When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Going back even further to the elven ranger in Warcraft 2, with his sexy hood and iconic blue face paint, this archetype has been a bit of an obsession of mine. I adore the feeling of taking aim, loosing an arrow, and watching some smug bruiser drop instantly from a critical hit. And while many have tried to deliver on this, Path of Exile 2 has finally perfected it.
It was a long and winding road to get to PoE2's Ranger, with a lot of missteps and lame abilities along the way. My least favorite has always been the nearly ubiquitous, "Shoot a bunch of arrows into the sky that come raining down in an area effect. You think Legolas would do that? I'm a medieval sniper for fletch sake. The class fantasy demands a focus on extreme single-target damage from range and cool, acrobatic movement abilities. I'm fine with a little bit of magic, but I don't want any buttons that do something silly that wouldn't even make sense with a bow in real life.
I want to put a single arrow in a guy over there, and I want it to hurt him very badly. The baseline for a top-tier archer ability, for me, would be the Hunter's Aimed Shot in World of Warcraft. It has a long wind-up as you take aim, but rewards you with a massive amount of single-target damage. Now we're getting somewhere: It makes you feel like a sniper, it has a trade-off that feels fairβbut we're not quite there yet. Aimed Shot is cool as hell, but the only skill expression it has is knowing when you have time to use it.
And that brings us to Snipe in Path of Exile 2, which might be the final culmination of video game archer design and, perhaps, human society as a whole. We often gush about our favorite guns in competitive shooters or our favorite weapon in a Soulslike, but this is my favorite button in any action RPG I've ever played. I want to marry Snipe and have beautiful children together, and when I'm old I'll be sitting looking out from my porch as the melancholy sunset highlights a glimmering mountain lake, and I'll imagine Snipe sitting next to me because they actually died four years ago from Based Syndrome but I know they're always still with me.
The way it works is similar to Aimed Shot, where it's a long wind-up to do huge single-target damage. But PoE2 has added an additional skill component, in that if you release the shot in a very small timing window, it's guaranteed to deal a critical hit.
