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crunchUK
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Re: Help Bungie improve BTB!

Tue Oct 05, 2010 10:29 am

Bloody Initiate wrote:
it's also not enough to destroy a team's starting compliment of vehicles on any map)


That's a bad thing is it?
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Re: Help Bungie improve BTB!

Tue Oct 05, 2010 10:55 am

I also want some Rocket Hog and some Gauss Hog. Why the hell do we spawn two hogs on so many maps and they're the same damn kind of hog?


Oh I'll love to have more hogs but I also understand how important balance is and unfortually the gauss is too overpowered for non heavy maps. The gauss would just shred everything.
Vechicles now take skill to use and I love having it like this as having laser or not having laser no longer determines who wins and who loses. Vechicles are no longer the map control tools like they were in Halo3 so we won't be seeing a hog running around getting an invincible spawnkilling with one hog.

Now it's much more important for hog teams to aid groundpounders and attack as a single unit as specific times in the game. A warthog going to the other side of bloodguluch without the help of ground pounders is going to wrecked. A warthog crew going to the other side of the map while you have team members in the rockfield or the cave will work.

The hog is a powerweapon now and should be used in that regard rather than a map control tool.
There is now significantly more vehicles on BTB maps if anything I would say much better than Halo 3's BTB and more of the golden age of BTB in Halo2. Were maps were huge.
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Re: Help Bungie improve BTB!

Tue Oct 05, 2010 12:40 pm

crunchUK wrote:
Bloody Initiate wrote:
it's also not enough to destroy a team's starting compliment of vehicles on any map)


That's a bad thing is it?


No, it's neither a bad nor a good thing. It's a detail that furthers my point: IF the laser is incapable of wiping out an opposing team's vehicles, it is not as powerful as people remember.

Consider if laser was placed in the center of Hemorrhage after the Scorpion is replaced with the Wraith.

It would be a power weapon for sure, but it's 4 shots vs. 5 vehicles on the enemy team. That's assuming you hit every time (Not a big assumption), that no one kills you for it, and that it doesn't de-spawn after you've been killed.

I am not arguing exclusively for a laser in Hemorrhage, I actually feel like a rocket launcher is a better weapon for the center because it can defend itself a little better from that extremely exposed position.

The plasma launcher is a MISERABLE excuse for a weapon. It has the charge-up time of a laser with the kill range of a shotgun. Yeah it can kill outside that range, but only if someone is so distracted they don't notice you peppering the ground around them with plasma grenades. It fires in an arc and doesn't track as well as a needler (which I don't feel tracks as well in this game). I've been killed with this thing twice, once when I rounded a corner and a dude fired it in my face point blank, and another time when I was fighting several people at once and the plasma launcher mopped me up with some splash damage. It sucks, it doesn't deserve to be on Hemorrhage, especially in the center position pretending to be a power weapon.

I DO want more lasers in Matchmaking though. It irritates me that they went through the trouble of limiting its capacity and making it much LESS satisfying to fire, only to put it on fewer maps. As if the other nerfs weren't rough enough, I have to walk out to the edge of a one-way death bridge in Paradiso to pick up my laser. Screw that. Or I can randomly find one on Boneyard, I have yet to learn the weapon spawns on Boneyard or Spire because I so rarely play them in BTB. Every weapon I find in those maps feels like an Easter Egg.

I can't believe the rockets and sniper rifle are where they are on Spire. It's like they just fell from the sky and landed in some rocks. I was just walking back from looking for the banshee one time and Behold! A Rocket Launcher! Thrilled with my find (Which I thought was there because someone had died there) I walked toward the fight only to find a Sniper Rifle! WTF? Sure! I'll take it! Then some weirdness happened with a Falcon (Both its gunners just randomly died and it reverse-crash-landed next to BFG) and a little bit of BS later I was back at spawn with nothing.

The last two paragraphs largely sum up my BTB experience thus far. I also got a rampage or something with a tank, but who cares?

Black Knight wrote:
I also want some Rocket Hog and some Gauss Hog. Why the hell do we spawn two hogs on so many maps and they're the same damn kind of hog?


Oh I'll love to have more hogs but I also understand how important balance is and unfortually the gauss is too overpowered for non heavy maps. The gauss would just shred everything.
Vechicles now take skill to use and I love having it like this as having laser or not having laser no longer determines who wins and who loses. Vechicles are no longer the map control tools like they were in Halo3 so we won't be seeing a hog running around getting an invincible spawnkilling with one hog.

Now it's much more important for hog teams to aid groundpounders and attack as a single unit as specific times in the game. A warthog going to the other side of bloodguluch without the help of ground pounders is going to wrecked. A warthog crew going to the other side of the map while you have team members in the rockfield or the cave will work.

The hog is a powerweapon now and should be used in that regard rather than a map control tool.
There is now significantly more vehicles on BTB maps if anything I would say much better than Halo 3's BTB and more of the golden age of BTB in Halo2. Were maps were huge.


I'm not sure how overpowered the Gauss is, especially with the new vehicle health system. Frankly with that system I feel like the chaingun hog occupies a position not unlike that of Avalanche's transport hornet. I can't say much about the gun, because while I've had horrible experiences in it I haven't had many experiences total.

I CAN say that "vehicles requiring more skill" isn't necessarily a good thing, because the majority of players aren't going to learn enough to utilize them well. They always required skill before, but there was an amount of protection you gained from getting in one that let you relax a little. Now it's just a matter of time before you explode. That time isn't long for a hog.

In addition to the health system that destroys hogs, there are also no maps with hogs that don't include powerful trumps or nerfs to the hog (This is why I want a rocket hog and a gauss hog).

On Paradiso, Hemorrhage, and Boneyard there is a tank. Bye bye hog. On Paradiso there's also a guy with a laser who is bored. On Hemorrhage there is a Revenant who isn't actually good at much other than ruining hogs.
On Spire, there is a Falcon and a Banshee, which btw aren't necessarily "anti-hog" except that the map is so tall that they can just chill above the hog's maximum turret elevation. They can spend their whole game ignoring you and you can spend your whole game ignoring them. The difference is they don't have to ignore you like you MUST ignore them. They can aim down, you can only aim so high up.

Unfortunately the spawns on Paradiso are such that I don't imagine a new type of hog would solve anything. A Gauss hog could spawn kill a little too easily, and a rocket hog would just be outside its element (Although I'm really not sure about the rocket hog, I've never seen it used against players). Boneyard could use a Gauss hog though, because the gunner would have to be a kind of sharpshooter just to hit all the people shooting at him from buildings and such. Of course the spawns on Boneyard need work first. Hemorrhage could use a rocket hog I think, the outer hogs have a different spawn time, so it could just be the hog that took longer to spawn. Spire could use a rocket hog because a rocket hog can track flying targets if the driver positions him where he can aim at them (The chaingun hog can get in the same positions, but his accuracy is so miserable he can't hurt the flying vehicles much from those locations)

Most of my suggestions are balanced by my own experience killing hogs in Reach. It's easy. It was always easy in H3, but I had to be careful. In Reach I can just stroll up to them and kill them, or gun them down from afar. The only time I've seen them used effectively, as I said above, is when they acted like the old transport hornet; Going in with some fire to fetch the flag carrier or something similar. If that's the new role the hog plays that's fine, but that's not something I want to specialize in. Btw I've seen the hog pull off the above job once, maybe twice successfully. I've personally DMRed the flag carrier out of the passenger seat from long range more times than that.

At least a Gauss or Rocket hog would feel like a glass cannon. I'm ok with being a glass cannon. A mongoose with extra seats and OK gun though? Not my thing. I even saw some pretty inventive drivers trying to change how things go, they did their best and I was impressed, they couldn't save the hog though

I really haven't had a good run in the thing yet though, so maybe once I get some time to dedicate to playing with a party in BTB or Invasion I'll feel like it's more effective. I don't like feeling like it's not worth trying to run a hog, but so far I just let those things sit while I wait for something else. I watch enough hogs explode under enemy fire or I destroy enough enemy hogs myself to know I'm not missing much.
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Re: Help Bungie improve BTB!

Tue Oct 05, 2010 1:12 pm

I agree fully that the new vehicle health system is pretty bad. Or at least the way it works now. As you said, no matter how good you are at driving it will blow up quickly if the other team knows to just team DMR you. It doesn't matter if you dodge grenades or rockets or get to cover to refill your shields; the hog just keeps taking damage until it blows up anyway.

But I don't believe strengthening them and adding more lasers would be any better. In my opinion they need to fix the Rocket launcher and make it lock onto all vehicles again. It has the portability of a laser, but the need to actually set yourself up to take out the enemy vehicles. The laser is just point and shoot, just like in Halo 3 there is almost no chance to escape a moderate skilled player who has a laser.

If Rockets were fixed they could become the center/anti-vehicle weapon that most of Reach's BTB maps are missing, without becoming a deciding factor in every game like the laser did in Halo 3. I always liked the missile pod in Halo 3 for the fact that you had a chance to escape it. It's only problem was its portability, which would not be a problem with lock-on rockets. Then Bungie could be free to buff the vehicles because they would have a good counter other than normal gun fire.

This would keep the good vehicle vs vehicle balance that there is now, but also fix the balance between ground pounders and vehicles. The vehicles when used skillfully would actually work well and the ground pounders would have a way to take them out, that wasn't an instant trump card or a certain eventual kill.
 
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Re: Help Bungie improve BTB!

Tue Oct 05, 2010 1:31 pm

Jon6600 wrote:
I agree fully that the new vehicle health system is pretty bad. Or at least the way it works now. As you said, no matter how good you are at driving it will blow up quickly if the other team knows to just team DMR you. It doesn't matter if you dodge grenades or rockets or get to cover to refill your shields; the hog just keeps taking damage until it blows up anyway.

But I don't believe strengthening them and adding more lasers would be any better. In my opinion they need to fix the Rocket launcher and make it lock onto all vehicles again. It has the portability of a laser, but the need to actually set yourself up to take out the enemy vehicles. The laser is just point and shoot, just like in Halo 3 there is almost no chance to escape a moderate skilled player who has a laser.

If Rockets were fixed they could become the center/anti-vehicle weapon that most of Reach's BTB maps are missing, without becoming a deciding factor in every game like the laser did in Halo 3. I always liked the missile pod in Halo 3 for the fact that you had a chance to escape it. It's only problem was its portability, which would not be a problem with lock-on rockets. Then Bungie could be free to buff the vehicles because they would have a good counter other than normal gun fire.

This would keep the good vehicle vs vehicle balance that there is now, but also fix the balance between ground pounders and vehicles. The vehicles when used skillfully would actually work well and the ground pounders would have a way to take them out, that wasn't an instant trump card or a certain eventual kill.

Great post, I agree fully.

Bungie have obviously gone with a more oldschool Halo approach to anti-vehicular weapons in Reach like Halo CE and perhaps some of Halo 2(Where vehicles were primarily countered by other vehicles due to a lack of real anti-vehicular weaponry, whereas Halo 3 revolved around map control to gain an anti-vehicular weapon to counter the vehicles), and they've restrained themselves when placing those sort of weapons, especially on Blood Gulch.

However, I think a compromise is needed.

Rockets in the center would be perfect. Not nearly enough ammo to take out all the vehicles on the map, yet enough to take out the most important vehicles on the enemy team, while still requiring some effort and skill. Adding lock-on would provide the compromise, so it could take out aerial vehicles(which I hope to God Bungie end up including on Hemorrhage).

EDIT: Woops, forgot rockets already had lock-on on banshees etc...
Last edited by BUfels on Tue Oct 05, 2010 1:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Help Bungie improve BTB!

Tue Oct 05, 2010 1:40 pm

Eh, I'm not big on tracking rockets. It's not so different from a laser when they track. Even if you miss you stand a good chance of sending the thing flipping out of control, whereupon your team can rape it with grenades and gunfire.

I understand that the laser was easy, but having it make such a minimal appearance in Matchmaking just feels wrong. Hell, gimme a laser on Boardwalk or Pinnacle (That might make Pinnacle tolerable. I hate that map.) The fact that it only shows up on two maps, and I'm not even sure it's actually on two (I THINK there's one on Boneyard, couldn't say for sure), which I think is less than any other weapon, just feels so very wrong.

Btw, who misses the banshee on PInnacle/Ascension? I'm not sure that I do, but I hate that map so much I'd be happy to stick something as silly as a banshee on it just to break the monotony of it. Halo has become so snipe-centric I feel like I'm jumping on the bandwagon any time I snipe anything. It really cheapens the experience.
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Re: Help Bungie improve BTB!

Tue Oct 05, 2010 2:20 pm

Eh, I'm not big on tracking rockets. It's not so different from a laser when they track. Even if you miss you stand a good chance of sending the thing flipping out of control, whereupon your team can rape it with grenades and gunfire.


The laser is too dominant.
If you're on one side of blood gulch you will be able to take out hogs on the other side as the laser is hitscan and it's pretty easy to use.
Rockets on the other hand are much different as you need to be inside the lock on range which puts you at greater risk of dying. Rockets aren't hitscan so they will take time to reach their target. This window of time allows the warthog/banshee operator to react. More emphasis on callouts too "Blue guy firing rockets at you banshee" and not "They have laser." "Instant death".

Less lasers on BTB maps is the best thing Bungie has done.
The warthog respawn times are pretty fast and help with balance. On standoff the warthog was overpowered even if it was fun the other team didn't really have a chance coming off spawn in the open. On valahalla the banshee with whosever team had laser is almost certain to win.

Overall the only main problems in BTB are the party splits and maps. The sandbox and balance is extremely good.
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Re: Help Bungie improve BTB!

Tue Oct 05, 2010 2:49 pm

I just played BTB on Hemmorage... Amazing, absolutely amazing. Now that the tank isn't there to destroy every vehicle that pops up, vehicles are extremely useful, and fun to drive around on that map again. The game was just... so much better.
The wraith also spawns late into the game I think too, because I didn't notice it for a while then suddenly it was just there.
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Re: Help Bungie improve BTB!

Wed Oct 06, 2010 4:52 am

Black Knight wrote:
Overall the only main problems in BTB are the party splits and maps. The sandbox and balance is extremely good.


What is "the sandbox"? I've seen people use that term pretty often and none of the meanings I know for it fit the contexts.

Also I have yet to go in with a party of 8 and I can't think of a time my smaller party has been split (Blacklite and I went in a lot together, we never had to fight each other outside of Rumble Pit). I joined a party of 8 but we couldn't even keep together in the lobby.

EDIT: I was re-reading this post and I noticed the second part seemed like I was implying that party splits weren't a problem. I meant to simply say "The one party of 8 I was in fell apart before the game could even split us". From what I've heard party splits for parties of 8 are worse than ever before, the "worse than ever before" may be an exaggeration people make due to exasperation, but I believe it when I'm told they're a problem even if I haven't seen it first hand. Small parties seem to stay together quite well though, so that's a plus.
Last edited by Bloody Initiate on Wed Oct 06, 2010 9:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Help Bungie improve BTB!

Wed Oct 06, 2010 9:02 am

I would love to see some Heavy variants soon. I wants my Gauss.
 
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Re: Help Bungie improve BTB!

Wed Oct 06, 2010 10:16 am

Grezzles wrote:
I would love to see some Heavy variants soon. I wants my Gauss.


Or even Rocket hog ::panic::
 
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Re: Help Bungie improve BTB!

Wed Oct 06, 2010 10:34 am

I hope you all have actually been posting your thoughts on Bungie. Otherwise, you're just wasting your time venting here.
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Re: Help Bungie improve BTB!

Wed Oct 06, 2010 10:38 am

BTB is fine for me now that SWAT is out of it =D
 
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Re: Help Bungie improve BTB!

Wed Oct 06, 2010 10:46 am

WatchGrassGrow wrote:
I just played BTB on Hemmorage... Amazing, absolutely amazing. Now that the tank isn't there to destroy every vehicle that pops up, vehicles are extremely useful, and fun to drive around on that map again. The game was just... so much better.
The wraith also spawns late into the game I think too, because I didn't notice it for a while then suddenly it was just there.


Yes. I am really glad that they took the tank out of Hemmorage, and yes the Wraith spawns late in the game. I think it spawns like 30 secs or a minute after the game has started. Other than that the only problem for the Hogs are those Revenants. I really want them to put the Gauss back into BTB also. Maybe replace one of the regular Hogs with a Gauss in Hemmorage, and the same for other maps like Paradiso and Boneyard.
 
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Re: Help Bungie improve BTB!

Fri Oct 08, 2010 10:40 pm

I put in my two cents, but I feel that my problems are with the OPness of the DMR and the way nerfed abilities of the Warthog thus problems with Halo Reach as a whole. I just miss Sand map and Snow map :'(
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