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> > I’d be curious to hear what Stabilizer takes away from trick jumps.
>
> I’m actually glad you asked that, since when I typed it I wondered if everyone would know what I meant. There are a couple different reasons why auto-stabilize makes most trick jumps easier. The first is that you can get some extra distance out of your jump if you use it, making the ones that are difficult to complete without stabilizers easier. The second is that you can attempt a jump, miss it, stabilize, and ground pound back to safety instead of falling to your death. Sure, doing that isn’t super easy, and it isn’t possible with every jump, but in previous halo games your jumps had to be perfect or else you would either miss it and not be where you wanted to be, or miss it and die. With auto stabilize and clamber, trick jumps are nearly non existent.
I would argue that Stabilizer isn’t your biggest problem there. First of all, the distance argument is at best incomplete. Consider for a moment what you can do only using Stabilizer, and no other Spartan Abilities. It won’t get you much further or higher than a plain crouch jump will. The truth is that Clamber, Thruster Pack, and Sprint all have a much more significant effect to jump distances, an effect that is so significant that it actually greatly impacts how maps need to be designed to fit difficult jumps.
The fact that short jumps become easier isn’t an inherent problem. It is in principle solved by creating longer jumps to compensate. For example, increasing base movement speed would have the same effect you are complaining about, but that is solved by making larger jumps. Likewise, if base movement speed was slowed down, some of the earlier difficult jumps would become impossible, and jumps would have to be scaled down. The problem with trick jumping in Halo 5 is that the distance combinations of different Spartan Abilities allow the player to cross are massive. They are so large that restricting the movement of players in a meaningful way would require either very open, or very large maps, which in turn creates other problems.
On paper, both Stabilizer and Ground Pound are actually very interesting. Neither of these abilities is intended to be used for jumps, but yet players have found ways to use them. And really, a jump that requires you to first repeatedly crouch while stabilizing, then hold Ground Pound, but not so long that it activates is, by definition, a trick jump because it makes use of a nonstandard trick to complete the jump. I don’t think these two abilities actively make the jumping worse because they actually require some dexterity to use, and leave the player hanging in the air as a large target. Much more harmful are abilities such as Sprint, Thruster Pack, and Clamber, which make jumps longer without any effort needed. With that said, I also do not think Stabilizer and Ground Pound have enough to offer that I would like to keep them, so, removing them from the game is fine by me.