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I have been looking at these damage charts of the main weapons in Battlefield 3. I am also using this Battlefield 3 stats provider, which is much superior to the built-in one that is provided by DICE. When I confront both data, a question comes up: how is it possible that some people have attained headshot ranges of around 4000 m (see here), if the most powerful weapon, the M98B, is uncapable of firing beyond 3250 m?

In addition, and from my in-game experience, attaining a headshot at 500 m is hard. I imagine that attaining a 1000 m headshot would be almost impossible, since the enemy soldier would be practically (if not totally) invisible. 4000 m sounds impossible to me.

Any ideas? Is this a result of plain fluke? Was this achieved with a different kind of weapon I am missing?

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  • Are there even 4km wide maps? Maybe they just hacked the data.
    – Etienne de Martel
    Jan 10, 2012 at 19:13
  • Echoing @EtiennedeMartel, are there a ton of people with a "4000 m kill" then a more normal distribution down near 500-1000 m?
    – Nick T
    Jan 10, 2012 at 19:32

3 Answers 3

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I and my friend recently were working on this. We were amazed by 4km too, so we tried to accomplish something close to that on my friend's friend's closed server, with special utility, which tells the distance to a particular player.

What we've found out:

  • There are no maps with 4km wide combat area, however you can get such extreme distance by sitting in an air vehicle (attack or transport heli).

  • The widest air space with two players being able to be in line of sight of each other has Caspian Border, when you are sitting in two "parked" attack helis on the opposite mountain ridges (we were trying on 4010 meters, but I think there are available at least 100 additional meters). The problem was that when you exit to snipe your bro, you have 10 seconds to do that, half-transparent screen with a countdown ticking in the middle and shaking camera, if you are standing or crouching. It's impossible to make this shot without advanced aim-bot or a dozen of four-leaf clovers in your pocket.

  • The best map to get 3km+ shot is Operation Firestorm. Firstly, both teams have their own transport heli, so snipers don't have to get out of it to shoot, they can sit as a 4th or 5th passenger. Secondly, it's very easy to get to the position - just fly to the end of the only road and park there sideways. Thirdly, the distance is somewhere around 3700 meters, I don't remember the exact number (slightly less than 4km, but it will still get you to the top-10). However, it's extremely hard to make. We've spent half an hour trying to get it done, with constant ammo-supply and no outer interference, but no success. There were two-three suppression-effects though.

This is all we've got. Some information may be inaccurate, but, unfortunately, we were doing this for ourselves and I don't have time to repeat the experiment.

P.S. Result of our research:

  • 95 shots out of top-100 were undoubtedly farmed and/or cheated.

  • You have to be considerably lucky OR to have a 10K x 5K resolution on a 100" wide monitor OR to have cheats enabled to make this shot.

  • Don't try to do that. Maybe you'll get your 3.5km, but your SPM and accuracy of M98B will drastically go down; isn't worth it, IMHO.

  • M98B has definitely longer range than 3250m, because we both have seen rounds hitting the ground in front of the heli, but I'm confused here, because Symthic charts were taken from the game files. The only hope is that these numbers mean something else.

  • With 12x ballistic scope your target will be almost at the bottom of the picture, where the vertical line is very thick, so you'll be aiming for the reflection, not the enemy himself.

  • Since there are no horizontal marks to remember previous shot, it's really hard to adjust your fire. I think a caliper glued to the screen would be a good idea, I'll try it out some day.

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  • Many thanks; this is an incredibly complete and detailed answer.
    – CesarGon
    Jan 10, 2012 at 21:54
  • This is excellent! Thanks for contributing this answer.
    – agent86
    Jan 11, 2012 at 0:36
  • @MyFaJoArCo: By the way, could you actually see the enemy soldier you were firing at from 3700 m away while you were running your tests? Just out of curiosity!
    – CesarGon
    Jan 11, 2012 at 1:09
  • @CesarGon Not on 1080p :) Reflection of the scope is very clear though. Actually, I think I couldn't see the other enemy because of it. I've updated the answer.
    – Alec Mev
    Jan 11, 2012 at 3:24
  • What's this utility for measuring distance to player? Can it display distance to the enemy closest to your reticle when aiming down the scope?I'm using objective points to evaluate angle at which I should shoot and it works quite well after practice, but I'm interested in something more precise (to shoot heads instead of legs, etc.). I generally take that in a ballistic scope first horizontal line under the reticle is ~330m, second is ~750 and such.
    – farnoy
    Jan 31, 2012 at 2:19
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Apparently, the longest headshot does not have to be longest marksman headshot.

So actually quite simple technique to achieve that, used by boosters, is:

  1. spawn as engineer on big fly-map
  2. go with heli to one corner of the map
  3. deploy EOD bot
  4. drive it all the way to the other corner
  5. use repair tool on enemy's head

Not sure if there would be any chance of getting that done in honest game play, although you'd probably could try with some noob sniper-campers. This however is mostly done by boosters with their boosting partner on opposite team.

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  • Thank you. I imagined you could do something like this, but it didn't occur to me that the EOD bot was it.
    – CesarGon
    Jan 24, 2012 at 3:00
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Getting around 1000m is pretty easy with the M98B, Bipod, and Ballistic scope. Especially when there are 4 snipers on the Caspian Border tower. Today I got 8 1030-1064m headshots, 5 of which were against the same guy who just would learn that at that distance the SV98 is almost useless, albeit his shots were just reaching my sides, it seems that if you go too far beyond your rifles max range it isn't as accurate

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