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Why are the sniper rifles so terrible? They do 1d10 damage, have the volley & unwieldy penalties , have an ammo capacity of ONE, a range of 100 ft and are martial weapons. Lets compare this to the Seeker rifle, which does 1d10 damage, has no penalties, a capacity of 6 rounds, and range of 120 ft and is a simple weapon. So, same damage, longer range, no minimum range, able to fire more than once a round, 6X the ammo capacity, and a simple vs martial weapon.
Both of the sniper rifles have the fatal d12 ability which will come up maybe 8% of the time (the equivalent of +.44 dmg per hit, if you ignore blow-through damage you may get when scoring a critical). The Assassin Rifle has breakdown (very limited utility) and backstabber (+1 dmg for the 1st shot) and the Shirren-eye Rifle has kickback, which, when done correctly, can give a +1 dmg with no to-hit penalty.
I just don’t think these abilities close the gap between the gap between the Seeker Rifle, which is a simple weapon.
Or Laser Rifle is you want to be technical.
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I think there are two factors at play here: one is that the Seeker Rifle is grossly overtuned in a way that suggests it's a 1-magazine gun that was accidentally given a larger capacity, and the second I suspect is that Paizo wanted to try inserting the unwieldy trait from Starfinder 1e into 2e and underestimated just how terrible the trait is.
Personally, I don't mind sniper rifles having a low magazine capacity, including a magazine capacity of just 1: that to me is the perfect excuse to give the gun a really high damage die, and load it with lots of extra traits so that each shot is exceptionally powerful. Volley also makes sense in this respect, if the intent is to encourage sniping from a distance, plus the restriction ought to allow making the gun even stronger. Unwieldy, however, just messes with the gun's interactions unnecessarily in a way that a low magazine capacity and reloading already cover, and requires class features to override the trait and make those guns work properly. I'd rather just get rid of that particular trait, and let reload, volley, and a low magazine enable truly powerful sniper rifles on their own.
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Sniper rifles should have a low magazine capacity, but not a magazine capacity of "1."
Both because the Operative sniper gets locked into a stable loop of Aim, Strike, Reload, and also because sniper rifles in reality and in science fiction tend to hold like 3-5 shots in a magazine at the low end.
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While I agree that not every sniper rifle should have a magazine capacity of 1 (though anything more than that is a major buff that should be reflected in the gun's power elsewhere), a big part of what makes the Operative so repetitive is Aim itself. Aim is basically the action you'll almost always want to take when you Strike, and because you'll be aiming to Strike most turns, you'll be Aiming, then Striking. Having a larger magazine capacity doesn't actually change this, because if you can fire another shot, the rotation becomes Aim + Strike x2.
Both of the sniper rifles have the fatal d12 ability which will come up maybe 8% of the time (the equivalent of +.44 dmg per hit, if you ignore blow-through damage you may get when scoring a critical).
If your operative is only critting 8% of the time with his sniper rifle (and who else is using sniper rifles?) you're doing something wrong. Here's the crit chance for a +4 dex operative playing through A Cosmic Birthday's enemies. It's 5% for a handful of enemies, but it's 25-30% on most, and some 55%/70% guys show up, too.
Please note that every other class, including the casters, with a +3 dex is doing 15% less crit rate (20% if they don't immediately get a tactical weapon at level 2), which is still higher than 8% on most of these enemies.
And all of this is without any demoralization, off guard (for a sniper using Hide from cover), or Get 'Em going on. (Or them taking cover to reduce these.)
Chapter 1:
Operative Level 1, +9 to attack
Maintenace Robot: 30%
Hardlight Scamps: 25%
Space Station Gremlin: 30%
Ghost Courier: 30%
Animated Vesk Statute: 5%/25%
Observer-Class Security Robot: 25%
Evangelist: 30%
Newborn Disciples: 40%
Assembly Ooze: Immune
Electrovore: 15%
Chapter 2:
Operative Level 2, +11 to attack (Tactical +1 tracking weapon)
Giant Dust Weevils: 35%
Ferrofulid Ooze: Immune
Spicy Sweet (Goblin): 25%
Space Goblin Gunners: 30%
Observer-Class Security Robot: 35%
Protection-Class Security Robot: 10%
Eldritch Squox: 10%
Crimson Queens: 40%
Crimson Queen Sniper: 40%
Metema the Eternal: 5%
Chapter 3
Operative Level 3, +12 to attack (Tactical +1 tracking weapon)
Tentacles: 50%
Fungal Warden: 20/10%
Sporelings: 70%
Umbral Echoes: 30%
Feral Ghouls: 30%
Hespers: 30%
Plasma Moths: 30%
Skeletal Horses: 35%
Cockatrice: 30%
Thane Hacker: 30%
Newborn Disciples: 55%
Aucturnite Swarms: 5%
Amnieka Midwife: 5%
Sniper rifles should have a low magazine capacity, but not a magazine capacity of "1."
Both because the Operative sniper gets locked into a stable loop of Aim, Strike, Reload, and also because sniper rifles in reality and in science fiction tend to hold like 3-5 shots in a magazine at the low end.
Basically every gun needs more ammo.
While I agree that not every sniper rifle should have a magazine capacity of 1 (though anything more than that is a major buff that should be reflected in the gun's power elsewhere), a big part of what makes the Operative so repetitive is Aim itself. Aim is basically the action you'll almost always want to take when you Strike, and because you'll be aiming to Strike most turns, you'll be Aiming, then Striking. Having a larger magazine capacity doesn't actually change this, because if you can fire another shot, the rotation becomes Aim + Strike x2.
Thats like saying Swashbuckler or Monk or Ranger is repetitive. The circumstances of the combat will create more situations where the class can/needs to do other things. They don't have the number of skills they had in SF1e, they are the one major skill & run-and-gun guy now. Like a ranged Swashbuckler.
Make the single attack function of sniper rifles more rewarding. Add a Zoom(Interact) action for sniper weapons where the next ranged Strike on that turn will gain doubled(or tripled with Sniper Scope) range increment & precision damage equal to Dex attribute. Like the Boost trait or the Kineticist's two-action Elemental Blast.
Looking back on first edition, most sniper rifles held multiple shots. The thing that kept you from spraying bullets with sniper weapons was the unwieldy property. Given that the means to limit weapons to one strike per turn exists, how necessary is it to impose an action tax on top of it?
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Thats like saying Swashbuckler or Monk or Ranger is repetitive. The circumstances of the combat will create more situations where the class can/needs to do other things. They don't have the number of skills they had in SF1e, they are the one major skill & run-and-gun guy now. Like a ranged Swashbuckler.
The opposite is true for all of those Pathfinder classes. The Swashbuckler has a variety of ways to get panache before even getting into feats, FoB is what lets the Monk do more with their turn as an action compressor, and the Ranger only needs to Hunt Prey once per target. When any of those classes has to spend most of their turn doing something else, they can still spare one action to do their class's thing. By contrast, if the Operative has to spend most of their turn doing something else, they don't tap into their Strike booster. Whereas Pathfinder classes get to have varied and fluid turns, most of Starfinder's martials I think ended up having the closest thing this game has to a fixed action rotation, as they very much wanted to spend their entire turn doing their two-action class combo and then making a Strike as a third action whenever possible. This obviously didn't make up every turn in gameplay, but when they had to switch up it had much more of a detrimental impact than on Pathfinder classes, which I think is one of the factors behind gameplay feeling quite static in playtesting.
Make the single attack function of sniper rifles more rewarding. Add a Zoom(Interact) action for sniper weapons where the next ranged Strike on that turn will gain doubled(or tripled with Sniper Scope) range increment & precision damage equal to Dex attribute. Like the Boost trait or the Kineticist's two-action Elemental Blast.
Or, perhaps, we should design fewer purely self-synergistic mechanics that offer little in the way of interesting or varied gameplay, and instead focus on mechanics that provide comparable or greater benefits based on interacting with others, whether with allies or against enemies. SF2e's design has plenty of these navel-gazing mechanics that I feel belong more in 1e than 2e, and I think it would be a lot healthier overall if there were instead more of a focus on synergizing with allies, exploiting enemy positioning, and the like.
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Reloading a lot is fine when you're able to combine other actions with reloading. The big miss with the sniper operative I think is that you're supposed to be sneaky (you get training in stealth and a stealth skill feat for being a sniper) and you get the tools to combine a move with a stride or a step (mobile reload, at level 1) and Strike with take cover (via Peak, which is probably your level 2 feat), but you don't get the ability to combine Sneak or Hide with your basic three things (Aim, Reload, Strike).
This seems especially odd when you note that the Way of the Sniper Gunslinger gets the ability to Hide when reloading. Though I guess you can grab this with multiclassing.
The moment you add other actions to reload you basically don't have a draw back of reloading, which solves it's own problem and creates one which Running Reload (Gunsliger Feat) causes the issue of being able to move and reload which is nice but put it on an Operative and oh boy, you got Action manipulation on top of that!
The operative already has running reload (well "Mobile Reload") baked in as a class feature. It's just weird that if I take all the action economy stuff I can move when I reload, move when I aim ,move when I shoot, take cover when I shoot, etc. but none of this interacts at all with the stealth rules.
Yup, it is almost like they need a special Aim COndensing Stealth ability just like the Envoy Leadership styles need more to them because they all feel very lackluster.