Ghost Recon Online: Accuracy, Control and Stability

By the time you have a couple of matches under your belt, I'm pretty sure you would start to wonder...

Just what exactly do these cover bonuses represent?

Well...even though I'm sure that, given your experiences in playing shooter games, you can roughly guess out what these might do already. But perhaps for clarification purposes or just to humor myself, I've decided to perform a tiny test down at the firing range so that there's something to go by.

Accuracy
To find out what exactly does "Accuracy" do to a weapon, I've picked up two "similar" weapons with slightly different Accuracy stats. (Well...not exactly identical of course, but rather stats that I've deemed might affect the outcome were made to be as close to each other as possible.)

Weapon Stats	Effect

From this tiny test, you can roughly see that the effect of accuracy on a weapon is such that the weapon with the better accuracy will actually have a smaller/tighter crosshair.

(As seen by the Accuracy 66 SMG having its bottom-right crosshair not touching the number "3" on the scope while the Accuracy 75 SMG does.)

And as you would all know, the tighter the crosshair, the better your chances of landing a bullet on the target. Hence, in other words, if you prefer mid to long-range fights, where the target size is smaller, you would want to choose a weapon with good accuracy or leverage on the accuracy boost provided by the cover bonus if possible.

If you prefer close range battles, then this stat becomes less important as the target size is usually large enough to cover your entire crosshair and thus your shots will definitely hit.

Control
Since its a no-brainer that this stat has definitely got something to do with the recoil of a weapon, I've decided to pick out two weapons with the same rate of fire and similar accuracy, but vastly different control stat.

For this test, I've reckoned that its pointless to simply reaffirm what's obvious because as a player, it would be impossible for you to not be actively adjusting to the weapon's recoil. Thus, what I did instead was to perform a test whereby I empty an entire clip on full auto fire, all the while trying to steady my sights upon the same spot on a wall.

Weapon Stats	Effect

As you can see from the results, despite having the same rate of fire and similar accuracy, the bullets from these two weapons landed differently on the wall.

(The Control 18 SMG's bullets are more random and spreaded out while the Control 51 SMG's is more tightly packed or concentrated.)

Conclusion?

The control stat becomes of huge importance in short range fights where you will need to fire upon a target in full auto or very rapid bursts.

In semi-auto or when taking single shots, this stat becomes of less importance as the recoil from each shot doesn't stack up like it does when your on burst or full auto mode.

Stability
For "Stability", I had initially thought that its got something to do with how stable your weapon firing would be. But since the control stat took care of that, the next logical candidate would be...yup, that's right...your weapon sway.

And knowing that weapon sway normally becomes more pronounced when using high-powered scopes, I sought to verify this hunch using a Nemesis 50 SV with a 2.5 - 12x scope.

Without +50% Stability	With +50% Stability

From this simple test, you can see that at max zoom, the crosshair fluctuates very wildly without the +50% stability bonus. However, once in cover, the weapon sway becomes nearly unnoticeable, making it that much easier to take a shot.

But like I've said before, a weapon's sway is hardly of consequence in GRO. Unless your aiming at a very small target from afar and using a scope that is above 4x, of which you would then need to squeeze in every little bit of benefit that you can get.

Posted in: Ghost Recon Online