: I was reading Bravo's part on weapon balancing and actually got excited that
: they're looking to balance the DMR, BR, LR and Carbine as I would love to
: use something else other than the DMR sometimes. The more I thought about
: it though, and I believe someone else brought it up recently in a
: discussion on the cut forerunner weapons, is it good to have four weapons
: that accomplish basically the same thing or should they be consolidated to
: 1 weapon?

Consolidation.
Maybe not to one weapon, but combining the Battle Rifle/Light Rifle and the Carbine/DMR would cut down on the clutter.

I think that a 3RB weapon is fairly distinct from a semiautomatic precision weapon, but I don't think that there's room for two semiautomatic rifles with slightly different firing rates.

I think that the gold standard for the Halo sandbox is Halo: CE. Each gun had its own broad niche, and you couldn't really drop the weapons into distinct categories like "Shotguns" or "Precision Rifles". The closes you could get was saying that the Plasma Rifle was the Covenant version of the Assault Rifle, and even that's a stretch.