Georg Zoeller Teaches you how to Fight Snipers

Lisa Clark forum post, Greg Zoeller

Are you wondering how to fight snipers in SWTOR PvP? Greg Zoeller, Principal Lead Combat Designer, has some solid advice in the official SWTOR forums.

Zoeller explains:
It’s much worse than you think.

No, a Sniper in cover cannot be charged with Force Leap. Yes, your warrior will have to move into melee range to engage the Sniper (or use ranged abilities like saber throw).

Marksman specced snipers specifically are a very defensive class.

He talks about how you will see them operate in combat, where you will encounter them on the battlefield and what you need to know in order to beat them. He talks about the tools they get (root/Leg Shot, ambush, etc) and how you want to approach them in order to be successful. For example, Zoeller says you don’t want to just charge them head on.
So the sniper sounds pretty awesome which has players asking how it is balanced. To this, he explains:

How is it balanced? Carefully… We force you to be smart about moving into the area protected by these guys. If you’re not smart about it and think you can charge into the fray, that’s the wrong class to try that on. Their weakness is the fact that their most powerful abilities require them to be entirely static, that they have little ability to kite or establish range against a close range attacker.

You want to sneak up on them, distract them or eject them from cover (there’s a very limited number of abilities that can do that), utilize environmental features to avoid line of sight, hit them with long range DOTs and wear them down, or gang up on them. If you manage to catch them close range without having lost too much of your health, they are in a lot of trouble and without Stealth generator or any kind of active escape ability, they are likely dead.

Lisa Clark

Lisa has been an avid gamer since she was old enough to hold her first controller and a game writer for more than a decade. A child of the Nintendo generation, she believes they just don’t make games like they used to but sometimes, they make them even better! While consoles will always be her first love, Lisa spends most of her gaming time on the PC these days- on MMOs and first-person shooters in particular.