Killing Floor 2's New Sharpshooter Class Detailed

We've known for some time that Tripwire Interactive plans to add a Sharpshooter class to Killing Floor 2, and now we know some of the tools it'll have at its disposal.

As the name suggests, the Sharpshooter class (or Perk, in the game's parlance) is designed around precision aiming. In the latest preview of upcoming KF2 content, Tripwire shared a render image of a new Tier 3 weapon for Sharpshooters, the M14 EBR rifle. Like other classes, the Sharpshooter also gets its own grenade type: the Liquid Nitrogen Freeze grenade. According to the update, this is "capable of stopping zeds in their tracks" and should make it easy to line up headshots.

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Beyond those, there's a Tier 4 railgun in the works that will be shown off "shortly." Tripwire also expects to have these implemented in-game soon so we can see how they'll look in action.

Unfortunately, there's still going to be a wait of at least a month for the Sharpshooter, as Tripwire doesn't plan to announce a release date for the class until E3 in June.

Aside from the new class, Tripwire also shared a preview of some balance changes it plans to make. These center around three topics: ammo, incapacitation, and resistances.

Regarding ammo, Tripwire intends to increase the amount of ammo you start with when using Tier 1 weapons, while certain weapons will have their ammo caps increased.

"To help balance this out with the economy as players move up the weapon tiers, they will start with less of the overall mag count and have to purchase those extra mags," Tripwire said. "As part of this, there are some pricing changes for ammo to bring some of the potential damage and actual damage we see these weapons doing more in line with each other."

Incapacitation will also change: "There are several ways to incap zeds: Stun, stumble, knockdown, poison, fire panic, etc. However currently these are a binary system; they either happen if the weapon has more incap potential to a zed's resistance to that incap. Overall as we've watched the game play out, we feel it has hampered the ability for interesting gameplay due to on/off often either being too overpowered or never triggered enough as well as confusing to many players.

"This system is being changed to a potential incap build up and fall off over time. This means that weapons and shots will stack up incap potential until they overcome a zeds resistance to that incap, and it will fall off if the damage stops or the incap triggers. This should allow us to build in more interesting combos between perks and players as well as more interesting ways for players to deal with threats that come their way."

There wasn't much to be said regarding resistances and weaknesses. Put simply, the goal is to make certain weapons better at dealing with specific enemy types. Work on this is in the prototyping stage, so no specifics were shared.

Killing Floor 2 remains in early access on Steam. It continues to see new content added for free; the most recent big addition was a new competitive multiplayer mode that sees players assume the role of zeds.