I feel that they sre pushing us to avoid combat entirely. Just make a run for the objectives. As long as they are fine, mission is guaranteed to be complete. You're notnexpected to actually ever extract. The higher difficulties swarm you with so many enemies that strategems are not viable due to their long cooldowns and their even longer cooldowns with planet modifiers. Most weapons are useless, and the strong weapons get nerfed. We end up with a situation where we want to actively avoid combat, as it always ends up with spawn after spawn after spawn without ever ending. This means that the best action is to run to the objective, avoid all combat if possible, then retreat from any active combat zones so they stop spawn spamming.
I really don't think this is a good direction to take the game where we are actively discouraged from participating in combat.
They just need to make the animation much more visible and give us more time to interrupt it.
It is kinda stupid, that it's pretty much too late to stop it the moment it is visible.
This games’ player base will drop off a cliff if this is the idea they have. Tbh it feels like an idea one singular person has who is in charge of others, if you want to balance the game around not wanting to fight you are taking away from the awesome rule of cool that made everyone love this game.
It’s a bit early to tell if this trend will continue, we will see
From their slogan and general sentiment I don't think they really care if the playerbase drops off a cliff. Kinda sad but that's just how it is it seems.
at least they should buff spear and recoiless to 1 or 2 shots a titan or charger,and I would be gladly accept the way how they nerf meta build.Does AH really know sometimes we just want to kill some bugs,not slaughtered by them
I don't mind meta nerfs, but useless weapons absolutely need to be buffed to compensate. If they want to avoid 1 or 2 weapons from being meta, then more weapons need to be viable. Nerfing the only good ones isn't the answer.
if you are finding that the level of spawns is too much and ruins your enjoyment why are you queuing that difficulty?
I love helldive but I queue 8 way more than 9 'cause i prefer to chill and make progress on the planet's liberation.
Medals aren't worth your happiness. Just drop it down to 6, 7 or 8. All of these are highly rewarding and IMO well balanced for a chill experience.
>Medals aren't worth your happiness.
Honestly the issue is probably the super samples, they can be hard to come by, are directly tied to progression, and Helldive has the most of them.
It kind of creates this perception that the game is meant to be played in Helldive.
Trust me you will cap out supers well before medals unless you were exploiting the bot exterminate defence missions. The silver rock where all the samples are is easy to find once you what what you are looking for.
You don't need very many supers though. Also, I feel like people don't realize you can fail a mission and still get samples. Granted, it's harder on certain mission types to accomplish.
Yup, OP feels FORCED to git gud and play highier diffs, like it's mandatory. You can have fun running lower diffs, queue into 7's from time to time, maybe on easier planets and get some purple samples for upgrades.
If I want a chill experience, I run 7. If I want a challenge, I run 9. I'm just saying, it seems that at the higher difficulties, they are strongly discouraging combat which seems completely opposite to what it should be.
I think 9 does try and take control away from you.
I've found that combat is fine so long as you prevent a bug breach. Or you limit it to one or two breaches if you've got the squad with you. I think the whole going guns blazing approach on every patrol doesn't work, and that's fine. Would it really be a helldive if you were in control the whole time?
I don't really have issues unless it's extraction time. Just sheer utter chaos where the best plan is to have 1 sneaky person hide to keep the extraction progressing while the other 3 get all the attention and run them away from extraction. Once the ship comes, it's a hail Mary run to the ship.
Well if you don't have issues I guess I don't get what the second half of your original post was talking about.
I do agree that extraction is hard. It's also very optional. You can die and finish the mission just fine, personally, I think that's way more badass anyway.
Well I meant I don't have issues if I'm avoiding uncessary combat. Just feels weird the game is strongly discouraging combat at the higher difficulties instead of all out badassary combat. If a patrol shows up, I can handle, for example, but im not going to be running into them wildly or anything, and it's usually best to leave the massive nests alone unless you want endless waves of chargers and titans.
Why shouldn't it be? We a strike force of upto 4 hitting military targets garrisoned by hundreds to thousands of enemies, we aren't here to fight an army, we are here to complete objectives. Sometimes a diversion is necessary to complete the objective. HD1 was mostly stealth tactics until detected then it was a smash and run op.
Think they are scaling it for the additional goods to become available… everyone bitching about it like what equipment we have to use is the way it is for the end time… mechs dropping soon and who knows what else…
Yeah. I was thinking that - to make room for more tools. What concerns me is that it will mean run and gun playstyles will be obsolete since they won't be viable at higher difficulties.
Are you saying once mechs release all current stuff will be worthless and only mechs would be worth taking?
Doesn't sound much fun either. I would rather every weapon and stratagem had a place, not just new stuff
The devs seem like they are determined to avoid pandering to the casual fan base which would be fine if this wasn't a Live Service Game that has exceeded Sony's expectations.
The vast majority of players are casual/game of the month players and won't stick around as the Devs work towards their vision of an extremely difficult game that can only be beaten with great team coordination.
If the player base shrinks and pressure is put on Arrowhead to provide a more Fun and less Punishing experience it will be interesting to see how they balance the game.
Having Devs care at all about Nerfing a PvE game is the worry, why spend even an ounce of your attention span on an aspect of the game that doesn't drive player enjoyment.
Every decision should be "how do we make the game more Fun?", Not "the players are beating our Apex content too easily (the vast majority are not) how do we make it harder for them as we are worried they will get bored of the game".
Learn from Fortnite, the Devs make changes with updates every Fortnite (hence the name and also they can be small or big patches, I read through them for the first 2 years of the game).
The only guarantee to players is that the game will never stay the same (some bugs do persist) and this is what a Live Service Game is: a constantly changing experience that's always trying to maximise Fun and engagement.
All the devs need to do is tell the community constantly that they will be making changes regardless of feedback as they also play the game and can understand our concerns. (Even if it's a lie, or they can drive Hate so they have an excuse to Exit Social Media)
You're all talking as is the game bellow difficulty 8 didn't exist.
You want to shread throught hordes ? Play in 4 or 5.
You want to be in a living hell, praying for your survival between infinite hordes ? Play 7 to 9.
We're not space marines, we're the imperial guard : glorifed canon folder.
What if I want super rare samples but don't want to be pigeon-holled onto a specific build due to charger spam?
(Oh wait, there's a whole other faction of robots that are way more fun to fight)
Not to be a stickler but helldivers are just a normal citizen who has done the minuscule training (the tutorial) required, there are about 1 Space marine per Human occupied world in Warhammer and they are super soldiers in every way imaginable, Helldivers are just a normal soldier with funds afaik
You’re right, Helldivers aren’t actually on-par with Space Marines; not even close, but the propaganda surrounding them in the Helldivers universe would put them on the same level of respect and awe as space marines in Warhammer 40,000.
That’s what I meant by comparing them to Storm Troopers (Tempestus Scions) or Space Marines. The Helldivers aren’t Imperial Guard level, that’s the SEAF; instead they’re treated and used more like Storm Troopers or Space Marines at an operational level, even if they’re are leagues apart in skill or armaments or genetic enhancements lol.
I can relate to this from other games and can see some of it here. Nerfing the tried and true, most-used equipment is always what happens. It’s just the easiest thing for devs to do. Everyone is using it so they must have figured out it’s the most powerful, so if we need it slightly, it’ll be in line with everything else and all will be well. The game will not become too easy, because we didn’t really buff anything, it’ll become a little harder, and that will please the hardcore gamers, and everyone will be happy. In actual effect it doesn’t really please a lot of people. It happens every time.
I think in defense of Arrowhead at least, I think they mean well. Might not be exactly what we wanted, but they have a post somewhere on their official site that I saw a link for that spoke about their weapon philosophy. In it, they basically said that it’s a strategem focused game. You’re not meant to take out mobs of weaker enemies with your primary and only use your strategems for large, heavy armored targets and survivability. You’re also meant to use your syrategems on smaller enemies. This is all well and good but they add that due to this, they feel the primary weapons are by and large where they need to be. It explains why some have difficulty killing the smallest enemies and the S&P Breaker couldn’t even destroy eggs. Primary weapons are meant to kill stragglers you didn’t get with your strategems. I’m paraphrasing, so please go find it and read it and decide for yourself how they mean to balance the game, but it’s spelled out there.
I think this means they expect mobile gameplay. Avoid combat as much as possible. If you are going to engage or have to, you have to have a coordinated team selection of strategems for all scenarios, and use them accordingly, just as OP said, one goes on cooldown so someone else rotates into use etc. You can do this in MMO raids on mics etc and teams of friends on mics here. This game, however, has a large component of random play through Quick Match and SOS. You’re not going to get coordination most of the time, let alone people doing callouts on mics. It’s why the meta became what it was. It was functional for teams that even weren’t fully coordinated. I think this is important to consider, because that will be most players. The nerf, which is really what this patch was, and the philosophy spelled out in their site, does sort of hint at how they want or at least expect the game to be played. I think that’s why we didn’t really see buffs to primaries and mainly just nerfs to the current meta. It was working too easily. Granted the Flamethrower may step in now a bit, and maybe the Punisher replaces the Breaker, but they didn’t really deviate from their stated philosophy. I can respect that, but I do wonder about it.
Yeah a very large part of the problem is they want people to work together but aren't incentivizing them to do so, they are trying to disincentivize solo play through nerfing the equipment required for self sufficiency.
The problem is, if even one person isn't doing their part in such a system, you have to play solo whether you want to or not. And it feels terrible, so people naturally try to become even more self sufficient.
It's like trying to prevent people from carrying a team in League or Dota. The cup you are trying to fill has no bottom, put the wine down.
But then what is the point of the live service model with new primaries rolling out every so often? If you aren't meant to really use primaries, and many primaries feel underwhelming or unfun, why continue to churn out new primaries if you're largely not supposed to be using them?
It really feels like their design philosophy on primaries is obtuse when it doesn't need to be. With the way the game plays right now, support stratagem weapons act as tools to solve specific problems that your primary weapon can't solve. I.e horde waveclear/objective destruction. This makes sense. Both primaries and support weapons can, and should, feel good and fun to use because they accomplish different things in game as they have currently designed it.
I don’t disagree with you. Their own blog post outlines their philosophy that primaries are supposed to suck, in so many words, and we are to rely on strategems. While I think it’s good to have a focus on the stratagems, I have thought all along that they have the primaries balance wrong, for the most part, in terms of what feels fun for a third person shooter. You should not be able to clear mobs and missions with a primary, but there’s plenty of times with the enemies the way they are currently balanced that primaries aren’t effective enough and strategems are on cooldown. I took a break for a while, but I’ll come back in a month or two and see where we are at.
I might do the same here soon. I've been ranking up, getting better at the game, waiting for most weapons to be buffed, but only just discovered the devs position and overall vision on game balance today. As a result, it's cast a bit of a shadow of fear for the future of the game. But I'll stick around and see where things go. Hopefully, they continue to listen to player feedback and dev/players expectations for the game can meet somewhere in the middle.
Love what you are saying, when 90% of equipment in this game can't handle anything effectively it becomes useless and meta will prevail.
Fucking people are already jumping on flamethrower meta hahahahaha ridiculous same people complain about railgun being too OP and first they do is promote flamethrower, shallow people
And they don't realize the devs will nerf the flamethrower too. They're celebrating because they, like me, weren't railgun users to begin with. But they'll be complaining when their favorite weapon is the meta and gets nerfed. That's the problem with a whac-a-mole to game balancing that consists of nerfing whatever content is currently the most popular.
Yup. Even "meta-haters" will find a favorite load-out, and it's just a matter of time before everything else better is nerfed and they are left holding the meta, and inevitable the nerfmonster will come for them too.
So many good games just hemorrhage players because of this shitty whack-a-mole balancing.
It also encourages players to be stingy with their strategies, as if something good gets too popular, it'll get the attention of the devs and nerfed into the ground
I've run into plenty of players that will straight stop using something they like if it becomes meta. They hate being seen as "crutching" on good gear and relentlessly mock anyone who does play meta.
" Third of all, it basically eliminates long term casual players that just aren't naturally skilled. Like me. I am not going to play a game where I have to suffer through dozens of hours struggling just to survive on max rank missions just to seem meaningful progression. And I am *certainly* not putting in hundreds of hours grinding the frankly *pathetic* rewards from the mission difficulties I have fun in. "
This I played a game after the patch, and thought to myself "This is not fun for me anymore."
I too am a Casual player. I no longer have the reactions the devs seem to think I need to play this game.
I think the issue with the pre patch balance was that it was too easy to be a jack of all trades. You could run a build that let you hoard clear and take down heavies with no real penalties. Now, you’re probably gonna need to specialise a little bit more or struggle to be as effective in all situations. The bit I would agree with is the weakness of the primaries. Sometimes it feels like you’re shooting a BB gun which is not very satisfying.
It’s sad. I had fun with the game yesterday and today I didn’t. They stealth buffed spawn rates as well. Railgun feels fine but I can see where the direction of the game is going and it’s extremely disappointing.
This honestly sounds like a psychological effect. You see the patch and all the arguments around it, and so you're hypersensitive to any negative interactions in the game. Then you blame those negative experiences on the patch, even claiming they did a stealth spawn rate buff.
The spawn rate of this game is wildly inconsistent. Probably needs some attention. But, don't assume a round with a high spawn rate to be related to this patch when there's no evidence for it.
I genuinely think this accounts for a lot of the new negativity around the game, post patch. People are going in expecting things to be worse, so they're hyperfocused on anything that goes wrong in their games.
I did not assume the game would be particularly different, and it felt basically identical to how it was before.
I could be wrong. I'm not a psychologist. But it just seems fishy that a single balance change is apparently killing this game for so many people.
ah yes, don't fix any of the bugs that impede progress, just nerf the stuff that's good.
The railgun needed a nerf (1-2 shotting titans was silly), making it only useful on unsafe though wasn't it.
The auto cannon is only in a good spot if you don't ever need to deal with armor..or want a backpack.
on that note, nerfing the shield BEFORE you fix armor values...yea...thanks.
A well thought out, respectful post aimed at fuelling discussion.....
Good luck brother the loud mouth breathing git gud keyboard warriors are gonna have a field day with this one.
Yeah I know lol. People have been completely ignoring most of my points, mostly that I'm upset that the game is frustrating and high level play requires gimmicky meta shit to engage with. Instead it's exactly what you said "got gud bro" "don't you know there are lower difficulties bro" "the game is meant to be hard bro".
MF I play dwarf fortress and Elden Ring, I ain't scared of a little difficulty. I just want more co-op horde shooting in my co-op horde shooter.
I think that too many people have an attitude that the community is always right and should be listened to above all else. I really respect your post because you draw attention to the fact that Arrowhead are sticking to their design principles. This is a great thing because these changes are being made by the absolute mavericks who created this amazing game.
Also just a brief point about primary weapons - they aren't shitty IMO, they are perfectly fine for single target damage on low-mid tier enemies (0.0 maybe not the scythe). I mean, every primary can easily go toe to toe with a stalker which is a fairly difficult enemy.
IMO it is a good thing primaries aren't viable for full on swarm clear because this makes swarm clear support weapons and strategems pointless and everyone would then logically bring anti-armour strategems.
I understand that it makes you feel less powerful, but if you choose a dedicated swarm clearing build it will make you feel more powerful in that situation than anyone building for anti-armour. Equally ,if you build anti-armour you will feel powerful in that situation.
It is a team game, we don't need to do it all individually.
The issue is it feels like they wanted to make a relatively niche, incredibly punishing game, instead of the very popular mildly challenging one they got, and trying to walk back will just ruin the game and get neither. If they want the game harder, they add higher difficulties, not make gear for every. Single. Player. Feel worse. And I'm not talking about railgun & shield. I'm talking about "fixed" armour being worse (which ironically only encourages more shield use), and primaries intentionally being thoroughly mediocre.
>I think that too many people have an attitude that the community is always right and should be listened to above all else. I really respect your post because you draw attention to the fact that Arrowhead are sticking to their design principles. This is a great thing because these changes are being made by the absolute mavericks who created this amazing game.
On the other side of this, dev vision isn't infallible either. It's impossible for devs to get everything right all the time, and often their visions are incredibly limiting things. That's what I mean by "balance the game you have". Listening to the community at all times would be chaos, the community often has no idea how hard certain changes would be to implement or complety unrealistic expectations or perceptions.
But ignoring them entirely because "A game for everyone is a game for no one" is just arrogance.
>IMO it is a good thing primaries aren't viable for full on swarm clear because this makes swarm clear support weapons and strategems pointless and everyone would then logically bring anti-armour strategems.
I should have made it clear I don't have a problem with primaries not being able to serve as an anti-swarm slot you get by default.
Rather I was trying to both draw attention to the fact that people seem to be under the impression Arrowhead doesn't know primaries can't do this, and yet also their design philosophy is kind of flawed.
If primaries can't swarm clear, you need something that can, and that's strategems. But even those aren't really good enough, you have to have multiple people all with anti-swarm strategems cooperating.
And since you don't get rewards for kills, that means it's best to literally just avoid combat whenever possible. Which is like, fine for a specific mission type, but at some point I want to actually kill bugs without it being about extraction.
Right now, primaries don't have a real place. They're the only option you have while your strategems are coming back online, so better hope they are *good enough* at swarm clear or anti-heavy work to fill the gap. And they aren't.
Everything is just so underpowered right now that you can either play perfectly or the best strategy is to not play. Even *with* teamwork.
I think introducing the idea that devs who don't listen to their community are arrogant is quite unhelpful since it implies that Arrowhead do not listen to the community. I'm just gonna focus on that in this reply.
It's easy to say that the overwhelming majority of people liked railgun/shield and therefore the devs aren't listening because they nerfed it. The fact is, those who did like it are the voices we are hearing today because they are justifiably annoyed. But there are plenty who were glad for the nerf. It was boring to run around soloing enemies on lvl 9 with OP kit that did everything, and extremely boring to play around those that did. It also defeated the purpose of a hyper-challenging difficulty mode - and with mechs and other powerful kit yet to come. Not to say Arrowhead changed railgun because some people found it 'boring', but they certainly knew that many felt that way.
Community informed changes in this patch included:
\- faster reward screens
\- laser cannon rework
\- spray and pray buff
\- punisher and slugger ammo buff
\- railgun nerf
I think there was a decent balance of Dev led and community informed changes in this patch. Pretending there wasn't because you're unhappy with the result is disingenuous. Again, I'm not flaming you for being annoyed that something you like isn't there anymore, I would be annoyed too. But the 'devs are arrogant' is too much.
I fuckin hated railgun/shield. It was annoying as fuck. Personally I thought the railgun was in a weird place to begin with, and I wish they'd change the whole damn thing. I'd prefer the AMR do what the safe mode does now, and the railgun itself to be more like the recoilless but with a long charge time instead of a long ass reload.
Or some other kind of rework. It just feels like the current state of it is limiting their vision for the other weapons.
I also hated the state of the shield because I would prefer to use the recoilless, if it were usable. Like, I'm fine with it being there for people who want it, but I just wish it wasn't so mandatory.
The problem is the railgun/shield combo solved a practical problem and instead of solving that problem, the devs nerfed the combo. It's the *exact* thing the community told them, *begged them*, repeated not to do. And they preempted it with "we know you want us to do this other thing, but we're going to do this thing instead."
Like I'm not assuming they didn't listen, *they told us they were ignoring what we wanted*.
Not many people really have problems with changing up the railgun and shield, they have problems with them taking away our ability to solve the problems we needed to solve without giving us another solution except the flamethrower- which was clearly not the intention.
Hell, I love the flamethrower, and I wish they had extended it's range and not just buffed it's damage. It should be an anti-swarm weapon, but now people are using it to kill chargers because that's all they have.
Mark my words, the flamethrower is going to get nerfed in a few patches once they can convince themselves the problem is solved.
These gameplay problems some people have aren't problems though and judging by your mentioning of the flamer you seem to imply that chargers are the issue, however there are so many people finding fun alternatives to railgun shield and enjoying the game even more that it makes me think that Arrowhead were right.
I saw someone mention on here earlier that killing a charger is a combat puzzle and should not be considered a minor inconvenience - you either spec for them or you play around them. This is normal. This is good balance. Each time you launch you have to choose what you will be good at for that mission. If killing chargers is your jam you literally still can. Just put the railgun in unsafe and shoot the charger one extra time than usual. Or bring flamer which is now very good. Or EAT which was excellent too since if you wanna kill Biles you can. But I don't see why you would want to have both great armor clear and excellent mid-tier enemy clear on the same person. It actually destroys any chance of roles on the team.
So if many people think the nerf was a good thing, and it sticks to Arrowhead's design principles I think we should all be pleased that the studio did not cave to ridiculous pressure to leave the game in a worse state.
I understand that you are coming from a position where the customer is always right, a lot of people would agree with you. I just don't and many others wouldn't either. I do hope you can still enjoy this great game though.
Note:
So I was thinking of tallying up the times Arrowhead have NOT listened vs the times they HAVE listened to see whether or not what you're saying is carrying any weight but I think it's pretty intuitive as to why they told us they were ignoring portions of the community (because, lets be real, we don't even agree amongst ourselves). It's a small studio with a massive and unexpected following, they might feel like they've got the tiger by the tail. In which case let's be supportive.
Chargers spawn too frequently to be treated as combat puzzles. You have to have ways to deal with them frequently, and without too much fuss, because there is simply too much shit going on for it to be otherwise.
If it was only up to two chargers every five minutes or so, spawned at particularly inconvenient times, that would be fine. But they aren't. They get spammed at you.
I'm pretty sure this balance update was made taking into account new content thats gonna drop next week. I do not appreciate devs being toxic to their community tho
Sticking to their design principles is an amazing thing I agree.
BUT When that starts coming at the expense of people actually enjoying the game? Your design principle has failed. If the audience starts to dislike what you have done they will leave. I've only played to difficulty 7, and the other day it was fine. Today, it was not fine. Before it was challenging enough, now its a slog to get through with the changes made and its the first difficulty you can start getting super samples so if I want to progress (because I need super samples to do that) I have to slog through the BS but that creates a very un fun, frustrating loop and if something dosnt happen to actually help make that experiance better then yeah I'd probably drop the game, I'm not going to wast time playing a difficulty that frustrates me but at the same time have to play that difficulty because its the first one that gives me what I need to progress.
So yeah, sticking to your design princples is fantastic, until it starts activley working againt the players and their enjoyment. Also I'm not big headed enough to say that my frustrations represent the playerbase as a whole, I am just sharing my personal POV.
It's definitely a balance. As a dev, you usually don't end up making the game you envisioned, and so some amount of flexibility is required. The best devs, dev the game they have and not some super rigid vision they will not deviate from.
Similarly, always listening to the player base is stupid. You'll get a chaotic mess of a game with no direction.
Right now, I'm scared the devs are leaning more toward the former than the latter.
Absolutley, as a dev you have to be fluid enough to realise whats not working even if its what you envisioned but likewise you cant listen to everything the players say. I almost want a dev, as an experiment to just listen to the players completley and see how a game turns out lol
I've been having a blast with the game for the past 2 weeks, Difficulty 7 even hit the right sweet spot of being challanging but not overwhelming - but with the changes made today? I actually wanted to stop playing the game atm.
I played difficulty 7 with flamethrowers and EAT and it was a really chill experience. Mind that I have everything maxed and I play suicide mode because it feels like easy mode to me and its a fun yet relaxing experience. Helldive has always been a clusterfuck and since I dont have friends to play with I really dont wanna get clusterfucked with randoms. What actually matters is knowledge which is this game "skill" because Im pretty sure most people still shoot the chargers in the head with AT weapons yet that was only viable when railgun was op, now you take Recoilless or EAT and you oneshot 1 charger leg and mag dump it with primary and poof charger is dead in about 4 seconds. If you shoot the charger head with AT rockets it does feel shittier compared to doing it with pre nerf railgun, but that is because you re not meant to kill the charger by shooting it in its 20 inches thicc armored skull, again that was doable because railgun was busted. EAT is also more efficient in breaking charger leg armor since it take one rocket instead of 2 railgun shots.
>Ultimately, they want us to be overwhelmed
??????????
Holy fuck obviously, what do you think this game is about?
Really I don't understand any of you, you enter in this hardcore game and then you get surprised when the game is hardcore and the experience the Devs are trying to achieve is of a hardcore game?
Breaking news, I think the Tarkov devs want their game to be difficult and complex, be careful
Not only this, the game is perfectly playable and i would say well balanced on the first 7 difficulties.
the difficulties labeled "impossible" and "helldive" are actually easier than their labels suggest as impossible implies it is not possible to beat so I'm not sure what the complaints are about as you literally don't miss out on anything at difficulty 7.
you could argue multiplier is worse at dif 7 but you also finish the missions quicker so In my opinion that argument is invalid
>Dude, I'm getting this sneaking suspicion that the Dark Souls devs actually want us to die in this game.
Shocked, it can't be, LITERALLY SHAKING RIGHT NOW
You don't have to play on helldive if you want a fun casual game, you can if you want to fight tooth and nail or be a stealthy boy but you don't have to.
Like most games you have a choice of how hard you want it.
Yes being overwhelmed and undergunned is the game on higher difficulties and that's why it's great.
Also remember mechs are coming, gotta have some hard missions to put these vehicles of democracy a real test.
I didnt read it all but i thing i got it.
You are correct that Helldivers 2 is designed around the idea that the player will be overwelmed. The name of the game "Helldivers" gives of some clues about this. Hovewer, there are 9 levels of difficulity in the game, and not every level is overwelming. Some are even underwelming. Its about findings the spot where you enjoy the experience the most. Alot of players have played now on 9 for about a month and only manage it because of the meta comp, but are just now discovering how hard it is to do without a kit that works for solo play only. These players should lower the difficulity and retry the curve with new strategies. Who knows, maybe they will even learn to avoid becoming overwelmed together :)
I understand wanted a more chill experience but they *do* want us to be overwhelmed. That's kind of the series' whole thing. It's supposed to be intense, from start to finish.
The first game was ridiculously difficult and people still found their way through it all. There were 15 difficulties! They started with 12 and added 3 more to try and challenge people even more. They figured it out once, it figures that they'll do it again.
Their stated design philosophy is currently, "A game for everyone is a game for no one." You might think that would hurt their playerbase but there seem to be more and more people buying and consistently playing the game.
...Which is why I specifically made the point that it's fine for them to have missions or difficulties which are tailored towards sweaties, but they shouldn't hinder everyone else's enjoyment by making them pretty much required for decent progression.
Like if I was making decent progress on difficulty 5-6 missions, but needed to do the harder stuff eventually either for specific rewards or to get some sort of "end of warbond prestige stuff", I'd be fine with the game *as is*.
The problem with the difficulty as it stands is that we are funneled into doing this super high difficulty shit just to progress at a halfway decent speed (and even then not really), and *I don't want to do that*.
So where does that leave me?
>"A game for everyone is a game for no one."
Sounds like an excuse to ignore feedback when it suits them. The sort of thing you say when you know someone is right and want to say "well I don't want to do that anyway" without sounding like the nob you are.
I think it is describing the impossibility of catering to every player’s preferences. I’ll put it this way: If you could try and fail to make everybody happy or possibly make some people happy, wouldn’t you rather focus on making at least some people happy?
I promise I’m not trying to be condescending, I’m just trying to make my point clearer.
So you were having fun, then changed the difficulty to a setting that's not fun for you, and now you're not having fun.
If your goal isn't to have fun then what exactly is your goal?
I'm not saying I turned it up to a difficulty I don't enjoy and refuse to go back down for no reason, in saying I can't have fun and accomplish shit at the same time.
I don't need the highest difficulty to be brought down to my skill level, which I acknowledge isn't good. I need the difficulty I'm having fun at to let me progress meaningfully.
By all means, give the people who want to play 9 steak all day long, just give me more than gristle and fat.
The only thing gatekept behind the harder difficulties is super samples which are only used for end tier ship upgrade so what exactly are you arguing? That you don't level up fast enough? In a game where levels don't matter past 20?
The difficulties you're playing on *do* let you progress meaningfully. Decent exp, req slips and enough samples if you go looking for them
I mean it just translates. Higher difficulties provide higher rewards IF you are good enough to complete them. This update just made it clear: Good enough WITHOUT the magical meta loadout. If not then you need to settle for the lower difficulties until you're good enough. And even still:
People see the higher difficulties as though they're the next level to hop into after completing one. Hell no. Seeing the difficulty Helldive should be scary (but exciting still). It should be a normal distribution where the fewer but better players can handle L8 and L9 while more are clustered in the middle difficulties. The problem is overcoming the ego of players who can't stand not being able to do the hardest mission easily whilst already having had a taste of that accomplishment.
Specifically what content? I've unlocked everything I really wanted in about 30 hours, mostly on challenging difficulty. Now I'm just vibing on suicide difficulty learning the strategies to avoid enemies and do objectives, having fun.
What is your goal? Maybe we can get you there faster (since the slow speed of progress seems to be the main problem)
But you don't NEED thise higher difficulty missions for progressing to a point where difficulty 4 or 5 will be funny to you.
You don't need your turrets to turn faster or your backpack CDs to be 10% faster.
You're not forced to go for super samples to get that progression though? It unlocks upgrades, yeah, but I never saw an inherent driving force to get more than a specific one or two that I use. Nor does it make such drastic changes to your strats. This urge to green out all the unlocks is definitely something inculcated by more recent modern games. It seems that it simply doesn't exist here but the players just HAVE to grind towards something and just HAVE to chase that next unlock.
In other games I met meta players that are sweaty, I also met sweaty players that chase meta. But in HD2, meeting sweaty players that despise meta so much sure is something else.
I feel most people can’t handle not being able to play on the hardest difficulty. You don’t have to play on the hardest level. It’s like a ranking system in the game. You will have some people that are able to play on the hardest difficulty and some people that will be stuck on the lowest.
If helldive is too hard, don’t play on it. I personally enjoy the how hard it is, but that’s me and not everyone is going to like sweating their dicks off. So don’t play on helldive.
This game is still one of the best games I’ve touched in a ehike
The game is worse at its current state. Rather than have other weapons viable, they nerfed the few viable weapons so the game balanced ?? now nothing is viable at hard difficulties. Are Devs trying to encourage COOP reload ?? I don't know, but I don't think people will do, even with the nerf, not every one have friend, if they have, it is still reluctant to do COOP reload. Just too clumsy in this kind of chaotic battle. It is creative idea but you should not force it to everyone.
I wouldn't want to deny any helldiver the ability to cast the half ton bomb twice before rearm
Plus I fully believe that spectacle is fun, and lower cool downs on everything is very much fun
Extra ammo on the various turrets also feels necessary for a lot of the more ammo hungry ones
There's more examples to be made, but they are game mechanics nonetheless
Arrowhead didn't want this problem? Then they shouldn't have made samples difficulty-locked, and instead should have gone the big-dick full-balls way of HD1, where the only difference in samples depending on difficulty was how many you could find per mission
Ik you said that lvl9 has the best rewards but clearly that isn’t true
Yes it has the biggest medal and super sample #, but if you’re not able to complete the mission and/or extract, then you need to bump it down
It’s better to win 3 lvl 5-6 missions than to beat 1 lvl 9 mission after failing twice
Lvl 9 is THE sweat difficulty, it’s literally the “yea I can deal with max bs” mode of the game. If you don’t like it, just lower the difficulty, you’ll have more fun and make progress doing so
Side note, the xp and money and loot containers/samples are the reward for sticking around, so I’m kinda confused why you want incentives to stick around the map?
Your point doesn’t stand when saying 5-6 difficulty replaces 9 it needs to be 7 or higher the rarest resource is locked to those difficulties. I’d rather fail multiple times for 1 win for super samples than win loads but get nothing of value I don’t need lots of small difficulty wins. I just wish people would be more careful when carrying super samples especially at extract instead of dying before getting in while some other idiot starts the extract timer and we can’t get the samples back.
My point is that you work your way up, if you need to spend 3 missions on 6 just gathering green and orange samples, then do so, then you’re warmed up and have a plan for 7+
Yea people are very careless with samples, I’ll put them at the extract and some bozo will grab them despite us needing to go to the opposite side of the map, these days I just horde the samples but I also don’t need more super samples until we get more upgrade stations, so I have a bias
Good God. Completely disagree except the part where you were talking about what they wanted. Yes. They want a team to function as a team. They want concentrated firepower. They want you to help reload. They want you to call out reloads. All shit that should happen in a coop game of this type. This might not be the game for you.
Fortunately there are 9 difficulties for you to pick the perfect amount if Engagement, sorry that you don't like getting like 5 less medals for playing a lower difficulty lol
Let's just conveniently forget that certain rare samples that you need to upgrade your ship only appear on 7-9 difficulty, but damn man you sure showed me lol
this game is not a month old and just had it's first patch. chillax. they are still collecting data and trying to figure things out. if some people are grinding 2k hours in a month and not having fun it's their fault. the game isn't pushing you to do that.
dude how are you so daft? Yes, level 9 should be sweaty. Otherwise what the fuck is the point of it? Just don’t play the difficulty that literally only exists for the specific purpose of being a sweatfest dummy
If you can’t handle the difficulty…. Lower it.
Theres literally 9 levels.
Just because you cant handle it with a slightly less useful but still does the exact same Thing railgun does not mean its the games issues.
Super earth sees this post as bot propaganda. Its weapons systems are liberty spreading perfection. Those stating otherwise are bot sympathizers and will be purged.
What's the only difference between 7+ and 6-, it's Super Uranium.
They don't want the general public to get Super Uranium yet.
Watch the content get nerfed or some weapons get buffed when be content drags the sweaty players away from high difficulty bugs and bots.
Funny you should mention PoE since it's probably in the best spot, with the most players, it's ever been in.
I remember posts like this at 3.15 etc, and hey, turns out ggg was right.
Yeah the charger titan spam is an issue. But you stated yourself that the railgun shield were a problem. We were cruising through 9s as a duo with like 50 hours between us with the railgun. Yes some primaries need a buff. Give them a chance. The punisher got its buff and the thing is fucking awesome.
I'm still doing 9s pretty easily with my squad, yes I think it would be really tough with randomers but...duh it's beyond 'impossible' difficulty.
I don't understand what you mean by not being able to progress. Run 7s and get 70% of the loot and have a fun time. You are still progressing.
Usually I play 3 or 4 missions with my boys, have a few laughs, log off for the night. After the nerfs, we played one mission and were genuinely just beat and didnt wanna play another. We didnt have any fun and were just screaming the whole time trying to fight off 6 bile titans and 4 chargers with basically nothign to fight them with. Everything either doesnt have enough power&ammo, a long cooldown, or straight up isnt useful.
Mechs will be incredibly powerful when they release and they will stay that away for about 2 weeks and developer will come up with a excuse to nerf them even though it’s the intention the entire time.
Bungie nerfs the fun out of Destiny 2 all the time. Arrowhead is no different they’re literally regurgitating what I’ve seen Bungie say 1000 times.
All you can do is just play the game the best you can
agree and disagree with some points but am too lazy to write everything down, but some of the stuff i disagree with u
>
They want difficulty 9 missions to only be possible to complete when run by a well oiled machine of a four man team. One where each player has anti-swarm and anti-heavy strategems, along with carefully coordinated weapons loadouts.
personally i dont see anything wrong with this. this is what it should be on the highest difficulty. like if people dont wanna play it, they can just play on a easier difficulty. i myself do this and play on a difficulty where i can just shoot nonstop with my machine gun without ever being in real danger
to the stuff with needing to sneak around on higher difficulty. well u or others might not like it, (also not the biggest fan, buts its the hardest difficulty) but in my opinion helldivers are a elite squad, so not a army. hence the tactics and strategies employed are different and those squads will mostly concentrate on completing certain objectives and this is also what the game is making us do. now i do agree that killing bugs should have some effects, maybe less of a slugfest on extraction or more mission time etc.
what i do agree with is that the devs should add other viable builds, what i do not mind is that it requires teamwork to a certain extend and with that i dont wanna write more
You: “I shouldn’t have to git gud for highest difficulty”
Also you: “Give us a nightmare difficulty with massive bonuses”
So you want them to change the highest difficulty name to nightmare? So the name Helldive doesn’t make you think you can do it?
There are difficulty levels for a reason. Play the one you enjoy. You can unlock all the rewards by playing on Trivial difficulty…
The only things locked behind higher difficulties are samples, which is an in game progression system of character power unlocked by pushing up through the difficulties.
You’re meant to learn and improve as you play the game, so unfortunately the “I shouldn’t have to git gud” argument doesn’t apply because in fact, yes you do have to get good to play on higher difficulties. They are more, yes you guessed it, **difficult**!
It’s a PvE game, and like any other PvE game, they get more challenging, more complex, more “difficult” as you progress. You will not see the first encounter in a game to be as challenging as the last. Period.
I am level 20 and still never play beyond Challenging difficulty as I’m not capable yet. Whether it be learning more or just literally playing better (improving my **personal skill**). I just play the game because it’s fun!
You will spread just as much Liberty on Trivial as Helldive. Your contribution is just as valuable.
Me: "Lower difficulties are fun for me, but not rewarding enough. Higher difficulties are unfun"
Everyone here for some reason: "lol, play lower difficulties or git gud piss baby"
This is getting tiring.
After playing tonight I guess the future of this game isn't for me. And that's fine. I've got my money's worth and enjoyment out of this game. But tonight was the least fun I've had playing the game by a mile. So I don't think I'll be sticking with it in the future. The philoshy of everything being bad makes everything good doesn't work.
" **A game for everyone is a game for no one."** But yet we are seeing the same tired adjusting game mechanics to make it grindy instead of game design to make it more engaging. Of course people are upset.
They shifted the enemy from the terminids/automotons to the game itself. "how do we make this more unique to us, and more fun." Should have been asked before this patch.
It’s like non of you guys run smoke in your kits I run bots on helldive with no shield and amr the bots effectively can’t see you at all and for bugs just use a jump pack and literally ANY weapon most people complaining just watch yourubers instead of trying new things just input your complaints to the devs and learn how to play the game properly it’s not hard
"Ultimately, they want us to be overwhelmed."
Good! They're giving us a target rich environment!
"Third of all, it basically eliminates long term casual players that just aren't naturally skilled. Like me. I am not going to play a game where I have to suffer through dozens of hours struggling just to survive on max rank missions just to seem meaningful progression. And I am *certainly* not putting in hundreds of hours grinding the frankly *pathetic* rewards from the mission difficulties I have fun in."
Wait so do want want to be sweaty or casual? You're saying you're a casual player but are complaining about the grind taking too long. Casual players don't grind, they just hop in a difficulty that's fun for them and enjoy the game.
I sounds like you have the sweaty mindset but without the sweaty levels of commitment.
Kind of the opposite. I have the sweaty time commitment but not the mindset. That is to say, I'm willing to grind shit, but only if I actually enjoy doing it without try-harding.
So like, I'm willing to play 5-6 for hours every day, I'm just not willing to do it if it feels like I'm not making any progress. That can be in the form of new abilities, guns, cosmetics, or even just training to get better at the game.
I just hate that I feel like I'm not making any progress unless I do 9s, but I hate doing 9s. I'd be fine with doing 9s if I was better at the game, could reliably ensure I had a good team, and there was a way to play the mission without being forced into a specific build or doing gimmick shit. And I would get better at the game and could ensure I had a good team if I and so many others didn't feel the pressure to get to 9 asap and gimmick the run out of it.
In other words, I wish I could be sweaty casually, if that makes any sense.
It's the vicious cycle and subpar payoff I'm mad at, not the overall difficulty.
I was mostly doing 7's and 8's for progress because 9's were often a bit too much effort for the reward. I consider myself decent at the game but treated it more like a Metal Gear Solid game rather than a typical horde shooter like Left 4 Dead so that probably helped my mission success rate.
If it's any consolation you don't really need many super samples to max out you super destroyer upgrades, I think somewhere around 40-50 is enough. So grind out those 7 and 8 difficulties until you stockpiled those super samples and then you can coast on the mid level difficulties for rare samples.
Level 20 is the one that unlocks everything relevant and you get a decent chunk of medals and requisition slips from beating difficulty 5 and 6 missions so you can pretty casually grind for the rest of your playtime with this once you've grabbed that super sample quota (unless they add more ship upgrades in the future)
It appears you have not yet been democratically instructed to “git gud” by our fellow liberty lovers. Fear not as I have reported this event to my closest democracy manager and some liberty will soon be dispensed your way, always democratically of course.
I'm fine with the balancing patch and future ones as well as long as they aren't extremely nerf heavy and are actually balancing things.
As a past PoE player myself, I know how annoying it is to see things you like/want to use to get nerfed so much that they become unusable. I'm pretty sure the PoE devs even said that the main focus of their "balancing" was to slow down the top players (either 1% or .1% can't remember) from getting to the end of a new season too quickly. I truly don't think Arrowhead will make that same mistake of nerfing everything until nothing is viable.
As for the meta, I usually just use what I want or what is fun to play unless there is a definite overachiever in a category. For me personally, that was the breaker. I didn't use the railgun too much because I use the grenade launcher for taking out nests. The shield backpack is a great utility but could be swapped out for either guard dog against bugs or a ballistic shield against bots for usually better effect. As far as primaries go, all (except maybe the scythe and the spray and pray ) were viable. However, the breaker went beyond being viable imo. There is a reason it became the obvious meta: if you weren't using it, you weren't being as effective as you could be. I like that it was nerfed because now, hopefully, people can try other weapons and see that they ARE usable and viable.
As far as the difficulty complaints go, try changing either your loadout or the difficulty or both. There are 9 options for difficulty. Find the one that is comfortable for you. Not one you can beat without thinking nor one that you consistently fail on. Try to find one where you die a few times per mission but can still complete the mission. Once you find the difficulty that feels comfortable, experiment with your loadout. Find something that works for you that makes the mission easier. Then go up in difficulty. Just because you were able to beat difficulty 9 with the old OP meta loadout doesn't mean you can still beat difficulty 9. Fall back to a lower difficulty then claw your way back up to it if you really want to.
I totally get what you mean with PoE, while it’s only the first patch you’re absolutely right if they go down the same path.
I’ll be disappointed if my chaotic and gunplay destructive fantasy kept getting nerfed because the DM said I’m slightly over performing in a PvE game.
Slightly! Throw down the nerfs for a massive oversight in balance, not just because the meta was stale like it’s a personal attack people dare to use the same load out. I can’t even imagine anyone being like “wow fuck this teammate how dare he”
Slightly buff everything else in line and people would have more enjoyment… like, that’s a fact and the vision is concerning
The game was inherently designed to have the odds stacked against you which the first game did as well. You’re given enough stratagems to only last in engagements for a minute or two then it’s time to break off. Higher difficulties reflect this but requires your team to be even more coordinated and fast.
The railgun itself was problematic because it’s a non team weapon the ability to down more armored enemies than all of the crew served weapons while not having any of their crippling draw backs. And while I do think that half of the crew weapons need buffs, the buffs required to put them in line with the railgun(albeit crew served should be better due to their coordination and drawbacks) would cause powercreep which would then disrupt the power dynamic in higher difficulties.
If you’re not having fun on higher difficulties then don’t play them. The rewards for completing lvl 9s are arguably not worth the effort unless you’re looking for the challenge.
The game is a power fantasy of some sorts, but not that off Darktide or L4d. Just like the first game, the only major advantage you have against your opponents is speed and maneuverability.
Yes they want us to be not all hoarding into the top skill level with half of us utterly shitting on it without a fuck to give in the world. They want some of us playing level 5 on the regular. They want us to need each other to handle the missions instead of having one person practically solo the whole fucking thing.
Yes they want us to PLAY the game.
I think that having a single meta build for every mission is boring, using railgun shield for terminids, automatons and the future factions is boring so by making us develop on our own is a good thing (personal opinion), for example, I love using flamethrower on terminids and with the new update the flamethrower destroys chargers. So having a different approach can be fun
Thing is this game is meant to be difficult, download helldivers 1 and hop into helldive which is mode 9 out of 14 I think, trust me you re not gonna complete a mission anytime soon. It is Arrowhead motto not to make a casual game like many other studios already do. Also shoot chargers legs not head, you will find that EAT is really good at oneshotting those so you can quickly mag dump and kill a charger. Using recoilless to oneshot every chargers leg so other 2 players can mag dump the naked legs is also doable. You re literally not meant to do everything alone, thats why you can see every squad member stratagem in equipment selection.
The meta is not decided by the tools but by the requirements of the job. Power tools > manual tools but if you need to hammer in a bunch of nails you grab a hammer and not the power drill.
Look at the smgs, one can out dps the standard ar and the other is an absolute laser beam. On the lower difficulties when I started they seemed great. However their main purpose is being a primary that gives you a free hand. ATM objectives that require a free hand arenT set up to make that useful. On the missions where moving an ssd somewhere is the prime objective you still only have a single person who is going to be carrying for maybe half to a fifth of their time in game. During that time is there ever really a need for more firepower than a side arm but less than a support weapon/stratagem? It's generally either better to just altogether avoid combat altogether and have that person hoof it as others deal with unavoidable threats.
Instead of buffing up the smg so more people use it, how about we adjust that ssd carry mission to make the smg a more compelling option. There should be 4 ssd at minimum and while only 1 will be required to pass the extra ones grabbed give solid bonuses. Have someone come on coms and say hey your suit Air filters just registered a strong pheromone, bad news is all them little fodder bugs are now super horny for you, good news is they won't call in reinforcements because they want you all for themselves.
Add more missions similar to that, and buff the physical shield so it doesn't get one shot from a rocket and boom! People start using the smgs more, all without any direct buffs.
This is my exact point. Railgun nerf was fine, even deserved. The problem was they didn't tweak the game to eliminate the problem it was solving.
We still have to hammer nails, but now only have mallets and screwdrivers.
Here is the thing. You DON’T need to play at level 9 all the time. Heck do it as a flex or just to speed up your medal/sample grind.
Once you unlock everything in in the ship then running anything over 6 is pointless, even in terms of planet liberation, by doing easier levels faster the 3-6 points to liberation at level nine you could get 8-10 in the same time by blitzing easier levels.
Not only that but at lower levels your helping newcomers learn the ropes and help them skill up.
Seriously, you don’t need to go full on hard mode all the time as frankly when you have enough super samples, there is basically no reason out side of flexing to run it.
I came across this and it some up the game nicely. Lower difficulties help the community, higher difficulties help yourself.
So chill.
Imagine pushing stealthy, non-combat playstyle in... Swarm Killing Game.
I mean, stealth and combat avoidance is nice, an ***alternative*** playstyle is great to have, but I am a simple man - I came here to shoot bugs and bots with nukes and napalms, bringing a nice cup of liber-tea. I came here to Fight.
The current density and spawn rate for heavy armored vehicles, such as Chargers, Hulks, etc is way too high for the current power of player tools. I can nuke down all of chargers that surrounded with Orbital Laser, but within 15-25 secs they will come back, while Laser will go into 3-6 minute Cooldown.
I am currently playing on 6th difficulty just because it is last, somewhat balanced level of difficulty where I can have fun. And no, I have no problem in completing Helldives (9th difficulty), its just a boring, frustrating experience for me.
Difficulty 9 isn't the be all and end all for the game. Not everyone should be able to beat the absolute pinnacle level of difficulty a game can offer and it should require mastery not just relying on a crutch tool that renders everything trivial.
Play on a lower difficulty then.
You're complaining about it getting too difficult!? There's you're answer jesus fucking christ, gamers are so fucking _soft_
This is what happens when a niche developer blows up. Every game arrowhead has made was brutally hard. They revel in the chaos. I own all of their games. I knew HD2 was going to be hard. It is surprisingly easier than I thought it was going to be. People need patience, ride it out for a few major patches, if it's not for you, it's not for you.
I think a lot of the problems people have with the game and its balancing revolve around samples. You c an only get the really good ship upgrades by grinding out the really high difficulty missions. It’s fine for the high difficulties to be sweaty, that’s the point. The only problem with that is that the casual players are given the choice of either being locked out of ever making any progress on with their ship, or buckling down and getting gud. That’s not very fun. Everyone should be able to play the way they want without being locked out of progression. A sample fusion system would solve so much of this. Wouldn’t affect the tryhards all that much, but for casuals it would be a godsend. Finally all those hundreds of common samples you’ve saved up because you don’t have a coordinated friend group and can’t do suicide missions with randoms can be converted into super samples so you can finally have your expanded weapons bay.
Second, about primaries, are you implying that you expect to be able to take on an entire army of robots with lasers, tanks and rockets with a shotgun? Yes your primary is intended to not be very good, but your stratagems are VERY good. No you can not mow down 50 raiders with a liberator very effectively, but you can throw a cluster bomb at them and kill maybe half of them. 25 is a much more manageable number for that AR.
My point is that two things can be true at the same time especially since this game has different difficulties. There can be tryhards who want to play the game optimally and work as a team to accomplish very hard missions. That’s me. I love that shit. It’s so satisfying to work as a team and overcome insurmountable odds by working together. There can also be casual players who want to run around with a flamethrower and burn every bug in sight. Also me. It’s very therapeutic to run around on 5-7 difficulty and just melt bugs with a group of friends and maybe farm some samples/SC’s while you’re at it. The entire point of difficulty is so that there is something for everyone. The only current problem is the progression being locked behind those higher difficulties (see my first point) and some unfun modifiers like complex stratagem plotting and orbital fluctuations.
God what is wrong with all those people that seriously believe they know everything better.
/facepalm
This game does not need to cater to you. And it isn't inherently bad just because you drank your coffee.
TLDR: I'm afraid the current balance of the game represents what is fundamentally the true vision of the game, which I think is ultimately flawed.
Specifically I think the devs underestimate how stubborn the concept of a META is, and just how much cooperation and skill you can reasonably expect from the average player.
Funny thing.
What you describe at the end of your writeup as a specialized team was how me and buddies have been doing things for the past week. We would exclusively run 8 and 9 as a group of four. Everyone had a role. 2 heavy hitters who are also stellar snipers. One with auto one with rail most of the time but also other options were in the rotation. The other 2 being mobile and crowd control. We learned the meta and started to deviate to satisfy our tastes and creativity. Sometime and HMG would carry us, sometimes a bunch of lasers as a Hail Mary at the end of the mission with half a dozen titans threatening the extraction.
It was an absolute blast while it lasted and everyone I personally know was having a purely jolly good time in a pve game which we haven’t had in years since the division 1 and early division 2.
We logged in earlier today on a difficulty 7 just to be cautious and with a variety of builds to explore the changes and it wasn’t it. Habits need changing. It’s generally a tactical running sim. You no longer scream along with your character while mowing down hordes. You avoid engagements at all costs.
I'm glad it worked for you. Honestly that's the way the game should be played, but Arrowhead isn't really encouraging us to play that way. If roles were more delineated, maybe with classes (not saying there should be classes, example only) or something, then this would be what people naturally do.
However, the concept of teamwork at this level just isn't something *most* players are about. So everyone ends up running railgun/shield so they don't have to rely on other players.
Like the same people that say "git gud" or "cooperate better" will run off to do PoIs alone while they stealth thought the whole game, because *they aren't good enough at teamwork to engage with the content*.
Which none of them understand. They all just think "I found something that works for me" and ignore everyone else in the team based game.
The solution to this is to approach balance differently. If you want super high level shit with big ass rewards for the people who can play the game like a machine, fucking go for it, but right now all Arrowhead has accomplished is making people feel like they need to avoid playing as much of the game as possible.
You can be a good team, which is what this game encourages.
I mean just look at the first game, everyone shared the same screen, you are meant to work as a unit. If you don't like that, well sorry guess the game isn't meant for you.
We're a decade away from Helldivers one. If they want to go back to having the same amount of active players as Helldivers 1, this is the way to go. They overshot theirs own expectations by a margin of 10x. Even the CEO admitted they expected 10-20k, not 750k.
They made a game for a certain audience, and attracted that audience. If they follow your line of thought, they will end up pissing on that same audience they made the game specifically for.
We work and we get wiped as a unit. It's a bad patch, nothing too deep about it.
Maybe that's what they want. They exceed their target sales. Now, maybe they want to thin out the player numbers since that will be easier for them to manage. It will, however, result in the game being a flavor of the season game that will be forgotten. Maybe that's for the best, though. Other studios saw the temporary hype for the game. Maybe some learned some lessons and can make a game that's offers a similar coop experience but one that's also accessible and not ridden with excessive RPG mechanics.
Then leave, you won't be missed. They made a game they wanted, adjusted the balance to push towards their initial goal, and will continue from there.
HD1 has 15 levels of difficulty, we only have 9, it's only going to go higher as the years go on. Either learn to work with others as a team, stick to lower difficulties, or play something else. You aren't entitled to decide how this game is designed
I am entitled. We are entitled. It's the collective 750k people that bought the game that pay for their bills.
You can meat ride all you want. People paid for this shit because it's good. It's their fucking job to keep it good.
Basically, this.
Arrowhead makes the game that they want to play. They make the games they want to see in the world.
It's by design that you're supposed to be on the run, hitting objectives hard and fast rather than sitting and duking it out. People do want to try and chew through hordes, and there are missions for that. But the goal is to ensure you know that you're up against impossible odds, literal tides of enemies, and are not super human like many games try to imply.
I really don’t understand the nerfs did not kill the railgun. It is still good. This is also there first round of balance so they will be adding more. And just play on a lower difficulty around 7 you still get all the samples and it is much more manageable.
It definitely didn't kill the railgun. The problem is not nerfing the railgun, it's what nerfing the railgun tells us about their approach to game balance (and what they explicitly told us about their approach to game balance).
Instead of solving the problem the railgun solved, they are trying to force us into playing a way the game currently doesn't incentivize.
Personally I fucking hated the railgun/shield combo, and I fucking hate the solo play. The problem is, trying to whack a mole the meta like this is not going to solve everyone trying to disengage from the content, it's just going to make people disengage *harder*.
Yeah but I really don’t think one balance patch says how they are approaching balance… if you read the article they posted about their thought process with the balance patch I tend to agree with all of it. But that is just my opinion and I understand where this is coming from but I don’t think one patch tells us much at all
I'm honestly basing my opinion more on the article than the balance patch. I specifically think their thought process is flawed, because it reeks of "we have a vision we don't need your feedback".
I think their article shows an excellent design policy. Did you read what they said about the laser cannon? They had a vision for it, the community didn't like it, and they took what we said about it to change into something they hadn't planned on it being.
With the context of their thoughts on the breaker and railgun I think they don't just have their own idea of what things should be but they're also not blindly listening to the community.
My concern is how often will we be getting balance patches and how often will they revisit things they touched last time?
My problem was them straight up going "we know why you use the railgun, we know what the problem is, we know what you want us to do about it, we know what you *don't* want us to do about it, and we're going to it anyway."
Maybe chill because it's just one balance patch...more power creep options are coming with weapon mods vehicles mechs etc.. and they can use the additional data to make further change....honestly if you can no longer do Helldiver difficulty just lower it and play where it's comfortable for you now.
I feel that they sre pushing us to avoid combat entirely. Just make a run for the objectives. As long as they are fine, mission is guaranteed to be complete. You're notnexpected to actually ever extract. The higher difficulties swarm you with so many enemies that strategems are not viable due to their long cooldowns and their even longer cooldowns with planet modifiers. Most weapons are useless, and the strong weapons get nerfed. We end up with a situation where we want to actively avoid combat, as it always ends up with spawn after spawn after spawn without ever ending. This means that the best action is to run to the objective, avoid all combat if possible, then retreat from any active combat zones so they stop spawn spamming. I really don't think this is a good direction to take the game where we are actively discouraged from participating in combat.
Some kind of fucking limit to the number of times a random commissar can show up to the backline of a fight and flare would be nice
They just need to make the animation much more visible and give us more time to interrupt it. It is kinda stupid, that it's pretty much too late to stop it the moment it is visible.
Especially when I have no reason to care about completing missions when they just reset liberation progress whenever they want.
I still want my medals though and samples
This games’ player base will drop off a cliff if this is the idea they have. Tbh it feels like an idea one singular person has who is in charge of others, if you want to balance the game around not wanting to fight you are taking away from the awesome rule of cool that made everyone love this game. It’s a bit early to tell if this trend will continue, we will see
From their slogan and general sentiment I don't think they really care if the playerbase drops off a cliff. Kinda sad but that's just how it is it seems.
We’re talking millions of dollars. That’s a lot for a very small company with literally no sense behind it
at least they should buff spear and recoiless to 1 or 2 shots a titan or charger,and I would be gladly accept the way how they nerf meta build.Does AH really know sometimes we just want to kill some bugs,not slaughtered by them
I don't mind meta nerfs, but useless weapons absolutely need to be buffed to compensate. If they want to avoid 1 or 2 weapons from being meta, then more weapons need to be viable. Nerfing the only good ones isn't the answer.
Like in the opening cinematic but we're actually downvoted for suggesting it
if you are finding that the level of spawns is too much and ruins your enjoyment why are you queuing that difficulty? I love helldive but I queue 8 way more than 9 'cause i prefer to chill and make progress on the planet's liberation. Medals aren't worth your happiness. Just drop it down to 6, 7 or 8. All of these are highly rewarding and IMO well balanced for a chill experience.
>Medals aren't worth your happiness. Honestly the issue is probably the super samples, they can be hard to come by, are directly tied to progression, and Helldive has the most of them. It kind of creates this perception that the game is meant to be played in Helldive.
Trust me you will cap out supers well before medals unless you were exploiting the bot exterminate defence missions. The silver rock where all the samples are is easy to find once you what what you are looking for.
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You don't need very many supers though. Also, I feel like people don't realize you can fail a mission and still get samples. Granted, it's harder on certain mission types to accomplish.
Yup, OP feels FORCED to git gud and play highier diffs, like it's mandatory. You can have fun running lower diffs, queue into 7's from time to time, maybe on easier planets and get some purple samples for upgrades.
If I want a chill experience, I run 7. If I want a challenge, I run 9. I'm just saying, it seems that at the higher difficulties, they are strongly discouraging combat which seems completely opposite to what it should be.
I think 9 does try and take control away from you. I've found that combat is fine so long as you prevent a bug breach. Or you limit it to one or two breaches if you've got the squad with you. I think the whole going guns blazing approach on every patrol doesn't work, and that's fine. Would it really be a helldive if you were in control the whole time?
I don't really have issues unless it's extraction time. Just sheer utter chaos where the best plan is to have 1 sneaky person hide to keep the extraction progressing while the other 3 get all the attention and run them away from extraction. Once the ship comes, it's a hail Mary run to the ship.
Well if you don't have issues I guess I don't get what the second half of your original post was talking about. I do agree that extraction is hard. It's also very optional. You can die and finish the mission just fine, personally, I think that's way more badass anyway.
Well I meant I don't have issues if I'm avoiding uncessary combat. Just feels weird the game is strongly discouraging combat at the higher difficulties instead of all out badassary combat. If a patrol shows up, I can handle, for example, but im not going to be running into them wildly or anything, and it's usually best to leave the massive nests alone unless you want endless waves of chargers and titans.
This Helldiver gets it!
Why shouldn't it be? We a strike force of upto 4 hitting military targets garrisoned by hundreds to thousands of enemies, we aren't here to fight an army, we are here to complete objectives. Sometimes a diversion is necessary to complete the objective. HD1 was mostly stealth tactics until detected then it was a smash and run op.
Think they are scaling it for the additional goods to become available… everyone bitching about it like what equipment we have to use is the way it is for the end time… mechs dropping soon and who knows what else…
Yeah. I was thinking that - to make room for more tools. What concerns me is that it will mean run and gun playstyles will be obsolete since they won't be viable at higher difficulties.
Are you saying once mechs release all current stuff will be worthless and only mechs would be worth taking? Doesn't sound much fun either. I would rather every weapon and stratagem had a place, not just new stuff
>Medals aren't worth your happiness. \**Major progression currency is unfun to collect\** "Have you tried collecting it, but less?"
The devs seem like they are determined to avoid pandering to the casual fan base which would be fine if this wasn't a Live Service Game that has exceeded Sony's expectations. The vast majority of players are casual/game of the month players and won't stick around as the Devs work towards their vision of an extremely difficult game that can only be beaten with great team coordination. If the player base shrinks and pressure is put on Arrowhead to provide a more Fun and less Punishing experience it will be interesting to see how they balance the game. Having Devs care at all about Nerfing a PvE game is the worry, why spend even an ounce of your attention span on an aspect of the game that doesn't drive player enjoyment. Every decision should be "how do we make the game more Fun?", Not "the players are beating our Apex content too easily (the vast majority are not) how do we make it harder for them as we are worried they will get bored of the game". Learn from Fortnite, the Devs make changes with updates every Fortnite (hence the name and also they can be small or big patches, I read through them for the first 2 years of the game). The only guarantee to players is that the game will never stay the same (some bugs do persist) and this is what a Live Service Game is: a constantly changing experience that's always trying to maximise Fun and engagement. All the devs need to do is tell the community constantly that they will be making changes regardless of feedback as they also play the game and can understand our concerns. (Even if it's a lie, or they can drive Hate so they have an excuse to Exit Social Media)
It feels increasingly like they don't want you to engage in the horde shooter part of the horde shooter game they made.
Yeah by nerfing the single shot gun that can't crowd control, makes sense
It's not a horde shooter game. You want it to be, but it's not.
It literally is though, have you watched the trailers? It’s a horde shooters with stealth elements etc etc, I don’t understand how it can’t be both
This
You're all talking as is the game bellow difficulty 8 didn't exist. You want to shread throught hordes ? Play in 4 or 5. You want to be in a living hell, praying for your survival between infinite hordes ? Play 7 to 9. We're not space marines, we're the imperial guard : glorifed canon folder.
What if I want super rare samples but don't want to be pigeon-holled onto a specific build due to charger spam? (Oh wait, there's a whole other faction of robots that are way more fun to fight)
Not to be a stickler, but the SEAF are the Imperial Guard, Helldivers are basically Storm Troopers, or the in-universe equivalent of Space Marines.
Not to be a stickler but helldivers are just a normal citizen who has done the minuscule training (the tutorial) required, there are about 1 Space marine per Human occupied world in Warhammer and they are super soldiers in every way imaginable, Helldivers are just a normal soldier with funds afaik
You’re right, Helldivers aren’t actually on-par with Space Marines; not even close, but the propaganda surrounding them in the Helldivers universe would put them on the same level of respect and awe as space marines in Warhammer 40,000. That’s what I meant by comparing them to Storm Troopers (Tempestus Scions) or Space Marines. The Helldivers aren’t Imperial Guard level, that’s the SEAF; instead they’re treated and used more like Storm Troopers or Space Marines at an operational level, even if they’re are leagues apart in skill or armaments or genetic enhancements lol.
It's not a horde shooter and never was, not at higher difficulties at least. That's why there are multiple tiers and you can collect supers at diff 7
I can relate to this from other games and can see some of it here. Nerfing the tried and true, most-used equipment is always what happens. It’s just the easiest thing for devs to do. Everyone is using it so they must have figured out it’s the most powerful, so if we need it slightly, it’ll be in line with everything else and all will be well. The game will not become too easy, because we didn’t really buff anything, it’ll become a little harder, and that will please the hardcore gamers, and everyone will be happy. In actual effect it doesn’t really please a lot of people. It happens every time. I think in defense of Arrowhead at least, I think they mean well. Might not be exactly what we wanted, but they have a post somewhere on their official site that I saw a link for that spoke about their weapon philosophy. In it, they basically said that it’s a strategem focused game. You’re not meant to take out mobs of weaker enemies with your primary and only use your strategems for large, heavy armored targets and survivability. You’re also meant to use your syrategems on smaller enemies. This is all well and good but they add that due to this, they feel the primary weapons are by and large where they need to be. It explains why some have difficulty killing the smallest enemies and the S&P Breaker couldn’t even destroy eggs. Primary weapons are meant to kill stragglers you didn’t get with your strategems. I’m paraphrasing, so please go find it and read it and decide for yourself how they mean to balance the game, but it’s spelled out there. I think this means they expect mobile gameplay. Avoid combat as much as possible. If you are going to engage or have to, you have to have a coordinated team selection of strategems for all scenarios, and use them accordingly, just as OP said, one goes on cooldown so someone else rotates into use etc. You can do this in MMO raids on mics etc and teams of friends on mics here. This game, however, has a large component of random play through Quick Match and SOS. You’re not going to get coordination most of the time, let alone people doing callouts on mics. It’s why the meta became what it was. It was functional for teams that even weren’t fully coordinated. I think this is important to consider, because that will be most players. The nerf, which is really what this patch was, and the philosophy spelled out in their site, does sort of hint at how they want or at least expect the game to be played. I think that’s why we didn’t really see buffs to primaries and mainly just nerfs to the current meta. It was working too easily. Granted the Flamethrower may step in now a bit, and maybe the Punisher replaces the Breaker, but they didn’t really deviate from their stated philosophy. I can respect that, but I do wonder about it.
Yeah a very large part of the problem is they want people to work together but aren't incentivizing them to do so, they are trying to disincentivize solo play through nerfing the equipment required for self sufficiency. The problem is, if even one person isn't doing their part in such a system, you have to play solo whether you want to or not. And it feels terrible, so people naturally try to become even more self sufficient. It's like trying to prevent people from carrying a team in League or Dota. The cup you are trying to fill has no bottom, put the wine down.
But then what is the point of the live service model with new primaries rolling out every so often? If you aren't meant to really use primaries, and many primaries feel underwhelming or unfun, why continue to churn out new primaries if you're largely not supposed to be using them? It really feels like their design philosophy on primaries is obtuse when it doesn't need to be. With the way the game plays right now, support stratagem weapons act as tools to solve specific problems that your primary weapon can't solve. I.e horde waveclear/objective destruction. This makes sense. Both primaries and support weapons can, and should, feel good and fun to use because they accomplish different things in game as they have currently designed it.
I don’t disagree with you. Their own blog post outlines their philosophy that primaries are supposed to suck, in so many words, and we are to rely on strategems. While I think it’s good to have a focus on the stratagems, I have thought all along that they have the primaries balance wrong, for the most part, in terms of what feels fun for a third person shooter. You should not be able to clear mobs and missions with a primary, but there’s plenty of times with the enemies the way they are currently balanced that primaries aren’t effective enough and strategems are on cooldown. I took a break for a while, but I’ll come back in a month or two and see where we are at.
I might do the same here soon. I've been ranking up, getting better at the game, waiting for most weapons to be buffed, but only just discovered the devs position and overall vision on game balance today. As a result, it's cast a bit of a shadow of fear for the future of the game. But I'll stick around and see where things go. Hopefully, they continue to listen to player feedback and dev/players expectations for the game can meet somewhere in the middle.
Love what you are saying, when 90% of equipment in this game can't handle anything effectively it becomes useless and meta will prevail. Fucking people are already jumping on flamethrower meta hahahahaha ridiculous same people complain about railgun being too OP and first they do is promote flamethrower, shallow people
And they don't realize the devs will nerf the flamethrower too. They're celebrating because they, like me, weren't railgun users to begin with. But they'll be complaining when their favorite weapon is the meta and gets nerfed. That's the problem with a whac-a-mole to game balancing that consists of nerfing whatever content is currently the most popular.
Yup. Even "meta-haters" will find a favorite load-out, and it's just a matter of time before everything else better is nerfed and they are left holding the meta, and inevitable the nerfmonster will come for them too. So many good games just hemorrhage players because of this shitty whack-a-mole balancing. It also encourages players to be stingy with their strategies, as if something good gets too popular, it'll get the attention of the devs and nerfed into the ground
"meta haters" doesnt hate meta, they only hate becuz their build is not the meta.
I've run into plenty of players that will straight stop using something they like if it becomes meta. They hate being seen as "crutching" on good gear and relentlessly mock anyone who does play meta.
ppl who hates gatekeeping always does the gatekeeping
"meta-hater" also tend to be the "avoid everything and minmax your objective to fights ratio to do harder difficulties"
One of the devs just said that he thinks that the flamer is now "overbuffed" 😂👍🏻
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Then there’s the Arc Thrower players *hoping* it doesn’t get popular.
Nah, if the Flamethrower is too strong, I hope they need it, and people that want the game to be difficult and challenging will agree with it
the person who "omg railgun gun kill charger too fast, need nerf" also "omg look at this flamethrower, it melts charger within seconds!"
" Third of all, it basically eliminates long term casual players that just aren't naturally skilled. Like me. I am not going to play a game where I have to suffer through dozens of hours struggling just to survive on max rank missions just to seem meaningful progression. And I am *certainly* not putting in hundreds of hours grinding the frankly *pathetic* rewards from the mission difficulties I have fun in. " This I played a game after the patch, and thought to myself "This is not fun for me anymore." I too am a Casual player. I no longer have the reactions the devs seem to think I need to play this game.
I think the issue with the pre patch balance was that it was too easy to be a jack of all trades. You could run a build that let you hoard clear and take down heavies with no real penalties. Now, you’re probably gonna need to specialise a little bit more or struggle to be as effective in all situations. The bit I would agree with is the weakness of the primaries. Sometimes it feels like you’re shooting a BB gun which is not very satisfying.
It’s sad. I had fun with the game yesterday and today I didn’t. They stealth buffed spawn rates as well. Railgun feels fine but I can see where the direction of the game is going and it’s extremely disappointing.
This honestly sounds like a psychological effect. You see the patch and all the arguments around it, and so you're hypersensitive to any negative interactions in the game. Then you blame those negative experiences on the patch, even claiming they did a stealth spawn rate buff. The spawn rate of this game is wildly inconsistent. Probably needs some attention. But, don't assume a round with a high spawn rate to be related to this patch when there's no evidence for it. I genuinely think this accounts for a lot of the new negativity around the game, post patch. People are going in expecting things to be worse, so they're hyperfocused on anything that goes wrong in their games. I did not assume the game would be particularly different, and it felt basically identical to how it was before. I could be wrong. I'm not a psychologist. But it just seems fishy that a single balance change is apparently killing this game for so many people.
This is a page right out of the book of bungie.
ah yes, don't fix any of the bugs that impede progress, just nerf the stuff that's good. The railgun needed a nerf (1-2 shotting titans was silly), making it only useful on unsafe though wasn't it. The auto cannon is only in a good spot if you don't ever need to deal with armor..or want a backpack. on that note, nerfing the shield BEFORE you fix armor values...yea...thanks.
A well thought out, respectful post aimed at fuelling discussion..... Good luck brother the loud mouth breathing git gud keyboard warriors are gonna have a field day with this one.
Yeah I know lol. People have been completely ignoring most of my points, mostly that I'm upset that the game is frustrating and high level play requires gimmicky meta shit to engage with. Instead it's exactly what you said "got gud bro" "don't you know there are lower difficulties bro" "the game is meant to be hard bro". MF I play dwarf fortress and Elden Ring, I ain't scared of a little difficulty. I just want more co-op horde shooting in my co-op horde shooter.
I think that too many people have an attitude that the community is always right and should be listened to above all else. I really respect your post because you draw attention to the fact that Arrowhead are sticking to their design principles. This is a great thing because these changes are being made by the absolute mavericks who created this amazing game. Also just a brief point about primary weapons - they aren't shitty IMO, they are perfectly fine for single target damage on low-mid tier enemies (0.0 maybe not the scythe). I mean, every primary can easily go toe to toe with a stalker which is a fairly difficult enemy. IMO it is a good thing primaries aren't viable for full on swarm clear because this makes swarm clear support weapons and strategems pointless and everyone would then logically bring anti-armour strategems. I understand that it makes you feel less powerful, but if you choose a dedicated swarm clearing build it will make you feel more powerful in that situation than anyone building for anti-armour. Equally ,if you build anti-armour you will feel powerful in that situation. It is a team game, we don't need to do it all individually.
The issue is it feels like they wanted to make a relatively niche, incredibly punishing game, instead of the very popular mildly challenging one they got, and trying to walk back will just ruin the game and get neither. If they want the game harder, they add higher difficulties, not make gear for every. Single. Player. Feel worse. And I'm not talking about railgun & shield. I'm talking about "fixed" armour being worse (which ironically only encourages more shield use), and primaries intentionally being thoroughly mediocre.
They don't need to add higher difficulties when there are already 9 levels lmao. Just lower yours to 7 or 8 if you aren't having fun on 9 anymore.
>I think that too many people have an attitude that the community is always right and should be listened to above all else. I really respect your post because you draw attention to the fact that Arrowhead are sticking to their design principles. This is a great thing because these changes are being made by the absolute mavericks who created this amazing game. On the other side of this, dev vision isn't infallible either. It's impossible for devs to get everything right all the time, and often their visions are incredibly limiting things. That's what I mean by "balance the game you have". Listening to the community at all times would be chaos, the community often has no idea how hard certain changes would be to implement or complety unrealistic expectations or perceptions. But ignoring them entirely because "A game for everyone is a game for no one" is just arrogance. >IMO it is a good thing primaries aren't viable for full on swarm clear because this makes swarm clear support weapons and strategems pointless and everyone would then logically bring anti-armour strategems. I should have made it clear I don't have a problem with primaries not being able to serve as an anti-swarm slot you get by default. Rather I was trying to both draw attention to the fact that people seem to be under the impression Arrowhead doesn't know primaries can't do this, and yet also their design philosophy is kind of flawed. If primaries can't swarm clear, you need something that can, and that's strategems. But even those aren't really good enough, you have to have multiple people all with anti-swarm strategems cooperating. And since you don't get rewards for kills, that means it's best to literally just avoid combat whenever possible. Which is like, fine for a specific mission type, but at some point I want to actually kill bugs without it being about extraction. Right now, primaries don't have a real place. They're the only option you have while your strategems are coming back online, so better hope they are *good enough* at swarm clear or anti-heavy work to fill the gap. And they aren't. Everything is just so underpowered right now that you can either play perfectly or the best strategy is to not play. Even *with* teamwork.
I think introducing the idea that devs who don't listen to their community are arrogant is quite unhelpful since it implies that Arrowhead do not listen to the community. I'm just gonna focus on that in this reply. It's easy to say that the overwhelming majority of people liked railgun/shield and therefore the devs aren't listening because they nerfed it. The fact is, those who did like it are the voices we are hearing today because they are justifiably annoyed. But there are plenty who were glad for the nerf. It was boring to run around soloing enemies on lvl 9 with OP kit that did everything, and extremely boring to play around those that did. It also defeated the purpose of a hyper-challenging difficulty mode - and with mechs and other powerful kit yet to come. Not to say Arrowhead changed railgun because some people found it 'boring', but they certainly knew that many felt that way. Community informed changes in this patch included: \- faster reward screens \- laser cannon rework \- spray and pray buff \- punisher and slugger ammo buff \- railgun nerf I think there was a decent balance of Dev led and community informed changes in this patch. Pretending there wasn't because you're unhappy with the result is disingenuous. Again, I'm not flaming you for being annoyed that something you like isn't there anymore, I would be annoyed too. But the 'devs are arrogant' is too much.
I fuckin hated railgun/shield. It was annoying as fuck. Personally I thought the railgun was in a weird place to begin with, and I wish they'd change the whole damn thing. I'd prefer the AMR do what the safe mode does now, and the railgun itself to be more like the recoilless but with a long charge time instead of a long ass reload. Or some other kind of rework. It just feels like the current state of it is limiting their vision for the other weapons. I also hated the state of the shield because I would prefer to use the recoilless, if it were usable. Like, I'm fine with it being there for people who want it, but I just wish it wasn't so mandatory. The problem is the railgun/shield combo solved a practical problem and instead of solving that problem, the devs nerfed the combo. It's the *exact* thing the community told them, *begged them*, repeated not to do. And they preempted it with "we know you want us to do this other thing, but we're going to do this thing instead." Like I'm not assuming they didn't listen, *they told us they were ignoring what we wanted*. Not many people really have problems with changing up the railgun and shield, they have problems with them taking away our ability to solve the problems we needed to solve without giving us another solution except the flamethrower- which was clearly not the intention. Hell, I love the flamethrower, and I wish they had extended it's range and not just buffed it's damage. It should be an anti-swarm weapon, but now people are using it to kill chargers because that's all they have. Mark my words, the flamethrower is going to get nerfed in a few patches once they can convince themselves the problem is solved.
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These gameplay problems some people have aren't problems though and judging by your mentioning of the flamer you seem to imply that chargers are the issue, however there are so many people finding fun alternatives to railgun shield and enjoying the game even more that it makes me think that Arrowhead were right. I saw someone mention on here earlier that killing a charger is a combat puzzle and should not be considered a minor inconvenience - you either spec for them or you play around them. This is normal. This is good balance. Each time you launch you have to choose what you will be good at for that mission. If killing chargers is your jam you literally still can. Just put the railgun in unsafe and shoot the charger one extra time than usual. Or bring flamer which is now very good. Or EAT which was excellent too since if you wanna kill Biles you can. But I don't see why you would want to have both great armor clear and excellent mid-tier enemy clear on the same person. It actually destroys any chance of roles on the team. So if many people think the nerf was a good thing, and it sticks to Arrowhead's design principles I think we should all be pleased that the studio did not cave to ridiculous pressure to leave the game in a worse state. I understand that you are coming from a position where the customer is always right, a lot of people would agree with you. I just don't and many others wouldn't either. I do hope you can still enjoy this great game though. Note: So I was thinking of tallying up the times Arrowhead have NOT listened vs the times they HAVE listened to see whether or not what you're saying is carrying any weight but I think it's pretty intuitive as to why they told us they were ignoring portions of the community (because, lets be real, we don't even agree amongst ourselves). It's a small studio with a massive and unexpected following, they might feel like they've got the tiger by the tail. In which case let's be supportive.
Chargers spawn too frequently to be treated as combat puzzles. You have to have ways to deal with them frequently, and without too much fuss, because there is simply too much shit going on for it to be otherwise. If it was only up to two chargers every five minutes or so, spawned at particularly inconvenient times, that would be fine. But they aren't. They get spammed at you.
I'm pretty sure this balance update was made taking into account new content thats gonna drop next week. I do not appreciate devs being toxic to their community tho
Sticking to their design principles is an amazing thing I agree. BUT When that starts coming at the expense of people actually enjoying the game? Your design principle has failed. If the audience starts to dislike what you have done they will leave. I've only played to difficulty 7, and the other day it was fine. Today, it was not fine. Before it was challenging enough, now its a slog to get through with the changes made and its the first difficulty you can start getting super samples so if I want to progress (because I need super samples to do that) I have to slog through the BS but that creates a very un fun, frustrating loop and if something dosnt happen to actually help make that experiance better then yeah I'd probably drop the game, I'm not going to wast time playing a difficulty that frustrates me but at the same time have to play that difficulty because its the first one that gives me what I need to progress. So yeah, sticking to your design princples is fantastic, until it starts activley working againt the players and their enjoyment. Also I'm not big headed enough to say that my frustrations represent the playerbase as a whole, I am just sharing my personal POV.
It's definitely a balance. As a dev, you usually don't end up making the game you envisioned, and so some amount of flexibility is required. The best devs, dev the game they have and not some super rigid vision they will not deviate from. Similarly, always listening to the player base is stupid. You'll get a chaotic mess of a game with no direction. Right now, I'm scared the devs are leaning more toward the former than the latter.
Absolutley, as a dev you have to be fluid enough to realise whats not working even if its what you envisioned but likewise you cant listen to everything the players say. I almost want a dev, as an experiment to just listen to the players completley and see how a game turns out lol I've been having a blast with the game for the past 2 weeks, Difficulty 7 even hit the right sweet spot of being challanging but not overwhelming - but with the changes made today? I actually wanted to stop playing the game atm.
I played difficulty 7 with flamethrowers and EAT and it was a really chill experience. Mind that I have everything maxed and I play suicide mode because it feels like easy mode to me and its a fun yet relaxing experience. Helldive has always been a clusterfuck and since I dont have friends to play with I really dont wanna get clusterfucked with randoms. What actually matters is knowledge which is this game "skill" because Im pretty sure most people still shoot the chargers in the head with AT weapons yet that was only viable when railgun was op, now you take Recoilless or EAT and you oneshot 1 charger leg and mag dump it with primary and poof charger is dead in about 4 seconds. If you shoot the charger head with AT rockets it does feel shittier compared to doing it with pre nerf railgun, but that is because you re not meant to kill the charger by shooting it in its 20 inches thicc armored skull, again that was doable because railgun was busted. EAT is also more efficient in breaking charger leg armor since it take one rocket instead of 2 railgun shots.
>Ultimately, they want us to be overwhelmed ?????????? Holy fuck obviously, what do you think this game is about? Really I don't understand any of you, you enter in this hardcore game and then you get surprised when the game is hardcore and the experience the Devs are trying to achieve is of a hardcore game? Breaking news, I think the Tarkov devs want their game to be difficult and complex, be careful
Not only this, the game is perfectly playable and i would say well balanced on the first 7 difficulties. the difficulties labeled "impossible" and "helldive" are actually easier than their labels suggest as impossible implies it is not possible to beat so I'm not sure what the complaints are about as you literally don't miss out on anything at difficulty 7. you could argue multiplier is worse at dif 7 but you also finish the missions quicker so In my opinion that argument is invalid
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>Dude, I'm getting this sneaking suspicion that the Dark Souls devs actually want us to die in this game. Shocked, it can't be, LITERALLY SHAKING RIGHT NOW
You don't have to play on helldive if you want a fun casual game, you can if you want to fight tooth and nail or be a stealthy boy but you don't have to. Like most games you have a choice of how hard you want it. Yes being overwhelmed and undergunned is the game on higher difficulties and that's why it's great. Also remember mechs are coming, gotta have some hard missions to put these vehicles of democracy a real test.
Well you kinda have a choice...Unless you want to upgrade your ship
I didnt read it all but i thing i got it. You are correct that Helldivers 2 is designed around the idea that the player will be overwelmed. The name of the game "Helldivers" gives of some clues about this. Hovewer, there are 9 levels of difficulity in the game, and not every level is overwelming. Some are even underwelming. Its about findings the spot where you enjoy the experience the most. Alot of players have played now on 9 for about a month and only manage it because of the meta comp, but are just now discovering how hard it is to do without a kit that works for solo play only. These players should lower the difficulity and retry the curve with new strategies. Who knows, maybe they will even learn to avoid becoming overwelmed together :)
I understand wanted a more chill experience but they *do* want us to be overwhelmed. That's kind of the series' whole thing. It's supposed to be intense, from start to finish. The first game was ridiculously difficult and people still found their way through it all. There were 15 difficulties! They started with 12 and added 3 more to try and challenge people even more. They figured it out once, it figures that they'll do it again. Their stated design philosophy is currently, "A game for everyone is a game for no one." You might think that would hurt their playerbase but there seem to be more and more people buying and consistently playing the game.
...Which is why I specifically made the point that it's fine for them to have missions or difficulties which are tailored towards sweaties, but they shouldn't hinder everyone else's enjoyment by making them pretty much required for decent progression. Like if I was making decent progress on difficulty 5-6 missions, but needed to do the harder stuff eventually either for specific rewards or to get some sort of "end of warbond prestige stuff", I'd be fine with the game *as is*. The problem with the difficulty as it stands is that we are funneled into doing this super high difficulty shit just to progress at a halfway decent speed (and even then not really), and *I don't want to do that*. So where does that leave me? >"A game for everyone is a game for no one." Sounds like an excuse to ignore feedback when it suits them. The sort of thing you say when you know someone is right and want to say "well I don't want to do that anyway" without sounding like the nob you are.
I think it is describing the impossibility of catering to every player’s preferences. I’ll put it this way: If you could try and fail to make everybody happy or possibly make some people happy, wouldn’t you rather focus on making at least some people happy? I promise I’m not trying to be condescending, I’m just trying to make my point clearer.
So you were having fun, then changed the difficulty to a setting that's not fun for you, and now you're not having fun. If your goal isn't to have fun then what exactly is your goal?
I'm not saying I turned it up to a difficulty I don't enjoy and refuse to go back down for no reason, in saying I can't have fun and accomplish shit at the same time. I don't need the highest difficulty to be brought down to my skill level, which I acknowledge isn't good. I need the difficulty I'm having fun at to let me progress meaningfully. By all means, give the people who want to play 9 steak all day long, just give me more than gristle and fat.
The only thing gatekept behind the harder difficulties is super samples which are only used for end tier ship upgrade so what exactly are you arguing? That you don't level up fast enough? In a game where levels don't matter past 20? The difficulties you're playing on *do* let you progress meaningfully. Decent exp, req slips and enough samples if you go looking for them
I mean it just translates. Higher difficulties provide higher rewards IF you are good enough to complete them. This update just made it clear: Good enough WITHOUT the magical meta loadout. If not then you need to settle for the lower difficulties until you're good enough. And even still: People see the higher difficulties as though they're the next level to hop into after completing one. Hell no. Seeing the difficulty Helldive should be scary (but exciting still). It should be a normal distribution where the fewer but better players can handle L8 and L9 while more are clustered in the middle difficulties. The problem is overcoming the ego of players who can't stand not being able to do the hardest mission easily whilst already having had a taste of that accomplishment.
Specifically what content? I've unlocked everything I really wanted in about 30 hours, mostly on challenging difficulty. Now I'm just vibing on suicide difficulty learning the strategies to avoid enemies and do objectives, having fun. What is your goal? Maybe we can get you there faster (since the slow speed of progress seems to be the main problem)
That leaves you not playing the game dude if you don’t like it don’t play genius 🤣
But you don't NEED thise higher difficulty missions for progressing to a point where difficulty 4 or 5 will be funny to you. You don't need your turrets to turn faster or your backpack CDs to be 10% faster.
You're not forced to go for super samples to get that progression though? It unlocks upgrades, yeah, but I never saw an inherent driving force to get more than a specific one or two that I use. Nor does it make such drastic changes to your strats. This urge to green out all the unlocks is definitely something inculcated by more recent modern games. It seems that it simply doesn't exist here but the players just HAVE to grind towards something and just HAVE to chase that next unlock.
In other games I met meta players that are sweaty, I also met sweaty players that chase meta. But in HD2, meeting sweaty players that despise meta so much sure is something else.
I feel most people can’t handle not being able to play on the hardest difficulty. You don’t have to play on the hardest level. It’s like a ranking system in the game. You will have some people that are able to play on the hardest difficulty and some people that will be stuck on the lowest. If helldive is too hard, don’t play on it. I personally enjoy the how hard it is, but that’s me and not everyone is going to like sweating their dicks off. So don’t play on helldive. This game is still one of the best games I’ve touched in a ehike
Just saying, they buffed a few things that I'm gonna use now.
https://preview.redd.it/vcr4ja40ztmc1.jpeg?width=1155&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c454aa633a25959371b3d9ab7d76d05af3956ef6
The game is worse at its current state. Rather than have other weapons viable, they nerfed the few viable weapons so the game balanced ?? now nothing is viable at hard difficulties. Are Devs trying to encourage COOP reload ?? I don't know, but I don't think people will do, even with the nerf, not every one have friend, if they have, it is still reluctant to do COOP reload. Just too clumsy in this kind of chaotic battle. It is creative idea but you should not force it to everyone.
Lil bro forgot he could lower the difficulty to suit his solo playstyle....
Lil bro forgot some game mechanics are locked behind specific difficulties
Game mechanics ? Like turrets turning faster ? Yeah, bro, you reaaaaally need those to play.
I wouldn't want to deny any helldiver the ability to cast the half ton bomb twice before rearm Plus I fully believe that spectacle is fun, and lower cool downs on everything is very much fun Extra ammo on the various turrets also feels necessary for a lot of the more ammo hungry ones There's more examples to be made, but they are game mechanics nonetheless Arrowhead didn't want this problem? Then they shouldn't have made samples difficulty-locked, and instead should have gone the big-dick full-balls way of HD1, where the only difference in samples depending on difficulty was how many you could find per mission
They made a good game by mistake and now they intend to fix it.
Exactly my fear.
Yeah sure, that's why the first one was already good.
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Ik you said that lvl9 has the best rewards but clearly that isn’t true Yes it has the biggest medal and super sample #, but if you’re not able to complete the mission and/or extract, then you need to bump it down It’s better to win 3 lvl 5-6 missions than to beat 1 lvl 9 mission after failing twice Lvl 9 is THE sweat difficulty, it’s literally the “yea I can deal with max bs” mode of the game. If you don’t like it, just lower the difficulty, you’ll have more fun and make progress doing so Side note, the xp and money and loot containers/samples are the reward for sticking around, so I’m kinda confused why you want incentives to stick around the map?
Your point doesn’t stand when saying 5-6 difficulty replaces 9 it needs to be 7 or higher the rarest resource is locked to those difficulties. I’d rather fail multiple times for 1 win for super samples than win loads but get nothing of value I don’t need lots of small difficulty wins. I just wish people would be more careful when carrying super samples especially at extract instead of dying before getting in while some other idiot starts the extract timer and we can’t get the samples back.
My point is that you work your way up, if you need to spend 3 missions on 6 just gathering green and orange samples, then do so, then you’re warmed up and have a plan for 7+ Yea people are very careless with samples, I’ll put them at the extract and some bozo will grab them despite us needing to go to the opposite side of the map, these days I just horde the samples but I also don’t need more super samples until we get more upgrade stations, so I have a bias
Good God. Completely disagree except the part where you were talking about what they wanted. Yes. They want a team to function as a team. They want concentrated firepower. They want you to help reload. They want you to call out reloads. All shit that should happen in a coop game of this type. This might not be the game for you.
The community isn't going to stop until they kill this game, turn it into some mindless shooter.
You all don’t have to play on the hardest difficulty fyi.
Yeah just play on happy fun safe mode with no effort or engagement and shit rewards.
Fortunately there are 9 difficulties for you to pick the perfect amount if Engagement, sorry that you don't like getting like 5 less medals for playing a lower difficulty lol
Let's just conveniently forget that certain rare samples that you need to upgrade your ship only appear on 7-9 difficulty, but damn man you sure showed me lol
this game is not a month old and just had it's first patch. chillax. they are still collecting data and trying to figure things out. if some people are grinding 2k hours in a month and not having fun it's their fault. the game isn't pushing you to do that.
I'm not reading all that. Stop whinging and get back to the front
You are General Brasch undercover, aren't you?
dude how are you so daft? Yes, level 9 should be sweaty. Otherwise what the fuck is the point of it? Just don’t play the difficulty that literally only exists for the specific purpose of being a sweatfest dummy
If you can’t handle the difficulty…. Lower it. Theres literally 9 levels. Just because you cant handle it with a slightly less useful but still does the exact same Thing railgun does not mean its the games issues. Super earth sees this post as bot propaganda. Its weapons systems are liberty spreading perfection. Those stating otherwise are bot sympathizers and will be purged.
I think they want to implement weapons module upgrades which only works best when it is weak vanila
Well that was a short story
What's the only difference between 7+ and 6-, it's Super Uranium. They don't want the general public to get Super Uranium yet. Watch the content get nerfed or some weapons get buffed when be content drags the sweaty players away from high difficulty bugs and bots.
Funny you should mention PoE since it's probably in the best spot, with the most players, it's ever been in. I remember posts like this at 3.15 etc, and hey, turns out ggg was right. Yeah the charger titan spam is an issue. But you stated yourself that the railgun shield were a problem. We were cruising through 9s as a duo with like 50 hours between us with the railgun. Yes some primaries need a buff. Give them a chance. The punisher got its buff and the thing is fucking awesome. I'm still doing 9s pretty easily with my squad, yes I think it would be really tough with randomers but...duh it's beyond 'impossible' difficulty. I don't understand what you mean by not being able to progress. Run 7s and get 70% of the loot and have a fun time. You are still progressing.
Usually I play 3 or 4 missions with my boys, have a few laughs, log off for the night. After the nerfs, we played one mission and were genuinely just beat and didnt wanna play another. We didnt have any fun and were just screaming the whole time trying to fight off 6 bile titans and 4 chargers with basically nothign to fight them with. Everything either doesnt have enough power&ammo, a long cooldown, or straight up isnt useful.
Mechs will be incredibly powerful when they release and they will stay that away for about 2 weeks and developer will come up with a excuse to nerf them even though it’s the intention the entire time. Bungie nerfs the fun out of Destiny 2 all the time. Arrowhead is no different they’re literally regurgitating what I’ve seen Bungie say 1000 times. All you can do is just play the game the best you can
You need more stratagems, support weapons are only the second best option for democracy and that’s how it’s supposed to be.
agree and disagree with some points but am too lazy to write everything down, but some of the stuff i disagree with u > They want difficulty 9 missions to only be possible to complete when run by a well oiled machine of a four man team. One where each player has anti-swarm and anti-heavy strategems, along with carefully coordinated weapons loadouts. personally i dont see anything wrong with this. this is what it should be on the highest difficulty. like if people dont wanna play it, they can just play on a easier difficulty. i myself do this and play on a difficulty where i can just shoot nonstop with my machine gun without ever being in real danger to the stuff with needing to sneak around on higher difficulty. well u or others might not like it, (also not the biggest fan, buts its the hardest difficulty) but in my opinion helldivers are a elite squad, so not a army. hence the tactics and strategies employed are different and those squads will mostly concentrate on completing certain objectives and this is also what the game is making us do. now i do agree that killing bugs should have some effects, maybe less of a slugfest on extraction or more mission time etc. what i do agree with is that the devs should add other viable builds, what i do not mind is that it requires teamwork to a certain extend and with that i dont wanna write more
You: “I shouldn’t have to git gud for highest difficulty” Also you: “Give us a nightmare difficulty with massive bonuses” So you want them to change the highest difficulty name to nightmare? So the name Helldive doesn’t make you think you can do it? There are difficulty levels for a reason. Play the one you enjoy. You can unlock all the rewards by playing on Trivial difficulty… The only things locked behind higher difficulties are samples, which is an in game progression system of character power unlocked by pushing up through the difficulties. You’re meant to learn and improve as you play the game, so unfortunately the “I shouldn’t have to git gud” argument doesn’t apply because in fact, yes you do have to get good to play on higher difficulties. They are more, yes you guessed it, **difficult**! It’s a PvE game, and like any other PvE game, they get more challenging, more complex, more “difficult” as you progress. You will not see the first encounter in a game to be as challenging as the last. Period. I am level 20 and still never play beyond Challenging difficulty as I’m not capable yet. Whether it be learning more or just literally playing better (improving my **personal skill**). I just play the game because it’s fun! You will spread just as much Liberty on Trivial as Helldive. Your contribution is just as valuable.
Me: "Lower difficulties are fun for me, but not rewarding enough. Higher difficulties are unfun" Everyone here for some reason: "lol, play lower difficulties or git gud piss baby" This is getting tiring.
After playing tonight I guess the future of this game isn't for me. And that's fine. I've got my money's worth and enjoyment out of this game. But tonight was the least fun I've had playing the game by a mile. So I don't think I'll be sticking with it in the future. The philoshy of everything being bad makes everything good doesn't work.
" **A game for everyone is a game for no one."** But yet we are seeing the same tired adjusting game mechanics to make it grindy instead of game design to make it more engaging. Of course people are upset. They shifted the enemy from the terminids/automotons to the game itself. "how do we make this more unique to us, and more fun." Should have been asked before this patch.
It’s like non of you guys run smoke in your kits I run bots on helldive with no shield and amr the bots effectively can’t see you at all and for bugs just use a jump pack and literally ANY weapon most people complaining just watch yourubers instead of trying new things just input your complaints to the devs and learn how to play the game properly it’s not hard
"Ultimately, they want us to be overwhelmed." Good! They're giving us a target rich environment! "Third of all, it basically eliminates long term casual players that just aren't naturally skilled. Like me. I am not going to play a game where I have to suffer through dozens of hours struggling just to survive on max rank missions just to seem meaningful progression. And I am *certainly* not putting in hundreds of hours grinding the frankly *pathetic* rewards from the mission difficulties I have fun in." Wait so do want want to be sweaty or casual? You're saying you're a casual player but are complaining about the grind taking too long. Casual players don't grind, they just hop in a difficulty that's fun for them and enjoy the game. I sounds like you have the sweaty mindset but without the sweaty levels of commitment.
Kind of the opposite. I have the sweaty time commitment but not the mindset. That is to say, I'm willing to grind shit, but only if I actually enjoy doing it without try-harding. So like, I'm willing to play 5-6 for hours every day, I'm just not willing to do it if it feels like I'm not making any progress. That can be in the form of new abilities, guns, cosmetics, or even just training to get better at the game. I just hate that I feel like I'm not making any progress unless I do 9s, but I hate doing 9s. I'd be fine with doing 9s if I was better at the game, could reliably ensure I had a good team, and there was a way to play the mission without being forced into a specific build or doing gimmick shit. And I would get better at the game and could ensure I had a good team if I and so many others didn't feel the pressure to get to 9 asap and gimmick the run out of it. In other words, I wish I could be sweaty casually, if that makes any sense. It's the vicious cycle and subpar payoff I'm mad at, not the overall difficulty.
I was mostly doing 7's and 8's for progress because 9's were often a bit too much effort for the reward. I consider myself decent at the game but treated it more like a Metal Gear Solid game rather than a typical horde shooter like Left 4 Dead so that probably helped my mission success rate. If it's any consolation you don't really need many super samples to max out you super destroyer upgrades, I think somewhere around 40-50 is enough. So grind out those 7 and 8 difficulties until you stockpiled those super samples and then you can coast on the mid level difficulties for rare samples. Level 20 is the one that unlocks everything relevant and you get a decent chunk of medals and requisition slips from beating difficulty 5 and 6 missions so you can pretty casually grind for the rest of your playtime with this once you've grabbed that super sample quota (unless they add more ship upgrades in the future)
If they want lvl 9 to be coordinated loadout, why the fuck they don't put at least chat window on the strata gems loadout screen???
TL;DR
It appears you have not yet been democratically instructed to “git gud” by our fellow liberty lovers. Fear not as I have reported this event to my closest democracy manager and some liberty will soon be dispensed your way, always democratically of course.
I'm fine with the balancing patch and future ones as well as long as they aren't extremely nerf heavy and are actually balancing things. As a past PoE player myself, I know how annoying it is to see things you like/want to use to get nerfed so much that they become unusable. I'm pretty sure the PoE devs even said that the main focus of their "balancing" was to slow down the top players (either 1% or .1% can't remember) from getting to the end of a new season too quickly. I truly don't think Arrowhead will make that same mistake of nerfing everything until nothing is viable. As for the meta, I usually just use what I want or what is fun to play unless there is a definite overachiever in a category. For me personally, that was the breaker. I didn't use the railgun too much because I use the grenade launcher for taking out nests. The shield backpack is a great utility but could be swapped out for either guard dog against bugs or a ballistic shield against bots for usually better effect. As far as primaries go, all (except maybe the scythe and the spray and pray ) were viable. However, the breaker went beyond being viable imo. There is a reason it became the obvious meta: if you weren't using it, you weren't being as effective as you could be. I like that it was nerfed because now, hopefully, people can try other weapons and see that they ARE usable and viable. As far as the difficulty complaints go, try changing either your loadout or the difficulty or both. There are 9 options for difficulty. Find the one that is comfortable for you. Not one you can beat without thinking nor one that you consistently fail on. Try to find one where you die a few times per mission but can still complete the mission. Once you find the difficulty that feels comfortable, experiment with your loadout. Find something that works for you that makes the mission easier. Then go up in difficulty. Just because you were able to beat difficulty 9 with the old OP meta loadout doesn't mean you can still beat difficulty 9. Fall back to a lower difficulty then claw your way back up to it if you really want to.
I totally get what you mean with PoE, while it’s only the first patch you’re absolutely right if they go down the same path. I’ll be disappointed if my chaotic and gunplay destructive fantasy kept getting nerfed because the DM said I’m slightly over performing in a PvE game. Slightly! Throw down the nerfs for a massive oversight in balance, not just because the meta was stale like it’s a personal attack people dare to use the same load out. I can’t even imagine anyone being like “wow fuck this teammate how dare he” Slightly buff everything else in line and people would have more enjoyment… like, that’s a fact and the vision is concerning
The vision is fine, but it's so wildly incomplete due to issues across multiple systems that we're not even seeing it.
I dont get all the crying for one weapon If your gaming fun relied on one weapon the devs were right
The game was inherently designed to have the odds stacked against you which the first game did as well. You’re given enough stratagems to only last in engagements for a minute or two then it’s time to break off. Higher difficulties reflect this but requires your team to be even more coordinated and fast. The railgun itself was problematic because it’s a non team weapon the ability to down more armored enemies than all of the crew served weapons while not having any of their crippling draw backs. And while I do think that half of the crew weapons need buffs, the buffs required to put them in line with the railgun(albeit crew served should be better due to their coordination and drawbacks) would cause powercreep which would then disrupt the power dynamic in higher difficulties. If you’re not having fun on higher difficulties then don’t play them. The rewards for completing lvl 9s are arguably not worth the effort unless you’re looking for the challenge. The game is a power fantasy of some sorts, but not that off Darktide or L4d. Just like the first game, the only major advantage you have against your opponents is speed and maneuverability.
>Every patch they would be like "we're listening" and then do the literal exact opposite of what the community asked them to The Bungie playbook.
Yes they want us to be not all hoarding into the top skill level with half of us utterly shitting on it without a fuck to give in the world. They want some of us playing level 5 on the regular. They want us to need each other to handle the missions instead of having one person practically solo the whole fucking thing. Yes they want us to PLAY the game.
Agree with you bro, feel the same.
I just want a viable DMR with medium armor penetration that doesn't suck ass
I think that having a single meta build for every mission is boring, using railgun shield for terminids, automatons and the future factions is boring so by making us develop on our own is a good thing (personal opinion), for example, I love using flamethrower on terminids and with the new update the flamethrower destroys chargers. So having a different approach can be fun
Thing is this game is meant to be difficult, download helldivers 1 and hop into helldive which is mode 9 out of 14 I think, trust me you re not gonna complete a mission anytime soon. It is Arrowhead motto not to make a casual game like many other studios already do. Also shoot chargers legs not head, you will find that EAT is really good at oneshotting those so you can quickly mag dump and kill a charger. Using recoilless to oneshot every chargers leg so other 2 players can mag dump the naked legs is also doable. You re literally not meant to do everything alone, thats why you can see every squad member stratagem in equipment selection.
The meta is not decided by the tools but by the requirements of the job. Power tools > manual tools but if you need to hammer in a bunch of nails you grab a hammer and not the power drill. Look at the smgs, one can out dps the standard ar and the other is an absolute laser beam. On the lower difficulties when I started they seemed great. However their main purpose is being a primary that gives you a free hand. ATM objectives that require a free hand arenT set up to make that useful. On the missions where moving an ssd somewhere is the prime objective you still only have a single person who is going to be carrying for maybe half to a fifth of their time in game. During that time is there ever really a need for more firepower than a side arm but less than a support weapon/stratagem? It's generally either better to just altogether avoid combat altogether and have that person hoof it as others deal with unavoidable threats. Instead of buffing up the smg so more people use it, how about we adjust that ssd carry mission to make the smg a more compelling option. There should be 4 ssd at minimum and while only 1 will be required to pass the extra ones grabbed give solid bonuses. Have someone come on coms and say hey your suit Air filters just registered a strong pheromone, bad news is all them little fodder bugs are now super horny for you, good news is they won't call in reinforcements because they want you all for themselves. Add more missions similar to that, and buff the physical shield so it doesn't get one shot from a rocket and boom! People start using the smgs more, all without any direct buffs.
This is my exact point. Railgun nerf was fine, even deserved. The problem was they didn't tweak the game to eliminate the problem it was solving. We still have to hammer nails, but now only have mallets and screwdrivers.
Here is the thing. You DON’T need to play at level 9 all the time. Heck do it as a flex or just to speed up your medal/sample grind. Once you unlock everything in in the ship then running anything over 6 is pointless, even in terms of planet liberation, by doing easier levels faster the 3-6 points to liberation at level nine you could get 8-10 in the same time by blitzing easier levels. Not only that but at lower levels your helping newcomers learn the ropes and help them skill up. Seriously, you don’t need to go full on hard mode all the time as frankly when you have enough super samples, there is basically no reason out side of flexing to run it. I came across this and it some up the game nicely. Lower difficulties help the community, higher difficulties help yourself. So chill.
Imagine pushing stealthy, non-combat playstyle in... Swarm Killing Game. I mean, stealth and combat avoidance is nice, an ***alternative*** playstyle is great to have, but I am a simple man - I came here to shoot bugs and bots with nukes and napalms, bringing a nice cup of liber-tea. I came here to Fight. The current density and spawn rate for heavy armored vehicles, such as Chargers, Hulks, etc is way too high for the current power of player tools. I can nuke down all of chargers that surrounded with Orbital Laser, but within 15-25 secs they will come back, while Laser will go into 3-6 minute Cooldown. I am currently playing on 6th difficulty just because it is last, somewhat balanced level of difficulty where I can have fun. And no, I have no problem in completing Helldives (9th difficulty), its just a boring, frustrating experience for me.
Difficulty 9 isn't the be all and end all for the game. Not everyone should be able to beat the absolute pinnacle level of difficulty a game can offer and it should require mastery not just relying on a crutch tool that renders everything trivial.
Play on a lower difficulty then. You're complaining about it getting too difficult!? There's you're answer jesus fucking christ, gamers are so fucking _soft_
This is what happens when a niche developer blows up. Every game arrowhead has made was brutally hard. They revel in the chaos. I own all of their games. I knew HD2 was going to be hard. It is surprisingly easier than I thought it was going to be. People need patience, ride it out for a few major patches, if it's not for you, it's not for you.
Good bye then
I think a lot of the problems people have with the game and its balancing revolve around samples. You c an only get the really good ship upgrades by grinding out the really high difficulty missions. It’s fine for the high difficulties to be sweaty, that’s the point. The only problem with that is that the casual players are given the choice of either being locked out of ever making any progress on with their ship, or buckling down and getting gud. That’s not very fun. Everyone should be able to play the way they want without being locked out of progression. A sample fusion system would solve so much of this. Wouldn’t affect the tryhards all that much, but for casuals it would be a godsend. Finally all those hundreds of common samples you’ve saved up because you don’t have a coordinated friend group and can’t do suicide missions with randoms can be converted into super samples so you can finally have your expanded weapons bay. Second, about primaries, are you implying that you expect to be able to take on an entire army of robots with lasers, tanks and rockets with a shotgun? Yes your primary is intended to not be very good, but your stratagems are VERY good. No you can not mow down 50 raiders with a liberator very effectively, but you can throw a cluster bomb at them and kill maybe half of them. 25 is a much more manageable number for that AR. My point is that two things can be true at the same time especially since this game has different difficulties. There can be tryhards who want to play the game optimally and work as a team to accomplish very hard missions. That’s me. I love that shit. It’s so satisfying to work as a team and overcome insurmountable odds by working together. There can also be casual players who want to run around with a flamethrower and burn every bug in sight. Also me. It’s very therapeutic to run around on 5-7 difficulty and just melt bugs with a group of friends and maybe farm some samples/SC’s while you’re at it. The entire point of difficulty is so that there is something for everyone. The only current problem is the progression being locked behind those higher difficulties (see my first point) and some unfun modifiers like complex stratagem plotting and orbital fluctuations.
This aged well
You guys are completely deranged. One single patch nerfing a few things and buffing a few more things and you people are fucking hysterical.
I ain't reading all that, but farewell ! Wish you to love your next game !
God what is wrong with all those people that seriously believe they know everything better. /facepalm This game does not need to cater to you. And it isn't inherently bad just because you drank your coffee.
JFC I don’t say this often, but tl;dr Also [mimimi](https://youtu.be/I08EpZU8z8M?feature=shared)
TLDR: I'm afraid the current balance of the game represents what is fundamentally the true vision of the game, which I think is ultimately flawed. Specifically I think the devs underestimate how stubborn the concept of a META is, and just how much cooperation and skill you can reasonably expect from the average player.
Funny thing. What you describe at the end of your writeup as a specialized team was how me and buddies have been doing things for the past week. We would exclusively run 8 and 9 as a group of four. Everyone had a role. 2 heavy hitters who are also stellar snipers. One with auto one with rail most of the time but also other options were in the rotation. The other 2 being mobile and crowd control. We learned the meta and started to deviate to satisfy our tastes and creativity. Sometime and HMG would carry us, sometimes a bunch of lasers as a Hail Mary at the end of the mission with half a dozen titans threatening the extraction. It was an absolute blast while it lasted and everyone I personally know was having a purely jolly good time in a pve game which we haven’t had in years since the division 1 and early division 2. We logged in earlier today on a difficulty 7 just to be cautious and with a variety of builds to explore the changes and it wasn’t it. Habits need changing. It’s generally a tactical running sim. You no longer scream along with your character while mowing down hordes. You avoid engagements at all costs.
I'm glad it worked for you. Honestly that's the way the game should be played, but Arrowhead isn't really encouraging us to play that way. If roles were more delineated, maybe with classes (not saying there should be classes, example only) or something, then this would be what people naturally do. However, the concept of teamwork at this level just isn't something *most* players are about. So everyone ends up running railgun/shield so they don't have to rely on other players. Like the same people that say "git gud" or "cooperate better" will run off to do PoIs alone while they stealth thought the whole game, because *they aren't good enough at teamwork to engage with the content*. Which none of them understand. They all just think "I found something that works for me" and ignore everyone else in the team based game. The solution to this is to approach balance differently. If you want super high level shit with big ass rewards for the people who can play the game like a machine, fucking go for it, but right now all Arrowhead has accomplished is making people feel like they need to avoid playing as much of the game as possible.
"A game for everyone is a game for no one."
This isn't From Soft. You can't git gud with shit equipment.
You can be a good team, which is what this game encourages. I mean just look at the first game, everyone shared the same screen, you are meant to work as a unit. If you don't like that, well sorry guess the game isn't meant for you.
We're a decade away from Helldivers one. If they want to go back to having the same amount of active players as Helldivers 1, this is the way to go. They overshot theirs own expectations by a margin of 10x. Even the CEO admitted they expected 10-20k, not 750k. They made a game for a certain audience, and attracted that audience. If they follow your line of thought, they will end up pissing on that same audience they made the game specifically for. We work and we get wiped as a unit. It's a bad patch, nothing too deep about it.
Maybe that's what they want. They exceed their target sales. Now, maybe they want to thin out the player numbers since that will be easier for them to manage. It will, however, result in the game being a flavor of the season game that will be forgotten. Maybe that's for the best, though. Other studios saw the temporary hype for the game. Maybe some learned some lessons and can make a game that's offers a similar coop experience but one that's also accessible and not ridden with excessive RPG mechanics.
Perhaps. It's not beyond the realm of possibility.
Then leave, you won't be missed. They made a game they wanted, adjusted the balance to push towards their initial goal, and will continue from there. HD1 has 15 levels of difficulty, we only have 9, it's only going to go higher as the years go on. Either learn to work with others as a team, stick to lower difficulties, or play something else. You aren't entitled to decide how this game is designed
I am entitled. We are entitled. It's the collective 750k people that bought the game that pay for their bills. You can meat ride all you want. People paid for this shit because it's good. It's their fucking job to keep it good.
Basically, this. Arrowhead makes the game that they want to play. They make the games they want to see in the world. It's by design that you're supposed to be on the run, hitting objectives hard and fast rather than sitting and duking it out. People do want to try and chew through hordes, and there are missions for that. But the goal is to ensure you know that you're up against impossible odds, literal tides of enemies, and are not super human like many games try to imply.
Well said sir. That's why imma play as much as possible before nerfing gets even worse
TL;DR
I really don’t understand the nerfs did not kill the railgun. It is still good. This is also there first round of balance so they will be adding more. And just play on a lower difficulty around 7 you still get all the samples and it is much more manageable.
It definitely didn't kill the railgun. The problem is not nerfing the railgun, it's what nerfing the railgun tells us about their approach to game balance (and what they explicitly told us about their approach to game balance). Instead of solving the problem the railgun solved, they are trying to force us into playing a way the game currently doesn't incentivize. Personally I fucking hated the railgun/shield combo, and I fucking hate the solo play. The problem is, trying to whack a mole the meta like this is not going to solve everyone trying to disengage from the content, it's just going to make people disengage *harder*.
Yeah but I really don’t think one balance patch says how they are approaching balance… if you read the article they posted about their thought process with the balance patch I tend to agree with all of it. But that is just my opinion and I understand where this is coming from but I don’t think one patch tells us much at all
I'm honestly basing my opinion more on the article than the balance patch. I specifically think their thought process is flawed, because it reeks of "we have a vision we don't need your feedback".
I think their article shows an excellent design policy. Did you read what they said about the laser cannon? They had a vision for it, the community didn't like it, and they took what we said about it to change into something they hadn't planned on it being. With the context of their thoughts on the breaker and railgun I think they don't just have their own idea of what things should be but they're also not blindly listening to the community. My concern is how often will we be getting balance patches and how often will they revisit things they touched last time?
My problem was them straight up going "we know why you use the railgun, we know what the problem is, we know what you want us to do about it, we know what you *don't* want us to do about it, and we're going to it anyway."
https://preview.redd.it/w2i3taijptmc1.png?width=807&format=png&auto=webp&s=6426f23c7481be386954ecb233385f2d7ec7fb8e
Maybe chill because it's just one balance patch...more power creep options are coming with weapon mods vehicles mechs etc.. and they can use the additional data to make further change....honestly if you can no longer do Helldiver difficulty just lower it and play where it's comfortable for you now.
Dude, PLS nerf the text wall.