in the E3 build it knocks you off your shot, but leaves scope in. Like lots of gameplay we are still tuning.
I was thinking about this post on the way home.
One of the reasons I like Halo so much is because it doesn't interfere with player's clarity and control, or their ability to aim and maneuver, in the interest of feedback or balance measures. No rasberry jam, no ADS, no shaking targeting reticule to interfere. Just very clean combat.
With that said, there are two related things going on.
The first is that players in Reach get pinged from very long range by the DMR, which require them to go in scope to fire back. And of course, getting pinged pulls you out of scope.
The other is that the DMR has a 3x scope, which enables users to ping players from very long range.
Now, I can only speak from my own experience. But I have the problem I described earlier - getting knocked in and out of scope constantly during DMR battles, in a frustrating loop of zoom/unzoom/zoom/unzoom - much more often in Reach than in previous Halo games. I think the reason for this is because players can tag me from so far away, I have almost no chance to land a shot on them unless I'm scoped. This was much less of a problem in previous Halo games. I'm not saying I never got in that loop before - I did - but that it's a much worse problem in Reach than in other games.
That creates a gameplay problem to solve, somehow. From your post it sounds like two solutions are on the table: don't have players get knocked out of scope, but have them get "knocked off their shot". That gets rid of the zoom/unzoom loop, but I submit that such solutions do not actually address the problem.
The problem is the 3x scope on the DMR, which is what enables players to ping others from so far away, and which requires those getting pinged to go into scope in order to fire back. Knock the DMR back to 2x, and the problem will be substantially mitigated. I won't say solved, because it can still happen. But greatly mitigated, because players will simply have to be closer in order to hit you, and you won't have to absolutely, positively go into scope to return fire.
It will also make the game better because enabling players to tag others from the 3x scope DMR in Reach is a bad thing. (I won't regurgitate the few thousand words I've put into that topic any further.)
Please consider this.