: Personally, I really like having so many choices of weapons in the sandbox.
: It's, IMO, more fun to see, hear, and use different weapons, and it allows
: us to customize ourselves deeper. I hope in future games that the weapons
: are balanced, but offer more differences. For example, in Halo 1, we had
: the Assault Rifle and the Plasma Rifle. The Assault Rifle was very
: effective at taking out nonshielded opponents, and the Plasma Rifle was
: very effective at reducing shields, and stunning players.

: Thus we have 2 automatic weapons that could be "balanced", but
: offer uniqueness that makes me actually ask, "Should I start AR or
: Plasma Rifle? Plasma Rifle does this well, whereas Assault Rifle does
: this well."

When creating and balancing items, it's far more interesting for the differences to be incomparable rather than only numerically different. You've described just that with the PR vs AR. The only really incomparable with H4's precision weapons would be the pistol vs everything else, in that it's very effective at close range and has the potential to be effective at long, but because of its rate of fire, accuracy, and damage output, it tries to do something fundamentally different from the rifles. In between the BR, DMR, LR, and Carbine, you have only minor statistical differences but no differences in what the gun does.