I'm building a sniper-type Renegade. I took wealth and the GM is being nice and letting us use the Trade rules for starting aquisitions, so I could end up with a few Near Unique Items, depending on how I play it. I need to see if I'm over-looking anything. He'll have low infamy, so I want to make my starting aquisitions count.

The basic background: Goes off to war for the Emperium, comes back to find his family missing, his planet stripped of all it's resourses and his people living in refugee camps.

He goes AWOL and joins Chaos. His intention is to "use" the "evildoers" to find his family and exact his revenge on the emperium. Once he finds his family, he'll carve out a little peice of paradise and live out the rest of his days in peace and harmony...

Obviously his perspective is skewed. He's mostly a coward in combat, and only likes to engage in fights where he has the advantage. If ambushed, his priority is to run away until he has the advantage. maybe use a smoke screen of some kind?

I took Wealth, Regret and either legacy(carving out his paradise) or Perfection +5 agility(he's survived so far by being on his toes)

I'll have an infamy of 21 + wealth: 3 aquisitions

DEFENCE
Light Power Armor -20
Best Quality -20
Ablative upgrade : Very Rare to Extremely Rare -30
possibly camolean coating upgrade depending on what the GM decides for stealth penalties for PA: Extremely Rare to Near Unique: -50
total: -70

Trade: Power Mace +30
One Item: +10
Wealth +20 Total: +60

OFFENSE
Best quality Long Las with a silencer, Telescopic sight and photo sight or fire selector: Extremely Rare -50
Trade: Good quality Boltgun: +30 + One item = +40

Last aquisition, I was waffling between an auto-cannon with a suspensor upgrade(for heavy fighting, probably mounted on a servitor) or a refractor feild. Or maybe even Hotshot ammo for the the Long Las

I'm not sure if there's a good miscellaneous item/cybernetic that will help me with my goals or if there are better choices for offense/defense. I'm not opposed to taking an exotic weapon, but I'd like to avoid that if possible.

Suggestion? comments?

As far as cybernetics go, consider the following:

Black Blood - extremely useful for everyone, faster natural healing and you get better mileage from Medicae rolls.

Maglev Coils - not an obvious choice but it lets you do

Cybernetic Eyes - buy it twice for Dark Sight.

Firstly is their any reason you are keeping the carapace armour and not trading that out? as if you are getting LPA then you won't need it and the bolter would be much more useful to keep as a back up weapon for situations you have no way out of and the bursting could be useful.

Also as Light power armour doesn't increase your size it has no stealth penalty.

Next, I wouldn't take either sight for the rifle,

as 1 the marksman talent does exactly the same as the telescopic sight but for all weapons not just one, and as a renegade you can start with it.

and 2 the photosight again is just one one weapon, instead consider best quality cyber senses or my own favourite, the good quality helmet augmentation, which gives you the dark sight as well as lots of other things and is again usable with all weapons and more importantly in non combat sneaking situations othrwise you would hve to walk around with your gun out.

Also the fire selector isn't worth it unless you are using the hot shot packs (you can start with 100 on a standard pick) but they are one shot only so you could have 3 shots with out reloading (half action per clip as a renegade has rapid reload), if you do go with it I would consider 1 standard ammo pack with 2 hot shots for people who need that extra little hit.

other picks, good quality helmet augmentations, counts as preysense goggles (suffers no darkness penalties and +20 to sight based perception tests), rebreather, photo visor, vox caster and mico bead.

Also I find the reaver long rifle a slightly better weapon than the long las, less shots and slightly less damage, but has the advantage of a much wider scope of ammo, I particularly like barbed and tox, tox to push the tox test to -20 from -0, alwaya useful, and barbed as its crippling (1), and therefore if they take more than a half action they take a point of damage that is unsoakable by any means, so people might be able to take acouple of full actions and take the damage but eventually they will have to go to half actions or kill themselves. against a marine its a life saver, also as an exotic wepon it can take advantage of the weapon tech talant (once per combat add int bonus to damage and penetration) very effective if you have best quality cerebral implants

I Traded out the Bolt gun, because I had the Long Las as my long range rifle and I'd still have the bolt pistol for shorter range. The Carapace is only Very Rare and therefore only a +20 to an aquisition while the bolt gun, being good quality, is +30. I was thinking of keeping the Carapace to use in situations where I don't want to stick out of the crowd. In any case, was thinking of getting an auto-cannon with my last purchase. Come to think of it, is there any reason why I'd get upgrades on a Long Las when an auto-cannon makes, esentially, a massive sniper rifle? It has a single fire mode and does piles of damage. It doesn't FEEL like a sniper rifle, but it certainly can perform that function. I was originally looking at the reaver Long rifle...I'd just have to spend the talent for it.

Regarding photo sight, I put it on the rifle because I'm trying to get more "bang for my buck". Getting an upgraded helmet or cyber eyes represents another aquisition - and I only have 3...not to say they aren't good purchases, but that was my original thought process...It would definitely be worth having Dark sight.

The Black Blood looks cool. As far as the Maglev Coils go, I like the idea of them but we're allowed to use other books for gear. Doesn't a Flip Belt to essentially the same thing? I'll have to look it up. It's something I'd forgotten, but it'd be very useful.

Lecram said:

Nothing stopping you trading in multiple items. Go for the Reaver rifle and trade in the boltgun and carapace armour, get some nice upgrades and ammo for it.

Kasatka said:

So I'm assuming you're talking about the Reaver Long Rifle in BC, pg. 161.

I don't really know what upgrades I could want besides what I've already mentionned - although I forgot to mention a noise suppressor. What would be nice is an omni-scope, but that's listed as Near Unique in the RT book. It's probably a separate aquisition; that or I make an aquisition for the omniscope and the use the weapon as the upgrade to Unique? IF so, I'm looking at a -90 or more aquisition.

I'm also not sure what kind of ammo can be used with a Reaver Rifle. What would you recommend?

Ammo is also a separate aquisition so I hesitate to get it as a start. Ammo is fairly easy to aquire (scarce +) so it's probably worth waiting to get it in-game? I guess I could use the aquisition to get LOTS of clips.

My last question about the Reaver rifle vs something with higher damage is what makes it so good. I've seen it recommended on a few threads. Keep in mind that I'm not trying to argue, but do this excercise for my own benefit so people can tell me if I"m overlooking something:

Say an average CSM has a toughness of 40 + Unnatural toughness = bonus of 8 and an Armor value of 8 = 16

Reaver
Felling 3 brings it to toughness 5 and the pen of 2 brings it to AP 6.
Even assuming you get the 4 degrees of success, that's an average of 20 damage.
so 9 damage. Then a toxin resist at -0, which will likely succeed. Or he just rolling at his toughness 40?

vs

Auto Cannon:
3d10+8 Pen 6
so CSM has a total armor/toughness value of +10 (after pen)
average damage = 24 - armor = 14 damage

Both weapons can benefit from the same upgrades? Stick a suspensor on the auto-cannon and there's no need to brace. It's not very quiet or light...or inconspicuous. It's more versatile with the Semi-auto and has twice the range.

Meh. After re-reading my post, Toting around a heavy weapon as a sniper rifle just seems silly to me. I still want to know if I've overlooked something in the above comparison.

Oh, and I also noted angelis' suggestions on ammo for the reaver. That makes it very nice.

I haven't got a book to hand, but off the top of my head, if you are going up against less armoured opponents, or big beasts (which may have unnatural Toughness but not neccessarily a high armour rating) the Felling comes in quite handy. Against armoured opponents, you can still use Accurate and aim for weak points to break through - it just requires some finesse.

As it's an SP weapon, there's a wider range of ammo options for it over a Las weapon, giving you more versatility, plus the fact that to get the most out of the Long Las you are using hotshot packs which effectively make it a sniper with a clip of 1 or at most a clip of 3 if you splash out on a shot-selector.

Ultimately it's your call, i was merely pointing out that there are several options open to you.

Oh and lastly, have you considered getting hold of a Legion boltgun, making it single-shot and giving it suspensors? With a telescopic sight on it, you have a very large, but very capable sniper 'rifle'.