Just like you answered yourself it's because you are sniping and are a pretty easy kill with your gear. Outnumbered situations the sniper is usually targeted because of the old triple snipe glitch and because there is a reason for them to be far back spamming snipe. Whenever I was in an outnumbered situation I would always kill the snipers and gankers first since they would be most likely to kill me and ruin my rotation.