@PrimRoseHavoc I don't buy the "intention" argument anymore. Titan skating wasn't intended to do what it can, but the developers were like, "Okay, interesting." And if snipers were "intended" to be a certain way, then Bungo is apparently full of the dumbest and most incompetent developers in the world for taking until Year 3 to finally get snipers to where they were "intended". Alternatively, maybe weapons can have ranges and bounds for how they can function and skill allows someone to use that weapon in a wider range of its capacity. I'm not saying snipers shouldn't have been tuned at all--just that they were tuned far more heavily than they should have been and the stated philosophy for why was hypocritically applied. Also, re: risk/reward ratio of shotguns: Specifically, I had in mind that the matador/party crasher class has the highest range and impact, while other shotties have lower impact and range, but higher rate of fire. And, despite that, rate of fire doesn't matter when you can fire the matador in full auto (which severely reduces rate of fire even without holding down the trigger). All reward, no risk for the most used class of shotguns, while dropping the capacity of 1000ys class's ability down so it has lower AA and can't snipe any class out of super except golden gun and blade dance (shit on hunter party, I guess)--all while increasing flinch by double what it used to be. You could say the "new intention" of snipers is to force people to stay back with them and hide like cowards and hard scope more, which was accomplished--to a degree. I think the unintended consequence (at least I hope it was), was to drop sniper usage so heavily in favor of shotguns. They buffed side arms a bit, but they're usage has only gone up about 3%. Sniper and sidearm have been my go to since the beginning of Year 2 (when I started playing), and I can sympathize with the frustration that getting sniped by someone when you had the jump on them with a primary--especially, since my go to primary was MIDA, which now staggers less effectively, even at long range, than pulse rifles (which, allegedly, are supposed to be more effective at long range than pulse rifles, but that hasn't been quite accomplished). The flinch update might not be as problematic and damaging to sniper usage if two things were implemented: (1) flinch should be damage based, so that less damage gives less flinch and (2) range reduction on hand cannons and pulse rifles. For the latter, I'm thinking, that both need to actually function as the mid-range weapons like Bungo stated they should be previously. Problem is, I think they imagine "long range" to be limited to about three maps (First Light on the moon and the other two that are same size on Mars and Earth), so "mid-range" becomes effective for any distance on just about any other map that's in the real rotation for most crucible playlists. Side Note: I haven't given up on snipers. I've been running No Land pretty consistently on both my accounts in trials every weekend since the update dropped and switching between sidearm and shotty for my special. But I do believe Bungo is running the risk of severely damaging variety in the game right now with all of their moves since the RoI drop, and they need to grow a pair and admit they acted too heavily handed. Unflinching perk needs to actually do something (since they added a shit ton to flinch, while simultaneously reducing the effectiveness of unflinching), flinch should probably be reduced by about 5-10% (still puts it higher than it was before update), flinch should be based on damage, and then they need to do something about primaries and shotties so that primary weapons actually become ... primary, and there's the same "intended" variety amongst shotgun usage so that Matador doesn't consistently make up 11-15% of all special weapon kills with the next specific special weapon accounting for less than 5%.

When the time to close is faster than my time to kill at radar range there's not much I can do. Not to mention there's not much space to give anybody on most maps.

Very good arguments. Where were you during my flinch thread before the tuning. [spoiler]even though we kinda won [/spoiler]

The problem with that is the maps are all small, what map has lanes long enough to snipe and not be in primary range?