Reach Challenges: Grunts

As more and more people catch Challenge Fever, it seems that some guidance might be in order.  Despite my previous recommendation of the Halo Reach Daily blog, it appears that many folks are still approaching challenges the "hard way."  Many of the challenges have much easier approaches, so I'll post some of the more common strategies here of the next few days.

First up: Grunts.  For "Firefight Matchmaking" challenges like A Satisfied Thirst (kill xxx Grunts), Killagruntjaro! (Grunt multi-kills), Covenant-cide (kill xx enemies), etc, the fastest way to knock these out is in Gruntpocalypse.  There are 120 Grunts per game, each game should take about 10 minutes to finish.

In the playlists, this is under Cooperative -> Score Attack.  Yes, even though this doesn't have "Firefight" in the title and it's only single player, it DOES count as "Firefight Matchmaking."  Once you're in the voting menu, you get to choose whatever map that you want.  Since it's single player, your vote will always win.  Moreover, this is the one playlist where you can keep choosing "None of the Above" until you get the map you want or you have vetoed all the maps and have reached the end.  Your voting options are always "Score Attack", "Gruntpocalypse", or "Mythic Attack"/"Sniper Attack".  Choose Gruntpocalypse.  Gruntpocalypse is all grunts, all the time.  All the loadouts have DMR and Magnum as your weapons, and the ammo lockers are infinite, so you can go back and refill as many times as you like.  My preference is to choose Armor Lock because I find that blind sticks are my greatest threat, but others like Bubble Shield to allow you to reload under fire.

My two favorite maps are Courtyard and Beachhead for Gruntpocalypse, some other folks like Corvette and Waterfront.

• Courtyard: You can basically hang around the main spawn room.  Grab ammo on your way out.  Enemies spawn in both the left and the right courtyards, but you can start on the left side since Grunt squads hobbling up the right usually give you plenty of warning.  When you start taking heavy fire, you can just pop back into the spawn room for ammo where the doors will close safely behind you.
• Beachhead: From initial spawn, head to the ammo locker right in front of you and then camp at the top of the stairs just past the ammo locker.  You can see just about the entire map from there, and the Grunts will happily funnel up the central walkway for easy multi-kills.  On occasion, one or two will wander up and flank from the left side by where you initially spawned, but you can prevent that if you're quick about picking them off on the left side.  There's a small ledge at the top of the stairs (where the tree is) where you have a shot on pretty much the entire left side.
• Corvette: Top of the platforms is where to play here.  Not my preference though since it's a pretty exposed run to and from the ammo lockers.
• Waterfront: The recommendation is to head out to the cliff across the open field where you have a safe view of the entire map.  There are a couple dangerous Grunt spawn spots right around that cliff (including one right behind you), but you can anticipate that with the "Reinforcements" announcement and lob an Overkill grenade as soon as they spawn.  The big issue is the long walk to/from the ammo locker.  Not a problem on Sniperfight with infinite ammo, but it is an issue on Gruntpocalypse.

Beachhead is so easy that I've started finding new ways to entertain myself.  Would you like to join my pursuit of the "perfect game"?   I recently finished my personal challenge of a perfect 120 headshots, 120 DMR kills and >10k points, but fell slightly short of my goal of 35 multi-kills (34) in one game.