personally disagree. The sniper is just way harder to use than past iterations, especially compared to h5. There is something off I would address though and that is the fire rate. There seems to be a large delay between shots which makes players feel like they are fighting it. If you are not hitting your shot though, its 100% cause your just missing given the very low bullet mag on this version of the snipe. If you are having deadzone issues and then pair that with the high accuracy needed, your gonna suck with it
It's definitely harder to use, which is a combination of a number of factors. The fire rate, the aggressive de-scoping combined with super-accurate bots, the dead zone and bullet magnetism and more. It means that right now it doesn't really satisfy the barrier of entry for an on-map power weapon. I've not seen any player control a map with it after hours and hours of play. Right now I honestly think players would be more likely to keep their assault rifle than pick it up, and ultimately that's a failure of balance as power weapons should be powerful, that's the literal point of them. They're meant to funnel players into the same places to contest them, but right now it's a shit-show.
There should be depth to the gun, but it should be useable for a good number of players in the standard controller setup. Right now it just isn't.
If you mean that in the sense that it's not the only weapon that every Godforsaken Halo highlight video ever is made with due to it being completely OP once you get good with it then it can stay absolutely that way.
I haven't used it much in this game but it's about seems to work as good as a sniper rifle in any other game.
This is the fist Halo in like what seems like forever that doesn't feel like a big portion of the weapons aren't useless.
I'm not sure it was ever over-powered, but it's a power weapon so it's inherently more powerful than your starting weapons.
I'm not really sure why you'd benchmark a sniper rifle in Halo to "any other game"? If you mean Halo games, it's by far the most under-powered sniper rifle in any Halo game thus far, in its current form.
Your last line about overall balance is true. But having an appropriately balanced power weapon which spawns once per rotation in the middle of the map is not going to completely throw the rest of the weapon balance out of whack. That's just not how it works.