Sniper Traits

[Rachelle Kun]

Rightoff the bat, I just want to say that I am no badass Dota player. I am mediocre at best. I only recently reached level 34, after about 4 months of playing Dota 2, and I have a win rate of 40.06%. So this is my humble build for Sniper. I would love to hear your thoughts on it.

Now I know my Average Kills does not seem that good, but since I have started using this build, it has started creeping up. My Average Kills for the past 10 games have been 9.3, with the highest being 25 kills and lowest being 2 kills.

Power Treads are vital for the extra damage and attack speed it gives Sniper. This will stack well with later items. Shadow Blade because Sniper is a bit squishy and sometimes need to escape quickly. Even if they have Dust or Sentry Wards, Shadow Blade can still give Sniper a temporary boost in movement speed.

I first go for Mask of Madness simply because it is cheaper. This is nevertheless the most vital item of this build. When activated, Mask of Madness gives you a temporary attack speed boost of 110 plus a movement speed bonus of 17%. On top of that it also gives you permanent lifesteal of 15%. The amount of havoc Sniper can wreak in a team fight, and even on his own against multiple squishier heroes, with a Mask of Madness, is insane.

As I have made abundantly clear, Mask of Madness is central to this build. Now you can do A LOT of damage with it, but it does have its cons. The first one would be that, when activated, it reduces your armour by 5 as well as silences you for 8 seconds. That would mean you cannot use your ult for those 8 seconds, which means an enemy or two might get away at times.

Also, with Power Treads, Mjollnir and Moon Shard, you are going to have ridiculous attack speed when you activate your Mask of Madness. If an enemy then activates their Blade Mail, you might be dead before you even notice because Sniper is just going fire off his gun that quickly.

Agreed. Definitely go wraith band then treads then straight to maelstrom (maelstrom early is key to farming alot faster). If you are finding yourself needing to pick up shadow blade it means sniper probably is a bad pick for the game. Best thing to do would be to ask your supports to buy a glimmer for you.

Ah ok. You will get there!

Your guide has a few weaknesses, but in my opinion it is best in the beginning of your dota career to just try different builds and heroes out till you become really familiar with every aspect of the game.

I personally don't like mask of madness to begin with. Upgrading shadowblade to silver edge is an option to consider - it will help you break tanky opponents. Moonshard is really an Ultralategame Item, but I see someone else already mentioned it. But don't worry too much about builds quite yet. Just keep grinding and you will naturally improve :)

You can eat it, but then you actually lose attack speed as eating it does not give you as much attack speed as holding on to it. You might consider eating it when you want to get Deadalus. Just my opinion ;) Thank you for the comment.

Haha! Nice Game. Played it throughout my college life and I still play sometimes if I get time. But beware it is very addicting.

The classiest way to play sniper, farm dragon lance and Mjollnir, stay behind your teammates and shoot the shit out of the enemy. Upgrade the dragon lance for Hurricane pike as it also works like a force staff . Keep building damage throughout and most importantly, keep an eye out for the occasional blademail. :)

I've been enjoying Maia and her guns, sniping from 14m+ away could kill totems without mobs noticing you (Dragon's Dowry). I'm wondering if there's any Sniper build that could match a Gunhawk, which we have no access to? (Range striker, if that's a more appropriate term)

Arcane archer maxing arcana can be quite devastating at range. Either solo (death ring melt group) or mc with a bleakwalker (better vs single entity). Very versatile class good for cc, aoe damage or single damage.

Here the key isn't high accuracy but incredible reloading times and dmg per shot. If you have trouble hitting stuff you can enable the arquebus modal. You will be slower but still fast - compared to other gunners.

The trick is to summon Whisps that simply fire at your character. They do little shock dmg. But they also distract on hit which is what the Streetfighter needs to unlock his "heating up" bonus of -50% reloading time and high Sneak Attack. Once those shocking bolts lowered your health to bloodied you will become "On the Edge" and get higher crit dmg. At some point you should stop obviously.

I imagine the character as an animancer sniper who gets boosted up by his own essence batteries. You can also wear Deltro Cage Helmet to profit from a small shocking lash the whisps will give you. The "loading up myself with essence" thought really helped me to get over the cringe to fire at myself.

In addition to the very strong recovery bonus you also profit from Sure-Handed Ila and Aefyllath Mith Fyr. Funny thing is that Ila applies both +20% attack speed AND -20% reload speed to the reloading process. On top of the Streetfighter passive this results in fantastically short loading times.

I personally used the Red Hand but any ranged weapon works. Non-reloading ones will only profit from +20% attack speed though. Pistol's and Hunting Bow's modal won't stack with Sure Handed Ila iirc. Also with reloading there's some hard cap - so it's not worth to stack too many reloading bonuses.

Arcane Archer + Bleak Walker with Spearcaster is not about speed but about high accuracy and overall usefulness. With Eternal Devotion + Ring of Focused Flames you'll have an elemental +20 ACC + Arcana-ACC attack which doesn't get the malus from Arcane Archer (because elemental) and which leaves you with a lash that you can use for your Imbue shots. Those will have twice the bonus from Arcana (on top of all the Ranger ACC bonuses and Zealous Focus of course). Besides that the char can heal very well (Lay on Hands) and push his Animal Companion (Exhortations). Works well right from the start and you can get Spearcaster very early. Due to the many high ACC attacks you can hit every enemy reliably. The arbalest can interrupt with modal who can be extremely helpful against bosses and casters.

Race doesn't matter much.

Streetfighter/Berserker with Essence Interrupter. Again this is about speed, not accuracy. Use Hunting Bow modal at all times. First Frenzy which will speed you up and gives you +2 PEN. It will also push you over the bloodied edge which will unlock "Heating Up". Don't Frenzy further (lest you die) but let Blooded (+25% dmg) and Heating Up take over. Bloodlust and Blood Thirst speed you up even more. Barbaric Smash is an awesome finisher. This build works very well on AI scripts as an automated turret. The shooting speed is insane. Even if you miss from time to time it's not a big deal because you shoot so freakingly fast. Works like a charm from level one on - which is very cool. This one went through Gorecci Street and Digside (as hireling) like a hot knife through butter. Felt like story mode... Just don't draw focus fire on you.

Race: human is nice.

Devoted/Sharpshooter with St. Omaku's Mercy or Veilpiercer. Here it's about crits. Driving Flight, ACC and crit conversions are key. You want to land crits as often as possible in order to trigger the recovery skip on crit. You should focus on low deflection enemies that stand together in order to increase the crit chance per shot. If you do that you will skip recovery very often, giving you great dps. The +2 PEN and crit dmg of the Devoted help. Also Disciplined Strikes of course. Penetrating Strike is a nice alternative to the Ranger's attacks. Also this guy works very well on AI.

Race: Hearth Orlan would be best.

Those are ones I played for some time. I'm sure there's more awesome stuff like Ranger/Cipher or Ranger/Helwalker crit builds with Frostseeker and so on - but those I only tested a bit with console or didn't even try them at all so others will have better insight on those.

Yes, that's the common way to unlock a ranged Streetfighter's passive. But the one I mentioned works with every weapon and the Streetfighter passive stacks with Sure-Handed Ila what makes this shooter even faster.

It's not really a fire damage build. Flames of Devotion still does the normal weapon damage - it just adds +10 ACC (+20 with Ring of Focused Flames) and a burning lash that adds fire damage on top of the physical weapon damage. Yes, a lot of melee attacks also work with ranged weapons. Not all though. Usually it's mentioned with the ability description. If it says "Range: Melee" there it usually only works with a melee weapon.

I have to add that Arcane Archer has a serious flaw inthe vanilla game: its damaging imbue spells don't scale their penetration at all. That means that Imbue:Missile, Imbue:Fireball and Imbue:Death Ring will have serious penetration issues in the late game. The other imbue shots (Imbue:Web, Imbue:Eora) are not affected of course since they don't penetrate anything anyway. You can use the Community Patch. If fixes this issue. Or you mainly use Web and Pull of Eora at some point.

Eternal Devotion (the upgrade of Flames of Devotion) leaves you with an effect that adds additional burn damage (+10%) on top of all your further attacks. It doesn't matter if weapon attack or spell: all your dmg rolls will get +10% burn damage as lonig as the buff of Eternal Devotion lasts. That means that an Arcane Archer's Imbue shots also will get +10% burn damage. This incudes the shot damage itself (for example the pierce dmage of the arbalest) but also the spell effect that follows (for example the Missiles from Imbue:Missile will also get +10% burn damage).

If it's your MC then it would be best to pick cruel and aggressive conversation options, yes. BUT: since this is a ranged build that doesn't rely on its defenses that much you can also just break this pattern and play a "chastened" Bleak Walker who wants to become good. It will give you only a worse "Faith and Conviction"-defense buff. Which is really not a big deal with a ranged character. You could also just pick another Paladin subclass. You'd lose a bit of dmg for Flames of Devotion but could get something else what's useful. Kind Wayfarer for example could heal allies with his shots.

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