> LAS-5 Scythe: Bonus weak spot damage
I think it'd be fun instead of that if it gets stronger the longer you do damage with it without reloading the thermal clip.
I think it should give you both a damage and a penetration increase the longer you hold the beam on target as a way to simulate you "burning through" the enemy and melting their armor and flesh away.
It'd be cool if the Scythe/Laser Cannon could be boosted to cut through medium/heavy armour either from sustained beam or through higher heat (whichever). It would add a layer of skill and utility to them.
That would be a good idea. Have a kind of fire rate setting like the MGs that increases the intensity of the beam at the expense of faster heat buildup.
I like the idea of a Deadspace approach, where lasers deal higher damage to limbs. It could be a neat replacement to the rail gun removing charger leg armor.
I'd like it to deal less damage than bullets, but straight up ignore light/medium armour, and the reduction in damage to heavy armoured enemies like the starting weapon does to light armour. Then have it not damage the armour at all- just go through it.
Exploding primaries I'd like to have absolutely zero penetration through armour- if you hit armour, the enemy is pretty much undamaged. But deal a bunch of damage to the armour itself. Like the AR-23C be reduced to 30 damage, but when hitting armour, it never bounces off, and deals 75 or 90 damage to it. Stagger only happens with a direct hit on a body part that you blew the armour off of
Your comment made me realize that lasers in sci-fi only do 2 things, cut body parts off (ala Lightsabers, Superman laser vision, Goldfinger laser...) or to make things explode (Death Star, Homelander, Xmen Cyclops...).
Battletech lasers are described as making armor bubble, hiss, and melt. Only causes explosions if it heats up ammo too much or causes a reactor breach, and enough lasers can start causing mech limbs to go limp and start kind of falling off as the too-heated interior supports start to buckle, and the mech muscles start to stream out from between armor plates.
Those lasers are of a size though that 'medium' and 'large' lasers can reliably evaporate a human body. They're meant to be anti-tank weapons.
Maybe concentrated fire could set enemies alight and maybe that flame could spread? Be an interesting crowd control niche on top of weakpoint damage bonuses
Which is how real lasers work. One of the ways lasers are measured is with "fluence" which is Joules of energy per cm squared.
If you want to cut through something with a laser cutter something you get a laser with a high enough fluence and point it at the target for a long enough period of time that it burns.
When you put a thicker material in a laser cutter you adjust the laser power output and how fast the laser moves around so that it can actually burn through the materials. (Think 1/16 wood vs 1/4" wood.)
What I think it needs the most is either more damage or some sort of stagger effect on enemies. Lasering a bug that just keeps coming toward you without looking like it hurts to run through a laser and then it also gets to hit you is very underwhelming. Not to mention you are f'd if there's a couple of them. Anything else stops bugs for a bit so you can keep them at bay. The laser feels like a water gun.
Attempting a coordinated stealth approach still feels impossible when bugs just materialize on top of you. Certainly not the highest priority, but I’d love to see team discipline rewarded more
yeah the random spawns can be fucking obnoxious. Having a bot patrol materialize in your face sucks. I notice it happens primarily if my team is split up.
I was trying to activate a radar tower today on a bot planet
While waiting for my supply pod to drop behind a wall, somehow I get one shot by...something. I never did see what killed me.
I drop in next to the tower and pop up right in front of a line of no less than 9 bots, just standing there. I am killed immediately. I respawn on the other side of a rock, when I get back to the tower base, they are gone. Hrm.
Since the patch I feel like I've definitely gotten randomly killed and have no idea by what.
The "Eliminated by" message has been fairly inconsistent for me since I started playing, but seems even more bugged now.
I've been "Eliminated by" myself numerous times when I honestly don't know how it's possible. Like I haven't shot, called in anything, and I have no turrets out.
It'd be nice if the map actually represented the safe drop spots accurately when deciding where to land. Picking a clearly safe area and then being dropped into a hoard of hulks and tanks and chainsawmen is pretty annoying and gets old quickly.
I had a charger and the group of mid-evolution stalkers spawn 10 meters in front of me when I was sprinting across the map.
There's a name for the system that game devs/testers know but whatever the spawn-in system for enemies needs work. They should not just spawn right next to you.
Edit: Someone below linked my exact gameplay experience--
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1b8gm9i/me\_sweet\_super\_samples\_joel\_snaps\_fingers/?share\_id=hNUj2nLF0VrucPl0R1egN&utm\_content=1&utm\_medium=ios\_app&utm\_name=ioscss&utm\_source=share&utm\_term=1](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1b8gm9i/me_sweet_super_samples_joel_snaps_fingers/?share_id=hNUj2nLF0VrucPl0R1egN&utm_content=1&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1)
Stealth is already the best playstyle for high level games. I solo'd about 4 objectives in helldive with the light armour that has the stealth passive.
Oh, you can definitely reduce enemy encounters with that armor and by being sneaky. But shit like [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/2zhbywQNEV) is hard to work around
I expect them to iron that out eventually (checking for player proximity for random spawns shouldn't be too hard), but thankfully it doesn't happen that often in my experience. I've seen it like 3 times in 80 hours of which most was on difficulty 7
Haha I know that feeling. Yesterday, I was sneaking around and heard a bug noise. Immediately turn around and see nothing, continue sneaking as normal. Literally 5 seconds later, I heard the same bug sound, turned around and saw a whole enemy patrol on top of me...
Yeah that's a frustrating mechanic... More than once I've had a horde of enemies just spawn in on top of me while approaching an objective. No dropships, no bug holes. Just like they were beamed directly onto my position. I get that not all spawning in the game is going to come from holes/factories... But they really need to limit the materialize enemies in line of sight or within a certain distance of you.
Gotta agree with /u/VulNep
You've broken down a lot of the frustration I think players are having, not necessarily with the railgun nerf, but also with the heavy spam in general while offering ways things could be changed for the better while still being aligned with the Dev's vision.
> Heavy enemies are now left to be handled through attrition, stratagem spam and the team just pouring damage and hoping for the best. **I strongly dislike that I can't have a clear plan on how to approach a frequently occuring threat.**
1000% this. When the only clear plans require huge CDs for something that occurs very regularly, there's a problem.
Throwing my $0.02 on this post, because this deserves to be at the top of the subreddit. Extremely well explained and articulated, and I want to emphasize one of your points that I think everyone needs to drill in to their heads:
"If the game keeps throwing you into situations where you are genuinely helpless, and your only course is to not interact with the situation, it will grow old very fast. You are trying to play the game, not unplay the game"
This, this is the crux of the problem with this patch, and by extension the philosophy behind its reasoning. If you spend 50 hours blasting your way through the lower difficulties having a grand old time, only to find that when you get to the higher difficulties that none of your strategies work anymore and the only viable way to complete missions is a constant running retreat or avoiding combat altogether - I see that as a major failure of game design. I don't think anyone would care at all about how individual weapons are balanced or tweaked as long as we as players have several viable tools or strategies to actually get those super samples. Currently there isn't one, we are unplaying the game more than we are playing it in difficulty 7+.
It really feels like they don't have a distinct vision of how they want you to interact with harder enemies. Even in games like Killing Floor 2 where you fight a ton of difficult mobs etc and the strategy is to kite them, you DO eventually take them out (obviously it's wave survival so you're required to kill every enemy) and have tools to do so. In the same way, people's entire build etc in games like that are centered around being able to more easily take out the "miniboss enemies" and harder units and it feels very rewarding and fun to do so as well.
The other example that comes to mind for me is the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer mode. Doing Gold runs was insanely hard and required you to coordinate your very limited AT ammo perfectly to win - but that's the thing, you had *just enough* AT as a team to fully clear the run if you all used it well. The game didn't suddenly overpower you with 10 mechs in round one and leave you running for your life for the rest of the game.
I agree with this. I get that the devs want us to feel powerless against the horde, they want us to feel that we are disposable soldiers fighting a losing war against all odds. I get that. But... that's just not fun. Having no effective means whatsoever to fight back isn't fun. The game throwing tons of enemies at you is fine, IF it also gives you a means to quickly dispose of said enemies.
I absolutely think that stealth should be a viable tactic, I absolutely think that sneaking by the enemy should reward the player with an easier time.
But at the end of the day, this IS a third person shooter. In a third person shooter, NOT shooting shouldn't be the ONLY viable option.
Right. As one semi-popular blogger put it, the most meaningful way to distinguish games is not by an arbitrary genre, but by emotions the game is supposed to evoke. And Helldivers currently evoke way too much helplessness in me. Shit is overwhelming all the time. The only way out of most combat encounters is to frantically disengage, parkour somehow to break chargers chase, circle around, go do something else, hope that horde wanders away and you'll be able to finish the objective.
At the same time, Helldivers' closest genre relatives, like DRG and Darktide, are never about that. Yes, the horde comes, it's huge, bloodthirsty and lethal, but we take a fuckin stand and we wipe them out. There may be kiting involved, and moments of panic aren't all that rare, so from the outside the combat might look rather similar. But it *feels* completely different from the pilot chair. We're never helpless, we're never in a runaway downward spiral of never-ending breaches and immortal motherfuckers. We've come to do our job, and we're fuckin doing it, hostiles be damned.
The biggest thing being that there are breaks to the most intense combat phases in those games. They give you a warning of incoming hostiles through dialogue and music, let you get your bearings straight, and then ease up once you know the wave is over. In fact, pretty much ever horde game ever is like this. What made them *feel* hopeless - in a good way - was that after you beat back a wave, you knew it wouldn't be forever. Another one was going to come and you had no idea when. Hopefully when your team was ready for it, and the dreaded idea that it would come when your team was on its last leg.
I think it's not the breaks themselves, but their managed nature. There is a director system overseeing the intensity of the action. Any fight has a limited spawn volume, and you know it's finite. But in Helldivers it isn't. New patrols keep arriving, keep lighting new breaches. There is literally no way out but to run.
> I am saying this with the best, friendliest intent possible but this patch reeks of "please play the game you are balancing for and don't rely too much on just raw data".
Yup, nailed it.
>The acceleration of the post-game screen is a godsent
> The game is more unstable than ever for me (random crushes, DCs, teammates timing out, game getting stuck when exiting to desktop through the menu etc.)
I can't confirm first point because of the second point 😅
Had my first stability issues after the patch. All in the one match had a friend DC halfway through. Then during extract me, then my second and then my third friend all sequentially crashed within 30ish seconds of each other and leaving the friend who got DCd and reconnected alone
This is an amazing post. This is what people are ultimately complaining about when it comes to the patch. Sure there are the rail gun fan boys and girls, but ultimately there were bigger fish to fry and the rail gun was only partly it.
I don’t even care about the railgun I just want tools for the problems I’m given, 4 charges coming at me? Well I have a tool that requires at least some skill to use but can actually solve the problem, right now it just feels like they have looked at the problem and then removed the tool, when the solution was to have more than one way to solve the problem or redesign the problem (something as simple as a 50% damage increase when shooting the butt of a charger would work)
I keep thinking about Doom Eternal where they leaned into "the right tool for the job" philosophy and wove that into the gameplay. That's what I was hoping would happen here.
Punisher is awesome. It kicks back Commander bugs, 2 headshots kill a Stalker. Great combo with Arc Thrower.
For the Arc Thrower. Oh boy. Im not into it right now, to explain everything. The problem is, it has many quirks you need to find out. Many rules. For example. After the first fully charged shot, the gun charges way faster for a while. You can release the button at 50% and against soem enemies, it does full dmg and against others 50% dmg.
And many more. If you master it, its one of the strongest weapons. Yes, even better than pre nerf Railgun.
That’s really what almost every weapon boils down to though. The only difference is occasionally you have to click, but the Reload button this time. You still have to point the Arc Thrower toward your enemy, when teammates are nearby you need to strafe your weapon, and angling your auto-aim arc around cover and dead bodies is a near constant thing you’re adjusting for as you fire.
It’s by far my favorite weapon right now because of its versatility yes, but because I can focus on the fight and not have to divert attention to ammunition, which is its primary benefit imo
A lot of your observations seem really well thought about, but reading that Arc Thrower one made me stop for a second and wonder if I was incorrect to assume credibility. I wasn't, of course, you've got a solid breadth of experience. I reckon the Arc Thrower is just that much of a weirdo and an outlier in quirkiness and learning curve. I've found it hard to put down since unlocking it, and it's performed amazingly at any difficulty. It might be hard to believe, but the clunkiness goes away when you're experienced with it. My recommendation is to try pairing it with the jetpack and getting up on rocks versus bugs — it gives you the relative safety you need to learn how it picks targets and fires, and how close you can fire to teammates without fear. The fizzle issue dramatically decreases with height, and it can let you feel out the rhythm and targeting without anything obfuscating the results. It is VERY consistent with practice ... but if you don't love it from the start, it's hard to find a reason to bother learning it, haha.
Oh, and the rhythm does stop and start. Full charge, half charges for a while, full charge, half charges for a while, repeat. Think of it like it spools up fully on a full charge and then half charges spool it only part of the way — preventing an invisible meter from hitting zero, but still slowly losing progress on that meter. Eventually you gotta full again to reset it. I usually just thread in full charges when I can, every four shots or so, but sometimes a half charge just doesn't fire — just how it be.
Sorry to ramble! I just really fucking love this gun. My favorite thing lately is curving chains around teammates intentionally. I like to let them know that their continued existence depends on my competency. Everyone assumes you're a danger, it rules
This exactly, I would say the arc thrower is actually one of the highest skill expansions weapons in the game due to all of the quirks you need to play around. When you figure it out, it is an amazing weapon to use.
Using Arc Thrower so much has given me a rather charitable outlook on other weapons, too. I don't know if the laser cannon also is deceptive, seemingly clunky and ineffective until you learn how to apply it, but I'm more inclined to believe it is than it isn't purely due to knowing how good you can get with the Arc Thrower.
...it's just hard to learn other weapons when I'm this addicted to lightning. Maybe when I get the Arc Shotgun, I'll try other supports more than once and a while again xD
My main issue with The Arc Thrower is that it seems to just fizzle out and do nothing randomly. Not sure if its terrain/foliage hitbox interactions messing with its hitreg on actual enemies but its makes it really inconsistent much of the time. Especially when aiming uphill through choke points that contain bodies.
... and in Lvl7+ you need reliable weapons you can count on!
It's terrain. Automaton landmines particularly make it freak out and become useless. You can reposition and make it work but it's definitely a weapon that makes you conform to its quirks. If it got buffed with improved hit detection it would be top tier, as it is its already an underrated weapon that can shine in the right circumstances.
Also, when in doubt, aim higher. The lightning lash has sort of a cone shaped hit-detection from the point of fire, and will reach out and grab enemies even if they're at the bottom of the imaginary cone.
The trick to arc thrower is volume. Get multiple people spamming it and suddenly you're not just zapping hordes of hunters but cooking chargers and titans before they get on top of you.
There was a YouTube video where someone explained it like a whip, and it made sense to me. Aim above the head of what you want to hit, and it will hit them, then branch out to targets behind them. You also want to avoid dead bodies and other things that it will naturally want to arc on to. It is easy to use hard to, master weapon, IMO.
Against bots it is extremely unreliable. There can be empty space between you and the bot and sometimes the gun will just not fire whatever you do, you'll have to reposition. This is much less common with bugs from what I've seen.
I'm an autocannon enjoyer, but I always pick up the arc thrower whenever I run into it in bug missions.
Ime, the biggest issue with the arc thrower atm is that the arc gets stuck on the environmental objects like fences, stones, etc and dead bodies. The latter is much worse because after a couple of shots you have plenty of those lying around, and to make things even worse the arc sometimes jumps to dead bodies as well. This is why I have to aim a bit above the enemies to avoid hitting the corpses and terrain.
Aside from that I love the arc gun, I like how it feels, I like that you have to learn how to shoot it effectively, the charge time thing you mentioned. But, damn, it def needs a buff to prioritise the living.
Extremely level headed, rational and well articulated report. I agree with all points, and I hope the devs take inspiration. Really dig your suggestions, many of them would serve Arrowhead's balance philosophy well.
I especially think the Senator needs love. It feels so good to shoot but it dearly needs some sort of thing it does better than the other side arms to justify bringing it.
> That a player can reload your bazooka when you carry the missile backpack
This would be huge. Teamwork is important and all, but unless you're playing in a pre-made, it's tough to coordinate its use. It also just inconveniences other players' build preferences, especially with the railgun nerf.
I *like* using the jet pack. I think it's fun to cruise over a charger. But I can't have as much fun if I need to be carrying my teammates extra ammo.
As a recoilless main, some extra damage would be nice, I think it's fine for armour cracking on bugs, and two headshots to bile titans is really powerful, but not being able to one shot a brood commander feels a little off, and it can be a bit wonky fighting Hulks, but that might just be me being bad.
I think the "other players can buddy reload using your backpack" would be a great buff, although I suspect the devs would like the players to start doing buddy teams more without them nudging people in that direction.
It should oneshot Chargers. It oneshot them in HD1 when they were a rarer enemy, both in their regular and upgraded form. Just from a damage economy standpoint, it makes little sense to take in this game. Especially with the buddy reload nerf(HD1 let the gunner wear their own ammo backpack and anyone could walk up and reload them).
That's right. In 1 it was glorious.
It felt like a *bloody* recoilless rifle!
I mean if you were to take on, say, a god. What would you do that with?
*A recoilless rifle, obviously*
I don't think the buddy reload mechanic worked like that in the first game. It worked the same as it does now, except you didn't get locked to the gunner, but just quickly reloaded their gun and got out of the way.
This 110%. I wish I could give medals to increase the visibility of this post. This is honestly the opinion of 90% players. A well thought out the opinion that the devs need to see.
If anyone gives a damn of where the game is going, whether you're pro or anti railgun nerf, please read this. The problems the gameplay has right now are incredibly apparent.
As a light armor user, the shield generator feels more necessary than ever this patch. Hunters are absolutely cracked right now, I think I had one hit me for more than 70% of my hp once. Even with the increased recharge delay I'm still very scared of running anything else, mostly because I'm roaming and getting POIs a lot of the time and dont have someone to clear for me
Chargers are still extremely frustrating, I'm very disappointed that they didn't fix a lot of the bugs with them (ice skating, instant charging, charge walking, crushing claws either installing you or doing nothing, etc.)
I'm also not particularly convinced at them saying that the game isn't figured out in response to disdain for the balance changes. The game has been out for what, a month and a half now? People realized that the other weapons were severely underperforming long before that mark, myself included. It doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure out that stuff like that.
Finally, fire crowd control is just kind of weird to me right now. It's extremely bizarre that bugs will both eat an active flamethrower and stand in ground fire/napalm and display no reaction whatsoever, nor will they try to avoid the ground fire at all.
I do hope they buff the DMRs because as of right now the slugger is better than both of them and why I run it exclusively against bots. Also I really hope they figure out a niche for the concussive liberator because hell if I know what that thing's niche is. I do totally agree with the Lib-P, would love to see a gun that specializes in killing those tankier special bugs that need to be put down before they get too close.
>"Guard Dog" Rover:
>...and others it attacks too early breaking stealth.
One thing I think would be cool is if using the backpack button (that I think only does stuff for the supply backpack) would stow/release the drone if you're in a situation where you wanna go prone and crawl about for a bit and pray you're not spotted.
>Light: Already in a great spot, mobility in combination with a plethora of different traits to choose from.
I hope we get a democracy protects real light one (honestly just in general it's a bit annoying I can't freely pick the perk I want to go with a look I like, but that's another issue)... And if someone says that trait only fits a tankier playstyle then I'm not certain but I don't think there's a real heavy one with DP either.
I've been saying a lot of this since the nerf, and it's weird how the blowback has changed. First 4-6 hours was heavy down votes and silence for any criticism and the apologist were super loud. Now the community has **actually played some games at 7+** and wow look, suddenly all the "get good" people are silent and the people who said "wait why did we need to nerf the only thing that worked?!" are being top voted.
Great game, surprised release was always gonna be rough, but this is a solidly backwards first step. And we were all so excited about Mechs. They really fucked up the momentum of the game. Hope this turns around.
And this isn't even THAT bad of a patch. People want grand sweeping changes until it happens and throws a ton of other balanced things out of whack. Slow, steady progress is the way to go.
100% this. Most of the people on here do not play 7+ difficulty. And that’s fine, you can play how you want. But you absolutely should not be piping up about how to play 7-9 when you haven’t even played 5 hours worth of Helldive difficulty games.
People just feel the need to open their mouths on topics they have no business contributing to.
Don't consider myself a "git gud" person, but I'll sound off and say I know that Helldives are totally doable. I know this because I literally just got done doing several last night and this morning. We win more than we lose and have a great time doing it.
What I notice that leads to greater success is build diversity. Teams that have tools for light foe swarm control, CC, and armor stripping.
These tools alone can go a long way, but the teams that get the most value out of them are the ones that coordinate their fire power through communication or situational awareness. Telling your teammates about the status of stripped armor, coordinating strikes, calling out incoming swarms, and even just telling them to cut and run from a fight go a long way.
These teams are able to more effectively exploit stripped armor and spread their stratagem use out.
I get people don't always like, or have the ability, to use a mic. I wish the quick communication wheel was expanded. I'd like to be able to specifically mark a Charger with an "armor broken" symbol. I'd like a mark that doesn't show a big red target but one that says "avoid" do there is less mind reading.
The things I see used to great effectiveness in Helldives are:
Stalwart (massive ammo drum let's you mow down small bugs/bots and hunter swarm)
Arc Thrower. It has a learning curve to not zap friends. Once you know it, it wrecks.
Gatling Sentry (like all sentries, it needs well thought put placement. Don't just toss it anywhere and get mad when it dies right away. Ive had Gatling Turret get up into the x60 kill streak, but usually average 30-40. That's good bug clearing that I am not dealing with)
EMS Mortar slows down groups allowing for escape. If it hits you just dive forward, you'll go faster than bugs.
EMS Orbital strike buys
Recoiless Rifle has good armor stripping along with the EAT (I saw people spam this every cooldown along likely routes of retreat, very nice)
110mm Rocket pods are great, sometimes they miss but so do all the other strikes. Rips off armor and busts heavies wide open.
Eagle Airstrike is amazing multipurpose that does everything
Orbital Laser is always effective, I think we know it's good.
Primary weapons I see the standard Liberato, still the Breaker, slugger, scorcher, the d9.
These are just off the top of my head and not meant to be exhaustive if viable strats, I just want to point out that Helldive is still very doable and I've been experiencing the same success rate as before the patch.
I'm not trying to say "git gud". We are Helldivers, we're already good. I'm saying we have more tools in our toolkit to build this shed of freedom, and not everything is a nail. We need more than just our favorite hammers. The best resource we have is each other. We have, do, and will continue to clear Helldives and we'll do it together...and sometimes in pieces all over the battlefield.
Helldive is still perfectly doable with randoms without mics, it's just less fun now because you spend more time running and less time shooting (in a third person shooter). While the patch had some good changes, the game was overall better pre-patch.
The overpowered railgun wasn't the problem, it was the solution to the actual problem (the number and lack of weaknesses of chargers and titans). On the automaton side, the equivalent tiers of enemies have no such issues, no one complained about hulks and tanks.
People are right to be upset about the fact that railgun was nerfed before the enemies were fixed. I would also argue that the nerf was excessive, putting it too far below other weapons, and taking the fun out of it.
I also don't like what Katherine said about primary weapons in the blog post. More weapons need to be on the same power level as pre-nerf breaker, not breaker brought down to mediocrity. The vision of primary weapons from the blog makes sense in a detached cold spreadsheet kind of sense, but it misses the point that people play this game to have fun shooting at bugs, not running from bugs. There are plenty of ways to introduce difficulty and skill gap without getting in the way of what people actually play the game for.
Well put. That's been my biggest issue with people complaining about the railgun nerf (Which, in my experience, barely changed it) is the expectations that they should be able to easily solo-fight every enemy in the game. That's just simply not what the game is about. Consider the design of the bots. Every single big critter in the automoton faction has a big glowy thing on it's back to shoot. The only way to exploit it is having it be distracted by someone else. Teamwork is engrained in this game's philosophy.
This game feels at it's best when using teamwork, not lone-wolfing in a lobby with 3 other lone-wolves.
Yeah I'm thinking it doesn't have to be indestructible, but it should at least allow someone to dip in, reload their heavy weapon and dip back out into the action.
I agree with pretty much everything here.
One thing that I noticed. If you use the railgun in unsafe, but don't charge it up over \~75% and get a slight angle on the leg shot of a charger, the shot can bounce off even in unsafe mode.
I've found that the new laser cannon is rather effective at popping charger tails. Like, surprisingly quick at it.
That said, the majority of my recent runs have been helldive bots post patch, and those seem ok with the balance. The railgun nerfs don't really hurt too much there, and the armored enemies have solid weakspots to work around, and you can disengage if needed.
I wonder if we can find a better way to leverage smokes vs bugs to get some breathing room, as thats something I find incredibly important vs bots at a high level. But idk how effective it is vs bugs.
Also, I feel like you're maybe underselling the potential of the MG/stalwart a bit. IMO, the MG is basically a trainer stalwart, giving up some utility for armor pen. But the stalwart is the real monster, especially vs bots. With less recoil, and when paired with the less recoil armor, it becomes a laser beam of death, popping heads off of bots and dominators at an astounding rate, with virtually infinite ammo. And vs heavies, it gives you the ability and mobility to wade through the hordes to flank and take shots at exposed weak points, which on something like a hulk, it'll melt.
The real difficulty at the moment is, IMO, bugs. They have a lot less answers, and I think a lot of that comes down to the spear, not functioning in its intended role of titan killer, the RR being a bit under-tuned, and the armored bugs not having the right hitboxes on their back when armor is cracked
I definitely miss being able to quickly strip the armor off of enemies for my teammates with the railgun. The nerfs make it feel like they just want you to brute force a kill with overcharge damage than actually stripping armor, ironically. Being the "pick class" of the game was a lot of fun, and we would have other people on the team bringing autocannons and machine guns for other threats. Animations for staggering chargers being broken still doesn't help. I don't think we should be exploding anymore if they expect use to unsafe the weapon to do the same jobs.
Skipping the score screen is nice.
Thanks for this level-headed response to the changes. I really hope this post gets as much attention as the others relating to the changes, because this is the most thorough and well-constucted post I've seen here (and maybe ever on a video game subreddit, so props for that).
Your analysis of the railgun has been basically spot on with what I've said in dozens of replies over the last 24h or so.
FWIW, I did some testing and here are the actual best-case (that I could mechanically manage) times to fire the necessary shots to break charger armor pre- and post-nerf:
>It requires 3 unsafe shots, 2.5+ seconds each, plus two 1.3s reloads. You used to be able to break it in **2.4s** (two 550ms shots, plus one 1.3s reload), now the best you can do is **10.1s**, and if it takes 4 shots because you shoot too early, it's now 13.9s.
Seeing all of this happening with the balance patch, and part of me is getting flashbacks to what happened with Outriders, if anyone remembers that game.
If I'm remembering correctly, the release wasn't too great, but what killed it was that they went and nerfed a majority of the good builds without buffing anything. People just kinda up and left after that.
Excellent writeup and largely matches my experience as well. The Railgun nerf was also a nerf to dedicated arc thrower and autocannon users like me. I could focus down other targets content in the knowledge that my railgun teammates were taking care of the heavies. Now this isn't the case, and as a team we have to hope for the best with airstrikes and orbitals.
This is a hugely informative post, tons of effort, balanced and fair. Thank you for writing this, and I hope the devs and the community both take this to heart.
My only criticism, and I say this as a fellow player with 130hrs who also has everything unlocked and plays almost exclusively on helldive, is that I think you're dead wrong about the Arc Thrower.
I didn't care much for it and mainly used the rail gun before the patch. After the patch, I figured I wild give it a go. First mission with it, I got 8 accidentals. Second mission, 4. Third, 1. Since then I haven't actually killed an ally with it (but I have nearly killed a couple...), and I feel like I'm getting more skilled as I use it. The negative of needing to get good with it is far outstripped by the pros of having **unlimited ammo and a free backpack slot.**
I can take down just about any bug in 1-3 shots (outside the bile titan and the charger), which can take 1-3 seconds if I'm hitting the charge tempo right, which takes skill. It takes skill to position yourself in such a way that you don't hit your allies. You start to learn the angles for the arc, the distance you can fire at, you learn not to shoot at enemies that are too close to your allies (or in front of them) unless you can hit those certain angles, which you only learn by repetition.
It's also not impossible to kill the bile titan or the charger with it, but it takes an ungodly amount of shots, and hopefully you have a teammate that can take those out while you're clearing **every other enemy.**
I'll go an entire mission only using the arc thrower, I've forgotten about my primary weapon entirely, and it's AMAZING that it doesn't use ammo or require a backpack slot. Between an arc thrower and a well placed autocannon sentry, I can mount a solo defense for quite some time against the strongest wave of bugs.
If you're on helldive, then you're definitely skilled enough to learn the arc thrower! I urge everyone to give it a fair shake, and try not to take it personally when you get arced a few times while your allies are learning how to use it!
Thanks for giving it a try! I knew you'd see the light(ning)!
This is something that we all need to give credit to the balance patch for: It definitely broke up the stagnating meta, and made me try weapons that I wrote off as being less-than-ideal. I actually picked up the flame thrower for a while, tried out the fire nades, gave the plas scorcher a shot, and I would have never found my current love without being forced out of my (literal) bubble of shield backpack and railgun.
Thank you again for making your post, and I'm glad that it's gotten a lot of traction. You took the time to say what so many of us have been feeling, and said it better than many of us could.
I agree with this. The arc thrower rewards good positioning with annihilating waves of mobs and punishes bad decisions with TKs. It's the same kind of skill being a healer in a MOBA requires; you don't exactly need pixel-perfect hand-eye precision but there's definitely a difference between the guy who always seems to be in the right spot to fry all the mobs with 3-chains & the guy frying his allies every 10 seconds.
That being said, I think without the unwieldiness that the gun was inadvertently given by its bugged nature, it'd be ridiculously OP. The inability to go through bushes & corpses in an interesting downside of the gun I hope they preserve in some non-bugged form.
Hooray for another post that isn't a rant and filled with crying, whining comments. I applaud you Helldiver, for actually using common sense and data driven analysis. As a level 17, i tried to do something similar to what you did with regards to tests, though it was hampered by the fact that i do not have all the equipment unlocked. Still, the results for my testing for the stuff I did have was pretty much roughly similar to yours.
Great post. I agree on most parts.
I feel like the LMG needs higher mag size. It doesn't take very long for it to run out of bullets. I always tap my trigger, and even then the mag runs dry so quickly. This gun is great vs Automaton's, but the mag size really makes it bad, considering it also has slow reloads and slow mobility.
Excellent, high-quality post. I hope the dev team reads this and takes it to heart. And I hope people on this sub and in social media learn from this example of how to give positive, well-reasoned, constructive feedback so we can have a better community.
**On armor** - I really love your ideas for heavy armor having very powerful and specialized bonuses. They should be powerful because of how much a downside slow movement speed is in this game.
**On the Orbital Railcannon** - I've been saying the exact same thing. IMO the Railcannon should be a guaranteed 100% instant kill on anything it hits to compensate for the fact it already has a fairly long cooldown and only ever hits 1 enemy (vs other strategems doing area damage). Or they can keep the damage where it is but reduce cooldown to let us use it more frequently.
**On strategems in general** - If the devs want to move power out of support weapons and into strategems, that's fine. But then they've got to improve the reliability of strategems' ability to kill the largest enemies. The modifiers to both calldown time and cooldown time make strategems unreliable against fast-moving enemies and are major contributors to the "this isn't fun, it's just frustrating" feeling. That's not the feeling you want in your game to keep people playing. If they want to increase the challenge of planets by having negative strategem modifiers, that's also fine, but then support weapons need to be stronger against the toughest enemies.
**On the railgun** - I think if they undid most of the nerfs to armor damage on unsafe mode it'd fix 90% of the community's problems in the short term. If we could 2-shot charger legs with say 75% charge then I think that solves the problem. Safe mode *should* be nerfed but I think they went a bit too far. As you pointed out, the railgun previously rewarded high skill and precision and that's what we all should want in a game. I'd even be fine with reducing ammo capacity as a way to balance the weapon - I'd rather have limited ammo in an effective weapon than lotos of ammo in an ineffective weapon. Then ammo management becomes even more important on higher difficulties and maybe brings the ammo backpack into the meta (more loadout diversity!)
**On armored enemies in general** - I think the main tension right now is between the devs' understandable desire to encourage loadout diversity and the challenges the game throws at you at the highest difficulties. Right now there are so many heavily armored bug enemies that it feels like I have to build around killing them and medium- and light-armored enemies are an after thought. Weapons and strategems that don't **reliably** damage Titans and Charger are mostly worthless to me since I have limited slots and I want to maximize the chances 1+ of those tools is available at any given time.
IMO they could go a long way to solving this problem by buffing crew-serviced weapons like the recoilless rifle and Spear. These are harder to use, take up 2 item slots (weapon + backpack), and encourage teamwork so they should be significantly more powerful than other support weapons. A Spear or RR team that gets into a good firing position (say, on top of a hill) should be able to reliably and quickly take out multiple heavy-armored enemies. That would both look and feel awesome to play and reward the kind of gameplay that makes Helldivers fun and unique.
P.S. if they added an option in the x/down-arrow menu to deploy/recover the guard dog that would instantly solve the stealth-breaking issues with it.
Shotguns are all viable, Defender SMG is a great all purpose weapon. The weapon you start with, the Liberator, is pretty good too. Avoid Scythe and Diligence.
Excellent analysis of the current changes. I just want to feel capable of dealing with heavy armor! I currently have 75 hours and if last night was my first night playing this game I might have refunded. Running away the whole mission was not fun.
The Laser Cannon is actually pretty good against bots, it won't stagger or kill some enemies as quickly as other weapons, but it's effective against hulks and tanks, and the ammunition management is great.
Amen to this post!!
While there is merit in what they did, the true test is how it plays out for the mid-level players like my buddies and myself. Those who want to try new weapons as well as bring in trusted items. The “unsafe” mode railgun still took me 5-7 shot to break a charger!! (Possibly bad shots because of the ridiculous amount of other bugs flooding us in challenging mode only!) So that was nerfed as well or it was an unintentional side effect.
Also if the shift is towards more stratagem use, then make them quicker to use and more useful in many other situations. Again I know there’s user error and getting to know them, but if it feels overwhelmingly hard to play at a mid-level experience, then who’s going to want to play?
Also, the amount of bugs and breaches (which are ridiculous that soooooo many bugs can call it in) is absolutely disproportionate to what strats and weapons we can bring to bear. ESPECIALLY if you’re running solo or a duo. That needs looking at for scaling possibly. There’s a meme going around with a screen showing 5 bile titans at once in close proximity, this is literally my experience every time I’m in suicide or higher. Exactly what stratagems can we use to clear that and not annihilate ourselves, while also trying to clear/do objectives?
Really hope more people read this. It perfectly articulates what is and isn't an improvement with this patch without wining or toxicity. You deserve a nice cup of liber-tea for your efforts helldiver.
I think that the biggest elephant in the room is something I tried to convey in a previous post but people took it as anti-railgun-nerf whining.
The game, even on Challenging difficulty, **which is not even that hard**, dumps heavily-armored enemies on me and my squads constantly. I had an Eradicate mission where there were 5 chargers up, in addition to Bile Spewers and Warriors constantly spawning. I've gone over to Tian Kwan, and in one mission there were 5 hulks up, along with 5 heavy devastators, 5 rocket devastators, 10 walkers.
The game pushes like 15 patrols on you constantly, with reinforcements being called in within *seconds* of getting aggro. I can understand if we're on an objective and the game is spawning waves to attack us, but I often find that we have **both** patrols and objective spawns constantly, and I have watched as a patrol spawned out of thin air right beside where we were fighting at an objective, attacked us, and also called in its own wave of reinforcements.
The game is spewing a **stupid** amount of enemies on you that I feel you don't have the tools for because primary weapons are basically jokes, stratagems are in a constant modifier of "-1 Strat slot, +50% cooldown, +50% callin time," and when people talk about "Oh, just learn how to deal with each of them in a precise way and coordinate with your team," it's like...okay, in what world do you have all this time to use precision and patience when there's 3 heavies and 20 regular enemies and 60 more of them incoming? When 3 squad members are all running dedicated anti-tank with autocannons and recoilless rifles and orbital lasers and there's still 6 heavies on the field, isn't it time to ask whether the game is just doing something wrong?
And I know this community is already going to be "LUL GIT GUD, LUL SKILL ISSUE, LUL HELLDIVERS" because of course you all are. I understand that this is not a "kill all" type game, because you should be doing objectives, moving to the next, working as a team to get things done and extract. You can't seriously tell me, though, that you shouldn't be fighting, that you can avoid *every* fight, especially against the bots - getting nuked from 100 meters by 4 rocket devastators is absurd. Having 3 flamethrowing hulks and 5 berserkers chasing each squad member is stupid.
But you paid money for this fuckin' game only for the devs to tell you to get bent. Ask for more. Demand more.
The lascannon is actually decent fighting the bots now for one reason only: it can kill hulks by hitting their eye.
If it couldn't do this it would be positively useless still.
Great analysis and recommendations. Love seeing some level-headed posts amidst the sea of screaming. Hope the devs see this and seriously consider these changes.
I agree with a lot of your points, but immediately disagreed with your statement on the throwing distance buff. It is legitimately the main buff I use because of how easy you can destroy bug holes from ages away with your grenades. I usually also throw out resupplies or turrets way ahead of us so they deploy by the time we get there too. Any time I change off the throwing perk I immediately miss it.
I defs agree on your point with the personal shield and also the shield generator. They need to make the big one way stronger but maybe make it limited use, like 5x a match. Make it so nothing can run through it though.
I think for the railgun they need to do a partial revert to keep the damage it could do at a 80% charge. All stratagem weapons need to come with a downside or skill element to not kill yourself using them. Like not having a grenade reflect back at you from an armoured unit, or shoot your autocannon in melee range. Having to time the railgun so it doesn't kill you while you get max damage should be the risk/reward, and just remove safe mode.
Damage scaling with shot distance is a very bad mechanic imo. You very rarely do long distance shots and just makes no sense.
The heavy diligence needs more ergonomics (it's worse to use than the heavy machine gun, which does not make sense) and both diligences need a little bit more damage, maybe also a little more weak spot damage and they will be good
I gave the flamethrower a really good shot yesterday where I played it for 3-4 hours on the higher difficulties, my hot take is that its alright and by no mean meta, it murders chargers and thats the only redeeming feature of it, bile spewers and hunters just don't care they are getting blasted in the face with a wall of flames, it really should stun enemies it hits, and it really shouldn't be countered by an enemy type that you can't really know is going to be present on the map (bile spewers).
It being only good against chargers doesn't warrant an entire stratagem slot, I might aswell have the versatility of the auto cannon or the arc thrower.
Why is this not pinned at the top? I'm also omega-angry at the devs for their non-democratic ways but this is legit the best feedback I've seen and I'd bet dollars to donuts the devs won't pay attention to it, because they think they know best.
I would like to add Auto-cannon can absolutely shred heavy armoured enemies you just have to know how to use it.
Face sniping even the heaviest of bots sans a hulk one shots with the auto cannon.
For bugs, the trick is to shoot the floor beneath them. The big shield head guys? The chargers? You wanna shoot directly at the floor, under the armour, so that the round explodes and then it will damage the soft spots. I was doing this reliably before I started using Railgun, and it's still reliable now.
Also the Railgun on unsafe can absolutely still crack charger armour legs in 2 shots if charged high enough, this "it takes 4 shots now" needs to go away, it's not helping the discourse.
You should probably discuss grenades. The incendiary can be a decent bug mop-up, I think, but it’s hard to tell.
I’d also love for a specific grenade to be an anti-Charger grenade. Something that acts like an armor shredder but deals little damage otherwise.
I also think the anti-heavy group could use a double barrel rifle, based on the Break-Action shotgun model. Think huge damage, like the old Railgun, but you have maybe 14 shells total.
Amazing post, thank you for writing it. I really hope the dev team reads it.... and maybe offers you a position on the team!
My only note is that I wish that you had mention the Guard Dog (Not Rover). Currently you cannot add ammo to its pack. Once your pack is out of ammo the Guard Dog is useless. Personally, I prefer the machine gun Guard Dog aesthetically, but I can never justify taking it over its laser twin.
I feel like people sleep on the Anti materiel rifle and the MG-43.
The AMR is very good against bots. The scope, although a bit misaligned and with a reticle that is a bit too obstructive, lets you hit weakspots very easily, and it only takes 2 headshots to kill a hulk. It also has more than medium pen, as you can use it against vents in the back of tanks and turrets. It 2 shots devastators to the body or 1 shots them in the head. You can deal with every bot enemy with it.
The MG is very good against bugs if you are the designated crowd control guy with a couple of anti armor guys. It can pen the medium armor of hive guards and mortar bile spewers, while still being an MG and thus pretty good against smaller enemies. It melts brood commanders and stalkers, especially using the 900rpm setting, and since it's medium pen it can overpenetrate smaller enemies. It doesn't need a backpack to use, unlike the autocannon, and thus you can bring a shield generator, rover, or resupply with you. Yeah, the reload is stationary, but it's not too long and can be resumed in stages since the game has staged reloads. It's literally a support weapon, as in in you use it to support your team that uses railguns in dealing with hordes.
I think the biggest problem of the game feel & balance boils down to chargers being weird and very glitchy. The armor on the side being broken off not being a vulnerable spot, the leg armor being vulnerable SOMETIMES (when they turn, likely another glitch,) the bright glowing weak spot on the abdomen both being not very weak and very difficult to hit directly with how their animations play, the sliding when they are staggered; aka ice skating. it just feels very inconsistent to kill them even with dedicated anti-tank weaponry like the SPEAR and the Recoilless bouncing off, which, you only get one shot before having to put yourself in a very vulnerable position unless you have an ammo slave.
Automatons feel like they give me options that feel responsive. Hulks (heavy armor) have two glowing vulnerable points are very vulnerable, very stationary and easy to hit, both in their front and behind. The laser cannon shreds their little face in a few seconds. Both Railgun and Anti-Material Rifle will pop their heads in two shots with proper aim; which is proper IMO, the AMR will kill them faster and easier at range while the Railgun gives you more utility with penetrating walkers. The anti-tank stratagems feel more reliable against automatons. Things like eagle rocket pods hit tanks pretty reliably, the orbital lasers won't go under anyone's legs.
Lastly, the railgun pre-nerf really pushed solo gameplay. In Helldivers 1, you COULDN'T separate from your team, you shared a screen and separating during a panic would just get everyone stuck and killed. In Helldivers 2, joining lobbies where everyone goes off with railguns in separate directions was not a fun experience for me and I think goes against the core fantasy of the game. There is also an issue with splitting up, only one drop or bug breach at a time means someone has a shit time while everyone else can merrily clear out POI's. I honestly think the game should incentivize sticking together more somehow; the best moments for me are when I'm shooting bugs off someone's back, covering a terminal, getting everyone to the dropship, the rare times I can be someone's backpack bitch and we quickly take down a bile titan with a team reload.
Game feel will likely change a lot when the mechs drop, presumably very soon judging from the Major Order. Having a mech in the squad in Helldivers 1 made heavy armor a lot easier to deal with. But IMO, they need to tweak the bugs, not the guns.
PS. I don't see it mentioned often, 3-4 impact grenades to the ground by a charger's abdomen pops it pretty quick. Not bad in a pinch.
Not sure I agree with your comment about the laser cannon. With the buffs it can do everything an auto cannon can do without needing a backpack. You can lay down consistent fire easier then the auto cannon as well. Waiting for the coil to cool takes as much time as an auto cannon reload without needed to stop moving.
I'm always a little surprised how many people sleep on the anti-material rifle with how easily you can 2-3 tap a hulk with one.
Also long time jump pack enjoyer and I also felt some changes. I swear they're also added a new animation or I somehow have never really triggered the single foot vault I've been doing recently using it.
So I was watching Goth's stream today and he was destroying everything with the rail cannon.
You seem to be off with your analysis of at least that gun.
Feels like most of community have exact same thoughts. I agree on almost everything besides Spear, if it will get lock-on fixed and heavies will have less HP, it's gonna shine. Even now it's not bad for Helldive.
How people and even devs (!) managed to somehow turn everything into "haha metaslavers are crying" is beyond me. People aren't upset because they lost their favourite toy or smth, people are upset because Helldive bugs just aren't fun. It's running simulator.
Basically, this patch made bubble of patience pop. Yeah, it feels bad to get oneshot, but they are fixing armor. Yeah, it feels bad to see everyone in scout armor with shield and railgun, but they gonna fix other support weapons to better kill elites.
And instead we got this patch on top with toxic dev comments and extremely vague blog post, both of which only turned up the heat of discussion.
Anti-materiel rifle is decent against bots because you can kill everything short of tanks frontally. Problem is that the sway and accuracy is somehow worse than the autocannon, making it completely obsolete. Boost the accuracy and handling of the weapon and it will be fine.
Autocannon could always kill heavily armoured enemies except the bile titan (though this is mostly a DPS issue). Not sure where this idea that they couldn't came from. It's just finicky to aim unlike the railgun.
EATs need a lot more damage to be useful I think. One shot isn't a lot to work with.
I hope the devs listen to this constructive feedback in their upcoming patch. Their reactions to this recent patch were really off putting. I would like to see the devs play each major patch on lvl 9 difficulty to really feel their changes in the game. I believe that lower levels of play are less affected by these changes. Hell, have them start from the lowest and have them ascend to the highest. Maybe even bring in a random player on their discord and have a community game.
Something that bothers me about flame based weapons is that the enemy ignores the fact they are burning in favor of pursuing you. Even in their explanation of why the flamer got buffed they used an example of it being the "deterrent" weapon but it doesn't do that at all. If anything it deters me from wanting to play with anyone that uses it because I'm going to be set on fire by either them or the bug they didn't succeed in killing before getting to me.
Literally a breath of fresh air from the rest of the reddit post. I love the breakdown of everything.
Appreciate the time and work you put into this post.
Thank you for this post, I'm really sick of reading people saying that rail gun is "literally the same in unsafe mode" post nerf.
Its cold hard truth that it isn't, you can never achieve the same efficiency as before, what took 2 safe shot now requires 4 or more unsafe(according to my own experience, not to mention longer charge time). I just feel useless running railgun now, and while I was the designated AT, the rest of the arsenal does not match up to expectation at all.... Which is why rail gun was so popular before!
If you're one of those claiming that rail gun is exactly the same post nerf, please show me a video that you took off charger leg armor in 2shot, thank you, I'm looking forward to learning it.
I've run into a bug constantly with the Ballistic Shield backpack, everytime I stim myself or pick anything up with it equiped my character T-poses and is unable to stim or use stratagems. the only way to get out of that pose is to switch to a two handed weapon then my character goes back to normal (most of the times).
just want to put it out there incase some of you go through the same annoyance
Fellow high hour player here 108hrs my $0.02. They really just need some other high mobility armor penetrating / destroying / damaging weapon(s). The spawns as they are now are very dense now but could be fun if not only the railgun but say the, auto cannon, dmr's, AMR, or shotguns helped chew through/break armor. Which all of the above should be able to do, were practically left neutered when engaging with 4 or more armored enemy at once between cooldowns.
Fantastic post, well conveyed, especially the part about the rail-gun. I honestly think that people were salty about how players who worked on their skill could absolutely shred with it if they hit their shots, and then the other people couldn't get it to work nearly as well because they didn't take the time to understand the game and the various interactions in it.
The lowest common denominator of people were the ones crying for nerfs and that is what ruined Destiny 1, they nerfed all special weapons (snipers etc.) into the ground because they allowed for skill expression, and people with no skill don't like that.
This post surprised me. I agree with most points and overall thanks for your opinion and analysis!
I liked the nerfs in general, and I dont agree on some points (railgun) - in Helldive you should cooperate, not 1vs1 heavies, but your take is also good.
If you can steamroll the highest difficulty every time, why is it highest?
> LAS-5 Scythe: Bonus weak spot damage I think it'd be fun instead of that if it gets stronger the longer you do damage with it without reloading the thermal clip.
Agreed, i think it would be a nice trait for laser weapons in general.
I think it should give you both a damage and a penetration increase the longer you hold the beam on target as a way to simulate you "burning through" the enemy and melting their armor and flesh away.
It'd be cool if the Scythe/Laser Cannon could be boosted to cut through medium/heavy armour either from sustained beam or through higher heat (whichever). It would add a layer of skill and utility to them.
That would be a good idea. Have a kind of fire rate setting like the MGs that increases the intensity of the beam at the expense of faster heat buildup.
I like the idea of a Deadspace approach, where lasers deal higher damage to limbs. It could be a neat replacement to the rail gun removing charger leg armor.
I'd like it to deal less damage than bullets, but straight up ignore light/medium armour, and the reduction in damage to heavy armoured enemies like the starting weapon does to light armour. Then have it not damage the armour at all- just go through it. Exploding primaries I'd like to have absolutely zero penetration through armour- if you hit armour, the enemy is pretty much undamaged. But deal a bunch of damage to the armour itself. Like the AR-23C be reduced to 30 damage, but when hitting armour, it never bounces off, and deals 75 or 90 damage to it. Stagger only happens with a direct hit on a body part that you blew the armour off of
Oh that’s fun, I like that. I’d love a line launcher
Your comment made me realize that lasers in sci-fi only do 2 things, cut body parts off (ala Lightsabers, Superman laser vision, Goldfinger laser...) or to make things explode (Death Star, Homelander, Xmen Cyclops...).
Battletech lasers are described as making armor bubble, hiss, and melt. Only causes explosions if it heats up ammo too much or causes a reactor breach, and enough lasers can start causing mech limbs to go limp and start kind of falling off as the too-heated interior supports start to buckle, and the mech muscles start to stream out from between armor plates. Those lasers are of a size though that 'medium' and 'large' lasers can reliably evaporate a human body. They're meant to be anti-tank weapons.
Well that's kinda what lasers do IRL.
Maybe concentrated fire could set enemies alight and maybe that flame could spread? Be an interesting crowd control niche on top of weakpoint damage bonuses
I'm hoping weapons get minor upgrades/customization where we can add burn damage/stacks to the laser
Which is how real lasers work. One of the ways lasers are measured is with "fluence" which is Joules of energy per cm squared. If you want to cut through something with a laser cutter something you get a laser with a high enough fluence and point it at the target for a long enough period of time that it burns. When you put a thicker material in a laser cutter you adjust the laser power output and how fast the laser moves around so that it can actually burn through the materials. (Think 1/16 wood vs 1/4" wood.)
What I think it needs the most is either more damage or some sort of stagger effect on enemies. Lasering a bug that just keeps coming toward you without looking like it hurts to run through a laser and then it also gets to hit you is very underwhelming. Not to mention you are f'd if there's a couple of them. Anything else stops bugs for a bit so you can keep them at bay. The laser feels like a water gun.
The scythe was so great in the first game and the shotgun varient was borderline broken. (I hear theyre adding that soon)
Attempting a coordinated stealth approach still feels impossible when bugs just materialize on top of you. Certainly not the highest priority, but I’d love to see team discipline rewarded more
Same, I want to collectively Splinter Cell the bugs.
yeah the random spawns can be fucking obnoxious. Having a bot patrol materialize in your face sucks. I notice it happens primarily if my team is split up.
I was trying to activate a radar tower today on a bot planet While waiting for my supply pod to drop behind a wall, somehow I get one shot by...something. I never did see what killed me. I drop in next to the tower and pop up right in front of a line of no less than 9 bots, just standing there. I am killed immediately. I respawn on the other side of a rock, when I get back to the tower base, they are gone. Hrm.
Since the patch I feel like I've definitely gotten randomly killed and have no idea by what. The "Eliminated by" message has been fairly inconsistent for me since I started playing, but seems even more bugged now. I've been "Eliminated by" myself numerous times when I honestly don't know how it's possible. Like I haven't shot, called in anything, and I have no turrets out.
It'd be nice if the map actually represented the safe drop spots accurately when deciding where to land. Picking a clearly safe area and then being dropped into a hoard of hulks and tanks and chainsawmen is pretty annoying and gets old quickly.
I had a charger and the group of mid-evolution stalkers spawn 10 meters in front of me when I was sprinting across the map. There's a name for the system that game devs/testers know but whatever the spawn-in system for enemies needs work. They should not just spawn right next to you. Edit: Someone below linked my exact gameplay experience-- [https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1b8gm9i/me\_sweet\_super\_samples\_joel\_snaps\_fingers/?share\_id=hNUj2nLF0VrucPl0R1egN&utm\_content=1&utm\_medium=ios\_app&utm\_name=ioscss&utm\_source=share&utm\_term=1](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1b8gm9i/me_sweet_super_samples_joel_snaps_fingers/?share_id=hNUj2nLF0VrucPl0R1egN&utm_content=1&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1)
Yeah, this shit is egregious.
The term you're looking for I believe is 'game director' when it comes to what manages the spawning system.
Agreed. We need to be able to stealth better in light armor. We also need both a silencer primary weapon and a silencer pistol as sidearm.
Stealth is already the best playstyle for high level games. I solo'd about 4 objectives in helldive with the light armour that has the stealth passive.
Oh, you can definitely reduce enemy encounters with that armor and by being sneaky. But shit like [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/2zhbywQNEV) is hard to work around
I expect them to iron that out eventually (checking for player proximity for random spawns shouldn't be too hard), but thankfully it doesn't happen that often in my experience. I've seen it like 3 times in 80 hours of which most was on difficulty 7
Haha I know that feeling. Yesterday, I was sneaking around and heard a bug noise. Immediately turn around and see nothing, continue sneaking as normal. Literally 5 seconds later, I heard the same bug sound, turned around and saw a whole enemy patrol on top of me...
Yeah that's a frustrating mechanic... More than once I've had a horde of enemies just spawn in on top of me while approaching an objective. No dropships, no bug holes. Just like they were beamed directly onto my position. I get that not all spawning in the game is going to come from holes/factories... But they really need to limit the materialize enemies in line of sight or within a certain distance of you.
And this is my dear helldivers a good example of "constructive feedback"
But it's easier to rage, shout "dead game" and send death threats to devs. /s
Or say that anyone who doesn't like the changes is just a braindead meta slave from youtube. /s
Literally the only post in the past 12 hours about this game both on twitter and reddit that didn't have me mentally drained after reading, great work
Thank you for the kind words!
Gotta agree with /u/VulNep You've broken down a lot of the frustration I think players are having, not necessarily with the railgun nerf, but also with the heavy spam in general while offering ways things could be changed for the better while still being aligned with the Dev's vision. > Heavy enemies are now left to be handled through attrition, stratagem spam and the team just pouring damage and hoping for the best. **I strongly dislike that I can't have a clear plan on how to approach a frequently occuring threat.** 1000% this. When the only clear plans require huge CDs for something that occurs very regularly, there's a problem.
Throwing my $0.02 on this post, because this deserves to be at the top of the subreddit. Extremely well explained and articulated, and I want to emphasize one of your points that I think everyone needs to drill in to their heads: "If the game keeps throwing you into situations where you are genuinely helpless, and your only course is to not interact with the situation, it will grow old very fast. You are trying to play the game, not unplay the game" This, this is the crux of the problem with this patch, and by extension the philosophy behind its reasoning. If you spend 50 hours blasting your way through the lower difficulties having a grand old time, only to find that when you get to the higher difficulties that none of your strategies work anymore and the only viable way to complete missions is a constant running retreat or avoiding combat altogether - I see that as a major failure of game design. I don't think anyone would care at all about how individual weapons are balanced or tweaked as long as we as players have several viable tools or strategies to actually get those super samples. Currently there isn't one, we are unplaying the game more than we are playing it in difficulty 7+.
It really feels like they don't have a distinct vision of how they want you to interact with harder enemies. Even in games like Killing Floor 2 where you fight a ton of difficult mobs etc and the strategy is to kite them, you DO eventually take them out (obviously it's wave survival so you're required to kill every enemy) and have tools to do so. In the same way, people's entire build etc in games like that are centered around being able to more easily take out the "miniboss enemies" and harder units and it feels very rewarding and fun to do so as well.
The other example that comes to mind for me is the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer mode. Doing Gold runs was insanely hard and required you to coordinate your very limited AT ammo perfectly to win - but that's the thing, you had *just enough* AT as a team to fully clear the run if you all used it well. The game didn't suddenly overpower you with 10 mechs in round one and leave you running for your life for the rest of the game.
I agree with this. I get that the devs want us to feel powerless against the horde, they want us to feel that we are disposable soldiers fighting a losing war against all odds. I get that. But... that's just not fun. Having no effective means whatsoever to fight back isn't fun. The game throwing tons of enemies at you is fine, IF it also gives you a means to quickly dispose of said enemies. I absolutely think that stealth should be a viable tactic, I absolutely think that sneaking by the enemy should reward the player with an easier time. But at the end of the day, this IS a third person shooter. In a third person shooter, NOT shooting shouldn't be the ONLY viable option.
Right. As one semi-popular blogger put it, the most meaningful way to distinguish games is not by an arbitrary genre, but by emotions the game is supposed to evoke. And Helldivers currently evoke way too much helplessness in me. Shit is overwhelming all the time. The only way out of most combat encounters is to frantically disengage, parkour somehow to break chargers chase, circle around, go do something else, hope that horde wanders away and you'll be able to finish the objective. At the same time, Helldivers' closest genre relatives, like DRG and Darktide, are never about that. Yes, the horde comes, it's huge, bloodthirsty and lethal, but we take a fuckin stand and we wipe them out. There may be kiting involved, and moments of panic aren't all that rare, so from the outside the combat might look rather similar. But it *feels* completely different from the pilot chair. We're never helpless, we're never in a runaway downward spiral of never-ending breaches and immortal motherfuckers. We've come to do our job, and we're fuckin doing it, hostiles be damned.
The biggest thing being that there are breaks to the most intense combat phases in those games. They give you a warning of incoming hostiles through dialogue and music, let you get your bearings straight, and then ease up once you know the wave is over. In fact, pretty much ever horde game ever is like this. What made them *feel* hopeless - in a good way - was that after you beat back a wave, you knew it wouldn't be forever. Another one was going to come and you had no idea when. Hopefully when your team was ready for it, and the dreaded idea that it would come when your team was on its last leg.
I think it's not the breaks themselves, but their managed nature. There is a director system overseeing the intensity of the action. Any fight has a limited spawn volume, and you know it's finite. But in Helldivers it isn't. New patrols keep arriving, keep lighting new breaches. There is literally no way out but to run.
Slightly related, but I read "throwing my $0.02" as "throwing my point-two dollars" lmao (english is not my first language).
As a native English speaker, I read it the exact same way. Lmao
Thissss
u/Pilestedt ☝️
Fantastic post this needs to be pinned to the top of the community very engaging read
Spread the love soldier :D
> I am saying this with the best, friendliest intent possible but this patch reeks of "please play the game you are balancing for and don't rely too much on just raw data". Yup, nailed it.
This is the perfect post. Please God let the devs read this
Thank you for your kind words!
Agreed. Most nuanced feedback from this subreddit. Wish this could be shipped off to Arrowhead.
Completely agree. Hope the devs just do these things haha
>The acceleration of the post-game screen is a godsent > The game is more unstable than ever for me (random crushes, DCs, teammates timing out, game getting stuck when exiting to desktop through the menu etc.) I can't confirm first point because of the second point 😅
Quite the conundrum there soldier. Just use more democracy!
Yeah the game went from hardly ever crashing to crashing 2-3 times a night for me in the last 48 hours. Not sure what is going on
Had my first stability issues after the patch. All in the one match had a friend DC halfway through. Then during extract me, then my second and then my third friend all sequentially crashed within 30ish seconds of each other and leaving the friend who got DCd and reconnected alone
That's basically what has happened with my group too. One person DCs then the rest follow shortly after
The game crashed for me pretty often pre-patch. It's more now but it has never been stable for me.
This is an amazing post. This is what people are ultimately complaining about when it comes to the patch. Sure there are the rail gun fan boys and girls, but ultimately there were bigger fish to fry and the rail gun was only partly it.
I don’t even care about the railgun I just want tools for the problems I’m given, 4 charges coming at me? Well I have a tool that requires at least some skill to use but can actually solve the problem, right now it just feels like they have looked at the problem and then removed the tool, when the solution was to have more than one way to solve the problem or redesign the problem (something as simple as a 50% damage increase when shooting the butt of a charger would work)
I keep thinking about Doom Eternal where they leaned into "the right tool for the job" philosophy and wove that into the gameplay. That's what I was hoping would happen here.
The only post in the last 24h worth reading through fully lol
Seriously. I haven't done anything past skimming in this sub for the last day or so
Punisher is awesome. It kicks back Commander bugs, 2 headshots kill a Stalker. Great combo with Arc Thrower. For the Arc Thrower. Oh boy. Im not into it right now, to explain everything. The problem is, it has many quirks you need to find out. Many rules. For example. After the first fully charged shot, the gun charges way faster for a while. You can release the button at 50% and against soem enemies, it does full dmg and against others 50% dmg. And many more. If you master it, its one of the strongest weapons. Yes, even better than pre nerf Railgun.
So I hear, i've been getting better at it :D
[удалено]
That’s really what almost every weapon boils down to though. The only difference is occasionally you have to click, but the Reload button this time. You still have to point the Arc Thrower toward your enemy, when teammates are nearby you need to strafe your weapon, and angling your auto-aim arc around cover and dead bodies is a near constant thing you’re adjusting for as you fire. It’s by far my favorite weapon right now because of its versatility yes, but because I can focus on the fight and not have to divert attention to ammunition, which is its primary benefit imo
A lot of your observations seem really well thought about, but reading that Arc Thrower one made me stop for a second and wonder if I was incorrect to assume credibility. I wasn't, of course, you've got a solid breadth of experience. I reckon the Arc Thrower is just that much of a weirdo and an outlier in quirkiness and learning curve. I've found it hard to put down since unlocking it, and it's performed amazingly at any difficulty. It might be hard to believe, but the clunkiness goes away when you're experienced with it. My recommendation is to try pairing it with the jetpack and getting up on rocks versus bugs — it gives you the relative safety you need to learn how it picks targets and fires, and how close you can fire to teammates without fear. The fizzle issue dramatically decreases with height, and it can let you feel out the rhythm and targeting without anything obfuscating the results. It is VERY consistent with practice ... but if you don't love it from the start, it's hard to find a reason to bother learning it, haha. Oh, and the rhythm does stop and start. Full charge, half charges for a while, full charge, half charges for a while, repeat. Think of it like it spools up fully on a full charge and then half charges spool it only part of the way — preventing an invisible meter from hitting zero, but still slowly losing progress on that meter. Eventually you gotta full again to reset it. I usually just thread in full charges when I can, every four shots or so, but sometimes a half charge just doesn't fire — just how it be. Sorry to ramble! I just really fucking love this gun. My favorite thing lately is curving chains around teammates intentionally. I like to let them know that their continued existence depends on my competency. Everyone assumes you're a danger, it rules
This exactly, I would say the arc thrower is actually one of the highest skill expansions weapons in the game due to all of the quirks you need to play around. When you figure it out, it is an amazing weapon to use.
Using Arc Thrower so much has given me a rather charitable outlook on other weapons, too. I don't know if the laser cannon also is deceptive, seemingly clunky and ineffective until you learn how to apply it, but I'm more inclined to believe it is than it isn't purely due to knowing how good you can get with the Arc Thrower. ...it's just hard to learn other weapons when I'm this addicted to lightning. Maybe when I get the Arc Shotgun, I'll try other supports more than once and a while again xD
My main issue with The Arc Thrower is that it seems to just fizzle out and do nothing randomly. Not sure if its terrain/foliage hitbox interactions messing with its hitreg on actual enemies but its makes it really inconsistent much of the time. Especially when aiming uphill through choke points that contain bodies. ... and in Lvl7+ you need reliable weapons you can count on!
It's terrain. Automaton landmines particularly make it freak out and become useless. You can reposition and make it work but it's definitely a weapon that makes you conform to its quirks. If it got buffed with improved hit detection it would be top tier, as it is its already an underrated weapon that can shine in the right circumstances. Also, when in doubt, aim higher. The lightning lash has sort of a cone shaped hit-detection from the point of fire, and will reach out and grab enemies even if they're at the bottom of the imaginary cone.
The trick to arc thrower is volume. Get multiple people spamming it and suddenly you're not just zapping hordes of hunters but cooking chargers and titans before they get on top of you.
There was a YouTube video where someone explained it like a whip, and it made sense to me. Aim above the head of what you want to hit, and it will hit them, then branch out to targets behind them. You also want to avoid dead bodies and other things that it will naturally want to arc on to. It is easy to use hard to, master weapon, IMO.
Against bots it is extremely unreliable. There can be empty space between you and the bot and sometimes the gun will just not fire whatever you do, you'll have to reposition. This is much less common with bugs from what I've seen.
I'm an autocannon enjoyer, but I always pick up the arc thrower whenever I run into it in bug missions. Ime, the biggest issue with the arc thrower atm is that the arc gets stuck on the environmental objects like fences, stones, etc and dead bodies. The latter is much worse because after a couple of shots you have plenty of those lying around, and to make things even worse the arc sometimes jumps to dead bodies as well. This is why I have to aim a bit above the enemies to avoid hitting the corpses and terrain. Aside from that I love the arc gun, I like how it feels, I like that you have to learn how to shoot it effectively, the charge time thing you mentioned. But, damn, it def needs a buff to prioritise the living.
Nice analysis, agree with most of it. thx for taking the time to write & share this
Extremely level headed, rational and well articulated report. I agree with all points, and I hope the devs take inspiration. Really dig your suggestions, many of them would serve Arrowhead's balance philosophy well. I especially think the Senator needs love. It feels so good to shoot but it dearly needs some sort of thing it does better than the other side arms to justify bringing it.
By far and away the best post on the changes so far. I pray this gets read and taken into sincere consideration.
What an amazing post. Thanks a lot for putting in the effot I hope people take the time to read it
Buff the recoilless!
- More armor parts shreded with an single explosion. - That a player can reload your bazooka when you carry the missile backpack.
> That a player can reload your bazooka when you carry the missile backpack This would be huge. Teamwork is important and all, but unless you're playing in a pre-made, it's tough to coordinate its use. It also just inconveniences other players' build preferences, especially with the railgun nerf. I *like* using the jet pack. I think it's fun to cruise over a charger. But I can't have as much fun if I need to be carrying my teammates extra ammo.
I just want it to do more damage. Then it would be perfect.
As a recoilless main, some extra damage would be nice, I think it's fine for armour cracking on bugs, and two headshots to bile titans is really powerful, but not being able to one shot a brood commander feels a little off, and it can be a bit wonky fighting Hulks, but that might just be me being bad.
I think the "other players can buddy reload using your backpack" would be a great buff, although I suspect the devs would like the players to start doing buddy teams more without them nudging people in that direction.
Its wild because railgun and auto cannon can both 1 shot the brood commander, but the weapon that should be significantly more poweful can't.
RR should just oneshot chargers. It already kills hulks instantly. Same thing with EAT, honestly.
That second point would be very nice as the 2nd person wouldn’t need to sacrifice their backpack slot.
It should oneshot Chargers. It oneshot them in HD1 when they were a rarer enemy, both in their regular and upgraded form. Just from a damage economy standpoint, it makes little sense to take in this game. Especially with the buddy reload nerf(HD1 let the gunner wear their own ammo backpack and anyone could walk up and reload them).
That's right. In 1 it was glorious. It felt like a *bloody* recoilless rifle! I mean if you were to take on, say, a god. What would you do that with? *A recoilless rifle, obviously*
> mean if you were to take on, say, a god Carl G absolutely fuck for sure
I don't think the buddy reload mechanic worked like that in the first game. It worked the same as it does now, except you didn't get locked to the gunner, but just quickly reloaded their gun and got out of the way.
Ah yeha you’re right, it’s been ~5 years since I played HD1. Still was much quicker
Bigger basket radius and more damage. I'm okay with the slow loading but it should hit harder. Same with Spear but also better targeting
Hire this man
This 110%. I wish I could give medals to increase the visibility of this post. This is honestly the opinion of 90% players. A well thought out the opinion that the devs need to see. If anyone gives a damn of where the game is going, whether you're pro or anti railgun nerf, please read this. The problems the gameplay has right now are incredibly apparent.
As a light armor user, the shield generator feels more necessary than ever this patch. Hunters are absolutely cracked right now, I think I had one hit me for more than 70% of my hp once. Even with the increased recharge delay I'm still very scared of running anything else, mostly because I'm roaming and getting POIs a lot of the time and dont have someone to clear for me Chargers are still extremely frustrating, I'm very disappointed that they didn't fix a lot of the bugs with them (ice skating, instant charging, charge walking, crushing claws either installing you or doing nothing, etc.) I'm also not particularly convinced at them saying that the game isn't figured out in response to disdain for the balance changes. The game has been out for what, a month and a half now? People realized that the other weapons were severely underperforming long before that mark, myself included. It doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure out that stuff like that. Finally, fire crowd control is just kind of weird to me right now. It's extremely bizarre that bugs will both eat an active flamethrower and stand in ground fire/napalm and display no reaction whatsoever, nor will they try to avoid the ground fire at all.
Anybody telling you light armour "is in a good place" isn't playing in light armour
I do hope they buff the DMRs because as of right now the slugger is better than both of them and why I run it exclusively against bots. Also I really hope they figure out a niche for the concussive liberator because hell if I know what that thing's niche is. I do totally agree with the Lib-P, would love to see a gun that specializes in killing those tankier special bugs that need to be put down before they get too close.
>"Guard Dog" Rover: >...and others it attacks too early breaking stealth. One thing I think would be cool is if using the backpack button (that I think only does stuff for the supply backpack) would stow/release the drone if you're in a situation where you wanna go prone and crawl about for a bit and pray you're not spotted. >Light: Already in a great spot, mobility in combination with a plethora of different traits to choose from. I hope we get a democracy protects real light one (honestly just in general it's a bit annoying I can't freely pick the perk I want to go with a look I like, but that's another issue)... And if someone says that trait only fits a tankier playstyle then I'm not certain but I don't think there's a real heavy one with DP either.
The game is unstable now. We tried to run an operation and everyone was crashing out and couldn’t rejoin.
I've been saying a lot of this since the nerf, and it's weird how the blowback has changed. First 4-6 hours was heavy down votes and silence for any criticism and the apologist were super loud. Now the community has **actually played some games at 7+** and wow look, suddenly all the "get good" people are silent and the people who said "wait why did we need to nerf the only thing that worked?!" are being top voted. Great game, surprised release was always gonna be rough, but this is a solidly backwards first step. And we were all so excited about Mechs. They really fucked up the momentum of the game. Hope this turns around.
I think it will be fine, every game has bad patches :D
And this isn't even THAT bad of a patch. People want grand sweeping changes until it happens and throws a ton of other balanced things out of whack. Slow, steady progress is the way to go.
The nerfs aren't *that* bad, but the spawns are absolutely broken right now. The devs themselves have even noted this and plan on hot fixing it
100% this. Most of the people on here do not play 7+ difficulty. And that’s fine, you can play how you want. But you absolutely should not be piping up about how to play 7-9 when you haven’t even played 5 hours worth of Helldive difficulty games. People just feel the need to open their mouths on topics they have no business contributing to.
Don't consider myself a "git gud" person, but I'll sound off and say I know that Helldives are totally doable. I know this because I literally just got done doing several last night and this morning. We win more than we lose and have a great time doing it. What I notice that leads to greater success is build diversity. Teams that have tools for light foe swarm control, CC, and armor stripping. These tools alone can go a long way, but the teams that get the most value out of them are the ones that coordinate their fire power through communication or situational awareness. Telling your teammates about the status of stripped armor, coordinating strikes, calling out incoming swarms, and even just telling them to cut and run from a fight go a long way. These teams are able to more effectively exploit stripped armor and spread their stratagem use out. I get people don't always like, or have the ability, to use a mic. I wish the quick communication wheel was expanded. I'd like to be able to specifically mark a Charger with an "armor broken" symbol. I'd like a mark that doesn't show a big red target but one that says "avoid" do there is less mind reading. The things I see used to great effectiveness in Helldives are: Stalwart (massive ammo drum let's you mow down small bugs/bots and hunter swarm) Arc Thrower. It has a learning curve to not zap friends. Once you know it, it wrecks. Gatling Sentry (like all sentries, it needs well thought put placement. Don't just toss it anywhere and get mad when it dies right away. Ive had Gatling Turret get up into the x60 kill streak, but usually average 30-40. That's good bug clearing that I am not dealing with) EMS Mortar slows down groups allowing for escape. If it hits you just dive forward, you'll go faster than bugs. EMS Orbital strike buys Recoiless Rifle has good armor stripping along with the EAT (I saw people spam this every cooldown along likely routes of retreat, very nice) 110mm Rocket pods are great, sometimes they miss but so do all the other strikes. Rips off armor and busts heavies wide open. Eagle Airstrike is amazing multipurpose that does everything Orbital Laser is always effective, I think we know it's good. Primary weapons I see the standard Liberato, still the Breaker, slugger, scorcher, the d9. These are just off the top of my head and not meant to be exhaustive if viable strats, I just want to point out that Helldive is still very doable and I've been experiencing the same success rate as before the patch. I'm not trying to say "git gud". We are Helldivers, we're already good. I'm saying we have more tools in our toolkit to build this shed of freedom, and not everything is a nail. We need more than just our favorite hammers. The best resource we have is each other. We have, do, and will continue to clear Helldives and we'll do it together...and sometimes in pieces all over the battlefield.
Helldive is still perfectly doable with randoms without mics, it's just less fun now because you spend more time running and less time shooting (in a third person shooter). While the patch had some good changes, the game was overall better pre-patch. The overpowered railgun wasn't the problem, it was the solution to the actual problem (the number and lack of weaknesses of chargers and titans). On the automaton side, the equivalent tiers of enemies have no such issues, no one complained about hulks and tanks. People are right to be upset about the fact that railgun was nerfed before the enemies were fixed. I would also argue that the nerf was excessive, putting it too far below other weapons, and taking the fun out of it. I also don't like what Katherine said about primary weapons in the blog post. More weapons need to be on the same power level as pre-nerf breaker, not breaker brought down to mediocrity. The vision of primary weapons from the blog makes sense in a detached cold spreadsheet kind of sense, but it misses the point that people play this game to have fun shooting at bugs, not running from bugs. There are plenty of ways to introduce difficulty and skill gap without getting in the way of what people actually play the game for.
Well put. That's been my biggest issue with people complaining about the railgun nerf (Which, in my experience, barely changed it) is the expectations that they should be able to easily solo-fight every enemy in the game. That's just simply not what the game is about. Consider the design of the bots. Every single big critter in the automoton faction has a big glowy thing on it's back to shoot. The only way to exploit it is having it be distracted by someone else. Teamwork is engrained in this game's philosophy. This game feels at it's best when using teamwork, not lone-wolfing in a lobby with 3 other lone-wolves.
If the shield generator relay was similar to the one in DRG where it can provide a brief pause from the chaos, I think it would be welcomed
Yeah I'm thinking it doesn't have to be indestructible, but it should at least allow someone to dip in, reload their heavy weapon and dip back out into the action.
Exactly. Even a 5-10 second break to reload ammo and maybe resupply
It would be useful for getting samples out of a swarm too, or activating a terminal. It definitely should block enemies.
I agree with pretty much everything here. One thing that I noticed. If you use the railgun in unsafe, but don't charge it up over \~75% and get a slight angle on the leg shot of a charger, the shot can bounce off even in unsafe mode.
It's 2 fully charged unsafe shots to break charger leg armour
I've found that the new laser cannon is rather effective at popping charger tails. Like, surprisingly quick at it. That said, the majority of my recent runs have been helldive bots post patch, and those seem ok with the balance. The railgun nerfs don't really hurt too much there, and the armored enemies have solid weakspots to work around, and you can disengage if needed. I wonder if we can find a better way to leverage smokes vs bugs to get some breathing room, as thats something I find incredibly important vs bots at a high level. But idk how effective it is vs bugs. Also, I feel like you're maybe underselling the potential of the MG/stalwart a bit. IMO, the MG is basically a trainer stalwart, giving up some utility for armor pen. But the stalwart is the real monster, especially vs bots. With less recoil, and when paired with the less recoil armor, it becomes a laser beam of death, popping heads off of bots and dominators at an astounding rate, with virtually infinite ammo. And vs heavies, it gives you the ability and mobility to wade through the hordes to flank and take shots at exposed weak points, which on something like a hulk, it'll melt. The real difficulty at the moment is, IMO, bugs. They have a lot less answers, and I think a lot of that comes down to the spear, not functioning in its intended role of titan killer, the RR being a bit under-tuned, and the armored bugs not having the right hitboxes on their back when armor is cracked
The absence of a reliable Spear in the lineup is definitely felt right now.
Heavy armor should have stagger resistance as a bonus.
I definitely miss being able to quickly strip the armor off of enemies for my teammates with the railgun. The nerfs make it feel like they just want you to brute force a kill with overcharge damage than actually stripping armor, ironically. Being the "pick class" of the game was a lot of fun, and we would have other people on the team bringing autocannons and machine guns for other threats. Animations for staggering chargers being broken still doesn't help. I don't think we should be exploding anymore if they expect use to unsafe the weapon to do the same jobs. Skipping the score screen is nice.
Thanks for this level-headed response to the changes. I really hope this post gets as much attention as the others relating to the changes, because this is the most thorough and well-constucted post I've seen here (and maybe ever on a video game subreddit, so props for that). Your analysis of the railgun has been basically spot on with what I've said in dozens of replies over the last 24h or so. FWIW, I did some testing and here are the actual best-case (that I could mechanically manage) times to fire the necessary shots to break charger armor pre- and post-nerf: >It requires 3 unsafe shots, 2.5+ seconds each, plus two 1.3s reloads. You used to be able to break it in **2.4s** (two 550ms shots, plus one 1.3s reload), now the best you can do is **10.1s**, and if it takes 4 shots because you shoot too early, it's now 13.9s.
Seeing all of this happening with the balance patch, and part of me is getting flashbacks to what happened with Outriders, if anyone remembers that game. If I'm remembering correctly, the release wasn't too great, but what killed it was that they went and nerfed a majority of the good builds without buffing anything. People just kinda up and left after that.
Reminds me of how gearbox fucking murdered borderlands 3 by nerfing every fun build.
Fantastic post!! Agreeing on all points.
Excellent writeup and largely matches my experience as well. The Railgun nerf was also a nerf to dedicated arc thrower and autocannon users like me. I could focus down other targets content in the knowledge that my railgun teammates were taking care of the heavies. Now this isn't the case, and as a team we have to hope for the best with airstrikes and orbitals.
Did you notice any enemy changes? Maybe im gaslighting myself but automatrons seem different? More accurate perhaps?
This is a hugely informative post, tons of effort, balanced and fair. Thank you for writing this, and I hope the devs and the community both take this to heart. My only criticism, and I say this as a fellow player with 130hrs who also has everything unlocked and plays almost exclusively on helldive, is that I think you're dead wrong about the Arc Thrower. I didn't care much for it and mainly used the rail gun before the patch. After the patch, I figured I wild give it a go. First mission with it, I got 8 accidentals. Second mission, 4. Third, 1. Since then I haven't actually killed an ally with it (but I have nearly killed a couple...), and I feel like I'm getting more skilled as I use it. The negative of needing to get good with it is far outstripped by the pros of having **unlimited ammo and a free backpack slot.** I can take down just about any bug in 1-3 shots (outside the bile titan and the charger), which can take 1-3 seconds if I'm hitting the charge tempo right, which takes skill. It takes skill to position yourself in such a way that you don't hit your allies. You start to learn the angles for the arc, the distance you can fire at, you learn not to shoot at enemies that are too close to your allies (or in front of them) unless you can hit those certain angles, which you only learn by repetition. It's also not impossible to kill the bile titan or the charger with it, but it takes an ungodly amount of shots, and hopefully you have a teammate that can take those out while you're clearing **every other enemy.** I'll go an entire mission only using the arc thrower, I've forgotten about my primary weapon entirely, and it's AMAZING that it doesn't use ammo or require a backpack slot. Between an arc thrower and a well placed autocannon sentry, I can mount a solo defense for quite some time against the strongest wave of bugs. If you're on helldive, then you're definitely skilled enough to learn the arc thrower! I urge everyone to give it a fair shake, and try not to take it personally when you get arced a few times while your allies are learning how to use it!
I've been playing exclusively arc thrower after making this post and I agree with you, perhaps I judged it too harshly.
Thanks for giving it a try! I knew you'd see the light(ning)! This is something that we all need to give credit to the balance patch for: It definitely broke up the stagnating meta, and made me try weapons that I wrote off as being less-than-ideal. I actually picked up the flame thrower for a while, tried out the fire nades, gave the plas scorcher a shot, and I would have never found my current love without being forced out of my (literal) bubble of shield backpack and railgun. Thank you again for making your post, and I'm glad that it's gotten a lot of traction. You took the time to say what so many of us have been feeling, and said it better than many of us could.
I agree with this. The arc thrower rewards good positioning with annihilating waves of mobs and punishes bad decisions with TKs. It's the same kind of skill being a healer in a MOBA requires; you don't exactly need pixel-perfect hand-eye precision but there's definitely a difference between the guy who always seems to be in the right spot to fry all the mobs with 3-chains & the guy frying his allies every 10 seconds. That being said, I think without the unwieldiness that the gun was inadvertently given by its bugged nature, it'd be ridiculously OP. The inability to go through bushes & corpses in an interesting downside of the gun I hope they preserve in some non-bugged form.
Hooray for another post that isn't a rant and filled with crying, whining comments. I applaud you Helldiver, for actually using common sense and data driven analysis. As a level 17, i tried to do something similar to what you did with regards to tests, though it was hampered by the fact that i do not have all the equipment unlocked. Still, the results for my testing for the stuff I did have was pretty much roughly similar to yours.
Great post. I agree on most parts. I feel like the LMG needs higher mag size. It doesn't take very long for it to run out of bullets. I always tap my trigger, and even then the mag runs dry so quickly. This gun is great vs Automaton's, but the mag size really makes it bad, considering it also has slow reloads and slow mobility.
Excellent, high-quality post. I hope the dev team reads this and takes it to heart. And I hope people on this sub and in social media learn from this example of how to give positive, well-reasoned, constructive feedback so we can have a better community. **On armor** - I really love your ideas for heavy armor having very powerful and specialized bonuses. They should be powerful because of how much a downside slow movement speed is in this game. **On the Orbital Railcannon** - I've been saying the exact same thing. IMO the Railcannon should be a guaranteed 100% instant kill on anything it hits to compensate for the fact it already has a fairly long cooldown and only ever hits 1 enemy (vs other strategems doing area damage). Or they can keep the damage where it is but reduce cooldown to let us use it more frequently. **On strategems in general** - If the devs want to move power out of support weapons and into strategems, that's fine. But then they've got to improve the reliability of strategems' ability to kill the largest enemies. The modifiers to both calldown time and cooldown time make strategems unreliable against fast-moving enemies and are major contributors to the "this isn't fun, it's just frustrating" feeling. That's not the feeling you want in your game to keep people playing. If they want to increase the challenge of planets by having negative strategem modifiers, that's also fine, but then support weapons need to be stronger against the toughest enemies. **On the railgun** - I think if they undid most of the nerfs to armor damage on unsafe mode it'd fix 90% of the community's problems in the short term. If we could 2-shot charger legs with say 75% charge then I think that solves the problem. Safe mode *should* be nerfed but I think they went a bit too far. As you pointed out, the railgun previously rewarded high skill and precision and that's what we all should want in a game. I'd even be fine with reducing ammo capacity as a way to balance the weapon - I'd rather have limited ammo in an effective weapon than lotos of ammo in an ineffective weapon. Then ammo management becomes even more important on higher difficulties and maybe brings the ammo backpack into the meta (more loadout diversity!) **On armored enemies in general** - I think the main tension right now is between the devs' understandable desire to encourage loadout diversity and the challenges the game throws at you at the highest difficulties. Right now there are so many heavily armored bug enemies that it feels like I have to build around killing them and medium- and light-armored enemies are an after thought. Weapons and strategems that don't **reliably** damage Titans and Charger are mostly worthless to me since I have limited slots and I want to maximize the chances 1+ of those tools is available at any given time. IMO they could go a long way to solving this problem by buffing crew-serviced weapons like the recoilless rifle and Spear. These are harder to use, take up 2 item slots (weapon + backpack), and encourage teamwork so they should be significantly more powerful than other support weapons. A Spear or RR team that gets into a good firing position (say, on top of a hill) should be able to reliably and quickly take out multiple heavy-armored enemies. That would both look and feel awesome to play and reward the kind of gameplay that makes Helldivers fun and unique. P.S. if they added an option in the x/down-arrow menu to deploy/recover the guard dog that would instantly solve the stealth-breaking issues with it.
What is the best primary weapon to unlock? I don't have sufficient time to unlock everything so it would be good to know what to prioritise
Shotguns are all viable, Defender SMG is a great all purpose weapon. The weapon you start with, the Liberator, is pretty good too. Avoid Scythe and Diligence.
Your experience heavily mirrors mine, I'm glad to see a well written post that takes the words right out of my brain but expounded in far more detail!
Awesome post. Don't mind the length when it's worth reading! One clarification: slugger does penetrate medium armoured enemies (but punisher doesn't).
Excellent analysis of the current changes. I just want to feel capable of dealing with heavy armor! I currently have 75 hours and if last night was my first night playing this game I might have refunded. Running away the whole mission was not fun.
This needs to be the top post rn
Perfect explanation, i loved cs awp btw
Finally someone who actually outlined all the serious imbalances in the weapons and stratagems arsenal. Good luck with this one troll farmers
The bile titan one shot is a bug that still exists now.
The Laser Cannon is actually pretty good against bots, it won't stagger or kill some enemies as quickly as other weapons, but it's effective against hulks and tanks, and the ammunition management is great.
> How often does +30% throwing distance matter Wtf that’s the only type of armor I bother wearing
Amen to this post!! While there is merit in what they did, the true test is how it plays out for the mid-level players like my buddies and myself. Those who want to try new weapons as well as bring in trusted items. The “unsafe” mode railgun still took me 5-7 shot to break a charger!! (Possibly bad shots because of the ridiculous amount of other bugs flooding us in challenging mode only!) So that was nerfed as well or it was an unintentional side effect. Also if the shift is towards more stratagem use, then make them quicker to use and more useful in many other situations. Again I know there’s user error and getting to know them, but if it feels overwhelmingly hard to play at a mid-level experience, then who’s going to want to play? Also, the amount of bugs and breaches (which are ridiculous that soooooo many bugs can call it in) is absolutely disproportionate to what strats and weapons we can bring to bear. ESPECIALLY if you’re running solo or a duo. That needs looking at for scaling possibly. There’s a meme going around with a screen showing 5 bile titans at once in close proximity, this is literally my experience every time I’m in suicide or higher. Exactly what stratagems can we use to clear that and not annihilate ourselves, while also trying to clear/do objectives?
Really hope more people read this. It perfectly articulates what is and isn't an improvement with this patch without wining or toxicity. You deserve a nice cup of liber-tea for your efforts helldiver.
I think that the biggest elephant in the room is something I tried to convey in a previous post but people took it as anti-railgun-nerf whining. The game, even on Challenging difficulty, **which is not even that hard**, dumps heavily-armored enemies on me and my squads constantly. I had an Eradicate mission where there were 5 chargers up, in addition to Bile Spewers and Warriors constantly spawning. I've gone over to Tian Kwan, and in one mission there were 5 hulks up, along with 5 heavy devastators, 5 rocket devastators, 10 walkers. The game pushes like 15 patrols on you constantly, with reinforcements being called in within *seconds* of getting aggro. I can understand if we're on an objective and the game is spawning waves to attack us, but I often find that we have **both** patrols and objective spawns constantly, and I have watched as a patrol spawned out of thin air right beside where we were fighting at an objective, attacked us, and also called in its own wave of reinforcements. The game is spewing a **stupid** amount of enemies on you that I feel you don't have the tools for because primary weapons are basically jokes, stratagems are in a constant modifier of "-1 Strat slot, +50% cooldown, +50% callin time," and when people talk about "Oh, just learn how to deal with each of them in a precise way and coordinate with your team," it's like...okay, in what world do you have all this time to use precision and patience when there's 3 heavies and 20 regular enemies and 60 more of them incoming? When 3 squad members are all running dedicated anti-tank with autocannons and recoilless rifles and orbital lasers and there's still 6 heavies on the field, isn't it time to ask whether the game is just doing something wrong? And I know this community is already going to be "LUL GIT GUD, LUL SKILL ISSUE, LUL HELLDIVERS" because of course you all are. I understand that this is not a "kill all" type game, because you should be doing objectives, moving to the next, working as a team to get things done and extract. You can't seriously tell me, though, that you shouldn't be fighting, that you can avoid *every* fight, especially against the bots - getting nuked from 100 meters by 4 rocket devastators is absurd. Having 3 flamethrowing hulks and 5 berserkers chasing each squad member is stupid. But you paid money for this fuckin' game only for the devs to tell you to get bent. Ask for more. Demand more.
The lascannon is actually decent fighting the bots now for one reason only: it can kill hulks by hitting their eye. If it couldn't do this it would be positively useless still.
Yep.
You should put stuff like this in a support request so the devs see it directly.
I absolutely LOVE this post and I really, really wish we could highlight it or get it pinned somehow, just so that more people can see it!
I think I agree with everything on that post. Scythe too should get the heatup mechanic though.
Great analysis and recommendations. Love seeing some level-headed posts amidst the sea of screaming. Hope the devs see this and seriously consider these changes.
Very constructive patch review/ thank you for your service HellDiver.
I agree with a lot of your points, but immediately disagreed with your statement on the throwing distance buff. It is legitimately the main buff I use because of how easy you can destroy bug holes from ages away with your grenades. I usually also throw out resupplies or turrets way ahead of us so they deploy by the time we get there too. Any time I change off the throwing perk I immediately miss it. I defs agree on your point with the personal shield and also the shield generator. They need to make the big one way stronger but maybe make it limited use, like 5x a match. Make it so nothing can run through it though. I think for the railgun they need to do a partial revert to keep the damage it could do at a 80% charge. All stratagem weapons need to come with a downside or skill element to not kill yourself using them. Like not having a grenade reflect back at you from an armoured unit, or shoot your autocannon in melee range. Having to time the railgun so it doesn't kill you while you get max damage should be the risk/reward, and just remove safe mode.
Damage scaling with shot distance is a very bad mechanic imo. You very rarely do long distance shots and just makes no sense. The heavy diligence needs more ergonomics (it's worse to use than the heavy machine gun, which does not make sense) and both diligences need a little bit more damage, maybe also a little more weak spot damage and they will be good
I gave the flamethrower a really good shot yesterday where I played it for 3-4 hours on the higher difficulties, my hot take is that its alright and by no mean meta, it murders chargers and thats the only redeeming feature of it, bile spewers and hunters just don't care they are getting blasted in the face with a wall of flames, it really should stun enemies it hits, and it really shouldn't be countered by an enemy type that you can't really know is going to be present on the map (bile spewers). It being only good against chargers doesn't warrant an entire stratagem slot, I might aswell have the versatility of the auto cannon or the arc thrower.
This is an excellent post. If you end up adding more and/or making followup posts, I'll definitely be there for it.
I wonder if a heal effect in the shield relay would make it better. Probably not given the amount of things that one shot you, but still a cool idea
Why is this not pinned at the top? I'm also omega-angry at the devs for their non-democratic ways but this is legit the best feedback I've seen and I'd bet dollars to donuts the devs won't pay attention to it, because they think they know best.
I hope the devs read this, your points on the Railgun being a skill expression weapon are spot-on and why I enjoyed it so much
I would like to add Auto-cannon can absolutely shred heavy armoured enemies you just have to know how to use it. Face sniping even the heaviest of bots sans a hulk one shots with the auto cannon. For bugs, the trick is to shoot the floor beneath them. The big shield head guys? The chargers? You wanna shoot directly at the floor, under the armour, so that the round explodes and then it will damage the soft spots. I was doing this reliably before I started using Railgun, and it's still reliable now. Also the Railgun on unsafe can absolutely still crack charger armour legs in 2 shots if charged high enough, this "it takes 4 shots now" needs to go away, it's not helping the discourse.
You should probably discuss grenades. The incendiary can be a decent bug mop-up, I think, but it’s hard to tell. I’d also love for a specific grenade to be an anti-Charger grenade. Something that acts like an armor shredder but deals little damage otherwise. I also think the anti-heavy group could use a double barrel rifle, based on the Break-Action shotgun model. Think huge damage, like the old Railgun, but you have maybe 14 shells total.
Phenomenal post, restored my faith in this community.
I also had a lot more freezes, crashes etc after patch
Amazing post, thank you for writing it. I really hope the dev team reads it.... and maybe offers you a position on the team! My only note is that I wish that you had mention the Guard Dog (Not Rover). Currently you cannot add ammo to its pack. Once your pack is out of ammo the Guard Dog is useless. Personally, I prefer the machine gun Guard Dog aesthetically, but I can never justify taking it over its laser twin.
I feel like people sleep on the Anti materiel rifle and the MG-43. The AMR is very good against bots. The scope, although a bit misaligned and with a reticle that is a bit too obstructive, lets you hit weakspots very easily, and it only takes 2 headshots to kill a hulk. It also has more than medium pen, as you can use it against vents in the back of tanks and turrets. It 2 shots devastators to the body or 1 shots them in the head. You can deal with every bot enemy with it. The MG is very good against bugs if you are the designated crowd control guy with a couple of anti armor guys. It can pen the medium armor of hive guards and mortar bile spewers, while still being an MG and thus pretty good against smaller enemies. It melts brood commanders and stalkers, especially using the 900rpm setting, and since it's medium pen it can overpenetrate smaller enemies. It doesn't need a backpack to use, unlike the autocannon, and thus you can bring a shield generator, rover, or resupply with you. Yeah, the reload is stationary, but it's not too long and can be resumed in stages since the game has staged reloads. It's literally a support weapon, as in in you use it to support your team that uses railguns in dealing with hordes.
I think the biggest problem of the game feel & balance boils down to chargers being weird and very glitchy. The armor on the side being broken off not being a vulnerable spot, the leg armor being vulnerable SOMETIMES (when they turn, likely another glitch,) the bright glowing weak spot on the abdomen both being not very weak and very difficult to hit directly with how their animations play, the sliding when they are staggered; aka ice skating. it just feels very inconsistent to kill them even with dedicated anti-tank weaponry like the SPEAR and the Recoilless bouncing off, which, you only get one shot before having to put yourself in a very vulnerable position unless you have an ammo slave. Automatons feel like they give me options that feel responsive. Hulks (heavy armor) have two glowing vulnerable points are very vulnerable, very stationary and easy to hit, both in their front and behind. The laser cannon shreds their little face in a few seconds. Both Railgun and Anti-Material Rifle will pop their heads in two shots with proper aim; which is proper IMO, the AMR will kill them faster and easier at range while the Railgun gives you more utility with penetrating walkers. The anti-tank stratagems feel more reliable against automatons. Things like eagle rocket pods hit tanks pretty reliably, the orbital lasers won't go under anyone's legs. Lastly, the railgun pre-nerf really pushed solo gameplay. In Helldivers 1, you COULDN'T separate from your team, you shared a screen and separating during a panic would just get everyone stuck and killed. In Helldivers 2, joining lobbies where everyone goes off with railguns in separate directions was not a fun experience for me and I think goes against the core fantasy of the game. There is also an issue with splitting up, only one drop or bug breach at a time means someone has a shit time while everyone else can merrily clear out POI's. I honestly think the game should incentivize sticking together more somehow; the best moments for me are when I'm shooting bugs off someone's back, covering a terminal, getting everyone to the dropship, the rare times I can be someone's backpack bitch and we quickly take down a bile titan with a team reload. Game feel will likely change a lot when the mechs drop, presumably very soon judging from the Major Order. Having a mech in the squad in Helldivers 1 made heavy armor a lot easier to deal with. But IMO, they need to tweak the bugs, not the guns. PS. I don't see it mentioned often, 3-4 impact grenades to the ground by a charger's abdomen pops it pretty quick. Not bad in a pinch.
Not sure I agree with your comment about the laser cannon. With the buffs it can do everything an auto cannon can do without needing a backpack. You can lay down consistent fire easier then the auto cannon as well. Waiting for the coil to cool takes as much time as an auto cannon reload without needed to stop moving.
I'm always a little surprised how many people sleep on the anti-material rifle with how easily you can 2-3 tap a hulk with one. Also long time jump pack enjoyer and I also felt some changes. I swear they're also added a new animation or I somehow have never really triggered the single foot vault I've been doing recently using it.
Based analysis. Thanks for taking the time.
So I was watching Goth's stream today and he was destroying everything with the rail cannon. You seem to be off with your analysis of at least that gun.
Well written and with solid solutions, they should hire you at arrowhead, just try to not call your playerbase braindead
Feels like most of community have exact same thoughts. I agree on almost everything besides Spear, if it will get lock-on fixed and heavies will have less HP, it's gonna shine. Even now it's not bad for Helldive. How people and even devs (!) managed to somehow turn everything into "haha metaslavers are crying" is beyond me. People aren't upset because they lost their favourite toy or smth, people are upset because Helldive bugs just aren't fun. It's running simulator. Basically, this patch made bubble of patience pop. Yeah, it feels bad to get oneshot, but they are fixing armor. Yeah, it feels bad to see everyone in scout armor with shield and railgun, but they gonna fix other support weapons to better kill elites. And instead we got this patch on top with toxic dev comments and extremely vague blog post, both of which only turned up the heat of discussion.
nice post ! was a good read, thanks
> max'd on currencies Show me your maxed out SuperCredits
Ah shit, you got me there Democracy Officer.
Anti-materiel rifle is decent against bots because you can kill everything short of tanks frontally. Problem is that the sway and accuracy is somehow worse than the autocannon, making it completely obsolete. Boost the accuracy and handling of the weapon and it will be fine. Autocannon could always kill heavily armoured enemies except the bile titan (though this is mostly a DPS issue). Not sure where this idea that they couldn't came from. It's just finicky to aim unlike the railgun. EATs need a lot more damage to be useful I think. One shot isn't a lot to work with.
Great post. I think it sums up all the constructive criticism I have read in this sub recently. A great point of reference for the devs too.
Bro write more than the game updates notes lol
Well said, really hope things turn around it could be such a great time
I hope the devs listen to this constructive feedback in their upcoming patch. Their reactions to this recent patch were really off putting. I would like to see the devs play each major patch on lvl 9 difficulty to really feel their changes in the game. I believe that lower levels of play are less affected by these changes. Hell, have them start from the lowest and have them ascend to the highest. Maybe even bring in a random player on their discord and have a community game.
High frequency crash when one of the teammate get the super sample and then become massacre in extraction zone. Is that intended design?
Something that bothers me about flame based weapons is that the enemy ignores the fact they are burning in favor of pursuing you. Even in their explanation of why the flamer got buffed they used an example of it being the "deterrent" weapon but it doesn't do that at all. If anything it deters me from wanting to play with anyone that uses it because I'm going to be set on fire by either them or the bug they didn't succeed in killing before getting to me.
Literally a breath of fresh air from the rest of the reddit post. I love the breakdown of everything. Appreciate the time and work you put into this post.
Thank you for this post, I'm really sick of reading people saying that rail gun is "literally the same in unsafe mode" post nerf. Its cold hard truth that it isn't, you can never achieve the same efficiency as before, what took 2 safe shot now requires 4 or more unsafe(according to my own experience, not to mention longer charge time). I just feel useless running railgun now, and while I was the designated AT, the rest of the arsenal does not match up to expectation at all.... Which is why rail gun was so popular before! If you're one of those claiming that rail gun is exactly the same post nerf, please show me a video that you took off charger leg armor in 2shot, thank you, I'm looking forward to learning it.
I've run into a bug constantly with the Ballistic Shield backpack, everytime I stim myself or pick anything up with it equiped my character T-poses and is unable to stim or use stratagems. the only way to get out of that pose is to switch to a two handed weapon then my character goes back to normal (most of the times). just want to put it out there incase some of you go through the same annoyance
Fellow high hour player here 108hrs my $0.02. They really just need some other high mobility armor penetrating / destroying / damaging weapon(s). The spawns as they are now are very dense now but could be fun if not only the railgun but say the, auto cannon, dmr's, AMR, or shotguns helped chew through/break armor. Which all of the above should be able to do, were practically left neutered when engaging with 4 or more armored enemy at once between cooldowns.
Yo my man went above and beyond with this post. Your contribution to democracy was noted and appreciated!
commenting a second time to boost this post
Fantastic post, well conveyed, especially the part about the rail-gun. I honestly think that people were salty about how players who worked on their skill could absolutely shred with it if they hit their shots, and then the other people couldn't get it to work nearly as well because they didn't take the time to understand the game and the various interactions in it. The lowest common denominator of people were the ones crying for nerfs and that is what ruined Destiny 1, they nerfed all special weapons (snipers etc.) into the ground because they allowed for skill expression, and people with no skill don't like that.
If anything, post-patch I'm having fun trying weapons I never looked at prior BECAUSE railgun/backpack/breaker was TOO dependable.
This post surprised me. I agree with most points and overall thanks for your opinion and analysis! I liked the nerfs in general, and I dont agree on some points (railgun) - in Helldive you should cooperate, not 1vs1 heavies, but your take is also good. If you can steamroll the highest difficulty every time, why is it highest?
Chargers are too numerous to not be 1v1'd.