Stealth Skill Unlock and Improved Sniping?

[Shinwasha]

With Improved Sniping
Benefit: You take only a -10 penalty to your Stealth skill instead of -20 when sniping.

and Stealth Skill Unlock
With sufficient ranks in Stealth, you earn the following.

5 Ranks: Reduce the Stealth penalty from sniping by 10.

Does that make the penalty for sniping 0? Or are they both competence bonuses and cancel each other out?

The way it could be read is that with Improved Sniping you take only a -10 penalty instead of the -20 and then with the skill unlock it reduces the penalty by 10.

[Weirdo]

They're definitely not typed bonuses.

I'm inclined to say that it does combine to make no penalty by RAW.

I could see an argument for them not combining, if you apply the skill unlock to reduce the penalty from -20 to -10 and then apply Improved Sniping, which simply sets the penalty to -10.

Also, I think Improved Sniping is a third party feat? The Paizo equivalent being Expert Sniper - the wording of which sounds even more like it would stack with the skill unlock:

Expert Sniper wrote:

Benefit(s): You reduce the penalty on your Stealth checks to stay hidden while sniping by 10.

Normal: You take a –20 penalty on Stealth checks to stay hidden while sniping.

Seems a bit powerful to me for something you can get by 5th level at the cost of two feats (or one if you're an Unchained Rogue and get a free skill unlock as a class feature). Then again, making a single ranged attack per turn is generally not an optimal strategy. It's probably more useful for solo assassin antagonists than for PCs.

[*Thelith]

Yes they stack. Penalty is changed to ten, then you get to reduce the penalty by ten to result in no penalty. Add hide in plain sight and you can snipe with no penalty in the middle of *insert your terrain* with no cover and no actual place to hide. :)