Halo CE is currently the only Halo game (despite the pistol) where all weapons were effective at quickly taking out opponents. With each sucessive Halo game afterward, the game has devolved into one gun dominating over other weapons. This needs to change.
Halo 4 must follow the CE model, where every weapon is EXTREMELY OVERPOWERED to promote balance, fun and sandbox gameplay. One gun gameplay gets boring quickly, and it doesn’t promote skill either, only memorizing where the better weapons are on the map.
In CE, it was less about finding power weapons, and more about your individual skill with whatever you had on you. This needs to come back to Halo.
I agree, Halo 3 had terrible weapon balance and Reach was on the right road towards fixing that. In Halo 1, you could beat any weapon with any other weapon as long as you knew how to play well and were using it in the right situation. Sure, the pistol was super powerful, but it was still easy to beat provided that you outsmarted the opponent.
A lot of people never played Halo 1 and think “derp 3 shot kill pistol is overpowered you would never use anything else”. Having been playing Halo since 2001 (including Halo 1 on PC online), I know that statement is completely false.
By extremely overpowered you mean fast kill times? I’ll agree with that sentiment. I’ve been bouncing various ideas around in my head, but the only thing that really sticks out is that the game needs to feel fast paced and more visceral I guess (well, that and the game needs to focus on well balanced and visually appealing maps). Lighting someone up should really feel like it. There’s a lot of love for single-shot, and mechanically it works well, but I just find that the BR seems more satisfying from the perspective of someone viewing the action. A 3sk BR? Who knows.
As for your point about power weapons, I agree and disagree. Power weapons shouldn’t be AS dominant, but they should be dominant. You should fear engaging the rocket guy close up, you should fear the sniper down if he’s got a nice vantage point. I think with teamwork you should be able to neutralize them without necessary taking causalities, but I don’t think that competing 1v1 against a power weapon on his turf should be viable.
The skill a weapon takes to use should be proportionate to the amount of damage it deals. Anyone can paint a target with an AR. Not everyone can get a headshot with the Sniper Rifle especially at close range. See the difference in kill times? Easy to use AR has a long kill time while, hard to use, Sniper Rifle has an instant kill time. The utility weapon, which is a precision weapon, is harder to use than the AR so it should be rewarded with a faster kill time. The user of an easy-to-use weapon has to think less about aiming so they should be free to use that extra brain power to position themselves in a manner that offsets their weapon’s disadvantage of a longer kill time
> The skill a weapon takes to use should be proportionate to the amount of damage it deals. Anyone can paint a target with an AR. Not everyone can get a headshot with the Sniper Rifle especially at close range. See the difference in kill times? Easy to use AR has a long kill time while, hard to use, Sniper Rifle has an instant kill time. The utility weapon, which is a precision weapon, is harder to use than the AR so it should be rewarded with a faster kill time. The user of an easy-to-use weapon has to think less about aiming so they should be free to use that extra brain power to position themselves in a manner that offsets their weapon’s disadvantage of a longer kill time
I like this post, a lot. AR users can kill BR users. If an AR user tries to challenge a BR user head on, and then the BR user outplays him by hitting all his shots, then yeah, the BR guy should win. But if the AR guy starts getting some shots on him before the BR guy starts shooting him, yeah the AR guy can win and that’s what makes sense.
Also note, that faster kill times means that the AR guy getting the jump makes more of an impact. That’s fine, that’s just shifting the skill weighting around to map awareness and strategy from the aiming. No big. That’s part of being good at the game is having map awareness and creating a strategy to avoid being flanked like that.
What weapon in each halo is the best then accordding to you then?
Yes and no, the main problem with Reach’s sandbox is the DMR, most other weapons are balanced. With a utility weapon nerf, the only other thing that needs to happen are slightly faster kill times, for most weapons.
It should be AR beats BR at close range most of the time, BR beats AR at mid range all the time. In Reach the AR feels weak, yet sounds gnarly compared to the Halo 3 AR, which sounded like a pellet gun but did more damage.
Agreed, every weapon should be relatively balanced.