TL;DR: Not always.
This is an issue I have wanted to address. I’ve talked about this earlier, going into some detail. Consider this my full review of the issue. It’s a complex problem and the review won’t be short.
I believe limiting the “fuel” armor abilities have is a wrong approach, clouded by people’s wishes of a system like in Halo 3. The Halo 3 equipment system is fundamentally bad. It’s not more than a gimmick and offers little depth to gameplay.
When you have a player ability, any ability that allows the player to do what they normally couldn’t, it has an impact on the game associated with it. The impact depends on how long they can use the ability (or how many times they can use it), and how widely the ability impacts the play space (the map).
The area of impact is easy to understand in terms of explosives. If you give the player a grenade, they will have to use it very carefully to have any impact on the game. It’s difficult for the player to drastically change the state of the game with a single grenade. On the other hand, say, you give the player a missile they can deploy anywhere on the map and it will affect a quarter of the map. Wherever the player fires the missile, there’s a good chance they will kill multiple players. Whether the player kills a majority of the enemy team or their own team, it’s fairly easy for their action to have a major impact on the game, definitely easier than with a grenade.
How long the player can use their ability is an equivalent concept, but only in the time dimension. If the player only has a single grenade and there are enemies the player needs to hold off in a corridor, there isn’t much the player can do with the single grenade before the enemies overrun them. However, if the player has a very large number of grenades, they can just continuously spam them in the corridor and prevent any enemies from getting through.
The impact an ability has has strategic significance. If the ability has little impact on the game, the player will hardly be interested in it. No one would run through half of the map just to pick up a grenade. If someone has a grenade, people will hardly care because it’s difficult to make good use of it to have significant impact on the game
On the other hand, if there is a rocket launcher somewhere on the map, everyone will rush to it because they know it’s powerful and can kill a lot of enemies. People want the rocket launcher because they know that if you can make good use of it, you can control the game as long as long as your launcher has ammo.
The problem with equipment in Halo 3 was that often they were hardly useful. I don’t mean this with respect to the individual player, but to the game as a whole. Sure, it was very useful fir you to have a bubble shield so you could save yourself if someone shot you to low shields. But because it mostly only affects your survival, it’s very limited in use and has little impact on the game as a whole. It’s not an ability a skilled player can utilize much differently from a less skilled player.
Most of the time it happens to be that you need to limit how much something can be used. If a player got a rocket launcher with infinite ammo, the strategic diversity of the game would quickly deteriorate to them endlessly dominating the game because the launcher is such a powerful weapon that killing the player would be near impossible unless they made a bad mistake.
However, this is not case with all player abilities. This is most notably a property of abilities that are directly offensive (weapons) and abilities that are directly defensive (e.g. Overshield). It’s a result of these abilities directly affecting encounters with the player. It’s also where people make the mistake with some Armor Abilities.
Take Jetpack for example. It’s (relatively) easy to kill a Jetpack user. They have no direct advantage in an encounter. The only way they can really make use of their ability in an encounter is to escape if they are losing. They still have to face the other player on an equal ground. Killing them is not much more of a problem than it would be if they didn’t have a Jetpack. Therefore you don’t need to limit the use of the Jetpack.
The impact of Jetpack on the game is very strictly tied to how much the player makes use of it. In low-level gameplay, Jetpack has little effect on the game because players usually don’t use teamwork and communication, and people have little knowledge of how to strategically use it. In higher level gameplay, the problem with Jetpack as an off-spawn ability is that there is little punishement for mistakes. If you die, you still have your ability to fly, and anyone in the game can choose to fly.
When you limit the Jetpack to a map pick-up, these problems go away. There is only one (possibly two) Jetpack on the map to begin with, and if you die with a Jetpack, you lose it and everyone will have to wait for it to respawn. Forcing the Jetpack to have limited fuel would handicap the more skilled players because no matter how long you can survive, you will run out of fuel. There is less difference between a good player using a Jetpack and an amazing player usinng a Jetpack. Hence it’s more beneficial to the depth and the skill gap of the game to not limit the fuel.
The example used is Jetpack, but it could equally well apply to Thruster Pack or some other ability. Of course this doesn’t mean it applies to all armor abilities, the decision has to be made on the basis of the specific ability, there is no general all-encompassing rule. Active Camo is better to be limited because an unlimited recharging Active Camo encourages passive, self-centered gameplay with little strategic thinking.
The general problem with Armor Abilities as they are now is that you spawn with them. That’s the only problem, anything else will have to be handled on the basis of the individual ability to decide what is the best course of action for it.