Destiny House of Wolves Sniper - Rifle and Reforging Tier List for PvP Guide

Formatting Provided by /u/famousbirds.

Also, for a similar list for shotguns, you can check out

This shotgun reforging thread by /u/famousbirds

Most of the good snipers aren't even re-rollable. Low-grade gets the top pick for being re-rollable, having highest AA, decent two-hit kill, consistent two-hit kill, enough ammo to go +5 per box with a special/sniper-ammo boosting armor-piece.

Shadow of veils gets second pick, because it has high AA, can revive snipe. Unfortunately, its right perk doesn't affect PvP, and it's left perk is mediocre, but it has access to perfect balance and extended mag, along with a decent inventory size

Eye of Sol has pretty good perks on it, a large inventory size, and a fast two-hit bodyshot kill. You'll like this if you prefer double-tapping bodyshots. But it also does headshots well, with its really nice AA.

I didn't include prudence, because it's impossible to put up prudence without a re-rollable version, or a vendor version. However, if you get rolls that are at least as good as Eye of Sol (Field scout and a decent scope alone will do it), then it'd be just above Eye of Sol

Also, I didn't include efrideet's, as Final Rounds snipers really don't work anything like regular snipers. And any other Efrideet's is bad, unless you're trying to generate ammo at start of match (in which case, double-down and field scout)

Hidden Hand is amazing because it simply increases the size of your enemy's hit-boxes, making longer and faster swipes possible at a variety of ranges.

Unflinching tightens flinch spread from bullets. It works extremely well with hidden-hand, as having it will reduce the probability of being flinched out of a hitbox while taking fire. It also makes the scope reset fast enough to be on target between Thorn shots.

Injection Mold, Quickdraw and Snapshot all increase ADS speed, but do it differently. Quickdraw adds +100 Handling, which is a massive increase in draw-speed and ADS time (but doesn't stack with Blade-dancer's Quickdraw perk). Snapshot puts the sniper at a set ADS speed regardless of scope (so it's good with scopes that offer no ADS speed). Injection mold stacks with everything, and offers stability as well.

You want ADS speed, because this makes close-quarter sniping possible. It also reduces the chance of an enemy getting a first-shot that will flinch you off target. +MLG quick-scoping. Kidding. But, seriously. Quicker scoping means it'll be easier to visualize where your scope will land, giving you much more time to make a swipe.

Aim-Assist Modifiers on Sniper Scopes.

I finally, fee-fi-fiddley-fucking did it! I found the aim-assist values on most of the sniper scopes. I did this by comparing the API's Minimum and Maximum values for Aim-assist across the raid/PoE/Trials snipers (which have concrete scope-values, I also observed that the "base" values of these guns were derived from using the first scope in the perk tree). Using a couple tables, and some substitution/subtraction, I quickly found the following (I used ambush as a base). These are only approximations, because the data didn't fit in a couple of scenarios, but you can take these as fairly-accurate, relative values:

NOTE: These are not the values you add to the base-AA to find total AA.

NOTE: Randomly re-rollable Snipers seem to use a base that is +10 over ambush. This means that aim-assist values in the various databases are vastly skewed in favor of Raid Weapons with high AA scopes (because the base-values would be listed under the high-AA scope). Above, I've reflected this by subtracting 10 from all of these values.

Also, apparently its logically impossible for the "Superb" and "enhanced" and "improved" values of TA to mean anything, unless TA is something entirely different from AA, which it may as well be.