RedStarRocket91

It's just like Halo 2 all over again in that regard Did you know that although very difficult and often requiring multiple players, it's possible perform Assassinations on Watchers?

What I'd really like to see more of are special application weapons, rather than just raw damage dealers, as we have enough of those already - things like the Plasma Pistol, Plasma Cannon and Binary Rifle (which is used as much for intimidation and area control as it is actually shooting people - seriously, keep hold of it even when it's out of ammunition and see how many people walk into an area you're scoped at). One of the things I've been thinking over is the Pulse Grenade, which is basically just a joke weapon as things stand right now: it does next to no damage, even if you're standing inside it when it finally dissipates, and it doesn't have a single advantage over either Frag or Plasma Grenades. Put bluntly, there are only three reasons you'd carry one, and that's because you're new and don't know any better, you like the way it looks, or you want a weapon to get humiliation kills with. So what I'd like to see is a way of making the Pulse Grenade more useful in combat without fundamentally changing its purpose. First of all, whatever happens it needs a bigger blast radius - its current size is pathetic, especially considering only one can be carried, so you can't even put two down to stop people just walking around them. As for the actual damage, in the spirit of making it more dangerous with just having yet another direct damage grenade, what I'd suggest that while it continues to do roughly the same damage to shielded players, the pulse field not only lasts a bit longer than it currently does but also instantly kills any unshielded targets within. This opens up a lot more opportunities for tactical use, like cutting off a retreating opponent or mopping up several injured players at once - it would also make players a lot more hesitant about charging straight through an active pulse field, as currently you can just run through it without any real concerns about damage taken. It could also make for a very interesting set of applications during vehicle-based matches, as instead of destroying a vehicle outright perhaps planting it would only kill the driver and passengers without doing any structural damage, meaning you could then hijack it afterward. On the topic of grenades, a couple of other ideas I've had in the past are EMP Grenades, which have a large blast radius but do nothing to their victims' health and are also capable of disabling vehicles; Sensor Grenades, which reveal any hostile targets in their radius for a few seconds (could be blocked or reduced by Stealth specialisation package, like Promethean Vision); Scrambler Grenades, which act like the Radar Jammer equipment in Halo 3 and add random dots to the motion trackers of anyone who strays too near; and lastly Inhibitor Grenades, which do little or no damage at all in the traditional sense, but have temporary negative affects on anyone caught in the blast such as shutting down their HUD and motion tracker, stopping shield regeneration, and preventing the use of armour abilities (even if currently in use). Mostly, I just want to get away from the idea of traditional damage-dealing weaponry, as I honestly think that for the most part right we've got more than enough of those and adding more would just be to increase variety, rather than to try and fill gaps in purpose.

When the weapon tuning update came out last year, I remember one of the things that was mentioned is that the SAW had been tweaked so that it still killed exactly twice as fast as the Assault Rifle, and though the Suppressor definitely kills a bit quicker than the Assault Rifle provided all shots hit, I'm pretty sure it doesn't kill in half the time. The thing with the Suppressor is that its fast kill time doesn't make up for just how poor its accuracy is. Even at point-blank range - and I really do mean at punching range - you're almost certain to miss at least one or two shots, so it's very rare that you're even going to get close to its actual best kill time. Plus, thanks to its projectiles you'll have to lead your shots, and even though they're very fast they're still not hitscan, as with something like the SAW or the Assault Rifle: this also means that there's a bit less in the way of bullet magnetism, so just tapping the trigger to keep your reticle tight is less effective. And then the reticle is the hardest in the game to control anyway, so if you want to maintain any degree of accuracy whatsoever you're going to have to shoot much more slowly, and there's little point in picking the Suppressor if you're going to do that. There's also the issue of ammunition. Sure, the Suppressor has a surprisingly deep magazine and comes with a fair bit of spare ammunition, but unless you're using the Ammo support package it's going to run out very quickly. This isn't a problem for a lot of other weapons like the Assault Rifle or Battle Rifle as they're very popular, so you can always pick up more ammunition from defeated opponents, but since the Suppressor is so rarely used you're going to be very hard pressed to find more ammunition for it once your initial supply is gone. This is one of the few problems that you really aren't going to be able to just plan for in the long term as even the extra magazines from the Ammo package will run out eventually, so taking it as a sole primary might not be the best choice. Don't get me wrong, the Suppressor is a fantastic weapon if you're playing defensively and forcing opponents to come to you, or can force battles at very close ranges, and the sheer size of its magazine means that provided you don't die in the meantime you'll almost definitely put out enough fire to assure a kill with every reload, even on full-auto. As long as you shoot first or attack from the sides, you might well be able to beat a SAW user. But in a straight fight at anything beyond very close range, against an opponent of your own skill level, it's more likely to get you killed.

For any Halo fans today's biggest news is undoubtedly the confirmation of Halo 5: Guardians as the next instalment of the Halo franchise, and for many the most exciting thing isn't the revelation that the Chief's next adventure will have a name, but the prominence of what appears to be a second Spartan on the front cover. I've attached a high-quality file in the spoiler box below for the purposes of formatting (and you can click on it to make it even bigger!) The armour itself is an interesting starting point: the helmet appears to be a blend of the Fotus faceplate from Halo 4, combined with the top of the Mark V variant in Reach. The torso segment bears a lot of similarities to the Recruit variant found in Halo 4, though with a Mass Effect-style strip down the centre, and the arms in particular have the rounded pauldrons common to that series. The sides of the helmet also evoke the jaw mandibles of the Elites, so given that Sangheilios appears to be the world in the background (more on that later) it could be that the new suit is built by co-opting both Forerunner AND Covenant technologies, which would make this by far the most powerful incarnation of Mjolnir to date. Overall, the suit seems to have the round, curved shapes associated with the Spartan-IVs rather than the hard, angular plates of the Spartan-II series of Mjolnir, so it could be that we're looking at a Spartan-IV. The upper figure's fingers actually look to be somewhat longer than the Chief's (although this could just be distortion), and although it's been suggested that the upper figure has a feminine look, to me the body shape looks more masculine. I think a lot of people might be getting this impression from the fact that the figure's helmet bears some similarities to that found on Samus' suit from the Metroid series, or possible the blue visor. Josh Holmes also confirmed that the character is a 'he' in a tweet, and that the new Spartan was to be a completely new character. Something else which is of interest is that fact that while the Chief's armour is still devoid of insignias, the second Spartan's armour is clearly marked with an ONI logo on the left side of the breastplate. Several Spartans have been confirmed to be working for ONI over the course of the series and expanded universe, and the Spartan-III program was of course commissioned by ONI. In short we could well be looking at any class of Spartan, from a Spartan-II like Naomi to a Spartan-IV like Team Majestic or even an enhanced Spartan-III like the members of Noble Team. Perhaps we'll even be playing our own Spartan-IVs from Halo 4, and be allowed to customise them as happened with Noble Six in Reach? One last thing of interest in the reflection atop the second Spartan's helmet, which has the orange and silver colouration associated with the Didact, and indeed looks a little like the Forerunner construct seen in last year's E3 trailer. It's not clear what it is but it wouldn't be shown if it weren't important, so I'm excited to see what it turns out to be - possibly a new Forerunner weapon or (and behold rampant speculation) perhaps a part of a newly-composed Didact? The background planet appears to be Sangheilios, from its descriptions within the books, and tied in with the amount of sand sweeping through the image it definitely appears to match the desert teaser image from last year's E3, agains suggesting that whatever is being reflected atop the Spartan's helmet is a forerunner creation. The weapons themselves are also notable. It looks as though the MA5D model Assault Rifle from Halo 4 is going to make a return, as will the BR85HB Battle Rifle from Halo 4, which appears to be sporting a reflex sight rather than the classic scope associated with it zoom function: while this may not be the final model, it might hint at the inclusion of some sort of ADS mechanic, the removal/reduction of its ability to scope in at long ranges, or the ability to customise weapon sights (or it could be purely cosmetic). Both weapons also appear to be somewhat elongated from their Halo 4 counterparts, although again this could just be distortion. Lastly, it does appear that the Chief's visor has retained the cracking we saw at last year's E3 trailer (though it's quite difficult to see), although he's missing the heavy cloak which he was wearing then: presumably this means that it won't be incorporated into his final character design. At any rate, the Chief himself looks about the same as ever, and it's going to be very interesting to see what the dynamic between these two characters is, especially in light of the events concerning Dr. Halsey toward the end of the first season of Spartan Ops, ONI's relationship with her, the death of Cortana, and the Chief's own loyalties.

As of this weekend, we're going to be making some alterations to our policy on members' usernames and username changes. Although we believe that over 99% of our users will be unaffected by the new policy, we recommend familiarising yourself with them anyway. These changes are as follows: Previously, members were allowed to alter their name three times per month. In the future, members will be able to change their names twice in every two-month period. Previously, members were allowed to use special symbols in their usernames. In the future, members will be restricted to alphanumeric characters only. For most members, this means that you're essentially restricted to one name change per month. The reason we've chosen to define it as twice per two months instead is so that if you make a name change you're unhappy with, you won't have to wait another month or contact a member of the moderating team in order to change it back. Any members currently using special characters in their usernames will not be required to change them, although we would strongly recommend doing so, as continued use of non-alphanumeric symbology may adversely affect your ability to receive site Awards. The reasons these changes are being made are twofold. The first is that frequent name changes or special symbols can adversely affect the moderating team's ability to track individual members and undertake moderation (whether positive or negative) as necessary; the second is that frequent name changes or special symbols can cause issues with our bulk Award system, and potentially prevent qualifying members from receiving any Awards which are handed out to more than one person at a time (e.g. the Top 15 and Gamer Awards). While we hope you'll agree with these changes, if you have any questions or concerns this thread will remain open, so please don't hesitate to post below.

Did you know that whenever you're inside a Regeneration Field, your shields will always charge at the standard rate? This means that if you're using the Shielding tactical package, your shields will actually take slightly longer to regenerate than if you were standing outside of it!

Absolutely. For me, Dominion feels like a natural evolution of the old Territories gametype, and the inclusion of actual bases which can defend themselves to a degree and which actually reward maintaining control with things like weapon drops, rather than just points, makes for much more varied and tactical gameplay. I also really like the dynamic it creates between infantry and vehicles, as unlike Territories most of the maps were designed specifically around the gametype, rather than just having relevant zones added: this means that while vehicles are great for controlling the map and actually laying siege to bases, infantry are actually needed to capture or properly defend them. It also means that anyone inside a base has a good chance to successfully fight off any vehicles outside - I think one of the only things I'd like changed in this regard is the addition of more anti-vehicular turrets, and perhaps one or two manually-operated turrets to each base. Moreover, it's really important just to try and get as much variety into matchmaking as possible. King of the Hill is pretty fun, but it just doesn't lend itself well to the use of vehicles, and there aren't really any other gametypes about maintaining control over bases rather than just capturing objectives. Overall, definitely keep!

THE HYPE TRAIN HAS NO BRAKES

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The thing with forerunner vehicles is that the Prometheans don't really need them. The average Knight is already heavily shielded and armoured, extremely manoeuvrable thanks to their teleporting and dash abilities, and carries heavy weapons. Considering they can also spawn Watchers to protect them with Hardlight Shields, the truth is that putting the average Promethean into a vehicle would make them less effective in combat, not more. Plus, to compensate, there'd need to be more heavy weapons like Fuel Rod Guns, Rocket Launcher, etc. around to allow players to avoid the vehicles being completely overpowered if they were actually more effective than regular Knights, and any spare ammunition would then make taking care of the regular enemies a bit easier. There's also the issue of redundancy. For almost every role on the battlefield, there's already a vehicle which can does its job: for transports/mobile weapons you've got the various Warthogs, for light single-crew vehicles there's Ghosts, for artillery there's the Wraith, for air superiority there's the Banshee, and for slow but very powerful tanking there's, well, a tank. Any Promethean vehicles would probably just be doing the same sort of things, except with a different coat of paint. If we were to come up with new types of vehicles, which served new purposes, then there'd be a good case for them being Promethean-based, but otherwise there's just not much point.

Betrayal is a good concept implemented poorly. When making a decision about whether or not to include a game mechanic, the most important thing to ask is why it's being included: not how it's going to work or what it will do, but what the point of including it is. With betrayal, the objective was to encourage players to be careful with their shots, and to give drawbacks to otherwise very powerful weapons like grenades and Rocket Launchers. Sure, you could just start chucking explosives into a heated fight and hope for the best, but the possibility of actually losing points rather than gaining them means it's a bad idea. The problem with having friendly-fire damage is that it's often exploited. Literally anyone who's ever held a Sniper Rifle or equivalent will have a story of the time where they were minding their own business when some idiot on their own team ran up to them and killed them just so they could pick it up. Other times, they'll stand in your way so you can't shoot without hurting them, keep punching you to make you an easy target for opponents, shoot at you to scope you out, or any one of a dozen things which means if you want to have a few seconds to actually play the game you're basically forced to betray them, meaning that even though they were the ones who were ruining the game, you're the one who gets kicked for it. This kind of behaviour was so common in Halo 3 and Reach that I stopped bothering to pick up power weapons on some maps, and eventually quit playing Big Team Battle altogether. It hasn't happened to me at all outside of custom games in Halo 4. And then of course it's abused in other ways by griefers and trolls. Teammates deliberately shooting you once you've taken damage so they can kill you without it counting as a betrayal, destroying friendly vehicles because they don't want anyone but themselves driving them (anyone remember the Mantis, Plasma Pistol pre-update combo?), learning exactly how many times they can get away with it in order to upset other teammates and boot them when they get angry and fight back: even if the betrayal system does encourage precision over just spamming fire - and that's debatable, especially in older games where you could carry 4 of each grenade - the way it's currently implemented brings up a whole host of its own problems. What's needed is a better system for calculating intentional betrayals, and to discourage bad behaviour and abuse. A good start would be altering the way players pick up weapons so that if they've betrayed or been betrayed by a teammate, they can't pick up weapons from their corpse: this discourages team killing just because you want someone's weapon. An even better way would be trying to code a system which works out the intent of the person who performed the betrayal, perhaps based on the proximity of the victim to an opponent, when the shot was fired if there's travel time, if the player had landed shots on an enemy immediately prior to the betrayal, etc: this would be the best way of doing it, although I have no idea how hard it would be to code, and of course there would no doubt be cases where the system got it wrong, allowing griefers to get away with it and punishing players who've killed teammates completely by accident. The last way would be to re-introduce separate playlists for Ranked and Social. Friendly fire could just be set to 'Off' in social playlists (because it's mean to be relaxed, not competitive) and betrayals in Ranked would directly affect whether you rank up or down after a winning game, because I think far fewer people would deliberately teamkill if they thought it would hurt their standing.

My 'favourite' weapon is kind of a tricky question, since the weapon that I personally most enjoy using isn't actually the same weapon that I consider to be the 'best' of the loadout weapons. Prior to the weapon tuning update, my favourite weapon was the DMR, which I also regarded as the 'best' loadout weapon at the time. It had the longest effective range, the fastest kill time of any of the precision weapons (or so I think - the Carbine might have been a little quicker), a large magazine, a powerful scope and fairly strong aim assist. It also had a great firing sound and generally just pretty powerful. The only thing I didn't like was that it was too dominant: you could easily gun down automatic users even at close range and it outperformed virtually all the other precision whether scoped or unscoped, so even though I was disappointed at my favourite gun becoming weaker I'm still glad they nerfed it because it makes the game feel a lot more balanced. Post-update, my favourite primary weapon is probably the Assault Rifle. Ever since Halo 2 came out I've been wishing for an automatic which felt as good as the Assault Rifle in Halo: CE, nd every time I've been disappointed. Halo 3's version was pretty good: it was reasonably powerful, fairly accurate and combined really well with the melee system, but it didn't feel like anything special and was almost always outclassed by the Battle Rifle, the Carbine or just dual-wielded SMGs or Plasma Rifles. The older model found in Reach was absolutely terrible, being weak, inaccurate, and horribly ineffective thanks to the removal of shield damage bleedthrough, and though the pre-update model in Halo 4 was a step in the right direction, it was still outclassed at anything above short range by the precision weapons and still only existed on even footing at close range, rather than having an actual advantage. But post-update, I love it. The sound design, muzzle flash, and thick metallic model all combined to make it look powerful anyway, but with the improved kill times and more controllable recoil it's become something truly satisfying: I'm fairly sure if you hit with every shot it's possible to kill two Spartans with a single magazine, and provided you manage your shots you can reliably hit stuff even out to medium range. The extra weapon skins from the Bullseye pack also look amazing: I have a particular fondness for the shark skin, though as I like to match my loadout skins I normally just use the gold-plated one. However, while it's now not just a good weapon but an excellent weapon, I don't really consider it to be the 'best' weapon in the loadouts as even though it has better range than before it's still just not versatile enough. Instead, it's still essentially a specialist weapon like the Lightrifle or the Plasma Pistol: it's much better than the average precision weapon when used at its correct range, but at anything other than that it's just not going to cut it. As a result, while I have it as a backup weapon on one of my loadouts, I still wouldn't consider using it as my sole primary during competitive gameplay. So as for the overall 'best' weapon, I'm going to say the Carbine. It has a good, powerful sound and a satisfying projectile which makes it fun to use, and some of the alternate skins are also pretty nice, so it just feels good to begin with. But what really elevates it above the Battle Rifle comes down to the fact that it kills very slightly faster (a tenth of a second or something), that it's projectiles don't spread so much, and that because you can pull the trigger more quickly it works better at long ranges against opponents using scopes on things like the DMR and Lightrifle. I think the Battle Rifle is more popular both because of nostalgia and because people tend to feel more comfortable using human weapons (and it might have a little bit more aim assist - not sure on this, but it does feel a little easier to aim), but for my money the Carbine is probably the best primary weapon in the loadouts right now. As for favourite power weapon - Shotgun all the way. It's horribly short ranged, fires slowly, doesn't hold much ammo, can't be deployed as effectively as older models thanks to larger, more open maps and faster movement, is crippling overspecialised, and is the single most satisfying weapon to use thanks to the cyclying animation after each shot and the firing sound. My God, that firing sound. 'Best' power weapon is the Incineration Cannon because it's stupidly overpowered.

Staff Response You've already had multiple warnings and yet every time I open this topic it's managed to drag itself back down to a flame war. Thread locked.

Although it might not seem like it, the Shotgun is actually significantly more powerful and with a greater effective kill range in Halo 4 than it is in any other title (with the possible exception of the first game). The reason it feels less effective is because map design, sprint, and the higher kill speeds of other weapons discourage fighting at melee range, whereas in older titles the most common and effective strategies involved trading fire at very close distances: think how often you'd get a melee kill in Halo 3 compared to now, for instance. It's not that the Shotgun itself is less powerful, it's just that it's less powerful in comparison to other weapons, and much more difficult to find confined areas where it can be used effectively. It's still an incredibly dangerous weapon in the right hands, but it needs to be used more tactically than its predecessors to be effective.

Although the Legendary Member group is normally reserved for ex-staff members in recognition for their past services, as of today I'm incredibly pleased to be able to announce the return of two of its members to active service in the moderating team. These two moderators were instrumental in shaping the forums as they exist today, and to have their experience and wisdom at work in an official capacity once again is something I hope you'll agree can only continue to improve our site. Ladies and Gentlemen, please give a warm welcome back to our two newest Community Moderators, Total Mayh3m and The Director!

Smeeze lol

We may have video spotlights of some of the maps in our Forge sections sometime in the future, if it seems there's demand for it. For now though it's mainly composed of in-game footage from Community Events and the Community Podcast.