Yes. The balance of the weapon sandbox is negatively impacted by the change. Sword behaves strangely, I prefer having the block, even if latency interferes with its operation. The only changes in the TU I don't take issue with are the AC/AL nerfs, but I'd rather just play without those abilities (Squad Slayer).
Do you remember 343's reasoning against bloom?
It essentially came down to,
It was good on paper, but in practice it ended up in very sloppy gameplay. What ended up happening is spammers win at close range. Pacers win from afar, but in the middle its a COMPLETE gamble, which leads to very frustrating encounters.
85 percent bloom rewards pacing from afar, but it reduces max bloom and makes the pacing faster. I know I'm not the only one that thinks 100% was painfully slow and only worsened the ability of people escaping from firefights, and slowed kill times to a crawl.
85 was the perfect compromise. An AR will beat a DMR at super close range given good aim. It's a lot harder to aim a DMR at such a range. It's got a good balance between the Easy to use/tons of aim assist/auto aim AR vs. the more skill based, but higher potential for damage DMR.
For TU AR starts, the pistol was brought up a nudge, and rewards players for good aim rather than spraying their AR. But they're more or less evenly matched. DMR pickups become more valuable.
In DMR Starts... well its precision weapon starts, so automatic weapons are irrelevant anyway, so why cry about the sandbox here?
Aside from AA's and player mobility, 85% Reach is really, really nice.
The amount of people that have DLC is extremely low, that's just the reality of the situation. Can you blame them, I don't think I've gotten moneys worth out of Noble or Defiant, they are not in matchmaking.
Congrats on getting the absurdly rare DLC in matchmaking, can the rest of us get that? Ever?
Just as an example Noble has been out for about 19 months. I've played Anchor 9 15 times in 19 months outside of a DLC locked playlist. The last time I've played Anchor 9 in matchmaking was November of last year, 7 months ago.
DLC comes up all the time though!
Nor should you, there is no reward of having the maps.
Yeah 3 maps per pack is pretty bad, especially in Halo because you have a divide in BTB and 4v4 maps, and not everyone played both commonly. I know several people that didn't buy Noble because they have no interest in BTB, so they saw the Noble pack as $10 for Anchor 9. 5 maps per pack would help get rid of this issue.
Never really thought about what a waste the Reach DLC ended up being.
Goddamn.
