Designated Operative Rifle
Range: 100, 1d10P, Deadly D6, Volley 30ft, Unwieldy, Tech, Magazine: 5, Expand: 1
Not yet familiar with the feel of SF2 weapon balance, but this statline doesn't seem out of place to me.
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One pain point I haven't seen brought up is also scaling.
The sniper gets some pretty good scaling as they level up.
It is only a level 2 purchase to get an advanced bipod. So, at level 2 you don't need to invest any Str because of kickback. Very few games spend a lot of time at level 1 so that is pretty much your entire career.
As early as Level 5 the Operative can have access to a 3rd level recharge. So at that point their turn becomes
Aim - Fire- Recharge Reaction hit or gets to fire twice a round a fair bit.
At level 11 they now get 3 shots between reloads which gives them a fair bit of flexibility.
And while fatal D12 does get a bit less powerful relatively speaking as you scale up it is ALWAYS very, very, very nice to have.
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One pain point I haven't seen brought up is also scaling.The sniper gets some pretty good scaling as they level up.
It is only a level 2 purchase to get an advanced bipod. So, at level 2 you don't need to invest any Str because of kickback. Very few games spend a lot of time at level 1 so that is pretty much your entire career.
As early as Level 5 the Operative can have access to a 3rd level recharge. So at that point their turn becomes
Aim - Fire- Recharge Reaction hit or gets to fire twice a round a fair bit.At level 11 they now get 3 shots between reloads which gives them a fair bit of flexibility.
And while fatal D12 does get a bit less powerful relatively speaking as you scale up it is ALWAYS very, very, very nice to have.
I don't think Recharge increases your Magazine size. I mean, it would be nice if it would, but I don't think it does. Also, the bipod takes up an upgrade slot, so especially later on I'd rather take the hit and have +2 Strength.
But at least we can all agree that nobody would lose out if a balanced Sniper with a larger magazine came out, right? People who prefer the 1-Mag Snipers can just keep using those.It would depend a lot on what that "balanced" weapon looks like. I think we can all pretty much agree that with an Assassin Rifle with a magazine of, say, 10 just about all operatives would be snipers using an Assassin Rifle.
So, how much do you knock off that to make it "balanced"? Obviously, on the low end, it has to be better than the existing non sniper weapons.
So. balanced is somewhere between those 2 extremes. Not actually a huge amount of room there.
I think there's design room there. Obviously you can't just increase the magazine size on existing rifles, that would be way overtuned.
So, how about we take a hint from, say, a simple weapon? The Laser Rifle.
Range: 100, 1d8F, Battery: 10, Expand 2, Tech
Well, first we change its weapon group. Laser to Sniper. Neutral change, easy enough. Then, since we really just want a basic weapon, we change its damage and magazine type. I will admit that I genuinely don't know how Starfinder values these, but it's probably a negative change? Since batteries can be upgraded, but magazines can not. Let's treat it as neutral.
Changing it to a martial weapon is the easiest step, we know how that is valued thanks to Deadly SImplicity. One die size up it is.
The next part is the complicated part. All snipers have Volley 30ft and Unwieldy. Those are negative traits. So they do give a trait bonus, right? Can't be too high, though, since Sniper Operative immediately deletes them. Maybe a Deadly d6? Keeps with the critical theme of snipers. Totally open to thoughts there, especially since I will likely offer a weapon like that to any Sniper player in any of the groups I run.
We'd be left with something like this:
Designated Operative Rifle
Range: 100, 1d10P, Deadly D6, Volley 30ft, Unwieldy, Tech,...
Maybe. It seems very deliberate to me that we've never seen a martial ranged weapon with a d10 damage die that doesn't need to be reloaded after every shot. D8, deadly d10 feels safer. We're also sticking to the proven territory with a longbow-like stats that way.
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Maybe. It seems very deliberate to me that we've never seen a martial ranged weapon with a d10 damage die that doesn't need to be reloaded after every shot. D8, deadly d10 feels safer. We're also sticking to the proven territory with a longbow-like stats that way.
The Longbow has Reload 0, a flexible hand while not shooting and isn't vulnerable to Tech-related issues. So it quite clearly needs to be a step above that. I also don't really think that the lack of not-Mag 1 d10 damage martial weapons is deliberate, especially considering the Magnetar Rifle and the Laser Rifle both exist - Advanced 1d12 and Simple 1d8. There are also several 1d10 martial area weapons.
Overall, the missing weapon seems more like a symptom of lack of content.
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I don't think Recharge increases your Magazine size. I mean, it would be nice if it would, but I don't think it does. Also, the bipod takes up an upgrade slot, so especially later on I'd rather take the hit and have +2 Strength.
I think recharge maybe does increase magazine size. Its magic, after all. But I see nothing to make me sure one way or the other. I think this needs clarification.
As to the upgrade slot vs the +2 Strength I can see it going either way. It would depend on how desperately I wanted to spend that +2 on something else.
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Yeah that's true (though it also suffers from the same issue as backstabber of being a very small one time bump, I feel like both should be 1/die to keep up with the baseline). I'm also not entirely sure how we're supposed to great PF2 firearm modifications. You're right though I just completely forgot about that item.Kickback is basically Propulsive, but it requires your strength to scale to it rather than the other way around. Making it one point per die makes it a lot more like a thrown weapon, or arguably loads better because you're also getting whatever cool traits the Kickback weapon has. I'm not sure guns need to eat more of the thrown weapons' lunch.
I'm also not sure that a weapon needs to grant you legendary Weapon Specialization if it's both Backstabber and Kickback, tbh.
Maybe, maybe not, but the feature already exists and is already fairly powerful... at level 1. But the trait budget doesn't change as it becomes increasingly irrelevant as levels scale, which is what feels problematic to me. The relative value declines extremely sharply, which creates an awkward scenario where the damage bonuses are fairly significant at low levels and those traits might as well not exist at higher levels.
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I have played 5 games with a buddy that used a sniper operative. He wields the Coil Rifle (Boost d10). Without support he one-shot a boss and easily one-shot several other enemies. A few times we played with a witchwarper that had the reload cantrip. My buddy has expressed zero complaints about his operative. I'll also note that he had Enhance Weapon cast at one point. 4d10+1d4+1 (non-crit) is plenty of damage attached to fighter accuracy. The reload necessity feels very appropriate.
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I have played 5 games with a buddy that used a sniper operative. He wields the Coil Rifle (Boost d10). Without support he one-shot a boss and easily one-shot several other enemies. A few times we played with a witchwarper that had the reload cantrip. My buddy has expressed zero complaints about his operative. I'll also note that he had Enhance Weapon cast at one point. 4d10+1d4+1 (non-crit) is plenty of damage attached to fighter accuracy. The reload necessity feels very appropriate.
That sounds like an account from the early levels, far before the reaction and Advanced Exploit turn into a problem. I'm not sure I specifically brought it up here, but that early Sniper Operative's only sin is being a mildly worse Sniper Gunslinger.
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I'm gonna give it a bit. I certainly expect Operative to get its subclasses looked at again. I don't necessarily expect the sniper specialization itself to get a change, but we do have the possibility of getting a a sniper rifle with different traits that isn't available at low levels.
Even with the class losing its move-on-reload ability, the end result still works a lot better for the barathu sniper I played in the playtest. Grab the traversal move-on-aim feat, and now they can aim, fly, shoot, and reload.
I wouldn't mind some more action compression or a two-shot sniper rifle for flexibility, but in the meantime, I'll keep my eye on special ammo and hope for an ammo-crafter archetype. Reloading every round does provide some benefits after all.
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Seems well balanced with the rest of the team to me. I think that is better then an over powered "realistic" sniper.
I went over this. It's more action constrained and, once reaction attacks come in, also does less damage. A real lose-lose, you exchange flexibility for less damage.
At no point, ever, did I ask for an overpowered realistic Sniper. I didn't ask for lengthened range increments. I didn't ask for a weapon that one shots. I simply asked for the Operative class to work well with the Sniper weapon group as is, which it currently does not.
Seems well balanced with the rest of the team to me.
The numbers really don't bear out that way though.