Bloody Initiate

The update is pretty important to me IF they do what they need to do (Which I doubt, not even because I have no faith in 343 but instead because I've never seen a game developer make an update that addresses EVERYTHING or makes EVERYONE happy). I was playing today and I realized that one of the reasons I do poorly in this game is because I don't want anything in this game. There is nowhere on the maps I want to be, there is no weapon or vehicle that I simultaneously desire AND believe I should/could acquire it. If there IS something I want to have I don't have any sense that I could keep it. When I finally score ordnance it often just stares me in the face for the whole game because either none of it appeals to me or it DOES appeal to me but I'm certain as soon as I get it I'll lose it. Multiple games went by today where I never dropped my ordnance because I just didn't see the point. With no place on the map worth controlling and no sense that I can control my own life (You can't focus on surviving and then have a high chance of doing so; you will have a higher chance but not a high chance) I just kind of wander and react. That's no way to play. Bulleted list of improvements they should/could make: -Shorten shield recharge delay (4 seconds tops, 3 seconds might be more appropriate because Halo 4 IS faster) -Fix Exile (Adding a Gauss for the red team and removing the Scorpion is an easy but sloppy fix, Scorpion ends up being easiest to edit/remove because it's the only one the two teams can fight over -Stop #*$#ing nerfing stuff no one EVER complained about. No one ever complained their gun had too many bullets in it, but 343 made the clips shallower anyway. 4-shot BR, 7-shot carbine w/faster kill time than BR OR 6-shot w/equivalent, 15 bullet DMR clip. I know those aren't happening, but they should because they should never have been changed. -Fix Abandon (Should be doable by pushing blue spawn a bit closer, not 100% sure though). Blue starts at a disadvantage in slayer and gets completely wrecked in Oddball (Because in other game types the key is to avoid top center, but in Oddball they're forced to go there, get destroyed, and then suffer the rest of the game) -Might want to drop the boltshot's kill range (Should be doable with 95% damage or something. I actually like the boltshot as is and don't mind if it stays as is, but I also recognize when enough people are complaining that maybe they should be appeased even if they're wrong). -Fix glitches/problems. I don't know all of them, but fixing the things that aren't working properly should always be top priority. Fine-tuning is important, but making everything work is more important. It's my understanding file shares aren't working or something, and host-switching seems entirely too common. -Introduce penalty for quitting. I don't know why this wasn't done at the start. What exactly the penalty should be I'm not sure, an experience penalty is fine, and if it's at the right spot in your level it should be capable of dropping your rank and re-locking your unlocks. It won't come up often, but if you quit often enough you should lose stuff. I don't mind JIP, I think overall it improves the game (despite coming with many flaws), but having a penalty for quitting just makes more sense than not having one. -Clean up the sandbox. I don't think it works as intended, or it DOES work as intended and 343's intention was to make the game sub-par (They would obviously use a different term for it). Weapon kill times and such just aren't doing what I think they wanted them to do. You have a crappy BR, a crappy Carbine, automatics which seem to kill slower than either of those crappy marksman weapons, camo that apparently only jams radars occasionally, the Nemesis perk which only half-works, extremely narrow custom game options, and plenty of other things. There are more problems than I have the knowledge or space to list. I don't think most of them are major game-destroying problems, just a lot of things lacking polish which is normal for a multiplayer title. I think it's hard to account for all the things players will discover and account for because there are thousands of players and much fewer developers, but patches are your chance to fix things.

I always try to think of how the game would look if my suggestions were implemented. I've advised people to do the same thing on this very forum. Since I actually have a LOT of suggestions and I'm confident all of them would drastically improve the game, I tend to be pretty long-winded. I will restrain myself and post only one for now. Reduce shield recharge delay to AT MOST 4 seconds. This allows players to begin fights at full strength more often, making the result of the fights more dependent on the actions and decisions of the players involved. As it is you spend a massive 6 seconds without shields, which means you have to hide a lot or you get killed more by people who didn't do any work to kill you. This is one of the greatest factors contributing to the "get one kill then die" design 343 wanted, and it's one of the easiest to fix. I wish there were data available about how much time the average player spends in an average game with or without shields. I bet the percentage of match time that players spend without shields is shockingly close to the amount of time they spend with shields. The amount of effort it would take to fix this and the amount it would improve the game is probably greater than anything else they could do as far as the ratio of effort to improvement. All they have to do is make the default recharge delay shorter in all gametypes and Halo 4 will become not only a much better game, but a much better Halo game. I have other ideas, but if I got NOTHING else I want, this would be the one thing I think is most important.

That's exactly how they made the game. Your failure to grasp the fact doesn't change it. Good job being good at the game, you are not the only exception, but you are an exception. Also just because they designed the game that way doesn't mean you have to play that way, but that IS how they designed the game. Give me another reason why you have to wait 6 seconds for your shield to start recharging, all weapons run out of ammo faster, and maps are designed so that you have multiple ways to attack every location and you can't defend any of them. They wanted players to get one kill then die, just because people don't automatically do that doesn't make it any less true. I kill more than 1 before dying too, but that doesn't change a fact. It takes less than 2 seconds to kill someone, your shields won't begin recharging for 6, they'll take 2 seconds once they do, and everyone can respawn instantly and sprint. You are therefore weakened by a fight for 8 seconds after the fight, even though the fight only took 2 seconds to resolve. This isn't my opinion dude, it's data forcing a conclusion. I may not be that good at the game, but I can look at that and see the design.

I am bad at Halo 4, I have failed to adapt in this game and in Reach and I was bad at that game too. That doesn't mean they were excellent games worthy of their predecessors, or that complaints I have are somehow invalid. Nor does it mean that people who are better than me have more worthy views of the game or that they even know that much more about the game. Even bad as I am I still am better than some, and when I thought the BR was 4-shot at the beginning of Halo 4 I was still wrong and the people who were worse than me telling me it was 5-shot were right. It also doesn't mean I'm always right or that people who are better than me are always wrong, it just means that your ability at the game only gets you so much information and add so much much worth to your views. You still have to know what you're talking about, and you still have to conduct yourself with civility. I disagree with the OP on a lot of things. The campaign sucked, Lockout was never a good map, and I love Promethean Vision. I have the nuts to say so from my original account though, linked to my original and only gamertag, and I play Halo the same way. The OP doesn't speak for me, but neither does anyone else, and the fact that I suck at the game doesn't mean the game is good and I'm just somehow missing the point. They designed Halo 4 to force a certain type of behavior and a certain type of result. They want you to keep moving, get one kill, then die, then repeat. That's how they built the game and that's how it plays, but that's not a good way to make a game. A good game allows you to do more of what you want, it gives you freedom to choose how you play without imbalancing things. Halo 4's multiplayer is a rat maze, and we're the rats. We're going only where they want us to go and we're not doing anything interesting or unique. One player is as good as the next, because even if one player is much better than the next the game won't allow him to distinguish himself as much. Better players obviously shine more, but they don't get to shine as much as they once did because even if they get more impressive numbers those numbers come from a less impressive game. It's like being awesome at chess, and also being awesome at checkers. When you brag you don't bother mentioning that you're also good at checkers, because you know no one cares and no one is impressed.

I would like them to think more outside the box for any new guns they introduce. I liked the target designator in Reach and I would like to see more thinking along the lines of shaping and controlling the battlefield. I don't need ANOTHER marksman rifle or ANOTHER bullet hose or ANOTHER sniper rifle or ANOTHER launcher. I don't think making something that performs almost identically to another weapon and then tweaking it just enough to notice really counts as "new." I'd like a spotter scope, a tool that takes up a weapon slot but doesn't actually shoot anything. It would have high potential magnification and perhaps one or two extra vision modes, and with it you could paint targets for your allies by placing nav points on spotted enemies or something similar. It's one thing to call out a target, it's another paint them for your team to see. I've spent entire games in Battefield 3 with the recon drone or scoped in from miles away spotting targets for my team. My K/D didn't impress in those games, but my teammates' numbers were staggering because the enemy couldn't hide from them anywhere. I'd also like to see some kind of sticky tether/grapple weapon. Someone jumps behind cover and you literally yank them out of it after hitting them with a leash. Or you fasten it to a high point and use it like a grapple to gain elevation or hide below a walkway where no one is looking for you. You could also tether yourself to a vehicle to gain some speed or stick a banshee and drop yourself off somewhere with greater elevation. Stuff like this you can see a super soldier using precisely because a normal soldier can't withstand the tension or friction created. You could even do a bit of web-slinging with it, it's a perfect opportunity to play with the physics of your game engine. I'd also like to see the return of the sentinal beam/beam rifle only I'd like them to get smart about it this time and make it into something like a microwave beam which could damage people through walls, even at a reduced force. In this case I'd like it to do less damage over longer distances. I liked the flare from Halo 3, but it had physics properties which made it unsuitable for matchmaking. Combine Halo 3 equipment with the grenade launcher from Halo: Reach so you have a grenade launcher which shoots support equipment, you could fire a flare or a shield drain at a certain location by loading different ammo into it. Weapons like the needler and the sticky detonator are where I'd draw my inspiration. Offbeat weird ideas like that make games feel new without altering the core gameplay. They perform well situationally and give you new options, but you still depend on your rifle and your wits most of the time.

I would be comfortable with attachments that didn't alter weapon performance. So if you wanted a scope that would be fine, if you wanted a laser sight that would be fine, as long as the weapon performed the same with or without those attachments. You might find you want a lower power scope on smaller maps for your DMR, so you could attach one. I think a game with performance-altering attachments CAN be balanced, but even if they're balanced they're not what I want from Halo. I'm comfortable with it in Battlefield 3, and I think it SHOULD show up in games like Borderlands and Shadowrun, but not in Halo. Weapons have always been fine tuned to perform a certain way in this game, that's how I prefer it.

Halo 3 Halo: CE Deathrow Phantom Dust Battlefield 3 Assassin's Creed II Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Ninja Gaiden Black Skyrim, Oblivion, or Morrowind. They're very different, but my favorite tends to be the latest.

Shielding is terrible, never use it unless you're making a vehicle loadout pre-wheelman. It drops your shield regen time from 2 seconds to 1 second, but doesn't reduce the time before your shield begins recharging. So out of the 8 seconds it takes to get a shield back from being one-shot, shielding saves you 1. What kills you with your shield regen is the 6 seconds it takes to start recharging, not the 2 seconds it takes to recharge to full once it begins recharging. You're better off using almost anything else. 1 second is a long time in Halo 4 I'll admit, but compared to getting a power weapon before anyone else shielding just has nothing to offer. I'd rather have Mobility and use it to get a good start on the game. Also if it's team regicide consider subbing a plasma pistol for the boltshot. Dropping that overshield might matter more than dropping someone up close.

If you were playing Social the matches were probably made using your Trueskill number for the Social playlists. Every time a new playlist comes out everyone's Trueskill in that playlist is 1, you have to play it to do increase that number. So if those 40s and 50s had only played the playlist a little bit or weren't very good at it then they would have had lower Trueskill in it. All the playlists had a Trueskill system matching players together, the Social ones just hid the number. The constant "new" playlists in Halo 4 keep a lot of people from excelling in any one playlist, so their Trueskills stay lower and the matches are less even. Basically the system doesn't get the time and the information it needs to correctly sort players against other players of similar skill. It needs so many games to be played by a player before it can get an accurate number on them.

I find Flood very much like Infection used to be. I don't like either one, but in both this game and Reach they play about the same. As for the variants on Infection that gained popularity in previous games, the majority of them were horrible ideas for Matchmaking and I have no idea why anyone ever designed or played them even in customs (Fat Kid, Duck Hunt, Speed Demons, all incredibly stupid ideas that should have never made it to a console. Speed Demons was so bad that the zombie players literally gave up playing it in Matchmaking and just hid. I saw it myself and was amazed that anyone could be so dim-witted as to put that gametype into matchmaking). I DO think it's a shame that there are so few options for custom gametypes. I just tried to make one called "Predator" like the Predator movies, got the idea from the binary rifle's aiming beam, and found it nearly impossible.

You should check the accuracy of most of your information. The Battle Rifle doesn't require every bullet to land, it requires 13 of the 15 bullets it fires to land. Your first 4 shots remove shields completely, your final shot is a 3 shot burst searching for a headshot. They're all 3-shot bursts, but you do not need every bullet from every one to land. "More accurate" is definitely an advantage. You may mean that a tighter spread and/or smaller projectile isn't always better because as you get closer to a target you want shots to land whether or not your aim is perfect, but the ability of the weapon to hit where its reticule indicates it will is accuracy, and more is better. Someone who gets saved by a luckily inaccurate shot is just that, lucky. If you can't predict where the bullets will go you are at a disadvantage, period. As for the weapons "jumping" I doubt there is a difference in the amount your aim strays upward nearly so much as there is a difference in your capacity to notice it. A 5x scope will show your reticule traveling upward more, but probably only about 250% as much (which is how much bigger everything seems compared to a 2x scope). So you likely have the same amount of "jump" but can notice it more sharply on a DMR scope. Concerning aim assist and bullet magnetism, the DMR's aim assist continues out to a longer ranger than the BR's. I don't know which one gets more at medium range, or whether they are different at all at that range. Bullet magnetism is a much harder thing to measure, I haven't done any tests myself, but I don't think anyone else has done one that makes a strong case either. It's not that people are failing, it's that I don't think players have the capacity to accurately show something like that without cracking the game's code.

Was thinking more on this today while at work, I focused on things you could do to make the gametypes entertaining when you are taking away many of the weapons normally available. Effectively I ended up wanting to make people "super" so that you can make up for the limitations of their weapons. For example, if you keep people moving the normal speed then you have players spotting and meeting each other at mid-range still, the range at which they suffer. So I thought a speed boost would be the first thing you'd want. It makes the players more capable of closing the gap as well as strafing more effectively to make their combats more exciting. I don't know how much of one though, 110% or 120% at most probably. Automatic weapons can actually afford to be a lot more mobile than marksman weapons because they're more forgiving. You can leap all around someone while keeping the reticule on their body since you don't need to score headshots. For this I suggest a boost to jump height, an increase in player gravity to keep the jumps from becoming too floaty/slow, and deactivating fall damage so that players never regret exploring their newfound mobility. I've never actually taken fall damage in Halo 4 yet though, so I don't know if it's even a concern. In ANY custom gametype I would design I'd reduce the shield recharge wait. 4 seconds would be the maximum I'd ever put in a game (Any longer and you wonder why you have shields in the first place). For a gametype that gives players faster speeds and such I'd go even lower to 3 or 2 seconds. The idea of this gametype is that players don't feel like they need to hide a lot, they feel comfortable getting out there and raining hell on people. You can't have a long recharge wait in a gametype like that. Obviously I'd also preset the loadouts. In addition to it being the only way players can control loadouts with custom options (that I know of), some weapons and abilities just make a lot less sense in such a gametype. I may not think the boltshot is broken, but it's designed to kill players who have automatic weapons and need to get in close (The boltshot's kill range is just about the ideal kill range of an automatic weapon). I don't like games that are designed to punish players for acting naturally. No boltshots, no marksman rifles, and no need for things like "firepower" since I can decide the starting weapons. Toying with the idea of 110% damage to boost the range of the weapons, but I've actually tested it and combined with the already-faster kill times of Halo 4 it gets excessive very quickly. Possible loadouts: Assault: Assault Rifle Storm Rifle Pulse Grenade Thruster Pack Shielding Dexterity Likely to be the most popular and the "go to" of them. Good at being on the front lines and surviving there, hopefully. Support: Storm Rifle Plasma Pistol Frag Grenades Autosentry Grenadier Ammo Originally this loadout had a jet pack because that would have made sense early on in Halo: Reach, but I'm not sure it makes any sense ever in Halo 4. I gave him two plasma weapons so he could knock shields off for his teammates and Ammo so he doesn't have to sacrificie position for supplies as often. Combine that with autosentry and you have a guy who can make an area very hazardous for the enemy. Guy should score a lot of assists and grenade kills, forcing players to think twice about playing TOO dumb. Guardian: Suppressor Not sure what his secondary should be, might go magnum. Plasma Grenades Hardlight Shield AA Efficiency Explosives He's meant to bait people into range and cover his teammates' retreats. Hardlight shield is the closest thing to a wall you can make. Suppressor is the best up close of the automatic weapons I think, also he has plasma grenades to punish people who walk right at him and the explosives upgrade to keep the grenades that land behind him from hurting so much. Tactician: Magnum Plasma Pistol Pulse Grenade Promethean Vision AA Efficiency (or Resupply) Stealth (Or Sensor if Stealth isn't possible) He may look strange in a full-auto focused playlist, but this guy's job involves informing his team of enemy locations and making sure they get the first shot in most fights. He's also far down on the loadout list so he becomes a bit of an offbeat option. Specialist: Suppressor Plasma Pistol Frag Grenades Hologram Mobility Ordnance Priority I feel cheated any time the preset loadouts don't include one with hologram, just because I love seeing that thing used effectively. What you have here is a power weapon player. It's designed to run for power weapons off of spawn and then to get them via ordnance more often. Medic: Scattershot, what? No secondary Frag Grenades Regeneration Field AA Efficiency Dexterity Because what list of preset loadouts is complete without one? Bottom of the list because I don't think a regen field will be necessary considering my above suggestion of shortening the shield recharge wait. It has a scattershot because that's the worst shotgun it could have without getting a boltshot. Plus a weapon whose projectiles ricochet opens up a whole new kind of "spray and pray." I also like medics to be able to defend themselves, so if someone gets in this guy's face they'll regret it.

Dual wield maulers had a shorter kill range. If a shotgun and dual maulers met, the shotgun could fire first and win. Feel free to go back and check it if you find the time. MLG maulers were a different story, but there was no shotgun in MLG other than a mauler so they would never meet.

Actually the original hornet fit this description. Its machine guns did normal damage for a vehicle machine gun but they possessed perfect accuracy. I don't think it appeared in matchmaking, but if it did it was only briefly before Bungie figured out it was insanely good. You could spot and kill someone from across the map in Valhalla with that thing, they'd only have about as long to get to cover as they would if you were right next to them BRing them. Also if you hit Y when you are in the pelican in Halo 4 you can use... its spartan laser. The pelican segment was pretty weak though, the best part about it was that it had ammo for you. Even on Legendary the phantoms went down like prom dates. However, to match the more extreme examples you give, I want them to improve their moving fortress (mammoth, elephant) in the next campaign where one appears. If you're going to have a moving fortress, make it feel like that. In the Halo 4 campaign it was just a taxi cab between lame scripted encounters, and in Halo 3 Matchmaking it was just a gimmick. In the mission with it in Halo 4 I got so bored and disgusted with it that when Cortana yelled "Banshees!" like they mattered I just walked below decks and waited for the thing to move past. That's as lame as things can get I think. I can't explain how sad it made me feel. I even like the idea of different races having different moving fortresses. Covenant have Scarabs, we have elephants/Mammoths. Fighting Scarabs felt like attacking a moving fortress SHOULD feel, it was hard to board and harder to infiltrate. There were guns and aggressive enemies ready to fight you for it. The mammoth was just awfully boring.

I don't think armor permutations should have any mechanical effect on gameplay (I specified mechanical because a dude with a unicorn horn is easier to spot, he doesn't have bigger hit boxes, just sticks out like a sore.... unicorn horn). However more and more I think there's an audience for a Halo RPG. The first Mass Effect almost fit the bill. THAT type of game would be where I could tolerate small bonuses in different directions for different armor permutations.

I enjoyed using equipment in Halo 3. I didn't use the radar jammer though because it had physics properties that got it removed from Matchmaking. As for bringing any of it back... I feel no desire or repulsion to it. I used it as much as anyone else, but it wasn't critical to my enjoyment of the game. And the AAs from Reach like Armor Lock, while I STILL laugh at people who couldn't handle an armor locker, they have been largely replaced. The hardlight shield serves the purpose of the dropshield/armor lock, obviously it isn't quite as useful as armor lock was (You see it much less in MM), but several of the AAs are like that (Don't see a lot of effective autosentries either). Looking back on it I suppose equipment was better than AAs because it managed to stay in Matchmaking largely unedited for a longer time. With AAs in Reach Bungie decided to back off of their own idea and 343 continued that. I never thought jet packs or armor lock were broken, but Bungie made sure every map was crushed with soft kill zones after awhile and the first thing 343 did when they took the reigns was nerf armor lock. Other AAs never saw much use, like the dropshield. It's a bit sad because I liked AAs when they were introduced (Although I thought sprint being among them was lame, I still used it a lot), I feel like a bit more thought, effort, and faith in the idea could have made AAs a more welcome addition to the game. So I wouldn't have any of them back. I enjoyed using the shield drain and bubble shield equipments a lot, but everyone stays one-shot forever in this game and bubble shields wouldn't work for other reasons. The regen field limped back as a weaker AA, and the radar jammer was never that exciting anyway. I liked armor lock even though I didn't use it, and even though I still feel like it was fine and everyone who disagreed was silly, it didn't make the cut and that says enough about it. Evade would have been better with thruster pack range, thruster pack would be better if you stayed in 1st person like you did with evade. Amazing how close Bungie and 343 came to doing something good with those AAs and failed in both cases. Seems like everything that makes thruster pack good was accidental. Funny I didn't start this post intending to criticize AAs and such, it just kinda ended up that way.

I think a Gauss cannon would be a legit heavy sniper in Halo 5. Make it 1sk like normal, shoulder mounted with a decent scope, and shots deplete shields as well as ammo. 1 shot depletes 1/2, so you get 2 shots like a binary rifle before you have to "reload" but your extra weakness for having a 1sk weapon is shield depletion rather than exposure. Could do more than copy binary rifle with it, but as I said my adoration for that gun is almost unhealthy.

They're two very different mini-shotguns, but they are both definitely mini-shotguns. I would rather have a mauler in Halo 3 than a boltshot in Halo 4 though. I disliked the long melee lunge and am glad it's gone, but the mauler WITH that lunge was a more effective weapon than the boltshot. You could kill 5 people in 5 seconds with a mauler, assuming they were dumb enough to line up for it. The boltshot doesn't have that kind of killing power even in perfect circumstances. That's why I prefer a shotgun or scattershot, they don't kill at the same range but if you need to fire again it's there for you.

Beam Rifle seems stealthier than sniper rifle so I chose it (Less audible report), but I totally prefer the Gauss Turret and think adding that option was a brilliant move. I'd Gauss fools all day long. The amount of pleasure that weapon gives me is borderline perverse.

Here's another way of explaining it: Players like options. If you take away their options, they want power in return. If you just take away options, you have taken away a thing they like and given them nothing in return. In SWAT and Snipers you take away most of the weapons, but you make everyone deadly at any range. That's the removal of options and the addition of power. In MLG they remove a lot of stuff but give you a professional pat on the back for doing well, and that doesn't even help that much (Those playlists typically have a very small and dedicated population until the next game comes out). Never take away options without giving them something very special in return. A spray and pray playlist takes away options, does nothing else.

Ignoring the continuing failure of most people to understand things, I can say a few things with certainty: Halo 3's success was not due to visible Trueskill. Making Trueskill visible is counter to its purpose. It's not there to make you play harder, it's there to make sure matches are as fair as a computer can make them. From Halo 3 forward (Because I didn't play Halo 2 online) ranked playlists have always been less populated than non-ranked playlists. "Populated" does not equal "well-liked" though. I suspect they were never as populated because people rarely feel like giving 100% when playing a video game, I don't think they were that much less liked though. People would prefer to drive very nice cars and eat extremely good food in very nice houses, but not everyone can afford to do that, nor can everyone do the same job that allows for it (Someone has to cook your very nice food, make/maintenance your nice car, and clean your nice house). Social playlists were consistently more populated and probably better liked, but if you're good enough to win consistently in ranked playlists you'd probably prefer that. Most people aren't though, so why make a playlist that is by its very nature going to have fewer people in it? Every game you win has to be lost by someone else. From a game developer's perspective this means 100% of your games are going to leave 50% of their players dissatisfied, why make that difference more pronounced when no one else in the market is doing so? Halo 3 and Call of Duty were not competing for the same consumers. Halo 4 is now because 343 and Microsoft don't know what they're doing, but that's a different issue. Halo 3 may have lost a lot of players to CoD, but that was probably because before CoD4 there wasn't a single Xbox 360 multiplayer shooter that offered the production values of Halo 3. Players prefer one or the other, or they like both. Players know the differences between the two and play what they want to play. As soon as other developers started getting their **** together Halo lost players, not because it was losing a competition, but because other developers were catching up.

I love that little pistol. Nothing is funnier than owning people with a secondary. Does it **** to die to it? Yeah, but generally I don't like dying anyway so the boltshot doesn't make it any worse.

Aside from being very much like pistol-sized shotguns they aren't really that similar gameplay-wise. The mauler could not kill in one shot when you wielded only one, and even when you wielded two its 1sk range was shorter than that of a normal shotgun. The mauler WAS a good shot + bash weapon, but in Halo 3 you had a more significant melee lunge that allowed such weapons to work. That longer lunge is absent in Halo 4. The boltshot kills in one shot beyond shotgun range and has all the charge-up/cooldown stuff going for it. You can also start with it, but there is no dual-wielding in Halo 4 to add the ammo consumption limitation of dual-wielding maulers. In MLG settings for Halo 3 the mauler would kill in one-shot if you were right in their face, but usually those guys still shot + bashed with it. I am thankful that we no longer have that long melee lunge and equally thankful that we no longer have dual-wielding. Dual-wielding was stupid, and that long melee lunge was one of those creeping cancer type issues that had an enormous impact on gameplay despite being a relatively small feature. Most people don't realize how much it changed things, I believe we're better without it. In its absence I think we're also better off without the mauler, I liked maulers but they were dependent on that lunge. They wouldn't work in Halo 4, no shot + bash weapon does.

I'll take 3. I would take an infinite supply, but if you give me this weapon I will rarely need replacements. I definitely like the idea of vehicles having different weapon options like the warthog does. A vehicle is just the platform on which the weapon is mounted, no need to get so restrictive.

I hate kill cams. I suspect that usually when you see someone shooting the wall and getting the kill on you that you're seeing the difference due to connection issues. I hate killcams.