Slow-Firing Sniper Rifles - Any Way to Make Them Not Suck?

Solution is rather simple. 1 fucking shot in the chamber, right? Pretty much the HEAVIEST weapons in the game, check. Terrible time to kill due to reload + one shot in the chamber, ready? :

Buff THE SHIT OUT OF THEM DAMN YOU, 1 fucking shot for christ sake and then we're stuck half an hour reloading!
Improve the dumb reload mechanic goddammit, if interrupts weren't bad enough, the average reload speed for these single shot guns is like 4 seconds or so.

Come on Bioware, look at the time to kill, look how unforgiving they are! give them good damage, great weakpoint multipliers, multipliers to armor or something! dammit the Widow is supposed to be an anti materiel rifle, and yet the Bersekers wipe their asses with it.
The only purpose of snipers in this game is shooting crippled turtles. Outlaws move at the speed of light, Kett do weird break-dance shit. The only ones that are somewhat viable to be fought using a SR are Remnant.

The only way in the eyes of this player is to balance them around attainable shot to kill thresholds. There are a lot of ways you can do this but I think the simple and least infringing on the rest of the game's balance is to look at each rifle on a case by case basis (even doing this I think the Isharay is still fucked barring some other, deeper game changes) to create acceptable values - 1 headshot kill, 2 body shot kill mook, 2 headshot kill vs shield due gate, so on and so forth.

The obvious problem here is that where do you allow these thresholds to happen, and on what classes with what passives? 10 ranks of weapons and 10 ranks of barrels on top of that just makes it all a mess. You can fiddle with health values if you want but that impacts every other aspect of balance.

Personally, I'd remove barrels from the game and make weapon damage not scale at all with rank, but compensate and increase other stats more, clip size, reload rate etc. Otherwise, as developers, you are in an impossible to control situation with so many variables floating around and as a player using a high damage, low rof/clip size sniper rifle you are always going to be wasting huge amounts of damage per shot.

Outstanding numbers aside, this why the Shadow (and to a lesser extent the Indra) are phenomenal sniper files because they allow you to use exactly what you need to kill your current target. The downside is they don't fill that sniper fantasy of high impact, one shot one kill rifles.

Remove Shield gates on enemies, or increase headshot multipliers of some Sniper Rifles from 1.4 or 2.0 or whatever it is currently to like 3.5-4.0 if not higher so that your head shots deal so much damage they go through the shield gate. I think its utter bullshit that its basically impossible to OHK a full health shielded target with a Widow/Isharay, as you need something like 2000 damage to Shield gate a Gold tier enemy in one hit. It pretty much makes the Widow and Isharay completely useless in most situations as all factions on Gold have a good deal of shielded targets.

Miss ME3 days were you could with no consumables cloak with a GI fire a mine and OHK almost anything on Gold with the Widow/Javelin/Claymore, like you hit so hard it didn't matter if your target had a shield or not or if you landed that dome piece, they were dead.

Edit: I over guessed the shit out of how high a damage threshold shieldgate on Gold have, said like 10000, its more like 2000. Looking back at this post I also realize giving something like the Widow/Isharay absurdly high weak spot multipliers would then also make them basically the best sniper rifles in the game if it allowed any class to just throw out a 3500-4000+ damage shot and not even be cloaked if they can line those shots up.

I think like someone else has mentioned, simply make certain weapons completely ignore shield gate is the way to go, either that or like I said flat out remove the shield gate, I mean it only last 100ms's in most cases it is doing next to nothing to stop incoming damage. It is literally there so you can't one shot everything that's not armored and a or a boss with the harder hitting weapons in the game, which again like I said makes them pretty useless in that regard and like many have pointed out we cant reload cancel any more.

Have the game play elevator music during reloads. Or hold music.

that's the issue, I don't get it why there are damage reduction for when you are not using scope on a SR. You only getting bonus damage when you hit weak points. And SR is not even consider OP weapon (Cough, I am looking at you Rozerad, how can Rozerad deal more damage than an assault rifle even at mid-range?), so why introduce damage reduction for punishing blind fire/hip fire? Gosh, we are not playing sniper elite here! I used to play with the indra using hip firing/blind firing in ME3. But now this gun is collecting dust

Tried to host games, wait for 15 minutes and no one showed up .....No one play this game in Asia

I think Bioware issue is just that they screw up developing MEA as the whole project. The issues they had during development basically meant they rushed this game out. So MP wasn't even tested properly before they release the game. Remembered they cancelled the Beta? I just hoped they will keep supporting MP as long as they could. It will be sad if they leave so many issues behind and left us to eat dust. This is their only redemption now to me as a fan

Barring changing the reload system entirely the single shot snipers NEED faster reloads. Even if they can one hit kill everything on gold with no passives they will still pale in comparison to weapons that don't have a massive downtime between kills.

One shotting phantoms with a x Jav is so satisfying. Phasic rounds made snipers viable and scary in me3 when snipers were having these issues. In ME:A, it's going to be don't use all the way which is kinda sad. 

Shit, it turns out I have done a poll! O.O

Steroid Outlaw suck balls. Erspare you the pain and use not the sniper rifle.