je_saist

I'd honestly rather see the developers focus on exposing more chat management tools to channel moderators. Several of the large channels that have been "forced" to uproot, such as Triumph Watch or Victory Badges, would have been fine if moderators could have removed joined accounts that were no longer active.

Going to echo some of what Adeon is saying here. Once you get into the mid-20's, have stamina, and can slot SO recharges, most of the ranged damage sets that I've played to level 50 (Archery, Rad Blast, Dark Blast, Electric Blast) tend to develop natural attack chains that preclude Interrupt Intensive attacks. That being said, I have taken LRM Rocket on my Ice / PSI blaster as the Ice Blast set lacks a sniping power, and there always will be cases in the game where a snipe power is useful.

Corruptors, however, tend to be a in a tight spot on powers they have available. One of the things to consider is that corruptors are the primary buff / debuff archtype for the villain side. This creates a duality trap for the archtype. Some teams depend on corruptors to act like a defender and lay on their secondary power set. Other teams expect corruptors to act like a blaster and pour on the damage. Some teams want corruptors to be a bit of both.

The damage problem is fairly complicated by the sniping sets not really being... that good on the IO front. Some of them, like Calibrated Accuracy which is the only set that offers an IO +acc bonus from memory, slam one attribute hard into ED and leave other aspects critically weak. In the case of Calibrated Accuracy, you get tons of +acc, but almost no damage. Sting of the Manticore isn't that great on the IO set bonus either, although it does offer a 7.5% recharge bonus at pump 5... which is actually useful. Really though, you can get better buffs in the ranged damage set, as well as some better procs.

On Corruptors, the problem worsens. Case in point for me are the numbers between a Stalker and a Corruptor, both of which have Moonbeam. Stalker's can get it as a Patron Power.

At level 30, my corruptor has a base Moonbeam damage of 83.
At level 50, the base damage is 115.

At level 30, my stalker would have a base moonbeam damage of 92.
At level 50, my stalker has a base moonbeam damage of 127.

Let me repeat that. My STALKER... a class designed to fight IN MELEE DISTANCE... has a more powerful SNIPING ATTACK than an archtype designed to fight from a distance. And it's not just limited to the sniping attack. Dark Blast is in the same spot.

On my corruptor, dark blast does 32.26 damage at level 30
At level 50, it would do 41.71 base

At level 30, my stalker would have a base dark blast damage of 40.35
At level 50, that base damage would be 55.61.

In addition to a higher base damage, my stalker gets build up, and land critical damage from hide. So basically, I get double damage from hide, and I can trigger an 80% boost on top of that.

Now, Corruptors do get scourge, and theoretically, once an enemy goes under 50% health a sniping attack would do double damage. However, in my own personal experience, while I can pull off moonbeam in the middle of a fight, since I can floor most to-hit values, there's the ever so slight problem that I can count on both hands the number of times moonbeam has scourged in 20 some levels. That's it. Only 8 or 9 times have I moonbeamed an enemy under 50% health and gotten a scourge effect.

Okay, there are arguments to be made here that this is really a fault of the corruptors inherent, a fault of my timing, or a fault of something else, and that it's not really a problem with the sniping set. There's also the point to be made that as a corruptor, I can debuff my enemies... which my stalker... can't.

Anyways. Since most sniping powers have pitiful Damage Per Activation, they don't proc against scourge like I think they should, and I can understand why the snipe powers are generally the first to be thrown "under the bus" to make teaming partners happy.

Hopefully this will also explain to you (and those searching the forums) on why Snipe Attacks are the first to be tossed out of many ranged damage builds.

I'm for keeping the ski-slopes around outside of the Winter Event. The chatlet's a nice place to hang out.