Here's my personal suggestion that I've held back and tried not to be a part of the conversation because of all things going on right now, getting into paragraph long fights on this particular topic is NOT my priority.
The most hilarious thing is that this was said right at the beginning as a problem and no one suggested the most simple solution:
mofetagalactica wrote: ↑06 Nov 2019, 20:56
We all had those games where we had double sniper on the other team completely locking infantry offensive formation with pretty much 0 skill, we all also tried running into them as fast as possible to detect them and shot them, we all also had stupid situations where we had 3 of the models that had survived to the stupid super rate of fire of such snipers and couldn't deal with it at point blank range with the sniper just running away for uknown reasons maybe
super high hp pool or "armor"?
So my solution is to adjust their veterancy. Since people like to make suggestions without doing research (except for warhawks, if there's one thing I have to give him credit for is that), here's some interesting facts.
Sniper HP stands at 140 right now, which is already nearly 3 times the amount of regular infantry.
Sniper veterancy HP increases are the following:
Vet 3 = +5%
Vet 4 = +7%
Vet 5 = +7%
Sniper received accuracy modifier are the following:
Vet 1 = -5%
Vet 2 = -5%
Vet 3 = -6%
Vet 4 = -6%
Vet 5 = -6%
Before players knee jerk reaction and exclaim WTF WHY DO SNIPERS HAVE SO MUCH HEALTH THATS TOO MUCH MAKE IT 50 LIKE OTHER INFANTRY! No. Absolutely not because it's not like snipers are unkillable. Snipers has had and always had that health for a reason and snipers weren't ALWAYS a problem. I can go into a really long rant as to why snipers are a problem NOW and it has to do with garand changes but that would take forever. Instead of that, the question here is this:
Do people have problems killing the sniper at vet 0 through 2 or does it really just get terrible at vet 3 and forward when those HP modifiers start kicking in with stacking received acc modifiers? From what I've seen, players in the early game dont have issues with snipers at lower vets because they can properly send in units like jeeps or cheap infantry to kill. It becomes harder at higher vet because even when you can make a maneuver to get at the sniper and take shots, it's never enough before a reasonably skilled player (or even unskilled) can press the retreat button in time.
My proposal is to ONLY remove the HP and received accuracy veterancy buffs. Even then I fear would be too much but meh we'll see.
WARNING: Constructive suggestions stop here. I basically just critique every idea proposed.
I recently got bitched at hard for making "too drastic of changes" to bk mod even though the specific thing being complained about came directly from the community and I hard agreed with the person but I had to respond "that's what the community wanted" and his response was "yeah but devs get the final say so the responsibility falls on them" which he's right. I am so vehemently against so many of the suggestions here because they are NOT isolated as they claim to be. Continue to read if you want I got the constructive stuff done, the rest is not constructive:
About mark target, this would require micro similar to using the marksman ability the brits have. Will players have the speed and micro fast enough to be able to pull this off or will this essentially be more of a "pros with good micro" available ability (which would give a significant advantage to higher tier players). I know personally I DONT have that speed. I can barely get my tommy squads to counter snipe, I rely on other methods like offmap attacks to kill snipers. Additionally, it's not focused solely on sniper balance, it will impact ANYTHING with camo, including MG's, TD's, AT guns, etc that really rely on camo. THOSE will need to get balance because of this sniper topic. That is my biggest critique on this idea.
Panzer Elite counter snipe ability is a stressful idea because countersnipe can obviously be used on things other than snipers. While I agree that the PE SS squad is annoying and one way to tone it down is to make the sniper an micro required capability rather than position-based, it doesn't directly address the overall complaint about snipers.
Improving detection is a difficult idea because it also impacts not just snipers. You improve detection against snipers, you improve detection against all things including really core units like AT guns that heavily require that ambush ability now with the teardown time. Sending a detection unit in towards a hidden AT gun should be a viable tactic, no doubt, but not sending a detection unit towards the general direction of a defensive line. It takes away from the "skill" of defense if someone wants to lay an ambush. Not all defenses are skillful, true, but we don't want to take away from good positioning skill in any nerf, a drastically different type of nerf when we make changes that take away from good micro when it comes to strategy games. A strategy game should reward good strategy always. It's a really hard line to balance, even if it's not perfect I'd stay away from it in general. Unless there is across the board complaints about being unable to detect all kinds of units, I'd rather not adjust detection radius for the sake of one kind of unit.
Two man sniper squad idea, no I really don't like this idea because having any more than 1 person in the squad for camo is a freakin nightmare to deal with because of individual model AI. Not a good idea especially for a unit the heavily relies on the camo mechanic. CoH2 does it well because their unit AI is drastically simplified which people actively complain about which is really ironic. People in CoH1 complain about how units don't get to cover and stay in it when they need to. People in CoH2 complain about how infantry look "lifeless" and don't respond at all when they're getting shot at resulting in unforgiving squad wipes.
Overall, I flat out don't understand why these really really far out derivative ideas come out when the solution is super simple and clearly explained in the problem.