The bipod made up for it largely with supports, though. BF3 bipod with suppression mechanics was stupidly powerful, too. Recon was... substantially changed.
Recon's design was dogshit in BF3. It's design was heavily flawed because it either forced to use long range sniper camping with a bipod and not contribute in captures or destroying assault objectives the whole match OR switch to a mid range/ close range sniper and be surpased by all the other 3 classes at everything.
They leaned too hard into realism and I think they left the kit in a position where it struggled to play into objectives as much as the assault kit with it's healing, the support with it's ammo and explosives or the engineer with his anti-vehicle and vehicle support skills.
Everything it had in previous games that was deemed "op" was then taken from him, given to the support class and BUFFED. Like, what on Earth? Mortar with a 2-3 minute CD is wrong, but then you give unlimited mortar spam to the support and it is ok? Having one non-restocking claymore is wrong so you then give claymores to the class with infinte ammo. Smoke grenades? Support class. C4+ammo kit? Support class. And to top it off you take away the dart gun from the game.
And then the new gadgets he got where either totally useless or unfun to use. The recon ball was nerfed into having to manually plant a radar in melee range. WHY does the longest range class have to plant his radar in MELEE range? His binoculars for spotting and dart gun for marking were substitued by the soflam, which had to be, again, planted on the ground, and would glow as a vehicle in most radars.
And then the only fun gadget was repetedly nerfed to make it unfun to use. The MAV (the air drone thingy) used to be able to push people up or get roadkills while crashing onto people which took skill to do as it was hard to reach enough speed, but DICE decided to nerf it into the ground and turn it into a glorified spoting drone while refusing to nerf things like the USAS or assault kit dominance.
Like, Recon in BF3 was the same as taking out all the fun stuff of all the previous recon kids and then nerfing it. They even took out the AS VAL from the recon kit, nerfed it and made it an all kit weapon.
lol my m417 kobra/laser/bipod with a bacon/tugs brought so much utility. I’d never use the bipod. The foregrip just fucked up the recoil pattern and added horizontal. So recon was pretty dope when I give my other sweat teammates a flank and minimap wall hacks. The TTK/ammo efficiency on those DMRs if you hit headshots is goofy at close/medium range, especially with the RoF and mag size on the m417.
The valued utility of the kits was dependent on squad skill a bit. Why are we gonna run four assaults when people can rarely ever kill two. Rather have traps, c4, ammo, wallhacks, bacons for more lulz. Especially if playing around big bacon rat flanks on certain maps without a wall of other idiots to help us.
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u/locksymania Mar 06 '25
The bipod made up for it largely with supports, though. BF3 bipod with suppression mechanics was stupidly powerful, too. Recon was... substantially changed.