Sonic Prestigeboom, Part 2: Early Levels

I prestiged today, so I've kind of had experience and prestiging on the brain. That said, since I'm going through it right now, I figure that this is a good time to talk about the very early levels in a prestige. The chart I'm working from is after the jump.

Now, my least favorite part of a prestige is levels 1-3. I hate not being able to create my own classes. It takes 3,100 experience to get out of this hole, so what are the best ways to do it? I've come across two, more or less:

• Use First Recon, with its UMP45 Rapid Fire, and wreck face.
• Use Overwatch, with its M60 Red Dot/Grip, and wreck face.

Now, while these strategies may seem superficially similar, I find First Recon a lot hard to wreck face with since you have no pro perks, questionable long range capabilities, and you're rocking assault killstreaks. You pretty much have to hope for a lucky care package, or be pro enough to get a Reaper while pretty seriously handicapped, if you want to finish levels 1-3 off in just a game or two. Of course, if you CAN pull that off, your first Reaper kill will also get you an Assault Drone, so 31 kills in a single game is a definite possibility.

I am not able to do that, so I tend to go for Overwatch. LMGs with Grip are surprisingly good at range; I think they're competitive with any assault rifle except the MK14 and Type 95. More importantly, Overwatch also is the only default class which uses Support killstreaks, and it even has the Recon Drone! So, if you can get 12 kills (1,200 exp) and 10 tagged assists (1,200 xp), the 700 exp. from your killstreak rewards (100 CUAV + 350 Recon Drone + 250 Remote Sentry) will get you to 3,100 experience and Create-a-Class in a single game. Not too shabby.

Of course, the real moral of this story is how insanely good the Recon Drone is for generating score if your team can start a halfway decent spawn trap, but that's a story for another time.