>>2255
just because you're still in the mmr where russians pick riki and win doesn't mean rikis a problematic hero
hes literal paper and doesn't do much damage if hes not backstabbing, AND he doesn't farm well because backstab won't work on neuts.
At max level, smoke screen is a 325 radius. You're lucky if you can catch two people inside that aoe that haven't been vac'd or RP'd. Not only that, but its slow is non-scaling. 25% at all levels. I'll give you that it slows attack speed by 25, but that's mostly irrelevant. The miss chance means you're not really able to manfight riki in the cloud unless you have a bkb, which makes the whole cloud irrelevant in the first place. Calling it 50% uptime is like saying tidehunter's 60% damage reduction has a 150% uptime. Sure, if you're fucking standing still and are doing nothing about him being next to you, it's strong as fuck. But both of those effects are melee range, and smoke screen especially is something you can just walk away from. Sure, riki can appear next to you and rape your poor little white support ass, but that's because you didn't fucking buy detection.
Shrapnel comes in with 3 charges that are each 450 radius. Uptime is significantly lower, but with three charges that barely matters. In a fight, he can use all three, and cover an ENORMOUS AREA in 48 dps, 30% slow. That cancels blinks, making it impossible to fight into the fucker unless you are a hero with an innate gap closer, and even then, if you're a mirana with a single leap (which will only take you from one end of A shrapnel charge to the other) or a phoenix with a single dive, you need to be fucking certain of either your ability to kill him or your teams ability to follow up and help you. And when their blinks are cancelled because shrapnel lasts 10 seconds, they might not. On top of ALL OF THIS, shrapnel fucking GIVES VISION, which means he can plink away at your highground tower for 30 seconds without even having creeps. AND he can throw shrapnels from daytime vision range away. 1800. Do you know why it's so hard to gank during the day? Because people can see you before you are in range of ANY MOBILITY ANYTHING (that isn't ball lightning). All of that from level 7. Fuck even at level 5, on mid, he'll demolish you unless you're a puck or a qop or something else with non-ultimate mobility.
Sniper's other abilities are what make him a carry. SF has a strong -armor aura and a +72 damage/hit steroid. Headshot only increases his damage by 36/hit. I do think maybe along with a nerf to shrapnel, making headshot scale up to its current ms and as slows would be fine. I'd even be happy with REDUCING his base range, and scaling up take aim's bonus range accordingly. The issue being, by level 8, he's already very difficult to gank, even if by some miracle your support has an ult, because he can cs in the mid from under his tower. If you lower his range and make his laning (made strong by shrapnel) weaker, he becomes less of an issue.