Weekly Challenge: This Is How We Do It

This week, Bungie is offering 10,000 cR for finishing 9 Campaign levels on Heroic.  If you haven't finished the Campaign yet, 9 levels is exactly how many it takes to play the whole game through, so this week would be a good time to do so.  If you've been paying attention to the blog, you'll already know the easiest way to get this done.  I finished in about 30 minutes.

Please Be a Team Player

Occasionally, I will ask the clan to work together and leverage our advantage in numbers to do stuff.  This is typically centered around achievements, but may also be for in-game challenges or other entertaining tasks.  I try to make it as fair as possible so that people don't get bored and so that everybody who wants to get the achievement or challenge has the opportunity to do so.  I ask you to please be patient, participate, and be a team player, or excuse yourself from the party until we are done.  Most of us learned in Kindergarten that sometimes we have to play a game that somebody else chooses, even if it's not our first choice.  Please remember that lesson.

• Achievements: There are a handful of achievements in each game that are a lot easier if you have friends to help you boost for them.  When those opportunities present themselves, I will generally coordinate the clan to help.  If you know we are boosting for achievements, please help, or at a minimum, don't hinder the progress.  As an example, an achievement will often require a special kind of kill, so we'll have dummies line up in a configuration to make that a lot easier and have other folks setup to get the easy kill.  Unless it's your turn to get the achievement, don't kill the dummies.  Definitely don't kill the people trying to get the achievement.  If we have enough people, you don't always have to be a dummy if you'd rather do something else, but don't ruin it for others.
• Wins for the Clan: Based on the blog poll, when we have 5-6 folks on-line, people would prefer to be split up into separate 4v4 teams rather than play on the same team in Invasion.  If there is a daily challenge requiring a certain number of wins, I will ask those on the other team (1-2 players) to sandbag so that the 4-player clan team can log a win.  Because of the skill disparity within the clan, we will typically be matched against random players at a higher skill level than many of the folks playing on clan night, so this is the most efficient way to log wins for the most people.  It can be boring to sandbag, and you don't want to get booted for obvious griefing or betrayals, so the standard rule is to allow assassinations only when you're on the other team.  This basically makes it a 4v3 or 4v2 game so that the clan team has the best chance of winning, and also gives the sandbagging players something incredibly entertaining to do while they wait.  I think we can all agree that it's hilarious to assassinate your friends and then laugh in party chat while you abuse their body.  It REALLY sucks if the sandbaggers don't play nice.  If AT ANY POINT the 4-player clan team is losing, or winning by less than 10 kills, I will take exception to any sandbaggers that aren't playing nice.  That includes:
• Getting kills with guns or grenades
• Punching people in the face
• Working on "assists" (unless there's a challenge, in which case I may allow this on a case-by-case basis)

If you're worried about your K/D ratio, you can go hide in a corner.  Getting kills with guns or grenades means you're explicitly not following the clan rules.  Punching people in the face is fine if you're following somebody and they turn around at the last second, but don't punch them again in the face for the kill.  The proper thing to do is to run away if you can't get behind them -- if you die, you're helping the clan. Assassinations are hard to get.  THAT'S THE POINT.  When available, I will try to pick games like Slayer Pro where there's no radar to help folks get their assassinations.

Boosting and sandbagging are things we do for the greater good.  If we are on different teams, it just makes sense to help the 4 people log a win, at the cost of 1 or 2 people logging a loss.  Matchmaking does a decent job at shuffling folks around so you're not always the odd man out.  If it's problematic, I will take us into different playlists so people aren't stuck.

As I said above, you always have the option to exclude yourself from the party if you think boosting or sandbagging is lame.  Moving forward, if I have to continually remind somebody to play nicely, I will go ahead and boot/exclude you from the party myself so that you can play a few games on your own.  I want this to be a fun environment for everyone.

Iron With Friends

Today features another "Iron With Friends" challenging you to finish a campaign mission on co-op with the Iron skull turned on.  I just discovered that you can actually do this yourself in split-screen with a guest on the second controller.  If you sprint through Winter Contingency, the guest will just teleport forward as you make progress so you never have to touch the second controller.  The only place you have to move player 2 is after the Falcon drops you off by the blast doors, where you'll have to move player 2 out of fire.  I moved both players to the stairs, and then moved one at a time into the blast door area.  For those who can't figure this out, I'll likely be on at 11pm tonight to work on the multiplayer challenges.

Challenge Etymology

Reach Daily Challenges (another daily challenge blog) posted the origins to some of the daily challenge names. I think some of these are just his best guess, but an interesting read nevertheless.

Reach Challenges: Heroic Demon

This is in response to a challenge earlier this week to get 10 Elite kills in Firefight Matchmaking.  There are no Elites in Gruntpocalypse (obviously).  In the other single-player Score Attack playlists (Firefight, Sniper Attack, Mythic Attack), there are at most six elites in the last wave and it can be really hard to get there with enough lives to kill them.  The best place to get Elite kills are in standard Firefight matchmaking, in Rocketfight or Sniperfight.  I prefer Sniperfight because you can just hang back and pick off the Elites.  On many maps, there are sniping locations where the rest of the enemies will largely ignore you and you can just focus on your personal objective.  Some examples:

• Waterfront: Across the field on the cliff that overlooks the entire map.  The enemies will actually largely ignore if you hang out here quietly.  The biggest threat in Sniperfight is the Focus Rifle Jackals directly to your left.  I recommend loading out with Bubble Shield so that you can deploy it as soon as the Jackals start shooting.  Then you can aim at them, creep out the shield, and fire as soon as your gun pokes out while you stay safe.
• Courtyard: Leave the spawn room and run to the far right of the map, camping out behind the large propane tank-looking thing.  As long as you don't try to spawn kill the Phantom drop ships and stay hidden behind the tank for a few seconds, the enemies will all funnel towards the middle of the map, away from you.  You'll largely have easy pot shots at whomever you want to kill with basically no repercussions because the other AI enemies won't know where you're shooting from.
• Beachhead: From the spawn, head up the stairs to the left immediately in front of you and camp out on the balcony there.  The rest of the players will generally run around the map like a-holes trying to spawn kill so that you can get your snipe kills without anybody coming to bother you.  Bonus?  You'll have the easiest view from there for the Wraith kills.  Wraiths take 4-6 shots from a sniper rifle to kill.  I recommend reloading after 2 shots when Mythic is on so that your teammates don't steal your tank kill.  You get huge points, 2 Elites per kill, and can work on your Firefight commendation.  Active Camo is good here so that you can cloak and take out the Wraiths without worrying about them seeing you and shelling you in response.

Reach Challenges: Multiplayer Boosting

Do you ever look at a challenge that requires 30 kills or 10 assists in one game and think that it's stupidly impossible?  Since most of us don't play much Rumble Pit and have low TrueSkill ratings, that's often a decent choice to go and rack up some big kills.  However, Rumble Pit maxes out at 25 kills, so how do you get 30?  4v4 games max out at 50 kills, so it's hard to get 30 for yourself when it's split amongst 4 people.  Big Team Battle is possible if you can get snipe or tank, but there's always a mad rush for those so it could just be a big waste of your time if you're not the one of eight people to get the right power weapon/vehicle.

My preferred playlist?  Multi-Team.

In multi-team, even in Slayer, kill count is to 50, split only among 2 people, so it's much easier to get 30 kills for yourself.  If you can get into an objective game like Crazy King or Oddball, you can ignore the objective and just get kills...then there's no limit to how many you can get.  And since everybody else is going for the objective, they'll largely ignore you while you shoot fish in a barrel.  Also, since there's five other teams, there's plenty of opportunity for people to steal your kills so that you get your assists.  One very effective tactic is picking up the sniper rifle with active camo, camping someplace quiet, and getting body shots as the lambs run into the slaughter.  Assist Spree!

Reach Challenges: Cook 'Em and Clean 'Em

Pretty regularly, there are daily challenges for getting jetpack kills.  These can be frustrating to get because it may seem inconsistent about whether or not you get credit for your jetpack kill.  The key here is that the enemy has to die while your jetpack is active.  That means your are holding down the jetpack button while he dies.  If you have been flying around and feathering your jetpack (like you're supposed to) and get the headshot between bursts, it will not count because the game doesn't recognize that your jetpack is on while you get the kill.  You can get kills however you want - body shots, head shots, grenades, melees all count - as long as you are holding the jetpack button when they die.  You will see the Firebird medal pop up when your kill registers correctly.

Now that you know, knowing is half the battle.

Reach Challenges: Single Player Boosting

Happy Thanksgiving!  Today is the first day that people are eligible to pop the 16,000 cR weekly challenge!

I previously posted about how to exploit the save game glitch to get Flawless campaign finishes over and over again.  There are two other main methods to boost as a single player, one in Campaign and one in Firefight.

• Red Ring of Death: This video shows how to get fast, cheap kills on ONI: Sword Base.  Don't worry if you don't get a ton of cR per game, it may only be a handful especially if you've already leveled up a bunch of your commendations.  You'll get cR for getting new Commendation levels (up to Onyx Max) on Splash Damage, Walking Tank, SpecOps, Leadership Element and Cannon Fodder.  This is also a good way to pick up stray kills for daily challenges that just require kills in any game mode (at least 10 kills/minute).  Finally, there are occasionally challenges for killing Specialists or Leaders in Campaign so again, this is an easy way to pick them up.
• Firefight pwnage: There's an achievement as well as occasional challenges that require you to get ridiculous points in Firefight.  You'll note that this does not have to be in matchmaking and can be done in a local game.  The link here points to a custom game type in my Fileshare that you can download and use for yourself.  It's all Elites where you are invincible with bottomless clips.  That means you can just run around launching Rockets like crazy to run up your score without worrying about dying.  Takes about 45-60 minutes for 1,000,000 points solo.

Reach Challenges: Campaign Scoring

Sometimes there are challenges like Points Pyramid (score xx,000 points) that require you to turn on a bunch of skulls and try to rack up a high score in Campaign.  The skulls do things like limit ammo, increase AI dodging of grenades, turn off the HUD, turn off radar, upgrade enemies, etc.  The more skulls generally, the harder it is.  But it's something you have to do in order to get a high enough score.  The key here is that the flying levels are largely unaffected by skulls because you have infinite ammo and Banshees/Phantoms/Seraphs are mostly unaffected by skull upgrades.

• Long Night of Solace - Rally Point Alpha: This is my preferred level for picking up Campaign scoring challenges.  Alpha checkpoint will put you in the Sabre.  I play on Legendary, with all skulls on except for Iron, which gives you a score multiplier of around 15x.  You can actually play with Iron as well since I don't die in the time it takes to get the challenge, but just in case you do die, this save you from having to restart.  I picked up the 40k challenge in 7 minutes.  Note that on-line it only shows 32,100 kills since I think you lose your time multiplier if you quit out of the level early, but the challenge still pops and sticks even if your final score ends up below the target.
• New Alexandria: Same thing as above, turn on a bunch of skulls since you'll be in the Falcon and shooting down Banshees.  Concentrate on Banshees only and ignore the Phantoms, that way you won't get swarmed.  See where OD picked up the 40k challenge in 9 minutes.

I prefer the Long Night of Solace because the bad guys are easier to see, Banshees are "fire and forget" kills because the missiles lock on automatically, and it seems to a little faster.  Your choice, both are pretty easy.

Reach Challenges: Finishing Campaign Levels

There are lots of campaign challenges that simply require you to finish a level with some specific conditions.  Challenges like Foggy Notion (Heroic, Cloud, Famine), Like a Glove (Heroic, Catch), Flawless Cowboy (Heroic, No Deaths) sound a lot harder than they actually are.  Most of the time, you don't really have to "play" the level at all and can be done in about 5 minutes.

Nightfall has a path and a glitch that allows you to sprint through and finish the entire level in 5 minutes.  You can  have as many skulls as you like since you won't really run into any resistance.  See here for a real example from my game history.  Winter Contingency also has a path that allows you to sprint through and finish the entire level in under 15 minutes.  No glitch required here, but takes a little longer because of the unskippable cutscenes.  See game history example here.  For most of the challenges, I prefer the Nightfall run because it's faster.  Sometimes the Winter Contingency run is more appropriate though, especially if you have to not die for the challenge.  On occasion, the Forklift Glitch takes more than one try and you can get killed trying.

• Forklift Glitch: This is one of the coolest things we've seen in Reach so far.  Shows how to sprint through Nightfall and exploit the Forklift Glitch to avoid almost all the enemies on the map.
• Winter Sprint: Shows the path to sprint through on Winter Contingency with very little risk of dying.  At the end, I recommend a green gun combo on the Sword elite, it's a little safer and more reliable.  With *some* skull combos, it may take two green gun blasts, or a green gun + a sticky grenade to take out his shields.
• Flawless Finish Glitch: Shows the save point at the end of Winter Contingency that allows you to finish it over and over again flawlessly with no effort.  Is not a Bungie bannable offense.

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.

Firefight Galore

Today's challenges are all in Firefight.  Most of them will be a lot easier if coordinated with friends.  If you'd like some co-op fun, I'll be on-line hosting FF games a little before 10pm and then again at 11:30pm.  It will actually help you when I drop at 10:30pm because I can go into your game to fill a spot and keep a random out, so that you get your gametype of choice without an extra body competing for kills/assists.

Iron With Friends

Today's challenges are all really easy, with only Iron With Friends requiring some coordination.  Should only take 10-15 minutes to sprint through Winter Contingency, but does require co-op mode.  As usual, I'll be available at 10pm PT to bring parties into Campaign together to knock this out.  If there's more than 4 people on, join my party and I'll help folks coordinate before breaking into smaller teams.  Because today's challenge is shorter, if you are on-line by 10pm, I'll wait until 10:10pm to launch games if people are busy in matchmaking.

Daily Challenges

Have you caught Challenge fever yet?  Halo Reach's new daily and weekly challenge system is wildly addictive and is easily the fastest the way to level up to new armory items.  There are typically over 6,000 cR points available in daily challenges and several more thousand in the weekly challenge.  We recommend Halo Reach Daily, a blog dedicated to outlining the best way to tackle the daily challenges each day.  Thanks to OD for the link.

Office of Not Dying

One of today's daily challenges is to complete ONI on Legendary without dying.  It's worth 4,000 cR and rightfully so, because it's basically impossible to do on your own.  There is a glitch in the game however, where it will credit you for finishing a level without dying if you don't do from the last "Save and Quit" checkpoint.  What this means is that you can play through the entire level on Legendary solo, die as many times as you like, and then Save and Quit at the last checkpoint.  Then Resume your campaign game, don't die, and BAM 4,000 cR.  On ONI Sword Base, the last checkpoint is at the top of the base after you cross the last bridge and before you pick up the Rocket Launcher to go Banshee hunting.

Easy cR Points

Today's daily challenges in Halo Reach are amongst the easiest I've ever seen.  There are 4 Firefight challenges worth a total of 6,000 cR.  All four can be completed in just two Gruntpocalypse games, I finished them in about 20 minutes.  Today's challenges are:

• Be Their Huckleberry (3,500 cR) Kill 200 enemies in Firefight Matchmaking with the pistol.
• Blastin' and Relaxin' (1000cR) Kill 90 enemies in any game mode in Reach.
• The House of Blue Leaves (1000cR)Kill 88 enemies in a single Firefight Matchmaking game on Heroic.
• Above the Law (500cR Awarded) Complete a Round in Firefight Matchmaking without dying.

Daily challenges are like mini achievements with in-game related goals.  They are issued each day at 3am PT and you have 24 hours to complete them.  Completing each one rewards cR points which can be used in the Armory to purchase armor and other aesthetics.