Using snipers effectively.

[UraniumOverdose]

I have seen several people complain about the sharpshooter being underpowered and I respectfully disagree.

Early game they are definitely hard to use as most missions are infiltration missions. However, there are a few things to take note of.

If you infiltrate and then finish a mission without killing anything, you still get good EXP. So if you have a small team for a quick jailbreak mission, consider taking a sharpshooter along. You can also sit them as haven advisors and get some easy EXP for the faceless missions.

Once you have a SGT or better, they become beast mode for missions like Haven defense, Troop ambushes, and supply hits. Basically any nontimed mission. Find some high ground, give them Armor piercing rounds, and let them go to town.

Finally, and the part that people rarely seem to get, is holotarget specced sharpshooters turn your whole squad into beast mode.

I have a group of three snipers I use at every troop column ambush. Two high aim killers, and one holotarget spec. I have laser and plate armor tech and I dont even bother infiltration on troop ambushes. Getting a good defensive position and using shinobis as spotters, nothing is safe.

Sharpshooters take a bit of investment, and they are suited to a handful of missions only, but those missions they reign absolutely supreme.

Just my two cents.

[trihero]

I agree sharpshooters are very handy on non-timed missions, so much so to the point where I go in at 0% infiltration on supply raids/troop columns because I'm confident with 10 men I can take a lot of corpses home. The good old concealed shinobi giving you squadsight lets you herd pods into your overwatch fire, allowing for a relaxing experience of free overwatch kills versus the drudgery of engaging at midrange and exchanging fire on the first turn.

I actually find that they are not that bad on timed missions either once you rank them up, put stocks/spider suits on them. It's handy to poke some eyes out from long distance at good accuracy.

The holo-targeting path is very attractive versus things like generals and gatekeepers, hard not to not bring one to the late game. It can go up to +20% aim, with some crit and damage modifiers on top of that which is unique and powerful.

I build 1 pure long distance sharpshooter, and 1 focused holo-targeter in different operational 5-6 man squads and that's fine for me. The holo-targeter is an officer with Lead by Example and Fire Discipline to maximize the aim of the team. They do some pretty nice things together too when I have a big 10+ man mission; in a sniper nest I typically have the officer sniper use Command on the distance sniper since he has better perks and items to get off some big 100% aim hits even behind high cover sometimes.

[aedn]

Th hassle is getting them ranked up, and hoping you do not get a low aim sniper with NCE. Once they come online they are great, and if you go with an AWC start you can just tank them to get the pistol perks.

With ththe exception of VIP killling, and the occasional relay the low mobility is problematic on timed missions, especially ones with longer routes to the objective/extract.

Once they come online or in large squad missions with HT they are ok early as support I use them. It's just a hassle and a risk having them on teams until you reach that point.

[NephilimNexus]

A new sharpshooter is as effective as the weapon mods you give them, no more, no less. An elite scope and stock turn even E1s into monsters. They should always get first pick for these mods.

They're hard to level-up at first but once they get going they snowball in kill-counts. Once you get to where you've got 80%+ accuracy firing from a rooftop it's basically a dead enemy every turn. It's keeping them alive until they get that good that is the tricky part.

[Devon_v]

Send them on VIP extracts. Treat them like the VIPs, just stay out of sight and win the mission, free XP.

[Eskimow]

I haven't gotten late game yet, restarted from Veteran cause I was getting too many Flawless missions. Hopefully Commander kills me a few times and teaches me better.

Anywho, I've found that Sharpshooters are fantastic! IF! You play around them. If you build a fast moving squad, Sharpshooter gets left behind. I tend not to use them on any of the Rescue missions based on that alone. But on missions where the timer goes away after the objective? Wonderful.

The Mission:
Hack Advent thing. Retrieve Advent item. Supply Raids. Anything with no timer or a timer that can go away.

The Squad:
Shinobi, Sharpshooter, Specialist, Technical, Ranger, Grenadier, Assault, Gunner. In that order of priority, depending on how many I can take on the mission.

The Set-Up:
Shinobi out front first, scouts patrols and finds a safe path towards objective. Rest of the squad follows, usually staying about a blue-move length behind. Can usually find the objective within 4 turns or less (Got lucky and found it almost immediately once). Once the location is scouted, get the Specialist in position to hack. Get Sharpshooter on high ground, ideally with his/her back to the edge of the map or where you know no soldiers are. Keep in mind I've avoided or ignored all patrols still. No contact is made. Take my time here, as long as Specialist has vision, I can hack it on the last possible turn. Using that time to collect as much info as possible with the Shinobi.

At that point, it's pretty cut and dry. Sharpshooter is up high for aim bonus, far enough back to be out of Advent sight. Hack objective, drop the evac, hold position. (Ideally have at LEAST a stock on your Sharpshooter for the Steady Aim.) Every time a patrol comes into sight and scatters, the Sharpshooter gets first shot on your turn. Almost always has a shot at 80%+. Often better. Rack up some early kills, get those high ground perks.

I've used this over and over, and it only failed once when a patrol decided to jump down from a roof and right onto my squad.

TL;DR: Sharpshooters aren't bad in my experience. Just gotta play around them early until you can get the ranks in. Then, if they're anything like Long War 1 late game, they're just gonna solo carry my missions for me. :^)

[trihero]

The hardest part about using them has nothing to do with timed missions, but rather the fact that the enemy loves to hump high cover, so your sniper is looking at a lot of uncomfortable < 50% shots most of the time. They are indeed invaluable in nontimed missions, but my estimation of them has gone down a bit recently when I feel like all they're doing is waiting in the back for shots that aren't happening, when instead you could have someone supporting your front line by smoking/fbanging or having assaults break the enemy position with lightning reflexes + run and gun. This is especially bad if you can't find stocks/scopes for the life of you, which is happening to me on my legendary campaign ; (

[Dwarfling]

I kinda stopped consistently using Snipers as killing machines, mostly because cover is so hard to remove in LW2. Chances are that whenever I get a Sharpshooter in LW2 it's gonna have so-so aim, so I turn them into holo-targeting officers. My high aim rookies that do go thru GTS training mostly end up as Rangers.

[trihero]

I kinda stopped consistently using Snipers as killing machines, mostly because cover is so hard to remove in LW2. Chances are that whenever I get a Sharpshooter in LW2 it's gonna have so-so aim, so I turn them into holo-targeting officers. My high aim rookies that do go thru GTS training mostly end up as Rangers.

Yup, that's exactly what I've found out, that snipers are usually waiting for shots that don't happen.

I have also in general reduced my sharpshooter count to 1 for nontimed missions. You only need one to pull distant pods, but you do a need a ton of firepower/overwatch to deal with streams of junk. And since 1 guy is dedicated scouting (shinobi), you need to make every bit of your squad count.

I do like Lead by Example on a sharpshooter though since they tend to have the best aim, and also slap the best aim pcs on them to benefit the whole team.

[Saracan]

Situational, but I've started loving my death from above-sniper in my last ambush mission. With a good stock, scope, tracer rounds and high ground obviously, she managed to kill one enemy every turn with 90+ cth against high cover. Got lucky with the damage rolls, I suppose, but still. On timed missions, I still like my holo support Snipers, even though they rarely get to shoot. but they are a great force multiplier, especially once they get the advanced holotarget perks.

Now, I usually don't bring multiples of a class, so for me it is more a case of "I have this sniper, let's see what I can do with him" and less "well, let's just bring another grenadier". Have I had missions where they underperformed? Yes. But that holds true for all classes; sometimes they have a bad run, missing 5 80% shots in a row, dealing min damage on every shot, getting hit through high cover while hunkering down. But overall, I'm quite happy with my snipers.

[code99]

Sharpsooters are great, sharpshooter is life, i love sharpshooters.

Well, rng kinda rulled in my favor in my campaign, it so happens that my main sniper has 100 aim (not counting the various bonuses from scopes, focus fire, holo targeting and the like) and I can reliably hit enemies at any range and in any type of cover. She literally never misses.

Combine the precise shot ability with get some and (in my case since the aim is so good) maybe a laser sight on the weapon and you can reliably crit too. I managed to crit the advent commander guy from the hq assault with my first shot and brought him to 4 hp.

Put AP rounds and you'll be chewing through mechs and other armored enemies like it was nothing.

I find snipers to be useful in almost all types of missions (especially kill vip type missions). If i can take a sniper on a mission i almost always do.

[LordYanaek]

I agree with everyone thinking they are good soldiers. I use 3 different kinds of sharpshooters (playing on Veteran, now in July)

• The pure sharpshooters. I have 2 of them in squad "Specters" along with a Sharpshooter officer, a Specialist and a Shinobi. They are my go to squad for ambushes. This 5 soldiers squad can take some heavy opposition while usually staying safe because the enemy dies without ever seeing them (hence the squad's name). I spot them with my full saboteur shinobi and kill them from afar. Basically they mostly take the Sniper perks, and their sniper rifles (now laser lances) are equipped with scope and stock. Kill someone, end your turn with steady weapon (thanks to Death from above), repeat next turn. If i ever have a sniper who couldn't kill his target in one shot, then my officer will rapid target someone next turn to keep my to-hit chance close to 100%. They even managed to take a supply convoy with low infiltration and 8 man pods. They got wounded but they did it. On one occasion i deployed them on a hacking mission due to lack of other squads and they finished it just nice by killing the pods on the way to the objective from the first rooftop they found while the specialist moved in the now-clear path. Obviously they wouldn't be good for jailbreak missions but otherwise they can do great job even on non optimal missions.
• The officer, i have one in the above squad and one in my heavy duty "Sledgehammer" squad. This is the squad that goes on those 12h left counter dark even missions or on non infiltration missions. They often face big pods with some strong enemies and while the techs and grenadiers take care of clusters of basic troops, the officer will make sure the ranger and gunners can hit the high threat enemies. Those officers are my low aim sharpshooters, they take all the holo-targeting perks and combine them with officer boosts.
• The scout. I have one in one of my infiltration squads and she does a great job. Snap-shot plus Damn Good Ground and some plus damage perks allows her to easily flank and kill annoying targets without the need to send a shinobi forward. Phantom allows her to play well with this high stealth squad. Her kill counter is pretty high. This squad goes into all sort of infiltration missions including jailbreak and other timed evac missions.

All variants of sharpshooters can be very useful when used correctly.

[infidel901]

Can we talk skills?

What builds are people using on a 2 or 3 sniper set up?

[junk]

Here's the moment that sold me on sharpshooters in LW2, and now it's always a priority to bring one along on every mission if for no reason other than the promotions.

I brought a veteran squad to a swarming/impregnable column assault, among the vets was a top tier sniper with Serial, using a mag rifle that was tricked out. In my vanilla playthroughs I tended to use snipers as gunslingers, fan fire being one of the best single target elimination abilities, and I just like pistols. Anyway, until this mission I had always thought of my sharpshooter as a clutch utility, someone to knock out an overwatching guardian so that my other units could move freely, take out rocketeers and such before they could become a problem, and free my dudes from snake-wraps. Not this time.

The mission opened with nearly every enemy on the map within activation range of my drop point. My very first move was just a few steps to the closest cover and 3 huge pods activated at once, talking like 18-24 dudes jockeying for position to kill my squad.

Now my squad is no joke, this is the A-team, two technicals with exo suits, a master specialist with an obscene hack score, a ranger officer, a gunner with an aim as high as a sharpshooter, spider suits and mag weapons all around; but no lie, Turn 1 I was looking down the barrel of a total squad wipe. Now the good thing about 20 aliens being visible at once means that my sharpshooter has her pick of targets. There's a big clump of guys out in the middle, so I tab to my technical and have him launch a rocket, then tab to my other one and she launches a rocket too. The second rocket scatters really far and ends up hitting a different cluster of advent. Now there's about 14 wounded advent out in the open.

My sharpshooter spiders up on top of a bus stop. I check my targets, nearly 100% to hit anything I want. This was my first time using Serial ever, in 300+ hours of Xcom2. In one turn, with an expanded magazine, an autoloader, AP rounds, in a mag long rifle, my sniper killed 12 advent, totally saved my squad from certain death, and went on to finish the mission with an excellent. Now the team of bunker buster technical with serial sniper is definitely my go to for the hardest and heaviest missions.

[Poobah]

Want to chime in with more love for aggressive snipers. My man Ramírez is a lean mean killing machine. When he got Serial he graduated from killing 1 alien a turn to killing as many aliens as my squad can see whenever I desire as long as Serial isn't on cooldown. The hardest choice is deciding if I should swap out something from my go to sniper rifle setup of Stock-Autoloader-Scope to add expanded mags so he can kill even more things in a serial chain.

[Jacke]

From reading the recent post on ADVENT HQ missions:

http://www.pavonisinteractive.com/phpBB ... 16&t=24141

I now see the utility of a left-side Sharpshooter build, as trihero mentioned a while back.

Sharpshooter Sniper
Death From Above - Damn Good Ground - Deadshot - Low Profile - Aggression - Kubikiri - Serial

Finally hit 16 builds, but still holding Ranger and Gunner to 1 each.

I'm fairly sure Long Watch is more situational and Deadshot would be better. However, still thinking about Conceal instead of Aggression, Hunter's Instinct instead of Kubikiiri, and both Double Tap and Alpha Mike Foxtrot instead of Serial.

EDIT: Definition not changing any of those. Squadsight usually means lots of enemy in sight, so Aggression to drive up crit chance, which aids Death From Above, Kubikiri, and Serial.

[trihero]

My sharpshooter spiders up on top of a bus stop. I check my targets, nearly 100% to hit anything I want. This was my first time using Serial ever, in 300+ hours of Xcom2. In one turn, with an expanded magazine, an autoloader, AP rounds, in a mag long rifle, my sniper killed 12 advent, totally saved my squad from certain death, and went on to finish the mission with an excellent. Now the team of bunker buster technical with serial sniper is definitely my go to for the hardest and heaviest missions.

That is beautiful. I can also see serial working with bunker buster.

Myself I still prefer Alpha Mike Foxtrot (+4 primary weapon damage). Perhaps it's overkill but I like to see regular shots doing 22 damage o.O

[cerebrawl]

I'm fairly sure Long Watch is more situational and Deadshot would be better. However, still thinking about Conceal instead of Aggression, Hunter's Instinct instead of Kubikiiri, and both Double Tap and Alpha Mike Foxtrot instead of Serial.

Long Watch is awesome if you manage to get overwatch perks from the AWC.

One of my sharpshooters has Cool Under Pressure and Rapid Reactions. He is most definitely picking up Alpha Mike Foxtrot at the top rank too.

[Mal_rgn]

Can we talk skills?

What builds are people using on a 2 or 3 sniper set up?

I have a few different builds, the one I like the best is:

Sharpshooter Build 1 Cleaner

Corporal >> Death From Above
Lance Corporal >> Damn Good Ground
Sergeant >> Phantom [Obviously Deadshot is excellent as well]
Staff Sergeant >> Center Mass [or to hedge your bets defensively, low profile.]
Tech Sergeant >> Aggression
Gunnery Sergeant >> Kubikiri [this one is iffy for me, think Hunter's Instincts may better overall]
Master Sergeant >> Serial

As others have state on untimed missions (looking at you Supply Raid) this particular build/soldier is the only reason I was able to make it through some VERY tough fights. Ideally you would, place him/her in a 'perch' relatively close to the team but not directly in the heat of the fight (to avoid range penalties as much as possible). If they do come under fire, their survivability is very good, especially if you are fortunate to have them behind some decent cover due to DGG.

Having a Shinobi to scout for you (I like to use the Rogue Class mod myself) and you can really put a hurting on the x-rays and have fair confidence your Sniper will come out with many kills and no wounds. I know many have voices they are weak but on certain missions they give you that extra reach you need and firepower to clean up the field quickly. I have not yet made it to top rank but my thoughts are, open with an explosive and then proceed to have this 'cleaner' sweep as many as possible, kill the stragglers with whoever else you have on the team or flash bag and cycle to the next turn. Hopefully this proves to be true because I am certainly making the investment.

I also have a Sniper with the above build with Shadow Strike from the AWC... which is just so darn sweet I must say =)

Sincerely,

Mal

[Jacke]

My sharpshooter spiders up on top of a bus stop. I check my targets, nearly 100% to hit anything I want. This was my first time using Serial ever, in 300+ hours of Xcom2. In one turn, with an expanded magazine, an autoloader, AP rounds, in a mag long rifle, my sniper killed 12 advent, totally saved my squad from certain death, and went on to finish the mission with an excellent. Now the team of bunker buster technical with serial sniper is definitely my go to for the hardest and heaviest missions.

That is beautiful. I can also see serial working with bunker buster.

Myself I still prefer Alpha Mike Foxtrot (+4 primary weapon damage). Perhaps it's overkill but I like to see regular shots doing 22 damage o.O

Yeah, tradeoffs. Would like Phantom and Conceal, but I think they might be of limited use to a Sharpshooter and they're up against Deadshot and Aggression, two crit chance buffs. Phantom is useful for a holotargeting Sharps, Conceal less so being the same rank as Vital Point Targeting.

That last skill is tricky. Serial is great for wiping out a bunch of wounded enemy every 7 turns. Double tap can double damage every other turn if the Sharps can hit reliably. And Alpha Mike Foxtrot maxes the single-shot damage, working with Death From Above and buffing a Sharp's overwatch.

And AWC skills are definitely something that should be taken into account. I do the INI mod to see them all. And I've got two Sharps right now with overwatch buffs. One even has Killzone. But my first Sharps, from Gatecrasher.... Damn, his aim is so poor, which is why I went holotargeter. But he's got those overwatch buffs. And who wants any Sharps with poor aim.

I'm not that far into my LW2 campaign. And there's a number of problems with my initial 8 soldiers and my early play. Now that Commander's Choice is available, I think I'm just going to restart my campaign.

[trihero]

My usual long range sharpshooter goes

death from above - damn good ground - long watch - center mass - aggression - hunter's instincts - serial

I have one sharpshooter who goes alpha mike foxtrot instead of serial because I like hitting for a truckload of damage. Death from above into steady weapon is really nice.

[Jacke]

In practice, how useful is Low Profile instead of Center Mass? It would give the Sharps better protection at a minimum cost if discovered and fired upon.

[trihero]

In practice, how useful is Low Profile instead of Center Mass? It would give the Sharps better protection at a minimum cost if discovered and fired upon.

It's a very interesting decision, I take Center Mass to squeeze every last dps out of the sniper and I try to keep my sniper way out of reach of anyone so he's not getting shot at to begin with.

But there have been times where mobs have caught me unexpected or the sniper's best cover was low cover in range of enemies(like avenger defense) and low profile is indeed a massive defensive benefit in those cases.

You can think of it in 2 ways

1) if you're conservative, then the more high cover the better, and you might be willing to skimp on 1 point of damage considering late game sniper rifles do 9-15, and even more with crits, so maybe 1 damage just isn't that much relative to what you can do at that point

2) every point of damage counts, you want to raise that minimum damage as much as you can so you can chain together long serials. The sniper's job is damage and center mass gives you that, and you can make up for defenses by simply being way out of range.

[nightwyrm]

In practice, how useful is Low Profile instead of Center Mass? It would give the Sharps better protection at a minimum cost if discovered and fired upon.

For me, DFA Sharps get CM and Snapshots get LP.

[Jacke]

Thanks for that on Low Profile!

How about Long Watch? If the soldier has AWC overwatch perks, then yeah, and Alpha Mike Foxtrot usually too. But taking it passes up Deadshot. Is it worth the trade?