I can see where you are coming from on this but honestly, snipers ruin the flow of games. I don't know if you have ever played with "pro gamers" but they have a horrible habit of taking a fast paced match and bringing it to a grinding halt. Additionally, long range combat is the weakest part of this game and giving people incentive to sit as far back as possible will encourage lone wolf players and make playing supports and close combat entirely unfun.

In battelfield it makes sense because sniping was hard. You had bullet drop, windage , and small targets. The dev's have said that bullet drop *might* be in post launch and that windage will never be a thing so sniping will probably never be hard.

I am hoping that the faster targets in this game will make sniping a little challenging, but I doubt that.

Well the other things to consider are:

• No bullet drop on Laser Rifles.
• Extremely visible shot will force people to have to move because the Ranger will immediately become more than just visible, but briefly illuminated.
• Rangers will probably not be allowed to cap points while they remain an Elite Choice in EC. However, they are one of the best candidates for sabotage. Meaning that certain wargear options that we haven't seen yet might become available, like Haywire Grenades on Vehicle Terminals might shut down an enemy's access to get Vehicles temporarily.
• The maps right now only support sniping under certain conditions:
  • Pegasus, Olipsis v2, BlackBolt v2, Maggon, and some of the founder's maps have a lot of restricted fields of view and only a few spots where they could have a pretty good firing lane. Which means that Ranger's fighting at full range at full advantage will only occur in certain maps... like... Harkus... which needs a V2 and possibly v3 or v4 by launch anyway.
  • Maps will eventually become zones, making sniping a valuable asset to have to slow movement of an enemy's advance. The waxing and waning of cover and the terrain itself will significantly dictate where rangers will even be useful or desired over another Elite class choice... like Warp Spiders....
  • Snipers are generally useless against tanks (Rending is helpful in TT, but even then, they can't do anything against Predators)
  • Rangers aren't particularly good at close range either. They have no TT wargear option that makes them capable at close range other than a dagger and pistol. If Be decides to give them close range ranged wargear, I'm all for that, but it would also likely change the class significantly - i.e. the difference between Sniper Infiltrator and Crossbow Infiltrator from PS2.
  • Shield Bros can totally negate the damage, I can easily see VM forming a super small roman testudo to get past a sniper alley.
  • MoN can absorb the damage and get healed.
  • Raptors can easily flank.
  • All Ranged Classes can get into a battle with them.
• Eldar are going to get a really hard split of damage capabilities between short and long range. There's going to be almost nothing in the middle ranged (30m-70m) at which the Eldar will excel at that isn't already long range. The Rangers are going to pretty much exemplify this. They are either that lone wolf (or a pack of lone wolfs) providing pinning fire, and yes, fully slowing down infantry from extreme distances, or use specialist skills to do something like sabotage up close.
• Their uses are pretty specific in their specialization. Rangers excel at not only being limited to killing infantry at long range without too much of a worry of retaliation, but also targeting a specific type of Infantry and dealing with it so the rest of the warhost doesn't have to. You've given the example of dealing with Terminators, and I agree. Terminators are slow moving wretchedly tough Elites, and Ork Meganobs even more so. Valuable Ranger shots would be wasted on targeting small fry unit's (like Ork Sluggas) that the rest of the Eldar can easily deal with, Rangers want to target the biggest, most baddass players/NPC's and bring them down with extreme prejudice. This is basically as Asymetircal of Faction balance as it gets, since a Ranger is never going to directly fight against a Terminator, but it is almost unequivocally the answer to them - and yes, I see many tears in the future of the SM's who feel like it's a good idea to have terminators rush Eldar as the point guard, only to witness their headless corpses smack the ground as hails of Shuriken open up on stunned Tacticals.
  • Where the balance lies is going to have to be in how the damage is applied:
  • Set up and Teardown times are very likely.
  • Very slow RoF ~ Bolt Action Rifle.
    • Headshots are going to have to be 1 shot kills on anything without special protection - Iron Halo. This means that a Ranger is really going to have to rely on getting that headshot on the first hit and then move, or have a team of 5 of them picking on one guy at a time.
    • Non-Headshots are going to be fairly weak against everything that has an armor value. Which means it will probably be more than two or even 3 shot on the torso against Marines. Non-armored Orks may still get two shotted on the torso, but there will be a shifting horde of them, so getting two consecutive shots on the torso might be difficult... and then they'll know where you are.

I love sniper classes. I'm no way the best but I love the patience involved in getting set up in a good position and waiting for the shot. I find it very zen. I'm hoping that our Rangers get implement for that reason. Lots of good ideas in this thread.

I think the set up time is important for balance and agree that headshots should one hit but body shots shouldn't do much damage, you need to reward a good shot and punish a miss. Some kind of tracer bullet to show the direct of the shot would aid balance too.

I was mainly thinking how they can make the Ranger's stealth fair however. Unless things have changed it's my understanding that the Ranger's cape that gives them the stealth. And it's not a pure stealth either but rather a blending in with the background. Like the weapon set up I could see some kind of set up time for the stealth. So we can imagine while the Ranger is in motion the cape flows behind they can be seen, then as they come to a halt and wish to blend in they need to stop fully and hunker down swirling the cape around them to blend in. Movement breaks the stealth but aiming is fine. Firing breaks the stealth also but the stealth will return if the stay crouched. They're should be some skill in deciding if you've given away your location and have to move or if position is safe for a while longer and you can take another shot.

However stealth capping should be out of the question for all classes and if a Ranger can cap the above mechanic would make a stealth cap impossible.

Just some ideas!

I actually don't like the idea of tracer rounds, I think it's kind of nonsense in any game.

If you hear a sniper bolt pass by your head and whiff you, your first reaction should be to get the hell out of the open - not stop and return fire at the exact position of the snipers head (you now have the end of the beam as a dot on your screen, exactly where the snipers face is).

You should have to use cover wisely, and not just go skipping through the fields feeling safe because you know you can return fire before they can prep their next shot. Stick to walls, doorways, etc if you are being sniped at - flank them or avoid their line of fire - that's interesting gameplay.

True, but by the same token it should be extremely easy for other players on the opposing team to trace and take out the sniper unless they move quickly.