This Tuesday Tutorial is brought to you by Kilo Yankee’s number one groupie, KentuckySpaz. As you may recall, Spaz offered a wonderfully detailed breakdown of the different BF3 weapon classes in a previous tutorial. Since then he’s fought the good fight ten-times over the average Kilo Yankee, and returns to provide us with another dollop of knowledge. Spaz’s extensive experience not only shaped him into the hardened virtual soldier that he is today, it has also allowed him to discover the best of the best when it comes to your weapons of choice in BF3.
Assault Rifles:
Best – FAMAS
FAMAS is an abbreviation for Fusil d’Assaut de la Manufacture d’Armes de Some frenchie crap. It is the standard service rifle in the French military. Now I love my country, but if a platoon of French soldiers ever parachutes into DC carrying these, we won’t be eating Freedom Fries for much longer. This thing can out-duel shotguns at short range and pierce your earlobe of choice at medium range. But you probably already know that, since if you’ve played the game for very long, you’ve probably seen this come up on about half of your killcams. The only drawback is an unusually long reload time and unwieldy iron sights to start, but if you unlock it a bit, you’ve unlocked the scythe of the Reaper himself.
Runner-up – AEK-971
Worst – AN-94
No fully automatic firing. Any argument should just stop there, but you might think it would compensate for lacking full automatic capacity with increased accuracy and power. If you thought that, you’d be wrong. If I had a choice between picking up this gun or a nearby rock to throw at an enemy, I’m going with the rock. It wouldn’t even have to be a big rock. That’s how much this thing sucks.
Engineer Carbines:
Best – SCAR-H
This gun is as badass as its name. While a little wild without a foregrip, unlock one, and you’ll start finishing a lot of duels you didn’t start. You’ll also find that you can drop enemies at ranges you didn’t think possible without a sniper rifle. Debatably the best weapon in the game, along with the FAMAS.
Runner-up – A-91
Worst – G36C
This weapon has a G prefix because without one, you wouldn’t think it was a gun. You would think it would be a piss-the-other-guy-off-and-get-you-killed tool, because that would seem to be its natural purpose if you used it.
Support Light Machine Guns:
Best – PKP Pecheneg
The Pecheneg refers to the Pecheneg people, a warlike tribe of Turkic origin who lived in what later became steppes of Southern Russia andUkraine. The PKP is apparently an abbreviation for People Killing Performance, because this gun provides superior performance in killing people. Like all LMGs, it needs a foregrip, but put one on and you can hold your own against assault rifles, or suppress and mow down entire squads. It is also phenomenally accurate for an LMG, and can almost be used as a medium range assault rifle, if you can resist the temptation to unload 200 rounds on somebody. I can’t.
Runner-up – Type 88 LMG
Worst – M240B
This thing recoils more than women do when I ask them out. If you want to actually shoot someone with this gun, ensure that the barrel is inserted into one or more of your enemy’s orifices before you pull the trigger, because otherwise this is going to happen.
Recon Sniper Rifles:
Since real snipers use bolt-action rifles, but semi-automatics are better in smaller maps, I’ve split my recommendations up into each.
Best Bolt-Action: M98B
This thing is probably the most accurate (along with the L-96), but it also has less bullet drop with a suppressor than with other sniper rifles. If you want to lobotomize someone on the other side of the map, this is the gun. The magazine size is small, but you won’t need more than two bullets anyway.
Best Semi-Automatic: QBU-88
The QB weapons are Chinese in origin, and in the QBU-88, I think they’ve been working on a gun that can shoot us from across the ocean. All of the semi-autos have increased bullet drop compared to bolt-actions, but this one shoots with enough velocity to make you think about setting down the bolt-action.
Worst – MK11 MOD 0
This is the favorite weapon of the noob sniper. Not someone who snipes noobs, but a sniper with no experience. The bullet drop on this is terrible after 100 meters, and you won’t actually be able to snipe anything, which is kind of the point of a sniper rifle. I guess you could put an ACOG sight on it and use it at medium range, but you would also have to put a sign on yourself that says “That Guy.”
- KentuckySpaz