PhoenixFlame Presents: Eclipse Phase

[Geminex]

Oh, I'm not saying that a sniper isn't useful. I'm saying that OC would be more useful as something other than sniper. See, amongst combat classes, I think there are two roles: Support and Assault.

Support are meant to stay out of harm's way, avoid taking damage, while disrupting the enemy's operations. They don't deal a lot of damge, usually, but what damage they do deal is very effective. An example of that would be Spectre. Spectre's a very heavy supporter. His infiltration allows him to move through combat unseen, attack the enemy from unexpected angles, gather intel, or eliminate the enemy's support units. Like I said, his infiltration skill is central to that, but so is his sniper rifle use, since attacking from long range will make him even harder to detect and avoid. Support units are the Chi.

Assault, they're not supposed to stay out of harm's way. They engage the enemy openly, they take the most fire and return the most fire, they assault and take enemy positions. NotSure (I vote that you make his in-game name NS and he refuses to tell what it stands for) is assault. He's capable of taking a significant amount of damage, and also dealing a lot of damge, at various ranges. Assault units are the Cheng.

"Engage with the Cheng, succeed with the Chi". That's Sun Tzu, for you, though quoted sloppily.

Anyway, like there you are. Support and Assault. And I think OC would be far better-suited to an assault role.

Mind you, I can't tell any of you what to do (I'm not your real dad, after all). If OC wants to go support, fair enough. The reason I got pissed off was that his justification wasn't: "I think I'd be more useful as a sniper", because I'd have been totally fine with that. His character, his choice.

But his argument was "I'm less likely to die as a sniper". He's specifically saying that his primary motivation for getting high survivability and going sniper (a definite support role) was the fact that he'd be less likely to die this way. And that annoyed me, because I set up my character for maximum effectivenes, and self-preservation was quite low on my list.

Edit: But I'm fine with OC's response. He says it's in-character for him to do that, ok. I'll continue my argumentation IC as well, though my low SAV is gonna make that difficult.

Edit2: And apologies for quoting Sun Tzu up there, I don't want to seem pretentious. But goddammit, never, ever imply that I don't see the big picture, or I will bury you in strategy until your brain disintegrates in the most allocatively efficient way possible, and game theory starts dripping from your ears.