Rate of Fire and Zero Bloom

Games Other Halo
1

I personally love the changes that are being made to Halo:Reach; I’m glad that the initiative to turn Reach back into the Halo that I love is being taken. However, I think that there are still some changes that need to be made to fine tune the effects of the No-Bloom arsenal. First off, let me start by saying that I think that 0 bloom is amazing, but it needs to be played with (explained further down). Here is my “100% Opinionated” argument for what needs to be done to the precision weapons to yield the best results; it is broken up for you:

I: Introduction - the old Reach
II: The effects of a Bloomless game
III: Rate of Fire - a fix
IV: Some final opinions
V: TL: DR

I:

When the update was released, many of us rushed to our Xbox and were ready to experience the Halo Reach that we wanted since the beta. Finally, the removal of bloom was made and the randomness was taken out of fights. So what did this really do?

When you think about it, bloom was put on these precision weapons (DMR, Needle Rifle, Magnum) to cripple them and keep them balanced; Bungie clearly didn’t want an over-dependency on these weapons and that is completely justifiable because a one-weapon game isn’t particularly exciting or unpredictable. Bloom’s intentions were perfectly fine, but the way that it was implemented was catastrophic; many fights are settled by a “coin toss” and the gun didn’t really fire where it was pointed at under certain circumstances. A look at just about any Halo forum over the last year will tell you that bloom didn’t roll over so well with many players.

II:

So what am I getting at? Well think about this:

The precision weapons like the DMR, NR, and Magnum were clearly the most reliable all-purpose weapons in the default Reach. So with the removal of bloom, the game has just taken the most reliable weapons and removed what was crippling them; the TU made the best even better. Inversely, the game just took the less dependable weapons (really, just about any weapon: ex: AR, Needler, Concussion Rifle, etc…) and made them even more useless. Now, I’m not saying this out of an outrage that I can’t use my T0tALLy L33T AR Skillz to destroy a DMR anymore, but it seems pretty useless to have an entire weapons sandbox consisting of one amazing gun and a bunch of pea-shooters.

Even if that doesn’t bother you, the removal of bloom has simplified the “golden duel” between precision weapons in every Halo game. Why do I say that? Any person that had some knowledge on how to use a Magnum in Halo CE and a BR in Halo 2 & 3 would agree when they say that movement is a HUGE factor in precision weapon duels. I would say that moving is as important as maintaining accuracy in a duel. I am referring to the the tactics that include strafing, jumping “Gandhi Hopping” (spamming the crouch button in midair), etc… to throw your opponent off in a duel.

What happened to that? Well the new bloom settings allow these precision weapons to fire incredibly accurately at a ridiculously fast rate of fire. What that means is that movement was thrown out the window. A magnum can kill in less than a second which means that you can barely take a single step before your opponent takes your life.

III:

How can all of the issues be satisfied? People want a non-crippled gun that shoots where they point it; they want a gun that injects no randomness into their bullets. When they receive that, they get a weapon that dominates everything that IS Halo. How can these guns be re-crippled to fit back into their dominant, but not overpowering, place WITHOUT sacrificing their accuracy? By tuning the rate of fire.

If the guns are to shoot a bit slower, they will benefit everyone. The rest of the guns in the game won’t be completely useless, and the precision weapons will still be the most reliable guns with the biggest skill gap (aka: the gun will still be far more deadly when used by someone that is an expert with it as opposed to someone that doesn’t know the tricks with it). There would also be more skill involved when two precision weapons face off: maintaining accuracy on a moving target for even longer will take more skill out of the user.

The challenge lies within finding the perfect rate to which these guns need to be lowered to so that they aren’t useless, but they aren’t overpowering. Making the guns too fast (what we currently have) makes the guns hardly about maintaining accuracy and more about who shoots first. Making the guns too slow will make the guns utterly useless and we will be settling fights with the next best gun. When a perfect balance is made, we may be finding ourselves playing the Halo that we have loved for years.

IV:

Personally, I have always preferred Halo over any other FPS such as CoD or Battlefield primarily due to its unique health system. The fact that a fight is so unpredictable is what held my utmost interest in the game for so many years; the fact that you could have your back turned to an enemy, take a bullet from them, and COMPLETELY turn the tables out of them due to quick thinking, skill, and strategy. This has always been why Halo has sat at the top of my favorite games list. Now, the current rate of fire on a gun like the bloomless-magnum, a gun that kills in a second, makes the game feel more like CoD. You make one strategical error, the enemy gets the first shot on you and “OOPS! You’re dead. Better luck next time!” These precision weapons kill before a player can react to being shot, let alone has the idea that the player has been shot has even appeared in their brain.

V:

TL:DR: If the rate of fire is tuned on the precision weapons (magnum, DMR, and NR) so that they fire slower, rainbows, sunshine, and sparkles will rain over Halo:Reach and everyone will be happy. If you want to know why, I think the OP might have explained it somewhere… I wonder where.

2

I would rather see everything else get buffed in order to meet the precision weapons rather than pulling the precision weapons back to the level of other weapons.

3

The ideas in the ops post have been stated many times before. But with halo 4 a year away, I dont think they should strip bloom from reach.

Let bloom be reach’s addition to halo, let bloom be what we remember reach as, let bloom be reach’s mechanic.

Use reach as a stepping stone to make halo 4 a great halo game, dont try to turn reach into something it isnt.

I dont really have a problem with 343 making stuff like 85% bloom for the social playlists and arena, and 0% bloom for mlg. But there is no reason to seriously alter game mechanics down to the point of RoF over one year into the game’s release. Just let reach be reach, plenty of people love reach, and while there is a large minority that do not like the mechanics, if 343 changed reach mechanics this late into reach’s lifespan, the repercussions would be ridiculous: This forum would be literally BURSTING with angry semi-pros and casuals alike for changing the matching systems that we have been used to for over a year.

4

> I would rather see everything else get buffed in order to meet the precision weapons rather than pulling the precision weapons back to the level of other weapons.

Well then we would be playing a game with kill times that are fast enough to be relatable to CoD. The entire idea behind Halo in which the health system was designed for would be thrown away. There would simply be a bunch of guns that kill in a second or less. There wouldn’t really be as much of a skill, just strategy and the ideology of “whoever gets the first shot wins.”

If the kill time was tuned to be neither too fast nor too slow, Reach would resemble the Halo that so many loved and was such a big success for so long.

> The ideas in the ops post have been stated many times before.

Yeah, but I don’t see enough of those ideas being voiced with threads. I think that the idea really needs to be pressed.

> But with halo 4 a year away, I dont think they should strip bloom from reach.
>
> Let bloom be reach’s addition to halo, let bloom be what we remember reach as, let bloom be reach’s mechanic.
>
> Use reach as a stepping stone to make halo 4 a great halo game, dont try to turn reach into something it isnt.
>
> I dont really have a problem with 343 making stuff like 85% bloom for the social playlists and arena, and 0% bloom for mlg. But there is no reason to seriously alter game mechanics down to the point of RoF over one year into the game’s release. Just let reach be reach, plenty of people love reach, and while there is a large minority that do not like the mechanics, if 343 changed reach mechanics this late into reach’s lifespan, the repercussions would be ridiculous: This forum would be literally BURSTING with angry semi-pros and casuals alike for changing the matching systems that we have been used to for over a year.

Eh. I want to see a Reach that I can enjoy; I don’t want to look at it as a black stain on the franchise when Halo 4 comes out and if it is more successful. I want there to not only be a good game for the next year, but I want assurance in 343i’s capabilities when tackling possible problems that resemble this one in a future game.

5

Is Reach your first Halo? There’s nothing wrong with the RoF, the kill time for the CE pistol is faster than the zero bloom DMR and the Halo 2 BR has the same kill time as the DMR does now. What needs to happen is strafing needs to be fixed, remove movement acceleration (or inertia as some call it) and bump up the base player speed and jump height and there would be nothing wrong with ZBS.

7

>

I will remember Reach for what i choose to remember it for: The Anniversary maps/playlist.

Until then i will be playing TU Beta and MLG ZB customs. Snipers and SWAT too.

8

> >
>
> Clearly someone hasn’t noticed the zero bloom magnum. If you can compare that to Halo 2’s BR, then you need to replay those games.
>
> It may take more shots to kill someone with the magnum, but the rate of fire on it is much higher than the CE pistol AND the CE pistol didn’t have bullet magnetism and aim assist to make the gun so mindless, hence why the new magnum is a problem. Most of this thread is directed at the magnum, which needs the biggest change, and a much smaller portion is dedicated to the NR and DMR to change them by the tiniest amount to apply the same factors and so that they don’t completely wipe out magnum’s purpose.

343i has already stated that they would adjust the RoF on the magnum. I don’t think it should be changed at all, it just needs to either replace the DMR as the primary weapon and have AR secondaries or it needs to be removed from spawn and be made into a map pick-up.

9

i agree. they need to cap the rate of fire on the pistol so it can only fire one bullet every .35 seconds. i wish they could do the same with the DMR, but its not possible without another TU :C (no idea why they only did this for ONE gun :X)

10

> I would rather see everything else get buffed in order to meet the precision weapons rather than pulling the precision weapons back to the level of other weapons.

I totally agree with you.

11

ROF needs reducing, movement needs to be fixed and so does aiming.

Strafe acceleration cripples strafing and the skill that went with it. It’s bad enough there is bloom and hitscan, but we aren’t even able to dodge or maneuver around there shots.

Aim acceleration needs to go. If I’m on sensitivity 3, I want to play on that sensitivity, not accelerate up to it. I know plenty of people who played 3-4 on previous Halos and now play 6+ because they notice the acceleration so much. I personally played on 2-3 and now find myself on 4 on Reach.

To be honest, I don’t see why Bungie worked so hard to make Reach so casual. They nerfed strafing, aiming and jumping. Some of these played huge parts in competitive play. And it’s obvious these changes definitely did some damage to the “pro” side of Reach.

Hopefully you guys at 343i get this done well. I’d love to see Reach take center stage and it would set up Halo 4 if Reach managed to change and do that.

12

> ROF needs reducing, movement needs to be fixed and so does aiming.
>
> Strafe acceleration cripples strafing and the skill that went with it. It’s bad enough there is bloom and hitscan, but we aren’t even able to dodge or maneuver around there shots.
>
> Aim acceleration needs to go. If I’m on sensitivity 3, I want to play on that sensitivity, not accelerate up to it. I know plenty of people who played 3-4 on previous Halos and now play 6+ because they notice the acceleration so much. I personally played on 2-3 and now find myself on 4 on Reach.
>
> To be honest, I don’t see why Bungie worked so hard to make Reach so casual. They nerfed strafing, aiming and jumping. Some of these played huge parts in competitive play. And it’s obvious these changes definitely did some damage to the “pro” side of Reach.
>
> Hopefully you guys at 343i get this done well. I’d love to see Reach take center stage and it would set up Halo 4 if Reach managed to change and do that.

You’re definitely right about the aim acceleration, in H2 I played on 4 and in H3/Reach I have to have it all the way up to 7 or 8. And the fact that all of my controllers have slow turn really doesn’t help.

13

> > ROF needs reducing, movement needs to be fixed and so does aiming.
> >
> > Strafe acceleration cripples strafing and the skill that went with it. It’s bad enough there is bloom and hitscan, but we aren’t even able to dodge or maneuver around there shots.
> >
> > Aim acceleration needs to go. If I’m on sensitivity 3, I want to play on that sensitivity, not accelerate up to it. I know plenty of people who played 3-4 on previous Halos and now play 6+ because they notice the acceleration so much. I personally played on 2-3 and now find myself on 4 on Reach.
> >
> > To be honest, I don’t see why Bungie worked so hard to make Reach so casual. They nerfed strafing, aiming and jumping. Some of these played huge parts in competitive play. And it’s obvious these changes definitely did some damage to the “pro” side of Reach.
> >
> > Hopefully you guys at 343i get this done well. I’d love to see Reach take center stage and it would set up Halo 4 if Reach managed to change and do that.
>
> You’re definitely right about the aim acceleration, in H2 I played on 4 and in H3/Reach I have to have it all the way up to 7 or 8. And the fact that all of my controllers have slow turn really doesn’t help.

I don’t think it is your controllers dude.

14

> I:When you think about it, bloom was put on these precision weapons (DMR, Needle Rifle, Magnum) to cripple them and keep them; Bungie clearly didn’t want an over-dependency on these weapons and that is completely justifiable because a one-weapon game isn’t particularly exciting or unpredictable. Bloom’s intentions were perfectly fine, but the way that it was implemented was catastrophic

Agreed sort of, Bloom was to nerf the DMR’s CQC, The NR’s auto capability and The pistols ROF to keep them on par with other weapons.

IMO bloom wasn’t implemented catastrophically.(But that discussion is for anther day)

> II:The precision weapons like the DMR, NR, and Magnum were clearly the most reliable all-purpose weapons in the default Reach. So with the removal of bloom, the game has just taken the most reliable weapons and removed what was crippling them; the TU made the best even better. Inversely, the game just took the less dependable weapons (really, just about any weapon: ex: AR, Needler, Concussion Rifle, etc…) and made them even more useless. Now, I’m not saying this out of an outrage that I can’t use my T0tALLy L33T AR Skillz to destroy a DMR anymore, but it seems pretty useless to have an entire weapons sandbox consisting of one amazing gun and a bunch of pea-shooters.

That is the point though, The TU makes those 3 weapons Deadly and the rest of the weapons are stuck to a tiny niche or support/assist weapons.

The default Reach all weapons are balanced, You can’t take away bloom the thing that keeps precision weapons balanced then expect them to stay balanced.

> Even if that doesn’t bother you, the removal of bloom has simplified the “golden duel” between precision weapons in every Halo game. Why do I say that? Any person that had some knowledge on how to use a Magnum in Halo CE and a BR in Halo 2 & 3 would agree when they say that movement is a HUGE factor in precision weapon duels. I would say that moving is as important as maintaining accuracy in a duel. I am referring to the the tactics that include strafing, jumping “Gandhi Hopping” (spamming the crouch button in midair), etc… to throw your opponent off in a duel.
>
> What happened to that? Well the new bloom settings allow these precision weapons to fire incredibly accurately at a ridiculously fast rate of fire. What that means is that movement was thrown out the window. A magnum can kill in less than a second which means that you can barely take a single step before your opponent takes your life.

Seriously… Default Reach works, Heard the saying “If it’s not broke, Don’t fix it”? What that saying means is if it’s working don’t change it because you could do something wrong then that would lead to something else wrong etc etc. (Reach not broke>Add bloom>Rof to fast>change movement speed>etc>etc going on forever)

> III:
> How can all of the issues be satisfied? People want a non-crippled gun that shoots where they point it; they want a gun that injects no randomness into their bullets. When they receive that, they get a weapon that dominates everything that IS Halo. How can these guns be re-crippled to fit back into their dominant, but not overpowering, place WITHOUT sacrificing their accuracy? By tuning the rate of fire.
>
> If the guns are to shoot a bit slower, they will benefit everyone. The rest of the guns in the game won’t be completely useless, and the precision weapons will still be the most reliable guns with the biggest skill gap (aka: the gun will still be far more deadly when used by someone that is an expert with it as opposed to someone that doesn’t know the tricks with it). There would also be more skill involved when two precision weapons face off: maintaining accuracy on a moving target for even longer will take more skill out of the user.
>
> The challenge lies within finding the perfect rate to which these guns need to be lowered to so that they aren’t useless, but they aren’t overpowering. Making the guns too fast (what we currently have) makes the guns hardly about maintaining accuracy and more about who shoots first. Making the guns too slow will make the guns utterly useless and we will be settling fights with the next best gun. When a perfect balance is made, we may be finding ourselves playing the Halo that we have loved for years.

Slow the Rof then it will be balanced? You would have to have a lot of testing to know what a perfect Rof is(if there is one) because if it’s to slow other weapons would dominate precision weapons(then it wouldn’t be a utility weapon) and at long range everyone would escape without dieing.
But if the Rof is to short the precision weapons will dominate most everything (excluding obvious examples of rockets/snipers long range,etc) and all the other weapons will be limited to a tiny niche of support weapons…Oh wait…

But the point of the TU was to make the DMR/NR/Pistol OP! so making it balanced isn’t a priority.

> IV:Personally, I have always preferred Halo over any other FPS such as CoD or Battlefield primarily due to its unique health system. The fact that a fight is so unpredictable is what held my utmost interest in the game for so many years; the fact that you could have your back turned to an enemy, take a bullet from them, and COMPLETELY turn the tables out of them due to quick thinking, skill, and strategy. This has always been why Halo has sat at the top of my favorite games list. Now, the current rate of fire on a gun like the bloomless-magnum, a gun that kills in a second, makes the game feel more like CoD. You make one strategical error, the enemy gets the first shot on you and “OOPS! You’re dead. Better luck next time!” These precision weapons kill before a player can react to being shot, let alone has the idea that the player has been shot has even appeared in their brain.

I’ve always enjoyed Halo because you can turn the tables AND you had strategy on choosing the right weapon but at a competitive level you always had to use the BR/DMR/Pistol OP weapon but in Reach you can use most any weapon in the sandbox and still win at a competitive level because of bloom.

TU brings you back to a OP utility weapon game, Neither mode is bad IMO it’s just preference but it’s either OP utility’s or Balanced weapons, Pick your poison.

15

In my opinion, the rate of fire shouldn’t be touched on the DMR or Needle Rifle. I do think, however that the NR should be a 7-shot kill again. The pistol is WAY too fast as of now though, so I completely agree there.

What needs adjusting is movement speed, jump height, gravity, movement acceleration, and most of all, shield recharge.

Check out my thread on ROF here and my thread on other changed needed here.

16

Completely wrong. Bloom does nothing to any weapon period. Bloom is just the retracting and expanding of the HUD widget known as the reticule. It’s a damn bitmap, thats all. The “blooming” reticule was added so that players could for the first time, actually see and guage where their shots would land, rather than guessing insode the large reticule of the previous games. The “bloom” you are describing is the firing radius of the weapon. This has been in all Halo games and always will. There is no magic randomness to where your shots land when spamming. These parameters are well defined in the [weap] tag, as well as firing rate, heat recovery etc. Best to understand exactly what it is you are talking about when it comes to weapon mechanics my friend.

As for the TU changes, these changes ar a combination of 7 floats being manipulated in memory by MegaloScript. The whole point of the change was to give the player a more “Battle Rifle” style weapon feel, and to speed up gameplay a bit. The magnum is just a sad attempt to replicate the H1 pistol…which it does poorly I may add.

Either way, with or without a defined smaller or larger firing radius or for you all…“bloom”, it still comes down to how well you evade and return fire. If you just plain suck or tend to even for a millisecind hold out on taking action, you lose. Did we all forget those wild and crazy BR fights in Halo 2 and 3? Skill dominates everytime, not how a weapon fires. A weapon of any type can be deadly when weilded properly and by a truly skilled adversary.

17

TL;DR

No, for real. I was riveted the whole time. Never have I seen such a well-presented opinion. I don’t necessarily agree with everything, but I respect your position.

> Completely wrong. Bloom does nothing to any weapon period. Bloom is just the retracting and expanding of the HUD widget known as the reticule. It’s a damn bitmap, thats all.

I was wondering what people were complaining about when they talked about “bloom”. I recall pretty clearly the BR spread in H3 as widening up significantly at long range.

I think the main problem is not the grouping of the bullets, but rather the hit detection and auto-aim. I know for a fact that the inner circle of DMR reticle must rest just outside the head (in multi) at certain ranges in order to get a headshot. Otherwise, it seems to auto-aim to the body. Has anyone else noticed this?

18

> Completely wrong. Bloom does nothing to any weapon period. Bloom is just the retracting and expanding of the HUD widget known as the reticule. It’s a damn bitmap, thats all. The “blooming” reticule was added so that players could for the first time, actually see and guage where their shots would land, rather than guessing insode the large reticule of the previous games. The “bloom” you are describing is the firing radius of the weapon. This has been in all Halo games and always will. There is no magic randomness to where your shots land when spamming. These parameters are well defined in the [weap] tag, as well as firing rate, heat recovery etc. Best to understand exactly what it is you are talking about when it comes to weapon mechanics my friend.
>
> As for the TU changes, these changes ar a combination of 7 floats being manipulated in memory by MegaloScript. The whole point of the change was to give the player a more “Battle Rifle” style weapon feel, and to speed up gameplay a bit. The magnum is just a sad attempt to replicate the H1 pistol…which it does poorly I may add.
>
> Either way, with or without a defined smaller or larger firing radius or for you all…“bloom”, it still comes down to how well you evade and return fire. If you just plain suck or tend to even for a millisecind hold out on taking action, you lose. Did we all forget those wild and crazy BR fights in Halo 2 and 3? Skill dominates everytime, not how a weapon fires. A weapon of any type can be deadly when weilded properly and by a truly skilled adversary.

Lolwat. Are you serious? You have no idea what you’re talking about.

20

Have you guys actually played ZB? The only useless weapons were already useless(PR and AR).

This sandbox argument is null and void. If anything it balances the sandbox by not making niche weapons way overpowered in their niche, to the point of rock paper scissors gameplay. It also makes the sniper/rockets require a little thought to use. Not just I have rockets=killing spree.

I will take eliminating randomness at any cost. The DMR without bloom has the potential to be the most skillful Utility since the CE pistol.

The reach pistol is, however, way OP. Obviously. And random too.

21

DMR needs a fire rate cap. Magnum is fine because it doesn’t have the range. And by capping the DMR, vehicles survive longer too, and you can’t use one in close quarters. WIN/WIN

22

> DMR needs a fire rate cap. Magnum is fine because it doesn’t have the range. And by capping the DMR, vehicles survive longer too, and you can’t use one in close quarters. WIN/WIN

The fact that it doesn’t fire at as long of a range as the DMR doesn’t make it any less of a mini-hand-cannon that takes little skill to operate while it fits the shotgun’s niche better than a shotgun does. Its skill gap is so small that it is more mindless and simplistic to comprehend and operate than the AR’s.