Sorry but AR takes 0 skill

If the AR takes “no skill” then what are you complaining about? You should be able to get easy kills with the AR just like everyone else.

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The AR is a beginner weapon. The Sidekick rewards skill with a significantly faster potential killtime.

I do think the AR should have it’s killtime effectively nerfed by removing the headshot multiplier but leaving damage otherwise as is. But aside from that it seems pretty much fine to me. Just too random with that headshot bonus.

I’m complaining that it should be a PICKUP WEAPON like everything else in this game. It’s borderline a power weapon.

Yes but at the cost of being WAY more punishing if you miss. You can miss 5 bullets, that’s it. AR you can miss 1/3 of the clip and still kill. Compound that with insane range and ROF and all you do is force players to use it if they want to keep up.

Looks like someone is bad at shooting games and thus needs to start with a weapon that let’s you miss 1/3 of the bullets and still kill in under 2 seconds.

See I can make assumptions too.

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If I had to tweak the AR in any way, I would say, just make the shots go a little more wild at range, don’t change the damage, just make it less accurate at range. But that’s just me.

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Well, your options are there. None of the other weapons in the UNSC are better picks because of thier range and or damage. Accept it and move on, or dont. Its not our faults you’re upset about it

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If anything, the sidekick is OP

Because the first weapon you get in the game should be viable? What kind of question is that?

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That’s part of the skill gap with the weapon. But that’s still quite a few “extra chances” and if you miss 2-3 the AR’s killtime catches up anyway. Even in other Halo games when you compare the AR to the Magnum/BR/DMR the AR usually caught up if the precision weapon user missed a couple of shots. If a BR user in H3 needs more than 6 shots to get their kill the AR can, and will beat them consistently. Which was a lot of them all things considered, it’s why a player with excellent aim could carry hard in that game, if you only needed 5 bursts consistently to take a player down you had a huge leg up in H3.

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This is an excellent troll. I salute you, sir/madam/other.

In all honesty, at to this point, it’s pretty dejavu to me, because this AR Topic comes up almost each Release and hardly even true. That’s why i ready already Popcorn and stuff when a new Halo gets released.

I get the feeling that this is a conscious decision from the developers - so that new players can get into the game and compete favourably against anyone

It defo needs to be less powered over mid-long distance though.

There’s no incentive to pick up a VK or BR on the smaller maps right now

The AR is the worst part of Infinite. The range on the AR is way way too far. There is so little spread and so much damage, it is practically impossible to survive an AR fight that you don’t shoot first in, unless they start missing.

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The AR is almost always the first weapon I swap out. While it’s effective, it just doesn’t feel as good to use as the other weapons. I’m not sure what it is, but my favorite AR was Halo 5’s. It felt powerful and very skillful.

Edit: After some thought, I believe the smaller reticle on H5’s AR made it more enjoyable, at least for me.

Lol what are you dropping the mic for? You’ve failed to make even a single valid point in this entire thread. Nothing you say matters until you provide in-game proof. For example: Video evidence of full sustained fire beating controlled fire at a variety of ranges and against different types of enemy player movement, demonstrating higher scores in weapon drills, etc.

Please quote where I said that I primarily use the AR, and then when you’re done not being able to do that because I said no such thing, you can stop erecting strawmen in order to have something to argue against, because you very obviously can’t argue against any of my points.

Name the 5 principal skills that govern playing video games, and explain how the AR fails to stress each. Until you can do that, you claims of the AR taking no skill are completely meaningless. It doesn’t matter how many times you want to say it, it doesn’t make it true until you prove it with observable evidence. Which you can’t do, because it’s an objectively false statement.

Being the most versatile weapon is not synonymous with being the most forgiving, or the least skillful. You’re begging the question and drawing conclusions based on a premise you have yet to prove, which makes your statement invalid by default.

You’re simply not a good enough player to be able to beat someone using the AR, and you’re upset about it. The fact that your entire argument is just whining and rhetoric without even a single piece of evidence is proof that it’s based in emotion rather than fact, because if you were right it would be easy to demonstrate. So why haven’t you done it yet if the AR so obviously requires no skill?

What’s you’re excuse? I anxiously wait for you to continue to just ignore the content of my post and keep responding with the same thing that you have yet to prove.

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I see you understand design and gameplay about as much as the OP. That is to say: Not at all. The specific pacing of your shots matters, and it changes depending on range. Do you know how many shots you have to fire before stopping at 10m, 20m, 30m, etc. in order to optimize accuracy without sacrificing damage output? How about against each other weapon in the game? Because that’s a very high-order skill, and it makes a significant difference.

The problem here is that both you and the OP understand nothing about what skill actually is and how it is determined.

You should probably talking before you embarrass yourself further.

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Lol ok i had several 50s in halo the AR takes zero skill it has been noted a million times the range and damage is disproportianate for its intended use

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Blah blah blah you’re so good, blah blah, whatever. Nobody cares how good you claim you are.

The AR has exactly one issue: Its range allows it to consistently de-scope long-range weapons and undermines their intended functional niche. The damage isn’t too high; it takes forever to kill because by time the enemy’s shield breaks the accuracy has tanked so bad that it takes half a clip to actually land the required number of killing shots. And understanding how to control its fire so that doesn’t happen is not only highly variable depending on context, but also requires a fair bit of skill. If the damage was any lower the weapon would be basically useless because it wouldn’t beat anything. It barely even beats the weapons it’s supposed to beat in its functional range.

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That was just an over convoluted, dude-bro explanation. The entire concept of the assault rifle is that is doesn’t require mass amount of skill. It’s a standard, spawning weapon that is easy functioning and doesn’t require heaps of nuance to understand. Distance vs. pace is not a hard concept. Especially on a gun that does mass damage over a long range with a spread. You know, like the ridiculous, game breaking AR we’re currently using. Are people picking up commando? Are people picking up anything other than weapons spawned with and power weaponry? No? You know why? Because the commando is immensely more difficult to use than the AR in most situations. The AR requires less finesse and skill to output mass amounts of damage due to its range and spread. The AR requires some kind of skill (Like all weapons) but to sit here and act like this is some skill-based, learning curve that require precise timing and a dedication to accuracy? Give me a break.

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No, it’s a level of understanding that is internalized by skilled players - knowledge is one of the five pillars of video game skill.

And no, the AR isn’t designed to not require skill, it’s designed to be a jack-of-all-trades weapon that can serve a variety of functions, but that loses to weapons that are more specialized. No element in a competitive game is designed to compress skill differential because depth is the goal, and depth is a product of nuance.

Distance vs. pace is not a hard concept

The number of players who don’t know how to use the AR proves otherwise. And you could argue that tracking a target with a precision weapon isn’t difficult. No statement about skill means anything without putting it into the context of the 5 pillars of skill. Vague statements like the one quoted above are literally meaningless.

It’s not simply a matter of understanding range and pace as a concept, it’s about knowing specifically how to pace your shots at every potential engagement range and in every potential weapon match-up, down to the bullet. Because it’s not always the same, and knowing these things gives you an advantage and separates the top players from everyone else. You clearly don’t have much, if any experience playing video games in a competitive tournament setting where you need every advantage you can get. Because when money is on the line, you can bet that your competition is going to lab out every possible advantage they can find.

If the AR is so broken, then why do top players hardly ever use it? The Sidekick has faster TTK and it’s not more difficult to finish with a Sidekick headshot than it is AR headshots, which are required to consistently win duels. If anything, it’s easier to headshot with the Sidekick than to manage the bloom enough to secure finishing headshots with the AR. Again, all statements about skill need to be put in context of the skill spectrum.

Having to repeatedly press a button instead of holding it is only a marginally higher-order dexterity skill than holding the button, but pacing the AR for optimal damage output is a significantly higher-orderd timing skill than simply firing the Sidekick as fast as you can, which is the optimal way to use it unless you’re out of it’s effective range. A case could be made that using the Sidekick effectively (i.e. consistently winning duels) is actually easier than using the AR effectively.

This is why people who don’t understand the concept of skill shouldn’t make statements about what does and does not require skill. You don’t understand what “skill” even is.

People aren’t picking up the Commando because it’s under-powered, not because the AR is too good. Making the AR weaker elevates the BR, Sidekick, and Bulldog in addition to the Commando, but does not improve the Commando’s match-ups (which are currently terrible) against those weapons. It’s not that the Commando is difficult to use as much as it is that it needs to be buffed, because it currently loses most match-ups regardless of how skillfully you use it, even in its intended range and role.

Nerfing the AR is going to shrink its functional role to the extent that its becomes basically useless, because it will then lose to the BR, Bulldog, and Sidekick within a majority of its effective range, making it redundant and with no reason to even exist in the game. If there is any weapon that you should be encouraged to drop because it’s only situationally effective, it should be the Sidekick given that it’s a sidearm , but that’s not currently the case because it’s so effective.

The weapon sandbox is a dynamic system, and every change affects the entire system, not just the element that was changed. Again, this is why having a fundamental understanding of game design concepts is required to have this conversation; I’m wasting my time for my own amusement here, honestly.

You just don’t get it. Being effective means finding every advantage you can get, however small. Top players in any game have a fluent understanding down to the most inconsequential elements and interactions because even a 1% advantage can be used to turn the tide of an interaction. The AR has a higher skill ceiling than most other weapons in the game because of the granularity in which it can be used. There’s no way to be “better” with the BR beyond getting perfect kills. That’s a low skill-ceiling because there’s less that the player can do with he BR to gain an advantage than there is with the AR.

Please learn something about skill before you attempt to continue with this discussion, because you’re not making any kind of valid point whatsoever. I can link you to resources examining skill in video games if you’d like, but I’m sure you already think you know everything there is to know because you’ve “played Halo/video games for (X) years” or for whatever reason or another than doesn’t actually teach you anything about game design.

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The Halo game that has the lowest aim assist, and best strafing should not have the best AR simple as that.

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