Category: Gaming

Thoughts from end of July/early August.
If you are looking for a definitive yes/no on the foregrip here it is: Use it on the AEK but none of the other popular assault rifles. That is basically it. If you run it on your M16 or M416 you are making yourself less effective as they lack horizontal recoil and the foregrip adds spread.

Update for June Patch / DLC. Some quick patch note comments.
Reduced the inaccuracy added when in suppression. There is still an enhanced suppression compared to the initial state in the game, but the effect is now less than it was in the last patch

• Slightly decreased the foregrip aimed accuracy penalty on the M4A1 to bring it in line with other guns.
• Slightly increased the foregrip aimed accuracy penalty on the SCAR-H to bring it in line with other guns.

I was not aware of specific “buggy” numbers so these changes are interesting. This means that currently (before the june patch / DLC) foregrips may have been useful on the SACR-H and M4A1!

• F2000 foregrip accuracy penalty reduced and recoil reduction bonus increased.
• AEK971 foregrip recoil reduction bonus increased.
• SG553 foregrip recoil reduction bonus increased.
• FAMAS foregrip recoil reduction bonus increased.

Pre-patch the AEK is the only assault weapon possibly worth using the foregrip on. I feel that these changes will make the AEK good with the foregrip, rather than just sitting the fence. Keeping in mind the foregrip mechanics of -horizontal recoil +spread, the other weapons listed above will still be less than spectacular. This is conjecture at this point as the patch is not yet available, however based on the fact that the current FAMAS/F2000 +spread is much larger than the recoil reduction, it is probably safe to assume that the reduction buff will not be large enough to offset this. However for the FAMAS it hinges on..

• Reduced some of the vertical recoil and zoomed accuracy penalties added to the FAMAS in the previous update.

Depending on this change, the foregrip may become useful on the FAMAS once more.

Seems like you need close to 100 kills with a weapon before you have enough decent attachments to become a little bit more competitive.

No. I run AEK with bipod (just to fill the slot, not because I use it often), iron sights and flash suppressor. Flash suppressor could be replaced with heavy barrel or a silencer without many issues. You unlock heavy barrel at a whopping 20 kills. My basic setup would be working happily after 20 kills, as I mentioned before the bipod is not required and I only take it because I can, it is occasionally useful. So 20-40 kills if you want a sight.

If you hate ironsights and would rather run a scope you get a low zoom very early and either the US/RU red dot depending on the gun shortly after. If you need a very specific sight to perform well I look at how you play and why it works and see if you can translate this to other sights.

Before the patch I would have said that 100ish is correct because foregrip was pro and comes later.

Which leads to an important question: Should I use the foregrip after the most recent Battlefield 3 patch?

To which would be a resounding no. At least for assault and engineer weapons. You should also learn how to aim and fix the Battlefield 3 mouse acceleration.

Sure there are other sites that will give you numbers and back these up with statistics up with spread and recoil. They will then go to say it could be beneficial to use a foregrip on a few weapons – offset with other attachments. They will then leave selection in the readers court. By not forcing a view on readers I assume the authors of these articles are trying to be PC, or at the very least covering their asses in case their math is wrong, or that the trade offs leave the gun similar to the unmodified version.

Foregrip Before the Patch

Before the last patch the foregrip had a global flat horizontal recoil percentage reduction. This was good because for some guns it removed a good % of nothing recoil and for others it removed a good percentage of a lot, but not all recoil. The answer to should I use a foregrip was easy. The answer was yes unless you wanted to run a bipod on an LMG, but even then the global reduction was quite good and probably worth using over a bipod. Plus before the patch the bipod was not quite as useful as it is now. The pre-patch foregrip turned some of the weapons into freaking laser beams, and made me question if Dice had implemented their.. vision, for lack of a better word, correctly. At the time I did not know that the foregrip was a global reduction, just that it was awesome and that you should use it!

Why is a flat global reduction bad? Because some of the weapons were balanced to be used without a foregrip – adding one reduced the horizontal recoil to the point it was non-existent. For others it decreased it enough that the weapon became usable.

The Foregrip after the patch

Now the foregrip applys a different amount of horizontal recoil adjustment based on the weapon it is used on. This number is still decent across the board and if it were the only change then it would probably still be the go-to attachment for its slot, but only because there is little choice here.

The biggest problem with the foregrip and why you should not use it is because it adds spread.

Battlefield 3 gun mechanics 101 and the foregrip

A quick recap on gun mechanics. Till now I have mentioned recoil only. This is easy. You shoot and the weapon kicks. Easy to understand and in game it is easy to see how to control it – if you are spraying you simply aim down slightly to bring the weapon back to where you want it. Bit of interesting info: the first shot kicks more than the consecutive shots, but the first shot goes where you aim it unless the item is heavily affected by spread. This first bullet kick makes bursting less good than other ADS titles.

The second mechanic is spread. This is a completely random addition on top of recoil. Your first shot will go where you point it, provided the weapon does not have an assload of spread. If you are suppressed you receive additional recoil and spread. If you have a high amount of spread the first bullet does not go where you want it! It might appear to leave the gun at a very alarming angle, not at all out the front of the barrel.

Back to the Foregrip after the patch

So should you use it? No, not really. It adds a random, completely uncontrollable aspect to your weapon. Some players say to use a heavy barrel with a foregrip. Ok? The heavy barrel reduces spread when aiming down the sights but adds vertical recoil. The foregrip removes horizontal recoil and adds spread. The heavy barrel does not balance out a foregrip. True one removes spread and the other adds it – cancelling each other out? At the same time one reduces horizontal recoil and the other adds vertical recoil. No cancelling there at all. This is ignoring the other unrelated benefits of heavy barrel.

You should not use the foregrip because it adds randomness to every shot you fire. At least with the heavy barrel you can be selective and only ADS, knowing the hip firing incurs a penalty. The foregrip on the other hand always has a penalty.

To top it off each weapon has a different reduction from the foregrip. The popular M16A3 receives very little in the way of benefit from it while the AEK-971, FAMAS and F2000 receive more. But even here the weapons are all over the place and receive different reductions and just because a weapons sprays more does not guarantee that the foregrip will do anything useful.

So in short – don’t add uncontrollable randomness to your weapons. Learn how to control them instead.

Purg writes… Here

I’m not sure if you realise but when you drop and ammo pack, move on, drop another ammo pack, the previous ammo pack disappears after a couple of seconds..?

I read Milans post as “I drop mine at this flag and someone else drops it at another flag. Now the team has ammo at two points!”. I think this works reasonably well for ammo since it is not required as frequently as health in Battle field 3. On the rare occasion I play support this is what I do. Either at a flag or at a specific point that has lots of combat. For example if we are attacking Gas Station from Hilltop on Caspian I try to leave some in the buildings just before Gas Station so anyone else coming through there can ammo up.

I have players run up to me asking for health frequently in BF3. I drop packs whenever the cool down is up but I move around all the time so the chance of it being where I am is rather low. People get annoyed and unload their weapon at me if I don’t comply instantly with their demands. There is a health pack 10 feet behind me that I just dropped. Of course I drop another when available.. but the 5 seconds wait was too long for them. Says a lot for the mentality of the Battlefield 3 pub player.

I think it goes both ways. Yes people don’t drop health or ammo, but at the same time walking 20m to get ammo is probably going to work better than annoying someone for it given that.. people don’t drop it. Apparently. I tend to see a few medpacks and an ammo box at a flag, so think the problem quite often lies with the recipient rather than the donor.

What to do?

There are really only two options here.

• Drop ammo at one point on the battlefield and leave it
• Forever drop when poeple ask/when the cool down is up/when it is needed

Dropping when the cool down is up or when asked/needed seems to be the most obvious way to go. I mainly play assault and it is how I operate the majority of the time. Depending on your play style you need to heal yourself frequently so leaving a health pack lying around somewhere else is not going to be too useful. On the flip side if you have just finished an encounter you do not always need to heal up too 100% straight away. The other classes operate just fine without this crutch, as does assault when you rock an M320 or M26.

Less required by far is ammo. I think most pub players (myself included) are not good enough to run out of ammo on the assault rifles or carbines, execpt in rare situations. Even fairly good players run around a 1-1 KDR, so will usually die before using their ammo, even without ammo specialisation. Players should learn to use the map to find ammo.

If you plan to drop when possible I suggest a little more caution than I have used in the past. I have many deaths from running into firefights, dropping ammo and then dying because I have a health pack in my hands. You have been warned!

Dropping at a specific point that requires ammo or health frequently. This one is much trickier and depends entierly on the map and how the map is being played. Examples of where I would do this almost always is metro and bazaar. If you decide to take this route know that some people will be annoyed at you for not complying with their demands.

You can keep tabs on your ammo pack by watching points gained from resupplies. One problem with this method is the pack can be destroyed while you are on the other side of the map and cannot monitor it. For this method to be effective you have to watch the flow of the battle and points gained from resupplies. If you are playing metro and leave your ammo box somewhere near escalators and your team pushes past, you need to find a new high traffic area and more it accordingly. Keeping your ammo pack back from the front line/behind a wall works well as it protects it and stops it being destroyed by random fire. It may result is less quick points but you will have to babysit it less.

Keeping in mind where grenades/explosives/RPGs can go when dropping your specific point ammo pack is a good idea. The maps and places you want to utilise this method in Battlefield 3 tend to be quite spammy. Not dropping near walls that receive RPGs/M320s frequently is a good idea.

JoeKerr writes… here

Jets are supposed to be super-fast, intimidating bits of machinery

…so do you want them to be awesome or not?

I want jets to be balanced. I think part of the balance problem stems from Dice wanting non-infantry equipment to be significantly more durable and intimidating than infantry, whereas I think it should be simply like picking up another weapon.

Jets should be quick and easy to destroy – if your load out suits –  just like it is quick and easy to kill another infantry player. This should be especially true on instant vehicle spawn servers. By the same token Jets should destroy other things quickly, which they apparently already do. Choppers, other jets and even ground targets melt before them.

This is not to say Battlefield 3 jets should be useless, or die when looked at, and a good pilot should be an asset that contributes to the overall game. Much the same way a good infantry player can turn the tide and help out significantly. There should be solid counters that are easily deployed by infantry and not limited to other vehicles or jets.

The current incarnation does not do this, it is extremely difficult to shoot down a jet as a non-jet, non-AA unit. The Whirlpool conversation on this topic continues along the lines that mobile AA and base AA is ok for killing aircraft. Other jets are also ok for killing jets. Infantry are pretty useless for killing jets.

I am not here to offer a balance solution because really, I don’t care and if jets (and even choppers) were removed my game would be relatively unaffected. This post is just here to say that jets should not be awesome and intimidating bits of high-speed machinery. They should be simply another facet of the game, that is balanced and similar to picking up another weapon in a more traditional FPS. Not similar to picking up quad damage plus invulnerability.

NussBuster writes… here

Yes, very good, I’ll be happy when they are. As it is they’re _any speed you want_, intimidating bits of machinery.

Sums it up quite well. I think the any speed is a dig at externally binding heavy brake.

Mav_au said..

Too old for fast paced 😛

.. somewhere in this thread.

The comment was made in relation to the new Tribes beta. I would say quake is fast paced.

Battlefield 3 is also fast paced, but in a different way. A more, twitchy way, which is funny because the Battlefield crowd on Whirlpool seem to think that “twitch” games are things like quake, COD (roll them together 🙁 ) and counter strike.

Checkout this random duel on my all time favorite map. Two of the best US players. Checkout 1:25ish. You don’t get quality like that in battlefield, or any current FPS for that matter! 😛

Is it fast paced? Sort of. Each encounter is significantly longer than a general encounter in Battlefield 3.

Here is an example of good Battlefield 3 infantry. Courtesy of the clanbase comp the Australian team won. I guess the closest you can get to the top quake players in the previous video.

Notice how all the encounters are very short. Short to the point that it is a “player who reacts first, wins” type deal. Compare that to the previous quake video. A few spawn kills may go that way, but generally there is a lot of tactics and drawn out encounters involved in converting each point. Primarily note the time of the first death, quite a while after the players have seen each other.

The tactics involved in the ongoing game for quake are extremely apparent. Back and forth, cutting the other player off, predicting movement and so on. This is not apparent at all in the Battlefield 3 video. In the Battlefield 3 videos defense it is a kill compilation so somewhat hard to comment on in that regard, but in my experience simply reacting first and putting fire on the target will win more often than not.

Being old and your reflexes getting slower is ok. Picking a game like Battlefield 3 over something like quake is a mistake because of age. If anything you would stand a better chance of playing an even game in quake. You will lack reflex time but can make up for it in other ways. In battlefield, and most of the current crop of FPS this is not the case. Reflex is all.

I might expand on this later, but for now this is it.