I'd like to talk to you about it at length, at some point, because my initial impressions are that all the guns seem to rape now and the game has become completely unenjoyable. I thought the re-balance was mainly focused on the precision weapons, yet I feel like I'm getting destroyed by guys with ARs (like in record time, from a range where you'd think you'd be able to fight back), guys with turrets, and basically guys with anything. Maybe I just need to get used to it, I dunno, but as a proponent of larger, more open maps and being able to move around instead of just camping and playing ping-ping-ping wars, this update has me frustrated as hell. I just turned my XBox off after a couple games of getting slaughtered by everyone and was about fed up enough to not even want to play it anymore. My friend felt the same way - he feels like the game is COD now, where going into the open at all is insta-death. That's not fun to me. The other possibility is just that pretty much all the relative weapon strengths have changed now, and I'm not sure I have the energy to go back through and feel it all out again. It took me a while to get my legs in Halo 4; now all the sudden I'm awful again, and the **** is tiresome, man.
Kinda my impression of it as well. The automatics buff and movement speed increase were 2 steps too far IMO. I thought the movement and jump heights were at their all time best in H4, more mobile than Reach and not as floaty as H3. It felt good, didn't need to change. Not sure why sprint wasn't enough already. I'm pretty happy with the BR and Carbine changes though. edit: ****ing hell.
You gotta feel for 343i and their complete incompetence of understanding Halo and its weaponry. So now they fixed the BR and made it awesome again like it should be, but they also utterly ****ed up the SAW and made it the most ridiculously overpowered weapon ever. I played 2 games and in both games total I got killed 4 times in less than a second by the SAW. The automatics didn't need a buff, and the SAW certainly didn't. Very bad move, I really hope they'll fix it. At the moment, SAW could easily beat Rocket Launcher up close.
@Indie. I've played on both Longbow and Vortex since the update, and personally I don't think the changes that are listed there are that bad. Gameplay is a little more chaotic, but I still thought it was fun overall. What confuses me about Longbow though is 343i's decision to add three Shade turrets to top-mid. @Remkings. Is the SAW really that bad now? I spent a bit of time using it when the update first came out and it didn't feel like that big of a difference. If it can seriously beat rockets up close then that's insane.
I can't get Longbow to come up anymore but I can't imagine this being any good. Gauss hogs have no place in matchmaking to begin with. Longbow was my favorite map precisely because it downplayed vehicles compared to the other BTB maps. The whole school of thought that BTB = vehiclefest is stupid to me. I'm tired of things getting "a little more chaotic" every time they tweak something.
The buffing of the vehicles only adds to this. I like vehicles in BTB, unless it gets too hefty like you say. They should've just tackled the source of the problems and removed Infinity Slayer from BTB, or rather the ability to start with plasma pistols and grenades, instead of bumping down a lot more vehicles and buffing them in an attempt to compensate for their lacking use.
343 is too headstrong to think that anyone would want to play anything other than Infinity Slayer in BTB, especially when it is the #1 playlist (which doesn't make much of a statement when you look at the game's total population). Nonetheless, I'm glad I got my BTB 50 when I did because it's just Fiesta Slayer now.
I'm loving the weapon changes. It's nice to actually be able to kill someone before they can just duck behind cover and get away all the time, and I'm glad they buffed the automatics so that they could keep up with the improved BR and not just be useless (even at their intended range) like in passed Halos. I could take or leave the movement speed increase, but it doesn't really bother me. Maybe if they had a 105% setting it'd be perfect, lol.
I don't understand why they changed the movement speed. First time I played again after the update, it felt like I had a Speed Boost while sprinting. I like the weapon changes though, I just played a few games and haven't really had any vehicular combat yet. What about the new Flood maps? It seems really weird putting Black site, a 4v4 map, in that playlist.
It will never truly feel like COD, and never play like it either. Though, it bothers me a bit that they are trying to make this game even more fast-paced, open to new gamers (Coming from COD then). Making the kill times faster... I don't want faster kill times, hell, without the buffs the kill times were already a bit too fast. I still enjoy the game heavily though. But, this is your experience, and I know some other people have that experience too.
I've played more now and I'm adapting to it, but I think there are some real problems. First of all, maybe this is just personal preference, but the automatic weapons didn't need to be buffed. I know the precision weapons all were, but I feel like the AR is just too powerful now. It's completely changing the DNA of Halo that these things are so effective. Even worse, the SAW absolutely obliterates. It's my favorite ordnance weapon by far, short of the top-end, 1SK weapons like rockets and sniper. I feel like a god with that thing. Second, the precision weapon issue really manifests itself if you play teams that coordinate at all and team-shoot. I played a completely wretched game on Settler where my team was outclassed and the other guys held the ridge and middle ground most of the game; the result was that we could literally not leave our own base, because being in the open for one second was guaranteed death. Between the light rifle and the DMR, we were just pinned down completely. This is devastating to my playstyle; I've never been the kind of person to sit still behind cover and wait for enemies to appear unsuspectingly in my scope. I like to move around and flank; sometimes I get shot first and rely on being smart or accurate to win the fight anyway. But the way the game is now, I feel like I just can't play that way except against complete morons. Any halfway-decent player will kill you so fast with most weapons that sacrificing first shot, or sprinting through an open area to gain a strategic advantage, ends up being a death sentence. I do like the new BR, but the game changed so much to accommodate it that I'm not sure it was worth it. I wish 343i would give up on this notion of an entire class of primary weapons that are all equal and all have offsetting roles to play. The primary weapon was not balanced that way in any previous Halo - it was always best to use a pistol in CE, a BR in 2 and 3, a DMR in Reach - and the game still worked just fine. Making this game a class-based shooter with weapon options has created this arms race where making one weapon more effective apparently means rejiggering the entire system, and now every player with any weapon is a murder machine.
This. It simply doesn't work. Neither does ordnance: just keep it as an option for custom games in Halo 5, but remove it from MM. And yeah, the SAW is one herp of a derp. Needs an immediate nerf again, this is no longer a weapon worthy of being in Halo due to its huge advantage over any other weapon in the game.
Settler is just a horribly designed map with no alternate routes to anywhere and little-to-no cover. The fact that it's in Matchmaking at all when there are many better Forged BTB maps out there that could take it's place (or just be added to the list) is laughable. You can't really blame the weapons for having those sorts of troubles there, imo. And I have to say that I just disagree with the premise that the primary weapons all being a little more balanced against one another is a bad thing. This goes back to the idea that, if you're just going to have one clear-cut better weapon that renders all the others (except for power weapons) in any situation useless, then what is the point in even having any of them? Just cut everything out of the game except for the Battle Rifle, Sniper Rifle and Rocket Launcher, and there you go. The perfect Halo, apparently. Maybe that's what you actually want, but to me that would get pretty boring. I like the fact that there are different weapons available that all behave differently and lend themselves to particular play-styles, and that can all actually beat each other in the right situations. I can agree that the SAW probably didn't need a buff, and that the movement speed increase probably wasn't necessary, but the vast majority of the changes to the various weapons' performance has been really enjoyable for me.
I feel the same. I was super excited for this update. And Now I can't play more than 2 or 3 games before I'm utterly disgusted.
Are you sure that's not a problem with Settler? @GrenadeGorilla SAW kills in exactly .8 seconds. Five kills per clip plus spare bullets. That's retardedly OP. Suppressor kills in one second flat, SR in 1.1, and AR in 1.2 for anybody complaining about automatics. BR is somewhere in the 1.3 range. DMR is hanging back at 1.5ish, compared with pre-patch BR which was around 1.73. For those of you complaining that the new killtimes are CoD, Halo CE had a .6 second killtime primary, and H2/H3 BRs had a killtime around .1 seconds slower than the new H4 BR. On top of that, we move faster now and we have sprint in this game. There's no basis to argue that you can't move around in the open like CoD. Saying Halo copying CoD is bad itself also has no basis. Enter key is screwed up on my keyboard, btw.
I like the update. Actually gives meaning to the SAW's name, because it fittingly now tears everything a new one.
I don't disagree (though I think the updated version that encloses the shotgun walkway and removes the sniper is an improvement). But I was really just singling out that game because it was the most frustrating one, and the one that made me turn my XBox off that day. It's just one of many I've played since the update that informed this post. I perhaps could have made my point more clearly, so let me try again. I feel like the impetus behind this update was first and foremost to balance the primary precision weapons against each other, and to lower kill times on the BR in particular. Because the underlying philosophy of the game is that all primaries have to be equally viable in some way, the net result was that the carbine was made incredibly powerful at short and mid-range, and the automatic primaries were all buffed even though they were already the most powerful automatic weapons in the series (the AR in Halos 1-3 and Reach, as well as the SMG from Halo 2 and 3, don't even begin to compete with the AR/suppressor in Halo 4, even in original as-shipped state). Why I object to this: - Overall kill times are as low as they've ever been in a Halo game, no matter what weapon you're using. - The variety of weapons available means that if you design your loadouts intelligently, you can have a murder-machine primary for all maps and situations. You can be a cross-mapping god with a DMR or light rifle in BTB; you can be a mid-range monster with the BR or carbine; and you can be a disgusting beast at mid and close range with any auto weapon (and a boltshot in your back pocket). - The upshot is that by moving to a class system with "better" weapon balance, they've created a game where I feel frustrated on almost every map, because I feel like I'm constantly running up against a swarm of guys with the best weapons for every situation, and you just can't move around. Settler is a particularly garish example, but it's just as easy to get pinned down by teamshooting on, for example, a small map like Simplex or Solace. Only a highly divided map like Adrift allows me to actually get into neutral or enemy territory without having to kill multiple enemies. Did you play any of the other Halos..? Other weapons had situational uses, but you had to lean on your precision primary off spawn if you wanted to succeed. That worked for four games in a row. However, my basic objection is not to the on-paper idea of offering multiple, equal weapons; it's the result that that philosophy has given us, which I think started with one basic not-bad idea of buffing the BR a little bit. (Which may be a false assumption on my part, but it's one of the main things people complained about in advance of this patch, and it's one of the key aspects of the patch that I think was an improvement.)
The BR in both of those games was more random and less forgiving than the H4 BR, which makes the average (not peak) kill time slower, and makes the game feel more forgiving as a result. In fact that's an overall problem of this game which I understand is caused by a combination of large hitboxes and high bullet magnetism. People who are decent with precision weapons rarely miss (at least when firing body shots). CE had small hitboxes, less or no bullet magnetism, and less autoaim, plus a responsive strafe; it had the highest skill gap of the series, because while you COULD kill someone really fast, you very often did not, and poorer players would almost never kill someone in less than a second. The basis is that I played it all weekend, and that was how it made me feel, and now I'm trying to analyze why that would be the case. I'm not just inventing **** for funsies. Didn't say that, and I don't care to open that can of worms anyway. It was an offhand remark a friend of mine made. I am quite willing to talk about Halo 4 on its own merits without mentioning COD again, if it leads this discussion in a more fruitful direction.
The SAW was already fine though. If you're accurate and use burst fire, it would shred people from a pretty good distance. Their stated reason for buffing it was to maintain its damage as "double" the AR, but the result has been that when I get ordnance, I go to the SAW every time so I can get a few gross kills on people that don't have a prayer of fighting back. I found out on smaller maps that even if I foolishly charge into three fully-shielded opponents, I'll usually kill one or two and shred the shields of the rest; if you hang back and play smart with it against guys that don't have power weapons, it's an easy killing spree or even frenzy because you can get so many kills per clip and it has a lot of ammo.