Grinded Recon for almost 3hrs last night in order to unlock the Designated Marksman Rifles for use for all classes. The starting bolt-action rifle + iron sights (I hate scope glint) + CQB combat = no fun at all
Also, for NVIDIA users, make sure you download the Game Ready Driver. Otherwise you will get flickering disco-coloured textures on some panels. So, imagine dealing with that on top of what I described above. No bueno
Despite the 100-damage up to 12m according to Symthic, I don't think I ever won a heads-up 1v1 CQB fight against AK-12s and even PDWs, unless it was by a BS lucky headshot. Even sneaking up behind a squad is no guarantee to get a kill; I often found myself just switching to pistol to finish people off. At the end of the night, out of the 32 kills I made as a Recon on foot, the P226 pistol accounted for 2 more kills than the 100-damage rifle
Some of those, I bet, were even the "kill assist counts as kill" ones.
Anyways, I don't know how those BF3 M40A3 "aggressive recons" do it, but I got what I needed so I'm glad that's over with. Ended up just capping flags on foot and throwing motion sensors everywhere
Now I can go back to playing "whichever class will help the squad," mostly as a combat medic.
Looks like no more platoons in BF4, but I will still rock the [FG] tag if that's what we're doing.