Private

Mildly Menacing Medic
I have been playing VSH for a while now on multiple different servers and have slowly been liking to play the actual boss less and less. I am most of the time found on VSH NY, but have hopped around on EU and US from time to time as well, so hopefully this has some merit. I think that Sniper needs a rework in how he is played because it's come to point that if there is a decent sniper on the opposite team I don't want to become the boss. I HAVE A LIST.

1. Insane Knockback - it's ridiculous that sniper does 150 dmg on a body-shot that should normally do 50 dmg. It takes quick timing and precision to be able to pull off a quick head-shot like like, so why lower the skill ceiling by just clicking on the boss. On top of that if you use you very needed tool of the "Super Jump" or "Wall Climb", you get completely snuffed out by just one shot and need to start from square one, just because a sniper looked up and shot at you.
2. Knockback (conti.) - why does the knockback completely stop you midair and I've had it that where I have skyboxed because a sniper was shooting me consistently. Sniper makes himself a very valuable keep pick where if you pick off all the sniper, you have a chance of winning. Where you won't get knocked on the other side of the map trying to kill a medic or a heavy that you've just hit twice.
3. S H E I L D S - why is this even a thing? Sniper himself is already very difficult to kill and with the semi-recent addition of the shield I know need to work twice as hard to kill the sniper. Unless you put your boots in his face, you need to catch the sniper two times and get lucky twice. Even if you hit an unaware sniper, he might have enough reaction time or knockback from hale himself to run away. Ban shield
4. Team Support - The boss now needs to get all this information when chasing a sniper and try not to die to the whole team as well. While a sniper could be wall climbing away, most hales just sit there waiting for their super jump to come back, only to be snuffed out again. If a well placed pipes, rocket, crossbow, etc. is shot at it hale, it makes it that much more difficult. Sometimes the knockback from the team is enough to send hale away to the other side of the map, making him redo the whole process all over again.
5. Wall Climb - i'm not going to deny that this is a very useful tool for sniper, but I believe that it's a little overpowered. With good enough strafing you can fly around the whole map in just a few seconds and try to catch the sniper. Even if the sniper is just hitting a wall trying to reach the skybox and hale wants to kill that sniper, all he can do is watch while the rest of the team punishes hale for even considering that option. It's a huge time waster and discourages hale's from even chasing a sniper because it takes away so little of the sniper resources. While hale needs to wait either 5-10 seconds for another super jump or 45 for another teleport (but thats a different problem in itself)

Possible Re-balances/Fixes:
-Revert Sniper Rifle to VSH 1.0 - just because your rifle isn't shiny doesn't give you the excuse to do 150 dmg on with the click of a button. It should be 50 dmg, the way sniper was intended. It just lowers the skill ceiling and makes sniper a very easy point and click class, sitting back while the rest of the team needs to try so hard. All sniper needs to do is hit 3 fully charged shots and most of the time is top scoring at that point. Hopefully doing less damage would also decrease the knockback that hale receives while in the air. It be punished for using one of most reliable tools, is just frustrating and unable to play.
- Just Ban Shields pls - No one complained in pre-VSH 1.0 that sniper didn't have a shield. Everyone put on the cozy camper and that was the go to sniper secondary and I still think it should be. Makes no sense for a boss to chase around a sniper for 3 minutes just to do it. again, because he put on the razorback. There could be other uses for it, like a projectile (cleaver = sapper)
- Wall Climb Nerf - I think Wall Climb is a much needed nerf, even though its not as severe as the other points this still should be fixed. Where the wall climb should take away more health and give you less distance from using it. It even makes it more difficult that when a skilled medic shoots the sniper when he pulls his gun out midair, and he has all his health back to keep on climbing. It's possible for a sniper to just wall climb and theoretically never get killed (without rage of course), if the sniper is aware enough and good enough at strafing.
- Class limits - Why was this removed? Like I remember having 4 scouts and 4 engis as the limit, so why can't that be the case for sniper. It also shouldn't be the map makers job to fix a map, just because the sniper player found a busted spot and it makes it so that it is unreachable for hale. This is hopeful, but maybe bring class limits back

If you have the time one of my friends put up a video on youtube show-casing how I play the boss and he is sniper, for how easy it to just annihilate the boss with little to no effort.
youtube.com/watch?v=qmHkSbVSRmc&feature=youtu.be

Lastly, I just want to be able to play the boss without utter defeat every single time. I've been playing this gamemode for about 8 years at this point and I would always look forward to playing the boss. Nowadays if you join a server, half the server has !noboss on, everyone has their reasons, but since the boss had been so severely nerfed, it makes it a losing battle. Hopefully you take my points into consideration and maybe add some improvements as well. I welcome all feedback and by no means I'm saying that mine is perfect.

TL;DR
Sniper op, reduce knockback, ban shield, smaller wall climb+less hp from it
 
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Private

Mildly Menacing Medic
ALSO: HUGE props to Alien for giving the video out to me and helping me put together some ideas on how to write this essay rant.
 

BigChapAlien

Mildly Menacing Medic
Contributor
+1

A lot of these were true when I posted the thread about limiting to Sniper - who is limited to 4 now. I've discussed with some other VSH regulars and one notable one has said that he feels that Sniper's limit should be reduced further to just 1. If Devs aren't willing to nerf any of his tools listed here, then I'd agree. Sniper in VSH's current build is too important to ignore and 2 decent/good Snipers makes life hell for Hale. There was one point where I was playing with Dexter and he and I were pingponging Hale back and forth with Sydney Sleeper body shots. This isn't fair at all.

Military specific, but that water tower is god awful for Trolldier to deal with when Sniper kites around it. The shield exacerbates this problem.

The shields for Sniper in general were really unneeded. I don't know who thought that would be a good idea. Demoman having a shield is fine since he gives up sticky jumping and MUST use the Grenade Launcher as his safest form of damage - a weapon which is hard to aim and very rewarding on hit. Sniper is way less difficult to just no-scope with the whole time, but does half as much as Demoman does, without having to worry about 'effective range' while also still getting a shield to force Hale to hit him twice. You guys should really playtest some of these ideas with VSH veterans who can really find out how to break a system.
 
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mub

Positively Inhumane Poster
Contributor
https://www.skial.com/threads/vsh-uncapped-sniper-rework-ideas.86773/

Bottiger said he'd remove the sniper limit once knockback is removed from sniper rifles.
Therefore, I personally think the best way to go about rebalancing him would be to do this first, since the true power of this class as it functions in VSH would be a lot more apparent if there was no class cap.
From there we could further tweak/nerf him.

+1 on only awarding headshot damage on headshot, removing knockback, and increasing the health taken on climbing.
0 for removing shield; using Razorback means the sniper is forced to find more health in a way other than Cozy Camper, making the fight far more predictable/making the sniper easier to pin down.
Also, if the rest of these reworks go through, specifically the wall climb nerf, the Razorback gets indirectly nerfed.
 
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Opb

Sufficiently Lethal Scout
Contributor
Mapper
For me as a semi sniper main, the razorback means i have to be more self conscious of where health packs are, for example on vsh_toys_b3, there is only 1 health pack in the first area which means i have to keep a close eye and stick near the health in case i need to escape. Ammo packs are also a key thing to look out for. The cosy camper with the non crit smg can be more annoying than a sniper rifle. With crit's is worse. Especially when you are the last person alive which means every weapon gets crit's, in any case, what is stopping me from using an smg as my secondary to deal knockback? It has crits. The razorback means i have to depend on either my Melee or Primary to deal damage, giving snipers another secondary weapon (Like a throwable) is pointless since the sniper will use it to their advantage to keep the hale at bay while maintaining a high dmg output. The throw-able kunai that spy has to replace his sapper does deal knockback including the bleeding effect which might make the hale more likely to mess up their jump. The sniper's wall climb ability, I've found, to be key in actually being useful in certain maps since a sniper cant escape or outrun a hale and has to depend on his team to defend him (Which can be unlikely). The wallclimb allows the sniper to escape from hales and it allows the sniper to be more independent from his team. It can be a slight issue to deal with a sniper wallclimbing everywhere but eventually they need to grab health (if they aren't using the cosy camper). Which means that they'll be much easier targets once their health drops low enough and they mess up.

In terms of the knockback reduction, that is perfectly fine for me. Ive seen and experienced sniper knockback to know that its really strong. Reducing it is a good idea. However, reducing the damage output in my opinion makes the sniper useless, since from what i've seen i deal less damage. I'm aware that it was different in 1.55 and i welcomed the increased dmg when the move to v2 completed. Therefore, I am presenting the idea that snipers have a dmg output dependent on the amount of health a hale has (similar to the market gardeners mechanics in vsh). This would mean that snipers can be more beneficial to a team as the health count increases from the number of players on red. So it would increase from a base of 100 dmg To 150 (Non charged) depending on the playercount. For me, i'd have it by around 15-20 players is when a sniper rifle should deal a max of 150 dmg as a non charged shot. Basically as it was before the dmg reduction

Current dmg output from what ive tested:

Stock Rifle: 113 (Non charged), 338 (Fully Charged)
Shooting Star/ Machina: 113(Non Charged), 388 (Fully Charged).
 
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Opb

Sufficiently Lethal Scout
Contributor
Mapper
Forgot to notice that the smg was removed from the cosy camper in VSH 2 since i havent used it in so long.
 

True Darkian

Wicked Nasty Engineer
Contributor
In terms of the knockback reduction, that is perfectly fine for me. Ive seen and experienced sniper knockback to know that its really strong. Reducing it is a good idea. However, reducing the damage output in my opinion makes the sniper useless, since from what i've seen i deal less damage. I'm aware that it was different in 1.55 and i welcomed the increased dmg when the move to v2 completed. Therefore, I am presenting the idea that snipers have a dmg output dependent on the amount of health a hale has (similar to the market gardeners mechanics in vsh). This would mean that snipers can be more beneficial to a team as the health count increases from the number of players on red. So it would increase from a base of 100 dmg To 150 (Non charged) depending on the playercount. For me, i'd have it by around 15-20 players is when a sniper rifle should deal a max of 150 dmg as a non charged shot. Basically as it was before the dmg reduction
Agreed on this.