As much as I love Warzone Firefight and play it a lot, I think there are some grave problems with this mode that make it extremely unbalanced and a lot of times unenjoyable. Here are my thoughts about it:
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A lot of times there’s no music during the intro sequence of a Firefight game which makes the whole experience underwhelming (and a bit laughable to be honest). This bug was already in the beta and it’s disappointing to see that 343 didn’t fix it.
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Rounds don’t represent “increasing difficulty”. On the contrary, difficulty is all over the place, sometimes it’s perfectly playable when other times you can’t complete even the first objective.
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Defend the Garage / Armory objectives are nigh-on impossible to complete. There are simply too many enemies, especially when Prometheans attack. Even soldiers are extremely hard to kill, not to mention when Knights attack in packs. It’s simply too much and most of the time these objective fail. Even if it’s the first round.
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Respawn times are too long, and respawn points are often too far away from the objectives or the action, thus it makes death even more punishing. There’s also no spectator camera so all you can do is watch the action from above, often for half a minute. It takes up too much time dying every time, and since enemies are so overpowered they can kill you in a few shots.
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Power weapons should have much lower REQ level requirements. By the time you reach REQ level 5-6, you won’t use a rocket launcher, you’ll use a Scorpion tank. This makes power weapons useless in most matches. Also, since objectives are completely random, there are occasions when the team should shoot a lot of enemy vehicles but they don’t have the necessary level to do so. We can’t call in vehicles at round 1-2. Power weapons would help in these occasions but they are locked.
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Warthogs are almost useless. They don’t pack the necessary punch and they are destroyed by a few enemy shots. Barely anyone uses them.
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Maps differ greatly regarding difficulty. Some maps are quite playable, you could almost call them easy (like Raid on Apex 7 and Attack on Sanctum) while others are too hard or simply impossible due to their nature (like Urban for example). Urban is a horror map, there’s no room for vehicles to maneuver, and there are way too many Promethean enemies (Knights, Phaetons even).
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Final round bosses that spawn inside bases are too hard to destroy. They require the best vehicle firepower to be destroyed but there’s no room for those vehicles to go in and attack them. These bosses should spawn either outside the bases or inside but slightly weaker.
I think the main problem is that the whole Firefight mode is extremely unbalanced. Maps, enemies and objectives as well. It’s mostly about luck to get good objectives to be able to complete a round and it’s very unfair that sometimes even the first round is impossible to complete, making players waste boost cards too. How could you destroy 50 soldiers on March on Stormbreak for example? It’s just too many, especially that on another map you only have to destroy 20. There’s no gradual difficulty, the whole mode is too hard and unbalanced. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a separate playlist for Heroic and Legendary difficulty as well. Right now the game seems to be set to the latter which, in a lot of cases, is just not fun. And the most disappointing thing is that these problems were apparent in the beta, yet it seems nothing has been fine-tuned in the past couple of months.
What do you think?
