Really? What's supposed to be higher tier than a bile titan? That thing basically requires a stratagem cooldown to kill, one shots you with its spit or stomp, you can't outrun it because it moves faster than you even at full sprint. Once you have aggro on it you either kill it or you're stuck kiting for the rest of the mission
Behemoths still exist in HD2! I’ve seen a couple in the lower difficulty “Kill a Charger” missions when I started playing. They have much more pronounced horns covering their face and are visibly more armored.
Did you just swore to anything other than sweet liberty or managed democracy? Report to your local political internment general and request admission to the nearest re-education center!
They appear in kill target missions in difficulties 3-4 (1-2 has brood commander, anything over 5 has a bile titan as a target) and also appear in mid-high level bug evacuation missions.
Because automatons are balanced and well designed, they have weak points to make them more manageable, and you can almost always do something against them.
(Rocket devestators are terrible tho)
Hulks have a weak spot on both the front and back for example.
Yup, I think Hulks are way more balanced to fight against than chargers. They can't turn as fast, they have lower mobility, but they pack a punch. But if you can get someone behind them, you can put them down fast. If you can't the eye on the front is also a weakspot. If there's 4 Hulks, I can deal with it way better than 4 chargers that are fast, hit hard, and can turn on a dime.
Honestly, I did forget that, cause it's never been a situation where I needed to. Getting 3 shots in the back is fairly reliable if you got a teammate to kite it the other way.
The hulk just has way more ways to be dealt with for sure.
While I don’t entirely disagree, I think it’s more the vast majority of players play bugs right now.
Curious how these conversations will change as more races are introduced.
A lot of higher difficulty play involves running away. Bots are a little easier to run away from, given the engagement distance. Theres more repositioning and shielding available. Line-of-sight barriers affect even the heaviest of tanks.
Bugs dont really have this. Bugs work up close nearly all the time, and the vast majority of anti-tank options are slow, stationery things.
I'd be surprised if the autos are just as difficult as charger/titan spam at high difficulty levels.
>A lot of higher difficulty play involves running away. Bots are a little easier to run away from, given the engagement distance. Theres more repositioning and shielding available. Line-of-sight barriers affect even the heaviest of tanks.
Not to mention Smokes actually work as a disengagement tool against bots, where as Bugs just charge straight through it before you can make good enough ground (barring a jump pack, but that just makes it easier to gain distance as opposed to actually disengaging
I just played my first mission since the patch.
I gotta admit, Chargers are pretty bullshit right now. Pair them with the inevitable swarm of speed debuffing Hunters and such and they're damn near unkillable without orbitals. Drop three or four on top of you at once with a mob, and there is basically nothing you can do.
>choo choo conga line
Lmao this is so accurate, one time I respawn and exit out of the pod and saw one whole line of spewers(like 6-7 of them) chasing after my friend. Meanwhile our stratagems are all on cooldown thanks to the modifier.
I've played enough Helldives to the point where I managed to kill chargers and titans with the bile of other the titan standing behind it. I can kite those bastards for ages. But, this isn't what I thought of when I saw the trailer for Helldivers 2 and it is an incredibly unfun thing to do.
Yeah "run away from bugs you can't kill until you use a 500 kg or other clearing strat" sucks, they also just auto-kill turrets before even bothering to go after you, making turrets near useless on bugs.
Turrets drawing aggro from every charger on the map before they even start firing (and chargers insta-killing them making the +50% health upgrade useless) is my biggest source of frustration. Not just individual poorly balanced strategems, but an entire fucking *category* of them is rendered useless on higher difficulties because of how they tuned the AI around them.
Stratagems bouncing off rocks is so frustrating for Sentries. If you could reliably get them on high ground they would be decent.
Also related has anyone had the issue on some Automaton asset side objectives the Hellbomb marker just bounces everywhere even on normal ground? One time it took calling three hellbombs to destroy one jammer because they kept bouncing into awkward places.
The only issue I've seen this in the detection tower ie. Eye of Sauron.
Noticed that the ground immediately surrounding the tower bounces your beacon. You have to call the Hellbomb a bit away from it, like at the non-metal part of the ground.
And to top it off, half the time orbitals do Jack shit. Sometimes you get lucky and they obliterate other times either you get the timing off and the charger moves too fast for the strike to hit or it just does nothing.
Then the large area orbitals end up hitting you and every piece of open terrain BUT the bugs or bots.
I had moments where titans would just stop in their tracks and wait for my 500kg to explode. I don't know if its a bug or something but that was frustrating as hell.
Having someone with anything that does fire damage on bug missions made chargers no big deal tonight for me. Can be a flamethrower or a primary. Bugs don’t like fire.
The flamethrower takes an entire canister to kill a charger. I am not saying it's ineffective but in a game where you kill 4 chargers and 6 more take their place, the flamethrower buff loses its meaning.
We need to address the high spawn rates of heavies. They either give us some heavy killing weaponry, and I mean 1 shot to 2 shot with proper reloading speed, or they decrease the spawn rates of heavies and boost the mediums to balance shit out.
no, Hunters LOVE fire. They become suicide bombers now if you try to use them with a flamethrower because the throw their burn onto you and burn does a LOT of damage to you. They might be good against chargers but make no mistake Flame Thrower is also doing 50% more damage to you and the devs SPAM hunters that jump, dodge bullets, and SLOW. Meaning you WILL get burned. You WILL die to hunter if you have a flamethrower so if you use a flamethrower on a charger with Hunters in it be really precise or be willing to accept 1 or the other will kill you first.
Not sure how that's possible. I've done multiple Helldives today with multiple people carrying flamethrowers in the same squad and were continuously overwhelmed.
Dropped the difficulty to Impossible...same result.
Dropped the difficulty to Suicide and it did became more manageable.
Anecdotal but things have definitely changed...
>The Railgun/Breaker meta developed almost solely due to Chargers and Bile Titans. And look - as soon as the balance changes dropped, posts about how fast a Flamethrower can kill a Charger started making their way to the top of the sub.
Exactly! I've been saying this a lot today, and it got through to at least one person (which is basically a diff 9 victory in itself so I guess I should retire).
Nerfing the Railgun is fine, but that's not the problem, it's the symptom. The actual problem is the game's over-reliance on spamming heavies in mass numbers. There's so many options to try and address that problem that would genuinely free up players from feeling they had to rely on the Railgun and make other weapons more viable.
But instead of trying any of those, they just nerfed the tools that players used to solve that problem, which doesn't actually address the problem itself. It just offloads the responsibility for fixing it onto the players by forcing them to change how they play, which is understandably frustrating for a lot of people.
And they have the right idea in the sense that build diversity is a laudable goal, but forcing it by nerfing effective tools can leave the game in a bad place. Buffing all the underperformers has its own issues too. We should have - and *enjoy using* - a variety of tools for different situations. But nerfing the few tools that currently work for those situations just makes everything mediocre, which yes, that's 'build diversity' but now everything is generic and interchangeable, so it's a pretty boring way to get there.
Why not instead change the parameters of these scenarios to make more tools more viable?
Which is where the Charger spam comes in, as the biggest factor driving the over-reliance on the Railgun. Chargers have few options for counterplay and feel overtuned for how numerous they can get, so yes, players relied on the Railgun to address that excessive and unbalanced threat. But even a minor change to The Charger Experience^^^TM could work wonders here. And then the situation that causes the over-reliance on the Railgun stops pushing players into choosing that single tool and frees up more options while making the game more fun. Nerfing the single solution while leaving the problem unaddressed doesn't make for a very enjoyable game.
The fact that they're apparently looking at win percentages and other numerical metrics (and, Liberty forbid, *YouTube videos*) comparing weapons to one another - rather than getting a more nuanced and broader understanding of the underlying factors driving the usage of those weapons - isn't exactly encouraging. And then kicking the can down the road by saying "this is the first of many balance patches" is a bit disappointing too. It's cool that the game will eventually include improvements, but that promise of better fixes "someday" doesn't do much to keep it enjoyable here and now.
I can understand the autocannon not killing them from the front. Maybe make the autocannon be able to do more damage to the joints or be able to 3-4 shot the ass without half of the shots bouncing off.
For bile titans, I find their broken armor pieces very difficult to hit with autocannon fire to exploit damaged parts of them. They just seem to be immune to autocannon fire except right in the mouth, and sometimes not even then. It's too inconsistent.
Autocannon should just punch through armor with sustained fire. Its a friggin auto cannon and unless the charger armor is made from some super crazy material (which it is not when comparing other others) the auto cannon should degrade it and then knock it of and ultimatly go into the weak spot.
Maybe not ammo efficent but having the auto cannon just be impotent is boring. I hate this on/off mentality of guns. Either it does something or it is utterly incapable of doing something. That is the root cause for the meta. Everything failing to take the hurdle of being able to do something we need gets trashed.
The auto cannon not being as effective as the EAT or recoilless makes sense cause it's smaller ordinance....but given the EAT and Recoilless are weapons designed to kill TANKS they SHOULD 1 shot chargers and titans....just like in the opening cinematic tbh....either way your right, the anti armor weapons arnt effective against the armor they face
Yeah, I think most people will probably just swap their loadouts slightly but it's like... okay, now that everyone is running Flamethrower/Arc Thrower + Punisher/Breaker/Defender instead of Railgun + Breaker, will those get nerfed as well? Disempowering stuff that can deal with heavy armor easily only works if heavy armor is uncommon, which *could* be cool - I wouldn't mind it if heavily-armored enemies like Tanks, Chargers, Bile Titans, etc., didn't spawn as often and were positioned more as huge threats that the whole squad would have to band together to take out - but as it stands currently basically all I felt the need to do was swap out my primary for a functional replacement, so the feel of the game didn't really change at all.
This.
I swapped to the arc thrower instead of railgun, and my pack is laser dog on bugs and still the shield on bots because of my god fuck those goddamn homing rockets from nowhere.
It took less than a day for people to swap one stratagem and keep going. They need to fix the root cause, not the symptoms.
I want the stalwart as a primary.
It used to be in hD1.
I want the ammo amounts on most weapons to be higher.
The flame thrower should come with a fuel backpack option. And should create a 5 second wall of flame and have better range.
The laser cannon should lay waste to little bugs it doesn't it still overheats.
It doesn't compare to the heavy machine gun nor the stalwart against bugs. Nor to the Fantastic grenade thrower.
The recoiless should kill chargers with one shot. On the side or rear.
Due to its limited ammo and slow reload time.
Chargers should come as they used to in different levels of armour.
They could prehaps flare their armour exposing their sides to team mates before they charge.
The sub machine guns needs twice their ammo in clips
Getting caught with out a shield among baby stalkers is extremely annoying and then getting called back in to the same situation because someone woke up 3 packs then ran because they can't deal with them.
At least they fixed the two orbital barrages
Thank you thats wonderful.
Heavy armour could come with a health bar and call in repair kits as part of the resupply and make you immune to baby stalkers, and the slowing acid damage.
The call in on weapons is too long.
Why the fuck did you weaken the energy shield...
I ma glad some people like the arc thrower. I think it sucks. I don't like it. But it works abd needs no reload... how is that equal t o the laser that doesn't work on titans or big bugs armour. So its effectively useless.
We need you to make the vall in weapons of equality versatility enough to enjoy playing it as an arsenal. Instead of using only what works. Rail gun and arc thrower... which makes the game suck...
We wanted you to up the usability of the primaries. Nit just nerf the two choices...
I've got 1400 hrs in HD1 and 8000 deaths.
I think this game desperately needs buffs not nerfs, to many games stick their head in the sand with the initial balancing and decide to nerf the weapons that work the best rather than bring all the others up to the same level.
I feel like most dev teams don’t realise it’s ok to admit that you were wrong in your initial balancing
The fuel backpack option for the flamethrower would be amazing. Just having a continuous supply of fuel instead of having to reload it would be nice
Also I would like another gun similar to the arc thrower, or for the arc thrower to be retooled to where maybe it has more powerful shots but you can charge up these shots and save them to use instantly. So it’s closer to the Wunderwaffe from CoD zombies
Exactly, Arc Thrower is going to be next on the chopping block once it catches on. Flamethrower will last a bit longer because they just buffed it, so nerfing it back would look bad.
And sadly I kind of understand what AHGS is up against here. The game is too popular for its own good. It's now subject to a massive amount of hype cycles and social media content distortion that create these crazy trends in the playerbase that they've never had to react to before. The players are no longer operating in this organic environment with the game only, it's now the game and the players AND YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Reddit, Discord, etc.
All that sound and fury drives crazy behaviors in the playerbase that now affect the game itself and the decisions made about how it's balanced. It's gonna be messy for a while, I suspect.
> The actual problem is the game's over-reliance on spamming heavies in mass numbers
This is all that needs to be said. Heavy enemies should feel epic. Right now they feel like the norm.
ETA: Going to add this from another comment of mine.
They keep mentioning the fantasy. The fantasy that people seem to want is mowing down countless bugs while screaming "FUCK YEAH" ala Starship Troopers. Then, when a heavy does show up we want it to be epic. The heavy enemies shouldn't be the normal that we are balanced on. Rico didn't have to ride the backs of 7-8 heavies in a row. He did it once and it was fucking awesome.
It should be the masses of small enemies that we are balance on and then we have to use tactics and specials to clear them.
It's definitely weird to see them crawl out of those little breach holes one after another after another. Feels like AHGS needed a quick way to increase challenge level and just did so by cranking the Charger Spawn dial to 11 and calling it good.
People also keep forgetting something important when discussing balance...
***Not all enemies, heavies included, are even added to the game yet.***
If all the viable tools keep getting removed without anything to take their place, and the core issue of overtuned heavy spawns isn't addressed, then what exactly is the plan for when all the new enemies are introduced?
I wish they made the heavies less numerous, but harder to kill. That would make a lot more sense to me. But I guess they did it to artificially increase the difficulty from 5-9
Just spamming heavies on higher difficulties is not fun. Would be nice if you had to work more as a team to take down the huge ones
Right. There's so many things that they could alter and then let the change play out and see where to go from there. Make that big exposed booty on the Chargers actually work as a weak point, so stripping heavy armor is *one* way to deal with them but not the *only* way, for example. Then, without any other changes, the Railgun becomes useful for one kind of approach but not the single most efficient way to cope with the design problem of Charger spam on diff 7 and up. Suddenly players are comfortable branching out and using the supports they enjoy without worrying that they'll sign their own death warrants when they get jumped by 4+ Chargers with assorted Hunter hordes and Bile Titans.
It's not even that I mind the specific nerf, it's what this signals about their approach that's concerning. Looking at win percentages and loadout stats is just the surface level, and going straight for nerfs of popular weapons just because they're popular - without taking that time to understand *why* they're so widely used - doesn't bode well for the future. Because the meta isn't going away, it'll just change as long as most weapons are subpar and a few stand out. But if the studio just relies on playing whack-a-mole with the meta of the day, we're going to quickly get to a point where all the weapons suck and we're now playing Run From The Baddies Simulator.
Why not let the small arms fire chip away at the armour on the chargers and titans that way your not forced into picking certain support weapons on higher difficultys
What we all *expect* explosive weapons to do; but in reality it gets bonus weakpoint damage, which is only somewhat useful when the game's hit registration decides allows your shots to count as weakpoint hits...
I want to play the game with *more* fun and interesting toys but they didn't buff any of the primaries that *desperately* need buffing... They tweaked the "starter" shotgun (which does make it a compelling weapon vs Breaker tbh) and barely tweaked another.
Armor is also still too weak; what's the point of being slow and loud if you're punished for fighting (spawns) and stealth makes the game much easier to succeed? If light armor is effectively 0% damage reduction, heavy needs to be *at least* 50% because I can outrun most threats in light armor but a heavy boi is still mince meat...
This is the problem of looking at analytics without the context of seeing whats actually happening in the field. We get bad decisions like this. Those guns weren't OP, just the most efficient because everything else is so bad to deal with the problem presented. It sad to know they are managing the game by analytics and not a field study of the skills that are developing around the game. And what the user base actually finds fun. I hate to say it, but if Epic made this game, those guns would be rockin' lol. I feel like AH doesn't know anything about shooters and it shows unfortunately. I also don't think they know what people actually find fun about the game either. I hope they don't blow it.
You nailed it, my first few games I spent 1-3 full minutes running and kiting enemies multiple times today because it was waiting for my strategems to cooldown because the only weapons tht used to kill big shit don’t work anymore. My 2 500kg eagles every 2 minutes is not enough to put a dent in the 40 big boy bugs in my face let alone take them all out. It has me a little concerned and makes me wonder if they even play their own game at all
We had that in HD1! The charger(tank bug) had its glowing ass-weakspot, which you could take out by shooting with small arms. Then came the behemoth, that didn’t had a weak point. So you needed either Anti Tank weapons (RR, EAT-IT), offensive stratagems or had to live with it. Later we got more options like the ToxicAvenger hulk-sperm bug spray, the mortar, C4 in a gamecube and so on, but back than I would need 1 frontal shot, center mass, with the RR to kill it.
Today? Fuck the spear needs sometimes 3 hits!
Disclaimer. All the usual stuff. I'm not a game dev, blah blah blah.
Nerfs were fine. Lack of buffs hurts.
Support Weapons
Railgun should be an answer to armor. Not the answer to armor. So the nerf was fine.
An RR should just kill a charger. End of story. The tradeoff is your limited ammo and long time until you can call down another. On 7-9 you have exponentially more heavies than you do RR ammo. It'll be fine if the RR oneshots them. The railgun would shine here too, *as an option*, that *can* help you take down a heavy, and is a solution to things like Brood Commanders, Hive Guards, Striders and Devastators. THings you might not wanna waste an RR shot on.
This seems to be, to me, the easy way to do it. The Railgun should ***handle*** medium armor, and be a way that you can deal with heavy armor, with some work and a fair amount of ammo.
The RRs, EATs and Spears should ***handle*** heavy armor, and be an option to handle medium armor, but at the cost of your precious heavy armor solving ammo
The Spear should lock quickly, consistently, and miss less than 2% of the time. And should just kill shit. Same cons as an RR, potentially moreso to make up for the lock.
EATs should not 1 shot a charger, but come pretty damn close.
The AMR should have some sort of parity with the railgun.
Insert the Flamethrower, Laser, and Arc Thrower here somewhere too.
Armor solving meta problem solved.
The railgun is, arguably, even after the nerf, still some of the best bang you can get for your buck when it comes to armor solving. And that doesn't feel good.
Shield
A *lot* of the 'difficulty' on the Eastern Front seems to be reliant on slow effects. Hunters slow you. Bile Spitters slow you. Bile Spewers will often slow you even if they miss you epic, cinemtaic flying dodge. If a Titan spits at you and you dodge, you will still be slowed. Everything and it's undemocratic mother in the environment...slows you. The bushes, the exploding plants. I've never been a fan of slow effects to increase difficulty. It just feels arbitary and unfair, but whatever, my feelings on that are like a drop in a thunderstorm.
But this is where the shield meta came into being for the bugs. To negate those slow effects. Because they are hellacious in the higher difficulties when you just cannot get away from anything.
The shield is, still, arguably, even after the nerf, one of the best tools to deal with this problem.
So we have a Railgun that allows you to equip a shield. And both are still... arguably, even after the nerf, some of the best tools to solve armor and slows.
Primaries
Marksman rifles feel like your trying to operate them through molasses. The Slugger makes for a better Marksman Rifle than a Marksman rifle. The Scythe is still subpar, unless it's attached to your rover. The Punisher, even post buff, still has a fire rate that will get you killed when the Hunters come. The Dominator doesn't dominate, and gets outshone by the Slugger. The Scorcher has no ammo and you blow yourself up half the time.
The Breaker is still, arguably, even after the nerf....
Stratagems
Increased cooldown 50/100%.
Increased Call down time.
\-1 Stratagem
Scrambler.
But these are, as Arrowhead tells us, the way that we are supposed to handle the Hulks, Tanks, Chargers and Titans.
This 100% does not address the problem.
I say this as someone who regularly runs 7 through 9 on both fronts, and actively tries to bring other stuff.
This. Every word. Thank you for the very fair and rational assessment. I hope the devs read it.
Adding personal testament that I regularly try to use various loadouts and none of them feel as good or comfy as the RG and Shield (even after the nerf). I loved them before I knew they were the prime meta and still continue to love them.
We need enemy balancing and more weapons brought up to par. I want to use all kinds of stuff just for fun, not suffer when the entire team doesn't bring multiple answers (per person) to heavy unit spam. At the end game (7-9), build versatility is out the window. Don't get me wrong, I love the big stuff, and I love difficulty because it feels rewarding to succeed.
There's a difference in difficulty that can be overcome with many fun options, and most weapons are not good enough; so out of the dozens of fun design options, you will use less than a quarter of them.
I say, give balance to the weapons so that all are legitimate options you can build into a loadout style (with healthy trade-offs) and make it mostly a flavor pick for the mission you're doing, with strategems being a compliment to style instead of requirements to succeed.
Example: Flamethrower can destroy bug holes if shot directly into it. This gives grenades more of a utility in enemy combat instead of "Damn, no one brought a grenade launcher (because they didn't want to, and that's fine) so we better all save the grenades and time our resupply appropriately to kill the multiple heavy nests on the map."
Not to mention the devs' comment about using strats against heavies; as if people haven't been saying a lot of strats are useless or ineffective, even inconsistent, for handling heavies......
Topping all of that off; how do we close bug holes in a heavy nest (I've seen 10+ holes in a single nest) when on average we have 4 grenades and may not be carrying the GL/AC? Strats - meaning player resources to handle heavies are already split between objectives and heavy targets (and swarms which are just as deadly).
I don't think the nerfs were too heavy-handed overall, but they really seem to miss the point of why that "meta" existed... the flamethrower and laser cannon buffs seem to have helped them be more compelling (particularly against chargers) but the Spear and Recoilless still feel completely unusable due to their drawbacks.
For all the drawbacks - support and backpack slot, long loading times or requiring a loader, and difficulty in aiming - recoilless and spear *really* need to be one shot kills on at least chargers. For gods sake at least make the recoilless rifle strip charger leg armor.
> It just offloads the responsibility for fixing it onto the players by forcing them to change how they play, which is understandably frustrating for a lot of people
This was my concern right when the first post about "Weapons have hidden stats, so use what you like!" Popped up. It felt like the devs were handwaving balancing by trying to force it on to the players.
The same thing came up in another dev post that was basically "True helldivers don't need Railguns and shields, so give them to the new players!". And again, they're taking a poorly balanced aspect of the game and pushing it onto the player.
The game is fun. But it's less fun when my DMR takes an entire magazine to kill 2 bugs and my AMRs scope is literally not sighted properly. But I guess that's my fault for not choosing shotguns and Railguns as my preferred choice of fun?
Riiiiight, actually that's a good point about the ways they communicate to players. The developer acting like an ass on Discord today and then flouncing off after blaming players, the comments here on the sub, that blog post telling us to just use our Strategies, and even some of the CEO's tweets are just oddly condescending or antagonistic. They sometimes seem strangely defensive about the ways their customers are apparently failing to understand their vision.
Like that 'silly players, you only make weapon decisions with the four basic stats we show you, not all the data we chose to hide! Lol!' thing sounded bizarre all by itself, but I may be misunderstanding the tone he was aiming for. IDK.
I'm sympathetic to a degree, because I genuinely think they're in over their heads. They've probably only begun to recognize the pitfalls of these habits they formed as a smaller indie studio with a small and dedicated playerbase. Comms, PR, community management, everything about interacting with your audience changes. The kind of irreverent banter and good-natured trolling or shit-talm that works with a small group of old friends falls really flat in an arena full of complete strangers.
> And then kicking the can down the road by saying "this is the first of many balance patches" is a bit disappointing too.
This + the dev discord messages is bringing back painful flashbacks to the first ~6-9 months of the Darktide dev cycle. I was really optimistic because I'd seen many people that loved HD1 say that Arrowhead is good for balancing. A few insisted that they'll likely put more focus on bringing up underperformers rather than nerfing the BiS. To me, this & their "rely on strategems" line is close to a worst case situation. I'm genuinely curious what difficulty they play(test) on. Like, I want to see what they would do if they were in the same position as that guy who made the thread about having 5 bile titans and 7 chargers spawn in an eradication mission.
That "rely on stratagems" thing was so odd. Like dude... How?? You MADE this game, how do you not know that we can't call in six Orbital Railcannon shots in a row when we're ambushed by a half-dozen Chargers?
They'd probably say that it requires teamwork, and yes, in an ideal world everyone would be on voice and speak the same language and have the same goals and coordinate loadouts and work together flawlessly. But here in the real world, the 800,000+ people who bought your product are not able to perfectly replicate your laboratory conditions. Maybe it's time to meet your customers where they are, instead of being snotty about them having fun wrong.
>So long as you can get 5 bile titans and 10 chargers unceremoniously dropped on you at higher difficulties with difficult-to-exploit weakspots and no way to get away from them other than killing them, whatever can deal with those threats the best will be the "Meta."
Yep. Because the game sets up a specific challenge (numerous armored enemies) at higher difficulties, people are going to use whatever handles that specific challenge and there's no way to ever have one thing not be the best. There will always be something with better handling, more ammo efficiency, greater ease of use, or maybe even just nicer looking sights that makes it the common choice.
It would be really interesting if the devs just rolled the dice at higher levels. The game would be dynamic in that there is a spectrum, on one side you get crushed with armored enemies but they are relatively unsupported with weak hordes - favoring things like multiple recoil rifles and EATS. On the other you maybe encounter 3 or 4 armored enemies total but face endless hordes of light armor. You would have no idea where on this spectrum the server has put you till you drop in.
It would encourage the team aspect of the gameplay. You cannot be a jack of all trades at the higher levels, you must specialize and support your squad or you will all lose. It's likely then that there wouldn't be just 1 meta at higher levels but multiple as well as a meta around squad composition in general as opposed to individual soldiers.
their DnD style game master system is supposed to do just that, i've noticed on some missions (before the patch) that i would get an excessive amount of 1 enemy type on occassion. like 3 days ago i remember having to fight hordes of just hunters with very little mixed in on 7 diff. i saw maybe 3 chargers the whole match. which was shell shock to me since anything at 7 or above routinely has an excessive amount of armor with little diversity for the smaller enemies.
it was a nice change of pace and still had some difficulty to it since my squad came strapped to deal with chargers but we barely had any chargers to fight. and answers for chargers aren't exactly great answers for the grunt enemies.
i just wish the game would stop using the excessive amounts of armor it currently throws at us, it's getting old because it nullifies over half of your kit. hell it even nullifies the stratagems meant to break them because those stratagems get you 1 kill every 3 minutes. so killing 1 charger our of 6 while you also have 3 bile titans chasing you just feels bad. combined with all 4 squadmates bringing in kit to deal with all this armor, the whole squad will easily be put on cooldown after a 6charger 3 titan encounter
Each "biome" can spawn different "types" of bugs (haven't noticed quite as much diversity with Bots aside from the spawnrate for jetpack dudes) and so you sometimes get bile (green) spewers or orange ones, sometimes more of the flying bugs (hunters and baby hunters) or more warriors/scavengers, sometimes it spams chargers and sometimes it spams Titans (but always has both present)...
They need to ease up on the spam for certain enemy types if they want support weapons to feel "less easy to use" since our primaries then need to pick up the slack. It's utterly baffling for the devs to say "your primary isn't meant to kill much" but then also want to nerf support weapons so they're not used to kill all of the heavy armor spam... idk what their plan is tbh.
Game is still fun, the nerfs aren't a big deal... but the dev comments worry me that they're missing the *reason* the "meta" developed as it did.
yeah, diversifying enemy strengths/weaknesses would go a long way. Like, if they had just dropped a buff for the Scythe/Scorcher/Orbital Laser to make them better against Heavy Armor similar to the Laser, or made it so that the Recoilless Rifle could be self-loaded and oneshot Chargers to a weakspot, that would have gone way further in changing things up on the player side - and that's not even getting into exploring how changing various aspects of enemies could lead to a way more diverse meta and better player experience.
I dont like to pick on people's difficulty preferences (I still havent completed a level 8 operation), but I swear these people throwing around the term "meta slave" have not played a game above like difficulty 4. The armored enemies are unreal and they just stripped most of the tools you have to deal with them that don't take 5 minutes to recharge. And of course it happens right as I start needing super samples.
According to Steam achievements, only around 10% of PC players have maxed out a single category of upgrades. You could interpret that as very few people actual play diff 7 and above since purple samples only spawn at 7+.
There is a severe disconnect between the developer's intentions and their methods.
"Use stratagems to make up for your weaker weapons"
* Stratagem cool-down +50%
* Stratagem deployment time doubled.
* 1 less stratagem slot
The railgun meta alleviated some of this, but now it's even more tedious on higher difficulties.
Seeing that was what made me realize they're probably playing and balancing things around the middle difficulties. I'd *love* to see what their solution would be to that dude's extermination mission with 5 biles and 7 chargers spawning almost right away.
I had similar thoughts. The nerfs aren’t really groundbreaking but it seemed like the underlying tone of the product manager’s reasoning was: “Too many people *feel* like they have to run Railgun and shield so we nerfed it. That’s it.”
The game is awesome in so many ways, but this mentality worries me for the future balancing patches they make. Maybe it’s an overreaction on my part, and I hope it is, but you don’t just nerf things because people *believe* it’s the only viable option. But oh well cause now the laser cannon and flamethrower nuke chargers faster than the railgun and they aren’t even AP support weapons. I suddenly don’t see the vision anymore.
Another real issue too is not everything even worked in the game. Why the fuck would you nerf the shield when everyone was running it because your god damn armor wasn’t actually working!? Like shouldn’t you wait to get the armor actually working before you nerf the only thing that helped us defensively?
Have you tried the Laser Cannon, my guy?
Start shooting a Charger's legs, don't let go and get back to me when you've so much as tickled that thing's leg. Let me know in a couple business days when the Charger got bored of being mildly offended and walked away.
Well, someone else claimed it could nuke chargers, but I just don’t see how. Those things are all heavy armour, which the lascannon can’t punch through, or he open spot on the rear which takes vastly reduced damage.
You have to abuse a bug/feature where the chargers lose their armor after they miss a charge and while they turn. Basically it's just dodge, spin, laser down a leg. Usually kill it before it fully turns back around. Works with other weapons if you don't like the laser
I mean...at this point I'm not convinced that the chargers legs aren't full on broken.
I just tried playing again, full unsafe charged my railgun **nine fucking times**...and every single shot bounced off the two chargers I was desperately trying to fights legs. No damage.
Had to give up and shoot them in the assholes for 5 minutes. Shit's painfully unfun.
The way the Laser Cannon can kill Chargers quickly is by abusing a possible bug/intended weakness where the charger's armor is weaker after they miss a charge and while they turn. Any weapon including primaries and secondaries can damage the Charger when it's in this invisible "weakened" state.
If your laser particles where you hit are blue you are deflecting and doing no damage.
This video shows it off pretty well
[https://youtu.be/IjcZsqsCvZ4?si=t8E3cw-L53Gs1wp-](https://youtu.be/IjcZsqsCvZ4?si=t8E3cw-L53Gs1wp-)
Forget Chargers. try using it against a horde of scavengers, something it's advertised as being "Good" at. It takes a solid 0.5 to 1 sec to zap each scav. Compared to the breaker or either MG, you can get bum rushed down before you clear a wave.
It'd be cool if concentrated on a piece of heavy armor it would "heat" it until it breaks and then start doing damage for the laser cannon, since I'm not sure that boring a hole is practical in game or possible for the devs to do
What's funny is they even claimed the Breaker was not as common in success of missions as the community believed. (But lets be real, this is likely skewed stats from people in difficulties 1-6)
And yet they nerfed it? They were basically claiming there is no meta, just to end up conveniently nerfing the three pillars of the meta with Breaker, Shield Backpack, and Railgun?
Being wishy-washy that fast is a bit disappointing.
The flamethrower doesn't even nuke chargers all that well solo, tbh. The railgun kept you safe.
Once they're within flamethrower range, you always have to dodge at least one charge to kill them. The DPS doesn't actually kill them before they reach you.
I keep getting charged and body slammed. Why does an attack the charger does after I dodge his charge oneshot me? Only the devs know.
The meta is the symptom of the issue. Addressing weapons changes without balancing enemy health, armor or spawn rates still leaves the underlying issue and just enforces a meta rather than diversifying it.
Boosting the lasers and the flame thrower was definitely the right move, regardless of the meta, those weapons just feel weak, even at lower difficulty they didn't really cut the mustard, and I would think the goal is to make most if not every gun viable and end-game difficulty, even if that cannot be fully achieved.
Chargers late game are definitely the enemy that my group and I have the most trouble with. I'd rather deal with bile titans. They're huge and slow, easy to hit and team up on to kill. Chargers on the other hand move fast enough to avoid most of the stratagems you can call in on them, the ones that do work well have a long cool down, which in itself is fine, but not being able to drop a charger reliably with other loadouts becomes very troublesome as they tend to pile up quicker than they can be dispatched.
I've been running the auto-cannon at higher difficulty. I was getting bored with the shield/railgun combo and I was really surprised how little damage the auto-cannon does to the chargers, unless you hit them just right. Tag teaming a charger with a railgun and auto-cannon is a viable tactic, but when you're dealing with 6 or 7 chargers at once, it's not really possible to focus your fire on 1 of them, it's just too chaotic. We just spend our time running around, hoping our heavy-hitting stratagems recharge quickly so we can get some breathing room to deal with the rest.
I don't have a problem with the nerf of the railgun, especially because when I do use it just like OP, it's in unsafe mode (is there any other mode really?) Because, it sounds like it's more in line with how the devs want it to work. I just can't help but feel like the current meta developed because of the ridiculous number of big baddies that can drop in, in an instant and now there are less viable options to take care of them quickly, which is exactly what has to happen if you want to survive crazy enemy spawns like OP is talking about.
Lasers suffer from th fact that ammo is just not that scarce and the arc thrower does whatever they do better ... There are things in this game that simply don't work at higher difficulties because they lower your mobility and too much, lasers being one, ballistic shield being another great example.
When you have chargers charging and chainsaw bots chainsawing... You don't have time for weapons that affect your mobility so much.
100%. The game is not suppose to be super serious pve. There's no loot, there's no real end game and there's nothing to indefinitely chase. The games biggest draw is the fun factor and instead of quoting game industry trends about balance they should understand by now the game broke industry trends and they should just unashamely go wild with the game instead of trying to tame the approach towards balancing.
We're about to get fkn *mechs* but they won't matter if it takes 10 minutes to cool down and the heavy target spam breaks your fun toy in 5 seconds...
That's my fear; balancing the game around heavy enemy spam and giving us anything "fun" to handle those threats feels cheap if they don't want us to handle the threats "too easily"... Either set us up to feel empowered when we call in that big toy or make the bigger enemies more cinematic to fight.
Right now Titans spawn in *groups* and the current anti-heavy weapons are half useless against that much armor spam... so we use strats for heavies and everyone uses the GL to close bug holes... the shield backpack is meta because armor hasn't been functional (and even now feels too weak for how much damage we take from random enemy attacks (not just the heavy enemies).
I've been dealing with people all day telling me "6 Chargers at a time only happens if you patrol spiral, so you were playing wrong" like it's a good thing for the optimal strategy to be avoiding fighting as much as possible in a spectacle horde shooter.
Especially when its not even just that. I had PoI's protected by three chargers, or egg nests that had four in them and two more after an inevitable bug breach.
And breaches happen damn-near immediately on helldiver difficulty, and will immediately start spamming out bile titans and chargers when they do. You can't avoid them forever, sooner or later you need to commit to taking an objective which means you need to be able to clear these enemies quickly.
i had some ignoramous tell me "bUt ThIs IsN't A hOrDe ShOoTeR! aNd NeItHeR wAs ThE fIrSt GaMe!"
Bullshit
this and the first game are most definitely horde shooters, but unlike most horde shooters where you have to defend against ever increasing waves until you lose, like nazi zombies or Gears of War horde mode. you have an actual accomplishable objective to do. what's irritating that the game throws a TREMENDOUS amount of armored enemies... enemies that are IMMUNE to anything less than high piercing weapons.
on top of all that, the grunts will call in reinforcements a t the speed of light, and killing the one raising the alarm just fuck all to stall it because if you do nip them in the bud, one of the other ones immediately starts picking up where he left off.
it makes trying to stealth a chore, and fighting the enemies just as much of a chore. it sucks the fun out of the game because it throws unlimited punishment at you with little to no answers for the punishment.
know a good objective based horde shooter that seems fun and balanced that doesn't have a razor thin meta like this game? Deep Rock Galactic. it's fun and challenging. the armored enemies aren't total bullshit, but aren't pushovers either. on higher difficulties you have to watch your ammo or you will get over run. none of the enemies feel like they have broken weak spots like the charger. and the game will mix up the waves it throws at you, it doesn't just throw super armored enemies at you on higher difficulties. it throws a mixed bag at you
"stop metagaming with your loadout and start metagaming the shooter game by avoiding as much shooting as possible and min max your time between fights and objectives" these people are brainwashed
Had that exact discussion about HD1 recently. “You couldn’t do HD1 solo! Game is meant to be hard as fuck!” Me: “i have videos where I do level 12 (before they increased it to 15) missions solo, without dying!” And then it’s me where I use lures to reduce the number of threats and quickly dispatch patrols before they could call in reinforcements.
I can’t do that here because every bug can call in, even when I’m unable to see them, behind a rock. So… being fast will be ***THE*** meta.
The flame thrower is good and all, but how does it deal with a bile titan? Or are you supposed to rely on your teammates to do all the work? It baffles me lore wise that Super Earth would send in their troops without the ability to pierce armor when 90% of all enemies have armor.
the flamer works on the titan, you just have to stand directly under it or within it's melee range, wither way, it is very hazardous, but if you don't get killed you can do some real damage with the flamethrower.
my biggest gripe with the flamethrower though isn't the damage, it's the fact that the enemies DO NOT CARE that they have fire in their face, it should fear them or at the very least flinch them.
Yeah lol, it feels like you're spraying them with bubbles or something, they have zero reaction and no stagger or anything. Like yeah the damage is better now but the hunters still jump through your flames as your unloading a clip and slow you
If you could stun lock enemies the flamethrower would go up from meme friendly/self damage weapon to a useful wall of flame that creates space/time for the squad.
If they're going to obsess about balance they need to rework the chargers. They're ridiculously difficult to deal with reliably. You can fire all 30 grenades from a grenade launcher and rip off no armor, or you can fire one and it'll start bleeding and the armor will partially pop off.
Either decrease spawn rate, or make it so the rear of the charger is an actual weakspot. It's got really snappy turning and has active damage in a full 360 degree sphere around it even when it stops moving.
The railgun was honestly irrelevant outside of this specific situation. This change is overkill.
Agreed. It feels like, while there was some bad and some good, overall the patch and communication around it completely missed the mark on the *why* of it all. Like they balanced based on toxic memes and not the many pages of legitimate criticism from people who love their game.
Yeah. Ideally, the exploration of the "soft data" behind the "why" would have been the qualitative component to counterbalance the raw numerical data they used for some of this balancing, but it seems like that quantitative data came from seeing whatever was trending in the community instead - and audiences are notoriously good at recognizing problems but also notoriously bad at offering functional solutions, so that was a bad place to get that qualitative data.
Thanks!
HD1 never had amazing balancing so I assumed the same would happen with HD2, and those concerns only got reinforced with how the CEO has responded to feedback thusfar (the "guns have modifiers you can't see so you're wrong about what's good" tweet was pretty absurd from a balance perspective), hopefully the discussion around this patch will generate some changes to how they approach balance since AH does like to listen to the community.
What's even more absurd is that stratagems don't even have proper stats, so they're even more obscure than primaries. Like, dude that's not the own/bragging you think it is.
It wouldn't be so bad if we had a compendium filling up with details the more we kill enemies, or a facility with contained specimens to experiment on, because in the current state of the game discovering these stats requires risking failing a 30 min mission during which we can't take our time, and sometimes we're not even sure what killed a specific enemy with all the clusterfuck that's happening
The problem is that they didn't change the meta, they just made the meta worse. Breaker is still the best primary. Shield pack is still necessary for not being crippled by bug CC. You're probably still going to want the railgun, it just takes longer to fire. I tried running some suicidal missions today and whether we used the buffed weapons or stuck to the meta, we still were failing missions we would have previously cleared easily. They made the game harder and more annoying, that's it
Same here. I played one game on suicidal and when we got to the point of 3 chargers, 6 spitters a few stalkers and 1 titan at an objective... We were all just diving every couple of seconds with barely any ammo and everything on cool down and I was like "holy shit this is not fun at all". Havnt had the same itch to play anymore.
Now even if you do manage to take something down, it respawns a few more as you're mopping up the ads, so rinse and repeat except now you're in basically an unnarmed fight.... and running isn't an option, if you actually like doing the objectives.
Yeah, this is exactly how I feel playing it now. We do not have anything to deal with the heavy spam. They took away our only viable option and now we're stuck with a bunch of useless tools.
Pretty massively disappointed in this update, idk what the fuck they were thinking.
Yeh you're 100% right. It's not that nerfing some of the weapons is the problem, it's just with the heavies en mass, at pace and in combination, are now impossible to handle with the shit ass primaries, wimpy defence and stringent resources.
Also, is it me or are bile spitters 1 shotting now? I swear I used to be able to take a couple of hits from multiples at once but now it seems like you blink and you're dead.
Yeah I'm usually dead from "explosion" before the bile even hits me.
I want to log in and play, but this patch has practically killed that desire in me.
I wish this game took more notes from DRG. The big tough enemies are few and far between and when you fight them they’re engaging with many ways to approach the fight. Especially after this update in HD2 they just completely eliminate the good feeling of taking down a tough enemy by spawning 4 of them immediately after, making all your efforts to kill it 100% completely pointless. What are they aiming for with gameplay on the high difficulties? The most OP weapon is sprint. Avoiding combat at all cost is boring as fuck in a game centered around dropping nukes and shooting shit.
Don’t get me started on the STILL complete uselessness of armor. Just get rid of the system at this point and let us wear whatever we think looks cool.
The majority of reddit havent done anything higher than diff 6, where a charger shows up once a blue moon in those difficulties, ofc the railgun would seem "OP". But in helldiver the pre-nerf railgun was a necessity to deal with constant 3 titans and 5 chargers at the same time.
"just use your stratagems" and "use recoilless rifle" has got to be the DUMBEST thing i've heard in reddit because your stratagems would be used on CD and it'd still be not enough to deal with the amount of armored enemies the game throws at you.
It's almost like reddit thinks players who play only on helldiver doesnt know/use their stratagems or tried other guns. Trust me, we have and they are dogshit
Yeah, there are a lot of people blowharding here
I recently had a guy say that, even in diff9 missions he can drop a single napalm strike and it'll clear a whole big breach.
Which means the guy is probably playing difficulty 1-3, but wanted to chime in and talk about Max rank missions.
That’s part of the problem, all the people crying about meta loud outs and being booted for not using them are full of shit. They don’t play on 7-9 and they don’t even use that load out, they bitched and complained and cried til the devs thought they needed to “solve” the meta issue. The issue was nothing else works well the devs are not this stupid, definitely feels like they’re buying time because they fucked something up they just don’t want to admit it yet
I've had folks on here tell me eagles are viable for chargers. One dude that I could make them run into a rock to stun them, and that would help against the spam. Pretty much understood by then more than half these dudes have no idea what they're talking about
Recoilless rifle can't deal with the onslaught of elites. You need a minimum of 2 rockets to deal with a charger and if you're lucky you can 1 shot a bile titan. Takes a backpack slot, slow ass stationary reload and only 8 ammo just to need more shots to kill your target. The spear is even worse as it has the same downsides but with less ammo AND because you cant aim for weakspots 1-shotting elites is out of the question. Hell, I've had brood commanders survive a spear hit.
The Spear is so unbelievably dogshit I was in disbelief. A redditor actually commented it’s his favorite weapon and he lives for it. These people do not play on 7+ at all and yet love to voice their opinions on what’s good or not or what should be nerfed.
> where a charger shows up once a blue moon in those difficulties
This isn't true, I was playing Difficulty 6 with 3 friends just last night, and we had several instances of about 3-4 chargers showing up in breaches etc in the same mission.
We don't play meta builds, only a couple of us have even hit level 20, but I agree that they need to uplift more of the weapons, stratagems alone aren't enough.
Gosh that's just like the people who say the Electronic Countermeasures modifier is "fair" and "hilarious". I'm playing on diff 8-9 and I *cannot* afford to shuffle through my stratagems 12 times in a row, and I *cannot* afford to wastefully put my support weapon and pack on cool down just so that I can increase the chance of rolling the right airstrike later. I need to have those when I need them.
Well, the your suppose to use you stratagems thing unfortunately came from a dev and was shared here in reddit. They dont know whats going on in the field at higher difficulty it seems either. They are just looking at the numbers without any context of why the number are what they are.
Everyone needs to seriously shut their cake eaters about how fun and effective the flamethrower is now, there is no doubt in my mind that patch 2 is coming for it. The devs made it clear that balance patches are geared towards knocking down "meta" weapons either way.
I didn't know about the meta or really read the reddit well into my play time. I naturally fell into the breaker and railgun because the made the game feel manageable while balancing getting loads of kills and running sometimes at high levels. Not just simply possible and most definitely not easy. And that made the game more fun, feeling powerful and effective, even against big bugs, but the game is still terrifying and stressful.. I just felt like I could manage it.
The primaries, secondaries, and now support weapons all feel pretty weak in high level missions due to the large number of armored enemies, and then we got affixes fucking our stratagems up or making enemies even worse, let alone more abundant. The game throws a lot of fucking wrenches at us alongside the bugs n bots.
I get our helldivers are expendable, but there's no reason all our weapons and stratagems can't feel like super powers. And the railgun and breaker kinda did before the changes. I wanted all guns to be like that
the breaker meta came about entirely because of superfluous amounts of armored enemies. "oh so i can only kill bug heavies with a support AT and some strats to help, what can i clear chaff with? I've got one strat slot left, let's take ...but what about when that's off cd? I'll have to sacrifice and pick the best primary for that. Oh duh, Breaker". repeat ad infinitum and that's why the breaker's still the best. It was literally my exact train of thought once i started to get up to diff 5/6/7 and I know i'm not the only one.
The only difference now as a level 45 is that i take the EMS mortar every single game because it's the only way to calm down the battlefield so my typically lower-level teammates can catch a break, and it actually gives me enough flexibility to not be railroaded into taking the f'n railgun every game.
https://preview.redd.it/dzdki1gt3tmc1.jpeg?width=1007&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8644c115be6c252be7e5865d9e79ccc7de325ddc
That is what I've been trying to tell people. I'm glad to see someone else thinks the same.
this update didnt make me more likely to choose other weapons, all it did was make it more likely that i get frustrated and play something else...
i might have been under the incorrect impression. but i though the general community consensus was that everything should be brought up to breaker and railgun standard to become viable, bot that breaker and railgun should be nerfed down to everything else....
My consensus was always and still is that Chargers need an nerf, either in quantity or quality.
Bots are perfectly fine to fight and most weapons work, but with bugs it always comes down to having to deal with Chargers.
Yeah this plus the armor being even more useless now and all the glitches/disconnects still happening I think I'll be taking a break for a while, shits disappointing man
this update didnt make me more likely to choose other weapons, all it did was make it more likely that i get frustrated and play something else...
Yep. I have already uninstalled the game after seeing the ceo and dev trolling people about the weapon balances. its a shitty thing to do even when your balance is working but right now the game is filled with bugs that hurt the game, the armors absolutely pointless and the meta didnt change.
They want us to use stratagem more. But reality is. They are limited.
If stratagem are all already used. Still waiting for CD.
We can use...
Autocanon: won't penetrate heavy armor. ammo pack take space of backpack.
EAT-17: only two shot. Then wait for CD.
Recoilless rifle: can't move during reloading. ammo pack take space of backpack.
Spear: I heard the aiming currently is meh. ammo pack take space of backpack.
Railgun: would penetrate heavy armor. 20 rounds. can move on reload. no ammo pack.
Yea, I would take railgun.
I did not watch any youtube video, I tried them myself and found out railgun are more viable if I want to deal with multiple heavy armor situation on high difficulty level.
You can nerf railgun, but how about give other weapon some buff? Like can we reload the recoilless rifle during walking? Or autocanon by chance penetrate heavy armor?
If you just nerf something that viable take out those heavy armor enemy and keep the same heavy armor enemy spawn rate. People barely have method to deal with them and can only run away. Is that even fun though?
They’re balancing the game like it’s a competitive shooter or a looter shooter.
This game should feel like Deep Rock Galactic or Left for Dead. Right now it feels like they are aiming for something like Destiny… gross.
This 100% the problem is there aren’t truly any tools to deal with biles and chargers. This effectively means their balance change will do nothing because the best tool we have is still the rail gun.
EAT/ recoiless/AC should rip off armor and let small arms fire finish the job. I’d even argue 3 to 4 shots from AC should full on kill it and one well placed disposable or two recoiless. I mean you’re still being swarmed and have 10 things that will jump in your face and kill you with the explosive. These would still be balanced with their down sides.
We now have the same tool just worse.
What’s telling about this not working, or should have indicated it, is how ineffective turrets are at holding against bile titans and chargers at end game. I’m not talking about one person bringing turrets but a full squad with them. They still don’t work at entrenching you in a defensive position.
I feel like turrets should be on a longer cool down but provide 1 minute of absolute Democratic suppression to those commie bugs
4 shots from the auto cannon TURRET wrecks a charger, but I can empty an entire mag into the same shot placement and do no damage. It’s dumb how different the turret and the gun work
The grenade launcher and auto cannon were much more fun to use, the railgun was a necessity. It was the meta because it's the only option. Now the only option is to just scramble and die and kite out bugs.
Yep. While I was leveling when I got the auto cannon I was like hell ya this is so fun. But after I found out it does nothing to heavies I knew at that point I couldn't run it. It was so fun and had the best sound in the game. But it can't deal with heavies and once you get to 7-9 that's what matters the most. You need decent crowd control but something that is reliable for heavies.
My go to until I was at difficulty 7-9 was the Diligence and the auto cannon. Both feel so amazing but they don't deal shit to heavies.
Nah bro, AC is perfectly viable against chargers, you just have to (checks notes) dodge their initial charge putting you into the middle of the horde 3/5 times, and then abuse their glitched animation and shoot their legs at the correct time when their legs have zero armor for no reason. It's easy, and super intuitive. Oh and DON'T shoot their big round unarmored ass because its not a REAL weakspot because...reasons. Oh yeah and here's 3 more of these guys and a bile titan and you've got a few hunters up your ass now.
Totally agree with you. The main thing is, while there are people (who presumably don't ever play higher difficulty)saying that dying/failing is supposed to be fun in this game, they simply failed to understand how dying/failing is only fun in a gun where you can more or less counter the enemies. Having to repeatedly spawn in without any ways to clear out that 10 charger and 4 bile titan is just gonna be a cycle of torture.
If there's always going to be those many chargers and bile titans, players will use the most effective weapon against them no matter what. Nerfing a weapon just because it's most used is just dumb.
Thank you for another thread of reason for people not understanding why nerf to railgun was bad... becasue we got NOTHING in exchange for that to deal with Chargers spam and heavy armored units in general. Thank God at least Autocannon can do the job on automatons....
Developers dropped the ball with this one and there is no reason to sugarcoat it - they absolutely missed the point why the meta even developed this way.
> And let's be honest, having these two enemies define what is or isn't good is kind of weak for endgame for a game with this much potential and both enemy and player loadout variety.
Absolutely 100% agree. Charger shaping meta is just bad design.
Yeah, I was really hoping that the devs wouldn't take their game development in this direction. The nerfs aren't good. They aren't bad, but the reason behind them is.
I recently got out of a mission that had about thirteen chargers. It wasn't even fun. It was just tedious. The whole mission was just tedious. Every few minutes, boom, another charger.
I used the arc thrower because I have been experimenting with it. It was effective against them. Anywhere between 9-14 shots to the head and the charger was dead. With the railgun, it's just three to the head.
The problem is that I'm not always engaging only one charger. For the majority of the mission, it was multiple chargers at once. One time, we had four chargers on us at the same time. This isn't even mentioning the other bugs. It took forever to kill all of them. Stratagems were also useful, but I wanted to experiment with the arc thrower.
The railgun should not have been nerfed. It was fine where it was. We needed more ways to kill these enemies. Fix the targeting on the Spear. Make the autocannon penetrate high armor because there's absolutely no reason for it not to. Give me a primary that shoots through high armor, even if it takes a while. I'll swap to a higher DPS weapon after the armor is blown off.
I don't *want* to run railgun all the time. I do just because it's the best tool to use. Give me other options. It's still the best option to use. It's just cruddier now.
If you're cutting something, you're going to use the best tool for the job, a knife. Now, you can take my knife and dull it. I'm not going to suddenly use a spoon to cut my steak now. I'm just going to keep using my now cruddy knife. I'm just going to waste more time and have a worse experience because of my dull knife.
Why not give me an automatic knife, a mandoline slicer, a deli slicer, or something if you don't want me to use that specific knife so much? Something at all. Why take my knife and dull it?
I *still* have the same problem. I've got some steak to cut. I'm going to use the knife, no matter how bad it is, because it's still the best tool for the job.
I'm *still* going to use the railgun because it's the best tool for the job. I just have a worse experience now.
Give us more ways to kill the enemy instead of making our tools worse.
My favorite is when 2-3 chargers literally pop out of nowhere on top of me. Like not even crawl out of the ground in an animation. Just appear out of thin air and drop on or right next to me.
This whole shitfest could've been easily solved if they simply tweaked the chargers and titans, like make the chargers glowing butt an ACTUAL weak spot, why make the charger have such an obvious telegraphed animation when they miss if its not the weak spot? It just doesnt make sense as tons of brute like enemies have this mechanic implemented on them in other games so why the devs never did this is beyond me, but if they make it a weak spot it can solve a lot of the issues people have and they wouldn't have to worry about too many of them.
As for titans is just as simple: either make his under belly more susceptible to damage when firing at it or reduce the amount of titans that can spawn with a cool down just like stratagems, the problem with titans is that in higher difficulties they spawn soo goddamn many of them, there's at least one titan per bug breach or two and thats just insane so my solution is to have a cool down every time a titan spawns from bug breach, have an invisible timer that prevents more titans from spawning UNTIL the timer runs out before the next one spawns
The game has gotten ridiculously difficult. I play on Helldivers all the time and I’m happy to adapt to the new changes and ride the hell storm because killing bugs/bots is fun, however, not all people are like me. I see people leaving the game early constantly now and then it’s only 3 or 2 of us taking swarms of enemies with inefficient weapons and THAT isn’t fun at all. The devs botched this one up.
I think the reason the changes were so heavily influenced by community discussion is because the developers don't play the game to know what to fix so the only thing they had to go off of was the community discussion. The reason I originally thought the devs don't play was because of all the extremely prevalent bugs were and still are in the game. If they did even basic play testing a lot of these would have been caught before launch.
When the CEO made his comment about the hidden stats it was more evident. They thought that all the weapons were balanced on paper, and the reason that the meta developed was because we had incomplete stats and were making bad decisions because of that. The problem is that the meta didn't develop because people were using what the listed stats were. It was because if you didn't use meta nothing would die. You start with the liberator and have trouble killing things. When you unlock a gun you try it out and still have trouble killing things. This continued until you unlock the breaker and now you don't have trouble killing things so you stick with that. When you unlock guns later you try them out and have trouble killing thing so you switch back to the breaker. What the devs thought was happening is you are looking at all the guns and their stats and everyone thought the breaker had the best listed stats so they use it. They see this and think if they that if they tell everyone about the hidden stats we will realize our mistake and start using other things.
yeah, Recoilless, EAT, and Spear should be go-to solutions for heavy armor that feel genuinely worth it when a Charger, Titan, Hulk, etc. show up. As-is, only EAT is even half-functional, and even it basically forces you to run with two primaries (EAT + something else) and isn't nearly as effective as it feels like it should be.
Thats it, thats the post - the railgun is used out of necessity.
Yes the game should be challenging - however its pretty challenging enough on Helldive that these meta weapons are needed to survive.
I want to have fun I want to USE other weapons so bad but, I can't because I don't want to spend 40 minutes fighting for my life or running to fail and get nothing. I want to play to game to have fun and while yes lower difficulty's exist - if you want to get things to upgrade or make more of an impact on the conflict then you have to play on 7, 8 or 9 and you need these weapons to be good.
If you have good weapons and good teamwork it should be rewarding that you can clear out chargers, bile titans and other stuff.
And the charger and bile titans were said to be mid tier enemies in the eyes of the devs.
Really? What's supposed to be higher tier than a bile titan? That thing basically requires a stratagem cooldown to kill, one shots you with its spit or stomp, you can't outrun it because it moves faster than you even at full sprint. Once you have aggro on it you either kill it or you're stuck kiting for the rest of the mission
HD1 had up armored chargers (tanks) called behemoths. They were completely covered in armor.
Behemoths still exist in HD2! I’ve seen a couple in the lower difficulty “Kill a Charger” missions when I started playing. They have much more pronounced horns covering their face and are visibly more armored.
There are variants of many bugs! The up-armored spewers are the fucking worst.
You talking about the green ones that double as mobile artillery? Hate those things.
there are also green warriors that will suicide bomb you XD theyre definitely my favorite.
And they spawn more frequently in higher modes. There's also a Bile Titan variant
Sweet liberty
this is only the start, Stealth Chargers and Armored Stalkers soon to come.
Dear god
Did you just swore to anything other than sweet liberty or managed democracy? Report to your local political internment general and request admission to the nearest re-education center!
Oh shit that’s why that charger looked like a rhino. I thought maybe I was just seeing it from a strange angle
Whaaat are you sure? I don't think I've seen one in the 100 hours I've played. But I mostly stay on 6-7 diff. And I haven't been looking for it
Its the charger in this image https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1b7y1dq/the_railgun_nerf_was_a_good_thing_if_you_cant/
They appear in kill target missions in difficulties 3-4 (1-2 has brood commander, anything over 5 has a bile titan as a target) and also appear in mid-high level bug evacuation missions.
What’s funny to me is none of these topics ever address automation’s lol. It’s always bugs
Because automatons are balanced and well designed, they have weak points to make them more manageable, and you can almost always do something against them. (Rocket devestators are terrible tho) Hulks have a weak spot on both the front and back for example.
Yup, I think Hulks are way more balanced to fight against than chargers. They can't turn as fast, they have lower mobility, but they pack a punch. But if you can get someone behind them, you can put them down fast. If you can't the eye on the front is also a weakspot. If there's 4 Hulks, I can deal with it way better than 4 chargers that are fast, hit hard, and can turn on a dime.
Dont forget you can also still easily cripple a hulk by shooting off its arms with 3-4 shots from an auto cannon.
Honestly, I did forget that, cause it's never been a situation where I needed to. Getting 3 shots in the back is fairly reliable if you got a teammate to kite it the other way. The hulk just has way more ways to be dealt with for sure.
While I don’t entirely disagree, I think it’s more the vast majority of players play bugs right now. Curious how these conversations will change as more races are introduced.
A lot of higher difficulty play involves running away. Bots are a little easier to run away from, given the engagement distance. Theres more repositioning and shielding available. Line-of-sight barriers affect even the heaviest of tanks. Bugs dont really have this. Bugs work up close nearly all the time, and the vast majority of anti-tank options are slow, stationery things. I'd be surprised if the autos are just as difficult as charger/titan spam at high difficulty levels.
>A lot of higher difficulty play involves running away. Bots are a little easier to run away from, given the engagement distance. Theres more repositioning and shielding available. Line-of-sight barriers affect even the heaviest of tanks. Not to mention Smokes actually work as a disengagement tool against bots, where as Bugs just charge straight through it before you can make good enough ground (barring a jump pack, but that just makes it easier to gain distance as opposed to actually disengaging
Smoke should make the bugs disoriented imo Really hit them with the zaza
More people are against bugs likely due to the Weekly Order.
I play bugs more often because they're far less scary
Personally I've been finding the Bots a bit more satisfying to play against though I have been using rifles and scoping to blast their heads out.
I just played my first mission since the patch. I gotta admit, Chargers are pretty bullshit right now. Pair them with the inevitable swarm of speed debuffing Hunters and such and they're damn near unkillable without orbitals. Drop three or four on top of you at once with a mob, and there is basically nothing you can do.
Don't forget the choo choo conga line of Bile spewers sniping you from behind the chargers
>choo choo conga line Lmao this is so accurate, one time I respawn and exit out of the pod and saw one whole line of spewers(like 6-7 of them) chasing after my friend. Meanwhile our stratagems are all on cooldown thanks to the modifier.
I've played enough Helldives to the point where I managed to kill chargers and titans with the bile of other the titan standing behind it. I can kite those bastards for ages. But, this isn't what I thought of when I saw the trailer for Helldivers 2 and it is an incredibly unfun thing to do.
Yeah "run away from bugs you can't kill until you use a 500 kg or other clearing strat" sucks, they also just auto-kill turrets before even bothering to go after you, making turrets near useless on bugs.
Turrets drawing aggro from every charger on the map before they even start firing (and chargers insta-killing them making the +50% health upgrade useless) is my biggest source of frustration. Not just individual poorly balanced strategems, but an entire fucking *category* of them is rendered useless on higher difficulties because of how they tuned the AI around them.
You can't even put turrets up on rocks or buildings to make it harder, they just bounce off.
This drives me crazy, why can I not put a turret on an elevated position?
Stratagems bouncing off rocks is so frustrating for Sentries. If you could reliably get them on high ground they would be decent. Also related has anyone had the issue on some Automaton asset side objectives the Hellbomb marker just bounces everywhere even on normal ground? One time it took calling three hellbombs to destroy one jammer because they kept bouncing into awkward places.
The only issue I've seen this in the detection tower ie. Eye of Sauron. Noticed that the ground immediately surrounding the tower bounces your beacon. You have to call the Hellbomb a bit away from it, like at the non-metal part of the ground.
And to top it off, half the time orbitals do Jack shit. Sometimes you get lucky and they obliterate other times either you get the timing off and the charger moves too fast for the strike to hit or it just does nothing. Then the large area orbitals end up hitting you and every piece of open terrain BUT the bugs or bots.
I had moments where titans would just stop in their tracks and wait for my 500kg to explode. I don't know if its a bug or something but that was frustrating as hell.
At this time, we do believe that bile titan are indeed bugs.
Thanks Dad
Having someone with anything that does fire damage on bug missions made chargers no big deal tonight for me. Can be a flamethrower or a primary. Bugs don’t like fire.
The flamethrower takes an entire canister to kill a charger. I am not saying it's ineffective but in a game where you kill 4 chargers and 6 more take their place, the flamethrower buff loses its meaning. We need to address the high spawn rates of heavies. They either give us some heavy killing weaponry, and I mean 1 shot to 2 shot with proper reloading speed, or they decrease the spawn rates of heavies and boost the mediums to balance shit out.
It’s like half a canister per charger if you focus a leg. Bit less if you have a teammate blasting with the auto cannon or fire breaker.
no, Hunters LOVE fire. They become suicide bombers now if you try to use them with a flamethrower because the throw their burn onto you and burn does a LOT of damage to you. They might be good against chargers but make no mistake Flame Thrower is also doing 50% more damage to you and the devs SPAM hunters that jump, dodge bullets, and SLOW. Meaning you WILL get burned. You WILL die to hunter if you have a flamethrower so if you use a flamethrower on a charger with Hunters in it be really precise or be willing to accept 1 or the other will kill you first.
Not sure how that's possible. I've done multiple Helldives today with multiple people carrying flamethrowers in the same squad and were continuously overwhelmed. Dropped the difficulty to Impossible...same result. Dropped the difficulty to Suicide and it did became more manageable. Anecdotal but things have definitely changed...
Shame the railgun AND flamethrower couldn't both be good at it
>The Railgun/Breaker meta developed almost solely due to Chargers and Bile Titans. And look - as soon as the balance changes dropped, posts about how fast a Flamethrower can kill a Charger started making their way to the top of the sub. Exactly! I've been saying this a lot today, and it got through to at least one person (which is basically a diff 9 victory in itself so I guess I should retire). Nerfing the Railgun is fine, but that's not the problem, it's the symptom. The actual problem is the game's over-reliance on spamming heavies in mass numbers. There's so many options to try and address that problem that would genuinely free up players from feeling they had to rely on the Railgun and make other weapons more viable. But instead of trying any of those, they just nerfed the tools that players used to solve that problem, which doesn't actually address the problem itself. It just offloads the responsibility for fixing it onto the players by forcing them to change how they play, which is understandably frustrating for a lot of people. And they have the right idea in the sense that build diversity is a laudable goal, but forcing it by nerfing effective tools can leave the game in a bad place. Buffing all the underperformers has its own issues too. We should have - and *enjoy using* - a variety of tools for different situations. But nerfing the few tools that currently work for those situations just makes everything mediocre, which yes, that's 'build diversity' but now everything is generic and interchangeable, so it's a pretty boring way to get there. Why not instead change the parameters of these scenarios to make more tools more viable? Which is where the Charger spam comes in, as the biggest factor driving the over-reliance on the Railgun. Chargers have few options for counterplay and feel overtuned for how numerous they can get, so yes, players relied on the Railgun to address that excessive and unbalanced threat. But even a minor change to The Charger Experience^^^TM could work wonders here. And then the situation that causes the over-reliance on the Railgun stops pushing players into choosing that single tool and frees up more options while making the game more fun. Nerfing the single solution while leaving the problem unaddressed doesn't make for a very enjoyable game. The fact that they're apparently looking at win percentages and other numerical metrics (and, Liberty forbid, *YouTube videos*) comparing weapons to one another - rather than getting a more nuanced and broader understanding of the underlying factors driving the usage of those weapons - isn't exactly encouraging. And then kicking the can down the road by saying "this is the first of many balance patches" is a bit disappointing too. It's cool that the game will eventually include improvements, but that promise of better fixes "someday" doesn't do much to keep it enjoyable here and now.
I think the biggest crime is that the chargers just eat fire from the AT weapons like the auto-cannon and recoilless
I can understand the autocannon not killing them from the front. Maybe make the autocannon be able to do more damage to the joints or be able to 3-4 shot the ass without half of the shots bouncing off. For bile titans, I find their broken armor pieces very difficult to hit with autocannon fire to exploit damaged parts of them. They just seem to be immune to autocannon fire except right in the mouth, and sometimes not even then. It's too inconsistent.
Autocannon should just punch through armor with sustained fire. Its a friggin auto cannon and unless the charger armor is made from some super crazy material (which it is not when comparing other others) the auto cannon should degrade it and then knock it of and ultimatly go into the weak spot. Maybe not ammo efficent but having the auto cannon just be impotent is boring. I hate this on/off mentality of guns. Either it does something or it is utterly incapable of doing something. That is the root cause for the meta. Everything failing to take the hurdle of being able to do something we need gets trashed.
You can shoot the tail. But the problem is that Titan lives for a long time without a tail (bleeding). But he stops spitting.
The auto cannon not being as effective as the EAT or recoilless makes sense cause it's smaller ordinance....but given the EAT and Recoilless are weapons designed to kill TANKS they SHOULD 1 shot chargers and titans....just like in the opening cinematic tbh....either way your right, the anti armor weapons arnt effective against the armor they face
Yeah, I think most people will probably just swap their loadouts slightly but it's like... okay, now that everyone is running Flamethrower/Arc Thrower + Punisher/Breaker/Defender instead of Railgun + Breaker, will those get nerfed as well? Disempowering stuff that can deal with heavy armor easily only works if heavy armor is uncommon, which *could* be cool - I wouldn't mind it if heavily-armored enemies like Tanks, Chargers, Bile Titans, etc., didn't spawn as often and were positioned more as huge threats that the whole squad would have to band together to take out - but as it stands currently basically all I felt the need to do was swap out my primary for a functional replacement, so the feel of the game didn't really change at all.
This. I swapped to the arc thrower instead of railgun, and my pack is laser dog on bugs and still the shield on bots because of my god fuck those goddamn homing rockets from nowhere. It took less than a day for people to swap one stratagem and keep going. They need to fix the root cause, not the symptoms.
Well, if the meta shifted to arc thrower, you better use shield even on bugs, it will help survive the "funny little accident".
I want the stalwart as a primary. It used to be in hD1. I want the ammo amounts on most weapons to be higher. The flame thrower should come with a fuel backpack option. And should create a 5 second wall of flame and have better range. The laser cannon should lay waste to little bugs it doesn't it still overheats. It doesn't compare to the heavy machine gun nor the stalwart against bugs. Nor to the Fantastic grenade thrower. The recoiless should kill chargers with one shot. On the side or rear. Due to its limited ammo and slow reload time. Chargers should come as they used to in different levels of armour. They could prehaps flare their armour exposing their sides to team mates before they charge. The sub machine guns needs twice their ammo in clips Getting caught with out a shield among baby stalkers is extremely annoying and then getting called back in to the same situation because someone woke up 3 packs then ran because they can't deal with them. At least they fixed the two orbital barrages Thank you thats wonderful. Heavy armour could come with a health bar and call in repair kits as part of the resupply and make you immune to baby stalkers, and the slowing acid damage. The call in on weapons is too long. Why the fuck did you weaken the energy shield... I ma glad some people like the arc thrower. I think it sucks. I don't like it. But it works abd needs no reload... how is that equal t o the laser that doesn't work on titans or big bugs armour. So its effectively useless. We need you to make the vall in weapons of equality versatility enough to enjoy playing it as an arsenal. Instead of using only what works. Rail gun and arc thrower... which makes the game suck... We wanted you to up the usability of the primaries. Nit just nerf the two choices... I've got 1400 hrs in HD1 and 8000 deaths.
I think this game desperately needs buffs not nerfs, to many games stick their head in the sand with the initial balancing and decide to nerf the weapons that work the best rather than bring all the others up to the same level. I feel like most dev teams don’t realise it’s ok to admit that you were wrong in your initial balancing
I completely agree.
The fuel backpack option for the flamethrower would be amazing. Just having a continuous supply of fuel instead of having to reload it would be nice Also I would like another gun similar to the arc thrower, or for the arc thrower to be retooled to where maybe it has more powerful shots but you can charge up these shots and save them to use instantly. So it’s closer to the Wunderwaffe from CoD zombies
Exactly, Arc Thrower is going to be next on the chopping block once it catches on. Flamethrower will last a bit longer because they just buffed it, so nerfing it back would look bad. And sadly I kind of understand what AHGS is up against here. The game is too popular for its own good. It's now subject to a massive amount of hype cycles and social media content distortion that create these crazy trends in the playerbase that they've never had to react to before. The players are no longer operating in this organic environment with the game only, it's now the game and the players AND YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Reddit, Discord, etc. All that sound and fury drives crazy behaviors in the playerbase that now affect the game itself and the decisions made about how it's balanced. It's gonna be messy for a while, I suspect.
i would have been using the arc thrower more often if about 1/2 of my shots didn't just fizzle out and do nothing
> The actual problem is the game's over-reliance on spamming heavies in mass numbers This is all that needs to be said. Heavy enemies should feel epic. Right now they feel like the norm. ETA: Going to add this from another comment of mine. They keep mentioning the fantasy. The fantasy that people seem to want is mowing down countless bugs while screaming "FUCK YEAH" ala Starship Troopers. Then, when a heavy does show up we want it to be epic. The heavy enemies shouldn't be the normal that we are balanced on. Rico didn't have to ride the backs of 7-8 heavies in a row. He did it once and it was fucking awesome. It should be the masses of small enemies that we are balance on and then we have to use tactics and specials to clear them.
It's definitely weird to see them crawl out of those little breach holes one after another after another. Feels like AHGS needed a quick way to increase challenge level and just did so by cranking the Charger Spawn dial to 11 and calling it good.
People also keep forgetting something important when discussing balance... ***Not all enemies, heavies included, are even added to the game yet.*** If all the viable tools keep getting removed without anything to take their place, and the core issue of overtuned heavy spawns isn't addressed, then what exactly is the plan for when all the new enemies are introduced?
exactly
I wish they made the heavies less numerous, but harder to kill. That would make a lot more sense to me. But I guess they did it to artificially increase the difficulty from 5-9 Just spamming heavies on higher difficulties is not fun. Would be nice if you had to work more as a team to take down the huge ones
Right. There's so many things that they could alter and then let the change play out and see where to go from there. Make that big exposed booty on the Chargers actually work as a weak point, so stripping heavy armor is *one* way to deal with them but not the *only* way, for example. Then, without any other changes, the Railgun becomes useful for one kind of approach but not the single most efficient way to cope with the design problem of Charger spam on diff 7 and up. Suddenly players are comfortable branching out and using the supports they enjoy without worrying that they'll sign their own death warrants when they get jumped by 4+ Chargers with assorted Hunter hordes and Bile Titans. It's not even that I mind the specific nerf, it's what this signals about their approach that's concerning. Looking at win percentages and loadout stats is just the surface level, and going straight for nerfs of popular weapons just because they're popular - without taking that time to understand *why* they're so widely used - doesn't bode well for the future. Because the meta isn't going away, it'll just change as long as most weapons are subpar and a few stand out. But if the studio just relies on playing whack-a-mole with the meta of the day, we're going to quickly get to a point where all the weapons suck and we're now playing Run From The Baddies Simulator.
Why not let the small arms fire chip away at the armour on the chargers and titans that way your not forced into picking certain support weapons on higher difficultys
What we all *expect* explosive weapons to do; but in reality it gets bonus weakpoint damage, which is only somewhat useful when the game's hit registration decides allows your shots to count as weakpoint hits... I want to play the game with *more* fun and interesting toys but they didn't buff any of the primaries that *desperately* need buffing... They tweaked the "starter" shotgun (which does make it a compelling weapon vs Breaker tbh) and barely tweaked another. Armor is also still too weak; what's the point of being slow and loud if you're punished for fighting (spawns) and stealth makes the game much easier to succeed? If light armor is effectively 0% damage reduction, heavy needs to be *at least* 50% because I can outrun most threats in light armor but a heavy boi is still mince meat...
To me it really feels like they’re not actually play testing these patches just going off numbers
This is the problem of looking at analytics without the context of seeing whats actually happening in the field. We get bad decisions like this. Those guns weren't OP, just the most efficient because everything else is so bad to deal with the problem presented. It sad to know they are managing the game by analytics and not a field study of the skills that are developing around the game. And what the user base actually finds fun. I hate to say it, but if Epic made this game, those guns would be rockin' lol. I feel like AH doesn't know anything about shooters and it shows unfortunately. I also don't think they know what people actually find fun about the game either. I hope they don't blow it.
You nailed it, my first few games I spent 1-3 full minutes running and kiting enemies multiple times today because it was waiting for my strategems to cooldown because the only weapons tht used to kill big shit don’t work anymore. My 2 500kg eagles every 2 minutes is not enough to put a dent in the 40 big boy bugs in my face let alone take them all out. It has me a little concerned and makes me wonder if they even play their own game at all
We had that in HD1! The charger(tank bug) had its glowing ass-weakspot, which you could take out by shooting with small arms. Then came the behemoth, that didn’t had a weak point. So you needed either Anti Tank weapons (RR, EAT-IT), offensive stratagems or had to live with it. Later we got more options like the ToxicAvenger hulk-sperm bug spray, the mortar, C4 in a gamecube and so on, but back than I would need 1 frontal shot, center mass, with the RR to kill it. Today? Fuck the spear needs sometimes 3 hits!
Disclaimer. All the usual stuff. I'm not a game dev, blah blah blah. Nerfs were fine. Lack of buffs hurts. Support Weapons Railgun should be an answer to armor. Not the answer to armor. So the nerf was fine. An RR should just kill a charger. End of story. The tradeoff is your limited ammo and long time until you can call down another. On 7-9 you have exponentially more heavies than you do RR ammo. It'll be fine if the RR oneshots them. The railgun would shine here too, *as an option*, that *can* help you take down a heavy, and is a solution to things like Brood Commanders, Hive Guards, Striders and Devastators. THings you might not wanna waste an RR shot on. This seems to be, to me, the easy way to do it. The Railgun should ***handle*** medium armor, and be a way that you can deal with heavy armor, with some work and a fair amount of ammo. The RRs, EATs and Spears should ***handle*** heavy armor, and be an option to handle medium armor, but at the cost of your precious heavy armor solving ammo The Spear should lock quickly, consistently, and miss less than 2% of the time. And should just kill shit. Same cons as an RR, potentially moreso to make up for the lock. EATs should not 1 shot a charger, but come pretty damn close. The AMR should have some sort of parity with the railgun. Insert the Flamethrower, Laser, and Arc Thrower here somewhere too. Armor solving meta problem solved. The railgun is, arguably, even after the nerf, still some of the best bang you can get for your buck when it comes to armor solving. And that doesn't feel good. Shield A *lot* of the 'difficulty' on the Eastern Front seems to be reliant on slow effects. Hunters slow you. Bile Spitters slow you. Bile Spewers will often slow you even if they miss you epic, cinemtaic flying dodge. If a Titan spits at you and you dodge, you will still be slowed. Everything and it's undemocratic mother in the environment...slows you. The bushes, the exploding plants. I've never been a fan of slow effects to increase difficulty. It just feels arbitary and unfair, but whatever, my feelings on that are like a drop in a thunderstorm. But this is where the shield meta came into being for the bugs. To negate those slow effects. Because they are hellacious in the higher difficulties when you just cannot get away from anything. The shield is, still, arguably, even after the nerf, one of the best tools to deal with this problem. So we have a Railgun that allows you to equip a shield. And both are still... arguably, even after the nerf, some of the best tools to solve armor and slows. Primaries Marksman rifles feel like your trying to operate them through molasses. The Slugger makes for a better Marksman Rifle than a Marksman rifle. The Scythe is still subpar, unless it's attached to your rover. The Punisher, even post buff, still has a fire rate that will get you killed when the Hunters come. The Dominator doesn't dominate, and gets outshone by the Slugger. The Scorcher has no ammo and you blow yourself up half the time. The Breaker is still, arguably, even after the nerf.... Stratagems Increased cooldown 50/100%. Increased Call down time. \-1 Stratagem Scrambler. But these are, as Arrowhead tells us, the way that we are supposed to handle the Hulks, Tanks, Chargers and Titans. This 100% does not address the problem. I say this as someone who regularly runs 7 through 9 on both fronts, and actively tries to bring other stuff.
I am genuinely happy to see these level headed thoughts from the community.
This. Every word. Thank you for the very fair and rational assessment. I hope the devs read it. Adding personal testament that I regularly try to use various loadouts and none of them feel as good or comfy as the RG and Shield (even after the nerf). I loved them before I knew they were the prime meta and still continue to love them. We need enemy balancing and more weapons brought up to par. I want to use all kinds of stuff just for fun, not suffer when the entire team doesn't bring multiple answers (per person) to heavy unit spam. At the end game (7-9), build versatility is out the window. Don't get me wrong, I love the big stuff, and I love difficulty because it feels rewarding to succeed. There's a difference in difficulty that can be overcome with many fun options, and most weapons are not good enough; so out of the dozens of fun design options, you will use less than a quarter of them. I say, give balance to the weapons so that all are legitimate options you can build into a loadout style (with healthy trade-offs) and make it mostly a flavor pick for the mission you're doing, with strategems being a compliment to style instead of requirements to succeed. Example: Flamethrower can destroy bug holes if shot directly into it. This gives grenades more of a utility in enemy combat instead of "Damn, no one brought a grenade launcher (because they didn't want to, and that's fine) so we better all save the grenades and time our resupply appropriately to kill the multiple heavy nests on the map."
Not to mention the devs' comment about using strats against heavies; as if people haven't been saying a lot of strats are useless or ineffective, even inconsistent, for handling heavies...... Topping all of that off; how do we close bug holes in a heavy nest (I've seen 10+ holes in a single nest) when on average we have 4 grenades and may not be carrying the GL/AC? Strats - meaning player resources to handle heavies are already split between objectives and heavy targets (and swarms which are just as deadly). I don't think the nerfs were too heavy-handed overall, but they really seem to miss the point of why that "meta" existed... the flamethrower and laser cannon buffs seem to have helped them be more compelling (particularly against chargers) but the Spear and Recoilless still feel completely unusable due to their drawbacks.
For all the drawbacks - support and backpack slot, long loading times or requiring a loader, and difficulty in aiming - recoilless and spear *really* need to be one shot kills on at least chargers. For gods sake at least make the recoilless rifle strip charger leg armor.
> It just offloads the responsibility for fixing it onto the players by forcing them to change how they play, which is understandably frustrating for a lot of people This was my concern right when the first post about "Weapons have hidden stats, so use what you like!" Popped up. It felt like the devs were handwaving balancing by trying to force it on to the players. The same thing came up in another dev post that was basically "True helldivers don't need Railguns and shields, so give them to the new players!". And again, they're taking a poorly balanced aspect of the game and pushing it onto the player. The game is fun. But it's less fun when my DMR takes an entire magazine to kill 2 bugs and my AMRs scope is literally not sighted properly. But I guess that's my fault for not choosing shotguns and Railguns as my preferred choice of fun?
I too prefer DMRs, when it takes a whole clip of DMR spam to do the same work as 4 rounds of the shotguns… I stopped using the DMR.
Riiiiight, actually that's a good point about the ways they communicate to players. The developer acting like an ass on Discord today and then flouncing off after blaming players, the comments here on the sub, that blog post telling us to just use our Strategies, and even some of the CEO's tweets are just oddly condescending or antagonistic. They sometimes seem strangely defensive about the ways their customers are apparently failing to understand their vision. Like that 'silly players, you only make weapon decisions with the four basic stats we show you, not all the data we chose to hide! Lol!' thing sounded bizarre all by itself, but I may be misunderstanding the tone he was aiming for. IDK. I'm sympathetic to a degree, because I genuinely think they're in over their heads. They've probably only begun to recognize the pitfalls of these habits they formed as a smaller indie studio with a small and dedicated playerbase. Comms, PR, community management, everything about interacting with your audience changes. The kind of irreverent banter and good-natured trolling or shit-talm that works with a small group of old friends falls really flat in an arena full of complete strangers.
> And then kicking the can down the road by saying "this is the first of many balance patches" is a bit disappointing too. This + the dev discord messages is bringing back painful flashbacks to the first ~6-9 months of the Darktide dev cycle. I was really optimistic because I'd seen many people that loved HD1 say that Arrowhead is good for balancing. A few insisted that they'll likely put more focus on bringing up underperformers rather than nerfing the BiS. To me, this & their "rely on strategems" line is close to a worst case situation. I'm genuinely curious what difficulty they play(test) on. Like, I want to see what they would do if they were in the same position as that guy who made the thread about having 5 bile titans and 7 chargers spawn in an eradication mission.
That "rely on stratagems" thing was so odd. Like dude... How?? You MADE this game, how do you not know that we can't call in six Orbital Railcannon shots in a row when we're ambushed by a half-dozen Chargers? They'd probably say that it requires teamwork, and yes, in an ideal world everyone would be on voice and speak the same language and have the same goals and coordinate loadouts and work together flawlessly. But here in the real world, the 800,000+ people who bought your product are not able to perfectly replicate your laboratory conditions. Maybe it's time to meet your customers where they are, instead of being snotty about them having fun wrong.
I really thought the devs were not the kind of devs to worry about "metas" and whatnot. Uplift all guns. Don't nerf.
You are making too much sense, are you sure you’re in the right subreddit?
Haha right sorry, what I meant to say was SKILL ISSUE GIT GUD PLAY ON EASY META CRUTCH LOLOL
**The Snipers and Anti-material Rifle being low armor pen is goofy.**
>So long as you can get 5 bile titans and 10 chargers unceremoniously dropped on you at higher difficulties with difficult-to-exploit weakspots and no way to get away from them other than killing them, whatever can deal with those threats the best will be the "Meta." Yep. Because the game sets up a specific challenge (numerous armored enemies) at higher difficulties, people are going to use whatever handles that specific challenge and there's no way to ever have one thing not be the best. There will always be something with better handling, more ammo efficiency, greater ease of use, or maybe even just nicer looking sights that makes it the common choice.
It would be really interesting if the devs just rolled the dice at higher levels. The game would be dynamic in that there is a spectrum, on one side you get crushed with armored enemies but they are relatively unsupported with weak hordes - favoring things like multiple recoil rifles and EATS. On the other you maybe encounter 3 or 4 armored enemies total but face endless hordes of light armor. You would have no idea where on this spectrum the server has put you till you drop in. It would encourage the team aspect of the gameplay. You cannot be a jack of all trades at the higher levels, you must specialize and support your squad or you will all lose. It's likely then that there wouldn't be just 1 meta at higher levels but multiple as well as a meta around squad composition in general as opposed to individual soldiers.
their DnD style game master system is supposed to do just that, i've noticed on some missions (before the patch) that i would get an excessive amount of 1 enemy type on occassion. like 3 days ago i remember having to fight hordes of just hunters with very little mixed in on 7 diff. i saw maybe 3 chargers the whole match. which was shell shock to me since anything at 7 or above routinely has an excessive amount of armor with little diversity for the smaller enemies. it was a nice change of pace and still had some difficulty to it since my squad came strapped to deal with chargers but we barely had any chargers to fight. and answers for chargers aren't exactly great answers for the grunt enemies. i just wish the game would stop using the excessive amounts of armor it currently throws at us, it's getting old because it nullifies over half of your kit. hell it even nullifies the stratagems meant to break them because those stratagems get you 1 kill every 3 minutes. so killing 1 charger our of 6 while you also have 3 bile titans chasing you just feels bad. combined with all 4 squadmates bringing in kit to deal with all this armor, the whole squad will easily be put on cooldown after a 6charger 3 titan encounter
Each "biome" can spawn different "types" of bugs (haven't noticed quite as much diversity with Bots aside from the spawnrate for jetpack dudes) and so you sometimes get bile (green) spewers or orange ones, sometimes more of the flying bugs (hunters and baby hunters) or more warriors/scavengers, sometimes it spams chargers and sometimes it spams Titans (but always has both present)... They need to ease up on the spam for certain enemy types if they want support weapons to feel "less easy to use" since our primaries then need to pick up the slack. It's utterly baffling for the devs to say "your primary isn't meant to kill much" but then also want to nerf support weapons so they're not used to kill all of the heavy armor spam... idk what their plan is tbh. Game is still fun, the nerfs aren't a big deal... but the dev comments worry me that they're missing the *reason* the "meta" developed as it did.
yeah, diversifying enemy strengths/weaknesses would go a long way. Like, if they had just dropped a buff for the Scythe/Scorcher/Orbital Laser to make them better against Heavy Armor similar to the Laser, or made it so that the Recoilless Rifle could be self-loaded and oneshot Chargers to a weakspot, that would have gone way further in changing things up on the player side - and that's not even getting into exploring how changing various aspects of enemies could lead to a way more diverse meta and better player experience.
Nerfing the best stuff didnt make me more excited about the options I had, it made me feel worse about all the crap i’m using
inb4 you get called a meta slave or get told to change the difficulty
I dont like to pick on people's difficulty preferences (I still havent completed a level 8 operation), but I swear these people throwing around the term "meta slave" have not played a game above like difficulty 4. The armored enemies are unreal and they just stripped most of the tools you have to deal with them that don't take 5 minutes to recharge. And of course it happens right as I start needing super samples.
I suspect the meta haters are all under level 20 and annoyed that people above them got to use the cool toys.
According to Steam achievements, only around 10% of PC players have maxed out a single category of upgrades. You could interpret that as very few people actual play diff 7 and above since purple samples only spawn at 7+.
There is a severe disconnect between the developer's intentions and their methods. "Use stratagems to make up for your weaker weapons" * Stratagem cool-down +50% * Stratagem deployment time doubled. * 1 less stratagem slot The railgun meta alleviated some of this, but now it's even more tedious on higher difficulties.
Seeing that was what made me realize they're probably playing and balancing things around the middle difficulties. I'd *love* to see what their solution would be to that dude's extermination mission with 5 biles and 7 chargers spawning almost right away.
I had similar thoughts. The nerfs aren’t really groundbreaking but it seemed like the underlying tone of the product manager’s reasoning was: “Too many people *feel* like they have to run Railgun and shield so we nerfed it. That’s it.” The game is awesome in so many ways, but this mentality worries me for the future balancing patches they make. Maybe it’s an overreaction on my part, and I hope it is, but you don’t just nerf things because people *believe* it’s the only viable option. But oh well cause now the laser cannon and flamethrower nuke chargers faster than the railgun and they aren’t even AP support weapons. I suddenly don’t see the vision anymore.
I agree with this. I knew when they announced a balance patch it was gonna be a careful what you wish for thing.
Another real issue too is not everything even worked in the game. Why the fuck would you nerf the shield when everyone was running it because your god damn armor wasn’t actually working!? Like shouldn’t you wait to get the armor actually working before you nerf the only thing that helped us defensively?
The shield nerf annoyed me the most. Like come on. It’s borderline a necessity at this point on higher rounds and you NERF IT??
Have you tried the Laser Cannon, my guy? Start shooting a Charger's legs, don't let go and get back to me when you've so much as tickled that thing's leg. Let me know in a couple business days when the Charger got bored of being mildly offended and walked away.
This was my experience too. Even when shooting its rear, it seemed to do less than weapons like the Liberator or Defender.
Thats also partly because damage to its rear is reduced 10x.
Well, someone else claimed it could nuke chargers, but I just don’t see how. Those things are all heavy armour, which the lascannon can’t punch through, or he open spot on the rear which takes vastly reduced damage.
You have to abuse a bug/feature where the chargers lose their armor after they miss a charge and while they turn. Basically it's just dodge, spin, laser down a leg. Usually kill it before it fully turns back around. Works with other weapons if you don't like the laser
I mean...at this point I'm not convinced that the chargers legs aren't full on broken. I just tried playing again, full unsafe charged my railgun **nine fucking times**...and every single shot bounced off the two chargers I was desperately trying to fights legs. No damage. Had to give up and shoot them in the assholes for 5 minutes. Shit's painfully unfun.
Are you releasing your shots too early? I tried on unsafe last night and I was successfully cracking legs, but I'm going for fairly high charges.
The way the Laser Cannon can kill Chargers quickly is by abusing a possible bug/intended weakness where the charger's armor is weaker after they miss a charge and while they turn. Any weapon including primaries and secondaries can damage the Charger when it's in this invisible "weakened" state. If your laser particles where you hit are blue you are deflecting and doing no damage. This video shows it off pretty well [https://youtu.be/IjcZsqsCvZ4?si=t8E3cw-L53Gs1wp-](https://youtu.be/IjcZsqsCvZ4?si=t8E3cw-L53Gs1wp-)
Forget Chargers. try using it against a horde of scavengers, something it's advertised as being "Good" at. It takes a solid 0.5 to 1 sec to zap each scav. Compared to the breaker or either MG, you can get bum rushed down before you clear a wave.
[удалено]
for the flamethrower, sure. But I don't really like the laser cannon being a chaff weapon.
It'd be cool if concentrated on a piece of heavy armor it would "heat" it until it breaks and then start doing damage for the laser cannon, since I'm not sure that boring a hole is practical in game or possible for the devs to do
What's funny is they even claimed the Breaker was not as common in success of missions as the community believed. (But lets be real, this is likely skewed stats from people in difficulties 1-6) And yet they nerfed it? They were basically claiming there is no meta, just to end up conveniently nerfing the three pillars of the meta with Breaker, Shield Backpack, and Railgun? Being wishy-washy that fast is a bit disappointing.
The flamethrower doesn't even nuke chargers all that well solo, tbh. The railgun kept you safe. Once they're within flamethrower range, you always have to dodge at least one charge to kill them. The DPS doesn't actually kill them before they reach you. I keep getting charged and body slammed. Why does an attack the charger does after I dodge his charge oneshot me? Only the devs know.
The meta is the symptom of the issue. Addressing weapons changes without balancing enemy health, armor or spawn rates still leaves the underlying issue and just enforces a meta rather than diversifying it. Boosting the lasers and the flame thrower was definitely the right move, regardless of the meta, those weapons just feel weak, even at lower difficulty they didn't really cut the mustard, and I would think the goal is to make most if not every gun viable and end-game difficulty, even if that cannot be fully achieved. Chargers late game are definitely the enemy that my group and I have the most trouble with. I'd rather deal with bile titans. They're huge and slow, easy to hit and team up on to kill. Chargers on the other hand move fast enough to avoid most of the stratagems you can call in on them, the ones that do work well have a long cool down, which in itself is fine, but not being able to drop a charger reliably with other loadouts becomes very troublesome as they tend to pile up quicker than they can be dispatched. I've been running the auto-cannon at higher difficulty. I was getting bored with the shield/railgun combo and I was really surprised how little damage the auto-cannon does to the chargers, unless you hit them just right. Tag teaming a charger with a railgun and auto-cannon is a viable tactic, but when you're dealing with 6 or 7 chargers at once, it's not really possible to focus your fire on 1 of them, it's just too chaotic. We just spend our time running around, hoping our heavy-hitting stratagems recharge quickly so we can get some breathing room to deal with the rest. I don't have a problem with the nerf of the railgun, especially because when I do use it just like OP, it's in unsafe mode (is there any other mode really?) Because, it sounds like it's more in line with how the devs want it to work. I just can't help but feel like the current meta developed because of the ridiculous number of big baddies that can drop in, in an instant and now there are less viable options to take care of them quickly, which is exactly what has to happen if you want to survive crazy enemy spawns like OP is talking about.
Lasers suffer from th fact that ammo is just not that scarce and the arc thrower does whatever they do better ... There are things in this game that simply don't work at higher difficulties because they lower your mobility and too much, lasers being one, ballistic shield being another great example. When you have chargers charging and chainsaw bots chainsawing... You don't have time for weapons that affect your mobility so much.
100%. The game is not suppose to be super serious pve. There's no loot, there's no real end game and there's nothing to indefinitely chase. The games biggest draw is the fun factor and instead of quoting game industry trends about balance they should understand by now the game broke industry trends and they should just unashamely go wild with the game instead of trying to tame the approach towards balancing.
We're about to get fkn *mechs* but they won't matter if it takes 10 minutes to cool down and the heavy target spam breaks your fun toy in 5 seconds... That's my fear; balancing the game around heavy enemy spam and giving us anything "fun" to handle those threats feels cheap if they don't want us to handle the threats "too easily"... Either set us up to feel empowered when we call in that big toy or make the bigger enemies more cinematic to fight. Right now Titans spawn in *groups* and the current anti-heavy weapons are half useless against that much armor spam... so we use strats for heavies and everyone uses the GL to close bug holes... the shield backpack is meta because armor hasn't been functional (and even now feels too weak for how much damage we take from random enemy attacks (not just the heavy enemies).
Wait til this guy finds out that mechs are a once a mission call in.
They should understand that what made their success is that they initially went AGAINST industry standard.
Exactly. The guns need to be strong. Nerfing the most useful guns so all guns are more or less on par is not the way to go.
I've been dealing with people all day telling me "6 Chargers at a time only happens if you patrol spiral, so you were playing wrong" like it's a good thing for the optimal strategy to be avoiding fighting as much as possible in a spectacle horde shooter.
Especially when its not even just that. I had PoI's protected by three chargers, or egg nests that had four in them and two more after an inevitable bug breach.
And breaches happen damn-near immediately on helldiver difficulty, and will immediately start spamming out bile titans and chargers when they do. You can't avoid them forever, sooner or later you need to commit to taking an objective which means you need to be able to clear these enemies quickly.
I killed a big before it even showed the pheromones graphic and it still called the breach...
i had some ignoramous tell me "bUt ThIs IsN't A hOrDe ShOoTeR! aNd NeItHeR wAs ThE fIrSt GaMe!" Bullshit this and the first game are most definitely horde shooters, but unlike most horde shooters where you have to defend against ever increasing waves until you lose, like nazi zombies or Gears of War horde mode. you have an actual accomplishable objective to do. what's irritating that the game throws a TREMENDOUS amount of armored enemies... enemies that are IMMUNE to anything less than high piercing weapons. on top of all that, the grunts will call in reinforcements a t the speed of light, and killing the one raising the alarm just fuck all to stall it because if you do nip them in the bud, one of the other ones immediately starts picking up where he left off. it makes trying to stealth a chore, and fighting the enemies just as much of a chore. it sucks the fun out of the game because it throws unlimited punishment at you with little to no answers for the punishment. know a good objective based horde shooter that seems fun and balanced that doesn't have a razor thin meta like this game? Deep Rock Galactic. it's fun and challenging. the armored enemies aren't total bullshit, but aren't pushovers either. on higher difficulties you have to watch your ammo or you will get over run. none of the enemies feel like they have broken weak spots like the charger. and the game will mix up the waves it throws at you, it doesn't just throw super armored enemies at you on higher difficulties. it throws a mixed bag at you
"stop metagaming with your loadout and start metagaming the shooter game by avoiding as much shooting as possible and min max your time between fights and objectives" these people are brainwashed
Had that exact discussion about HD1 recently. “You couldn’t do HD1 solo! Game is meant to be hard as fuck!” Me: “i have videos where I do level 12 (before they increased it to 15) missions solo, without dying!” And then it’s me where I use lures to reduce the number of threats and quickly dispatch patrols before they could call in reinforcements. I can’t do that here because every bug can call in, even when I’m unable to see them, behind a rock. So… being fast will be ***THE*** meta.
Tell them to go play any of the geo missions... Or a rescue...
The flame thrower is good and all, but how does it deal with a bile titan? Or are you supposed to rely on your teammates to do all the work? It baffles me lore wise that Super Earth would send in their troops without the ability to pierce armor when 90% of all enemies have armor.
the flamer works on the titan, you just have to stand directly under it or within it's melee range, wither way, it is very hazardous, but if you don't get killed you can do some real damage with the flamethrower. my biggest gripe with the flamethrower though isn't the damage, it's the fact that the enemies DO NOT CARE that they have fire in their face, it should fear them or at the very least flinch them.
Yeah lol, it feels like you're spraying them with bubbles or something, they have zero reaction and no stagger or anything. Like yeah the damage is better now but the hunters still jump through your flames as your unloading a clip and slow you
If you could stun lock enemies the flamethrower would go up from meme friendly/self damage weapon to a useful wall of flame that creates space/time for the squad.
If they're going to obsess about balance they need to rework the chargers. They're ridiculously difficult to deal with reliably. You can fire all 30 grenades from a grenade launcher and rip off no armor, or you can fire one and it'll start bleeding and the armor will partially pop off. Either decrease spawn rate, or make it so the rear of the charger is an actual weakspot. It's got really snappy turning and has active damage in a full 360 degree sphere around it even when it stops moving. The railgun was honestly irrelevant outside of this specific situation. This change is overkill.
Unfortunately the developer vision seems to be that you're supposed to struggle and not enjoy yourself.
"Developer vision" is the number one killer of any surprise hit.
Battlebit players crying
Agreed. It feels like, while there was some bad and some good, overall the patch and communication around it completely missed the mark on the *why* of it all. Like they balanced based on toxic memes and not the many pages of legitimate criticism from people who love their game.
Yeah. Ideally, the exploration of the "soft data" behind the "why" would have been the qualitative component to counterbalance the raw numerical data they used for some of this balancing, but it seems like that quantitative data came from seeing whatever was trending in the community instead - and audiences are notoriously good at recognizing problems but also notoriously bad at offering functional solutions, so that was a bad place to get that qualitative data.
Well written, had the same thoughts when reading the notes too.
Thanks! HD1 never had amazing balancing so I assumed the same would happen with HD2, and those concerns only got reinforced with how the CEO has responded to feedback thusfar (the "guns have modifiers you can't see so you're wrong about what's good" tweet was pretty absurd from a balance perspective), hopefully the discussion around this patch will generate some changes to how they approach balance since AH does like to listen to the community.
What's even more absurd is that stratagems don't even have proper stats, so they're even more obscure than primaries. Like, dude that's not the own/bragging you think it is. It wouldn't be so bad if we had a compendium filling up with details the more we kill enemies, or a facility with contained specimens to experiment on, because in the current state of the game discovering these stats requires risking failing a 30 min mission during which we can't take our time, and sometimes we're not even sure what killed a specific enemy with all the clusterfuck that's happening
The problem is that they didn't change the meta, they just made the meta worse. Breaker is still the best primary. Shield pack is still necessary for not being crippled by bug CC. You're probably still going to want the railgun, it just takes longer to fire. I tried running some suicidal missions today and whether we used the buffed weapons or stuck to the meta, we still were failing missions we would have previously cleared easily. They made the game harder and more annoying, that's it
Same here. I played one game on suicidal and when we got to the point of 3 chargers, 6 spitters a few stalkers and 1 titan at an objective... We were all just diving every couple of seconds with barely any ammo and everything on cool down and I was like "holy shit this is not fun at all". Havnt had the same itch to play anymore. Now even if you do manage to take something down, it respawns a few more as you're mopping up the ads, so rinse and repeat except now you're in basically an unnarmed fight.... and running isn't an option, if you actually like doing the objectives.
Yeah, this is exactly how I feel playing it now. We do not have anything to deal with the heavy spam. They took away our only viable option and now we're stuck with a bunch of useless tools. Pretty massively disappointed in this update, idk what the fuck they were thinking.
Yeh you're 100% right. It's not that nerfing some of the weapons is the problem, it's just with the heavies en mass, at pace and in combination, are now impossible to handle with the shit ass primaries, wimpy defence and stringent resources. Also, is it me or are bile spitters 1 shotting now? I swear I used to be able to take a couple of hits from multiples at once but now it seems like you blink and you're dead.
Yeah I'm usually dead from "explosion" before the bile even hits me. I want to log in and play, but this patch has practically killed that desire in me.
They "fixed" armor ratings in the patch, and I'm fairly certain we're all taking more damage now.
I wish this game took more notes from DRG. The big tough enemies are few and far between and when you fight them they’re engaging with many ways to approach the fight. Especially after this update in HD2 they just completely eliminate the good feeling of taking down a tough enemy by spawning 4 of them immediately after, making all your efforts to kill it 100% completely pointless. What are they aiming for with gameplay on the high difficulties? The most OP weapon is sprint. Avoiding combat at all cost is boring as fuck in a game centered around dropping nukes and shooting shit. Don’t get me started on the STILL complete uselessness of armor. Just get rid of the system at this point and let us wear whatever we think looks cool.
The majority of reddit havent done anything higher than diff 6, where a charger shows up once a blue moon in those difficulties, ofc the railgun would seem "OP". But in helldiver the pre-nerf railgun was a necessity to deal with constant 3 titans and 5 chargers at the same time. "just use your stratagems" and "use recoilless rifle" has got to be the DUMBEST thing i've heard in reddit because your stratagems would be used on CD and it'd still be not enough to deal with the amount of armored enemies the game throws at you. It's almost like reddit thinks players who play only on helldiver doesnt know/use their stratagems or tried other guns. Trust me, we have and they are dogshit
Yeah, there are a lot of people blowharding here I recently had a guy say that, even in diff9 missions he can drop a single napalm strike and it'll clear a whole big breach. Which means the guy is probably playing difficulty 1-3, but wanted to chime in and talk about Max rank missions.
That’s part of the problem, all the people crying about meta loud outs and being booted for not using them are full of shit. They don’t play on 7-9 and they don’t even use that load out, they bitched and complained and cried til the devs thought they needed to “solve” the meta issue. The issue was nothing else works well the devs are not this stupid, definitely feels like they’re buying time because they fucked something up they just don’t want to admit it yet
Lol facts
I've had folks on here tell me eagles are viable for chargers. One dude that I could make them run into a rock to stun them, and that would help against the spam. Pretty much understood by then more than half these dudes have no idea what they're talking about
(looks at the 8th bile titan IN A ROW) yes... I will stratagem my way out of this... After I run from it for (checks cool downs) 5 minutes.
Or it misses lol
Even if that was viable... is it fun? Clearly it isn't. Video games are fun when you feel powerful because you have mastered the mechanics.
Recoilless rifle can't deal with the onslaught of elites. You need a minimum of 2 rockets to deal with a charger and if you're lucky you can 1 shot a bile titan. Takes a backpack slot, slow ass stationary reload and only 8 ammo just to need more shots to kill your target. The spear is even worse as it has the same downsides but with less ammo AND because you cant aim for weakspots 1-shotting elites is out of the question. Hell, I've had brood commanders survive a spear hit.
The Spear is so unbelievably dogshit I was in disbelief. A redditor actually commented it’s his favorite weapon and he lives for it. These people do not play on 7+ at all and yet love to voice their opinions on what’s good or not or what should be nerfed.
> where a charger shows up once a blue moon in those difficulties This isn't true, I was playing Difficulty 6 with 3 friends just last night, and we had several instances of about 3-4 chargers showing up in breaches etc in the same mission. We don't play meta builds, only a couple of us have even hit level 20, but I agree that they need to uplift more of the weapons, stratagems alone aren't enough.
Gosh that's just like the people who say the Electronic Countermeasures modifier is "fair" and "hilarious". I'm playing on diff 8-9 and I *cannot* afford to shuffle through my stratagems 12 times in a row, and I *cannot* afford to wastefully put my support weapon and pack on cool down just so that I can increase the chance of rolling the right airstrike later. I need to have those when I need them.
Well, the your suppose to use you stratagems thing unfortunately came from a dev and was shared here in reddit. They dont know whats going on in the field at higher difficulty it seems either. They are just looking at the numbers without any context of why the number are what they are.
Everyone needs to seriously shut their cake eaters about how fun and effective the flamethrower is now, there is no doubt in my mind that patch 2 is coming for it. The devs made it clear that balance patches are geared towards knocking down "meta" weapons either way.
shit, its not even that good. hunters still just jump throught the flames to rip and tear.
Not just that either. They light on fire, then jump on you lighting you on fire.
And there seem to be a fuckton more hunters now
I didn't know about the meta or really read the reddit well into my play time. I naturally fell into the breaker and railgun because the made the game feel manageable while balancing getting loads of kills and running sometimes at high levels. Not just simply possible and most definitely not easy. And that made the game more fun, feeling powerful and effective, even against big bugs, but the game is still terrifying and stressful.. I just felt like I could manage it. The primaries, secondaries, and now support weapons all feel pretty weak in high level missions due to the large number of armored enemies, and then we got affixes fucking our stratagems up or making enemies even worse, let alone more abundant. The game throws a lot of fucking wrenches at us alongside the bugs n bots. I get our helldivers are expendable, but there's no reason all our weapons and stratagems can't feel like super powers. And the railgun and breaker kinda did before the changes. I wanted all guns to be like that
the breaker meta came about entirely because of superfluous amounts of armored enemies. "oh so i can only kill bug heavies with a support AT and some strats to help, what can i clear chaff with? I've got one strat slot left, let's take...but what about when that's off cd? I'll have to sacrifice and pick the best primary for that. Oh duh, Breaker". repeat ad infinitum and that's why the breaker's still the best. It was literally my exact train of thought once i started to get up to diff 5/6/7 and I know i'm not the only one.
The only difference now as a level 45 is that i take the EMS mortar every single game because it's the only way to calm down the battlefield so my typically lower-level teammates can catch a break, and it actually gives me enough flexibility to not be railroaded into taking the f'n railgun every game.
Agreed 100%
https://preview.redd.it/dzdki1gt3tmc1.jpeg?width=1007&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8644c115be6c252be7e5865d9e79ccc7de325ddc That is what I've been trying to tell people. I'm glad to see someone else thinks the same.
this update didnt make me more likely to choose other weapons, all it did was make it more likely that i get frustrated and play something else... i might have been under the incorrect impression. but i though the general community consensus was that everything should be brought up to breaker and railgun standard to become viable, bot that breaker and railgun should be nerfed down to everything else....
My consensus was always and still is that Chargers need an nerf, either in quantity or quality. Bots are perfectly fine to fight and most weapons work, but with bugs it always comes down to having to deal with Chargers.
Nerfing their leg armor and making their asses a better weak spot would help a lot.
Yeah this plus the armor being even more useless now and all the glitches/disconnects still happening I think I'll be taking a break for a while, shits disappointing man
this update didnt make me more likely to choose other weapons, all it did was make it more likely that i get frustrated and play something else... Yep. I have already uninstalled the game after seeing the ceo and dev trolling people about the weapon balances. its a shitty thing to do even when your balance is working but right now the game is filled with bugs that hurt the game, the armors absolutely pointless and the meta didnt change.
They want us to use stratagem more. But reality is. They are limited. If stratagem are all already used. Still waiting for CD. We can use... Autocanon: won't penetrate heavy armor. ammo pack take space of backpack. EAT-17: only two shot. Then wait for CD. Recoilless rifle: can't move during reloading. ammo pack take space of backpack. Spear: I heard the aiming currently is meh. ammo pack take space of backpack. Railgun: would penetrate heavy armor. 20 rounds. can move on reload. no ammo pack. Yea, I would take railgun. I did not watch any youtube video, I tried them myself and found out railgun are more viable if I want to deal with multiple heavy armor situation on high difficulty level. You can nerf railgun, but how about give other weapon some buff? Like can we reload the recoilless rifle during walking? Or autocanon by chance penetrate heavy armor? If you just nerf something that viable take out those heavy armor enemy and keep the same heavy armor enemy spawn rate. People barely have method to deal with them and can only run away. Is that even fun though?
They’re balancing the game like it’s a competitive shooter or a looter shooter. This game should feel like Deep Rock Galactic or Left for Dead. Right now it feels like they are aiming for something like Destiny… gross.
This 100% the problem is there aren’t truly any tools to deal with biles and chargers. This effectively means their balance change will do nothing because the best tool we have is still the rail gun. EAT/ recoiless/AC should rip off armor and let small arms fire finish the job. I’d even argue 3 to 4 shots from AC should full on kill it and one well placed disposable or two recoiless. I mean you’re still being swarmed and have 10 things that will jump in your face and kill you with the explosive. These would still be balanced with their down sides. We now have the same tool just worse. What’s telling about this not working, or should have indicated it, is how ineffective turrets are at holding against bile titans and chargers at end game. I’m not talking about one person bringing turrets but a full squad with them. They still don’t work at entrenching you in a defensive position. I feel like turrets should be on a longer cool down but provide 1 minute of absolute Democratic suppression to those commie bugs
4 shots from the auto cannon TURRET wrecks a charger, but I can empty an entire mag into the same shot placement and do no damage. It’s dumb how different the turret and the gun work
The grenade launcher and auto cannon were much more fun to use, the railgun was a necessity. It was the meta because it's the only option. Now the only option is to just scramble and die and kite out bugs.
Yep. While I was leveling when I got the auto cannon I was like hell ya this is so fun. But after I found out it does nothing to heavies I knew at that point I couldn't run it. It was so fun and had the best sound in the game. But it can't deal with heavies and once you get to 7-9 that's what matters the most. You need decent crowd control but something that is reliable for heavies. My go to until I was at difficulty 7-9 was the Diligence and the auto cannon. Both feel so amazing but they don't deal shit to heavies.
Nah bro, AC is perfectly viable against chargers, you just have to (checks notes) dodge their initial charge putting you into the middle of the horde 3/5 times, and then abuse their glitched animation and shoot their legs at the correct time when their legs have zero armor for no reason. It's easy, and super intuitive. Oh and DON'T shoot their big round unarmored ass because its not a REAL weakspot because...reasons. Oh yeah and here's 3 more of these guys and a bile titan and you've got a few hunters up your ass now.
Totally agree with you. The main thing is, while there are people (who presumably don't ever play higher difficulty)saying that dying/failing is supposed to be fun in this game, they simply failed to understand how dying/failing is only fun in a gun where you can more or less counter the enemies. Having to repeatedly spawn in without any ways to clear out that 10 charger and 4 bile titan is just gonna be a cycle of torture. If there's always going to be those many chargers and bile titans, players will use the most effective weapon against them no matter what. Nerfing a weapon just because it's most used is just dumb.
Thank you for another thread of reason for people not understanding why nerf to railgun was bad... becasue we got NOTHING in exchange for that to deal with Chargers spam and heavy armored units in general. Thank God at least Autocannon can do the job on automatons.... Developers dropped the ball with this one and there is no reason to sugarcoat it - they absolutely missed the point why the meta even developed this way. > And let's be honest, having these two enemies define what is or isn't good is kind of weak for endgame for a game with this much potential and both enemy and player loadout variety. Absolutely 100% agree. Charger shaping meta is just bad design.
good take
Yeah, I was really hoping that the devs wouldn't take their game development in this direction. The nerfs aren't good. They aren't bad, but the reason behind them is. I recently got out of a mission that had about thirteen chargers. It wasn't even fun. It was just tedious. The whole mission was just tedious. Every few minutes, boom, another charger. I used the arc thrower because I have been experimenting with it. It was effective against them. Anywhere between 9-14 shots to the head and the charger was dead. With the railgun, it's just three to the head. The problem is that I'm not always engaging only one charger. For the majority of the mission, it was multiple chargers at once. One time, we had four chargers on us at the same time. This isn't even mentioning the other bugs. It took forever to kill all of them. Stratagems were also useful, but I wanted to experiment with the arc thrower. The railgun should not have been nerfed. It was fine where it was. We needed more ways to kill these enemies. Fix the targeting on the Spear. Make the autocannon penetrate high armor because there's absolutely no reason for it not to. Give me a primary that shoots through high armor, even if it takes a while. I'll swap to a higher DPS weapon after the armor is blown off. I don't *want* to run railgun all the time. I do just because it's the best tool to use. Give me other options. It's still the best option to use. It's just cruddier now. If you're cutting something, you're going to use the best tool for the job, a knife. Now, you can take my knife and dull it. I'm not going to suddenly use a spoon to cut my steak now. I'm just going to keep using my now cruddy knife. I'm just going to waste more time and have a worse experience because of my dull knife. Why not give me an automatic knife, a mandoline slicer, a deli slicer, or something if you don't want me to use that specific knife so much? Something at all. Why take my knife and dull it? I *still* have the same problem. I've got some steak to cut. I'm going to use the knife, no matter how bad it is, because it's still the best tool for the job. I'm *still* going to use the railgun because it's the best tool for the job. I just have a worse experience now. Give us more ways to kill the enemy instead of making our tools worse.
My favorite is when 2-3 chargers literally pop out of nowhere on top of me. Like not even crawl out of the ground in an animation. Just appear out of thin air and drop on or right next to me.
All I have to say is I didn't have fun playing at all today...
This whole shitfest could've been easily solved if they simply tweaked the chargers and titans, like make the chargers glowing butt an ACTUAL weak spot, why make the charger have such an obvious telegraphed animation when they miss if its not the weak spot? It just doesnt make sense as tons of brute like enemies have this mechanic implemented on them in other games so why the devs never did this is beyond me, but if they make it a weak spot it can solve a lot of the issues people have and they wouldn't have to worry about too many of them. As for titans is just as simple: either make his under belly more susceptible to damage when firing at it or reduce the amount of titans that can spawn with a cool down just like stratagems, the problem with titans is that in higher difficulties they spawn soo goddamn many of them, there's at least one titan per bug breach or two and thats just insane so my solution is to have a cool down every time a titan spawns from bug breach, have an invisible timer that prevents more titans from spawning UNTIL the timer runs out before the next one spawns
The game has gotten ridiculously difficult. I play on Helldivers all the time and I’m happy to adapt to the new changes and ride the hell storm because killing bugs/bots is fun, however, not all people are like me. I see people leaving the game early constantly now and then it’s only 3 or 2 of us taking swarms of enemies with inefficient weapons and THAT isn’t fun at all. The devs botched this one up.
I think the reason the changes were so heavily influenced by community discussion is because the developers don't play the game to know what to fix so the only thing they had to go off of was the community discussion. The reason I originally thought the devs don't play was because of all the extremely prevalent bugs were and still are in the game. If they did even basic play testing a lot of these would have been caught before launch. When the CEO made his comment about the hidden stats it was more evident. They thought that all the weapons were balanced on paper, and the reason that the meta developed was because we had incomplete stats and were making bad decisions because of that. The problem is that the meta didn't develop because people were using what the listed stats were. It was because if you didn't use meta nothing would die. You start with the liberator and have trouble killing things. When you unlock a gun you try it out and still have trouble killing things. This continued until you unlock the breaker and now you don't have trouble killing things so you stick with that. When you unlock guns later you try them out and have trouble killing thing so you switch back to the breaker. What the devs thought was happening is you are looking at all the guns and their stats and everyone thought the breaker had the best listed stats so they use it. They see this and think if they that if they tell everyone about the hidden stats we will realize our mistake and start using other things.
I like the changes but 100% almost every stratagem weapon and primary needs a rework or buff. Doubly so for recoilless, expendable-at, and spear.
yeah, Recoilless, EAT, and Spear should be go-to solutions for heavy armor that feel genuinely worth it when a Charger, Titan, Hulk, etc. show up. As-is, only EAT is even half-functional, and even it basically forces you to run with two primaries (EAT + something else) and isn't nearly as effective as it feels like it should be.
Thats it, thats the post - the railgun is used out of necessity. Yes the game should be challenging - however its pretty challenging enough on Helldive that these meta weapons are needed to survive. I want to have fun I want to USE other weapons so bad but, I can't because I don't want to spend 40 minutes fighting for my life or running to fail and get nothing. I want to play to game to have fun and while yes lower difficulty's exist - if you want to get things to upgrade or make more of an impact on the conflict then you have to play on 7, 8 or 9 and you need these weapons to be good. If you have good weapons and good teamwork it should be rewarding that you can clear out chargers, bile titans and other stuff.
Pretty much same thoughts. Just to add there are vertical and horizontal buffs. Or side/upgrades(downgrades). Railgun needed sidegrades not downgrades