Keep Away on Locus Locutus

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:

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?

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.