47 replies to this topic

[WonderSparks]

Personally, I think snipers are not that bad unless you let them shoot you. Of course, as a cumulative effect, the more of the enemy that is shooting you at once, the better it is for them, so try not to let too much damage swamp you at once (though I do not encourage cowering in a corner while the rest of your team gets hammered) and keep your wits about you.

At this point my "advice" is probably worth about as much as a rock in a pond, so I suppose you should just do what the others are saying and ignore me.

[Mogney]

Yelland, on 28 July 2014 - 09:45 AM, said:

How is radar deprivation broken in the extreme? Your description seems to be exactly how it works and is supposed to work. It's a sort-of personal ECM, I never leave home without it. Everyone else can, please do.

Its broken because everyone uses it all the time.

I would go so far as to say that if you are not using this module, then you are doing it wrong.

Once there was another module like this, it was called Seismic, if you werent running Seismic Sensor, then you were doing it wrong.

Eventually PGI nerfed the Seismic down to where it is another choice of many good modules, because it was broken good.

I am confident that Radar Deprivation will get the nerf-hammer sometime in the near future as well.

In the mean time, use it on every mech in every drop. It's simply too good not to.

[Koniving]

Defense:
Go into half reverse, turn in the direction opposite of the enemy's running.
If you can turn fast enough to track, lock arms and fire away. If you cannot, unlock arms (good time to have pulse lasers).

If you still have problems, you can either 1) enlist lights/mediums to give you support against them or 2) employ lots of streaks.

[Tiamat of the Sea]

Mogney, on 28 July 2014 - 10:47 AM, said:

Its broken because everyone uses it all the time.

I would go so far as to say that if you are not using this module, then you are doing it wrong.

This, so much. If there is a piece of gear- whatever it is- that the majority of players will always take no matter what (regardless of the rest of their gear, their preferred activity, and what else they could have taken instead), that's a good sign that that piece of gear is imbalanced wrong and needs to be either reduced in power (which PGI did to Seismic) or restricted in some other way (which PGI did to ECM).



That said- handling snipers is really the topic at hand.

Moving is your best defense. Even in a Dire Wolf, which moves at the speed of late-winter molasses, you should only stop moving if you're absolutely certain that no enemy can take a shot at you, and even then only for a second or two at most. I'd go as far as to say that in most situations, piloting skill is more important to your game than shooting skills. Moving around and torso twisting (especially doing both together to look in directions you aren't moving in) will mitigate any form of damage. Even the best snipers have trouble when their shots don't land where they want because you turned your torso at the right time or suddenly stepped down a hill they weren't expecting you to.

I'm also going to say that I disagree with Koniving. In my experience, taking the time to go backwards is nearly always a worse option than turning and moving forwards- the only general exception I can think of is when being circled by a light 'mech. When you move backwards, you move slower, you can't look where you're going, and you accelerate and decelerate less sharply.

Edited by Quickdraw Crobat, 28 July 2014 - 10:59 AM.

[Kjudoon]

Mogney, on 28 July 2014 - 10:47 AM, said:

Its broken because everyone uses it all the time.

I would go so far as to say that if you are not using this module, then you are doing it wrong.

Once there was another module like this, it was called Seismic, if you werent running Seismic Sensor, then you were doing it wrong.

Eventually PGI nerfed the Seismic down to where it is another choice of many good modules, because it was broken good.

I am confident that Radar Deprivation will get the nerf-hammer sometime in the near future as well.

In the mean time, use it on every mech in every drop. It's simply too good not to.

I use it because it is broken, just not as broken as AMS and ECM. BTW, all three of those systems means other than SRMs, you don't worry about missiles. It's why I named my Raven 3L 'Crutches', because I use them the crutches.

[Sug]

Sky Hawk, on 28 July 2014 - 10:34 AM, said:

(I assume when you use Sniper Advanced Zoom, otherwise you were not a sniper ...)

So, to you (for CB) not have your own Clan Mech, you can do .. I can see that even a clan bike has at least one CERLL, and if someone grabs it pass by several tons for targeting computer, it can get you from anywhere nichst . meet Like the others said, remains only Crouch ... (I personally have geweckselt me of Erll sniper to LRM-Boat-in-cover, at least until the end of Autumn.)

And Thermal and Heat "see" not very far ... Except in a Sneesturm, I just use the normal view with Advanced Zoom. In all night cards you can actually see the vastness well with normal vision, only in the melee need night vision manschmal ...

And who and what you see .. In Canyon me a Gauss Sniper 2 times in head hit by more than 1,100 meters ... When dead, I had time to ask, How does he do ... He had only Advanced Zoom like me ..?

Well, in my little screen and LOW PC I see of 1000 m, with a maximum of Advanced Zoom an atlas than 1.8 cm Gross ...... But he said he could very clearly see my head window ... How? Well, in a large screen, with very good resolution you can really see very well all the details of ...

So Ducking, Clan Mech, different style of play and good PC do I need to snipe work today ... Unfortunately, the old times are past ... forever ...

Fixed...

[JigglyMoobs]

Sug, on 28 July 2014 - 11:23 AM, said:

Fixed...

Magnificent! Bravo!

[SVK Puskin]

Lorgarn, on 28 July 2014 - 08:10 AM, said:

I get sniped a real lot. Since the clan Lasers are in the game it is getting worse. Enemies are so incredably far away that the dont even render on termal vision and are at best 40 to 60 pixel high on normal vision, still they manage to precisely remove my center torso at that distance.

I cant not return fire. I simply cant! I have no weapon which can cover that distance, and I have utterly no idea how it can be possible in this game to shoot that precice on a target which can be barely seen at best.

I feel like being in a contest with other people in the same room, to build an actual, flying aeroplane, while I can only manage to fold a paper plane.

How can I defend against that?

Regards
Lorgarn

Build a sniper loadout, equip advanced zoom and return fire, it is simple!

[Training Instructor]

Massive monitors with tweaked brightness and gamma settings is the common trick.

What on a 17" monitor might appear to be a shadow in the distance, an HD projector with a 90" throw will reveal to be an easily shootable mech. That's an extreme example, but I'd be surprised to find that any of the well-recognized good shots in this game are playing on anything less than 24".

I had Lasik surgery in 2008 that gives me 20/15 vision and I played on a 17" laptop screen for the first 18 months I played this game. after moving up to a 24" monitor all of a sudden I became much better at long-range ballistics and erppcs.

[n r g]

Lorgarn, on 28 July 2014 - 08:10 AM, said:

I get sniped a real lot. Since the clan Lasers are in the game it is getting worse. Enemies are so incredably far away that the dont even render on termal vision and are at best 40 to 60 pixel high on normal vision, still they manage to precisely remove my center torso at that distance.

I cant not return fire. I simply cant! I have no weapon which can cover that distance, and I have utterly no idea how it can be possible in this game to shoot that precice on a target which can be barely seen at best.

I feel like being in a contest with other people in the same room, to build an actual, flying aeroplane, while I can only manage to fold a paper plane.

How can I defend against that?

Regards
Lorgarn

As a sniper, how can tell you how to defeat us, since you seem like a nice guy. You simply need two things:

1) speed
2) big firepower, preferably from something <400 that packs a punch

It is completed via one pathway:

1) closing the distance; meaning, you must find a way to move behind terrain to close the distance gap i.e. a Dragon slayer is shooting you at 800m with ppc/gauss or TW with lasers

thus, it is completed via your speed (you can't do it if you are slow) and you need that big , fire power that is heat efficient once you close the gap. Sure, it can be done with PPC/gauss or a similiar sniping loadout, but those loadouts tend to be hot, and you need to run in and close the distance and stay cool so you can continue shooting and putting pressure.

One of the fallacies of the sniping loadouts in this game tends to be heat.

There you go, thank you.

[Kjudoon]

Training Instructor, on 28 July 2014 - 12:11 PM, said:

Massive monitors with tweaked brightness and gamma settings is the common trick.

What on a 17" monitor might appear to be a shadow in the distance, an HD projector with a 90" throw will reveal to be an easily shootable mech. That's an extreme example, but I'd be surprised to find that any of the well-recognized good shots in this game are playing on anything less than 24".

I had Lasik surgery in 2008 that gives me 20/15 vision and I played on a 17" laptop screen for the first 18 months I played this game. after moving up to a 24" monitor all of a sudden I became much better at long-range ballistics and erppcs.

There's a real example of 'P2W' people complain about but is perfectly legitimate.

[JigglyMoobs]

Yelland, on 28 July 2014 - 10:38 AM, said:

Here is something else to consider.

While a sniper provides situational damage benefit to the team, they do not provide as much team benefit. I could argue that snipers in the current state of MWO are a detriment to PUG team play. Their own team, not the red.

How many times have you seen your team drop and then the remaining one or two mechs are at 90%, long range of engagement, with a couple of ERLL, ERPPC (running hot), or Gauss?

Adv zoom on, and in a panic when the 3-4 remaining reds come barreling down on them. I feel their gameplay experience lies in staying at range, so they depend heavily on team support for distraction. (perhaps a generalization, but I see it often spectating.)

In a closer engagement their tonnage spread over team may have given you the upper hand versus their ~500 damage in a defeat.

It's very situational. If it was a very tough premade vs premade match against the best people around, I would not take a full blown sniper build because:

A. There are many ways a fully organized team can counter a sniper.
B. There are not many organized strategies that have been developed around supporting truly long range snipers.

On the other hand, against slightly less demanding opposition or in PUGs, there are many ways to utilize a sniper to actually contribute to a team.

I play quite a bit as a sniper and have compiled a long list of videos. Below are a few that illustrates the different situations. If you take the time to watch these, keep in mind that in the first 3, I either:

A: made mistakes of some sort
B: utilized the psychological effect of sniping on inexperienced players.

In other words, I helped my team win but only because I bluffed the in experienced players on the other team into not doing certain things that would have made my efforts ineffective. In the first video, I basically just panicked them. In the second one, I bluffed the other team into not rushing over enmass and crush us. In the third one, I discouraged flanking attacks from the enemy team, but if they had not gotten scared and stopped, our team could have been in trouble. The point I want to emphasize to the OP is, in these situations, as long as you do not panic, you can defeat the sniper's intent.

In the second set of 4 videos however, I was using tactics that gave the team a real advantage in killing power or created real problems for the other team that it could not ignore. In these situations, you have to work as a team to overcome the sniper's tactics.

First set:

In this one I jumped on top of a hill and caused chaos and panic in half the enemy team. Didn't actually do that much for my team damage wise, but the psychological impact on inexperienced PUGs on the other team contributed to our victory. Here, had the enemy team simply remained calm and ignored me to focus on the rest of my team, my efforts would not have been very effective.



Here certain members of my team were, shall we say, very discrete in their gameplay? I was pretty much the only one fighting and holding back the other team in the last 5 min. Alas it was not enough Here, had the enemy team simply called my bluff and walked up to me enmass, we would have been crushed 5 min earlier.



In this one I played an over watch role for my team, securing their flanks and rear (to a limited degree) as they did their push. All in all not bad but had the other team really pushed of course, they would have gotten past me. Here, had the enemy cave rush not stalled, or had the flanking enemies decided to ignore my lasers and attack my team, they could have caused problems.



Second set. These last four videos show pretty good use of sniper builds in conjunction with a supportive and aggressive team. A team effort is needed to counter these tactics.

Here, I push right along with the team and take kill shots on weakened enemies to speed up the enemy collapse. Here the enemy team needed to have a tighter formation with better mutual fire support. Also, they needed to rotate their more damaged members to the rear.



In this one I found nice pieces of terrain to constantly harass the enemy team from the rear and flanks. This made the frontal attack by my team more effective. Here, the initial moments where I was facing half the enemy team on my own was very dangerous for them. Had my team pushed aggressively at that moment, they would have been rolled in 30 seconds. Later on, when I was chased off my perch by that solitary light, the enemy team had opportunities to engage isolated pockets of my team, but they never took it.



And in this one I used the limited visibility on River City to constantly hit people who were opposing my team's advance. This ensured that the guys fighting at the frontlines of the enemy team had no cover between my team pushing aggressively from the front and me hanging back and shooting them from a different angle. (But also notice that I'm still close enough to my team to run to them for protection or defend them against a flanking attack at least temporarily). In this video, the enemy team made a fundamental error by not engaging in locations where it can mass its firepower. They probably thought that they could use the buildings to hide and fire at my team, but my positioning took that option away from them.



This next one shows the benefit of protecting your snipers. I was being hunted by my friend Airu, who I think is one of the best light players in the game. Fortunately my team focused fired him effectively. This freed me up to take the fight against the larger mechs on the enemy team. Here you see the real value of a sniper - any time any enemy has a damaged component - it's gone. People on the other team end up dying much faster than expected, and the team collapses. In this last one, the enemy team was too strung out. Too many of them were, once again, isolated from mutual fire support. They also positioned themselves in locations where people can fire at them from multiple angles from multiple covers. They made it easy for me to snipe.

[LiGhtningFF13]

Kjudoon, on 28 July 2014 - 10:27 AM, said:

It's amazing that this is the same advice given for dealing with LRMs.

Yeah, how effective cover is!

[JigglyMoobs]

LiGhtningFF13, on 28 July 2014 - 12:44 PM, said:

Yeah, how effective cover is!

Cover = infinite armor. Most people have no trouble learning to take cover.

The trick is to recognize those times when you need to get out of cover and just take the damage.

[Autobot9000]

Use cover does not mean "duck and cover". It just means use cover. The rest depends entirely on your team. If it was a hypothetical 1v1 you vs the sniper then "advance while using cover" is the thing to do.

You gotta take the snipers serious, but you gotta know their weakpoints too. Going into mental defense, hull down is the route to losing the game. You always need to think about howto get rid of the enemy mechs, not howto hide

That said I can just say snipers usually suck vs a fast brawler, e.g. 2 Gauss Jager/Cat or Twin ERPPC/Gauss Direwolves have a terrible time coutnering someone circling them with 90+ kph. If their team is playing well tho, then youre obviously in trouble.

[Sug]

One of the paintball fields by me has a field called The Ruins. MWO could use a map like it. It's football field sized with like 50 small walls/piles of cinderblocks randomly placed all over it. Just enough cover for 1, maybe 2 people to crouch behind and be safe from one direction.

Everyone hated it.

If you stayed put too long you'd get flanked and surrounded. 20 minutes of constantly sprinting from pile to pile. By the end everyone is all mixed up. You end up in front of, next to, or behind someone on the other team without even knowing it.

But I swear to god it'll teach you to be aware of your surroundings and use cover.

[JigglyMoobs]

I was saying earlier that no one has developed sniper-centric premade tactics, but actually I forgot that there IS a group of such characters. If you ever run into a large premade in group queue all sporting [CSJ] tags, then you know what I'm talking about. These guys are using massed clan er LL and castle defense tactics to massacre unsuspecting teams. Ran into them the other night while I was dropping with JagerXII's twitch stream group:

http://www.twitch.tv...821?t=03h28m00s

In this case you cannot charge these guys. They will focus fire and kill you in seconds. What you have to do is use their own medicine against them, and force them to come to you in a place of your choosing that favors your builds. Worked out pretty well even with 2 of our players disconnecting and unable to reconnect for a while in the middle of the match. I think they were pretty frustrated.

Edited by JigglyMoobs, 28 July 2014 - 08:48 PM.

[LiGhtningFF13]

JigglyMoobs, on 28 July 2014 - 01:09 PM, said:

Cover = infinite armor. Most people have no trouble learning to take cover.

The trick is to recognize those times when you need to get out of cover and just take the damage.

Well, depend on the number of your opponents! I prefer to leave cover with some covering fire and assurance that they are busy with some other thing like a wing tactic of my team mates. So that the enemy is forced to turn his back!

[Training Instructor]

JigglyMoobs, on 28 July 2014 - 03:17 PM, said:

I was saying earlier that no one has developed sniper-centric premade tactics, but actually I forgot that there IS a group of such characters. If you ever run into a large premade in group queue all sporting [CSJ] tags, then you know what I'm talking about. These guys are using massed clan er LL and castle defense tactics to massacre unsuspecting teams. Ran into them the other night while I was dropping with JagerXII's twitch stream group:

http://www.twitch.tv...821?t=03h28m00s

In this case you cannot charge these guys. They will focus fire and kill you in seconds. What you have to do is use their own medicine against them, and force them to come to you in a place of your choosing that favors your builds. Worked out pretty well even with 2 of our players disconnecting and unable to reconnect for a while in the middle of the match. I think they were pretty frustrated.

Reminds me why i don't watch twitch streams. That match features camping, and then watching jager trying to reconnect.

Good strategy, by the way, just a poor choice of video.

Edited by Training Instructor, 28 July 2014 - 10:48 PM.

[Fiona Marshe]

One thing to remember is that the high end snipers are also using top end hardware.

Triple 42" monitors on max resolution. CPU/GPU that generates 120+ frames per second.

Unless you've got a couple of thousand to throw at your computer system, all you can do is not stand in the sniper alleys, keep moving and stay behind cover while you close.