The UAV

Once upon a time I wrote the following:  "[The UAV] dies in three hits, and the crazy long-distance accuracy of almost every class means you're under fire immediately upon takeoff.  The hellfire missile doesn't have a big explosion radius and reloads every 25 seconds.  The altfire machine gun is hard to aim on the move, which you need to do at all times because you die if a stiff breeze hits the UAV.  A safe vertical distance is too far away for active spotting.  Nobody ever does anything useful with the UAV."

I'd like to take this back, after some more practice and experimentation, and after the first official time I was accused of hacking because I completely dominated a Harvest Day rush (and won the Ace pin, no less, with the UAV).  My major complaints about the UAV centered around the fact that there's a maximum spotting distance.  Even if you see dudes, if you're 100+ meters away you can't hit Q and mark them.  Similarly it was very hard to aim the hellfire outside of that range.  This meant you had to bring the UAV close to enemy positions, which always resulted in instantaneous death.

Then I discovered V-OPTIC.  Holyfuckingshitballs.  It essentially doubles your camera zoom, which means you can spot and aim with precision while hovering over your own deployment base instead of the objective zone.  It keeps you far enough away from the action that most of the time the opposing team can't even find you, and when they do it takes minimal strafing to avoid the scatterspray gunfire.

And then, on top of this, last night happened.  I don't know if I was playing on a modded server or if there was a glitch or if this was normal, but on Harvest Day the UAV seemed to have extra altitude boundaries, and it was 1-shotting tanks.  Undamaged tanks, one hellfire from above, BOOM.  From hovering over the UAV station itself.  Nothing was safe.  Stationary AT, BOOM.  Snipers in the 3-story building, DEAD.  Creeping engineers in the hay, SPLAT.  I was called cheap, cheap-ass, noob, hacker, lame, camper.  First time I've ever seen someone call the UAV overpowered or cheap.  (Which, incidentally, it probably was.)

Looking forward to testing again tonight on Harvest Day to see if it's just something special about that map, or if I ran into a bizarre server mod or glitch.  Anyway, highly recommend the UAV for helping your team win rush matches.  It eliminates stationary weaponry in one click, spots hiding flankers so your team doesn't die on approach, and eats tanks for breakfast.  Use V-OPTIC.