After playing quite a few BTB games in my halo 4 career I can say that the game is fun for the most part, but when it comes to vehicles, it completely misses the mark. I’ve personally had enough of the way the vehicle combat system in Halo 4 works. All vehicles are susceptible to damage from Small Arms fire, all players have the ability to spawn with Anti-vehicle weapons, and the game gives players free power weapons for doing virtually nothing worth noting. Call me Crazy, but I think vehicles are Underpowered.
I want t go over the biggest problem with vehicle combat as it is. Plasma weapons in loadouts. By plasma weapons I mean the Plasma Pistol and Sticky Grenades. In all past halos, the Plasma Pistol was a utility weapon that spawned in 1-2 areas on the map because of its usefulness towards vehicles. A charged shot from a Plasma Pistol tracks vehicles like a homing missile and once it hits, it disables the vehicle for a few seconds. This mechanic is fine when there’s only one per team, but it gets very overpowered if EVERY MEMBER of the enemy team has access to it.
Before Halo 4 was launched, 343i addressed the issue of it being added to loadouts by stating that the Tracking feature was heavily nerfed. I noticed zero change in the tracking, it is still as lenient as it was in all past Halos, it is VERY hard to miss a vehicle with a charged shot at its range, and because of that, it is way too easy to shut down a vehicle before it becomes even a minor threat.
The next weapon is the plasma Grenades, which can stick to vehicles if thrown. It only takes two to take down Halo’s signature vehicle, the warthog, and each player gets two off the spawn, meaning that every player has the ability to take down what was once a very major potential threat, single-handedly, without doing much. In past Halos, Plasma Grenades spawned in only a few areas for pickup because of its usefulness and power. Now EVERYONE gets two free.
Every vehicle now has to be weary of every single player, as setting the wrong foot with anyone could be fatal. Almost every player in BTB uses the Plasma Pistol-Plasma Grenades combo, and vehicles are suffering
Simply EMP the vehicle in question and chuck both of your plasma Grenades at it for a free vehicle kill.
Sometimes you don’t even need the Plasma Pistol, just chuck two stickies at a vehicle without an EMP and you will still probably get a kill due to the grenades’ power.
I have yet to find a SINGLE person that disagrees in that Plasma Grenades and Pistols need to be removed from loadouts, not a single one, yet they are still in the game aren’t they? It seems that Vehicle combat is almost meaningless to the community, despite it being a huge part of the most popular playlist in Halo History, Big Team Battle. Don’t believe me? Check these forums, you rarely see a thread about vehicle combat, and if you do, it very quickly gets buried (as this one will probably as well). Surely something the community cared about would see a little more attention…
I digress…
Surely if it were a problem, 343i would’ve fix it by now? Well, excluding the topic’s unpopularity, the “Most used weapon” Charts are likely very biased towards Plasma weapons, as a large majority of loadouts contain the combo. 343i must be thinking that if they change something that a large majority of the populace has grown accustomed to, surely some uprise will follow that. If so many players are using the combo, and 343i removes them, lots of people are likely to get mad, and I don’t blame 343i for not changing it at this point. But they should do SOMETHING about it, vehicles are heavily underpowered.
My suggestion is the following:
- Make EMP shots have zero tracking capabilities, and remove its ability to disable the main gun of a Tank and torso of a Mantis.
- Make it so Plasma Grenades cannot stick to vehicles, but rather the OCCUPANTS of the vehicle. (Mantis is special)
For one thing, these suggestions promote skill, Plasma Pistols guys will have to aim and lead their shots to make it count. And the Plasma Grenade guys can no longer mindlessly spam grenades and get a free 2 kills, they have to either aim to stick the guys in the vehicle, or time a throw so that a vehicle runs over the Plasma.
“But what about Tanks? Their drivers are not exposed…”
True, but their large profile and slow speed make it easy to time a throw at them. And while the grenades no longer stick to vehicles, they don’t just bounce off like Frag grenades. If you angle the throw right, you can get the grenade to sit on the tank, but if the tank moves in such a way, the grenade can still roll off.
“What about the Mantis? Its driver isn’t exposed either”
Because of the Mantis’s profile, I feel that if a Mantis has its shields down, it can get stuck by a plasma, but if the Shields are up, even a little bit, the grenades will bounce off.
Speaking of Tanks and Mantises, I should bring up another thing about vehicle combat:
Tanks and Mantises cannot be hijacked.
Yes, they can be boarded, but you cannot kill the driver without destroying the vehicle itself. This is a big issue considering in past Halos, you could commandeer a tank if you punched out the driver, but in Halo 4, you have no choice but to destroy it unless the pilot bails. There should be a reason you want to punch the vehicle rather than plant a grenade (besides lack of grenades).
The next thing I want to go over briefly is Ordinance drops. In Infinity slayer, people can call in power weapons after getting a small number of kills or points. Considering that a Vehicle has enough to deal with already, and removing ordanace drops really isn’t a valid option, I’d like to see a couple of the power weapons fixed:
The Spartan Laser:
Currently, when driving a vehicle, it is INCREDEBLY hard to see the targeting laser, making the Weapon very overpowered unless you have very keen eyes (which I do not)
The Incinerator cannon:
Projectiles move too fast, and considering the damage, it’s a pretty Overpowered weapon. All I want is a reduced projectile speed.
Considering how many ways a vehicle can be countered, it makes me believe that 343i hates vehicles/vehicle combat, and I really don’t want that to be true. I picked up halo for its vehicles exclusively, nothing else, so having my most beloved part of Halo so drastically ruined makes me very pissed off.
please lets this thread get some traffic… PLEASE!!