See title. Why?; the SHARP can be used in two ways:
- trap setting device
- burst damage on click with 2.5 sec delay
The first use doesn’t really care about marines unless they literally run in front of you while you are setting the trap or are completely blind to them and do stupid shit like building a cade right on top of your bombs.
But the 2nd use… This is where most of the SHARP hate comes from - you can really fuck up the marines with FF and it embeds the darts which need a special interaction to pull out that most people don’t know about. If you don’t want to constantly friendly fire marines, you need to get in front and take the shot. Okay, you did it; now what? You have an immense delay before you can fire again and by that point the xeno is probably gone, so you have to reposition. The SHARP is basically a gimmicky sniper rifle, but you constantly have to push your way through ungas if you want to spriteclick xenos. It’s clearly not an afterthought for intended use since you have a specific kind of ammo that can only be used for clicking xenos, but using the weapon that way is a massive pain in the ass.
Adding sniper-like IFF to the SHARP would allow the spec to actually provide fire support with fletchettes and more consistently embed darts into xenos while eliminating the number one reason why people hate SHARP specs. Would it impact game balance? Yes, and thats a good thing since right now SHARP is widely considered to be one of the less powerful specs. If you want to click xenos then its a hybrid of grenadier and sniper but doesn’t have the IFF both of them have.