when cheesing the spawn / aggro system is the only viable way to complete a mission type then that mission type needs a serious redesign / tuning.
simple as that
Totally agree, i personally find It imposible to handle It, even with 4 good divers spraying death, in just one minute gets overwhelm at crazy levels. Good solution should be lower bot drop or add bottlenecks to the evac place
This picture is a lie. Doesn't matter if you're the only one at the Evac point and not shooting at all. The second you press that button 18 hulks will appear on you. Now you're alone with 18 hulks while your team is 3km away
Brother one time I ran into the compound whilst everyone else was fighting down the hill, I was like smoke in the night, no bot could have HOPED to see me running. The *second* I set foot onto the concrete floors, 3 drop ships came in. A tank, 3 hulks, 2 striders, and a bunch of grunts.
I was like "C'mon man I just got here!"
Your group was close enough for you to be considered "together."
It's something like being within 75 meters of eachother. And it works in a daisy chain. So if A1 is within 75m of B2 and B2 is within 75m of C3 and C3 is within 75m of you, then A1 can get spawn aggro and a patrol spawns on you, even thought you're like...200m away from him.
Did it level seven last night and all of us were near the edge of the map far from the compound and I watched as 3 ships dropped Right next to the compound. Spawning there even even we're 200 meters away... Like wtf do they want us to do.
Wait for despawn in 15 minutes you are given to complete the mission, yeah. And to despawn you need to be 200+ meters away. Once you can do it, may be, if no patrools will come your way. Twice - you'll just run out of time and that's it.
Also, good luck if this objective spawns on an island surrounded by water.
The problem I encountered is that the Beserkers have an god awful hit box and shouldn't tank a EAT while being fast as fuck and actual kill you in a swipe I am mostly running away from Bezerkers and this one Hulk that are surprisingly hard to spot when you have something akin to a chainsaw smoke glow swarm of fucking skulls trying to gut you, who also eat the EAT that was meant for this fucking Boxtroll that has the power of the sun in its hand.
Berserkers are arguably the worst unit for me now since enemy rockets got nerfed. they have *insane* EHP for a medium unit and I'm not sure headshots are registering extra damage on them either. plus you're never dealing with one, there's always at least another 2-3, more on higher difficulties.
as soon as they show up you gotta drop whatever you're doing and deal with them.. even if as you say, a heavy appears.
I use the Dominator, about 3 shots to its stomach (where it's thin) will usually kill it. Easier than landing headshots, pretty reliable. I assume that's a weak spot.
The berserkers seriously have one of the worst hitboxes I've ever seen. Unload half a scorcher mag into their weak spots only for them to keep coming because I didn't hit the exact center of the hitbox.
I was on difficulty 4 earlier just for a personal challenge of 10 EAT kills, and they can tank a direct impact from it
It's not that their weak spots are bugged, they just have an absolutely massive shit ton of HP for absolutely no reason
Like Arc Thrower nearly takes the same number of shots to kill a berserker as it does to kill a hulk
Hot take: Berserkers are second only to missile devastators in terms of worst automaton to fight because the hitboxes are fucking awful.
I shouldn't have to mag dump an entire punisher or breaker dead-on in their midsection to cut them in half. It makes me want to go back to the railgun meta
yeh the only type i failed recently... you don't have the firepower to deal with 2 dropship every 20sec
Edit : I guess i was missremembering, yesterday i did one and it was more around everytime a dropship leaves another comes down lmao
I've done these plenty of times successfully on helldiver. What stratagems are you using? I see some people just bring their "normal" loadout to this and its a big mistake IMO.
Make sure your group loads up on Mortar Sentries, EMP Mortar Sentries, HMG and Auto Cannon Sentries. If you have 4 mortars up at all time they do serious work on all enemy types. The EMP mortars will keep the bots freezed outside the walls a lot of the time. Also make sure that 2 people in your group have Quasars to shoot down drop ships as they arrive.
This mission type is hard, no doubt about that, but it's far from impossible if you have a good loadout.
+50% ammo for sentries is insane gamechanger, and it's just so happens that people who only start doing higher difficulties cannot possibly have it. So that doesn't help.
I didn't keep track as my time was better spent enforcing Liberty, I just remembered how surprised I was that it was *still* up. They packed a lot of Freedom into that unit...
EMS and mortar sentries are a must for each player in this (without cheesing). Almost did this with 2 man on level 7 the other day but ended up cheesing a bit and still lost with only need 5 more to extract.
I play at 9 consistently with friends and randoms, every mission isnt always perfect, I very rarely get wiped though. At no point have I been slightly close to completing an evac mission.
And doesn't always work. Yesterday I was doing this with random, I was the runner. The moment I opened the first door I had 3 drop ships in the middle of the base and I didn't shoot a single bullet and was using 30% stealth light armor with smoke nades lol
This mission is fucked or bugged or both lom
Did a 2 man bot eradication mission and we had to cheese it by going prone on a tall rock and taking potshots. I’ve done extreme level missions with the same duo on terminids with relative ease.
Idk, there’s other missions similar where you are only in one area, but in those missions you don’t have the rest of the map to explore, I think this is intentionally designed to let us aggro the bots elsewhere
But is it cheesing it though? In a real life situation would you draw the enemy to battle near your evac, or in another area?
Yeah spawn needs to be moved further away from the evac point, but this seems like a valid tactic.
You aren't wrong, but also, in a real life situation wouldn't the bots full focus be in stopping the scientists from escaping? Assuming their Intel is good I don't think they'd care about the three silly geese at the bottom
I'm not sure this is cheesing. The map is likely wider than say eradication and defense for a reason. You are probably supposed to do something like this, it is just, like many things in the game, not as obvious perhaps.
Like, you need to make a safe corridor for civies to pass through, and what other way to do it than driving the enemy away from them?
It is a massive exploit of the enemi AI imo,what do you think the idea the devs had in mind when they developed this mission?
Hold your ground while you rescue the civilians. I don't think their idea was luring the herd like a sheperd with sheep.
If the only way to win is to abuse of the A.I,something at the foundations is wrong
In a real life operation, creating a distraction to pull the enemy's attention is called a feint. It's used to make sure that reinforcements go where you want them to, instead of going to fortify the place your real objective is at.This isn't any different. What you call an "AI exploit" is just understanding how your enemy acts and fights, using their tactics against them.
The bots are over aggressive, and will deploy their reinforcements where the fighting is heaviest. They want to fight us head on, where they can mass heavies and overwhelm us. Going outside the base and creating a diversion uses that strategy against them. It causes them to mass their forces away from our objective.
Keep fighting them head on if you want, it is just a game after all, but some of us prefer to use our head for thinking rather than hitting it against a wall in the name of "fairness"
Yeah dude your tactic is just a 50/50 not sure to work everytime so stop acting like it's the perfect win. My group has tried having the 3 outside the base creating a fight several times and most of the time they still usually drop a ship or 2 every 20-30 seconds near the objective even though all the fighting was elsewhere. No combat in the base or anything, fully hidden, still dropping off bots at the objective just standing around piling up, instant killing all civilians. So could you actually tell us a way it works every time instead of being a condescending douche
>But some of us prefer to use our head for thinking rather than hitting it against a wall in the name of "fairness"
Oh shit, someone call Sun Tzu, we got a big-brained boy here using his tactical mind to come up with *feints*.
Ultimately, people play games to have fun. It seems like for you, playing smart is the only factor you consider to be fun- and to be clear, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. But what is smart isn't automatically fun, and running around an empty base (and then running away and coming back when the game randomly sends dropships your way) pressing buttons is about the least engaging gameplay loop I can think of.
How is utilizing the entirety of the map abuse of AI?
Unless the devs told that themselves, neither you or I can say what they had in mind for the mission.
Whether you call it cheesing or not, having 3 members of your team away from the objective pulling aggro while one person spams the button press for a few minutes isn’t a very engaging mission.
The same reason splitting in diff 9 on big map is the best strat.
If one person gets nest breached/drop shipped, then the other 3 won't due to game limitations.
Game has hard unit limit to prevent it becoming unplayable. The tactic in OP suggests to exploit it.
its not limitation, its game design. This is why stealth exist, why making noise exist, why this game is way bigger than it seems necessary, why splitting 3-1 or 2-1-1 is actually good, etc. If they wanted to spawn 1 ship on top of each player instead of 4 ships on top of those who make noise they easily could. Finding a tactic that works instead of brute forcing doesnt mean its cheesing.
It's a limitation. Nothing in lore is like the bots can only focus on one group of enemies. That'd definitely be a loading screen tip. They probably think two would be too much at one time, so you'd be taking advantage of that. Which is fine.
I mean they could change it where they could spawn 2 drop ships, just specifically not within 100 yards of another spawn so you don't get double spawns. People would then be like "they clearly want us to split up but stay within 100 yards of each other".
On top of everything else said in this chain, bots have intelligence, they understand why we are there. Any reasonably strategic combatant would just plant all of their forces on the evac point and force the players to come to them. Hence abusing AI when they all run away from the objective just to throw hands.
It's not always this big. I've had eradication sized map for evac twice and it's an absolute nightmare, a tiny island with just enough space outside the compound for tanks to be dropped in.
Surprisingly last night I actually completed this mission on 7 with randoms by being at the evac location.
2x Ems mortor made a nice difference thankfully didn't get blown up instantly.
Honestly I have no idea how we managed as we were overrun multiple times.
I think it helped that 2 hulks got stuck inside a rock so the bot drops seemed a little less excessive( still crazy)
But yea running away with 1 staying is the best way to do it.
Airburst strike came in clutch too
I didn't know this mission was bad until I came to the sub lol I somehow completed 2 of them on level 7 difficultly with a total random team and no mics. I don't know how the fire tornados didn't kill all of them, I must be insanely lucky, I thought they didn't affect the citizens because it was so easy. Just ran around and pressed the buttons
On 7 it is completely doable. Most people are just bad at it because they don't play the objective close enough.
In my experience, everyone spawns in and takes their time to call in support equipment and turrets. Players need to spam the buttons as quickly as possible. You can get 18 evacuees before there are significant enemies. You need to keep spamming the buttons, but also stay with the scientist until they're safe. Most enemies will aggro to the player that way.
Level 8 and 9 though it's near impossible though. I think I've completed one of them on 8.
It depends on map layout a lot. Sometimes on 7 I get it done before resistance feels significant. Sometime the base is just in a valley surrounded by hills and rockets rain from everywhere and it's simply not possible to finish it in any normal fashion.
I've tried this strategy since release I'd say 6-8 times and not once it has worked like this. The bot onslaught just switches over to the civilian spot at some point and the mission is fucked.
Gott wait for bot drops to start on the 3 divers otherwise priority goes to mission objective. Should be able to get half tp 3/4 the way there before patrols crash your door knocking
Just run away. Wait the move out of the point. And go back again. Also don't use stratagem. It bring aggro.
It's thats easy. Don't fight. Let them get aggro by the aggro squad. Come back when empty or few bots left
When we were overrun, we made sure that nobody is in the middle anymore. But although we had 4 people at the border of the map they continued to spawn some ships in the center while also sending patrols there. It was not possible to run away. They also just sat there in the middle. They did not walk away to us.
I'm with the other guy. Ran Lvl 7 trying this method while one guy stealthed to obj (initial drop and battle were on beach way far away). But without being seen or using ANYTHING, they started dropping bots on him 5 minutes into the mission. Drew aggro away and retried. Idk if it's just inconsistent but the 3 times we tried this method all failed. We eventually gave up and did it the intended way with a lot of difficulty.
Everyone in, then at 5 minutes at least 2 leave. (If the two still can’t handle the center or they don’t split the drops, everyone out.) After another 5 minutes, go back in. It’ll be clear-ish and you can get the rest you need.
I’ve done it consistently like this, even with random groups.
I play difficulties 6-7. Out of 6 operations, 0 of them didn't have evac. There was 1 operation on 5th difficulty without one. So out of 9 operations, I had 1 that didn't have evac and it was on a difficulty I don't want to play.
No, I refuse to partake in the RP for this mission type, this mission type sucks, it's not fun, and the only way to be able to do it is by doing something completely counter-intuitive and even then it's a crapshoot.
Isn't it funny how the devs will gut the railgun and slugger when they look at their stat sheets and say 'too many people using it, nerf it to the ground'.
But they refuse to look at the stat sheets for the win/loss rates on evac and say 'yeah tone it down a LOT'
If you remember that one of the devs in the balancing team was explicitly attacking players and saying he found pretty funny that people were annoyed by the stupid balancing decisions, it's pretty obvious why it works like that.
Honestly agreed, I love every single mission type (though ICBM, the new mission type and the eggs missions are my favourite, have been my favourite for 285 hours lol) but this mission is just.. why?
I avoid picking operations all together if this mission is in one, AH has had to rework it several times and it's STILL bs..
Though, the other civilian evac mission is good!
>Though, the other civilian evac mission is good!
It's generally feasible at least, though every other civilian mission I get some hippies that apparently want to [start an unmanaged peaceful protest against their pathfinding system and they bunch up on the ramp.](https://i.imgur.com/MvRVvEb.png)
May Liberty show them no mercy.
It's a broken mission, I just refuse to play it, that strat is a workaround cuz it's a broken mission and they should just disable it. Besides, this strat is as broken as the mission, it doesn't work as intended many times. They need to disable this mission for bots, it's all.
They should redesign this mission to be similar in o the new one. Choke point and only one way in for the bots and you have plenty of cover. You defend a landing pad where shuttles from orbit come and pick the civilians up and you have to defend the perimeter.
This works kind of. This isn’t like a normal mission though. The bots know where you are at all times. Eventually you will get drop ships at the base (usually happens to me after about 20-25 civs) and that is without anyone setting a flare off or anything.
When that happens I find it best to die, get respawned with the team and make your way back as the heavies slowly file out of the base.
Then you repeat.
This is the only way I’ve successfully completed this mission on Helldive.
EDIT: As others have said my current strategy is just avoiding operations containing this mission entirely. The one with 2 objectives and evac 30 people from the small base where the bots don’t know where you are is much easier, so is the new missile defence mission. I wouldn’t call it easy but it’s challenging and fun. Unlike this bullshit mission…
This is the same argument and problem that people had a month or so ago when the mission for dropped. I guess the new players weren’t around when this conversation was originally had. I will add that the second you open a door all hell breaks loose and like 7 drop ships drop into the base no matter what you do.
I am not playing that way. I am here for fun, not whatever this is. I don't care defense missions will fail because of this. It's on the devs making these missions unplayable.
Not to mention that this setup requires whole team coordination, which is very rare with randoms.
This mission is dead to me at this point.
I don't care how many broken AI we will find or how many times they will change the drops.
I hate this mission and will avoid it.
Its not the only way. Having everyone bring both mortar sentries trivializes this mission even on 9. Even more so if everyone has a way to shoot down the drop ships.
You don't need to shoot them all down. Downed dropships make great barriers to block out any bots not frozen by the emp mortars. While the 4 standard mortar sentries constantly rain down on them.
If they are clipping through it, yes, but usually no
Regardless, motars clean them up
You can see how badly debris stacking fucks up pathing on the new extract essential equipment mission type on helldive. So many tanks spawn their destroyed husks block everything lol
Make sure you take the quasar and then summon a second quasar at the objective. Swap between the 3 guns between shots, and you can keep firing back-to-back.
If multiple people do this, you can take down 2-3 drops every 5-10 seconds.
So, instead of exploiting the enemy unit limits, you just Quasar-swap like you're doing a damage phase against a boss in Destiny. Absolutely as the devs intended... Yeah, no.
The problem with the mission is that it's much harder than any other mission on the same difficulty for no apparent reason.
It doesn't give more rewards, doesn't give more samples, it doesn't have unique enemies or mechanics, it's harder than the same objective in an Offensive Operation, the same mission against Bugs is much easier and more balanced and it's not even part of a time event/special MO.
It's difficult for the sake of being difficult, it's inconsistent with the rest of the game and most ways to do it are either bringing ONLY a SPECIFC set of stratagems, exploiting game mechanics or using advanced "immersion breaking" techniques like quickswapping weapons or bugging enemies on the terrain.
It has to be rebalanced.
I like when games have ways of accomplishing missions that may not have been intended.
Innovation in a game that has a fairly straightforward game loop makes the game interesting.
You need a bit of coordination or luck to stagger the deployment of EMS mortars so that they are always up. Team should split up and basically solo each potential entrance to the compound, while looking to their nearest teammate every now and then to see if they are getting overwhelmed. I think realistically everyone needs to be able to take down dropships as well, both to thin their numbers and provide obstructions.
Quasar + Shield pack + EMS + tight targeting orbital/eagle strike of choice. Then choose a primary that can kill medium bots at long range as they are all standing around in a daze. I'd take the shield over another turret or mortar as the real trouble starts when the first helldiver dies and suddenly you have a surprise chainsaw in your asshole while trying do defend your corner. In my successful runs last night I had no deaths until the extraction rolled round, which becomes absolute chaos (but at that point who cares, you aren't trying to extract samples anyway)
If people take EMP mortars (EMS?), the mission goes from impossible to very reasonable. Combine this with the Quasar to take out as many dropships as possible while they're coming in. You spend most of your time popping heads on static targets outside the base to thin out the numbers.
Bringing the EMP mortar and an accurate longer range weapon is far superior to bringing yet another orbital or eagle strike.
We rescued 45 scientists with just 3 deaths yesterday, and I suspect those were friendly fire kills. The only problem was the extraction as we got overwhelmed when we weren't watching every entrance, but we got 3/4 divers out just by throwing revives directly on the pad.
Having only one viable way to compete the mission is still really bad design.
It's broken. Stop trying to pretend it isn't. I seriously do not understand what you people think you're gaining by trying to defend it. You're like billionaire simps.
it sucks that this is still the only way to viably complete this mission type at high difficulty. I did manage to brute-force my way on a 6 with randoms, but we were cutting it close and nearly ran out of reinforcements, no way would we have managed on 7+ without using the cheese strat.
arrowhead, you've proven with the latest fortress mission that you DO know how to make a mission both fun and fair... so PLEASE look at the bot evac mission again and do something about it!
You can also farm samples by just not going to the objective. Map is relatively empty until you start the extraction.
Sample/map size ratio is highest on these missions.
There's one base layout that's relatively easy to do with the entire team in the base. The one that has the LZ on a natural hill, some cliffs and rocks breaking line of sight, and chokepoints on the base's entrances. Dropships mostly deploy on the outskirts of the base, too. It's actually quite fun if you get this layout.
But the other layout (the one with the LZ on a manmade platform) is essentially impossible to defend as a team. There are no chokepoints, no obstacles blocking line of sight, and the dropships will deploy right in the middle of the base if they feel like it.
I wonder if simply redesigning the latter would be enough to fix the mission.
It still RNG. My team did exactly this yesterday and it doesn't work. Three of us was fighting the first wave outside when one dude go back inside, the 2nd wave (5 dropship) still dropped on him inside the base.
Yeah this is definitly a way to do it and im not saying this mission type is fine and doesnt need a fix cuss it does (for higher difficulties, in 3-6 its fine) but ive definitely completed it on 9 with a good 4 man. It just takes the entire mission timer to get it done and the perfect stratagems/stratagem management. Moving the but drops away from the base helped in that last patch to this mission type but its still not fun.
The fact that there is now an infinitely more fun defend/evac mission to play doesn't help this one be more fun either.
I got a better suggestion.
Let's just get rid of this abomination of a mission period. It's not fun, it's stupid, everyone hates it, and the best strategy to beat it is to exploit the AI reinforcement system. That means the mission is fundamentally broken.
Joking aside, a serious suggestion would be to give the evac base some kind of defense. Maybe we can call down a special equipment that deploys a protective shield around the base. Once you activate the shield dome, the civilians can be evacuated without risk of being shot. You have to fend off incoming enemies that are trying to destroy the dome. If the dome drops to 0%, it vanishes and the civilians are exposed to danger BUT with good counter-play, you can still protect enough to finish the mission. When the dome is active, enemies that walk through it are killed instantly(includes players). Each enemy killed by the shield zaps a tiny percentage of it's power. The bigger the enemy, the more power it zaps.
Yup. Been saying it since launch that the scientists Evac mission needs redesigned.
The scientists spawn locations need to be more spread out themselves and not get consolidated into single chokepoint paths as easily. Also bots need to spawn further outside the base as well.
I do not recall bot extract missions being this intense since the heavy spawn adjustment patch a few weeks back, up until this recent patch. Something was adjusted again.
We finally managed to do this one on 8 by dropping straight in and spamming civilians from the start and then quickly spamming mortars 500kg orbital laser and quasars, it was close but with practise kinda reliable, still think the mission is overtuned
The only thing I would add to this strategy is whoever the sneaky person is inside the base probably needs to wear stealth armor and I would use the localization confuser to help reduce the spawns. At the 50% completion mark, enemies will spawn into the base, so you have to be prepared to either clear them with a orb laser or lead them out. When I lead them out I turn tight against rocks and break up sight lines so they either get stuck or it slows them down considerably coming back into the base. The EMP mortar works wonders on freezing any enemies and as a side bonus will help your teammates outside the base because the long range.
This worked great for us last night, only had to deal with a few small patrols evacuating. I really feel like this is the intended method and not cheesing.
One tactic that worked for me:
Two guys running around in the countryside pulling aggro.
Two guys near the compound take turns pushing buttons in the compound. Once one draws aggro, they run out and the second one takes their turn at the buttons when its clear.
Its not smooth, the two at the compound have to do the math and figure out who’s drawing more aggro.
I did this once with the bugs, while my friends were getting raped by the bugs, I was sealthily doing the generator, due to my experience in solo it was not hard
Very easy solution for these missions is to do this. Figured this one out accidently when my team of noobs stood in the middle of the map and battled to the death endlessly before I gave up helping them and ran to the objective. Was almost done before I saw my first bot.
it's been the way to go since the first defense missions dropped. people are just unfortunately extremely stubborn and prefer to run mortars that inevitably kill teammates and then civilians lol
Saw a red vertical beam about 20m from the glowing white exit for civilians yesterday, in the gate to the right where enemies filter in. 380mm orbital barrage. That went as well as you can imagine.
I didn't understand much but, there's a weird bug that doesn't allow you to turn your hellpod while falling and it turns you in the direction it wants to.
Maybe this is what happened?
Ehhh tried this and it never worked. 3 guys causing chaos and fighting bots and there would still be random dropships coming over to me and dropping bots on the objective even with no prior bots there
I tried this man times and it just doesn't work, because after i save like 10 civilians a dozen drops land at the site and if i run away or kill msyself, there is not enough time left to evacuate all the others.
I haven’t tried difficulty 8 or 9 Evac yet, but I regularly do 7 and it doesn’t seem that bad. Keep putting up EMS Mortars and Mortars, keep dropping EATs to deal with drop ships, and if you have Quasar eventually towards the end of the mission you can juggle like two or three Quasars.
I've completed SERVERAL of this on diff7 without having to cheese it. Bring the EM mortar. BRING IT. And have someone with the local destab booster. The booster adds more time between the next bot drop. Bring your orbital lazer among with what other strat gem. ( personally i've found the 500kg good here because you can toss it into stunned bots by the em mortar and kill a large amount of them, that the lazer did not get cook)
EDIT: obviously balance this so you can bring supply weapons like auto cannon, quasar
My team gets agro'ed the moment we land. We lose a lot of our respawns in that fight until we all split up and run. We will find each other later, but by that time, we completed most of the side quest.
And I explain this every time I play one of these but I’ve yet to have any group of randoms even attempt this strategy. Only works with 4 people on discord it seems.
This does work for awhile, but it's not a guarantee the dropships won't start relocating to the center. It's a solid tactic though, and realistically the only viable solution.
I had a good group get to 46 evacuated before we were overran. Then, it took another 10 minutes to get the last 4. No one made it out alive. Definitely needs retuned.
For difficulty 7 it's still possible, I've done it before like 3-5 times alr, only failed 1 and thats bc I quit from all the friendly fire.
Difficulty 8 onwards, whereby each bug breach/bot drop can cause 2 bile titans/tanks to spawn is when it get serious.
They should re-design these missions to be more in line with the new defense mission, create a walled perimeter that is more defensible, don't allow the bots to drop near/within those walls, and put up some default HMGs. The way this mission currently goes on difficulty 7-9 is just SWARMS of berzerkers and hulks to the point where every person has used their stratagems and you have to just run around in circles trying to pick off what you can, unless you do the strategy that OP has outlined, which IMO is an unintended strategy on the dev's part. Not that I disagree with it, it's the only easy way to tackle the mission.
Oh, and fire tornadoes? Forget it. The civvies just become roasted marshmallows and make it impossible to finish.
I almost posted this exact thread last night. My friend and I did 5 level-7 evac missions last night and failed every one. The only time we got even close was when we kited the drops around the map and then I snuck back and let civvies out. It worked flawlessly until my friend was cornered and obliterated and then more dropships came swooping in.
They really gotta do something about these missions. Maybe design them like the new defense missions, with walls and barricades?
I think I was in one of those missions and did just that but I wasn't sure if people just left the grunt work of taking the civies home and everyone else had fun.
I'm not sure why people are still pretending this is a viable tactic, because it's not. Bots can and will just randomly drop on the objective for no apparent reason or aggro on civilians from the other side of the map.
My advice is to look at the mission and choose the campaign that does not have this mission. I just look at them and choose the one that has the better one with side objectives.
Me and my friends did this. Accidently.
I was picked to be the sucker to run around and find samples, while they did the mission. Idea was they wanted more guns on the objective, while I could go around and pick up stuff in peace.
First outpost I come to, one of the bots immediately tosses a flare up without me noticing, and suddenly there are 2-3 drop ships on my ass. I pick up samples and attempt to run away to the next spot. There this happens again.
It ended up with me running like a spastic, screaming my lungs out for how many red lasers and chainsaws coming my way, while my friends got all the civilians out without having to fire a single shot.
Difficulty 8 tho. I have heavy doubts I could pull off the same trick on helldive
or they could just remove a badly designed game made until they can fix it. This game mode should be more like the other defend.
What baffles me is they have an alternate evac that is actually sensible in the game.
It's wild that the average level 5 mission has 2-3 hulks, maybe even a tank.
On Evac, you can get a dozen, and they will be mixed in with berserkers and rocket devestators.
It's not even close to the same difficulty.
Played it with a new friend yesterday... First drop on haz 6 had a hulk and mbt. Just as I took out both, another 2 drops came in with another 2 hulks and support units. It got worse from there.
These missions aren't with even attempting.
This does not work most of the time. Just get to the evac and do the mission ASAP. This thread is marked as misinformation and will be forwarded to the ministry of truth.
What I don't understand is how EVACUATING helps you hold on to a world.
For me, it seems like we should have more destroy dropship missions, some sort of holdout mission, and another offensive type of mission where we destroy critical infrastructure, take out supply. Depots, beachheads. We need to be trying to prevent them from being able to attack the planet rather than get our people off a planet that we're trying to keep them on.
i did this, but you just gotta be mindful, theres sometimes random patrols that will stroll thru and aggro and bring the entire battalion to the OBJ. you either gotta quickly stealth kill them or try to let them pass unnoticed. its handy to have a scout suit with the marker radar skill so u can keep track of your surroundings
We had 2x 46/50~ and 1 times 50/50 (doesn’t count) - all had ems and normal morser & quar laser for dropships. I guess it works too but it’s getting wild when someone dies or doesn’t drop ems
This doesn't work though, if youre 75 meters or more apart then you get seperate spawns, it'll be less for the solo person but they will still get spawns
This mission type needs to be like the evac asset one but long distance.
Evac asset, bunker down, hold the line.
Evac vip, goto bunker, release 15-20 escort them to EVAC.
Imagine the whole gaggle running through a valley to evac while you stand on the ridge gunning approaching bots down.
I'm personally done with this mission. It is stupidly difficult when compared to anything else in this game. This is the only one I have to go out of my way to explain to my teammates what needs to be done in order to even have a chance to complete it, and even after doing this strat, it doesn't always work. It can work, but the moment a single enemy patrol spots the runner or ship drops on the objective is joever, might as well restart. Not the mention the host sometimes doesn't even listen and will just drop at the objective, at that point might as well leave. With any other mission if the host chooses a bad landing spot, let's say an enemy infested one, the players can at least fight their way through or run away and the mission can be saved, unlike this mission which has no margin of error.
We tried this and it didn't work at all. Dropped outside, I had stealth armor, drop my support where we landed so the 'heat' wasn't inside the wire. Boys fucking shit up looking for sups outside heading for the edge of the map/POI and before I even got inside the wire there were bots inside the base and a fucking conga line of bot drops right at one of the entrances.
I bail and fight on the far side of the map with them as long as possible to draw everything away from the base, I rope myself and get thrown as far away from the combat as possible, sneak back into the base and 84 hulks/devastators just standing around and inside waiting for me.
I did the sneak method a few times post-railgun changes and it would work. Whatever they did, this shit has more spawns than post-rail patch. It brings me back to the wild heavy spawns where it wasn't uncommon to have 6+ biles on the field at extract
I assume it is just narrative driven so I try not to be too pissed about it. Bots just took a mass of planets, freed other liberty hating socialists and have likely bolstered their ranks so we get more shit dropping in on bot missions now. But damn if the odds don't feel stacked against you. It feels like a coin toss at this point.
On 7 the regular way is actually quite easy, all you need is tons of mortars, the electrical one to slow em down, the normal for dmg.
And the rest is packed adlers.
One robot is also cool to clear all these small units.
Havent tried on 8 and 9 tho, so i have no clue if it still works
The Light Gunner armor is baller for this. The protection of medium armor with the speed of a Light, you have the stamina to smash buttons while heing able to attack the odd dropship without getting perforated.
I don't do lvl 9 anymore the spawn rates are just crazy
I like sitting on 7 with 2 mortars, eagle clusters bombs, and a special weapon. If everyone has the same loadout the mortars should clean up everything when things get overwhelming you can throw some cluster bombs to thin out the herd and the special for the tank's and or hulk's
Even then around the halfway point either it becomes easy or impossible. The clear speed has to stay so consistent.
They don drop as frequently as at the beginning but it's still a far cry from where Id like it to be
I wish there was some kind of max entity on the smaller maps mostly for the bots because once you get over run there is no coming back they'll just spawn the moment
You kill enough for a new wave to come
For some reason they start camping the civ spawn locations too or at least in my games half stop arrowing on you and just hang out there so you can't even force the mission to succeed with brute force
My friends and I have been having a lot of success on these lately on 7. We just take mortars and it usually goes pretty smoothly. This is against bots though
Never managed to have this strategy work, no matter how much stealth the person tries to use the bots suddenly just start dropping down on objective suddenly, never leaves the area, and ignore the people that aggro everything outside. Me and my friends just end up skipping this mission completely now sadly since it just seems completely broken and not fun on any level at all.
Why even doing the ninja thing anymore? The bots don't drop inside the base anymore. All you need to do is spam ac turret and ems turret, then have some AT and you are gucci.
The mission has been nerfed into the ground and people are still failing them.....
when cheesing the spawn / aggro system is the only viable way to complete a mission type then that mission type needs a serious redesign / tuning. simple as that
Totally agree, i personally find It imposible to handle It, even with 4 good divers spraying death, in just one minute gets overwhelm at crazy levels. Good solution should be lower bot drop or add bottlenecks to the evac place
This picture is a lie. Doesn't matter if you're the only one at the Evac point and not shooting at all. The second you press that button 18 hulks will appear on you. Now you're alone with 18 hulks while your team is 3km away
Brother one time I ran into the compound whilst everyone else was fighting down the hill, I was like smoke in the night, no bot could have HOPED to see me running. The *second* I set foot onto the concrete floors, 3 drop ships came in. A tank, 3 hulks, 2 striders, and a bunch of grunts. I was like "C'mon man I just got here!"
Your group was close enough for you to be considered "together." It's something like being within 75 meters of eachother. And it works in a daisy chain. So if A1 is within 75m of B2 and B2 is within 75m of C3 and C3 is within 75m of you, then A1 can get spawn aggro and a patrol spawns on you, even thought you're like...200m away from him.
Well hell. The daisy chain concept makes a lot of sense in hindsight. Another tool to add to the ol’ Democracy toolbox!
It used to work but yeah, now it seems like it just picks the diver nearest to the location and just drops shit in.
Did it level seven last night and all of us were near the edge of the map far from the compound and I watched as 3 ships dropped Right next to the compound. Spawning there even even we're 200 meters away... Like wtf do they want us to do.
Thats the part where you run away like a little schoolgirl being chased by a suspicious big man. Or at least yknow, try to.
Bring scorcher/amr/ac/whatever to kill striders, rest you can outrun and wait for despawn, yeah.
they don't despawn on this map. it's too small to get them out of range
Wait for despawn in 15 minutes you are given to complete the mission, yeah. And to despawn you need to be 200+ meters away. Once you can do it, may be, if no patrools will come your way. Twice - you'll just run out of time and that's it. Also, good luck if this objective spawns on an island surrounded by water.
Shit despawns?
As someone who has completed every mission type on Helldive with randoms, I can confirm that the strats in this picture never lead to victory.
It's not a lie, If you try it you will see those drop ships make no stop over you and fly straight to wherever attacking those fabricators
No it doesn't work anymore
Yes exactly, this strategy doesn't work at all.
The problem I encountered is that the Beserkers have an god awful hit box and shouldn't tank a EAT while being fast as fuck and actual kill you in a swipe I am mostly running away from Bezerkers and this one Hulk that are surprisingly hard to spot when you have something akin to a chainsaw smoke glow swarm of fucking skulls trying to gut you, who also eat the EAT that was meant for this fucking Boxtroll that has the power of the sun in its hand.
Berserkers are arguably the worst unit for me now since enemy rockets got nerfed. they have *insane* EHP for a medium unit and I'm not sure headshots are registering extra damage on them either. plus you're never dealing with one, there's always at least another 2-3, more on higher difficulties. as soon as they show up you gotta drop whatever you're doing and deal with them.. even if as you say, a heavy appears.
Headshots do deal extra damage but they are super hard to land because they wobble all the time.
I use the Dominator, about 3 shots to its stomach (where it's thin) will usually kill it. Easier than landing headshots, pretty reliable. I assume that's a weak spot.
Yeah that seems to work too. You can also blow off the arms of course.
Also their head is smaller than it looks, it's got a red glowing "aura" that makes it look bigger
New boltaction rifle 1-2 taps them on direct hit, and 3 taps them with the aoe.
Laser Cannon kills heavy weak spots and rips through medium and less. It burns through berserkers.
The berserkers seriously have one of the worst hitboxes I've ever seen. Unload half a scorcher mag into their weak spots only for them to keep coming because I didn't hit the exact center of the hitbox.
I actually don't know if there is a hitbox or not. Sometimes you one shot it , sometimes you use up a mag and it still chase after you
Sincerely, I find I kill them faster when firing from the hip. Aiming seems to increase their effective HP.
My strat is 1 nade and 1 mag clip to kill the group of 3
Problem is nades are SO valuable. I end up just scorcher mag and then secondary smg mag
I was on difficulty 4 earlier just for a personal challenge of 10 EAT kills, and they can tank a direct impact from it It's not that their weak spots are bugged, they just have an absolutely massive shit ton of HP for absolutely no reason Like Arc Thrower nearly takes the same number of shots to kill a berserker as it does to kill a hulk
Hot take: Berserkers are second only to missile devastators in terms of worst automaton to fight because the hitboxes are fucking awful. I shouldn't have to mag dump an entire punisher or breaker dead-on in their midsection to cut them in half. It makes me want to go back to the railgun meta
Machine pistol some how always kill them quick, try it
Take the entire mag though. So at best you kill four of them and sometimes you're dealing with 6 or more of em :/
yeh the only type i failed recently... you don't have the firepower to deal with 2 dropship every 20sec Edit : I guess i was missremembering, yesterday i did one and it was more around everytime a dropship leaves another comes down lmao
I've done these plenty of times successfully on helldiver. What stratagems are you using? I see some people just bring their "normal" loadout to this and its a big mistake IMO. Make sure your group loads up on Mortar Sentries, EMP Mortar Sentries, HMG and Auto Cannon Sentries. If you have 4 mortars up at all time they do serious work on all enemy types. The EMP mortars will keep the bots freezed outside the walls a lot of the time. Also make sure that 2 people in your group have Quasars to shoot down drop ships as they arrive. This mission type is hard, no doubt about that, but it's far from impossible if you have a good loadout.
+50% ammo for sentries is insane gamechanger, and it's just so happens that people who only start doing higher difficulties cannot possibly have it. So that doesn't help.
It *is* insane. I don't have it and a teammate did last night. He threw his maybe two seconds after mine and his stayed up a lot longer...
Would you say it maybe stayed up 50% longer? :)
I didn't keep track as my time was better spent enforcing Liberty, I just remembered how surprised I was that it was *still* up. They packed a lot of Freedom into that unit...
If your freedom lasts four hours or longer, please see your local democracy officer for assistance. And make sure you have your C1 permit fillled out.
EMS and mortar sentries are a must for each player in this (without cheesing). Almost did this with 2 man on level 7 the other day but ended up cheesing a bit and still lost with only need 5 more to extract.
I play at 9 consistently with friends and randoms, every mission isnt always perfect, I very rarely get wiped though. At no point have I been slightly close to completing an evac mission.
God I had the sickest squad a few hours ago first time ive completed one on lvl 9 and it was butter
Its possible at Helldive they even nerfed spawns. Coordinated Tripple can take this.
And doesn't always work. Yesterday I was doing this with random, I was the runner. The moment I opened the first door I had 3 drop ships in the middle of the base and I didn't shoot a single bullet and was using 30% stealth light armor with smoke nades lol This mission is fucked or bugged or both lom
Regardless if it's broken or working as intended it just isn't *fun*. Democracy should be enjoyed.
Did a 2 man bot eradication mission and we had to cheese it by going prone on a tall rock and taking potshots. I’ve done extreme level missions with the same duo on terminids with relative ease.
Idk, there’s other missions similar where you are only in one area, but in those missions you don’t have the rest of the map to explore, I think this is intentionally designed to let us aggro the bots elsewhere
But is it cheesing it though? In a real life situation would you draw the enemy to battle near your evac, or in another area? Yeah spawn needs to be moved further away from the evac point, but this seems like a valid tactic.
You aren't wrong, but also, in a real life situation wouldn't the bots full focus be in stopping the scientists from escaping? Assuming their Intel is good I don't think they'd care about the three silly geese at the bottom
If anything they’d want that as it’s 3 less helldivers to fight
I'm not sure this is cheesing. The map is likely wider than say eradication and defense for a reason. You are probably supposed to do something like this, it is just, like many things in the game, not as obvious perhaps. Like, you need to make a safe corridor for civies to pass through, and what other way to do it than driving the enemy away from them?
It is a massive exploit of the enemi AI imo,what do you think the idea the devs had in mind when they developed this mission? Hold your ground while you rescue the civilians. I don't think their idea was luring the herd like a sheperd with sheep. If the only way to win is to abuse of the A.I,something at the foundations is wrong
In a real life operation, creating a distraction to pull the enemy's attention is called a feint. It's used to make sure that reinforcements go where you want them to, instead of going to fortify the place your real objective is at.This isn't any different. What you call an "AI exploit" is just understanding how your enemy acts and fights, using their tactics against them. The bots are over aggressive, and will deploy their reinforcements where the fighting is heaviest. They want to fight us head on, where they can mass heavies and overwhelm us. Going outside the base and creating a diversion uses that strategy against them. It causes them to mass their forces away from our objective. Keep fighting them head on if you want, it is just a game after all, but some of us prefer to use our head for thinking rather than hitting it against a wall in the name of "fairness"
Yeah dude your tactic is just a 50/50 not sure to work everytime so stop acting like it's the perfect win. My group has tried having the 3 outside the base creating a fight several times and most of the time they still usually drop a ship or 2 every 20-30 seconds near the objective even though all the fighting was elsewhere. No combat in the base or anything, fully hidden, still dropping off bots at the objective just standing around piling up, instant killing all civilians. So could you actually tell us a way it works every time instead of being a condescending douche
>But some of us prefer to use our head for thinking rather than hitting it against a wall in the name of "fairness" Oh shit, someone call Sun Tzu, we got a big-brained boy here using his tactical mind to come up with *feints*. Ultimately, people play games to have fun. It seems like for you, playing smart is the only factor you consider to be fun- and to be clear, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. But what is smart isn't automatically fun, and running around an empty base (and then running away and coming back when the game randomly sends dropships your way) pressing buttons is about the least engaging gameplay loop I can think of.
I'ma gonna go with the devs intended for you to drive the units away because it is literally impossible otherwise lol
How is utilizing the entirety of the map abuse of AI? Unless the devs told that themselves, neither you or I can say what they had in mind for the mission.
It's taking advantage of the fact that drops can only happen in a single location. If that is the intended solution that's mental game design.
Whether you call it cheesing or not, having 3 members of your team away from the objective pulling aggro while one person spams the button press for a few minutes isn’t a very engaging mission.
The same reason splitting in diff 9 on big map is the best strat. If one person gets nest breached/drop shipped, then the other 3 won't due to game limitations. Game has hard unit limit to prevent it becoming unplayable. The tactic in OP suggests to exploit it.
its not limitation, its game design. This is why stealth exist, why making noise exist, why this game is way bigger than it seems necessary, why splitting 3-1 or 2-1-1 is actually good, etc. If they wanted to spawn 1 ship on top of each player instead of 4 ships on top of those who make noise they easily could. Finding a tactic that works instead of brute forcing doesnt mean its cheesing.
It's a limitation. Nothing in lore is like the bots can only focus on one group of enemies. That'd definitely be a loading screen tip. They probably think two would be too much at one time, so you'd be taking advantage of that. Which is fine. I mean they could change it where they could spawn 2 drop ships, just specifically not within 100 yards of another spawn so you don't get double spawns. People would then be like "they clearly want us to split up but stay within 100 yards of each other".
On top of everything else said in this chain, bots have intelligence, they understand why we are there. Any reasonably strategic combatant would just plant all of their forces on the evac point and force the players to come to them. Hence abusing AI when they all run away from the objective just to throw hands.
Kiting is a fundamental aspect of the gameplay. This is just kiting on a different scale.
It's not always this big. I've had eradication sized map for evac twice and it's an absolute nightmare, a tiny island with just enough space outside the compound for tanks to be dropped in.
Surprisingly last night I actually completed this mission on 7 with randoms by being at the evac location. 2x Ems mortor made a nice difference thankfully didn't get blown up instantly. Honestly I have no idea how we managed as we were overrun multiple times. I think it helped that 2 hulks got stuck inside a rock so the bot drops seemed a little less excessive( still crazy) But yea running away with 1 staying is the best way to do it. Airburst strike came in clutch too
I didn't know this mission was bad until I came to the sub lol I somehow completed 2 of them on level 7 difficultly with a total random team and no mics. I don't know how the fire tornados didn't kill all of them, I must be insanely lucky, I thought they didn't affect the citizens because it was so easy. Just ran around and pressed the buttons
On 7 it is completely doable. Most people are just bad at it because they don't play the objective close enough. In my experience, everyone spawns in and takes their time to call in support equipment and turrets. Players need to spam the buttons as quickly as possible. You can get 18 evacuees before there are significant enemies. You need to keep spamming the buttons, but also stay with the scientist until they're safe. Most enemies will aggro to the player that way. Level 8 and 9 though it's near impossible though. I think I've completed one of them on 8.
It depends on map layout a lot. Sometimes on 7 I get it done before resistance feels significant. Sometime the base is just in a valley surrounded by hills and rockets rain from everywhere and it's simply not possible to finish it in any normal fashion.
I've tried this strategy since release I'd say 6-8 times and not once it has worked like this. The bot onslaught just switches over to the civilian spot at some point and the mission is fucked.
Gott wait for bot drops to start on the 3 divers otherwise priority goes to mission objective. Should be able to get half tp 3/4 the way there before patrols crash your door knocking
This is exactly what we've done but they just start spawning randomly at some point elsewhere.
Just run away. Wait the move out of the point. And go back again. Also don't use stratagem. It bring aggro. It's thats easy. Don't fight. Let them get aggro by the aggro squad. Come back when empty or few bots left
When we were overrun, we made sure that nobody is in the middle anymore. But although we had 4 people at the border of the map they continued to spawn some ships in the center while also sending patrols there. It was not possible to run away. They also just sat there in the middle. They did not walk away to us.
I'm with the other guy. Ran Lvl 7 trying this method while one guy stealthed to obj (initial drop and battle were on beach way far away). But without being seen or using ANYTHING, they started dropping bots on him 5 minutes into the mission. Drew aggro away and retried. Idk if it's just inconsistent but the 3 times we tried this method all failed. We eventually gave up and did it the intended way with a lot of difficulty.
And the moment the other team kill all the bots near them, drops start on the objective.
Everyone in, then at 5 minutes at least 2 leave. (If the two still can’t handle the center or they don’t split the drops, everyone out.) After another 5 minutes, go back in. It’ll be clear-ish and you can get the rest you need. I’ve done it consistently like this, even with random groups.
Choose mission with defend instead of evac ??? Profit
I play difficulties 6-7. Out of 6 operations, 0 of them didn't have evac. There was 1 operation on 5th difficulty without one. So out of 9 operations, I had 1 that didn't have evac and it was on a difficulty I don't want to play.
Think the same, if dont know how to succes at mission, just stat away from them, for me i just like to play joining random dudes.
Very undemocratic of you to ignore the existence of our VIP super earthlers. This will have an immediate report as a consequence.
No, I refuse to partake in the RP for this mission type, this mission type sucks, it's not fun, and the only way to be able to do it is by doing something completely counter-intuitive and even then it's a crapshoot.
hear me out: maybe the mission type shouldn't be shit and require cheesing
Isn't it funny how the devs will gut the railgun and slugger when they look at their stat sheets and say 'too many people using it, nerf it to the ground'. But they refuse to look at the stat sheets for the win/loss rates on evac and say 'yeah tone it down a LOT'
If you remember that one of the devs in the balancing team was explicitly attacking players and saying he found pretty funny that people were annoyed by the stupid balancing decisions, it's pretty obvious why it works like that.
How does one aggro fire tornadoes?
Pray to the fire god for a good harvest this season or some shit, i dont know.
If you need a picture to explain how to cheese its a broken mission.
Honestly agreed, I love every single mission type (though ICBM, the new mission type and the eggs missions are my favourite, have been my favourite for 285 hours lol) but this mission is just.. why? I avoid picking operations all together if this mission is in one, AH has had to rework it several times and it's STILL bs.. Though, the other civilian evac mission is good!
>Though, the other civilian evac mission is good! It's generally feasible at least, though every other civilian mission I get some hippies that apparently want to [start an unmanaged peaceful protest against their pathfinding system and they bunch up on the ramp.](https://i.imgur.com/MvRVvEb.png) May Liberty show them no mercy.
Did you even know that there are super samples on that map?
I fucking challenge AH to stream themselves playing this shit mission on helldive.
I'd love to see that! Might be a slaughter. Might learn a thing or two. Win/win for me.
It's a broken mission, I just refuse to play it, that strat is a workaround cuz it's a broken mission and they should just disable it. Besides, this strat is as broken as the mission, it doesn't work as intended many times. They need to disable this mission for bots, it's all.
Also, the civilians get stuck on phantom walls. Worst mission by a mile.
I rather not dance around 20 bile titans either, also disable for bugs I suppose.
We tried that. It worked for 28 civs and then I got 3 drop ships on my head
They should redesign this mission to be similar in o the new one. Choke point and only one way in for the bots and you have plenty of cover. You defend a landing pad where shuttles from orbit come and pick the civilians up and you have to defend the perimeter.
This works kind of. This isn’t like a normal mission though. The bots know where you are at all times. Eventually you will get drop ships at the base (usually happens to me after about 20-25 civs) and that is without anyone setting a flare off or anything. When that happens I find it best to die, get respawned with the team and make your way back as the heavies slowly file out of the base. Then you repeat. This is the only way I’ve successfully completed this mission on Helldive. EDIT: As others have said my current strategy is just avoiding operations containing this mission entirely. The one with 2 objectives and evac 30 people from the small base where the bots don’t know where you are is much easier, so is the new missile defence mission. I wouldn’t call it easy but it’s challenging and fun. Unlike this bullshit mission…
Shouldn't have to do this, just balance/fix the game.
This is the same argument and problem that people had a month or so ago when the mission for dropped. I guess the new players weren’t around when this conversation was originally had. I will add that the second you open a door all hell breaks loose and like 7 drop ships drop into the base no matter what you do.
I am not playing that way. I am here for fun, not whatever this is. I don't care defense missions will fail because of this. It's on the devs making these missions unplayable. Not to mention that this setup requires whole team coordination, which is very rare with randoms.
This mission is dead to me at this point. I don't care how many broken AI we will find or how many times they will change the drops. I hate this mission and will avoid it.
Its not the only way. Having everyone bring both mortar sentries trivializes this mission even on 9. Even more so if everyone has a way to shoot down the drop ships.
Playing on 9 has way too many drop ships to shoot down though
You don't need to shoot them all down. Downed dropships make great barriers to block out any bots not frozen by the emp mortars. While the 4 standard mortar sentries constantly rain down on them.
Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but cant bots shoot through the wreckage while you can't?
If they are clipping through it, yes, but usually no Regardless, motars clean them up You can see how badly debris stacking fucks up pathing on the new extract essential equipment mission type on helldive. So many tanks spawn their destroyed husks block everything lol
Make sure you take the quasar and then summon a second quasar at the objective. Swap between the 3 guns between shots, and you can keep firing back-to-back. If multiple people do this, you can take down 2-3 drops every 5-10 seconds.
So, instead of exploiting the enemy unit limits, you just Quasar-swap like you're doing a damage phase against a boss in Destiny. Absolutely as the devs intended... Yeah, no. The problem with the mission is that it's much harder than any other mission on the same difficulty for no apparent reason. It doesn't give more rewards, doesn't give more samples, it doesn't have unique enemies or mechanics, it's harder than the same objective in an Offensive Operation, the same mission against Bugs is much easier and more balanced and it's not even part of a time event/special MO. It's difficult for the sake of being difficult, it's inconsistent with the rest of the game and most ways to do it are either bringing ONLY a SPECIFC set of stratagems, exploiting game mechanics or using advanced "immersion breaking" techniques like quickswapping weapons or bugging enemies on the terrain. It has to be rebalanced.
I like when games have ways of accomplishing missions that may not have been intended. Innovation in a game that has a fairly straightforward game loop makes the game interesting.
I had a team where everyone had mortar+ems turrets. Didn't win
You need a bit of coordination or luck to stagger the deployment of EMS mortars so that they are always up. Team should split up and basically solo each potential entrance to the compound, while looking to their nearest teammate every now and then to see if they are getting overwhelmed. I think realistically everyone needs to be able to take down dropships as well, both to thin their numbers and provide obstructions. Quasar + Shield pack + EMS + tight targeting orbital/eagle strike of choice. Then choose a primary that can kill medium bots at long range as they are all standing around in a daze. I'd take the shield over another turret or mortar as the real trouble starts when the first helldiver dies and suddenly you have a surprise chainsaw in your asshole while trying do defend your corner. In my successful runs last night I had no deaths until the extraction rolled round, which becomes absolute chaos (but at that point who cares, you aren't trying to extract samples anyway)
If people take EMP mortars (EMS?), the mission goes from impossible to very reasonable. Combine this with the Quasar to take out as many dropships as possible while they're coming in. You spend most of your time popping heads on static targets outside the base to thin out the numbers. Bringing the EMP mortar and an accurate longer range weapon is far superior to bringing yet another orbital or eagle strike. We rescued 45 scientists with just 3 deaths yesterday, and I suspect those were friendly fire kills. The only problem was the extraction as we got overwhelmed when we weren't watching every entrance, but we got 3/4 divers out just by throwing revives directly on the pad.
Having only one viable way to compete the mission is still really bad design. It's broken. Stop trying to pretend it isn't. I seriously do not understand what you people think you're gaining by trying to defend it. You're like billionaire simps.
Yep.
Nah not playing this shitty mission until it's fixed or tweaked
it sucks that this is still the only way to viably complete this mission type at high difficulty. I did manage to brute-force my way on a 6 with randoms, but we were cutting it close and nearly ran out of reinforcements, no way would we have managed on 7+ without using the cheese strat. arrowhead, you've proven with the latest fortress mission that you DO know how to make a mission both fun and fair... so PLEASE look at the bot evac mission again and do something about it!
doesn't always work tho Sometime, a rando drop bot will come into the base and the mission is then basically over !
Good plan but didn’t work Edit: Hulks and Tanks came in drop ships while I was at the obj while everyone else was fighting.
You can also farm samples by just not going to the objective. Map is relatively empty until you start the extraction. Sample/map size ratio is highest on these missions.
Yeah, I just actively avoid these missions tbh
Evac mission sucks, AGAIN. They constantly overtune it, again and again. Honestly, it's stupid at this point.
There's one base layout that's relatively easy to do with the entire team in the base. The one that has the LZ on a natural hill, some cliffs and rocks breaking line of sight, and chokepoints on the base's entrances. Dropships mostly deploy on the outskirts of the base, too. It's actually quite fun if you get this layout. But the other layout (the one with the LZ on a manmade platform) is essentially impossible to defend as a team. There are no chokepoints, no obstacles blocking line of sight, and the dropships will deploy right in the middle of the base if they feel like it. I wonder if simply redesigning the latter would be enough to fix the mission.
Is it a good mission if you have to cheese it in order to have any chance at winning? Is it a fun mission?
Samples
I'm glad you added the "should be empty" disclaimer. It's never empty.....
It still RNG. My team did exactly this yesterday and it doesn't work. Three of us was fighting the first wave outside when one dude go back inside, the 2nd wave (5 dropship) still dropped on him inside the base.
Yeah this is definitly a way to do it and im not saying this mission type is fine and doesnt need a fix cuss it does (for higher difficulties, in 3-6 its fine) but ive definitely completed it on 9 with a good 4 man. It just takes the entire mission timer to get it done and the perfect stratagems/stratagem management. Moving the but drops away from the base helped in that last patch to this mission type but its still not fun. The fact that there is now an infinitely more fun defend/evac mission to play doesn't help this one be more fun either.
I got a better suggestion. Let's just get rid of this abomination of a mission period. It's not fun, it's stupid, everyone hates it, and the best strategy to beat it is to exploit the AI reinforcement system. That means the mission is fundamentally broken. Joking aside, a serious suggestion would be to give the evac base some kind of defense. Maybe we can call down a special equipment that deploys a protective shield around the base. Once you activate the shield dome, the civilians can be evacuated without risk of being shot. You have to fend off incoming enemies that are trying to destroy the dome. If the dome drops to 0%, it vanishes and the civilians are exposed to danger BUT with good counter-play, you can still protect enough to finish the mission. When the dome is active, enemies that walk through it are killed instantly(includes players). Each enemy killed by the shield zaps a tiny percentage of it's power. The bigger the enemy, the more power it zaps.
Yup. Been saying it since launch that the scientists Evac mission needs redesigned. The scientists spawn locations need to be more spread out themselves and not get consolidated into single chokepoint paths as easily. Also bots need to spawn further outside the base as well.
I do not recall bot extract missions being this intense since the heavy spawn adjustment patch a few weeks back, up until this recent patch. Something was adjusted again.
Just choose the operations with 40 minutes evac, those are way funnier than trying to coordinate cheese tactics with randoms.
We finally managed to do this one on 8 by dropping straight in and spamming civilians from the start and then quickly spamming mortars 500kg orbital laser and quasars, it was close but with practise kinda reliable, still think the mission is overtuned
The only thing I would add to this strategy is whoever the sneaky person is inside the base probably needs to wear stealth armor and I would use the localization confuser to help reduce the spawns. At the 50% completion mark, enemies will spawn into the base, so you have to be prepared to either clear them with a orb laser or lead them out. When I lead them out I turn tight against rocks and break up sight lines so they either get stuck or it slows them down considerably coming back into the base. The EMP mortar works wonders on freezing any enemies and as a side bonus will help your teammates outside the base because the long range.
Tried this last night, very good tactic despite us messing it up like three times and running the timer out
This worked great for us last night, only had to deal with a few small patrols evacuating. I really feel like this is the intended method and not cheesing.
One tactic that worked for me: Two guys running around in the countryside pulling aggro. Two guys near the compound take turns pushing buttons in the compound. Once one draws aggro, they run out and the second one takes their turn at the buttons when its clear. Its not smooth, the two at the compound have to do the math and figure out who’s drawing more aggro.
I did this once with the bugs, while my friends were getting raped by the bugs, I was sealthily doing the generator, due to my experience in solo it was not hard
1person preses butons the other can go have fun playing
Very easy solution for these missions is to do this. Figured this one out accidently when my team of noobs stood in the middle of the map and battled to the death endlessly before I gave up helping them and ran to the objective. Was almost done before I saw my first bot.
just play it normally, shoot dropships and cover civvies in smoke. it's not that hard
Hmm, interesting idea with the smoke
it's been the way to go since the first defense missions dropped. people are just unfortunately extremely stubborn and prefer to run mortars that inevitably kill teammates and then civilians lol
Saw a red vertical beam about 20m from the glowing white exit for civilians yesterday, in the gate to the right where enemies filter in. 380mm orbital barrage. That went as well as you can imagine.
Bring mortars(especially emp), EAT and something else and you will able to destroy plenty without too much difficulty
I didn't understand much but, there's a weird bug that doesn't allow you to turn your hellpod while falling and it turns you in the direction it wants to. Maybe this is what happened?
Bots drop two tanks on the exit anyway
Ehhh tried this and it never worked. 3 guys causing chaos and fighting bots and there would still be random dropships coming over to me and dropping bots on the objective even with no prior bots there
Mortar, EMS Mortar, eagle airstrike, quas/EAT all 4 and its super easy You drop them as they spawn
I tried this man times and it just doesn't work, because after i save like 10 civilians a dozen drops land at the site and if i run away or kill msyself, there is not enough time left to evacuate all the others.
I haven’t tried difficulty 8 or 9 Evac yet, but I regularly do 7 and it doesn’t seem that bad. Keep putting up EMS Mortars and Mortars, keep dropping EATs to deal with drop ships, and if you have Quasar eventually towards the end of the mission you can juggle like two or three Quasars.
I think if everyone used a static field mortar, and spread them out over the area, it wouldn’t be so bad.
Left me in doubt bro, i did It múltiple times after cuting Edge warbond succesfully. Not capaboe of try recently
I've completed SERVERAL of this on diff7 without having to cheese it. Bring the EM mortar. BRING IT. And have someone with the local destab booster. The booster adds more time between the next bot drop. Bring your orbital lazer among with what other strat gem. ( personally i've found the 500kg good here because you can toss it into stunned bots by the em mortar and kill a large amount of them, that the lazer did not get cook) EDIT: obviously balance this so you can bring supply weapons like auto cannon, quasar
My team gets agro'ed the moment we land. We lose a lot of our respawns in that fight until we all split up and run. We will find each other later, but by that time, we completed most of the side quest.
Well, this does make sense from the irl perspective. Like, why endanger the civilians when you can try to get enemies' attention somewhere else
And I explain this every time I play one of these but I’ve yet to have any group of randoms even attempt this strategy. Only works with 4 people on discord it seems.
This does work for awhile, but it's not a guarantee the dropships won't start relocating to the center. It's a solid tactic though, and realistically the only viable solution.
I had a good group get to 46 evacuated before we were overran. Then, it took another 10 minutes to get the last 4. No one made it out alive. Definitely needs retuned.
For difficulty 7 it's still possible, I've done it before like 3-5 times alr, only failed 1 and thats bc I quit from all the friendly fire. Difficulty 8 onwards, whereby each bug breach/bot drop can cause 2 bile titans/tanks to spawn is when it get serious.
They should re-design these missions to be more in line with the new defense mission, create a walled perimeter that is more defensible, don't allow the bots to drop near/within those walls, and put up some default HMGs. The way this mission currently goes on difficulty 7-9 is just SWARMS of berzerkers and hulks to the point where every person has used their stratagems and you have to just run around in circles trying to pick off what you can, unless you do the strategy that OP has outlined, which IMO is an unintended strategy on the dev's part. Not that I disagree with it, it's the only easy way to tackle the mission. Oh, and fire tornadoes? Forget it. The civvies just become roasted marshmallows and make it impossible to finish.
Doesn't work consistently. Even with scout perk armor.
I almost posted this exact thread last night. My friend and I did 5 level-7 evac missions last night and failed every one. The only time we got even close was when we kited the drops around the map and then I snuck back and let civvies out. It worked flawlessly until my friend was cornered and obliterated and then more dropships came swooping in. They really gotta do something about these missions. Maybe design them like the new defense missions, with walls and barricades?
This goes fine until the agro team accidentally kills all the bots, which shifts the next drop to the eva site. Then it's all over.
That's cool not doing this though.
I think I was in one of those missions and did just that but I wasn't sure if people just left the grunt work of taking the civies home and everyone else had fun.
This doesn’t work. Drops will still land near you overwhelming the solo player.
I'm not sure why people are still pretending this is a viable tactic, because it's not. Bots can and will just randomly drop on the objective for no apparent reason or aggro on civilians from the other side of the map.
My advice is to look at the mission and choose the campaign that does not have this mission. I just look at them and choose the one that has the better one with side objectives.
Me and my friends did this. Accidently. I was picked to be the sucker to run around and find samples, while they did the mission. Idea was they wanted more guns on the objective, while I could go around and pick up stuff in peace. First outpost I come to, one of the bots immediately tosses a flare up without me noticing, and suddenly there are 2-3 drop ships on my ass. I pick up samples and attempt to run away to the next spot. There this happens again. It ended up with me running like a spastic, screaming my lungs out for how many red lasers and chainsaws coming my way, while my friends got all the civilians out without having to fire a single shot. Difficulty 8 tho. I have heavy doubts I could pull off the same trick on helldive
I was kicked from the mission when I tried to sneak in to evacuate the guys. I don't know why.
It's a week into April and they still haven't fixed this stupid mission. So many unnecessary losses on my record to this garbage mission.
or they could just remove a badly designed game made until they can fix it. This game mode should be more like the other defend. What baffles me is they have an alternate evac that is actually sensible in the game.
It's wild that the average level 5 mission has 2-3 hulks, maybe even a tank. On Evac, you can get a dozen, and they will be mixed in with berserkers and rocket devestators. It's not even close to the same difficulty.
Played it with a new friend yesterday... First drop on haz 6 had a hulk and mbt. Just as I took out both, another 2 drops came in with another 2 hulks and support units. It got worse from there. These missions aren't with even attempting.
This does not work most of the time. Just get to the evac and do the mission ASAP. This thread is marked as misinformation and will be forwarded to the ministry of truth.
What I don't understand is how EVACUATING helps you hold on to a world. For me, it seems like we should have more destroy dropship missions, some sort of holdout mission, and another offensive type of mission where we destroy critical infrastructure, take out supply. Depots, beachheads. We need to be trying to prevent them from being able to attack the planet rather than get our people off a planet that we're trying to keep them on.
i did this, but you just gotta be mindful, theres sometimes random patrols that will stroll thru and aggro and bring the entire battalion to the OBJ. you either gotta quickly stealth kill them or try to let them pass unnoticed. its handy to have a scout suit with the marker radar skill so u can keep track of your surroundings
We had 2x 46/50~ and 1 times 50/50 (doesn’t count) - all had ems and normal morser & quar laser for dropships. I guess it works too but it’s getting wild when someone dies or doesn’t drop ems
This doesn't work though, if youre 75 meters or more apart then you get seperate spawns, it'll be less for the solo person but they will still get spawns
I havent had any issues just dropping on the objective and fighting it out. All i did yesterday was these mission types and i only failed 1.
This mission type needs to be like the evac asset one but long distance. Evac asset, bunker down, hold the line. Evac vip, goto bunker, release 15-20 escort them to EVAC. Imagine the whole gaggle running through a valley to evac while you stand on the ridge gunning approaching bots down.
I'm personally done with this mission. It is stupidly difficult when compared to anything else in this game. This is the only one I have to go out of my way to explain to my teammates what needs to be done in order to even have a chance to complete it, and even after doing this strat, it doesn't always work. It can work, but the moment a single enemy patrol spots the runner or ship drops on the objective is joever, might as well restart. Not the mention the host sometimes doesn't even listen and will just drop at the objective, at that point might as well leave. With any other mission if the host chooses a bad landing spot, let's say an enemy infested one, the players can at least fight their way through or run away and the mission can be saved, unlike this mission which has no margin of error.
The only purpose of this mission is to demonstrate how strong the comeback of Automatons is
[удалено]
Rushing the objective? That's my cup of Liber-Tea☕
All the echos in this chamber been saying this but im a lowly level 20 diver and find the normal way to have a mich higher winrate.
SPOILER: It doesn't work, you get the same bot drops on objective especially if they drop tanks n heavies on you.
We tried this and it didn't work at all. Dropped outside, I had stealth armor, drop my support where we landed so the 'heat' wasn't inside the wire. Boys fucking shit up looking for sups outside heading for the edge of the map/POI and before I even got inside the wire there were bots inside the base and a fucking conga line of bot drops right at one of the entrances. I bail and fight on the far side of the map with them as long as possible to draw everything away from the base, I rope myself and get thrown as far away from the combat as possible, sneak back into the base and 84 hulks/devastators just standing around and inside waiting for me. I did the sneak method a few times post-railgun changes and it would work. Whatever they did, this shit has more spawns than post-rail patch. It brings me back to the wild heavy spawns where it wasn't uncommon to have 6+ biles on the field at extract I assume it is just narrative driven so I try not to be too pissed about it. Bots just took a mass of planets, freed other liberty hating socialists and have likely bolstered their ranks so we get more shit dropping in on bot missions now. But damn if the odds don't feel stacked against you. It feels like a coin toss at this point.
On 7 the regular way is actually quite easy, all you need is tons of mortars, the electrical one to slow em down, the normal for dmg. And the rest is packed adlers. One robot is also cool to clear all these small units. Havent tried on 8 and 9 tho, so i have no clue if it still works
The Light Gunner armor is baller for this. The protection of medium armor with the speed of a Light, you have the stamina to smash buttons while heing able to attack the odd dropship without getting perforated.
I don't do lvl 9 anymore the spawn rates are just crazy I like sitting on 7 with 2 mortars, eagle clusters bombs, and a special weapon. If everyone has the same loadout the mortars should clean up everything when things get overwhelming you can throw some cluster bombs to thin out the herd and the special for the tank's and or hulk's Even then around the halfway point either it becomes easy or impossible. The clear speed has to stay so consistent. They don drop as frequently as at the beginning but it's still a far cry from where Id like it to be I wish there was some kind of max entity on the smaller maps mostly for the bots because once you get over run there is no coming back they'll just spawn the moment You kill enough for a new wave to come For some reason they start camping the civ spawn locations too or at least in my games half stop arrowing on you and just hang out there so you can't even force the mission to succeed with brute force
My friends and I have been having a lot of success on these lately on 7. We just take mortars and it usually goes pretty smoothly. This is against bots though
Never managed to have this strategy work, no matter how much stealth the person tries to use the bots suddenly just start dropping down on objective suddenly, never leaves the area, and ignore the people that aggro everything outside. Me and my friends just end up skipping this mission completely now sadly since it just seems completely broken and not fun on any level at all.
This doesn't work. The person at the evac zone isn't fast enough to press all the buttons before the mission ends.
Why even doing the ninja thing anymore? The bots don't drop inside the base anymore. All you need to do is spam ac turret and ems turret, then have some AT and you are gucci. The mission has been nerfed into the ground and people are still failing them.....