From my own personal experience I find LA and HA to be very effective at cert gaining. Vehicles only account for about 2% of my total kills. I don't have an outrageous K/D ratio but my kills per hour is pretty good playing almost exclusively infantry. I think it comes down to playstyle, not everything will be effective or ineffective for everyone.
Using the jump jets and moving constantly makes it very difficult for people to land head shots, nanoweave 5 also helps. That's why I recommend the shotguns or a hipfire carbine with advanced laser. If you use weapons that fire effectively without aiming down sights you will be able to move more freely than your opponent evading some of their bullets. You take three penalties when you aim down sights. First your mouse sensitivity is reduced so it takes more mouse movement to track a target. Second your movement speed is also reduced which makes you an easier target. Lastly, and the least significant, is the delay before the sights come up (never timed it but its probably like .2 or .3 seconds) if you wait for that delay before firing then your opponent could have a bullet advantage on you. The bonus is obviously increased accuracy. I'm not saying that you shouldn't ADS just that it's not always the best option. A side note most of the fire in the video was coming from either long range (non-snipers) or pistols. The only person who had an automatic weapon at mid range was the one who scored the kill.
It's all about your playstyle. Going to face the enemy head on, in confined areas? Heavy Assault. Going to exploit the terrain, use vantage points and surprise attacks? Light Assault. A good assault player will switch between Heavy Assault and Light Assault depending on the circumstances. Playing only one class can be quite troubling.
I would think heavy assaults would be useful, though not optimal, in all situations. Light Assault seems more gimmicky, unless you have everything upgraded and thus can always find a ridiculous position to shoot from. I don't know from all the 1337 youtube vids of light assaults I see, its either them sniping from good vantage points in open ground, or in bases its them finding really good vantage points to duck and weave in the fight and rack up a bunch of kills.
Yes, it's true the Heavy Assault is slightly better overral/the better option if you were going to play one class in particular, but I didn't feel like making my post overly long And yeah, the Light Assault is all about being gimmicky. But, a Light Assault's worst enemy is a person who actually looks up. All it takes is a single person to look up at the roofs/vantage points to end up killing most of the light assaults. From a personal experience, I've actually found it to be more safer to hunt Light Assaults than trying to face the enemy head on, they never expect to be the hunted!
Man I just made a new LA char and had amazing first drop run. Camping a tree right on top of VS assault I ran out of ammo for the carbine, then I ran out of ammo for the pistol, obviously no grenades... and I managed to get the **** out of here in one piece in the end. Knifing some inf straggler along the way too. Ended up 20:1. Bloody claymores. The moral of this story is: camp a tree.
I had something similar happen the other day at the Esamir tech plant. I drop in and see another LA who didn't see me, I follow him but my Jet decides to call quits mid air so I get stuck on a piece of pipe (outer buildings). A bit annoyed I decide to look around and right below me there's a bunch of Vanu just sitting there taking cover n firing at an NC zerg. I'm sitting there with my silenced GD7 picking them off one by one. Lovely cause they kept comming back... Than I ran out of ammo and asked myself why oh, f'ing why I hadn't purchased the Lvl2 Ammo Belt yet... Went on a spree with pistol ran out of ammo, threw a grenade bam they're dead... Last resort C4 afterwards I'm sitting their still looking at them going wondering how I was still alive and decided to just suicide run, rush in knife several of them from behind and finally I die to a Rocket in the face (Funny thing being he also whispered me for hacking since he got weapons locked while there were about 6 other Vanu standing ontop of him)
