Recently, I’ve been playing lots of Halo: 5 Guardians Warzone. I played tons of matches on the balanced setting compared to the focused setting. I’ve come to the conclusion that the balanced option is not balanced enough.
Comparison:
When playing Warzone on the balanced setting, most of the time, our team either dominates or loses by a landslide.
Whenever I play Warzone on the focused setting, half the time, the scores are really close. But the other half we lose by a landslide. The team I get placed on has never dominated in a focused match.
I believe that this has something to do with the way the enemy team plays. I usually solo-queue into warzone matches as I don’t have many friends to party with. Whenever most of the time, I feel that the enemies I face are either communicating, or are really skilled at playing Warzone, while I am stuck with teammates who seem that they don’t know what they’re doing. I usually rank 1st-5th on the score for our team while we get triple-capped and cored within the first 6-7 minutes of the game.
The Snowball Effect:
With Warzone, there is something called the “snowball effect” where whoever gets the early lead will keel that lead throughout the rest of the game. Let’s say someone on the enemy team gets a super lucky grenade throw and kills three spartans on our team. Then, they req a battle rifle and gets a killing frenzy. After that, they’ll be at level 4 reqs while the rest of us are at level 2-3 reqs. If you don’t get kills, you don’t increase your req level, so while our team is sitting at 0 kills, the enemy is able to req higher level things that we cannot counter.
Let’s say that same player summons a Sword Banshee and then completely annihilates our team, getting a 25-kill streak. They are able to call in things that our team cannot counter. We lost that game because the majority of our team had level 2-3 reqs while a certain member of the opposing team either had level 5 reqs or got lucky with a random vehicle.
This is something many people fail to grab the concept of, as I feel that sometimes, my team doesn’t know how to get that early edge.
Who Usually Wins?
I can conclude from playing many warzone matches, that whichever team calls in the most stuff usually wins. If the opposing team calls in some Banshees, Scorpions, Mantis’, and Wasps at the same time, and you are only at level 4 reqs, there isn’t too much you can do as a solo-queue player to do to combat these things. If you have the laser unlocked, you can try to summon it in, but not everyone has the laser unlocked, and even with that, not every shot will hit, and on top of that, certain vehicles, like the Banshee Ultra for example, take more than one laser hit to kill!
Most new free-to-play players don’t even have lasers unlocked! For newer players, warzone can be very infuriating. I feel sometimes that the team I’m on does not summon things as much as the enemy, which is why we end up losing. The team I’m usually placed on is comprised of more lower-leveled players–the players under spartan level 40, while the lucky enemy team has 3 players ranked 145. I kind of wish that the team I’m on had some high-leveled people in a party so that our team would win.
Before I unlocked the spartan laser, I would have to summon in a less-powerful railgun or wait for someone else in my team to summon a laser to counter vehicles, which would happen, but it usually takes time. By the time my teammates summon in a laser, the damage has already been done and we’ve already lost the central base/armory. In one game, I hijacked 2 banshees, boarded 2 tanks, and hijacked a temple ghost. That game would have been a lot harder if I didn’t successfully stop those vehicles since no one summoned in anything to counter those vehicles.
Farming For The Achilles Helmet?
To get the Achilles helmet, you and a few others need to grind a ton. For example, you need around 500k spartan kills between you and 99 others. That is 5,000 kills per person, if everyone contributes, and if you have a max-sized spartan company. The best way to get tons of kills is by playing warzone. You can achieve this by triple-capping the enemy and not killing their core. You basically farm them for kills. This has been done to me many times, and I have never done anything like that, since I am currently not grinding for kills. It’s very infuriating when you’re in a game and the enemy triple-capped us and it’s only 6 minutes into the game. We’re either stuck in our home base or spawning outside and getting spawn-killed within 2 seconds of spawning.
I have actually found a way to prevent spawning outside the home base and getting spawn-killed. Just spawn in a cheap vehicle, like a mongoose, and hide out back while you wait for the terribly long farming session to end.
Why don’t I leave the match?
I could, but most of my games are boosted, as I have too many boosts, but I don’t like wasting those boosts. On top of that, if you quit, you don’t receive any req points, and that’s what I’m after.
I don’t like getting a negative KD, but whenever I’m being farmed for someone else’s kills, my KD is usually low. I’ve still managed to get an overall average KD in warzone of 2.7 and an average of 26 kills per game. In addition, I usually average around 20 of everything: 20 kills, 20 deaths, and 20 assists per game.
Conclusion
It’s random. Focused gives a higher chance, but even then, it’s up to the the rng and whatever games are currently going on at the same time you queue. I suggest going focused if you want closer games, but balanced sometimes gives you a landslide win against the enemy, whereas focused does not.