AR, BR and Sidekick just outclass a good chunk of the guns.
Most of the other weapons are very niche, needlessly difficult to use and stay on the shelf.
Some of the guns are that bad I’ve found it easier to run up and double beat down a guy rather than try and shoot them. Plenty of times I’ve tried being clever with a Pulse Carbine, gave up mid fight and just got my AR to hose him down.
I am also not a fan of reinventing the wheel to make guns you never use distinct.
The Halo 5 Magnum is not especially different from any other utility weapon in a Halo game where the aim assist is high. Not that the high aim assist is justified mind you, I just don’t agree that it was especially strong, especially in the context of the rest of the sandbox, nor is uniquely good at range while unscoped beyond not being burdened with bloom or
When people typically talk about weapons being too reliable, they usually mean is: this weapon doesn’t have enough random spread with “too strong” usually being interchangably used with "can be used to outplay an opponent via skill rather than shallow rock paper scissors.
The Halo 5 sandbox was flawed in its own ways, but it is not devoid of upsides. Infinite retains most of its flaws while ditching the parts that did work, like spawning with a proper utility weapon.
It’s regarded as one of the best magnums in the series and that’s not a good thing in this context. Especially strong is appropriate because it’s just too good stat wise.
A kill time lower than the BR but range to match it. That’s not good. Especially after they widened the BRs spread. If you want lower kill times, that range has to be neutered or you’re going to break the balance. What use is a BR when you have a weapon with just as much range that takes less effort to use?
When I said too reliable, I meant it. Decent kill time, decent range, and high aim assist and bullet magnetism. That’s pretty much what I was highlighting.
There ARE plenty of upsides. I’m not bagging on H5’s sandbox. There are plenty of weapons I’d like to see being brought back. Just not it’s magnum. I prefer the classic model anyway. Probably can’t have the same 3 tap kill though.
See for me a utility weapon is just dang boring to spawn with. I have never liked it in Halo (I am not gloating here i just know people will use this to say i am bad, but i made Onyx this season so its not because i am bad at Halo, i just don’t enjoy utility weapons). CE wasn’t even supposed to originally have one but one lone dev secretly buffed the magnum before release.
The original design intent was not to have a utility weapon. It was a complete accident not to mention that multiplayer wasn’t the main focus in CE so weapon balance wasn’t as big of a concern then. Infinite returned to this original philosophy and tried (its not perfect and has some small issues I will admit) to have a smaller sandbox where every weapon has its usecase. I love this design and it makes you think so much more about what weapon you are taking into combat. Utility weapons let you not think too much as they can be used pretty effectively in any case.
I think Halo got stuck in this “utility weapon meta” on accident and it seems the devs forgot how to balance guns on maps unless they had some OP spawn weapon. This prevented map weapons from being more useful. Part of an Arena Shooter is grabbing map weapons to be more powerful/more prepared than your opponents. A utility weapon down plays this feature. Yes if the other team is better at securing weapons and map placement they should be dominating you unless you are way more skilled with a spawn weapon that isn’t OP. Hence the AR SK spawns. You are very vulnerable to long and short range map weapons. Now you have to constantly think about the opponents positioning and weapons and if you can push a certain way. This premise is what keeps Battle Royales fun too so now i understand why the vocal minority of Halo fans don’t want a Battle Royale. It goes directly against spawning with an OP weapon. Also before people get all upset that i want a Halo Battle Royale, i do want one just give us co op, forge, and more maps first.
Halo’s ALWAYS been like that. Precisions are just better than autos. And if you were playing a lot of HCS Arena then that’s because those map/modes where stripped down to nothing but Magnums and BRs. Super boring.
I know and I just explained how this trend started on accident and that i never liked it this way. Custom games where always more fun to me when you didn’t spawn with the BR/DMR/Magnum.
Reach had the worst weapon balance of them all i hope that if the DMR ever rears its ugly face in Infinite that its only a map weapon. If it had been that way in Reach it would have been fine but spawning with it as powerful as it was basically guaranteed infinite ammo and that just made it so broken.
Intent is irrelevant, you can’t escape from the utility weapon without deleting scopes from the game entirely. Both developers have both expressly tried to get away from the concept multiple times, and it always comes back, because as much as some people try and pretend otherwise. Precision starts are popular even among casual players.
Infinite has done exactly nothing to go back to this no-utility concept which has never meaningfully existed in practice to begin with. It retains all the flaws of those “utility meta” Halo games(which is all Halo games but I digress) you seem to hate. Like I said, the only meaningful difference between Infinite and those other games is the AR being buffed, and utility starts marginalized by a developer that steadfastly refuses to listen to feedback.
Halo is “stuck in the utility meta” because it is not, as many PC arena fans would have attested too, a traditional arena shooter. The relatively slower movement speed, combined with the team focus, two weapon limit, and console friendly aim assist don’t support spawning players with weak/limited weapons,. It is just laughably easy to counter and exploit fresh spawns who fundamentally lack the capability to fight back properly or even avoid.
Utility starts do not and have not undermined the concept of picking up weapons off the map. Badly designed weapons do. They only further insure that the winner of a match is the consistently better team, not the team who was better/got lucky once at the start and snowball for the rest of the match.
The idea that you are going to outplaying a halfway competent team with map control with your AR has always been a complete fantasy. The Halo where this happens only exists at the absolute lowest skill players and at that point utility starts wouldn’t change anything because those players can’t utilize them properly to begin with.
You just fundamentally don’t like players being able to outplay you. You want rock paper scissors. Any given utility weapon is “OP” because it gives players a chance to change the outcome beyond having happening to be using a rock when you are using scissors. You twist yourself into knots trying to downplay the importance of aiming in a shooter as a skill and pretend the full auto bullet hose with the gigantic reticle actually takes as much or more skill that the weapon based around precision in a shooter.
Utility starts are Halo, but y’all refuse to accept that in favor of the Halo in your head which has never existed. And its all down to the fact you don’t like seeing a particular weapon model so often. Instead of lobbying to make underperforming parts of the sandbox more engaging and useful, you just try and take away what people already enjoy instead just so you can see more pretty weapon models and shiny effects.
Variety is the spice of life. So yes i want to be able to use more guns more often and a utility precision weapon doesn’t allow for that. They had 6 games to try to get the balance right with a utility weapon and couldn’t do it. It was always too strong compared to its competition. I would say this is because its impossible to balance a game around an OP way too versatile gun without it being the gun you use 90%+ of the time.
Ideally there would be both casual and ranked modes with both no utility weapon spawns and with utility weapon spawns. I understand the draw to utility weapon spawns, i don’t enjoy them personally but wish 343 had the player base and drive to make both playlists. I don’t want to take away utility weapon spawns entirely and started this thread to give praise to the social modes because i find them fun. Didn’t totally expect to have to defend not having utility weapons as fun and different this much but am glad to do it.
I like variety too but variety in and of itself is not engaging if said variety is not actually well designed and interesting. You don’t care about interesting and engaging sandboxes and gameplay, just arbitrary quotas to fill.
They’ve had 6 games and 20 years to try and remove the concept of utility weapons, failed every time and you honestly still believe that utility weapons are not an integral part of the game? Spectacular. People will apparently use the same gun "90+% if the time but god forbid anyone try to do anything with the underperforming weapons. People are going to use that shallow bullet hose and their gonna like it.
You can enjoy auto starts all you want, but if you want to convince people it should be the norm, you need to do better than whine about how players don’t use X badly designed weapon and misrepresent how precision starts play out. Because I am not a highly competitive player, I just want to enjoy social and BTB without enduring god awful settings to placate players who care about aesthetics over gameplay.
Agree magnum was the weapon of choice but I also used the carbine DMR and bolt shot quite a bit. All were viable especially if you carried a magnum along
In every previous Halo basically nothing outside of the BR, DMR, or Magnum (CE and 5) is worth using.
Even at close range these guns killed faster than many weapons designed for close range.
The precision utility weapon is a scourge that has finally lost some ground in Infinite.
The AR is for the first time actually decent, the Sidekick is fun as heck to use, the Skewer is awesome albeit a bit too strong, the sword and hammer finally have major differences in how they function, the commando is great (they really should get rid of its bloom. The recoil is enough to make it hard to use and then give the bloom to the BRs hipfire) that would finally nerf the BR into the sandbox because it still sits atop by a pretty wide margin, and all the other guns minus the shock rifle and ravager are fun/good. The shock rifle just needs to be removed and the ravager needs a way wider area of effect.
Vehicles are the only really lacking part of the sandbox. A few kill too fast but all have eay too little health and there are way too many counters to them on every map and the terrain only makes it easier to counter them.
I do not accept the premise that any Halo before Infinite had a better sandbox. CE will always be my favorite but no way its or any other Halo’s MP sandbox more balanced.
CE had a better sandbox, by far. Only useless weapon in the game is the needler. Plasma stuns movement+ directly counters OS. AR is meant for cleaning up kills after you run through your pistol ammo, or is used with the double melee glitch for the fastest double melee in the game.