Harsh though it may be, if you’re not a good sniper, chances are you’d be much more helpful (from a team perspective) as a different class. Any more than 2 snipers is overkill, no matter how open the map is. Of the other two support classes, the medic is very capable and even suited to push forward with his teammates as offensive support and the spy lives behind enemy lines. The sniper is primarily defensive support, and while he can be offensive, you’d probably be better off with another medic or soldier.
Don’t waste your time sitting at the back of your base defending when there’s no one to shoot. Your job as sniper is to take people down from a distance, not just be at a distance. You don’t have to be right up the front taking fire (although your secondary submachine gun can be quite effective at close range), but if your team is winning the tug of war, you are just as able to defend your base by defending the enemy’s entrances rather than your exits (i.e. the places the enemy comes out of to attack).
There is a good chance that you will miss your target’s head, so in most cases it is not worth lining them up for 20 seconds waiting for your chance. If you have a fully charged shot, you may as well just fire it; the sniper rifle is pretty random when it comes to accuracy anyway, and you might get lucky and hit, or even hit someone else behind your target. Even a completely uncharged headshot can do 150 damage, so in most cases waiting for a full charge headshot is overkill (except perhaps when attempting to deal 450 damage to a heavy, which a fully charged headshot is more than capable of). The golden rule should be quantity over quality (unless you’re a pro and can actually convert your tracked targets), since many players may only have low health and even an uncharged shot to the foot would result in a kill, meaning lining up their head for an exorbitant amount of time is overkill.
posted on May 6th, 2008 at 11:15 am
posted on May 6th, 2008 at 11:22 am