I want to start this one off by saying I love all of the weapon tuning that has taken place. That was one huge step in the right direction to recover the Halo series.
There is only one thing that hasn’t left my mind since I began to play this game…combat wise, the rubbery physics of the frag/plasma grenades don’t feel right in any aspect to me.
Plasma grenades feel worthless in comparison with older Halo titles, they used to feel like death mines…now they seem like they are only made to be sticky softballs.
It’s as simple as that really…can they not be so bouncy?
Frags only bounce once and it makes sense if you take into consideration how hard they are being thrown and what surface they hit. Stickes bounce once too but it is very small, it’s negligible. I feel grenades have finally been balanced. In previous titles, especially Reach, it was always a grenade fest and now not so much.
Use the frag bounce to your benefit. I for one love bouncing them off a wall to a corner that I can’t see my enemy but know he is there. Gotten a couple of satisfying kills that way.
I think the bounce is pretty convenient for frags (though it took me a while to adjust) but yeah it sucks for plasmas. Plasma grenades used to be a viable choice for decimating Elites. Now it’s good for an occasional stick.
Also, the bouncy stickies make reverting to second last checkpoint in Campaign very inconvenient, not to mention are impractical for grenade jumps.
It’s passable for frags if you adapt to throwing at a different angle, but on stickies it’s plain atrocious, especially with the boosted movement speed.
As far as the grenade spamming arguement goes, in Halo 2 you carried 4 of both types of grenades.
It’s a core gameplay mechanic in the Halo series, I would say a well placed grenade is one of the qualities that makes a great player.
The thing that would balance grenade spam out was the maneuvering and killtimes (that we now have). If a player is caught throwing a grenade while getting fired at, they are punished for not putting up their rifle before a potato.