As I’ve said before I love to analyze aspects of these games and figure out things nobody else seems to talk about much. Rather than just show what weapon does what and how fast, I actually thought about how different damage TYPES work, and what 343 intended to do with their sandbox. In many ways I actually like it, because it requires a little thought and careful planning. On the other, it doesn’t always favor the randomness of the current BTB layout, what with vehicles appearing at random, and weapon spawns being different from match to match.
STILL, This is how weapon damage types work on vehicles and what weapons do the most and least damage to vehicles. If you’ve been wondering why your vehicles feel like paper and enemy vehicles take tons of damage, maybe this will help. I found some surprising details I wasn’t aware of, and am going to change a lot of my current behaviors to do better now that I know what to do.
I’m doing more testing and have a follow up video planned going over how vehicles damage each other, How vehicle weak spots work, and what equipment, grenades, fusion coils, and melees do in regards to vehicles. It’s a little more complex than you might think.
In a nutshell. In terms of damage that KILLS the vehicle, the tiers are set up something like:
S - Power Weapons
A - Hardlight
B - Plasma
C - Shock
D - Kinetic
With a couple of weapons overlapping due to interesting interactions, such as the Hydra and Ravager. Also, I believe given what I found, the plasma pistol overcharge counts as a form of explosive damage, but without digging through the code in some way I don’t know how I’d be able to prove that. Also, Tanks and Wraiths basically ignore the list above and are something more akin to:
S - Gravity Hammers, Rockets
A - Hydras, Ravagers, Cindershots, Swords
F - Literally Everything Else
Something great that could be implemented would be to allow the needlers to track vehicles and supercombine (they should count as both kinetic and explosive)
Which weapons are in this category? Is it just the Sentinel Beam? I know this was a type of weapon in Halo 4 and Halo 5 but I don’t think it’s in Halo Infinite right now. I’d sooner call it forerunner, but it’s not a big deal.
Where does melee damage fit into this? I’m asking because if I’ve got a weak weapon would it ever be better to do normal melees against the tank instead? I’d also like to know how boarding melees and boarding grenades (frag, plasma, brute, electric) fit into this list if only because I’ve had extremely few opportunities to fight against wraiths and tanks. Sorry to give you more work.
I’m looking forward to the weak spot video. The wraith’s driver hole is now more front-facing which should make for easier kills. How to kill the driver without destroying the vehicle is a skill that I still need to develop in Halo: Infinite.
Right now there are only two true hardlight weapons, the sentinel beam and the heatwave. The Cindershot technically fires explosive hardlight, but the game registers it as “power weapon” in the ammo type.
I plan on going over the melee damage in the follow up video, the melee bonus with blades weapons definitely matters
I’m planning on that next too, and what I’ve already found is kind of surprising, also I’m going to include how fusion coils damage things, because there are different fusion coil types and the types make a huge difference
Or like, they should be able to pop the tires more easily maybe, so they disable the vehicle easier than some other things. It would certainly make them worth picking up since the game places them on the same spawn racks as sentinel beams, which are vastly better antivehicle weapons
There’s some really good info in here. I’d figured out the hardlight weapons doing a lot of vehicle damage, but Ihadn’t been able to really test plasma or shock damage.
I have two questions if you’re looking for more stuff to investigate.
Did you see the Halo Infinite Mythbusters video that came out in the last week or so about the threat sensor damage? They thought they were seeing evidence that vehicles have some sort of built in health regen mechanic. At any point do you think you also found evidence that vehicles have some sort of health regen?
I’ve noticed during games that sometimes enemies inside wraiths will die a long time before the tank takes enough damage to hit its doomsday point. Did you see this with any weapons?
Pretty sure Tanks are weak to precision sniping weapons too because you can easily blow the cap off the driver’s seat and headshot the player directly.
Things like Stalker, Sniper and Shock rifles are choice weapons once the lid gets popped off. And it’s very easy to pop the lid off too if your team is coordinating their nades and precision shots.
This has to do with the weak spots and destructible armor etc. Once the driver is exposed they can be shot out of the vehicle, and in some case can take enough damage from the vehicle being shot that they die before it does.
The first part you mentioned is something I’m working on, it’s super hard to test without some kind of forge mode honestly.
