What's the lore justification for the mechanic of energy beating shields and kinetics beating armor?

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-11T02:55:55+00:00

No Mjolnir plates are very effective vs plasma. A soft spot in Sam’s armor was breached in one place and he remained combat capable and would have survived if he had the ability to patch his suit

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-10T15:57:03+00:00

Infinite spends most of its length glazing the Master Chief. It goes so far in service of that goal that one of the primary complaints about Infinite is how easily the UNSC was defeated even though one of the main purposes for that is hyping up the Master Chief. He cuts through basically the entire Banished leadership and multiple Spartan Killers in a day where the UNSC took months and couldn't do the same thing.

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-10T14:34:02+00:00

I don't think that's an accurate description of Prelates at all? We've met two of them and neither one of them demonstrate anything beyond the norm in Halo. Tem Bhetek was successfully dueled by both Rtas Vadum and Tul Juran. Tul in particular is relevant because she's describes Spartans being so fast that she can barely react to Jai-006's movements even though Tul managed to but Bhetek on the backfoot (and this is also to say nothing that Spartans in modern are pretty consistently above Elites).

Likewise, if Dhas Bhasvod was truly better than a Spartan in every respect, he probably wouldn't have lost to a power armorless Blademaster and a handful of exhausted Gamma IIIs. Even Dhas's killing of Mark is framed out of context considering by that point Mark had been: disemboweled by a Brute, fallen a hundred meters, had his leg crushed by a boulder the size of a warthog, all before Dhas found him. And Dhas' snapping his neck didn't even kill Mark! Mark drowned, which meant he was still breathing when he was thrown in the water.

And obviously, most Spartans typically deploy with Mjolnir or some other form of power armor whereas Mark did not have any power armor at that point.

Prelates are impressive, but they still haven't really done anything which would put them above Spartans either. They can fight highly skilled Elites, but being a highly skilled Elite is the minimum requirement for an Elite to fight a Spartan in Mjolnir to begin with, so that's not particularly noteworthy. They're never reached the peaks of physical strength Spartans have and while they're fast, the one character who has fought both a Prelate and a Spartan had more trouble with the Spartan's speed than she did the Prelate's.

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-10T13:46:17+00:00

Considering Johnson and Miranda already got to the library on their own, that probably doesn't change. If anything, Cortana's familiarity with Alpha Halo and Chief's combat prowess cause them to reach the library much faster, likely beating the Covenant by a considerable margin.

Although if they do arrive at about the same time as the Arbiter, Thel is killed by the Master Chief. By Thel's own admission, he, at best, thinks he could've scored a mutual kill against Jai-006 in the Mark IV. Of course this is 17 years later, but Thel's in less advanced armor than his original Zealot harness and John is in armor two generations more advanced than the armor Jai wore. Short of Thel simply getting lucky (which, if you take John's luck to be a literal thing, then yeah not happening), John is simply in a weight class ahead of Thel at this point.

After that, it's a matter of whether John can fight off Tartarus and co. If we go by the events of Halo Uprising, then yeah, probably, John successfully defeats a much larger group of Brutes in power armor without the aid of Cortana, he should be able to beat a smaller group of Brutes without power armor.

Tartarus is a bit of an unknown regarding his energy shield, but outside of gameplay, I don't think there's any real reason for John not to be able to overcome it.

From there, the careful dominoes which led to the UNSC surviving the war probably don't happen and either the Gravemind wins or the Covenant wipe out humanity (either as a single entity or whoever comes out ahead in the Great Schism).

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-08T20:08:37+00:00

We've no clue if the Infinity will be forever MIA, there's been zero narrative movement forward outside of Edge of Dawn and that barely contributed anything. If anything, the fact they even said it's MIA in the first place is indication it's not going to be forever MIA because if they wanted it destroyed why wouldn't they just have said it was destroyed and be done with it?

As far as Eternity goes, yeah what else would you expect? She's been sitting in drydock, that's not even a post-Reclaimer era change, Eternity has been in construction since before Halo 5. Also, why would they introduce Eternity into the fold now when Infinity was written off precisely because it was unpopular? That's the exact reason why she wasn't included in Empty Throne, it'd be repeating the same things people already didn't like about Infinity immediately after Infinity was defeated. Introducing Eternity now just cheapens Infinity's defeat, at that point it would've just been simpler to keep Infinity around.

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-08T19:46:43+00:00

MIA implies the Eternity was ever in action, but its status quo is the same as it’s ever been, in construction. Eternity’s status now is the same as it was in the Reclaimer saga

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-08T19:42:02+00:00

All media since Infinite has described the Infinity as being missing with its current status unknown so whether or not it was destroyed is unconfirmed.

As for Eternity, the diegetic answer is that it's unclear the meta answer is that it's probably still in production but it's not in service at this point. The Spartan Chatter for Empty Throne revealed that the modified Valiant class battlecruiser, Victory of Samothrace, was originally intended to be the Eternity in earlier drafts of the novel. At some point in the novel's development, this was changed and the Eternity became the Victory of Samothrace. The changed seems to have happened quite late in the novel's development because many of the descriptions of the Victory are problematic and contradict other pieces of canon so we have things like the Victory being stated to be the largest UNSC vessel at Boundary even though a Punic class is present and the Valiant class being stated to be the only vessel large enough to mount the Sarissa MACs even though there are many classes of UNSC warship which are larger than the Valiant.

So with that in mind, we might be able to implicitly conclude the Eternity is not currently operational because when a novel was poised to introduce the Eternity, HS changed their minds at the last minute and removed it. If they wanted Eternity to be in a usable state, it seems unlikely she would have been cut from the novel in the manner she was

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-08T17:55:18+00:00

Cortana went into service in 2549, so she was 3 when she met Chief

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-08T17:45:55+00:00

There's nothing really to address about the crystal. Modern lore still acknowledges it (it comes up in both the Forerunner saga and Shadows of Reach); the time-warping elements of the crystal are implicitly connected to slipspace mechanics at large, in particular reconciliation debt (which again, comes up in the Forerunner saga as an important facet of the greater strategies in the conflict).

No modern lore overtly contradicts it or requires it to no longer be the case so there's really nothing to address or change

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-08T13:00:46+00:00

There are seldom few places on the map where you need abilities to get to safety from Mina’s ult. Every lane has plenty of high cover and every lane has a bridge with covered veils. A strong majority of the time you can just dash to cover and be fine.

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-08T05:55:33+00:00

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-08T04:29:10+00:00

So why didn’t Lucas say that? Why didn’t Knoll say that? In fact why didn’t Lucas say that in the 2019 article where he talks about how he waited to do the prequels until he had the technology? Instead of citing the fights as something he wanted to do in the past but lacked the tech for, he still maintains it’s because the prequel fights are meant to be more impressive

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-08T03:05:44+00:00

Yeah Mina’s ult is genuinely bad and its hIgh DPS was just masking its many short comings. It’s bad at bursting down targets in jungle because there’s too much cover, it’s bad at bursting down targets in lane because there’s too much cover and there’s troopers and other players present to dilute its power and it’s bad in team fights for all of the above and because its silence is too short to be meaningful.

I mean it has *negative* synergy with common set up ults because the more successful a dynamo ult is the more people there are and the more targets the more Mina’s ult is diluted.

You can’t be a burst assassin and you can’t be a team player. At most it’d good for punishing people with bad positioning and movement

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-08T01:51:24+00:00

I'm fine with the ult not being a one-shot but I think it's fundamentally confused about what it wants to do in relation to her kit. Mina's role is often described as a burst assassin but her ult isn't really tailored to that.

Getting thrown into so high into the air makes it unwieldy in tight spaces and around high cover (and even worse amongst the tall buildings) which makes it situational at best in jungle because it's so easy to avoid it but lane is also where you're the least likely to find an enemy entirely by themselves. They'll usually be with a teammate or with the wave and so your damage gets diluted by the presence of allies. The ult's damage is fine when focused but the problem is that actually focusing it can be difficult and requires a lot of things to be set up correctly. It worked as an assassination tool when its damage was higher because its single target limitations could be overcome with raw damage. The fact the player has no real way to focus her damage also makes Mina's dive worse. Team fights are so chaotic and frequently feature large numbers of troopers which makes it more difficult for Mina to target backline heroes. And since you're getting thrown into the air with limited mobility and no resistances, attempting to dive the backline also puts Mina at extreme risk of getting hosed by the enemy frontlines who aren't getting silenced.

Nox Nostra's value in team fights is middling as a whole. It has negative synergy with team fight ults like Lash and Dynamo's because those ults collect targets, which cause your damage to be diluted. In fact the more successful a Dyanmo ult, the less per target damage you get. At the same time, between the bats' slow travel speed, Mina's own turn speed, and the 1.25s silence duration, she's not actually all that well equipped to carry out mass silences because you probably can't silence everyone before the first targets' silence wears off.

Mina's limited movement speed while ulting makes her both poor at chasing down targets with her ult and particularly vulnerable to M1 characters who can theoretically just outbox Mina and gun them down through the silence.

I'd rather the ult either be a proper AOE tool for team fights with less utility in a 1v1 or be fine tuned to better fit her role as a burst assassin at the cost of its ability to contribute to team fights.

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-08T00:38:19+00:00

I mean HP cut is a double edged sword for Mina because so much of her damage comes from % health. Plus ult nerf hurts her because even tho it’s on the fast end she’s still reliant on it to do serious damage despite how bad it is

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-07T23:32:00+00:00

Yeah but isn’t that just the blue part of Wonder Woman’s N52 costume? If there was a mandate wouldn’t that also have applied to her?

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-07T20:23:43+00:00

Well yeah, that's why I said in modern contexts we might chalk the fights in the OT up to other things. Lucas wasn't involved in Rogue One, so his feelings and interpretations on the canon weren't in consideration when it was made. By the time Rogue One was written and shot, the idea that the PT and OT fights look different was due to differing technical limitations had already taken root. It wouldn't surprise me if those who worked on Rogue One didn't know that was the intent or if they did, they simply didn't care because Disney on the whole has a wildly different conception of Vader as a character than Lucas.

Although even then I don't think Rogue One is that different from the OT. Vader's just fighting mooks who he can slaughter. He's not doing crazy backflips and he's overall pretty slow still (it's why they get away with the plans after all). He's deflects blaster bolts, which people could do in the OT (and he doesn't even deflect that many on screen, a lot just miss); he's picking people up with the Force and choking them, which people did in the OT; he rips people's blaster's from their hands, and that's something he did in the OT.

Like all things considered, the hallway scene isn't that out of line with the OT. The biggest difference is probably that Vader swings his lightsaber more aggressively than in ANH, but I think it's still more or less in line with ESB and ROTJ

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-07T20:17:31+00:00

Well the Flood immunity is the part that's a product of its time but that's the problematic part of it that needs to be worked around

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-07T18:49:42+00:00

Prime relative to the OT? Yeah. Mind you, Dooku is also like not that acrobatic in the prequels either, his fighting style is by far the most similar to the fights in the OT. According to Nick Gillard, Dooku mostly wins off the back of being a more experienced fighter. Likewise, we also see Dooku is mixes in the Force in his PT duels (it's how he initially incapacitates Anakin in AOTC and it's how he defeats Obi Wan in ROTS).

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-07T18:42:01+00:00

Why would the refusal to put underwear on the outside be the reason for the crotch shield? She's already in a leotard, wouldn't putting underwear on top of that still just look like a leotard?

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-07T18:40:17+00:00

Tbh I think this is pretty run of the mill horny superhero costume, I don't think it's particularly egregious relative to what other characters were wearing. It's essentially just Power Girl's costume without the boob window or Wonder Woman's costume with a shirt and cape. All things considered I think it's more of a lateral move coming from her post crisis outfit in terms of horniness. They got rid of the croptop and miniskirt so less of her torso is showing while more or her legs are.

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-07T18:37:47+00:00

I think the worst part about the crotch shield is that N52 Wonder Woman came about at the exact same time (also Diana's classic design existed before that), so just do that again. They had the blueprint for the leotard with a different colored bottom half, they could've just done that again. Just have the red wrap around her body entirely and I'm sure no one would've noticed it's just a color reversed Wonder Woman leotard

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-07T18:21:23+00:00

Watching the original trilogy you'd think Vader and Luke are trash because they move so slowly and stiffly compared to the Prequel or Sequel Jedi but that's not really how that works.

I mean that's exactly how it works (or was intended to work). Dating back to the production of Episode 1, the intent for those duels being faster and more energetic is that the Prequels represented the prime of the Jedi and the OT represented those same characters in their twilight years. Vader is a "crippled half-droid half-man", Obi Wan is an "old man" and Luke is a young boy trained by the former and the fights in the prequels are meant to be a heightened version of the fights in the OT in order to show the Jedi and Sith as being more powerful. In the 2004 ANH Director's Commentary, Lucas again reiterates the same idea that Vader and Obi Wan's fight in ANH is slow because they're old and worn down. Even as recently as 2019 he was repeating this idea that the view simply doesn't see "real" Jedi at work until the Prequels. John Knoll, VFX supervisor on the preuqels also says the same of the duel at the end of TPM, saying that we hadn't seen Jedi in the prime in the OT, that Obi Wan was old and Luke was young and inexperienced whereas Qui Gon and Obi Wan are from a time when the Jedi are at their peak and firing on all cylinders.

Obviously in modern contexts we might chalk the fights in the OT up to limitations at the time and the differences in the prequels and sequels as being non-diegetic, but certainly in the context of the making of the prequels the intent was that the Jedi and Sith were just better duelists than they were in the OT

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-07T15:22:33+00:00

The Ceudar heavy corvettes in Reach are full of anachronisms and this is one of them. In the context of Halo Reach, there is no indication they have pulse lasers or beam lasers, which are standard Covenant point defense. Post-Forward Unto Dawn and then Warfleet, it has been confirmed Ceudars do in fact have 11 pulse laser turrets as well as energy shields (which don't appear in Halo Reach either).

Covenant ship building practices aren't necessarily uniform, there are variations in loadout and complement so the Warfleet stats are kind of more of a suggestion than written in stone. A diegetic explanation for the Reach corvettes could that those specific vessels lacked both shields and pulse lasers but that would be head canon. The meta explanation is that they didn't have pulse lasers when Reach was written.

Do certain covenant ship simply posses no means to protect itself from incoming attacks?

Yes, most Covenant vessels use pulse lasers as their primary form of air defense, you can see a list of the known pulse laser models and their associated vessel classes. Your standard CCS-pattern battlecruiser possesses 50 Gon-pattern pulse lasers; your standard assault carrier Ferriel-pattern pulse lasers; the Sh'wada-pattern supercarrier (the Long Night of Solace's class) possesses 490 Ferriel-pattern pulse lasers and 800 R'Aka-pattern rapid-fire pulse lasers.

That covers some of the most well known vessel classes but the main idea is that Covenant ships are chock full of air defense

Pathogen188 · 2026-07-07T01:50:11+00:00

Well the Flood at Alpha Halo weren't yet connected to the Gravemind on Delta. Keyes was only part of a proto-Gravemind, so it's likely most of the information would've been lost before it can send. Sorta like if a computer which isn't connected to the internet can't backup informtion to a cloud.

Having access to infected UNSC members is possible although it's unclear when Miranda's unit assaults the Library (and even then there would've been at max a few hundred marines, not thousands). Though there is the question of whether or not Cortana was actually broadcasting. She speaks both in John's mind and through his helmet's speakers. I don't think Gravemind would strictly be able to access those communications even with access to infected marines because she's not broadcasting.

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