Sniper Beta Patch Notes, June 1st 2019

[Jaguaratron]

I'm a little sad since this seems to be taking away the thing that made Devices special. Does Targeting Drone still cause Sniper Rifle to do bonus damage?

 

yes, but its junk damage

 

I dont really mind it leaving /dev, things like fire/dev beam/dev were crazy strong but Ar/Dev? Its fun atm but its the bottom of the heap in terms of the classes function.

[Adeon Hawkwood]

I'm a little sad since this seems to be taking away the thing that made Devices special. Does Targeting Drone still cause Sniper Rifle to do bonus damage?

 

yes, but its junk damage

 

I dont really mind it leaving /dev, things like fire/dev beam/dev were crazy strong but Ar/Dev? Its fun atm but its the bottom of the heap in terms of the classes function.

I like Ar/Dev, it's a fun combo with lots of AoE damage.

[Dan Petro]

While we are looking at the snipes can we take a look at the PvP damage values for the fast cast versions?  They are kind of breaking the damage formula in that they are under tuned.

 

Enough time was given between attacks to reset any defiance bonuses and 3 yellows were popped to hit instant snipe without aim/BU.

 

Blaster Values :

 

HIT Hot Dogger! Your Blazing Bolt power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 42.31.

Your Blazing Bolt helps you focus your abilities on your target, increasing your range for a short time!

Your Blazing Bolt snipes Hot Dogger for 151.64 points of fire damage!

Hot Dogger takes 53.89 points of bonus toxic damage!

You hit Hot Dogger for 80.44 points of bonus Toxic damage!

Your Blazing Bolt continues to burn Hot Dogger for 20.39 points of fire damage!

Your Blazing Bolt continues to burn Hot Dogger for 20.39 points of fire damage!

Your Blazing Bolt continues to burn Hot Dogger for 20.39 points of fire damage!

Your Blazing Bolt continues to burn Hot Dogger for 20.39 points of fire damage!

Blazing Bolt is recharged.

 

HIT Hot Dogger! Your Flares power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 18.60.

Your Flares burns Hot Dogger for 137.47 points of fire damage!

Your Flares continues to burn Hot Dogger for 28.24 points of fire damage!

 

HIT Hot Dogger! Your Fire Blast power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 63.80.

Your Fire Blast burns Hot Dogger for 200.21 points of fire damage!

Your Fire Blast continues to burn Hot Dogger for 14.12 points of fire damage!

Your Fire Blast continues to burn Hot Dogger for 14.12 points of fire damage!

Your Fire Blast continues to burn Hot Dogger for 14.12 points of fire damage!

Fire Blast is recharged.

Your Fire Blast continues to burn Hot Dogger for 14.12 points of fire damage!

 

 

Blazing bolt is doing 152 damage in this instance with a 1.67 animation.  Flares is doing a guaranteed 165.7 damage (as for some reason it gets its fire dot 100% of 1 tic instead of 80% of 4-5 tics like other powers). And fire blast, with the same 1.67 animation is doing 200 damage.

 

I'm pretty sure this is the case with other instant snipes on blasters, but if anyone else wants to test that'd be great. 

 

 

[Dan Petro]

I have mixed feelings about this. I like the idea on paper but a few things come to mind;

 

 

1) It feels like a slight nerf to those of us who already achieved Perma fast snipe. We already have fast snipe, but now our snipe not only loses *half* its range (which was useful for picking off runners or stragglers), but recharge was also increased by 3 seconds. The "Slow Snipe Bonus" may or may not make up for it depending on one's play style.

(However the increased recharge should make it proc a bit more, so that might even out if you use damage procs)

 

Having carefully planned to get Perma fast snipe, I feel like the carpet is being pulled out from under me. Not only does everyone get it now (Which I can live with), but I'm worse off for it as well from a power perspective.

 

 

 

2) DPS studies on Live Beta showed that the old fast snipe really messed up the "status quo" and sets without Snipe fell far behind in min/maxed single target damage. Ice notoriously fell from "top tier" to near the bottom. This is only going to serve to exacerbate that effect, and without any planning or IO investments. Are there plans to look at Ranged sets without Snipe and give them a few buffs to compensate?

 

 

 

Thank you for your time and everything you guys have been doing for this great game! This was just my 2 cents.

 

You are pretty wrong about ice being bottom tier.  Freeze ray is a 125 damage per animation/second attack and BiB is 133 DPA/S. 

 

Instant snipe for 1.33 cast powers (energy snipe/zapp/moonbeam/proton volley) are a 129 DPA attack and those respective sets don't have a follow up power that is anywhere near 100 DPA/S. In fact most other sets are closer to 60-65 DPA/S on their attacks. 

 

Sets with a 1.67 cast snipe (archery/Fire) are a bit weaker @ around 100 DPA/S with those attacks not including fire dots, but fire still has blaze at a beefy 132.6 DPA w/o Dots and as high as 170 with them. 

 

The only set that really comes out ahead is Psi as it has a 1 second fast cast snipe (which is being nerfed) as it was a 172.6 DPA/S attack and had a follow up with TK blast being 122.6 DPA/S.

 

Realistically, for primaries ice came in third behind Fire and Psy but decently far ahead of Dark, Energy, Rad, Elec, Archery, etc when it came to perma snipe.

[Prototelis]

I feel like going from the in combat state to not in combat state is too long. Like as soon as you drop the last thing you're fighting it should turn off auto cast IMO.

 

So, I can use snipe as part of my primary attack chain, and every time I roll to a new group of mobs use snipe on them as if I stayed in combat. Thats seems kinda broken to me.

 

[Goat]

I've tried this out a little bit on the test server, and here are my thoughts so far!

 

I like the idea of fastsnipe not being tied to ToHit, for the reasons some people mentioned earlier - it wasn't realistic for all ATs/Sets to achieve it without serious, serious investment. I seem to recall reading it was especially difficult for Dominators to achieve. Rolling fastsnipe into a baseline function seems fine to me. I don't think it will be overpowered, since many endgame builds can get fastsnipe already - it's a strong attack, yes, but as people have mentioned many blast sets have trouble with single target damage otherwise. Especially with the recharge for blasters/defenders/corruptors getting bumped up, I think snipes will maintain their place as strong attacks to weave in when they're off cooldown without being gamebreaking. A reasonable comparison might be the decision to make Assassin's Strike for Stalkers into a fast-cast out of Stealth - it turned a power that was essentially useless in combat into a quick, powerful, single-target strike that kept its hefty endurance cost.

 

-Fast Snipe:

-Base Range 80ft (except Psi snipes, as they get bonus range)

This is the first part I take issue with. One of my favorite parts about fastsnipe is the ability to quickly hit far-off enemies (especially runners). Realistically I don't think the range matters that much for the actual power level, but it just felt good and made the snipes stay mechanically distinct. With this, I'm concerned that in-combat they'll just be Normal But Strong Single Target Attacks and lose some of their mechanical identity. Basically they won't feel like a snipe when they just have the same range as everything else in your arsenal. I'm fine with it having a reduced range compared to Slow Snipes, but think that Fast Snipes having a longer range than other blast powers would still be nice (90-100 feet, maybe?).

 

Regarding balance concerns about sets without snipes, or sets like Devices where guaranteeing Fastsnipe was one of the few things it has going for it, I imagine those will eventually be addressed through further balance patches. The sets without snipes already had that problem in late-game builds, and Devices needs some attention anyway. This change might make some of the imbalances more front-and-center, but it's not going to create any that weren't there to begin with. Targeting Drone making fast-snipe easier to achieve did not make Devices a high-performing set to begin with, since Blasters could already get fastsnipe with well-slotted Tactics and a Kismet IO.

 

 

Now, this part's really minor, but I have to ask about it. I love LRM Rocket from Munitions Mastery for Blasters. It was a fun toy I liked using on Live, despite it objectively not being that great. Four minute recharge, four second interruptable cast time, need to spec deep into the entirely lackluster Munitions Mastery epic pool to get it at all - from a build perspective, it can be tough to justify outside of getting it for concept or as a gimmick! I was disappointed to find on the test server before sunset that it didn't follow the same fastsnipe rules as other sniper attacks, was disappointed again to find out it still wasn't the case when the game suddenly came back to life with improvements, and was triply disappointed to discover it doesn't work with these new changes either. Is there any chance at all of it getting updated somewhere down the line to follow a similar principle as other snipe attacks, with a (possibly tuned-down) faster in-combat version? I understand if that would be too powerful, but it be nice to hear Developer thoughts on it one way or another.

[Super Homer]

2) DPS studies on Live Beta showed that the old fast snipe really messed up the "status quo" and sets without Snipe fell far behind in min/maxed single target damage. Ice notoriously fell from "top tier" to near the bottom. This is only going to serve to exacerbate that effect, and without any planning or IO investments. Are there plans to look at Ranged sets without Snipe and give them a few buffs to compensate? 

 

And ice blast got an insane buff because of it, tied to no conditionals.

 

Dual Pistols still sucks and hope it gets some love (looks at what they did to the Senrinel version of suppressive fire.)

[Tallaan]

-Fast Snipe:

-Base Range 80ft (except Psi snipes, as they get bonus range)

This is the first part I take issue with.

 

After playing around with it for a little bit I have to agree. The range change just feels wrong.

[Super Homer]

I'm more concerned with the change giving Dominators 12 second recharge when blasters are having it taken away from them. I'd like more explanation on why this was considered a good idea.

 

It seems the dominator version has lower recharge at the cost of lower damage. That definitively means they don’t pack as strong a DPS as the blaster fast snipes.

[Super Homer]

After a slow snipe when snipe goes into its fast mode its 80ft? not everything is a short range blapper and why in gods name does Psi get bonus range? Since the "emergence" of COH again AR/Dev was actually fun and fairly strong, now they are being forced to close range, have the most resisted damage type but psi gets more range.

 

Psi ranged attacks have always had higher range. It’s kinda like their signature “secondary trait.”

[ryuplaneswalker]

I am okay with this change for Blasters and Sentinels who being a Pure Damage AT should have some mechanics that allow them to do that better than others and being able to instant snipe baseline would be great, I however think that Defenders and Corruptors shouldn't have the perk unless they get to the To-Hit.

 

Dominators and Stalkers get snipes from their epic pools so I have no idea, maybe give it instant during Hide and Domination?

[nihilii]

OUCH! This sniper nerf is going to hurt. While I understand the rationale of +ToHit unfairly favoring certain builds, is there any reason behind raising the recharge to 15 seconds? It feels like salting the wound for no reason, especially as you acknowledge the intent of the Paragon devs was to give extra DPA to blasters.

 

Having a 150+ feet attack (more like 180... yum, Cardiac) in combat was one of the best thing ever, shooting adds left and right in the midst of your standard rotation. Oh well. Time to enjoy this fire/time corr as much as possible before the patch hits live. ;-)

[atletikus]

As a blaster, I'm not a fan of the idea of this Snipe change. That's way too much power in one power. Especially with Recharge Rate Reduction in that set.

I'm just gonna end up going Snipe>Fireball>Blaze>Fireball>Snipe>Fireball>Blaze>Fireball>Snipe, etc...

 

I like the idea of having to save the Snipe for tactical purposes better. Picking out which minion in the crowd is the one most deserving to die before anyone else knows I'm there (and it's *always* the Sapper).

 

I worry now that this change is just going to let Blasters steamroll over everything, especially with the tweaks that seem to have been done to Endurance so I never have to stop already.

As a veteran Blaster (played almost exclusively Blasters for years back in the day), I'm a YUUUGE fan. Sniper powers were never even in the meta at the start of the game, and over the years the game sped up and the sniper powers lingered. And this is objectively a better change than the current where you needed a very specific build (unless Targeting Drone) to leverage viable snipes...as opposed to worries about your pimped out build becoming too stale. Additionally, it adds a needed boost to power sets like Dark/ and Electricity/ who lacks a hard-hitting ranged option.

[blitzboy]

Any chance we can see elevator doors in the base editor, as well as some form of teleporter (for the doors) to travel from one section of a supergroup base to another without all the behind-the-scenes extra stuff we have to jury rig to do it?  Just wondering!

[Novacat]

After some testing:

 

Fast Snipe's range loss is counterintuitive and annoying. You can't just turn and hit a runner anymore, it's out of range of your snipe too.

The slow snipe's extra damage is certainly impressive.

LRM still isn't 'a snipe' and so is entirely unaffected by any of these changes.

It takes an annoyingly long time for combat to become non-combat, so after you kill everything you're standing around for what, ten seconds or so, before you can just snipe something. Your range was reduced too so it's not just about getting the high damage.

 

Overall I think the range loss and combat timer are just too frustrating for the extra damage the slow mode gives - would gladly give up a bit of the extra damage multiplier or the interrupt-reduction (3s to 2s that was done) in exchange for eliminating those two peeves.

[nihilii]

And this is objectively a better change than the current where you needed a very specific build (unless Targeting Drone) to leverage viable snipes...

 

Maneuvers with a Kismet ToHit (available from lvl 10, ~2M on AH) and Tactics 6-slotted with ToHit SOs. One power pool selection, two power choices, five extra slots. That's the level of "very specific" you need to let any character run with permasnipe.

 

If anything, the issue has more to do with intuitiveness than accessibility. In the post-ED paradigm, the idea of overslotting a power past 3 SOs is alien to many.

 

The change is objectively bad to anyone who did their homework. But it never made sense to tie instasnipes to ToHit in the first place. So...

[Auroxis]

I personally like the 22% tohit thing, it rewards builders for thinking ahead and is achievable on blasters/corrs/defenders if they take tactics (doms need to take Link Minds from psi mastery). Now tactics will go away and building characters will be easier. So:

 

Pros:

 

1. Easier (arguably "more fun") game for people who don't wanna bother building for insta-snipes

2. New mechanic for super snipe, which no one will ever use outside of PvP.

 

Cons:

 

1. Builders like me who invested time into building for insta-snipe now have to re-work all their builds. So we get punished for putting effort.

2. All Blaster, Corruptor, and Defender builds with Snipe will no longer be applicable to other servers.

3. People who wanna start fights with their highest Damage per Activation attack will now get frustrated as their character locks into place for a lower DPA attack.

[Auroxis]

And this is objectively a better change than the current where you needed a very specific build (unless Targeting Drone) to leverage viable snipes...

 

Maneuvers with a Kismet ToHit (available from lvl 10, ~2M on AH) and Tactics 6-slotted with ToHit SOs. One power pool selection, two power choices, five extra slots. That's the level of "very specific" you need to let any character run with permasnipe.

 

You don't have to 6-slot it with SO's. Any of the major sets (adjusted targeting, gaussian's sync) will work if you +5 the IO's with a ToHit bonus.

[Zolgar]

I like the idea of having to save the Snipe for tactical purposes better. Picking out which minion in the crowd is the one most deserving to die before anyone else knows I'm there (and it's *always* the Sapper).

 

Except Snipe is improved for that purpose now, too.

 

You can still use Snipe to say "... that foe needs to die." and kill them before anyone knows you're there, kind of like a stalker with AS.

 

What this change does is it puts Snipe in line WITH assassin strike, that it's still a viable power to use in combat as well, as opposed to just an opener for combat (which was already an option, if you had a high enough +to-hit), but it is more powerful if you use it as a combat opener.

[Primantis]

I have mixed feelings about this. I like the idea on paper but a few things come to mind;

 

 

1) It feels like a slight nerf to those of us who already achieved Perma fast snipe. We already have fast snipe, but now our snipe not only loses *half* its range (which was useful for picking off runners or stragglers), but recharge was also increased by 3 seconds. The "Slow Snipe Bonus" may or may not make up for it depending on one's play style.

(However the increased recharge should make it proc a bit more, so that might even out if you use damage procs)

 

Having carefully planned to get Perma fast snipe, I feel like the carpet is being pulled out from under me. Not only does everyone get it now (Which I can live with), but I'm worse off for it as well from a power perspective.

 

 

 

2) DPS studies on Live Beta showed that the old fast snipe really messed up the "status quo" and sets without Snipe fell far behind in min/maxed single target damage. Ice notoriously fell from "top tier" to near the bottom. This is only going to serve to exacerbate that effect, and without any planning or IO investments. Are there plans to look at Ranged sets without Snipe and give them a few buffs to compensate?

 

 

 

Thank you for your time and everything you guys have been doing for this great game! This was just my 2 cents.

 

You are pretty wrong about ice being bottom tier.  Freeze ray is a 125 damage per animation/second attack and BiB is 133 DPA/S. 

 

Instant snipe for 1.33 cast powers (energy snipe/zapp/moonbeam/proton volley) are a 129 DPA attack and those respective sets don't have a follow up power that is anywhere near 100 DPA/S. In fact most other sets are closer to 60-65 DPA/S on their attacks. 

 

Sets with a 1.67 cast snipe (archery/Fire) are a bit weaker @ around 100 DPA/S with those attacks not including fire dots, but fire still has blaze at a beefy 132.6 DPA w/o Dots and as high as 170 with them. 

 

The only set that really comes out ahead is Psi as it has a 1 second fast cast snipe (which is being nerfed) as it was a 172.6 DPA/S attack and had a follow up with TK blast being 122.6 DPA/S.

 

Realistically, for primaries ice came in third behind Fire and Psy but decently far ahead of Dark, Energy, Rad, Elec, Archery, etc when it came to perma snipe.

 

 

Thank you for the clarification. Scratch that then, I must be confusing it with something else or remembered incorrectly.

 

I still stand behind Point 1 though.

 

Perhaps leave it as-is but lower the prerequisite To-hit buff to something more Blaster friendly? 10-15%

 

 

[Auroxis]

I like the idea of having to save the Snipe for tactical purposes better. Picking out which minion in the crowd is the one most deserving to die before anyone else knows I'm there (and it's *always* the Sapper).

 

Except Snipe is improved for that purpose now, too.

 

You can still use Snipe to say "... that foe needs to die." and kill them before anyone knows you're there, kind of like a stalker with AS.

 

What this change does is it puts Snipe in line WITH assassin strike, that it's still a viable power to use in combat as well, as opposed to just an opener for combat (which was already an option, if you had a high enough +to-hit), but it is more powerful if you use it as a combat opener.

 

AS is only powerful to use as combat opener because of the Fear AoE. Take that away and you're just wasting time winding up for an attack when you could've already killed the boss. Not to mention AS is more intuitive since there's no range penalty, and Hide is clearly visible in telling you when your AS will go wind-up mode.

[Auroxis]

Why do you think Paragon Studios went with the ToHit requirement in the first place? Perhaps because +ToHit is the most useless stat in the game since Accuracy from set bonuses soft caps your chance to hit anyway?

 

There's Aim and Build-up at early levels to enable it, and at later levels you have Tactics with +5 IO sets and Kismet. The only class in the game which needs to invest into something specific is Dominator (link minds from psi mastery), and that can be fixed by making Domination's ToHit bonus last the entire duration.

[nihilii]

You don't have to 6-slot it with SO's. Any of the major sets (adjusted targeting, gaussian's sync) will work if you +5 the IO's with a ToHit bonus.

 

I mean to suggest anyone can have instasnipe as soon as lvl 22, for a small investment. Step out of the DFB sewers, sell a couple rare salvage pieces on the market, and most of your hero career will be graced with a strong attack chain.

 

Indeed, for level 50 builds there's a wealth of better options. From alpha slots boosting ToHit for the price conscious, to the enhancement boosters solution you point out.

[kelticfury]

I rolled a beam time blaster on beta, then realized I have no idea how to build 1 beam rifle, 2 time manip, or even 3 Blaster. Could any of you braniacs throw together a pine's build for beam/time blaster that can guide me through the enh and pools/incarnates etc that are accessible on the beta please? Or possibly point me to one that already exists? I haven't been able to find any with google fu.

[Piyerus]

Out of curiosity, will there be a free respec given out with this patch, to help us compensate for the massive nerf?