This may not be very organized…sorry.
Spartan abilities:
While ground pound seems like it should be in a super smash bros game, it does come in handy… sorta. I played pretty much the whole weekend and I got maybe 2 kills with it, out of maybe 20 games. I wasn’t killed by it once. I think myself and those I was playing with it were just too focused on playing regular halo that no one really tried to use the dumb thing. I did use the animation to avoid grenade. You can jump up and initiate ground pound to stay in the air and avoid some of the splash damage.
Sprint-
sprint is sprint, I don’t hate it but I don’t like it. It always made me question myself after winning a challenge as “I can’t recharge while running” If I did, 80% of the time I was found and killed. So it seems pretty balanced.
spartan charge-
Used it to just see the animation but never thought to use it in battle. I’m a BR guy and so if someone gets that close to me, shame on me. You can only initiate it at top sprint speed which happens about 1-1.5 seconds after you start running.
Thrusters-
super easy to avoid grenades. They need to fine tune that somehow.
Clamber-
Cool, Ill have to play more games to really see how I feel about it.
Slide-
I didn’t slide a single time. Not sure I even knew how to do it. lol
Weapons:
AR-
Too good. Close range is extremely deadly and pretty good at medium range. Clip size is pretty good, can’t remember the number. Smart scope makes it on par with the BR.
SMG -
Insane at close range. Not so great at medium as the recoil will throw you off.
BR-
Seems balanced? Its certainly not king of weapons at this point in the Beta. I think the scope looks ugly. Despite it not being the king, I still only used it.
DMR-
Didn’t use it too much as I didn’t know where it spawned. (beta was AR starts). When i did pick it up, the zoom was too much IMO. Kills pretty quickly. Definitely for more long range encounters as it should be.
Pistol-
If you take your time and have good aim, you can do pretty well with it. Cant remember the number of shots for a kill.
Sniper -
Pretty much the same sniper as halo 4. The scope screen is terrible and ugly.
Energy sword -
Aesthetically looks bad and awkward. Lunge felt slower than previous games. Cant get a one hit kill with regular melee. Maybe that was just a glitch.
Misc:
Announcer -
Annoying as fuuuuu. Everytime you get a 4shot he goes “Perfect Kill”. 5 medals a kill…Really? worse than halo 4.
When the match starts “Control power weapons to dominate the enemy team” please stop…
Spartan callouts - why?
Power weapons in 30 seconds
Sniper rifle in 30 seconds
Power weapons are up
Sniper rifle is up
Sniper rifle picked up
Okay… I get it!
Arena Ranks-
7 Ranks with 3 tiers each.
Got up to Onyx III. The next was “Semi Pro” with “Pro” being the top rank. Really? “Guys I’m semi pro” Smh.
You get performance points after each game depending on how you play. Before you can even get a rank, you must complete 10 games. On average I went around 18 kills 3-4 deaths and I gained about 13-15 performance points a match. Got half way to “semi-pro”.
Conclusion:
Despite all the new changes, I pretty much ignored them. I sprinted and used the thruster pack. My mind was fixed too much on old school halo that I didn’t care to really try to clamber a lot or ground pound or shoulder charge. When I would see others using it, it would just make me laugh as they would either get shot in the sky charging the pound or gunned down by an AR(shoulder charge). I wish we could get 1-50 ranks for this game. It seems like a good game overall. Weapon tweaks and ability tweaks and it should be pretty fun. Also, finding a match in the beta was about the same as finding a match in MCC at this moment. I had to force quit the game a few times but no where near as much as I had to in MCC.
