Sonic Prestigeboom, Part 5: Diversity and Specialist

I'm special

You may have noticed a recurring theme in this series: completing challenges is very important to prestiging quickly. Let's do some arithmetic after the jump.
I'm going to pick on JiaJohn a little in this post because his playstyle, while hugely effective for killing enemies and winning games, is very, very narrow. For a brief description, he uses the ACR pretty much exclusively, plays mainly TDM and Kill Confirmed, and shoots down everything in the sky with his Stinger. Despite him having a higher K/D and score per minute than I do, I'm more than a prestige ahead of him. So, how does that work? Well, let's add up the challenges he completes over the first, say, 1500 kills of a prestige:

• ACR 6.8 Marksman I-VIII for 48,250.
• ACR 6.8 Expert I-V for 19,000
• ACR 6.8 Silencer for 750
• ACR 6.8 Extended Mags for 1,000
• ACR 6.8 Red Dot for 1,000

• Sleight of Hand Pro for 29,000
• Quickdraw Pro for 29,000
• Assassin Pro for 29,000
• Stalker Pro for 29,000
• SitRep Pro for 29,000

•  Aerial Assault I-V for 18,250
• Reaping the Rewards I-V for 18,250
•  Raining Death I-V for 18,250

He also gets the assorted "Win this many games" and "Get this many Killcams", etc. challenges, but these are the big ones that you can work toward instead of having to have a combination of stupid opponents and luck. These are also the ones where using a relatively narrow subset of weapons/perks means you're not getting other challenges. All told, those are a pretty respectable 269,750 points from challenges for 1,500 kills, giving him an overall 280 or so experience per kill. It's actually a little higher because I haven't included the points from calling in his killstreaks or Assault Master; let's call it a round 300 per kill.

Now, compare that to someone who divvies up the first 1500 kills in a prestige as follows:

• 350 to Assault Rifle 1
• 350 to Assault Rifle2
• 350 to SMG 1
• 100 to Machine Pistol 1
• 100 to Machine Pistol 2
• 50 to Revolver 1
• 50 to Revolver 2
• 150 with LMG 1

and

• 350 to Sleight of Hand/Quickdraw/Stalker
• 1000 to Scavenger
• 150 to Hardline
• 250 to Assassin
• 350 to Steady Aim
• 350 to Marksman
• 350 to Dead Silence

So that should be enough to

• Get each primary weapon except the LMG to Marksman V for 18250; the LMG gets 8250 for Marksman IV
• Top out each secondary weapon for 15,000 (13,000 for the revolvers)
• And get each perk to to Pro V for 19,000
• As well as getting Hoarding Ammo to VI for 29,000

For a total of 319,000. That ends up being around 310 experience per kill, even ignoring the Expert challenges, weapon attachment challenges, killstreak experience bonuses, etc.

So, the fact that switching your loadout around and completing lots of gun and perk challenges lets you match the entire output of someone who doesn't  is the key here; you can, for example, replace the assault killstreaks with Specialist.

Specialist is important to prestiging quickly for several reasons: first, all the bonuses Specialist gives you make it easier to get kills and points, fueling all the weapon attachment challenges, etc. you're working on. Second, it's another category of challenges which are not particularly difficult to complete. I say that because while getting the 10,000 experience challenges for the AC-130 and Osprey Gunner are quite difficult unless you're supremely skilled, you can switch literally any Specialist killstreak reward to be a 2 point reward. Third, once you earn a perk with Specialist, you can work toward the challenges it has as though you had equipped it normally - rather than having to choose between getting kills toward Sleight of Hand Pro or Hoarding Ammo, you can do both at the same time.

Finally, with Hardline, you get 150 bonus points on the first kill of each streak, as well as for the 3rd, 5th, and 7th, and then 100 for every 2 kills after that - that's 50-75 bonus points per kill. Including the 10,000 point challenges, the most valuable assault killstreaks are the low-level ones like the UAV; these end up being worth about 50 points added to each kill leading up to them. As you go to the higher streaks, the returns diminish until you're getting about 30 points added to each kill leading up to an Osprey Gunner or Juggernaut. This number goes up if you get some kills with the streak, but you need to get a lot of kills out of your killstreak - above and beyond the kills you would be getting while not operating the killstreak - in order to match the bonus experience you'd get from Specialist. This is all assuming that your streaks don't get interrupted and you don't lose out on the higher killstreaks you're working toward - if you get buzzkilled before you get the Cobra you need to get your Reaper and AC-130, each kill in that streak is just worth the basic 100 points.

So, basically, challenges are worth a lot of experience, and Specialist is a reliable way to get a lot of bonus experience. Now, if you play this game for fun instead of to get bigger numbers (though it baffles me why anyone would do that), operating a Reaper or an AC-130 is super fun. But, if you;re interested in prestiging faster, I think Specialist is the way to go.