Is Sniper Overrated?
Image by Zaphk
The rise of ranged position one carries opened the melee position five support route. It is definitely a good thing, as some long-forgotten heroes are now starting to see play. At the same time, once players figured out how good heroes like Treant Protector are, they started trying to get away with even greedier and even squishier carries, ultimately ending up with Lina, Shadow Fiend, Drow Ranger and Sniper as the biggest trendsetters. Only one of them is not like the others.
Laning Stage
We’ve talked multiple times about how powerful Lina’s laning stage is. The same is true for Shadow Fiend, who can deal a tremendous amount of damage with his nukes come level three. Drow is also surprisingly potent: the Frost Arrows extra damage and the ability to harass without aggro is worth a lot.
Sniper and his Shrapnel are roughly in the same boat. It is a very powerful slow that has three charges. While each charge individually takes ages to cool down, having the ability to cover the battlefield with a very annoying effect is worth a lot. Even with the last nerf to its radius, it is still a potent ability and most high level players now max it out first.
There was a trend that concentrated on Headshot and Take Aim, but it is long gone from both professional and high level pub meta, since it makes Sniper too weak in lane. With a Shrapnel build the hero is more than comparable to the other meta carries in lane, so the reason why he had a ~44% win rate this week in Divine+ games has to lie elsewhere.
Utility
Let’s look at what the meta carries offer their team from midgame onwards. Lina is Lina, it is a hero with an AoE stun that has a ~36% uptime. It is insane how powerful it is in certain scenarios.
Drow Ranger probably has the lowest utility of them all. After all, the slow on Frost Arrows is single-target most of the time. Gust is a very powerful silence with insance cast range and good duration. It is usually dealt with by the end of midgame, but it almost always forces a dispel item out of one or two enemies.
On top of it, Drow’s Aghanim’s Shard is one of the most potent Heal and Regeneration reducing tools in the game and in certain matchups it is worth a lot. For a low price of 1400 gold Drow can essentially get a better Skadi, that doesn’t go through BKB, but can be devastating against heroes like Leshrac, Viper and Razor who often rely on Bloodstone heal in the midgame.
Shadow Fiend has a screen-covering, Fear-inducing ultimate. His utility is already through the roof. His ultimate has a relatively long cooldown and cast time, but both problems can be solved by the late midgame.
On top of it, come level fifteen, Shadow Fiend gets an incredibly potent pushing aura that allows him to capitalize on any won fight with an objective. SF is extremely punishing to lose a fight to.
Then there is Sniper, who is now frequently going the Aghanim’s Shard route. Concussive Grenade is pretty good, but it is barely utility. Its Cast Range is pretty low, so most of the time it is best used for self-save.
Shrapnel, as discussed previously, is amazing. It is also a very potent Blink-canceling tool, which currently suffers from how good 
Pipe of Insight is. The latter appears in almost every game and is a very strong counter to Shrapnel.
Finally, there is Assassinate which is just not great. It is so mana intensive and mediocre, most professional players skip the ability altogether, concentrating on getting Sniper’s passive maxed out first. It has a very strong Aghanim’s Scepter upgrade, but it is still a 4200 gold investment with stats Sniper doesn’t need for a long range “setup” stun.
Don’t get us wrong: we think that Sniper has utility to offer and the Assassinate upgrade especially is very underrated as a way to low-commit to a potential fight. The problem is, all of the utility on Sniper comes at a great opportunity cost and is very niche, especially when compared to a straightforward ~36% uptime hard disable.
Damage Steroids and DPS
Finally we get to what Carries should be about: dealing damage. To understand some of the arguments we strongly recommend giving our primers on Attack Speed and Armor a quick look. Some information in them is outdated, but the general ideas are still relevant.
Drow Ranger is theoretically one of the highest DPS heroes in the entire game. Her Marksmanship is a +50% Agility steroid, which means more AS and more Damage, as long as conditions are met. But while it is already very impressive, she also gets 40% chance to ignore all base armor on a target, which in certain cases can be comparable to having 4x+ crits.
She also has a very strong teamfight ability in Multishot, that deals bonus damage on top of bonus damage she gets from Marksmanship. And it also fully applies Hypothermia stacks from her Aghanim’s Shard. Shard, that also shatters killed targets for extra AoE damage. It is really hard to compete with Drow damage output, though the hero is still balanced around needing very specific conditions to deal that damage.
Lina is a lot more straightforward. She just gets +385 Attack Speed and good Intelligence growth. Unlike Drow, this is very hard to prevent. A good Lina player will always have Fiery Soul stacks coming into a fight and will keep them up. This is basically 
Troll Warlord levels of DPS increase, but without the need to build up Fervor.
Shadow Fiend has multiple DPS things going for him. Good Teamfight ultimate that can blow up isolated targets until the later portions of the midgame. Triple Razes, that can deal a tremendous amount of damage. Insanely high right-click damage with a potential +140 from Necromastery and crits from Aghanim’s Shard, all bolstered by his armor reducing aura.
Because of innate high damage output, he can also freely go for an Arcane Blink and Refresher build, adding even more teamfight damage. Being a mixed damage core in the later portions of the game is also pretty good: it is a way to deal with high armor targets and there are SF builds that can concentrate on that aspect of the hero.
Finally, there is Sniper DPS. His Headshot adds an average of 44 extra damage per hit, rising to 56 with the talent. While Take Aim is active, it essentially turns into a +140 Attack Damage boost, which is very much comparable to what Shadow Fiend has, but is a very far cry from what Lina (+385 AS) and Drow (+50% Agility) get to work with. This +140 attack damage also has a ~29% uptime at best: Take Aim is quite restrictive.
The Magic Damage output of Sniper is also pretty weak. Shrapnel can be a ~100 DPS DoT effect, but with the radius decrease, avoiding it is easier than ever. There is also the aforementioned Pipe that mitigates a lot of it. Moreover, DoT effects are just straight up weaker than burst damage: late game regeneration has to be taken into account.
Assassinate is a respectable nuke, but it can’t really be used during the fight. The cast point is very long and going Aghanim’s is not always an option.
Closing thoughts
The end result is that Sniper is very much inferior to Lina and Drow in terms of right-click damage, while also not offering even a fraction of magic damage Shadow Fiend gets to offer. His utility is quite limited and is mostly about keeping Sniper safe.
With his extra attack range and multiple ways of repositioning himself, Sniper can be the safest of all three carries, but what is he being safe for? In the later portions of the game his DPS is not going to be enough to deal with most equally farmed threats. He will also take longer to kill weaker targets. His scaling is very much limited.
Hence the conclusion: yes, Sniper is very much overrated and is among the least reliable carries in the current patch. Do you agree with us? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
Sniper is neither overrated nor least reliable carry currently. You just voiced forcefuly alternate and controversial opinion to bait and stir. Shame. Thats me sharing thoughts.
While I agree with just about everything said about Sniper in this article, I feel that Sniper is more potent as an A-Tier mid-lane. For anybody trying to pick up this hero, I have a few advanced tips:
1. Notice this scaling on headshot damage is 20/50/80/110. The second point is your bread and butter as you more than double the proc damage. From mid, I'm usually still building 0-4-4, but in the off chance I'm maxing shrapnel, I like to at least take a second point in headshot before putting more than one point in take aim if permitted. That said, you have a massive power spike at 0-2-1 that you can lean into (this could apply to carry if you happen to build this route as well).
2. The best utility that Assassinate provides without aghs is long-range vision. While aiming and the projectile is traveling, you get shared vision of the target (meaning your team sees what that unit sees). This is a really strong tool for invading and sieging when enemies are grouped together. Use this to give your initiators more information; you don't even have to fully cast assassinate, just cancel right before you fire and recast on the same target if you need to. If you wanna get really fancy, you can actually target swap with the vision granted by the cast animation. Just quickly stop-cast and cast on someone else before losing the shared vision. This works by aiming at creeps as well.
3. You can lead smoke ganks for your team if you aren't trigger-happy. Sniper's increased night vision is supposed to make it so that his attack range is never longer than his vision, but you can abuse this. Many teams will opt to smoke during the day since the smoke break radius of 1025 is shorter than the base day vision of 1800 for most heroes; this lets you see the enemy before they can see you. At night, this is impossible for most heroes without wards as the base night vision is 800, but Sniper's base 1400 night vision still allows your team to see enemies before they can see your team so long as you lead. When you see an enemy, just be patient for someone else to initiate as you won't be the one providing the necessary lockdown. Ideally, you don't want your enemy to get off a BKB, as your headshot procs don't pierce spell immunity.
Most people dont consider sniper to be broken he's just a regular ol' carry in a good spot right now. He has strengths and weaknesses. Lina and SF are considered broken heroes right now by most because of their flat DPS increases they don't really have to worry about conditions.
Sniper is good in Low Mmr's 2k ,3k's love that hero xD, In High Mmr they just Consider it a good counter matchup vs Lina which is so popular right now.
One of the most defining feature of sniper is its ability to deal damage from further range in comparison to the other heroes that are mentioned, no? In some fights, especially Roshan, with the terrain, good positioning, and a too-tanky-to-burst frontliner, it might be more difficult to be able to get close to Sniper. Obviously, against heroes such as the Spirits & Morph, this advantage is effectively nullified. All these are just hypothetical and i'm not a Sniper main myself, but a discussion of Sniper should mention that niche at least
Edit: after reading in more detail, I saw you mentioned that in one paragraph in the closing. To reply to that, the most important fights are the Roshan and highground siege/defense fights, in which the extra range might make a little bit of difference. Though as you pointed out, the low winrate speaks for itself, but i'm wondering what kind of heroes are on the opposing team in those games.
My problem with him is that he's very popular in lower brackets just because of how easy he is to play, and how hard he is to deal with if he gets farmed and you're team doesn't have a good Blink-dagger user. He's not necessarily OP, just very popular and also very annoying, which makes the game un-fun very quickly. So I try to ban him every match.
Sniper has the twin problems (IMO) of being frustrating to play against in the lower brackets and not very appealing in higher brackets. The whole hero needs some kind of rework IMO. Maybe change his passive and some of his abilities to give him more short-ranged utility and damage, while keeping the long-range ult for pickoffs (which is really what a "sniper" is anyway).
Either that or, for a REALLY crazy idea, give him some sort of invis or stealth ability and make him more of a ganker, and change his abilities to be skillshots, so Sniper-players actually have to try in teamfights. Again, combine it with a utility increase and make him more interesting than just "spooge shrapnel everywhere and then go AFK while you auto-attack".
snipers good in 5k+
Why does this guy still get to write articles?
Terriblade is also a good ranged carry alternative. Yes, he's a hybrid between illusion and ranged, but higher level Dota players would rather run with him than with Sniper. If Sniper gets picked, it's a concession because Drow or Lina were banned.
He works better as "carry from mid" in the trench because outscale traditional mids in damage for the game goes 40 minutes+.
Just like Medusa, another ranged hero who went unmentioned.
Sniper's not overrated. Drow, Lina and SF are just overpowered and have way too much going on for them. Calling Sniper overrated is like calling all these less picked melee carries with less going for them overrated cause they're not on par with these disgustingly powerful ranged carries.
Go ahead and keep pumping false info though, less people picking or banning my boy the better.