What exactly are these weapons that people are allegedly not using? Sniper, rockets, stalker rifle, shock rifle, AR, Mangler, bulldog, heatwave, sentinel beam, Skewer, sword, hammer, Commando can all outgun the BR in their effective ranges. Even the sidekick, high bloom piece of garbage that it is, can still outgun a BR.
Which leaves us with lock on weapons like the Pulse Carbine and Needler which can still outgun the BR in theory, but their lock on nature makes it so that they can never be too powerful without breaking completely. The Hydra while not as great in direct confrontation has its fire and forget feature and superior Anti-vehicle capability.
This leaves us with only really the Plasma Pistol, Ravager, and Disruptor being garbage choices as weapons go. The Plasma Pistol had all its utility stripped out to justify the Pulse Carbine and Disruptor, the Ravager has been notoriously bad since launch, and the Disruptor is just flat out badly designed, I can’t believe people are not tripping over each other to pick up a gun that takes like 10 seconds to kill a player after you’ve landed all your shots.
So this leaves us with 3 weapons that are total garbage, and another 3 that can only ever be so good unless you think guns that aim for you should be the meta and 14 other weapons that can still go toe to toe with a BR, but the BR is going to erase all variety because…? if other players are not making use of these weapons properly in BR starts that’s their loss and your gain no?
This has been a common claim with auto starts for nearly 20 years. Precision start Halo is totally a one gun game, except for that weapon, oh and that weapon, oh and that weapon, and so on and so forth.
It has never stood up to scrutiny. When people say “one gun game” they always mean “I can’t use this minority of poorly balanced and designed weapons.” And the claims have only grown more outlandish to distract from this reality. People like to pretend that power weapons don’t count(their shouldn’t be a huge divide between “normal” and "power weapons to begin with.)
And during their crusade against DMR starts in MCC Reach folks started to make even more outlandish claims that the game only consisted of DMR, sniper, rockets and that close range weapons were not even usable. Which is such completely dishonest nonsense its honestly staggering.
The BR or its equivalent weapons have never been standouts on their own beyond being a starting weapon which is naturally going to get more use. The biggest flaws in the Halo sandbox have been the result of a minority of poorly balanced/designed weapons or were otherwise just redundant.
People just like to pretend the BR or any given utility weapon is the problem because pinning all of the sandboxes issues on one spawn weapon is the easy “solution” to an otherwise more complicated problem.
