor on how you can approach a situation. My own frustration with seeing oppertunities slip away because my gun was cycling is actually one of the main reasons I really put the effort into going back to learning how to exploit the semi-sniper's more risk vs reward qualities. Now if a shot oppertunity gets by, it's because I passed on it, not because my gun was cycling and couldn't scope up.
bonus points for versatility mean nothing when the returns expressed in hard numbers are not there (returns are what counts at the end of the day). With BASR you can go to tower, do a bit of parkour and farm people all day long from under platforms. Not possible with semis.
I'm not certian of your logic on that one. I snipe from under the platforms all the time, without issue. There's nothing about the weapon that procludes you from doing so without a bolt action. Hell light assaults do it with slug shotguns all the time. People don't look up. Further basing a weapon's performance entirely on hard numbers is simply shortsighted unless you never leave VR training. Hard values or 'points' only matter on a stat sheet. One of the things I mean by versatility is that with the semi in a successive target situation you can drop your second before having to pause for CoF recovery and before the bolt action would even be through it's first refire cycle and scope up for the second shot. That's even assuming the BA user is a robot and drop their scope the instant the bullet left the barrel and didn't artifically inflate the cycle. The bolt action has a hard pause between every shot, the semi has the option of picking up an immediate second kill, within the same controlled breath even, if the situation presents. And this is quantifyable by hard number if you can't get your head around it otherwise.
I apologize if I start using ztiller-style bluntness but I just don't want to type too much as I respond to this. All sniper rifles require trigger discipline. Semi autos require 3-4 shots for a kill, unless you are hitting a headshot. The whole point of using a SASR is to engage moving targets, because a BASR is far superior at stationary targets. And moving targets are much harder to land headshots on. So most often you will be requiring 3-4 shots, if all of them hit. In order to be accurate while firing these shots, you will not be moving while ADS. It makes you a standing target, even for a second... which is all I need to put a bolt action round in your head. A decent sniper lands the headshot, even on moving targets. If you are waiting for your shots to be lined up, you might as well use a BASR and get the kill right away. Again - I enjoy my SASR's and use them in crowded open combat zones with lots of moving targets. They have a role. But the people in this thread trying to promote them over bolt actions are frequently either overstating the utility of the SASR or understating what can be done with the BASR.
I disagree with the following: easier to land one shot on stationary target - This assumes a OHK, which is not always the case. I can put at least 3, probably 4 rounds into a stationary target with my Guass SPR in the same time it takes to fire a round off with my Longshot and chamber another. I only need two shots with SPR 80+% of the time under these firing conditions. Multiple shots and the fact that suppressor on semi-auto is not advisable IMO does validate your second point. But, this leads me to a point I recently made in a related post that basically states that this weapon is most successfully used in heated battles where allies are drawing more attention than you are.
In the context of countersniping, infiltrators rarely have Nanoweave 5. I can count on one hand the number of times an enemy sniper has taken a headshot and survived. And anyway, Nanoweave 5 isn't even supposed to save an infiltrator from headshots; nanoweave is bugged. That will probably get fixed someday.
No need to apologize for bluntness. So long as it lacks malice only an idiot would be offended. The point of all this is to promote Semi-Autos as a viable alternative to the Bolt-Action, as a side-grade. Not that the semi is the better choice, but that bolt-actions are not sacred cows. Now frankly, the moment you suggest that the point of the SA, a sniper rifle, isn't to get headshots you highlight the disconnect people have with this weapon. it assumes the 'point' of the SA's best use is to fill a niche where the BA is disadvantaged. That may be the main reason people pull their SAs, but that would be akin to me saying the BA only exists for single target drops beyond 200m, which most any user would ferociously contest, and rightly so. And yet that's what's being said to SA users when you suggest it's primary use is just that singular niche. Yes, I can kill a running target in 3-4 snap shots with next to no effort, but there is also nothing stopping me from exercising precision and doing it in a quick 2. I COULD grab a BA and do it in 1, but the SA easily lets me transition between these firing styles without a trip to a terminal. For me at least, that's easily worth sacrificing the OHK for a 1/3 second double-tap. And what disadvantage there is in precision kills simply feels easier to make up for than those on the BA when engaging multiple and mobile targets.
I like the SASR's personally. I'll readily admit that I'm a crap sniper, and I'm sure that has something to do with it, but regardless I just do better with them than with the BASR lines. I have a relatively easy time putting a quick BAMBAM double-tap into enemy heads with SASR's, and in the somewhat common event that I whiff a shot, I can easily follow up with a third. Also, they're much better defensive weapons than bolt-actions.
I haven't read every singe post in this thread, but I get impression that some of you are putting way too much faith in SOE as if they know what the **** they they're doing with sniper rifles. I've adopted the weapons having a Philosophy of Use. (nutnfancy wut up!) I like to look at the differences of each weapon and figure out, where would I incorporate this weapon over another. The two semi-auto *Sniper Rifles* are almost statistical mirrors. They have the tiniest of insignificant stat differences. Other than that, one has long range scopes, the other has shorter range scopes. Does this sound like SOE has any ******* clue what they're doing with sniper rifles? If you still have faith in the SOE weapon designer, lets move to comparing the *Scout* and lower magnification semi-auto *Sniper Rifle*. Both take several shots to kill at any distance neither is capable of a OHK. Minimum potential TTK when plotted on a graph these two are nearly identical, thus their POU's are the same. Or should I say, their POU's SHOULD be the same, but for one very important detail. Scout rifles only have weapon sway on 6x scopes. The lower magnification semi-auto sniper rifles have weapon sway applied to all levels of magnification. If you still have faith in the SOE weapon designer, the 2 lower magnification restricted sniper rifles and the 2 higher magnification restricted sniper rifles are the most blatant, lazy money grabbing example we have in PS2. Both of the lower magnification restricted sniper rifles are accurate enough to make good use of a higher magnification sight. All of the higher magnification restricted sniper rifles could make perfectly good use of lower magnification optics. Please do not search through the aether of ignorance to try to pull out a valid reason for these decisions, the answer is money. If you want to use short range optics on a sniper rifle, give me more money. ^ This is the mindset of the person that designed the semi-auto sniper rifles. I strongly recommend you don't put too much effort into theorycrafting POUs for these ******* pieces of ****. Here is where all of the semi-auto long range infiltrator weapons break down for me. POU 1) Sniping - I want that OHK. POU 2) Ninja - CQC inf with an smg. POU 3) Mid-long range squad support. In the line of fire, needing to put accurate rounds down range. Problem here is that there are 3 other classes with weapons that can both perform this role well that are also more dynamic. SABR-13 + rezz. Battle rifle + ammo + repairs. Damage soaking HA with battle rifle and anti-vehicle weaponry. For inf, I stick with POU 1 and 2.
Only the TR and NC semi-auto high power rifles are the same the VS is: VA39 SPECTRE Fire rate: 231 Damage: 400/8m 260/200m Velocity: 570m/s
I find the infiltrator the most rounded class now. Using the semi-auto high powered rifles allows you to take on enemies at "very long" to "long" distances, and coupled with the Commissioner, that can take enemies down from "medium" to "short" distances you are suited to take out any enemy at any range. The semi-autos also are the most forgiving at range. The TR and NC only loses 66 damage @ 75 meters, and the 800 damage rifles lose 250 damage @ 100 meters big difference.
To be honest, I've been considering picking up my old friend the Spectre. I used it when I was new, and did not care for it a bit. Most likely because of the hold your breath mechanic. I'd take my one steady shot, and then after that it was spamming the trigger before the target moved. The way our current hold your breath mechanic works is that after 1 shot, you lose your steady aim. This makes a lot of sense, but is rather counter intuitive to the idea of a semi-auto sniper. So my issue is that it lacked power that I desired, thus I made my switch to bolt-action. However, now with nano-weave popping up, I have been considering switching back to my semi-auto for closer engagements. I wanted to see my targets drop in 1 shot, but with nanoweave becoming more popular, that may soon be an issue. So rather than waiting for for that clunky and silly bolt action cycling to finish, I may just fill the area with plasma around my target's body using a semi-auto. I may be spotted soon, but by god my target will be dead and bullet marks will fill the terrain around him. I will be keeping a close eye on this thread, hoping to see that winning combination with the Spectre Edit: I would like to point out that BASR, in my own opinion, are generally more effective than SASR due to the simple fact of damage potiental. SASR are good in certain situations, but in others BASR dominate them. In other words they are a "niche pick".
