Cyte-09 is to Sniping what Kullervo was to Melee.

ok, take yourself back too a few months before Kullervo was released. this was before melee arcanes, before melee galvanized mods, before Tennokai. youre DE and youve finally come around to the idea that maybe, possibly, melee could use some help. Design a warframe intended to fix all of melee's problems.

"well, weve got this heavy attack thing going, but making it work requires running a bunch of bespoke heavy attack mods that our players dont really like because that cuts into their light melee performance"

so kullervo's Passive is just he gets those stats for free. heavy attack speed and heavy attack efficiency.

"part of the issue with melee as compared to guns is that with melee you need to close the distance to enemies before you can start doing damage, usually"

so we give kullervo an extremely potent Gap-closer for his 1, that doubles as a powerful melee buff.

"melee frames are in melee range and are thus subject to alot of damage. melee playstyles either need powerful CC or strong survival"

so we give kullervo Overguard and we rework overguard so that its guardier.

"its hard for melee setups to deal with large groups of enemies, in a way that chain-beams and AOEs dont struggle with"

so we give kullervo a power that lets him turn ANYTHING into an absurd hallway clearing AOE attack.

"Building combo is still a bit of a drag"

so we give kullervo's 2 and his 4 and his Signature shotgun the power to build combo for you.

Kullervo is now widely considered to be the best melee focused frame in the game, and his release was followed by a bunch of melee Tech stuff.

so Cyte-09.

Snipers want to do weakpoint hits and direct damage kills?

your passive is a huge crit buff and you expose enemy weakpoints.

Sniper weapons want alot of range, but most warframe maps are designed for knife fighting?

just give him wallhacks and what testing indicates is probably infinite terrain punchthrough.

Sniping tends to involve alot of stationary gameplay with a lack of awareness around yourself?

give him an invisibility gimmick.

most Sniper rifles scale poorly into the modern game, and apart from a few exceptions none deal with large groups of enemies well?

give him an Exalted Sniper that Triples every kill provided you can aim worth a shit.

Throw in a completely out of pocket omni-elemental damage buff that doubles as a reload skipper and free status and naturally gives even more damage to sniper rifles. . and you have Cyte-09. a Frame grown in a lab intended to settle all the gruff about how badly Snipers got Shafted over the years.

Except this time they didnt wait a full 6 months to start dropping the follow-up tech like they did with the Melee arcanes.
Primary Crux, Primary Acuity, Spectral Serration.

im not totally sold, i still want to see Vectis or Rubico incarnon. id like to see some more done to solve the problems of sniper rifles for the non-sniper warframes, in the same way that we eventually got all the tools to make melee sick for everyone who isnt kullervo. but this is certainly a leap in the right direction and some creative, if blunt, solutions to the problems that Snipers have with functioning well in warframe's modern game.

. . . .hopefully the next weapon class to get this sort of treatment is archguns.