I just had a great idea for ordnance in Halo 5. How about, if your team accumulated 500pts in total, the highest-scoring player on the team would be able to choose from one of three options. 1. Marked Man (Slayer Symbol) Marked Man would put a kill marker above each enemy player's head, along with a 15 second timer. If the player dies or the 15 seconds runs out, the marker disappears. The enemy is told they are marked by a "Carrying Flag" style message which says "MARKED" and the number of seconds to survive before becoming incognito again. To make this a more viable choice, each enemy's weapon is shown next to their marker e;g: KILL (Rocket Launcher). This would be active for the whole team. 2. Invincibility Invinicibility would give the friendly team 10 seconds of invincibility. On the flip side, they would be marked on the enemy team's HUD as AVOID, and the announcer would tell them that (x) team is invincible, and show a timer next to each avoid marker e;g: AVOID 5s. 3. Stealth Stealth will disable all traces of the friendly team from the enemy's sight for 20 seconds. Here are the specifics. -Footstept dampened -Cannot be detected on Radar -Reticle of enemy team will not go red on a stationary Spartan of your team -Assassinations are quicker, and the body will disintegrate -No red X when enemy team member dies The team that earned stealth will not get camo though. The enemy team will be informed by the announcer the enemy team used stealth, and to watch their backs. If they are not killed in the 25 seconds, they earn a 25pt medal called "Vigilant". How would this be for a better and more predictable ordnance system? You will always know what the enemy has and it is not random, as well as introducing NEW, BALANCED mechanics. Innovation not imitation.
hm. The stealth looks somewhat interesting to me, but the invincibility is just screaming broken to me. It sounds like a jacked up version of Armor Lock, where you can shoot and move while in Armor Lock. The Marked Man sounds like Promethean Vision except with weapon information. IMO it's not an awful idea but it's not a great one, either. It reduces the need for awareness greatly, which is just as important to preserve as non-randomness.
Invincibility is pretty much never a good thing. Even the small window of invincibility from picking up the OS was deemed bad for gameplay so it was replaced with a custom power up in Halo 3 MLG. Have you ever seen someone in Halo 4 stand right next to an OS, wait till they are one shot, then pick it up? Pretty frustrating for the dude fighting against the OS guy and it only lasts a moment in this case. Also...Armor Lock. I like the idea of marking enemies with a waypoint. I could see it working as a power up that one player could pick up. To give that ability to an entire team seems overpowered though. Not to mention the fact that the other team knows they're marked so it becomes hide and seek for them. As for stealth: -Footstept dampened I like it but I feel like footsteps should be pretty quiet to begin with. Successfully flanking an enemy undetected only to be given away by your tap dancing shoes is annoying. -Cannot be detected on Radar It could work in gametypes with radar. -Reticle of enemy team will not go red on a stationary Spartan of your team I see what you are going for but red reticle is tied into the aim assist system. If it wasn't then this could work. -Assassinations are quicker, and the body will disintegrate Leave no trace? I like it. -No red X when enemy team member dies This would work well in conjunction with the disintegrating bodies. You have some cool ideas here, like allowing the highest scoring player to choose the team's reward. Keep refining them.
Personally I wonder if rewarding any one or a team with some special capability is good for halo. It all screams cod. Don't you think? I mean... this is halo. I wouldn't mind keeping the game depth solid for pros and simple for noobs. But that's me.... sigh...
I could see this working pretty well for an Action Sacky gametype (in the vein of Team Hotshot and the like), but not for core/standard play. Killstreaks and Personal Ordnance have never really sat right with me. They're not like Halo's other reward systems (i.e. power weapons on the map) in that they can and often do reward you just for killing random stragglers without any measure of strategy. It's also weird to reward players for getting points by directly (or almost-directly) giving them the means to get more points. Doing that just creates a snowball effect, where good performance early in a match reduces (or, in particularly bad cases, wholly removes) the need for any significant effort later on in the match.