Natsu

This has to be one of the stupidest ******* things I have ever heard someone say. Go kill yourself or get educated. Do you seriously, honestly believe Europe just regulates something as arbitrary as ******* game add-ons like this? It's people like you that make America a cesspool of ignorance.

It wasn't only MLG variants. The four-shot of Halo 3 was possible in default, and you could miss only a single bullet to pull it off. People here are absolutely retarded. It has ALWAYS been equal damage to body and head when you have shields. It only took 3 shots and 1 head shot to kill in H3, or it took 4 headshots. The reason you morons are getting different results is cause you don't know how to test for **** and forgot the the BR is a 3 round burst. Say you shoot someone 3 times in the body, now, their shields haven't completely popped but it doesn't matter because this isn't a DMR game. Your 4th shot WILL kill them because the 1st bullet pops what was left of the shield and the 2nd or 3rd bullet kills them. This is the same exact formula that has been in every Halo. Body and head shots do the exact same amount of damage when you take into account burst.

343 seems to think that wins just grow on trees in this game. Even the commendations are a mess. If you weigh them up in the game types section, you are basically guaranteed to max out the others before you even get off the 3rd page of the winning section. And the xp associated is terrible. I'm on page 3/5 for dominion and I have to get up to 50 wins, and the xp reward is 1,000.

Assuming people actually knew there was a LE, assuming we knew what came in it, assuming we knew what specializations even were and whether we would actually like them sooner or not. There's so many factors of ignorance in here that don't give us the ability to make a clear choice or a choice at all. I didn't know anything of these specializations but would have got LE if I knew they'd pull something like this. There's far too few ranks anyways in this game. I'm pretty much done with this game and forced to play something else unless they completely overhaul the playlists and game engine to make it fun and competitive or they give us ranking systems to work towards.

This game has been out for only a few weeks and already most people are halfway finished with the full ranking system. If you count all armor specializations then the max rank is 130. So what happens then? I mean, they have map packs planned for throughout the year, but everyone is going to be completely maxed out in the following month or two. I'm almost done with half of my commendations. There's no ranking system for me to work towards a 50 like in Halo 3. There's no huge ranking system like in Halo Reach that took forever to max out. I mean, I like playing the game for fun but it's almost like they want me to go back to Cod or BF because there's just no goals to shoot for aside from padding W/L and K/D. Just think about being SR130 in a few weeks. It really isn't hard at all with double xp and the 5000 point games in spartan ops. Surely they are going to add more ranks for us, right?

One of my fave gametypes in a shooter ever was this CTF variant on the game Conker's BFD, where you had 5 lives and then were eliminated and had to watch teammates (or spawn in the AI's place) and the last team left alive won. I think a lot of people wouldn't want to watch teammates though if this were implemented in Halo. It sure would be epic to be the last guy against two or three and you'd have to be stealthy in order to assassinate one while he's alone or something.

If you think this game is more about playing the cheapest and less about shooting skill then you never played Slayer on Halo 3, lmao. All that game was about was obtaining a bunch of power weapons that you couldn't even defend yourself against because the starter weapons were so weak. But yeah, I feel like the vanilla slayer is really boring in this game. I blame the ordnance and the lack of weapon spawns. The ordnance also generates so much randomness that it isn't even fun sometimes. At least in past games you had a general idea of when/where you would run into a sword/rocket/sniper enemy, but now anyone around the corner just might have the right gun to beat you. Luckily the starter guns are powerful enough to close the gap between power weapon and non-power weapon, but there just needs to be much more incentive to move around the map and hold places down. Only thing I could think of would be different map design with natural terrain advantages. Most people usually try to hold mid on Ragnarok for instance, because the hill and pelican have major advantage. But on a map like Adrift people are just going to roam everywhere they care to. Only other fix could be abusable spawns so you could get into position and set up a nasty contain or spawn trap, but most people don't like the idea of that, especially if you join in progress and don't deserve the trap that you find yourself in.

The most important tip is that you have to stop the warthog and back it up whenever you run into infantry dead ahead and they are on a narrow road. You never want to drive towards or past infantry, because that is getting too close. Not only could you get plasma'd, but the gun turret turns too slowly to spin around and finish off the guy, and then there will be another guy up ahead and your turret has to move again. Try to keep all enemies in one general direction and don't drive past people. This sometimes means violating the "don't stop moving" rule. Sometimes you have to stop in your tracks and move back and forth until your gunner clears the path. What I like to do is just perform hit and runs by whipping around and just leaving and going at another angle.

I agree with zexi. The problem with your idea of balance is that it isn't balance at all. You have two guns, one that takes skill to use and one that doesn't. Currently, the skilled one is much more powerful to use than the unskilled one. Now, if you changed this and made the DMR equally as *useful* as the AR, which is what is meant by balance (albeit useful in different scenarios, but equally useful in terms of amount and capacity) then you all of a sudden have everyone using the AR. Why would someone bother training the DMR if they get the same proportionate reward out of using the AR? Your logic is so skewed to think you are balancing the game by doing so. All it does is take away incentive from mastering the more skilled gun, because the reward for using each is equally balanced. I agree wholeheartedly with balance in games like COD where every type of gun is roughly equal in skill to use (although I always argued that snipers in COD should be a bit better than all other guns just because they were more difficult to use). I mean, look at COD Black Ops 1. The snipers were atrocious to use in that game and took waaaay more skill than anything else. But there was no incentive to use the sniper because its effective range and "value" of use was equivalent to everything else. This appeared balanced to the developers and people like you, but absolutely no one used the snipers because they could put up the same scores with a lesser weapon. The more skilled a gun is, the more overpowered it must be. This is what true balance actually is. You're delusional to think game design shouldn't work this way. Otherwise you have no incentive to actually use the more skilled guns because you have to learn a niche that takes more time and yields the same results as the easier gun. It was the same in Starcraft. The Terran race was more difficult to use than Protoss (as far as mechanical skill on the keyboard went), and the design was the Terrans were simply better if both players were complete robots in terms of playing perfectly at all times (which is the equivalent of getting a 5 shot DMR at all times as fast as possible). This actually made SC the most balanced game in the history of competitive games because no Terran actually could reach such robotic levels but could still strive for it while the Protoss would try to throw their mechanics off by putting them out of their comfort zone using obscure strategies. I've been a high level competitive gamer in a multitude of games and I think you are just clueless about your ideas of balance because you have to have incentives to use the more skilled guns other than sheer bragging rights. And no, just having the gun be good at mid range is not a proper reward because a DMR user would perform equally to an AR user that is always at close range. The DMR user would just drop the DMR, get an AR and simply play close ranged and get the same score without needing to put as much effort in to learning the more skilled gun. And besides all of that, such a system slows the game down to teeth-grinding proportions. All the DMR users would be too scared to push or be aggressive because any corner they turn could have an AR user camping that would beat them. The DMR would have to avoid walls and corners so as to stay in their proper range. The AR user would have to avoid open spaces and stay around walls and corners. So you have the AR users playing base defense because it doesn't expose them to ranged fire and the DMR users avoiding base attacks because they have to move into walled areas. This is how stuff went down in Halo 3 to an extent, except most players would have both guns usually because there were many pick up BRs. But switching between the right weapon for the right range wasn't a tactical decision at all; it was common sense. And it became much more of a chore than a tactic to just keep switching between guns for different ranges.

The people saying Halo 4 is not Halo or doesn't feel like Halo would say the exact same thing about Halo CE, which I find hilarious. Seriously, Halo CE and Halo 2 are much closer to Halo 4 than 3 and Reach. I enjoy Halo 4 because it's much closer to the better games of Halo to me than it is closer to the worse ones.

The thruster pack and backwards ninja jump are perfect for assassinating the guy behind you. I've even used the jetpack to some effect, by jumping back and up and Boosting a little bit. Most people look up and whiff their punch since you are too high up.

There's just no talking to you. I absolutely hate RPS styled games. It's sickening how Halo 3 played to me, with everyone rushing with AR's and beatdown. I've explained elsewhere how it is 100% necessary for a player to start in Halo with an all-purpose weapon. If you start with CQB only guns, then whichever team wins the opening rush will secure the DMR and power weapons on the map, and then go on to win the game flawlessly. This has been my experience in Halo 3 non-BR start gametypes in rank 50 on all playlists. Experienced players know how much of a disaster AR starts is. It may sound more strategic in your head but in practice it turns into tic-tac-toe. And also, the AR isn't even that bad in this game. You can't just say the DMR guy is going to be perfect. You're implementing your idea of balance in make-believe land. No one, NO ONE is going to 5 shot kill an AR guy ghandi-hopping in your face in this game with the DMR. It just doesn't happen. The AR currently does have a niche in this game, and I sometimes use it to good effect. But again, the purpose of an FPS game is to test player skill in aiming and teamwork, not to see who has the better weapon for the range they are in. That completely destroys competition because it introduces a slew of randomness and snowballing. There's really no point in even talking about this stuff, casual players just can't comprehend high-level play and the inevitable results that happen with certain factors like this.

That's what Halo CE and H2 was all about. Most competitive players want exactly that. It's not "wrong," it's just an extreme distaste for rock/paper/scissors styled gameplay and an emphasis on mechanics and not decision making.

Halo isn't a game where weapons should be balanced. The entire point of the original Halo and Halo 2 was that you had your go-to gun that you started with everytime, either pistol or BR, and you used only that because it was the skilled gun to use. Automatic weapons should be discouraged from being used by their very design. This isn't Call of Duty where every gun needs to be balanced because the autos are just as skillful as the burst and single shots. Autos in Halo are inherently nooby and that just takes all the mechanical skill out of the game and replaces it with rock/paper/scissors in weapon choice. I've always been more of a fan of supporting mechanical skill in games because decision-making is going to be there at all times no matter what. A game with straight DMR is going to take as many decisions as a Halo Reach game with varied weapons. And not only that, but the kind of decision making found in "lol I have this gun at this range and you have that one, lol I win" is just so freakin stupid. Players should win battles based on mechanical skill and not based on what position they placed themselves in with a certain gun. Halo has always been about just one utility gun that had an out to everything at all ranges that you started with, and everything else had a tiny niche that you could use if you just wanted to. Halo 3 and Reach were abominations to the Halo formula that was set up by H2 and CE, and H4 is finally getting back to the roots of what a Halo game actually is, let alone a few minor things like ordnance and sprint.

Yeah me and my friend were very impressed with this mission. Between splattering entire groups of people when they fall out of the drop pods with the ghost, and raining chunks of debris all over the place in the AA battles, it's extremely fun. I feel like whoever made that map must have been huge Starcraft fans. It feels exactly like SC, with the Mantis being the Goliath and the Phantoms and Banshees being carriers and the elites and hunters being zealots, with the odd wraith thrown in being a dragoon.