Snipe is... Well, look for your self.

Wuerstal

Most of you likely already know how broken snipe in PvP is but yesterdays encounter with a sniper was the most outlandish thing that happend to me in PvP. Here is a short video of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwrSNsSiFV8

As you can see, my character just stops dead in her tracks as soon as the enemy fired that snipe. It took a full 2 seconds until the first arrow hit. In these 2 seconds I couldn't do anything. No break free (even when the game claims otherwise), no skills, no dodge. Nothing. Only after the first (and second arrow at the same time) hit I was able to break free. Didn't get me anywhere as two other snipes where already hitting me before breaking free was finished.
I stood there longer "stunned" by the sneak-attack than it took 4! snipes to hit me. Considering that the skill has a cast time of 1 second that should just be impossible.
If you look closely you see the dmg-numbers popping up next to my character and there are always 2 snipes hitting at the same time. Confirmed by the death recap: there where no light attacks or anything else. Only snipe. 2 per visual representation of the arrow.

Just wanted to bring this to attention as it really boogles me that something like this is possible and there is nothing beeing done about for ever now.

To be clear: I don't want to shame any snipers with this. It's not their fault the game is broken.

EDIT: I know that this is nothing new. I know that it's probably a desync issue. But ZOS never said anything addressing this topic. So letting it die because: "this is nothing new" is not the way to go.

Qbiken

This happens to me and many others on a daily basis when PvP-ing, and yet people defend this broken skill.

Edit: People like to blame lag for what happened in the video, but it's quite obvious that no such thing is present.

UrbanMonk

Wuerstal wrote: »

Most of you likely already know how broken snipe is and the game is broken.

There is your answer.

olsborg

A good ol' desync, happens everyday, several times a day, afaik there has been no word from ZOS regarding this.

Berchelous

I thought like this before. However, i realized that snipe is not the problem. Problem is desync that comes with some skills and snipe is one of them. Sometimes it's dizzying swing or sorcerer's endless fury. Zos should find a way to fix that desync problem.

Desync example: A player uses snipe twice in 5 seconds and two skill hit at the same time at the fifth second. Thus, you feel that you get one shot by snipe.

Onefrkncrzypope

Berchelous wrote: »

I thought like this before. However, i realized that snipe is not the problem. Problem is desync that comes with some skills and snipe is one of them. Sometimes it's dizzying swing or sorcerer's endless fury. Zos should find a way to fix that desync problem.

Desync example: A player uses snipe twice in 5 seconds and two skill hit at the same time at the fifth second. Thus, you feel that you get one shot by snipe.

Desyncs are more like poison sounds oh look both my resources disappeared I must be dead from snipe. Finish a game of solitaire, you lose the health.

Recap 3 Snipes 2 PI and a diseased weapon. None of that was seen.

Toc de Malsvi

Wuerstal wrote: »

Most of you likely already know how broken snipe in PvP is but yesterdays encounter with a sniper was the most outlandish thing that happend to me in PvP. Here is a short video of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwrSNsSiFV8

As you can see, my character just stops dead in her tracks as soon as the enemy fired that snipe. It took a full 2 seconds until the first arrow hit. In these 2 seconds I couldn't do anything. No break free (even when the game claims otherwise), no skills, no dodge. Nothing. Only after the first (and second arrow at the same time) hit I was able to break free. Didn't get me anywhere as two other snipes where already hitting me before breaking free was finished.
I stood there longer "stunned" by the sneak-attack than it took 4! snipes to hit me. Considering that the skill has a cast time of 1 second that should just be impossible.
If you look closely you see the dmg-numbers popping up next to my character and there are always 2 snipes hitting at the same time. Confirmed by the death recap: there where no light attacks or anything else. Only snipe. 2 per visual representation of the arrow.

Just wanted to bring this to attention as it really boogles me that something like this is possible and there is nothing beeing done about for ever now.

To be clear: I don't want to shame any snipers with this. It's not their fault the game is broken.

EDIT: I know that this is nothing new. I know that it's probably a desync issue. But ZOS never said anything addressing this topic. So letting it die because: "this is nothing new" is not the way to go.

Not a typical desync, your resource bars didn’t drop and you didn’t run around before instantly dropping. Although you don’t appear to take damage immediately upon stun.

Which would obviously point towards lag. Your character is stunned but no damage has appeared to take place. You are unable to respond then the damage all comes in, in rapid succession and you die. That’s stereotypical lag.

It can easily be demonstrated that Snipe does not cause your character to be unable to respond on its own. That is lag, by the time your client caught up with the server you were dead.

Snipe is So obvious an offender here because you died unexpectedly and due to lag had no ability to respond. What makes Snipe so blatant an offender in general is that it is most often used in these type of scenarios where players are relatively alone, further it has a long range, delayed damage, and can be cast from stealth.

I played on PC for the first year of ESO, then I spent 4 years playing on Xbox. I have seen this sort of death thousands of times and snipe isn’t the only offender. I saw this all the time in BGs where a couple players would run at me then stun me, there would be a delay while I was unable to break free, then I would melt. It’s lag.

Most of the time if there are not active players in combat near you, you do not know whether you are lagging or not. Even trying to monitor latency has delays that do not accurately display lag immediately.

Many players, myself included have actively campaigned to change Snipe fundamentally because of these associated issues. Snipe has been repeatedly nerfed because of these issues, it goes up and down in popular usage based on nerfs and set balance.

JB_den

olsborg wrote: »

A good ol' desync, happens everyday, several times a day, afaik there has been no word from ZOS regarding this.

Is maybe the person using snipe spamming it and then it gets stacked up on the server, for lag reasons or something, and then it all goes though at one time, in one single GCD?

Wuerstal

Toc de Malsvi wrote: »

Not a typical desync, your resource bars didn’t drop and you didn’t run around before instantly dropping. Although you don’t appear to take damage immediately upon stun.

Which would obviously point towards lag. Your character is stunned but no damage has appeared to take place. You are unable to respond then the damage all comes in, in rapid succession and you die. That’s stereotypical lag.

It can easily be demonstrated that Snipe does not cause your character to be unable to respond on its own. That is lag, by the time your client caught up with the server you were dead.

Snipe is So obvious an offender here because you died unexpectedly and due to lag had no ability to respond. What makes Snipe so blatant an offender in general is that it is most often used in these type of scenarios where players are relatively alone, further it has a long range, delayed damage, and can be cast from stealth.

I played on PC for the first year of ESO, then I spent 4 years playing on Xbox. I have seen this sort of death thousands of times and snipe isn’t the only offender. I saw this all the time in BGs where a couple players would run at me then stun me, there would be a delay while I was unable to break free, then I would melt. It’s lag.

Most of the time if there are not active players in combat near you, you do not know whether you are lagging or not. Even trying to monitor latency has delays that do not accurately display lag immediately.

Many players, myself included have actively campaigned to change Snipe fundamentally because of these associated issues. Snipe has been repeatedly nerfed because of these issues, it goes up and down in popular usage based on nerfs and set balance.

While I see your point of it not beeing desync, I cant see it beeing plain lag.

I did some testing with a friend and what happens in the video can actually be reproduced pretty easy. Just let a friend go in a straight line while you sneak behind them. Spam snipe. done. They will stop dead in their tracks and only get properly stunned when the arrow hits. And most of the times tested the individual snipes will hit way faster than expected on the victims side.. so.. either there is constant brutal lag of multiple seconds (while no other lag is noticable) or there is something bigger broken.

EDIT: Made reconstruction results more clear.

Deathlord92

This happens to me all to often especially in this imperial city event 😭

Luke_Flamesword

Snipe is definitely need some cooldown

Stigant

Exactly this happened to me several times in IC... No lag whatsoever, no fights going on, my character stops unresponsive to any input from my y side and after about 2 to 3 seconds drops dead. Every time my death recap consists of two or three snipes...

Ezorus

Same happens with Leap, dead before they land on you.. needs better servers

Wuerstal

Ezorus wrote: »

Same happens with Leap, dead before they land on you.. needs better servers

See thats the thing. I don't think its the servers. the fact you drop dead in your tracks means that the server already acknowledged the dmg on you and confirmed it to your client. The dmg only goes off after the animation hits. Executioner in fact also suffers from this. I think its rather an issue with when animations hit and when the hit actually is performed.

novemberhhh

just use these aoes to deal with the sneaky snipers

o wait theyre all still on cooldown

RandomKodiak

I don't PvP very often and I agree snipe in PvP is broken. That being said as someone who has PvE bow/bow characters the calls for snipe to be removed or cut in half or given a cooldown are BS. There is no other ability bow/bow characters can use to even remotely keep up damage wise with the other weapon builds. So unless you have a great I dea for an actual usable spammable for bows please stop. I am all for getting rid of snipe as soon as there is a replacement for PvE damage but until then quit trying to kill an entire weapon line. And for the trolls no crushing weapon, bird spam, poop fist and the new sorc frag do not even come close to the damage in PvE so going there will just prove you wrong.

E-Zekiel

I don't play any sniper types, but as someone who's been hit by it and other things, I have to say this isn't really exclusive to snipe in my experience. Snipe is one (of a few) that capitalize most on this.

There are some world bosses that have the desynch issue, too, btw. I was doing a WB farm a few weeks back and kept randomly getting "oneshot" from full by abilities that hit for half my health.

I do think measures can be taken to balance sniping somewhat though. Maybe give it a cue like Ice Comet has. But regardless, what you're seeing here is desynching. The people saying it's not a desynch issue have probably not experienced a desynch outside PVP - this is exactly what it looks like.

Hotdog_23

I get snipe, befoul weapon followed by Silver Shards, light attack. Dead instantly. Sometimes followed by another snipe if needed to finish me off depending on the snipers crit chance. No way to defend against it. Just walking or riding and dead.

Guess I could build tanky and survive the onslaught of the first wave of timed attacks at once but even if I did the snipes would keep coming and kill me. Over 20k damage at once. Snipe for 12k, befoul 2k, silver shard 6k and light attack for 3-5k go over 20k damage at one time. Sometimes the 2nd snipe is not even needed.

Be safe and have fun

Mayrael

It's not just Snipe. I can remember a fight with DK, when I was pressuring him all the time he was hiding behind rocks and trees, then when he recovered he tried to push me with his combo with ult, but again he was forced to defend him self and suddenly bam again Take Flight, from almost full (27k hp) to 0 in a blink of an eye. WTF, I check improved death recap, according to it he was dealing damage to me for 5s with dizzy, LA weaving and I haven't reacted to it at all and I'm suddenly dead. Then I check shadow play footage and I can clearly see how my hp goes down in a blink of an eye... Awesome.

Morwaenna

“It - just - works!”

Mortiis13

Atm nothing seems to work well again. I have huge delaysv(up to 1 sec = dead) in weapon swap, breakfree that consumed stamina but did nothing, positioning desyncs/rubber banding opponents.

Now this fantastic timed and forced CD experiments
(didn't we have an pts for that? Why I am, as a paying costumer, being forced to be an beta tester. If I want to pay to be a beta tester [that's a joke by itself] I would join one of the thousand early access games)

I'm glad I play sorc/nightblade/necromancer and can adjust my builds to single target only. Can't imagine how bad it must be as a templar or magward/cro.

Oh and BTW bow gank is better than ever before as no one can catch u anymore /is unable to counter heal anything

Grianasteri

Snipe is... AWESOME

itscompton

Mayrael wrote: »

It's not just Snipe. I can remember a fight with DK, when I was pressuring him all the time he was hiding behind rocks and trees, then when he recovered he tried to push me with his combo with ult, but again he was forced to defend him self and suddenly bam again Take Flight, from almost full (27k hp) to 0 in a blink of an eye. WTF, I check improved death recap, according to it he was dealing damage to me for 5s with dizzy, LA weaving and I haven't reacted to it at all and I'm suddenly dead. Then I check shadow play footage and I can clearly see how my hp goes down in a blink of an eye... Awesome.

I can confirm stam toons, especially DK and Stamsorc, are running rampant on PS4 using Dizzy to dysnch the client/server; applying all the damage to me from multiple attacks on the server side before it even tells my PS4 to start showing the first attack on my end. I wonder if instructions for doing it intentionally are posted to Reddit or Discord somewhere because the sheer amount of people taking advantage of it. This is something that can be done at will and on a consistent basis, breaking game mechanics for easy kills. Dare I say it borders on being an exploit?

FriedEggSandwich

I think the stopping dead in your tracks is a mechanism zos introduced several years back to stop a target from being able to move out of range of a skill after the skill has been launched. So say a skill has a range of 28m, and the target is at 27 or 28m away to allow you to fire your skill at them. Well it used to be possible to move to 29m away after the projectile had been launched at you, whereby the projectile would vanish but the caster would still get charged the resource cost. The same used to be true of gap closers. So zos added a "snare" to keep you in range until the projectile or gap closer reached you. It's clunky af. It should have a cooldown at least to stop you from being stun-locked by multiple projectiles being in the air travelling towards you.
Edit: I might be wrong though, it might be something totally different.

Wuerstal

FriedEggSandwich wrote: »

I think the stopping dead in your tracks is a mechanism zos introduced several years back to stop a target from being able to move out of range of a skill after the skill has been launched. So say a skill has a range of 28m, and the target is at 27 or 28m away to allow you to fire your skill at them. Well it used to be possible to move to 29m away after the projectile had been launched at you, whereby the projectile would vanish but the caster would still get charged the resource cost. The same used to be true of gap closers. So zos added a "snare" to keep you in range until the projectile or gap closer reached you. It's clunky af. It should have a cooldown at least to stop you from being stun-locked by multiple projectiles being in the air travelling towards you.
Edit: I might be wrong though, it might be something totally different.

Na I think the reasoning you gave is absolutely valid as it can be observed with leap, gapclosers, and other stuff as well that would suffer from that problem. But keeping me stunned for 2 seconds before I get stunned?! Thats not how this should work...

cheesefome

It isnt just snipe. Any bow builds in this game are busted. Im going on 3 months into this game but within my first session of pvp realized how overpowered bow is. I feel they really should consider bringing down the nerf hammer bow skill tree. Look at the bow ulty... Does like 20k+ dmg in one skill and the fire rate is fast... How this skill got through the testinng phase is beyond me.

RandomKodiak

cheesefome wrote: »

It isnt just snipe. Any bow builds in this game are busted. Im going on 3 months into this game but within my first session of pvp realized how overpowered bow is. I feel they really should consider bringing down the nerf hammer bow skill tree. Look at the bow ulty... Does like 20k+ dmg in one skill and the fire rate is fast... How this skill got through the testinng phase is beyond me.

Right let's nerf an entire weapon line because you don't like it in PvP. Nevermind it's behind every other weapon build and magic build in PvE but let's ignore that because ZoS can't get PvP right.

Soris

You either quit early or stay and realise you slowly became one of those pesky snipers. Lol. This bug is in game since the very early release in 2014. They never fix it and i dont think it will ever be fixed. It is like hard coded in game.

So... Yeah.. Good luck.

Gilvoth

it is not just snipe.
this happens to all of us from ALL of the skills in eso, it is not just snipe.

Mayrael

Gilvoth wrote: »

it is not just snipe.
this happens to all of us from ALL of the skills in eso, it is not just snipe.

TBF I've never met any magicka toon desyncing my hp, its always goes with snipe or dizzy, but maybe its just a coincidence...

Edit for wrong quote.

itscompton

Gilvoth wrote: »

it is not just snipe.
this happens to all of us from ALL of the skills in eso, it is not just snipe.

No, it does not happen with all skills in the game.

But yes, SOME other skills such as dizzy can also dysnch the client/server.

The big difference being that no other skill, including dizzy, gets regularly used for the purpose of dysnching the server and killing someone before they even get the tell they're being sniped, while they're already engaged in a fight with someone else!