When 343 added a seconds-long cool down to performing banshee flips last week, they addressed one of Halo 5’s longest-standing issues: its overpowered banshee.
But I think 343 addressed the problem poorly.
Let me get this out of the way first: I agree that the vanilla h5 banshee was overpowered and needed some sort of nerf; I only have qualms with the way 343 decided to nerf it.
The banshee was the only vehicle in H5 with a meaningful skill curve, aside perhaps from the wraith. Every other vehicle in the game is devoid of interesting mechanics and is simple to drive and aim, meaning the only difference between good and bad users is their ability to keep a safe distance from enemy players.
The banshee’s skill curve centered on its use of flips both to make banshee bombs fly faster and to snap turn (the ability to instantly change direction after a flip).
Adding the flip cool down drastically lowers the skill cap. Without the ability to chain snap turns together with banshee bombs (which the vast majority of players don’t know how to do), the vehicle becomes limited to playing passively.
With the new patch, the banshee can no longer be flown well. Pilots are now forced to fly unintelligently by an arbitrary cool down.
Rather than cutting off the top of the skill curve, 343 should make the banshee harder–but not impossible–to use well.
Time to be constructive though: Here’s some alternative nerfs that I and others have thought of.
Note: I would have preferred 343 adopt all of the changes below rather than implement the cool down nerf.
Remove the banshee’s shields:
The banshee has too much health, and making it drastically weaker would force players into smarter play. There’s no reason pilots should be able to tank a sniper shot (and more) without taking any permanent damage. If it’s not possible to remove the shield, just lower the vehicle’s total health pool. - Make flips consume the boost meter:
I’d recommend that backflips use half the meter and side flips use a quarter of the meter. If the whole meter gets used up, force players to wait until it’s back to 100% before allowing them to boost or flip again. - Drastically reduce red reticle range and bullet magnetism/auto-aim for green bombs:
Again, forcing players to actually be good with the vehicle rather than use the auto aim as a crutch - Allow weapons to maintain lock on through banshee flips:
I don’t think this would be very effective unless 343 gave hydra-level tracking to rockets and fuel rods, but I see it suggested a lot around the community. - Increase the distance at which enemy players can hijack a banshee:
This would go a long way toward punishing pilots for making mistakes. - Let the banshee receive self-inflicted physics damage
This is a no-brainer. I was actually floored when I used the h5 banshee for the first time and found that I couldn’t kill myself–or even damage myself–by flipping into walls etc. Changing this would be another extremely effective way of making sure banshees don’t stay alive so long.I’m not sure whether 343 is even technically capable of implementing some of these suggestions, but I hope they keep them in mind for the Halo 6 banshee rather than keeping the cooldown.
As someone who was a top-tier banshee pilot in h5, it kinda sucks to see them cut the legs out from under the vehicle like this and I hope they’ll reconsider their nerf, if not in H5, then at least in h6.
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> The banshee’s skill curve centered on its use of flips both to make banshee bombs fly faster and to snap turn (the ability to instantly change direction after a flip).
I wouldn’t call that ‘skill’. It seems to me like that’s more similar to abusing mechanics that were not intended.
> - **Remove the banshee’s shields:**The banshee has too much health and making it drastically weaker would force players into smarter play. There’s no reason pilots should be able to tank a sniper shot (and more) without taking any permanent damage. If it’s not possible to remove the shield, just lower the vehicle’s total health pool. - **Make flips consume the boost meter:**I’d recommend that backflips use half the meter and side flips use a quarter of the meter. If the whole meter gets used up, force players to wait until it’s back to 100% before allowing them to boost or flip again. - **Drastically reduce red reticle range and bullet magnetism/auto-aim for green bombs:**Again, forcing players to actually be good with the vehicle rather than use the auto aim as a crutch - **Allow weapons to maintain lock on through banshee flips:**I don’t think this would be very effective unless 343 gave hydra-level tracking to rockets and fuel rods, but I see it suggested a lot around the community.
Yes (never had them in previous games, don’t know why they have them now), yes (but not that much), why is there magnetism on them at all, and YES.
I, however, do believe that there should still be a cooldown on flips and a limitation to when you can use them. Just not quite as strict as 343 made them.
I disagree with being able to spam flips as some sort of skill. There was probably no nerf that all would agree with. Wether it would be tie the flips with the boost or add a cool down time between flips. To me the change makes the need for actual skill needed more so. There wasn’t much skill involved in spamming flip. Now flips have to be timed, you have to use available cover and know where anti aircraft weapons spawn or could to neutralize them. Also maybe after more time and game play either you will get used to it or perhaps they may tweek it a bit more. I would rather they had changed it than left it the way it was that is for sure.
I agree with everyone else here. Smashing the RB button is not skill at all. Tbh it would have been stupid for 343 not to add a cooldown to the flip. I also think 343 should also do the 4 things you listed.
Not to sound harsh or anything, but I’m getting awfully sick of people b****ing that 343 took their crutch away.
I agree with everyone here. The banshee having a cooldown timer was added to fix how overpowered it was. Also, the banshee always had a cooldown timer in every other Halo game.
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> I agree with everyone here. The banshee having a cooldown timer was added to fix how overpowered it was. Also, the banshee always had a cooldown timer in every other Halo game.
Everyone agrees the banshee deserved a nerf. The question isn’t whether the banshee should have been nerfed, it’s how the banshee should have been nerfed.
I think the above nerfs would have effectively re-balanced the banshee without sacrificing the best parts of it.
Also, none of the banshees in any Halo game had a flip cooldown. Go pop in H2, H3, Reach, and H4 and you’ll see you’re just kinda wrong on that point.
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> > 2533274974350131;7:
> > I agree with everyone here. The banshee having a cooldown timer was added to fix how overpowered it was. Also, the banshee always had a cooldown timer in every other Halo game.
>
> Everyone agrees the banshee deserved a nerf. The question isn’t whether the banshee should have been nerfed, it’s how the banshee should have been nerfed.
>
> I think the above nerfs would have effectively re-balanced the banshee without sacrificing the best parts of it.
>
> Also, none of the banshees in any Halo game had a flip cooldown. Go pop in H2, H3, Reach, and H4 and you’ll see you’re just kinda wrong on that point.
Oh yeah… Maybe 343 could slightly reduce the cooldown timer. Just slightly though, not completely.
a noob just holding the flip button wasnt hard to kill. there was a skillgap to banshee between the few top tier pilots and everyone else
however even the best pilot in the world was still very much so killable when using an equal tier req. even when the person using it didnt come close to the amount of skill the best pilot may have had with the banshee
tying flips to the boost meter would have been fine. it would have properly limited the amount of continual flips you could do. but now it isnt worth wasting 5-7 req levels on pulling out an immobile easy target death trap.
now you would be better off just pulling out a fuel rod than a banshee. at least then you arent a huge easy target that has to stop moving for several seconds every time you use an ability
> 2535442377964386;10:
> a noob just holding the flip button wasnt hard to kill. there was a skillgap to banshee between the few top tier pilots and everyone else
>
> however even the best pilot in the world was still very much so killable when using an equal tier req. even when the person using it didnt come close to the amount of skill the best pilot may have had with the banshee
>
> tying flips to the boost meter would have been fine. it would have properly limited the amount of continual flips you could do. but now it isnt worth wasting 5-7 req levels on pulling out an immobile easy target death trap.
>
> now you would be better off just pulling out a fuel rod than a banshee. at least then you arent a huge easy target that has to stop moving for several seconds every time you use an ability
Yeah, this is the problem exactly.
Right now, even the best banshee pilots have no motivation to call in banshees during a high-skill game, because they will be instantly destroyed and lose that REQ energy that’s crucial to winning a tough WZ game. Yes the banshee is still useful if you want to farm noobs who don’t shoot back (and in fact that may be many of the people who have the biggest problem with the banshee), but I can easily kill 3-4 banshees with an endgame now.
An Endgame costs 5 REQs, each banshee costs 5-7 REQs. So when I pull an endgame on their banshees, I kill 15-28 of the enemy team’s REQ energy using only 5 REQ energy myself… Arclight and Laser are similar (though not as good as the endgame). How on earth is that balanced???
Even before the nerf, the Endgame and arclight were fair counters to the banshee. Now the Banshee stands NO chance against them, regardless of pilot skill.
And to those who say “good riddance, the banshee is awful and it should be gone”, I say that without the banshee, there’s no way to recover from getting double capped and losing the mid base on a map like ARC, Noctus, or Sanctum. Because the other team has all the high ground, and bigger REQs, and now you can’t use banshees to recover map control. You just get slowly ground down. Note, I’m talking about higher skill games here. At lower skills, sure, anything goes and comebacks are possible cause nobody pays attention to map control or back-caps.