Hello Waypoint! Castle Wars is back in rotation and with it returns the largest public Energy Sword fighting playlist Halo has ever had. Unfortunately, many people in the playlist still (after it coming up many times) seem to be dying to basic things like Smart Scope lunging. With that in mind, I thought it may be cool to have a thread with tips and tricks on how to use a sword effectively. Sword combat has a surprising amount of depth in Halo 5, arguably more so than in any previous Halo games, so there is quite a lot to consider when trying to get better with a sword.
Here’s what I have to add, feel free to leave anything you know here as well!
- First and foremost, scoping in with an Energy Sword both increases your lunge distance significantly and staggers the opponent slightly more on-clash than an unscoped lunge (at least, from my experience it seems to be that as opposed to simply letting you lunge faster). - Spartan Charge may seem useful, but I honestly warn against using it for a variety of reasons. Because it leads to many unnecessary trades and opens you up for a period of time after you use it, it has the effect of weighing your K/D ration closer to 1.0, which although useful if you’re not very confident in your abilities will only bring you down as you try to get better. Honestly I’m of the opinion that Spartan Charge doesn’t actually add anything good to the skill factor of sword-fighting and should probably be removed from playlists like Castle Wars, but for now advising against it will have to do. - If you’re annoyed with other people using Spartan Charge against you, it’s not actually particularly difficult to jump and thrust out of the way of an incoming Spartan Charge and punish the other person for doing it when they’re still locked in the animation. - Crouching just as you press the button to lunge will slightly increase your lunge distance as long as you aim at your enemy’s lower body, and has the added bonus of making your Spartan do a more uppercut-esque lunge animation which sometimes throws people off. - Moving in an erratic pattern is a good way to throw off the other person’s lunges, allowing you to kill them in-between their misses. - Jumping also throws off people’s aims, especially (in my experience) when done immediately after each clash. The trade-off is that having auto-stabilize on greatly impairs one’s ability to do this. - If someone is still able to clash with you even when you’re using a good, unpredictable movement pattern, you can try using your thrusters immediately after a clash to throw off someone’s aim and then kill them. - Be wary, though: anything you use to throw off the other person’s aim is also throwing off your own at the same time. Be sure you can quickly re-aim on an enemy before trying to make heavy use of these mechanics. - A melee attack behaves slightly different from a regular attack on a clash. I’m not exactly sure on the specifics, but if someone clashes with you when you’ve used a melee attack and they’ve used a normal, unscoped lunge, you gain a small time advantage on the next lunge. I believe that it isn’t that the melee attack in Halo 5 is faster than the normal attack, but rather that it staggers the other person for longer than a normal attack on a clash. Therefore, you recover faster off the clash and are able to kill the other person before they can attack you again. I also want to add that I have no idea how Smart Scope lunges factor into this; I only know that the time advantage one gains when using a melee doesn’t seem as prevalent when the other person is using Smart Scope vs. when they are not. - A melee attack also has a slightly wider area of effect than a normal attack, from what I’ve seen. - Once you initiate a lunge, it is nigh-impossible for the other person to avoid it by virtue of their own actions. Even if they back up (or even thrust backwards) out of your thrust range after you initiate a lunge, you will lunge far enough to kill them. Even if the other person thrusts to the side, as long as you began your lunge before they used their thrusters, you will still almost always kill them. Usually, only an obstacle blocking your lunge will stop it. - Sliding can be useful against certain people, but be warned that it prevents you from using Smart Scope for a moment as you’re sliding. For that reason, I usually don’t use sliding in sword fights unless I plan to use my thrusters to move right or left immediately afterwards.Let me know if I’ve made a mistake or you have a question about something I’ve said here - and again please add anything you know as well!