Learning to play Sniper - need some guides.

When you are new to Dota I would rethink the idea of playing sniper.

I myself play for 2-3 month now and imo sniper is actually pretty tough. He is slow and squishy, making positioning very important. You really need to concentrate in the first 5 minutes or you are behind. Against decent players he is not easy to play. In my first matches I had to play a lot of mid with my friends. Zeus, Pudge, QOP.. all of them are easier to play at least without ruining the game completely.

I see so many ppl picking sniper first in all-pick and you know were this is going.. new to dota, played the tutorial, know nothing about the game. You see the counterpicks rolling and know you will have a tough time in that match.

This story I really have to get off my chest:

Last time I had a sniper going mid with basilius and shrapnel standing and right-clicking next to a Pudge and Pudge got 3 kills in 2 min! We still won by the way. I switched my support Necrophos to carry and we had a good Axe. To finish the game we went Roshan. When Roshan was at 20% in comes the sniper. Assassinate on Roshs Linkens from a distance. Walks in and this useless underfed piece of sh*t steals the aegis from Axe. At that point I really wished for the ability # to pass electroshocks through teamchat. Oh by the way he abandoned the game due to inactivity 10 minutes before. So whenever I see a Sniper firstpicking in my team I am tempted to Alt-F4.

Don't need a guide on how to right click, stop playing Sniper right now, everyone hates Sniper. Why does every single noob decide on playing sniper blood or riki? I have no idea but just stop it and start feeding with invoker, it'll take a while but it will make you a better player

First off, stop playing Sniper right now. There is absolutely nothing to learn about DotA by playing the hero besides how to right click. If you want to learn DotA then pick some good heroes and learn how to play AGAINST Sniper.

Of course good players will always punish a Sniper pick. It's just so easy! In a high skill bracket a Sniper mid will just get perma-ganked by 2 supports all the time and go 0-10 in 8 minutes. And counterpicking is completely fair game now since the rework on the picking system, at least in ranked, so yes he'll be counterpicked and hunted down because everybody hates Sniper - it's just so satisfying to hear him die, I dont know if it's just me : "Flowing through...aargh" ;)

Sniper IS a hero for new players, he's very easy to play and he's good against other new players. That's all there is to him honestly.

Need some guides on Sniper huh? It's going to be hard : to be honest, almost every Sniper guide on Dotafire sucks. Since he's a n00b hero, the guides are written by people who have almost as much experience about DotA as my grandmother about recompiling a Linux kernel. Any serious guide writer in here has probably far better things to do than write a Sniper guide.

Those two guides are pretty legit though :

http://www.dotafire.com/dota-2/guide/boom-headshot-anti-alt-tab-4653

http://www.dotafire.com/dota-2/guide/blink-on-sniper-no-longer-bored-to-tears-9841

Any guide with Shadow Blade as core is not even worth looking at because it teaches you how to NOT play DotA (and it will hurt like hell once you play against semi-decent players who know that Dust of Appearance exists - I've been at low 2K MMR and even there these snipers get punished hard for this). Only possible core item is Blink Dagger, Force Staff or possibly Mask of Madness.