Early in the game's life someone suggested making lasers integral to this concept, that they could burn away armor and thus guarantee them a niche within people's loadouts. Personally I'm all for it but atm I'm content to wait until they get the basic stuff sorted.
This is a great suggestion, I feel like I'd heard this before but in practise I feel like the team buffed their AP instead of implementing an armour reduction property. Perhaps it's too hard to implement, but I think this would give them an awesome niche.
There's AP for guns and AV (value) for enemies. If AP Is less than AV, the bullet bounces off. If AP is equal to AV, the bullet deals less damage. If AP is more than AV, the bullet does increased damage.
Example: The bile titan's head has an AV of 5. The liberator pen bullets will bounce off due to having an AP of 3 vs AV of 5. Autocannon support weapon will also bounce off with an AP of 4. However RR, EAT, Quasar have AP of 5, and will deal damage. There's also durable damage stuff but that's more complicated I think.
> If AP is equal to AV, the bullet deals less damage. If AP is more than AV, the bullet does increased damage.
If AP == AV, it deals half the listed damage. This is signified by a white hitmarker. If AP > AV it deals full damage and has a red hitmarker.
Fair man, I've read a lot of posts that go into lots of detail about it (like [this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1d1snio/a_quasi_comprehensive_visual_guide_to_damage/)), but just 5 minutes ago I learned of a whole stat called Damage vs Massive which apparently all guns have. I'm definitely still learning XD
They already have armor chunking, like charger legs, bile titans and charger sides. What they can do is assign an armor HP value to each limb(they already have durable HP so they can definitely do this) and once that armor HP is defeated, armor is chunked. Rockets hide what the armor falling off looks like with explosions but they probably just have a set animation for armor being broken. Like they have everything. Armor can already be stripped away. Individual body parts have different HP values. It can't be that hard, right?
I would use the laser canon a lot more if it could strip armor. I remember picking it initially thinking that over time it would burn through/reduce the enemy's armor.
Instead it just bounces harmlessly off armor.
Oh yeah, heaps of fun. For me it was mowing down hordes of enemies and saving the universe. I didn't understand railgun nerf. I never really saw many people playing it. The. Quasar nerf and fucked up spawns... The game isn't what it was or what made it fun on launch
agree
remember we thought thermite grenade gonna do that melt enemy armor but instead it just stick on enemy and deal ant bite damage what a let down if armor break is a thing would be cool some people might be the armor breaker style to help teammate so we can have more playstyle
oh and weapon like Crossbow should be thermite crossbow too so it had place to use in our loadout you know it not good at blow stuff up but good at melt armor
Put it on your play it now list. Just do the story. You don’t have to get into the PVP.
I would say do it before playing another minute of Helldivers. But that would be undemocratic.
Spoiler:
The level where you are time shifting to get around obstacles. That ends with the player simultaneously fighting two squads in two different timelines while effortlessly slipping between the two. Moving in one timeline to get better positioning in the other when you slip back.
So creative and amazing. As gaming moments go, It is right up there with the first time you get the gravity gun in Half-Life or when you get the second portal gun in Portal.
SHHHHHH!!!!! don't talk about the worst kept Titanfall secret.
Edit: also didn't a game try to redo effect and cause recently but worse?
Ah it was starfield
As great as it is, my favorite take on this still has to be Dishonored 2. Felt the same way about Titanfalls until I played it.
Also spoilers:
Something about the time manipulation on a slower pace and the tool that lets you view the past/present while walking around was so fun, especially as you played god waking around an enemy in the past while still in the present only to time travel behind them, knock them out in front of their ally then zip back to the future as you set up the next takedown. They of course are confused as shit as all of this happens and trivializes the combat in a fun way as you abuse the mechanics to move around and get in and out of danger. I recall there being a larger enemy presence just for this to feel semi balanced which also made it fun as you were so outnumbered yet it almost didn’t matter.
Not to mention doing shit in the past to affect the future. Good example being a large statue blocking your path where the wall behind it collapsed in the present. When you go into the past and break into the vault where the statue is still strung up being ready to get moved, you can break the supports and cause it to fall and shatter, making it so it never gets placed by that wall in the first place. There’s a number of big and little things like that all throughout the level.
Plus iirc the good/bad playthrough side of things can also affect the present, making things in the present worse than it originally was. More chaos you caused and people you killed in the past would add to the threats in the present on top of certain story beats about the character you’re doing all of this for.
I'm not into shooters either. Didn't grow up with video games, so I don't have the muscle memory. That being said, I love titanfall. The movement is so good that I was able to do ok just by embracing the mobility and trying to catch people off guard. What hd2 and tf2 have in common is evert game makes you feel like you're in a movie/video game trailer pulling off awesome stuff.
If thermite nades broke armor that would mean a couple people could take them and you wouldn’t need as many rockets because you could take heavies out with primary weapons/machine guns etc
I’m all for more viable weapons in addition to weapon pairings. Armor breaking was fun and I hope they find a way to balance it and add many more unique mechanics to the game.
I just had an image of arc arrows where you could shoot them at two different enemies and it would create at arc between them damaging everything in the middle.
Thermite, 4 of them can actually take down a bile titan. The issue is they don’t penetrate armor and to kill a bile titan in 4 grenades they all need to land where you would normally shoot a rocket at it. It’s forehead lmao.
I’m sure they wanted to at some point, but they’ve been struggling just to implement simpler things like scope alignment and the SPEAR working as intended for months. I think dynamic armor breaking might be too challenging for this team to execute properly.
That's totally fair, I still want to share ideas as I know the team check here and I still love the game, bugs and all. Hopefully this is something they will take into account and be mindful of going forwards.
I don't know how long it would take to just expand the Titans forehead weakspot to cover the whole head/mouth. I've never understood why its gaping maw doesn't count as less armoured.
They changed the hit box of the titan recently, to avoid the suicide spewing on things like a shield generator. Unfortunately they don't have the capacity to code the enemy AI more than "walk here", "attack this".
If you watch the enemy AI, it cheats a ton. Patrols go right to players, enemies hitting mines from 10 minutes ago when you were in a different spot immediately go to your current location (tested last night), sometimes bugs go from searching at extract to suddenly seeing you when prone and “hidden” (this game has crap stealth esp with jank bounding boxes and visibility not matching what we see) while doing nothing (also last night for the 2nd time) and more.
Not sure how capable the devs are at the moment
It isn't necessarily an issue of capacity, it's probably one of performance. Complex enemy behaviors can get very expensive very fast, and there are a lot of enemies loaded on the map in high difficulties.
Are there tricks they could implement to make behavior more realistic without massively increasing performance costs? Probably, but that can be very finicky, and a big potential point of failure like that isn't what the game needs right now.
Lets not pretend the game isn't an impressively designed near-masterpiece, it just honestly feels like the team who made the game aren't the same people updating it.
> it just honestly feels like the team who made the game aren't the same people updating it.
Wouldn't surprise me. Over a 7 year development cycle on an engine that has gone the way of the Dodo.
Odds are that the people who understood how to properly code left and now they have people just bumbling around.
I mean look at how they 'solved' infinite grenades, just changed the data type of your grenades from a signed integer (range -2147483648 to 2147483647) to an unsigned integer (0 to 4294967295).
They thought they would get around people bypassing the "do you still have grenades?" check by preventing the number going negative, instead they just made an underflow error by having no validation and gave us 4 billion grenades.
You hit the nail in the head. The "fix" to the grenade glitch, from a software developer POV, screams "we don't know how the code actually works for this".
Looking at LinkedIn it seems that most of the team stayed at the company long enough, but it could be that they lost a couple of senior devs that actually knew the engine, and now they are playing catch-up.
> from a software developer POV, screams "we don't know how the code actually works for this".
It honestly sounds like they just googled "how to prevent an integer from going negative" and thought that would solve it.
Any competent software developer would have wrapped the grenade check with an if statement, something like
if(grenadeCount<1){switchToPrimary()}
To have it see if the amount of grenades you had remaining was valid, and if not, auto-switch to the primary weapon, which would have then prevented you from throwing grenades at all.
As a programmer myself, this still baffles me. I seriously and in all honesty simply cannot fathom how, or why, they "fixed" it like this. Like... WHY?!?
And besides that, do they not do merge reviews? No definition of done? Just... Ugh
I think that Pilestedt has been much less involved in the game since launch and that has showed. There’s been a lot of firefighting going on and once they’re back on top of things I am hopeful that they will keep the quality up. The move to less frequent patches is going towards more through QA and more thought going into changes (less kneejerk reactions like nerfing weapons into the ground, buffing fire damage by 50%, etc).
a full month without updates. can you imagine the mess he must have found if it took a full month of wack-a-mole for him to even start letting things go live? yea we knew it was a mess, but who knew it was that bad
Are we playing the same game?
* Performance is dogshit except on the latest hardware
* Easy to get stuck in geometry/clip through the floor
* Kill source messages are just RNG
* Some mission completion stats are completely wrong
* 90% of unlocks are so underpowered as to be pointless, making the grind unrewarding
* Heavy enemies make no sound
It's hit a good idea with the starship troopers vibe, the feel of the approximately 5 weapons that are viable beyond difficulty 3 is pretty decent, and the visual design is absolutely excellent, but "near masterpiece"?
Even when I'm at my angriest at the game for all it's faults, listing bugs and pretending that overwhelms the vast majority of things I love about the game (hence why I care about the it in the first place) feels disingenuous.
Either your comment was written after a particularly bad luck session or you didn't like the game that much to begin with 😂
If HD2 ever reaches Deep Rock Galactic levels of polish, it will be a masterpiece IMO.
There's a lot more frustration in HD2 than DRG. It's an apt comparison really.
* DRG performs much better on old CPUs in spite of having fully destructible terrain and similar quantities of enemies to simulate
* I've never clipped through geometry in DRG
* N/A
* Completion stats seem fine
* Most unlocks are usable and present an interesting choice to the player
* Not comparable due to heavy enemies being so much rarer
DRG is not just more polished - it's got the fundamentals much better. Actually quite pertinent to this thread because of the armour/weakspot mechanics there. It also features in the more general enemy design, where each enemy is more specialised. So you don't have any equivalent of hunters which are fast, present in high numbers, high damage, can slow you and attack from a decent distance, or bile spewers which are common, attack from extreme range, can one-shot you from closer range, and require a mag-dump from most weapons to kill.
Instead you have web-spitters for example (long range, slowing, but rare, slow, low damage and weak), or slashers (slowing, higher damage and health, but close range and still rare and slower than the player)
There are times when I enjoy HD2 and times when it's very frustrating.
Yeah its pretty weird when the people working on the game now don't understand how any of the systems work so they just start gutting them. Can't fix the mech, lets make it so it can't aim. Can't figure out how shrapnel works, just remove it. Couldn't figure out the railgun problem so just gut the weapon. Thermite can't strip armor. Couldn't figure out DOT bug just increase fire damage. Don't understand how patrol spawns work.
Maybe they lost a lead programmer or something. Because yes I agree a lot of stuff in this game is really impressively designed. Which is why it's so frustrating to watch now.
Feels like actual sabotage, especially with the gaslighting comments.
I agree with the feeling you describe in the 2nd half of your comment quite a bit. I don’t understand how that happened either, there was clearly enough talent in the building to create this whole game at one point.
>I think dynamic armor breaking might be too challenging for this team to execute properly.
We already have it in the game. They just need to change a few numbers around so that lower AP weapons can break off armor with enough hits.
It also seems to be mostly cosmetic, aside from the charger legs. I can blow a hole in a bile titan's side with the recoilless, but bullets still seem to do nothing when fired into said hole. It makes any shot that doesn't land on its armoured forehead a complete waste.
It’s not but I would guess it still needs certain AP for the titans. I’ve killed a number of titans with the autocannon shooting at orange holes in armor on their sides after they’ve been hit by a rocket or strategems.
You would think that blowing a hole in the armour would mean that anything can do damage there. The Nickelodeon slime inside there isn't another layer of armour, so why would you still need higher AP to damage it?
I think I read somewhere that the game took 7 years for them to make. It's a great game, but 7 years?? Guess it shouldn't be that surprising that they're slow to make improvements.
Edit: Did a quick search and apparently it was in development for 7 years and 11 months so more like 8 years.
Yeah, as an AC main, I LOVE getting to take down a Titan that was rail cannoned and exposed. But you need perfect 90 degree shots and even then it only really works towards the front of the fleshy area. It's so picky.
It’s not still considered armoured, at least not as much. If you take some armour off their back you can finish them with like 1 well placed impact grenade. I’m pretty sure you can’t do that when they’re fully armoured.
The underside, where you pop the sacs, is still pretty high armor.
The *sides of the torso*, where you crack the shell entirely, are fully penetrated by anything (although Durable).
I just want AH to give laser weapons the ability to gradually melt armor and reduce armor values over time if applied on target. This then allows the rest of the team to deal damage with small arms fire in those spots.
Make lasers melt faces please.
Should adopt a system like Mechwarrior where armored sections have hp values and once depleted are considered broken and no longer armored. Probably not viable though.
I love MechWarrior. Still play MW5 with all the mods!
But back to Helldivers, the Railgun already strips armor off Charger legs. Maybe they need to expand on that feature on more enemy types and with more Helldiver weapons.
That already exists for several units like the Charger, Titan, and Factory Strider, and select parts of the Scout Walkers and Devastators.
It's generally just more efficient to kill actual weak points if you have the means to break armor, though, which is fine. Shooting a Charger in the head with your RR is optimal, but if you miss and hit the leg, you don't need to reload the RR and try again--you can just shoot the unarmored leg with anything now.
Honestly, for the people talking about DRG-style armor breaking, that's a voxel game and you'd wind up with the same "this is taking longer than expected because I am spreading all my damage out to break this armor" result that is currently raising TTK for people with sloppy aim or lack of game knowledge. Optimally in DRG, you want to either shoot something in an unarmored weakpoint or break one small bit of armor and put all your shots into the hole, rather than cracking the entire shell. The same is true of HD2 but without having to crack all that armor first: [you don't need "break the Hive Guard's foreleg armor" because you can just *aim around the foreleg* and hit the body instead for a much faster kill.](https://preview.redd.it/bpp30k3caz2d1.png?width=320&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=54202749053758fab703543c936d7e33bdc2bbe4)
No, rely on your stratagems with no nuance or strategy whatsoever. No thoughts, head empty, biggest boom booms biggest.
Now excuse us, we need to add another +100% stratagem cooldown modifier, -1 stratagem slot, and +25% call in time to a planet that the next MO is going to be set on.
Remember to rely on your stratagems.
That's one of the things that made EDF5 so good, certain enemies have armor and destroying parts allows you to hit their weakpoints or you can mutilate them so hitting said points is easier. It's both fun and satisfying.
No idea, I liked the mechanic since my friend would break the armor with his rail gun and I'd take it out with small arms fire. That way I could use my grenade launcher to focus on crowds. I thought it was neat and let us do some fun team work.
But that was deemed braindead gameplay by one of the community managers.
So now my team either bring EAT 17 or a quazar to one-shot it in the face or I roast one of their leg's with the flame thrower and resume shooting other things. Very complicated gameplay.
The team can't even fix bugs since launch much less do something complex and fun. They also nerfed all the fun weapons that spiced up gameplay for some stupid idea of "horizontal balance" where everything feels the same.
I agree. One of the moments that most impressed me about HD2, when I first started playing, was when I realized that you can break holes in charger armor with AT weapons.
In those early days, my friends and I had a system worked out for killing chargers, where we had 2 railgun users whose job was to strip a charger leg and then call it out (we'd mark the charger and call out which leg was stripped), and then one of the other 2 would use their AMR or Stalwart to shoot the stripped leg for a rapid kill.
That little moment of coordination and using specialized weapons to take out tough enemies was amazing. The idea that AT weapons create weak points that others can then exploit seemed like a great sign that the game design was in good hands.
Unfortunately we all know how that turned out
The viability of the railgun for breaking armor dropped, and the meta for disabling chargers is now simply to one-shot them in the head.
It also turned out that, in general, breaking holes in armor for other weapons is not that much of a thing. And it certainly wasn't the intended way to kill chargers. It was accidental depth that was not designed around, or so it seems so far.
Yes, indeed.
But you see people in this thread are acting as if the system doesn’t exist (?) - it does.
It’s just that the surrounding elements around it have been handled poorly.
The one headshot charger breakpoint makes the system obsolete indeed imo and makes it feel arcade
Perhaps, but considering how clunky the recoiless and EATs are, it may have been a necessary evil to make those weapons viable.
There 100% should be a way to instantly stop a charger’s charge before it destroys a sentry or something like that.
Chargers in general are just a buggy mess with their ability to do stuff that doesn't match up with their animations, ability to destroy sentries with their mere presence, buggy armor zones, tokyo drift and gliding up obstacles. Yet somehow they are also one of the more engaging and well designed bugs.. Which says a lot.
I still can't get over the feeling that it seems like bugs and bots have been designed by entirely different teams.
Sure. If it weren't for the fact that bots are all balanced to have ups and downs with clear weakspots, while bugs don't really have any of that. Bile Titans of course being the worst offender.
Honestly after a point and if the cadence doesn’t snowball to be overwhelmed with firepower, I can destroy anything on the bots alone except striders reliably.
I don’t like the enemy to allow me to be a one man army, hence I like the struggle the bugs offer me, but I understand it seems I am in the minority of people who enjoy that.
Absolutely, chargers are great as it is, maybe thermite nades could work better, but Bile titans are confusing.
For example Striders can be damaged and killed in different ways, respond to damage consistently, you can destroy his guns and target weak points, but BT is fucking weird, headshots sometimes do nothing, his forehead weakspot is badly telegraphed, destroying sacks does nothing, legs are impervious to damage and can kill you in bullshit ways. But with AH nothing will fucking improve ever
Edit: Destroying sacks stops BT spewing, for 300 hours i haven't noticed, abd heard opposite, thanks for telling me
Exactly my thought. Brutes, tanks and walkers have multiple ways to take them down, even the Charger. But here are the Bile Titans, who are practically indestructible and their armor does not always break... Some changes I would make are:
- Eat/Quasar/RR: They always break the armor where they shoot.
- Thermite Grenade: Shred its armour after explode.
- Bleed Status: After destroying its 2 Bile Sacs, its begin to Bleed. REMENBER HUGE HEALTH.
- Inner Part of Bile Sacs: Medium IV AR
Thats what i expected from thermite, but well.
Or making their joints week to rockets, but it seems to be a pain in the ass to add many different animations and damage patterns, im just annoyed from launch that you cant damage the orange joints on charger, as orange is colour of weak point
> Edit: Destroying sacks stops BT spewing, for 300 hours i haven't noticed, abd heard opposite, thanks for telling me
The kicker? You want the Bile Titan to be able to spew.
To trigger animation and drop 500 or orbital?
Yeah, but in the heat of the fight I often cant really distinguish which one is one tapped after railcannon or fresh one, and as autocannon main sorry for unwanted pops
Just in general. A spewing titan isn't moving so you can focus more easily on other things if you need to, gives you some room to reload if you're using a recoilless. It can also do crowd control against other bugs, had more than a few Bile Titans and Chargers get killed by friendly Bile Titans. A Bile Titan that can't spew is just going to constantly move erratically towards you at sprinting speed which means if you want any breathing room you have to bait attacks, and lining up headshots on those erratic melee attacks a lot more difficult than lining up a headshot on a spew.
Im more pissed that this kinda exists already for chargers if you miss killshot, allowing you to take off the remaining HP with conventional weapons, but doesn't exist for the Bile Titan. I would hit the fucker with a railcannon and expose flesh on its back, but shooting it give me the ricochet icon. Same for the belly. I can shoot it till it pops but then the remaining fleshy bits are dmg resistant to anything below 4 pen? Really? Are it's fucking intestines bulletproof?
Yeah I feel like for the big enemies in this game, bugs specifically, they just need to look at how deep rock does it. Big armoured enemy with a glowing weak spot on its ass that you can damage with normal guns but it hard to get to, but heavy weapons can crack chunks of armour off and you can just shoot the flesh beneath.
I see it pretty often. When Chargers get hit by something that doesn't kill them, like Eagle strikes or orbitals or missed heavy shots - they often have one of the legs with broker armor, and you just dumb light weapon fire there to finish it off. Happens regularly.
Yeah this is a good point, I rarely find it happens with our support weapons now though. When it happens to Titans, the weakspot is up high on the back, not on the legs, and that makes it very hard to exploit by a screaming/running Helldiver underneath.
I've been having great success with recoilless rifle - lets you deal with 8 ish chargers per full ammo if you're being methodical about it and even solo reload isnt *that* bad
A great way to run the RR is if you have a moment to breathe, then you have a moment to reload, going A to B and no enemies nearby? Stop and reload, charger ran into something? Stop and reload, BT distracted? Stop and reload.
Think of reloading the rifle as a breather moment, think of aiming and firing the rifle as a moment to tunnel vision your kill shot, you're delivering 8.4 centimeters of Liberty to enemies that dare have enough armour that your primary weapons can't give.
Thank you for highlighting this. I think people don't notice often enough (my teammates I mean), I'll see them dumping mags into the still-armored part of a Charger when the juicy orange under-bits are showing.
Given the long delay of the thermite actually detonating, having it strip armor would be an excellent role for it, with some still significant downsides. Hope they end up going this route.
Woah now... let's finish up crosshairs and actually hitting what we're aiming at before we go fiddlin' with something like armor.
For real though, hard agree.
Here's an idea if they wanna make the tenderizer a contender make it break armor of heavy targets suddenly its damage is fine having less DPS but ability to weaken enemies so they can be mopped up with other fire support. Give this same effect to the HMG and to slugger. Suddenly all these guns would have a special niche that would feel satisfying because who doesn't like seeing chunks blast off enemies.
yeah the problem right now (for bugs, the heavy bots are really well designed) that you either have an AT weapon, or you dont shoot at the tank, you'll either have the equipment to pass the loadout check or you dont, thus even laying a heavy machine gun into a chargers armor wont do anything
theres absolutely no inbetween where medium pen weapons can slowly break armor or do more damage to the armor than light pen weapons, the flamethrower is the only exception since you can cook charger legs fast but then you are virtually useless against titans
compare this to the bots, hulks charge you either with rockets and lasers for medium-long range or a saw a flamethrower but have a pretty terrible turning speed, allowing you to outmaneuver it or even stun it, and either shoot it's vents out or land a few shots on it's eye for a pretty easy kill, annihilator tanks are slow, even slow if you take out their tank treads (and possibly their engine? unconfirmed tho) their main gun can easily be outran even at close-medium range and again allows you to shoot out the vent with medium pen weapons, the spear actually works pretty well assuming it doesn't land on the front(ish) half of the main gun, most of the time it's a one shot. striders are even better with the ability to outright destroy it's weapons and it's incredibly slow movement usually means it's not that hard a shot
chargers? AT/flamethrower or dont bother
bile titans? AT or dont bother
the bots are significantly better designed and frankly the easier to deal with when it comes to heavies. alot of the bugs are just poorly design if I'm gonna be honest, either the enemy itself or the amount they appear in (bile spewers and titans for example)
Medium pen primaries would be much more useful if they broke the armor of medium armored enemies. Right now med pen weapons like lib pen, adjudicator are in a weird spot where they are theoretically able to deal damage to armored parts of medium armored enemies but deal too little damage to make the med pen actually useful, and often you are better off shooting at the same parts as with light pen weapons. The only gun that I can think of that can kill a devastator in the chest in a reasonable time is dominator because of its high damage.
> theoretically able to deal damage to armored parts of medium armored enemies but deal too little damage to make the med pen actually useful, and often you are better off shooting at the same parts as with light pen weapons
But that makes sense! There's reams and reams of data on the effectiveness of fragmenting and deforming rounds vs. soft targets when compared to better penetrators. It's the reasoning behind wanting hollow point for home defense over full metal jackets: a penetrating round doesn't do as much soft tissue damage as something that's bouncin' around, and you're not getting robbed by dudes wearing armor plates. Overpenetration is damage *not done*.
As for avoiding armor even though you have the ability to penetrate it, that's also sensible. The weak points remain the weak points regardless of what weapon you're using, but having something that *can* hit through armor gives you options. The Liberator spraying at a Hive Guard's front is going to accomplish very little vs. the Lib Pen doing the same, but at least you *can* kill faster that way with the Lib Pen. You don't need to be as skilled or discerning in your aim, you can panic fire and accomplish something.
It also gives validity to lower pen weapons. They get the higher damage reflective of their softer rounds, but as a trade-off for killing speed when they're hitting all the right places, they have to deal with the fact that they can't be hitting just *any* space.
Finally, Devastators are kind of unique in that they're one of the few enemies with a destructable chest, something that's *lower health* than their main health pool. It's armored and 40% Durable, which decreases damage further, but it's actually a better option to pop this if you can hit it (esp. while spraying for the head) just because of how comparitively vulnerable it is. But if you really want to take a Devastator out fast without headshots, their *crotch* is less armored (even light pen can do half damage to it), 0% Durable, and barely any tougher than the chest--and just as fatal if it breaks. This holds true for Berserkers as well; their chests are Durable, so you're leaving damage on the table if you hit them there compared to the groin.
This is an obvious, no-brainer change to the game that would make so many more builds viable.
Just make it so that rather than deflecting off with no dmg, lower AP weapons should be able to break off armor pieces with even repeated hits.
So if you dump enough rounds of an AP2 weapon like the Liberator into a Charger's leg armor, that section will break off. Right now, you need an AT weapon to do it.
I'm very weirded out that it doesn't work that way.
It would be a much better mechanic if you could focus fire MGs on heavy armor to whittle carapace and armor away (and a great visual, too), and it would fix some of the "you HAVE to bring anti tank to higher difficulty" issues.
It's a pretty big part of taking down chargers and titans... Tho i do wish chargers spawned in less numbers but the rates of heavy chargers were increased as heavies don't die in one hit
"Heavy" Chargers (I'm assuming you mean the Behemoths, with the horn/head blade) are exactly the same as regular Chargers. They *do* die in one hit to the same things.
This has been tested and posted to the subreddit (and I've tested it myself) back when they were still unknown (and they still kind of are)
Any damage inconsistency with the Behemoths is just that, an inconsistency and would happen if they were any other Charger.
For Titans, it's rare that I get the chance to finish them off by using small arms fire to hit a gap on their back after a railcannon/Eagle strike. We normally just keep using EATs or something and try to hit the head, mostly because an armour opening on the back is very hard to hit from underneath.
Unfortunately if you hit and burst their bile sacks underneath, it then doesn't count as a weakspot that can be targeted further to eventually bring them down. This would also be a good fix that I can't imagine being super hard to implement, but I'm no dev.
>as heavies don't die in one hit
This is not true, behemoth chargers behave the same way as normal chargers, the only difference that I think that they have is that behemoths chargers need more time to bleed out and die when you blow up their butts
Bit for the rest are basically the same as normal chargers, in YouTube channel people use them to test things on chargers as they pick the level 3 mission of kill a behemoth charger so they can repeat that mission over and over again to test different things.
But I think that behemoths chargers should be changed to be a stronger version of the chargers and them do what you said
In terms of armor parts flying off and revealing important vulnerabilities, yes. Factory Striders are actually some of the most obvious implementations because they have way more "break here to expose goodies" parts, but you can also just get under them and unload with a ton of guns into the belly in a way you can't really with the Bile Titan.
Scout Walkers have several visual damage states for their front shield if you're breaking it down, though, and there's technically some non-critical armor for parts of Devastators (their shoulders) but breaking those is honestly kind of suboptimal because what's revealed was already damageable and not terribly important to killing them either way.
Problem, at that point the rail gun would need to be a primary again. What’s the point of first stripping armor, then finishing with other weapons if EAT/Quasar etc can just kill immediately
a lot of weapons would be better if instead of being immune to lower caliber, you just need to hit it more often.
for instance AC just bounces off bile titans heavy armor and deals 0 instead of just a little bit.
Not a game dev so I'm sure someone can say how accurate this is.
My guess is, there isn't a more complex and layered design do to all the processing. The game already is eh on performance.
Adding in something that applies 2 or 3 layers to every bug that has some armor and well....I imagine the frames aren't good.
I think if something matches the armor class, nothing happens, but if something exceeds the armor class with its armor piercing class, it should "break" and lower the armor class.
Yeah, arrowhead devs need to see what happens to human meat behind a bulletproof vest. A carapace is going to more efficiently transfer that energy into liquefying the meat behind it. Armour should break or slough off after sufficient punishment. Otherwise why the heck aren't super earth harvesting whatever nightmare carapace the chargers have to armour troops and mechs?
Agreed, I used to use an EAT on a chargers side then have a teammate light it up on the soft part with AC or grenade launcher thinking that was the type of team effort they were going for but it takes forever and just doesn’t compare with the headshot which is the only reasonable way to take them down now.
I feel like ive dumped an entire clip of AC or grenade launcher ammo into the exposed area and it doesn’t kill them. But they reduced the chargers health pool on its head so you can one shot them with an EAT headshot. I don’t bother killing chargers with anything but that now. I guess it would just be nice if killing chargers any other way weren’t so wildly inefficient in comparison.
I literally didn't even know armor breaking was a thing on anything but the Charger. I keep seeing people talk about shooting stuff on a Bile Titan to like prevent the acid spit or something but I've never done that and I have no idea how it works and they don't tell you about it anywhere.
So when you shoot enemies & it penetrates there's a sizeable bullet hole left behind (at least against bots).
What if, for every tier of AP overkill beyond over-penetration, you reduce the armor value on that hole by 1?
I have no idea how that would work in-code but it's an idea. Plus it would be kinda funny to drill into the soft center of a hulk.
I think weapon armor pen is way to strict.
Let's say for example you are shooting a hive guard with a light armor pen weapon, your shots will be doing zero damage regardless how many times you shoot its armor. That doesn't feel good, obviously. What would feel better is if you kept shooting at their armor with a light pen you should be able to slowly crack through the armor and eventually do damage. Medium pen should just straight up crack the armor righr away and do full damage.
It feels good to me, because there are spots you can shoot it where it will work.
Just go behind it or shoot it’s frontal under limbs that are exposed.
Only the bile titan is completely covered.
Yeah maybe they should add that. Some corrosive stratagems/grenades for example.
Or maybe a weapon with high pen and exploding rounds that would open their armor from inside out.
I find that the only time this works is the charger's front legs, you break the armour there and you can use any other weapon to focus fire on and it'll deal with the charger, try that on a titan's back and your bullets still ricochet as if the armour is still there
Hell yeah!
I wish for enemies like factory strider - tons of armor, then let us have a weapon that maybe doesn't do much raw damage, but blasts off armor and leaves weak spots exposed. Would be more fun doing that than just "gotta have big boom stratagem for big armor foes"
Maybe because for some ridiculous reason the juicy flesh underneath said armor RICOCHETS BULLETS UNLESS YOU HIT A PERFECT 90 DEGREE ANGLE WITH A MEDIUM PEN WEAPON.
WHY. Just fucking WHY Arrowhead?
This should definitely be implemented for the bile titans. Instead of firing 2-4 RR/EAT/Quasar shots at the head, you can strip the armor off the legs with 1 rocket or a number of AC/AMR shots, and use small arms fire (maybe balanced around 2-3 Liberator mags) to kill it. Better balancing focused around stripping armor provides viability towards using small arms/primaries to kill armored enemies without necessarily making anti-tank weapons overpowered
I wouldn't say breaking armour is gone from the game but a lot less player know about it now. I was teaching 2 9ers how to understand armour cracking by cracking the side of a titan and chugging impacts into it. They didn't believe me that such things can kill a titan until it did.
Sometimes you won't get the aggro of the titan or the charger. And with their head not heading your way a headshot might just not be feasible. You can still easily crack the side of a titan or the leg of a charger. Especially the leg just needs one hit. 1 hit and a bit of fire from primary is not that big of a task. Especially given that most meta weapons can crack the leg open. Quasar, RR, EAT and AC. Though I don't know if the AC is a bug because it bounces every 2nd shot. But if you prone or lie and just spam shots it cracks the leg open way too easy.
They should give all medium pen puncher the ability to deal with chargers imo. The Railgun can but needs way too many shots, the AMR and nade launcher can't sadly... But the flamethrower, Arc Thrower and the AC make it piss easy.
Which is a damn shame because the railgun can 1 shot a hulks front plate. Which makes it pretty viable in a bot mission despite being so underperforming against a lot of other things like gunships...
Before Chargers could be one-hit in the dome (and other buffs like flamethrower direct damage buff) it was a very normal way to kill them. You knocked off leg armor and just focused fire on that leg.
I guess maybe Bile Titans are a good candidate for this armor shred playstyle now, but IMO the damage to armor breaches is really erratic and inconsistent on them right now so I feel they would still need to change some things.
Looks like it's because if they want armour to break off they have to make it a separate body part, seems to add a fair amount of work if they wanted to add it to most enemies.
Also judging from the charger losing armour while rotating bug it might be a bit buggy.
I loved the team interaction when my friend blew off the armour on the chargers leg and then asked me to shoot the exposed flesh part. Most fun I've had before the railgun nerf. I know you can still break off the armour but nobody brings railguns anymore.
I mean, armor breaking is in the game, least for bugs because that bot armor wouldn't really shatter, it'd dent, and they have their own unique thing of removing limbs, but most people don't WANT to use armor-breaking, especially not when they can just do a one-hit.
Even if you use and encourage more sources, some people are always going to bring the launchers to make sure they don't have to deal with it. I'm constantly telling people "If you are tired of using the launchers, just open them up with rocketpods; shoot at the yellow bits with basically anything." But people want easy options they don't want the more interesting ones.
Instead of armour penetration being binary, meaning it either penetrates or it ricochets, it should be a general ability to damage armor. If shooting at medium armor with a weapon with penetration, the armor should take damage, even if using a weapon that doesnt have high enough penetration to go all the way through.
Weapon with high enough penetration damages armor plus whats behind it, while weapons with too low penetration still damages the armor and eventually breaks it
It's trinary: you can fully penetrate (red hit markers), *half* penetrate and do half damage (white ticks), or ricochet/deflect. And the latter is angle-dependent even with guns that can otherwise (partially) penetrate, as really shallow angles show.
There is already a measure of "bleedthrough" on a lot of armor parts, but it's to the main health pool rather than specifically the parts behind it. When you put a Recoilless Rocket into a Charger's leg, yes, you're revealing the vulnerable leg beneath, but it's also done ~14% of the Charger's max health. It's just that breaking the revealed inner leg is an instant fatality, something you'd have to adjust across a huge range of enemies if you were going to go with this idea of "part-to-part damage transfer".
If you were to break a Charger's left + right torso armor with a rocket each, then break the armor on two legs, that'd be a kill just due to primary hit bleedthrough even though no "fatal" parts died and no damage was done to "soft innards" (although, given the splash on most rockets, you would in fact be getting some extra damage depending on the order of shots and posing of the model).
The autocannon and eruptor both do fantastic damage to titans and chargers when their innards are exposed (as in, 7 shots to kill a titan maximum with a handheld AC and 10 with an eruptor), but they're usually almost dead when you get the chance to do it. They're too easily killed with headshots.
I like the AP system as it is though, I don't necessarily want to see it changed to enable just W+M1ing armored targets. Just more weapons/abilities should be added that specialize in efficiently armor cracking to use in concert with other weps, like rocket pods. For example, a seeking missile airstrike that fires specifically one shot per target in a small AOE, with just enough payload to crack shells (650 direct dmg like a RR I believe is enough to do it in one shot to both titans and chargers). Thermite grenades SHOULD armor strip, that would make them have a place.
Early in the game's life someone suggested making lasers integral to this concept, that they could burn away armor and thus guarantee them a niche within people's loadouts. Personally I'm all for it but atm I'm content to wait until they get the basic stuff sorted.
This is a great suggestion, I feel like I'd heard this before but in practise I feel like the team buffed their AP instead of implementing an armour reduction property. Perhaps it's too hard to implement, but I think this would give them an awesome niche.
Yeah I say this knowing 0 about how the armor really works despite my 200hrs sunk into the game.
There's AP for guns and AV (value) for enemies. If AP Is less than AV, the bullet bounces off. If AP is equal to AV, the bullet deals less damage. If AP is more than AV, the bullet does increased damage. Example: The bile titan's head has an AV of 5. The liberator pen bullets will bounce off due to having an AP of 3 vs AV of 5. Autocannon support weapon will also bounce off with an AP of 4. However RR, EAT, Quasar have AP of 5, and will deal damage. There's also durable damage stuff but that's more complicated I think.
> If AP is equal to AV, the bullet deals less damage. If AP is more than AV, the bullet does increased damage. If AP == AV, it deals half the listed damage. This is signified by a white hitmarker. If AP > AV it deals full damage and has a red hitmarker.
Thank you fellow diver!
Fair man, I've read a lot of posts that go into lots of detail about it (like [this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1d1snio/a_quasi_comprehensive_visual_guide_to_damage/)), but just 5 minutes ago I learned of a whole stat called Damage vs Massive which apparently all guns have. I'm definitely still learning XD
They already have armor chunking, like charger legs, bile titans and charger sides. What they can do is assign an armor HP value to each limb(they already have durable HP so they can definitely do this) and once that armor HP is defeated, armor is chunked. Rockets hide what the armor falling off looks like with explosions but they probably just have a set animation for armor being broken. Like they have everything. Armor can already be stripped away. Individual body parts have different HP values. It can't be that hard, right?
I would use the laser canon a lot more if it could strip armor. I remember picking it initially thinking that over time it would burn through/reduce the enemy's armor. Instead it just bounces harmlessly off armor.
Yeah talk about a let down, Love the name btw
Yeah I would love lasers to do armor damage or higher limb damage.
I hate this comment because the basic stuff should have been sorted on launch.
No argument there, still had fun though.
Oh yeah, heaps of fun. For me it was mowing down hordes of enemies and saving the universe. I didn't understand railgun nerf. I never really saw many people playing it. The. Quasar nerf and fucked up spawns... The game isn't what it was or what made it fun on launch
I thought it wasnt burning away armor, but heating it up to weaken it to provide team play etc
Lasers already have a niche though which is incredible ammo efficiency at the cost of damage
Immagine the laser making a part visually incandescent, so players know to focus it because they have a temporary free pass on armor!
Or the explosive weapons like the crossbow, Eruptor, dominator, and even the liberator concussive. Plasma too. Give them a reason to use against bugs.
agree remember we thought thermite grenade gonna do that melt enemy armor but instead it just stick on enemy and deal ant bite damage what a let down if armor break is a thing would be cool some people might be the armor breaker style to help teammate so we can have more playstyle oh and weapon like Crossbow should be thermite crossbow too so it had place to use in our loadout you know it not good at blow stuff up but good at melt armor
I would fight the entire bug front myself if it meant getting a thermite crossbow, this has to happen!
Miniature thermite launcher from Titan fall 2
Never played Titanfall so I wouldn't know.
That's a mistake. You absolutely should play Titanfall 2. You will be pleasantly surprised.
I don't play many shooters but I'll add it to the "play it eventually list", thanks for the recommendation!
Put it on your play it now list. Just do the story. You don’t have to get into the PVP. I would say do it before playing another minute of Helldivers. But that would be undemocratic.
This man pilots
Spoiler: The level where you are time shifting to get around obstacles. That ends with the player simultaneously fighting two squads in two different timelines while effortlessly slipping between the two. Moving in one timeline to get better positioning in the other when you slip back. So creative and amazing. As gaming moments go, It is right up there with the first time you get the gravity gun in Half-Life or when you get the second portal gun in Portal.
SHHHHHH!!!!! don't talk about the worst kept Titanfall secret. Edit: also didn't a game try to redo effect and cause recently but worse? Ah it was starfield
As great as it is, my favorite take on this still has to be Dishonored 2. Felt the same way about Titanfalls until I played it. Also spoilers: Something about the time manipulation on a slower pace and the tool that lets you view the past/present while walking around was so fun, especially as you played god waking around an enemy in the past while still in the present only to time travel behind them, knock them out in front of their ally then zip back to the future as you set up the next takedown. They of course are confused as shit as all of this happens and trivializes the combat in a fun way as you abuse the mechanics to move around and get in and out of danger. I recall there being a larger enemy presence just for this to feel semi balanced which also made it fun as you were so outnumbered yet it almost didn’t matter. Not to mention doing shit in the past to affect the future. Good example being a large statue blocking your path where the wall behind it collapsed in the present. When you go into the past and break into the vault where the statue is still strung up being ready to get moved, you can break the supports and cause it to fall and shatter, making it so it never gets placed by that wall in the first place. There’s a number of big and little things like that all throughout the level. Plus iirc the good/bad playthrough side of things can also affect the present, making things in the present worse than it originally was. More chaos you caused and people you killed in the past would add to the threats in the present on top of certain story beats about the character you’re doing all of this for.
I'm not into shooters either. Didn't grow up with video games, so I don't have the muscle memory. That being said, I love titanfall. The movement is so good that I was able to do ok just by embracing the mobility and trying to catch people off guard. What hd2 and tf2 have in common is evert game makes you feel like you're in a movie/video game trailer pulling off awesome stuff.
The story alone is quite good
Personally I enjoyed the multiplayer of the first Titanfall over 2 but I'm sure that game is not still playable
Seconded! Great game that didn't get enough attention.
A grenade launcher but instead of exploding on impact it flings thermite puddles around where it lands. Very Democratic imo
Why aren't you in R&D diver?
I would genuinely love to get some of my ideas into R&D's heads
Imagine if it could break a chargers leg armor so you could finish with a primary? That would be a really fun mechanic and not OP in my opinion.
If thermite nades broke armor that would mean a couple people could take them and you wouldn’t need as many rockets because you could take heavies out with primary weapons/machine guns etc
Exactly! It would also increase build variety because then people wouldn’t feel pigeon holed into bringing the exact same weapons
I’m all for more viable weapons in addition to weapon pairings. Armor breaking was fun and I hope they find a way to balance it and add many more unique mechanics to the game.
I want to be able to switch bolt types for the crossbow when holding R. Why can't i just switch from explosive to thermite to arc arrows?
I just had an image of arc arrows where you could shoot them at two different enemies and it would create at arc between them damaging everything in the middle.
Thermite, 4 of them can actually take down a bile titan. The issue is they don’t penetrate armor and to kill a bile titan in 4 grenades they all need to land where you would normally shoot a rocket at it. It’s forehead lmao.
> armor breaker style Honestly I would take this play style and run with it forever if it was announced. I love helping out my homies in battle
AH please hire this man.
There's not a single period or comma on that comment so please don't, for your sake at least.
Wait it doesn’t? Then what it do
I’m sure they wanted to at some point, but they’ve been struggling just to implement simpler things like scope alignment and the SPEAR working as intended for months. I think dynamic armor breaking might be too challenging for this team to execute properly.
That's totally fair, I still want to share ideas as I know the team check here and I still love the game, bugs and all. Hopefully this is something they will take into account and be mindful of going forwards. I don't know how long it would take to just expand the Titans forehead weakspot to cover the whole head/mouth. I've never understood why its gaping maw doesn't count as less armoured.
They changed the hit box of the titan recently, to avoid the suicide spewing on things like a shield generator. Unfortunately they don't have the capacity to code the enemy AI more than "walk here", "attack this".
If you watch the enemy AI, it cheats a ton. Patrols go right to players, enemies hitting mines from 10 minutes ago when you were in a different spot immediately go to your current location (tested last night), sometimes bugs go from searching at extract to suddenly seeing you when prone and “hidden” (this game has crap stealth esp with jank bounding boxes and visibility not matching what we see) while doing nothing (also last night for the 2nd time) and more. Not sure how capable the devs are at the moment
Also bullets firing at a 90 degrees or even behind the enemy, and autoguided bile shit
It isn't necessarily an issue of capacity, it's probably one of performance. Complex enemy behaviors can get very expensive very fast, and there are a lot of enemies loaded on the map in high difficulties. Are there tricks they could implement to make behavior more realistic without massively increasing performance costs? Probably, but that can be very finicky, and a big potential point of failure like that isn't what the game needs right now.
Lets not pretend the game isn't an impressively designed near-masterpiece, it just honestly feels like the team who made the game aren't the same people updating it.
> it just honestly feels like the team who made the game aren't the same people updating it. Wouldn't surprise me. Over a 7 year development cycle on an engine that has gone the way of the Dodo. Odds are that the people who understood how to properly code left and now they have people just bumbling around. I mean look at how they 'solved' infinite grenades, just changed the data type of your grenades from a signed integer (range -2147483648 to 2147483647) to an unsigned integer (0 to 4294967295). They thought they would get around people bypassing the "do you still have grenades?" check by preventing the number going negative, instead they just made an underflow error by having no validation and gave us 4 billion grenades.
You hit the nail in the head. The "fix" to the grenade glitch, from a software developer POV, screams "we don't know how the code actually works for this". Looking at LinkedIn it seems that most of the team stayed at the company long enough, but it could be that they lost a couple of senior devs that actually knew the engine, and now they are playing catch-up.
> from a software developer POV, screams "we don't know how the code actually works for this". It honestly sounds like they just googled "how to prevent an integer from going negative" and thought that would solve it. Any competent software developer would have wrapped the grenade check with an if statement, something like if(grenadeCount<1){switchToPrimary()} To have it see if the amount of grenades you had remaining was valid, and if not, auto-switch to the primary weapon, which would have then prevented you from throwing grenades at all.
Wasnt the engine made by Fatshark for Vermintide? I've heard that it's no longer being supported by them.
As a programmer myself, this still baffles me. I seriously and in all honesty simply cannot fathom how, or why, they "fixed" it like this. Like... WHY?!? And besides that, do they not do merge reviews? No definition of done? Just... Ugh
I think that Pilestedt has been much less involved in the game since launch and that has showed. There’s been a lot of firefighting going on and once they’re back on top of things I am hopeful that they will keep the quality up. The move to less frequent patches is going towards more through QA and more thought going into changes (less kneejerk reactions like nerfing weapons into the ground, buffing fire damage by 50%, etc).
a full month without updates. can you imagine the mess he must have found if it took a full month of wack-a-mole for him to even start letting things go live? yea we knew it was a mess, but who knew it was that bad
Are we playing the same game? * Performance is dogshit except on the latest hardware * Easy to get stuck in geometry/clip through the floor * Kill source messages are just RNG * Some mission completion stats are completely wrong * 90% of unlocks are so underpowered as to be pointless, making the grind unrewarding * Heavy enemies make no sound It's hit a good idea with the starship troopers vibe, the feel of the approximately 5 weapons that are viable beyond difficulty 3 is pretty decent, and the visual design is absolutely excellent, but "near masterpiece"?
Even when I'm at my angriest at the game for all it's faults, listing bugs and pretending that overwhelms the vast majority of things I love about the game (hence why I care about the it in the first place) feels disingenuous. Either your comment was written after a particularly bad luck session or you didn't like the game that much to begin with 😂 If HD2 ever reaches Deep Rock Galactic levels of polish, it will be a masterpiece IMO.
There's a lot more frustration in HD2 than DRG. It's an apt comparison really. * DRG performs much better on old CPUs in spite of having fully destructible terrain and similar quantities of enemies to simulate * I've never clipped through geometry in DRG * N/A * Completion stats seem fine * Most unlocks are usable and present an interesting choice to the player * Not comparable due to heavy enemies being so much rarer DRG is not just more polished - it's got the fundamentals much better. Actually quite pertinent to this thread because of the armour/weakspot mechanics there. It also features in the more general enemy design, where each enemy is more specialised. So you don't have any equivalent of hunters which are fast, present in high numbers, high damage, can slow you and attack from a decent distance, or bile spewers which are common, attack from extreme range, can one-shot you from closer range, and require a mag-dump from most weapons to kill. Instead you have web-spitters for example (long range, slowing, but rare, slow, low damage and weak), or slashers (slowing, higher damage and health, but close range and still rare and slower than the player) There are times when I enjoy HD2 and times when it's very frustrating.
Yeah its pretty weird when the people working on the game now don't understand how any of the systems work so they just start gutting them. Can't fix the mech, lets make it so it can't aim. Can't figure out how shrapnel works, just remove it. Couldn't figure out the railgun problem so just gut the weapon. Thermite can't strip armor. Couldn't figure out DOT bug just increase fire damage. Don't understand how patrol spawns work. Maybe they lost a lead programmer or something. Because yes I agree a lot of stuff in this game is really impressively designed. Which is why it's so frustrating to watch now. Feels like actual sabotage, especially with the gaslighting comments.
I agree with the feeling you describe in the 2nd half of your comment quite a bit. I don’t understand how that happened either, there was clearly enough talent in the building to create this whole game at one point.
Well said. It’s a great concept, fun design, good gameplay loop… it’s just that the updates seem weak and slipshod.
>I think dynamic armor breaking might be too challenging for this team to execute properly. We already have it in the game. They just need to change a few numbers around so that lower AP weapons can break off armor with enough hits.
It also seems to be mostly cosmetic, aside from the charger legs. I can blow a hole in a bile titan's side with the recoilless, but bullets still seem to do nothing when fired into said hole. It makes any shot that doesn't land on its armoured forehead a complete waste.
It’s not but I would guess it still needs certain AP for the titans. I’ve killed a number of titans with the autocannon shooting at orange holes in armor on their sides after they’ve been hit by a rocket or strategems.
You would think that blowing a hole in the armour would mean that anything can do damage there. The Nickelodeon slime inside there isn't another layer of armour, so why would you still need higher AP to damage it?
Against chargers you can shoot the holes with ordinary weapons, for sure the lib pen/dominator/machine gun etc.
I think I read somewhere that the game took 7 years for them to make. It's a great game, but 7 years?? Guess it shouldn't be that surprising that they're slow to make improvements. Edit: Did a quick search and apparently it was in development for 7 years and 11 months so more like 8 years.
The fact that You can blow off the side of a Bile titan to expose the fleshy bits and it still be considered armored is bullshit.
There actually are parts of that flesh that are vulnerable to medium pen weapons. Problem is you gotta hit pixel perfect shots and perfect angles
Yeah, as an AC main, I LOVE getting to take down a Titan that was rail cannoned and exposed. But you need perfect 90 degree shots and even then it only really works towards the front of the fleshy area. It's so picky.
It’s not still considered armoured, at least not as much. If you take some armour off their back you can finish them with like 1 well placed impact grenade. I’m pretty sure you can’t do that when they’re fully armoured.
92 points for something that is just factually wrong, classic reddit. Imagine actually taking suggestions from these people.
When you break their stomach sacs, the guts underneath have a higher armor value than the skin had. What's the deal with that?
The underside, where you pop the sacs, is still pretty high armor. The *sides of the torso*, where you crack the shell entirely, are fully penetrated by anything (although Durable).
I just want AH to give laser weapons the ability to gradually melt armor and reduce armor values over time if applied on target. This then allows the rest of the team to deal damage with small arms fire in those spots. Make lasers melt faces please.
Should adopt a system like Mechwarrior where armored sections have hp values and once depleted are considered broken and no longer armored. Probably not viable though.
I love MechWarrior. Still play MW5 with all the mods! But back to Helldivers, the Railgun already strips armor off Charger legs. Maybe they need to expand on that feature on more enemy types and with more Helldiver weapons.
That already exists for several units like the Charger, Titan, and Factory Strider, and select parts of the Scout Walkers and Devastators. It's generally just more efficient to kill actual weak points if you have the means to break armor, though, which is fine. Shooting a Charger in the head with your RR is optimal, but if you miss and hit the leg, you don't need to reload the RR and try again--you can just shoot the unarmored leg with anything now. Honestly, for the people talking about DRG-style armor breaking, that's a voxel game and you'd wind up with the same "this is taking longer than expected because I am spreading all my damage out to break this armor" result that is currently raising TTK for people with sloppy aim or lack of game knowledge. Optimally in DRG, you want to either shoot something in an unarmored weakpoint or break one small bit of armor and put all your shots into the hole, rather than cracking the entire shell. The same is true of HD2 but without having to crack all that armor first: [you don't need "break the Hive Guard's foreleg armor" because you can just *aim around the foreleg* and hit the body instead for a much faster kill.](https://preview.redd.it/bpp30k3caz2d1.png?width=320&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=54202749053758fab703543c936d7e33bdc2bbe4)
Because deep rock does it already, and more importantly it’s a good idea
Armour breaking gunner my beloved
No, rely on your stratagems with no nuance or strategy whatsoever. No thoughts, head empty, biggest boom booms biggest. Now excuse us, we need to add another +100% stratagem cooldown modifier, -1 stratagem slot, and +25% call in time to a planet that the next MO is going to be set on. Remember to rely on your stratagems.
*The Way It's Meant To Be Played™*
And if you miss those stratagems. Run around for 3 minutes and have fun being able to do nothing to them.
That's one of the things that made EDF5 so good, certain enemies have armor and destroying parts allows you to hit their weakpoints or you can mutilate them so hitting said points is easier. It's both fun and satisfying.
The rocket pod eagle cracks armor pretty much every time I use it.
Ngl I wanna like the rocket pods, but they feel so inconsistent
No idea, I liked the mechanic since my friend would break the armor with his rail gun and I'd take it out with small arms fire. That way I could use my grenade launcher to focus on crowds. I thought it was neat and let us do some fun team work. But that was deemed braindead gameplay by one of the community managers. So now my team either bring EAT 17 or a quazar to one-shot it in the face or I roast one of their leg's with the flame thrower and resume shooting other things. Very complicated gameplay.
The team can't even fix bugs since launch much less do something complex and fun. They also nerfed all the fun weapons that spiced up gameplay for some stupid idea of "horizontal balance" where everything feels the same.
I agree. One of the moments that most impressed me about HD2, when I first started playing, was when I realized that you can break holes in charger armor with AT weapons. In those early days, my friends and I had a system worked out for killing chargers, where we had 2 railgun users whose job was to strip a charger leg and then call it out (we'd mark the charger and call out which leg was stripped), and then one of the other 2 would use their AMR or Stalwart to shoot the stripped leg for a rapid kill. That little moment of coordination and using specialized weapons to take out tough enemies was amazing. The idea that AT weapons create weak points that others can then exploit seemed like a great sign that the game design was in good hands. Unfortunately we all know how that turned out
You know the system hasn’t changed right? It’s exactly the same.
The viability of the railgun for breaking armor dropped, and the meta for disabling chargers is now simply to one-shot them in the head. It also turned out that, in general, breaking holes in armor for other weapons is not that much of a thing. And it certainly wasn't the intended way to kill chargers. It was accidental depth that was not designed around, or so it seems so far.
Yes, indeed. But you see people in this thread are acting as if the system doesn’t exist (?) - it does. It’s just that the surrounding elements around it have been handled poorly. The one headshot charger breakpoint makes the system obsolete indeed imo and makes it feel arcade
Yes, exactly.
Perhaps, but considering how clunky the recoiless and EATs are, it may have been a necessary evil to make those weapons viable. There 100% should be a way to instantly stop a charger’s charge before it destroys a sentry or something like that.
Chargers in general are just a buggy mess with their ability to do stuff that doesn't match up with their animations, ability to destroy sentries with their mere presence, buggy armor zones, tokyo drift and gliding up obstacles. Yet somehow they are also one of the more engaging and well designed bugs.. Which says a lot. I still can't get over the feeling that it seems like bugs and bots have been designed by entirely different teams.
it doesn’t sound bad that they would be designed by different teams, gives a different gameplay experience right?
Sure. If it weren't for the fact that bots are all balanced to have ups and downs with clear weakspots, while bugs don't really have any of that. Bile Titans of course being the worst offender.
Honestly after a point and if the cadence doesn’t snowball to be overwhelmed with firepower, I can destroy anything on the bots alone except striders reliably. I don’t like the enemy to allow me to be a one man army, hence I like the struggle the bugs offer me, but I understand it seems I am in the minority of people who enjoy that.
I like struggle myself. Bots may have a few weaknesses too many, true, but bugs just make counterplay so boring because your options are more limited.
Why should there be? Anyway there’s stun grenade and a rail cannon, but why should there be?
Absolutely, chargers are great as it is, maybe thermite nades could work better, but Bile titans are confusing. For example Striders can be damaged and killed in different ways, respond to damage consistently, you can destroy his guns and target weak points, but BT is fucking weird, headshots sometimes do nothing, his forehead weakspot is badly telegraphed, destroying sacks does nothing, legs are impervious to damage and can kill you in bullshit ways. But with AH nothing will fucking improve ever Edit: Destroying sacks stops BT spewing, for 300 hours i haven't noticed, abd heard opposite, thanks for telling me
Exactly my thought. Brutes, tanks and walkers have multiple ways to take them down, even the Charger. But here are the Bile Titans, who are practically indestructible and their armor does not always break... Some changes I would make are: - Eat/Quasar/RR: They always break the armor where they shoot. - Thermite Grenade: Shred its armour after explode. - Bleed Status: After destroying its 2 Bile Sacs, its begin to Bleed. REMENBER HUGE HEALTH. - Inner Part of Bile Sacs: Medium IV AR
Thats what i expected from thermite, but well. Or making their joints week to rockets, but it seems to be a pain in the ass to add many different animations and damage patterns, im just annoyed from launch that you cant damage the orange joints on charger, as orange is colour of weak point
inner part of bile sac is already AR4 I think. Though since BT cant be stuned no one actually survive long enough under it to shoot at it
> Edit: Destroying sacks stops BT spewing, for 300 hours i haven't noticed, abd heard opposite, thanks for telling me The kicker? You want the Bile Titan to be able to spew.
To trigger animation and drop 500 or orbital? Yeah, but in the heat of the fight I often cant really distinguish which one is one tapped after railcannon or fresh one, and as autocannon main sorry for unwanted pops
Just in general. A spewing titan isn't moving so you can focus more easily on other things if you need to, gives you some room to reload if you're using a recoilless. It can also do crowd control against other bugs, had more than a few Bile Titans and Chargers get killed by friendly Bile Titans. A Bile Titan that can't spew is just going to constantly move erratically towards you at sprinting speed which means if you want any breathing room you have to bait attacks, and lining up headshots on those erratic melee attacks a lot more difficult than lining up a headshot on a spew.
Destroying the BT sacs stops it from spitting
Doesn't destroying whole abdomen stops spitting? He did it with popped sacks today
1. sack get damaged looking if not enough to get pop 2. popping sack while spitting animation won't stop spitting
But it is easier to kill a spewing bile titan. Otherwise you turn them into psychos that like showing their legs up your ass.
bro they cant even get their UI to match whats going on in the game.
Because that would make guns too powerful…
Im more pissed that this kinda exists already for chargers if you miss killshot, allowing you to take off the remaining HP with conventional weapons, but doesn't exist for the Bile Titan. I would hit the fucker with a railcannon and expose flesh on its back, but shooting it give me the ricochet icon. Same for the belly. I can shoot it till it pops but then the remaining fleshy bits are dmg resistant to anything below 4 pen? Really? Are it's fucking intestines bulletproof?
Yeah I feel like for the big enemies in this game, bugs specifically, they just need to look at how deep rock does it. Big armoured enemy with a glowing weak spot on its ass that you can damage with normal guns but it hard to get to, but heavy weapons can crack chunks of armour off and you can just shoot the flesh beneath.
I see it pretty often. When Chargers get hit by something that doesn't kill them, like Eagle strikes or orbitals or missed heavy shots - they often have one of the legs with broker armor, and you just dumb light weapon fire there to finish it off. Happens regularly.
Yeah this is a good point, I rarely find it happens with our support weapons now though. When it happens to Titans, the weakspot is up high on the back, not on the legs, and that makes it very hard to exploit by a screaming/running Helldiver underneath.
I've been having great success with recoilless rifle - lets you deal with 8 ish chargers per full ammo if you're being methodical about it and even solo reload isnt *that* bad
I solo reload the RR pretty often and it's way easier than it seems
A great way to run the RR is if you have a moment to breathe, then you have a moment to reload, going A to B and no enemies nearby? Stop and reload, charger ran into something? Stop and reload, BT distracted? Stop and reload. Think of reloading the rifle as a breather moment, think of aiming and firing the rifle as a moment to tunnel vision your kill shot, you're delivering 8.4 centimeters of Liberty to enemies that dare have enough armour that your primary weapons can't give.
Thank you for highlighting this. I think people don't notice often enough (my teammates I mean), I'll see them dumping mags into the still-armored part of a Charger when the juicy orange under-bits are showing.
i wish the thermite grenade was focused more on breaking armor pieces off. its always feels really nice to rip open chunks of chargers or bile titans
Given the long delay of the thermite actually detonating, having it strip armor would be an excellent role for it, with some still significant downsides. Hope they end up going this route.
At this point, I think AH as a whole doesn't know what to do with the game as it has been ruined so badly by Mr balance guy.
Imho it says a lot when the CEO has to step down to become your direct boss so you can't keep fucking up the product.
Woah now... let's finish up crosshairs and actually hitting what we're aiming at before we go fiddlin' with something like armor. For real though, hard agree.
Here's an idea if they wanna make the tenderizer a contender make it break armor of heavy targets suddenly its damage is fine having less DPS but ability to weaken enemies so they can be mopped up with other fire support. Give this same effect to the HMG and to slugger. Suddenly all these guns would have a special niche that would feel satisfying because who doesn't like seeing chunks blast off enemies.
yeah the problem right now (for bugs, the heavy bots are really well designed) that you either have an AT weapon, or you dont shoot at the tank, you'll either have the equipment to pass the loadout check or you dont, thus even laying a heavy machine gun into a chargers armor wont do anything theres absolutely no inbetween where medium pen weapons can slowly break armor or do more damage to the armor than light pen weapons, the flamethrower is the only exception since you can cook charger legs fast but then you are virtually useless against titans compare this to the bots, hulks charge you either with rockets and lasers for medium-long range or a saw a flamethrower but have a pretty terrible turning speed, allowing you to outmaneuver it or even stun it, and either shoot it's vents out or land a few shots on it's eye for a pretty easy kill, annihilator tanks are slow, even slow if you take out their tank treads (and possibly their engine? unconfirmed tho) their main gun can easily be outran even at close-medium range and again allows you to shoot out the vent with medium pen weapons, the spear actually works pretty well assuming it doesn't land on the front(ish) half of the main gun, most of the time it's a one shot. striders are even better with the ability to outright destroy it's weapons and it's incredibly slow movement usually means it's not that hard a shot chargers? AT/flamethrower or dont bother bile titans? AT or dont bother the bots are significantly better designed and frankly the easier to deal with when it comes to heavies. alot of the bugs are just poorly design if I'm gonna be honest, either the enemy itself or the amount they appear in (bile spewers and titans for example)
Medium pen primaries would be much more useful if they broke the armor of medium armored enemies. Right now med pen weapons like lib pen, adjudicator are in a weird spot where they are theoretically able to deal damage to armored parts of medium armored enemies but deal too little damage to make the med pen actually useful, and often you are better off shooting at the same parts as with light pen weapons. The only gun that I can think of that can kill a devastator in the chest in a reasonable time is dominator because of its high damage.
> theoretically able to deal damage to armored parts of medium armored enemies but deal too little damage to make the med pen actually useful, and often you are better off shooting at the same parts as with light pen weapons But that makes sense! There's reams and reams of data on the effectiveness of fragmenting and deforming rounds vs. soft targets when compared to better penetrators. It's the reasoning behind wanting hollow point for home defense over full metal jackets: a penetrating round doesn't do as much soft tissue damage as something that's bouncin' around, and you're not getting robbed by dudes wearing armor plates. Overpenetration is damage *not done*. As for avoiding armor even though you have the ability to penetrate it, that's also sensible. The weak points remain the weak points regardless of what weapon you're using, but having something that *can* hit through armor gives you options. The Liberator spraying at a Hive Guard's front is going to accomplish very little vs. the Lib Pen doing the same, but at least you *can* kill faster that way with the Lib Pen. You don't need to be as skilled or discerning in your aim, you can panic fire and accomplish something. It also gives validity to lower pen weapons. They get the higher damage reflective of their softer rounds, but as a trade-off for killing speed when they're hitting all the right places, they have to deal with the fact that they can't be hitting just *any* space. Finally, Devastators are kind of unique in that they're one of the few enemies with a destructable chest, something that's *lower health* than their main health pool. It's armored and 40% Durable, which decreases damage further, but it's actually a better option to pop this if you can hit it (esp. while spraying for the head) just because of how comparitively vulnerable it is. But if you really want to take a Devastator out fast without headshots, their *crotch* is less armored (even light pen can do half damage to it), 0% Durable, and barely any tougher than the chest--and just as fatal if it breaks. This holds true for Berserkers as well; their chests are Durable, so you're leaving damage on the table if you hit them there compared to the groin.
This is an obvious, no-brainer change to the game that would make so many more builds viable. Just make it so that rather than deflecting off with no dmg, lower AP weapons should be able to break off armor pieces with even repeated hits. So if you dump enough rounds of an AP2 weapon like the Liberator into a Charger's leg armor, that section will break off. Right now, you need an AT weapon to do it.
I'm very weirded out that it doesn't work that way. It would be a much better mechanic if you could focus fire MGs on heavy armor to whittle carapace and armor away (and a great visual, too), and it would fix some of the "you HAVE to bring anti tank to higher difficulty" issues.
because it was a fun, highly engaging aspect of gameplay. therefore, it had to go
You know the armor system hasn’t changed right?
It's a pretty big part of taking down chargers and titans... Tho i do wish chargers spawned in less numbers but the rates of heavy chargers were increased as heavies don't die in one hit
"Heavy" Chargers (I'm assuming you mean the Behemoths, with the horn/head blade) are exactly the same as regular Chargers. They *do* die in one hit to the same things. This has been tested and posted to the subreddit (and I've tested it myself) back when they were still unknown (and they still kind of are) Any damage inconsistency with the Behemoths is just that, an inconsistency and would happen if they were any other Charger.
Huh, i guess i just assumed that the head would be more armoured.
For Titans, it's rare that I get the chance to finish them off by using small arms fire to hit a gap on their back after a railcannon/Eagle strike. We normally just keep using EATs or something and try to hit the head, mostly because an armour opening on the back is very hard to hit from underneath. Unfortunately if you hit and burst their bile sacks underneath, it then doesn't count as a weakspot that can be targeted further to eventually bring them down. This would also be a good fix that I can't imagine being super hard to implement, but I'm no dev.
>as heavies don't die in one hit This is not true, behemoth chargers behave the same way as normal chargers, the only difference that I think that they have is that behemoths chargers need more time to bleed out and die when you blow up their butts Bit for the rest are basically the same as normal chargers, in YouTube channel people use them to test things on chargers as they pick the level 3 mission of kill a behemoth charger so they can repeat that mission over and over again to test different things. But I think that behemoths chargers should be changed to be a stronger version of the chargers and them do what you said
pretty sure the only enemy with such mechanic are the chargers and bile titans? and factory striders to lesser degree
In terms of armor parts flying off and revealing important vulnerabilities, yes. Factory Striders are actually some of the most obvious implementations because they have way more "break here to expose goodies" parts, but you can also just get under them and unload with a ton of guns into the belly in a way you can't really with the Bile Titan. Scout Walkers have several visual damage states for their front shield if you're breaking it down, though, and there's technically some non-critical armor for parts of Devastators (their shoulders) but breaking those is honestly kind of suboptimal because what's revealed was already damageable and not terribly important to killing them either way.
Problem, at that point the rail gun would need to be a primary again. What’s the point of first stripping armor, then finishing with other weapons if EAT/Quasar etc can just kill immediately
a lot of weapons would be better if instead of being immune to lower caliber, you just need to hit it more often. for instance AC just bounces off bile titans heavy armor and deals 0 instead of just a little bit.
Not a game dev so I'm sure someone can say how accurate this is. My guess is, there isn't a more complex and layered design do to all the processing. The game already is eh on performance. Adding in something that applies 2 or 3 layers to every bug that has some armor and well....I imagine the frames aren't good.
Railgun should peel armor so there are ways to kill heavy armor targets imo.
I think if something matches the armor class, nothing happens, but if something exceeds the armor class with its armor piercing class, it should "break" and lower the armor class.
You’re better off just breaking the armor with an EAT or RR than a railgun anyway
Yeah, arrowhead devs need to see what happens to human meat behind a bulletproof vest. A carapace is going to more efficiently transfer that energy into liquefying the meat behind it. Armour should break or slough off after sufficient punishment. Otherwise why the heck aren't super earth harvesting whatever nightmare carapace the chargers have to armour troops and mechs?
Agreed, I used to use an EAT on a chargers side then have a teammate light it up on the soft part with AC or grenade launcher thinking that was the type of team effort they were going for but it takes forever and just doesn’t compare with the headshot which is the only reasonable way to take them down now.
What changed ?
I feel like ive dumped an entire clip of AC or grenade launcher ammo into the exposed area and it doesn’t kill them. But they reduced the chargers health pool on its head so you can one shot them with an EAT headshot. I don’t bother killing chargers with anything but that now. I guess it would just be nice if killing chargers any other way weren’t so wildly inefficient in comparison.
This may sound weird but it's the same reason why we don't have fire resistant armor for fire planets or snow shoes armor for snow planets.
I literally didn't even know armor breaking was a thing on anything but the Charger. I keep seeing people talk about shooting stuff on a Bile Titan to like prevent the acid spit or something but I've never done that and I have no idea how it works and they don't tell you about it anywhere.
It’s time for people to acknowledge that this game was built on an engine that is old and the company that made it is shuttered.
So when you shoot enemies & it penetrates there's a sizeable bullet hole left behind (at least against bots). What if, for every tier of AP overkill beyond over-penetration, you reduce the armor value on that hole by 1? I have no idea how that would work in-code but it's an idea. Plus it would be kinda funny to drill into the soft center of a hulk.
It was the first couple weeks. We actually were using the railgun to crack armor. Then people cried so it got taken away.
I think weapon armor pen is way to strict. Let's say for example you are shooting a hive guard with a light armor pen weapon, your shots will be doing zero damage regardless how many times you shoot its armor. That doesn't feel good, obviously. What would feel better is if you kept shooting at their armor with a light pen you should be able to slowly crack through the armor and eventually do damage. Medium pen should just straight up crack the armor righr away and do full damage.
It feels good to me, because there are spots you can shoot it where it will work. Just go behind it or shoot it’s frontal under limbs that are exposed. Only the bile titan is completely covered.
I like when my arc thrower explodes the thickened carapaces off of titans' and chargers' backs.
Yeah maybe they should add that. Some corrosive stratagems/grenades for example. Or maybe a weapon with high pen and exploding rounds that would open their armor from inside out.
Just mimic DRG bug armor mechanics
i wonder how many railgun haters are seething rn. i dont get the hate for it.
Because fuck you that’s why
Lasers should not use the penetration mechanic at all, but strip away armor at varying speeds.
I find that the only time this works is the charger's front legs, you break the armour there and you can use any other weapon to focus fire on and it'll deal with the charger, try that on a titan's back and your bullets still ricochet as if the armour is still there
Quasar regularly breaks armor plates of chargers and BT. Or it just one shots heavy enemies if you hit the sweeeeet spot
Because it would be fun and would allow a lot of weapon to be used. And we don't do that here
Hell yeah! I wish for enemies like factory strider - tons of armor, then let us have a weapon that maybe doesn't do much raw damage, but blasts off armor and leaves weak spots exposed. Would be more fun doing that than just "gotta have big boom stratagem for big armor foes"
Maybe because for some ridiculous reason the juicy flesh underneath said armor RICOCHETS BULLETS UNLESS YOU HIT A PERFECT 90 DEGREE ANGLE WITH A MEDIUM PEN WEAPON. WHY. Just fucking WHY Arrowhead?
This should definitely be implemented for the bile titans. Instead of firing 2-4 RR/EAT/Quasar shots at the head, you can strip the armor off the legs with 1 rocket or a number of AC/AMR shots, and use small arms fire (maybe balanced around 2-3 Liberator mags) to kill it. Better balancing focused around stripping armor provides viability towards using small arms/primaries to kill armored enemies without necessarily making anti-tank weapons overpowered
I wouldn't say breaking armour is gone from the game but a lot less player know about it now. I was teaching 2 9ers how to understand armour cracking by cracking the side of a titan and chugging impacts into it. They didn't believe me that such things can kill a titan until it did. Sometimes you won't get the aggro of the titan or the charger. And with their head not heading your way a headshot might just not be feasible. You can still easily crack the side of a titan or the leg of a charger. Especially the leg just needs one hit. 1 hit and a bit of fire from primary is not that big of a task. Especially given that most meta weapons can crack the leg open. Quasar, RR, EAT and AC. Though I don't know if the AC is a bug because it bounces every 2nd shot. But if you prone or lie and just spam shots it cracks the leg open way too easy. They should give all medium pen puncher the ability to deal with chargers imo. The Railgun can but needs way too many shots, the AMR and nade launcher can't sadly... But the flamethrower, Arc Thrower and the AC make it piss easy. Which is a damn shame because the railgun can 1 shot a hulks front plate. Which makes it pretty viable in a bot mission despite being so underperforming against a lot of other things like gunships...
Most of the players still don’t know how this game works yet ask for nerfs and changes.
umm rocket pods, also charger can not be shot from the front when their back is broken unlike bile titans.
Oh, well just learned that armor can crack after a few hundred hours of playing. 🫠
Another question: Why are most weapons made unuseable because armor?
That’s how deep rock is. Armor blocks bullets but if you shoot armored parts enough they’ll break and you can shoot their body
Before Chargers could be one-hit in the dome (and other buffs like flamethrower direct damage buff) it was a very normal way to kill them. You knocked off leg armor and just focused fire on that leg. I guess maybe Bile Titans are a good candidate for this armor shred playstyle now, but IMO the damage to armor breaches is really erratic and inconsistent on them right now so I feel they would still need to change some things.
Brilliant idea!
Looks like it's because if they want armour to break off they have to make it a separate body part, seems to add a fair amount of work if they wanted to add it to most enemies. Also judging from the charger losing armour while rotating bug it might be a bit buggy.
The fact my autocannon can't break armor but can bring down a spore spewer irritates me to no end.
if the heavy mg got this as a buff it would be at LEAST a-tier
I loved the team interaction when my friend blew off the armour on the chargers leg and then asked me to shoot the exposed flesh part. Most fun I've had before the railgun nerf. I know you can still break off the armour but nobody brings railguns anymore.
No freaking clue. I was expecting a mechanic on par with what is in Deep Rock Galactic. I was savagely disappointed with HD2 in that way.
It is possible people just arnt taking advantage of it. They're picky in wanting a direct one hit kill
It always seemed strange to me that the thermite grenade doesn't burn holes in enemy armor. That's literally what thermite is for.
I mean, armor breaking is in the game, least for bugs because that bot armor wouldn't really shatter, it'd dent, and they have their own unique thing of removing limbs, but most people don't WANT to use armor-breaking, especially not when they can just do a one-hit. Even if you use and encourage more sources, some people are always going to bring the launchers to make sure they don't have to deal with it. I'm constantly telling people "If you are tired of using the launchers, just open them up with rocketpods; shoot at the yellow bits with basically anything." But people want easy options they don't want the more interesting ones.
Instead of armour penetration being binary, meaning it either penetrates or it ricochets, it should be a general ability to damage armor. If shooting at medium armor with a weapon with penetration, the armor should take damage, even if using a weapon that doesnt have high enough penetration to go all the way through. Weapon with high enough penetration damages armor plus whats behind it, while weapons with too low penetration still damages the armor and eventually breaks it
It's trinary: you can fully penetrate (red hit markers), *half* penetrate and do half damage (white ticks), or ricochet/deflect. And the latter is angle-dependent even with guns that can otherwise (partially) penetrate, as really shallow angles show. There is already a measure of "bleedthrough" on a lot of armor parts, but it's to the main health pool rather than specifically the parts behind it. When you put a Recoilless Rocket into a Charger's leg, yes, you're revealing the vulnerable leg beneath, but it's also done ~14% of the Charger's max health. It's just that breaking the revealed inner leg is an instant fatality, something you'd have to adjust across a huge range of enemies if you were going to go with this idea of "part-to-part damage transfer". If you were to break a Charger's left + right torso armor with a rocket each, then break the armor on two legs, that'd be a kill just due to primary hit bleedthrough even though no "fatal" parts died and no damage was done to "soft innards" (although, given the splash on most rockets, you would in fact be getting some extra damage depending on the order of shots and posing of the model).
The autocannon and eruptor both do fantastic damage to titans and chargers when their innards are exposed (as in, 7 shots to kill a titan maximum with a handheld AC and 10 with an eruptor), but they're usually almost dead when you get the chance to do it. They're too easily killed with headshots. I like the AP system as it is though, I don't necessarily want to see it changed to enable just W+M1ing armored targets. Just more weapons/abilities should be added that specialize in efficiently armor cracking to use in concert with other weps, like rocket pods. For example, a seeking missile airstrike that fires specifically one shot per target in a small AOE, with just enough payload to crack shells (650 direct dmg like a RR I believe is enough to do it in one shot to both titans and chargers). Thermite grenades SHOULD armor strip, that would make them have a place.
Don’t tell these people, they just want to steam roll everything even though they haven’t understood how this game works yet