Feedback after 70+ hours in beta from a long time BF player

Now that the beta is over I figured I'd share my feedback that i've been collecting over both weekends. Steam clocks me in at 75 hours spent in the beta, the vast majority of it infantry and mostly played on Breakthrough, but I did give all vehicles at least a quick try, played some of the other game modes a bit, and did all the challenges. I’ve been playing since BF1942 and every game since. Loved my time with the beta and will absolutely be playing day 1 despite all the negative feedback that is about to follow. This list is mostly the things I dislike or think need work. I did put a few positives here and there on major things I wanted to touch on. I tried not to list things that I know are changing.

Gunplay / Weapons

Gunplay was great, best since BF3. Recoil felt good, bloom was manageable, but I wouldn’t be upset with a slight reduction in bloom (though I also wouldn’t mind if it shipped as in the beta).
Snipers are too oppressive. Sweet spot mechanic + fatal headshot is too much. Sweet spot should be removed. Fatal headshot at least requires some sniping skill, unlike sweet spot.
Bring back BF4-style suppression: stronger with LMGs, lighter with other weapons. Suppression should also heavily affect high-zoom scopes (anything above 4X). With snipers being so strong, suppression has never been more needed.
Pistol is useless, needs a buff. Most of the time I’d rather knife than use it.
Weapon optic reticles look awful and lifeless. DICE should go back and look at BF3 reticles. BF3 got the color, opacity, and fuzziness of the optic reticles dead on.
Smoke grenades could use a small radius buff (maybe a biased medic/PTFO player take).
All guns in the same class should have all optics of the other guns in their class. It was really dumb to see the NVO, for example, not be able to use the raised red dot.

Vehicles

Tanks/IFVs: sluggish acceleration/braking, turrets turn too slowly. Splash damage on tank shells is tiny. Gunner was very strong on both tank and IFV — hope it doesn’t get nerfed.
Jets: limited maneuverability, turn radius too wide. Bombs seemed very strong and guns shredded anything in the air maybe a little too easily (only played 1 jet game so I maybe didn’t get the best experience).
Helicopters: clunky handling, need better responsiveness and maneuverability. Weapons did feel very strong though.

Really wasn’t impressed with the vehicles, especially the tank — all of them are pretty terrible to drive.

Maps (mostly Breakthrough perspective)

New York: too small, too many sightlines. Needs a rework — legitimately one of the worst BF maps ever made. Final Breakthrough point is absolutely impossible to defend. Would like to see the parking garage be a second point in the final sector for breakthrough.
Cairo: fun map, though it could maybe use a tiny bit more verticality (like the roof just before the 2nd Breakthrough point). The final point feels bad for both attackers and defenders.
Liberation Peak: grew on me the more I played, feels like a BFBC2 map. Attackers could use more cover in Breakthrough; helicopters should be available after the 1st point.
Iberian Offensive (only Conquest): fun but hilariously one-sided for Pax. Really want to see how it plays on Breakthrough.

Overall, besides NYC, I liked the maps a good bit and I can’t wait to see the larger maps. This is a massive step up from 2042's maps.

Classes / Gadgets

Assault: biggest disappointment. Signature gadget is useless, weapon sling + shotguns is frustrating, and double grenade launcher spam is cancer (especially with how OP the fire nade is). Even with a respawn beacon, the class would still feel wrong for Battlefield. Both Recon and new Support do a better job on the front lines for pushing/anti-infantry. Removing Medic from Assault is a massive mistake.
Support: really dislike Medic and Support being combined. The roles of frontline medic and support clash, and it will only get worse once all launch gadgets are available. Shield is buggy — half the time it disappears from inventory without deploying. LMGs are a poor fit for frontline medics. Losing ARs pushed me into open role queues, even though I prefer closed ones.
Recon: stacked toolkit (TUGS, C4, UAV, OP sniping perks). Even without the respawn beacon, it’s one of the strongest Recon classes Battlefield has ever had. Although it has powerful sniper tools, it actually shines equally in close range thanks to strong information-gathering tools and throwable C4 + M4A1. C4 throwing range needs a big reduction.
Engineer: anti-vehicle role is strong as ever, but I’d like to see a tiny bit of kit that can be used for both anti-vehicle and anti-infantry utility, especially with this game being so infantry-focused. Giving them C4 (possibly replacing a launcher so they can’t have both) would help. Repair tool also feels slightly too strong.
Classes look too similar with only Recon standing out slightly. In BF3/4 you could tell even from pretty far which classes were what. Classes need to look more unique from each other — like giving Engineer back his hat instead of a helmet.

Overall, I’d love to see DICE drop the idea of Assault not being a medic. BF2142/3/4 had classes perfected and there was no reason to change it. Assault is awful now (besides OP nade spam), and class roles are even more muddled with the respawn beacon moving from Recon to Assault. If I could make one change from the beta to launch, it would be making Assault the medic again, just like BF2142/3/4.

Score based on how much HP% we revived a teammate to should be a thing, just like BF4.
Grenade indicator is awful — should be reworked so it doesn’t blend in as easily.
Scoreboard should show revives, heals, resupplies, and repairs just like 2042 (one of the very few things 2042 got right).
Throw the entire main menu UI in the trash — dear god, when did this HULU crap become a thing FPS games used???
When standing on a teammate’s resupply box I don’t need 5+ notifications that they are resupplying me almost in the middle of my screen. One every once in a while will do just fine.
Enable compass by default. No reason it should be off by default.

Miscellaneous Feedback

HP regen is too fast.
The ammo/HP box feels like it resupplies a little too slowly for gadgets and grenades. Would be nice if, say, you’ve already regenerated over half of whatever you are waiting for, you could leave the radius and still get a gadget/nade resupply. That, or speed it up a tiny bit.
Auto-spotting has to go on everything but Recon. Everyone else should have to manually spot.
Server browser has never been more needed. My queue times alone were 3–5 minutes, and with a full squad were between 4–7 minutes — ridiculously unacceptable.
Closed vs open classes: as a long-time BF fan I would rather closed, but locking away ARs from Medic was unacceptable to me and pushed me into the open queues.
Grenade throw is way too fast — should have to equip and pull the pin, not the quick throw we have now.
The 2nd weekend felt like it had SBMM — curious what others think about this.

Bugs

Terrain collision is terrible — bouncing off rocks, sliding off them, or being launched into the air. Extremely annoying.
Dying mid-air or against terrain often sends bodies flying, which is frustrating when trying to revive.
Bloom bug uncovered by Exclusive Ace needs to be fixed before launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXURdayG57k
Can’t revive people clipped in rubble with paddles sometimes (though dragging still works).
Invisible walls after destruction are frustrating.
The prompt to tell someone you are coming to revive them was very buggy and didn’t work the majority of the time.