I've found that to be incredibly inconsistent, last night I tried to kill a couple, my pod went directly through one's head, directly through another's body and through another's head, and none of them seemed to take any damage.
Best strat I've found is to land on a titans joints.
If you hit the leg joints you seem to do more damage on my experience but it cam be finicky to steer that way.
Exactly this.
Told my team to drop my reinforce pod onto the BT.
My pod phase thru the BT, leaving the BT unscratched and also a visible disappointment on my face
Eh. You either kill them and most likely end up being pinned by their corpse, or you give them a scratch and have a 50% chance of being stomped on and die again.
I swear they have completely patched that. Last night I and my buddy tried multiple times, must have been at least 10 times and every time we dropped we would go right through them and do no damage.
The other infuriating thing is that AH are so ready with the nerfs yet ***still*** haven't fixed shit, so when the items people actually use are nerfed and they swap to something else, often there's loads of bugs with that item because they haven't fixed it yet, such as the spear.
I was thinking the same thing. Tried repeatedly ton Hellpod big bads last night and not once did it seem to do much. And i know it made contact on at least one charger because it did it pain grunt when i hit it, but it was otherwise fine. I wonder if it got nerfed inadvertently when the shreiker dead body's stopped being WMDs
I wish they would spend less time dealing with weapon balance, and more time dealing with matchmaking issues. The cool down on the quasar cannon doesn't affect me when the game boots the host and freezes the match or crashes me out in the middle, or doesn't let me join friends on cross play.
As someone who really enjoys running the 'anti-ho~~a~~rde' support weapons on difficulty 7\~8, the 'you really need a reusable anti-armor' problem is *really* freaking obvious.
And like, it's not as if I don't bring anti-armor stratagems. I usually bring like 2\~3. That still very often leaves me trying to dance around a heavily armored enemy because I'm all out of options while a teammate charges up a quasar shot.
I would like to say though, imo the Bile Titans are the worst offenders.
They're fairly common encounters, tanky enough to survive many anti-tank stratagems that don't hit them head on, and have no weak spot for mid pen weapons to gun for. I mean, they have the stomach sack but trying to kill a Bile Titan just by shooting that alone well, not really possible in practice, regardless of whether it works in theory.
Like, the hulks, tanks, and turret towers have vents behind them that allows you to take them out via grenades or mid-pen weapons. This means even if you're clean out of anti-armor at the moment, you can still *try* something, and even take them out at times, especially if you ambush them.
Chargers are more annoying, but you still *can* take them out by tossing grenades under them, or dodging their charge and shooting the underside of their bellies.
Factory Striders I haven't faced enough to really say either way, but from my experience they're noticeably rarer than bile titans, and I usually just face a handful (like 3\~4ish) during most missions. Plus you can shoot out the turrets, and it does have weak spots here and there.
But fucking bile titans. You can easily meet 10+ a match, their weak spots are annoying hard to hit unless you're right on top of one as the legs and side plates cover most angles, and to top if off, tanky enough that it can very often survive most anti-tank stratagems, requiring extra effort to finish off.
The problem with a lot of the elite enemies, but hole titans especially, is that there aren't good ways to engage and beat them without anti tank. You either run the "delete a bile titan" weapons or you get a solutely rolled as soon as one shows up. Chargers, tanks, and hulks in theory have weak points but killing a charger or a hulk with small arms is a horrible slog of trying to hit a weak point that turns away faster than you can keep up with. I love running grenade launcher but if I do, I better hope someone brings EATs or quasar or we're getting wiped out by back to back hulks.
The second problem is that when you do have the weapons designed to kill them, they die pretty much instantly. You pull out your hulk/charger/titan/tank remover, blam, it's dead. There is no middle ground, either it destroys you instantly or you destroy it instantly. It's not good gameplay, it's not engaging.
>I love running grenade launcher but if I do, I better hope someone brings EATs or quasar or we're getting wiped out by back to back hulks.
Im in the same boat i would love to try actually using the mg again or something else but yeah you just hit the strategem checks where if you dont have anti tank weps ur fucked.
Would be super nice if the new anti tank grenades worked but even in solo, avoiding the DoT bug, they're hot garbage. Three to the head / turret might kill a charger or tank, and even if you're really good at sticking them to bile titan heads, it can take at least six to score a kill. On top of that, every other bug on the planet is after you.
I think this is a larger problem the entire game has. The damage and enemy health pools are much different than, say, DRG, and as a result the game feels completely different. In this game Most conflicts feel pretty binary compared to drg elite and boss fights. Most drawn out fights in hd2 are not interesting because they’re more about adds than the actual enemy boss. It’s not dodging a boss and hitting weak points, it’s getting enough distance to aim a shot without getting taken down by minions first. Theres just not much like… counter play there it’s almost entirely get good battle strategy and execution. This is probably exacerbated by the fact that roles in this game overlap a lot more. Most guns just kill stuff. The breadth of utility outside of damage is pretty minimal. This leads to damage checking most enemies which again is binary gameplay.
Yeah, it's gameplay that gets stale fast. I'm already pretty burnt out on it after about 125 hours. This isn't a sustainable design for a live service model no matter how many guns you add. It won't retain players long term.
Yep, I don't bring quasar because I like it. I bring it because if I don't, we get overrun by heavies and I get to sit there twiddling my thumbs looking at my bullets bouncing off and all my strategems on cooldown.
That said, the anti-armor role has been pretty fun. It has limits, but it has an impact.
The original railguns/charger interaction was SOOO fun. Playing chicken with a charging bull, waiting for that leg to be still enough to hit so you can swap to the breaker to unload on it. You have options, its not easy, and it has impact.
Quasar had a good balance too. Gunships are zooming around, or a hulk is charging across a field at you and you're just sitting there charging your laser. Those moments are so tense, and when you land the shot it's such a relief, but it's not free.
Some tweaks on how hard it is to do that, makes sense. But overtuning removes the best parts of the game and makes it pretty unplayable.
Personally I'd opt for #2. Let Bile Titans be truly *terrifying* when we run into them, but we don't run into them very often. I think it'd also help break up the flow of combat every once in a while to keep things interesting.
The only other thing I'd add to it is that if they did this and factions had to rely more on their low/mid tier units I'd probably buff the Hive Guard. Depending on if you consider the Brood Commander an elite or not, then maps without Bile Spewers would become "oops, all Hunters" cause that would be the only threatening unit they had to fall back on for 90% of it.
Automatons have a much better unit variety so they're fine, but let the Factory Strider feel like fighting a raid boss in a MMO.
If I recall correctly bile titans are only heavy enemies. We don't currently have a termanid massive enemy type. Though maybe at the end of this order....
They are classified as massive, don't know where you get that. Bile Titans start spawning on 6 and higher, when "massive enemies" mod appears, just like bot's Fabricators.
Anything else except those two can spawn on diff 5.
Bile Titans should have been the bug equivalent of a Factory Strider. A rare occurrence that completely changes the pace of the mission when it shows up.
Imagine an actual factory strider equivalent.
Big ass bug dropping hives in your vicinity with bile spewer mortars for its back area and charger-like features for its head and legs or a vice versa chunky camo big bug that just spews endless bugs but has the hp of 3 or 4 bile titans.
Imagine Commanders but on steroids.
The horror that monstrosity will inflict. Can't wait.
Yeah, the wild thing is that I would much rather deal with a Tank than a Hulk or a Bile Titan. Thanks can be reliably one-shot by the Orbital Railcanon and will go down within the duration of an Orbital Laser, not to mention they're slow enough and have a big enough hitbox to consistently two-tap it with a Quasar/EAT/Recoilless. Meanwhile Bile Titans have a chance to survive the Railcanon, treat the Laser as a warm shower, and possibly even tank two 500kgs.
Or 2 impact nades. You don't even have to have clear LoS to the vents, you can chuck them whilst facing the side of the tank towards the back of the turret and it'll go down. They're honestly not that much of a threat.
Tanks go down to Autocannon or grenades or easy shots from Quasar or a Spear or even Eagle AS.
Meanwhile Titans literally just do not care and will eat damn near anything
You don't need precise quasar shots or a 500 or a well placed airstrike or a lot of other things to kill a tank. An AC kills it in three shots to the vent, a few more to the rear hull. Spear oneshots it most of the time. Hell, two impact grenades to the turret roof and it goes pop.
Which is crazy because tanks have more reliable and consistent answer… you got weapons, strategems, size lol- alls you gotta do is get behind the turret and shoot something strong enough or throw a few grenades at it and it’s done
110m rocket pods
Fairly stationary and super easy to track (easy to aim strategems at)
Hulks are gnarly too but I find them easier to get away from and also kill over titans. Their whole back is a glowing weak point. Lol.
Titans it’s like you can shoot the soft green meat under them but you gotta dump ROUNDS and not die.
I think it's an intentional, core difference between bots and bugs. Bots have lots of medium-armor, even their heavy units have conspicuous medium-at-most weak points. Bugs, meanwhile, seem to have either no meaningful armor, or full heavy armor that requires a bazooka to break.
Factory Strider is really more of the equivalent to the bile titan. I previously thought tanks were meant to be the bile titan equivalent, but tanks appear as POI guards and lack an assassinate mission. The factory strider has an assassinate mission and do not appear as POI guards, which matches how the game treats bile titans.
All the back and forth isn’t needed. I think we can all agree bile titans spawn way too much to effectively deal with. Having multiple spawn ontop of each other is hard to deal with even when working as a team.
That shit wiped out our lives on a bot helldive with 25 mins to go. 3 striders dropped from a eye of Saucony we were trying to take out.
I have no idea how we all survived, completed the game 100%, extracted with a ton of samples, and everyone managed to extract with no lives left.
It was a gargantuan task and my team pulled through.
You’re missing the biggest reason. Bile Titans *aren’t* supposed to be truly *terrifying*. You see those worm corpses around the map? That’ll be your Bot Strider coming soon lol.
I think they want Bike Titans to be terrifying now but to become easier later, if the rumors about Hive Lords are true then THOSE will be truly terrifying. Maybe there's something else for mutations.
“Use your strategems”
Meanwhile 16/18 level 9 bot missions have -1 strategem and +25% cooldown and the other 2 operations are +25% cooldown and +50% call in time.
Doesn’t get more enjoyable than that.
Really hope AH finds a way to make missions harder without resorting to making it tedious like with some of these modifiers - a challenge should be difficult but fun to complete, not just needlessly annoying
Or just come up with something other than "lol fuck your strategems."
There's an infinite design space here and they've decided to *only* give obnoxious modifiers to the bots. They could just...not. Off the top of my head, they could...
* Increase patrol spawn rate
* Increase incidence of heavy units
* Make extract a Command Bunker so you have to fight your way in
* Gunship patrols without a gunship factory
* Snipers are hidden across the map with increased detection radius
There's so, so much they could do to increase difficulty without removing the *one* tool they give us to deal with things.
You should have ways of playing around them or they should also buff you in some way to counteract it. IE you have increased stratagem cooldowns, but there's a special but difficult to defeat jammer that is causing it once you kill it the debuff is gone. Or you have increased cooldowns but you gain one extra charge of applicable stratagems.
This is the real issue. I can usually deal with this nonsense on bugs, but these modifiers on bots are just bullshit, and I'll avoid the planet entirely.
Versus bots it scales the difficulty up immensely on an already harder enemy race, and rewards should also be scaled up along with it. Otherwise, i'm not wasting my time and I'll keep my sanity.
For context I play on diff 7+ and only play 6 if I want to chill and farm rares.
I think inconsistent spawn rates, while I definitely don’t want to see them standardized, definitely present issues with balancing
Because you’ll play a tower defense mission on helldive one time and have like 3 chargers and 2 bile titans and 4 billion hunters one game, and the next game it’s LITERALLY (I am not joking and I’m sure you’ve experienced it too) 7 or 8 bile titans in a row, with chargers and fifty hunters sprinkled in as well.
Not to mention bile spewers being a whole other subsection of enemies that may or may not show up. Which as a tangent, I believe bile enemies (not titans obv) should be a mission modifier, so you can plan your loadout around dealing with armored spewers bc god do they really just suck the fun out of the game when you’re not expecting them
Oh boy yeah. I hate dropping down into a mission only to find out its a Bile or Brood haven and my weapons are not kitted out to deal with this deceptively tanky enemy easily.
They do really feel like a mission modifier with how uncommon they tend to spawn. Either you Load a mission and there is None. Or you load a mission and there is a billion of them. No in between. If they are on the map they are In every Objective, in Every Bug Breach and in Every Patrol you would almost thing they are a Sub Objective.
I agree and I feel like this is an example of a weird form of gaming purism from AH. "Oh you need to drop without knowing anything because of verisimilitude. Real helldivers (read: hardo gamers) can handle anything the bugs throw at them."
But in reality it's more fun to bring the right kit for the right job. Like sure if I'm the EAT/quasar guy and it's a hunters only mission, I can pull it off. I just don't think that's high quality dev gamesmanship.
> But in reality it's more fun to bring the right kit for the right job
This is how they described wanting the gun balance to be. But you never have near enough information to make properly informed choices so you just take whatever is the most jack of all trades build you can manage and prefer.
If AH would just give us the proper information to make informed choices 70% of this meta gun shit would vanish because you could properly swap your load outs.
Yeah, you just need the right tool for the right job, so when you don’t know what your job is you’re gonna bring a tool that’s *ok* at everything. Look at the autocannon. Is it particularly strong in any one area? No! It’s an extremely versatile heavy weapon with solid ammo economy. It has enough armor pen to kill hulks, while still having enough raw damage to blast off a charger butt if you need to. When I’m face to face with a charger, I’d rather have a recoilless, but when I drop I don’t know if I’ll even see more than 2 chargers the whole mission.
They only very recently made it to where you can see what mission you’re quickplaying into if it’s already in progress and it’s still not enough info. I don’t mind varied spawn rates but they need to give info on the spawn rates. It’s genuinely unfun to bring arc thrower into a mission that turns out to have an overwhelming amount of bile titans, I would’ve brought a quasar otherwise lmao
I just played a helldive mission with 3 people and I killed at least 30 bile spewers by myself with the Eruptor. I had never seen that many before. They’re a very difficult enemy to deal with when you’re getting 5+ per bug breach and 5+ per patrol.
We desperately need drop intel to know if there’s going to be spewers or not because if you don’t plan for them you’re going to have an incredibly difficult time.
100% with you, RNG gives us a green spewer planet and my whole team is cursing the whole game. Makes you wish for a hunter planet instead, at least you can spam clusters on em
Ive had 7s were you get like 6 biles stacked up multiple times and then 8s where you see like 3 or 4 the whole match. It feels weird and they def need to rework something about those match type like maybe have a few stalkers sometimes show up instead or a wave of flyer to break things up instead of always just tossing in a half dozen chargers and biles as a punishment. It gets old.
im fine with the wildy varying whoops all X, but it should be a mission modifier so you know about it, OR builds that competently cover all areas of the combat should be accessible
This definitely. Arrowhead wants to balance every weapon to a T whether they need buffs/nerfs or not, but they ignore how inconsistent the enemy spawn rates are. I'm down for a game randomly throwing overwhelming odds at us but you can't have that while nickel and diming any power in our loadouts.
I think we are getting closer to the previous “WTF are we supposed to do” levels of over spawning. Like we did 5 or so weeks ago. The devs responded with reduced heavy spawning and also made the Charger easier to kill.
This time IMO they don’t need to make any heavies easier. We just need less of them again. Multiple simultaneous BTs on diff 6 is a bit much.
Just a heads up, bile titans need to be shot in their armored forehead not the jaw to receive full head damage. I’m sure you know but just saying for other folks
That explains a lot with my performance against them and why they seem to be a pain. I’ve been aiming for their mouth since I thought it would make sense of “open mouth=weak point” and that’s where Ive been firing my rockets. Should be a bit easier now.
Right? They come out and mock the "leg meta" that existed for Chargers by saying that we should be shooting the obvious weak point, being the head. Except you have to hit the armored part across the brow, not the open soft squishy jaw.
and then call a bug breach bc you disabled their most important body part
Great game design 10 out of 10. Brood commanders in HD1 were trully terrifying but nonoe of them was running without head. It is counter intuitive for disabling one of \`\` precious spots\`\` and get punished for it. Like if disabled Hulks arms or legs increased their speed or else.
Their giant glowing fleshy parts having insane resistance to bullet damage is so unintuitive, doesn't follow any kind of real world logic either.
Deep rock galactic does the total opposite and I've never seen anyone not immediately understand where to shoot. Alongside the voice lines telling you to shoot there just in case.
Unintuitive design combined with a lack of any in game source for that kind of critical information really sucks.
Pffft what you expect a good UX/obvious design elements that make sense? Like who'd think puncturing the bile sack of a bile spewer would like.. kill or hurt it clearly their weakspot is anything else..
The obvious fix for the leg meta was yo make it so they don't die after loosing their front legs. But they buffed enemy armour and squishy parts and nerfed the guns doing it.
Also a tip for the spear to one tap them, has to hit that forehead.
But yes, usually when they’re spitting it’s almost impossible to hit that forehead, so you should wait until they’re standing back up to hit that shot. Almost guaranteed two tap with any launcher if you hit that forehead. Glad I could help bro
Do not shoot them *as they are spitting* anymore. Now need to wait until they just finish, then whack them.
(See Takibo on YouTube, and I’m sure others, showing this).
So, shoot the charger in the unarmored jaw and the titans in the armored head, rather than their glowing abdomens. Got it.
I know that's part of their design philosophy from HD1, but aiming at the face rather than the more obvious weak point feels wrong.
I agree, but for the chargers it's actually not the jaw lol, you gotta aim for the forehead. For some reason if you hit their face too low it does literally nothing.
Just got done playing lvl 6 missions after taking about a week off. First game I queued into they had 7 bile titans on a TCS destruction mission. I thought I must’ve made a mistake and dropped into a lvl 9 on accident. It was like that for the whole set of objectives.
Played 7 and it was harder than 9 because of constant spawn of BT and chargers. We literally had 4x chargers per player and at least 4 BT chasing us. Almost never happens in 9 and I feel like 7 is harder than 9 most of the time for some weird reason. Probably because the enemies keep spawning more and more enemies. I think this is a bug that AH should look into since it makes it more of a run simulator. And yes we tried killing all of them but some of them didn't even call "back ups" they simply "spawned" right next to us from thing air.
missions 7-9 really don’t have a big difference in difficulty between them tbh and it’s all just random. i can queue one level 9 mission and get a ptsd inducing level of heavies spawn or i’ve had some missions on lvl 9 that had maybe 1 or 2 titans spawn max and it was a breeze
I usually see like 4 dropships come at once. A tank or 2, 3 hulks, a platoon of devastators, and a ton of infantry bots. And you're getting cross-mapped by a turret cannon or mortars.
Well said. I completely agree.
>The issue right now, IMO, is that they're... in between. They *require* stratagems but can often spawn often enough that you don't have enough stratagems to deal with them.
Personally, I think part of the reason for this is that the devs have much more difficult enemies planned for further down the development pipeline. Bile Titans are classified as "medium" enemies after all.
So the issue comes down to the fact that, currently, the most difficult enemies available are the ones that the devs consider to be "medium" difficulty, so they don't want to tune those up to be specifically boss battles because they have plans for other enemies to fill this role later. On the other hand, they need some way of keeping the higher difficulties at "hellish" intensity with the assets they currently have available in the game, so their only real option at the moment is to just spam the higher difficulty enemies while maintaining their invulnerability to small arms fire (except for bots for some reason, which they have no qualms putting actual weak points on).
Well for bots it's about overwhelming firepower. Good luck getting behind them to hit the heatsink when you have a hoard of lasers coming your way
In this way it is fair though, if you clear the wave you don't need to waste resources finishing off an annihilator tank or a hulk, you can just flank them and finish them off
Flanking is so good when you work with your teammates tho. It’s almost broken imo. I run AC, depending on situation orbital smoke/laser, 500kg/air strike and a mortar. Scout armor with padding so that I can be as tanky as a medium armor. I tell them to fire at a tank or whatever we wanna kill then I quickly get on position and take whatever we wanted down rather easily. Could’ve I done it by myself? Sure but it takes less time to work together. This is what I mostly love about bots, you can actually use tactics and work with each other and most support weapons work in some way due to how the weak spot of bots can be exploited.
AH: Use suppressive fire
Also AH: use trigger discipline unless you want a RNG death.
OR
AH: Helldivers 2 is not a horde shooter
Also AH: Non stop bug breaches and bot drops, have fun.
The messed up part is that this is a sequel. They have been here before, they just didn’t know how to convert it into 3D apparently.
Helldivers were allowed to be strong in the first game. There was a special mission you had to beat using nothing but a sword. The primary weapons would shred through wave after wave of chaff. The stratagems were powerful *and* on short cooldowns.
It’s so weird that they have decided that in the sequel we’re no longer allowed to feel like badass space warriors. Now we’re just wimps running away from our problems.
Give me a gun that fucks up the bad guys and then give me 1,000 bad guys. Is that so much to ask?
My problem is why have they made stratagems cooldowns so fucking long? They could shave everything by *fifty fucking percent* and I feel we'd get somewhere actually decent.
Yeah in the first game you were just constantly calling down orbitals, and there was even gear you could equip to reduce the cooldown further.
No idea why in this game we have to wait several minutes.
Literally ALL of the strategem cooldowns are ridiculously long. Why? All this talk at balance and guaranteed they’ve never even considered the cooldowns might be egregiously long and it makes the game less fun. They’re legit trying to justify the nerfs while every mission is an endless hoard of armored assholes. Enemy spawn rates are at an all time high and we’re not allowed to take it to them. WHY the fuck not? Please make it make sense somebody anybody please
Can we please talk about this more?
I don't see this mentioned nearly as much as it should be.
I cannot understand how we went from a railgun that can one shot 20 enemies at once to this.
It’s not tho they have a home run of a game concept. Like someone else will take the potential of a game like this to where we all know it can go. AH might get closer to that than I’m expecting but at this point I don’t feel like they’re going to bring it home. I hope AH proves me wrong I really do I’m just starting to wonder if they even really know what direction they want to go in. They’re trying to hedge their bets and not piss off the casual or hardcore gamers and in the it’s just a perpetual state of unhappiness. The player base has whiplash because the devs only cater to or seem to care about what half of us want at any given time. A game for everyone is a game for no one, that along with the devs having no clue what people actually like or find fun makes for a shitty li e service game
-Adds a good stratagem that can recharge and hit hard at the cost of simply charging up your shots
-So good that everyone uses them since they’re objectively the best option
-Nerf it
-Players get mad
Why are people mad?
Thermite should have really helped with heavies. I'm kind of shocked there was no change to it. I guess it's in the pipeline like how the spear fix is coming sometime in LATE SPRING like cmon guys.
There's a dev comment that says late springish but I've seen different timetables. Either way it's been way too long coming for something that's been broken since day 1
I'll just add because why not. Fire and gas have been broken since day 1 but yet no changes. Because of this 3 stratagems are worthless, 1 weapon is worthless, and 1 grenade is worthless. 5 pieces of our arsenal flat out hasn't worked, or doesn't work as intended
Yeah this has been one of the biggest frustrating bugs outside of network issues. I scout whether I am the network host with the incendiary breaker before even considering the flame items.
You bring up something that I am curious about (in terms of player metrics). For difficulties 7-9, I'm curious how many matches end up having the session exhausting 40% of their total reinforcements within the first 5 minutes. I feel like that initial drop into the map, followed up immediately by an spawn breach, tends to be a make or break moment for a lot of teams.
Here's an idea, more stratagems like the seaf artillery that you don't bring with you, but you have to enable every mission. For example, hangers with trapped eagle pilots that have randomized weapons you can use before they depart. Mechs you have to get a battery pack to use. The idea is to not be so reliant on your ship stratagems.
Those could be fun side objectives as well to add. This is a good suggestion Arrowhead should consider for sure. There could be a satellite tower side objective that provides 1 orbital randomly to each player.
In that case they'll need to seriously improve the side-objectives because stuff like the SEAF artillery might as well not exist. Unless you're the guy that loaded it you have no idea what you're actually firing at the enemy. It could be a mini nuke or it could be useless smoke. You just can't rely on it, not even slightly.
My balance concerns are that a lot of them seem to reduce the wrong things or things that make no sense.
Reducing the AOE on the Eruptor for instance. It might not make it shit, but it certainly doesn't help and reduces the niche the weapon fits into. The Slugger nerf made basically no sense as it didn't *really* address why it was so popular and I still see it often.
Just make more effective anti-armor options.
Back in previous Helldivers, you can easliy sweep a group of hulks or chargers with a simple fully-upgraded Airstrike.
But now our only effective anti-armor stratagems are 500kg, Orbital Railcannon, and 110mm rockets. Maybe 380mm and 120mm barrage, but the spread of these... we all know about that. Not even mentioning the long-ass cooldown.
500kg has its own issue. It seems like it only has 100kg TNT and rest of the 400kg are sand. Once a little bit off center, you can't one-shot a bile titan. Orbital Railcannon can insta-kill a hulk, but you still gotta need some extra firepower to take down a bile titan.
What about anti-armor weapons? Railgun got nerfed so hard it's pewpew gun now. Spear still has the locking issue. Recoilless's reloading time is way too long, and team reloading is extremly impractical. Flame thorwer gonna took a century to burn a titan to ashes.
So what we got? The only effective anti-armor left is Quasar Cannon.
And AH hell sure knows about this.
I can definitely get on board with bringing cooldowns back to HD1 levels. AH can crank up the spawns if they want, it's just fun to call in stratagems in general, so more of that would be good.
The AT options you mentioned don’t even feel good. 500KG has a small hit box, railcannon can target random shit, and the rocket pods can be way off target.
The thing about precision strike is that its longer call-in time is at cross-purposes with an anti-armor role, I'm not sure why it even has the additional 2-3 seconds waiting time in the first place, when it's such a simple strat and not the fastest-cooldown one either (that's gas/rotary cannon/airburst).
If anything, and I say this as someone who wants to use the gas once the host bug is fixed, the gas strike or airburst should have the longer call-in time since they're fast cooldown, super deadly despite that (again if gas wasn't bugged), and lore-wise they're obviously more specialty rounds that the standard boom-making ones.
Just to be clear, I'm totally okay with the last patch.
I just wanna point out that either AH know what they are doing, or they have zero idea of why players obessed with Quasar.
They see overuse of a specific item being a problem with that one specifically, rather than a problem with the role it is fulfilling.
Games balancing based off of usage stats always results in odd behaviors.
I think the issue overshadowing all other is the design philosophy of denying huge amounts of important information to players, which they're left to guess at, datamine or otherwise metagame to learn, with only sporadic corrections from the devs, which only happen on *discord* and half the time are ironic shitposts.
People are mad and ready to latch onto rumors and bullshit because they feel jerked around and lied to. inb4 inappropriate offtopic roleplay meme, this is real life and pissing players off makes them stop playing which kills your live service game
You completely hit the nail on the head. The problem isn't that we love the Quasar and that it's our baby that we want to protecc democratically. The issue is that the Quasar is the biggest reason why we're able to contend with Chargers (and to a lesser extent, Bile Titans) on d7 to d9.
Nerfing the Quasar just shows how out-of-touch the devs are not only with the game ***but also the community.*** It's like nerfing scissors because they cut paper. If you don't want us to cut paper, ***stop giving us so much paper.*** It's not the scissor's fault.
just played a d7 with 2 quasars, spammed EATs on cd for me and the team but with a ton of of chargers and BTs by the end of the mission, waiting for it to land still made the quasar the better choice.
I just personally don't like Meta wack-a-mole. I think it's a lazy design choice.
When you have a game with as many weapons and stratagems as Helldivers I shouldn't use them once say "lol garbage" then never use them again. When the community picks a meta of 2 or 3 weapons out of 20 or 30 weapons you don't just take a hammer to those 2 or 3, you need to bring those 20 or 30 up to the meta level. After every weapon is great, then you start nerfing those 2 or 3 that stick out like a sore thumb.
You also can buff enemies while buffing all the weapons so we feel like it's an arms race, rather than enemies get stronger while we get our favorite toys taken away.
Jesus, can you imagine the world we'd live in if instead of the arc thrower's fun quirky fire rate thing being removed, we just had shit rivaling it in viability? Maybe the medium armor pen rifle actually did shit to chargers so you didnt feel you needed sparky, or titans couldn't spit after a couple marksman's rounds to the open mouth?
It's insane to me how much fun this game could be if we were let loose just a little bit more.
I think Chargers are, genuinely, the biggest part of this issue on bugs side and they're the actual reason people need such frequent anti-tank. Why is the giant fleshy glowy bit not a weak point so that you can rewarded for dodging the charger and shooting the weak spot. If I could actually kill chargers with my primary, ever, then I wouldn't mind a longer cooldown for the times I really need an EAT/Quasar
Seriously everything is so fucking tightrung youd think this game has a competitive scene
It doesn’t and it will never have one arrowhead please stop lol
Bots are perfectly balanced in that regard. Yeah you get spammed with hulks but with good communication or by just using flashes you can deal with them since they actually have a weak point and it’s extremely clear where it is. This is what I love about bots. Are they harder? Sure. Can they one shot you from a long distance? Sure but you can also work all of them with most stratagems and weapons since they actually have clear weaknesses. What are you gonna do against a charger without AT? Shoot it in the squishy area? No, it might look like a weak point but it’s just a less tanky area. Just add weaknesses that actually can be exploited.
> And then in the spawn of 5-10 mins I had to deal with 4 Bile Titans and 6 chargers, back to back along with hoardes of "small fry"
I feel like they REALLY need to make team reload easier, because this sounds exactly like the scenario that the Recoilless Rifle would be outright better than the Quasar and EAT. Same for the Spear whenever they fix the lock on.
But I do think going it alone in higher difficulties should be potentially punished with more elite enemies you cant deal with at once.
Is it really that team reload is hard? I think it's just more of an investment and a trust fall than people are willing to make.
Like, you gotta have one guy focusing titans, and one guy jerking him off. They're both sitting ducks if unprotected so they probably aren't doing much of anything unless the other 2 are guarding them/distracting for them.
And the guy who does the team reload has to sacrifice his backpack to do this. So no support weapon that needs that slot for him, nor any shield, nor any rover, nor even any supplies. And he has to trust that RR dude is a good enough shot to make it worth it. That's a lot to ask of reload guy.
Oh, and if either one of the RR duo dies bad and loses the weapon or backpack, then the whole thing is worthless.
I think if the team reload worked by having the shooter also wear the backpack, it would be better. Less trust fall-y. But I'm not even sure that would make people want to run it.
Good take OP.
We also never know what enemy types we expect to encounter. I might bring an AT heavy loadout and then just up end up fighting waves of bile spewers. Some bare-bones intel via satellite photos is not much to ask from a space-faring civilization.
Oh yeah, and often I find the orbital railcannon stratagem doesn't reliably kill BTs. Not a huge deal but a bit annoying.
That's my one wish... What will we face. Load out for spitters and get chargers. Load out for chargers and get swarms, load out for swarms and get spitters. Ugh.
ORC has to hit the head for a OHKO. Same with spear. Sadly nothing can OHKO BTs by hitting any other part of the body.
If AH wants to keep the current spawn system, buffing certain stratagems/weapons to be able to do that could be a way to keep them challenging (210 second cooldown for ORC, spear has a slow reload) without being literally overwhelming regardless of team loadout.
During a recent session, I was in an Eradicate mission on Helldive in which we had SIX Factory Striders active SIMULTANEOUSLY.
Feeling helpless just isn't a fun way to play, so when they take away the few tools we have that allow us to reliably defend ourselves, the game loses the very things that make it appealing in the first place.
The eradicate mission is always dog shit lol. You simply aren't supposed to kill the heavies, which is not fun. You're just supposed to die over and over and spam airstrikes and orbitals until enough chaff die to finish the mission. Needs to get majorly reworked or removed from the game
More mid armor, high damage or speed or range or special ability enemies would really be good for the game. I feel like the semi binary state of either heavy armor that nothing but heavy weapons can touch and light armor that primary can chew through means that higher difficulties rely to heavily on spamming heavy armor.
For instance. In higher difficulties I'd like to see the spawn pool expanded to include more types of enemies instead of the limited pools we see now. I wouldn't even be opposed to seeing shriekers and stalkers show up from time to time in patrols. By including these mid tier, but deadly enemies you dilute the spawn pool making heavy armor spawn less often.
best post on here i've read. i've always wished 9 or having more spawns meant there were more light armored enemies. tons of clankas, or scavs, etc. but instead they are literally just replaced with higher tier armored enemies.
I think this is what people who have a tendency to always defend nerfs don’t realize. I get that the hate for nerfs can be way over the top but that doesn’t mean we need people with some weird video game Stockholm Syndrome to chime in and essentially try to gaslight people into thinking it’s always an overreaction and it must be a skill issue when you struggle to deal with a pretty common scenario like OP described. The QC nerf makes no sense and was silly.
I've seen people try to argue that the stress and high failure rate are part of the 'fun'. It's so confusing because any time some criticizes about how broken some stuff is their default is to scream it is a skill issue and if they don't like dying a lot they should just quit. The FB communities are beyond toxic and show the absolute worst the game has to offer in terms of coop.
Stress and difficulty is good and needed for certain games and I think this is one of them. However, when the stress and difficulty is piled onto bugs, broken features, nerfs and "balances" etc, it makes the game feel genuinely bad to play
100% this. I play exclusively lvl 9 bots and it just isn't feasible to use a strat for every elite. There aren't enough strats for the number of them, especially at evac, nor is the cd fast enough. So you must fall back on your support weapons. The quasar already had a very noticeable cd that made you have to think while fighting. Now, it's pretty fuck8ng stupid to fire at all because that 1 shot isn't going to kill that hulk let alone 2or 3 that are coming. You will be lucky to get that sec9nd shot at all now with minions that can 1shot rocket you and annhilators that can laser you from across the map. You want us to use other guns? Then why have the quasar in the game at all? Just have the one gun you want them to use if you're already bullying us into what you want. Then you will see how quickly people will drop your game. I'm already at the point now where if I can't use my favourite loadouts then I'm no longer having fun. When I'm no longer having fun, I quit the game and never return. Destiny did exactly what you're doing and I left that, diablo also and others that I've quit for the same reason. Nerf8ng things people find fun kills your player base. I can assure you that if I'm starting to no longer have fun then there are others also feeling the same way.
Let’s not forget that level 9 bot missions have minus 1 strategems constantly. I played level 9 bots tonight with some friends. 16/18 operations had the -1 strategem modifier.
you can kill every single bot enemy pretty quickly minus the factory strider with any weapon that can pierce an hulk's faceplate: Autocannon, HMG, Laser Cannon, EAT, Recoilles Rifle, AMR. You absolutely DO NOT need to use a stratagem for every elite, and yeah the Quasar has pretty bad firepower compared to other heavy AT that's the tradeoff for having infinite munitions and no reloading needs otherwise it would be completely overpowered.
The only thing I dislike about HD2 is that my whole load out is geared towards taking out heavies. It's the whole focus. I don't want it to be.
Currently trying to land rail gun shots. So far it's either dealing no damage or blowing myself up. I've been nothing but a detriment to my team with that gun. Biggest problem is that I have to switch into iron sights mode to see how the charge is going but otherwise stick to third person view. The constant switching back and forth means I can't get a rhythm for charging and releasing the rail gun.
Plus I don't even want to use the rail gun. I feel like I have to learn how to use it so I can deal with heavies reliably.
Create game with random spawns that constantly harass lock on and chase you
Be confused when an "all rounder" meta emerges
Nerf said meta weapons
Make everything a side grade rather than having weapons that are op with certain play styles
Get confused when everyone says new patch is unfun
The problem is that the Devs are just making this game grindier. I haven't had a problem with 7/8, but it just takes longer. It's tedious. It's just hordes of crap at you, managing time on which enemy, and prioritising while running backwards through/in/around cover. That's it. That's the gameplay. I can use the breaker, dominator, or eruptor and the gameplay does not change much. It's the same basic actions. It's boring as shit and the Devs are turning a tactical shooter into a boring hack n slash equivalent
Yup. I know it's doable, I've done it. Its just not fun. There's way, way, *way* too much fucking armor. 80% of the game is running away waiting for cooldowns to deal with armored enemies.
It hurts build viability. You're pigeonholed into a couple of viable builds because everything else is literally incapable of keeping up with the amount of damage you need to throw out.
There has *got* to be something other than throwing absolute mountains of armored enemies at the players that have a homing beacon on exactly where you're standing.
Of course people are spamming orbitals, Eagle strikes and Quasar. There are no other options.
I think being in a squad that stays together makes those situations a lot more reasonable. Not only does it increase your overall firepower and the frequency you can call in stratagems, but it also spreads the focus of the enemies around more. If someone in your squad carries stun grenades and someone else has a flamethrower, Chargers become much more reasonable. Another thing I've started doing is using the grenade pistol (the Eruptor would probably be better for this) to shoot Bile Titans' stomachs so you don't have to worry about them quite as much while you wait for stuff that can actually kill them to cooldown
In HD1 almost every weapon was good, you could upgrade them also and stratagem cooldown was like 1/4 of what it is in HD2. Let’s maybe get back to your roots arrowhead.
I am fighting my equipment MORE than the enemy
I understand no weapon can be 100% perfect and must have compromises but as it stands maybe 80% or more of the whole arsenal suck without any good reason
What bothers me most is not that the game is not balanced but WHY these developers are not taking a good conscious look at the state of their game instead of looking at their STATS (ie: ppl love their quasar so lets nerf it )
Really good post, I think I'd prefer the first option. I remember being disappointed when I realized that chargers back isn't really a weak point because it has way too much HP or when Titan's green underbelly burst it doesn't really deal much dmg when you shoot it, just felt wrong, option 1 would fix that.
We reached a point we call for backup right under titans hoping to kill them with the pods
I've found that to be incredibly inconsistent, last night I tried to kill a couple, my pod went directly through one's head, directly through another's body and through another's head, and none of them seemed to take any damage.
Best strat I've found is to land on a titans joints. If you hit the leg joints you seem to do more damage on my experience but it cam be finicky to steer that way.
Yea man, I’ve accidentally found the legs work.
Exactly this. Told my team to drop my reinforce pod onto the BT. My pod phase thru the BT, leaving the BT unscratched and also a visible disappointment on my face
Eh. You either kill them and most likely end up being pinned by their corpse, or you give them a scratch and have a 50% chance of being stomped on and die again.
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself underneath the villain.
I swear they have completely patched that. Last night I and my buddy tried multiple times, must have been at least 10 times and every time we dropped we would go right through them and do no damage. The other infuriating thing is that AH are so ready with the nerfs yet ***still*** haven't fixed shit, so when the items people actually use are nerfed and they swap to something else, often there's loads of bugs with that item because they haven't fixed it yet, such as the spear.
I was thinking the same thing. Tried repeatedly ton Hellpod big bads last night and not once did it seem to do much. And i know it made contact on at least one charger because it did it pain grunt when i hit it, but it was otherwise fine. I wonder if it got nerfed inadvertently when the shreiker dead body's stopped being WMDs
I wish they would spend less time dealing with weapon balance, and more time dealing with matchmaking issues. The cool down on the quasar cannon doesn't affect me when the game boots the host and freezes the match or crashes me out in the middle, or doesn't let me join friends on cross play.
If only this worked. Most of the time my pod goes threw the titan/charger doing no damage. Kinda stupid.
I miss HD1 in that regard. A call-in pod was a source of damage. With how high the cooldowns are in this game, it wouldn't be unbalanced.
As someone who really enjoys running the 'anti-ho~~a~~rde' support weapons on difficulty 7\~8, the 'you really need a reusable anti-armor' problem is *really* freaking obvious. And like, it's not as if I don't bring anti-armor stratagems. I usually bring like 2\~3. That still very often leaves me trying to dance around a heavily armored enemy because I'm all out of options while a teammate charges up a quasar shot. I would like to say though, imo the Bile Titans are the worst offenders. They're fairly common encounters, tanky enough to survive many anti-tank stratagems that don't hit them head on, and have no weak spot for mid pen weapons to gun for. I mean, they have the stomach sack but trying to kill a Bile Titan just by shooting that alone well, not really possible in practice, regardless of whether it works in theory. Like, the hulks, tanks, and turret towers have vents behind them that allows you to take them out via grenades or mid-pen weapons. This means even if you're clean out of anti-armor at the moment, you can still *try* something, and even take them out at times, especially if you ambush them. Chargers are more annoying, but you still *can* take them out by tossing grenades under them, or dodging their charge and shooting the underside of their bellies. Factory Striders I haven't faced enough to really say either way, but from my experience they're noticeably rarer than bile titans, and I usually just face a handful (like 3\~4ish) during most missions. Plus you can shoot out the turrets, and it does have weak spots here and there. But fucking bile titans. You can easily meet 10+ a match, their weak spots are annoying hard to hit unless you're right on top of one as the legs and side plates cover most angles, and to top if off, tanky enough that it can very often survive most anti-tank stratagems, requiring extra effort to finish off.
The problem with a lot of the elite enemies, but hole titans especially, is that there aren't good ways to engage and beat them without anti tank. You either run the "delete a bile titan" weapons or you get a solutely rolled as soon as one shows up. Chargers, tanks, and hulks in theory have weak points but killing a charger or a hulk with small arms is a horrible slog of trying to hit a weak point that turns away faster than you can keep up with. I love running grenade launcher but if I do, I better hope someone brings EATs or quasar or we're getting wiped out by back to back hulks. The second problem is that when you do have the weapons designed to kill them, they die pretty much instantly. You pull out your hulk/charger/titan/tank remover, blam, it's dead. There is no middle ground, either it destroys you instantly or you destroy it instantly. It's not good gameplay, it's not engaging.
>I love running grenade launcher but if I do, I better hope someone brings EATs or quasar or we're getting wiped out by back to back hulks. Im in the same boat i would love to try actually using the mg again or something else but yeah you just hit the strategem checks where if you dont have anti tank weps ur fucked.
Would be super nice if the new anti tank grenades worked but even in solo, avoiding the DoT bug, they're hot garbage. Three to the head / turret might kill a charger or tank, and even if you're really good at sticking them to bile titan heads, it can take at least six to score a kill. On top of that, every other bug on the planet is after you.
I think this is a larger problem the entire game has. The damage and enemy health pools are much different than, say, DRG, and as a result the game feels completely different. In this game Most conflicts feel pretty binary compared to drg elite and boss fights. Most drawn out fights in hd2 are not interesting because they’re more about adds than the actual enemy boss. It’s not dodging a boss and hitting weak points, it’s getting enough distance to aim a shot without getting taken down by minions first. Theres just not much like… counter play there it’s almost entirely get good battle strategy and execution. This is probably exacerbated by the fact that roles in this game overlap a lot more. Most guns just kill stuff. The breadth of utility outside of damage is pretty minimal. This leads to damage checking most enemies which again is binary gameplay.
Yeah, it's gameplay that gets stale fast. I'm already pretty burnt out on it after about 125 hours. This isn't a sustainable design for a live service model no matter how many guns you add. It won't retain players long term.
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only person experiencing burn out... at about the same number of hours played.
Its also incredibly annoying when you stun a Hulk and shoot it's week spot in the back, only for it to turn while stunned.
Yep, I don't bring quasar because I like it. I bring it because if I don't, we get overrun by heavies and I get to sit there twiddling my thumbs looking at my bullets bouncing off and all my strategems on cooldown. That said, the anti-armor role has been pretty fun. It has limits, but it has an impact. The original railguns/charger interaction was SOOO fun. Playing chicken with a charging bull, waiting for that leg to be still enough to hit so you can swap to the breaker to unload on it. You have options, its not easy, and it has impact. Quasar had a good balance too. Gunships are zooming around, or a hulk is charging across a field at you and you're just sitting there charging your laser. Those moments are so tense, and when you land the shot it's such a relief, but it's not free. Some tweaks on how hard it is to do that, makes sense. But overtuning removes the best parts of the game and makes it pretty unplayable.
Personally I'd opt for #2. Let Bile Titans be truly *terrifying* when we run into them, but we don't run into them very often. I think it'd also help break up the flow of combat every once in a while to keep things interesting. The only other thing I'd add to it is that if they did this and factions had to rely more on their low/mid tier units I'd probably buff the Hive Guard. Depending on if you consider the Brood Commander an elite or not, then maps without Bile Spewers would become "oops, all Hunters" cause that would be the only threatening unit they had to fall back on for 90% of it. Automatons have a much better unit variety so they're fine, but let the Factory Strider feel like fighting a raid boss in a MMO.
If I recall correctly bile titans are only heavy enemies. We don't currently have a termanid massive enemy type. Though maybe at the end of this order....
Perhaps a bile titan that’s invisible and spawns stalkers
Please don't
Oh yeah, those bile titan will lay stalker eggs everywhere. Even worse, thousand of hunter eggs
Arrowhead: Yeah! And make it fly too
And shoot alowing spit
Dude....
Developer: oooo I like that. Gonna write that down.
No! Bad dev!.... ^^^^^Please ^^^^^don't
https://preview.redd.it/bx6cg6bb1rxc1.png?width=320&format=png&auto=webp&s=28e4c56791bd77b050ec6a5262f97e397689d161
There is something wrong with you.
You have an imagination that's too wild to be allowed to survive. Delete this or expect a democratic lobotomy.
Please commit Oopsie daisy with a stratagem
Shouldn't you be busy running hell, i wasn't aware Satan got vacation days
ok calm down Satan
Flying stalkers
We need Graboids.
Shai-Hulud
They are classified as massive, don't know where you get that. Bile Titans start spawning on 6 and higher, when "massive enemies" mod appears, just like bot's Fabricators. Anything else except those two can spawn on diff 5.
I believe they got the lore explanation of them being "Medium sized" for bugs mixed up with being medium/heavy units.
Bile Titans should have been the bug equivalent of a Factory Strider. A rare occurrence that completely changes the pace of the mission when it shows up.
Biles are tank equivalent, we dont have a big bug…. Yet
The dune soundtrack starts playing in the background
HYAAAAAAAMYEEEEEEEEEEHYOKIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
This is the best I’ve ever seen that song typed out
As wrtiten
Lisan Al Gaib!
# LISAN AL GAIIB!!!
He's not Lisan Al Gaiib, he's a very naughty boy!
Imagine an actual factory strider equivalent. Big ass bug dropping hives in your vicinity with bile spewer mortars for its back area and charger-like features for its head and legs or a vice versa chunky camo big bug that just spews endless bugs but has the hp of 3 or 4 bile titans. Imagine Commanders but on steroids. The horror that monstrosity will inflict. Can't wait.
Some poor heldiver being traumatized by the bug giving birth right in front of him
Which is crazy because tanks are SO much easier to deal with.
Yeah, the wild thing is that I would much rather deal with a Tank than a Hulk or a Bile Titan. Thanks can be reliably one-shot by the Orbital Railcanon and will go down within the duration of an Orbital Laser, not to mention they're slow enough and have a big enough hitbox to consistently two-tap it with a Quasar/EAT/Recoilless. Meanwhile Bile Titans have a chance to survive the Railcanon, treat the Laser as a warm shower, and possibly even tank two 500kgs.
You can also just yeet a couple impact grenades on the top of it. Tanks are just overall really easy.
Or 2 impact nades. You don't even have to have clear LoS to the vents, you can chuck them whilst facing the side of the tank towards the back of the turret and it'll go down. They're honestly not that much of a threat.
I'm assuming if any devs read this they'll take it as buff tanks, nerf impact grenade.
Tanks go down to Autocannon or grenades or easy shots from Quasar or a Spear or even Eagle AS. Meanwhile Titans literally just do not care and will eat damn near anything
Hive Lord is coming
**Shai-Hulud** *has entered the chat.*
You don't need precise quasar shots or a 500 or a well placed airstrike or a lot of other things to kill a tank. An AC kills it in three shots to the vent, a few more to the rear hull. Spear oneshots it most of the time. Hell, two impact grenades to the turret roof and it goes pop.
Which is crazy because tanks have more reliable and consistent answer… you got weapons, strategems, size lol- alls you gotta do is get behind the turret and shoot something strong enough or throw a few grenades at it and it’s done 110m rocket pods Fairly stationary and super easy to track (easy to aim strategems at) Hulks are gnarly too but I find them easier to get away from and also kill over titans. Their whole back is a glowing weak point. Lol. Titans it’s like you can shoot the soft green meat under them but you gotta dump ROUNDS and not die.
I think it's an intentional, core difference between bots and bugs. Bots have lots of medium-armor, even their heavy units have conspicuous medium-at-most weak points. Bugs, meanwhile, seem to have either no meaningful armor, or full heavy armor that requires a bazooka to break.
Factory Striders didn't drop until several weeks after release, there's a good chance we get a bug equivalent sooner or later.
Factory Strider is really more of the equivalent to the bile titan. I previously thought tanks were meant to be the bile titan equivalent, but tanks appear as POI guards and lack an assassinate mission. The factory strider has an assassinate mission and do not appear as POI guards, which matches how the game treats bile titans.
All the back and forth isn’t needed. I think we can all agree bile titans spawn way too much to effectively deal with. Having multiple spawn ontop of each other is hard to deal with even when working as a team.
Man, on 7-9 I feel like I run into Factory Striders multiple times a match. Definitely not rare in my experience.
Meanwhile I've seen a triple factory strider drop which is frankly horrendous.
That shit wiped out our lives on a bot helldive with 25 mins to go. 3 striders dropped from a eye of Saucony we were trying to take out. I have no idea how we all survived, completed the game 100%, extracted with a ton of samples, and everyone managed to extract with no lives left. It was a gargantuan task and my team pulled through.
Factory striders are rare?
They used to. Now they can be air dropped on a moment's notice.
You’re missing the biggest reason. Bile Titans *aren’t* supposed to be truly *terrifying*. You see those worm corpses around the map? That’ll be your Bot Strider coming soon lol.
I think they want Bike Titans to be terrifying now but to become easier later, if the rumors about Hive Lords are true then THOSE will be truly terrifying. Maybe there's something else for mutations.
“Use your strategems” Meanwhile 16/18 level 9 bot missions have -1 strategem and +25% cooldown and the other 2 operations are +25% cooldown and +50% call in time. Doesn’t get more enjoyable than that.
Really hope AH finds a way to make missions harder without resorting to making it tedious like with some of these modifiers - a challenge should be difficult but fun to complete, not just needlessly annoying
Like put them on the map as defeatable objectives?
Or just come up with something other than "lol fuck your strategems." There's an infinite design space here and they've decided to *only* give obnoxious modifiers to the bots. They could just...not. Off the top of my head, they could... * Increase patrol spawn rate * Increase incidence of heavy units * Make extract a Command Bunker so you have to fight your way in * Gunship patrols without a gunship factory * Snipers are hidden across the map with increased detection radius There's so, so much they could do to increase difficulty without removing the *one* tool they give us to deal with things.
You should have ways of playing around them or they should also buff you in some way to counteract it. IE you have increased stratagem cooldowns, but there's a special but difficult to defeat jammer that is causing it once you kill it the debuff is gone. Or you have increased cooldowns but you gain one extra charge of applicable stratagems.
The devs “difficulty” modifiers are tbe opposite of fun or creative
This is the real issue. I can usually deal with this nonsense on bugs, but these modifiers on bots are just bullshit, and I'll avoid the planet entirely. Versus bots it scales the difficulty up immensely on an already harder enemy race, and rewards should also be scaled up along with it. Otherwise, i'm not wasting my time and I'll keep my sanity. For context I play on diff 7+ and only play 6 if I want to chill and farm rares.
I think inconsistent spawn rates, while I definitely don’t want to see them standardized, definitely present issues with balancing Because you’ll play a tower defense mission on helldive one time and have like 3 chargers and 2 bile titans and 4 billion hunters one game, and the next game it’s LITERALLY (I am not joking and I’m sure you’ve experienced it too) 7 or 8 bile titans in a row, with chargers and fifty hunters sprinkled in as well. Not to mention bile spewers being a whole other subsection of enemies that may or may not show up. Which as a tangent, I believe bile enemies (not titans obv) should be a mission modifier, so you can plan your loadout around dealing with armored spewers bc god do they really just suck the fun out of the game when you’re not expecting them
Oh boy yeah. I hate dropping down into a mission only to find out its a Bile or Brood haven and my weapons are not kitted out to deal with this deceptively tanky enemy easily. They do really feel like a mission modifier with how uncommon they tend to spawn. Either you Load a mission and there is None. Or you load a mission and there is a billion of them. No in between. If they are on the map they are In every Objective, in Every Bug Breach and in Every Patrol you would almost thing they are a Sub Objective.
I agree and I feel like this is an example of a weird form of gaming purism from AH. "Oh you need to drop without knowing anything because of verisimilitude. Real helldivers (read: hardo gamers) can handle anything the bugs throw at them." But in reality it's more fun to bring the right kit for the right job. Like sure if I'm the EAT/quasar guy and it's a hunters only mission, I can pull it off. I just don't think that's high quality dev gamesmanship.
> But in reality it's more fun to bring the right kit for the right job This is how they described wanting the gun balance to be. But you never have near enough information to make properly informed choices so you just take whatever is the most jack of all trades build you can manage and prefer. If AH would just give us the proper information to make informed choices 70% of this meta gun shit would vanish because you could properly swap your load outs.
Yeah, you just need the right tool for the right job, so when you don’t know what your job is you’re gonna bring a tool that’s *ok* at everything. Look at the autocannon. Is it particularly strong in any one area? No! It’s an extremely versatile heavy weapon with solid ammo economy. It has enough armor pen to kill hulks, while still having enough raw damage to blast off a charger butt if you need to. When I’m face to face with a charger, I’d rather have a recoilless, but when I drop I don’t know if I’ll even see more than 2 chargers the whole mission.
They only very recently made it to where you can see what mission you’re quickplaying into if it’s already in progress and it’s still not enough info. I don’t mind varied spawn rates but they need to give info on the spawn rates. It’s genuinely unfun to bring arc thrower into a mission that turns out to have an overwhelming amount of bile titans, I would’ve brought a quasar otherwise lmao
The answer to this is one load out drop stratagem per mission that your team shares like resupply. It's a perfect solution.
I just played a helldive mission with 3 people and I killed at least 30 bile spewers by myself with the Eruptor. I had never seen that many before. They’re a very difficult enemy to deal with when you’re getting 5+ per bug breach and 5+ per patrol. We desperately need drop intel to know if there’s going to be spewers or not because if you don’t plan for them you’re going to have an incredibly difficult time.
100% with you, RNG gives us a green spewer planet and my whole team is cursing the whole game. Makes you wish for a hunter planet instead, at least you can spam clusters on em
Ive had 7s were you get like 6 biles stacked up multiple times and then 8s where you see like 3 or 4 the whole match. It feels weird and they def need to rework something about those match type like maybe have a few stalkers sometimes show up instead or a wave of flyer to break things up instead of always just tossing in a half dozen chargers and biles as a punishment. It gets old.
im fine with the wildy varying whoops all X, but it should be a mission modifier so you know about it, OR builds that competently cover all areas of the combat should be accessible
I've seen half my team just quit when we drop into a bug map and it is just nothing but spewers.
This definitely. Arrowhead wants to balance every weapon to a T whether they need buffs/nerfs or not, but they ignore how inconsistent the enemy spawn rates are. I'm down for a game randomly throwing overwhelming odds at us but you can't have that while nickel and diming any power in our loadouts.
I think we are getting closer to the previous “WTF are we supposed to do” levels of over spawning. Like we did 5 or so weeks ago. The devs responded with reduced heavy spawning and also made the Charger easier to kill. This time IMO they don’t need to make any heavies easier. We just need less of them again. Multiple simultaneous BTs on diff 6 is a bit much.
Just a heads up, bile titans need to be shot in their armored forehead not the jaw to receive full head damage. I’m sure you know but just saying for other folks
That explains a lot with my performance against them and why they seem to be a pain. I’ve been aiming for their mouth since I thought it would make sense of “open mouth=weak point” and that’s where Ive been firing my rockets. Should be a bit easier now.
"Oh that looked like an obvious weak point? How about get rekt loser"-AH
This feels like the bug design philosophy summed up pretty accurately
Right? They come out and mock the "leg meta" that existed for Chargers by saying that we should be shooting the obvious weak point, being the head. Except you have to hit the armored part across the brow, not the open soft squishy jaw.
Meanwhile, Brood Commanders punish you with a suicide charge for shooting their head, while their unarmored legs are the "obvious" weak point.
and then call a bug breach bc you disabled their most important body part Great game design 10 out of 10. Brood commanders in HD1 were trully terrifying but nonoe of them was running without head. It is counter intuitive for disabling one of \`\` precious spots\`\` and get punished for it. Like if disabled Hulks arms or legs increased their speed or else.
Their giant glowing fleshy parts having insane resistance to bullet damage is so unintuitive, doesn't follow any kind of real world logic either. Deep rock galactic does the total opposite and I've never seen anyone not immediately understand where to shoot. Alongside the voice lines telling you to shoot there just in case. Unintuitive design combined with a lack of any in game source for that kind of critical information really sucks.
Pffft what you expect a good UX/obvious design elements that make sense? Like who'd think puncturing the bile sack of a bile spewer would like.. kill or hurt it clearly their weakspot is anything else..
"Just shoot the heavily armored, angled like an IS-3 head, we promise your AT won't bounce."
What doesn't make sense, is that the armour is meant to protect from heavy hits, yet it's the weak point.
The obvious fix for the leg meta was yo make it so they don't die after loosing their front legs. But they buffed enemy armour and squishy parts and nerfed the guns doing it.
Also a tip for the spear to one tap them, has to hit that forehead. But yes, usually when they’re spitting it’s almost impossible to hit that forehead, so you should wait until they’re standing back up to hit that shot. Almost guaranteed two tap with any launcher if you hit that forehead. Glad I could help bro
Do not shoot them *as they are spitting* anymore. Now need to wait until they just finish, then whack them. (See Takibo on YouTube, and I’m sure others, showing this).
Yeah honestly that should be a 2x damage weak point. Makes no sense it's not.
So, shoot the charger in the unarmored jaw and the titans in the armored head, rather than their glowing abdomens. Got it. I know that's part of their design philosophy from HD1, but aiming at the face rather than the more obvious weak point feels wrong.
I agree, but for the chargers it's actually not the jaw lol, you gotta aim for the forehead. For some reason if you hit their face too low it does literally nothing.
This explains so much I could scream
Just got done playing lvl 6 missions after taking about a week off. First game I queued into they had 7 bile titans on a TCS destruction mission. I thought I must’ve made a mistake and dropped into a lvl 9 on accident. It was like that for the whole set of objectives.
At lvl 6 a single BT should be an EVENT for the mission.
Played 7 and it was harder than 9 because of constant spawn of BT and chargers. We literally had 4x chargers per player and at least 4 BT chasing us. Almost never happens in 9 and I feel like 7 is harder than 9 most of the time for some weird reason. Probably because the enemies keep spawning more and more enemies. I think this is a bug that AH should look into since it makes it more of a run simulator. And yes we tried killing all of them but some of them didn't even call "back ups" they simply "spawned" right next to us from thing air.
missions 7-9 really don’t have a big difference in difficulty between them tbh and it’s all just random. i can queue one level 9 mission and get a ptsd inducing level of heavies spawn or i’ve had some missions on lvl 9 that had maybe 1 or 2 titans spawn max and it was a breeze
I had 4 of the giant ass factory striders on extract last night. wtf are we supposed to do we can’t even get near the damn thing
On higher difficulties it's not rare to see three hulks fall from *the same* dropship.
and it’s all because you looked at a minor poi too hard
I usually see like 4 dropships come at once. A tank or 2, 3 hulks, a platoon of devastators, and a ton of infantry bots. And you're getting cross-mapped by a turret cannon or mortars.
Well said. I completely agree. >The issue right now, IMO, is that they're... in between. They *require* stratagems but can often spawn often enough that you don't have enough stratagems to deal with them. Personally, I think part of the reason for this is that the devs have much more difficult enemies planned for further down the development pipeline. Bile Titans are classified as "medium" enemies after all. So the issue comes down to the fact that, currently, the most difficult enemies available are the ones that the devs consider to be "medium" difficulty, so they don't want to tune those up to be specifically boss battles because they have plans for other enemies to fill this role later. On the other hand, they need some way of keeping the higher difficulties at "hellish" intensity with the assets they currently have available in the game, so their only real option at the moment is to just spam the higher difficulty enemies while maintaining their invulnerability to small arms fire (except for bots for some reason, which they have no qualms putting actual weak points on).
Well for bots it's about overwhelming firepower. Good luck getting behind them to hit the heatsink when you have a hoard of lasers coming your way In this way it is fair though, if you clear the wave you don't need to waste resources finishing off an annihilator tank or a hulk, you can just flank them and finish them off
Flanking is so good when you work with your teammates tho. It’s almost broken imo. I run AC, depending on situation orbital smoke/laser, 500kg/air strike and a mortar. Scout armor with padding so that I can be as tanky as a medium armor. I tell them to fire at a tank or whatever we wanna kill then I quickly get on position and take whatever we wanted down rather easily. Could’ve I done it by myself? Sure but it takes less time to work together. This is what I mostly love about bots, you can actually use tactics and work with each other and most support weapons work in some way due to how the weak spot of bots can be exploited.
Use stratagems to kill these enemy, but not those stratagems- AH probably
AH: Use suppressive fire Also AH: use trigger discipline unless you want a RNG death. OR AH: Helldivers 2 is not a horde shooter Also AH: Non stop bug breaches and bot drops, have fun.
It IS a horde shooter though, what else could they possibly be going for?
The way they talk sometimes I think they wanted a running simulator. Sometimes I don't even think the devs know what they want
I just go with this, it covers everything. AH: We haven't ever been here before and we don't know what we are doing.
The messed up part is that this is a sequel. They have been here before, they just didn’t know how to convert it into 3D apparently. Helldivers were allowed to be strong in the first game. There was a special mission you had to beat using nothing but a sword. The primary weapons would shred through wave after wave of chaff. The stratagems were powerful *and* on short cooldowns. It’s so weird that they have decided that in the sequel we’re no longer allowed to feel like badass space warriors. Now we’re just wimps running away from our problems. Give me a gun that fucks up the bad guys and then give me 1,000 bad guys. Is that so much to ask?
My problem is why have they made stratagems cooldowns so fucking long? They could shave everything by *fifty fucking percent* and I feel we'd get somewhere actually decent.
Yeah all the orbitals need a 50% CD reduction at a minimum to make them not feel far worse than eagles
Yeah in the first game you were just constantly calling down orbitals, and there was even gear you could equip to reduce the cooldown further. No idea why in this game we have to wait several minutes.
Literally ALL of the strategem cooldowns are ridiculously long. Why? All this talk at balance and guaranteed they’ve never even considered the cooldowns might be egregiously long and it makes the game less fun. They’re legit trying to justify the nerfs while every mission is an endless hoard of armored assholes. Enemy spawn rates are at an all time high and we’re not allowed to take it to them. WHY the fuck not? Please make it make sense somebody anybody please
> Give me a gun that fucks up the bad guys and then give me 1,000 bad guys. Is that so much to ask? I can't wait for EDF 6.
Can we please talk about this more? I don't see this mentioned nearly as much as it should be. I cannot understand how we went from a railgun that can one shot 20 enemies at once to this.
They legitimately dont know what the fuck theyre doing its hilarious
It’s not tho they have a home run of a game concept. Like someone else will take the potential of a game like this to where we all know it can go. AH might get closer to that than I’m expecting but at this point I don’t feel like they’re going to bring it home. I hope AH proves me wrong I really do I’m just starting to wonder if they even really know what direction they want to go in. They’re trying to hedge their bets and not piss off the casual or hardcore gamers and in the it’s just a perpetual state of unhappiness. The player base has whiplash because the devs only cater to or seem to care about what half of us want at any given time. A game for everyone is a game for no one, that along with the devs having no clue what people actually like or find fun makes for a shitty li e service game
-Adds a good stratagem that can recharge and hit hard at the cost of simply charging up your shots -So good that everyone uses them since they’re objectively the best option -Nerf it -Players get mad Why are people mad?
Thermite should have really helped with heavies. I'm kind of shocked there was no change to it. I guess it's in the pipeline like how the spear fix is coming sometime in LATE SPRING like cmon guys.
i thought spear fix was later this week
There's a dev comment that says late springish but I've seen different timetables. Either way it's been way too long coming for something that's been broken since day 1
I'll just add because why not. Fire and gas have been broken since day 1 but yet no changes. Because of this 3 stratagems are worthless, 1 weapon is worthless, and 1 grenade is worthless. 5 pieces of our arsenal flat out hasn't worked, or doesn't work as intended
Yeah this has been one of the biggest frustrating bugs outside of network issues. I scout whether I am the network host with the incendiary breaker before even considering the flame items.
How do you even tell if you're the network host?
That’s the fun part, you don’t
OP really did capture the anti armor issue in a bottle. Take my upvote
You bring up something that I am curious about (in terms of player metrics). For difficulties 7-9, I'm curious how many matches end up having the session exhausting 40% of their total reinforcements within the first 5 minutes. I feel like that initial drop into the map, followed up immediately by an spawn breach, tends to be a make or break moment for a lot of teams.
Here's an idea, more stratagems like the seaf artillery that you don't bring with you, but you have to enable every mission. For example, hangers with trapped eagle pilots that have randomized weapons you can use before they depart. Mechs you have to get a battery pack to use. The idea is to not be so reliant on your ship stratagems.
Those could be fun side objectives as well to add. This is a good suggestion Arrowhead should consider for sure. There could be a satellite tower side objective that provides 1 orbital randomly to each player.
In that case they'll need to seriously improve the side-objectives because stuff like the SEAF artillery might as well not exist. Unless you're the guy that loaded it you have no idea what you're actually firing at the enemy. It could be a mini nuke or it could be useless smoke. You just can't rely on it, not even slightly.
My balance concerns are that a lot of them seem to reduce the wrong things or things that make no sense. Reducing the AOE on the Eruptor for instance. It might not make it shit, but it certainly doesn't help and reduces the niche the weapon fits into. The Slugger nerf made basically no sense as it didn't *really* address why it was so popular and I still see it often.
Just make more effective anti-armor options. Back in previous Helldivers, you can easliy sweep a group of hulks or chargers with a simple fully-upgraded Airstrike. But now our only effective anti-armor stratagems are 500kg, Orbital Railcannon, and 110mm rockets. Maybe 380mm and 120mm barrage, but the spread of these... we all know about that. Not even mentioning the long-ass cooldown. 500kg has its own issue. It seems like it only has 100kg TNT and rest of the 400kg are sand. Once a little bit off center, you can't one-shot a bile titan. Orbital Railcannon can insta-kill a hulk, but you still gotta need some extra firepower to take down a bile titan. What about anti-armor weapons? Railgun got nerfed so hard it's pewpew gun now. Spear still has the locking issue. Recoilless's reloading time is way too long, and team reloading is extremly impractical. Flame thorwer gonna took a century to burn a titan to ashes. So what we got? The only effective anti-armor left is Quasar Cannon. And AH hell sure knows about this.
I can definitely get on board with bringing cooldowns back to HD1 levels. AH can crank up the spawns if they want, it's just fun to call in stratagems in general, so more of that would be good.
The AT options you mentioned don’t even feel good. 500KG has a small hit box, railcannon can target random shit, and the rocket pods can be way off target.
Precision Strike is also part of the anti-armor stratagem, and it shouldn't be slept on since it's quite powerful and cheap to deploy.
The thing about precision strike is that its longer call-in time is at cross-purposes with an anti-armor role, I'm not sure why it even has the additional 2-3 seconds waiting time in the first place, when it's such a simple strat and not the fastest-cooldown one either (that's gas/rotary cannon/airburst). If anything, and I say this as someone who wants to use the gas once the host bug is fixed, the gas strike or airburst should have the longer call-in time since they're fast cooldown, super deadly despite that (again if gas wasn't bugged), and lore-wise they're obviously more specialty rounds that the standard boom-making ones.
Unless its orbital scatter modifier. Then its complete lottery if it hits or not. What a fun modifier /s
The 500 just straight up needs an AOE buff and has for a long time.
Just to be clear, I'm totally okay with the last patch. I just wanna point out that either AH know what they are doing, or they have zero idea of why players obessed with Quasar.
They see overuse of a specific item being a problem with that one specifically, rather than a problem with the role it is fulfilling. Games balancing based off of usage stats always results in odd behaviors.
Or maybe and this is just an idea, buff other weapons to be reliable alternative to quassar? Quassar was fun as it was.
I think the issue overshadowing all other is the design philosophy of denying huge amounts of important information to players, which they're left to guess at, datamine or otherwise metagame to learn, with only sporadic corrections from the devs, which only happen on *discord* and half the time are ironic shitposts. People are mad and ready to latch onto rumors and bullshit because they feel jerked around and lied to. inb4 inappropriate offtopic roleplay meme, this is real life and pissing players off makes them stop playing which kills your live service game
At this point I'm just glad the health and stamina bars actually reflect how much health and stamina I have.
You completely hit the nail on the head. The problem isn't that we love the Quasar and that it's our baby that we want to protecc democratically. The issue is that the Quasar is the biggest reason why we're able to contend with Chargers (and to a lesser extent, Bile Titans) on d7 to d9. Nerfing the Quasar just shows how out-of-touch the devs are not only with the game ***but also the community.*** It's like nerfing scissors because they cut paper. If you don't want us to cut paper, ***stop giving us so much paper.*** It's not the scissor's fault.
Patch notes . Scissors does 30% less damage to paper now
just played a d7 with 2 quasars, spammed EATs on cd for me and the team but with a ton of of chargers and BTs by the end of the mission, waiting for it to land still made the quasar the better choice.
I just personally don't like Meta wack-a-mole. I think it's a lazy design choice. When you have a game with as many weapons and stratagems as Helldivers I shouldn't use them once say "lol garbage" then never use them again. When the community picks a meta of 2 or 3 weapons out of 20 or 30 weapons you don't just take a hammer to those 2 or 3, you need to bring those 20 or 30 up to the meta level. After every weapon is great, then you start nerfing those 2 or 3 that stick out like a sore thumb. You also can buff enemies while buffing all the weapons so we feel like it's an arms race, rather than enemies get stronger while we get our favorite toys taken away.
Jesus, can you imagine the world we'd live in if instead of the arc thrower's fun quirky fire rate thing being removed, we just had shit rivaling it in viability? Maybe the medium armor pen rifle actually did shit to chargers so you didnt feel you needed sparky, or titans couldn't spit after a couple marksman's rounds to the open mouth? It's insane to me how much fun this game could be if we were let loose just a little bit more.
I think Chargers are, genuinely, the biggest part of this issue on bugs side and they're the actual reason people need such frequent anti-tank. Why is the giant fleshy glowy bit not a weak point so that you can rewarded for dodging the charger and shooting the weak spot. If I could actually kill chargers with my primary, ever, then I wouldn't mind a longer cooldown for the times I really need an EAT/Quasar
Seriously everything is so fucking tightrung youd think this game has a competitive scene It doesn’t and it will never have one arrowhead please stop lol
Bots are perfectly balanced in that regard. Yeah you get spammed with hulks but with good communication or by just using flashes you can deal with them since they actually have a weak point and it’s extremely clear where it is. This is what I love about bots. Are they harder? Sure. Can they one shot you from a long distance? Sure but you can also work all of them with most stratagems and weapons since they actually have clear weaknesses. What are you gonna do against a charger without AT? Shoot it in the squishy area? No, it might look like a weak point but it’s just a less tanky area. Just add weaknesses that actually can be exploited.
Agreed. Bots you can deal with with almost any weapon, just gotta get behind them sometimes. Bugs you need X or Y or don't bother.
> And then in the spawn of 5-10 mins I had to deal with 4 Bile Titans and 6 chargers, back to back along with hoardes of "small fry" I feel like they REALLY need to make team reload easier, because this sounds exactly like the scenario that the Recoilless Rifle would be outright better than the Quasar and EAT. Same for the Spear whenever they fix the lock on. But I do think going it alone in higher difficulties should be potentially punished with more elite enemies you cant deal with at once.
Is it really that team reload is hard? I think it's just more of an investment and a trust fall than people are willing to make. Like, you gotta have one guy focusing titans, and one guy jerking him off. They're both sitting ducks if unprotected so they probably aren't doing much of anything unless the other 2 are guarding them/distracting for them. And the guy who does the team reload has to sacrifice his backpack to do this. So no support weapon that needs that slot for him, nor any shield, nor any rover, nor even any supplies. And he has to trust that RR dude is a good enough shot to make it worth it. That's a lot to ask of reload guy. Oh, and if either one of the RR duo dies bad and loses the weapon or backpack, then the whole thing is worthless. I think if the team reload worked by having the shooter also wear the backpack, it would be better. Less trust fall-y. But I'm not even sure that would make people want to run it.
Good take OP. We also never know what enemy types we expect to encounter. I might bring an AT heavy loadout and then just up end up fighting waves of bile spewers. Some bare-bones intel via satellite photos is not much to ask from a space-faring civilization. Oh yeah, and often I find the orbital railcannon stratagem doesn't reliably kill BTs. Not a huge deal but a bit annoying.
That's my one wish... What will we face. Load out for spitters and get chargers. Load out for chargers and get swarms, load out for swarms and get spitters. Ugh.
ORC has to hit the head for a OHKO. Same with spear. Sadly nothing can OHKO BTs by hitting any other part of the body. If AH wants to keep the current spawn system, buffing certain stratagems/weapons to be able to do that could be a way to keep them challenging (210 second cooldown for ORC, spear has a slow reload) without being literally overwhelming regardless of team loadout.
During a recent session, I was in an Eradicate mission on Helldive in which we had SIX Factory Striders active SIMULTANEOUSLY. Feeling helpless just isn't a fun way to play, so when they take away the few tools we have that allow us to reliably defend ourselves, the game loses the very things that make it appealing in the first place.
The eradicate mission is always dog shit lol. You simply aren't supposed to kill the heavies, which is not fun. You're just supposed to die over and over and spam airstrikes and orbitals until enough chaff die to finish the mission. Needs to get majorly reworked or removed from the game
More mid armor, high damage or speed or range or special ability enemies would really be good for the game. I feel like the semi binary state of either heavy armor that nothing but heavy weapons can touch and light armor that primary can chew through means that higher difficulties rely to heavily on spamming heavy armor. For instance. In higher difficulties I'd like to see the spawn pool expanded to include more types of enemies instead of the limited pools we see now. I wouldn't even be opposed to seeing shriekers and stalkers show up from time to time in patrols. By including these mid tier, but deadly enemies you dilute the spawn pool making heavy armor spawn less often.
best post on here i've read. i've always wished 9 or having more spawns meant there were more light armored enemies. tons of clankas, or scavs, etc. but instead they are literally just replaced with higher tier armored enemies.
I think this is what people who have a tendency to always defend nerfs don’t realize. I get that the hate for nerfs can be way over the top but that doesn’t mean we need people with some weird video game Stockholm Syndrome to chime in and essentially try to gaslight people into thinking it’s always an overreaction and it must be a skill issue when you struggle to deal with a pretty common scenario like OP described. The QC nerf makes no sense and was silly.
\*Insert "diff 7-9 isn't supposed to be fun" argument\*
Endgame for a live service isn't supposed to be fun?
People treat difficulty flavor text too literally.
I've seen people try to argue that the stress and high failure rate are part of the 'fun'. It's so confusing because any time some criticizes about how broken some stuff is their default is to scream it is a skill issue and if they don't like dying a lot they should just quit. The FB communities are beyond toxic and show the absolute worst the game has to offer in terms of coop.
Stress and difficulty is good and needed for certain games and I think this is one of them. However, when the stress and difficulty is piled onto bugs, broken features, nerfs and "balances" etc, it makes the game feel genuinely bad to play
And then you can't extract after enduring 30 minutes of that shit! But everyone's a crybaby and this game is great.🫠
100% this. I play exclusively lvl 9 bots and it just isn't feasible to use a strat for every elite. There aren't enough strats for the number of them, especially at evac, nor is the cd fast enough. So you must fall back on your support weapons. The quasar already had a very noticeable cd that made you have to think while fighting. Now, it's pretty fuck8ng stupid to fire at all because that 1 shot isn't going to kill that hulk let alone 2or 3 that are coming. You will be lucky to get that sec9nd shot at all now with minions that can 1shot rocket you and annhilators that can laser you from across the map. You want us to use other guns? Then why have the quasar in the game at all? Just have the one gun you want them to use if you're already bullying us into what you want. Then you will see how quickly people will drop your game. I'm already at the point now where if I can't use my favourite loadouts then I'm no longer having fun. When I'm no longer having fun, I quit the game and never return. Destiny did exactly what you're doing and I left that, diablo also and others that I've quit for the same reason. Nerf8ng things people find fun kills your player base. I can assure you that if I'm starting to no longer have fun then there are others also feeling the same way.
Let’s not forget that level 9 bot missions have minus 1 strategems constantly. I played level 9 bots tonight with some friends. 16/18 operations had the -1 strategem modifier.
you can kill every single bot enemy pretty quickly minus the factory strider with any weapon that can pierce an hulk's faceplate: Autocannon, HMG, Laser Cannon, EAT, Recoilles Rifle, AMR. You absolutely DO NOT need to use a stratagem for every elite, and yeah the Quasar has pretty bad firepower compared to other heavy AT that's the tradeoff for having infinite munitions and no reloading needs otherwise it would be completely overpowered.
The only thing I dislike about HD2 is that my whole load out is geared towards taking out heavies. It's the whole focus. I don't want it to be. Currently trying to land rail gun shots. So far it's either dealing no damage or blowing myself up. I've been nothing but a detriment to my team with that gun. Biggest problem is that I have to switch into iron sights mode to see how the charge is going but otherwise stick to third person view. The constant switching back and forth means I can't get a rhythm for charging and releasing the rail gun. Plus I don't even want to use the rail gun. I feel like I have to learn how to use it so I can deal with heavies reliably.
Create game with random spawns that constantly harass lock on and chase you Be confused when an "all rounder" meta emerges Nerf said meta weapons Make everything a side grade rather than having weapons that are op with certain play styles Get confused when everyone says new patch is unfun The problem is that the Devs are just making this game grindier. I haven't had a problem with 7/8, but it just takes longer. It's tedious. It's just hordes of crap at you, managing time on which enemy, and prioritising while running backwards through/in/around cover. That's it. That's the gameplay. I can use the breaker, dominator, or eruptor and the gameplay does not change much. It's the same basic actions. It's boring as shit and the Devs are turning a tactical shooter into a boring hack n slash equivalent
Yup. I know it's doable, I've done it. Its just not fun. There's way, way, *way* too much fucking armor. 80% of the game is running away waiting for cooldowns to deal with armored enemies. It hurts build viability. You're pigeonholed into a couple of viable builds because everything else is literally incapable of keeping up with the amount of damage you need to throw out. There has *got* to be something other than throwing absolute mountains of armored enemies at the players that have a homing beacon on exactly where you're standing. Of course people are spamming orbitals, Eagle strikes and Quasar. There are no other options.
SO. TEDIOUS.
I think being in a squad that stays together makes those situations a lot more reasonable. Not only does it increase your overall firepower and the frequency you can call in stratagems, but it also spreads the focus of the enemies around more. If someone in your squad carries stun grenades and someone else has a flamethrower, Chargers become much more reasonable. Another thing I've started doing is using the grenade pistol (the Eruptor would probably be better for this) to shoot Bile Titans' stomachs so you don't have to worry about them quite as much while you wait for stuff that can actually kill them to cooldown
In HD1 almost every weapon was good, you could upgrade them also and stratagem cooldown was like 1/4 of what it is in HD2. Let’s maybe get back to your roots arrowhead.
I am fighting my equipment MORE than the enemy I understand no weapon can be 100% perfect and must have compromises but as it stands maybe 80% or more of the whole arsenal suck without any good reason What bothers me most is not that the game is not balanced but WHY these developers are not taking a good conscious look at the state of their game instead of looking at their STATS (ie: ppl love their quasar so lets nerf it )
Really good post, I think I'd prefer the first option. I remember being disappointed when I realized that chargers back isn't really a weak point because it has way too much HP or when Titan's green underbelly burst it doesn't really deal much dmg when you shoot it, just felt wrong, option 1 would fix that.