We needed a thread to discuss this, so let's get to it. I'll post some things I've already gathered:

Handling

Thus far, I've felt that the Halo 4 Warthog feels a lot like a Halo 3 mongoose. I don't know how many people here drove a lot of mongooses in Halo 3, but I played a ton of Rocket Race. I first felt this impression when I tried using the e-brake in matchmaking. The H4 Warthog doesn't slide like the Halo 3 or even the Reach hog did. I'm still tinkering with it, so I won't make any assertions at this moment. However, when I've been flipped, the Hog responds well to the counter-steering maneuvers Smitty preached back in Halo 3, which I felt worked best on the Halo 3 mongoose.

So, in summary:
-Rolls like the Halo 3 Mongoose
-Slides a like the Reach Warthog

Physics

This hog is a bit weird when it comes to game physics. Thankfully, when I've been shot at thus far, I haven't felt like I lost totally control of my Warthog. However, if you gain any air, the hog seems to hang there inexplicably sometimes. I've tried a few light maneuvers where I will slide off a very small incline to hit an enemy and the hog will seem to hang the in the air a full second and a half longer than it did in Halo 3. The hog feels tough when taking damage, but light when maneuvering. It's a weird sensation.

Toughness

I think the layouts of the maps has a lot to do with this, but this hog feels sturdy to me. I've been shot at a bunch, but the hog hasn't disintegrated beneath me. I think the Reach driving mentality will work very well in this game. By Reach mindset, I mean the hit-and-run style and pure support play that we developed to play well in Reach. Hogs can take more of a beating than the Reach hog, but they do accrue damage. I will post more concrete details this weekend after I've had some time in Forge to get some numbers on the hog.

However, I will say that a Warthog is capable of engaging the enemy with team support and controlling small portions of the map, but it is not a dominant force. I think the Halo 3 days of Warthog solo supremacy are over.

Terrain

I think this bears mentioning. I haven't seen all of the maps yet, but our hogs are going to battle on wildly different terrain in this game. I went from running Ragnarok Halo 3 style where I got aggressive with the attacks on a base and slashing through enemies, to Dominion on Exile where I had to avoid the turrets of the enemy base, the sudden spawns near me, and pick off people running to B. Then, there's Dominion on Meltdown, where the terrain is very tight the entire time. I think we're going to develop different tactics in this game based on maps with tight lines and maps with wider, more open lanes.

Loadouts

This is the area I think will cause the greatest disruption of how we drive in Halo 4. People no longer spawn equal. In BTB even in Reach, all you wondered about was whether they'd spawn with armor lock or drop shield. In Invasion, you knew Elites had plasma pistols and stickies. However, we do not know what people will possess coming out of spawn. Some of these loadouts alter how quickly people's shields recharge and how long they can run. Caution will be the guiding force behind driving in Halo 4, I think.


That's all I've got for now. I'd really appreciate some gunner input on the turret, particularly its accuracy and warmup as well as its overheat.

What do the other drivers think out there?

Great insights sarge, i too am looking forward to reading about the gunner perspective; I wonder if twisted will be the first to take on that endevour, hmm.

I only gunned a couple times, but it seems inconsistient.
One moment I'm mowing people down, another I can't seem to put anyone down.
I've never had good accuracy with my thumb, so I know I'm not the best person for this.

Hog drives great. I'm dissappointed it still is one gear though. Hopefully 343i gives us at least two gears in a future Halo.
I think the hog is much sturdier now.


Honestly it makes sense that Team shooting a hog kills it quickly. I remeber the days in Halo3 where I'd just run at the enemy, bob and weave. When I was faced with putting a hog down, shooting it in H3 wasn't too effective.

I haven't driven the hog much at all, but every chance I get I ask if someone would like to drive me. So I've gunned quite a bit. I wasn't sure if I should post something about it because I didn't gun too much in 3 or Reach, but here it goes.

Regular Warthog:
I'm not accurate all of the time, but when I manage to stay on target, it takes a bit longer to kill someone than it feels like it should. The turret feels powerful enough that I'm confident in shooting at a banshee for a bit and knowing it will go down, so when I shoot at someone so long that the turret overheats, it can get frustrating when they don't die and I end up getting sniped off. (I don't usually find the turret overheating too often thankfully, so I don't really worry too much about it when I'm actually using it.)

I'll agree with Deaf Smith about the inconsistency. This is mostly because I just said that I can shoot so much at a person and not kill them, but then I'll have another match when people go down fairly easily. I really enjoy using the turret and I will definitely prefer riding one rather than running on the ground anytime.

Gauss Hog:
I love the gauss hog, I'm not sure if I like it for the one hit kill it provides or just the fact that it's a laser. I like lasers. :P I recommend trying to use it at least once, just to feel for yourself how awesome it is. Like I said before, I'm not always too accurate, but the one-hit kill and fairly quick recharge time in between each shot makes up for it. Since it's only available on select maps, I think I've only gunned it four-five times.

Rocket Hog:
I've literally only gunned this once so far, and compared to Reach, I'd say the rockets are more controlled. (I'll stick with saying it's the rockets and not my own aim.) I remember in Reach it was difficult for me to adjust to the blasting, while I caught on fairly quickly in 4 and managed to not blow us up when I was using it.

Since I've used the Gauss and Rocket Hog less than the regular Warthog, I'll leave those like they are and let someone else add on to what I've mentioned.

Hope this helps at least a little bit ^^!

Historical perspective
Hogging is as fun as ever. What bungie game the hog was best on, you tell me.
In Halo CE the hog was an indestructable tool that we rode around in transporting flags on blood gulch and sidewinder. After that the hogs supremacy has been varied from game to game, and map to map.
With Halo 3 came the wheelman medal, and had it not been for this very group the hog role might not have evolved as good in games to come. In Halo 3 the hog was a tool of destruction, perfected by many, on 3-4 maps heaving a hog meant heaving the force to win. And for the BTB enthusiasts, one could not wait to jump in one (unless you got to play covies..)

In reach, new things happend, and you could stop the hog with armor lock, also the tanks and the banshee got to play a larger role on a lot of maps. Goaing for a hog really was taking risks, and second priority for a lot.

Now, we have an interesting twist, where a lot of maps have ghosts and hogs, and other vehicles. New vehicles that are perhaps more powerful than the hog in many ways I think this game is the best Halo thus far for hogging. Becouse hogging now isn't the knife that depends on weither your team wins or looses the game.

You can't hold power wapons and expect the hog to do all the work, like wheels says it has to be a careful timed hit and run game. You don't know what your up against, plasma nades can be all around, and this game really gives the practiced drivers buck for their money, and the bad ones quick deaths. Hogging is fun now, map control(except for ragnarok) is not always so important in slayer, but teamwork still is. The hog run is not life and death for your team. So the responsobilety for commandering the hog is not that big, if it fail it fails, but still the hog can bring new life to a trailing team with some hog-magic.


Map-tactics
Comparing ragnarok to valhalla is an obvious pick, why is hogging fun there? Well the banshee is still a powerful but unreliable wapon that might go down fast or dominate a bit. What really attracts the fire though is the Mantis. Map-control+mantis = Win. The addition of the ghost gives the teams one more vehicle to spread mayham with, and so the amount of vehicles has doubled on the map. The hog and banshee is not that vital to map control and winning as they where before. Now the hog has more vehicles to reign fire upon before goaing to killing footsoldiers. Order of priority for gunning down opponents is far more complex now than ever. And with the hog now more working as a support wapon rather than power wapon, I think that is the reason we're heaving more fun then ever.

Driving Longbow can be interesting, you can't dominate the whole map at once like with standoff, and it's not as wide open a map as the sidewinder-remake in halo 3. Now the enemy has places to hide, stay alert.

Exile is a map where you'd best have some teammates around wherever you go, don't cross corners alone, If you run into the other team here alone you will get outgunned fast. The hog trives best when your team has control of B, and you can assist one another around the whole map. But total map control seems impossible. The Gauss hog might seem powerful like in earlyer games, but the plasma nade/pistol spawn for everyone makes it that mutch more vounerable.

Meltdown is a small, funny and thight map, with lots of grav lifts. Fire can rain upon you at any time. Better to show up to a gunfight than look for one on your own with the hog, team communication could be key here. I think the posibilleties for hogs to affect games on this map is endless. Probobly the best suited map for cowboy drivers trailblazing around dooing the unexpected and ending up with splatters or surprisingly good driving assists in places the enemy thought themselfs really safe.

That last big map somehow reminds me of sandtrap, I like how it is big, and that there is a lot of places to hide. All the small corners you get to turn makes the map a challenging thing for rocket hog operators. The gauss hog might trive on this map compared to it. Becouse gunning a rocket hog is an art that the gunner and operator have to put a big effort in to making safe and effective. The Wraith is definatly a powerhouse here if exploited the right way.

Loudouts
Not gonna say much, Sarge filled in good. But about armor abieties. The power sheild can be rammed down, the armor lock could not, but the sheild moves. Good changes to the game if you ask me. Be aware of them. Also, with the maps a lot more rocky and full of hills, we aware of all kinds of enemyes, camo around corners, jump packs raining plasma or rockets from the skies. Prioretizing who to shoot first just became a lot harder. Now that the hog has to be more dexterious than before to survie in thighter maps, counting nades thrown at you can be really useful, becouse sometimes, there's just to many to shoot at for the drivers liking. He will have to ram someone down more often I think.

Old tricks of the trade tested:

I had a mess around with Jammy in forge last night and anti jack works again....sort of.

Driver Jacked
If you are getting jacked, hit the breaks, this rarely works when you are moving turn the camera (chevron) to the passenger seat and melee the jacker as you are pulled out.
Then its a matter of landing 3 shots or a headshot, which with low shields and the fact the hog has stopped isnt too tricky.

Stop, Turn, Melee, Shoot.

Attacker boards the passenger seat
as soon as they melee you you need to get out, either you can get back in or you will have enough time to run round the hog and assassinate them as they exit if they behave instinctively when exiting you will have an easy assassination, if not simply shooting through to the passenger side and strafing will probably get you the kill as side seat restricts movement and the dismount is a very slow animation.

Gunner jack
there is no anti jack and you are thrown to hard to melee.
The driver should stop and beat the gunner down twice as he dismounts.

Nose down
Everybody dies, don't do it, avoid bumper hogs at all costs.

Relephant like a trunk on a mammal:

Well done video Luv Gunn, I think we should do v2 version of this when somebody has the operator spec.

Sweet Luv Gunn. I've sticked with the BR this game, and I love to se that my gut feeling told me right.
The DMR is supposed to be an old outdated wapon compared to the BR (story wise), so that it is in this game, and a bit stronger than the BR in the MLG pros heads makes me a bit fired up. Good to se that the BR is better at the most important job it does!

The BR is good as shredding through vehicles but I've found the DMR to be better in almost every other situation. The rate of fire to kill a player is shorter than that of the BR and the spread is also much better in that the bullets are more tightly packed together.

Therefore it would interesting to conduct a test of firing at a warthog at range with the BR and DMR to see how much spread factors into the equation. (T1 to Pelican on Valhalla) I imagine that due to the size of the warthog the spread shouldn't have too much of an effect.

Black Knight wrote:

The BR is good as shredding through vehicles but I've found the DMR to be better in almost every other situation. The rate of fire to kill a player is shorter than that of the BR and the spread is also much better in that the bullets are more tightly packed together.

Therefore it would interesting to conduct a test of firing at a warthog at range with the BR and DMR to see how much spread factors into the equation. (T1 to Pelican on Valhalla) I imagine that due to the size of the warthog the spread shouldn't have too much of an effect.

DMR is also much stronger at long ranges. I'm kind of sad they made the BR so much worse, it seems to be a bit of a no-brainer which one to use right now...

Made a quick video about the Halo4 Warthog's Health. Most of you have probably noticed this by now but I thought making it official couldn't hurt.

Great videos. Does anyone know how the explosives armor mod affects the damage the hog takes from grenades? Since it's supposed to diminish the blast radius of enemy grenades, it'd be interesting to if it changes how the hog reacts to getting stuck. Also, does the hog take more damage when the driver is unshielded like in reach? If that's still true it'd make sense for the driver to have the shielding mod.

Gunner thoughts: I've found that the machine gurret turret (or maybe it's just me) is wildly inaccurate when it's spun up to its full speed. I reeeally dislike the new reticule 343 put in. How am I supposed to aim when all that I'm given is just a large rectangle? It becomes nearly impossible to tell where your bullets are going at anything beyond close range which, given the ubiquity of plasma of both the gun and grenade variety, is not a good encounter.
The gauss turret is just wonderful. Although once again, I preferred the Reach reticle to the one in H4. As far as I can tell, 343 removed the little circle from inside the rectangle and instead added some extra lines on the outside that seemingly indicate nothing. Nevertheless, the gauss is such a killing machine that it's hard to complain
Although I havent had too much experience with it, I really like the feel of the rocket hog. The rockets are good for pretty much any situation except for extreme proximity and are great against vehicles. One volley will kill everything but a tank. I almost feel like I can bend my shot around corners due to the staggered volley.
I like having the sensor armor mod (since I don't have gunner or operator). The extended range on your radar is really useful since ideally most of your encounters are going to be taking place at longer range, the maps are bigger, and it helps point out the campers who are waiting with baited plasma for you to come around a corner.

From what I can tell the cannon on the regular hog is much much weaker than it needs to be. Weapons kill much faster in this game, and I feel like the buff most weapons got probably didn't make it to the hog's chaingun, even if it did, they did other things to keep it down.

The gunner is much easier to take out of a hog, not sure why, but I know that I've 5-shotted a gunner at long range almost effortlessly (Hog at flat rock on Ragnarok, me on hill just about on laser spawn). They were driving toward me, which made it much easier for me to aim, but the point is that guy never had a chance. He should have been able to hit me to make my DMR flinch or something, but I don't think he had anything he could do about it.

When I see people running hogs on Ragnarok they might get a few kills around the hill before they're flipped and annihilated. In particular the hog struggles with the Mantis, which has superior firepower and comparable durability, at least when its only adversary is the chaingun. The fact that the Mantis is slow and the hog is fast is no help, because that means you're usually facing the Mantis on its own side of the map.

On Meltdown the hog has extremely limited options for movement, and spawns on low ground in tight quarters. The only time I've seen the hog even move on this map is when I was in a Wheelman team. We got a few heavily-assisted kills before our run concluded. I have BARELY played Meltdown though.

Longbow hogging has potential since infantry seem to fight almost exclusively over Bravo. That means the hog has the run of the rest of the map and can focus on cornering stragglers. Do you see the problem though? You need two players to run a hog, and you're hoping to find a lone footsoldier who's lost his way. You could very likely be just as effective or more effective if you just ran in pairs on foot.

Vortex is a horrible map for almost anyone who isn't in Bravo, and the hog doesn't fit so well in there.

As for Exile, that's actually the heaviest map in the game. Gauss, Scorpion, Banshee, Rockets that spawn on the way to Scorpion, and a design very much like Rat's Nest where the map is partitioned into vehicle space and infantry space. You guys have seen ample examples of what happens on Exile, the chain hog can get a little action in between Gauss and Scorpion spawns, and LouieBlack has an awesome video where he moves the hog like you'd move on foot in a firefight, but at the end of the day the hog sits on spawn and no one expects it to do anything else.

Loadouts:

Gunners: The Gunner (Pathfinder) and Sensor upgrades are prime options for gunners. Sadly they take up the same slot, so you can only run one at a time. You obviously want Sensor when you're in a Gauss or Rocket Hog, and you MIGHT want it still in the chain hog, but the Gunner upgrade will easily outshine Sensor if you are communicating well with your team and your driver. It will also be the difference between a hit-and-run on a Mantis or enemy hog and a kill on a Mantis or enemy hog (I don't think the chaingun can destroy a Mantis before overheating normally). Run Shielding if you have no other choice. Shielding sucks, but most of the upgrades do nothing while in a vehicle so you may as well regen your shield in 1 second instead of 2. I also pack a hardlight shield in my gunner loadout because if we get flipped it COULD make the difference, but for the most part your AA is obviously going to make very little difference. Prepare for the worst though. Operator does nothing in the gunner seat.

Drivers: Obviously the Wheelman (Operator) upgrade is going to be top of the list. I don't think any perk does more for a driver in that slot. Consider Sensor in your other slot. The gunner perk might not be awful either, silly as that sounds, because you might get flipped and when you and your gunner get back in you might end up in the wrong seats without having the time to switch back. In that situation you just need to lay a line of lead so thick the enemy will back off to avoid brain damage.


Alternate Hogs:

I don't like the Rocket Hog. I thought I would, and I've only had randoms drive me in it, but inevitably someone gets too close and the gunner is basically forced to nuke everybody. More than any other hog I think this one needs a steady driver. You can't fire just one rocket, so you have to make sure you give your gunner ample opportunity to land all six. You also can't ever get close... to anything. If any of those rockets hit near the hog you risk flipping it. It doesn't have the versatility of either the chain or Gauss Hog. It DOES shine when you need a lot of damage in one place quickly, but you have to make sure you place that damage properly.

The Gauss Hog is still the Gauss Hog. They reduced it's rate of fire a LOT, and it still destroys. You have to be more careful than before, and gunners have to take their time lining up shots. With the abundance of personal ordinance you often won't get a second chance. I waited till a laser was bright red before shooting him the other day, because it wasn't until he was a milisecond from toasting us that I was sure I could keep him from doing just that.

Plenty of good information before my post.

Sarge and I had great success with the chain hog on Vortex in BTB. I'm not sure why, but the chain gun can actually kill people on Vortex. Despite the map being large, the engagement distances are close. We pissed the other team off and they were trying to kill us, but something about Vortex gives the hog enough cover to operate. I'm sure Sarge has a better idea of why we were so successful. As long as you don't get killed by the wraith, you just gotta watch out for plasma pistols and ordinance, but that's for every map.