Battlefield 3

[Stark]

Except they tried to 'balance' snipers by having low base damage; the SKS takes 4 body hits to kill. Oh dear.

[weemadando]

I snipe with RPK/IAR...

Seems to work fairly well.

[Stark]

I bet you're the first person who noticed that the select-fire machineguns are better sniper rifles than the sniper rifles.

[weemadando]

I did notice ages ago that swapping to 4x scope and flash hider for the SKS also made stringing together kills way easier.

I CANNOT SEE BRIGHT LIGHTS! WHEREVER COULD HE BE?

[Alyeska]

Except they tried to 'balance' snipers by having low base damage; the SKS takes 4 body hits to kill. Oh dear.

SKS is a battle rifle. It can fire faster than any other semi-auto sniper rifle. I have it setup with a 3.4x scope and vertical grip and I use it like a battle rifle.

[Alyeska]

I did notice ages ago that swapping to 4x scope and flash hider for the SKS also made stringing together kills way easier.

I CANNOT SEE BRIGHT LIGHTS! WHEREVER COULD HE BE?

Go for the silencer. Silencers do not reduce the firepower on sniper rifles.

The flash hider increases muzzle climb while hiding the flash. The silencer takes you off the mini map, reduces noise, and hides the flash. The bullet drop is minimal while using a 3.4 to 4x scope. And as noted, silencers do not reduce the firepower on a sniper rifle.

[CaptHawkeye]

Yeah the SKS like the Mk11 and Dragunov are designed to take things close with the ability to engage targets far away if they must. With a laser sight on the SKS has ridiculously accurate hipfire.

BTW I've been using the SOFLAM for a month now and have yet to assist one Javelin user with it.

[Alyeska]

Yeah the SKS like the Mk11 and Dragunov are designed to take things close with the ability to engage targets far away if they must. With a laser sight on the SKS has ridiculously accurate hipfire.

The SKS fires even faster than the MK11 and Dragunov. There is a delay on the trigger pull on those two.

[Stark]

Except they tried to 'balance' snipers by having low base damage; the SKS takes 4 body hits to kill. Oh dear.

SKS is a battle rifle. It can fire faster than any other semi-auto sniper rifle. I have it setup with a 3.4x scope and vertical grip and I use it like a battle rifle.

Thats great and thanks for letting me know and all, but having 'battle rifles' that do about the same damage as carbines is lameo balance dogshit sadness. While it's clear that everyone who plays recon is an idiot, literally forcing players to either pretend they're using a proper rifle (that htey can't use because... uh... recon... ???) or go exclusively for headshots while camping on the five thousand cranes the entire match is hardly quality stuff.

Imagine if the game wasn't balanced in the most primitive and childish 'DPS/accuracy' manner. The lol of hipfire is that almost all the snipers can trivially hipshot anyone at close range, thus arguably making them simultaneously crap sniper weapons and really good close-range weapons. Go DICE!

[Alyeska]

Thats great and thanks for letting me know and all, but having 'battle rifles' that do about the same damage as carbines is lameo balance dogshit sadness.

Seeing as they reduced the accuracy of fully automatic weapons, the SKS is even more valuable. It is extremely accurate compared to any assault rifle or carbine.

[Steel]

Thats great and thanks for letting me know and all, but having 'battle rifles' that do about the same damage as carbines is lameo balance dogshit sadness.

Seeing as they reduced the accuracy of fully automatic weapons, the SKS is even more valuable. It is extremely accurate compared to any assault rifle or carbine.

Now was that a reduction to the accuracy of fully automatic weapons in fully automatic mode, or a reduction to their accuracy in general?

Places like http://symthic.com/?s=bf3 don't have the full details on firemode effects yet.

As it stands, using one of the carbines in single shot mode looks to be just as viable as an SKS really. Find the video by robbaz with his incredibly effective sniper shotgun (6x(?) scope and slugs).

The one thing I really wish was that instead of the current 'massive conefire just after running when aiming' was instead handled by having your actual sights be pointed somewhere other than the centre of the screen, as your hasty aiming was not perfectly seated yet, and if you do fire before the aim was corrected then recoil has much more effect as you aren't quite in position yet. This would be much better than the current system of:

run somewhere, aim, sights appear perfectly in the centre of the screen
a) fire after 0.9 seconds aiming: all bullets make immediate turn of 45-90 degrees on exiting the muzzle until you stop firing
b) fire after 1.1 seconds aiming: zero spread

and there is no actual indication of when the magical conefire period is up over.

If instead you could see your sights swinging closer to the actual centre of the screen (with perhaps some jostling as you seat the weapon) and when your sights were on something you could guarantee that within the physical limits of the weapon, then that was where the shots would go. Also one of the critical things in my book is that no matter what as long as the character could pull the trigger, if you press the fire button, the weapon fires. No bullshitty unable to fire when aiming pauses or anything like that to attempt to balance this.

[Stark]

Thats great and thanks for letting me know and all, but having 'battle rifles' that do about the same damage as carbines is lameo balance dogshit sadness.

Seeing as they reduced the accuracy of fully automatic weapons, the SKS is even more valuable. It is extremely accurate compared to any assault rifle or carbine.

So what? It also has a way larger magazine and has ROF and early options other than 'snipe like a giant pussy and pray for headshots' or 'use irons for 50 kills lol'. 'Battle rifles' doing similar damage to carbines is flat out retarded, particularly since the odds of anyone with lag ever getting a headshot is basically zero. Unless they're using a carbine/AR/SMG/anything but the awful 'battle rifles' where the ROF means you'll get headshots about 20-40% of the time by pure luck, of course. If only snipers could use the KH2002 or 553? :V

Having actual barrel awareness (ie the bullets go straight where your gun is pointing but the guns have more settle time) would be waaaaay better than the comical confire we have now. The laughs of the machineguns where bullets literally turn 45 degrees is amazing, especially since adding a 'barrel climbs uncontrollably' animation would have been trival. Guns recoiling out of control... but you can keep the dot of your ACOG on their head pixel. MAKES SENSE.

Old UT mods had things like sight misalignment and accuracy/recoil/stability being communicated through sight picture and gun alignment, so its a bit sad that BF3 basically has a big dot that your bullets will land in a magical cone around, just like Counterstrike.

The shotgun thing is less terrible than in BC2, though. In BC2 the slugs were perfectly flat and near perfectly accurate to infinity range, so you could literally for reals snipe with a shotgun. Apparently in BF3 there's significant drop and damage loss over range.... but now we have the frag shells of hilarity.

[Alyeska]

You can snipe with assault rifles and carbines. Heavy barrel, 6x scope. I have my M16A4 setup like that.

[weemadando]

Whodathunk that BI would have created the best bullet spread/recoil system back in 2002? Bullets how from where barrel is with standard deviance. Barrel moves according to player motion, aim etc.

Impractical I say!

People demand their hip shooting Barrett!

[Steel]

Whodathunk that BI would have created the best bullet spread/recoil system back in 2002? Bullets how from where barrel is with standard deviance. Barrel moves according to player motion, aim etc.

Impractical I say!

People demand their hip shooting Barrett!

Flashpoint/ArmA system was great.

You could fire while sprinting, but as your character was holding his weapon across his chest, you were spraying sideways into the floor outside your view.

You could hipfire, but unless you were incredibly good at judging the muzzle angle, you wouldnt hit anything beyond 10 feet.

As far as I recall though there was no difference in how stable your firing platform was depending on how you had moved recently.

[Stark]

You can snipe with assault rifles and carbines. Heavy barrel, 6x scope. I have my M16A4 setup like that.

Its cute you're telling two people who obviously already know that. You don't even need the heavy barrel really; the gun isn't crippled to force slow rof or feathering, so you can burst it out fine and get kills. Stealing kills from your team's squad of sniper idiots hiding on a crane/on top of a building they rode the MAV up/whatever with a QBZ is the funniest shit ever, particularly since in many ways only kills matter.

Its sad that games don't even do mobile aimpoints anymore, which is pretty much the only reason hipfiring noscope fuckwits even exist. An UT mod had stamina-based scope wobble, so the concepts were obvious and implemented like a decade ago. Its easier to use conefire and ROF to 'balance' guns for the Counterstrike generation I guess.

[weemadando]

ArmA2 has it and I'm pretty sure ArmA1 did as well, but you have to catch your breath after any exertion in order to fire accurately.

[Stark]

Yeah but both those games suck so nobody gives a shit. I'm dead serious; if they were popular games developers might pay attention, instead of the features being branding 'milsimhard idiot niche dogshit' like the rest of the game.

Barrel awareness doesn't require the game to be a slow, buggy, ugly, by-fat-nerds-for-fat-nerds piece of crap, but that's what everyone takes away from ARMA. Using a less terrible system wouldn't even be obvious to players if done sensitively to the game, it'd just make things like spread patterns and engagements ranges emerge from the dimensions of a gun and sight rather than be blocked out by conefire.

Hell, bullet drop is waaaaaay more simhard than barrel awareness in my opinion, and everyone loves that shit these days. Its just lame we're stuck with MGs filling a perfect circle with bullets rather than actually recoiling, sights being magical 2D overlays, sway only existing on 'ballistic' scopes, etc.

The laugh of suppression being a 'feature' with an effect and stuff, and literally doing absolutely nothing, is really BF3 in a nutshell. We can't move the aimpoint - people would BE SAD!

[weemadando]

I'm not saying "MAEK LAIK ARMA" I was pointing out that BI had a barrel awareness system a decade ago and no one has used one since in favour of conefire laziness. Just like I'll be pissed if no one else carries and improves in BF3'S traversal system which in my opinion may be the best in a FPS I've played.

Hey,remember when CoD introduced penetration physics and 99.99% of people went "wow!" and 0.01% went "doesn't anyone remember SWAT3 from a decade ago? And then it didn't matter because it was so selectively used as to be laughable.

Yeah, suppression has been the biggest "what?" moment in BF3 for me. After all their hoo hah about how important it would be, you get *some* blurry edges on your screen. OH NO. WHATEVER SHALL I DO?

[Stark]

Even something really simple and slight like a tiny area of movement for the aimpoint or regular divergence would have been simple and most people would never have noticed. Instead its just 'set motion blur to 1000 and hope they don't just click the button to headshot anyway'.

[CaptHawkeye]

It's arguably designed only to rob a player of situational awareness and not the ability to fight back at their shooter. I wouldn't mind this if the damage model wasn't also weak.

Also in practice it doesn't matter since most gamers have tunnel vision already.

[Stark]

This IS the game where small RC drones are fucking elevators, after all.

[Edward Yee]

The SKS fires even faster than the MK11 and Dragunov. There is a delay on the trigger pull on those two.

This is pretty much why I use it over the MK 11 and Dragunov.

Go for the silencer. Silencers do not reduce the firepower on sniper rifles.

Not directly, but I understand that they quicken the damage dropoff at range. Still though, to this day I always take them over a flash suppressor.

Strangest Metro-64-meatgrinder round I've been in had to be the experience of being on a RU team today that did the standard meatgrinder at the usual spots, only for A to be backcapped, then the US team pushing the RU team out of B, and for the first time actually feeling a sense of desperate urgency when playing Metro-64-meatgrinder as RU, to grind down the US team before they could close the earlier disparity in tickets, instead of just giving up to grind points/unlocks... and pulling it off despite being 3-capped for the last third of the round.

Also ended up in a Rush match on Strike at Karkand that ended with the attackers pulling off a "0 tickets left when the last MCOM goes off" win, which was fun for me.

P.S. Julheim, I really like the pieces you put up at the link!

[Alyeska]

Not directly, but I understand that they quicken the damage dropoff at range. Still though, to this day I always take them over a flash suppressor.

It is my understanding that silencers do not alter the damage statistics on sniper rifles in any way.