Honor Guard Councilor

"Honor Guard Councilors" are a fan-derived term describing a weird Elite seen in the level Gravemind. He appears to be wearing gauntlets and greaves of the Honor Guard Ultra with the helmet of either a Councilor, an Ultra Elite, or an Honor Guard Elite. The Elite's appearance can be attributed to a glitch in the game's programming due to a programmer typing incorrect coding; it was meant to be a Zealot.

Appearance
It appears at the end of the level Gravemind, at the fore of the bridge between the Mausoleum of the Arbiter and the Far Tower. The Honor Guard Councilor is flanked by two SpecOps Elites wielding Plasma Rifles or Carbines, but is always armed with an Energy Sword himself and he may be a bit dangerous if the player doesn't know how to avoid his attacks. This only occurs after the Master Chief has killed the Ultra Elites, Hunters, and Brutes fighting in the Mausoleum and moved to intercept the High Prophet of Truth.

Combat
The Honor Guard Councilor is extraordinarily powerful and on Normal difficulty or higher requires at least two Fuel Rod Cannon hits to kill or multiple Energy Sword slashes to defeat. The Honor Guard Councilor is programmed to have the power and skills of a Zealot. It always wields an Energy Sword.

Explanation
The Honor Guard Councilor only appears by mistake in Halo 2 because its appearance was never intentional. The armor the Elite wears is the result of a bug in the programming of the game. This glitch does not always appear.

Every character was programmed into Halo 2 with variations to increase the realistic feel of the game. These variations would be randomly placed in each level, each time it was played. These variations determined that the Elites would act and sound differently, instead of saying the same things, as they did on Halo: Combat Evolved. In particular, there are two voice sets for regular Elites. They are "_dog" (Meaning "dogmatic") and "_scl" (Meaning "scully"). _dog Elites have the voice clips of Norm Woodel, while _scl Elites have the voice clips of David Scully. The "Object Properties" tag takes care of what variations of things have; it assigns armor, voices, faces, default health, and such. So in most maps, the Elites have 2 copies of one rank, one assigned to each voice. For instance, in the level Great Journey, when you exit your Spectre/Wraith there is an Elite saying either;
 * "The Arbiter? I thought he was dead. Hold your fire! The Hunters have come to our aid, Arbiter. They will stand by our side." In a calm and steady voice, or;
 * "The Arbiter? I thought he was dead. Hold your fire! The Hunters have come to our aid, Arbiter. They will fight by our side." In a fast and energetic voice.

Therefore, in the case of The Great Journey for example these are all the Elite variations:


 * Minor_dog
 * Minor_scl
 * Major_dog
 * Major_scl
 * Stealth_dog
 * Stealth_scl
 * Stealth_Major_dog
 * Stealth_Major_scl
 * Ultra_dog
 * Ultra_scl
 * Etc. etc.

However, both sets of variations are not always used. For example, in Metropolis, the voices of all the Grunts are the same because the designers did not put the Brian Posehn Grunt variation in the Metropolis Map file, so that all the Grunts only have the voice clips of Joseph Staten variant. They chose only to use one of the two available variations in the game.

On most levels, all the programmer has to do is program the Game to produce one Minor Elite for instance and the game itself will randomly chose between the Minor_dog and Minor_scl variations, unless otherwise specified. But, only one set of variations exists on the Gravemind map file. Gravemind is another level like this. It was programmed so that only the _scl type of Elites were in the file. Therefore, every time the programmers wanted an Elite to appear, they would have to add the _scl suffix.

Unfortunately, the programmers accidentally programmed the game to spawn a "zealot_dog" Elite to appear at this point on the level. They had intended for the Elite to be a Zealot, but attached the wrong variation suffix to it. Since this variation was not in the level, the game can not find it. This results in the glitch players see: The game knows to spawn an Elite with the power and weapons of a Zealot, but it does not know what the armor is supposed to look like. Since white is the default armor color, the game automatically chooses it. Since it does not know what helmet to give the Elite, it randomly chooses between the Councilor helmet, the Honor Guard helmet and the Ultra Elite helmet. Apparently on very, very rare occasions, there is no helmet at all. The no helmet variation comes from the corpses seen earlier in the level and only sometimes at the level's end.

Finally, since the game does not understand the Elite appearance, it automatically enables the "Honor Guard" armor for some reason. This armor is a feature available on all Elites but is supposed to be disabled on those that are not supposed to wear Honor Guard armor. The game may even spawn the Elite with the wrong face, Rtas 'Vadum's, minus the green eyes.

Trivia

 * On rare occasions, the Councilor head dress design will look different.
 * It will sometimes have Rtas 'Vadum's "half jaw" facial structure.
 * If this glitch was corrected it would be the only time in the game where Master Chief fights a Zealot on any difficulty.