I’m not sure how most people still get this wrong, but in the context of Halo 5’s aiming mechanics, I have provided a link to a video cut from The Sprint that helps allay some of the misconceptions regarding Halo’s aim-assist mechanics.
From the developers themselves.
The developers don’t make the distinction between “aim-assist” and “auto-aim”, and instead only use the former. Having modified their weapon values in Halo 4, it is safe to say that they use auto-aim in Halo 5, however, it’s application has modified to make ranged combat “easier”, which is what they have stated when questioned about Halo 5’s wonky aim mechanics.
Aim-assist is the cover-all term for the host of mechanics that the game uses to make aiming easier for the player.
Aim-assist uses an array of concentric circles (some for magnetism, others for auto-aim) to mitigate the difficulty of trying to make precise actions with a controller.
Auto-aim is the mechanic that helps determine whether a a player should land a shot that they otherwise would have missed. Despite the fact that auto-aim is designed to assist the player, high levels of auto-aim can really ruin gameplay by making shots that really should miss, hit their target instead.
Games with higher levels of auto-aim tend to encourage cheap tactics like “quick-scoping” or “drag shots” where players rely on the auto-aim to place their shots, rather than actually try to aim themselves.
Nobody likes dying, but I am constantly appalled at how many of my terribly placed shots actually result in kills. It just feels cheap.
Magnetism is the mechanic where a player’s aim is slowed when a target is inside a magnetism circle, making it easier to acquire and maintain aim on the target during combat. When active, magnetism will also try to track a target’s movements by dragging the reticule back towards their position when they move out of it, but only to a certain degree.
Magnetism is a much less intrusive mechanic than auto-aim, as helps guide the player’s aim onto targets, but unlike auto-aim, it doesn’t make shots “bend” toward their target unrealistically.
As a side note, each weapon has both short and long aim-assist and magnetism ranges (which I took to mean zoomed and unzoomed when testing); these help the developers push each weapon into an “effective range” by making them harder to use outside of their intended range, as I was able to do in my modified gametypes.
From my understanding of Halo 4 and Halo 5’s aiming mechanics, the wonky aim an Halo 5 is simply a list of tweaks made to each weapon to make their short range auto-aim and magnetism lower, and their long range auto-aim and magnetism higher than in previous games or even the Beta. This is still speculation, however, as an ancillary function may have been implemented to make a greater distinction between Halo 5’s short and long range aiming.
To be fair, this is all greatly simplified, as the depth of my knowledge on the auto-aim mechanics only extend to that which I have tested.
There are other variables that affect the aiming mechanics, such as: auto-aim and magnetism angles, deviation angle and safe radius for both auto-aim and magnetism. That said, the most important part is the distinction between auto-aim and magnetism, and the fact that the widely used term “bullet magnetism” is actually wrong as it actually falls under the scope of the auto-assist mechanic.
So to answer the OP, the CE pistol likely has quite a high level of auto-aim and magnetism, as has been proven time and time again with the Halo 2 BR, thus making it a lot easier to score easy kills and even cheap kills that should honestly have missed. Being on both the giving and receiving end, I would say that they CE pistol uses a lot more aim-assist than the Halo 5 pistol, but a little bit less than the Halo 2 BR.
Hopefully I didn’t mess something in this post up, it’s quite a detailed subject.
