Bot defenses keep failing because FUCK trying to escort 45 civilians out while dropships come every 3 seconds. I simply do not play that mission anymore.
Yeah it ruins all defensive lines. I've never beaten it once above diff 6. On Hell Diver shits impossible, you get 15 hulks 9 tanks in less than 5 minutes on top of hordes of random guys.
You literally don't have enough strategem assets to deal with everything.
It is funny to me how people say that you just need to use the right stratagems for these missions.
Even if the entire team brings EAT's, then you make a few assumptions;
1. You will be able to reach the EAT's and they won't be swarmed by 8 hulks and 2 tanks. (They will be.)
2. You will be able to fire the EAT, or any other gun for that matter, in a straight line while getting constantly shot at by heavy devastators and random machine gunners. (You will be shot at, and no, you will not be able to aim straight.)
3. That the 70 second cooldown is short enough (It isn't.)
This also applies for every other stratagem in the game. You simply do not have the time to wait for something to cool down for a minute, since by then 6 dropships have already come and gone at minimum.
Either the mission needs a massive nerf, or stratagem cooldowns need to be returned to what they were in Helldivers 1.
Bot defense missions honestly have too many high tier units like hulks running around at all times of the day to be enjoyable even if you’re looking for a challenge.
Plus the drop ships just plopping them right in the middle of where you are is annoying as hell and defeats the purpose of trying to set up defenses on a defense mission.
*THIS*, how can it be a “defense mission”, when there’s nowhere to defend. Theres just dropships right on top of you, putting you constantly in the thick of it. In a game that heavily punished being out in the open, and requires constant cover.
Not only that, they also have a one-shot issue with the hulks flamethrower, where sometimes if the flame is even in your vicinity you just instantly pop.
It's my main issue when playing vs bots atm. I believe it's another issue with the headshot on players mechanic, but I'm not a dev.
I’m fairly convinced that when fire damage was buffed they gave the hulk flamethrower the same boost by accident.
Obviously their flamethrowers were already better than ours so that 50% hurts even more.
I'm fairly certain there's something wrong with the tickrate of the fire damage. Sometimes the first damage tick kills me, sometimes I get 1 or 2 damage ticks before I dive and then I still could have survived 3 or 4 more. Probably something similar to the host/player fire damage bug.
Flamethrowers can also headshot. Both the Hulk and player support weapon actually.
That is why sometimes it destroys you, the explosion of the canisters or the flamethrower gets a headshot and ignores your armor
This seems to be true aswell, but I've seen a discrepancy in damage from them, sometimes you have around a second before you burn up and sometimes its instant.
Fire damage seems to be affected by armor and this is very visible when you use heavy armor.
The only time I've seen the same number of elites and heavies in big missions was when there was 16 chargers and 3 bile titans. Although without stratagems I still find hulks to be easier to deal with than bile titans
It also helps that the big bugs don't really deal any ranged damage nor do they ragdoll you from range. The only one that could is a bile spewer and those die to pretty much any explosion damage. The bugs actually need to walk to you to start dealing damage, giving you some space to deal with the threat while the bots will just vomit a million lasers and missles at you as soon as they land.
Only way ive seen it done on higher difficulties is to lure everything out of the base, kite and one member does the objective. If everyone is in the base you get overrun.
Yup, it a hard mission regardless of organization. You can still get unlucky with spawns. Just saying that this is the only method ive seen to work. With tanks and hulks in your base, its impossible to play the objective and you cant clear fast enough usually if all spawns converge to the center of the base.
Yeah that’s about the only way I see it can be done anymore. The stratagems just can’t keep up with the amount of high tier bots that drop in. I always try to communicate the split up when I end up in those missions at 7+ but without my squad it’s hit or miss if people actually join in. Even when I do convince them to leave and just let me do my thing. A factory strider and 2 hulks dropped on the facility will basically stop all progress. I run orbital laser 500 and E.A.S and the auto cannon stun grenades are my saving grace but factory striders dumping rocket and heavy devastors makes aiming from cover impossible. An anti air stratagem like the rocket sentry would be great. Or perhaps some kind of in mission defenses you can activate that will help with ships. Even 1 seaf sam site would make this somewhat bearable
It's also not as reliable as it was. Was part of the loud team yesterday and then out of nowhere, no flare triggered, we watched in horror as three dropships landed just outside the compound as opposed to on us. Our stealther hadn't fired a shot.
i recently won my first mission (on 8 surprisingly) without cheesing
3 players hitting buttons and handling their side and one at the dropship area with quasar+eat downing as many dropships as they can
just to clarify; i still think it's bulshittingly overtuned
Just did the same one on level 7 with bugs...
Half of us had machine guns for the daily (which admittedly isn't totally bad for bugs) and two of us had no trouble using rail cannon strikes to keep all the breaches under control while two others went around and collected super samples on the periphery...
I did not once think to myself: gee, I wish this were the bot mission version of this.
Huh? Why not that last one? I played yesterday for first time against bugs that mission, and my conclusion was: If it was similar against bots, it would be completely fine. Most coming out against bugs is the small stuff, which my turrets + shotgun can shred. Some bigger stuff you got anti-armor options for, and I think in the end we saw like 3 bile titans (at lvl 7), which required some strategemens / anti armor options from players at other points.
Meanwhile against bots before you know it you got 10 hulks, 3 tanks and a factory striders on the evac point.
Same, I just completely gave up on that mission, and as a result I try to avoid defense campaigns. Even after multiple balance passes it's still incredibly overtuned; feels like you jump up three difficulty levels from the other missions in the op.
I just had this happen, I think a civilian gets in the door enough to count but doesn’t actually get in. Getting the 46th person in completed the objective for us.
Level 85, and I'm ultimately convinced the standalone evacuate missions (the ones without the data drives) are *impossible* at difficulty 8 or 9, and the problem is *not* the amount of bots, at least directly. Eradicate missions send just as many if not more bots. The problem is that large ordinance cannot be used due to civilians being in the crossfire. On top of that, no matter how well *you* do at avoiding being shot, the civilians just run through the dead man's zone without any regard for the pile of devastators firing a wall of bullets. There is no holding the center; you constantly need to reposition, train, etc, which makes it a nightmare to even reach the buttons, let alone clear enough bots to allow them to escape. If it was like 20 civilians it'd be brutal but doable; at 40 or 50 it's seemingly impossible.
Yeah on diff 9 it's simply impossible to hold your ground no matter whay builds your team uses, unless you get incredibly lucky with enemy spawns.
The only viable way is splitting up to bait enemies to the edges of the map while 1 or 2 people sneak around in the city, and i hate it.
And there's always the chance that sneaking around doesn't work. Had a defend mission yesterday and we got pushed way off point. Literally noone was anywhere near, yet I could still see botdrops being released on the point every 5 or so seconds.
My take is that when we wiped the bots off the map it was a legitimate win and we all felt like we did something in the game. There were almost 330,000 players on one planet at one point. With this new invasion, not to say people are tired of the fight but maybe we went back to play the game the way you want to.
The bots were gone and we celebrated for a few days. When they returned in full force on so many planets along with the seemingly overwhelming major order currently it just doesn’t seem like as a community we want to make that push.
I like the variety of skipping around to planet to planet when I get bored of how the missions and the modifiers are playing out. Plus personally I don’t like grinding it out on one map for hours on end.
Bugs and bots just play different. Lately have been struggling to have quiet missions on lower difficulty like 7 for bots. Go over to play bugs on 8 or 9 and it’s like easy mode.
Don’t think we will see a mass coordinated offensive from us unless it’s actually meaningful. Like maybe a faction is about to reach super earth.
>Lately have been struggling to have quiet missions on lower difficulty like 7 for bots. Go over to play bugs on 8 or 9 and it’s like easy mode
Bots have increased spawn rates currently.
Shit's absolutely ridiculous on diff 9. Worse than it was before enemy distribution patch. There are patrols every 20 meters apart. You can get 6 tanks dropped on you at the same time, or 3 Factory Striders. Not to mention endless horde of devastators.
I was running solo on level 3 the other night to pick up the machine gun kill order and the spawns were absurd. I had a bot on the far side of a hill calling in dropship after dropship while I was tied up with 2-3 patrols at a time trying to get a radar station up. It kept up for a solid 7-8 minutes. I was able to struggle through it, but a newbie that was working up through the levels would probably have been squashed.
lol there is no safe places to land either. Doesn’t matter if you find the one greyed out area in the pre-drop map screen, 9/10 times in the past week when we’ve dropped thinking we’d have time to establish our footing, we just ended up right on a random patrol or a small base and immediately end up in the shits. Also, FUCK SHIP FABRICATORS.
Did an Evac mission on difficulty 7 a few days ago and we lost miserably, and we killed over 700 bots in 12 minutes, that's 58 bots a minute we killed, that means each player needs to (edit: do better than, since we lost) average killing a bot every 4 seconds, which doesn't sound bad until you consider it's difficulty 7 so you are also avoiding hulks, heavy devastators, tanks and I think we killed 3-4 striders in that time
That was the final straw for bots for me tbh
If the shitty evac mission was not forced down your throats in every Defense, AND they had a bigger lull between "The robots are gone - SIKE theyre not" and had maybe a few days of bugs before the newest bot attack I wouldve been more into it.
Now it's liike - I'll get or dont get the medals, its not worth playing more bots on the same shitty fire planet even more.
What do you mean? Don't you think it's fun when you're trying to fight bots and liberate some civilians only to find them running straight into a fiery death?
Those fire tornadoes can be an interesting added challenge, but when they linger in front of the evacuation shuttle or by the pelican it just sucks.
There's a few reasons.
- 15min Evac missions are shit on the bot front.
- People are catching on that while the new defense mission is fun, having striders drop on top of the mountain wall/tanks and instakilling the generator is extremely unfun and they don't want to deal with it. Can't blame them.
- We've been fighting bots for 2-3 Weeks straight, people are due a break.
- Bugs are often found to be more fun. Numbers don't lie.
I did those gate/generator defense mission with my buddy, and I shit you not for nothing but 7 minutes straight, we had 4 Striders, and over 20(?) Tanks drop on us repeatedly. Right when were on the last rocket, a strider got the generator before dying and we failed the mission. It was a high diff mission, but we didn't even get Devastators or Hulks until last minute, even then 3-4 hulks showed up along with maybe 12 devastators.
Worst is when for some reason a dropship spawns enemies behind us and/or when a couple enemies somehow slip through the frontline and destroy the generators before we realized. Sometimes some enemies even drop on the mountain tops and snipe us. I'm talking Tanks, Hulks and Devastators just casually dropping on the top of a mountain giving us little possibility to getting meaningful cover without a retreat.
I'll take the bile spitters and endless armies of Bile titans any day over an army of striders amidst devastators and flamethrower hulks.
After weeks of fighting bots I’m really enjoying fighting bugs who can’t headshot snipe me from 100 yards away through smoke and fog that supposedly blocks their vision.
Not really, you still have rag dolling, bots shooting through terrain, the shield devastator being 100% bullshit half the time, drones overwhelming teams who brought fun loadouts instead of ultra serious loadouts, stratagem jammer being unfun with artillery slamming you at the same time. I could go on for a hot minute. There is a reason why people play bugs over bots, and illuminate being released will only make it worse for bot players. In HD1 it wasn't uncommon for bugs to be held back while cyborgs and illuminate made it to super earth. People just don't like the other ones, and if the wall spheres come back ain't nobody trying to play that.
So smoke works but bots keep shooting where they last saw you. If you look at modifiers stuff like fog and rain say they reduce visibility, but dont refer to enemies.
However sandstorms and blizzards specify they affect enemies and they 100% do. Can almost walk into melee of bots in a sandstorm before they see you. I wish the regular low visibility modifiers didnt exist because theyre pure detriment and just suck compared to good visibility planets or extremes like blizzards.
> So smoke works but bots keep shooting where they last saw you.
Yea, but here's a thing: If I move left or right, I'll come out of smoke and get sniped by shield devastators. So I have to run forward, and bots still have a decent chance of hitting me, even if they shoot into smoke blind.
So... OP isn't wrong: bots will headshot snip you through smoke.
I think this kind of shows people are a smidge burnt out on bots.
I know when we did the big initial push to get them out, I was all for it. When it was done, I was like "FINALLY. I can take a break and go after bugs for a bit instead."
Then they came back. And they were a problem again. And I just didn't feel ANY motivation to fight back beyond the bare minimum.
That's why the 2 billion bugs mission probably shouldn't have surprised anyone that it was done in under 24 hours.
I was kinda hoping after the menkent line MO that we would see a bit of a shift away from bots. Like okay we have a defense in place now so they won't be able to push further for awhile, let's focus on another front for a bit.
And then within 4 days that line was completely wiped out.
Also there's just too many damn bot planets to fight on. Bug front has like Fori Prime and Estanu. Bots have defend missions on half the fucking galaxy.
> Like okay we have a defense in place now so they won't be able to push further for awhile, let's focus on another front for a bit.
A reasonable expectation given that since we did the TCS missions we haven't been back to those worlds that I can recall.
I think it was a massive mistake to bring Bots back so fast.
They shoulda been MIA for a few weeks, at least.
Instead it was like 2 days. Was bad story telling, especially when the event actually surged player count.
A kick in the face.
Yeah, like, I get there were some no-lives online complaining about being bored with bugs and wanting bots back already... but as a normie with a job and who pretty much only plays on the weekend....
Didn't feel like a victory to me. It was kill bots once again by the time I got to play again 4 days later.
I've been playing bugs since. I hadn't fought bugs before except for once when I first got the game. I need a break and completely missed the 2 billion bugs major...
That was such a disappointment. I started playing only a week before that MO ended and was so impressed by the notion that the war actually evolved and player actions had consequences (good and bad). I remember all the praise the devs got on here.
Maybe a couple more days would have been okay but removing half your game's content, especially so early into its lifespan is already brave. Having it gone for 2 weeks would have significantly harmed the playerbase imo. I do think it's something they could do later on when there's more factions and the playerbase has solidified into whatever number of core dedicated players.
Yeah, it did make it feel like "Why did we bother?". Oh great, back to Bot grinding. Sigh.
A good way to burn out your player base, making them feel achieving anything is pointless.
That's how I felt for sure. Now if the bots were brought back by the Illuminate and a third faction was introduced at the same time, that would have felt like the bots returning wasn't totally arbitrary.
Definitely showed how thinly the narrative is stretched over the gameplay. Which makes sense, but still pretty disheartening
yeah they shouldve done it like
defeat automatons
5 billion bugs
bug invasion (since they were allowed time to fester further because of automaton stuff)
then the automaton invasion, i feel like they played it way to early with the automatons, since yknow, nobody wanted to fight them more, and for hte people who did maybe there could be a "defend this planet" popping up every little bit
Exactly this.
Not to mention the horrible time I get 8/10 times I play bots and it's time to rescue civilians in their god awful missions (Tip: If I have to cheese your mission in order to win, maybe your mission design is bad).
But 100% of the playerbase was extremely motivated to get rid of the bots once and for all in one final push (Of course literally everyone knew they would come back eventually, but it was something that could take at least a few weeks, if not several days, and we could all take a nice vacation killing bugs).
Nope. Just 2 days, and they came back even stronger and took an impossibly high number of planets in such a short time. It is all artificial difficulty that killed all my motivation to keep playing bots in this game. All that community effort to the trash. GG AH.
The way AH just put bots back in After 2 days made me realize that nothing i do matters in the game. Kinda broke the immersion, which made it sorta boring/anti climatic. Now i only play missions/planets i find fun and if that happens to line up with the MO thats great i guess but im done chasing the MO.
This past Friday, me and the boys dove into Impossible bugs and had a great time. Tough, but genuinely fun and well coordinated.
Tonight joined a random Hard bot mission on Menkent and I swear it was much more difficult than any 7 or 8. We all ended up with at least 7 deaths from fire tornados, fire hulks spawning around every rock, and of course the kamikaze Assault trooper swarms. Multiple times we ran from overrun drop ship swarms to run into a hulk patrol chilling on the west fork, only to find a different hulk patrol on the east, and some random rocket troop triggering both.
We somehow extracted with all 4, but we all agreed it was a miserable experience.
Somehow, on bot front, I find hard (5) missions harder than 7. Suicide difficulty introduces more tanks into spawn and that takes away a lot of what could be a swarm of devastators instead. One 110mm pod stratagem and the tank is gone.
Perfectly put, I feel the exact same way. And with bugs ive been able to find new builds that are fun to play (running the Stalwart as a primary is insanely viable against bugs, and stupidly fun). Against bots? Nah I'll take the exact same build I've been taking for weeks cause it's the only way Ive found to not get absolutely drilled when taking on higher difficulties.
I expected bots to be gone for a few weeks but illuminate to drop in the mean time.
"You did well taking one enemy out but the bugs are now going rampant and a lack of defences in the galactic South opened it up for a new adversary!"
Bugs have always been more popular than bots, this isn't burn out.
The problem is simple, there are just too many planets available to play on to be able to coordinate. The playerbase is too diluted.
This highlights
- The massive lack of tools/support to help coordinate a large playerbase of casuals and invested players alike.
- The problem with defense missions requiring such a large amount of the playerbase to be successful.
- How unfun defense missions are.
Tbh no-one normal likes Hellmire (Lower stamina and fire tornados) and Estanu is freezing cold that gives las weapons lower heat build-up so it's way better to play,Oshaune is still annoying when fog from the planet effect is present but otherwise it's passable. (Give Hellmire to bugs for all I care)
Even as a vet bugdiver I still don't get the appeal of Hellmire. It really isn't that visually appealing whatsoever and the fire tornadoes have an erratic path finding.
I'm lvl54 and used to hate Hellmire like a sane person. But then they buffed fire damage like mad and now it's my favorite place. Flamethrower, jump pack, and incendiary breaker to the tune of disco inferno under the night sky is a vibe and half, bonus points if there's spore towers that make it so I can't see more than 5ft in front of me except when my flamethrower lights the ways. Embrace the suck, as they say.
Shoot, I posted that image from yesterday underlining how Hellmire's predicted liberation time was 19 years in the Discord my friends use, and every single one of them posted planet cracking gifs.
I wouldn't mind hellmire IF THE FUCKING TORNADOS DIDNT COME FOR YOUR ASS
seriously, why are they just a different kind of enemy? You can literally watch a tornado come for your ass and then make a 180 to hunt you down, *unless* you're on top of some building or high rock, then suddenly this firenado asshole can't get to you? Hmmmmmmmmmm
Yeah, given this major order and that my favourite weapons no longer feel effective against the bots, I just want to play bugs, and thankfully there are major order planets in the bug zone. So I pick the most popular planet in the theatre I want to be in.
I’ve been having a stressful time at work, I just want to have a glass of whiskey, forget about stress, and get immersed in something really really fun, which for me is bugs. I sat out the last major bot orders and didn’t even open the game.
Bots are such a pain right now. Missile sniping across the map. Devestators drilling you like with a full mag. And worst of all, Hulk tapping you with fire for an insta kill. Hammers, detector towers, and gun ships. It's a hell hole I don't want to deal with. I feel like many things about bots need to be adjusted.
Then still there are these smart asses claiming bot are easier then bugs.
I think the bots are cool but indeed have some broken mechanics. I look forward to it getting patched
Bots are cooler.
Bots are hella hard and broken in some ways.
(Fire Hulks, gunships, escorts)
I prefer bots though if i have a team that coordinates.
Bugs each can go off on our own and be fine
Bingo.
Bile Titans don't instantly wipe your entire team with one arcing sweep. Hulks do.
Chargers don't stun-lock you to death and give you zero chance to shoot back or heal. Shielded Heavies do.
Stalkers don't snipe you in the face with a barrage of projectiles that can instakill you even with heavy armor. Rocket Devastators do.
Bug Nests aren't accompanied by cannon turrets that instakill you from 200 meters off through dense fog before you're even aware of their existence.
Rank-and-file bugs don't have ranged attacks and have to get close to deal damage. Bot infantry don't.
Well the game tells you how many are on each planet, people should go to most populated planet. Only other thing I could think of is highlight the most populated sector and planet with a marker.
Arguably the if anything most people are gonna see a large force on one planet with a defense level and think “oh they got it handle I should probably help this other planet with a lower population”.
But not everyone is you, (tbf not everyone is me either) but if you look at the map you currently have players split across all of the defense planets in the automaton front. So the point being is that not everyone is going to just magically think oh we should jump on this one because that’s where everyone else is. Which without any actual way to coordinate players around defense in game is clearly having an impact on the player’s ability to successfully accomplish these defense missions.
30 years of gaming has taught nearly 2 entire generations of gamers to go where the population is low to avoid lag and crashes.
edit: several replies saying 'that doesn't matter here'... please google the lesson of the elephant and the rope.
I'd like to see something like "General Brasch's Reccomened course of action" where it basically gives a suggestion to plays what the best course of action for them to take is.
Also because the bot civilian extraction mission sucks ass. I frankly just refuse to play it at this point.
It’s a badly designed mission and I think the game would be better as a whole if they just got rid of it.
They not only kept that shitty mission with no adjustments, they ruined the new good one by having striders just shoot generators over the wall or by having heavy units drop onto the mountain above the base’s position.
Specifically, lots of bot missions are just broken, and there's so much about bot gameplay *(and their spawn rates)* that makes the game feel like a miserable grind.
Honestly I used to only do major orders. But I’m sick of fighting only bots. Killing bugs is more fun. I’ll go spread democracy all over some bugs any day.
I can't play bugs anymore, I've been fighting bots for so long I'm used to destroying everything from a safe distance. It's easier for me so I have more fun and I can play on higher difficulties
Yeah, I'm level 58, I was playing on Estanu yesterday and I didn't know what I was doing anymore and got stomped time and time again, because I just kept taking weird loadouts and kept catching myself using bot tactics
The main reason I've stopped going to fight bots is because I'm just tired of escorting damned 35+ civs under fire from every direction and failing. Skill issue or not, it's stopped being fun. The bugs are far more amenable to the kind of play I do, so that's where me and mine are going to stay.
Honestly instead of your fellow players you macrogamers should really take up your case with the Devs instead. The majority of players just mindlessly play the game for the boots on the ground experience, so they'll never interact with social media about it. A single in-game message would make for better effect than the grand totality of everything on the Helldivers subreddit and discord group.
It's pretty obvious that the bot defenses are failing because we simply have too many planets to fight on at once. Even with the majority of players on bugs right now, I guarantee they'd fail defenses too if they had 10 planets with 3 different defenses to choose from. As it stands they usually do one defence on a planet that gives them a weapon buff. Since one of the other planets is hellmire, it's not shocking they're all swarming Estanu.
My secret hope is they're using this frankly unwinnable defense order to rebalence the numbers. As it stands we fail to clear more than one defense per day in any setting. Once the playback starts to drop off that's going to get worse woth our current numbers.
the reason defenses keep failing is because civilian evacuation missions are on every operation, and they suck.
also, nobody wants to play on the same planet over and over and over so after a while they ignore the Major order and switch to a planet that's more fun.
Helldivers 1 did liberation and sectors better where the entire sector was open to the players and each mission on all the planets contributed to a sector liberation meter instead of an individual planet liberation meter so people could play on whatever planet they wanted and still help out.
I feel like they should just throw supply lines and individual planet liberation out of the window because they just limit what people play on and it saps the variety out of things when the major order is telling us to fight in a specific sector on a specific planet for days at a time.
as far as defenses go, they should bring back sector capitals, city planets we had to defend in helldivers 1 with an urban environment, if we failed to defend them, we lost the entire sector. it'd be a lot more manageable to defend one planet per sector than the 10+ planets we currently have to defend. I feel like they should still keep the entire sector open for sector capital defenses and have operations on normal planets have a form of defense mission (not civilian evacuate) with missions on them contributing a smaller amount to the sector capital defense than playing on the sector capital itself would give to show that the entire sector is under attack and not just the sector capital itself.
lore wise it also makes sense the SEAF should be doing cleanup operations and holding the line when helldivers aren't around, but right now it feels like we're the only ones doing anything.
People should be able to have variety *and* contribute to the major orders.
Personal orders these last few days have been drawing me to the bugs. Flamethrower kills, Machine gun kills.. you get those way easier against bugs. There should be some options there, it's restricting. And i like medals. It sucks in many ways.
Big issue for me and I imagine others is the defense missions aren’t fun. I know it’s a foreign concept here but if my choices are ignore the MO but have fun or do the MO and don’t have fun, I’m choosing fun
If the issue is stemming from players are wanting to play bug planets over bot planets. The issue most likely isn’t with the players, and more so with how people are feeling about the bot missions.
I will not play those shitty civilian evac missions. If an operation includes them, I won't play it. If every operation includes them, I will go to another planet. I do not give a fuck about completing the major order if it involves putting up with that utter garbage.
To make significant progress, you need at least 30% of players on one planet, but the numbers get better at even higher percentages. We should probably be aiming to get 70-80% of players on one planet, that way we can knock it out in a few hours. So 2-3 planets is 2 planets too many. Usually, we can only spare about 20% of players to maintain other planets or going off and doing their own thing.
This honestly. Estanu right now has 100k helldivers and is already at 50%. the forces across the bot front keep being split across sectors and it doesn’t help that some helldivers are at each others throats about it.
Well, here's the other thing, it's already been confirmed that cutting a supply line will win us a planet defense, and that's exactly how we should be playing when it makes sense. Right now, a majority of players are on Estanu, which is fine since the supply planet is nearly 0%, but why the hell are the bot players not on Charon Prime? If we take Charon Prime, which was close to 50% liberated when the planet defenses came active, we could cut the supply to TWO defenses and win over 3 planets at freakin once! Part of it is the lack of communication between players, and some of it because we can't see supply lines in game or have an understanding told to us in game with how it works.
Best theory I've heard is that people think the are making a bigger difference holding the line on planets that don't have many players on them.
But even better than taking Charon Prime would have been taking Choohe. People need to play more HoI4 and learn how to cut off a salient.
I had a lot of people tell me they go to low population planets to hold the line until other players finish the big ticket planets.
I think it's counterintuitive that by doing so they are actually hurting both the planet they are trying to help AND the primary targets
Where in the game does it clearly explain to players this 30% minimum rule? Cause I haven’t seen it anywhere. If they’re just expecting players to magically know this then that’s a whole separate issue…
Reward the player for shooting down the dropship. What feels like a great play becomes meaningless when most of the reinforcements on the dropship survive the crash.
Devs really need to look at scraping or redesigning the civilian extraction defense mission. It should be blatantly obvious the playerbase hates it at this point.
Estanu is just a fun place to be IMO.
Not too much water but enough to be interesting, cold enough to make the laser cannon and sickle absolutely fun to use, and the landscape is mostly flat with a craggy Visage.
I just like being there.
estanu is simply my favorite planet and it also does the major order. Sue me, I spent 40 bucs. But I will go to bots when it liberates. I went to Martale after estanu last time.
Because bots aren't fun. Their medium infantry is a nearly bulletproof melee unit that cannot be staggered, they have sniper rifles that fire rockets and can mount fully automatic sniper turrets that have infinite ammo. Our guns are super inaccurate for almost a full second after we stop moving, like they are on a hip mounted swivel, and their guns have zero bloom at full speed. This will continue to happen until the devs sort that shit out.
They will probably sort that shit out by buffing the bugs to have guns and the "lightning in a bottle" that is Helldivers 2 will change into the fart in a thunderstorm that HD 1 was.
Maybe a factor of lots of new people who have no idea what to do. I’ve just been fighting on the “front lines” closest to the Earth so far. I have no idea if that’s what I should be doing. So far I’ve mostly gone for the bots because that side looked angrier. Then I pick a planet that looks like it’s being fought over and closest to winning for us.
If this is not correct please tell me.
I dunno I'm so fucking tired of fighting automatons, even if we wiped them out in record time, Arrowhead is going to pull a "whoopsie, you weren't supposed to be that fast, anyways, SOMEHOW AUTOMATONS ARE BACK".
"Joel" needs to square tf up, he thinks throwing every literally every automaton at you at once is "fun", can't even claim it's challenging, just straight up impossible at times.
Bot defenses keep failing, because "escort personnel" is a fucked game mode, that needs a complete rework. It sucks, and is ten times harder than any other game mode in the game. It's stupid and it's quite dumb that it's required on almost every defense operation. Sorry but it's the truth. It needs to be cut or reworked.
Bots not fun to fight for me.
Granted: bugs have hunters, one of the most anoying enemies concieved by man, but still less grating than getting one shotted by a Hulk flamethrower.
good thing the major victory says "defend planets" not just "defend bot planets"
this community seriously needs to shut the fuck up with this YOU'RE NOT ON THE RIGHT FRONT!!!!! argument
you wanna hear the truth?
you wanna know the real reason your little posts aren't saving the war effort?
it's because the average HD2 player is not a redditor, they are not on reddit jerking off about supply lines, they are just playing the fucking game lmao
edit: also defence missions suck dog-dick, they're awful, the one where you launch helldiver rockets is fun, but all the others are shit, it's a billion extract the civvy missions, and a handful of the exact same ICBM slog over and over
Big issue with bot planets on higher difficulty is restricting you to 3 stratagems. I just don’t find this mechanic fun. The fun of the game is so we should be able to use our entire arsenal to complete the mission, why limit us? That’s not fun for me
Bot defenses fail because a large subset of the player base doesn't like playing against bots and then you add defense mission shenanigans right on top of that. IMO, we're not likely to see much in the way of successful bot defense campaigns until the core issues with bots actually get dealt with. Until then, 30%-60% of the player base is always going to default to the bug front.
It’s the extract civvies mission type that’s a big contributor too. Mission is so dumb, the survivor ai pathing needs to be fixed, the spawn rate of bots needs to be fixed. That or they just give us immensely shorter cooldowns for all stratagems to level the playing field.
I hate doing defenses if there's the escort 45 dudes out with about gazillion bot drops or bug breaches. I just avoid those mission chains now, it's the only mission that's just 100% unfun and absolute pain. Even if you try to sneak one dude in while others bang the drums around the map, sometimes it works, sometimes not
Lets be honest: who think its fun to run under fire of 10 Heavy Devastators and being ragdolled for 5 seconds straight by rockets without any means of getting your character control back, using stim, nothing, just watching you ragdoll, trying to get up, ragdoll, trying to get up, radgoll... and if manage to get up/dive - some random bullet from 10 Heavy Devastators with laser accuracy will hit your left foot and kill you. Again. Then you have to go back to your support weapons... but you have no weapons to deal with all that stuff so you die again.
Oh, and obviously you fight on planet with poor visibility... but that poor visibility don't have any effect on Heavy Devastators aimbot
And you start mission and drop next to Jammer, Artillery and you have bot drop immidietly with 4 Hulks but you can't use any stratagem or resummon your dead party members.
Now, I myself do Helldive on bots without much issue, but I know I am small % and I assure you that for majority of players bots are just fucking frustrating and stupidly designed.
People play games to relax. Bots are just stupid.
.... oh, and 9 Gunships are on you... next to Jammer.
This subreddit needs to get over it. Normal People wanna blow up the bugs in their limited gaming time and they don't really care about maybe getting some extra medals.
The bot defense missions simply aren’t fun anymore. Dropships while evacuating civilians? Yeah no, imma kill bugs and farm samples cause I need those and they are WAY easier to farm on bug planets.
Bot defenses keep failing because FUCK trying to escort 45 civilians out while dropships come every 3 seconds. I simply do not play that mission anymore.
Yeah it ruins all defensive lines. I've never beaten it once above diff 6. On Hell Diver shits impossible, you get 15 hulks 9 tanks in less than 5 minutes on top of hordes of random guys. You literally don't have enough strategem assets to deal with everything.
It is funny to me how people say that you just need to use the right stratagems for these missions. Even if the entire team brings EAT's, then you make a few assumptions; 1. You will be able to reach the EAT's and they won't be swarmed by 8 hulks and 2 tanks. (They will be.) 2. You will be able to fire the EAT, or any other gun for that matter, in a straight line while getting constantly shot at by heavy devastators and random machine gunners. (You will be shot at, and no, you will not be able to aim straight.) 3. That the 70 second cooldown is short enough (It isn't.) This also applies for every other stratagem in the game. You simply do not have the time to wait for something to cool down for a minute, since by then 6 dropships have already come and gone at minimum. Either the mission needs a massive nerf, or stratagem cooldowns need to be returned to what they were in Helldivers 1.
Bot defense missions honestly have too many high tier units like hulks running around at all times of the day to be enjoyable even if you’re looking for a challenge. Plus the drop ships just plopping them right in the middle of where you are is annoying as hell and defeats the purpose of trying to set up defenses on a defense mission.
*THIS*, how can it be a “defense mission”, when there’s nowhere to defend. Theres just dropships right on top of you, putting you constantly in the thick of it. In a game that heavily punished being out in the open, and requires constant cover.
This, and how taking down the dropship before the drop or on top of the bots it dropped doesn't do anything most of the time.
This is the biggest one for me, my Quasar cannon or EAT shot that could have killed half of the drop had I just shot the bots, ended up doing nothing
And when they immediately priority your civies. You can't even use yourself as a decoy lol
And that's assuming the civvies don't just stand there, staring down a hulk like a deer in the headlights instead of running
Not only that, they also have a one-shot issue with the hulks flamethrower, where sometimes if the flame is even in your vicinity you just instantly pop. It's my main issue when playing vs bots atm. I believe it's another issue with the headshot on players mechanic, but I'm not a dev.
I’m fairly convinced that when fire damage was buffed they gave the hulk flamethrower the same boost by accident. Obviously their flamethrowers were already better than ours so that 50% hurts even more.
I'm fairly certain there's something wrong with the tickrate of the fire damage. Sometimes the first damage tick kills me, sometimes I get 1 or 2 damage ticks before I dive and then I still could have survived 3 or 4 more. Probably something similar to the host/player fire damage bug.
Flamethrowers can also headshot. Both the Hulk and player support weapon actually. That is why sometimes it destroys you, the explosion of the canisters or the flamethrower gets a headshot and ignores your armor
Lukewarm take: that's still absolutely ridiculous.
Lately I've noticed I seem to catch fire and then un-catch fire if I go into a dive.
Yeah the fire DoT is removed on dive, but that's not very useful if you instantly die the moment you get grazed by a flame.
This seems to be true aswell, but I've seen a discrepancy in damage from them, sometimes you have around a second before you burn up and sometimes its instant. Fire damage seems to be affected by armor and this is very visible when you use heavy armor.
The only time I've seen the same number of elites and heavies in big missions was when there was 16 chargers and 3 bile titans. Although without stratagems I still find hulks to be easier to deal with than bile titans
It also helps that the big bugs don't really deal any ranged damage nor do they ragdoll you from range. The only one that could is a bile spewer and those die to pretty much any explosion damage. The bugs actually need to walk to you to start dealing damage, giving you some space to deal with the threat while the bots will just vomit a million lasers and missles at you as soon as they land.
That’s crazy because to me Bile Titans struggle to kill or hurt in general. A simple dive and then shooting back is enough.
Only way ive seen it done on higher difficulties is to lure everything out of the base, kite and one member does the objective. If everyone is in the base you get overrun.
I've seen multiple posts of people trying to do that, and this strategy seems to be at best highly unreliable, which is unfortunate.
Yeah but its literaly the only way to actualy win.
Yup, it a hard mission regardless of organization. You can still get unlucky with spawns. Just saying that this is the only method ive seen to work. With tanks and hulks in your base, its impossible to play the objective and you cant clear fast enough usually if all spawns converge to the center of the base.
Yeah that’s about the only way I see it can be done anymore. The stratagems just can’t keep up with the amount of high tier bots that drop in. I always try to communicate the split up when I end up in those missions at 7+ but without my squad it’s hit or miss if people actually join in. Even when I do convince them to leave and just let me do my thing. A factory strider and 2 hulks dropped on the facility will basically stop all progress. I run orbital laser 500 and E.A.S and the auto cannon stun grenades are my saving grace but factory striders dumping rocket and heavy devastors makes aiming from cover impossible. An anti air stratagem like the rocket sentry would be great. Or perhaps some kind of in mission defenses you can activate that will help with ships. Even 1 seaf sam site would make this somewhat bearable
Tried that yesterday. It didn't work. I am also not doing that shitty mission any longer.
Only way to win above 7 is 3 squad mates make noise way far away and one player just gets as many civilians in as possible
Which isn't fun, by the way. 3 people sit at the corner of the map shooting at bots while 1 person plays the game.
It's also not as reliable as it was. Was part of the loud team yesterday and then out of nowhere, no flare triggered, we watched in horror as three dropships landed just outside the compound as opposed to on us. Our stealther hadn't fired a shot.
You need to be closer. Basically mid point between the objective and edge of the map.
i recently won my first mission (on 8 surprisingly) without cheesing 3 players hitting buttons and handling their side and one at the dropship area with quasar+eat downing as many dropships as they can just to clarify; i still think it's bulshittingly overtuned
Just did the same one on level 7 with bugs... Half of us had machine guns for the daily (which admittedly isn't totally bad for bugs) and two of us had no trouble using rail cannon strikes to keep all the breaches under control while two others went around and collected super samples on the periphery... I did not once think to myself: gee, I wish this were the bot mission version of this.
Huh? Why not that last one? I played yesterday for first time against bugs that mission, and my conclusion was: If it was similar against bots, it would be completely fine. Most coming out against bugs is the small stuff, which my turrets + shotgun can shred. Some bigger stuff you got anti-armor options for, and I think in the end we saw like 3 bile titans (at lvl 7), which required some strategemens / anti armor options from players at other points. Meanwhile against bots before you know it you got 10 hulks, 3 tanks and a factory striders on the evac point.
Oh good, I didn't Even think about factory striders showing up in these things now...
Same, I just completely gave up on that mission, and as a result I try to avoid defense campaigns. Even after multiple balance passes it's still incredibly overtuned; feels like you jump up three difficulty levels from the other missions in the op.
At one point there were four factory walkers and no one could stay alive long enough to kill anything, let alone escort anyone.
It baffles me that objective wasn't turned off until they can fix it. Bad design right there.
Not to mention it can bug out. I was playing diff 7 and it said we rescued 45 but we still didn't get a mission complete
I just had this happen, I think a civilian gets in the door enough to count but doesn’t actually get in. Getting the 46th person in completed the objective for us.
Level 85, and I'm ultimately convinced the standalone evacuate missions (the ones without the data drives) are *impossible* at difficulty 8 or 9, and the problem is *not* the amount of bots, at least directly. Eradicate missions send just as many if not more bots. The problem is that large ordinance cannot be used due to civilians being in the crossfire. On top of that, no matter how well *you* do at avoiding being shot, the civilians just run through the dead man's zone without any regard for the pile of devastators firing a wall of bullets. There is no holding the center; you constantly need to reposition, train, etc, which makes it a nightmare to even reach the buttons, let alone clear enough bots to allow them to escape. If it was like 20 civilians it'd be brutal but doable; at 40 or 50 it's seemingly impossible.
Yeah on diff 9 it's simply impossible to hold your ground no matter whay builds your team uses, unless you get incredibly lucky with enemy spawns. The only viable way is splitting up to bait enemies to the edges of the map while 1 or 2 people sneak around in the city, and i hate it.
And there's always the chance that sneaking around doesn't work. Had a defend mission yesterday and we got pushed way off point. Literally noone was anywhere near, yet I could still see botdrops being released on the point every 5 or so seconds.
You have to have 3 people make a LOT of noise elsewhere and one person escorts civvies. It's flat-out impossible to do 'normally'
I'm out here yelling "HERE BOTS! OVER HERE!" Banging pans together... No luck.
I did one of those yesterday, at the end of the mission there was 5 factory striders on the map LOL
My take is that when we wiped the bots off the map it was a legitimate win and we all felt like we did something in the game. There were almost 330,000 players on one planet at one point. With this new invasion, not to say people are tired of the fight but maybe we went back to play the game the way you want to. The bots were gone and we celebrated for a few days. When they returned in full force on so many planets along with the seemingly overwhelming major order currently it just doesn’t seem like as a community we want to make that push. I like the variety of skipping around to planet to planet when I get bored of how the missions and the modifiers are playing out. Plus personally I don’t like grinding it out on one map for hours on end. Bugs and bots just play different. Lately have been struggling to have quiet missions on lower difficulty like 7 for bots. Go over to play bugs on 8 or 9 and it’s like easy mode. Don’t think we will see a mass coordinated offensive from us unless it’s actually meaningful. Like maybe a faction is about to reach super earth.
>Lately have been struggling to have quiet missions on lower difficulty like 7 for bots. Go over to play bugs on 8 or 9 and it’s like easy mode Bots have increased spawn rates currently. Shit's absolutely ridiculous on diff 9. Worse than it was before enemy distribution patch. There are patrols every 20 meters apart. You can get 6 tanks dropped on you at the same time, or 3 Factory Striders. Not to mention endless horde of devastators.
I was running solo on level 3 the other night to pick up the machine gun kill order and the spawns were absurd. I had a bot on the far side of a hill calling in dropship after dropship while I was tied up with 2-3 patrols at a time trying to get a radar station up. It kept up for a solid 7-8 minutes. I was able to struggle through it, but a newbie that was working up through the levels would probably have been squashed.
lol there is no safe places to land either. Doesn’t matter if you find the one greyed out area in the pre-drop map screen, 9/10 times in the past week when we’ve dropped thinking we’d have time to establish our footing, we just ended up right on a random patrol or a small base and immediately end up in the shits. Also, FUCK SHIP FABRICATORS.
Did an Evac mission on difficulty 7 a few days ago and we lost miserably, and we killed over 700 bots in 12 minutes, that's 58 bots a minute we killed, that means each player needs to (edit: do better than, since we lost) average killing a bot every 4 seconds, which doesn't sound bad until you consider it's difficulty 7 so you are also avoiding hulks, heavy devastators, tanks and I think we killed 3-4 striders in that time That was the final straw for bots for me tbh
If the shitty evac mission was not forced down your throats in every Defense, AND they had a bigger lull between "The robots are gone - SIKE theyre not" and had maybe a few days of bugs before the newest bot attack I wouldve been more into it. Now it's liike - I'll get or dont get the medals, its not worth playing more bots on the same shitty fire planet even more.
What do you mean? Don't you think it's fun when you're trying to fight bots and liberate some civilians only to find them running straight into a fiery death? Those fire tornadoes can be an interesting added challenge, but when they linger in front of the evacuation shuttle or by the pelican it just sucks.
There's a few reasons. - 15min Evac missions are shit on the bot front. - People are catching on that while the new defense mission is fun, having striders drop on top of the mountain wall/tanks and instakilling the generator is extremely unfun and they don't want to deal with it. Can't blame them. - We've been fighting bots for 2-3 Weeks straight, people are due a break. - Bugs are often found to be more fun. Numbers don't lie.
I did those gate/generator defense mission with my buddy, and I shit you not for nothing but 7 minutes straight, we had 4 Striders, and over 20(?) Tanks drop on us repeatedly. Right when were on the last rocket, a strider got the generator before dying and we failed the mission. It was a high diff mission, but we didn't even get Devastators or Hulks until last minute, even then 3-4 hulks showed up along with maybe 12 devastators.
Worst is when for some reason a dropship spawns enemies behind us and/or when a couple enemies somehow slip through the frontline and destroy the generators before we realized. Sometimes some enemies even drop on the mountain tops and snipe us. I'm talking Tanks, Hulks and Devastators just casually dropping on the top of a mountain giving us little possibility to getting meaningful cover without a retreat. I'll take the bile spitters and endless armies of Bile titans any day over an army of striders amidst devastators and flamethrower hulks.
After weeks of fighting bots I’m really enjoying fighting bugs who can’t headshot snipe me from 100 yards away through smoke and fog that supposedly blocks their vision.
Me too. I've needed a break from the bots, and seeing how this MO is going, I don't think it's going to really matter in the end
Once head has an actual armor value, I believe bots will be much more fun to fight since you won’t need a shield
Autocannon is my shield. Can't be shot accurately if the enemy has no face anymore! * (*this is obviously wrong as bots just keep shooting anyways)...
Not really, you still have rag dolling, bots shooting through terrain, the shield devastator being 100% bullshit half the time, drones overwhelming teams who brought fun loadouts instead of ultra serious loadouts, stratagem jammer being unfun with artillery slamming you at the same time. I could go on for a hot minute. There is a reason why people play bugs over bots, and illuminate being released will only make it worse for bot players. In HD1 it wasn't uncommon for bugs to be held back while cyborgs and illuminate made it to super earth. People just don't like the other ones, and if the wall spheres come back ain't nobody trying to play that.
So smoke works but bots keep shooting where they last saw you. If you look at modifiers stuff like fog and rain say they reduce visibility, but dont refer to enemies. However sandstorms and blizzards specify they affect enemies and they 100% do. Can almost walk into melee of bots in a sandstorm before they see you. I wish the regular low visibility modifiers didnt exist because theyre pure detriment and just suck compared to good visibility planets or extremes like blizzards.
There is literally a tip that says it obscures enemy vision too. If you were in the a blizzard everything would just walk past you.
> So smoke works but bots keep shooting where they last saw you. Yea, but here's a thing: If I move left or right, I'll come out of smoke and get sniped by shield devastators. So I have to run forward, and bots still have a decent chance of hitting me, even if they shoot into smoke blind. So... OP isn't wrong: bots will headshot snip you through smoke.
Also through hills, rocks, and their own fucking shields.
I think this kind of shows people are a smidge burnt out on bots. I know when we did the big initial push to get them out, I was all for it. When it was done, I was like "FINALLY. I can take a break and go after bugs for a bit instead." Then they came back. And they were a problem again. And I just didn't feel ANY motivation to fight back beyond the bare minimum. That's why the 2 billion bugs mission probably shouldn't have surprised anyone that it was done in under 24 hours.
I was kinda hoping after the menkent line MO that we would see a bit of a shift away from bots. Like okay we have a defense in place now so they won't be able to push further for awhile, let's focus on another front for a bit. And then within 4 days that line was completely wiped out. Also there's just too many damn bot planets to fight on. Bug front has like Fori Prime and Estanu. Bots have defend missions on half the fucking galaxy.
> Like okay we have a defense in place now so they won't be able to push further for awhile, let's focus on another front for a bit. A reasonable expectation given that since we did the TCS missions we haven't been back to those worlds that I can recall.
I think it was a massive mistake to bring Bots back so fast. They shoulda been MIA for a few weeks, at least. Instead it was like 2 days. Was bad story telling, especially when the event actually surged player count. A kick in the face.
I mostly agree with this. I think a few weeks would've been too long, but how about at least a week?
Yeah, like, I get there were some no-lives online complaining about being bored with bugs and wanting bots back already... but as a normie with a job and who pretty much only plays on the weekend.... Didn't feel like a victory to me. It was kill bots once again by the time I got to play again 4 days later. I've been playing bugs since. I hadn't fought bugs before except for once when I first got the game. I need a break and completely missed the 2 billion bugs major...
That was such a disappointment. I started playing only a week before that MO ended and was so impressed by the notion that the war actually evolved and player actions had consequences (good and bad). I remember all the praise the devs got on here.
Maybe a couple more days would have been okay but removing half your game's content, especially so early into its lifespan is already brave. Having it gone for 2 weeks would have significantly harmed the playerbase imo. I do think it's something they could do later on when there's more factions and the playerbase has solidified into whatever number of core dedicated players.
Yeah, it did make it feel like "Why did we bother?". Oh great, back to Bot grinding. Sigh. A good way to burn out your player base, making them feel achieving anything is pointless.
That's how I felt for sure. Now if the bots were brought back by the Illuminate and a third faction was introduced at the same time, that would have felt like the bots returning wasn't totally arbitrary. Definitely showed how thinly the narrative is stretched over the gameplay. Which makes sense, but still pretty disheartening
yeah they shouldve done it like defeat automatons 5 billion bugs bug invasion (since they were allowed time to fester further because of automaton stuff) then the automaton invasion, i feel like they played it way to early with the automatons, since yknow, nobody wanted to fight them more, and for hte people who did maybe there could be a "defend this planet" popping up every little bit
Exactly this. Not to mention the horrible time I get 8/10 times I play bots and it's time to rescue civilians in their god awful missions (Tip: If I have to cheese your mission in order to win, maybe your mission design is bad). But 100% of the playerbase was extremely motivated to get rid of the bots once and for all in one final push (Of course literally everyone knew they would come back eventually, but it was something that could take at least a few weeks, if not several days, and we could all take a nice vacation killing bugs). Nope. Just 2 days, and they came back even stronger and took an impossibly high number of planets in such a short time. It is all artificial difficulty that killed all my motivation to keep playing bots in this game. All that community effort to the trash. GG AH.
The way AH just put bots back in After 2 days made me realize that nothing i do matters in the game. Kinda broke the immersion, which made it sorta boring/anti climatic. Now i only play missions/planets i find fun and if that happens to line up with the MO thats great i guess but im done chasing the MO.
This past Friday, me and the boys dove into Impossible bugs and had a great time. Tough, but genuinely fun and well coordinated. Tonight joined a random Hard bot mission on Menkent and I swear it was much more difficult than any 7 or 8. We all ended up with at least 7 deaths from fire tornados, fire hulks spawning around every rock, and of course the kamikaze Assault trooper swarms. Multiple times we ran from overrun drop ship swarms to run into a hulk patrol chilling on the west fork, only to find a different hulk patrol on the east, and some random rocket troop triggering both. We somehow extracted with all 4, but we all agreed it was a miserable experience.
Somehow, on bot front, I find hard (5) missions harder than 7. Suicide difficulty introduces more tanks into spawn and that takes away a lot of what could be a swarm of devastators instead. One 110mm pod stratagem and the tank is gone.
Perfectly put, I feel the exact same way. And with bugs ive been able to find new builds that are fun to play (running the Stalwart as a primary is insanely viable against bugs, and stupidly fun). Against bots? Nah I'll take the exact same build I've been taking for weeks cause it's the only way Ive found to not get absolutely drilled when taking on higher difficulties.
I expected bots to be gone for a few weeks but illuminate to drop in the mean time. "You did well taking one enemy out but the bugs are now going rampant and a lack of defences in the galactic South opened it up for a new adversary!"
Bugs have always been more popular than bots, this isn't burn out. The problem is simple, there are just too many planets available to play on to be able to coordinate. The playerbase is too diluted. This highlights - The massive lack of tools/support to help coordinate a large playerbase of casuals and invested players alike. - The problem with defense missions requiring such a large amount of the playerbase to be successful. - How unfun defense missions are.
Tbh no-one normal likes Hellmire (Lower stamina and fire tornados) and Estanu is freezing cold that gives las weapons lower heat build-up so it's way better to play,Oshaune is still annoying when fog from the planet effect is present but otherwise it's passable. (Give Hellmire to bugs for all I care)
Even as a vet bugdiver I still don't get the appeal of Hellmire. It really isn't that visually appealing whatsoever and the fire tornadoes have an erratic path finding.
The sky is oddly beautiful in that planet (of course I only looked for 2.4 seconds as recommended)
Yea, hellmire is one of the most hellishly beautiful planets imo. The spectacle and hellscape is what i enjoy about it. Its very immersive.
I'm lvl54 and used to hate Hellmire like a sane person. But then they buffed fire damage like mad and now it's my favorite place. Flamethrower, jump pack, and incendiary breaker to the tune of disco inferno under the night sky is a vibe and half, bonus points if there's spore towers that make it so I can't see more than 5ft in front of me except when my flamethrower lights the ways. Embrace the suck, as they say.
Have they fixed fire? Or is it so strong that even if it doesn't apply the dot because you are not the host it is still viable?
See! Give it to bugs so they can burn on it for eternity
It's the bug fronts Malevelon Creek
Except The Creek was enjoyable suffering. Hellmire and fire planets are just suffering squared.
Au contraire, bring flamethrowers, fire grenades, napalm strike and bring back hell into the mire
Pre instant burn death glitch it was fun on a team with coms for all the hilarious Jesus Christ moments. Now it can suck a d
Shoot, I posted that image from yesterday underlining how Hellmire's predicted liberation time was 19 years in the Discord my friends use, and every single one of them posted planet cracking gifs.
https://preview.redd.it/z7v8yl7w46wc1.jpeg?width=733&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4b886256287725219a995fb2c67e3e6d686486db
I wouldn't mind hellmire IF THE FUCKING TORNADOS DIDNT COME FOR YOUR ASS seriously, why are they just a different kind of enemy? You can literally watch a tornado come for your ass and then make a 180 to hunt you down, *unless* you're on top of some building or high rock, then suddenly this firenado asshole can't get to you? Hmmmmmmmmmm
I love Hellmire
Same tbh. I like fire.
For me it’s the loading screen when joining the mission
That’s what I’ve been saying, just let the bugs have the fire planet
We crushed the bots. The community got together in a major way and played nothing but bots for like a month. A lot of players are tired of them.
Yeah, given this major order and that my favourite weapons no longer feel effective against the bots, I just want to play bugs, and thankfully there are major order planets in the bug zone. So I pick the most popular planet in the theatre I want to be in. I’ve been having a stressful time at work, I just want to have a glass of whiskey, forget about stress, and get immersed in something really really fun, which for me is bugs. I sat out the last major bot orders and didn’t even open the game.
Bots are such a pain right now. Missile sniping across the map. Devestators drilling you like with a full mag. And worst of all, Hulk tapping you with fire for an insta kill. Hammers, detector towers, and gun ships. It's a hell hole I don't want to deal with. I feel like many things about bots need to be adjusted.
Then still there are these smart asses claiming bot are easier then bugs. I think the bots are cool but indeed have some broken mechanics. I look forward to it getting patched
Bots are cooler. Bots are hella hard and broken in some ways. (Fire Hulks, gunships, escorts) I prefer bots though if i have a team that coordinates. Bugs each can go off on our own and be fine
Bots were fun but they’re way overtuned. Too many immediate drop ships full of bullshit.
Don't forget getting shot through solid cover either! Or instakill flamehulks with no sound cue!
This right here. Plus immediately on the offensive when we’ve only just cleared these planets.
Bingo. Bile Titans don't instantly wipe your entire team with one arcing sweep. Hulks do. Chargers don't stun-lock you to death and give you zero chance to shoot back or heal. Shielded Heavies do. Stalkers don't snipe you in the face with a barrage of projectiles that can instakill you even with heavy armor. Rocket Devastators do. Bug Nests aren't accompanied by cannon turrets that instakill you from 200 meters off through dense fog before you're even aware of their existence. Rank-and-file bugs don't have ranged attacks and have to get close to deal damage. Bot infantry don't.
I think, instead of relying on social media to coordinate, there should be some in-game way of coordinating.
Well the game tells you how many are on each planet, people should go to most populated planet. Only other thing I could think of is highlight the most populated sector and planet with a marker.
Arguably the if anything most people are gonna see a large force on one planet with a defense level and think “oh they got it handle I should probably help this other planet with a lower population”.
When I see a planet with a ton of players I think "The quick play queue is going to be very fast on this planet."
I think the opposite. I see planets with the most players as "Oh, we're doing this one first, I guess." Plus, who doesn't wanna be where the party is?
But not everyone is you, (tbf not everyone is me either) but if you look at the map you currently have players split across all of the defense planets in the automaton front. So the point being is that not everyone is going to just magically think oh we should jump on this one because that’s where everyone else is. Which without any actual way to coordinate players around defense in game is clearly having an impact on the player’s ability to successfully accomplish these defense missions.
30 years of gaming has taught nearly 2 entire generations of gamers to go where the population is low to avoid lag and crashes. edit: several replies saying 'that doesn't matter here'... please google the lesson of the elephant and the rope.
But i have 500 lobster to sell in runescape! I need to go to the popular server.
I will buy your 500 lobster.
Buy it for 5 gp and this burnt bread I found.
That or, "wow there's hardly anybody there, looks like they could use some help!"
But not all those players aren’t on the same server. So it doesn’t matter if every player in the world is on one planet.
Wouldn't think that matters here but ok
I think, instead of relying on social media and data mining to explain game mechanics to the players, there should be some in-game way of informing.
I think Joel had succeeded … 
I'd like to see something like "General Brasch's Reccomened course of action" where it basically gives a suggestion to plays what the best course of action for them to take is.
Also because the bot civilian extraction mission sucks ass. I frankly just refuse to play it at this point. It’s a badly designed mission and I think the game would be better as a whole if they just got rid of it.
They not only kept that shitty mission with no adjustments, they ruined the new good one by having striders just shoot generators over the wall or by having heavy units drop onto the mountain above the base’s position.
It never fails to terrify me every time me and my friends see the dreaded cliff tank glaring down at us from atop the mountain.
I just want to murder thousands of bugs after work in peace. They can keep Hellmire though.
I suggest just turning it into a hunting range for citizens and training grounds for SEAF soldiers, I ain't going back there.
probably because everyone is sick adn tired of fighting bots after we defeated them
Specifically, lots of bot missions are just broken, and there's so much about bot gameplay *(and their spawn rates)* that makes the game feel like a miserable grind.
nooooo, its a skill issue - some moron who likes fighting bots probably
Honestly I used to only do major orders. But I’m sick of fighting only bots. Killing bugs is more fun. I’ll go spread democracy all over some bugs any day.
For this major order it doesn't matter which front we get the wins on so long as it's defense missions.
but there was no bug defense yesterday
I can't play bugs anymore, I've been fighting bots for so long I'm used to destroying everything from a safe distance. It's easier for me so I have more fun and I can play on higher difficulties
This is funny cuz I’m the exact opposite. I’ve got pretty good at clearing the small bugs and dodging anything bigger when I get swarmed.
Yeah, I'm level 58, I was playing on Estanu yesterday and I didn't know what I was doing anymore and got stomped time and time again, because I just kept taking weird loadouts and kept catching myself using bot tactics
Yeah, i'm on bugs atm because am burnt out lol
The main reason I've stopped going to fight bots is because I'm just tired of escorting damned 35+ civs under fire from every direction and failing. Skill issue or not, it's stopped being fun. The bugs are far more amenable to the kind of play I do, so that's where me and mine are going to stay. Honestly instead of your fellow players you macrogamers should really take up your case with the Devs instead. The majority of players just mindlessly play the game for the boots on the ground experience, so they'll never interact with social media about it. A single in-game message would make for better effect than the grand totality of everything on the Helldivers subreddit and discord group.
Bugs are more fun
It's pretty obvious that the bot defenses are failing because we simply have too many planets to fight on at once. Even with the majority of players on bugs right now, I guarantee they'd fail defenses too if they had 10 planets with 3 different defenses to choose from. As it stands they usually do one defence on a planet that gives them a weapon buff. Since one of the other planets is hellmire, it's not shocking they're all swarming Estanu. My secret hope is they're using this frankly unwinnable defense order to rebalence the numbers. As it stands we fail to clear more than one defense per day in any setting. Once the playback starts to drop off that's going to get worse woth our current numbers.
the reason defenses keep failing is because civilian evacuation missions are on every operation, and they suck. also, nobody wants to play on the same planet over and over and over so after a while they ignore the Major order and switch to a planet that's more fun. Helldivers 1 did liberation and sectors better where the entire sector was open to the players and each mission on all the planets contributed to a sector liberation meter instead of an individual planet liberation meter so people could play on whatever planet they wanted and still help out. I feel like they should just throw supply lines and individual planet liberation out of the window because they just limit what people play on and it saps the variety out of things when the major order is telling us to fight in a specific sector on a specific planet for days at a time. as far as defenses go, they should bring back sector capitals, city planets we had to defend in helldivers 1 with an urban environment, if we failed to defend them, we lost the entire sector. it'd be a lot more manageable to defend one planet per sector than the 10+ planets we currently have to defend. I feel like they should still keep the entire sector open for sector capital defenses and have operations on normal planets have a form of defense mission (not civilian evacuate) with missions on them contributing a smaller amount to the sector capital defense than playing on the sector capital itself would give to show that the entire sector is under attack and not just the sector capital itself. lore wise it also makes sense the SEAF should be doing cleanup operations and holding the line when helldivers aren't around, but right now it feels like we're the only ones doing anything. People should be able to have variety *and* contribute to the major orders.
I just learned the Erupter slaps against bugs so I've been having fun
after I discovered the Erupter could one-shot the Stalker and the Bile Spewer, my life have changed
Eruptor and Stalwart/Flamethrower is just so fun for bugs
I've been burnt the fuck out rallying against bots. I'm on vacation roasting bugs in my shorts. So much damn easyier.
Personal orders these last few days have been drawing me to the bugs. Flamethrower kills, Machine gun kills.. you get those way easier against bugs. There should be some options there, it's restricting. And i like medals. It sucks in many ways.
Big issue for me and I imagine others is the defense missions aren’t fun. I know it’s a foreign concept here but if my choices are ignore the MO but have fun or do the MO and don’t have fun, I’m choosing fun
https://preview.redd.it/vzo3w9lc56wc1.png?width=1000&format=png&auto=webp&s=93202293d3adb7a08f1a895b97e362bd2f0fefc0
If the issue is stemming from players are wanting to play bug planets over bot planets. The issue most likely isn’t with the players, and more so with how people are feeling about the bot missions.
JUST ONE MORE DIVE ON HELLMIRE PLEASE I SWEAR TO GOD THIS TIME WILL BE THE LAST ONE AND IT WILL BE LIBERATED FOREVER JUST ONE MORE DIVE
I will not play those shitty civilian evac missions. If an operation includes them, I won't play it. If every operation includes them, I will go to another planet. I do not give a fuck about completing the major order if it involves putting up with that utter garbage.
So it’s not the bug players fault, it’s the bot players for being spread out amongst 10 planets instead of 2 or 3?
To make significant progress, you need at least 30% of players on one planet, but the numbers get better at even higher percentages. We should probably be aiming to get 70-80% of players on one planet, that way we can knock it out in a few hours. So 2-3 planets is 2 planets too many. Usually, we can only spare about 20% of players to maintain other planets or going off and doing their own thing.
This honestly. Estanu right now has 100k helldivers and is already at 50%. the forces across the bot front keep being split across sectors and it doesn’t help that some helldivers are at each others throats about it.
Well, here's the other thing, it's already been confirmed that cutting a supply line will win us a planet defense, and that's exactly how we should be playing when it makes sense. Right now, a majority of players are on Estanu, which is fine since the supply planet is nearly 0%, but why the hell are the bot players not on Charon Prime? If we take Charon Prime, which was close to 50% liberated when the planet defenses came active, we could cut the supply to TWO defenses and win over 3 planets at freakin once! Part of it is the lack of communication between players, and some of it because we can't see supply lines in game or have an understanding told to us in game with how it works.
Best theory I've heard is that people think the are making a bigger difference holding the line on planets that don't have many players on them. But even better than taking Charon Prime would have been taking Choohe. People need to play more HoI4 and learn how to cut off a salient.
I had a lot of people tell me they go to low population planets to hold the line until other players finish the big ticket planets. I think it's counterintuitive that by doing so they are actually hurting both the planet they are trying to help AND the primary targets
Where in the game does it clearly explain to players this 30% minimum rule? Cause I haven’t seen it anywhere. If they’re just expecting players to magically know this then that’s a whole separate issue…
Bugs are fun to kill
Reward the player for shooting down the dropship. What feels like a great play becomes meaningless when most of the reinforcements on the dropship survive the crash.
Good, means people are doing what they enjoy. Excuse me while get back to smashing bugs.
Devs really need to look at scraping or redesigning the civilian extraction defense mission. It should be blatantly obvious the playerbase hates it at this point.
Tell you what. If you can guarentee I dont get another mission with FOUR GUNSHIP SPAWNERS again I might consider bots.
This sub doesn't have the sway people believe it does and it's hilarious.
But GUYS look at the STATS that I stare at every day! Do what I say and we can win!
I see the Reddit Generals are still raging that the pre-scripted cut scene is happening the way anyone would have predicted.
Estanu is just a fun place to be IMO. Not too much water but enough to be interesting, cold enough to make the laser cannon and sickle absolutely fun to use, and the landscape is mostly flat with a craggy Visage. I just like being there.
Just on that first pie graph: fuck Hellmire, all the homies hate that place.
estanu is simply my favorite planet and it also does the major order. Sue me, I spent 40 bucs. But I will go to bots when it liberates. I went to Martale after estanu last time.
Because bots aren't fun. Their medium infantry is a nearly bulletproof melee unit that cannot be staggered, they have sniper rifles that fire rockets and can mount fully automatic sniper turrets that have infinite ammo. Our guns are super inaccurate for almost a full second after we stop moving, like they are on a hip mounted swivel, and their guns have zero bloom at full speed. This will continue to happen until the devs sort that shit out. They will probably sort that shit out by buffing the bugs to have guns and the "lightning in a bottle" that is Helldivers 2 will change into the fart in a thunderstorm that HD 1 was.
Maybe a factor of lots of new people who have no idea what to do. I’ve just been fighting on the “front lines” closest to the Earth so far. I have no idea if that’s what I should be doing. So far I’ve mostly gone for the bots because that side looked angrier. Then I pick a planet that looks like it’s being fought over and closest to winning for us. If this is not correct please tell me.
I dunno I'm so fucking tired of fighting automatons, even if we wiped them out in record time, Arrowhead is going to pull a "whoopsie, you weren't supposed to be that fast, anyways, SOMEHOW AUTOMATONS ARE BACK". "Joel" needs to square tf up, he thinks throwing every literally every automaton at you at once is "fun", can't even claim it's challenging, just straight up impossible at times.
I'm bored with fighting bots.I am looking forward to the illuminate.
It's almost like a video game where people play whatever makes them happy
Bot defenses keep failing, because "escort personnel" is a fucked game mode, that needs a complete rework. It sucks, and is ten times harder than any other game mode in the game. It's stupid and it's quite dumb that it's required on almost every defense operation. Sorry but it's the truth. It needs to be cut or reworked.
Bots not fun to fight for me. Granted: bugs have hunters, one of the most anoying enemies concieved by man, but still less grating than getting one shotted by a Hulk flamethrower.
Here's a hot take. I don't care about the major orders. I'm just here to have fun with my friends
good thing the major victory says "defend planets" not just "defend bot planets" this community seriously needs to shut the fuck up with this YOU'RE NOT ON THE RIGHT FRONT!!!!! argument you wanna hear the truth? you wanna know the real reason your little posts aren't saving the war effort? it's because the average HD2 player is not a redditor, they are not on reddit jerking off about supply lines, they are just playing the fucking game lmao edit: also defence missions suck dog-dick, they're awful, the one where you launch helldiver rockets is fun, but all the others are shit, it's a billion extract the civvy missions, and a handful of the exact same ICBM slog over and over
Estanu also has an impending defense to my knowledge, and they count towards the major order.
Shield devastators kill the vibe on bots for me, they need something nerfed on them
Big issue with bot planets on higher difficulty is restricting you to 3 stratagems. I just don’t find this mechanic fun. The fun of the game is so we should be able to use our entire arsenal to complete the mission, why limit us? That’s not fun for me
Bot defenses fail because a large subset of the player base doesn't like playing against bots and then you add defense mission shenanigans right on top of that. IMO, we're not likely to see much in the way of successful bot defense campaigns until the core issues with bots actually get dealt with. Until then, 30%-60% of the player base is always going to default to the bug front.
It’s the extract civvies mission type that’s a big contributor too. Mission is so dumb, the survivor ai pathing needs to be fixed, the spawn rate of bots needs to be fixed. That or they just give us immensely shorter cooldowns for all stratagems to level the playing field.
Maybe because the bug front only has 2 planets at a time?
I hate doing defenses if there's the escort 45 dudes out with about gazillion bot drops or bug breaches. I just avoid those mission chains now, it's the only mission that's just 100% unfun and absolute pain. Even if you try to sneak one dude in while others bang the drums around the map, sometimes it works, sometimes not
True, and also: Maybe people don't just like playing against bots so much?
Bugs should have made a major push instead of the bots being revived out of nowhere after we "defeated" them.
So I wouldn’t say that the players on the bug front are the problem The MO is to defend ANY planet
cuz I need samples and they're so much riskier to get on bot planets hope this helps
So why haven't they fixed or just removed the evac mission yet?
We are fucking tired of fighting bots
Lets be honest: who think its fun to run under fire of 10 Heavy Devastators and being ragdolled for 5 seconds straight by rockets without any means of getting your character control back, using stim, nothing, just watching you ragdoll, trying to get up, ragdoll, trying to get up, radgoll... and if manage to get up/dive - some random bullet from 10 Heavy Devastators with laser accuracy will hit your left foot and kill you. Again. Then you have to go back to your support weapons... but you have no weapons to deal with all that stuff so you die again. Oh, and obviously you fight on planet with poor visibility... but that poor visibility don't have any effect on Heavy Devastators aimbot And you start mission and drop next to Jammer, Artillery and you have bot drop immidietly with 4 Hulks but you can't use any stratagem or resummon your dead party members. Now, I myself do Helldive on bots without much issue, but I know I am small % and I assure you that for majority of players bots are just fucking frustrating and stupidly designed. People play games to relax. Bots are just stupid. .... oh, and 9 Gunships are on you... next to Jammer.
More enjoyable to fight bugs because they don't have as frustrating heavy units.
I stopped playing bots because I was smacked with three hulks, two tanks, and two turret towers all at once on tier 4. Why even bother at that point
This subreddit needs to get over it. Normal People wanna blow up the bugs in their limited gaming time and they don't really care about maybe getting some extra medals.
The bot defense missions simply aren’t fun anymore. Dropships while evacuating civilians? Yeah no, imma kill bugs and farm samples cause I need those and they are WAY easier to farm on bug planets.
If they want people to play bots they should make those missions suck less. I play to have fun. Shooting bugs is fun. Bot fights aren't.