This full build is fantastic at waveclearing and dishing out AOE damage in teamfights. Nova having great waveclear? Pretty strange right. The railgun / explosive shot combo does just that tho. If you line your shots up right, you can double snipe and instant clear an entire wave.

With the rangefinder talent, your snipes base cooldown is 8. With railgun it drops 1 second for each additional enemy. If you hit three heroes in a teamfight, it will drop down to 5 seconds. If you hit all 5, it will drop down to 3 seconds. With explosive shot, you will be dishing out 100% snipe AoE damage to tightly packed enemies.

Envenom is obviously to help burst down single targets, with headshot it helps get that reset for even more AoE snipe action.

We take PR as the ultimate, because the whole premise of the build is to dish out AoE damage. PR is fantastic for that if you manage to make a shot stick, and it lets you drop it while going back to other actions.

We get bolt of the storm for lvl 20 talent, simply because Nova needs the extra help "peeling". Go ahead and take barrage if you are confident in both your accuracy and your allies ability to peel for you.

Obviously their are better builds for single target alpha burst, and this build does not really bear fruit until level 16.

At level 1 you are trading off the burst potential of ambush snipe for rangefinder. This is a minor tradeoff but it does lower your alpha burst a bit.

The biggest tradeoff is at level 7. This is where nova normally picks up a single target DPS booster with either Anti-Armor Shells or One in the Chamber. We go with explosive rounds for the payoff later, in synergy with railgun at 16, but you can definitely feel the DPS decrease until then.

At level 7 is when we play a bit more conservatively and not trust that we can solo burst squishes. Rather coordinate with allies while still providing ample gank damage even with the reduced payload.

The build really fruitates at level 16. Until then explosive shot almost feels like a waste, in a core talent selection none the less, but it can still be decent if you can get that AoE dump on a pile.