Tips and Tricks for Multiplayer
Assassination
Not a true trick but I wanted to mention this in case someone brand new jumps into a game without taking the time to read up on the instructions. If you manage to melee an enemy in the back, it will result in an immediate kill for you, regardless of your opponents remaining shield/health. You can even kill an opponent who just recently picked up an OS that hasn’t fully charged yet. A word of advice – going for the back-whack kill isn’t always ideal and some percentage of the time if you are in this type of situation you are better off just trying to kill them with your weapons as you have already caught them off guard. I’ve seen pros miss kills they would have otherwise had by getting greedy and trying for the assassination so use it when its appropriate.
Double Melee
The first true trick on this list. Normally after your melee you must wait for the visual animation to finish in order to melee again but if you have a grenade in your inventory you can bypass this restriction. The combination is to melee, grenade, melee as quickly as you can. This will not inflict enough damage on its own to kill an opponent who is at full shields and health and its also very difficult to consistently dodge the grenade that you throw (you will more likely than not get caught in in the radius of your own grenade) so this is usually a last ditch tactic to do as much damage to an opponent before you die.
Doubling Power Ups
More than one person can pick up a powerup when it respawns – all the players that want it need to position part of their Master Chief character on top of where it spawns in order to pick it up upon spawn. This isn’t done too often in competitive Halo as its very difficult to coordinate. This is mostly used in map specific situations (such as when you have top control of prisoner to double the OS). Please note that if you try to double the camo good teams will be paying attention the when it respawns, and you run the risk if giving the enemy an easy double kill if you get caught off guard. The few times I have successfully pulled this off I would only try this on the over shield (at least if you get caught off guard on this one if you can survive long enough for it to spawn, you’ll be able to easily fight back when its charging up). This will also work on Rat Race if you can position enough characters underneath the power up you are shooting down.
Quick Camo
Normally after you fire your weapons while you have camo you momentarily de-cloak and it takes a little bit of time for the camo to fully reactivate. By accident it was discovered that if you fire certain weapons and immediately switch to your other weapon, the camo comes back on considerably faster. This does not work with every weapon and the only three weapons I use this with are the assault rifle, shotgun, and plasma rifle. At high level game play if you see someone drop his pistol for the rocket launcher while keeping the AR as his second weapon, the quick camo trick is the reason why. If you fire a rocket, you can switch to any of those three weapons to have the camo restore faster. Also, if you have any of those three weapons out and you take damage you can immediately fire them to activate the same affect.
Backpack reload
Pressing reload twice on a gun and switching to your second gun allows your first weapon to reload in the background while you are still able to fight with your second weapon. Make sure not to switch back to your weapon that is reloading too quickly as you still need to give it enough time to finish the reload.
Grenade Reloading
Throwing a grenade and pressing reload at the same time will perform both actions simultaneously.
Crouch Jumping
Press the crouch button you can jump on certain objects that are otherwise inaccessible. This trick is mostly used to get on top of the pillars on the bottom of the map on Hang Em High but it can be used in other areas of the game as well (such as the ledges on the bottom of the rocket pit on Damnation & also jumping on the needler rock on Battle Creek to get on top of the base).
Crouch falling
You can also press the crouch button right when you land if you fall from a great distance to mitigate the fall damage. You can use this quite effectively on maps like Damnation.
Crouch walking
If radar is on you can hide yourself from you opponent’s radar by crouch walking.
Grenade jumping
You can extend the height that master chief can reach by jumping by throwing a frag grenade on the ground and jumping right before it detonates. The grenade will damage you so I recommend you only use this in situations where this makes sense (such as after you pick up the overshield on damnation and are grenade jumping into the rocket pit, where in that situation you can time the detonation to occur while your OS is charging thereby negating the damage from the grenade).
Picking up weapons and items from below
You can grab certain weapons in certain maps (for example, the pistol in Wizard if you are playing custom start or the plasma rifle on the second floor or prisoner) by jumping up below them and pressing the X button and literally grabbing the weapon through the wall. You can do the same thing with Health Packs (again, the second-floor prisoner health pack is a great example) but you will need to crouch at the top of the jump in order to grab the health pack through the floor.
Can’t pick up the oddball
If you hold down the fire trigger you will be unable to pick up the oddball. This is useful for when you are holding the oddball and someone comes up right next to you – you can throw your opponent the oddball but he can’t throw it back at you so long as you are holding the fire trigger down. Please note that the pistol will be very inaccurate if you choose to do this with the pistol as your weapon as choice so keep that in mind.
Grenade Tricks
It’s possible to grenade power ups and weapons to yourself using either frag or plasma grenades. Most of the grenade tricks require a frag grenade. Below I will show a few videos of some of the more useful grenade tricks. I will not show all of them as it will take too much space in this guide but what is linked below will give you a good idea as to what is possible. If you want to find more of these grenade tricks there are lots of good videos on YouTube that you can search for that will show in much greater detail exactly what is possible.
Spawn Manipulation
In Halo CE whenever you die, you respawn within proximity to a teammate. This is different from games like Halo 5 (which goes out of its way to respawn you away from the enemy team). If your team positions itself poorly you can find yourself getting spawn trapped.
In 4v4 games very little emphasis is given to this fact as you can’t control which teammate you respawn off and in 4v4 I can only give general advice such as stay away from red base in Hang Em High so that you don’t respawn your teammates there.
In 2v2 games however an entirely different world of possibilities can open as you now have only one teammate you can respawn off which means your teammate that is still alive can determine where you respawn in the map. In high level 2v2 games strategies are built around manipulating this mechanic. Of all the maps available for 2v2 play, maps like Hang Em High & Prisoner represent the greatest potential to use the respawn mechanic to your advantage. In Hang Em High there are a few spots in the map in which there actually are no respawn points close to your character – if you can position yourself in one of these locations your teammate will get a random spawn throughout the map and the callout for this was simply ‘random’ (all I had to so was say that one word and if my teammate is still alive and near one of these locations he/she knew what I was asking for). You can also respawn a teammate on the top of certain maps even though you are on the bottom if you position yourself right (for example, hiding in the corner below the blue pistol in Hang Em High gives your teammate an almost guaranteed chance to respawn on top of blue pistol provided that respawn point is not being block by an opposing player).
