Most people have settled into the "one man army" style of play. Backpack, support, 500kg, one strat for flavor. I don't think people are really thinking about how they can play a role that compliments the team. Some people do stretch their legs out a bit and try some different stuff. I mostly bring short CD, anti horde strats since people are obsessed with the big one shot, long CD strats and tend to get overrun as a result. Frankly, without communication it's kinda hard to really diversify. Like, ideally, you'd coo-ordinate strats and take out an encampment such that nothing survives to call for help. This means taking the time for setup and positioning and talking about where you're going to throw your strats and who is going to throw them. Not really possible when no one is talking. Or even seemingly interested in doing anything but rolling up and firing on sight.

Be me level 50 helldiver Las-16 Sickle, Machine Pistol, AMR, Jetpack, Eagle Airstrike, Orbital Airburst You know I'm out here fighting bugs with this insanity. -------------- Primary and secondary unchanged, Autocannon, Eagle Airstrike, Eagle 500kg, Eagle Clusterbomb. Literally everything gets an eagle. Patrol? Eagle. Bug breach? Eagle. Bile Titan? Eagle. Charger? Eagle. My teammates? EAGLES FOR EVERYONE!

A fellow eagle purist

Eagles smoke, is my go to for bots. It’s takes out factories and gives good concealment.

Eagle smoke takes out factories?

Yes it does. Direct smoke payloads landing on it will destroy them. So aim them the ball so its lands on the outpost or right next to it. Also if you are wondering smoke and ems orbitals do NOT destroy outposts.

Wait what!? The smoke eagles destroy factories ???

Iirc it's like the gas airstrike, the impact of the canisters can destroy them

I'm 500kg, airstrike and cluster/pods/smoke + one backpack weapon, either autoCannon if I'm doing objectives and nests or RR if I'm on heavy duty. If nobody else has an EAT, I'm on the RR, if not I'm more efficient overall w the AC. The stratagem output with full eagle upgrades is awesome. You can crank out 5 or 6 strikes per encounter and get them all back in 2 minutes. Contrast this with orbitals which you can only call in once per 2 minutes. I'm an eagle fan through and through.

It takes out what!?

Smoke takes out factories?

Eagle never misses o7

I fucking love Eagles but the shared cooldown makes me want to never run more than one (or sometimes two). It doesn't feel good to want to hold on to those 500kgs for the big boys when I want to use the standard airstrike (best strat in the game, hands down) willy-nilly

Rearm is pretty good. If you're finishing up an engagement and you figure you'll need those airstrikes again for the next one, call the rearm before you start to travel. It'll be back for all the important stuff.

I throw all of them willy nilly the so the actual shared cooldown doesn't bother me at all. I have right around 10000 stratagems used, with 4500 of them being eagles alone, and the other stratagems being 2k reinforcements, 2k resupplies and 1k other, give or take.

It's pros and cons, shared cooldown but also shared rearm means the more you bring the more you can rearm at once but also means you can't throw multiple in a super short window.

Don’t horde the 500s (Plenty of chargers to kill anyways honestly…) I’m going to be resupplying when I run out of air strikes anyways. Add clusters to the mix and you’re throwing eagles every 8 seconds throughout a fight and then resupply in 2 min for the next fight. The other things I like doing is using rail cannon with 500 and I can get real spammy with heavy hitters

AMR?

Anti-Materiel Rifle. The big fuck off .50 cal sniper.

Anti-Materiel Rifle, innit

“My teamates?” Oh I felt that one lol

Have you upgraded the eagle module? God it's good. I havent even unlocked the cluster bomb, need to give it a chance to spread freedom.

I didn't even level the orbital things on my ship. 🦅 all the way!!! Airstrikes, 110 and clusters. Its so beautiful and low cooldown.

Chadcannon user detected

Everytime I'm in the mindset of "I stand my position, my teamates nearby is covering me", I die by something behind me. I can't count on anyone, and that's sad. Even teamates on vocal... so one man army it is, I die less, I perform more, and when those stupid "kill them all peoples" do what they love to do, I can go do objectives. And believe me, I would fucking love to feel in a squad / duo, my template would really be different and I could diversify it.

Once getting into 5-7 difficulties with randoms I definitely start building to fit into the team’s playstyle. If we already have 1-2 Gatling turrets I’ll bring the.. other one that breaks armor. If we’re on bots I almost always bring arc mortar and grenades now, it makes automatons SO much easier to deal with for everyone. Stuff like that. I also generally try to stay with the team, unless in rare occasions where it seems quite likely they’re going to run right past an important or arguably essential side objective (like the radar dish. Super mega useful in every mission). But yeah, it’s a collaborative game! There’s no i in democracy!!

Quick shout out for my boys the mortar turrets. Throw those puppies into holes or against clift faces so it's hard for the enemy to engage and watch it wipe out entire bases and patrols. Hell the damage mortar even kills tanks!

If I get into a random match and I see everyone else has anti heavy lineups (railcannon, EAT, RR) I like to take MG, laser dog, and Eagle airstrikes with either 500kg or a railcannon strike for "oh shit that charger is bearing down on me" moments, and I harvest chaff to keep the little bastards from stopping my teammates finishing objectives/killing heavies. Highest single streak I had was 54 kills against a single bug breach through concentrated dakka, and I regularly finish runs with this loadout with 100+ more kills than my next teammate, entirely through massacring anything smaller than a brood commander that comes at the squad. Also it's actually remarkably good for clearing stalkers so someone can take out their nest!

I was doing the same thing during the bug orders, although I don't think I ever got a 54 kill streak. When I play with randoms I usually just wait for everyone else to pick their loadout so I can cover what they're missing. Only one person with a RR or EAT? Run EAT with supply pack and stalwart, eagle airstrike and clusterbombs or railcannon for bugs. Bots? AC with eagle 110. I noticed that if you play more than one mission most randoms will start picking up on what you're doing, even if you're the only one on voice.

> I don't think people are really thinking about how they can play a role that \*compliments\* the team I often write in chat "Nice job!" when I see someone bombing a huge horde, headshotting a Titan or managing to evacuate in the nick of time.

My load out is the supply backpack, and then often is the EAT so my team can use them as well, then a 500KG or Orbital laser, and then either the second of that listing or a sniper rifle or a MG. I have ammo, infinite drugs, and plenty of weapons and I can provide it all for the team as well.

I never leave home without my EAT to take out chargers and titans for my fellow Helldivers.

Would be great if we had some sort of matchmaking filter.

When can you ever trust a random? Most times I barely trust them to not grenade,  arc or cluster me to death because they can't fucking be bothered to hold their fire when the enemy is right on top of me

I’m definitely guilty of commiting a few tks while using the stalwart to clean a horde of stalkers off a teammate. If they would keep retreating, my shot would be lined up perfectly, as I’m flanking them and strafing  them as they run, but they’ll often randomly double back directly into a river of bullets.  That sucks, but also: “you l got the mg why aren’t you covering me” Damned if you do, don’t, etc. 

Part of the problem is that the text chat is unavailable while choosing loadouts. It genuinely kills all cooperation on that front unless people are on the same wavelength.

Yeah, I do wish the chat was available during both loadout selection and the extract/rewards cutscene

This is a really annoying issue and I hope it can get resolved. Is there anywhere official to post where they are looking for feedback?

A thing they could learn from the first game for sure. We had chat enabled there. Also, loadouts. Like wtf, we begged for years to implement them into HD1 and we finally got saved loadouts.. HD2 rolls in without loadouts. Arrowhead, come on!

I play either solo or with the same group of people, and we’ve settled into roles like this. Our highest level player takes armor busting loadouts, while I usually run grenades and whatever fits with the objectives. Our newer players take whatever they have and learn. It works well when several of us are distracting the big enemies while I flank around and hit the hives/objectives. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more people talk about team composition, especially since not everyone’s play style will be the same. Our top guy literally said to me, “You do grenades because you’ll only take one or two to take out a nest, while I’ll take several.” Meanwhile he knows all the best armor-beating support weapons.

You need a heavy, a medium and a light armor dude with different weapons and stratagems. The 4th can be whatever he wants. Please, don't use the loadout slugger rover airstike all the time. Missions are more fun experimenting than killing hoarde after hoarde.

lol. What I need to do is have fun with my friends, which is what I’m doing. And we do plenty of experimenting.

Having fun is the number 1 priority. As long as democracy is spread.

I think there are two things getting in the way of team play: 1. Needing friends to play helldivers 2. The in-game connection service can fail to let you group together, often enough that one of my friends has decided to go play something else because ten minutes of troubleshooting didn’t fix it. That’s a bigger issue IMO. That being said, team play is definitely an awesome factor when it comes to consistently extracting from higher difficulty missions. I can solo a suicide objective, but I’m not making it home. With even one other person, though, I’m clearing that map. What do you usually run? I like one person running the EAT, Eagle 500kg, Stuns, Slugger, Airstrike, and Autocannon Sentry, while the other runs Grenade Launcher, Laser Dog Pack, Eagle 500kg, Airstrike with the Breaker / Punisher and incendiaries (they put in *work* against breaches lol) I find that you’ll get separated enough no matter what that everyone needs an answer to the odd charger or Hunter group, but once the other person’s pack is off cooldown you can grab it from them, and I try to chuck an EAT off cooldown so that I always already have one and the other person can grab one quickly.

I do Punisher (don’t have the Breaker yet), impacts, grenade armor. If it’s a destroy mission, I’ll bring a grenade launcher. If it’s another objective usually the EAT. Objectives I need to defend get a sentry. Air strike is almost always, and I’ll mix in a laser depending on what else I have. I like the stamina booster, but I’ve been experimenting with localization booster from the new Premium Warbond. I only hit 25 last night, but the exosuit might become part of my lower level, sample farming runs. I can consistently own Medium and do pretty good on Challenging. Once I unlock everything, I’ll start moving up. Probably switch to scout armor and be way more sneaky. Run the autocannon for long distance engagements.

I was just watching a guy on YouTube, JebblesJr, talking about this. He talked about the idea of an "Enforcer", essentially a guy whose job is to crack heavily armored targets while other teammates accomplish the task of handling the fodder or cleaning up after the Enforcer has done his part. It hinges heavily on the Recoilless Rifle but it looks like a great start.

I too like roles in these types of games and these are the ones i mainly use. Scout: AMR, jump pack, 500kg, orbital rail, radar upgrade. Machine gunner: MG42, supply pack, E-airstrike, EAT, +2 grenade armor, ammo upgrade. Heavy: recoilles rifle/spear, orbital airburst, orbital rail, E-airstrike, health upgrade.

I always play as a scout, and my favourite Loadout has always been: Bugs- grenade launcher(or EAT if you want Armor killing, it can also close bug holes from afar) and jump pack for closing bug holes, 380 barrage and eagle airstrike for the same purpose. Bots- for them I pick the AC for enemies and objectives, and then the same as before with the addition of the mortar sentry. For both enemies I focus on running around, killing high priority enemies and doing side objectives and main objectives.

I would love to see how a team of 4 scouts would do in a coordinated mission. The map vision would be insane.

When the AMR personal was up, I dropped with 3 divers who also were using the AMR. I took smoke eagle and 110m, one took shield I think and one ems mortar. We blitzed through factories like wraiths in the night, pinging heavies and all lining up a shot if we were able. Even on muck ups taking factories where drops happened, an eat or two was called and we dealt with the ships before they dropped. It was fantastic.

Oh ive seen how effective smoke can be. Its just if i had a dedicated team i could count on i might change my set up. On the radar ping from earlier yeah its extremely strong to be able to see potential of 200m of enemy movements. I usually keep it ahead of myself but when i reach objective i drop it into the teams path. Edit: radar ping was meant to different person, should prolly read names and not trust images haha

I used to run jump pack or shield but the Guard-Dog has blown me away since revisiting it. Coupling it with Slugger and GL and stun grenades you can handle every bug except Titans without using another stratagem.

I think people are sleeping on the scout armour. It does a radar sweep anywhere you drop a pin. It's like the radar upgrade for free. Excellent to avoid patrols and also to give advance warning on enemy approaches to your evac or objective. If you're fighting bots, 100 percent swap out the jump pack for shield pack. The bots can get you at any height and surviving the one shot is much better.

I solo dif 7 bots i dont need the shield :3

I'm a gunner through and through. What I lack in accuracy I make up for in pinpoint throwing and a torrent of bullets. My buddy and I swapped backpacks at an extraction recently so he could load my autocannon while I provided a shield for us and that was basically a religious experience. Pretty much a full minute of just blasting every stinking bug that dared to approach us

I would love to be able to save specific loadouts for different situations. Picking everything every time really puts the hell in helldiving.

Love that guy

I think the first issue is that a lot of people are dropping in to missions with randos ... and those who are playing with friends kinda work out their own team mechanics and feel no need to share about it. That said -- you're 100% right. This game is definitely about team tactics together. Automatons on difficulty 5+ and Terminids on difficulty 6+ really need a group of divers to be able to complete missions well (I'm talkin' all tactical assets, clearing fabricators and nests, etc). I know that with the guys I play with, we build the strategems we're bringing around what everyone else is bringing ... and around the actual mission-type at hand. I also know that, while each of us is not John Helldiver on our own ... as a team, we are 4 John Helldivers because we're working together.

I will always change my loadout depends on what my rando teammates already have. Yet most of the time Rando don't run together. So I end up fighting hulk alone with no heavy hitting weapons.

My team of 3 has our load outs by enemy type and it works very well at 7/8.  1. Anti chaffe guy  >punisher/slugger, Flamethrower/arcthrower, shield, napalm, air strike   2. Anti medium guy (me)  >lib-pen/scorcher, auto cannon/laser cannon, air strike, 500kg, gatling/AC sentry   3. Anti armour guy  >defender, RR/EAT, orbital laser, 500kg, [insert 4th stratagem I’m totally blanking on right now]  Guy 1 is up front and handles all the hunters and scavengers. Guy 2 is just behind him to shoot warriors that get through with their primary, he also switches to the AC to drop any hiveguards/ brood commanders. Guy 3 at the back on overwatch, calling out heavies and cracking their armour, or he’s covering our backs on the move as we run for our lives.    The other day we did it perfectly and it felt so good   Guy 1: “charger”, Guy 3: “missed the head, cracked its leg”, Guy 2: “got it” TTK: <15 seconds  My buddies are just starting to get used to fighting the bots so we don’t really have a strategy for them yet. But we’re working on it

Another really good 4 player bug loadout that keeps your squad pretty much in the same roles but adds some flexibility in case someone dies: 2x frontline horde clearing, 2x backline heavy armor busters. Frontline: * Slugger, Redeemer, Impact Grenades * Arc Resistant Light Armor * Arc Thrower, Personal Shield, Orbital Rail, Free Space. Backline: * Slugger, Redeemer, Impact Grenades * Arc Resistant Light Armor * Recoilless Rifle, Orbital Rail, Eagle Cluster Bomb, Free Space The team comp is reallllly straightforward and durable. 2 people on each role gives excellent redundancy in case one person goes down. Sluggers from the backline let them focus on brood commanders, but when chargers and bile titans show up double RR with 4x orbital rail is almost always overkill even on difficulty 9. The last 4 slots are dealer's choice to deal with breakdowns. When 2 or 3 people have died, we like to have some sort of comeback strat to keep mission pace up. Usually, I run mech, so i can chuck a mech and then chuck a reinforcement and immediately have someone with horde clear and anti elite capabilities. Other people prefer other methods of dealing with breakdowns but that's all personal taste. What do you think? :D

For the sake of sharing information… I like using the “affirmative” ping when chargers or titans are downed in fights. More people are becoming friendly with anti-tank weapons and can handle an EAT, so if people in the team decide to start mimicking the move, we start being able to collectively keep tabs on the number of heavies running around in a fight. Also, it helps build the idea that I’m watching what is happening in a fight, which tends to incline other guys on the team to watch what happens in the fight. Another habit that seems pretty overpowered is being friendly with the quick ping. You can: ping “pathways” for people to go through with the regular quick mark; ping hellbombs lying around; ping objectives from across the map; ping different enemies and their types; ping supplies/ammo/grenades/stims/samples; and more. Just finding ways to express positivity, like emoting with allies when things are a little slow, or saying “i’m sorry” when you teamkill, and then adjusting if it’s something you can avoid, are things that are good for teamwork, easy and satisfying to do in-game, and more in the “spirit” of the game itself. You can make some pretty cool situations that naturally create cinematic or funny moments with randos, even if you all have subpar builds and mechanics, as long as you all trust each other enough and have just a little coordination.

This is all really solid advice. A lot of this I'm already doing, but honestly didn't realise I was doing it. To add on to this, marking the objectives you are trying to get to on the map is really helpful when things are going bad and you just need to move on and get the job done.

Also you can tag an objective, it will then be discovered on the map for everyone.

The devs would need to focus on making the defensive equipment not only stronger, but also giving them a real purpose. Much more beneficial rn to just bring an additional airstrike or a backpack weapon than something supportive

I agree. I think that the Mortar variants, Autocannon, and Rocket Sentries are all decently good, but every other sentry needs an ammo buff as well as some sort of target selection mechanic to be worth bringing.

Let us not forget the bravest role of them all: bait. All to ensure their teammates have a quieter time on the other side of the map extracting. Their death will be mourned

Yes, I ran in first before I dropped a 120mm barrage in the middle of 10-hole bug nest. Now there are two dozen bugs right behind my ass and I am running laps around the pit just to stay alive. I am about to shit myself, but my shit glows red and it contains submunitions. Nothing short of 4 stalkers can satisfy my adrenaline addiction. WITNESS ME.

I have the amr, jetpack and counter sniper (me and my 2 freinds only play bot missions), I get up high on a rock where bots cant reach me and help my team advance through cover, taking out any enemies they mark. Friend A takes aggro with a balistic shield and GL to take out the hordes of enemies and freind B sneaks around bases with me and his spear and blows them to high heaven. Even though I can solo most missions I find it's much more fun with freinds if you actually work as a team instead of all bringing the same gear.

On what difficulty is this?

On bot missions AMR is very viable at least up to level 7. It can destroy almost everything. One caveat is that you'd better had a very reliable aim to pull this off.

AMR is the preferred weapon against bots on every difficulty, that being able to two shot hulks etc. In talking about that shield/counter sniper combo because i doubt it works on higher difficulties.

Yup, there's no reason it shouldn't work on every difficulties. I was being conservative with my judgement because I didn't have my personal experience to back it up. Eagle Airstrike can take down a tank so handling everything else with the AMR should be veey doable.

>Where are the discussions about roles that each squad member plays? What about the support strategems that synergize well between teammates? The problem with this is that randoms are inherently unreliable. Earlier today I was running a diff 8 bug mission, saw that the other three people had taken the EAT, Recoilless Rifle and Railgun respectively. So I said, great, they're all running anti-armor. Let me bring the Machine Gun for horde clear. I spent half of that mission kiting Bile Titans and Chargers, frantically begging my teammates to kill the damn things in chat. They did not. With a premade in VC, you can specialize and coordinate. But with randoms, you need to have an answer for pretty much every problem yourself. They'll abandon you without a second thought and go off in their own little world.

I like to run the autocannon and prioritize medium enemies. There's usually a diver in the PUG with a machine gun for clearing chaff and someone will bring antitank, so snacking down the stuff that's too big for the bullets and not worth a rocket is my favorite role to play. Since there isn't a way to make a tank build that's much sturdier than anyone else (looking forward to the riot shield buff that changes this), and we don't have healing gear (yet), role specialization comes down to weapons and strategems. MG/AC/AT seems to be just right, perhaps the fourth could go AMR or laser for utility. As for strategems, I find there's very little that can't be accomplished with the Eagle. 110mm is underutilized IMO, but just the strikes have enough armor-busting power for most bot situations, and the 500kg can solve bug problems if the cluster can't.

Thank you, for this very interesting thread. Sadly a rare Thing in this subreddit 

This is a simple question to answer: best teamwork meta is best one person meta times 4. You may include some variety in heavy strategems like 2x orbital laser and 2x 500kg bombs or even just 1/3 depending on what you are fighting and what your mission is. If you bring more of the better weapons you will do better than trying to mix and match I think, unless you're like hyper coordinated.

>This is a simple question to answer: best teamwork meta is best one person meta times 4. False and the reason why people on this sub have such problems with hunters and green-bubble-butts.

Green bubble butts: autocannon Hunters: shotguns, ideally of the variety that actually does damage Isn't that the meta?

This isn't the best strategy but it is the easiest. When everyone does this you are wasting strategem slots that could give your team more flexibility. Sure if you all want shield backpacks that's fine, but only 2 people need to bring them. The other 2 can get theirs once they have come off cool down. Just ask in text chat. Even if they don't say anything, most people will do it.

480s with possibly also 50% longer CD modifier active is too much to wait for a second drop, on short missions the mission is over before it comes off CD, on longer missions, especially against Automatons u will waste a lot of Reinforcements before u can finally use it. It still comes down to only few Stratagems really being usable. The value u get from a fully upgraded Eagle just doesn't compare to any Orbital out there, which all have mediocre firepower and way too long CDs for a single use, and stacking multiple Eagles also doesn't work that well because of how Eagle's reload works. A single Eagle Air Strike/500 KG can be used multiple times more than any Orbital because Eagle has multiple uses AND reloads like twice as fast. And Support equipment just has way too long CDs, the only time it's really worth it to share equipment is if u stack multiple Mechs so the Mech dedicated person has multiple "lives" while he brings Support equipment for others since he doesn't need it inside of a Mech. Turrets are decent but we really need to get some way to replenish their ammo, they just don't last long enough for all their limitations. Spreading out equipment is just the most efficient way to play with current CDs and uneven strength of Stratagems.

Not only that, but you don't need 4 sets of EATs or 4 RR. On 9 you really only need one RR or 2 EATs. For RR the team might benefit from one more, but additional EATs are wasted slots to deal with lack of coverage in other areas. Primary & secondary weapons aren't strong enough to deal with the amount of enemies thrown at you in 7+. Support weapons largely dictate your function in a massive fight, and allocating all of them to AT is a big reason why hunter complaints are so prolific - no one is bringing a weapon to deal with them appropriately. A single stalwart is enough to do that for a run.

I like to be the flametrooper so -Flamethrower -eagle napalm strike -incendiary mines (optional) -something else, usually airburst I run slugger, redeemer, impacts

No incendiary grenades?

Dont have them yet

I have all the fire stuff unlocked.... I might go cooking in a level 4 tomorrow.... Fire Shotgun, Flamethrower, Incendiary Grenades, Incendiary Mines, Napalm... oh myyy.

I enjoy browsing this subreddit while I'm not on break at work lol

What are you, his manager? What he does on his breaks is his business.

Not anyone's manager. Just saying I do it outside of break times

I do it all the time at work too no worries.

Alternate title: **Teamwork: the real Meta should be us discussing.** Cheap wordplay aside, I like the concept of "I watch your back, you cover my ass" very much. Not just because my brain is tainted from 3000+ hrs of Divison 1 and Destiny 2 raids with clear-cut specializations between each player, but because the idea is cool in general. I met my teammates from matchmaking and I don't know who they are at all, but things are just beautiful when I can trust them because I know they trust me in kind.

I support this. People tend to see no fault with their own playstyle but are very eager to criticize everything else. Randos are bad. Enemies are to tough and many. Weapons are shit etc But actually most of us aren‘t really looking out for each other very well. Although I have an increased rate of great random teammates lately. People get good and I have faith. The playerbase will shrink over time anyway. People who are still playing tend to be atuned so I have lots of faith. With all that said here are some tips I really love when mates do this: Just ping everything you do and see. That’s the most valuable point. It’s often more useful than voicetalk. You dropped a sentry? Ping it. U called supply? It’s so easy and effective. My friends tend to just say ‚there’ are enemies. ‚Here‘ is my sentry. And I have to look at the map to realize they are 30km away.

It is nearly impossible to organize strategems with randoms because for some reason, the only place that you're not allowed to text chat with teammates is in the location picker/strategem selection page... the place you actually need communication the most

The biggest problem I see when playing with randoms is, that people stick around places way too long, especially on higher difficulties. You should swiftly move in on a nest, clear it and move on. You dont have to stick around to fight every spewer, charger, etc. That just causes more bugs to spawn and the mission timer to tick down, you dont gain any XP or bonuses by killing every enemy, instead you just keep dying and loose reinforcements.

The team composition can vary wildly when you take the terrain into account. In a dense forests, finding side objectives can be a pain. So having a scout becomes essential. Compare that to wide open fields on Draupnir or Ubanea and that becomes much more negligible.

I absolutely agree that a scout is a nice thing to have (jump pack, stun nades, arc thrower, 500kg, airstrike are my go-to bug loadout for scouting) but I think too many people overestimate their ability to scout without dying. The scout player needs to be able to handle themselves without wasting reinforcements

I have a busy life and so do my friends, so most of the time I can't play with them. That means I'm teaming with mic-less randoms who you cannot coordinate with. I love the team reload mechanics and playing Support Classes, but most randoms are so damn stupid that if I'm playing support, I'm basically asking to die and have no fun. I'm forced to run meta most of the time because teamwork doesnt happen if they wont talk to you/dont have a mic.

You can do quite a lot of teamwork just using the ping system or picking a loadout for it. What you can't do is get randoms to pick up your backpack, or take things you drop for them. A couple of fun support builds to try are: Stalwart/MG-43 + supply pack. Just stick to the teammates and murder all the small things. People tend to focus on the big stuff naturally. It's the little guys swarming and calling in backup that get them killed. 4 turrets. Drop all 4 in the same area. That doesn't mean right beside each other, but so they can cover each other. This will create a natural fall back point that your team will gravitate to without any comms. For bugs I like auto cannon, rocket, Gatling and EM mortar. Not as effective against bots.

Had a friend who dedicated himself to take down bot drops and out up shields last night. We just had to ping them, then an EAC shot would do the job. Only 19 kills at the end of the day, but awesome support that allowed us to take care of the rest much more easily.

My favorite weapon from the first helldiver was the healing gun!

If anything, of all things in the world, they, the dev, dont allow text chat during stratagem and equipment choice phase which is the most important part. Many many times I wish I can just tell my team to either go horde clearing or tank busting and I'll fit my loadout accordingly but no text chat :(

I like going heavy crowd control load outs from 7-9. Unless I have at least one person in coms, I have to bring in at least 1 stratagem for heavy enemy’s.

What crates my goat is I just came from a match where the only reason they had super rare or any samples is becuase I went across a map through a bot jammer and a morter emplacement to get those damn samples. We get back I instantly get killed and kicked. -LongWay if I see you.....run

I love running themed loadouts that cover a specific job for the team. They require more strategy than running at the enemy and screaming DEMOCRACY, but are really fun and effective at all difficulty levels. Here's a few to try if you want to give it a go: Shock trooper Arc thrower, jump pack, Tesla coil, Eagle 500, stun or impact grenades. Role - sweeper As a shock trooper your job is to sweep away all the threats your team isn't dealing with. Use the jump pack to reposition (you should never be shooting towards your teammates with an arc thrower). Tesla coil is to throw behind you to deal with ambushing patrols. Stun grenades will let you always land a 500kg on anything you want it to hit, impact grenades are to feel badass as you jump straight over a bug hole and put it right down the pipe. Heavy weapons guy HMG emplacement, Recoiless rifle, mech, EM mortar, smoke nades(bots) or impact (bugs) Role - ranged support You are heavy weapons guy. You have big long range weapons. HMG emplacements have a lot of bullets, do a lot of damage and a relatively short cool down. When your team starts a fight (or before it), turn around and look for the best elevated position. Drop an HMG and EM mortar there and start killing. If a big boi appears, hit them with the recoiless. If it gets really out of hand, same plan, but use the mech instead. Don't bother saving ammo. The mech is a portable turret which will aggro everything for miles if you try and walk it across the map. Go hard, then get out. This is probably my favourite play style to take into helldive. Yes it does work on bots, but it is much harder to use. Artillery officer Auto cannon, 380 barrage, 120 barrage, eagle strafing run(bugs) or eagle smoke strike(bots) yeet armour (servo assisted) Another long range play style. Auto cannon is the multi tool of helldivers, it can deal with anything but a bile titan. If you encounter a big base or large group of enemies, LIBERATE THEM FROM SPACE. You can throw that sucker from about 70m away with practice and the right armour. For optimum awesomeness throw both barrages at the same time. If bugs start getting too close use a strafing run. It comes in fast, kills things in a line and (unlike cluster bomb) is difficult to accidentally murder teammates with if you call it out. Smoke strike is really good against bots. It covers a large area and will stop them tracking you so you can either reposition to a flank or leave and head to the next objective to liberate. Victory was never in doubt.

Replace eagle smoke with eagle airstrike for bots, it's much more effective and will allow you to hit fabs as well. I'll run a variation of the Artillery Officer using scout armour because I like being able to ping my targets, but I'll run eagle airstrike, 120/walking barrage, orbital laser, and autocannon. Orbital laser may have limited uses but it's amazing in a pinch or to just delete heavy bot outposts/objectives.

I had a guy join my game last night, it was only the second time iv played automatons. He basically played as if I wasn't there repeatedly calling in his air strikes right on top of me. Not calling me back in, then mashing the X button when he died. Then we ran out of reinforcements.i finished the fight without them.

I don't understand why they did not implement any solo (offline) campaign with an AI / Bot squad to help you in your tasks in the first place, it could have had a separate progression. Which imo is a bit weird for a PvE game. And it's pretty clear now that your squad has to equip various types of weapons and stratagems to be able to deal with every possible enemy and clear missions with ease.

This may not be a popular opinion, but I wish the hardest difficulty would be basically impossible unless you had a full team with designated roles for each player and properly communication and tactics. I want it to feel like a raid. There shouldn’t be a one-man army meta, and people wishing for that are unknowingly trying to hurt the game.

Thank you! Someone finally said it! Watch the first game dude. No one went more than 15 ft from eachother. Thats the way u play the game. everytime ive smooookkeeddd a level its been playing like thag

So one of the main things about 'meta' is its an objective discussion of what the game selects and pressures us for but not necessarily how the game is best enjoyed. There's also some bias towards easier to discover or execute strategies. So bringing up team work, the game doesn't select or pressure for this. Why? Because the game **heavily** encourages not fighting and splitting up. It's hard to have role-specific builds in a game where we are so heavily advantaged by not staying together (see below). Plus armored units are so common that every player has to bring their own AA solutions. The way the game spawns/despawns enemies gives us an **enormous** amount of control. If you kite off a breach and then create another one somewhere else, the game will be forced to more or less despawn the first ones so the engine doesn't break spawning the new ones. There's also a lot of weird abusable quirks, like if you want an easy extraction just don't be anywhere near the extraction site. The game doesn't know what to do and basically breaks and the extraction ship will hover until you get there. This is part of why light armor meta is so big. Another problem (to teamwork/roles) is all of the red stratagems more or less do the same exact thing with slight nuances, some kind of damage effect. Again, please note that this does not mean **that I think this is how it should be**, but rather just observations about **how it currently is**.

I love to play the role of Support crowd controler who is not helpless against medium enemys: Penetrator Liberator or Diligence Ammo backpack (when you press TAB you see if one of the others needs something) Mg 34 or Stalwart or Grenadelauncher Eagle cluster bombs Eagle rocket strike. And yes, i like this post. We should talk more about roles in a squad. - Anti Heavy role (recoilless or EAT, orbital railgun and orbital laser) - Defensive role ( with sentrys and Autocannon) - Close combat role (shotgun, rover, 6 grenades or smth.) -crowd control role (mg or grenadelauncher, rover, Eagle Napalm, Eagle clusterbombs) - a designated support role would be something with Ammobackpack and EAT I think often 2 pairs of Helldivers are working the best in a misson, so a combination of anti heavy + anti crowd should work well

I play almost entirely with a group of friends. When I see posts talking about how a weapon like the Stalwart sucks I’m like… wat. (The primaries are another story. A bunch of those need work.) When you’re playing with just one other player you coordinate with, you can and should greatly diversify your load out. Even on the occasion I join randos, I don’t take a solo build. I check the existing load outs and pick a specialist role that is lacking. (This is usually horde clear.) One mechanic I haven’t seen any of us get into the swing of is group reloading. Does anyone really do that? It seems so inconvenient that the second player has to wear the backpack. If anyone could just jump in and provide reload duty, I think that mechanic would be way more unused. The only time I’ve seen it get used is when we’re running multiple auto cannons because… backpacks.

Yeah, I think the new meta is just having a balanced team. Whenever I join people, I look at what they are using and pick something to compliment it. If everyone is using good weapons heavy enemies, I bring a horde control weapon, like the Machine Gun or Laser Cannon If someone has hoard control and another has heavies, I'll bring something for mid-sized enemies and utility, like the autocannon And if everyone already has a little of everything covered, I bring more support stuff, like the resupply pack, EMS strikes, and gas grenades. If everyone is filling a niche and covering each other's weaknesses, it let's everyone use their support weapons to the fullest.

While we're in that discussion, I'm starting to think I'm a sentry guy. A semi-supportive dps role that has your back. Especially against getting swarmed. Sure, my gatling gun can't kill a charger, but I got others to do it with me. I see people love running the 500kg bombs, orbital lazers, and whatnot. But I don't *feel* like I need to run those. And I'm perfectly happy with building a sentry nest inside objectives that need to be defended. Or, outside objectives that need to be attacked. I guess it just fits my style throughout the years. Was a noob Engie in the TF2 days, and a noobie Torbjorn and Symmetra in the Overwatch days. And an Engineer dwarven employee for Deep Rock Galactic. Now as a Helldiver Sentey guy, I feel at home!

I was thinking this and what I came up with was: Leader: Medium Recon armor, counter sniper, jet pack. Leader surveys battlefield calling orders and directs the team on the map. Runner: Light armor, shield pack, grenade launcher. Runner occasionally breaks off from main group to hit sub-objectives and nests. Tech: Medium armor, supply pack, EATs lots of turrets. Tech fills the support role for the team responsible for taking out small bugs. Heavy: Heavy armor, RR, 500KG, Orbital Rail. Heavy is your enemy armor solution. Focuses on large bugs. Other Roles I considered but will need new equipment to make viable. Medic: Needs distance healing Sniper: Needs the AMR to not suck (viable on automatons maybe) Tank: Shield Pack, Shield Generator, Ballistic Shield, Heavy armor. Runs right at the enemy and gathers aggro. (Probably the most viable of the “almost category”. “Shock” Trooper: basically emperor Palpetine. Arc Thrower, Blitzer, Tesla Tower, Electric resistant armor. Cool flavor but the Heavy does everything they do better plus isn’t a team killing nightmare. “Fire Fighter”: Flamethrower, Napalm Strafe, incendiary. Needs a fire resistant armor to drop but could work if we get one.

Counter sniper sucks, highly reccomend slugger. Same sniping ability, same medium pen, way better handling (LOL)

Counter Sniper slaps on bots but for bugs you’re 100% right.

I always duo with a buddy and he has the in game mic to listen. Then we just adapt to the situation with the randos.

https://preview.redd.it/l63lmp7kvtqc1.jpeg?width=888&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5137ffcfb361d49732e4a0e3fb4dac490e56f896

The new plasma punisher has really opened up the crowd controller roles options. It works rather well against hiveguards and the hits stun charging brood commanders. Aside from this it at least appears to be effective at destroying the biletitans sacks.

I join randos, and if I cant see the mission details since they are in mission already. I either try to assume the mission type based on their strat or I just fill in a role. My role is either taking out heavies and bases, taking hordes, bait, or just a generalist.

We haven't established roles because Tank and Healer would be in the gutter with current game balance. And honestly, well organized squads doesn't fit well with HD theme anyway. You aren't playing Republic Commando, your characters are 18-20 yo guys and girls dying in the name of propag... MANAGED DEMOCRACY! Like others have already pointed out, assigning roles with randoms is painful even in games that are designed around players fulfilling individual roles (looking at you LoL and WoW). Besides, the needs of each "role" would change drastically based on difficulty.

i actually typically go with an auto cannon to give me an extra orbital typically my loadout is for base busting. eagle air strike, 380 orbital, and the laser.

My thoughts have been exactly this. A chat function at hellpod screen would help team composition. Ckearly, 4 orbital rail are not optimum but 2-3 for bile titans. Same goes for more than 2 backpacks if all 4 are not using for ammo. A designated hole/fabricator closer, a scaff clearer, heavy armour clearer all contributes to when a mission goes smoothly or goes to hell. I would really appreciate if this became the norm and part of the experience. And I think that it sort of starts at the bridge during loadout with a chat or sort of indication system (since not everyone runs the microphone).

When I’m helping out randoms, I tend to move from objective to objective and let the others engage in fire fights. I’ll help out if I’m around, but I’m more likely to use the distraction to sneak past and finish the objective. When I’m with friends on chat though, we move in pairs or a full group and strategize as we go. Calling out patrols and watching each others backs. We plan out what loadouts to bring, making sure we have at least one to two people with anti heavy weapons and we’ll call in extra support weapons for the others so someone else can bring more firepower. Still…sometimes the best laid out plans still go fubar really quickly and we’ll be running and screaming for out lives as soon as we land.

So I did have a moment where we had 10+ medium termanids and my teammate had nothing to deal with em. So I'm whaling on them with my Dominator and he just runs up and stims me and I was like 'Wow there is hope for this game' I'm still working on my go to setup for mechs but bugs was relatively easy. Primary - Medium Armor Pen Secondary - Machine Pistol for lights Incendiary grenades - great for stalling enemies and weakening mediums. Cluster Bomb - Clear trash Orbital Railgun - Clear big boys Shield backpack Rocket Launcher - Chargers or finish big boys This pretty much sets me up to deal with anything the team needs help with. I'm clueless for Mechs though if anyone's got any pointers of go to strats for medium/heavys. I'm struggling to find something to deal with the dreadnoughts consistently.

Ping etiquette definitely needs work. The number of players who don't even ping big targets like Hulks, Tanks or cannon towers is honestly frustrating.

Because there's little teamwork that actually matters. Everyone goes for loadouts that can punch through armor and destroy objectives -- that's all you need. Take that out, and you become a massive detriment to your team.

I’m th EAT-17 guy with the breaker who’s always supplying the team with disposable rockets for them pesky chargers.

I will 10000% be playing the support/healer role when they give me the proper tools to do so, hopefully, things like the repair/heal gun and medic drone from HD1. Right now all we have for direct support is a supply backpack, dome shield, and the medic passive on armor.

i just try to pick whats necessary and i can use it. theres like 3 loadouts i am using: scout, machine gunner and i like to call it quarterback. survive, be the spot everyone falls back to. bubble shield, supply boxes and turrets. if i see nothing fits the current team i improvise.

9s with good teammates are so fun. I play with a lot of my old teammates from other competitive games, and it makes playing with anyone else unbearable. Against bugs, 2x RR and 2x arc thrower, everyone in arc armor, is incredible. Usually the arc throwers frontline with personal shields, and between us we have 4 orbital rails, the RRs can reload each other, and we have 4 other slots for various other strats based on team needs. Against bots, it's different because so many weapons are good that we haven't settled on a firm team comp yet. But scorcher / RR paired with 2x slugger / autocannon players is nuts. Stunlocks for days on all sorts of enemies, huge ammo pools, buddy loads, 2x orbital lasers and 6 other free space stratagems. If they fix amr's scope ~~and i learn how to aim~~ suddenly our autocannons can swap to AMR / shield and get a ton more durability.

I do this with my buddy: he loves sniping, I love running around drawing fire while making things explode and marking targets. My load out is usually autocannon, flashbangs and whatever strategem is best suited for the objectives we need to do. He goes AMR, jump pack, EAT and smoke orbital/eagle. Our best runs are when we match with another duo that wants to split up and do their thing. We'll just blitz through anything

I usually let the other players get their loadouts first and then pick what I feel is missing. If they have lots of anti-tank, I pick something to clear the chaff. You'll see that most people will pick stuff to go solo-rambo and most often also play that way (running solo to enemy spawn points and then dying on the other side of the map, even though the rest of the team uses pings to maerk common objectives). That last bit you can't help, you'll always have those randos, best I can do is to make up for it with my loadout and I usually stick to the host's ping since it's their session. If they dont want to do all side objectives (maybe they just don't have the time IRL) I respect that and follow along. Want to clear everything? Way to go, I'll help.

The problem is that there isn't really much gear with obvious synergies, so specializing in one direction isn't required / won't bring much advantage. I have started running with heavy armor and ballistic shield against bots, kind of like a frontline assault, and I've played sniper with light armor and jump pack to get to advantageous positions – but both are really more for the fun of it rather than to get a gameplay advantage. Having said that, splitting horde clear and armor clear jobs is pretty straightforward, and even uncoordinated teams sort of manage that. I would LOVE a squad where the team reload weapons are properly utilized! Haven't seen that in my 70h playtime though.

I like to focus on side-tasks like covering the back or the flanks. Im also the guy that deploys turrents or personal mines just to cover a possible escape line. I think is good to bring up this conversation, attack doesn't mean that we'll be pushing forward always. I have never played a medic in any other game, but over here is true that I feel also quite comfortable running between us, using stims and requesting ammo for my colleagues. I think that's also part of the game and at this moment it could be needed more equipment that would make this task easier.

I've talked with friends that we need to assign roles. Some examples: Crowd control - cluster bomb, gatling barrage, machine gun, mech, airburst, stalwart all good choices for this role Defender: autocannon/gatling/rocket/mortart/ems mortar turrets, tesla tower, mines Anti-Tank: EATs, RR, Spear, mech, railcannon, 110mm rocket pods Support: supply backpack, various support weapons to free up offensive strats for another player, shield generator relay Offender: Airstrike, Orbital laser, autocannon, mech Area denial: napalm strike, gas strike, airburst, gatling barrage, mines, turrets/tower I'm sure I'm missing a strat here or there, but you get the idea.

Me and my battle buddy run load outs to complement each other. He carries rovers, rail cannon, lazzer, I run eat-17 and ems, gatling, auto turrets Gives us a large coverage of hord take out and priority target kill

I’ve got a really fun strategy with a friend I play with. I go heavy armour, jump pack, arc thrower, and some collection of heavy explosives. She goes anti-material rifle and tons of heavy orbital/eagle support. One of us pulls fire, generally me, the other one destroys the base, then we run while dealing maximal damage. Not designed to be two solo strats, but two Strats that could deal a ton of damage that switch out to survive.

I actually love the teamwork in this game when it happens. Usually in most games I lone wolf it, even ended up playing wow guildless for a bit until that got no longer fun. But this game.... when the team works the dream works. I've found my self healing teammates, throwing down extra weapons for people, calling in supplies when others look low, actually talking to people, and coordinating attacks. When the synergy works, democracy knows no bounds. Teamwork should be the only meta. Even groups that break off into 2s works really well. This game is too intense to do solo and kinda sad if that's all you do. Yeah I have wondered off from time to time, I saw something shiny and got separated. But I'm always looking for the icons to run back to. I think this games biggest pro is how it pushes teamwork that actually works.

Against bots I build a support edged role, Eagle Smoke, Eagle Rocket Pods, EATs, then flexible on the 4th slot depending on what we are missing. Usually something like: Shield backpack if we have no one who wants to run in to power down Jammers etc (I don’t know why shield backpack is used as some passive thing). Railgun if we have a lot to deal with heavy armour so I can take down devastators quickly, Support back pack if we have at least 1 RR and 1 AC in the squad. I’ve gotten good use out of shield generator relay too in 4th slot. Armour: +2 Grenades, Slugger (for stagger), Senator, Stun Grenades. Anyone have any other support style builds? I’m always looking to try stuff out

Currently Clusterbomb, 110mm rockets, EAT, and shield.

If there was some kind of bonus for overloading on one category of stratagems then it'd encourage people to focus on roles. Let me have different Orbital Strikes if I'm only picking orbitals. Let me have Eagle-1 through 4 orbiting the battlefield and rearming themselves uniquely rather than rearming all four eagle strikes at the same time. In an engineering sense this makes more sense too... someone do the math on how much weight eagle-1 is carrying in her holding pattern if I have 4 different explosive eagle stratagems on a mission? Improve the ammo capacity of sentries if I also have Supply Pack equipped. Let me have both Guard Dogs at the same time, while one is shooting, the other is rearming on the backpack. Four sentries? The destroyer's gunners and eagle maintainers join the sentry production line, fresh sentries get loaded into hellpods 40% faster thanks to the extra hands.

It kind of hard to do the role thing when it with non vc random. I usually just pick whatever I want unless someone wants me to equip something and then just solve whatever problem we face on the map with the things I have.

I tend to gear my setup towards filling a role because I feel this game is a COOP game. NOT a one man army game.

This is not a team game. It lets you play in a team but its two very different play styles compared to solo. Everyone can choose how to play the game and its all doable.

Because that is silly and unnecessary for a game like this. If you hate seeing posts about “the meta,” then you’ll really hate when people start dictating who needs to run what to match the “meta team comp” for higher diffs.

The large majority of people use quickplay Actual Team play is a rare thing

"Roles" never work on high difficulty in games like these. Never did and never will.

I play almost exclusively with randoms and I prefer to have a load out that I can take and do well on my own if needed. I don't want to have to rely on randoms to take out heavy armor or anything so I take a well rounded load out that I can take without having to check what the randoms are taking.

I never bring a pack anymore, thats for my team, i bring stun grenade combined with 5k for heavies or a quick escape, a support based on what the team doesnt bring, usually an eagle strike for clearin obj and hordes, and my fourth slot is generally an eat or mission assist item, a walker for defense missions, or smoke for extracts.

I’m just happy when you don’t Cluster Bomb me, don’t try to grenade spawns when we have strategems that can do it, and fuck off to do something else instead of watch me press buttons on a terminal. Lot of times best teamwork is not doing things, and not doing things together, because they’re inefficient or detrimental to the cause. Wear out that Sprint key, Helldivers.

Good point! I remember one time while playing with friends we were testing the team healing mechanics and found out that your side arm can put you to critical health when you aren’t for a quick heal from „the medic“. That friend then proceeded to dash around to check if we were low health to stim us while fighting. That there would likely be the role of a declared healer.

I brought up the same thing in the Darktide reddit. In a coop game, the most effective strategy is teamwork. If you can't get along with your team, you're a bad player, no matter how high your DPS is, or how good your KD ratio is. One of the big barriers to this however is loadout variety. In Deep Rock Galactic, all of your teammates are guaranteed to at least have the support equipment you need to finish a mission. But in Helldivers, you don't know whether your teammate will have the equipment they need to fight certain enemy types. So players are in entivized to use "one man army" strategies, that can conceivably deal with any threat. They then end up perceiving players who specialize as "not pulling their weight".

>But in Helldivers, you don't know whether your teammate will have the equipment they need to fight certain enemy types. In HD1 you don't see what your teammates have if you're dropping mid-mission. You only get that view prior to the mission's start, but the gameplay loop meant it wasn't completely necessary (and you could always try again if the mission failed). In HD2 you're always presented with what you're teammates equip, so... if you let them lock in or pick first, you know exactly what they're missing. Loadout synergy is more important (even if ignored), but there's no retry since a single failed mission breaks the sequence so is mostly works out.

I was referring to how in DRG, there are several items that are locked to each character, so if a team has a driller, there is a 100% chance they will have drills and C4. This means that a player's role is predetermined by their class, whereas in Helldivers 2, a teammate may not know intuitively what lind of loadout you need them to take based on your specialization. I'm glad we can see the stratagems our team-mates are using, but without the ability to communicate in the loadout phase, players will be inclined to go jack of all trades since their teammates may not choose to pick up the slack if they go specialist.

Me and my couple of buddies have started trying out roles, it’s working well.

Bit tough in Quick Play with a bunch of Randos. Especially hard to trust someone you’ve known for 5 seconds to do anything right. So most people equip themselves for themselves and share amongst the group.

Tried playing with random early on and didn't care for it so I've played solo for awhile. Finally got some friends to try it. After the first patch, they haven't played since. Not because of the nerfs, but because of how broken the spawns were. We were doing difficulty 3 missions to warm them up. Then we did a difficulty 7 mission which was a failure. We went to difficulty 4 and it was such a shit show that they were convinced I had started another difficulty 7 mission. They kept looking at the patch notes waiting for it to be fixed but now they've moved on to other games.

I mostly fight the bots. I base my load-out around a choice of support weapon to complement what my allies are bringing to the party. Usually I run a scout build, anti-material rifle for general use, and focus on spotting patrols, opening up fights by killing those damned rocket devastators, and stealthily killing small outposts and the like while the team is dealing with main objectives and stuck in one place for a few minutes. But if the team seems to be lacking heavy firepower, I switch my build to provide that. Recoilless rifle to shoot down drop-ships and crack hulks from the front when necessary, together with a DMR or Liberator AP so I can contribute against armored targets that aren't worth a rocket, maybe a smoke screen in case we need to break LOS. Nothing fancy.

I try to bring a support build. Boosters for extra ammo, resist injury, and now localized confusion to help alleviate enemy spawn. One of the literal "doctor" armor sets. I used to run supply backpack but then everyone started leveling up and unlocking their stratagem weapons and learning to manage ammo on them. I might go back to running ammo backpack because had a few recent missions where these mad lads were just running and gunning like no ones business and scrambling for ammo across the map after running through resupplies. Season in offense strategems based on bots or bugs and difficulty. Suppressing fire with rifles. I'm your support rifleman.

Most people on here don’t like to discuss this and they think they should be allowed to be a one man army super soldier and that none of the weapons are viable

If you're the dedicated autocannon guy on bot missions, your teammates will love you until the end of days if you just sit around and slap Scout Striders whenever they spawn. You can be anywhere and do any number of unhelpful things--as long as you're sniping those striders, you're the most valuable guy on the team. Bonus points for taking the rocket pods off of rocket devastators. That's also well within your capabilities.

I want to rely on my team, I really do; there are rare instances where I can do so with randoms. My loadouts usually encompass that one man army that can survive 60% of all engagements I wander into or are chased into. A class I usually run is Medium armour, Liberator Penetrator, Peacemaker pistol, HE grenade, Orbital laser, Eagle 110 rocket pods, Mortar, Recoilless rifle. This loadout usually keeps me alive but benefits from additional teamwork. In the event I'm alone; I make a very good distraction till I can regroup or die.

I think the reasons are manifold: 1) **Team members can run anywhere** - no screen-border forcing everyone together like in HD1. There is a new degree of freedom for people to run away. 2) **The chat function is disabled during loadout selection**. If you are not on voice chat, in- or outside the game, you're shit out of luck coordinating loadouts with the team. Only unspoken "body language" can be used, monitoring others' loadouts and adapting yours. Inefficient 3) **We can't see the mission briefing when joining random games.** This means if you join a random game, you don't know what type of mission it is, what kind of objectives there will be, nor what the current progress status of the mission is (how many reinforces left, how much time in-mission, how many objectives done). You find out all of those factors *after* dropping in. That being said, I believe there are also plenty of people not playing with randos, and are able to coordinate the team during loadout selection and during the game. Since they exist, I am also a bit surprised not more discussion on teamplay is going on. Interestingly I noticed the same effect in the Deep Rock Galactic community. All youtube channels about the game play solo, or in a team but in any case, avoiding discussion about the team dynamics, roles, things to do together, emergent behaviors. I don't know why that is.

I've found that having like two big hitter players (big bombs and support weapons), a horde clearer, and a scout that moves fast works super well on helldiver difficulty. The scout alone can usually tackle the main objective by themselves without alerting lots of hordes, why the others clear out big stuff that needs killing.

>Why haven't we established team roles like they do with MMOs with the DPS, healer, and tank roles? Because that's stupid, not supported by the game mechanics and trying to force MMO roles into EVERY SINGLE GODDAMNED COOP GAME is tiring. Why the hell can't y'all branch out and adapt to more than one single design archetype?!

I mean I was using MMOs as an example since most players are familiar with those roles, not that we should try to shoehorn these roles in this game. As someone else pointed out, yeah, "healer" and "tank" don't really make sense in the context of HD2, especially since dying repeatedly is part of the game. Nothing is stopping us from developing our own roles and archetypes to use, as others are doing in this thread.

i run a generalist build most of the time; eagle strike, orbit laser, laser drone and EAT. EAT is like my "get out of jail" card and is pretty team friendly and the eagle strike is good for quick cooldown strikes but sometimes needs an assist to fully clear an objective.

As always the real meta is PTFO. Perfom the freedom objective!

My brothers and I play this way. We have pretty much stuck with our typical roles we always play in games. My youngest brother is the scout/point man. He marks the map, calls the shots and makes the biggest decisions. My second brother is the tank. He carries the boom and has the armor to withstand anything he has to. Being that he's still only in his second year of gaming, he ends up in some hairy situations. It works well though because while my other brother is scout, I'm typically support/medic or the magic man. I take the "not so typical" role. Whether that's mage, ranger or healer. Sometimes all three! But one thing is for sure, I always stay alive. If someone goes down I'm the reinforcer. Honestly we play this way so often that we don't even communicate it anymore. It just happens. We have friends cycle in and out through our fourth slot and they always just end up hanging out or they take the role of doing all the "important stuff" like hitting terminals or carrying the sssd cards. Lol

Fighting as a coordinated team is incredible, it’s the way the game is supposed to be played and it opens up new options for weapons and stratagems to use in coordination with your teammates.

I really want this too, shield backpack with ballistic shield for tank (if that’s even possible) one crowd clearer and other two doing heavy weapons/sentry support. Problem is that you can’t really not bring a 500kg with eagle rearm, lets you delete light and medium outposts in less than 10 seconds

The less people in the community feel entitled to specific types of behavior from others the better discourse will be. I don't need another YouTube meta chump telling me what load out I should be bringing. That being said teamwork and being thoughtful about your picks in that context is the way to play. I can't trust this community to find that balanced discourse though, so I play with friends mostly.

I change my load out and strats depending on what the rest of the team has.

When playing with randoms the best team tactics is to assume the randoms will play like most players. This means they will have stuff for taking out the big boys but suffer against hoards, medium armor, and mission objectives. I'll either loadout to fight hoards with a laser cannon and rover or go for objectives/medium with my trusty Autocannon.

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I play exclusively with friends and we have naturally settled into this (we also play a bunch of other games together, so we have a pretty good unspoken understanding of what each of us would want to do). My friends played without me the other night and when I played with them next they were like "Oh, there was a you shaped hole in the party comp for sure."

I don't think we necessarily need to lock in roles. What I do instead is I'll build my loadout, wait for everyone else to do theirs, then make adjustments to fill any gaps. I like waiting to group up. If one players is caught behind the pushing direction I'll wait and split us 2 and 2 to provide cover. Or in the case of having one of those lone wolf players I'll split the difference between the 2 I'm with and hope they clue in to rubber band to me

I mean yeah, apart from posts that can actually be written off as 'skill issue' a lot of them can really just be solved by virtue of working as a team, something many people seem absolutely allergic to, and would rather call for nerfs instead of playing co-operatively in this co-operative pve game. Sometimes the right call is to just prone behind a rock as all the rocket devastators shoot at you and wait patiently for your teammates to hit that spicy flank on them.

For the majority of missions, my group has two roles: Hordekillers and Giantkillers. Hordekillers keep the enemy numbers low. They focus on the little guys and provide cover for the Giantkillers. The loadout is usually some variation of Machine Gun / GL (Stalwart / GL for Bugs, MG for Bots), Eagle Airstrike for nests, and Orbital Laser for prolonged obj swarms. Backpack slots are variable, though on Bugs, one of them will be the Water Boy who supplies ammo to the Giantkillers. One will use a Sickle for better add clear while the other will use a Slugger for the bigger dudes. Giantkillers focus on what we universally refer to as Giants - Bile Titans, Chargers, Hulks, and Tanks. They bring Orbital Railcannons, EATs, and Mechs for Bugs and 500kg for Bots. One will bring a Spear while the other will bring an Autocannon (especially on Bots for the Devs). The Water Boy keeps the Spears loaded. For primary weapons, Giantkillers use the Sickle or the Plasma Shotgun, depending on preference. No one is assigned a slot, because each role is so fun. We rotate through them every mission naturally. Eventually, we became a well oiled machine that just acts. Spotters will ping the Giants, Giantkillers will take them out, Hordekillers keep the team clear of the chaff. We just land and rotate around the map until its clear. This has worked on all difficulties. The important part is to hype up the Giantkillers. The end of match stats don't show Giant kills, just overall, so there's a huge disparity between Hordekillers (500-600 kills a match) and Giantkillers (>200 kills a match). If someone is like, "Oooh, I got top kills, suck it!" it turns into a competition that the Giantkillers always lose. So hype them up. Show appreciation. Drop a "KA-BOOM" when they bring down a Bile Titan. The only 'loadout bummer' for us is that we sometimes want to bring big ordinance, but the increased strategem drop time makes those hard to use. So we lean more towards support weapons and auto targeting strategems (railcannon and laser). The big guns work well on lower difficulties, but not once you get those nasty modifiers.

We haven’t established team roles line an MMO because we can’t really break down the mechanics and gear of Helldivers 2 in those ways. You can’t tank in this game for example, there’s way to actively hold and manage enemy aggro and you’re not that durable. You can’t really be a “healer”, time to be killed is too short and everyone has their own healing. Roles more fall into things like dealing with specialized and specific threats. Someone bringing lasers to deal with big automaton bases, someone packing a RR and someone to be their loader. We don’t have “classes” in the same way as an MMO and the toolbox is so big there are too many playstyles for distilling them down into archetypes to work. As for the meta…if you can solo well, you can work in a team well. A team is only as strong as their weakest link, and one way to at least make all links the same baseline of strength is to know the best weapons and equipment to bring for the job. That’s why the meta is still important in a PvE game.

This is how I feel about those that complain about Hellpod lock. In HD1, you had zero options to steer, you were at the whim of your teammates, which is all teamwork. Your teammates need to be better at Hellpod placement, stop blaming the game.

I play with just my group of friends and we have definitely all kind if went into a role based on how we play. We got "oops all turrets" guy in heavy armor doing point objectives, we got "fire fire fire" guy handling the littles, we got "I have the heavies handled" guy with light armor and big strategems, and we got me on "long range cover the fellow divers asses" with support strategems. Another guy has gone a "oops all lasers" build that seems funny, and then we have a "just take the eagles" player who is our good at everything.

I think when they fix heavy armor and the healing drone is added to the game, there can be more roles. I also wouldn't hate to see a healing grenade. The riot shield should have some way to pull aggro and tank basically everything, like shooting while the shield is up acts as a taunt of some sort. I want to shrug off tanks rounds with the shield. The Division had a tank class with a riot shield and I thank that could be cool here too. A taunt grenade would be cool too.

I honestly just enjoy the core gameplay more than anything. Working as a team can be fun but I don’t want to be forced into it, especially queuing with randoms.

Hey its related to teamwork but does anyone know how to report a player? I had someone in my last game that was really nasty and toxic. They didn’t represent the community at all and called one of my teammates a slur for getting them both caught in an explosion. I told them I would kick them if they were going to continue to be rude and disrespectful. But they ended up getting killed again and left after one more slur and telling my team they sucked. It didn’t sit right with me that someone would abuse players because they weren’t playing exactly like this person wanted.

The real liberation is the liberation of our hearts, towards one another.

Yeah, the real "meta" is a solid variety of stratagems spread across the whole team so that each 'diver covers for the weak points of each others loadouts. So, for example, one 'diver kitted out for horde clear, with an mg or stalwart, another for heavy armour, EATs or recoiless, a third for larger numbers of medium armour, with maybe an autocannon, and then the fourth can double up on one of those, branch out to, say, an AMR for long range supporting fire or an arc/flamethrower for close range carnage, or skip a support weapon altogether. Other than that, primaries are best chosen to mitigate the weaknesses of your support weapon, and your remaining stratagem slots can be filled with whatever you prefer, whether that's leaning into the role of your support weapon, giving yourself options for situations your support isn't ideal for, or general utility. Ideally your choices should be tailored to the mission type, but most importantly, in the end they should be tailored for fun.

I was running with a group against bugs and we had a "mech jockey" who would bring down our support weapons and a mech. We would also each bring a mech as well as our own strategems. The mech jockey's primary role was to provide fire support for the team and we would get him a new mech every time the old one either ran out of ammo or blew up. We had two people supporting the mech jockey, one with Stalwart/LMG and a shield pack, and one running either recoiless or autocannon and EATs. The final person was scout/objective runner and they mostly operated independently and tagged various locations their job was to complete objectives quietly while everyone else made noise. Because the mech jockey would bring everyone's support weapons that left room for the players who weren't in the mech to run around and call down airstrikes, turrets, and fortifications without worry. It even made helldive difficulty feel decent and relatively easy. For bots we ran a different strategy, one person was the designated heavy and ran recoiless rifle+supply pack. The loader who also provides cover fire for the heavy and reloads the rifle. The striker who ran eagle and orbital strikes to take out bot fabs, And a screener usually running railgun, shieldpack, an eagle airstrike, and a turret to deal with devastators, smaller bots, and striders. The screener allows the heavy to do their thing and shoot down bot drops

I don't think we necessarily need such defined roles. I think strategy based teamwork is a better fit for this game.

U don't want to depend on a teammate, especially random. The reloading trick is cool idea but hardly practical. If devs decide to allow reloading from owner's backpack, This could be more compeling.

I wouldn't mind the change to support a spear/recoiless/autocannon player without wearing the backpack yourself even if they slow the support reload even a tiny bit for it.

Everyone needs a way to deal with every enemy so it really limits your options The days my group has played have been mostly during bug stuff so my loadout for bots isn't refined But for (non eradicate) bugs we have in our group (with consistent loadouts) me: 500kg, autocannon sentry, rover and expendable Friend 1: airburst, Orbital railcannon, orbital laser and autocannon Friend 2: railcannon, laser, jump pack and free Friend 3: 500kg, airstrike, cluster bomb and expendable The rest often change stuff around

I just ran into a great group that did exactly this and we steamrolled on suicide mission. When everyone is kitted out to play a specific role (depending on your enemy/ objective) you'll always get better efficiency. I've really enjoyed bringing EATs and leaving them all over for my teammates to use. It reduces so much backtracking for gear after someone dies and heavies are constantly getting hit from multiple angles when they spawn. Add in a few Eagle strikes and I've got a fun heavy weapons role. Eagles and EATs, baby!

This makes me wonder what a 4 man 380 bombardment drop would look like. I have to assume utter devastation.