Discovered I kept updating my post through the birth of a new page so I'll just copy it to the new page.
I'm not sure why you're singling out when a player dies from a shot when the reticule isn't on them to just shots simply landing (whether or not they hit the head). I find the other cases even more interesting because they mean 3 (bodyshots) landed hit the player even though the reticule wasn't on them. I just pulled that screen out because it's the first clear case of it in the single film I watched. I haven't got the chance to go through the films because I opted to play the game more instead and watch them latter so I've held off on analyzing them and unfortunately can't give you a proper response but this was just one result of the bloom that I was interested in (whether the bullet distribution in that wide circle had a uniform or Gaussian distribution) which would give me an idea of just how inaccurate the guns would get. The more important test, which I haven't conducted, would be to plot how long it takes to kill someone when spamming the trigger and see what kind of variance that distribution has.
This random element of the bloom (when someone who is spamming the trigger gets a kill over someone who more methodically times their shots) is what bothers me the most. Many times I'll be at a health disadvantage coming in or at some point in a fight and know my only chance to live is to spam the hell out of the trigger and hope that the game decides to place one of the final bullets into my opponent's head. Sometimes I'm able to take him down in a matter of seconds with a lucky headshot (where the center of the reticule is on his head but the bloom is so severe it will more likely than not fall elsewhere), other times I still die, but the important thing is I'm not doing anything different in either case, I'm just getting "lucky" and other times not.
Another factor that further makes going for a precise headshot by slowing down your shots after dropping their shield is that the opponent can often spam 3 body shots in that time. That coupled with the health system makes precision headshots less important than landing as many bullets on the person by any means necessary (spamming). If another player got even a single bullet's drop on you, you know for damn certain they'll probably be able to spam 3 body shots or the occasional headshot before you have a chance at delivering 4 shots then a precise 5th. Hell, even if you luck out of a firefight with a decent opponent you'll probably have a bit of health damage which means getting body shot in your next encounter is even more likely. All of this contributes to less of an importance on precise headshots and more on landing wild body (and occasional) headshots. I believe I may've gone off on a tangent a bit here but it's just part of the beta that makes me think the gunplay took a huge leap back from where it was.
Not sure what you mean by a lucky kill in Halo 3. Surely you don't mean things like lucky nades or sweeping sniper headshots because that's an entirely different subject. Things like latency which throw an element of chance and randomness into the equation can't be avoided but my beef with Reach's bloom is that even in the most ideal situation, the bloom mechanic alone adds that randomness in there. In Halo 3, disregarding lag, your bullets with the precision weapons landed where your reticule specified. There was a build in, random spread to the BR but nothing as severe as a DMR, let alone the pistol, fired at their full RoF. No other Halo game's precision weapons have handled this way and its something I've appreciated about the series and why I've been able to have fun with competitive Halo 3 matches.
I see what Sage/Bungie was trying to do, or at least what the concept of bloom could do to benefit the sandbox. The pistol has the potential to drop someone very quickly at close range because the max RoF is extremely quick but it's not a godly long range weapon because that same RoF would result in wild long range shots. It gives it extremely versatile without it becoming the BR or CE pistol of past games (which evidently made them play like shit?). This is great and all, but it also adds an element of randomness to how the gun performs and makes the gunplay feel looser and less consistent to me. It's trade-off that ultimately hurts the game and I believe it'd work better having the pistol and DMR acting as the two halves of the BR with a little less versatility to each one but much more consistency.
