In the coming weeks, 343 Industries will release a Halo 4 competitive multiplayer update that will tune weapons and add new playlists. The update aims to bring greater balance between Spartan weapons and the weapons on some vehicles.
With the update, the Battle Rifle will return to its 4-shot kill glory of the Halo 2/3 days to better counter long ranged weapons. The DMR will receive tweaks to the expansion of the reticle bloom to slightly increase the difficulty when killing enemies at long range. For more details on the changes to other weapons like the Covenant Carbine, LightRifle and Magnum, the Halo 4 Waypoint blog lists everything you need to know.
As for the vehicles, both the chain guns for the Mantis and Warthog will receive a 35% damage increase to bring back that fear whenever a Warthog heads in your direction.
When some 343 staff spoke with professional Halo player, Coby Yamauchi, about the upcoming update he said:
"I feel it would be a big benefit to tournament play. … I believe the weapons tuning will help move Halo back into the direction of the competitive success of the earlier versions of Halo. "
In addition to the weapons tuning, players will see updates to current playlists and new maps added to the Forge Island playlist. 343 Industries selected 6 new community made maps built on the free Forge Island DLC made available as a free download in early April.
To see the new changes in action, 343 will live stream gameplay on their Twitch channel Friday, May 17th at 2pm PDT/5pm Eastern.