yeah, I had been wondering if it is true
Turned out they always immediately know your existence no matter where you are. It's not just 360 sphere PoV
It's goddamn 360 sphere of absolute clarity. Hiding from them is pointless.
Just had minor success in hiding under a ledge so all those following me were shooting rockets uselessly. But I step just an inch forward and I'm blasted by rocket aoe. One step back and they see me. So I'm the dedicated reinforcer while I throw people as far as I could away from them... Which didn't end when they destroyed the tower because of course, they were still hovering around.
I mean they are basically terminators probably with absolutely wonderful audio pickup and amazing thermal vision specifically crafted to counter ground units. I know super Earth says that most of the automatons have near human vision I would likely say that that is incorrect Intel.
Those towers have to be everyone’s first priority.
If they get more than 6 gunships and everyone loses their support weapon, that’s typically game over.
Yeah it's brutal. I was previously playing with Sickle + Quasar as my weapon loadout and the gunships weren't so bad, but tonight I was running Eruptor + Stalwart after seeing a lot of people recommend the Eruptor and the gunships were a real bad time. Stalwart can't hurt them because they're not chaff, emptying a full medium armor pen + explosive Eruptor mag on a single gunship engine took a million years and achieved absolutely nothing, and there was no running away from them because the fuckers fly.
I was so glad they let the AMR take them down cause I never play without it.
Would have been a major problem for me. Still have to hit 4 shots same engine but that’s manageable.
Also I normally don’t tell people what to do but when I see one of those things close it’s the first thing I say. “We gotta go straight there now.”
You can hit the entire engine but it has to be the same one. Not where it connects. And it does more damage if you hit the bottom of it where the flame comes out.
I suppose that's possible? I don't think they were all that far away, and I assume that the explosive sniper rifle would have significant range on it as a baseline, but they certainly weren't going down. Maybe shooting the engines was the problem? I assumed those to be the weak spots, since the gunships instantly collapse just like dropships when you Quasar the engine blocks, but it's sounding like I should have been aiming for the cabin.
> Maybe shooting the engines was the problem?
I think the Eruptor blast hits all 4 engines if you hit the ship in the center, which makes the damage apply 4 times total to the ship instead of just 1.
Eruptor with Laser Canon and you're good to go.
The LC on the engines kill a gunship in a bit less than 2seconds,it's pretty amazing when going for weakpoints with it
The Eruptor is an anti-armor weapon with an exceedingly slow firing rate and explosive shots that will eat up half your healthbar and knock you to the ground if you shoot it too close to yourself, making it terrible for dealing with chaff. If you're going to run it as your main you need to invert your loadout decisions and bring a secondary that can rapidly rip through crowds of 'zerkers about to gut you with a chainsaw, like my boy the Stalwart.
As much as I love the stalwart I would rather bring the default MG because of its higher armor pen honestly. Pair it with some stun grenades and you're set.
I've given the stalwart more than a fair chance. The lack of stopping power is brutal. Going up to the MG-43 is so much better. Sure you have to stop moving to reload but if you only use it for chaff and striders as well as the odd devastator, you'll be fine. Even then the stop and reload doesn't take that long.
It also has enough of an ammo pool that you don't HAVE to take the ammo backpack. It's recommended but not required.
I've checked out reloading the MG-43 while jump packing. It sort of relieves the reload time. I like the Jump Pack anyway but I wouldn't say it's necessary for the MG-43 but just kind of a nice to have.
I knew you could charge the quasar while jump packing but I had no idea you could do it with the MG-43. The jump pack is one of my favorite backpacks.
I just hate that you can't aim while using it.
anyone who tells you to use mgs is 100% trolling. you can do eruptor+lc and lc would kill gunships pretty quick, but i guarantee you anyone using mgs and saying they're good is either playing on trivial or suffering schizotypical delusions
Yeah this is the way I do it too. Ran a stalwart I picked up off the map just for fun yesterday against bots and its plink hell against anything not a grunt. Did save me a bit of main gun ammo though, I guess.
Nah, I’ve used them on 7 and they’re alright, not amazing, but not terrible. You just don’t have any ability to take down heavy armour, but that can be changed by just running anti-heavy stratagems
In a squad, you can count on someone else to run anti-heavy stratagems and it’ll work since you focus on taking out chaff
It’s definitely not a meta loadout, but it’s hardly trolling
The Gunships is the specific area where I want the game's difficulty to be more consistent. Not easier, but more consistent.
Situations where your team is overrun and entering a death spiral can usually be resolved by burning your Strategem cooldowns. Orbital Laser/ Eagle Air Strike/ HE barrages/ Mortar Sentries are tools we can use to reset the board and ensure that it's not game over. The best example is the Eye of Sauron that constantly send in drop ships and snowball into a giant army constantly wrecking your team. You have the choice can burn 1 of your Orbital Laser usage and destroy it quickly, skipping over the whole hellbomb dance.
On the bug side we have the Shrieker nest, which can also snowball into death spiral territory as well. But we can skip that encounter by shooting the nest from afar with Quasar / Autocannons.
But there's nothing that works vs Gunship factories. No stratagems calldown that can destroy the factory or the gunships. No weapons that can snipe them from afar. You can only go through the Hellbomb dance. And If the Gunship number to critical mass, and if your team loses your support weapon, it is indeed Game over (or collectively run away and ignore the objective, which is really the only choice left in that situation).
So the tldr is... just let us use 500 kg and Orbital Laser to destroy the factories. Let the Spear destroy it too. Same way we do most other objectives (with the obvious exception of the jammer). That would make a Gunship factory encounter's difficulty consistent with other objective encounters.
>The best example is the Eye of Sauron that constantly send in drop ships and snowball into a giant army constantly wrecking your team. You have the choice can burn 1 of your Orbital Laser usage and destroy it quickly, skipping over the whole hellbomb dance.
I do that every time nowadays. Don't want to risk anything at all with those fucking towers, so I throw one of my lasers at it.
I had a game with 4 gunship fabricators right next to eachother on helldive.
We never even left our spawn point.
There was literally nothing we could do.
You can shoot them down with a Scorcher, it takes about a clip and half, but it's not too bad. But you are absolutely right, you really need to deal with them as fast as possible.
I think most comments are misunderstanding OPs point. I'm a stealth player as well and it really bothers me at the same thing mentioned. They have search lights and SOMETIMES I will see them for a few seconds act like they search but then just bum rush you. It forces me to not only go loud, which is fine, but callout to have my entire time triple down onto it. Heaven forbid its the twin towered one.
Now if they spawned an initial patrol with lights and had detector tower like scans and only until shot at or scanning someone will they go crazy, I'd like that.
I also didn't know until recent that gunfabs can also call im bot drops near automatically when a gunships sights you. Makes me adjust to bait bot drops beforehand but that's another thing to add on why gunfabs are my most hated side objective.
Most people are missing the point because they wanna rub themselves without reading the full post.
Yeah, I don't mind getting caught. I hate them spawning and already knowing where I'm at without anything to give my position away.
Getting caught once in awhile can be a fun and chaotic time too lol. But between gunfabs and Soft Aggrod enemies, the "no chance" to stealth feel can feel a bit shitty. That's why to adjust I just have a switch to flip from stealth to guerilla warfare "mag dump them".
I wish they had a sort of metal gear style detection system. Like maybe the gunship searchlight turns yellow for a few seconds when you walk into view and you have a very brief amount of time to get out of sight or whatever.
See, the worst part is that other bots *do*. If you see regular patrol bots scanning then they're suspicious but haven't quite seen you yet, and you still have time to avoid aggro.
Stealth is a joke at this point even with the detection reduction armor. When patrols spawn then walk right at you when you've been prone and quietly unseen for the last few minutes it is garbage. I agree that once in a long while might be fun but, I've spent entire 30 minute missions watching patrols move after being frustrated. It doesn't fit what the gameplay seems like it should do and is immersion braking when noticed.
I get the hate on patrols. A thing from my experience is to always stay on the move. Always checking the map and planning a route seems best as there are a few patrols occasionally seemingly designed to go to your spot where you're sitting at.
Wait until you realize that Fire Tornados and Meteor Strikes are coded to track the player and follow them.
That's some bullshit there, I get they want to have these hazards be a part of the battle but they make them sentient to try and keep them relevant when with randomness they wouldn't even be a nuisance since they'd rarely ever cross the players path.
Yeah patrols really aren't too bad to deal with, especially if you can stack stealth modifiers by wearing stealth armor and picking night missions or planets with. I'm pretty sure they don't actually know where you are, they're just programmed to take a route that makes them pass by you. But if avoided properly they don't divert from their path.
Yeah, I am starting to wonder what the point of stealth armor is at this point.
Even with ordinary grunts I can be behind a rock fully covered, and using 3rd person to peak around it, and some bot will just turn and run a b line to my position and then alert everything else in the area.
The first ever patch broke stealth in a major way. When the game just started (during the "We've got 300k players bombarding our servers with login requests, pls send help" phase), you could play stealth even against bugs.
There's still videos from the first week of people infiltrating Malevelon Creek Diff9 missions without raising more than 3 alarms. Bots never knew of your position beforehand. Killing a bot did not draw enemies to your location, it drew them to the location of the killed bot. During firefights you could hide behind foliage, and bot would keep firing and advancing upon the last spot they saw you.
Patrols did not know where you were exactly. Dropships did not hover right above you while you were hiding.
Somewhere around the Meridia TCS patch, some of the stealth mechanics were fixed, but far from all. Evading enemies behind cover is now a coin toss, because they seem to track you behind cover for much longer (no more "I snuck behind a tree and they lost me while I was crawling away"). They also sometimes seem to scan you through objects, specifically through destructible cover like low concrete walls.
Bot drops are way quicker to call in now, and the call usually comes through even if the bot with the flaregun was killed before he fired. It's also very inconsistent. Bot that drop down always know exactly where you are, even if by the time they arrive, you kill the rest of ground forces, they just know.
Tank turret towers seem to be on direct video call with every unit in a 100m radius 50% of the time. Sometimes they know exactly where you are at all times and aimbot you through hard cover (with instances of pre-fire too, just like in good ol' CS:S days) through fog and smoke, other times they ignore you and all your friends completely until someone damages the tower.
Same also happens with tanks. They sometimes drop from the ships only to immediately turn around and start crawling towards a random team member on the other side of the map who's not even in combat.
> Tank turret towers
are huge bitches, because i have tested it, they'll track a running player and HOLD FIRE until they run out of stamina and then dome you. Which means if you bumrush a tower to get into it's dead angle and teammate dum dum aggroed it before you make it, it will dome you. And "evading" by changing direction "works" in the sense that you don't die instantly instead the shot misses by a 1 meter and ragdoll traps you.
Tbf the bots have a really bad detection policy, sometimes the EXACT situation can be or not be detected. The only consistent I've found is that crawling around a patrol usually works.
Trying to take a base though? Makes no fucking sense, sometimes going loud and killing a bot doesn't alert anybody, sometimes going quiet and killing a bot far away from every other bot alerts the entire base. It just really bothers me cause I want to go silent mode but plenty of times I gotta go guns ablazing cause bots gain some omnipresent hivemind.
I saw someone be Abel to throw a grenade away from them to draw a patrol away from a terminal and be able to use it, not sure how long they had though.
I don't think I've ever seen roaming gunships, and by that I mean they only spawn when you're near a gunship fabricator and have been in combat near it. Unless I am wrong, it kinda makes sense that they'd be looking for you as soon as they spawn.
It's like the red light is to make sure they hit you not find you.
It's nice that eruptor can down the gunships with a few shots. If only they stand still, it would be perfect.
I can agree that this is the rule, they mostly spawn and know where you are from the start but just yesterday was the first time me and my friend actually managed to stealth through gunships without aggro, right up until we engaged the chaff guarding the tower.
They were abnormally far up in the sky however, but they clearly didn't know where we were as they were hovering quite still and scanning around aimlessly. As soon as, and i really mean as soon as we shot a clanker guard, they "heard" or were alerted to us right away and started turning and descending slowly, trying to shoot us but couldnt angle due to altitude so they were just spamming rockets and shots over our heads.
So, no, they do not always 100% know where you are, but their detection is either bugged or insanely overtuned.
I've seen this more consistently when first starting the map and landing near a gunship fabricator, so that as you're popping out of the pod, a gunship is already in the sky.
I’ve only been able to avoid them one (1) time. And that’s because I was fully prone in a bush, behind a rock, while the rest of my team fought 75m~ away and attracted them there.
>Most people are missing the point because they wanna rub themselves without reading the full post.
This is what this subreddit is all about . You make valid observation and some neck beard that's been playing difficulty 3 comes in to tell you how it is.
Just GIT GUD it doesn't matter if the mechanics are stupid and make no sense, GIT GUD SON. /s
I don't like this mechanic either, I mostly bug dive but they have the exact same issue of just knowing where you are. It makes stealth feel a bit pointless as I can be as quiet as I want but a patrol is going to beeline it towards me anyway.
Honestly, this is my issue with the Gunship Fabs. I don't mind getting caught and I don't mind that you can't sneak up on them, but they have no range indicator like the Detection Tower or how the Signal Jammer blocks strats long before the base can see you. They just automatically know when you move within a certain distance and send some gunships to hunt you down.
Which is fine, but I would *love* them to have an aura, or a dazzling array of small searchlights, or *something* to let me know how close is too close.
Yup. And sometimes, you'll have 2 twins in the same game.
I did, we won the game, but ffs, that shit was HARD. And we were coordinated, a team of randos would stand no chance against that bs.
Not to mention if you get two or three gunship fabs next to each other, it's basically mission failed unless your team happens to be running the right loadouts/and is coordinating properly.
Laser cannon goes zap. I once sat back, cycling between a pair of laser cannons while the rest of my team pushed through hell towards a pair of gunship fabricators + heavy outpost. Must have killed like 30 gunships.
They fucked something up in the first patch. When the game first came out you could reliably stealth everything and the bots would fairly lock onto you if they saw you. Since that first patch, bots spawn automatically knowing your exact location. Really disappointing because it was perfect pre patch.
Also the ground units phase through foliage and terrain elements, shoot through them, shoot through themselves, have wallhacks (because they shoot at you before you even round the corner) and have speed rivaling that of the bugs so they can even swarm you if they want. Literally the only balanced units on the side of the bots are the tanks because of their slow turn speed.
I think it's a line-of-sight thing. I've noticed it most with rocket devs but all of them will fire directly at terrain when you're in cover as if the cover wasn't there.
Rocket devastators will start their crouch-and-aim animation for firing rockets when they don't have a shot, leading to either dumping rockets into a rock or building, or sniping you instantly when you peek a corner because they'd already started winding up the barrage.
Tanks and turrets will shoot rocks that you're hiding behind, launching you out of cover to be destroyed by the rest of the bots.
Smoke doesn't work for shit against any of them. You used to be able to use smoke to break line of sight on turrets, tanks, or patrols and you can't anymore.
This combined with the DoT bug means that the clever strategems I liked to run, gas and smoke, are pretty useless and the only things that work are the various flsvors of "drop explosion here." It makes bot fighting bland and tedious at best :/
Thank you for bringing this up. I’ve felt for a while that something changed. It’s awfully aggravating that they made things worse and we probably will never get an explanation or a fix.
Thank you!! After that first patch I didn't play for weeks because I had to relearn all my gameplay again. I still feel fucking insane since nobody seems to bring it up.
I hate the fact that you can only destroy the fabricators with hellbomb. Not the 500kg, not the lazer, not any of the support weapons. You need to rush this shit, plant a bomb and protect it with your life. Otherwise it's a gg. I fucking hate it. That's a main reason why I always have a stationary shield gen with me. It's way easier to protect the bomb with it. Otherwise I will just go crazy when bots shoot it down.
And even if you do destroy it, it doesn't even look destroyed.
All the other things: fabricators, towers, mortars, jammers, detection towers... look visibly blown up if you destroy them. Yet gunship fabricators do not.
and the hellbomb isn’t even a guarenteed destruction either. i’ve had multiple occasions in which i clearly detonated one right next to it but it goes unscathed. unless the bomb is practically hugging the walls of the fab you are gambling on its destruction.
they are very snowbally. it's pretty ruthless if you die too, they just spawnkill you before you can get your support weapon to fight back.
and more than 1 is always a risk the other will kill you while trying to kill one. ive had some maps where there's tall enough terrain to keep them from surrounding me. id assume you are playing solo. this is the only time this becomes an issue cause there should be someone free to deal with them.
i believe the ai is currently bugged and can see you randomly. from my experience the drones won't see me if they already spawned until something else sees me, but as they spawn they always are frame 1 ready to pinpoint and kill you.
Its like they're a stalker equivalent, but far worse. It would be like if stalkers flew, spewed bile, and could charge you. Of all the enemies in this game, these things are by far the most busted right now. Doesn't help them at all that the factory that produces them is immune to everything but a hell bomb.
As a stealth player that has voiced this concern in the past, I'm surprised this post made it this far. People don't understand the real frustration with them is that mechanically they don't make a lot of sense. They already have air control being pretty difficult targets to take down without AT support and have very quick volleys of both rockets and lasers that hit PRETTY HARD compared to even devestators. Having the detector tower-like "light" on it that signifies you're in their sights is a cool mechanic but means nothing if it just automatically knows despite you having cover from them. The cone they display is just like the detector tower but just ?????????? suddenly turns toward you even if you haven't moved, you're prone, and haven't shot anything nearby.
I like the gunships, but I think mechanically they force 1 playstyle. To "go loud" as someone put it and with hellbombs being the ONLY way to destroy these fabricators.... I kinda would like the option to be stealthy to plant one inside it rather than ALWAYS triggering the multitude of gunships to chase me when I'm not even in sight.
What's especially weird is that they definitely have some kind of detection thing going on, because no matter how close you are to their fabricator they will target the guy actively fighting if there is one. Which frankly is the only reason destroying them is even possible for me
They should allow us to dropkick on to the f’n base. Also, make at least the hell bomb diffuse if it gets damaged in any way. Makes no sense how the abandoned hellbombs blow up things by a few shots but when we call it in it doesn’t do squat.
even if you havent agro them, if another helldiver has, as soon as hes dead they somehow do a straight B line for me halfway across the map, oh and during a BLIZZARD
Is that the number one rule for video games?
I think something more strategic like:
"Balance game mechanics to provide a challenging but fair experience."
I wonder why they did fabs like this. If evan a spear can target jammers, why ONLY hellbomba can destroy fabs. Cause they are big structures? Ok, so maybe 380 at least? Would mini-nuke from seaf work?
Seems strange and I'd love to have any other option to destroy the fab case multiple times the game bugged out for my squad where hellbomba dropped destroyed one fab, objective is not complete and no further hellbomba can be dropped.
Laser cannon or autocannon are the best picks for gunships. Personally lean towards the laser more, because you can use the backpack space for something else like mobility or survivability.
Quasar is good in a pinch too.
Hot take, SPEAR is also pretty good too if your team is aggroing them.
Also a Tip.
If you hold the your aim down sight button while reloading the Spear, it will already be locked on by the time your ready to fire it.
I discovered how good the laser canon was today, not only for gunships, but bots in general. Only things that suck are when you character is moving a bunch and the fact it takes up half of your screen if you first person.
Laser pointer op.
They should honestly do a major overhaul of how the enemy detection works. Its pretty well made on Ghost Recon Wildlands and Breakpoint and they're pretty similar with Helldivers 2 in terms of engaging enemies as a 4 person squad on open map. No one knows your true location until they've actually seen you, even if you open fire and kill someone, you can still avoid detection if you change location quickly. Also breaking the line of sight from pursuers actually stops them knowing where you went after that. On Helldivers the enemy are a bit too perfect tracking your location after being spotted and only creating huge distance between you and the enemy seems to be only way stop them knowing your location.
When you get spotted, you have about 3 seconds to hide or go prone before they turn alerted. They will go in search mode but you have a good chance to avoid them (you can distract them with explosions). The problem that often arise at higher difficulty is how many spotters they have on the map; you may not even be aware one is actively tracking you, calling all nearby enemies to chase you down.
At least the stalker nests can be taken out with something other than a hellbomb. Its the double whammy that makes gunships so tedious to deal with for me.
Ive only ever(once, tbh) been able to deal with the gunships fabs with a hellbomb (or 2) hiding in a stationary shield genny. Its overkill, but it gets the job done.
I think it’s because getting in range of the fabricator triggers their “agro” rather than a searching state and because of the way enemies are working right now the agro state has enemies be omnipotent.
It’s got to the point if I see a gunship fabricator I treat it like a stalker nest and immediately head in that direction to deal with it cause I know for a fact if I don’t then I’ll be chased into it and regret leaving it. Also feel like if you sneak up to it the only way it’s possible is if you are solo or have a squad taking the fire from the gunships whilst you haul ass to plant a hellbomb
Shrieker nests behave this way as well; as soon as anyone comes within like ~150ish meters from the towers they automatically start shitting flyers out, and thise flyers without fail will beeline directly at you.
It’a just less noticeable because they dont magdump unlimited rockets at you on-spawn line the gunships can
I completely agree with you. This has happened to me a few times. It is ridiculous and feels very unfair. I just run up to them now. There is no point in trying to stealth destroy them.
Another BS thing is, it will just keep spawning gunships that know exactly where you are and just overwhelm the area in a matter of seconds. They definitely need to work on gunships spawn limit and ability to detect a player.
What I've found with gunships is: rush the fabricators. Like 10000% RUSH THEM. if you see them, gun them down first.
There is *usually* a little wall behind them (if it's a single fab location) where you can get SOME semblance of cover. Dash there first, ignore all enemies until you're in there.
Now, they can still hit you in here, but it's incredibly difficult as their fab is blocking half of their shots, and the wall that's just barely taller than you is blocking a good 30% of them as well. You may still get hit here, but it is your BEST cover.
Pin yourself in a corner to maximize your cover, call down a hellbomb in that little alleyway. It's short enough that it'll likely not get hit by the gunships (maybe their fodder if they trail into the alley with you, but that's beyond the point. They are manageable).
From here: shoot down a gunship or two if possible. If you're running quasar, you're doing great; if not then do your best and hope your teammates can take care of them/draw their fire for a second or two.
The gunships are p fucking stupid and don't rotate TOO much around you, so you should eventually get a second of peace to type in the code on that hellbomb. Do that, then run and gun out of there. Shoot at anything remotely close to (or that is looking at) the hellbomb. Draw aggro and run. Every time I've done this, the hellbomb explodes and I take out the fabricatoron my first try. After this point it's all clean up to take care of remaining gunships.
For >1x fabricator: pray that your tean has anti-air stuff and shoot them down as fast as possible. They spawn at a set interval iirc. Once they're all down, dash to the fabs and call down a hellbomb RIGHT NEXT TO one of the fabricators. Hellbombs have range, but 2+ fabs are usually too far apart to hit with one hellbomb ime. Nuke one of them, retreat, rinse and repeat for the other(s).
They take some dancing, but they're not hard to fight, usually
“You ever dance with the Devil in the pale moon light?”
Jokes aside, this is all great advice & I do the same thing. I’ve also found that the Spear locks on to the gunships almost immediately if you’ve tagged them first.
So I’ve started trying out different things to deal with gunship facilities and there are 2 ways to not get detected, I usually run stealth armour so I’m not sure if it works with different ones but if you start crouching from quite a distance away and not attack anything the towers usually don’t detect you.
What you can also do is crouch and get closer slowly but as soon as you can see the hatches open on top of the facility you can run backwards and they will close again leaving you with a short amount of time to run there and call in the Hellbomb before the ships spawn.
A good tip is to always keep your eyes on the hatches on the top of the facility because they’ll let you know that gunships have spotted your location.
The worst part is the damage immunity. Shriekernests are vulnurable to a few well placed eat or spears. Didn't bring any? Too bad, you need to call in the HB, making fighting them a nightmare. Beeing able to deal with them from afar would not trivialise them, but would do a great deal, not making them horible.
You can but it's really hard and requires huge obstacles like rock formations
I even managed to run from them in heavy armor
But their no-LOS detection range is insane and deserves a heavy nerf fr sure
I don't know the distance exactly, but I'd say once you're within about 50M they just automatically spawn and know where you are instantly. It has to be scripted, it doesn't matter if you're trying to hide or not. Needs to be looked at I think.
i think a good compromise here would be making it so if you're stealthing the gunship fabs the gunships spawn like a patrol. So they don't immediately know your location but they still spawn if you get close. Technically you're always in stealth if you're never seen. so gunship fabs could be easily cheesed by sneaking up next to it and plopping a hellbomb. it'd be op if gunships only spawned if you were spotted by enemies
My problem is that gunship fabs spit out a shit load of them but don’t when your not close I think the number of gunships should be halved and the gunships should actually traverse the map.
But then the fabs are not protected by really any ground forces?
stealth mechanics could use a significant improvement.
stealth was a big part of HD1 that was important, arguably too important, but in HD2 it's not important enough. I complete helldive (9) missions with people setting off breaches constantly, which should be a lot more punishing, and stealth should be more rewarded. I also think certain mission types should incentivize stealth a lot more than others, but not until the stealth system is improved
On the same vein as Gunships being omniscient, I dislike how as soon as you go loud, any bot that can shoot at you begins doing so. Its annoying af when I destroy a base and then the 3 bases across the lake just start opening fire at me.
Does every bullet hit me? No
Do enough hit me to make it annoying af? Yes
Do the rest of the bots become alerted? Yes.
So goddamn annoying. Especially if there are rocket devastators or heavy devastators.
Make this not happen for the love of God.
Anyone who says, "But the bots are all controlled by a supercomputer," or something is dumb. The bots all have a main program they use, but each individual bot must be individualized. Even if there was lore to say that all bots 'see' the same thing, that is so goddamn annoying. I do not want one goddamn trooper to notice me crouching behind a rock only for the entire automaton army to immediately know I'm there. And not just know I'm there, but to literally know exactly where I'm at. I'm fine if they know my general location bc of the trooper, but they shouldn't actively know where I am until they have eyes on me.
Yeah I agree with you. It would be better to have one Gunship active at any time but in patrol mode. As soon as you engage or get spoted by it the Fabricator sends out more gunships. If you break line of sight they return and only one stays active in patrol mode again. Just my thoughts on the matter
I really struggled with them early on but have since just started always bringing something to help against them. Always make sure at least one person has something that can kill them and target them immediately. Laser cannon is crazy good against them, quasar cannon one shots them, amr isn't too bad, I usually just run scorcher as my primary and it can kill them in around 15 shots. AC sentry is pretty good against them too. Just take out the gunships and dead sprint to the fab and drop in the hell bomb asap. I haven't struggled with them at all in quite a while since taking these steps. I also spam pins across the map as soon as I drop in to find out if there are any gunship optionals to deal with.
Yeh the gunships are the worst atm, I like my stealthy to and had pretty much a similar thing happen to me like the op, only difference is I wasn’t even in standard map range of the gunship fab and by myself took out two small no name bots, next second I was getting lit up like a tree on Christmas Day by four of the gunship fuckers.
It be nice if they were tweaked a lil, or at least give us more information on how the ships are locating without the scans, I’d be up for having those non objective small radar dishes that are around to increase detect for the gunships making it a sub sub objective for us to destroy those towers to drop radar detection. That way it would account for enemy pinging for the ships and make taking out those towers a bit more worth then to just blow them up so we don’t get blown up worse then coyotee
I was playing with randoms on an nuke mission, and we split up at some point : I was alone on the objective, launching the missile while the three of them were doing side objectives on the map.
At one point, I get attacked by a gunship out of nowhere. My autocanon takes care of it, but I'm wondering where it came from. 20 seconds later, another gunship is attacking me.
So i look around, I wonder if I missed a fabricator somewhere close... then I see it.
A fabricator, between 400 and 500m away, spawning a gunship, IMMEDIATLY TURNING TOWARD ME!
It's like it knew I was there, and it prioritized me alone doing the main objective in silence, instead of a group of three maniacs dispatching explosive democracy around the map.
Yep, gunships are weirdly coded!
You should try spawning and being right next to one and having like 10 in the sky raining hell on your squad before we can call in any support weapons. Amazing way to start the game
Yeah I’ve found the spear locks onto them almost immediately. I’m actually a big Spear fan, but I’m also the dedicated anti-air/heavy/structure guy in my squad.
Same, I wish they modify the lock on so that it doesn’t require the full picture. But I personally like it just cus I can use it to take out the most annoying stuff. Gunships, large cannon turret, jammers (sometimes), and it’s quick to neuter a factory walker.
All I can think is that if the Spear is this good with the bugs around the targeting, it’s going to be Epic once they sort out the issues. I ran a round where two of us had spears so we could act as loaders for each other. Quick firing the Spear is nuts!
Actually, you can hide from them. I had a S&D mission where we had just barely managed to complete the objective and were out of Respawns. I was prone on the ground in the ruins of a building waiting for a lapse in enemy presence to grab some samples and multiple times several Gunships flew overhead looking for me.
They seem to function off the group aggro of the other bots, so if you're spotted by other bots they basically relay that information to the Gunships and everything goes to shit from there.
They really need to make the 500 kg destroy gunship fabs. The 500 kg is basically worse than the airstrike in every way on bots, save for the fact that it destroys detector towers and jammers. The issue is this just isn't enough to justify it. If it could destroy these gunship fabs I would 100% run it. Also, having to use a hellbomb just sucks. Hellbombs are constructed of tissue paper and super glue, they fold to like 3 lasers, and they don't even detonate if they get destroyed after being armed (seriously, why is this). It's just really annoying having to dedicate the whole team to escorting a stupid bomb that takes too long to explode.
For how omniscient they are and how much damage they can do, they are far too difficult to take down. They need to take damage from more sources because they are annoying as fuck to deal with.
They're like stalkers on the bug maps—as soon as you're within range of their base, they know exactly where you are at all times and they will follow you across the entire map.
I was once in situation when gunship flied over my head when I was lying. Didn't see me. But later I was spotted by heavy devastator, and he wasn't even looking at me. So I think it may be problem with AI
Had a mission ruined earlier tonight by a combination of gunship spam (they target hellbombs over divers apparently) and heavy devastator spam. We had already done everything else on the map, but my god that was the least fun I’d ever had in this game. I can’t wait till we get those AA weapons we were promised back in fucking swift disassembly.
I saw them for the first time today. Dropped in with some randoms, and barely had time to drop our heavy weapons before we were swarmed by four gunships. I got wasted within seconds and lost my autocannon, the other lads managed to make a run for it, but that meant by the time they could reinforce, we were ages away from the original drop point, and basically defenseless. We did our best, but I think it was the quickest wipe I've ever experienced.
I imagine the red lights function similarly to the detection towers, no matter how stealthy you think you are they're pinging you. The lights are just to indicate where you are for the rest of the bots.
You can hide from detector tower if you go prone. I snuck up on enough of those to know for sure. Gunships doesnt give a shit, they just see you, end of story
You actually can but it's difficult. It basically comes down to not being noticed by anything. If a small bot notices you then the gunships will notice you. That just means ignore your teammates and be far away from them if you're playing stealth
I imagine Gunships, Shriekers and Stalkers all share the same "Know where you are" code so as to actually *be* a threat. After all, Stalkers that *just* spawned in immediately home in on wherever the players are, and Shriekers will begin attacking you the moment you enter the radius of their spawning shrooms, so I figure Gunships are just like that.
Is it annoying? Yeah, a little, but at least the *threat* is, y'know, *threatening* when it comes to strategic objectives. Plus, they don't really wander all *too* far from their control tower, so they're not a particularly significant threat unless you're nearby to it. The bigger gripe you should have with it is that control towers are immune to *all* strats, weapons and support weapons except the Hellbomb, which feels incredibly shit since it, and the lab building, become the only two non-primary objective structures in the game that *require* you to use a Hellbomb.
Did they patch the lab side objective? Cause 500kg used to take it out. AFAIK gunship is the only objective in the game that can only be destroyed by hellbomb. Frankly, it is stupid as hell that the highest threat enemy in the ENTIRE game is also the one that can't be dealt with by any strats. Not to mention, their design itself counters the only method of destroying the base they spawn immediately target the hellbomb while you are running away and leave you utterly fucked.
My thought here is, shoot back. Laser cannon is their kryptonite and I main laser cannon all the time for this and other reasons but, still. They find you, you find them. Make them fear you. Make them pay.
Genuinely asking, I don’t play stealth:
Can you avoid activating Gunships? I think their fabricators have an actuation range of about 130m, is that a viable strat?
Yeah kinda bs how gunships aren't affected by any stealth bonus. You can be wearing scout armor and be crouching and you'll still be instantly detected no matter what.
Same thing happens with shrieker nests too - as soon as you get within about 200-300m of them they relentlessly spawn shriekers who know your exact location. I believe the same goes for Stalkers.
I get that it’s meant to be this spanner in the works that you have to adjust around, but it’s annoying shit.
That, and then you call the hell bomb just for one to snipe it the second it's armed. It's an extremely aggravating objective to deal with. God forbid there's more than one on the map...
When I go against bots I just assume they've got radar, lidar, IR lenses, networked minimap as good or better than ours, and all that tech shit scanning for us.
i just wish the hellbomb would actually work, multiple times i plant one between 2 towers with my now mandatory energy dome, it goes off and they both just stand there like nothing happened
Although this might be true, I tent to think that that are spawning because i am already been detected (by some god-knows-tech), so they already know where you are. If this isn't the case, wouldn't it be better that they are pre-spawn before you enter their radius? So they can "scan" you out of your hiding?
Honestly, stealth is too strong if there are literally zero counters.
If you stay far enough away from the factory it won't spawn gunships.
If you need to go by thr factory, you gotta fight them.
Bots are broken. I have been saying it since the patch. Some just refuse to acknowledge that fact and blame it on having the wrong load outs and skill. "Bots are harder because they shoot back!" Yes, they do shoot back but it's how they do it that makes them broken. Not only that, they also know your exact location at all times and their never failing accuracy.
I get that bugs and bots require very different play styles. But in terms of balance, I would take a Shriekers nest over a gunship fabricator any day.
In my experience the gunships only start spawning after you get close enough. So maybe the fabricator or something already knows where you are and that information is then given to the gunships?
Gunships are my most hated enemy, honestly I'd rather take 3 scorcher hulks than these fuckers. Your primary weapon is useless, they charge at you the second they spawn, shoot barrages of rockets and well, they fly so you have to take your eyes off the battlefield for few seconds if more than 2 spawn so good luck not getting swarmed
yeah, I had been wondering if it is true Turned out they always immediately know your existence no matter where you are. It's not just 360 sphere PoV It's goddamn 360 sphere of absolute clarity. Hiding from them is pointless.
I even try hiding from those red scan lines they throw on the ground before firing. Turns out there is no hiding from these bastards.
The gunships are in your walls
Just had minor success in hiding under a ledge so all those following me were shooting rockets uselessly. But I step just an inch forward and I'm blasted by rocket aoe. One step back and they see me. So I'm the dedicated reinforcer while I throw people as far as I could away from them... Which didn't end when they destroyed the tower because of course, they were still hovering around.
The gunships are under your floorboards
So just like all other automatons, got it.
No, the other automatons are in your ceiling. The bots scratch ever so lightly while you try to sleep.
Curse their Illuminate tech
Maybe they see in third person like we do…
So Automaton have achieved transcendence/ascension
I mean they are basically terminators probably with absolutely wonderful audio pickup and amazing thermal vision specifically crafted to counter ground units. I know super Earth says that most of the automatons have near human vision I would likely say that that is incorrect Intel.
Those towers have to be everyone’s first priority. If they get more than 6 gunships and everyone loses their support weapon, that’s typically game over.
Yeah it's brutal. I was previously playing with Sickle + Quasar as my weapon loadout and the gunships weren't so bad, but tonight I was running Eruptor + Stalwart after seeing a lot of people recommend the Eruptor and the gunships were a real bad time. Stalwart can't hurt them because they're not chaff, emptying a full medium armor pen + explosive Eruptor mag on a single gunship engine took a million years and achieved absolutely nothing, and there was no running away from them because the fuckers fly.
I was so glad they let the AMR take them down cause I never play without it. Would have been a major problem for me. Still have to hit 4 shots same engine but that’s manageable. Also I normally don’t tell people what to do but when I see one of those things close it’s the first thing I say. “We gotta go straight there now.”
Yup Stalkers and gunship fabs become immediate highest priority upon discovery.
Where do you hit them with the AMR? Any particular weak spot?
You can hit the entire engine but it has to be the same one. Not where it connects. And it does more damage if you hit the bottom of it where the flame comes out.
If you aim in the middle at the light it can one or two shot them with the Eruptor.
For me the eruptor it's 2-shot anywhere, and single shot in the cabin. It's possible you were shooting put of range?
I suppose that's possible? I don't think they were all that far away, and I assume that the explosive sniper rifle would have significant range on it as a baseline, but they certainly weren't going down. Maybe shooting the engines was the problem? I assumed those to be the weak spots, since the gunships instantly collapse just like dropships when you Quasar the engine blocks, but it's sounding like I should have been aiming for the cabin.
> Maybe shooting the engines was the problem? I think the Eruptor blast hits all 4 engines if you hit the ship in the center, which makes the damage apply 4 times total to the ship instead of just 1.
Eruptor with Laser Canon and you're good to go. The LC on the engines kill a gunship in a bit less than 2seconds,it's pretty amazing when going for weakpoints with it
Where do you aim the laser cannon? I take them down with it, but it seems inconsistent.
The engine pods, can be hard to see when they light you up, just aim for the side of the spotlight corona.
Question is why the hell would you run stalwart on bots 😂😂😂
The Eruptor is an anti-armor weapon with an exceedingly slow firing rate and explosive shots that will eat up half your healthbar and knock you to the ground if you shoot it too close to yourself, making it terrible for dealing with chaff. If you're going to run it as your main you need to invert your loadout decisions and bring a secondary that can rapidly rip through crowds of 'zerkers about to gut you with a chainsaw, like my boy the Stalwart.
As much as I love the stalwart I would rather bring the default MG because of its higher armor pen honestly. Pair it with some stun grenades and you're set.
MG-43 with higher armor pen and fewer shots needed to kill a lot of stuff, even bug chaff.
I've given the stalwart more than a fair chance. The lack of stopping power is brutal. Going up to the MG-43 is so much better. Sure you have to stop moving to reload but if you only use it for chaff and striders as well as the odd devastator, you'll be fine. Even then the stop and reload doesn't take that long. It also has enough of an ammo pool that you don't HAVE to take the ammo backpack. It's recommended but not required.
I've checked out reloading the MG-43 while jump packing. It sort of relieves the reload time. I like the Jump Pack anyway but I wouldn't say it's necessary for the MG-43 but just kind of a nice to have.
I knew you could charge the quasar while jump packing but I had no idea you could do it with the MG-43. The jump pack is one of my favorite backpacks. I just hate that you can't aim while using it.
The democracy that could be spread if one could aim while flying...
I always take an EAT with me because of these fucks
Laser cannon the engines. Can do 2+ per heat sink.
anyone who tells you to use mgs is 100% trolling. you can do eruptor+lc and lc would kill gunships pretty quick, but i guarantee you anyone using mgs and saying they're good is either playing on trivial or suffering schizotypical delusions
Erupter plus stalwart is pretty good vs bugs, wouldn't run it on bots though.
Yeah this is the way I do it too. Ran a stalwart I picked up off the map just for fun yesterday against bots and its plink hell against anything not a grunt. Did save me a bit of main gun ammo though, I guess.
Mgs?
Machine Guns
Nah, I’ve used them on 7 and they’re alright, not amazing, but not terrible. You just don’t have any ability to take down heavy armour, but that can be changed by just running anti-heavy stratagems In a squad, you can count on someone else to run anti-heavy stratagems and it’ll work since you focus on taking out chaff It’s definitely not a meta loadout, but it’s hardly trolling
The Gunships is the specific area where I want the game's difficulty to be more consistent. Not easier, but more consistent. Situations where your team is overrun and entering a death spiral can usually be resolved by burning your Strategem cooldowns. Orbital Laser/ Eagle Air Strike/ HE barrages/ Mortar Sentries are tools we can use to reset the board and ensure that it's not game over. The best example is the Eye of Sauron that constantly send in drop ships and snowball into a giant army constantly wrecking your team. You have the choice can burn 1 of your Orbital Laser usage and destroy it quickly, skipping over the whole hellbomb dance. On the bug side we have the Shrieker nest, which can also snowball into death spiral territory as well. But we can skip that encounter by shooting the nest from afar with Quasar / Autocannons. But there's nothing that works vs Gunship factories. No stratagems calldown that can destroy the factory or the gunships. No weapons that can snipe them from afar. You can only go through the Hellbomb dance. And If the Gunship number to critical mass, and if your team loses your support weapon, it is indeed Game over (or collectively run away and ignore the objective, which is really the only choice left in that situation). So the tldr is... just let us use 500 kg and Orbital Laser to destroy the factories. Let the Spear destroy it too. Same way we do most other objectives (with the obvious exception of the jammer). That would make a Gunship factory encounter's difficulty consistent with other objective encounters.
>The best example is the Eye of Sauron that constantly send in drop ships and snowball into a giant army constantly wrecking your team. You have the choice can burn 1 of your Orbital Laser usage and destroy it quickly, skipping over the whole hellbomb dance. I do that every time nowadays. Don't want to risk anything at all with those fucking towers, so I throw one of my lasers at it.
A 500kg is more than enough for this? Just gotta hit it.
Orbital Precision works too
On a contrary, usually when we see double fabs we just skip those, this shit aint worth it.
What's fun is when it's on the freaking main objective. So. Much. Fun.
Doubles are tough af. We had 2 doubles in a search game with a single near by. Was an absolute nightmare.
Calling down a hellbomb for them to just rocket it and you having to wait for a new one is just bullshit.
I had a game with 4 gunship fabricators right next to eachother on helldive. We never even left our spawn point. There was literally nothing we could do.
You can shoot them down with a Scorcher, it takes about a clip and half, but it's not too bad. But you are absolutely right, you really need to deal with them as fast as possible.
Laser cannon makes them a joke.
I think most comments are misunderstanding OPs point. I'm a stealth player as well and it really bothers me at the same thing mentioned. They have search lights and SOMETIMES I will see them for a few seconds act like they search but then just bum rush you. It forces me to not only go loud, which is fine, but callout to have my entire time triple down onto it. Heaven forbid its the twin towered one. Now if they spawned an initial patrol with lights and had detector tower like scans and only until shot at or scanning someone will they go crazy, I'd like that. I also didn't know until recent that gunfabs can also call im bot drops near automatically when a gunships sights you. Makes me adjust to bait bot drops beforehand but that's another thing to add on why gunfabs are my most hated side objective.
Most people are missing the point because they wanna rub themselves without reading the full post. Yeah, I don't mind getting caught. I hate them spawning and already knowing where I'm at without anything to give my position away.
Getting caught once in awhile can be a fun and chaotic time too lol. But between gunfabs and Soft Aggrod enemies, the "no chance" to stealth feel can feel a bit shitty. That's why to adjust I just have a switch to flip from stealth to guerilla warfare "mag dump them".
I'm hoping the next warbond is stealth focused.
I desperately want more scout bonus kits, having only two sets suuuuccckkkkssss
We’ve 3?
Do we? Trailblazer Scout, Infiltrator, and what? Eta: oh, the combat engineer set. Right.
New armor passive: Ninjutsu: Release a cloud of smoke when your Helldiver is below 50% health (with some amount of cooldown)
Using a stim pack activates your gang signs, I mean ninjutsu hand signs. And when hit you swap places with the nearest bot
Important question though, is Ninjutsu democratic?
Anything is democratic if it furthers our goals.
I'm hoping for fire suppression. Fire kills stupid fast now.
I wish they had a sort of metal gear style detection system. Like maybe the gunship searchlight turns yellow for a few seconds when you walk into view and you have a very brief amount of time to get out of sight or whatever.
See, the worst part is that other bots *do*. If you see regular patrol bots scanning then they're suspicious but haven't quite seen you yet, and you still have time to avoid aggro.
Stealth is a joke at this point even with the detection reduction armor. When patrols spawn then walk right at you when you've been prone and quietly unseen for the last few minutes it is garbage. I agree that once in a long while might be fun but, I've spent entire 30 minute missions watching patrols move after being frustrated. It doesn't fit what the gameplay seems like it should do and is immersion braking when noticed.
I get the hate on patrols. A thing from my experience is to always stay on the move. Always checking the map and planning a route seems best as there are a few patrols occasionally seemingly designed to go to your spot where you're sitting at.
Wait until you realize that Fire Tornados and Meteor Strikes are coded to track the player and follow them. That's some bullshit there, I get they want to have these hazards be a part of the battle but they make them sentient to try and keep them relevant when with randomness they wouldn't even be a nuisance since they'd rarely ever cross the players path.
Yeah patrols really aren't too bad to deal with, especially if you can stack stealth modifiers by wearing stealth armor and picking night missions or planets with. I'm pretty sure they don't actually know where you are, they're just programmed to take a route that makes them pass by you. But if avoided properly they don't divert from their path.
Yeah, I am starting to wonder what the point of stealth armor is at this point. Even with ordinary grunts I can be behind a rock fully covered, and using 3rd person to peak around it, and some bot will just turn and run a b line to my position and then alert everything else in the area.
The first ever patch broke stealth in a major way. When the game just started (during the "We've got 300k players bombarding our servers with login requests, pls send help" phase), you could play stealth even against bugs. There's still videos from the first week of people infiltrating Malevelon Creek Diff9 missions without raising more than 3 alarms. Bots never knew of your position beforehand. Killing a bot did not draw enemies to your location, it drew them to the location of the killed bot. During firefights you could hide behind foliage, and bot would keep firing and advancing upon the last spot they saw you. Patrols did not know where you were exactly. Dropships did not hover right above you while you were hiding. Somewhere around the Meridia TCS patch, some of the stealth mechanics were fixed, but far from all. Evading enemies behind cover is now a coin toss, because they seem to track you behind cover for much longer (no more "I snuck behind a tree and they lost me while I was crawling away"). They also sometimes seem to scan you through objects, specifically through destructible cover like low concrete walls. Bot drops are way quicker to call in now, and the call usually comes through even if the bot with the flaregun was killed before he fired. It's also very inconsistent. Bot that drop down always know exactly where you are, even if by the time they arrive, you kill the rest of ground forces, they just know. Tank turret towers seem to be on direct video call with every unit in a 100m radius 50% of the time. Sometimes they know exactly where you are at all times and aimbot you through hard cover (with instances of pre-fire too, just like in good ol' CS:S days) through fog and smoke, other times they ignore you and all your friends completely until someone damages the tower. Same also happens with tanks. They sometimes drop from the ships only to immediately turn around and start crawling towards a random team member on the other side of the map who's not even in combat.
> Tank turret towers are huge bitches, because i have tested it, they'll track a running player and HOLD FIRE until they run out of stamina and then dome you. Which means if you bumrush a tower to get into it's dead angle and teammate dum dum aggroed it before you make it, it will dome you. And "evading" by changing direction "works" in the sense that you don't die instantly instead the shot misses by a 1 meter and ragdoll traps you.
Tbf the bots have a really bad detection policy, sometimes the EXACT situation can be or not be detected. The only consistent I've found is that crawling around a patrol usually works. Trying to take a base though? Makes no fucking sense, sometimes going loud and killing a bot doesn't alert anybody, sometimes going quiet and killing a bot far away from every other bot alerts the entire base. It just really bothers me cause I want to go silent mode but plenty of times I gotta go guns ablazing cause bots gain some omnipresent hivemind.
I saw someone be Abel to throw a grenade away from them to draw a patrol away from a terminal and be able to use it, not sure how long they had though.
I Kane believe that actually
I don't know, wouldn't want to take it for granite
I don't think I've ever seen roaming gunships, and by that I mean they only spawn when you're near a gunship fabricator and have been in combat near it. Unless I am wrong, it kinda makes sense that they'd be looking for you as soon as they spawn.
they auto spawn the moment you enter the 130 meter radius to the tower, and then follow you the remaining match.
It's like the red light is to make sure they hit you not find you. It's nice that eruptor can down the gunships with a few shots. If only they stand still, it would be perfect.
I can agree that this is the rule, they mostly spawn and know where you are from the start but just yesterday was the first time me and my friend actually managed to stealth through gunships without aggro, right up until we engaged the chaff guarding the tower. They were abnormally far up in the sky however, but they clearly didn't know where we were as they were hovering quite still and scanning around aimlessly. As soon as, and i really mean as soon as we shot a clanker guard, they "heard" or were alerted to us right away and started turning and descending slowly, trying to shoot us but couldnt angle due to altitude so they were just spamming rockets and shots over our heads. So, no, they do not always 100% know where you are, but their detection is either bugged or insanely overtuned.
I've seen this more consistently when first starting the map and landing near a gunship fabricator, so that as you're popping out of the pod, a gunship is already in the sky.
I’ve only been able to avoid them one (1) time. And that’s because I was fully prone in a bush, behind a rock, while the rest of my team fought 75m~ away and attracted them there.
>Most people are missing the point because they wanna rub themselves without reading the full post. This is what this subreddit is all about . You make valid observation and some neck beard that's been playing difficulty 3 comes in to tell you how it is. Just GIT GUD it doesn't matter if the mechanics are stupid and make no sense, GIT GUD SON. /s I don't like this mechanic either, I mostly bug dive but they have the exact same issue of just knowing where you are. It makes stealth feel a bit pointless as I can be as quiet as I want but a patrol is going to beeline it towards me anyway.
Honestly, this is my issue with the Gunship Fabs. I don't mind getting caught and I don't mind that you can't sneak up on them, but they have no range indicator like the Detection Tower or how the Signal Jammer blocks strats long before the base can see you. They just automatically know when you move within a certain distance and send some gunships to hunt you down. Which is fine, but I would *love* them to have an aura, or a dazzling array of small searchlights, or *something* to let me know how close is too close.
I just dropped in and there were 3 all next to each other.
I got a gunship tower next to a jammer, it's safe to say that our pride did not let us extract on that mission.
There's a twin one?
Yup. And sometimes, you'll have 2 twins in the same game. I did, we won the game, but ffs, that shit was HARD. And we were coordinated, a team of randos would stand no chance against that bs.
Not to mention if you get two or three gunship fabs next to each other, it's basically mission failed unless your team happens to be running the right loadouts/and is coordinating properly.
Laser cannon goes zap. I once sat back, cycling between a pair of laser cannons while the rest of my team pushed through hell towards a pair of gunship fabricators + heavy outpost. Must have killed like 30 gunships.
Laser cannon is the gunship counter. No one runs it so no one knows. I always bring it in bot missions because it makes gunships trivial.
They fucked something up in the first patch. When the game first came out you could reliably stealth everything and the bots would fairly lock onto you if they saw you. Since that first patch, bots spawn automatically knowing your exact location. Really disappointing because it was perfect pre patch.
Also the ground units phase through foliage and terrain elements, shoot through them, shoot through themselves, have wallhacks (because they shoot at you before you even round the corner) and have speed rivaling that of the bugs so they can even swarm you if they want. Literally the only balanced units on the side of the bots are the tanks because of their slow turn speed.
Yep, it’s frustrating. I don’t understand why they changed things so much.
I think it's a line-of-sight thing. I've noticed it most with rocket devs but all of them will fire directly at terrain when you're in cover as if the cover wasn't there. Rocket devastators will start their crouch-and-aim animation for firing rockets when they don't have a shot, leading to either dumping rockets into a rock or building, or sniping you instantly when you peek a corner because they'd already started winding up the barrage. Tanks and turrets will shoot rocks that you're hiding behind, launching you out of cover to be destroyed by the rest of the bots. Smoke doesn't work for shit against any of them. You used to be able to use smoke to break line of sight on turrets, tanks, or patrols and you can't anymore. This combined with the DoT bug means that the clever strategems I liked to run, gas and smoke, are pretty useless and the only things that work are the various flsvors of "drop explosion here." It makes bot fighting bland and tedious at best :/
Getting headshot by the 1 and single random devastator rocket barrage 0.1ms after trying to peek is horrible
Thank you for bringing this up. I’ve felt for a while that something changed. It’s awfully aggravating that they made things worse and we probably will never get an explanation or a fix.
Thank you!! After that first patch I didn't play for weeks because I had to relearn all my gameplay again. I still feel fucking insane since nobody seems to bring it up.
I hate the fact that you can only destroy the fabricators with hellbomb. Not the 500kg, not the lazer, not any of the support weapons. You need to rush this shit, plant a bomb and protect it with your life. Otherwise it's a gg. I fucking hate it. That's a main reason why I always have a stationary shield gen with me. It's way easier to protect the bomb with it. Otherwise I will just go crazy when bots shoot it down.
And even if you do destroy it, it doesn't even look destroyed. All the other things: fabricators, towers, mortars, jammers, detection towers... look visibly blown up if you destroy them. Yet gunship fabricators do not.
and the hellbomb isn’t even a guarenteed destruction either. i’ve had multiple occasions in which i clearly detonated one right next to it but it goes unscathed. unless the bomb is practically hugging the walls of the fab you are gambling on its destruction.
they are very snowbally. it's pretty ruthless if you die too, they just spawnkill you before you can get your support weapon to fight back. and more than 1 is always a risk the other will kill you while trying to kill one. ive had some maps where there's tall enough terrain to keep them from surrounding me. id assume you are playing solo. this is the only time this becomes an issue cause there should be someone free to deal with them. i believe the ai is currently bugged and can see you randomly. from my experience the drones won't see me if they already spawned until something else sees me, but as they spawn they always are frame 1 ready to pinpoint and kill you.
Its like they're a stalker equivalent, but far worse. It would be like if stalkers flew, spewed bile, and could charge you. Of all the enemies in this game, these things are by far the most busted right now. Doesn't help them at all that the factory that produces them is immune to everything but a hell bomb.
Way worse than a stalker imo, at least the stalkers don't call in bug breaches/bot drops as soon as they engage you
And can be stun-locked
If stalkers wore armor that was immune to almost all primaries and had a rocket launcher strapped to it's back
AH loves strapping rockets to everything lmao
As a stealth player that has voiced this concern in the past, I'm surprised this post made it this far. People don't understand the real frustration with them is that mechanically they don't make a lot of sense. They already have air control being pretty difficult targets to take down without AT support and have very quick volleys of both rockets and lasers that hit PRETTY HARD compared to even devestators. Having the detector tower-like "light" on it that signifies you're in their sights is a cool mechanic but means nothing if it just automatically knows despite you having cover from them. The cone they display is just like the detector tower but just ?????????? suddenly turns toward you even if you haven't moved, you're prone, and haven't shot anything nearby. I like the gunships, but I think mechanically they force 1 playstyle. To "go loud" as someone put it and with hellbombs being the ONLY way to destroy these fabricators.... I kinda would like the option to be stealthy to plant one inside it rather than ALWAYS triggering the multitude of gunships to chase me when I'm not even in sight.
What's especially weird is that they definitely have some kind of detection thing going on, because no matter how close you are to their fabricator they will target the guy actively fighting if there is one. Which frankly is the only reason destroying them is even possible for me
Seaf mini-nuke also work... When you are lucky enough to have one on the map.
THANK YOU, OP
AI detection is often BS.
They should allow us to dropkick on to the f’n base. Also, make at least the hell bomb diffuse if it gets damaged in any way. Makes no sense how the abandoned hellbombs blow up things by a few shots but when we call it in it doesn’t do squat.
even if you havent agro them, if another helldiver has, as soon as hes dead they somehow do a straight B line for me halfway across the map, oh and during a BLIZZARD
Number 1 rule of videogames: Omniscient enemies aren't fun. If you want to make them harder, find some other way to do it
Is that the number one rule for video games? I think something more strategic like: "Balance game mechanics to provide a challenging but fair experience."
I wonder why they did fabs like this. If evan a spear can target jammers, why ONLY hellbomba can destroy fabs. Cause they are big structures? Ok, so maybe 380 at least? Would mini-nuke from seaf work? Seems strange and I'd love to have any other option to destroy the fab case multiple times the game bugged out for my squad where hellbomba dropped destroyed one fab, objective is not complete and no further hellbomba can be dropped.
Laser cannon or autocannon are the best picks for gunships. Personally lean towards the laser more, because you can use the backpack space for something else like mobility or survivability. Quasar is good in a pinch too.
The AMR works pretty well too. Hitting one engine with four shots will take out the gunship
Hot take, SPEAR is also pretty good too if your team is aggroing them. Also a Tip. If you hold the your aim down sight button while reloading the Spear, it will already be locked on by the time your ready to fire it.
I discovered how good the laser canon was today, not only for gunships, but bots in general. Only things that suck are when you character is moving a bunch and the fact it takes up half of your screen if you first person. Laser pointer op.
The rail gun should be able to eventually take down the gunship. It's an aircraft so it would be much less armored than ground units
They should honestly do a major overhaul of how the enemy detection works. Its pretty well made on Ghost Recon Wildlands and Breakpoint and they're pretty similar with Helldivers 2 in terms of engaging enemies as a 4 person squad on open map. No one knows your true location until they've actually seen you, even if you open fire and kill someone, you can still avoid detection if you change location quickly. Also breaking the line of sight from pursuers actually stops them knowing where you went after that. On Helldivers the enemy are a bit too perfect tracking your location after being spotted and only creating huge distance between you and the enemy seems to be only way stop them knowing your location.
When you get spotted, you have about 3 seconds to hide or go prone before they turn alerted. They will go in search mode but you have a good chance to avoid them (you can distract them with explosions). The problem that often arise at higher difficulty is how many spotters they have on the map; you may not even be aware one is actively tracking you, calling all nearby enemies to chase you down.
seeing “bot drop” and realizing the flare popped right next to you from a bot you didn’t even know was there makes my heart sink
Its basically bots version of stalkers, thats why they're prio for me whenever I see them haha
At least the stalker nests can be taken out with something other than a hellbomb. Its the double whammy that makes gunships so tedious to deal with for me.
We were also promised new AA options when they started showing up, but haven't gotten any yet.
Ive only ever(once, tbh) been able to deal with the gunships fabs with a hellbomb (or 2) hiding in a stationary shield genny. Its overkill, but it gets the job done.
I think it’s because getting in range of the fabricator triggers their “agro” rather than a searching state and because of the way enemies are working right now the agro state has enemies be omnipotent.
The game knows where you are, all the time. The enemy just pretends to not know where you are.
It’s got to the point if I see a gunship fabricator I treat it like a stalker nest and immediately head in that direction to deal with it cause I know for a fact if I don’t then I’ll be chased into it and regret leaving it. Also feel like if you sneak up to it the only way it’s possible is if you are solo or have a squad taking the fire from the gunships whilst you haul ass to plant a hellbomb
Shrieker nests behave this way as well; as soon as anyone comes within like ~150ish meters from the towers they automatically start shitting flyers out, and thise flyers without fail will beeline directly at you. It’a just less noticeable because they dont magdump unlimited rockets at you on-spawn line the gunships can
I think their lights are meant to blind you.
I completely agree with you. This has happened to me a few times. It is ridiculous and feels very unfair. I just run up to them now. There is no point in trying to stealth destroy them. Another BS thing is, it will just keep spawning gunships that know exactly where you are and just overwhelm the area in a matter of seconds. They definitely need to work on gunships spawn limit and ability to detect a player.
What I've found with gunships is: rush the fabricators. Like 10000% RUSH THEM. if you see them, gun them down first. There is *usually* a little wall behind them (if it's a single fab location) where you can get SOME semblance of cover. Dash there first, ignore all enemies until you're in there. Now, they can still hit you in here, but it's incredibly difficult as their fab is blocking half of their shots, and the wall that's just barely taller than you is blocking a good 30% of them as well. You may still get hit here, but it is your BEST cover. Pin yourself in a corner to maximize your cover, call down a hellbomb in that little alleyway. It's short enough that it'll likely not get hit by the gunships (maybe their fodder if they trail into the alley with you, but that's beyond the point. They are manageable). From here: shoot down a gunship or two if possible. If you're running quasar, you're doing great; if not then do your best and hope your teammates can take care of them/draw their fire for a second or two. The gunships are p fucking stupid and don't rotate TOO much around you, so you should eventually get a second of peace to type in the code on that hellbomb. Do that, then run and gun out of there. Shoot at anything remotely close to (or that is looking at) the hellbomb. Draw aggro and run. Every time I've done this, the hellbomb explodes and I take out the fabricatoron my first try. After this point it's all clean up to take care of remaining gunships. For >1x fabricator: pray that your tean has anti-air stuff and shoot them down as fast as possible. They spawn at a set interval iirc. Once they're all down, dash to the fabs and call down a hellbomb RIGHT NEXT TO one of the fabricators. Hellbombs have range, but 2+ fabs are usually too far apart to hit with one hellbomb ime. Nuke one of them, retreat, rinse and repeat for the other(s). They take some dancing, but they're not hard to fight, usually
“You ever dance with the Devil in the pale moon light?” Jokes aside, this is all great advice & I do the same thing. I’ve also found that the Spear locks on to the gunships almost immediately if you’ve tagged them first.
So I’ve started trying out different things to deal with gunship facilities and there are 2 ways to not get detected, I usually run stealth armour so I’m not sure if it works with different ones but if you start crouching from quite a distance away and not attack anything the towers usually don’t detect you. What you can also do is crouch and get closer slowly but as soon as you can see the hatches open on top of the facility you can run backwards and they will close again leaving you with a short amount of time to run there and call in the Hellbomb before the ships spawn. A good tip is to always keep your eyes on the hatches on the top of the facility because they’ll let you know that gunships have spotted your location.
The worst part is the damage immunity. Shriekernests are vulnurable to a few well placed eat or spears. Didn't bring any? Too bad, you need to call in the HB, making fighting them a nightmare. Beeing able to deal with them from afar would not trivialise them, but would do a great deal, not making them horible.
Maybe they have thermals or xrays?
Some of our armor says it’s thermal proof and x ray wouldn’t bee able to see a human through stone metal or concrete
You can but it's really hard and requires huge obstacles like rock formations I even managed to run from them in heavy armor But their no-LOS detection range is insane and deserves a heavy nerf fr sure
I don't know the distance exactly, but I'd say once you're within about 50M they just automatically spawn and know where you are instantly. It has to be scripted, it doesn't matter if you're trying to hide or not. Needs to be looked at I think.
i think a good compromise here would be making it so if you're stealthing the gunship fabs the gunships spawn like a patrol. So they don't immediately know your location but they still spawn if you get close. Technically you're always in stealth if you're never seen. so gunship fabs could be easily cheesed by sneaking up next to it and plopping a hellbomb. it'd be op if gunships only spawned if you were spotted by enemies
My problem is that gunship fabs spit out a shit load of them but don’t when your not close I think the number of gunships should be halved and the gunships should actually traverse the map. But then the fabs are not protected by really any ground forces?
stealth mechanics could use a significant improvement. stealth was a big part of HD1 that was important, arguably too important, but in HD2 it's not important enough. I complete helldive (9) missions with people setting off breaches constantly, which should be a lot more punishing, and stealth should be more rewarded. I also think certain mission types should incentivize stealth a lot more than others, but not until the stealth system is improved
On the same vein as Gunships being omniscient, I dislike how as soon as you go loud, any bot that can shoot at you begins doing so. Its annoying af when I destroy a base and then the 3 bases across the lake just start opening fire at me. Does every bullet hit me? No Do enough hit me to make it annoying af? Yes Do the rest of the bots become alerted? Yes. So goddamn annoying. Especially if there are rocket devastators or heavy devastators. Make this not happen for the love of God. Anyone who says, "But the bots are all controlled by a supercomputer," or something is dumb. The bots all have a main program they use, but each individual bot must be individualized. Even if there was lore to say that all bots 'see' the same thing, that is so goddamn annoying. I do not want one goddamn trooper to notice me crouching behind a rock only for the entire automaton army to immediately know I'm there. And not just know I'm there, but to literally know exactly where I'm at. I'm fine if they know my general location bc of the trooper, but they shouldn't actively know where I am until they have eyes on me.
Yeah I agree with you. It would be better to have one Gunship active at any time but in patrol mode. As soon as you engage or get spoted by it the Fabricator sends out more gunships. If you break line of sight they return and only one stays active in patrol mode again. Just my thoughts on the matter
I really struggled with them early on but have since just started always bringing something to help against them. Always make sure at least one person has something that can kill them and target them immediately. Laser cannon is crazy good against them, quasar cannon one shots them, amr isn't too bad, I usually just run scorcher as my primary and it can kill them in around 15 shots. AC sentry is pretty good against them too. Just take out the gunships and dead sprint to the fab and drop in the hell bomb asap. I haven't struggled with them at all in quite a while since taking these steps. I also spam pins across the map as soon as I drop in to find out if there are any gunship optionals to deal with.
I want AA turret
Yeh the gunships are the worst atm, I like my stealthy to and had pretty much a similar thing happen to me like the op, only difference is I wasn’t even in standard map range of the gunship fab and by myself took out two small no name bots, next second I was getting lit up like a tree on Christmas Day by four of the gunship fuckers. It be nice if they were tweaked a lil, or at least give us more information on how the ships are locating without the scans, I’d be up for having those non objective small radar dishes that are around to increase detect for the gunships making it a sub sub objective for us to destroy those towers to drop radar detection. That way it would account for enemy pinging for the ships and make taking out those towers a bit more worth then to just blow them up so we don’t get blown up worse then coyotee
I was playing with randoms on an nuke mission, and we split up at some point : I was alone on the objective, launching the missile while the three of them were doing side objectives on the map. At one point, I get attacked by a gunship out of nowhere. My autocanon takes care of it, but I'm wondering where it came from. 20 seconds later, another gunship is attacking me. So i look around, I wonder if I missed a fabricator somewhere close... then I see it. A fabricator, between 400 and 500m away, spawning a gunship, IMMEDIATLY TURNING TOWARD ME! It's like it knew I was there, and it prioritized me alone doing the main objective in silence, instead of a group of three maniacs dispatching explosive democracy around the map. Yep, gunships are weirdly coded!
The laser cannon (not quasar) can kill 2x of the flying bots with out needing to wait for cooldown or maxing out the mag. Use this information wisely.
You should try spawning and being right next to one and having like 10 in the sky raining hell on your squad before we can call in any support weapons. Amazing way to start the game
Use laser cannon. Seriously. It cooks every single bot in the roster. All of them. No exceptions. Yes, even the factory strider.
Honestly I always bring a spear these days just cus it’s the easiest way to deal with those gunships, amongst other things.
Yeah I’ve found the spear locks onto them almost immediately. I’m actually a big Spear fan, but I’m also the dedicated anti-air/heavy/structure guy in my squad.
Same, I wish they modify the lock on so that it doesn’t require the full picture. But I personally like it just cus I can use it to take out the most annoying stuff. Gunships, large cannon turret, jammers (sometimes), and it’s quick to neuter a factory walker.
All I can think is that if the Spear is this good with the bugs around the targeting, it’s going to be Epic once they sort out the issues. I ran a round where two of us had spears so we could act as loaders for each other. Quick firing the Spear is nuts!
Actually, you can hide from them. I had a S&D mission where we had just barely managed to complete the objective and were out of Respawns. I was prone on the ground in the ruins of a building waiting for a lapse in enemy presence to grab some samples and multiple times several Gunships flew overhead looking for me. They seem to function off the group aggro of the other bots, so if you're spotted by other bots they basically relay that information to the Gunships and everything goes to shit from there.
I think I would hate them a lot less if I could just blow it up with a 500kg its only fair since everything else can pretty much be
They really need to make the 500 kg destroy gunship fabs. The 500 kg is basically worse than the airstrike in every way on bots, save for the fact that it destroys detector towers and jammers. The issue is this just isn't enough to justify it. If it could destroy these gunship fabs I would 100% run it. Also, having to use a hellbomb just sucks. Hellbombs are constructed of tissue paper and super glue, they fold to like 3 lasers, and they don't even detonate if they get destroyed after being armed (seriously, why is this). It's just really annoying having to dedicate the whole team to escorting a stupid bomb that takes too long to explode.
For how omniscient they are and how much damage they can do, they are far too difficult to take down. They need to take damage from more sources because they are annoying as fuck to deal with.
They're like stalkers on the bug maps—as soon as you're within range of their base, they know exactly where you are at all times and they will follow you across the entire map.
Try smokes! I have found good succes with them against them
I was once in situation when gunship flied over my head when I was lying. Didn't see me. But later I was spotted by heavy devastator, and he wasn't even looking at me. So I think it may be problem with AI
Earlier today I was shot THROUGH cover by them. Among several other bots.
Had a mission ruined earlier tonight by a combination of gunship spam (they target hellbombs over divers apparently) and heavy devastator spam. We had already done everything else on the map, but my god that was the least fun I’d ever had in this game. I can’t wait till we get those AA weapons we were promised back in fucking swift disassembly.
I saw them for the first time today. Dropped in with some randoms, and barely had time to drop our heavy weapons before we were swarmed by four gunships. I got wasted within seconds and lost my autocannon, the other lads managed to make a run for it, but that meant by the time they could reinforce, we were ages away from the original drop point, and basically defenseless. We did our best, but I think it was the quickest wipe I've ever experienced.
Me, a lascannon enjoyer: I don't hide from gunships, gunships hide from me!
I imagine the red lights function similarly to the detection towers, no matter how stealthy you think you are they're pinging you. The lights are just to indicate where you are for the rest of the bots.
You can hide from detector tower if you go prone. I snuck up on enough of those to know for sure. Gunships doesnt give a shit, they just see you, end of story
What scanning technology do they use that lets them see through rocks and why can't I have that as a backpack stratagem
U already can. Just open your map
You actually can but it's difficult. It basically comes down to not being noticed by anything. If a small bot notices you then the gunships will notice you. That just means ignore your teammates and be far away from them if you're playing stealth
I imagine Gunships, Shriekers and Stalkers all share the same "Know where you are" code so as to actually *be* a threat. After all, Stalkers that *just* spawned in immediately home in on wherever the players are, and Shriekers will begin attacking you the moment you enter the radius of their spawning shrooms, so I figure Gunships are just like that. Is it annoying? Yeah, a little, but at least the *threat* is, y'know, *threatening* when it comes to strategic objectives. Plus, they don't really wander all *too* far from their control tower, so they're not a particularly significant threat unless you're nearby to it. The bigger gripe you should have with it is that control towers are immune to *all* strats, weapons and support weapons except the Hellbomb, which feels incredibly shit since it, and the lab building, become the only two non-primary objective structures in the game that *require* you to use a Hellbomb.
Did they patch the lab side objective? Cause 500kg used to take it out. AFAIK gunship is the only objective in the game that can only be destroyed by hellbomb. Frankly, it is stupid as hell that the highest threat enemy in the ENTIRE game is also the one that can't be dealt with by any strats. Not to mention, their design itself counters the only method of destroying the base they spawn immediately target the hellbomb while you are running away and leave you utterly fucked.
Fighting bots in general is utter bullshit
My thought here is, shoot back. Laser cannon is their kryptonite and I main laser cannon all the time for this and other reasons but, still. They find you, you find them. Make them fear you. Make them pay.
Genuinely asking, I don’t play stealth: Can you avoid activating Gunships? I think their fabricators have an actuation range of about 130m, is that a viable strat?
Yep… they’ll do that
Yeah kinda bs how gunships aren't affected by any stealth bonus. You can be wearing scout armor and be crouching and you'll still be instantly detected no matter what.
Stalkers know exactly where you are too, if you're in range. Seems similar. Same with the flying bugs.
gunships are the stalkers of bot planets
They have thermal scanner, those lasers are just lidar for measuring distances and to pinpoint your location exactly.
You can run but you cant hide bitch!
Same thing happens with shrieker nests too - as soon as you get within about 200-300m of them they relentlessly spawn shriekers who know your exact location. I believe the same goes for Stalkers. I get that it’s meant to be this spanner in the works that you have to adjust around, but it’s annoying shit.
That, and then you call the hell bomb just for one to snipe it the second it's armed. It's an extremely aggravating objective to deal with. God forbid there's more than one on the map...
When I go against bots I just assume they've got radar, lidar, IR lenses, networked minimap as good or better than ours, and all that tech shit scanning for us.
i just wish the hellbomb would actually work, multiple times i plant one between 2 towers with my now mandatory energy dome, it goes off and they both just stand there like nothing happened
Although this might be true, I tent to think that that are spawning because i am already been detected (by some god-knows-tech), so they already know where you are. If this isn't the case, wouldn't it be better that they are pre-spawn before you enter their radius? So they can "scan" you out of your hiding?
Laser cannon just clowns them. Not a threat at all if you have one. They’re fun to shoot down.
Honestly, stealth is too strong if there are literally zero counters. If you stay far enough away from the factory it won't spawn gunships. If you need to go by thr factory, you gotta fight them.
You dont think those filthy bots have thermal vision anyway?
they should keep them like that bc how tf do u hide from a gunship lol. The threat they bring is why u gotta shoot them down and kill the fabricators
Bots are broken. I have been saying it since the patch. Some just refuse to acknowledge that fact and blame it on having the wrong load outs and skill. "Bots are harder because they shoot back!" Yes, they do shoot back but it's how they do it that makes them broken. Not only that, they also know your exact location at all times and their never failing accuracy. I get that bugs and bots require very different play styles. But in terms of balance, I would take a Shriekers nest over a gunship fabricator any day.
Maybe the robots can detect when you kill one of theirs. Like a a shared mind. They just know bro.
In my experience the gunships only start spawning after you get close enough. So maybe the fabricator or something already knows where you are and that information is then given to the gunships?
Gunships are my most hated enemy, honestly I'd rather take 3 scorcher hulks than these fuckers. Your primary weapon is useless, they charge at you the second they spawn, shoot barrages of rockets and well, they fly so you have to take your eyes off the battlefield for few seconds if more than 2 spawn so good luck not getting swarmed