This has irritated me for a while, and while I doubt this post will amount to much over people howling about the multiplayer I still feel it must be said.
Spartan Ops in it’s current state is atrocious. Legendary difficulty is in no way appropriately balanced, even for four players.
Almost every level on Legendary sports dozens Fuel-Rod wielding Elites, sometimes two or three at the same time and the game goes from a good challenge to a painful slog through semi-invincible enemies with super fast 1-hit-kills-everything cannons. I’ve been in games where the entire squad of players (myself included) have gotten obliterated multiple times by a single one of these monsters before everyone finally manages to rush him and just beat him down. The Promethean Knights are almost just as bad in such cases as well, but don’t beat the “Instant Hitscan Fuel Rod Dino”.
This is just god awful balancing. A game, no matter what difficulty, should be challenging but do-able for anybody. Currently, the way to play is more of a war of attrition, trading multiple deaths at a time to defeat a single enemy, and then dying a whole lot more on the next guy. I really feel like it’s devoid of skill anymore. Or really any fun at all.
I have two simple suggestions to fix this:
A) Return the difficulty back to Heroic. I felt this was a good balance. The AI was challenging, and you would die once or twice if you weren’t careful. It was difficult but achievable for all those involved.
B) Balance Legendary difficulty. This one requires more time, but if the difficulty must stay, then please take more time to balance what enemies are in the levels. More Fuel Rod Elites does not equate to more fun.
I LIKE playing co-op. I enjoy blazing through aliens with friends and random players alike. And Halo to me has always been more of a game about being a badass cyborg but that feeling is long gone.
What are your thoughts?
I agree that legendary difficulty is a bit much for spartan ops matchmaking. Its a fun challenge when there’s no button lag but unfortunately in matchmaking there’s hardly ever no button lag when it comes to spartan ops. I’d welcome a return to heroic difficulty and probably would play more spartan ops matchmaking if the difficulty was decreased.
Also I don’t think the spartan fours are cyborgs…walking, talking, shooting refridgerators maybe, but definitely not cyborgs…
I remember doing the Legendary achievement for this solo and spending a whole lot of time looking at the respawn screen. Heroic Co-Op was perfect when I went into MM for this.
Exactly. I thought that recapping the first 5 episodes again in Legendary was fine, but then I expected that when the new episodes released that the difficulty would revert back to Heroic.
I understand that the main reason the difficulty is like this is so new players can still get that achievement, but truly it should be more about everyone’s fun over little Timmy’s ability to get a single achievement. Players can still get it playing solo or with friends so if they want to trudge through a level, let them do it on their own time.
Everyone’s fun > Little Timmy getting an achievement
I feel like OP read my thoughts.
In general I feel like this difficulty is just overly punishing. Almost all the AI are crack shots. I like to set myself the personal challenge of not dying through missions, and that’s been pretty much shot to hell unless I set behind my teammates and snipe at long range, but that gets boring after a while.
Like I said, Heroic was a good setting. To me, a player dying 1-3 times is a good indicator of challenging but not absurd. When you see every player in the match has died upwards of 7-10 times or more, then there’s a problem.
I just feel like Spartan Ops hasn’t gotten the same kind of balancing that Campaign has, all too many times I see 4 fuel rod elites just steam roll everyone 3-4 times before they’re killed using attrition.
Charging the front line like it’s WW1 isn’t challenging, it’s annoying.