Super fun time going into Warzone solo and getting matched with full companies. Checked the post match to make sure that I wasn't the one rando on a team of 11, and lo and behold there was like three separate parties of two.
Fun fun fun
On the subject of vehicles 343 hasn't really done anything worth doing to the sandbox.
The removal of the Hornet, Falcon, Chopper, Specter and Revenant seem odd to me. The Hornet and Falcon are travesties, seeing as they were already well balanced and enjoyable both to pilot and combat, especially in the case of the Falcon. Arguably the Covenant ground vehicle sandbox has been lackluster at best, with the Specter and Revenant both being completely outclassed in usefulness by the Chopper. The Chopper could easily be reimplemented in the sandbox with no major changes, but the Specter and Revenant would both need severe buffs to be worth using or risk being completely outclassed by their human counterparts like the Wraith.
With the expansion of the Covenant weapon sandbox to include weapons such as the Rain of Oblivion, Blood of Suban, Void's Tear, Pool of Radiance, White Scar and Blissful Slumber, there's no reason we couldn't have vehicle weapons with the same properties. The Specter standard turret could fire bolts of plasma identical to the Blissful Slumber, or be a slightly buffed Rain of Oblivion. The Ultra variant could fire Blood of Suban rounds to mimic the ONI Warthog's behavior. The Revenant could be buffed to fire Ultra-Banshee strength fuel rods at a reduced rate of fire. The Ultra Revenant could fire Void's Tear black hole bombs, which do Fuel-Rod tier damage in a small radius and a larger radius acts as a black hole to hold the enemy in place so that the passenger can light them up.
I'd also like to see a new kind of Wraith or some such to counter Hannibal weapons. A Scourge of Fire Wraith that fires double shots with the ability to fire huge charged shots that has a Blood of Suban turret or something.
On the subject of the Phaeton, I feel like it exists solely because 343i wanted a VTOL but felt bad that the Promethians didn't have anything interesting in their sandbox (which they still don't, even after their overhaul). It feels like the worst kind of "Well, whatever," compromise because fictionally Promethian vehicles don't really make sense (why not just implant a composed human directly into the vehicle itself, cutting out the middleman and operational latency?) and it's underwhelming in the sandbox itself, with both of its weapons being relatively useless and the vehicle itself being relatively weak.
