With the updated weapons being mostly nerfed for longer kill times and shorter effective ranges, traditional Magnum loadouts will render nearly all other weapons useless.
I am very excited about the new weapon updates. I’ll be happy for slightly longer avg kill times and reduced ranges so I can actually cross open spaces without fearing instant death.
Prior to the update, the advantage of other weapons over the magnum has been fairly small, and so they tend to be underutilized. However, now that they have lost even more power respective to the Magnum, the game will instantly become Halo 5: Magnums Only (And Sniper, too).
This update is going to make competitive gameplay WORSE until the Magnum is modified or replaced by BR (hurray!) as the loadout weapon.
Traditional Magnum loadouts won’t render the other weapons useless at all. The whole point of the tuning update is to redefine the roles of the weapons in the sandbox in a positive way.
Take a look at the DMR for example. They slowed it’s rate of fire down slightly, but it’s damage output was unchanged, and it’s red reticle distance was not brought in more like the BR and Carbine, giving it that long range advantage it felt it was lacking when stacked against the pre-tune BR/Carbine.
“The whole point of the tuning update is to redefine the roles of the weapons in the sandbox in a positive way.”
That is the goal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will succeed.
If you exclude the traditional magnum from the sandbox equation, they have done a fantastic job with this update. If they plug in the BR as the starting weapon, then bravo, H5 is sooooo bae.
Let’s just consider this simple question/scenario. In the default settings, the most commonly used weapon aside from Magnum is BR, as there is a slight advantage for BR over Magnum.
With the new, slightly nerfed BR, will people even bother grabbing BR over Magnum?
It remains to be seen, but considering that BEFORE the BR was nerfed, it was just barely better than the Magnum. Now that it is nerfed, it will likely be less good, and therefore almost never used, thereby removing the single most-used non-magnum gun from play.