What is a mystery to you is actually very simple. If you want a ticket to see nice-guy enkelin, all you have to do is show me that you aren't trying to waste my time. You made no effort in your reply to engage with the point I made, which pertains to PvB and certain boss fights. Obviously stealth and range have minimal or no effect on bases with 10k range and powerful radars (and for similar reasons against bosses such as Kidd).

It is true that I don't need to be rude to get my point across. However, I see no reason why I should waste a second of my day composing a polite and earnest reply to you if you don't have the courtesy to actually read my arguments and respond to them. Luckily, I don't hold a grudge so perhaps next time we meet we will have a nice and productive discussion. There are few things I enjoy more.

Sniper doesn't have to be the best at everything. So what if zerk and gunner does more dps in PvB? Bring more Zerks and Gunners then. The sniper DPS will still help out. And in squad content, the sniper will most likely be able to connect more bullets, due to the naturally longer range. (Try fighting Ares or Zeus as seer - it's hell of a lot of fun to stay behind and within range (and seer DPS is more than fine!), but I've usually had to lock a shmonkeys heals on the seer to keep it alive (in Zeus at least). Poseidon, just forget about it.) So range does help in squad situations. Stealth helps to solo, and this combination (dps, solo, stealth) is what's made sniper the easiest, cheapest and probably most popular solo class. With the way things are now, they're also regarded as close to a must-have in most squads too.

As for Kidd - again, just tank him. There are plenty of ways to make a zerker _extremly_ tanky these days, and if sniper analysis is reduced to a 3rd then bring 3 times as many snipers. Poke him with low dps weapons that don't break his regen until full analysis, or range-poke him like someone else suggested. Either that, or just full-on kill him, and be ready with quick reflexes on every char. He was initially a truely epic boss, until people figured out how to kill him in seconds. I don't think he was ever intended to be killed the way he is now by most squads. So a drastic change to how he's killed isn't a bad thing, if you ask me. Make him epic again!

The only trade-offs sniper has at the moment is not being as tanky as a zerker, and that it has to wait 10 minutes to do full dps. Even after 2-3 minutes, the prawn sniper will out-dps pretty much everyone else. And I'd say being a superb solo-class makes up for not being as tanky as zerks. If anything, it'd make sense (to me at least) to have the best solo-classes be the worst squad-classes. (Ideally, all classes should be able to both solo and contribute to squads, but this re-balance seems oriented to squad content and not solo abilities.) It's a trade-off that's common in many other MMORPGs, and nerfing sniper analysis will make it less OPd in squads and less OPd solo-wise. (I bet it'll still be invited to squads due to the range and energy-efficient DPS, and will still be able to solo due to range and stealth. Might just take more effort/investments to solo the same content, and less sustain-oriented auging for squads if the ROF from analysis is reduced.)

Reading through this whole thread again, I want to highlight some other points.

I like Exodus' (was it Ex, or someone else?) idea to move seer's crit hit chance from being stealth-based to being based on hitting from behind. With T20 augs, you have all the crit hit chance you need available to you from auging, but until reaver/AoS there are a lot less options (to get both crit hit chance, and damage). Either changing the seer prowess (etc.) augs to give more auging options, or giving seers +crit hit chance when striking from behind, would open up more options for DPSing. As a seer, you don't really need incentive to stay in stealth - the strategic value of being unseen is more than enough reason to be invisible. We don't need the +crit hit chance to encourage use to be stealthy.

To the numerous people who think zerks need more hostility - I never had any problems as zerk to hold aggro until prawn snipers came along, and then mainly not until people started to put reaver augs on them. You don't _have_ to put a reaver aug on your prawn sniper. You don't even _have_ to use a prawn on your sniper. If you use a ship that gives +hostility, and an aug that gives +hostility, then expect your tank to struggle with aggro. If your sniper generates so much hostility that no zerk can keep aggro, then you've designed your sniper poorly. I think that's a briliant trade-off, and it's a shame that many zerks still manage to hold aggro despite all this +hostility on the sniper. (As a side not, zerk aggro will be less of an issue if sniper analysis is reduced too, so even more reason to not give more hostility to the class.)

If nerfing snipers makes people experiment more with un-sustainable setups (Cerb aug for example) that requires an engineer to elec-feed, then even better! More different roles to play in a squad! (Just set up your elec-feeding engi to be able to do more than just elec-feed, so it's not so boring.)

Thank you for your feedback. I'm going to lock this thread, please take a look at this thread