Original Title: Analysis of BF4 gun balance and niches, posted February 8th 2014
Author: 3VerstsNorth
Ok, I’m almost done 
with updating the brute-force tables and wanted to give a sneak peek into how the CR and SA guns rank in their in-game effectivity. In the bigger picture, I played around with an all-in-one visualization of the gun effectivity tables and it turned out quite interesting - and quite informative of the design choices DICE has made with the balance.
So, I’m showing below analyses of T100 values, like in the brute-force thread, but under conditions where the burst size is fixed to 3 shots and the aim is fixed either to middle of the head or to the middle of the torso. After the burst, there is a 100 ms inter-burst interval before the next: this is the same for all guns and because an optimal burst size is not searched for, it’s irrelevant (but included to T100). For guns with special burst-rate-of-fire, this is used.
Given these constraints, the tables below show for each gun (rows) and each distance (columns) the T100 value (mean time taken to achieve 100 damage), optimal attachment combination, and the mean number of bullets spent in getting the kill. All simulation methods, colors, etc. are as in the brute-force thread. Please note that these numbers are derived from numerical simulations including all relevant game-mechanic related factors as completely and correctly as we know of.
Let’s start with a stationary shooter aiming down the sights at torso with perfect recoil compensation (perfect V recoil compensation + compensation of the mean H recoil). The color tells how much faster (green) or slower (red) the gun kills at a given distance in comparison to the mean of all guns. The mean percentage across distances is shown in the second column and the guns are grouped per category and sorted within the groups.
For a moving shooter ADS’d to torso with perfect compensation, the data look like this:
Finally, shooting from the hip changes the picture quite a bit:
Generic summa summarum,
- Some guns consistently top the charts and hence are all-around better than others in their category. This effectivity seems well paired with their difficulty of use.
- ARs are the jack of all trades guns and outshoot others when ADSd both while moving and stationary.
- For a stationary shooter, LMGs are on par with ARs, and with suppression can outshoot them even in competitive settings, albeit situationally.
- If moving, consider stopping before shooting your LMG.
- PDWs own all other guns when shot from hip, carbines come second. PDWs are also effective with longer bursts, which is underestimated here.
If interested, see below for these tables for headshots and shooters with no recoil compensation. All input, critique, comments, and notifications of fuck-ups are welcome.
