Hydranockz said:
Bloom as a mechanic is fine. Some here just don't like it in Reach. Let's not sugarcoat it with words like random and unpredictable. When Ram says shots often miss in combat, down to pace/lag, or whatever and Ghaleon argues that it is too accurate I think we should step back and think a little harder on the subject.
So, what do we have? Ghaleon correctly notes that the range of the DMR is far beyond that of the BR. The BR in 3 had a 3-shot burst that fired within a cone and no bloom! The DMR has one super accurate bullet. You are always going to land the
first shot where the reticule is on someone. Bloom combats every successive shot though. Ghaleon essentially describing a DMR without bloom. Killing across the larger maps is definitely largely done by pacing the shots so that bloom resets each time.
Contrast this with Ram's very true perception of closer combat with it. What bloom does is make players further away from the Halo 3 BR the faster it is fired. Think of the area covered by the 1st DMR shot. It is exactly the same as being face to face with the BR. A 2nd shot expands that reticule a fair bit, so now instead of being face to face, the BR's target is a considerable distance away. Yes you can still expect your BR to land that shot but at the same time, you knew you were gambling with spread.
So why not kill bloom and slap on a fixed rate of fire so that you were always guaranteed to hit? I'd argue you would end up with a Halo:CE pistol. Bungie never wanted that to be so godly and for good reason. Let's be fair, if we were to fix the RoF, you'd imagine it should be the time it would take for the existing bloom to settle. This would make it considerably slower than the CE pistol. That would slow down kill times and make those 5 shots an eternity apart in every situation. Any faster, and Bungie will have reincarnated the pistol.
This just shows me how versatile the bloom mechanic is. It slows down super long distance killing by forcing the player to pace slower but it also allows you a faster kill when you are closer together.
I just can't really relate bloom specific hate I guess.
Just to be clear, my core criticism of the DMR is not the implementation of bloom per se, but to the effective range it enables.
Take the DMR and drop it into various BTB maps from Halo 2 and Halo 3 (we've seen what it does to Blood Gulch already). I noted Valhalla, where base to center donging would be easy with the DMR. On Headlong you could sit at the top of the building and nail players emerging from the offensive base; on Relic players by the flag could pin the attacking players in their bases with DMR fire. On Avalanche, the open spaces where vehicles or snipers were the only threat would become unplayable, and standoffs would skyrocket. on Standoff, instead of lining up along the rocks for shootouts across the middle, players could line up on top of their bases; anyone in the middle would be caught in a turkey shoot. On Rat's Nest, the entire length of the map could be cleared with the DMR, instead of one half; the map would become increasinly boring as players out in the race track couuld be destroyed from either corner. And so on. Those were spaces intended to be cleared by the sniper rifle, not the primary weapon. I think that's a problem on display in Reach, and just adding the requirement that players pace their shots is not enough to combat it.
With the BR, players could mitigate the spread by closing distance. With the DMR, players mitigate it with their firing speed. The two have very different effects on combat, with one pushing players together and the other further apart. In the end, I don't know why bloom was swapped in for bullet spread, other than it was a mechanism that Sage liked from Shadowrun. It was clearly implented without the care that went into the BR, with respect to combat distance. Part of this could be addressed by taking the DMR back to a 2x scope from the current 3x. But I do think there needs to be some mechanism to further shorten combat range. With a single fire, precision round, the only way to do that would be to make it less accurate over distance, which everyone would hate.
It's this train of thought that has me preferential to the BR's burst spread fire over precision aim with bloom.
I may well be describing a problem a lot of people don't think is a problem, but I've concluded that Bungie's efforts to limit the average combat distance of the BR/Carbine was one that was, in hindsight, beneficial to how the games played (for one, by making map movement easier, and second, bringing more combat elements into play). I don't enjoy these very long range DMR fights in Reach, they get boring. And they really hurt how maps play when you can be constantly taken out from that kind of range; from a map design perspective, it's very hard to compensate for.