Yes, it must be complicated, but they have DECADES of stats and a couple of games that had nearly the same weapons.
It's ridiculous. They get it wrong again and again and again.
Whether it's because they mess up the formula themselves (open weapons) or just incompetence or lack of testing or lack of expertise or whatever, it's not really very excusable.
Pretty much every Battlefield has adjustments to how weapons work on a technical level. The way recoil and spread works is quite a bit different from how it was done decades ago. So just because the weapon model is the same, it doesn't mean that the way the weapon works is going to be the same.
Every game is also different in terms of engagement distances. So every game requires its own balance. They can test it all they want, but the community will use weapons in ways that the developers can't necessarily predict. There is no multiplayer FPS game in existence that manages to nail the balance the right away.
DMRs have gone the way of how most games handle shotguns. It’s a fine line and they usually go “better safe than sorry” so they slightly over nerf them to cause no backlash.
Just look at shotguns beta vs now, can’t even remember the last time I got killed by one.
The TTK comparison seems fair to me, both on paper and practice these weapons outperform the DMR TTK on most ranges. The way DMR TTK is you simply cannot miss a single shot ever, while taking careful time aiming also adds to the TTK
Shotguns are honestly fine as they are right now. They drop people quite easily within the ranges that they are supposed to excel at, but are pretty ineffective beyond that. The one exception is slug rounds, which can be used at longer distances, but that's a niche loadout. You'll not find them all that much in Conquest or Escalation, but they are still very much a thing in any of the small map game modes.
DMRs can be separated into two categories, one category is the SVK and the second is all other DMRs. The SVK is great. The TTK in theory is slow, but because it's a 2 shot kill, there's a much bigger chance of you consistently landing the required shots on an opponent. The headshot damage deletes injured people and it can one-shot headshot at close range when you build it for that extra headshot multiplier damage.
The other DMRs generally suffer from the issues that both you and the OP have mentioned. It's not that I disagree with the overall conclusion that the TTK for some DMRs is too high, I specifically disagreed with the way he did the comparison.
In my opinion DMRs don't necessarily need to compete in terms of TTK. It's much more important that you can consistently hit those shots at longer ranges. So like the OP suggests, they should have fast recoil recovery and low spread values.
