Keep Away on Locus Locutus
We will not be updating this post so the numbers may start drifting away from reality but the conclusion most likely won't change.
October 7, 2023 note:
Keep Away was confirmed to not have an Accuracy Scalar but this ultimately doesn't change the conclusions in this post. The main benefit of it will be to Aim Assist Falloff from the 10 Range stat.
January 6, 2024: Added source for the GIF at the end. (Can't believe I forgot to do that lol)
Alright numbers nerds, let's jump into it. Keep Away is great but not that great and we're going to break that down now.
Bungie gave us the Accuracy Cone Angle values for Sniper Rifles a few years back and they look like this:
Hip-Fire Cone: 9-degree cone angle at 0 Range which scales down to a 6.5-degree cone angle at 100 Range
Aiming Down Sights multiplies these angles by 0.03 at 0 Range and by 0 at 100 Range
Don't worry if you don't understand what these exactly mean, I'll explain more in just a bit, it's just needed to set the stage. Going off of these numbers, we can set up a basic equation that will spit out the final cone angles for your gun:
Hip-Fire: 9 - [Range Stat] × 0.025
ADS: [Hip-Fire Angle] × ( 0.03 - [Range] × 0.0003 )
But we're still not quite done yet. As many of you will know, Zoom also improves accuracy. More specifically, it narrows the accuracy cone by the same amount that it increases magnification by. So in our case, that 40 Zoom stat on Locus Locutus translates to 4x magnification which means that our Zoom will scale down the Accuracy Cone to 1/4 of its baseline ADS size that those equations output.
Let's now take our baseline crafted roll for Locus with max handling. This will have 50 Range on the dot before factoring in other perks like Opening Shot or Keep Away so let's put this through the equations:
Hip-Fire Cone Angle: 9 - 50 × 0.025 = 7.75 degrees
ADS Baseline Cone Angle: 7.75 × ( 0.03 - 50 × 0.0003 ) = 0.11625 degrees
Now let's account for the 40 Zoom: 0.011625 / ( [Zoom Stat] / 10 ) = 0.11625 / ( 40 / 10 ) = 0.0290625 degrees
Now you might look at that number and go "Aww gee, that sure looks like a very small number" and you'd be right! It is in fact a very small number but we can use this handy tool to help visualize it. If you look on the right, you can see what a 0.03-degree cone would look like on a target 150 meters away. (Red circle)
Now would be a good time to also explain that cones are essentially just circles on your screen. You can think of them like the center of a toilet paper roll (let me cook). If you look through it at something within hand's reach, chances are you won't see a lot of things through it. But if you look at a tree far off in the distance, you'll see a large part of its crown as well as the surrounding trees.
Using this analogy, you can get an intuitive sense that while the size of the circle is the same on your screen, it covers more and more area the farther away the thing you're looking at is. This is why the exact reason cones expand as the distance increases.
The reason I went on this tangent to explain how cones expand with distance is because the above example is at a distance of 150 meters. That's so far that you pretty much never encounter it in the game. So let's take a more modest (but still pretty rare!) example with the same cone angle but at 80 meters.
As you can see on the right, at this distance, the cone is barely even noticeable. But the best part of this is that, at these distances, the reticle would essentially cover the target's head while the cone itself would still only be a tiny little dot inside your reticle.
Alright, let's now start adding some perks to it starting with Enhanced Opening Shot which brings us to 80 Range and further narrows the cone by 5% on top of what Zoom already does. So let's run the numbers first:
Hip-Fire Cone Angle: 9 - 80 × 0.025 = 7 degrees
With OS's 5%: 7 * 0.95 = 6.65 degrees
ADS Cone Angle: 7 × ( 0.03 - 80 × 0.0003 ) = 0.042 degrees
With Zoom: 0.042 / ( 40 / 10 ) = 0.0105 degrees
With OS's 5%: 0.0105 × 0.95 = 0.009975 degrees
So now we're down to essentially 1/3 of the (already minuscule) cone angle above. We can pretty much round this to 0.01 which will look something like... this at 80 meters:
At this point, I'm not even going to argue for any more improvements to the cone angle because it's literally smaller than a pixel of your screen. But let's run through this one more time with Enhanced Keep Away (12 more Range and a 7.5% angle decrease - confirmed to not have a cone angle scalar) added to the mix:
Hip-Fire Cone Angle: 9 - 92 × 0.025 = 6.7 degrees
With OS's 5%: 6.365 degrees
With Keep Away's 7.5%: 5.888 degrees
ADS Cone Angle: 6.7 × ( 0.03 - 92 × 0.0003 ) = 0.01608 degrees
With Zoom: 0.004 degrees
With OS's 5%: 0.00382 degrees
With Keep Away's 7.5%: 0.003533 degrees
Alright cool, we just cut maybe half of a pixel down to a sixth of a pixel? Congrats I guess?? The visualizer tool doesn't even go that low on the slider but here's what a 0.005-degree cone would look like on a player 80 meters away:
The thing is, Sniper Rifles have excellent accuracy when ADS and it's extremely unlikely that any sort of accuracy boost would help you in the overwhelming majority of situations. With boots on the ground, you'd probably have a better chance of winning the lottery than missing an enemy due to accuracy (especially if you have Opening Shot).
But the thing is, that's assuming you're on the ground. The story about accuracy scalars surely changes when you're in the air with Airborne Effectiveness smacking your gun's performance around, right? Well, no. The thing about AE is that it completely bypasses any sort of cone angle scalars including Opening Shot, Keep Away, and even Zoom!
So let's say you kit the gun out with everything to boost your AE like Extended Mag, Icarus Grip, and even Thread of Ascent from your Strand subclass to get to 59 AE. Alright then, let's take a look at how that translates to accuracy penalties.
From Bungie's numbers that they shared in TWABs, dev articles, and patch notes, we know that the accuracy penalty for snipers ever since the last patch in S19 is 1 degree at 0 AE which linearly scales down to 0 at 100 AE. From this, we can put together this equation for the penalty: 1 - [AE Stat] × 0.01
Plugging in 59 AE into the equation we get a penalty of 0.41 degrees which as it turns out, dwarfs every one of the ADS values we've arrived at above. But let's put it into context.
With 50 Range and no perks active, we got a 0.0290625-degree cone angle when ADS (accounting for the 40 Zoom as well). With both Keep Away and Opening Shot, we got a 0.003533-degree 0.0038195-degree cone angle which is admittedly much smaller.
But now let's throw our AE penalty on top of this! These numbers now jump up to 0.4390625 and 0.413533 0.4138195 respectively. If we compare these, the difference between them works out to be roughly just 5.75%! So even in the air, these accuracy bonuses just completely pale in comparison to the AE penalty to the point where they barely even make a difference.
But let's pull our visualizer out one more time to see what a 0.415-degree cone would look like at 80 meters because why not after all?
In all honesty, that's actually not bad at all considering the target is 80 meters away. For what it's worth, this is a significantly smaller cone compared to what it used to be before the AE changes.
For context, before the AE changes, the airborne penalty for Snipers was fixed at 3 degrees and Icarus Grip cut that down by 75% to 0.75 degrees. So in the current system, the equivalent of the old Icarus Grip on Snipers in terms of accuracy is 25 AE. (Which is getting changed soon to be the 0 AE baseline! Should be really nice.)
And finally, before I send you back to the S22 weapons review, let's quickly go over what Aim Assist (Auto Aim specifically) and Accuracy do so you can get a better idea why further accuracy help after a certain point isn't all that helpful.
First off, your Accuracy Cone defines an area within which your bullet will be generated completely at random. So if you think back to the red circles above, anything in the red can get hit by your bullet but nothing outside of the red can.
Meanwhile, Aim Assist has two parts:
Magnetism which the community generally refers to as "reticle friction" or "reticle stickiness"
This is active on controller inputs
Auto Aim which redirects the center of your Accuracy Cone to a more optimal spot on the target that is more likely to get you a hit
Auto Aim is the real key to this question because it's doing the most heavy lifting once your Accuracy Cone is narrow enough. You aim close to a target, the Auto Aim cone places your Accuracy Cone on the enemy's hitbox, your shot is generated, and you hopefully hit the target. For a visual showcase of this, check out this GIF on the right:
With a very small Accuracy Cone like in the case of Sniper Rifles, the Auto Aim cone will in most cases be disproportionally larger compared to it. It's to the point where Auto Aim almost becomes the sole determining factor for what hits and what doesn't.
Anyway, the TLDR of the whole thing is that Accuracy on Sniper Rifles is good enough. You won't be widening your Auto Aim cone by improving Accuracy so just feel free to invest your stat points into Handling instead.
Now this doesn't mean that Range is useless on Snipers because it still pushes out Aim Assist FALLOFF so the 12 range from Keep Away should still let you hit crits reliably a few meters farther out. THIS is the reason I still ended up recommending it as the second choice. Don't think of Accuracy as the end-all-be-all of reliability, there's a lot more at play here.
And that's it! Keep Away is pretty good but not because of accuracy like many people seem to think it is. Also, I'm not going to lie this side-article took a lot out of me while also working on the weapon reviews so if you could consider supporting our work on Ko-Fi, we'd be endlessly grateful. We have monthly membership tiers starting from just €2 that grants you access to a private channel in our Discord and early access to posts like these. But you also have the option to make one-time donations of €3 or more.
Otherwise, jump on back to the review!