The difference between a sniper and a weapons specialist is the equipment and cyberwear. For a street sammy, I'd go with shotguns and submachineguns and grenades, cyberwise I'd pump armour and HP as much as possible. For a sniper, I'd go with sniper rifle and an assault rifle and grenade launcher, cyberwise I'd pump Accuracy. As the cyber slots are far more restricted in SRR than in the P&P, you aren't able to get all the good stuff, or even anywhere close.
But there is a clear unbalance between the different types of weapons. If you focus on rifles you have access to close (assault) and long (sniper) ranges, aoe damage with grenade launchers, not to mention rifles are hands down the most damaging weapons in the game.
Now, the devs could nerf ARifles by giving toHit penalties in close ranges, the same way they do to sniper rifles and shotguns and giving a bigger cooldown to burst fire mode. They could also spread these different types of weapons between skill lines eg. grenade launchers to throwing skill. My point is that there isn't big enough differences between the different type of weapons to justify their use/existence, especially when rifles are better in alot of ways.
You completely ignored the previous pages where people were showing off their insane killing machine Adepts?
Dude, you don't know what you're talking about.
Perhaps I'm not being clear. I agree that you can use adepts and steamroll a lot of enemies or that if you use shotguns or smgs you will kill enemies easily. But there are better more effecient ways to do these things, and when there is no difference between different weapons or how certain builds behave in the battlefield then, IMO, the game doesn't incentivize you to use them.
For example, on the battlefield a melee street sam does exactly the same thing an adept does in the battlefield, they go around enemies and whack them to bring them out of cover/do AP damage. And if a cyberware street sam does it more efficiently than there is really no use for an adept. Also, a small note about adept builds, a melee street sam with chi focus is not, IMO, an adept, in the same way an assault rifle using street sam with the huntsman idol is not a conjurer.
Crichton I was actually able to talk sinclair down with my street samurai by just mentioning the relationship with his brother and the safety issues with the project.