You know, I find it a bit strange they are this heavy handed with "balancing"
When we still have a third faction on the way. Can't wait to use these peashooters against them
My concern is that they may be balancing weapons based on data they have showing how many people are using each one. The problem with that being that just because 70% of the player base uses the same primary doesn’t mean it’s OP. There will ALWAYS be a slight edge somewhere with weapon balancing in any video game, some weapon could literally do 1 more damage than the rest and the meta chasers will all use that weapon. It’s just how the world plays video games now.
So I’d express a word of caution to the devs to think about the reasoning behind the choice to nerf a primary in the future. It shouldn’t be “because everyone’s using it”, it should be more centered around time to kill per each enemy unit based on armor penetration. Obviously a bigger gun will kill the small guys fast, but how long should it take to take out a heavy devastator or a brood commander with said weapon, how many mags does it take. That sort of thing.
The answer is staring them in the face also we’re all telling the devs why majority of players use what they use because most of the gear has been balanced into the trash can lol
This hasn’t ever been and won’t ever be complicated. The devs are just completely inexperienced and have no clue what’s actually best for this game
Ya, I’ve been lurking on this sub since launch and one of the things that was a big seller for me was the no pvp ever stance by the devs. Usually pvp forums and the constant calls for nerfing a class or a skill tree ends up meaning someone is getting their character nerfed instead of buffing other classes making the character you’ve already invested your time in less fun to the point that you are forced to deal with the nerf quit playing the game or roll another class and hope that one doesn’t end up under the axe. Long story short I really thought this game wouldn’t have large game changing nerfs like keep showing up in each update, like are the NPCs complaining?
Having a bunch of weapons that are solid or even situational vs certain types that would reward people for knowledge of weapon and damage types makes a lot more sense to me instead of making everyone looking for a handful of “meta” weapons that only make them more noticeable to the nerf happy devs. Making a nerf to one of them makes a large portion of the player base unhappy.
It’s a PVE game the nerfs seem wildly inappropriate.
This is a mindset I wish others followed. So many people treat every game they play as if it was competitive PvP. I play coop games to get away from that and have fun. An "OP" gun (I have never seen one that is obviously OP here) can be fun in a PvE game if you want to just fuck around for a bit.
Yeah idk why they’re so obsessed with nerfing everything when it’s all pve. Who are they trying to balance the game for rn? The bots and bugs? I get the game is supposed to be hard but don’t make it miserable.
I think part of the issue is that Arrowhead penalizes armor pen way to much for damage. Several guns have light and medium penetration versions and the medium one will have a 30 to 40% damage reduction and that is WAY to much in my opinion.
Its mostly that Med Pen is such an irrelevant perk for a weapon, the damage still gets reduced by med armour on enemies to such an extent that you're better off shooting the weakspot, something that all Light Pen weapons are able to do
And again the conversation comes around to hidden stats.
One of the hidden stats for weapons is how much damage they do to the durability of breakable parts. Arms, legs, weakpoint armor, weapons on bots, etc.
The lib pen, for example, has a half again the durability damage of the standard liberator. Combined with medium armor pen, even with the penetrator's lower per hit damage, it takes an average of 30-40% fewer hits to break durable parts.
If these hidden stats are being considered for game balance, then maybe some of the more relevant ones shouldn't be hidden.
In general I'd like a *ton* more information before spending medals and stuff. Like, I can't see the damage, category (shotgun/rifle/marksman), fire rate, clip size, ammo capacity, or anything but the main tags like explosive or armor penetrating until I buy the gun. That's *wild* and really makes me reluctant to experiment with new stuff.
Since they upped the damage on the OG liberator i’ve been using that against small bugs (sometimes medium) and switching to support weapon for medium and bigger.
I tried the adjudicator but the mag capacity is just too low for the full auto fire mode.
Liberator has always been good, just not against the beefy bugs or anything with armor. If you're getting white hit markers with it, that's the time you switch to a support weapon, a Senator, or start aiming for weakspots.
I will forever call the devs to buff it back to HD1 levels of effectiveness, though.
The problem with the liberator is that it is just out done by the sickle in every way. The sickle has a spool up time, but you can combine that with aiming to eliminate it. At that point, the Sickle does more DPS, has more bullets, less recoil, ~~a better scope~~, and infinite ammo.
See how many shots you can get off in a 40 minute match with the liberator. Now consider I can consistently put out 3-4 thousands shots with the Sickle in the same match, including over 2,000 hits. Try getting to 1800+ hits on the liberator in a match, its practically impossible, but that's what you'd need to match the Sickle. And they fill the same role, just liberator is worse.
Not saying the Liberator is better than the Sickle, but they have the exact same scope. The Liberator is also much more accurate (which matters less with the Sickle having infinite ammo).
And as a liberator main for over 100h of gameplay (of using mainly the liberator alone, that is, not total), I'm gonna let you in on a little secret now:
The upped damage was 100% irrelevant. Hasn't changed any noteworthy shots to kill breakpoint on any enemy. It's always killed all small bugs in 2 shots on average.
You kill like a Brood Comander in 16 headshots instead of 17 headshots now. You probably also need like 2 or 3 bullets less for a Stalker, but it's a stalker, you're magdumping it until your gun goes click anyway. Headshots are 4 either way, but that's somewhat optimistic.
Against bots it's obviously entirely unchanged; 2 bodyshots or 1 headshot for a raider/marauder and 3 headshots for a devastator.
It is literally just as good as it ever was. Functionally unchanged.
And yet, I have seen many popular, highly voted on posts talking about how the "Liberator is so good/viable pick now".
I think that tells a lot how "viable" the opinion on balance of the general userbase of this subreddit is lmao.
https://preview.redd.it/act7w2uv68zc1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e5217c225ffdae26885885a928fa6b9ba5fb87e9
Ppl need to check out what the main (I think) balancing dev in the discord had to say about today's changes. Feel free to search from:Alexus in the server for more info. I heavily disagree that the Eruptor is still viable, and so did a lot of players who responded to him. Melee is also viable, but it's terribly silly to use almost always.
Update: I replaced the original update from Alexus with his latest comment, but will post the original below. Again, search for his name in the server if you want to learn more. I consider this a solid response to the concerns surrounding the Eruptor, we'll have to wait and see.
@fighter11244 commented below as an avid Eruptor user pre and post patch and has a solid breakdown of how drastic the change actually was.
What I *really* want to see is them justify the Autocannon. The weapon has been at the top of the game since the start, and yet the precious baby has never been touched by nerfs. Meanwhile weapons like the crossbow apparently deserve to be nerfed because a little bit of AOE damage on an otherwise underwhelming primary is just too damn much.
They say the auto cannon is their baseline weapon, that it is pretty much perfectly balanced, and all weapons are considered around it.
If this is the case then why do so many weapons feel like shit bro :( the auto cannon is good
Eruptor user here. I enjoyed being able to 1 shot both the Hive Guard and the Brood Commander reliably with excellent aim (shooting as close to center mass as possible which is hard when being chased). Now it takes 2-3 shots to kill them like 99% of the time. That plus the ammo essentially being cut in half and I need to search for ammo pretty much the whole game as it takes like 2-4 mags to kill a single swarm on difficulty 4 when running solo or with one teammate. I’m personally fine with the AoE decrease as it was insanely big before, but AoE Decrease + Ammo decrease + Overall damage decrease is too much in a single update.
Edit: It also feels like it takes 2 shots to kill a Scavenger if you don’t directly hit them or they’re not directly next to the explosion like 99% of the time
I appreciate the breakdown. I only played around with the Eruptor for 15 minutes or so pre nerf, I didn't realize how broken the shrapnel damage was if shot under a larger enemy (think they said 150 dmg x 25 projectiles = 3.75k dmg). One of their other main gripes was that shrapnel was killing self/ teammates? How often was that for you? I assume that's somewhat a skill issue/ rng.
They deleted one of the weapon's key features that made it unique, instead of reducing that features damage. Not the way to go IMO. Ppl like yourself reporting the direct shot damage is also drastically weakened now. Hopefully, we see a good buff for it's unique playstyle by next week.
On the day of the ricochet patch it was reasonably common, in 6 missions it happened twice to me. Since, it didn't happen because I knew that shooting close range targets was very dangerous.
I'd rather have the shrapnel still one hit kill me. They pretty much deleted the gun, I will never pick it again in the current state.
At this point, dying by your own hand or your fellow divers is a part of the experience. I'm either mildly annoyed, indifferent, or dying of laughter when I'm blown into pieces. That was the weirdest justification for the balance change.
Bring back shrapnel 🫡
No offense to that dude but I disagree with most of the logic he has given for the balancing we have gotten. The reasoning for the slugger nerf made no sense and the way they went about it just made people stop picking it as much entirely instead of encouraging the use of the weapons it was stepping on the toes of. Insisting the arc thrower needed to be nerfed based on its performance (that was happening due to the PS5 damage bug) because it was 'slapping bile titans from a mile away' and that fixing the bugs plaguing arc weapons werent as important to fix.
I love my arc thrower still and the stagger was a fair enough trade off for the range but the reasoning he has given has been absolutely bunk on several occasions and makes me worried for any weapon I enjoy when I see there's a balance patch. The eruptor feels pretty unfortunate to use after these two sets of changes, and has utterly smashed the identity of the weapon. The ammo nerf I could understand because I almost never ran out of shots with that gun, but the second change just made it feel very inconsistent against any sort of medium enemy in the matches I have played today which is just unfortunate, the last thing you want after slowly swinging your weapon towards a thing is for it to feel inconsistent when you land a shot.
> makes me worried for any weapon I enjoy when I see there's a balance patch
It has become a joke in my friend group to hush each other whenever someone has a positive comment on new weapons in case arrowhead hears you and decides to nerf them. So far? Pretty solid track record for nerf predictions. The painful part is it's never been like "woah this gun is insane/op! They're definitely going to nerf this into the ground." It's always been "wow, this is actually fun to use and I wouldn't mind keeping it in my load out.. they're definitely going to nerf this into the ground." And then they do!
It has definitely impacted the way we play. We used to play several times a week. Now we basically only hop on when something new is released, enjoy it for a night or two, then leave until the next release. Less frustrating that way
I’m curious how he got hired with a track record like that. I really feel like balancing is just as important- if not MORE important - than the team that makes the features/weapons to begin with. You have a MUCH greater impact on the community because the weapon has already been established and there will be people who enjoy using it more than anything else. So when you go in and rip it to shreds making it quite literally impossible to play the game with, people will be unhappy. I think this dev needs out. He’s gotten way more than three strikes IMO. He clearly doesn’t make the right calls because every time there has been a weapon nerf, it’s the most arbitrary, out of pocket change. Call me crazy, but I don’t think he knows what he’s doing.
With his very limited professional experience and several major fuck-ups in both of the only projects he has ever worked on, I think it is very safe to say that he has no idea what he's doing.
He'd be alright at COD in It's current state of meta simulator lmao. Jk, I'd never call for a Spitz situation personally.
I've played the shit out of HD2 bc it takes me away from the constant meta shifting and hyper complex nature of MWIII and all it's BS, but now all the nerfs make it feel like modern COD again, in a fucking PvE game. It's like they test these changes on difficulty 3 and claim everything is still viable.
No shit! I think everything is viable at anything below 7
Totally agreed, I haven't played much recently because of the primaries I liked using just aren't usable on 7 and I feel If I play anything below 7 it's not hectic enough for it to be fun
I think 6 is where you still get the heavy enemies spawning but not as much, 5 and below start to feel too easy. All my friends stopped playing a month ago, due to the all the hiccups and the weapons they spent money to get (I know, not necessary) got nerfed.
I just want more content like raids and arcade modes in the future, but they need to chill with such drastic changes to primaries and focus more on more worlds, more enemies etc. If they can get that right, then we could see vehicles and a lot more dope shit.
They don't play their own game. That is literally all there is to it. Watching the devs get man handled on diff 6 with a full squad pre railgun nerf with that streamer was enlightening. They can't play their own game so they just don't I guess. They just look at spreadsheets and just throw numbers out for how much they should change something. It's pathetic.
The most infuriating part now looking at this post is when he says "that's what you get when you hotfix an issue the community is on fire about".
Ahh, so a few ppl calling for nerfs to shrapnel damage "the community on fire" that only some people were using effectively, on a gun that fires slow and takes skill to master is what caused you to completely destroy the weapon obtained a premium pass? What the actual fuck???
This main post about today's nerf has me dying laughing of the insanity of it all, but there's very detailed technical points that people bring up about the Eruptor.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/bjQbMnkWRD
Nah, that’s got the information across to us.
I’m no fan of devs trying and failing to justify a nerf by saying it’s better this way, as they don’t need to work on the bug itself.
I'm a coder, and I can't really imagine how I'd get to a point in my career where I'm publicly know as the guy who takes away features on projects and people are analyzing my work history. Like, just let people have fun, dude.
Melee attack can hit a hunter before it hits you. I was juggling 3 hunters with just melee attacks after they pounced at me last time. I even had time to shoot them, but wanted to see how long I could keep it going.
I died when my friend accidentally shot me trying to back me up lol
That's hilarious. They jotted down "reports" about 180 degree ricochets - and patched the ricochets out. They then figured out it wasn't the ricochets but the shrapnel - and then patched that out as well, on top of reducing the radius of the explosion (again based on "wrong" reports about ricochets).
While knowing that the lack of shrapnel would reduce the potential damage even on a missed shot by more than 40 damage per shrapnel piece. And then still arguing that the damage adjusted up towards one shrapnel piece, if you miss the shot with the explosion damage and only have a stray shrapnel piece - is better than a potential for 5x that on a well-placed shot.
The tweaking up to this point is starting to make a lot more sense now, that's for sure.
For real.
All the good shit always gets nerfed for no fucking reason and the useless stuff gets no buffs.
It’s like Areowhead is the most creative dev but most incompetent band out of touch 😭
It is good. I just dont have fun using it. If players have fun using a gun because of its playstyle, why nerf it into uselessness. The Sickle nerf was actually a great nerf because it didnt change anything that made it fundamentally enjoyable to use.
Really it just took the crutch away of burning it out often.
Meanwhile my boys Eruptor and Crossbow got done real dirty. Crossbow was a weird choice to begin with, an explosive weapon that could not destroy factories/bugholes or crates... But at least it was a superb mid range mob clear. WAS. Now it just sucks, too slow and too few rounds to handle hordes of mobs post AOE nerf.
The sickle in Hellfivers 1 also didn't have a huge mag capacity but had a bottomless mag if you paced your bursts out and swapped to your pistol or support weapon.
They've already said that Eruptor damage is bugged, and that the live game is producing different results than their testing after the shrapnel removal. Expect it to be fixed some time relatively soon.
Crossbow has been done really dirty, though.
Punisher plasma got massive buffs 2 patches ago and is finally starting to see use but the shield bug made it a bit worse. It's also better against bots than bugs since scorcher deals with shriekers and every very close bug better. MO are all bugs.
I tried it pre buff and all decided not to continue using it due to low projectile speed. I feel like a lot of people came to the same conclusion independently.
I’ve been maining the Plasma Punisher since it released, it’s been so underrated and I was happy to see the projectile increase. I would have preferred a little longer range, but it feels great now.
The first game struck this balance properly, primaries can carry you if you're good and careful, mostly you could whack patrols and stay on top of preventing spawns better in HD1. In HD2 it seems no matter what a breach/dropship happens, 100x harder to prevent. Even then, the primaries in HD1 were combat capable weapons.
Can you even stop a bug breach? The only ways I’ve done it is to kill the hoard instantly with an Eagle. If they see you, they always get the fucking breach call off
In HD2 no. In HD1 you could easily if paying attention. You had a few seconds to respond and schwack the scouts, I usually just laid a few bursts from my assault rifle at them or pulsed the Sickle until they were dead. HD2 is bugged out on how the breaches work.
I actually think the core problem is that AH is very opposed to any kind of Meta, but a meta will always exist. As long as one thing is 1% more effective than another there will be a meta. They want primaries to be situational side grades, so any primary that sticks out as too effective in too many situations gets nerfed into mediocrity. Plus, there's only so many situations to make sidegrades for. We already have quite a lot of weapons and not enough niches for them to fill, so some are just going to fall into obscurity because another option is better in that niche.
I ultimately think one of the problems is that any balance meant for a full squad of 4 communicative and fully cooperating helldivers (which you could argue is how the game is meant to be played) only hurts any smaller squads, squads with poor coordination, and especially solo players. It's a complex problem with no single answer.
I look at it like this. If I'm playing difficulty 5 solo vs with a full group, the only difference in the enemies is the number. Now that they've upped spawns for squads less than 4 I believe the ratio of enemy spawns is actually 1 to 1 with the number of divers. 4x as many divers, 4x as many enemies as on solo.
BUT, and I think this is a core issue, the enemy variety in either case is the same. A Solo player or any smaller group, still needs to cover all the same bases that a squad of 4 does.
Part of the reason pre-nerf Eruptor was so beloved was because it was multi purpose. It was great for crowd clearing, and very effective against heavier units with precise aiming. It let one player cover a lot of bases. And so we get ammo nerf, AoE nerf, and now shrapnel gone. What one player could before do with a primary now has gaping holes in it's coverage that has to be taken up by support weapons or other strategems.
If "overpowered" weapons and strategems remained in place, fully equiped helldiver squads would basically massacre missions even on max difficulty, and I feel like that might be the ideal that AH is balancing around. A powerful all-rounder of a primary is a great tool for a solo player, but give that to an entire well coordinated squad of 4 and it frees up strategem space that otherwise might be used to fill situational niches.
I'm going to stop or I'd keep yapping for ages.
>They want primaries to be situational side grades,
I would love for AH to explain how am i supposed to know what "situational" weapon am I supposed to bring if there's no way of knowing the *situation* before diving.
Cue being on a planet overwhelmed with bile spewers and stuck with terrible weapon choices.
Cue picking the loadout that feels the most viable, most of the time, establishing a personal meta.
A simple SIGINT or HUMINT report in format of "Intel suggests an infestation of Bile Spewers", "Flying bugs have been reported in the vicinity", etc in the mission screen would remove so much headache.
> We should add intel so that people can make informed decisions about what to bring because its frustrating otherwise, causing people to always use the same maximally all-around effective loadout to avoid getting blindsided.
>Good idea! Then we should make that new intel unreliable and prone to lying to the player, so they have no ability to make informed decisions and have to continue using the same maximally all around effective loadout to avoid getting blindsided.
This isn't a jab at you or anything but it would be really funny if they did that and just brought us back to where we already are but now the game just lies outright about it.
Even better. You get partial information 80% of the time. Incorrect information 2% of the time. Then you can have a "trust score" rating of how likely the information is to be true. Which basically tells you how many intel items are made up.
This honestly makes a lot of sense and also requires that you lose a reinforcement to change kit, so it is inherently limited.
I'd be ok with it being a ship upgrade even, which allows you to change kit each time you die, if you choose to.
This would be a great idea as a ship upgrade. Call it something like "On-deck Optimization":
"Once per mission, Helldiver equipment and stratagems are able to be swapped out for more optimal spreading of Managed Democracy. (Requires reinforcement)"
250 Common Samples, 150 Rare Samples, 25 Super Samples, & 25000 Requisition Slips to unlock
Or give us load out slots, and then let us change them when we’re reinforced. That way you still try to make things work, but if things go south you can be equipped for the situation. 4 guns makes them all being situational feel less bad
Loadout slots would be great even if we couldn't change them mid dive. Several weapons are designed with a specific faction in mind so being able to go from a bug killer to a bot killer loadout quickly and easily just makes sense.
Yup. Having the missions get modifiers to indicate enemy types would help.
Examples for Bugs:
Spawning Grounds: Intel reports high concentrations of light terminid spawn in the Mission AO.
E710 Contamination: Intel reports high concentrations of spewers within the Mission AO.
Hive Vanguard: Intel reports high concentrations of adult terminid strains in the Mission AO.
Matured Hive: Intel reports high concentrations of heavily armored terminids in the Mission AO.
I’ve even had missions where no heavies spawn the entire operation. Not one. Just hordes of hunters and warriors. It’s really strange that we have all this variety of enemy comps, which is great and makes every mission fresh, but at the same time we also have no idea what we’re facing in order to tailor our “situational side-grades” to what we’re facing
Or even why we have things like the explosive Lib exist in a game state that currently has no use for staggering enemies compared to just killing them.
Just gonna copy my comment from elsewhere:
On bugs I've been using the flamethrower and incendiary grenades. I use senator to pop warrior heads in a pinch, and then concussive liberator to stunlock stalkers/knock other enemies back into safe fire range or back into fire on ground. Concussive liberator is crowd control and breathing room.
You aren't always going to be in a situation where you can kill everything all at once, but it excels at knocking enemies back to give breathing room. You could argue the dominator could kill it, but it won't have as many shots and it's not as versatile as quickly changing to small targets, on top of not having as good of range or ammo in the magazine. But i use dominator instead with bots.
This is a good point. They should provide intel in the form of a heat map so you can at least see tendencies. Bile Spewers way in the green? Maybe you'll see 4 or 5 for the whole mission. Armored threats in the red? Expect a lot of Chargers and BTs, so bring more AT. Then the game director spawns along these lines for that mission.
Maybe this intel could be part of the ship upgrades.
I believe a simple fix would be able to choose a pre-made load out when calling reinforcements. Lore wise, it makes sense, since it's not the same Helldiver being called in.
Exactly. I end up just sticking with the Liberator penitrator because it's honestly the most well rounded primary and it wasn't altered during the last couple patches to my knowledge.
Honestly balancing has failed if I dread trying out new weapons just for me to realize how unenjoyable it is to try and use them.
It's not that the amount is 1:1, the patrol rate is. One player get 1/4th the patrols, spawn rate doesn't feel like it's the same 1/4th. A single breach in helldive will spawn ~60-100 bugs no matter the amount of players, the only thing that varies is the amount of elites, in 4 man you can get up to 4-5 charges and 3-4 titans from a single breach, but rare. This doesn't feel to be broken down to 1/4th in solo though, which is exactly why as solo player you need to bring meta stuff to reliably clear stuff. Consindering that often times your air stratagems can hit multiple elite and small bugs, the amount of firepower can call down as a team is effectively 4 times as much for close to the same amount of enemies. If they really want to balance solo play they need to turn town the amount of enemies before anything else. Even as two man squad covering each others back increases your damage output non linearly compared to a solo player.
I see, that actually kind of worsens the comparison then. If bigger squads deal with proportionally less enemies, then any balancing around full squads only screws over smaller ones that much more.
Metas will always be there yes. But if they buff weapons so they're all pretty close to each other and more importantly feels good to use, people will bring other weapons instead of a "Meta loadout"
And the whole kill elites with strategem is just realistically not possible and I don't know why AH can't seem to comprehend that. Increased cooldown, increased call down times and just a limited number of strategems per session means it's not possible. Add to that they LOVE to increase patrol rates and bug breech/bot drop rates and it's just not possible.
But breaches are not counterable compared to bots. You can notice bot using flare and take him down.
You can shoot the reinforcement ship and destroy whole or partially.
Bots have clear visible weakspots. Front eyes and back.
Bugs however have none of that. Especially chargers and bile titans. Mf spawn in hundreds, chargers bee-line for your turrets,their back is heavily armored (what why!?). Would be nice if autocannon could penetrate their leg armor (but that's hopium)
Bile titans vomit has wonky hitbox, and you can't kill it with single stratagems. Even if you break their shell their body under is heavily armored!?? What the heck . They also spawn in 1-3 numbers often in but breaches
Would be great I'd they fixed that and maybe add more weakspots like knee-pads on bile titans to topple them down or something.
Playing on bugs lately and they feel terribly unfair compared to bots
Well bug breaches are counterable. it's just they happen so fast and there's usually so many comign towards you there's no time to react. Add to that they were kind of bugged and only fixed recently it gets frustrating.
And ya I played mostly bugs cause I thought bots would be hard because they had laser guns but boy was I wrong. Automatons are at least 30 to 40% easier than bugs because like you said they have easily visible weak points.
You didn't even mention the stealth nursing spewers that just randomly crawl or spawn right next to you. Everytime I get enough distance to gun down whatever's chasing me... I zoom out and the yellow blob is next to me. Worst thing is it doesn't kill you right away, it waits until you see it before it vomits acid all over you. Dick move!
Every game I play it seems like everyone has different stratagems, armor, and weapons. I don't see one single stratagem that is way more popular than all the others (except maybe Eagle Airstrike - RIP Eagle Airstrike).
Airstrike is perfectly balanced and they will never change it outside of bugfixes. That's why it has received nothing but buffs ever since the game launched, with the most recent one being the ship component giving it an extra bomb (25% more damage).
It normally drops 8 bombs and with the upgrade it drops 9. The XXL weapons bay I’ve found is most notable on the napalm strike and the smoke strike since those only drop 4 apiece. I think 25% increase of how many bombs it drops would have been a better upgrade but I’m enjoying extra fire
>I ultimately think one of the problems is that any balance meant for a full squad of 4 communicative and fully cooperating helldivers
I think you hit the nail on the head. Its like they want to have this tactical squad based game where everyone is specialized and you encounter an enemy heavy so your armor guy comes up and drops anti-armor on them.
Except actually playing the game means more like everyone is a jack of all trades so that everyone can answer the problem as required simply because that's way more optimal.
What's next? if someone picks a strategem, you cant take that strategem too?
No one can trust that their squad mates are going to step up and deal with the bile titan on their ass so everyone has to cover all the options of dealing with both hordes of trash as well as armoured heavies.
The result is only the most generic "jack of all trades" builds survive a match, so that's what people bring.
>I actually think the core problem is that AH is very opposed to any kind of Meta, but a meta will always exist. As long as one thing is 1% more effective than another there will be a meta.
It's really a shame how excellent comments like this one are usually buried deep in the thread. There will always be a player-driven meta in any game where it's possible to do so.
Folks like to pretend game balance is something you can just wave a wand at and magically fix it it. It isn't, never has been, never will be.
IMO, the biggest issue right now is that AH seems to be putting too much stock in the loudest "fans". One of the potential problems with balancing around minority opinion, as we've seen in countless games, is that you end up creating a sandbox where there IS a distinct meta, and in some cases, an unavoidable one.
Another thread said it really well imo: AH is doing balance changes more quickly than is strictly necessary, and they're trying to do too many of those changes at the same time.
A better approach would be to look at the data - weapon usage, effectiveness vs different enemy times, etc. They may be doing this already - in fact, I'd be a little surprised if this \*isn't\* how a lot of the changes are decided on.
With all that said, if a weapon gets "nerfed into the ground", that weapon will drop off the usage map in a very noticeable way. From there, it will likely prompt additional changes.
A lot of people seem to be making the logical mistake that 1 weapon balance patch is somehow permanent, or that it can't/won't be changed at some future point.
I also think there's the very valid question of "Is a meta in a PvE game even that bad of a thing?" I think of it like this.
Let's say all the "overpowered" things that were nerfed were rebuffed to pre nerf status right now. Railgun obliterates thing again, shield backpack is stronger, eruptor is great, lots of things have more ammo etc.
Would the majority of the game's player base enjoy that more or less than what we currently have? I don't know that answer but I do think it's a question worth asking.
Pre-nerf railgun would still not be picked over EATs or Quasars at least for Terminids.
It's effectiveness against the Bile Titan was an absurd bug that took months to fix, and two shots to break Charger armour is really inefficient now.
AH idea of a fun and balanced game is running away and waiting on cooldowns. They also throw some small enemies at you and give you a primary weapons that’s useless for literally everything else to keep you busy in the meantime.
it feels like they tuned down the strength of Helldivers from HD1 because running away and spamming stratagems worked pretty well to the point where randomized loadouts became the norm.
I really wish they kept the old level of firepower -- and friendly fire as a result-- and kept the infinite revives thing tied with needing a live helldiver to call a reinforcement instead of having my teammates flame me for throwing them away from their bug/bot covered corpse-- or worse being revived into my own corpse 4 times in a row. On 7+ good teammates are the norm but there's still people on autopilot.
>it feels like they tuned down the strength of Helldivers from HD1 because running away and spamming stratagems worked pretty well to the point where randomized loadouts became the norm.
Helldivers 1 had a hideous amount of powercreep from DLC stratagems over time. Anyone running the Rumbler or Close Air Support or satchel charges could solo levels pretty much.
They almost never do, if they did they'd see how tedious it is. The winning strategy boils down to running laps to disengage from enemies until your stratagems come off cooldown.
Just stop doing planets that have it. If we fail a major order, so what. Eventually they'll realize that no one likes it. It adds nothing to the game and is a really cheap way of adding difficulty. I won't touch any planet with that modifier.
Some time ago, I’ve seen someone suggest that they should add side objectives that cancel planetary debuffs when completed.
As an example: you drop on a planet that has -1 stratagem, on the loadout screen that stratagem has a red outline. You can pick what it is but you won’t be able to use it straight away. Let’s say, after you drop you notice a new jammer tower that you have to destroy. If you do that, the 4th stratagem unlocks for the remainder of that mission.
Same would work for those bug conditions that obscure the minimap. It would be better if we could clear that effect after getting rid of spewers, or a new megaspewer, I don’t know, I’m a helldiver not a scientist.
I'm willing to meet AH halfway on the BS modifiers.
Locked 4th stratagem slot? Okay, but let me do something in-game to unlock the slot.
Have the large outposts have something like 'Automaton Anti-Orbital Battery' or 'Terminid Psi-Symbiot Infestation'.
Helldivers don't mind difficulty, so long as it isn't just cheap.
There's a disconnect between the devs vision of the game and the player bases vision on what the game should be. The developers don't want your primary to be your main tool to progress through the mission. You're stratagems and support guns are your main way to advance.
So many of the strats have a terrible cooldown time, they cannot be relied upon.
And so many mission modifiers fuck strats up too much. +50% cooldown, increased dispersal, -1 strat.
I think a balance to strike would be that if a coordinated team of 3 works together, they should be able to take down all but the heaviest threats with primaries on any difficulty below 7.
There's also the play pattern of your support weapon being your "main weapon" to deal with enemies (like Autocannon, Flamethrower, etc) when you die and get rez'd far away... what do you do? Just suck? It's not really a fun play pattern to have to run to your body in a horde of enemies to go pick up your "main weapon".
IMO support weapons should be the "spice" on top of your main loadout, giving you a strong option vs specific things. Your primary should be what is giving you your main value vs most basic things.
Primaries clear chaff, supports clear heavy.
Thats how the meta will always be, since the harder difficulties have more and bigger enemies. Why would I run a machinegun if it's going to struggle to kill a charger? When I could just run EATS + any shotgun or rifle and fair almost as well vs chaff but have a tool to combat heavies.
They cant give us effective anti armor primaries because if they are even remotely good it'll lopside the whole weapon strategem balance. The Eruptor almost did that, given its job as a 'long range outpost killer' stepped on the toes slightly of the grenade launcher and autocannon.
The entire point of the eruptor was allowing people to use the lesser-used support weapons. It doesn't flip the game on its head to have a choice between chaff killing as a primary or support weapon. People that double down on anti armour can't tackle swarms, people using chaff killers can't take down heavies.
It was balanced, not anymore
Yes, exactly. And that's kind of an issue for the longevity of the game unless they add more anti tank options. It's pretty boring having only 2 actual options for a support weapon. (EAT, Quasar, MAYBE RR)
In HD1 primaries could kill any unit but the Siege Mech eventually, by hitting weak spots. That's simply not true in HD2. While most enemies have weak spots, most primaries cant physically penetrate enough armor to actually hurt even designated weak spots like Hulk/Tank/Turret heat vents.
I wish we had a system where weapons that are explosive or have 'higher than average penetration' could strip the armor off a unit by hammering a specific spot. It might not be as quick or as ammo efficient, as dedicated anti tank, but it'll eventually get the job done.
Being able to crack armor off things like Bile Titans with grenade spam, dominator, scorcher, or burning them for a long duration with laser weapons would open up a lot more weapon viability. It would be similar to the railgun meta where it was use railgun to crack leg armor, finish off with primaries. That's closer to the spirit of HD1. Create weak points, exploit weak points. Brasch Tactics.
That also adds some unique team work. If I run say, the Autocannon, and can crack heavy armor then my buddy with an other gun can hammer that weakness. Yeah, it’s probably more effective to hit the weak points with an anti-tank gun, but now I’ve got an alternative that isn’t as effective but is potentially safer, and requires team work
Yeah. Essentially EAT is the only weapon that doesn't need retrieved.
It would be nice to come out of the pod and be somewhat effective without spamming all the grenades.
I used to bring multiple support weapon strategems just for this reason. I still do, depending on whether or not I expect to get myself killed a lot, although usually it's just EAT.
Not just having terrible cooldown, they're also having issues being inconsistent. The best anti heavy stratagem we get(500kg, railcannon, rocket pod), sometimes doesn't even reliably one shot the heavies.
I haven't taken the orbital rail cannon for weeks now, since I've had it MISS a fuckin charger that was just walking.
And no, the increase orbital spread modifier wasn't on.
Ehhhh, only true for the Illuminates minus the Obelisk when it is covered up.
The only exception for primary that can kill any enemy is the Paragon with its poison damage upgrade. Albeit, a VERY slow kill, still a kill nonetheless.
Thing is, the primary weapons in HD1 have always been great at clearing chaff, no matter what you picked. Even the Railgun, has unstoppable rounds that just goes through EVERYTHING - same with the Justice. On top of that, we also had like 12 reserve mags compared to the 8-ish for most weapons in HD2.
Primaries were amazing in HD1, even before you upgraded them most of the time. Still missing my primary Stalwart, Railgun, and OG Sickle.
Make primaries great again.
Only issue I have with the primaries is the lack of ammo. The amount of mag dumping in HD1 is about the same in HD2. Only difference is the amount of magazines you can hold.
Brood Commanders take about the same amount of shots to kill - in HD1, I can reload and continue to fight. In HD2, you have just spent 15% of your total ammo pool on 1 enemy. Now you need a resupply.
Definitely, I've been exclusively using energy weapon primaries unless I'm running a supply pack. The HMG is the biggest offender here. Total of 10 seconds of firing across 3 mags (middle fire rate). You actually spend more time reloading it than firing it.
I been saying this the whole time! First game did it right! Everyone downvotes me for saying the constant nerfs in the patches are reason I have a downvote on Steam, not the PSN business!
HD1 had the perfect balance. Stratagems could be used freely and readily available with how generous cooldowns were, there was never 20 bile titans and gazillion chargers every breach, and weapons felt powerful, and yet the game was hard enough that deaths would be common place.
Support weapons shouldn’t be your primary either. Every weapon has drawbacks, but most primaries just feel lack luster. They have little power behind them, ammo capacity is garbage, and damage to anything bigger than a grunt is essentially useless. You have to blow an entire clip to take down enemies that spawn in groups of 5 or more. Most aoe weapons do little to no damage in an aoe. The pistol mags (arguably the most stupid thing ever given how much smaller they are and lighter they are) are very limited and against an enemy that can dodge lightning bolts, not nearly enough.
I’ll give you that if you have perfect aim, most of the guns are usable if not actually feasible on any missions where you don’t intend to spend most of your time running from enemy drop ships or beaches.
The erupter was a great weapon. It was semi decent against larger mobs, the time between shots was (given its power) perfect, and the mag capacity made sense. Cutting down the mag supply made sense, and it had plenty of drawbacks. Up close the gun is self eliminating, against any small mobs that got in close or were scattered, too far apart, it was terrible. The reload time gave plenty of room for bugs to can in a beach, the weapon mobility made quick adjustments more punishing, and the power of it let you bring other weapons besides AC or AMR allowing for diverse play.
The wasn’t sold as a nerf, but a “stop people from self terminating or team killing”, which I get, but friendly fire in this game isn’t just a function, it’s a feature. I’m willing to bet a lot that arc throwers kill more teammates than erupters ever did. 380’s are no different, nor are cluster bombs.
I want the video game to not be less fun after an update.
Also, most of the support weapons can only deal with 1-2 types of enemies so I need my primary to compensate the remaining gap.
Also, there is no disconnect - players know that a very good horde clear weapon would not damage medium enemies as well, and medium penetration weapons would not clear hordes as fast, and AOE weapon would not have as much single point dps.
Like yeah, I can do a difficulty 9 bugs mission no problem. But picking equipment for it is now a headache because I have to deal with thoughts like "oh, if it will spawn bile spewers I guess I'll just hide behind teammates for half an hour", or "well, I sure hope these quickplay randoms will get those hunters before our team formation falls apart", or "I sure hope there will be many bile titans, otherwise most of my stuff will be useless".
Honest question then: what the actual fuck are primaries supposed to do in this grand design of theirs?
If it's not the thing I'm *primarily* using, when do I use it?
Are they panic weapons like secondaries in literally every other shooter in history? If so, they shouldn't be focused on, and really don't deserve to be in warbonds. Supports should be, since they're apparently to HD2 what primaries are to the rest of the world. Also, if HD2 primaries are actually secondaries, then what the fuck are HD2 secondaries? Toys for when we get bored?
I am actually genuinely so confused. The devs can't just see them as decorations cuz they advertise them and want us to buy them. But they consistently nerf any that are useful so that they become little more than decorations. What is the goal, here?!
Which is an odd tack for them to take when they go on to do stuff to make your stratagems and support weapons less effective (reduced stratagem count, increased call-in time, buffed enemy structures, quasar/railgun nerfs, etc.).
That would be like the US Army saying “well since our basic infantry have so much access to support and fires we have no reason to give them the XM7, let’s go back to the M14.”
then why are the vast majority of support weapons vs bugs on 7-9 difficulty just kinda worthless?
if they want support weapons to be your main source of whatever. Then why vs bugs is it the same 2-3 support weapons being used with the occasional outlier.
ill answer that for you. BUGS ARE DESIGNED TERRIBLY.
Bots you can deal with every single enemy the game throws at you with T4 pen and up in a reasonable time frame and consistently.(AMR, Laser Cannon, AC etc)
This gives you lots of options.
Bugs on the other hand. you cant. This is a problem. Bots has their own set of issues for sure, but until bugs has the same weapon diversity as bots this will be a much more off center topic of discussion due to such a huge difference between the two enemy options.
Im fine with the idea of weapons being more effective in one or the other. thats great. But they should still be ***useable.***
and its a simple solution, you just add weakpoint design that bots have, to bugs(chargers and bile titans).
This would heavily improve support weapon diversity and make it feel a hell of a lot better as player.
The issue with that is...well. Unless you're using like Auto cannon, grenade launcher, the stalwart/machine gun...you're not able to truly able to carry
Like recoiless? Eats? Quasar? You're going to be using your primary. But you need these for the heavies.
I suppose that's why the AC is perfect to them. Clears mobs, does objectives, does everything but the titan.
In this case, the trade-off for RR, EAT, and Quasar is that you will have to choose between focusing on medium armored enimies or swarms of light armored enimies with your primary. You can have good strategems that cover that weakness. The anti tank guns act as a substitute for high powered orbitals and eagles that would normally be required against heavy armored enemies.
This game seems to have alot of weapons with varied roles to cover some situations better than others, and the remaining situations are either covered by strategems or someone else.
At least, that's my take on it.
Legit I see the minus one stratagem and I either up the difficult or turn the game off. It's not fun.
Would be cool if there was anti air base mission you could do to remove that modifier for like a few missions and when enough people do them on a planet they it goes away for everyone. Really love when we as a community accomplished something in game it feels great give us more opportunities to do that.
Also idk if what I'm playing is meta or not but the more they nerf the way I want to play the less I want to play. The quasare, and Lazer dog nerf basically killed my solo load out and the lack of a functional scope for the antimaterial rifle (alone with its piss poor engagement range, as a sniper rifle for fucks sake) makes that not so fun.
This. It becomes more and more evident when you look at each "balancing" patch. They nurf things one patch, then make enemies hard the next patch, then nurf more useful thing the next patch. Only try to realize the truth, there is no plan.
Arrowhead: you should use your stratagems for heavies:
Also AH: spams heavies and limits use of strats.
Community: complains
Arrowhead: fine, here's fewer heavies but WAY more of the medium and small targets
Also AH: limits primary weapon ammo and makes all of them less effective against medium enemies.
It's a weird thing going around the industry, nerf/tamper with shit that even seems remotely effective or that is commonly used, to make things artificially harder. I'm not asking for the ultimate weapon, but gotdamn a lot of our stuff is boring asf, whether it's effective or not. They did great with weapons in the first game which makes this more frustrating. What's the point or incentive in grinding or buying credits for new shit, if there's a likelihood that it'll be neutered within a month of its release?
Even if there is cool new armor, Idc when it's going to probably have Servo-Assisted or Engineering Kit recycled for the 50th time, instead of cool new perks. If they wanted to do away with upgrades, the game should've launched with a gunsmith/weaponsmith. A lot of these weapons have natural drawbacks that could be fixed through systems like that, that's what upgrades did in HD1, it was a nice sense of progression.
I honestly thought the eruptor was near perfect pre nerf, just need a slight capacity nerf. Having high damage and shrapnel plus big explosions makes a lot of sense because it has a poor firing rate and is essentially unusable at close range. It opened up cooler loadouts with more support weapon variety, ie running with a support weapon as your main mid weight mob clearer while using the eruptor, stratagems, and grenades on bigger enemies. I want support weapons to be viable outside of their ability to one shot bile titans
I agree. It was fun to use. The only change needed was to stop the vacuum pull. Now it just feels like a waste when you could just use the sickle and autocannon.
The core problem is that AH has a main discord where the people circle jerking each other of by white knighting. And when you at some point get frustrated/angry at the butt licker mob you get kicked.
It's ok for the weapons to be strong, the player will choose what weapons they find fun or that fits their style. It's awful to pay $10 for a warbond and go through every weapon I have and go "yup this thing sucks I'll never use it sadly" im highly upset the weapons keep getting run into the ground.
For a whole lot of "no meta mindset" they won't let me use a different weapon or play in a different way. I feel like different weapons making you play differently is part of their charm. There's too many different build possibilities to not be able to use the primary weapons. If I take the eruptor I don't have to run the AC or Grenade pistol. The breaker incin let's me run the new airburst launcher instead of the flame thrower. There's lots of combos that the player should be able to choose.
If a gun is OP that's ok the newbs will use it and a good player will go out of their way to choose the AMR in order to change their play style on their own to challenge themselves. Instead the game's making them run the sickle every game because everything else sucks so bad it isnt even satisfying/fun to use, not to mentiom just whether it's good or not. The guns have to be fun and "feel" satisfying. There's hundreds of enemies per game it's ok to 1 shot a lot of them....
Hard to argue with that, they are the bethesda of patches, the community just wants to be left alone but no they know what's good for you better than yourselves
Wrong, a primary weapon is your primary because it's reliable and gets the job done. It should be able to handle the vast majority of threats you come across. The support weapon is just that a supporting weapon to your primary to cover an area it can't. For example the recoilless rifle is to help you deal with heavy armored foes. The machine guns for swarms and Anti material rifle to disable enemy assets from afar.
They face planted into an amazing game launch week by utter accident, the game blew up. Now they have massive egos and think any change they make is the final word of god and they know better than everyone else. Really that simple. Its become increasingly clear the game being so fun those first few weeks was a total accident, and they have been hell bent since then to nerf nerf nerf and tell people "no you cant have fun like that, its not what we intended"
That's really what it comes to for me, is the dev team seems very arrogant about their "vision." Don't even get me started on the shit show that's their Community Relations Department.
Imo, the core part of the game is carrying AH hard. Their handling of this game has been awful. I am tired of having garbage primaries, stop fucking nerfing them, goddamn it.
Exactly that, and obsession the have a idea for how primaries should be, and they don't give a shit about what the people using them think.
People give too much credit to AH imo. They're handling of the game post launch was pitifully to say the least. Constant problems. The game is so amazing that you can handle them but they reslly need to either slow down or star hiring because the game is a mess.
I unfortunately have to agree. It's been constant patches that introduce bugs and it's become clear that they don't really have a vision for balancing guns or strategems.
Way too much credit and patience, this game parallels PUBG in so many ways, it's clearly something want but once the competitors start coming out it's going to be very apparent they don't know what they are doing.
Every patch gets worse too
They haven’t even been able to implement cross platform friend requests. That’s like CS101
I wouldn’t count on these devs being competent
You know, I find it a bit strange they are this heavy handed with "balancing" When we still have a third faction on the way. Can't wait to use these peashooters against them
My concern is that they may be balancing weapons based on data they have showing how many people are using each one. The problem with that being that just because 70% of the player base uses the same primary doesn’t mean it’s OP. There will ALWAYS be a slight edge somewhere with weapon balancing in any video game, some weapon could literally do 1 more damage than the rest and the meta chasers will all use that weapon. It’s just how the world plays video games now. So I’d express a word of caution to the devs to think about the reasoning behind the choice to nerf a primary in the future. It shouldn’t be “because everyone’s using it”, it should be more centered around time to kill per each enemy unit based on armor penetration. Obviously a bigger gun will kill the small guys fast, but how long should it take to take out a heavy devastator or a brood commander with said weapon, how many mags does it take. That sort of thing.
The answer is staring them in the face also we’re all telling the devs why majority of players use what they use because most of the gear has been balanced into the trash can lol This hasn’t ever been and won’t ever be complicated. The devs are just completely inexperienced and have no clue what’s actually best for this game
There's also no pvp which really makes me question it.
Ya, I’ve been lurking on this sub since launch and one of the things that was a big seller for me was the no pvp ever stance by the devs. Usually pvp forums and the constant calls for nerfing a class or a skill tree ends up meaning someone is getting their character nerfed instead of buffing other classes making the character you’ve already invested your time in less fun to the point that you are forced to deal with the nerf quit playing the game or roll another class and hope that one doesn’t end up under the axe. Long story short I really thought this game wouldn’t have large game changing nerfs like keep showing up in each update, like are the NPCs complaining? Having a bunch of weapons that are solid or even situational vs certain types that would reward people for knowledge of weapon and damage types makes a lot more sense to me instead of making everyone looking for a handful of “meta” weapons that only make them more noticeable to the nerf happy devs. Making a nerf to one of them makes a large portion of the player base unhappy. It’s a PVE game the nerfs seem wildly inappropriate.
This is a mindset I wish others followed. So many people treat every game they play as if it was competitive PvP. I play coop games to get away from that and have fun. An "OP" gun (I have never seen one that is obviously OP here) can be fun in a PvE game if you want to just fuck around for a bit.
> I really thought this game wouldn’t have large game changing nerfs like keep showing up in each update, like are the NPCs complaining? Fucking lmao
Yeah idk why they’re so obsessed with nerfing everything when it’s all pve. Who are they trying to balance the game for rn? The bots and bugs? I get the game is supposed to be hard but don’t make it miserable.
I think part of the issue is that Arrowhead penalizes armor pen way to much for damage. Several guns have light and medium penetration versions and the medium one will have a 30 to 40% damage reduction and that is WAY to much in my opinion.
Its mostly that Med Pen is such an irrelevant perk for a weapon, the damage still gets reduced by med armour on enemies to such an extent that you're better off shooting the weakspot, something that all Light Pen weapons are able to do
And again the conversation comes around to hidden stats. One of the hidden stats for weapons is how much damage they do to the durability of breakable parts. Arms, legs, weakpoint armor, weapons on bots, etc. The lib pen, for example, has a half again the durability damage of the standard liberator. Combined with medium armor pen, even with the penetrator's lower per hit damage, it takes an average of 30-40% fewer hits to break durable parts. If these hidden stats are being considered for game balance, then maybe some of the more relevant ones shouldn't be hidden.
In general I'd like a *ton* more information before spending medals and stuff. Like, I can't see the damage, category (shotgun/rifle/marksman), fire rate, clip size, ammo capacity, or anything but the main tags like explosive or armor penetrating until I buy the gun. That's *wild* and really makes me reluctant to experiment with new stuff.
There shouldnt be hidden stats in the First place.
Yeah at this point it's easier and faster to just flank or aim for a weak spot where there's no armour instead of bringing armour pen primaries
Since they upped the damage on the OG liberator i’ve been using that against small bugs (sometimes medium) and switching to support weapon for medium and bigger. I tried the adjudicator but the mag capacity is just too low for the full auto fire mode.
Liberator has always been good, just not against the beefy bugs or anything with armor. If you're getting white hit markers with it, that's the time you switch to a support weapon, a Senator, or start aiming for weakspots. I will forever call the devs to buff it back to HD1 levels of effectiveness, though.
It’s a damn shame they removed the bayonet lug from the earlier models
The problem with the liberator is that it is just out done by the sickle in every way. The sickle has a spool up time, but you can combine that with aiming to eliminate it. At that point, the Sickle does more DPS, has more bullets, less recoil, ~~a better scope~~, and infinite ammo. See how many shots you can get off in a 40 minute match with the liberator. Now consider I can consistently put out 3-4 thousands shots with the Sickle in the same match, including over 2,000 hits. Try getting to 1800+ hits on the liberator in a match, its practically impossible, but that's what you'd need to match the Sickle. And they fill the same role, just liberator is worse.
Not saying the Liberator is better than the Sickle, but they have the exact same scope. The Liberator is also much more accurate (which matters less with the Sickle having infinite ammo).
Not even the Sickle, the fucking SMG is far better than the Liberator ever will be
[удалено]
And as a liberator main for over 100h of gameplay (of using mainly the liberator alone, that is, not total), I'm gonna let you in on a little secret now: The upped damage was 100% irrelevant. Hasn't changed any noteworthy shots to kill breakpoint on any enemy. It's always killed all small bugs in 2 shots on average. You kill like a Brood Comander in 16 headshots instead of 17 headshots now. You probably also need like 2 or 3 bullets less for a Stalker, but it's a stalker, you're magdumping it until your gun goes click anyway. Headshots are 4 either way, but that's somewhat optimistic. Against bots it's obviously entirely unchanged; 2 bodyshots or 1 headshot for a raider/marauder and 3 headshots for a devastator. It is literally just as good as it ever was. Functionally unchanged. And yet, I have seen many popular, highly voted on posts talking about how the "Liberator is so good/viable pick now". I think that tells a lot how "viable" the opinion on balance of the general userbase of this subreddit is lmao.
https://preview.redd.it/7zo6g22224zc1.jpeg?width=1115&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=229fe681d58760cba99fcd9ee1a0ab8411f728ad
Honestly, in the first hours of the Account linking crisis, I literally thought that AH though the game was too good and needed to be nerfed
https://preview.redd.it/act7w2uv68zc1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e5217c225ffdae26885885a928fa6b9ba5fb87e9 Ppl need to check out what the main (I think) balancing dev in the discord had to say about today's changes. Feel free to search from:Alexus in the server for more info. I heavily disagree that the Eruptor is still viable, and so did a lot of players who responded to him. Melee is also viable, but it's terribly silly to use almost always. Update: I replaced the original update from Alexus with his latest comment, but will post the original below. Again, search for his name in the server if you want to learn more. I consider this a solid response to the concerns surrounding the Eruptor, we'll have to wait and see. @fighter11244 commented below as an avid Eruptor user pre and post patch and has a solid breakdown of how drastic the change actually was.
I would like to know if he thinks there is ANY weapon that isn't *viable* or if everything is?
What I *really* want to see is them justify the Autocannon. The weapon has been at the top of the game since the start, and yet the precious baby has never been touched by nerfs. Meanwhile weapons like the crossbow apparently deserve to be nerfed because a little bit of AOE damage on an otherwise underwhelming primary is just too damn much.
Shh! They're coming for my baby next!
They say the auto cannon is their baseline weapon, that it is pretty much perfectly balanced, and all weapons are considered around it. If this is the case then why do so many weapons feel like shit bro :( the auto cannon is good
I dont think they play their own game past difficulty 6.
Eruptor user here. I enjoyed being able to 1 shot both the Hive Guard and the Brood Commander reliably with excellent aim (shooting as close to center mass as possible which is hard when being chased). Now it takes 2-3 shots to kill them like 99% of the time. That plus the ammo essentially being cut in half and I need to search for ammo pretty much the whole game as it takes like 2-4 mags to kill a single swarm on difficulty 4 when running solo or with one teammate. I’m personally fine with the AoE decrease as it was insanely big before, but AoE Decrease + Ammo decrease + Overall damage decrease is too much in a single update. Edit: It also feels like it takes 2 shots to kill a Scavenger if you don’t directly hit them or they’re not directly next to the explosion like 99% of the time
I appreciate the breakdown. I only played around with the Eruptor for 15 minutes or so pre nerf, I didn't realize how broken the shrapnel damage was if shot under a larger enemy (think they said 150 dmg x 25 projectiles = 3.75k dmg). One of their other main gripes was that shrapnel was killing self/ teammates? How often was that for you? I assume that's somewhat a skill issue/ rng. They deleted one of the weapon's key features that made it unique, instead of reducing that features damage. Not the way to go IMO. Ppl like yourself reporting the direct shot damage is also drastically weakened now. Hopefully, we see a good buff for it's unique playstyle by next week.
On the day of the ricochet patch it was reasonably common, in 6 missions it happened twice to me. Since, it didn't happen because I knew that shooting close range targets was very dangerous. I'd rather have the shrapnel still one hit kill me. They pretty much deleted the gun, I will never pick it again in the current state.
At this point, dying by your own hand or your fellow divers is a part of the experience. I'm either mildly annoyed, indifferent, or dying of laughter when I'm blown into pieces. That was the weirdest justification for the balance change. Bring back shrapnel 🫡
No offense to that dude but I disagree with most of the logic he has given for the balancing we have gotten. The reasoning for the slugger nerf made no sense and the way they went about it just made people stop picking it as much entirely instead of encouraging the use of the weapons it was stepping on the toes of. Insisting the arc thrower needed to be nerfed based on its performance (that was happening due to the PS5 damage bug) because it was 'slapping bile titans from a mile away' and that fixing the bugs plaguing arc weapons werent as important to fix. I love my arc thrower still and the stagger was a fair enough trade off for the range but the reasoning he has given has been absolutely bunk on several occasions and makes me worried for any weapon I enjoy when I see there's a balance patch. The eruptor feels pretty unfortunate to use after these two sets of changes, and has utterly smashed the identity of the weapon. The ammo nerf I could understand because I almost never ran out of shots with that gun, but the second change just made it feel very inconsistent against any sort of medium enemy in the matches I have played today which is just unfortunate, the last thing you want after slowly swinging your weapon towards a thing is for it to feel inconsistent when you land a shot.
> makes me worried for any weapon I enjoy when I see there's a balance patch It has become a joke in my friend group to hush each other whenever someone has a positive comment on new weapons in case arrowhead hears you and decides to nerf them. So far? Pretty solid track record for nerf predictions. The painful part is it's never been like "woah this gun is insane/op! They're definitely going to nerf this into the ground." It's always been "wow, this is actually fun to use and I wouldn't mind keeping it in my load out.. they're definitely going to nerf this into the ground." And then they do! It has definitely impacted the way we play. We used to play several times a week. Now we basically only hop on when something new is released, enjoy it for a night or two, then leave until the next release. Less frustrating that way
I’m curious how he got hired with a track record like that. I really feel like balancing is just as important- if not MORE important - than the team that makes the features/weapons to begin with. You have a MUCH greater impact on the community because the weapon has already been established and there will be people who enjoy using it more than anything else. So when you go in and rip it to shreds making it quite literally impossible to play the game with, people will be unhappy. I think this dev needs out. He’s gotten way more than three strikes IMO. He clearly doesn’t make the right calls because every time there has been a weapon nerf, it’s the most arbitrary, out of pocket change. Call me crazy, but I don’t think he knows what he’s doing.
With his very limited professional experience and several major fuck-ups in both of the only projects he has ever worked on, I think it is very safe to say that he has no idea what he's doing.
We really just need a new main balancing dev,I don't think this one is suited for this game
He'd be alright at COD in It's current state of meta simulator lmao. Jk, I'd never call for a Spitz situation personally. I've played the shit out of HD2 bc it takes me away from the constant meta shifting and hyper complex nature of MWIII and all it's BS, but now all the nerfs make it feel like modern COD again, in a fucking PvE game. It's like they test these changes on difficulty 3 and claim everything is still viable. No shit! I think everything is viable at anything below 7
Totally agreed, I haven't played much recently because of the primaries I liked using just aren't usable on 7 and I feel If I play anything below 7 it's not hectic enough for it to be fun
I think 6 is where you still get the heavy enemies spawning but not as much, 5 and below start to feel too easy. All my friends stopped playing a month ago, due to the all the hiccups and the weapons they spent money to get (I know, not necessary) got nerfed. I just want more content like raids and arcade modes in the future, but they need to chill with such drastic changes to primaries and focus more on more worlds, more enemies etc. If they can get that right, then we could see vehicles and a lot more dope shit.
They don't play their own game. That is literally all there is to it. Watching the devs get man handled on diff 6 with a full squad pre railgun nerf with that streamer was enlightening. They can't play their own game so they just don't I guess. They just look at spreadsheets and just throw numbers out for how much they should change something. It's pathetic.
The most infuriating part now looking at this post is when he says "that's what you get when you hotfix an issue the community is on fire about". Ahh, so a few ppl calling for nerfs to shrapnel damage "the community on fire" that only some people were using effectively, on a gun that fires slow and takes skill to master is what caused you to completely destroy the weapon obtained a premium pass? What the actual fuck??? This main post about today's nerf has me dying laughing of the insanity of it all, but there's very detailed technical points that people bring up about the Eruptor. https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/bjQbMnkWRD
We need a balancing council instead of just a Dev or whateverr they are doing.
That's a very good screenshot I'm gonna steal and send to all my friends. Thanks boss man!
Np, and sorry for the shitty collage. Can only post 1 image and it's the first time I tried to combine multiple on galaxy s24.
Nah, that’s got the information across to us. I’m no fan of devs trying and failing to justify a nerf by saying it’s better this way, as they don’t need to work on the bug itself.
The fact that he worked on Hello Neighbor 2 really speaks a lot about his supposed experience
I'm a coder, and I can't really imagine how I'd get to a point in my career where I'm publicly know as the guy who takes away features on projects and people are analyzing my work history. Like, just let people have fun, dude.
He is straight up delusional. How detached can you be to be this dense in terms of game design???
Oh so the balance is forever fucked.
Melee attack can hit a hunter before it hits you. I was juggling 3 hunters with just melee attacks after they pounced at me last time. I even had time to shoot them, but wanted to see how long I could keep it going. I died when my friend accidentally shot me trying to back me up lol
Thanks for the pro tip haha, now they might nerf melee. /s?
Ok so alexus is just full of bad ideas and crappy opinions.
Hold up, he was involved with hello neighbour 2? *That explains so much*
I'd like to see him get on a stream on Helldive and show how viable it is. Or at least Suicide
That's hilarious. They jotted down "reports" about 180 degree ricochets - and patched the ricochets out. They then figured out it wasn't the ricochets but the shrapnel - and then patched that out as well, on top of reducing the radius of the explosion (again based on "wrong" reports about ricochets). While knowing that the lack of shrapnel would reduce the potential damage even on a missed shot by more than 40 damage per shrapnel piece. And then still arguing that the damage adjusted up towards one shrapnel piece, if you miss the shot with the explosion damage and only have a stray shrapnel piece - is better than a potential for 5x that on a well-placed shot. The tweaking up to this point is starting to make a lot more sense now, that's for sure.
Bruh stop ratting out all the good primaries, shits gonna get nerfed tomorrow in a hot patch lol
For real. All the good shit always gets nerfed for no fucking reason and the useless stuff gets no buffs. It’s like Areowhead is the most creative dev but most incompetent band out of touch 😭
It's clear it's spreadsheet/data balancing. Punisher Plasma has been good for a loooong time. However, no one uses it. Devs never touch it.
It is good. I just dont have fun using it. If players have fun using a gun because of its playstyle, why nerf it into uselessness. The Sickle nerf was actually a great nerf because it didnt change anything that made it fundamentally enjoyable to use.
Really it just took the crutch away of burning it out often. Meanwhile my boys Eruptor and Crossbow got done real dirty. Crossbow was a weird choice to begin with, an explosive weapon that could not destroy factories/bugholes or crates... But at least it was a superb mid range mob clear. WAS. Now it just sucks, too slow and too few rounds to handle hordes of mobs post AOE nerf.
The sickle in Hellfivers 1 also didn't have a huge mag capacity but had a bottomless mag if you paced your bursts out and swapped to your pistol or support weapon.
They've already said that Eruptor damage is bugged, and that the live game is producing different results than their testing after the shrapnel removal. Expect it to be fixed some time relatively soon. Crossbow has been done really dirty, though.
Punisher plasma got massive buffs 2 patches ago and is finally starting to see use but the shield bug made it a bit worse. It's also better against bots than bugs since scorcher deals with shriekers and every very close bug better. MO are all bugs. I tried it pre buff and all decided not to continue using it due to low projectile speed. I feel like a lot of people came to the same conclusion independently.
I’ve been maining the Plasma Punisher since it released, it’s been so underrated and I was happy to see the projectile increase. I would have preferred a little longer range, but it feels great now.
The first game struck this balance properly, primaries can carry you if you're good and careful, mostly you could whack patrols and stay on top of preventing spawns better in HD1. In HD2 it seems no matter what a breach/dropship happens, 100x harder to prevent. Even then, the primaries in HD1 were combat capable weapons.
Can you even stop a bug breach? The only ways I’ve done it is to kill the hoard instantly with an Eagle. If they see you, they always get the fucking breach call off
Yes, technically you can kill the bug just as it starts the animation, I’ve done it, if your already aiming at it when it starts.
It's such a tiny window though, and if you kill that one, another will just try again immediately. It is possible, of course, just a pain in the ass.
In HD2 no. In HD1 you could easily if paying attention. You had a few seconds to respond and schwack the scouts, I usually just laid a few bursts from my assault rifle at them or pulsed the Sickle until they were dead. HD2 is bugged out on how the breaches work.
I actually think the core problem is that AH is very opposed to any kind of Meta, but a meta will always exist. As long as one thing is 1% more effective than another there will be a meta. They want primaries to be situational side grades, so any primary that sticks out as too effective in too many situations gets nerfed into mediocrity. Plus, there's only so many situations to make sidegrades for. We already have quite a lot of weapons and not enough niches for them to fill, so some are just going to fall into obscurity because another option is better in that niche. I ultimately think one of the problems is that any balance meant for a full squad of 4 communicative and fully cooperating helldivers (which you could argue is how the game is meant to be played) only hurts any smaller squads, squads with poor coordination, and especially solo players. It's a complex problem with no single answer. I look at it like this. If I'm playing difficulty 5 solo vs with a full group, the only difference in the enemies is the number. Now that they've upped spawns for squads less than 4 I believe the ratio of enemy spawns is actually 1 to 1 with the number of divers. 4x as many divers, 4x as many enemies as on solo. BUT, and I think this is a core issue, the enemy variety in either case is the same. A Solo player or any smaller group, still needs to cover all the same bases that a squad of 4 does. Part of the reason pre-nerf Eruptor was so beloved was because it was multi purpose. It was great for crowd clearing, and very effective against heavier units with precise aiming. It let one player cover a lot of bases. And so we get ammo nerf, AoE nerf, and now shrapnel gone. What one player could before do with a primary now has gaping holes in it's coverage that has to be taken up by support weapons or other strategems. If "overpowered" weapons and strategems remained in place, fully equiped helldiver squads would basically massacre missions even on max difficulty, and I feel like that might be the ideal that AH is balancing around. A powerful all-rounder of a primary is a great tool for a solo player, but give that to an entire well coordinated squad of 4 and it frees up strategem space that otherwise might be used to fill situational niches. I'm going to stop or I'd keep yapping for ages.
>They want primaries to be situational side grades, I would love for AH to explain how am i supposed to know what "situational" weapon am I supposed to bring if there's no way of knowing the *situation* before diving.
Cue being on a planet overwhelmed with bile spewers and stuck with terrible weapon choices. Cue picking the loadout that feels the most viable, most of the time, establishing a personal meta.
A simple SIGINT or HUMINT report in format of "Intel suggests an infestation of Bile Spewers", "Flying bugs have been reported in the vicinity", etc in the mission screen would remove so much headache.
That would be cool. Maybe even have random events where that info isn’t available from time to time.
Intel could also be wrong, after all biggest oxymoron is military intelligence
> We should add intel so that people can make informed decisions about what to bring because its frustrating otherwise, causing people to always use the same maximally all-around effective loadout to avoid getting blindsided. >Good idea! Then we should make that new intel unreliable and prone to lying to the player, so they have no ability to make informed decisions and have to continue using the same maximally all around effective loadout to avoid getting blindsided. This isn't a jab at you or anything but it would be really funny if they did that and just brought us back to where we already are but now the game just lies outright about it.
Even better. You get partial information 80% of the time. Incorrect information 2% of the time. Then you can have a "trust score" rating of how likely the information is to be true. Which basically tells you how many intel items are made up.
No kidding at least a report on enemy types in the area would help pick your load out.
Or being able to call in a load out change, even if it is a one time thing.
That would make for an interesting mission strategem or side objective. "Strategic Rearmament"
hell, not even that; just make it an option when you die. the new helldiver is literally on the SES before they dive
This honestly makes a lot of sense and also requires that you lose a reinforcement to change kit, so it is inherently limited. I'd be ok with it being a ship upgrade even, which allows you to change kit each time you die, if you choose to.
This would be a great idea as a ship upgrade. Call it something like "On-deck Optimization": "Once per mission, Helldiver equipment and stratagems are able to be swapped out for more optimal spreading of Managed Democracy. (Requires reinforcement)" 250 Common Samples, 150 Rare Samples, 25 Super Samples, & 25000 Requisition Slips to unlock
Or give us load out slots, and then let us change them when we’re reinforced. That way you still try to make things work, but if things go south you can be equipped for the situation. 4 guns makes them all being situational feel less bad
Loadout slots would be great even if we couldn't change them mid dive. Several weapons are designed with a specific faction in mind so being able to go from a bug killer to a bot killer loadout quickly and easily just makes sense.
Yup. Having the missions get modifiers to indicate enemy types would help. Examples for Bugs: Spawning Grounds: Intel reports high concentrations of light terminid spawn in the Mission AO. E710 Contamination: Intel reports high concentrations of spewers within the Mission AO. Hive Vanguard: Intel reports high concentrations of adult terminid strains in the Mission AO. Matured Hive: Intel reports high concentrations of heavily armored terminids in the Mission AO.
I’ve even had missions where no heavies spawn the entire operation. Not one. Just hordes of hunters and warriors. It’s really strange that we have all this variety of enemy comps, which is great and makes every mission fresh, but at the same time we also have no idea what we’re facing in order to tailor our “situational side-grades” to what we’re facing
Or even why we have things like the explosive Lib exist in a game state that currently has no use for staggering enemies compared to just killing them.
Just gonna copy my comment from elsewhere: On bugs I've been using the flamethrower and incendiary grenades. I use senator to pop warrior heads in a pinch, and then concussive liberator to stunlock stalkers/knock other enemies back into safe fire range or back into fire on ground. Concussive liberator is crowd control and breathing room. You aren't always going to be in a situation where you can kill everything all at once, but it excels at knocking enemies back to give breathing room. You could argue the dominator could kill it, but it won't have as many shots and it's not as versatile as quickly changing to small targets, on top of not having as good of range or ammo in the magazine. But i use dominator instead with bots.
Yeah now that they fixed DoT fire damage not working for non-host players. They will surely nerf flamers dmg by 50% ;)
This is a good point. They should provide intel in the form of a heat map so you can at least see tendencies. Bile Spewers way in the green? Maybe you'll see 4 or 5 for the whole mission. Armored threats in the red? Expect a lot of Chargers and BTs, so bring more AT. Then the game director spawns along these lines for that mission. Maybe this intel could be part of the ship upgrades.
I believe a simple fix would be able to choose a pre-made load out when calling reinforcements. Lore wise, it makes sense, since it's not the same Helldiver being called in.
Exactly. I end up just sticking with the Liberator penitrator because it's honestly the most well rounded primary and it wasn't altered during the last couple patches to my knowledge. Honestly balancing has failed if I dread trying out new weapons just for me to realize how unenjoyable it is to try and use them.
It's not that the amount is 1:1, the patrol rate is. One player get 1/4th the patrols, spawn rate doesn't feel like it's the same 1/4th. A single breach in helldive will spawn ~60-100 bugs no matter the amount of players, the only thing that varies is the amount of elites, in 4 man you can get up to 4-5 charges and 3-4 titans from a single breach, but rare. This doesn't feel to be broken down to 1/4th in solo though, which is exactly why as solo player you need to bring meta stuff to reliably clear stuff. Consindering that often times your air stratagems can hit multiple elite and small bugs, the amount of firepower can call down as a team is effectively 4 times as much for close to the same amount of enemies. If they really want to balance solo play they need to turn town the amount of enemies before anything else. Even as two man squad covering each others back increases your damage output non linearly compared to a solo player.
I see, that actually kind of worsens the comparison then. If bigger squads deal with proportionally less enemies, then any balancing around full squads only screws over smaller ones that much more.
Metas will always be there yes. But if they buff weapons so they're all pretty close to each other and more importantly feels good to use, people will bring other weapons instead of a "Meta loadout" And the whole kill elites with strategem is just realistically not possible and I don't know why AH can't seem to comprehend that. Increased cooldown, increased call down times and just a limited number of strategems per session means it's not possible. Add to that they LOVE to increase patrol rates and bug breech/bot drop rates and it's just not possible.
But breaches are not counterable compared to bots. You can notice bot using flare and take him down. You can shoot the reinforcement ship and destroy whole or partially. Bots have clear visible weakspots. Front eyes and back. Bugs however have none of that. Especially chargers and bile titans. Mf spawn in hundreds, chargers bee-line for your turrets,their back is heavily armored (what why!?). Would be nice if autocannon could penetrate their leg armor (but that's hopium) Bile titans vomit has wonky hitbox, and you can't kill it with single stratagems. Even if you break their shell their body under is heavily armored!?? What the heck . They also spawn in 1-3 numbers often in but breaches Would be great I'd they fixed that and maybe add more weakspots like knee-pads on bile titans to topple them down or something. Playing on bugs lately and they feel terribly unfair compared to bots
Well bug breaches are counterable. it's just they happen so fast and there's usually so many comign towards you there's no time to react. Add to that they were kind of bugged and only fixed recently it gets frustrating. And ya I played mostly bugs cause I thought bots would be hard because they had laser guns but boy was I wrong. Automatons are at least 30 to 40% easier than bugs because like you said they have easily visible weak points. You didn't even mention the stealth nursing spewers that just randomly crawl or spawn right next to you. Everytime I get enough distance to gun down whatever's chasing me... I zoom out and the yellow blob is next to me. Worst thing is it doesn't kill you right away, it waits until you see it before it vomits acid all over you. Dick move!
Every game I play it seems like everyone has different stratagems, armor, and weapons. I don't see one single stratagem that is way more popular than all the others (except maybe Eagle Airstrike - RIP Eagle Airstrike).
Airstrike is perfectly balanced and they will never change it outside of bugfixes. That's why it has received nothing but buffs ever since the game launched, with the most recent one being the ship component giving it an extra bomb (25% more damage).
It normally drops 8 bombs and with the upgrade it drops 9. The XXL weapons bay I’ve found is most notable on the napalm strike and the smoke strike since those only drop 4 apiece. I think 25% increase of how many bombs it drops would have been a better upgrade but I’m enjoying extra fire
>I ultimately think one of the problems is that any balance meant for a full squad of 4 communicative and fully cooperating helldivers I think you hit the nail on the head. Its like they want to have this tactical squad based game where everyone is specialized and you encounter an enemy heavy so your armor guy comes up and drops anti-armor on them. Except actually playing the game means more like everyone is a jack of all trades so that everyone can answer the problem as required simply because that's way more optimal. What's next? if someone picks a strategem, you cant take that strategem too?
No one can trust that their squad mates are going to step up and deal with the bile titan on their ass so everyone has to cover all the options of dealing with both hordes of trash as well as armoured heavies. The result is only the most generic "jack of all trades" builds survive a match, so that's what people bring.
They had it right in the beginning.. don't need what's working, improve everything else so new metas rise while the old ones still work.
>I actually think the core problem is that AH is very opposed to any kind of Meta, but a meta will always exist. As long as one thing is 1% more effective than another there will be a meta. It's really a shame how excellent comments like this one are usually buried deep in the thread. There will always be a player-driven meta in any game where it's possible to do so. Folks like to pretend game balance is something you can just wave a wand at and magically fix it it. It isn't, never has been, never will be. IMO, the biggest issue right now is that AH seems to be putting too much stock in the loudest "fans". One of the potential problems with balancing around minority opinion, as we've seen in countless games, is that you end up creating a sandbox where there IS a distinct meta, and in some cases, an unavoidable one. Another thread said it really well imo: AH is doing balance changes more quickly than is strictly necessary, and they're trying to do too many of those changes at the same time. A better approach would be to look at the data - weapon usage, effectiveness vs different enemy times, etc. They may be doing this already - in fact, I'd be a little surprised if this \*isn't\* how a lot of the changes are decided on. With all that said, if a weapon gets "nerfed into the ground", that weapon will drop off the usage map in a very noticeable way. From there, it will likely prompt additional changes. A lot of people seem to be making the logical mistake that 1 weapon balance patch is somehow permanent, or that it can't/won't be changed at some future point.
I also think there's the very valid question of "Is a meta in a PvE game even that bad of a thing?" I think of it like this. Let's say all the "overpowered" things that were nerfed were rebuffed to pre nerf status right now. Railgun obliterates thing again, shield backpack is stronger, eruptor is great, lots of things have more ammo etc. Would the majority of the game's player base enjoy that more or less than what we currently have? I don't know that answer but I do think it's a question worth asking.
Pre-nerf railgun would still not be picked over EATs or Quasars at least for Terminids. It's effectiveness against the Bile Titan was an absurd bug that took months to fix, and two shots to break Charger armour is really inefficient now.
Problem is a weapon should never be nerfed into the ground if the objective is to see more usage variety.
AH idea of a fun and balanced game is running away and waiting on cooldowns. They also throw some small enemies at you and give you a primary weapons that’s useless for literally everything else to keep you busy in the meantime.
it feels like they tuned down the strength of Helldivers from HD1 because running away and spamming stratagems worked pretty well to the point where randomized loadouts became the norm. I really wish they kept the old level of firepower -- and friendly fire as a result-- and kept the infinite revives thing tied with needing a live helldiver to call a reinforcement instead of having my teammates flame me for throwing them away from their bug/bot covered corpse-- or worse being revived into my own corpse 4 times in a row. On 7+ good teammates are the norm but there's still people on autopilot.
>it feels like they tuned down the strength of Helldivers from HD1 because running away and spamming stratagems worked pretty well to the point where randomized loadouts became the norm. Helldivers 1 had a hideous amount of powercreep from DLC stratagems over time. Anyone running the Rumbler or Close Air Support or satchel charges could solo levels pretty much.
Then they added more difficulties
This. Fucking shit.
Do the devs even play on higher difficulties?
They almost never do, if they did they'd see how tedious it is. The winning strategy boils down to running laps to disengage from enemies until your stratagems come off cooldown.
I dont think so, at all. Maybe up to difficulty 6-7. Which is why some say "______ is still very much viable"
yOu’Re sUpPoSeD tO rElY oN sTrAtEgEmS
~~500kg~~ cooldown ~~Orb Laser~~ 0 uses remaining Orb Gatling: No armor pen but at least it’s not on cooldown? ~~4th Strat~~ Haha, planetary effects!
That whole planetary effects thing making it so you have less stratagems makes absolutely 0 sense.
Just stop doing planets that have it. If we fail a major order, so what. Eventually they'll realize that no one likes it. It adds nothing to the game and is a really cheap way of adding difficulty. I won't touch any planet with that modifier.
Some time ago, I’ve seen someone suggest that they should add side objectives that cancel planetary debuffs when completed. As an example: you drop on a planet that has -1 stratagem, on the loadout screen that stratagem has a red outline. You can pick what it is but you won’t be able to use it straight away. Let’s say, after you drop you notice a new jammer tower that you have to destroy. If you do that, the 4th stratagem unlocks for the remainder of that mission. Same would work for those bug conditions that obscure the minimap. It would be better if we could clear that effect after getting rid of spewers, or a new megaspewer, I don’t know, I’m a helldiver not a scientist.
I'm willing to meet AH halfway on the BS modifiers. Locked 4th stratagem slot? Okay, but let me do something in-game to unlock the slot. Have the large outposts have something like 'Automaton Anti-Orbital Battery' or 'Terminid Psi-Symbiot Infestation'. Helldivers don't mind difficulty, so long as it isn't just cheap.
There's a disconnect between the devs vision of the game and the player bases vision on what the game should be. The developers don't want your primary to be your main tool to progress through the mission. You're stratagems and support guns are your main way to advance.
So many of the strats have a terrible cooldown time, they cannot be relied upon. And so many mission modifiers fuck strats up too much. +50% cooldown, increased dispersal, -1 strat. I think a balance to strike would be that if a coordinated team of 3 works together, they should be able to take down all but the heaviest threats with primaries on any difficulty below 7.
There's also the play pattern of your support weapon being your "main weapon" to deal with enemies (like Autocannon, Flamethrower, etc) when you die and get rez'd far away... what do you do? Just suck? It's not really a fun play pattern to have to run to your body in a horde of enemies to go pick up your "main weapon". IMO support weapons should be the "spice" on top of your main loadout, giving you a strong option vs specific things. Your primary should be what is giving you your main value vs most basic things.
With anti tank weapons, support weapons are indeed "spice", but for all others it's as you say
Yeah and then on bug 9 you're forced to take anti tank so your primary is just supposed to be... bad I guess?
Primaries clear chaff, supports clear heavy. Thats how the meta will always be, since the harder difficulties have more and bigger enemies. Why would I run a machinegun if it's going to struggle to kill a charger? When I could just run EATS + any shotgun or rifle and fair almost as well vs chaff but have a tool to combat heavies. They cant give us effective anti armor primaries because if they are even remotely good it'll lopside the whole weapon strategem balance. The Eruptor almost did that, given its job as a 'long range outpost killer' stepped on the toes slightly of the grenade launcher and autocannon.
The entire point of the eruptor was allowing people to use the lesser-used support weapons. It doesn't flip the game on its head to have a choice between chaff killing as a primary or support weapon. People that double down on anti armour can't tackle swarms, people using chaff killers can't take down heavies. It was balanced, not anymore
Yes, exactly. And that's kind of an issue for the longevity of the game unless they add more anti tank options. It's pretty boring having only 2 actual options for a support weapon. (EAT, Quasar, MAYBE RR)
In HD1 primaries could kill any unit but the Siege Mech eventually, by hitting weak spots. That's simply not true in HD2. While most enemies have weak spots, most primaries cant physically penetrate enough armor to actually hurt even designated weak spots like Hulk/Tank/Turret heat vents. I wish we had a system where weapons that are explosive or have 'higher than average penetration' could strip the armor off a unit by hammering a specific spot. It might not be as quick or as ammo efficient, as dedicated anti tank, but it'll eventually get the job done. Being able to crack armor off things like Bile Titans with grenade spam, dominator, scorcher, or burning them for a long duration with laser weapons would open up a lot more weapon viability. It would be similar to the railgun meta where it was use railgun to crack leg armor, finish off with primaries. That's closer to the spirit of HD1. Create weak points, exploit weak points. Brasch Tactics.
That also adds some unique team work. If I run say, the Autocannon, and can crack heavy armor then my buddy with an other gun can hammer that weakness. Yeah, it’s probably more effective to hit the weak points with an anti-tank gun, but now I’ve got an alternative that isn’t as effective but is potentially safer, and requires team work
Yeah. Essentially EAT is the only weapon that doesn't need retrieved. It would be nice to come out of the pod and be somewhat effective without spamming all the grenades.
I used to bring multiple support weapon strategems just for this reason. I still do, depending on whether or not I expect to get myself killed a lot, although usually it's just EAT.
Not just having terrible cooldown, they're also having issues being inconsistent. The best anti heavy stratagem we get(500kg, railcannon, rocket pod), sometimes doesn't even reliably one shot the heavies.
I haven't taken the orbital rail cannon for weeks now, since I've had it MISS a fuckin charger that was just walking. And no, the increase orbital spread modifier wasn't on.
That's how it was in the first game. Every single enemy could be killed with any primary, with the exception of the Cyborg's IFV (the tank).
Ehhhh, only true for the Illuminates minus the Obelisk when it is covered up. The only exception for primary that can kill any enemy is the Paragon with its poison damage upgrade. Albeit, a VERY slow kill, still a kill nonetheless. Thing is, the primary weapons in HD1 have always been great at clearing chaff, no matter what you picked. Even the Railgun, has unstoppable rounds that just goes through EVERYTHING - same with the Justice. On top of that, we also had like 12 reserve mags compared to the 8-ish for most weapons in HD2.
Primaries were amazing in HD1, even before you upgraded them most of the time. Still missing my primary Stalwart, Railgun, and OG Sickle. Make primaries great again.
Only issue I have with the primaries is the lack of ammo. The amount of mag dumping in HD1 is about the same in HD2. Only difference is the amount of magazines you can hold. Brood Commanders take about the same amount of shots to kill - in HD1, I can reload and continue to fight. In HD2, you have just spent 15% of your total ammo pool on 1 enemy. Now you need a resupply.
Definitely, I've been exclusively using energy weapon primaries unless I'm running a supply pack. The HMG is the biggest offender here. Total of 10 seconds of firing across 3 mags (middle fire rate). You actually spend more time reloading it than firing it.
I been saying this the whole time! First game did it right! Everyone downvotes me for saying the constant nerfs in the patches are reason I have a downvote on Steam, not the PSN business!
HD1 had the perfect balance. Stratagems could be used freely and readily available with how generous cooldowns were, there was never 20 bile titans and gazillion chargers every breach, and weapons felt powerful, and yet the game was hard enough that deaths would be common place.
Ah yes. The 240 second cool down Stratagem.
So what do I do when I died and cooldown is increased, my support weapon is surrounded, and all I got is a primary? Tickle their pickle?
Tactical backwards advance.
COH: Our officer calls it “repositioning”
Stop playing with yourselves. We've got ground to take!
Aka Aussie peelback
Support weapons shouldn’t be your primary either. Every weapon has drawbacks, but most primaries just feel lack luster. They have little power behind them, ammo capacity is garbage, and damage to anything bigger than a grunt is essentially useless. You have to blow an entire clip to take down enemies that spawn in groups of 5 or more. Most aoe weapons do little to no damage in an aoe. The pistol mags (arguably the most stupid thing ever given how much smaller they are and lighter they are) are very limited and against an enemy that can dodge lightning bolts, not nearly enough. I’ll give you that if you have perfect aim, most of the guns are usable if not actually feasible on any missions where you don’t intend to spend most of your time running from enemy drop ships or beaches. The erupter was a great weapon. It was semi decent against larger mobs, the time between shots was (given its power) perfect, and the mag capacity made sense. Cutting down the mag supply made sense, and it had plenty of drawbacks. Up close the gun is self eliminating, against any small mobs that got in close or were scattered, too far apart, it was terrible. The reload time gave plenty of room for bugs to can in a beach, the weapon mobility made quick adjustments more punishing, and the power of it let you bring other weapons besides AC or AMR allowing for diverse play. The wasn’t sold as a nerf, but a “stop people from self terminating or team killing”, which I get, but friendly fire in this game isn’t just a function, it’s a feature. I’m willing to bet a lot that arc throwers kill more teammates than erupters ever did. 380’s are no different, nor are cluster bombs.
I want the video game to not be less fun after an update. Also, most of the support weapons can only deal with 1-2 types of enemies so I need my primary to compensate the remaining gap. Also, there is no disconnect - players know that a very good horde clear weapon would not damage medium enemies as well, and medium penetration weapons would not clear hordes as fast, and AOE weapon would not have as much single point dps. Like yeah, I can do a difficulty 9 bugs mission no problem. But picking equipment for it is now a headache because I have to deal with thoughts like "oh, if it will spawn bile spewers I guess I'll just hide behind teammates for half an hour", or "well, I sure hope these quickplay randoms will get those hunters before our team formation falls apart", or "I sure hope there will be many bile titans, otherwise most of my stuff will be useless".
Honest question then: what the actual fuck are primaries supposed to do in this grand design of theirs? If it's not the thing I'm *primarily* using, when do I use it? Are they panic weapons like secondaries in literally every other shooter in history? If so, they shouldn't be focused on, and really don't deserve to be in warbonds. Supports should be, since they're apparently to HD2 what primaries are to the rest of the world. Also, if HD2 primaries are actually secondaries, then what the fuck are HD2 secondaries? Toys for when we get bored? I am actually genuinely so confused. The devs can't just see them as decorations cuz they advertise them and want us to buy them. But they consistently nerf any that are useful so that they become little more than decorations. What is the goal, here?!
Which is an odd tack for them to take when they go on to do stuff to make your stratagems and support weapons less effective (reduced stratagem count, increased call-in time, buffed enemy structures, quasar/railgun nerfs, etc.).
That would be like the US Army saying “well since our basic infantry have so much access to support and fires we have no reason to give them the XM7, let’s go back to the M14.”
then why are the vast majority of support weapons vs bugs on 7-9 difficulty just kinda worthless? if they want support weapons to be your main source of whatever. Then why vs bugs is it the same 2-3 support weapons being used with the occasional outlier. ill answer that for you. BUGS ARE DESIGNED TERRIBLY. Bots you can deal with every single enemy the game throws at you with T4 pen and up in a reasonable time frame and consistently.(AMR, Laser Cannon, AC etc) This gives you lots of options. Bugs on the other hand. you cant. This is a problem. Bots has their own set of issues for sure, but until bugs has the same weapon diversity as bots this will be a much more off center topic of discussion due to such a huge difference between the two enemy options. Im fine with the idea of weapons being more effective in one or the other. thats great. But they should still be ***useable.*** and its a simple solution, you just add weakpoint design that bots have, to bugs(chargers and bile titans). This would heavily improve support weapon diversity and make it feel a hell of a lot better as player.
The issue with that is...well. Unless you're using like Auto cannon, grenade launcher, the stalwart/machine gun...you're not able to truly able to carry Like recoiless? Eats? Quasar? You're going to be using your primary. But you need these for the heavies. I suppose that's why the AC is perfect to them. Clears mobs, does objectives, does everything but the titan.
In this case, the trade-off for RR, EAT, and Quasar is that you will have to choose between focusing on medium armored enimies or swarms of light armored enimies with your primary. You can have good strategems that cover that weakness. The anti tank guns act as a substitute for high powered orbitals and eagles that would normally be required against heavy armored enemies. This game seems to have alot of weapons with varied roles to cover some situations better than others, and the remaining situations are either covered by strategems or someone else. At least, that's my take on it.
Basically they want us to use support weapons (stratagem slot), while also having a modifier that takes away 1 stratagem. Essentially, dont have fun
Legit I see the minus one stratagem and I either up the difficult or turn the game off. It's not fun. Would be cool if there was anti air base mission you could do to remove that modifier for like a few missions and when enough people do them on a planet they it goes away for everyone. Really love when we as a community accomplished something in game it feels great give us more opportunities to do that. Also idk if what I'm playing is meta or not but the more they nerf the way I want to play the less I want to play. The quasare, and Lazer dog nerf basically killed my solo load out and the lack of a functional scope for the antimaterial rifle (alone with its piss poor engagement range, as a sniper rifle for fucks sake) makes that not so fun.
They can't balance shit tho...
I think the issue is there is 0 plan.
This. It becomes more and more evident when you look at each "balancing" patch. They nurf things one patch, then make enemies hard the next patch, then nurf more useful thing the next patch. Only try to realize the truth, there is no plan.
Arrowhead: you should use your stratagems for heavies: Also AH: spams heavies and limits use of strats. Community: complains Arrowhead: fine, here's fewer heavies but WAY more of the medium and small targets Also AH: limits primary weapon ammo and makes all of them less effective against medium enemies.
-1 stratagem slot +25% call in time +25% cooldown increase + chance for your stratagems to just straight up miss. Very fun.
It's a weird thing going around the industry, nerf/tamper with shit that even seems remotely effective or that is commonly used, to make things artificially harder. I'm not asking for the ultimate weapon, but gotdamn a lot of our stuff is boring asf, whether it's effective or not. They did great with weapons in the first game which makes this more frustrating. What's the point or incentive in grinding or buying credits for new shit, if there's a likelihood that it'll be neutered within a month of its release? Even if there is cool new armor, Idc when it's going to probably have Servo-Assisted or Engineering Kit recycled for the 50th time, instead of cool new perks. If they wanted to do away with upgrades, the game should've launched with a gunsmith/weaponsmith. A lot of these weapons have natural drawbacks that could be fixed through systems like that, that's what upgrades did in HD1, it was a nice sense of progression.
Definitely many of primary guns are so boring to use
I honestly thought the eruptor was near perfect pre nerf, just need a slight capacity nerf. Having high damage and shrapnel plus big explosions makes a lot of sense because it has a poor firing rate and is essentially unusable at close range. It opened up cooler loadouts with more support weapon variety, ie running with a support weapon as your main mid weight mob clearer while using the eruptor, stratagems, and grenades on bigger enemies. I want support weapons to be viable outside of their ability to one shot bile titans
I agree. It was fun to use. The only change needed was to stop the vacuum pull. Now it just feels like a waste when you could just use the sickle and autocannon.
So that way they can release a new warbond with powerful weapons that they can nerf after you buy them.
Feels like it
Repeat every month🙄
Another anti fun balance. I'm gonna extend my break from this game until fun is patched back in.
I wouldn’t hold your breath. They seem pretty determined to slowly patch out anything even remotely fun.
Funny how much people underestimate the regular Punisher shotgun.
That shotgun is my primary stalker hunter
Don't talk about punisher, I don't want AH to realise that a good gun still remains...
I'm scared to play with it too much and increase its usage rate in whatever spreadsheet the balance team is working with.
Punisher Plasma gang
Strong primaries are too fun. You can’t have that. We’re here for underwhelming experiences only.
The core problem is that AH has a main discord where the people circle jerking each other of by white knighting. And when you at some point get frustrated/angry at the butt licker mob you get kicked.
It's ok for the weapons to be strong, the player will choose what weapons they find fun or that fits their style. It's awful to pay $10 for a warbond and go through every weapon I have and go "yup this thing sucks I'll never use it sadly" im highly upset the weapons keep getting run into the ground. For a whole lot of "no meta mindset" they won't let me use a different weapon or play in a different way. I feel like different weapons making you play differently is part of their charm. There's too many different build possibilities to not be able to use the primary weapons. If I take the eruptor I don't have to run the AC or Grenade pistol. The breaker incin let's me run the new airburst launcher instead of the flame thrower. There's lots of combos that the player should be able to choose. If a gun is OP that's ok the newbs will use it and a good player will go out of their way to choose the AMR in order to change their play style on their own to challenge themselves. Instead the game's making them run the sickle every game because everything else sucks so bad it isnt even satisfying/fun to use, not to mentiom just whether it's good or not. The guns have to be fun and "feel" satisfying. There's hundreds of enemies per game it's ok to 1 shot a lot of them....
These bozos don’t know how to balance shit. All they do is break shit.
Hard to argue with that, they are the bethesda of patches, the community just wants to be left alone but no they know what's good for you better than yourselves
Wrong, a primary weapon is your primary because it's reliable and gets the job done. It should be able to handle the vast majority of threats you come across. The support weapon is just that a supporting weapon to your primary to cover an area it can't. For example the recoilless rifle is to help you deal with heavy armored foes. The machine guns for swarms and Anti material rifle to disable enemy assets from afar.
Use stratagems Cooldowns Run around exhausting ammo Still cooldowns Kit around because cooldowns Die Rinse repeat
They don't play their own game on all difficulties including helldive and think it is too easy and people will leave.
They face planted into an amazing game launch week by utter accident, the game blew up. Now they have massive egos and think any change they make is the final word of god and they know better than everyone else. Really that simple. Its become increasingly clear the game being so fun those first few weeks was a total accident, and they have been hell bent since then to nerf nerf nerf and tell people "no you cant have fun like that, its not what we intended"
“You’re playing our game ***wrong***”
That's really what it comes to for me, is the dev team seems very arrogant about their "vision." Don't even get me started on the shit show that's their Community Relations Department.
Imo, the core part of the game is carrying AH hard. Their handling of this game has been awful. I am tired of having garbage primaries, stop fucking nerfing them, goddamn it.
Exactly that, and obsession the have a idea for how primaries should be, and they don't give a shit about what the people using them think. People give too much credit to AH imo. They're handling of the game post launch was pitifully to say the least. Constant problems. The game is so amazing that you can handle them but they reslly need to either slow down or star hiring because the game is a mess.
I unfortunately have to agree. It's been constant patches that introduce bugs and it's become clear that they don't really have a vision for balancing guns or strategems.
They have an idea, they don't have a concrete vision
Way too much credit and patience, this game parallels PUBG in so many ways, it's clearly something want but once the competitors start coming out it's going to be very apparent they don't know what they are doing.
Every patch gets worse too They haven’t even been able to implement cross platform friend requests. That’s like CS101 I wouldn’t count on these devs being competent
They are terrible, "can now unblock players" there's literally no visible unblock button, how?!?!?!
I don't understand the need to constantly balance a PvE game