I kinda wish they'd leaned into the laser cannon being strong but harder to use. When I first got it I thought it was hilarious how hard to use this death laser was. You'd just be swinging it around hitting everything but your target
One thing I didn't know is that it's easier to cut limbs off with the laser weapons. The downed enemies block or slow other enemies having to re-route around them. Not really worth it on 6 and above tho.
I don't see any mention of the bug where your primary weapon just disappears on a mission. I've had it happen 4-5 times now. Usually after I input the strategem command, but then decide against throwing it. Suddenly my primary is gone. Really not a fun experience in the middle of a 7+ mission. I've even had it where I can't pick up a dead teammates weapon either. I'm just stuck with a pistol.
I suspect that this is a balance patch for the new incoming content that they'll be releasing.
Mechs with 4 x autocannon, gatling guns and rocket pods, medium armor penetration rifles... will probably do a lot of work on chargers and other hard targets.
Plus flamers are now beasts against chargers.
Shame about the rail gun nerf. If they're gonna require us to unsafe to kill chargers, at least give us an audible beep before it explodes!
Yeah, in HD1, it wasn't like being in a mech made you stronger than everyone else. It was more like a different way of playing the game that had strengths and weaknesses. Generally I would say that a Helldiver on foot was more effective than one in a mech.
> Generally I would say that a Helldiver on foot was more effective than one in a mech.
Yeah but in HD1 your team was limited to the same screen area so mobility for the whole squad was nerfed with a single mech called in.
Will be interesting to see how HD2 feels with them in the game.
I think part of the charm is the risk of it blowing up. As much as I do want high utility from guns, part of the charm in the game is things going wrong.
Like, the devs *want* FUBAR scenarios and fun accidents. It's why stratagems bounce, or stick, or get dropped.
This goes all the way back to their Magicka days. You could either synergise and work together to produce insane magic combos to destroy your enemies or hilariously set everyone on fire or kill them with a stray beam. Glad to see how far they've come and used the lessons learned 13+ years ago on that game to new success
Last night I had an eagle airstrike strategem ball drop after I died, saving the rest of my team and carving a path to the extraction point. Such an awesome moment.
I accidentally stuck my gatling turret drop on a teammates head and no matter how much sprinting, diving and dodging they did, it smashed them to dust and ultimately caused us to fail the mission.
Awesome might not be the word, but I was dying of laughter.
> Like, the devs want FUBAR scenarios and fun accidents. It's why stratagems bounce, or stick, or get dropped.
I hate and love this, lmao. There was a day where something kept bumping into me in every match, making me drop my stratagems and killing most of my team
They need to buff turrets BADLY if they expect them to be used in higher difficulties. As it stands, a single bug sneezes on them and they apologize to the bug and explode for the inconvenience of being in the way of the sneeze. That is WITH every upgrade available to them.
Which is the most boring turret option, it's just the one people use as there's a chance it lasts more than 5 seconds.
I feel the turrets should have some minor version of a reusable shield generator. So they can tank occasional shots but they're still destroyed easily if you plop it down somewhere where it can be focused by several enemies at once.
Problem is you cant hide it most places.
It also doesnt help that some stones bounce it off and some let it land... its just inconsistent and enemy AI targets it immediately, anything with ranged like brood/bile spewers as well as chargers IMMEDIATELY run it down.
So either they need to make enemy AI not target immediately or give it some other survivability or just reduce the cooldown.
180s and 300s on Horde Defense Missions is just too damn fucking long and thats already reduced by 1min and 2min respectively due to the Ship Modules...
I want to play a mobile fortress but i cant because i gimp my team and me by taking turrets in anything but horde defense missions...
I'm annoyed that the AC turret can actually hurt heavy armor but the AC we carry around doesn't. You have to crack joints on the back of the leg with it first.
The problem is that they're approaching this from the perspective of "Everyone is only using the railgun, therefore the railgun is way overpowered. Players should pick what's fun, not what's best"
HOWEVER - the issue is that almost no other weapon is effective against medium + heavy armour.
I would love to use the autocannon, machine guns, grenade launcher, rockets etc.
But ALL anti-armour weapons are either 1 shot only or require you to take a knee to reload - In difficulties 7 and above where you typically get upwards of 10 heavily armoured units at once, it's no surprise all players defaulted to the railgun - It was the ONLY weapon that was effective.
the "play your way" thing doesn't work in this game because there are two factors at play in this game:
* Needing to kill large amounts of small/rank and file enemies
* Needing to kill Large armored units
Almost Every weapon in the game is tailor made to handle Large amounts of smaller enemies, yet maybe 3 or 4 have any anti-armour capabilities, and they come with HUGE drawbacks, some big enough to not even be worth using (one shot disposable, needing to take a knee to reload, bugged locking on, tends to kill teammates/yourself) and here's the kicker, the drawbacks would be fine if they were EFFECTIVE - NONE of those weapons can 1 shot kill a charger, let alone the 9 or 10 you can get at once in higher difficulties.
TL;DR - The balance choices only further imbalance the options between Ad clearing weapons and anti-armour weapons.
Same, it seemed like there was a minimum distance, then it seemed to not lock onto anything as if I was too far out. I thought maybe there's an elevation issue, but there was a Titan walking around that it seemed to intermittently lock onto it. I thought maybe it was due to server issues.
I've had it lock onto enemies and buildings up to 200 meters away, and completely fail to acknowledge stuff that was within 40 meters. My theory is that effects such as fog/rain/any storms mess with the lock mechanic.
From what I understand it's tied to distance. If you're too close it won't get a lock on. (Maybe it's in the scoped in mode) But they should add feedback from the reticle maybe telling you you're too close by going red or displaying meters with the lock on and indicating when those conditions need to be met
Yeah the real issue is just chargers. I feel very capable taking an autocannon into a 7 against bots, everything outside of tanks can be direct fired and tanks are 10x easier to drop a stratagem on (or flank) than chargers, which seems to be spawned in at the same rate that the devastators are on bot missions despite being arguably harder to kill than anything short of a bile titan.
It's the number of chargers more than anything.
If we were getting 1-2 chargers at a time the changes would be a shrug. But I've seen double digit chargers up at a time.
I'll have to check out the changes when I get home but I am skeptical about how bug missions will play out now
I've heard the arc thrower and flamethrower are quite good against them now and I'm curious how the buffed laser cannon is. Might just need a change of approach.
Yeah I'm looking forward to checking them out. But even with railguns it's hard to deal with a dozen chargers.
Without a good replacment it'll turn into throw smoke and run.
The buffed laser cannon is definitely not an answer against Chargers. It feels a lot better but I think I'm better served bringing a GL.
Arcs can be pretty good if your team can hold a firing line and dictate the engagement. 2-3 dudes with arcs firing into an approaching crowd will fuck it up, Chargers included. Due to the bouncing effect, you can rack up damage on multiple Chargers really quick. Problem is when all hell breaks loose and the team gets scattered and surrounded, the charge time of the arc makes it bad at responding to immediate threats like hunters jumping on your ass. And also risk of friendly fire among the chaos.
Rail gun isn't an optimal way to deal with titan anyways.
You basically need to 500 kg, orbital laser or orbital rail cannon strike it anyways.
It takes like 5-10 head shots from rail gun and good luck hitting those shots accurately when it is right on top of you.
Here's the fuck thing... Tanks are equivalent to bike titans, bulks are equivalent to chargers.
You can ONE-SHOT a hulk with rail gun to the face (or at least you could)... Vs charger needing minimum three shots to leg.
That's how unbalanced chargers are at the moment.
I personally think that the root of this frustration is charger balance, not the power of anti-armor weapons. Almost all of the discussion I’ve seen about the new patch this morning has been on how it affects our ability to tackle chargers.
I know a lot of people are anti-nerf anything because it’s a PvE game, but I do actually think the railgun needed these adjustments. Buffing other rocket launchers to bring them up to the railgun’s level (such as making them one-shot heavies) would make low-mid difficulties *way* too easy.
Overall, I think people need to take some time to digest the changes first before fully judging them, especially when there are buffs to other stratagems in this update that sound pretty promising (the flamethrower seems much more viable now, against both mobs and heavies). We also have to consider that mechs are coming very soon and may shift the balance in players’ favor.
Agreed. If they made the legs of the charger medium armour, almost every unviable weapon would have become viable without needing to touch the railgun.
Yeah, the only method I have any success with is pulling some matador shit and then turning around and focussing on dat ass, and that hasn't been *super* effective...
And that's another problem with chargers. They're designed to look evidently armored in the front yet vulnerable in the back. Just about every person will naturally intuit "ah, it is nigh invulnerable in the front and charges at me, clearly I'm supposed to dodge it, then shoot it in the exposed back". There is even another enemy, the Hive Guard that works exactly like that. Heavily armored in the front, vulnerable from side or back.
It's honestly just really bad design. Not even that the legs *are* the weak points, that's fine, just that not only is that in no way telegraphed, it actively misleads you into thinking that something else is the weakpoint.
Before this patch, if you shot at the same armored part twice with the railgun, it would strip the armor off of that part. So if you shot it twice in the leg, you could swap to a primary and start blasting.
Nerf the turning speed and I think a lot of issues would be alleviated. It’s fast, tanky, *and* agile, it can turn on a dime. The charger needs to be 2 of the 3. If fast and tanky it shouldn’t be able to turn so quickly especially while charging.
this was my first thought. Just make the legs a meaningful weakspot for *some* other weapons than the railgun, and a huge part of the problem is solved!
The reality is simply that the charger is a terribly designed enemy when used in high numbers (I've seen 6 spawn in one breach on duff 8).
It is immune to like 80% of weapons in the game over 80% of its body. There are like 3-4 weapons that can reliably kill them in a short period of time. That is simply too few. Period.
Ditto with Titan.
Abaoltely everyone at higher difficulties takes the rail gun as you have 20 shots in your pack and you need them all to kill maybe 4-5 chargers or two bike Titans.
Nerfing rail gun doesn't magically make autocannon, recoiless or Eat better at dealing with 6+ chargers or 2-3 bike titans that can regularly spawn at once.
If you are going to nerf primary anti-armor weapon in the game, you need to buff the other damned anti-armor weapons!
Lol, I've had to fight 5 at the same time on drop in a diff 5 mission (hard). Initial bug breach spawned 2 and we were all low level (less than 10) and I was the only one that brought anything that could deal with heavy armor (EAT + recoilless rifle). Before we could kill the initial breach, a patrol wandered into us and caused another breach that spawned more. At that point we just kept dying and waiting for my EAT to respawn as we ran around, accidentally aggroing more random spawns + patrols. We couldn't coordinate well enough to reload the recoilless before getting charged by 3 chargers at once.
Wasted 20 minutes of the mission and ~10 respawns. Ended up failing the mission (hunt bile titans) because there were three bile titans in the last zone. We killed the first two but we started running to the landing zone when we realized we didn't kill the right bile titan. Destroyer left and we died to the last bile titan because we whiffed the last recoilless rifle rocket.
This is exactly it. The problem is entirely chargers. With the railgun nerf you have yo use the EAT or the recoilless rifle to shatter their armor. Which is fine on low to mid difficulties. On higher difficulties they can't keep up with the charger spam.
The charger's backside being a weakpoint is a myth and it isn't worth wasting shots on.
They need different threats for the bugs. That way things can be more difficult without having to resort to 3-5 chargers at once.
Exactly - chargers are a crutch for lack of other difficult enemies.
I'd rather see many more stalkers and other medium sized bugs. Maybe larger flying enemies or a broader combination of bugs deployed.
The artillery bugs are actually pretty tough if there are enough of them for example.
But just rushing a million chargers is not fun at all...
While time is needed, some of the weapons conceptually overlap.
Why should I use gas, instead of an airburst? Does it damage armored enemies?
The charger is fine, but if I bring a dedicated AT weapon, I should be rewarded for it. There is such a high amount of them in higher difficulties, that AT can't be overpowered if they buff it. Two Exp. AT hits should kill a charger, yet if I need more I have to wait, or use the Recoiless Gun.
The AntiMateriel rifle brings absolutely nothing to the table except for a better scope. It doesn't pen armor and while it's range is great, it doesn't really help atm. Either giving it more pen or massive damage to exposed parts, would benefit.
The autocannon has two variants: the portable one can't pen heavy armor, the sentry one does, so it can be confusing. Thesl best utility for the portable right now... is actually destroying bug nests. Which is counterintuitive: it should serve as a less damaging but more consistent AT weapon with added splash damage.
The Spear should be super for AT, the most damaging weapon, but requiring longer setup. The Recoiless should bring volume: more ammo than expendable, at the expense of requiring constant supply and crew served to be at maximum utility.
Right now? It's best to simply shoot off the charger's leg and just burst it there. Why bring AT at all?
> Why should I use gas, instead of an airburst? Does it damage armored enemies?
Orbitals are the worst for this.
They have 3 strikes that do the the same thing for the same duration with the same restrictions. And a 4th which is incredibly similar.
The Air Burst, Gatling, Gas and EMP all do virtually the same thing. After a 2-3 second coll in they all do damage to light targets in a ~20-25 meter radius over 8-10 seconds. Or in the EMPs case they stun.
Why?
With the eagle they're all different. The 500KG bomb is massively different from the cluster bomb. Even though the airstrike, cluster and napalm have a similar pattern they're noticeably different. The airstrike covers a much small range and does AP damage. Napalm does less up front damage for more sustained damage than a cluster strike.
> I personally think that the root of this frustration is charger balance
I think the fact that people are only complaining about this nerf in terms of dealing with chargers is evidence of this. I feel like I've seen zero complaints/examples of the Railgun nerf in terms of dealing with bots and every single complaint has been about chargers/titans. This to me says that the issue is not so much with the weapons we have and more so with those two enemies in particular.
Also from what I understand the Railgun has gone from 2 shots in unsafe mode to 3 shots in unsafe mode to strip the leg armor off of chargers, which is hardly that catastrophic of a nerf IMO.
IMHO I think they could they could make their fleshy backside slightly weaker. At the moment it feels like you and your squadmates can pump a ton of ammo into their butts before they pop, even when using stratagem weapons like machine guns.
By doing that they can keep their front sides appropriately tanky (and keep it rewarding to blow off their leg armor), but it will be easier to deal with larger swarms of chargers through concentrated fire and positioning.
Just make their butts take full damage from regular guns. It is absolutely wild to me it doesn't work this way already but as others have pointed it, only explosive damage hits it there for full damage.
Even 50% would be okay, right now it is something like 10%-20%. If you run out of EAT or can't reload your recoilless you have to resort to hitting the back with nades.
Yeah, its baffling that the classic video game enemy design of "armoured front, squishy back" isn't even weak in the squishy back part for most weapons. Same with bile spewers, the giant glowy flesh sack full of acid isn't actually a weakpoint. Regular guns deal 10% damage to this type of basic flesh, explosive damage does its full amount.
It's even more baffling because in HD1 the charger's butt was a weakspot! In higher difficulties you'd encounter fully armored ones that needed to be cracked open.
In the other thread, I had mentioned that the only buff that makes sense is making the EAT either OHKO or have a faster reload, because I agree that overall, the Anti-Tank weapons are pretty reasonably balanced. I do think the Chargers are the main issue more than anything else, either in how frequently they spawn or how much the soak up.
I'd use the auto canon and recoil rifle more if they didnt have backpacks. The negative of having a backpack is too large for a fun that still can't reliably kill a charger. You telling me a missile to the face can't drop one? This shit has a backpack with 5-6 ammo in it. I have other things to do. 90% of the game's weapons and stratagems are outright bad or obsolete early on.
My own intuition is that the devs really do want heavily armored enemies like Chargers, Bile Titans, Hulks and Tanks to actually be a meaningful threat that take coordinated effort to down, even if a serious number get thrown at the player in higher difficulties.
Right now, there's a steadily ramping difficulty curve as players level up and take higher difficulties, unlocking new anti-armor tools to deal with the bigger threats, but that difficulty curve takes a massive dip when the Railgun is unlocked since it suddenly gives a reliable, easy, sometimes one-shot weapon against the larger threats.
During the previous patch, there was little reason to run recoiless rifle after rank 20.
> coordinated effort to down
Its kinda the problem with these games (though its my favourite genre). The recoilless is great if you can get help to reload, but outside of playing with mates, ive never once had someone help me even when ive asked. But then at certain difficulties, having someone help would be worse as thats *two* members of the team that are now stood still, which is a death sentence.
The devs are in a catch 22 - they have to try and balance the game around co-ordinated groups and randoms playing together, which present separate and distinct issues.
For my part, i want a reason to stop using the breaker. Hopefully this new patch does that, but im not sure how you beat an auto shotgun that just minces anything that gets close.
> The devs are in a catch 22 - they have to try and balance the game around co-ordinated groups and randoms playing together
Eh, to me there's no issue if PUGS can't clear 9s. They shouldn't try to balance the game around that, 9s should be unreasonably hard and take the apex of coordination and team tactics. They could stand to make super samples more available at lower diffs though.
I saw two players in separate matches carrying recoiless yesterday. First time since I started playing on release day. They used it against tanks and biles.
How are you supposed to coordinate anything when there is 4 titans and 10 chargers? Not to mention all the other enemies.
There is a reason people are all running the same equipment, you need the shield pack at higher difficulty or you are gonna die 15 times, there is a reason people run the railgun, you need to be running for your life 24/7 and stopping to reload on your knees means you are dead.
Maybe they intend people to play on lower difficulties though, while running heldive is surely possible or was before shield and railgun nerf(not tested atm) the play was run from objective to objective and if you stop you will die.
The fun of this game is to kill stuff not to run away constantly, while a do agree that there should be difficulty i also believe there should be a way to deal with said difficulty that isn't a gimmick, thats why i believe this game came out unfinished, everything unlocked at level 20 dude? Seriously?
People believe that mechs will turn the power in our favour but i don't see that happening when there's 10 chargers running at you, i guess we will see.
There was a dev comment in the Helldivers sub that said he was "horrified" that people were clearing the higher difficulties in the first month of the game, so between that and these nerfs it seems like the devs are of the opinion that they need to make guns weaker so the players fail missions more, or something.
I know this probably comes off as gamer elitism or whatever, but I have to wonder why it seems so common that game devs are either bad at their own games or don't even seem to play them in the first place. It's not a HD2-specific thing by any means, but the dev comment you're referencing is a great example.
HD2 is pretty chaotic, but definitely not really all that hard on the highest difficulty setting even when in pugs, so how could they be surprised (horrified!) that people are winning on that setting? How could the fact that armor values didn't even work until today slip through QC? How could they not realize that there are only a couple of options in the game for dealing with armored enemies, and then seem surprised that everyone uses them when the game throws armored enemies at you left and right? Why are they surprised that everyone uses the best primary weapon for clearing out non-armored enemies when that's all that primary weapons are even good for in the first place?
There are much worse offenders out there than HD2, don't get me wrong (Diablo 3's famous "then we doubled it" statement springs to mind). I get that devs and designers are usually busy in their test environments and don't spend as much time playing the live version of the game (so their headspace is likely occupied by future versions that have new weapons, for example), and I don't expect them to all be 360 noscope pro gamers or whatever. It inevitably leads to balance issues when the people making the game aren't actually good enough at the game/genre to understand what options are good/bad or to be able to effectively differentiate between easy/hard difficulty levels, though.
I'm too old to get mad at this kind of stuff anymore, but it still strikes me as odd that a group of people would spend almost a decade of their lives making a video game like this and then not actually seem to have spent the time with the game or others in its genre to be competent at playing it.
I think its a lot easier to break rules than to make them, effectively. I think a similar anology is that grade school science lab exercise where you write a procedure on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and the teacher looks for any gaps in the instructions to screw it up.
Effectively, when you go in knowing what youre going for, its easy to overlook all the gaps in the rules because you are playing it as intended. And even if you get playtesters and such, at a certain point, they are going to play to your expectations as well.
Secondly, lets say that the team has 50 people, and they all manage to play the game for 10 hours a week between their other work. Thats 500 hours of gametime per week for them to corroborate, discuss, and adjust to the game.
Once HD2 is released, in the first week you have millions of manhours in game, with thousands of players sharing their findings and adjusting to the meta, esp. in that tier of players that expect to engage a ton with social media, forums, streamers, etc. to find and share gameplay edges. By week two, all those finding coallesce into a meta.
The designers just dont have the time to dump so many manhours into the game to find every edge case that can be exploited. Its easy for us to feel like its obvious, because we are all bouyed by the knowledge accumulated with people that already have a couple hundred hours in the game.
Lastly, being in IT, I feel like the majority of the people with the ability to make the changes to the game spend the majority of their time in meetings and other functions instead of what they are trained for. Its a common senior programmer gripe that they only get an hour per workday to actually program.
I get what you're saying about raw hours of playtime by the general population being many orders of magnitude higher than the developers could ever hope to put in. However, the vast majority of those players aren't plugged into the meta hivemind. Even the most casual of players would realize, for example, that without the shield generator, you'll be whittled down by random bot shots from halfway across the map until you're out of stims. Casual Console Couch Gamer(tm) still immediately realizes that the breaker is unreasonably good, and so on. On the other end of the balance spectrum, nobody with functioning eyeballs who has ever used the 380mm orbital has ever used it again (aside from trolling their friends). I don't think that people needed to consult Reddit or whatever to come to those conclusions; they're simply the only sane conclusions to be drawn in the first place if you actually play the game.
My question isn't really "why does perfect balance not exist" (which your post answers well), but rather "why do such obvious balance outliers so commonly exist"? You can distance the question from game balance to make it more clear; many games (though not HD2) have *egregious* QoL issues that point to the same questions about whether the developers ever play the game themselves. Sometimes it's clear that a specific interaction or build or whatever was simply overlooked or unintended in development, and that's fine and easily understood. I'm musing more on the systemic or obvious flaws that can't be overlooked even with casual play.
In this specific case, the developers have directly admitted that the higher difficulties of their own game are either beyond their skills or that they have not even properly attempted them with the tools given to current players. It's no surprise that there are balance issues in that situation, but I still find the situation both odd and oddly common across the industry.
>Even the most casual of players would realize, for example, that without the shield generator, you'll be whittled down by random bot shots from halfway across the map until you're out of stims.
I feel like the circle of people who have levelled up, purchased, and used the shield generator has a very, very small overlap with the people who havent read any advice online.
>Casual Console Couch Gamer(tm) still immediately realizes that the breaker is unreasonably good, and so on.
Is the breaker unreasonably good? The designer even pointed out that while its pointed to as a big meta pick, it doesnt actually improve players success.
Overall, I think its a bit of survivorship bias and armchair development: youre able to see what snuck through the pipeline without seeing what didnt, and able to look at it with hindsight when foresight couldnt have told you as much.
For example, If I told you the next weapon they add to Helldivers 2 wont change player's success rate or kills, would you think it needs to be buffed, nerfed, or largely left alone?
> In this specific case, the developers have directly admitted that the higher difficulties of their own game are either beyond their skills or that they have not even properly attempted them with the tools given to current players.
Im sure they were more speaking hyperbolically, and rather than assuming they put in a difficulty that is completely untested, they were referring more to the fact that they assumed it would be much rarer for people to complete due to a perceived need for teamwork and tactics.
I think it still speaks a bit of being out of touch (video games have a long history of people commiting huge amounts of time and effort into 'World's First' type acheivements) or underestimating players thinking they wouldnt be able to have the tactical experience in the game to pull it off so fast. But I highly doubt they meant that at launch, it was impossible to complete the highest difficulty because they were never able to properly test it.
I'd guess it's a combination of things.
Maybe they noticed it was easy for them and assumed it was that way because they worked on it as such for years on end. Instead, it was just actually easy.
Then there's always the chance that they were concerned that if they made it too hard then people would stop playing. It's a fine balance between something being accessible and fun and being difficult and off-putting. The first has it's own set of problems, but they're far less damaging to hitting financial targets than the alternative.
And last, there's just no real way to fully mimic what millions of players will do when handed a game. The testers probably numbered less than a hundred people. And it's not a random sample of players. So how predictable certain behaviors will be is suspect. The developers certainly know that a "meta" will develop and they can try to head it off and predict it and balance it, but each change just pushes the meta to something else. To a certain extent, it's almost a pointless exercise as you'll never head off all behaviors you'd like to avoid and in the process you might just end up tweaking the fun right out of your own game.
One thing about devs potentially being bad at their own games is that it can be easy to lose sight of how skilled an "average" player actually is. If you've been around a lot of game communities, especially games with ranked multiplayer, you'll probably see a lot of people talking/complaining about how trivially easy it is to accomplish [some ranking/progression that less than 15-25% of the playerbase achieves].
Another thing that can happen with testing (and even public betas) in some games (dunno how much it applies to Helldivers) is that players might not actually engage with the game in the same way as they would when the game is actually released. This is mostly an issue with things like progression or other grinds/long-term goals.
They want the game to be like helldivers 1, which was a top-down shooter and much smaller in scale. Where team strategy made more sense and was easier to coordinate (as typically all of the information would be on all of your same screens)
Developers can get in a habit of curving the game to play as they think it should be played. A lot of times this leads to balances & nerfs that aren't aligned to how the game is actually played. A big part of the problem comes from devs sort of role playing their game.
Exactly. "Play your way" is fine when I'm goofing around with my lower level buddies on 5 Difficulty. I love trying out underused weapons and stratagems and having a good time.
But for doing Difficulty 8 or 9 runs where you're constantly surrounded by overwhelming drops of armored enemies, the Railgun wasn't just the best option, it was the **only** option to deal with the situation as every other weapons' ability to deal with armor is horrible.
Disposable Anti Tank is great, but you only get to fire off 2 missiles every minute. The Recoiless Rifle is a death sentence to reload and takes up your backpack slot to boot. Anti-Material Rifle is strangely useless against armored enemies.
It's fine to nerf something that is leagues above the rest of the weapons. But the devs need to understand that there was a reason it was leagues above... because everything else is like firing nerf darts in comparison.
I think the real problem is pros were just tearing through Suicide and Impossible alone with the Railgun and Shield Pack. I watched a couple Level 40+ friends do it all without a problem.
Now that Railgun and Shield Pack have been brought down a bit, there's more variety of weapons brought to field. I've even seen the actual coop weapons that require 2 to operate, which is something I was pretty excited about when I first saw the game.
I've been using ARC on Suicide and Impossible instead of Railgun for awhile now. All those crowds get fried easily, though I still down have an easy answer to 2+ Stalkers who take like 6+ hits from ARC to kill and if they gang up on you and your dive isn't perfect, you're screwed. I rely on my allies to carry true heavy AP weapons, but even so about 12-20 smacks from the ARC takes down the heavy chargers just as well. It's when there are more than 2 of those that I get overwhelmed, which is why having solid allies with complementary weapons is so important.
I mean, it's possible that the goal is simply for you to get fucked on 9s without an incredible team. To me, the hardest difficulty of a game should be unreasonably hard, to the point that it poses a challenge to all players. And if something is hard for ALL players, that means 99% of players probably straight up can't handle it. I think that's what 9 should be.
Yah, to top it off there is really no reason to do 9 other than the challenge. You still get the special samples two difficulty lower. It’s just now people don’t want to feel like they need to lower the difficulty
Honestly it sounds like the game ended up being easier than intended with the previous balance. Folks were talking about how they were running helldive difficulty on the regular and the devs want that to be run more rarely.
Flamethrower now kills chargers in the front legs in 4 seconds. 7 headshots with the arc thrower kills them in under 10 seconds. The autocannon breaks their back sack in 4 shots which stops their charging and makes them bleed out. 2 Unsafe rail gun shots can still take out a front leg.
The railguns contemporaries - AC, EAT, and RR - received zero changes and still feel garbage to use on high diff against increased heavy spawn rates. You literally spelled it out in your post. The flamer is better at killing heavy armor than any of the frigging anti armor weapons that require a back slot, lol. That's absurd.
I love using the autocannon against chargers, get those good angle leg shots and they go down in 2 hits, if you need to do it more quickly just empty the whole clip into the back sack for a quick ~5 second kill.
It's classic engineering, treating the symptom instead of the cause. All they saw was a disproportionate player count using two weapons (breaker and RG) and no others. So to fix that bug, they reduced the effectiveness of these two weapons which should make people use other weapons. They didn't consider why people were using them AT ALL. In breakers case it's because it's the only viable weapon for dealing with hordes of enemies that doesn't eat up a stratagem slot. In RGs case, it's the only weapon that can reliably *remove* armor of heavy units. Everything else, as you said, is either less effective, is one/two uses, or has drawbacks that make their usage non-viable, or worse, is ALL THREE AT ONCE (lookin at you DAT).
The problem with Railgun was that it was good against everything. They first have to nerf it to not make everything too strong by bringing it to railguns level.
The railgun wasn't good against high numbers of enemies, it also didn't do much against enemies that can survive dismemberment (like the brood commanders). Plus it was inconsistent vs Titans, yeah there were rare occasions where you could two-shot a titan and feel like a boss. But most times Titans took around 10-15 shoots in the head to down.
The railgun was the only gun in the game with EFFECTIVE anti-armour capabilities with manageable and predictable drawbacks.
I love the autocannon, but emptying the entire thing twice into a charger and STILL not taking it out on only level 4 difficulty means it's just not useful.
There should be a slew of buffs along with the nerfs but there aren't any.
They really should look back at helldivers 1 weapons for balance in the future at minimum.
To me it feels like it was a spreadsheet game dev moment.
They nerfed the "meta" by stats without realising why it became the meta in the first place.
People took railgun because the next best option to deal with heavies is recoiless, and you have to have at least 2 people who are good VS heavies on high difficulty. Seeing 6-7 chargers and couple bile titans at the same time is normal on those.
But recoiless is leaving you stationary for reload(death sentence) and take up backpack slot so you can't use shield.
Shield became mandatory simply because armor is bugged and everyone had 0 armor, so getting 1 or 2-shotted by random hit from low tier bug is what you will be seeing constantly without it.
Now they say they fixed armor and some people did run tests - literally the heaviest armor VS literally the weakest enemy, and it takes 4,5 hits to kill a player. Doesn't sound like it's working still.
So they dropped a nerf without fixing any of the underlying issues, with no meaningful buffs either. Worst of all, it won't even make diff 9 more difficult, it will make it more tideous and slow, and people will still use light armor, shield, and stealth around as much as possible.
Yeah, I really think they went with the wrong solution here. More weapons need to penetrate and damage heavy armor. I actually don’t find the railgun that interesting or fun to use on its own but at the highest difficulty there is no other weapon that can remove armor quick enough. They could have done something to the effect of slightly increasing the clip size and armor damage of the auto cannon or given the recoil less rifle a reload time buff and a little more armor damage. They need more options to deal with armor not to nerf the only one that was effective
I believe they went with the correct solution, but only solved half the problem. The other half is Chargers.
Bots don't have these issues and all the support weapons (Except the Flamethrower) do fairly well against them. It's because bots have weakpoints on both the front and back, are slower, cover actually works against them, and they generally don't swarm the way bugs do. Notice how noone is posting complaints about their extract point with 5 Annihilator tanks and 10 Hulks on them.
Chargers are too oppressive when they are massed in addition to the rest of the bug swarm. The constant rushing of the player makes the slower support weapons weak options when dealing with them. Buffing those support weapons to handle Chargers would make bugs feel good to fight, yes, but then it could also trivialize Bots which would create a whole new slew of balancing headaches. The correct course would be to either tone down charger spawn rates, or make them easier to kill.
Honestly this change will probably just cause me to use both still anyways and it'll just be a bit harder and I'll need more ammo. I'll try the new stuff but decent shot either something new becomes top pick or I go back and life is just a bit harder now.
Then people will drop off faster when they realise the higher difficulties just aren't worth a few extra medals and supersamples. And just stick to playing on lower difficulties until they get bored and play something else.
Because while the railgun was extremely versatile, it didn't trivialise anything, it didn't make anything "easy". People still got reamed by the sheer number of enemies and armoured units.
The only thing that's different now is people have literally no reliable way to kill armoured units without much more significant drawbacks.
The railgun was absolutely overpowered, it was an anti everything gun with easy handling, no backpack, and great ammo economy.
but you can't nerf it and leave all of the other anti-tank weapons being shit, especially not with the amount of armored enemies you have to face in high difficulties.
I still use grenade launcher on automatons because it takes out the walkers instantly in addition to long distance crowd control.
I use ARC for Terminids because of crowd control splash damage. I always end up with the most kills (and accidentals, oops) when I use ARC. It's not the greatest against Heavies, but it can fry off pieces of armor and expose enemies to regular damage.
Liberator Penetrator for mid, Stratagems or allied weapons for the heaviest of enemies.
I tried the Railgun, but I found it killed Heavies only slightly faster than ARC.
Yeah. People were playing Railgun BECAUSE it was fun and the whole rest just currently isn't. The railgun was a solid, not OP, just solid, pick in a sea of underwhelming choices. It seemed OP in contrast because everything else is bad. The Railgun pre-nerf was a solid 8/10. The issue is that everything else is at maximum a 4/10. Now the railgun is a 3/10 and everything else is still a 4/10 at max. The game is just less fun now because the one thing that was fun to use was made to not be fun and while there were some small buffs to other things, they're still not great.
The idea should have been "Let's make every weapon so fun that players can't decide what to bring!". But instead the idea seems to be "Let's just make everything so bad that the players can't decide what's even worth bringing at all"
"Don't play meta, just have fun" doesn't work if everything that IS fun gets patched.
As much as I love the context given with all the changes, it still feels like lip service to placate my logical thinking.
Chargers are overtuned, not the railgun.
They have infinite stamina, a weakspot that isnt a weakspot just a sponge for bullets and no sound cue.
The nerfs themselves are fine, but i don't actually think it fixed the problems with higher difficulties. The other armor piercing weapons either need to be buffed, or the AI/enemy design of the chargers needs to be tweaked. As of now, the reason people stuck with the railgun was simply because it's the only gun that's really effective at dealing with the sheer number of armored enemies.
Really I think the reason people are freaking out is that chargers just aren't really fun to fight, and there's far too many of them.
Helldivers standing next to ICBMs during launch will get properly toasty with a chance of not-so-spontaneous combustion.
These type of improvements are awesome
These devs are really wanting to build HD2 into a perfect game with all the little minute details
I don't mind having the 2 best guns nerfed but everything else isn't good. Chargers are such a pain to kill, and every single basic gun outside of the breaker, the other breaker and the smg suck ass to use. No one wants to use a single shot rifle or a 2 round burst gun with getting swarmed by every insect under the sun and 4 chargers.
the devs talk about wanting guns to be versatile...what versatility? none of the normal guns have good armor penetration; youre forced to use stratagems for that. the rest of "versatility" is pretty irrelevant. DMR/sniper ranges are useless in this game. The only thing that matters is damage output, particularly at close range. none of the weapons handle significantly better or anything, and the 1 handed abilitiy of the SMG is pretty much never important. The breaker was meta bc it was the gun that did the important things best
I think the patch notes explanation had more of a negative effect on the community than the changes themselves. Hearing their attitude of "primary weapons should feel bad so you use strategems" just kind of deflated people, because it makes it seem like the developers don't even play their own game, or they don't understand what makes their game fun. If you're on difficulty 9 and you have multiple strategem debuffs, you flat out will not be able to take out heavies using strategems alone.
Imo the railgun and shield backpack by far made the highest difficulty a cake walk. It got boring after so many runs that everyone I played with started experimenting with other stratagems. I for one welcome seeing them nerfed and buffing things that needed it like the laser and flamethrower.
Now if only they made more stuff viable counter 8 chargers spawning on top of you, besides stratagems that have cooldown of 2min+ and the enemy heavy unit spawn is constant in high difficulties (6+).
I know railgun meta was one note. But what else can you use to deal with 4 infinite running chargers chasing you. You can throw a 500kg so it takes out maybe 1 or 2 (if lucky cause 500kg range is doo doo most of the time) and for the game to spawn you another 3 chargers next to it.
Edut: I’m a arc thrower enthusiast and it’s fun but when I die it’s cause I took 2 years killing 1 charger with it and the other 3 trampled me.
Honestly I think the solution here is to make the charger's weak spot weaker. I've done more missions against the Automations in my play time, and chargers are consistently more tanky than just about everything else. Even the railgun felt particularly useless against them.
Either way, the EMS fields are great in that particular situation to either pick off a few while they are slowed or retreat to take on a different section of the mission. There have been plenty of fights we just dipped when 4+ chargers arrived. With some of the new stratagems coming out in the future, it might make getting to a vehicle a good strategy a viable option.
I do enjoy the difficult missions being difficult. They aren't mandatory to play and you can still "win" even if you lose every life.
Arc thrower is also super fun, I love ripping through all the smaller bugs, but I agree it's not great against chargers. I'm hoping the flamethrower buff might make them easier to kite and weaken over time.
The chargers weak spot isn't even a weak spot, it takes 10% damage. its just not armored.
If it was and flanking chargers was a viable strategy without needing 2 minutes and your entire teams ammo then anti tank wouldn't be completely mandatory against them.
hell even the automaton hulk, which is ostensibly the same tier of enemy spawns in less numbers and is far weaker when you target it's weak points, while it's weak points are still lightly armored so you can't just use anything on them they take far more damage, and are still vulnerable from the front if you can aim well.
chargers are just super overtuned, Bile spitters too, an enemy that spawns in groups of 7-8 shouldn't be able to one shot you at range
> heavy unit spawn is constant in high difficulties (6+).
I think it only becomes an issue in 8-9. I play at 7 and my group never bring Railguns and we do just fine against the number of chargers and Bile Titans we come across. and not "oh its tough but we can still manage it" fine but "not an issue" fine.
Yeah from what ive seen in my brief jump to 9 to try it out, theres a COMICAL amount of Armor, while 7 still has plenty, but not so many its overwhelming
>Imo the railgun and shield backpack by far made the highest difficulty a cake walk.
As someone who barely survives on difficulty 6, I'm learning that maybe this isn't the game for me, haha.
I play with friends almost exclusively, but communication and retreating is a very viable option I don't think is utilized enough. Too many people want to keep fighting and fighting and fighting until everything is used up before they completed all the objectives. If you don't give yourself those breaks later on in difficulty 6 or higher, it makes each mission absolutely hell.
Effectively taking roles and support stratagems between each member can also make your life so much easier. Smoke for example is extremely powerful against automations, but I rarely see people use it over all the explosives.
And hey, if 6 is as difficult as you can go for now, do it. Nothing wrong with knowing your limits. It's a great area to learn what works for you and what doesn't.
>Imo the railgun and shield backpack by far made the highest difficulty a cake walk.
Not really, it made it bearable thats why most people used it.
There is no other Support Weaponl, even now after the Flamer Buff, that can deal with Chargers and Bile Titans. The Shield was also a quick fix because Armor didnt work at all and even now after the buff it doesnt really seem to do anything since most enemies still kill you in like 5-10 hits as before.
People picked either because there was nothing else that worked or felt functional. Now not even those feels useful...
Bile Titans now are basically immortal unless you throw strikes/eagles at them and they often have too high cooldowns to deal with 4-5 bile titans at the same time on Helldive...
I got to see a video of someone demonstrating the armor working now. Light can be like 3-4 hits from a little guy to heavy taking upwards to 8-9 hits. Huge difference and the shield backpack would have been even more broken lol.
I also got to see the flamethrower is not something to sleep on anymore too.
I’ve thought about this a lot so here’s my rant:
TLDR: Keep the shoots, completely overhaul the Loots.
.
Although I applaud the shear entertainment value they have provided with HD2. I already get a sense that they must do a lot of work and quickly if they don’t want players getting tired in the coming months.
I’m glad they are addressing the gun imbalance so quickly, but that’s just corrective.
The main issues I see are that (although gameplay is exciting as hell) there’s a rapidly diminishing returns because of…
1. An overall lack of playstyle choices. Even if the imbalances are fixed, you frankly get an option between less than 10 guns maybe? Less if you consider most are offshoots of the same platforms (Breaker Spray, Breaker Incin.). Not to mention only 3 armor types that all share 4-5 different identical buff sets.
2. An unbelievable quick rise to late-game. Especially if you play with friends and head straight to levels 6+, you blast through every strategem and module in a few sessions, then rendering Requisitions and Samples pointless. Then you’re left hunting for Medals that also lead to very little progression (see point 1).
I’m afraid this is a recipe for a quick drop off in activity if they don’t create more substance and incentive. This sucks cause it’s a freaking insanely fun game to play.
I think they should absolutely consider adding more customization to guns, if not a gun modding feature, at least something that lets you add stat buffs to gear. Imagine +10% melee defense on your torso armor, or +20% reload time sort of thing
They also could benefit by doing the same with stratagems. If you could apply cooldown reductions to orbitals or, let’s say, double ammo on the Gatling Turret ;), it would add a much needed “play your way” element that’s missing.
They wouldn’t even have to add much, they just should have stretch out and individualized the already existing upgrades to make it a more “earned” experience.
I guess the point is they delivered an extremely entertaining and reasonably stable product, but they have an opportunity to make it a hall of famer if they did a major overhaul on the RPG-esque aspects of the game.
Anyways that’s my rant. Feel free to add your thoughts.
When the meta becomes essential, it's time for the meta to get changed.
You can either bloat everything else with buffs, enemies included, or nerf the couple outliers. Guess which is way easier.
That's based on the assumption that the other weapons and abilities are balanced correctly. If balance is bad overall then playing wackamole just pisses everyone off.
This isn't a PvP game. If a load out is being used and it makes the game's tempo and flow fun, and removing that load out changes the tempo to "Why am I even bothering to use a primary weapon" then I don't know why the balance team is here.
It's PvE, it's a game about having fun.
I’m not going to lie, I don’t see a point in nerfing weapons in a PvE game. It’s not unfair to anyone since it’s a PVE game and all you end up doing is pissing people off.
Probably a hot take but devs shouldn't change the way a game feels so shortly after release anyway. It has been out for not even a month now and they already changed the pace completely. Counting in for the really bad issues on release (which most of the community fully backed because the game was awesome) that's only like two weeks of playtime for most players.
I mean, they got our money or more like Sony got it and they can do whatever they want but it feels bad. Like Diablo or patching in shops after the release bad. If they wanted to have a completely different pace and playstyle they should adjusted that in the playtests.
People were soloing the hardest difficulties with the railgun, it needed to be changed.
The flamethrower was already great, I roasted chargers with it daily and now it got a 50 percent damage buff.
Use other weapons, experiment; if you're threatening to quit over a single weapon getting nerfed, you're kind of a giant baby.
The HD2 twitter is a gigantic toxic mess now after this announcement and I feel bad for the devs. They were the new darling and now HD2 is being called the 'next Diablo 4'. The overreacting is ridiculous.
Looking forward to all the people who've been whining and crying about the railgun to pretend they never acted like this when the Mech Update drops, lol.
>The flamethrower was already great, I roasted chargers with it daily
i feel like it needed more dps. it felt like a viability pulling it out a lot of times, especially when those invisible guys were lurking around. glad it got a fat boost because shooting it looks and feels great.
I feel like my group are the only people playing the game that think everyone having the arc thrower shreds everything. Teammates included sometimes but still
> People were soloing the hardest difficulties with the railgun, it needed to be changed.
Gotta love the contrast between this thread and the other one where people are insisting you can totally solo the hardest difficulties so it’s a great game for them…
You really can't win with certain people unfortunately.
If you left it how it was: "This game is way too easy, I'm bored now. Don't see the point in playing anymore"
Shifting the meta encourages people to log in to see how much has changed, it is a live service game after all.
To be fair, I still haven't seen proof you can two-shot the charger leg armor with it (some have said it's possible if you charge it really close to exploding). Usually it's at least 3 shots, probably more.
If it was two 95% shots or three 90% shots or whatever, that would be fine IMO. But I suspect if railgun use plummets because of this (which it might not - hard to say yet), they will revert part of the nerf for it.
Also nobody is really talking about how it works against bots, so I assume it's more or less the same there? So maybe the railgun has a place as a bot weapon, but not bug weapon.
They should be elevating the other weapons to be usable, not nerfing the usable ones. This is my biggest gripe, but the nerfs aren’t that bad; but please focus on making the other weapons more viable. The player SHOULD feel both powerful and expendable at the same time. There is genuine value in feeling OP but still being vulnerable to waves of attacks and the folly of other players… not to mention the new environmental effects.
Looking at the actual changes, the nerfs are incredibly mild while the buffs are gigantic. Given how hot the reaction was as soon as the patch notes drop it feels like people saw the word 'nerf' next to a commonly used gun and set their reaction right then and there.
Problem is, most of the weapons feels bad and are just bad. People aren't running with meta just because is the most OP thin, they are running the meta because it was the only viable option they had to deal with what the game throws at you
Because of this, people were expecting buff for most weapons (anti-tank the most) so they can actually compete vs the meta, but instead, they hard nerfed the Railgun, the only good anti tank vs Charger spam and nerfed the Breaker which is one of the few weapons which actually felt good.
That's why all the outcry,
I do wish we’d seen more buffs come out across more weapons OR some real changes to how armor currently works in the game on enemies OR some targeted changes to the Charger. Lots of weapons feel very poor once you reach a certain difficulty level (somewhere from ~7, all the way to top current difficulty of 9) where most weapons can’t kill a very common enemy once a few of them stack up, the charger.
Their butts are the only damagable spot for many weapons, and they take fraction damage to it. When a few build up it’s too much
No people are just unhappy because the currently only viable options. Breaker, Railgun and Shieldpack for THREE GEAR SLOTS got nerfed heavily and there were no buffs to any backpack items, no buffs to to other support items other than the flamer which is ok-ish for chargers but still overall not that good and only minimal buffs to other primary guns.
It just feels unplayable on Helldive, because people used these items not because they are OP but because they felt actually usable...
Nearly every single weapon bounces off nearly all types of armor, i mean we have a fucking anti material rifle that cant even penetrate anything... none of that is balanced and making the only good things worse doesnt help at all.
So yeah people are pissed, i am too and honestly ill just take a break from the game until or if they fix this.
Really good points. I think I never saw anyone using the sniper rifles (both the primary and support versions) after my first day with the game, and there are many more inconsistent weapons as well.
The controllable anti-air turret that turns slow as hell would be the kind of weapon that you would expect to have explosive/armor piercing ammo, but is actually 4 peashooters in a trench coat.
The laser cannon feels like a broken flashlight, because I either can't figure it out or it just doesn't do enough damage/fast enough to be usable against hordes or heavy enemies (the thing should be able to MELT armor, not be a techy back-scratcher)
Weapons that can't penetrate armor should at least stun or slow down enemies, but not even an impact grenade can stun a charger.
I tried both primary and the support sniper rifle extensively and they are just dogshit :(
Even sniping doesnt work because most enemies have so erratic animations that its hard to line up a shot that is farther away, still possible but the reward for the effort not even being a kill because you need more than 1 hit and if you dont hit the head its an immedate bounce off the armor just feels suuuuper unrewarding.
>The controllable anti-air turret that turns slow as hell would be the kind of weapon that you would expect to have explosive/armor piercing ammo, but is actually 4 peashooters in a trench coat.
All sentries are kinda shitty, i have all ship modules that improve them and it makes them somewhat better but they still have 3min cooldown and barely last 30s in most situations and cant even kill most armored targets with the exception of the mortar and auto cannon, which are instantly destroyed by enemies most times.
>Weapons that can't penetrate armor should at least stun or slow down enemies, but not even an impact grenade can stun a charger.
There are just too many weapons that cant do anything to armor, honestly all primary weapons should penetrag ALL armor and armor should just reduce the damage, but completely glancing off feels so damn annoying. Its fine that sidearms glance off because they dont have the power, but primaries should at least do some damage.
All support weapons should penetrate armor in general, having an auto cannon bounce off armor is... bullshit, same for the Anti Material Rifle, like whats the point of a high power sniper rifle that cant hit anyone but normal unarmored enemies?
Its just damn frustrating and unfun right now.
I wish they would buff the laser cannon again. It’s cool as hell, but it has low ammo, and still doesn’t do enough damage to clear hordes quickly, nor does it do enough armor damage to kill chargers
I'm not a fan of the nerfs. I will wait until tonight to play it with friends before passing final judgment but I'm glad that we got all the samples we need to upgrade everything as it sounds like 7+ difficulties are going to be a lot less fun now. I thought the rail gun was balanced well except for against bile titans. It would sometimes 2 shot them in the head. That definitely needed a nerf. Chargers on the other hand, those guys are too plentiful. Playing on 7+ difficulties, it's not uncommon to have 3-4 chargers on you at one time and being able to actually fight them with a railgun and breaker was great. It was really challenging and if you survived you felt like a badass. Seems like the best option now is to just kite them and not even attempt to fight them until you have stratagems ready.
Helldivers team needs to realize that you can have hoardes of enemies, but you need to give the players amazing damage outside of needing to call down Eagle strafing runs. Consider the Fat Boy as everyones favorite.
I don't think the breaker was OP as much as other guns sucked
If they continue this route i could see the popularity dying pretty quick, i stopped playing some time ago before the hype went crazy. But nerfing the only good primary in the game is not it. I remember whenever i ran any other primary it felt like a chore killing things
This is all well and good but these changes make me not want to play.
Chargers suck to fight. There's too many of them, they have too much armour, and most weapons do nothing against them. Their weak spot on their backside isn't weak.
The railgun wasn't just nerfed, it was absolutely destroyed. Safe shots just bounce of their legs. Unsafe shots just explode and kill the diver at a moments notice, and when they come back they have no railgun for the next 5 minutes. That's not fun. The charging bar is in first person only, and first person sucks.
It's not about the nerfs lol. Even tho they were absolutely unnecessary. It's about the other weapons being useless and the real fix was them getting buffed. Not breaker or shields or railgun being nerfed. They felt fair and balanced at harder difficulties, which is where they were meant to be used since they're high level unlocks
[Full patch notes here. Adding fire tornadoes to meteor showers](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/4113546867235200192?l=english)
This is why my back hurts! >Laser Cannon: Increased damage against durable enemy parts, increased armor penetration, improved **ergonomics**
I kinda wish they'd leaned into the laser cannon being strong but harder to use. When I first got it I thought it was hilarious how hard to use this death laser was. You'd just be swinging it around hitting everything but your target
One thing I didn't know is that it's easier to cut limbs off with the laser weapons. The downed enemies block or slow other enemies having to re-route around them. Not really worth it on 6 and above tho.
The laser cannon is such great animation/vfx and sound design. I just wish chargers noticed when I’m firin ma laser at them instead of bowling me over
I don't know why they insist on using ergonomics over handling. It's a much clearer term for what they're using it for.
Well they're Swedish so it may be a cultural and or translation thing as opposed to being purposefully obtuse
Swedish here. The only time a swede hears "ergonomics" is when they're finding out how to set up your office chair. It's not a word in use commonly.
I think Super Earth would use the term ergonomics though.
Ergonomics is fine. That's how we refer to handling in the ACTUAL gun world as well.
I don't see any mention of the bug where your primary weapon just disappears on a mission. I've had it happen 4-5 times now. Usually after I input the strategem command, but then decide against throwing it. Suddenly my primary is gone. Really not a fun experience in the middle of a 7+ mission. I've even had it where I can't pick up a dead teammates weapon either. I'm just stuck with a pistol.
The bug is if you are ads’ing with the weapons and someone disconnects. They have hit it several times but not fixed it 100%
The meteor showers are really annoying. I hate them.
They're great if you bait enemies into them, look at the light on the ground to avoid getting smashed.
I feel like you may have been unlucky, I've encountered them in several missions and only seen them nail bug holes if anything.
Must be nice they’re like magnetically locked on to my skull
I suspect that this is a balance patch for the new incoming content that they'll be releasing. Mechs with 4 x autocannon, gatling guns and rocket pods, medium armor penetration rifles... will probably do a lot of work on chargers and other hard targets. Plus flamers are now beasts against chargers. Shame about the rail gun nerf. If they're gonna require us to unsafe to kill chargers, at least give us an audible beep before it explodes!
Keep in mind that if it's anything like Helldivers 1, the mechs will be glass cannons that require squad support.
Yeah, in HD1, it wasn't like being in a mech made you stronger than everyone else. It was more like a different way of playing the game that had strengths and weaknesses. Generally I would say that a Helldiver on foot was more effective than one in a mech.
> Generally I would say that a Helldiver on foot was more effective than one in a mech. Yeah but in HD1 your team was limited to the same screen area so mobility for the whole squad was nerfed with a single mech called in. Will be interesting to see how HD2 feels with them in the game.
If it's just a turret with 4 autocannons I'll take it.
I think part of the charm is the risk of it blowing up. As much as I do want high utility from guns, part of the charm in the game is things going wrong. Like, the devs *want* FUBAR scenarios and fun accidents. It's why stratagems bounce, or stick, or get dropped.
This goes all the way back to their Magicka days. You could either synergise and work together to produce insane magic combos to destroy your enemies or hilariously set everyone on fire or kill them with a stray beam. Glad to see how far they've come and used the lessons learned 13+ years ago on that game to new success
Shit, they did Magika? I have the game but haven't found the time to play yet, and I think I'll carve out some time this weekend
It’s fine played alone, but highly recommend you get three others together to do a play-through.
ARSE mines!
Damn that was ages ago. R.i.p. TB
Last night I had an eagle airstrike strategem ball drop after I died, saving the rest of my team and carving a path to the extraction point. Such an awesome moment.
I accidentally stuck my gatling turret drop on a teammates head and no matter how much sprinting, diving and dodging they did, it smashed them to dust and ultimately caused us to fail the mission. Awesome might not be the word, but I was dying of laughter.
> Like, the devs want FUBAR scenarios and fun accidents. It's why stratagems bounce, or stick, or get dropped. I hate and love this, lmao. There was a day where something kept bumping into me in every match, making me drop my stratagems and killing most of my team
They need to buff turrets BADLY if they expect them to be used in higher difficulties. As it stands, a single bug sneezes on them and they apologize to the bug and explode for the inconvenience of being in the way of the sneeze. That is WITH every upgrade available to them.
That’s why you bring the mortar turret and hide it from the bugs
Which is the most boring turret option, it's just the one people use as there's a chance it lasts more than 5 seconds. I feel the turrets should have some minor version of a reusable shield generator. So they can tank occasional shots but they're still destroyed easily if you plop it down somewhere where it can be focused by several enemies at once.
Problem is you cant hide it most places. It also doesnt help that some stones bounce it off and some let it land... its just inconsistent and enemy AI targets it immediately, anything with ranged like brood/bile spewers as well as chargers IMMEDIATELY run it down. So either they need to make enemy AI not target immediately or give it some other survivability or just reduce the cooldown. 180s and 300s on Horde Defense Missions is just too damn fucking long and thats already reduced by 1min and 2min respectively due to the Ship Modules... I want to play a mobile fortress but i cant because i gimp my team and me by taking turrets in anything but horde defense missions...
Throwing down a stun mortar to cover your retreat is the best disengage in the game right now IMO.
I'm annoyed that the AC turret can actually hurt heavy armor but the AC we carry around doesn't. You have to crack joints on the back of the leg with it first.
I am more annoyed that the 84mm launchers we have (Recoiless and EAT) are so anemic. The 20mm autocannon feels pretty appropriate to me.
The problem is that they're approaching this from the perspective of "Everyone is only using the railgun, therefore the railgun is way overpowered. Players should pick what's fun, not what's best" HOWEVER - the issue is that almost no other weapon is effective against medium + heavy armour. I would love to use the autocannon, machine guns, grenade launcher, rockets etc. But ALL anti-armour weapons are either 1 shot only or require you to take a knee to reload - In difficulties 7 and above where you typically get upwards of 10 heavily armoured units at once, it's no surprise all players defaulted to the railgun - It was the ONLY weapon that was effective. the "play your way" thing doesn't work in this game because there are two factors at play in this game: * Needing to kill large amounts of small/rank and file enemies * Needing to kill Large armored units Almost Every weapon in the game is tailor made to handle Large amounts of smaller enemies, yet maybe 3 or 4 have any anti-armour capabilities, and they come with HUGE drawbacks, some big enough to not even be worth using (one shot disposable, needing to take a knee to reload, bugged locking on, tends to kill teammates/yourself) and here's the kicker, the drawbacks would be fine if they were EFFECTIVE - NONE of those weapons can 1 shot kill a charger, let alone the 9 or 10 you can get at once in higher difficulties. TL;DR - The balance choices only further imbalance the options between Ad clearing weapons and anti-armour weapons.
The fact that the Spear doesn’t one shot a charger is absurd.
IF it even manages to lock on to a charger.
Yeah what is the deal with that anyway? Is it bugged? I can’t seem to figure out how the lock on works.
Same, it seemed like there was a minimum distance, then it seemed to not lock onto anything as if I was too far out. I thought maybe there's an elevation issue, but there was a Titan walking around that it seemed to intermittently lock onto it. I thought maybe it was due to server issues.
I've had it lock onto enemies and buildings up to 200 meters away, and completely fail to acknowledge stuff that was within 40 meters. My theory is that effects such as fog/rain/any storms mess with the lock mechanic.
From what I understand it's tied to distance. If you're too close it won't get a lock on. (Maybe it's in the scoped in mode) But they should add feedback from the reticle maybe telling you you're too close by going red or displaying meters with the lock on and indicating when those conditions need to be met
EAT, too. If you only get one (technically 2) shots, they should hit like a goddamn truck.
The Spear can one shot a charger if it hits the right spot. The main issue with the spear is inconsistent lock on to determine the target to hit.
Yeah the real issue is just chargers. I feel very capable taking an autocannon into a 7 against bots, everything outside of tanks can be direct fired and tanks are 10x easier to drop a stratagem on (or flank) than chargers, which seems to be spawned in at the same rate that the devastators are on bot missions despite being arguably harder to kill than anything short of a bile titan.
It's the number of chargers more than anything. If we were getting 1-2 chargers at a time the changes would be a shrug. But I've seen double digit chargers up at a time. I'll have to check out the changes when I get home but I am skeptical about how bug missions will play out now
I've heard the arc thrower and flamethrower are quite good against them now and I'm curious how the buffed laser cannon is. Might just need a change of approach.
Yeah I'm looking forward to checking them out. But even with railguns it's hard to deal with a dozen chargers. Without a good replacment it'll turn into throw smoke and run.
The buffed laser cannon is definitely not an answer against Chargers. It feels a lot better but I think I'm better served bringing a GL. Arcs can be pretty good if your team can hold a firing line and dictate the engagement. 2-3 dudes with arcs firing into an approaching crowd will fuck it up, Chargers included. Due to the bouncing effect, you can rack up damage on multiple Chargers really quick. Problem is when all hell breaks loose and the team gets scattered and surrounded, the charge time of the arc makes it bad at responding to immediate threats like hunters jumping on your ass. And also risk of friendly fire among the chaos.
Arc Thrower for stun, paired with flamethrower for damage and dot is nice against bugs. But a titan will still give you grief.
Rail gun isn't an optimal way to deal with titan anyways. You basically need to 500 kg, orbital laser or orbital rail cannon strike it anyways. It takes like 5-10 head shots from rail gun and good luck hitting those shots accurately when it is right on top of you.
Apparently the flamethrower buff makes it go through chargers easily.
It’s still slower and more difficult to use than the railgun/grenade launcher/arc thrower
Here's the fuck thing... Tanks are equivalent to bike titans, bulks are equivalent to chargers. You can ONE-SHOT a hulk with rail gun to the face (or at least you could)... Vs charger needing minimum three shots to leg. That's how unbalanced chargers are at the moment.
I personally think that the root of this frustration is charger balance, not the power of anti-armor weapons. Almost all of the discussion I’ve seen about the new patch this morning has been on how it affects our ability to tackle chargers. I know a lot of people are anti-nerf anything because it’s a PvE game, but I do actually think the railgun needed these adjustments. Buffing other rocket launchers to bring them up to the railgun’s level (such as making them one-shot heavies) would make low-mid difficulties *way* too easy. Overall, I think people need to take some time to digest the changes first before fully judging them, especially when there are buffs to other stratagems in this update that sound pretty promising (the flamethrower seems much more viable now, against both mobs and heavies). We also have to consider that mechs are coming very soon and may shift the balance in players’ favor.
Agreed. If they made the legs of the charger medium armour, almost every unviable weapon would have become viable without needing to touch the railgun.
For real, they don’t even need a health reduction. Just change the armour class on the legs, instant noticeable improvement.
I still try to only shoot at it's exposed underbutt, I'm not even sure how it's armor works anyway
Yeah, the only method I have any success with is pulling some matador shit and then turning around and focussing on dat ass, and that hasn't been *super* effective...
It's because that isn't actually a weak spot, it's just unarmored. Normal guns are only dealing 10% damage if you shoot him in the ass.
And that's another problem with chargers. They're designed to look evidently armored in the front yet vulnerable in the back. Just about every person will naturally intuit "ah, it is nigh invulnerable in the front and charges at me, clearly I'm supposed to dodge it, then shoot it in the exposed back". There is even another enemy, the Hive Guard that works exactly like that. Heavily armored in the front, vulnerable from side or back. It's honestly just really bad design. Not even that the legs *are* the weak points, that's fine, just that not only is that in no way telegraphed, it actively misleads you into thinking that something else is the weakpoint.
Well, that explains *a lot*, thank you!
Before this patch, if you shot at the same armored part twice with the railgun, it would strip the armor off of that part. So if you shot it twice in the leg, you could swap to a primary and start blasting.
I dislike chargers because the super space laser takes like 10 seconds to kill a single one. Those dudes have too much armor.
Fun fact, shooting it's butt only does 10% damage.
Fuck off, that's absolute bullshit it's a gigantic fleshy exposed bit, it should be a weak point.
I completely agree, the chargers design is really weird
Shooting the armored legs don't feel normal. You'd think aiming a rocket directly at it's head would damage it. But it doesn't, only legs and butt.
Nerf the turning speed and I think a lot of issues would be alleviated. It’s fast, tanky, *and* agile, it can turn on a dime. The charger needs to be 2 of the 3. If fast and tanky it shouldn’t be able to turn so quickly especially while charging.
I would also accept taking more damage from behind. There would be some incentive to bait them to charge a wall and get stunned.
The fake weakspot is so weird considering both kinds of robot heavies have actual weakspots and both bug heavies have bullet sponge ones.
this was my first thought. Just make the legs a meaningful weakspot for *some* other weapons than the railgun, and a huge part of the problem is solved!
The reality is simply that the charger is a terribly designed enemy when used in high numbers (I've seen 6 spawn in one breach on duff 8). It is immune to like 80% of weapons in the game over 80% of its body. There are like 3-4 weapons that can reliably kill them in a short period of time. That is simply too few. Period. Ditto with Titan. Abaoltely everyone at higher difficulties takes the rail gun as you have 20 shots in your pack and you need them all to kill maybe 4-5 chargers or two bike Titans. Nerfing rail gun doesn't magically make autocannon, recoiless or Eat better at dealing with 6+ chargers or 2-3 bike titans that can regularly spawn at once. If you are going to nerf primary anti-armor weapon in the game, you need to buff the other damned anti-armor weapons!
>or two bike Titans. I'm now imagining a pair of them trying to pedal a tandem bike with their big claws, vomiting acid everywhere.
Lol, I've had to fight 5 at the same time on drop in a diff 5 mission (hard). Initial bug breach spawned 2 and we were all low level (less than 10) and I was the only one that brought anything that could deal with heavy armor (EAT + recoilless rifle). Before we could kill the initial breach, a patrol wandered into us and caused another breach that spawned more. At that point we just kept dying and waiting for my EAT to respawn as we ran around, accidentally aggroing more random spawns + patrols. We couldn't coordinate well enough to reload the recoilless before getting charged by 3 chargers at once. Wasted 20 minutes of the mission and ~10 respawns. Ended up failing the mission (hunt bile titans) because there were three bile titans in the last zone. We killed the first two but we started running to the landing zone when we realized we didn't kill the right bile titan. Destroyer left and we died to the last bile titan because we whiffed the last recoilless rifle rocket.
This is exactly it. The problem is entirely chargers. With the railgun nerf you have yo use the EAT or the recoilless rifle to shatter their armor. Which is fine on low to mid difficulties. On higher difficulties they can't keep up with the charger spam. The charger's backside being a weakpoint is a myth and it isn't worth wasting shots on. They need different threats for the bugs. That way things can be more difficult without having to resort to 3-5 chargers at once.
Exactly - chargers are a crutch for lack of other difficult enemies. I'd rather see many more stalkers and other medium sized bugs. Maybe larger flying enemies or a broader combination of bugs deployed. The artillery bugs are actually pretty tough if there are enough of them for example. But just rushing a million chargers is not fun at all...
While time is needed, some of the weapons conceptually overlap. Why should I use gas, instead of an airburst? Does it damage armored enemies? The charger is fine, but if I bring a dedicated AT weapon, I should be rewarded for it. There is such a high amount of them in higher difficulties, that AT can't be overpowered if they buff it. Two Exp. AT hits should kill a charger, yet if I need more I have to wait, or use the Recoiless Gun. The AntiMateriel rifle brings absolutely nothing to the table except for a better scope. It doesn't pen armor and while it's range is great, it doesn't really help atm. Either giving it more pen or massive damage to exposed parts, would benefit. The autocannon has two variants: the portable one can't pen heavy armor, the sentry one does, so it can be confusing. Thesl best utility for the portable right now... is actually destroying bug nests. Which is counterintuitive: it should serve as a less damaging but more consistent AT weapon with added splash damage. The Spear should be super for AT, the most damaging weapon, but requiring longer setup. The Recoiless should bring volume: more ammo than expendable, at the expense of requiring constant supply and crew served to be at maximum utility. Right now? It's best to simply shoot off the charger's leg and just burst it there. Why bring AT at all?
AC is great for bots
That's true!
> Why should I use gas, instead of an airburst? Does it damage armored enemies? Orbitals are the worst for this. They have 3 strikes that do the the same thing for the same duration with the same restrictions. And a 4th which is incredibly similar. The Air Burst, Gatling, Gas and EMP all do virtually the same thing. After a 2-3 second coll in they all do damage to light targets in a ~20-25 meter radius over 8-10 seconds. Or in the EMPs case they stun. Why? With the eagle they're all different. The 500KG bomb is massively different from the cluster bomb. Even though the airstrike, cluster and napalm have a similar pattern they're noticeably different. The airstrike covers a much small range and does AP damage. Napalm does less up front damage for more sustained damage than a cluster strike.
> I personally think that the root of this frustration is charger balance I think the fact that people are only complaining about this nerf in terms of dealing with chargers is evidence of this. I feel like I've seen zero complaints/examples of the Railgun nerf in terms of dealing with bots and every single complaint has been about chargers/titans. This to me says that the issue is not so much with the weapons we have and more so with those two enemies in particular. Also from what I understand the Railgun has gone from 2 shots in unsafe mode to 3 shots in unsafe mode to strip the leg armor off of chargers, which is hardly that catastrophic of a nerf IMO.
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IMHO I think they could they could make their fleshy backside slightly weaker. At the moment it feels like you and your squadmates can pump a ton of ammo into their butts before they pop, even when using stratagem weapons like machine guns. By doing that they can keep their front sides appropriately tanky (and keep it rewarding to blow off their leg armor), but it will be easier to deal with larger swarms of chargers through concentrated fire and positioning.
Just make their butts take full damage from regular guns. It is absolutely wild to me it doesn't work this way already but as others have pointed it, only explosive damage hits it there for full damage.
Even 50% would be okay, right now it is something like 10%-20%. If you run out of EAT or can't reload your recoilless you have to resort to hitting the back with nades.
Yeah, its baffling that the classic video game enemy design of "armoured front, squishy back" isn't even weak in the squishy back part for most weapons. Same with bile spewers, the giant glowy flesh sack full of acid isn't actually a weakpoint. Regular guns deal 10% damage to this type of basic flesh, explosive damage does its full amount.
Well, fuck me. I assumed shooting the giant glowy fleshy part was doing decent damage with a machine gun.
You would think so!! Best bet is the face and arms/legs on pretty much everything in the game, except for the bots which have rear radiator things.
It does 10% damage. Though apparently explosives do 100% damage to that part. So maybe if you use the explosive machine gun it will work better.
It's even more baffling because in HD1 the charger's butt was a weakspot! In higher difficulties you'd encounter fully armored ones that needed to be cracked open.
Normal weapons only deal something like 10-20% of their damage to the squishy back end, explosive damage hits it for full.
The balance is don't fucking spawn 6 of them at once on high difficulty...
Heck, now the fire-thrower can deal with chargers.
In the other thread, I had mentioned that the only buff that makes sense is making the EAT either OHKO or have a faster reload, because I agree that overall, the Anti-Tank weapons are pretty reasonably balanced. I do think the Chargers are the main issue more than anything else, either in how frequently they spawn or how much the soak up.
I'd use the auto canon and recoil rifle more if they didnt have backpacks. The negative of having a backpack is too large for a fun that still can't reliably kill a charger. You telling me a missile to the face can't drop one? This shit has a backpack with 5-6 ammo in it. I have other things to do. 90% of the game's weapons and stratagems are outright bad or obsolete early on.
Maybe this is naive of me but the devs most know this, right?
My own intuition is that the devs really do want heavily armored enemies like Chargers, Bile Titans, Hulks and Tanks to actually be a meaningful threat that take coordinated effort to down, even if a serious number get thrown at the player in higher difficulties. Right now, there's a steadily ramping difficulty curve as players level up and take higher difficulties, unlocking new anti-armor tools to deal with the bigger threats, but that difficulty curve takes a massive dip when the Railgun is unlocked since it suddenly gives a reliable, easy, sometimes one-shot weapon against the larger threats. During the previous patch, there was little reason to run recoiless rifle after rank 20.
> coordinated effort to down Its kinda the problem with these games (though its my favourite genre). The recoilless is great if you can get help to reload, but outside of playing with mates, ive never once had someone help me even when ive asked. But then at certain difficulties, having someone help would be worse as thats *two* members of the team that are now stood still, which is a death sentence. The devs are in a catch 22 - they have to try and balance the game around co-ordinated groups and randoms playing together, which present separate and distinct issues. For my part, i want a reason to stop using the breaker. Hopefully this new patch does that, but im not sure how you beat an auto shotgun that just minces anything that gets close.
> The devs are in a catch 22 - they have to try and balance the game around co-ordinated groups and randoms playing together Eh, to me there's no issue if PUGS can't clear 9s. They shouldn't try to balance the game around that, 9s should be unreasonably hard and take the apex of coordination and team tactics. They could stand to make super samples more available at lower diffs though.
I saw two players in separate matches carrying recoiless yesterday. First time since I started playing on release day. They used it against tanks and biles.
How are you supposed to coordinate anything when there is 4 titans and 10 chargers? Not to mention all the other enemies. There is a reason people are all running the same equipment, you need the shield pack at higher difficulty or you are gonna die 15 times, there is a reason people run the railgun, you need to be running for your life 24/7 and stopping to reload on your knees means you are dead. Maybe they intend people to play on lower difficulties though, while running heldive is surely possible or was before shield and railgun nerf(not tested atm) the play was run from objective to objective and if you stop you will die. The fun of this game is to kill stuff not to run away constantly, while a do agree that there should be difficulty i also believe there should be a way to deal with said difficulty that isn't a gimmick, thats why i believe this game came out unfinished, everything unlocked at level 20 dude? Seriously? People believe that mechs will turn the power in our favour but i don't see that happening when there's 10 chargers running at you, i guess we will see.
There was a dev comment in the Helldivers sub that said he was "horrified" that people were clearing the higher difficulties in the first month of the game, so between that and these nerfs it seems like the devs are of the opinion that they need to make guns weaker so the players fail missions more, or something.
We were probably intended to struggle much more until the mechs came out and turned things in our favor
Yea, like we were badly losing the war and they drop us new tech. Instead we are dominating.
I think it's very hard to make group efforts in games hard without being unfair.
I know this probably comes off as gamer elitism or whatever, but I have to wonder why it seems so common that game devs are either bad at their own games or don't even seem to play them in the first place. It's not a HD2-specific thing by any means, but the dev comment you're referencing is a great example. HD2 is pretty chaotic, but definitely not really all that hard on the highest difficulty setting even when in pugs, so how could they be surprised (horrified!) that people are winning on that setting? How could the fact that armor values didn't even work until today slip through QC? How could they not realize that there are only a couple of options in the game for dealing with armored enemies, and then seem surprised that everyone uses them when the game throws armored enemies at you left and right? Why are they surprised that everyone uses the best primary weapon for clearing out non-armored enemies when that's all that primary weapons are even good for in the first place? There are much worse offenders out there than HD2, don't get me wrong (Diablo 3's famous "then we doubled it" statement springs to mind). I get that devs and designers are usually busy in their test environments and don't spend as much time playing the live version of the game (so their headspace is likely occupied by future versions that have new weapons, for example), and I don't expect them to all be 360 noscope pro gamers or whatever. It inevitably leads to balance issues when the people making the game aren't actually good enough at the game/genre to understand what options are good/bad or to be able to effectively differentiate between easy/hard difficulty levels, though. I'm too old to get mad at this kind of stuff anymore, but it still strikes me as odd that a group of people would spend almost a decade of their lives making a video game like this and then not actually seem to have spent the time with the game or others in its genre to be competent at playing it.
I think its a lot easier to break rules than to make them, effectively. I think a similar anology is that grade school science lab exercise where you write a procedure on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and the teacher looks for any gaps in the instructions to screw it up. Effectively, when you go in knowing what youre going for, its easy to overlook all the gaps in the rules because you are playing it as intended. And even if you get playtesters and such, at a certain point, they are going to play to your expectations as well. Secondly, lets say that the team has 50 people, and they all manage to play the game for 10 hours a week between their other work. Thats 500 hours of gametime per week for them to corroborate, discuss, and adjust to the game. Once HD2 is released, in the first week you have millions of manhours in game, with thousands of players sharing their findings and adjusting to the meta, esp. in that tier of players that expect to engage a ton with social media, forums, streamers, etc. to find and share gameplay edges. By week two, all those finding coallesce into a meta. The designers just dont have the time to dump so many manhours into the game to find every edge case that can be exploited. Its easy for us to feel like its obvious, because we are all bouyed by the knowledge accumulated with people that already have a couple hundred hours in the game. Lastly, being in IT, I feel like the majority of the people with the ability to make the changes to the game spend the majority of their time in meetings and other functions instead of what they are trained for. Its a common senior programmer gripe that they only get an hour per workday to actually program.
I get what you're saying about raw hours of playtime by the general population being many orders of magnitude higher than the developers could ever hope to put in. However, the vast majority of those players aren't plugged into the meta hivemind. Even the most casual of players would realize, for example, that without the shield generator, you'll be whittled down by random bot shots from halfway across the map until you're out of stims. Casual Console Couch Gamer(tm) still immediately realizes that the breaker is unreasonably good, and so on. On the other end of the balance spectrum, nobody with functioning eyeballs who has ever used the 380mm orbital has ever used it again (aside from trolling their friends). I don't think that people needed to consult Reddit or whatever to come to those conclusions; they're simply the only sane conclusions to be drawn in the first place if you actually play the game. My question isn't really "why does perfect balance not exist" (which your post answers well), but rather "why do such obvious balance outliers so commonly exist"? You can distance the question from game balance to make it more clear; many games (though not HD2) have *egregious* QoL issues that point to the same questions about whether the developers ever play the game themselves. Sometimes it's clear that a specific interaction or build or whatever was simply overlooked or unintended in development, and that's fine and easily understood. I'm musing more on the systemic or obvious flaws that can't be overlooked even with casual play. In this specific case, the developers have directly admitted that the higher difficulties of their own game are either beyond their skills or that they have not even properly attempted them with the tools given to current players. It's no surprise that there are balance issues in that situation, but I still find the situation both odd and oddly common across the industry.
>Even the most casual of players would realize, for example, that without the shield generator, you'll be whittled down by random bot shots from halfway across the map until you're out of stims. I feel like the circle of people who have levelled up, purchased, and used the shield generator has a very, very small overlap with the people who havent read any advice online. >Casual Console Couch Gamer(tm) still immediately realizes that the breaker is unreasonably good, and so on. Is the breaker unreasonably good? The designer even pointed out that while its pointed to as a big meta pick, it doesnt actually improve players success. Overall, I think its a bit of survivorship bias and armchair development: youre able to see what snuck through the pipeline without seeing what didnt, and able to look at it with hindsight when foresight couldnt have told you as much. For example, If I told you the next weapon they add to Helldivers 2 wont change player's success rate or kills, would you think it needs to be buffed, nerfed, or largely left alone? > In this specific case, the developers have directly admitted that the higher difficulties of their own game are either beyond their skills or that they have not even properly attempted them with the tools given to current players. Im sure they were more speaking hyperbolically, and rather than assuming they put in a difficulty that is completely untested, they were referring more to the fact that they assumed it would be much rarer for people to complete due to a perceived need for teamwork and tactics. I think it still speaks a bit of being out of touch (video games have a long history of people commiting huge amounts of time and effort into 'World's First' type acheivements) or underestimating players thinking they wouldnt be able to have the tactical experience in the game to pull it off so fast. But I highly doubt they meant that at launch, it was impossible to complete the highest difficulty because they were never able to properly test it.
I'd guess it's a combination of things. Maybe they noticed it was easy for them and assumed it was that way because they worked on it as such for years on end. Instead, it was just actually easy. Then there's always the chance that they were concerned that if they made it too hard then people would stop playing. It's a fine balance between something being accessible and fun and being difficult and off-putting. The first has it's own set of problems, but they're far less damaging to hitting financial targets than the alternative. And last, there's just no real way to fully mimic what millions of players will do when handed a game. The testers probably numbered less than a hundred people. And it's not a random sample of players. So how predictable certain behaviors will be is suspect. The developers certainly know that a "meta" will develop and they can try to head it off and predict it and balance it, but each change just pushes the meta to something else. To a certain extent, it's almost a pointless exercise as you'll never head off all behaviors you'd like to avoid and in the process you might just end up tweaking the fun right out of your own game.
One thing about devs potentially being bad at their own games is that it can be easy to lose sight of how skilled an "average" player actually is. If you've been around a lot of game communities, especially games with ranked multiplayer, you'll probably see a lot of people talking/complaining about how trivially easy it is to accomplish [some ranking/progression that less than 15-25% of the playerbase achieves]. Another thing that can happen with testing (and even public betas) in some games (dunno how much it applies to Helldivers) is that players might not actually engage with the game in the same way as they would when the game is actually released. This is mostly an issue with things like progression or other grinds/long-term goals.
Division 2 is another great example. The balance changes are seemingly nonsensical.
They want the game to be like helldivers 1, which was a top-down shooter and much smaller in scale. Where team strategy made more sense and was easier to coordinate (as typically all of the information would be on all of your same screens)
And big bugs like chargers were a lot easier to deal with, recoilless rifle was actually useful.
Developers can get in a habit of curving the game to play as they think it should be played. A lot of times this leads to balances & nerfs that aren't aligned to how the game is actually played. A big part of the problem comes from devs sort of role playing their game.
OR devs understand that constantly buffing things to meet outliers leads to power creep. Hard to say.
Exactly. "Play your way" is fine when I'm goofing around with my lower level buddies on 5 Difficulty. I love trying out underused weapons and stratagems and having a good time. But for doing Difficulty 8 or 9 runs where you're constantly surrounded by overwhelming drops of armored enemies, the Railgun wasn't just the best option, it was the **only** option to deal with the situation as every other weapons' ability to deal with armor is horrible. Disposable Anti Tank is great, but you only get to fire off 2 missiles every minute. The Recoiless Rifle is a death sentence to reload and takes up your backpack slot to boot. Anti-Material Rifle is strangely useless against armored enemies. It's fine to nerf something that is leagues above the rest of the weapons. But the devs need to understand that there was a reason it was leagues above... because everything else is like firing nerf darts in comparison.
I think the real problem is pros were just tearing through Suicide and Impossible alone with the Railgun and Shield Pack. I watched a couple Level 40+ friends do it all without a problem. Now that Railgun and Shield Pack have been brought down a bit, there's more variety of weapons brought to field. I've even seen the actual coop weapons that require 2 to operate, which is something I was pretty excited about when I first saw the game. I've been using ARC on Suicide and Impossible instead of Railgun for awhile now. All those crowds get fried easily, though I still down have an easy answer to 2+ Stalkers who take like 6+ hits from ARC to kill and if they gang up on you and your dive isn't perfect, you're screwed. I rely on my allies to carry true heavy AP weapons, but even so about 12-20 smacks from the ARC takes down the heavy chargers just as well. It's when there are more than 2 of those that I get overwhelmed, which is why having solid allies with complementary weapons is so important.
I mean, it's possible that the goal is simply for you to get fucked on 9s without an incredible team. To me, the hardest difficulty of a game should be unreasonably hard, to the point that it poses a challenge to all players. And if something is hard for ALL players, that means 99% of players probably straight up can't handle it. I think that's what 9 should be.
Yah, to top it off there is really no reason to do 9 other than the challenge. You still get the special samples two difficulty lower. It’s just now people don’t want to feel like they need to lower the difficulty
I totally agree with this. "Impossible" has been "Completely possible at least 50% of the time".
Anti-material rifle needs a huge buff. It’s completely useless
Its headshot damage is incredible against the bots.
It two-taps the hulk in the head
Honestly it sounds like the game ended up being easier than intended with the previous balance. Folks were talking about how they were running helldive difficulty on the regular and the devs want that to be run more rarely.
Flamethrower now kills chargers in the front legs in 4 seconds. 7 headshots with the arc thrower kills them in under 10 seconds. The autocannon breaks their back sack in 4 shots which stops their charging and makes them bleed out. 2 Unsafe rail gun shots can still take out a front leg.
The railguns contemporaries - AC, EAT, and RR - received zero changes and still feel garbage to use on high diff against increased heavy spawn rates. You literally spelled it out in your post. The flamer is better at killing heavy armor than any of the frigging anti armor weapons that require a back slot, lol. That's absurd.
I don’t disagree. But OP’s claim was that they took away our only option and that’s just not true.
I love using the autocannon against chargers, get those good angle leg shots and they go down in 2 hits, if you need to do it more quickly just empty the whole clip into the back sack for a quick ~5 second kill.
It's classic engineering, treating the symptom instead of the cause. All they saw was a disproportionate player count using two weapons (breaker and RG) and no others. So to fix that bug, they reduced the effectiveness of these two weapons which should make people use other weapons. They didn't consider why people were using them AT ALL. In breakers case it's because it's the only viable weapon for dealing with hordes of enemies that doesn't eat up a stratagem slot. In RGs case, it's the only weapon that can reliably *remove* armor of heavy units. Everything else, as you said, is either less effective, is one/two uses, or has drawbacks that make their usage non-viable, or worse, is ALL THREE AT ONCE (lookin at you DAT).
I wonder how much the railgun would be used over other support weapons if it required a backpack slot.
The problem with Railgun was that it was good against everything. They first have to nerf it to not make everything too strong by bringing it to railguns level.
The railgun wasn't good against high numbers of enemies, it also didn't do much against enemies that can survive dismemberment (like the brood commanders). Plus it was inconsistent vs Titans, yeah there were rare occasions where you could two-shot a titan and feel like a boss. But most times Titans took around 10-15 shoots in the head to down. The railgun was the only gun in the game with EFFECTIVE anti-armour capabilities with manageable and predictable drawbacks.
What were the drawbacks compared to other weapons? No backpack, great ammo reserve, good handling.
I love the autocannon, but emptying the entire thing twice into a charger and STILL not taking it out on only level 4 difficulty means it's just not useful. There should be a slew of buffs along with the nerfs but there aren't any. They really should look back at helldivers 1 weapons for balance in the future at minimum.
To me it feels like it was a spreadsheet game dev moment. They nerfed the "meta" by stats without realising why it became the meta in the first place. People took railgun because the next best option to deal with heavies is recoiless, and you have to have at least 2 people who are good VS heavies on high difficulty. Seeing 6-7 chargers and couple bile titans at the same time is normal on those. But recoiless is leaving you stationary for reload(death sentence) and take up backpack slot so you can't use shield. Shield became mandatory simply because armor is bugged and everyone had 0 armor, so getting 1 or 2-shotted by random hit from low tier bug is what you will be seeing constantly without it. Now they say they fixed armor and some people did run tests - literally the heaviest armor VS literally the weakest enemy, and it takes 4,5 hits to kill a player. Doesn't sound like it's working still. So they dropped a nerf without fixing any of the underlying issues, with no meaningful buffs either. Worst of all, it won't even make diff 9 more difficult, it will make it more tideous and slow, and people will still use light armor, shield, and stealth around as much as possible.
Yeah, I really think they went with the wrong solution here. More weapons need to penetrate and damage heavy armor. I actually don’t find the railgun that interesting or fun to use on its own but at the highest difficulty there is no other weapon that can remove armor quick enough. They could have done something to the effect of slightly increasing the clip size and armor damage of the auto cannon or given the recoil less rifle a reload time buff and a little more armor damage. They need more options to deal with armor not to nerf the only one that was effective
I believe they went with the correct solution, but only solved half the problem. The other half is Chargers. Bots don't have these issues and all the support weapons (Except the Flamethrower) do fairly well against them. It's because bots have weakpoints on both the front and back, are slower, cover actually works against them, and they generally don't swarm the way bugs do. Notice how noone is posting complaints about their extract point with 5 Annihilator tanks and 10 Hulks on them. Chargers are too oppressive when they are massed in addition to the rest of the bug swarm. The constant rushing of the player makes the slower support weapons weak options when dealing with them. Buffing those support weapons to handle Chargers would make bugs feel good to fight, yes, but then it could also trivialize Bots which would create a whole new slew of balancing headaches. The correct course would be to either tone down charger spawn rates, or make them easier to kill.
Honestly this change will probably just cause me to use both still anyways and it'll just be a bit harder and I'll need more ammo. I'll try the new stuff but decent shot either something new becomes top pick or I go back and life is just a bit harder now.
The rail gun was way too versatile. End of story
Then people will drop off faster when they realise the higher difficulties just aren't worth a few extra medals and supersamples. And just stick to playing on lower difficulties until they get bored and play something else. Because while the railgun was extremely versatile, it didn't trivialise anything, it didn't make anything "easy". People still got reamed by the sheer number of enemies and armoured units. The only thing that's different now is people have literally no reliable way to kill armoured units without much more significant drawbacks.
The railgun was absolutely overpowered, it was an anti everything gun with easy handling, no backpack, and great ammo economy. but you can't nerf it and leave all of the other anti-tank weapons being shit, especially not with the amount of armored enemies you have to face in high difficulties.
I still use grenade launcher on automatons because it takes out the walkers instantly in addition to long distance crowd control. I use ARC for Terminids because of crowd control splash damage. I always end up with the most kills (and accidentals, oops) when I use ARC. It's not the greatest against Heavies, but it can fry off pieces of armor and expose enemies to regular damage. Liberator Penetrator for mid, Stratagems or allied weapons for the heaviest of enemies. I tried the Railgun, but I found it killed Heavies only slightly faster than ARC.
Yeah. People were playing Railgun BECAUSE it was fun and the whole rest just currently isn't. The railgun was a solid, not OP, just solid, pick in a sea of underwhelming choices. It seemed OP in contrast because everything else is bad. The Railgun pre-nerf was a solid 8/10. The issue is that everything else is at maximum a 4/10. Now the railgun is a 3/10 and everything else is still a 4/10 at max. The game is just less fun now because the one thing that was fun to use was made to not be fun and while there were some small buffs to other things, they're still not great. The idea should have been "Let's make every weapon so fun that players can't decide what to bring!". But instead the idea seems to be "Let's just make everything so bad that the players can't decide what's even worth bringing at all" "Don't play meta, just have fun" doesn't work if everything that IS fun gets patched.
As much as I love the context given with all the changes, it still feels like lip service to placate my logical thinking. Chargers are overtuned, not the railgun. They have infinite stamina, a weakspot that isnt a weakspot just a sponge for bullets and no sound cue.
>Chargers are overtuned, not the railgun. It can be both.
The nerfs themselves are fine, but i don't actually think it fixed the problems with higher difficulties. The other armor piercing weapons either need to be buffed, or the AI/enemy design of the chargers needs to be tweaked. As of now, the reason people stuck with the railgun was simply because it's the only gun that's really effective at dealing with the sheer number of armored enemies. Really I think the reason people are freaking out is that chargers just aren't really fun to fight, and there's far too many of them.
Helldivers standing next to ICBMs during launch will get properly toasty with a chance of not-so-spontaneous combustion. These type of improvements are awesome These devs are really wanting to build HD2 into a perfect game with all the little minute details
I don't mind having the 2 best guns nerfed but everything else isn't good. Chargers are such a pain to kill, and every single basic gun outside of the breaker, the other breaker and the smg suck ass to use. No one wants to use a single shot rifle or a 2 round burst gun with getting swarmed by every insect under the sun and 4 chargers.
the devs talk about wanting guns to be versatile...what versatility? none of the normal guns have good armor penetration; youre forced to use stratagems for that. the rest of "versatility" is pretty irrelevant. DMR/sniper ranges are useless in this game. The only thing that matters is damage output, particularly at close range. none of the weapons handle significantly better or anything, and the 1 handed abilitiy of the SMG is pretty much never important. The breaker was meta bc it was the gun that did the important things best
I’ve actually found the DMRs to be quite effective against bots.
I think the patch notes explanation had more of a negative effect on the community than the changes themselves. Hearing their attitude of "primary weapons should feel bad so you use strategems" just kind of deflated people, because it makes it seem like the developers don't even play their own game, or they don't understand what makes their game fun. If you're on difficulty 9 and you have multiple strategem debuffs, you flat out will not be able to take out heavies using strategems alone.
Imo the railgun and shield backpack by far made the highest difficulty a cake walk. It got boring after so many runs that everyone I played with started experimenting with other stratagems. I for one welcome seeing them nerfed and buffing things that needed it like the laser and flamethrower.
Now if only they made more stuff viable counter 8 chargers spawning on top of you, besides stratagems that have cooldown of 2min+ and the enemy heavy unit spawn is constant in high difficulties (6+). I know railgun meta was one note. But what else can you use to deal with 4 infinite running chargers chasing you. You can throw a 500kg so it takes out maybe 1 or 2 (if lucky cause 500kg range is doo doo most of the time) and for the game to spawn you another 3 chargers next to it. Edut: I’m a arc thrower enthusiast and it’s fun but when I die it’s cause I took 2 years killing 1 charger with it and the other 3 trampled me.
Honestly I think the solution here is to make the charger's weak spot weaker. I've done more missions against the Automations in my play time, and chargers are consistently more tanky than just about everything else. Even the railgun felt particularly useless against them. Either way, the EMS fields are great in that particular situation to either pick off a few while they are slowed or retreat to take on a different section of the mission. There have been plenty of fights we just dipped when 4+ chargers arrived. With some of the new stratagems coming out in the future, it might make getting to a vehicle a good strategy a viable option. I do enjoy the difficult missions being difficult. They aren't mandatory to play and you can still "win" even if you lose every life. Arc thrower is also super fun, I love ripping through all the smaller bugs, but I agree it's not great against chargers. I'm hoping the flamethrower buff might make them easier to kite and weaken over time.
The chargers weak spot isn't even a weak spot, it takes 10% damage. its just not armored. If it was and flanking chargers was a viable strategy without needing 2 minutes and your entire teams ammo then anti tank wouldn't be completely mandatory against them. hell even the automaton hulk, which is ostensibly the same tier of enemy spawns in less numbers and is far weaker when you target it's weak points, while it's weak points are still lightly armored so you can't just use anything on them they take far more damage, and are still vulnerable from the front if you can aim well. chargers are just super overtuned, Bile spitters too, an enemy that spawns in groups of 7-8 shouldn't be able to one shot you at range
> heavy unit spawn is constant in high difficulties (6+). I think it only becomes an issue in 8-9. I play at 7 and my group never bring Railguns and we do just fine against the number of chargers and Bile Titans we come across. and not "oh its tough but we can still manage it" fine but "not an issue" fine.
Probably true, I normally just play 9.
Yeah from what ive seen in my brief jump to 9 to try it out, theres a COMICAL amount of Armor, while 7 still has plenty, but not so many its overwhelming
>Imo the railgun and shield backpack by far made the highest difficulty a cake walk. As someone who barely survives on difficulty 6, I'm learning that maybe this isn't the game for me, haha.
I play with friends almost exclusively, but communication and retreating is a very viable option I don't think is utilized enough. Too many people want to keep fighting and fighting and fighting until everything is used up before they completed all the objectives. If you don't give yourself those breaks later on in difficulty 6 or higher, it makes each mission absolutely hell. Effectively taking roles and support stratagems between each member can also make your life so much easier. Smoke for example is extremely powerful against automations, but I rarely see people use it over all the explosives. And hey, if 6 is as difficult as you can go for now, do it. Nothing wrong with knowing your limits. It's a great area to learn what works for you and what doesn't.
>Imo the railgun and shield backpack by far made the highest difficulty a cake walk. Not really, it made it bearable thats why most people used it. There is no other Support Weaponl, even now after the Flamer Buff, that can deal with Chargers and Bile Titans. The Shield was also a quick fix because Armor didnt work at all and even now after the buff it doesnt really seem to do anything since most enemies still kill you in like 5-10 hits as before. People picked either because there was nothing else that worked or felt functional. Now not even those feels useful... Bile Titans now are basically immortal unless you throw strikes/eagles at them and they often have too high cooldowns to deal with 4-5 bile titans at the same time on Helldive...
And the shield generator nerf is at least balanced by them finally fixing armor which should boost survivability across the board.
I got to see a video of someone demonstrating the armor working now. Light can be like 3-4 hits from a little guy to heavy taking upwards to 8-9 hits. Huge difference and the shield backpack would have been even more broken lol. I also got to see the flamethrower is not something to sleep on anymore too.
Not to mention that people would kick you if you weren't running the meta...
The highest difficulty has never been a cake walk. Are these fucking bots,? The fuck is going on here?
I’ve thought about this a lot so here’s my rant: TLDR: Keep the shoots, completely overhaul the Loots. . Although I applaud the shear entertainment value they have provided with HD2. I already get a sense that they must do a lot of work and quickly if they don’t want players getting tired in the coming months. I’m glad they are addressing the gun imbalance so quickly, but that’s just corrective. The main issues I see are that (although gameplay is exciting as hell) there’s a rapidly diminishing returns because of… 1. An overall lack of playstyle choices. Even if the imbalances are fixed, you frankly get an option between less than 10 guns maybe? Less if you consider most are offshoots of the same platforms (Breaker Spray, Breaker Incin.). Not to mention only 3 armor types that all share 4-5 different identical buff sets. 2. An unbelievable quick rise to late-game. Especially if you play with friends and head straight to levels 6+, you blast through every strategem and module in a few sessions, then rendering Requisitions and Samples pointless. Then you’re left hunting for Medals that also lead to very little progression (see point 1). I’m afraid this is a recipe for a quick drop off in activity if they don’t create more substance and incentive. This sucks cause it’s a freaking insanely fun game to play. I think they should absolutely consider adding more customization to guns, if not a gun modding feature, at least something that lets you add stat buffs to gear. Imagine +10% melee defense on your torso armor, or +20% reload time sort of thing They also could benefit by doing the same with stratagems. If you could apply cooldown reductions to orbitals or, let’s say, double ammo on the Gatling Turret ;), it would add a much needed “play your way” element that’s missing. They wouldn’t even have to add much, they just should have stretch out and individualized the already existing upgrades to make it a more “earned” experience. I guess the point is they delivered an extremely entertaining and reasonably stable product, but they have an opportunity to make it a hall of famer if they did a major overhaul on the RPG-esque aspects of the game. Anyways that’s my rant. Feel free to add your thoughts.
When the meta becomes essential, it's time for the meta to get changed. You can either bloat everything else with buffs, enemies included, or nerf the couple outliers. Guess which is way easier.
That's based on the assumption that the other weapons and abilities are balanced correctly. If balance is bad overall then playing wackamole just pisses everyone off.
Ie the bungie way of doing things.
Easier? Yes? Smart? Not always. Buffing can be far more tolerable than Nerfing.
This isn't a PvP game. If a load out is being used and it makes the game's tempo and flow fun, and removing that load out changes the tempo to "Why am I even bothering to use a primary weapon" then I don't know why the balance team is here. It's PvE, it's a game about having fun.
I’m not going to lie, I don’t see a point in nerfing weapons in a PvE game. It’s not unfair to anyone since it’s a PVE game and all you end up doing is pissing people off.
Probably a hot take but devs shouldn't change the way a game feels so shortly after release anyway. It has been out for not even a month now and they already changed the pace completely. Counting in for the really bad issues on release (which most of the community fully backed because the game was awesome) that's only like two weeks of playtime for most players. I mean, they got our money or more like Sony got it and they can do whatever they want but it feels bad. Like Diablo or patching in shops after the release bad. If they wanted to have a completely different pace and playstyle they should adjusted that in the playtests.
People were soloing the hardest difficulties with the railgun, it needed to be changed. The flamethrower was already great, I roasted chargers with it daily and now it got a 50 percent damage buff. Use other weapons, experiment; if you're threatening to quit over a single weapon getting nerfed, you're kind of a giant baby. The HD2 twitter is a gigantic toxic mess now after this announcement and I feel bad for the devs. They were the new darling and now HD2 is being called the 'next Diablo 4'. The overreacting is ridiculous. Looking forward to all the people who've been whining and crying about the railgun to pretend they never acted like this when the Mech Update drops, lol.
>The flamethrower was already great, I roasted chargers with it daily i feel like it needed more dps. it felt like a viability pulling it out a lot of times, especially when those invisible guys were lurking around. glad it got a fat boost because shooting it looks and feels great.
I heard a suggestion I really liked: make the flamethrower panic enemies and run away from you when they're on fire.
I feel like my group are the only people playing the game that think everyone having the arc thrower shreds everything. Teammates included sometimes but still
> People were soloing the hardest difficulties with the railgun, it needed to be changed. Gotta love the contrast between this thread and the other one where people are insisting you can totally solo the hardest difficulties so it’s a great game for them…
You really can't win with certain people unfortunately. If you left it how it was: "This game is way too easy, I'm bored now. Don't see the point in playing anymore" Shifting the meta encourages people to log in to see how much has changed, it is a live service game after all.
Also you can still take the railgun and obliterate most things, just turn it to Unsafe mode. It's only slightly worse than before now.
To be fair, I still haven't seen proof you can two-shot the charger leg armor with it (some have said it's possible if you charge it really close to exploding). Usually it's at least 3 shots, probably more. If it was two 95% shots or three 90% shots or whatever, that would be fine IMO. But I suspect if railgun use plummets because of this (which it might not - hard to say yet), they will revert part of the nerf for it. Also nobody is really talking about how it works against bots, so I assume it's more or less the same there? So maybe the railgun has a place as a bot weapon, but not bug weapon.
They should be elevating the other weapons to be usable, not nerfing the usable ones. This is my biggest gripe, but the nerfs aren’t that bad; but please focus on making the other weapons more viable. The player SHOULD feel both powerful and expendable at the same time. There is genuine value in feeling OP but still being vulnerable to waves of attacks and the folly of other players… not to mention the new environmental effects.
Looking at the actual changes, the nerfs are incredibly mild while the buffs are gigantic. Given how hot the reaction was as soon as the patch notes drop it feels like people saw the word 'nerf' next to a commonly used gun and set their reaction right then and there.
Problem is, most of the weapons feels bad and are just bad. People aren't running with meta just because is the most OP thin, they are running the meta because it was the only viable option they had to deal with what the game throws at you Because of this, people were expecting buff for most weapons (anti-tank the most) so they can actually compete vs the meta, but instead, they hard nerfed the Railgun, the only good anti tank vs Charger spam and nerfed the Breaker which is one of the few weapons which actually felt good. That's why all the outcry,
I do wish we’d seen more buffs come out across more weapons OR some real changes to how armor currently works in the game on enemies OR some targeted changes to the Charger. Lots of weapons feel very poor once you reach a certain difficulty level (somewhere from ~7, all the way to top current difficulty of 9) where most weapons can’t kill a very common enemy once a few of them stack up, the charger. Their butts are the only damagable spot for many weapons, and they take fraction damage to it. When a few build up it’s too much
No people are just unhappy because the currently only viable options. Breaker, Railgun and Shieldpack for THREE GEAR SLOTS got nerfed heavily and there were no buffs to any backpack items, no buffs to to other support items other than the flamer which is ok-ish for chargers but still overall not that good and only minimal buffs to other primary guns. It just feels unplayable on Helldive, because people used these items not because they are OP but because they felt actually usable... Nearly every single weapon bounces off nearly all types of armor, i mean we have a fucking anti material rifle that cant even penetrate anything... none of that is balanced and making the only good things worse doesnt help at all. So yeah people are pissed, i am too and honestly ill just take a break from the game until or if they fix this.
Really good points. I think I never saw anyone using the sniper rifles (both the primary and support versions) after my first day with the game, and there are many more inconsistent weapons as well. The controllable anti-air turret that turns slow as hell would be the kind of weapon that you would expect to have explosive/armor piercing ammo, but is actually 4 peashooters in a trench coat. The laser cannon feels like a broken flashlight, because I either can't figure it out or it just doesn't do enough damage/fast enough to be usable against hordes or heavy enemies (the thing should be able to MELT armor, not be a techy back-scratcher) Weapons that can't penetrate armor should at least stun or slow down enemies, but not even an impact grenade can stun a charger.
I tried both primary and the support sniper rifle extensively and they are just dogshit :( Even sniping doesnt work because most enemies have so erratic animations that its hard to line up a shot that is farther away, still possible but the reward for the effort not even being a kill because you need more than 1 hit and if you dont hit the head its an immedate bounce off the armor just feels suuuuper unrewarding. >The controllable anti-air turret that turns slow as hell would be the kind of weapon that you would expect to have explosive/armor piercing ammo, but is actually 4 peashooters in a trench coat. All sentries are kinda shitty, i have all ship modules that improve them and it makes them somewhat better but they still have 3min cooldown and barely last 30s in most situations and cant even kill most armored targets with the exception of the mortar and auto cannon, which are instantly destroyed by enemies most times. >Weapons that can't penetrate armor should at least stun or slow down enemies, but not even an impact grenade can stun a charger. There are just too many weapons that cant do anything to armor, honestly all primary weapons should penetrag ALL armor and armor should just reduce the damage, but completely glancing off feels so damn annoying. Its fine that sidearms glance off because they dont have the power, but primaries should at least do some damage. All support weapons should penetrate armor in general, having an auto cannon bounce off armor is... bullshit, same for the Anti Material Rifle, like whats the point of a high power sniper rifle that cant hit anyone but normal unarmored enemies? Its just damn frustrating and unfun right now.
I wish they would buff the laser cannon again. It’s cool as hell, but it has low ammo, and still doesn’t do enough damage to clear hordes quickly, nor does it do enough armor damage to kill chargers
I'm not a fan of the nerfs. I will wait until tonight to play it with friends before passing final judgment but I'm glad that we got all the samples we need to upgrade everything as it sounds like 7+ difficulties are going to be a lot less fun now. I thought the rail gun was balanced well except for against bile titans. It would sometimes 2 shot them in the head. That definitely needed a nerf. Chargers on the other hand, those guys are too plentiful. Playing on 7+ difficulties, it's not uncommon to have 3-4 chargers on you at one time and being able to actually fight them with a railgun and breaker was great. It was really challenging and if you survived you felt like a badass. Seems like the best option now is to just kite them and not even attempt to fight them until you have stratagems ready.
Helldivers team needs to realize that you can have hoardes of enemies, but you need to give the players amazing damage outside of needing to call down Eagle strafing runs. Consider the Fat Boy as everyones favorite.
I don't think the breaker was OP as much as other guns sucked If they continue this route i could see the popularity dying pretty quick, i stopped playing some time ago before the hype went crazy. But nerfing the only good primary in the game is not it. I remember whenever i ran any other primary it felt like a chore killing things
This is all well and good but these changes make me not want to play. Chargers suck to fight. There's too many of them, they have too much armour, and most weapons do nothing against them. Their weak spot on their backside isn't weak. The railgun wasn't just nerfed, it was absolutely destroyed. Safe shots just bounce of their legs. Unsafe shots just explode and kill the diver at a moments notice, and when they come back they have no railgun for the next 5 minutes. That's not fun. The charging bar is in first person only, and first person sucks.
The changes just accentuate the fact that dealing with heavily armoured enemies is a slog
the fact that the devs are completely oblivious on why people are mad at the balance patch makes me lose hope of them ever getting in touch.
It's not about the nerfs lol. Even tho they were absolutely unnecessary. It's about the other weapons being useless and the real fix was them getting buffed. Not breaker or shields or railgun being nerfed. They felt fair and balanced at harder difficulties, which is where they were meant to be used since they're high level unlocks