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Melee: we all know it’s busted. Aside from the cheeky Melee-ReloadCancel-Melee/BXB bug, the lunge range feels stunted and on-hit sound effects occurring with no damage output seems to happen a bit too often. I understand that sometimes this can be due to lag or peekers advantage, but I think if a player hears a full on melee hit sound it would occur after tick confirmation or as a prioritized input occurring for more than 1 tick, so they don’t feel cheated, but I am no expert and not certain how melee hits are registering code-wise. Regardless, I found myself scared to go for melee at times but also wanting to sneak in and abuse BXB on players. It was odd and frustrating to lose trades with melee. I feel like the lunge range has always been larger in previous titles, with good hit reg and feedback, and going for a trade was far more consistent (i largely play h3 and reach on mcc). I assume programming is in the works toward adjusting this, so I would suggest slightly increasing the lunge range, maybe by 15% tops, and removing BXB unless it’s something worth leaving as a toggle-able setting for custom games.
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Radar: It isn’t bad. The range might be short and I might hate that but I think it displays info well. The visual indicator for when someone is on the same elevation as you is nice. Yet in Big Team Battle I’m feeling blind as a bat on a game mode I typically expect to have a great awareness of in regards to radar range. I think 18m is a bit close for even 4v4s and would suggest 20m for 4v4, 25m for 12v12 (or higher), and see how those feel before I gripe any further about having to adjust to the paranoia inducing red blips flying at me from my teammates direction out of no where :’) I liked the slow moving redbug dots of Halos long past a bit more but maybe I’m just getting old.
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Bloom/Aim: My impression of aiming in this game is iffy but hopeful, almost very very nice feeling but something feels off and I need to understand mechanically what is happening under the hood. I can hit lots of shots. Other shots are random hilarious jokes that do or don’t hit. W**hat is aim magnetism doing to my M+KB? I don’t think it’s moving my reticle, I think it’s moving my projectiles toward/onto the target like actual bullet magnetism, but I don’t know and don’t know how to confirm what it actually does. If it’s pulling bullets to my enemies, great, but does it apply at all times? Does it fall off with bloom and distance or always stay on? Should I not use it if I need to lead my shots true or hard aim for headshots like other arena shooters? Is it pulling headshots away from the head toward the body because the mag centers around an initial spot from where the first bullet landed? I just dunno. Coupled with this, as others are saying, I think the bloom for some weapons is a bit too high. As I spent more time with each weapon I found my accuracy improving as well as my consistency in choosing the right weapon for each encounter/fight but IDK how I feel about weapons that now have very potentially fast/low time-to-kill (TTK). Front and center the AR40 and Sidekick. With headshots and 100% accuracy you’re getting kills under .6 seconds. But who’s hitting 100% of the time then getting a headshot on shield-pop consistently? Well, not many people because bloom enters the equation and does it’s best to stop players from doing this. And so OK, that’s fine, we’ve dealt with this before (coughREACHcough), and I understand on some weapons it doesn’t apply. But I don’t want to die to someone spamming their mag against me and landing a headshot at mid-range. If I were to spam back with the same aim at the same rate, there seems to be plenty of bloom and margin for error there that allows another player to take a sloppy risk and grab a quick kill in a tight situation, making these weapons VERY dangerous yet not VERY reliable. This isn’t a common thing in Halo and I don’t know how I feel about it. I want my weapons to be super reliable. I’m at close range, we hit the same shots, we trade, okay that’s very fair. I will definitely take this trade and be happy with it! If I didn’t want the trade to happen I would have run from the fight and not taken said shots. To me, that’s a common and consistent gameplay aspect of Halo. Overall the guns are very powerful and feel great in some situations, but it is not fun to lose fights to bloom RNG. We learned this in Reach. I don’t know the exact formula to fix how those guns in general feel but I think reducing bloom on the Sidekick and AR40 by about 10-15% and increasing the TTK by no more than .20 seconds for each is worth trying out to give these guns a more consistent feeling and reliable edge. Maybe this adjustment would be too much of a buff but I believe in powerful, yet consistently fair starts for Spartans, as seems to be the intention with these.
Regardless of this critique I know I got better with time in-game and am looking forward to grinding future flights/the game itself in December and achieving better aim. Thanks for reading.
TL;DR: Fix melee, increase radar range slightly so we can try out how it feels, and reduce AR40/magnum bloom by about 15% while increasing their potential TTK by no more than .2 sec