Ragnarok

Spawns
Blue Team- Beach side
Red Team- Cliff (Waterfall) side
Spawns are NOT locked!
If spawn trapped, wait for respawn timer, do not instant spawn.

Starting Power Weapons:
Laser x 1 - Center Hill - Does not respawn
Sniper x 2 -Located beneath each base - Respawn 90s?
Rockets x 1 - Turret - Does not respawn
Railgun x 2 - 1 in Ter. 3, 1 in Red Shotty Cave - Does not respawn

Vehicles (per team)
Mantis - 180s
Banshee - 180s
Warthog - 60s
Ghost - 90s
Mongoose x 2 - 45s

Random Weapon Spawns
Locations are fixed, timers are random

Laser x 2 - Red landing, Blue landing
Sticky Launcher x 2 - Flat Rock (Blue), Outside base (Red)
Binary Rifle - Flat Rock
Incineration Cannon - Turret, the rock near water cave
Saw - Tri Rocks (Red)
Rockets - Spawn at Pelican
Sniper - Turret

Starting Roles
Sniper- Cover hill, then move right or left as needed to cover pelican (if starting red) or turret (if starting blue)
Ghost - Attack Turret, Defend Rockets, then suppress landing zone, Mantis, and/or Banshee
Banshee - Assess map, assist as needed on hill and Turret. Suppress opposing banshee. Do not push aggressively.
Mantis - Move to assist at hill
Lifters x 3 - Jump to hill. One grabs laser. The rest fan out to kill enemies on initial push. Secure Pelican if red. Secure turret if blue. (Rule of thumb, take hill then cover your right.)
Railgun - Go right off spawn (blue team to 3, red team to shotty). Blue use railgun to secure turret. Red use railgun to secure pelican

Basic Map Control
3 on Hill
One center rock anchoring map control (Does not peek head out, only shoots at flanks)
One left side of hill (Red covering turret, Blue covering pelican)
One right side of hill (Red covering pelican, Blue covering Turret)

Turret
Blue: 2
Red: 1

Pelican
Blue: 1
Red: 2

Sniper: Flexible, react to situation, stay behind team
Mantis: Flexible, defend against enemy assaults
Banshee: Defensive, cover middle of map

The Warthog and the Ghost
The Warthog and the Ghost should be used for offensive purposes only, whether that be pushing onto the enemy’s side of the map or pushing out of your own side of the map. Due to the range of the DMR and other rifles, Warthogs and Ghosts cannot survive unless they are sitting behind cover waiting for the enemy to push. Thus, the Warthog and Ghost should be used on pushes or when players need to bring offensive power to far away areas of the map quickly.

duce, i've seen binary rifles spawn in water cave as well

I had an idea a while ago that if you're blue team, you can use the mantis and a hog to cover turret side. If people want to use the hog, i mean. That would be the best way to do it, in my onion. Mantis and hog should be able to lock down that area, leaving the other 5 to worry about hill and pelican.

If you're red team, the hog and mantis at turret combo might still be able to work, as long as your team controls pelican. But the hog will probably end up taking a lot of sniper fire from flatrock, so it wont work as well for red team.

I think we can make the hog work on this map. Of course it will only work if your team controls the hill.

a while into the game there's more or less always a binary spawning water cave, and one spawning behind blue cave.

I'm going to suggest a possibility which may be relevant to succeeding in this map and in others.

Every game I've seen that surprised me in Ragnaroak was decided by ordnance. Every game I've seen decided by ordnance in Ragnarok was decided specifically by sniper rifles and beam rifles.

It is important to hold the hill and your right of hill landmark, but it's not as necessary as it was. What is really important is getting good ordnance.

The sniper rifles that spawn in the bases continue to spawn in the bases, as do the vehicles. That means both teams always have a sniper rifle and some vehicles.

The laser's only targets should be vehicles, specifically the banshee and the mantis. The hog may or may not come out, but it's not a big deal to destroy it if it gets within lethal range of anyone. Ghosts tend to only be dangerous when they're behind your line and you aren't paying attention to them. I have personally wreaked some entertaining havoc on the enemy base with a ghost, but the moment they turned around and took me seriously I may as well have died instantly.

Back to my original point, the main goal is getting good ordnance. You will have more shots at this if if you're doing well, but it's important to remember the enemy gets a shot at it even when they're doing only OK (you can get ordnance just from assists). Obviously you want as many points per person as possible to get ordnance drops early and often, and opening like we always do helps this happen. Continuing to put a high premium on controlling spots that are costing us deaths is not really an option. Treat each enemy ordnance drop as them getting exactly what they want, and exactly what you don't want them to have.

WHEN (Not "If") the enemy team's sniper gets kills they are often accompanied by assists. When you are on hill you are the easiest and safest target for an enemy sniper to shoot. If you peak your head out you can be hit from anywhere on their side of the map. If you get pinged by one DMR shot first that's 15 points to their team instead of 10. That's a 150% improvement on the value of their kills.

You can also be sniped pretty easily on turret and pelican, but you tend to be safe from at least 1/3rd of their side in those positions. The simple lesson is you need to peak only when you have something to shoot at and you need to minimize your exposure as much as possible. Center hill is not the primary source of fire against the enemy's side of the map, it's the primary source of assistance to the flanks of the map. It can be boring sitting up there hoping someone will push through their caves or toward turret, and it's often easy to get your head down after taking a few DMR shots, but it's the sniper who gets you, and you can't duck after his shot.

The hardest snipers to kill are the most cowardly, and they are often in the enemy base, camo, and looking for free kills on the hill and little else. Since Halo Reach the centers of maps have become the worst place to be, and that is a big change from Halo 3 where they were the most important point to control and this map last appeared. You stay on the outskirts of maps in games with DMRs. The reason you controlled the center in Halo 3 is because it put you closer to everything, in Halo Reach and Halo 4 you don't need to be close to anything to shoot it, so you get as far from them as possible while still having a shot.

Use callouts and teamshot to make every kill worth 15 points or more for the team, keep your head down any time you're not firing (Pull back into cover to reload), and focus your energy on ordnance - yours and theirs.

We're aware of all that...

These setups are being drawn up for maximum coverage with an emphasis on staying covered while also having angles for teamshots. The hog and ghost will be used for rapid flanks and distractions.

These things are in the plan, hopefully it will be more clear when we have an overhead map done.

Bloody Initiate wrote:

The hardest snipers to kill are the most cowardly

I prefer to consider myself "tactically intelligent" rather then "most cowardly"

When I'm playing Ragnarok, I use the perk that leads to receiving Ordnance drops faster as I agree with him Bloody that Ordnance drops usually determines who wins.

The hill isn't as important compared to Halo 3 but pushing up past the hill to flat rock/territory 3 is more important as you get into the range of having auto-aim for the DMR. So by having this auto-aim you're going to be able to counter the sniper more effectively. However that being said pushing up too far causes spawns to switch unfortunately.

The banshee is an excellent way to employ hit and run tactics on taking out power weapon wielding players. However to do so effectively requires a very conservative pilot which isn't kill hungry.

Not sure how I feel about warthogs or ghosts on this map as I feel they could be a waste of DMR firepower, might work against uncoordinated randoms but hitscan DMR's I'm not so sure. I'll abstain on this point for now.

Tl/Dr
- Hill isn't as important.
- Pushing up past the hill is more important.

I guess I'll try to respond to everyone here:

ORDINANCE LOCATIONS:

Can someone go into forge (if not, I'll check it tomorrow) to verify the binary spawn in water cave? If there is one there, verify there isn't a second random rocket drop or random incin drop.

ORDINANCE:

What we've created here is basic strats for everyone to follow. They are simple and straightforward. The lack of paragraphs of description about the importance of ordinance in the basic breakdown here does not mean it isn't acknowledged. I think anyone playing this game has learned of the importance of ordinance to how the game plays out. There's an assumption in the beginnings of a guide here anyone playing infinity slayer understands how game-changing ordinance can be. What we have established is the groundwork for fields of fire.

When discussing ordinance, something we should talk about is using specializations like engineer that apparently allow players to see when random ordinance is coming before it drops.

HILL:

It isn't that the hill is less important. It's that the hill's use has changed. Most two-versus-one situations are decided by shooting enemies from different angles to take away their ability to use cover. With the hill, it's not that holding the hill itself determines control of mid; it's that hill determines your ability to hold the rest of mid. I will explain:

One thing I'd like to mention is that I have had my head taken off by a sniper countless times while geting the laser at the start of the game. Something Criporc suggested that I would really like to test is having one hill jumper use hardlight shield to protect the person picking up the laser.

As a jet packer I can land right at the laser without showing my head till the very last second, but this has proven to be more than enough to get it taken off. Instead of this, I suggest having two jetpackers get to the hill fast to gaurd the laser while waiting for the hardlight shield to arrive before actually taking it.

We still need to test this, hopefully tonight if anyone can get together and try to bang out solid strat for this map. I'm ready.

It may end up that I'll have 5 load outs: Gunner, Ragnarok, Exile, Vortex, Longbow, and Meltdown, which would change for each gametype. With the amount of specialization we can accomplish, why not fine tune this crap????

re-rolling ordnance, using ammo perk for extra ammo, using the faster ordnance when playing really agressive so that you can drop something good next respawn. Engineer perk can also be very useful.

It's a lot down to knowing what perks each teammate uses. 3-4 operators in the start of the game should also come in handy for the vehicles. While laser and sniper humper from the start always should have the ammo perk.

I can confirm the secondary binary spawn in water cave is on the outermost path of the water cave (So there are two watery paths you can take, one is in the "cave" and the other outside on the edge of the map, the binary rifle spawns in this second path which is the edge of the part of the map). It spawns the same time the other spawns, they're supposed to be equivalent. The water cave spawn is more exposed to turret than the flat rock one is to pelican, but the water cave is also more often overlooked and doesn't yield as easily to pressure from the hill.

If you aren't careful the water cave binary rifle is also pretty easy to steal. Someone can be hiding around ambush and then just sprint and grab it at the right moment. I killed a guy who was trying to do exactly that in one game with the wheelmen, sadly his team was covering the spot from turret so I couldn't recover the rifle.

As for ordnance, I think you want Tracker in Objective games and Engineer in Slayer. I may have those backward, but the one that lets you know when ordnance is coming is obviously more useful in objective games and the one that lets you shuffle your personal ordnance is useless in objective games (Since they don't have personal ordnance). Shuffling your ordnance is particularly useful in Slayer, tracking incoming ordnance is something you should use when you're exploring new maps and not so much on maps you know, since you should learn those spawn times.

hel monkey wrote:

One thing I'd like to mention is that I have had my head taken off by a sniper countless times while geting the laser at the start of the game. Something Criporc suggested that I would really like to test is having one hill jumper use hardlight shield to protect the person picking up the laser.

As a jet packer I can land right at the laser without showing my head till the very last second, but this has proven to be more than enough to get it taken off. Instead of this, I suggest having two jetpackers get to the hill fast to gaurd the laser while waiting for the hardlight shield to arrive before actually taking it.

This sounds really good, if you time the jetpack right when going through the mancannon you should be able to manage your arc better. Then having the hardlight shield to help secure the laser. Legit strategy!

Great insights, these will definately help create a broad formula from which to start off from. My only questions are how risk avoidant should our power weapon wielders be so as to conserve ammo without wasting the asset; And will having a player with the drop recon perk be enough to get people in postion for most of these drops?

There are quite a few ways to secure the laser at the beginning of the game, even with a sniper watching that thing like a hawk. I should know...that's what I do. I take the sniper and stare, mostly scoped in, at the laser until it's grabbed by a teammate. Obviously I'm not perfect, but most of the time I can at least keep the other team off it.

For the aid of my friends, here are the ways you could stop ME from taking your head off when going for laser:

1. Timing. It takes a few extra moments to get the sniper on Ragnorak then it did on Valhalla. Valhalla's sniper was propped up against the doorway, making it easy to grab and be looking top mid before people could even make it out of the mancannon. Ragnorak I have to go inside the base, back up, and jump up. Quick runners who blitz the laser can often be at the top of the hill before I can get a clear line of sight. Jetpack or the perk that lets you run all the time CAN get you there before I am in position, and it would take a really good shot to take you down before you can away.

2. Camo. Run camo and sneak up on the laser. It's not foolproof, but most snipers are looking for a rush of movement, and it's REALLY hard to see a crouched camo guy.

3. Make me look at something else. Most of the time if I have to pull my eyes off the laser it's because something is rushing our base. In Flag games it's often an initial hog/mongoose rush that might slip behind our attackers. In slayer most often it's a really aggressive Banshee. If your Banshee rushes the other base it would take a LOT of fast teamwork on their part to keep you from at least putting pressure on the top of the enemy base (and where there sniper PROBABLY is) and that may be all the distraction you need to take the laser. But it's a tradeoff...

4. Send your sniper top mid to couter-snipe. This is the riskiest tactic, as it'll put your sniper right at the beginning of the game in the line of fire. But if you send two people top mid, one to counter snipe and at least draw attention while the other grabs the laser, you're chances go up that I'm gonna take my eyes off the prize and look at their sniper mostly out of defense.

5. Ignore laser. I know, I'm suggesting you not go for the top laser on this map. But think about it for a moment...how many of you have complained about every person being able to spawn with stickies/plasma pistol/DMR/BR that can kill you from across the map? Leave laser alone and rush other power positions on the map, putting fire on vehicles and people who rush top mid. But don't actually go there. Snipers get ansy when we don't see targets...good snipers aren't just killers, but keep an eye on the whole map to make call outs. If all of the action is elseware and I'm just looking at a piece of ordnance while my teammates are in trouble it's not gonna take long for me to stop staring at laser and go be more productive. But for a good minute you've done the worst thing you can do to a sniper: make them look at nothing.



....next time our party is split in matchmaking on this map, and you use these tactics against me, I want you to remember to thank me in postgame. Also that I have a few ways of countering them myself.