Payday 2's snipers have long suffered from lack luster bonuses for their massive drawbacks. They have incredible range and (some of them) have high damage, but their slow rates of fire, small magazines sizes, long reloads, and even downright bad damage in a few cases causes them to be outclassed significantly on difficulties like Death Wish. They struggle to take down large groups of cops and Bulldozers which leaves them as little more than special killers. Given the current state of the game where higher difficulties have comical numbers of cops, they simply can't compete with the likes of LMGs and certain shotguns.
To remedy this, Overkill added Graze, a skill that has a mediocre basic but is incredibly powerful when aced. Snipers went from being unable to deal with the swarm of SWAT to nuking entire hallways after headshotting a single tan cop. While this did technically address the issue, it failed to solve the fundamental problem with snipers: most of them aren't fun to use. Of the best snipers, many of them are nearly identical in terms of stats.
This mod aims to fix these issues with snipers and make them more fun without the need for a skill by doing the following:
- Almost every sniper has received faster fire rates to help them deal with large crowds of cops better
- Damage has been increased on many (especially semi-auto) snipers to make their downsides feel more worth it
- Ammo pickups and pools have been tweaked to make snipers feel more sustainable while still balanced around their damage output
- Magazine sizes have been changed to match their real-life counterparts to balance out the improved damage and fire rates
- Recoil has been rebalanced by reducing it across the board with the tradeoff that snipers (especially bolt actions) are now forced to engage with it
- Graze has been reworked. Both the basic and aced are now useful in their own right while eliminating the ability to nuke entire hallways off a single headshot
See the full change log included in the mod for more details.
Future plans:
- Balancing
- Light Sharpshooter skill tree rework
