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> > - What are the worst weapons in the Halo franchise?Here is my list.
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> > - Focus Rifle. This is probably the worst weapon there is. Yes it does decent damage but it over heats quickly and it’s super clumsy. - Halo 2 Magnum. For obvious reasons. - Halo 3 (not ODST) Spiker. This thing was fun to use in Reach because it’s damage was boosted. But in Halo 3 it had almost zero damage. I hated it.• Storm Rifle. It replaces the Plasma Rifle, which is bad.
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> > •Sentinel Beam. We only need one Laser. And that’s the Splaser. No but seriously, I never liked it except against the Flood. I didn’t like the design to it.
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> > And that my list. I’ll be making a new one soon.
> > What is you guys’ lists? I’d love to see them!
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> I dislike the Storm Rifle but not because of the really dumb reason you mentioned. Rather it feels an ineffective, inaccurate weapon that overheats extraordinarily fast.
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> Frankly the fact that it replaces the Plasma Rifle means nothing to me. The fact that it does not offer any value as a weapon compared to literally anything else in Halo 4s sandbox is pretty telling in how awful it is as a weapon**.** The Plasma Pistol had Half its entire battery cut in Halo 4 and yet its still a more applicable weapon.
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> I think the Halo CE and 2 Needlers are both awful and are made this way because of their sluggish behaviour which is especially annoying in the seemingly 12 hour reload time in those games. For a gun that you just wave around to reload the Master Chief took his sweet time waving the Needler around prior to The Second Battle of Earth.
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> I think ultimately this highlights one of Halos major sandbox issues, it doesnt know what it wants to do with its automatic weapons.
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> There are 5 automatics in Halo Reach; AR, Spiker, Plasma Rifle, Plasma Repeater and Needler. Of these 5 only the Needler strikes me as reliable. The AR is a close second because it frequently has ammo and its range is easy to grasp comparative to the other 3.
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> The problem in general is that the weapons should ideally be good at shredding health or shields or have some such gimmick but the Plasma Rifle is eh, the AR is samey, the Needler is the Needler, the Spiker is basically a worse AR and the Plasma Repeater has a manual cool down gimmick which in theory sounds interesting and helpful but in practice is more of a novelty because using a Plasma Repeater will rarely actually help you out.
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> Halo needs more solid weapon function and differences to make it clear the role the weapons are to fulfil and what niche they fall squarely into.
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> Shield/health damage differences also need to be strengthened in order to incentivise weapon swapping and strategising on what weapons you want as opposed to Noob Combo’ing the campaign which although effective is hardly rewarding unless you like effortless headshots and hiding behind rocks waiting for the snipers to forget you exist.
I don’t necessarily think disliking the Storm Rifle because it replaced the Plasma Rifle is “dumb”. From my perspective at least, they got rid of a really unique sci-fi weapon design, something that hardly felt like a conventional “rifle”, for a really generic looking gun that is very cleary just the alien equivalent of a fully automatic human weapon. It’s too relatable, if that makes any sense. I’ve always hated the Storm Rifle more for that reason than because of its effectiveness as it’s not really that bad of a gun aside from overheating a bit too fast. I also hate the firing sound (that goes for a lot of 343 era weapons though), another thing that was great about the old PR.
As for your other points, I agree with you on the needler being bad in CE and 2 but I think your point about automatics really only applies to Reach. Most of the automatics in that game are quite terrible.
In CE, the Assault and Plasma Rifles were both very strong, even if the Plasma Rifle was somewhat overshadowed by the Plasma Pistol because of its overcharge ability. The needler was bad, but it was really more of a unique gimmick than a genuinely useful weapon. I think Bungie figured it out in Halo 3 (and then 343 made it flat out busted in Halo 4).
In Halo 2, the SMG was essentially just the CE assault rifle but now you could hold two of them at a time and the Plasma Rifle traded a loss of damage against health for more damage against shields to really emphasize the bullet vs plasma choice.
In Halo 3, the AR definitely had a role in the multiplayer as both a cleanup weapon and as something you could combo with a quick bleedthrough melee. The needler finally became usable in H3 and the Plasma Rifle and SMG were more or less the same as the H2 versions (actually, the Plasma Rifle might have been even stronger in Halo 3 compared to Halo 2). The Spiker was really the only useless automatic in Halo 3.
In Halo 4 and 5, the assault rifle is just an all-around powerhouse and the Storm Rifle is decent in both games. The suppressor is awful in Halo 4 but most of the Promethean weapons didn’t seem very well thought out in that game, with most of them being little more than either overpowered (Binary Rifle) or underpowered (Suppressor) reskins of human weapons.
Also, I don’t think the bullet/plasma differences need to be emphasized any more than they already are. I honestly kind of miss the way CE handled it. The Plasma Rifle and Plasma Pistol in that game, while obviously being at their strongest against shields, could still kill unshielded targets just fine (even having the benefit of stunning unshielded targets in the Plasma Rifle’s case) whereas they’ve felt almost useless against unshielded enemies since Halo 2. It seemed like the player was encouraged but not forced to pay attention to the bullet/plasma dichotomy in CE if they wanted to be extremely efficient, which I think is preferable.
I was thinking more or less along the terms of its usefulness in the campaign. May as well be shooting crayons for all the good it does.