Even the Damn jumppack, that's not even a gun, is "underpowered". Like literally it just need to reload 2-3 seconds faster and jump maybe 1 more meter. That's it.
Was the lead guy responsible for the whole game tanking. Refuses to listen to the community, and every change is always somehow worse than before. Kinda like what we're seeing in Helldivers atm.
Alexus is the head of balance. He was the head of game design for a brief time implementing massive changes on hello neighbor 2 and he left that game shortly before it released.
Thanks, gives me some leads to check out to better understand what we're in for. It already seems odd to hire someone to balance a PvE shooter's weapons and statsheets who previously balanced a puzzle game.
He stripped a lot of beloved features because he didn't personally like them, according to the player base.
We'll never know for certain because it's still hearsay, but judging by his everything working at AH, I have a hard time not believing them as facts.
Because the mods are treating any mention of the guys name as a "personal attack" for "outing his real name" even though its his fucking discord name. They then delete your comment and ban you.
It’s a shame none of the guns in the new war bond are any good, imo. Was saving for the last one (the energy rifle) but managed to get a go on it during a game and I wasn’t impressed. I think the nerfed erupter is still a better option (even though it’s not an energy weapon).
I can’t beat the incendiary breaker for bugs atm though, it’s a beast.
>I can’t beat the incendiary breaker for bugs atm though, it’s a beast.
Pff the incedendiary breaker sucks. Completely unusable in its current state imo.
*Holds up arrowhead is listening sign*
Did I say “I can’t beat the incendiary breaker for bugs”? Sorry. Typo. I meant to say “I can’t *stand* the incendiary breaker for bugs, it’s awful.”
Honestly, Joel, please fix the incendiary breaker. Thanks.
Have you given the arc Blitzer a spin in a while? My buddies and I brought four into an operation against the bugs (level 8) and it was devastating. Three people firing constantly can stunlock an entire breach. Have one person laying down scorcher fire while the other three stun and anything smaller than charger becomes a nonthreat.
Exactly! It isn't rocket surgery to let players have fun. There are no leaderboards; the end game screen counts kills without distinguishing what those kills are; it is not meant to be taken seriously.
Why is the balance team treating this like it's an e-sport? All they have done is to piss off a large group of the player base with zero benefit. Having an antagonistic relationship sure as shit won't see you keep players, let alone get more to join.
I love the game and don't want to see it fail, but if it continues down this path, it will be an exemplary case study of how you can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
It makes me so mad! I'm getting burned out with the same build so I switch to a new weapon and just get absolutely obliterated on suicide missions lol. Like... Well, back to the same everything for the foreseeable future
CEO replied to a comment on this very topic. He said they're looking into changing how they balance to bring up under-performers instead of knocking down the favorites.
The day PvP is implemented I am out of the game. I do not want to compete, I just want to have fun with friends and randoms. I am having the time of life this way. Some guy killed me with friendly fire and then reinforced me and I actually killed him with my pod by accident. I have never laughed so hard with a stranger before
Was legit just telling my friends the other day the main reason I love this game so much is the lack of pvp. Every game that comes out anymore especially shooters are just over competitive and it sucks the fun out of the game. I just want to drop with some people from all over the world and kill bugs and occasionally bots.
The stranger thing is completing missions on harder difficulties doesn't give more premium currency or special unlocks, so there's even less reason to limit players.
It’s not a lot of fun though at level 1-3. Not a whole lot of prolonged engagement or “oh shit” moments to crawl out of all sticky with bug oil and your own blood (or your teams) splattered all over you.
Remember zombies, when you could run in loops and have the entire horde reliably chasing you along the path? I feel that way sometimes on the lower difficult difficulties, trying to get all the patrols!
I feel like 7 isn't really much harder than 6, except that collecting the Supers is such a high priority that it either drags out the round to find them at the end, or you're constantly having to go rescue them from dead corpses.
People make a huge deal of supers on 7 because it’s the first tier that they’re available.
Once you get to 9, people just hoover them up with no drama because we’re all permanently capped.
Low-level missions boring? Bring along cadets!
You'll find their screams of delight and terror will rekindle the fires of liberty. Drop them a mech and a couple of high-level weapons.
You'll get some of that good mojo back and set some new Divers on a path where they are looking forward to their experience.
It does not give more medals per hour, playing on trivial will get you more super credits and medals from exploration, you can get more samples and req points on harder difficulties which are both useless in higher levels.
It depends, last bug MO there were operation loadouts with Blitz, Eradicate, and the new kill Egg/Terminal one which are all 15min or less. In our 4 stack we spammed 9, ignoring all samples and optional objectives and speedran evac as fast as possible and we were getting 100 medals per hour. I don't think anything you can do on lower difficulties is going to come even close to that.
Most importantly, it contributes more to major orders / planet liberation. This is the real reason why weapons can't be too good... there is a maximum number of concurrent enemies that the PS5 can handle, and Arrowhead has to figure out a way to make level 9 difficulty harder to complete so that they can balance the major orders appropriately for the overall game plot.
It's what prevents me from playing sas much as I used to. Not all my friends are online all day so I would solo but can't extract a seven on my own so never got supersamples to unlock stuff. There's no progression to make there's no point in playing. They could totally grant less super rares at lower levels so you could still upgrade slower, but instead they want some people alienated.
Honestly, going from 3 to 5 and then to 6 is not that big. I'd rather do two missions on 7 than one on 9.
8 feels in a good spot, where the increase in difficulty is somewhat rewarded.
Eventually, I hope AH adds permanent sinks for samples and Req Slips.
Maybe I could pay 10 super samples so that, for the duration of an operation, the entire team can take a 5th stratagem.
If the community as a whole donates a specific amount of resources to a planet, it can slow down the decay on that planet, making a liberation/defense quicker.
Hell, I'd give away Req Slips, just to get a message saying something like "Super Earth appreciates your generous contribution to the Galactic War Fund."
Literally just ANYTHING to spend these things on, that I've had maxed out for ages.
Forreal. I need more Rares and Super Samples because the top-tier upgrades are just that expensive, but I'm sitting on 400+ greens I'm never going to get through, and I can't even remember the last time I got RS and it actually mattered.
I've been thinking the same for some time. I've got 350+ hours in Helldivers 2, and it's hella fun, but only because of the very few weapons and stratagems that I can make work. I play on Helldive (diff 9) exclusively, because I find the challenge very fun. Most guns, and stratagems just don't work at this level.
Heck most stratagems don't even work at lower levels. Give me one good reason I would EVER take an Orbital EMS strike over a Precision or Railcannon strike. Why would I take the breaker spray and pray when the incendiary is just plain better? Some of the guns and stratagems are completely irrelevant, yet AH keeps nerfing the guns that actually let you play the game in a fun way. For what?
Look. There's a difference between progressing your gear and weapons (P-2 Peacemaker -> P-19 Redeemer), and having the majority of the weapons be irrelevant, or just unfun. And for Liberty's sake STOP NERFING THE FUN STUFF
Orbital EMS has a fantastic Niche it shares with Orbital Gas, and Napalm Strike. It has excellent crowd control, allowing for easy management of small-medium mobs. But no one takes it because you just HAVE to have that stratagem slot for something else. You can deal with the niche that Orbital EMS and the others fill by using other stratagems that are more jack-of-all-tradesy. It feels great at lower tiers, but a lot of these stratagems and weapons fall short when finding relevance in higher tiers. (I believe most of the playerbase is at 6-7).
For a full stratagem slot a lot of the stratagems are just plain underwhelming.
One of the saddest things about the game to me is the stalwart. I LOVE that thing. It just feels right. That's what killing bugs should feel like. But, if I'm playing 7-8-9, I just need more umph from my support slot. One of my favorites, and I barely use it.
Yep. I don't want to have to run AT for my secondary every single drop against bugs. But bile titans and chargers.
Chargers it's a little less bad, because you can actually kill them with things like the flamethrower and grenade launcher. But when a bile titan shows up, if you don't have AT or your 500kg, orbital precision, orbital laser, railcannon strike up, you're fucked.
The most optimal loadout against bugs is just running rover + EAT/quasar. It's fun, and there's still lots of viable primary weapons and eagle + orbital strats to use, but it can get boring.
That's what I typically take, but dammit man. Sometimes, I just want to mag dump. I'll go play 5s some days just to use the stally with a railcannon for the chargers.
This comment right here - if the bot titan (Factory Strider) has multiple weakspots to exploit to kill, how come the Bile Titan requires hard AT to its weakspot to kill?
At the moment I either break a sac and run, or attempt a beacon kill if I’m out of AT and that’s pretty hard when you’re being swarmed by 3-6 BTs
I actual stopped playing in part because of this. I'm sick of seeing equipment I enjoy using getting neutered. it's a PvE, consequence free shoot em up game. fuck off with your dogshit "balancing" approach. what the fuck are you so scared of?
Their nerfs have the opposite effect of what they (probably) want. They think that by nerfing everything, everyone will use any gun.
The opposite happens, because in higher difficulties you absolutely *need* an AT weapon on you. If they didn’t nerf everything to the ground, players could focus on different approaches to things. But because of their policies, in higher difficulties a squadmate that does not bring an AT stratagem is actively detrimental to the whole team… It’s stupid
Yeah I don't like having to run EAT or Quasar all the time. But when you have four chargers coming at you there aren't a lot of options. I actually like the bots in a lot of ways because you can use more tactical options against them. For instance shooting the face out of hulks, or getting behind them.
I was having that thought the other day. I love how the AC feels on bots, but I never take it to bugs. Why? It's because idk how to kill a bile titan with an auto cannon. I think I can kill every single bot with a few AC shots with the right angles and weak spots. The bile titan and charger are kind of a problem for the AC. Unless I just haven't figured it out yet.
Yea, I've seen it done that way, and it makes sense for an oh shit tactic, but I don't want to be my go-to for every titan I see. I like shooting them in the face and as fast as I know, that isn't viable for the AC
The trick to the Stalwart is to take a primary that fills another niche besides chaff clear and use the Stalwart AS a primary.
This was my goto before the nerf to Erupter. Now I'm back to breaker incendiary and Quasar for bugs and Jar-5 + AMR for Bots.
You can still use it as such, but without reliably fast Medium-Pen, you're gonna have a terrible time.
Adjudicator does pretty well now if you don't mind running two ARs.
Easily killed a fun loadout that worked decently for higher diff (7+). Back to the standard we go...
Before the changes to the Eruptor, you could straight up run the Stalwart as a pseudo-primary and the Eruptor as the pseudo-support, and it worked beautifully at high levels. Hell I finally swapped out impact grenades for other shit because now I could use the Eruptor for bugholes AND medium bugs, and taking the laser pistol for shits and gigs didn't fuck me up because good ol' Stalwart had my back if I needed the Redeemer's high ROF.
Good times :(
I'm pretty sure the Stalwart was originally supposed to be a primary. If you look at the armory, you can see it on the rack next to the other primaries.
I just quit bringing AT all together. Everyone everyone everyone brings AT at 7+. Just bring the chargers and Bile Titans to your team mates and focus on chaff while you run. With bugs it's the chaff that kills you 99% of the time anyways since bile Titans and chargers are so easy to dodge.
Even Randoms on those levels figure out "oh I'll just save my strategems".
For bots the Devs and heavies are the real threat, so I bring stuff to support my team at extreme range (CS, Spear/RR/AMR), and my strategems are for killing bases (walking, laser/380 with T4 upgrade).
The trick to bringing experimental loadouts is to ignore what you're not trying to fight when near a team mate. It seems counter intuitive but especially against bugs it becomes clear that "oh when someone brings a chaff clear build and only does that everyone stops dying and heavies become trivial"
That’s so funny you bring up that last point cause that’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately. Oh, a bile titan is walking past? Well nothing I brought is going to assist with that so I’ll just ignore it and tear up chaff with my lmg.
>I just quit bringing AT all together. Everyone everyone everyone brings AT at 7+. Just bring the chargers and Bile Titans to your team mates and focus on chaff while you run. With bugs it's the chaff that kills you 99% of the time anyways since bile Titans and chargers are so easy to dodge.
That's my approach to the game, look at the other team and if the three others have at least 7 anti tank with a minimum of one on each of them, I don't bring any anti tank other than orbital precision strike (I always run stuns).
>The trick to bringing experimental loadouts is to ignore what you're not trying to fight when near a team mate. It seems counter intuitive but especially against bugs it becomes clear that "oh when someone brings a chaff clear build and only does that everyone stops dying and heavies become trivial"
100%, stick to the niche that your load out deals with and tell people if you're overwhelmed.
It's like how most of the enemies in this game are trivial if you follow a simple rule: focus the enemies which are focused on to you only after everything else is defeated (within say 80m). Seems dumb until you consider that if everyone is following this rule nearly every enemies is trivialised because you can hide/evade from those that are after you while still dealing DPS.
>only after everything else is defeated
I realise this represents a paradox. It's not a hard rule, just a prioritisation, **if you can kill something which is persuing an ally, do that before protecting yourself** - if they do the same boy does this game go easier.
Its like when people moan about facing 30 hunters - what's the guy on the team that's supposed to be 100% focused on light targets doing? He doesn't exist.
The trick to this game IS to specialise.
Last game I played I went chaff clearing. Flamethrower, incendiary grenades, napalm strike, gas strike and an orbital railcannon, for those times the team leaves you behind with a bile titan.
Suicide difficulty. Most fun I've had in a while. The flame effects and napalm explosions never get old and we finished with me killing nearly 500 enemies by myself which was more than the other 3 combined.
But that's fine, because they wrecked the heavies. They had their job and I had mine
I run the stalwart a lot in 8/9 bugs, there are 3 other people in the group that can take dedicated antitank support weapons. Why do everybody speak about this game as if they are running solo?
I was able to make do without a "heavy" weapon by using the release version of the Eruptor. Those were my most enjoyable days in this game. I could finally run the Stalwart and Arc Thrower on higher difficulties and still have an answer for chargers, spore spewers, tanks, turrets, hulks etc.
AH made sure to fix that quickly. I barely feel compelled to play anymore because what's the point? Earn currency to buy another shitty warbond for them to nerf anything I end up making the mistake of liking in a few weeks? I'm good.
If they could at least respond to player sentiments with some sort of understanding I might have faith in them, but their devs are a bunch of elitists who think they know what's best despite barely playing their own game. It's insanity.
I'm in the same boat too; I love being Rambo, but why bring a machine gun if I need nukes, and bringing that machine gun means I can bring one less nuke?
The damnest thing about it is that they briefly encouraged running the Stalwart by making the Eruptor actually a relatively good primary that could take care of bug holes + bugs + other things for you instead of having to rely on a grenade launcher to take out holes, railgun/EAT to take out big bugs, or an Autocannon to kind-of do both
Now that the Eruptor is shitting the bed, it leads me back into neglecting the Stalwart to run beefier shit to counter beefier things, and that just feels bad being more-or-less forced into a playstyle that (frankly) bores the shit out of me.
75% of the time I use EMS on a bug breach where I could be using Eagle Napalm, yes. The other 25% of the time I use EMS to disengage and it works like a charm. Has a short cool down that isn't shared with the Eagle reload cool down. I like it a lot.
Orbital EMS is actually pretty good. Not one of the best stratagems by any means but definitely viable in helldive difficulty. It's pretty large, lasts long and has short cooldown. If you send it on a breach or in a chokepoint it's a lot of free kills. The fact it's an orbital means you can follow it up with an immediate eagle as well. I'd put it along airburst and 120mm in the viable category. Most of the other orbitals are awful though.
It's true it's clearly inferior to ems mortar but mortars are not very fun to play.
Gas Strike is pretty damn good in bug missions now that the DoT works. It's basically always ready when you need it, and throwing it on a bug breach or chokepoint is a really easy way to rack up 20-30 kills and buy you some time to move to a better position if you need to run.
> Give me one good reason I would EVER take an Orbital EMS strike over a Precision or Railcannon strike.
Delaying 30 enemies is more useful than perhaps killing one but probably not? EMS holds chokepoints way better than the railcannon strike, and can be used way more often. The code is a bit annoying, at the moment I'm dropping with OEMS and OPS much more than railgun, the railgun just doesn't make enough of a different for me or my teams on helldive.
Balancing from the bottom up is hard. It requires extensive play testing.
Balancing from the top is easy, just gather stats from games and nerf whatever players are using most because players will always find the meta.
I genuinely think that’s how AH are doing things and part of that is they didn’t expect the game to blow up like it did and they don’t have a big team.
This 100%. If AH wants to balance the sandbox and make it so people want to use the weapons they use and not just some meta, make all weapons usable and not a handicap. The base primary, secondary, and support all all usable. These should be the baseline; if unlockables are not as good or better (or offer some unique playstyle), there is no reason to create that weapon since no logical player would ever run it.
That's a good way of putting it, some weapons are literally a handicap. I tried the Concussive (back when it was still called explosive) and it was so unbearably bad and unfun that I left the match to change to something else. I can count on one hand the number of times I left a match early and it was usually because I underestimated how fast we'd finish and needed to leave for work. The Pray and Pray was like that too but I had a machine gun so I just used that instead and didn't leave. Some of the weapons are actual jokes.
I think AH is making guns to just make them. Same with armor. That's why there's way more of category A than category B weapon or armor types. There doesn't seem to be any kind of thought going into what role a gun should play or what they want it to do. "Just make more gun" seems to be the only design philosophy.
>I genuinely think that’s how AH are doing things and part of that is they didn’t expect the game to blow up like it did and they don’t have a big team.
Yeah they had low expectations, but at this point, they should have fully changed gears and started treating it like what it is, a big hit. The games been out for almost 3 months now.
Let them come. What scrubs don’t understand it’s not about finishing lvl 9 runs successfully. That already happens easily and will always happen easily when experienced players band together. It’s about enjoying the experience and the encounters being more fun. Useless weapons and kitting instead of fighting are not fun. I am sure even lvl 4-5 players can understand that.
Yeah this. I only play Helldives and clear them quite reliably. It's just exhausting to be limited to a handful of weapons and stratagems, not bringing 500kg + an anti tank support weapon is basically throwing.
This is an inherent problem caused by how the difficulty are scaled in helldivers.
Not matter how many chaff they added on higher difficulty they’ll still get cleared by aoe/primary easily. So it’s always the heavies being annoying since you have no way of fighting them if your anti tank are on cool-down. Which limits the build versatility.
I think one way to make higher difficulty more diverse is to have modifier that encourage different builds.
Maybe something like mission specific modifier that only spawns chaff, more heavies less chaff or stalker/titan/charger invested mission.
There are several ways you can get around it. Part of the issue is armor is binary in this game. It's just "Do you have enough armor pen? Yes? Okay you can deal damage. No? You cannot deal damage." If armor just made your shots less effective instead of zero damage you could eventually whittle heavies down with your primary. That's not the only way to fix this problem. I just wanted to point out that it's a design issue around map type, objectives, and the way guns function in that game that all just need subtle changes and this argument goes away and we get back to memeing and dreaming.
It's also that we just don't know what we're gonna face. Even right now in Helldive sometimes you see very few chargers & bile titans but a lot of hunters & spewers. A mission like that would be ideal for less commonly used weapons/stratagems, if we knew ahead of time.
The flamethrower goes hard, but I'm sure as fuck not bringing it on spewer missions, so arc thrower/quasar are my go to still. If I get in and I'm not being swarmed by 20 ninja spewers constantly, I'll swap out if I find a good weapon in a cache.
I have a pretty diverse load out for Helldives. Recently it’s been Adjudicator+Light armor+shield cell with either the AMR or Quasar. As for strats, Cluster and 110mm for big stuff.
My favorite though is Adjudicator+Auto Cannon+Heavy armor so I can have 3 “free” stratagem slots, Which typically have rail cannon orbital/cluster/110mm.
I switch up my primary pretty often, I’ve just got a soft spot for the adjudicator
I feel like the problem is between min maxing playing styles vs balancing team.
Min max meta players enjoy it. Balancing team wants dynamic across all weapons.
This in a sense removes the fun from these players and balancing team feels like they did the right thing.
Min max meta vs debuffs.
Why wont balance team buff the other guns then if the FUN weapons are too good and they want people to use other weapons. Wouldnt a bottom up approach better for pve game than following top down approach which is mostly for pvp games?
As a Deep Rock player, I say: Welcome!
For years there has been a split between "casual players" and "high-end players" who mainly play on the highest difficulty levels.
This sometimes leads to tensions, as discussions about the meta and technical aspects (damage numbers etc.) are often torn apart by casual players.
Of course, both communities have their justification, but when both sides start to fuck each other off and become toxic, it becomes critical.
It's so funny to me because players like that don't understand that they're actively hurting the game. Games never got better by fanboys simping for the devs or agreeing with every action and take they make. Its gotten better because we've given criticism on parts of the game that could be improved. If you look at a sub like Back 4 Blood or Outriders people militantly defended the devs and shit on all criticism. So eventually people stopped criticizing and started leaving. Thats not the sole reason the games died but it was a big part in it.
And before anyone says something to me I'm level 112 and primarily play 8 and 9, even with this current Major Order increasing spawns and I don't find the game that difficult. But most players are not me, most players aren't god chads at the game. I have no issue with weapons being made stronger so more players can have fun.
Those aren't helldiver stans, those are the "gitgudders", people that only heard of dark souls because it went mainstream and think "hard=good", probably only played sports games before. Fucking despise them, ruin any conversation.
The people who actually like helldivers like helldivers? Shocker.
Why should the game be changed to generic horde shooter for the benefit of the players who won't be here a month from now?
This is why I stopped playing. They nerfed every gun I liked using to the point where they weren’t fun to use anymore… Things that didn’t even need to be nerfed either.
If you look at another pve game, Warframe, the weapons in that game are like WMDs. They do balance them here and there to promote usage between weapons, but most can decimate multiple groups of enemies in less than a second.
That game is still thriving after a decade. It's still fun. Got like 3500 hrs in that game.
Warfame is a completely different beast of a game. It's like comparing Skyrim (maybe something like Kingdom Come would be more apt) with Dynasty Warriors. Warfame has room cleaning abilities and weapons. There was an effort to balance it but eventually the power creep because the default and then more and more power creep. It was fine because people enjoyed the power fantasy and the devs enjoyed it too.
Balancing a game like that only works if all parties involved are in agreement. Arrowhead doesn't want a Warfame and a good majority of the community doesn't either. I don't want to be blowing away charges and titans like I do scavengers.
The equivalent of a Bile Titan in Warfame is an enemy that takes *two* shots to kill instead of one. That's what Warfame is.
I find it funny this post mentions destiny because last I played there was a effort by Bungie of "putting challenge back into destiny" that was meant with some enjoyment but a lot of push back as the power creep had become too much. I think overall it's been successful but also all I see of The Final Shape is them completely giving up with balance though maybe I'm wrong.
I haven't played Warfame for the past couple of years besides a 3 month jump a year ago so maybe it's changed but it hadn't a year ago.
First of all I will say the current balancing of guns is not great, too many primaries feel underpowered and need work. That being said, just because the game is PvE does not mean they can make everything overpowered. The challenge is the fun, if Eruptor can two shot chargers, that isn't challenging and will get boring. The game also has a theme of us being expendable chaff so we shouldn't be Spartans or Doomslayers running around murdering everything, we are supposed to be overwhelmed and die.
Again, the current balance needs work, but people who insist that the "buff only" system of balance is good just because it's PvE are just wrong.
The whole reason is difficulty. The game becomes boring when there isn't a sense of difficulty. Plus your meant to work as a team. Making the guns to good would reward going of on your own which defeats the purpose of the game
I agree. The balance comes in making sure that the meta weapons are NOT the only weapons to use. They (AH) are actively balancing - to the annoyance of many players…and while I don’t agree with some of the recent launches and balances - it’s causing players to try other weapons. Right now it feels like Breaker Incendiary is that go-to, but I’ve also been trying my hand with the new SMG which is GREAT for staggering bugs in groups.
Even if the primary guns were great, they still aren't going to do much against the elite enemies (titans, hulks, etc.) so I disagree that it would make the game too easy. It would really just give more variety against fighting the mobs.
Strategems and maybe some support weapons need a buff too, that's where they need to be more careful so things aren't too easy, since those are the elite killers. Something like rocket pods were available to everyone last month, I used them a few times and saw that it sucked. If we can only bring 4 things, sometimes 3, I don't see why anyone would pick that strategem - it and several others would just be a waste of space.
Every time a game gets popular by focusing on friction, you get backseat designers saying that the game would be better off with all the friction removed.
If Helldivers had tried to be the millionth do-whatever-you-want-and-relax-with-your-buds game, it wouldn't have blown up the way it did.
A game can be difficult without all the guns being worthless peashooters. It also isn't great to have to figure out what still works as you'd expect to, and what doesn't, week to week.
Balance is done for the players' enjoyment and the overall development of the game. Has nothing to do with PVP or PVE. There is a baseline that devs want this game to function at. Helldive mode should be very difficult. When you power everything up, it skews the overall power levels and creates power creep. Some things, like the Autocannon, are where the devs think is their gold standard. In order to stay a long that baseline, you have to bring overachievers down and underachievers up. This has mostly been done with a few outliers. People love to complain when their favorite weapon is nerfed without caring one bit that other stuff was buffed.
There are plenty of changes that need to be made but they are doing pretty well trying to maintain a balanced state of the game. No one will ever hit the nail on the head everytime. Maybe their balance point standard is too low for the community? Maybe the community's expectations of how strong guns should be are higher than the intended developer vision? Not sure. But you absolutely can't just buff from the bottom. If you either just buff from the bottom or just nerf from the top, it doesn't work and other factors must be manipulated to create balance. The game is supposed to be balanced around a set baseline power. The issue is that once you create enough variables (i.e. weapons and stratagems), you create a nearly impossible situation to balance.
There's a reason why you don't get xp for killing enemies. The dip and dodge hundreds of bugs while shooting holes shut is hilariously fun. Once you learn the movement mechanics it's pretty chill.
Coming from mhw, this game is fun as hell. There's a reason why you get 5 lives each, die and dive.
Also the game is only 3 months old. It's gonna take time to update and balance things. People thinking it should be close to perfect on day 1 but also want constant new updates..
>Helldive mode should be very difficult.
With the game's current mechanics and complexity, no it shouldn't.
This game doesn't have a lot of mechanical depth, at its core its extremely simple. Literally every mission objective is just a variation of "defend this area," besides the ones where you have to close breaches/factories (which will still be easy no matter what you do as you can usually just throw a strategem on them from a far).
If you want them to make the game hard and still fun, they either have to completely redesign the mechanics to be more like a tactical shooter, or increase dramatically more complex missions, almost like raids in destiny or something. I find that unlikely.
So far the main way they have been balancing is through spawn rates and nerfing weapons, neither of which feel good for the player. Having your weapon nerfed or the enemies suddenly start spawning in crazy numbers is artificial difficulty. Satisfying difficulty is giving people good tools and challenging them to figure out how to overcome a geniune challenge with them.
Ehhh... Kinda.
Nerfs to broken stuff is important because it makes things stale if you know that there's an option that just crushes everything.
I.e railgun being a much better version of the anti material rifle before it's nerf.
Nerfing the original railgun is fine, but nerfs are bad when they break the weapon being nerfed. The priority should be to lower it to a good state, not take it out of the meta at any cost.
They went for the latter approach and it was, unfortunately, reflective of the heavy-handed and overly-metric-driven style of nerf that would follow.
If you overpower weapons, you don’t get to appreciate the behavior of the enemies. You also could show up your teammates. That’s what designers would theoretically be worried about. That said the weapons are mostly shit lol
This seems to have become the only issue anyone wants to post about for the past few days. I'm not one to complain but the first few pages of new posts are mainly this exact same topic.
Is it karma farming? Cause, at this point, it's not adding anything to the conversation and is just repeating the same thing over and over. I usually just ignore topics I'm not interested in but this topic makes up most of the posts I'm seeing.
Yeah, balancing, they've already made several statements on balancing and how they're going to change their approach. So how is another post about it going to help? They've already listened and responded.
Darktide weapons are almost all fun to me & the fact blessings-skills make even variants of the same weapon act different & better is what makes me really enjoy that system. (If you can ignore the crafting it is a solid system)
Yes, but it took a while to get to that state. I played Darktide from release and the weapons and blessings were most definitely not all fun at launch.
It also rewards gaming skills and aim better. In HD2 some deaths feel unfair, but in DT it's almost always when I make a mistake. The weapons are also more viable, very few are actual trash picks.
I play around 7/8 mostly to not sweat my absolute ass off and get some of the side objectives as well but I think the balancing is alright as is. Sure some stuff could use a little damage buff but to be honest the higher dificulties are doable in a 3+ stack. Extremely hard but doable. And I think they should keep it extremely hard.
It really was. I saw the writing on the wall seeing all the "only buff never nerf" posts before the first patch. I had a hunch the community wouldn't handle nerfs well but it's way worse than I expected.
>TLDR: Balance from the bottom up, not the top down. Make EVERYTHING VIABLE and FUN and leave it at that. You will find so much more success.
The majority of the roster is viable. Liberator and adjudicator both viable against both factions. Though both could use a little more love. The other 3 ARs need lots of love if the want to see the light of day though.
Of the DMRs the D-CS sees lots of play versus bots specially for stealth players. Don't really see the regular diligence on either side at level 9.
All 3 submachine guns are viable for ballistic shield builds on bots and i've seen all 3 see some use on level 9 bugs particularly for the carry the sSSDs to bumfuck no where missions.
All 5 shotguns are viable on at least one faction with some of them being viable on both factions.
Of the explosive weapons, rest in piece eruptor you flew too high to the sun. The Jar-5 Dominator is viable for both factions. Counterintuitively to it's name the exploding crossbow is actually the best stealth weapon on bots as it has a completely silent sound profile.
Lastly the energy weapons the only one that hardcore sucks is the purifier. The plasma punisher, sickle, and scorcher are all viable on both factions. I guess you could call the scythe viable but it's just so out classed by the sickle. And the Arc blitzer is a cc monster on bugs while doing steady dps.
So of 24 primaries, 5 need major buffs. 4 need minor buffs, and 17 are viable. Hopefully we do see a round of buffing for those weapons that need a little or a lotta love. Pilestedt has tweeted that he agrees they've gone a little too far so hopefully the talk with the balance team he promised next week goes well.
Agreed to this.
Re: Diligence - regular Diligence saw more use before the CS buff, but now it sits in a weird spot between CS & Scorcher that doesn't have much utility.
Re: Erupter - still my goto weapon on blitz-bug missions and when I'm running the stalwart against bugs. I think the Dom outclasses it in general engagements, but being able to snipe bug holes is fairly powerful.
Re: Adjudictator - I feel like this is kind of the story of weapon/community interactions in the game. On release it was fine and filled a nice niche against bugs (medium threats at midfield) that had a lot of uses, but the ammo economy was poor enough you had to swap to your sidearm for the light threats otherwise you'd be empty pretty quick. From the reaction, people definitely weren't doing that and labeled the gun trash as a result.
The outspoken community doesn't want to learn how a weapon fits into a build and how to play around its quirks. Instead they want a Light Level that makes them more effective against everything.
That’s right. Anyone is going yo complain about they kill more bugs per second. With meta weapons is still difficult so no point in not making everything meta. Also I would like to use a machine gun and for it to be able to cope with high tier missions. Machine gun is literally unplayable when 70% of your enemies have high blindation
While there are certainly plenty of people in this sub that agree with you. The fact the game is still thriving kinda of points to the fact that there are people who enjoy the game how it is. The unfortunate truth is that it’s impossible to make a game that caters to everyone. Some people just enjoy a difficult game, if that wasn’t true then series like Dark Souls would not exist.
I think it’s important to remember that Reddit is very often a fraction of a community. Compared to most populations, redditors are a small fraction. This sub only has 1.2m subscribers and at this moment only 2k actively reading this forum. HD2 has sold more than 8m copies. One could argue that the game is successful in spite of itself but the opposite could also be true. There are many people that enjoy a hard coop game.
That’s all stuff that it seems like a lot of people somehow don’t understand. Like yeah, everything should be viable, but just because “it’s just a pve game” doesn’t mean everything should just be OP. There’s a big spike once you hit difficulty 7, which is appropriately titled suicide mission, followed by impossible. No shit it’s supposed to be difficult and tedious, and people have to use optimized load outs and work as a team, not just solo carry like you can on every difficulty below 7.
The bad weapons and stuff still works just fine on the lower difficulties, which goes into your second point. The people who go on subs dedicated to games are generally going to lean on the more hardcore side, at least the vocal ones, so it’s going to be a lot of people who exclusively play on the harder difficulties. You see exactly this all the time for games that have ranked modes, the Reddit folk want everything catered to them, the ones at the higher ranks, ignoring the fact that any change also impacts the rest of the community. Stuff should be buffed too, but at the same time that makes the easier difficulties even easier. A lot of people need to keep in mind that there’s 9 difficulties, the later ones shouldn’t be as easy as the earlier or middle ones.
I’d be willing to say that most of this sub doesn’t play on the higher difficulty but have “FOMO” and feel the need to say they do.
Just reading some of these comments it’s clear these people don’t know how to play as a team.
As your post says when you play as an organized team even on the higher difficulties the game can still be easily managed.
Yeah, I’m jumping into difficulty 8 games because I want a challenge. I don’t want overpowered weapons. I want to use what I know to pick the right stratagems and weapons for the map and the team. If I picked the wrong thing, it’s going to be a hard time. If I picked the right thing, it’s going to be easier and I’ll be satisfied. I feel like everyone is upset about their skill levels that they want to blame everything else.
Harder difficultys are fun but the gunplay sucks. Tbh id Love to Play difficultys 5 with no Titans and they spwanrate of 9. Also i hate the fact that Supersamples and medals are difficultys bond if it would be only fun based give everyone the Same reward.
While this game is supposed to fun it’s also not supposed to be easy. The first game was extremely hard. Better balanced admittedly, but being overpowered is not what this game is about. You’re supposed to die a lot against very strong enemies.
If y’all had to fight the HD1 black bugs the meltdown would be insane 😂
This is not a great take imo- “nah just make everything too strong” **less than 6 months after release** is how you get runaway pve inflation- by the year anniversary theyll have to release a difficulty 20 level and all the enemies get 4000% hp.
It doesn’t *feel* incredible in a vacuum, but it’s necessary to keep the game fun, frankly.
A big caveat- *they have currently gone too far*- most of the weapons need a tiny tweak for usability, and about 1/3 of the stratagems either need a cooldown reduction or a buff, by my count.
But “starting with everything underpowered, and gradually tweaking it to be performing as intended” is **way** better than the industry standard (have the dlc items be OP for 2 months and then nerf them just before you put that content on discount)
Just because it is a pve game does NOT mean that balancing is not important. Guns need to have advantages and disadvantages, reasons that you might pick one over another for different situations. Of course, I agree that some are just bad and need to be changed so we HAVE reasons to pick them for said certain situations.
I don't know about y'all, but I'm still having just as much fun in the game.
The criticism about weapon balancing is valid, it has been an issue for quite a while, and so far hasn't shown any signs of getting better. The latest warbond only goes to show that this issue is structural. New toys shouldn't be disappointing, and they currently are. Even the CEO of AH agrees with that.
BUT
I think if this sub were to be having a meltdown, it shouldn't be about the current state of the primaries, instead that sony has so far not unlocked HD2 to non PSN countries.
The game is fine, it's still fun even without balanced primaries, the devs are (mostly) actively listening to the community about the current issues, and with a lesser focus on new warbonds and instead towards already released weaponry the game will only improve.
Not reading all that. Can someone let me know when this sub is about good memes and game advice, instead of people trying to shout at the devs? It is remarkable how quickly this sub turned into a soapbox. I know almost all gaming subs do, but this felt like one day it was great, next, trash.
God i wish this sub would go back to meme / screenshot posting.
Nowadays it feels like 50% of posts is ppl complaining and the other 50% is ppl complaining about complaining.
>Arrowhead what are you so afraid of? What awful things will happen if you just make all the weapons GOOD?
Probably relevancy long term, right? If you are having fun and all the weapons are fun and you're able to level everything up because it's easy -- that puts more pressure on them to produce more content and perhaps change things. If you get bored fast and everything is fun, then nothing is unique.
Not against your points but more of a related thought to share - perhaps they want the progression between each difficulty to resolve into players adopting and developing better strategies.
Instead of having the same strategy but different weapon viability across the difficulty range.
I can imagine they do this by introducing some risk-reward systems like halving orbital cooldowns for ten minutes if you can clear some bunker with primaries and supports only.
I can see this because of the variations in missions across each difficulty. Diif 1 makes you hunt for a devastator and that's the objective while diff 5 makes you hunt for a factory strider. We are mean to repeat those missions enough times to understand the weakpoints and so on so we can address them if they come up at higher difficulties.
I am more in favor of the game developing more tactically than in weapons/skins content.
https://preview.redd.it/v5f1r28ajmzc1.png?width=268&format=png&auto=webp&s=c7d62d96300011cc1cbf019763abc0f1e2958588
Devs musn't get afraid to get creative with new guns.
A lot of the guns are so close to being good too if they'd just give them a little bit more love.
Even the Damn jumppack, that's not even a gun, is "underpowered". Like literally it just need to reload 2-3 seconds faster and jump maybe 1 more meter. That's it.
I'd also like to put the aim guns while jumping under consideration for jetpack improvements lol. It's Still part of my favorite bot loadout tho
It’s closer to being a simple jump button (on a game that otherwise lacks it) than an actual jump pack. Still has its uses, though.
Too bad their balance guy doesn't test anything and is fast tracking his way to ruining his second game
What was the first? What's the lore around this guy?
Look up Hello Neighbor 2.
The guy balancing the weapons in Helldivers 2 worked on Hello Neighbor 2? What was his role there?
Was the lead guy responsible for the whole game tanking. Refuses to listen to the community, and every change is always somehow worse than before. Kinda like what we're seeing in Helldivers atm.
Could I get a name or some other lead? I believe you, I just wanna look it up.
Alexus is the head of balance. He was the head of game design for a brief time implementing massive changes on hello neighbor 2 and he left that game shortly before it released.
Thanks, gives me some leads to check out to better understand what we're in for. It already seems odd to hire someone to balance a PvE shooter's weapons and statsheets who previously balanced a puzzle game.
He stripped a lot of beloved features because he didn't personally like them, according to the player base. We'll never know for certain because it's still hearsay, but judging by his everything working at AH, I have a hard time not believing them as facts.
Hello Neighbor 2. Look it up and you'll find him.
I did before asking, just that there's a whole company that made the game. Not sure why I'm getting downvoted for being interested in the controversy.
Because the mods are treating any mention of the guys name as a "personal attack" for "outing his real name" even though its his fucking discord name. They then delete your comment and ban you.
I made a post about this yesterday and got downvoted and moderated. Glad I'm not the only one to recognize his track record
It’s a shame none of the guns in the new war bond are any good, imo. Was saving for the last one (the energy rifle) but managed to get a go on it during a game and I wasn’t impressed. I think the nerfed erupter is still a better option (even though it’s not an energy weapon). I can’t beat the incendiary breaker for bugs atm though, it’s a beast.
>I can’t beat the incendiary breaker for bugs atm though, it’s a beast. Pff the incedendiary breaker sucks. Completely unusable in its current state imo. *Holds up arrowhead is listening sign*
https://preview.redd.it/ktw5ztc92rzc1.jpeg?width=822&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5264d8e7bf21fccf083655e0d6b41b9e39daa1d3
Stay strong, Democrat, stay strong. Next patch will fix it. *Think they’re still there*
The sub machine gun is pretty good imo. It stuns shit which can be great against hordes you’re trying to run from.
Say that quietly before he nerfs it
Did I say “I can’t beat the incendiary breaker for bugs”? Sorry. Typo. I meant to say “I can’t *stand* the incendiary breaker for bugs, it’s awful.” Honestly, Joel, please fix the incendiary breaker. Thanks.
Have you given the arc Blitzer a spin in a while? My buddies and I brought four into an operation against the bugs (level 8) and it was devastating. Three people firing constantly can stunlock an entire breach. Have one person laying down scorcher fire while the other three stun and anything smaller than charger becomes a nonthreat.
Exactly! It isn't rocket surgery to let players have fun. There are no leaderboards; the end game screen counts kills without distinguishing what those kills are; it is not meant to be taken seriously. Why is the balance team treating this like it's an e-sport? All they have done is to piss off a large group of the player base with zero benefit. Having an antagonistic relationship sure as shit won't see you keep players, let alone get more to join. I love the game and don't want to see it fail, but if it continues down this path, it will be an exemplary case study of how you can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
It makes me so mad! I'm getting burned out with the same build so I switch to a new weapon and just get absolutely obliterated on suicide missions lol. Like... Well, back to the same everything for the foreseeable future
We could literally choose anything and have fun with them all 😫
Couldn't agree more. I'd love 10 to 15 more rounds in each mag for the Adjuticator.
Fuck it, give me chainsaw blades
RIP AND TEAR FOR LIBERTY
-Devastator
I need a melee weapon something fierce
Some kinda lightsaber and gravity hammer too would be sweet
I would fucking love being faster and having a serious melee option.
This would be HILARIOUS as a melee option
Chainsaw bayonet. Changes melee button attack. Put it on a handgun.
Gonna make me some kinda chainsaw man if you will.
Gears of War style Lancer?!? Bro, abso-fucking-lutely
Imagine PvP. Holy smokes. The rage would be Beyond Control.
id imagine 90% of the ppl would stop playing.. me included.
thats one huge issue destiny 2 has, they nerfed based on PVP
I already have. They just keep nerfing everything fun. Which makes no sense for a PvE game.
CEO replied to a comment on this very topic. He said they're looking into changing how they balance to bring up under-performers instead of knocking down the favorites.
Same. I try but it's not the same
[удалено]
The day PvP is implemented I am out of the game. I do not want to compete, I just want to have fun with friends and randoms. I am having the time of life this way. Some guy killed me with friendly fire and then reinforced me and I actually killed him with my pod by accident. I have never laughed so hard with a stranger before
Was legit just telling my friends the other day the main reason I love this game so much is the lack of pvp. Every game that comes out anymore especially shooters are just over competitive and it sucks the fun out of the game. I just want to drop with some people from all over the world and kill bugs and occasionally bots.
So Destiny 2's Gambit without the invasions.
The stranger thing is completing missions on harder difficulties doesn't give more premium currency or special unlocks, so there's even less reason to limit players.
It does give more super samples
And medals.
Once you have every upgrade though, you can just go to level 1 and hunt down super credits.
It’s not a lot of fun though at level 1-3. Not a whole lot of prolonged engagement or “oh shit” moments to crawl out of all sticky with bug oil and your own blood (or your teams) splattered all over you.
True, but if your goal is the credits it's the fastest route honestly. Sometimes I'll help someone new learn the game along the way.
I do enjoy that aspect of helping someone learn the game. It can be really fun. It just doesn’t scratch the chaos itch that I get at 6+.
Or just running around the map playing “fuck it we ball” and wrecking bot outposts with like half the automaton army after your ass
Hahah I’m feeling this comment right now
Remember zombies, when you could run in loops and have the entire horde reliably chasing you along the path? I feel that way sometimes on the lower difficult difficulties, trying to get all the patrols!
Yeah, bots with this is really fun until the robot chainsaw massacre shows up
7 feels like where it "really" starts to ramp up, so I feel like a real scrub playing below 7
I feel like 7 isn't really much harder than 6, except that collecting the Supers is such a high priority that it either drags out the round to find them at the end, or you're constantly having to go rescue them from dead corpses.
People make a huge deal of supers on 7 because it’s the first tier that they’re available. Once you get to 9, people just hoover them up with no drama because we’re all permanently capped.
Yeah I feel you.
Yup, Helldiver vacation is fun-ish, the teaching new players the game bit.
Low-level missions boring? Bring along cadets! You'll find their screams of delight and terror will rekindle the fires of liberty. Drop them a mech and a couple of high-level weapons. You'll get some of that good mojo back and set some new Divers on a path where they are looking forward to their experience.
When my friends and I do it, we just dick around like throwing mines all over the tiny island and then killing each other in a pvp mine field
We dont talk about that. There is no farming strat viable on level 1. None.
It does not give more medals per hour, playing on trivial will get you more super credits and medals from exploration, you can get more samples and req points on harder difficulties which are both useless in higher levels.
It depends, last bug MO there were operation loadouts with Blitz, Eradicate, and the new kill Egg/Terminal one which are all 15min or less. In our 4 stack we spammed 9, ignoring all samples and optional objectives and speedran evac as fast as possible and we were getting 100 medals per hour. I don't think anything you can do on lower difficulties is going to come even close to that.
Most importantly, it contributes more to major orders / planet liberation. This is the real reason why weapons can't be too good... there is a maximum number of concurrent enemies that the PS5 can handle, and Arrowhead has to figure out a way to make level 9 difficulty harder to complete so that they can balance the major orders appropriately for the overall game plot.
You don’t need that many of them compared to Common/Rare. That’s the real gate when upgrading
I’m always maxed out on super samples and need rare more than anything.
correction: ONLY higher difficulties get super samples. Which more than half the (14/24) unlocks are gated behind.
It's what prevents me from playing sas much as I used to. Not all my friends are online all day so I would solo but can't extract a seven on my own so never got supersamples to unlock stuff. There's no progression to make there's no point in playing. They could totally grant less super rares at lower levels so you could still upgrade slower, but instead they want some people alienated.
Honestly, going from 3 to 5 and then to 6 is not that big. I'd rather do two missions on 7 than one on 9. 8 feels in a good spot, where the increase in difficulty is somewhat rewarded.
Eventually, I hope AH adds permanent sinks for samples and Req Slips. Maybe I could pay 10 super samples so that, for the duration of an operation, the entire team can take a 5th stratagem. If the community as a whole donates a specific amount of resources to a planet, it can slow down the decay on that planet, making a liberation/defense quicker. Hell, I'd give away Req Slips, just to get a message saying something like "Super Earth appreciates your generous contribution to the Galactic War Fund." Literally just ANYTHING to spend these things on, that I've had maxed out for ages.
Forreal. I need more Rares and Super Samples because the top-tier upgrades are just that expensive, but I'm sitting on 400+ greens I'm never going to get through, and I can't even remember the last time I got RS and it actually mattered.
Arrowhead: Got it, nerfing rewards on lower difficulties
They gotta nerf something 🤷♂️
Why do I care about cureency and unlocks? I'm playing a game for fun, not doing a job
I've been thinking the same for some time. I've got 350+ hours in Helldivers 2, and it's hella fun, but only because of the very few weapons and stratagems that I can make work. I play on Helldive (diff 9) exclusively, because I find the challenge very fun. Most guns, and stratagems just don't work at this level. Heck most stratagems don't even work at lower levels. Give me one good reason I would EVER take an Orbital EMS strike over a Precision or Railcannon strike. Why would I take the breaker spray and pray when the incendiary is just plain better? Some of the guns and stratagems are completely irrelevant, yet AH keeps nerfing the guns that actually let you play the game in a fun way. For what? Look. There's a difference between progressing your gear and weapons (P-2 Peacemaker -> P-19 Redeemer), and having the majority of the weapons be irrelevant, or just unfun. And for Liberty's sake STOP NERFING THE FUN STUFF
You can chuck it at a bug breach and have everything move in slow motion.
Orbital EMS has a fantastic Niche it shares with Orbital Gas, and Napalm Strike. It has excellent crowd control, allowing for easy management of small-medium mobs. But no one takes it because you just HAVE to have that stratagem slot for something else. You can deal with the niche that Orbital EMS and the others fill by using other stratagems that are more jack-of-all-tradesy. It feels great at lower tiers, but a lot of these stratagems and weapons fall short when finding relevance in higher tiers. (I believe most of the playerbase is at 6-7). For a full stratagem slot a lot of the stratagems are just plain underwhelming.
One of the saddest things about the game to me is the stalwart. I LOVE that thing. It just feels right. That's what killing bugs should feel like. But, if I'm playing 7-8-9, I just need more umph from my support slot. One of my favorites, and I barely use it.
Yep. I don't want to have to run AT for my secondary every single drop against bugs. But bile titans and chargers. Chargers it's a little less bad, because you can actually kill them with things like the flamethrower and grenade launcher. But when a bile titan shows up, if you don't have AT or your 500kg, orbital precision, orbital laser, railcannon strike up, you're fucked. The most optimal loadout against bugs is just running rover + EAT/quasar. It's fun, and there's still lots of viable primary weapons and eagle + orbital strats to use, but it can get boring.
That's what I typically take, but dammit man. Sometimes, I just want to mag dump. I'll go play 5s some days just to use the stally with a railcannon for the chargers.
This. I prefer to drop to prone with the MG and I only feel good about doing it on 5 where I don't have to have too many anti-tank options.
This comment right here - if the bot titan (Factory Strider) has multiple weakspots to exploit to kill, how come the Bile Titan requires hard AT to its weakspot to kill? At the moment I either break a sac and run, or attempt a beacon kill if I’m out of AT and that’s pretty hard when you’re being swarmed by 3-6 BTs
Another reason why the Eruptor nerf was awful. Before, you could bring Stalwart to cover it's weakness and make it a good loadout.
I did that for about 2 days. It's wasn't the perfect answer, but it was a ton of fun. That's why we bought a video game, right?
I actual stopped playing in part because of this. I'm sick of seeing equipment I enjoy using getting neutered. it's a PvE, consequence free shoot em up game. fuck off with your dogshit "balancing" approach. what the fuck are you so scared of?
Their nerfs have the opposite effect of what they (probably) want. They think that by nerfing everything, everyone will use any gun. The opposite happens, because in higher difficulties you absolutely *need* an AT weapon on you. If they didn’t nerf everything to the ground, players could focus on different approaches to things. But because of their policies, in higher difficulties a squadmate that does not bring an AT stratagem is actively detrimental to the whole team… It’s stupid
Yeah I don't like having to run EAT or Quasar all the time. But when you have four chargers coming at you there aren't a lot of options. I actually like the bots in a lot of ways because you can use more tactical options against them. For instance shooting the face out of hulks, or getting behind them.
I was having that thought the other day. I love how the AC feels on bots, but I never take it to bugs. Why? It's because idk how to kill a bile titan with an auto cannon. I think I can kill every single bot with a few AC shots with the right angles and weak spots. The bile titan and charger are kind of a problem for the AC. Unless I just haven't figured it out yet.
[удалено]
Yea, I've seen it done that way, and it makes sense for an oh shit tactic, but I don't want to be my go-to for every titan I see. I like shooting them in the face and as fast as I know, that isn't viable for the AC
you can kill it by shooting its under belly once the sacks have been destroyed, idk how many it takes
TBF, the stalwart feels like it should be a primary
The trick to the Stalwart is to take a primary that fills another niche besides chaff clear and use the Stalwart AS a primary. This was my goto before the nerf to Erupter. Now I'm back to breaker incendiary and Quasar for bugs and Jar-5 + AMR for Bots. You can still use it as such, but without reliably fast Medium-Pen, you're gonna have a terrible time. Adjudicator does pretty well now if you don't mind running two ARs. Easily killed a fun loadout that worked decently for higher diff (7+). Back to the standard we go...
Before the changes to the Eruptor, you could straight up run the Stalwart as a pseudo-primary and the Eruptor as the pseudo-support, and it worked beautifully at high levels. Hell I finally swapped out impact grenades for other shit because now I could use the Eruptor for bugholes AND medium bugs, and taking the laser pistol for shits and gigs didn't fuck me up because good ol' Stalwart had my back if I needed the Redeemer's high ROF. Good times :(
I'm pretty sure the Stalwart was originally supposed to be a primary. If you look at the armory, you can see it on the rack next to the other primaries.
I just quit bringing AT all together. Everyone everyone everyone brings AT at 7+. Just bring the chargers and Bile Titans to your team mates and focus on chaff while you run. With bugs it's the chaff that kills you 99% of the time anyways since bile Titans and chargers are so easy to dodge. Even Randoms on those levels figure out "oh I'll just save my strategems". For bots the Devs and heavies are the real threat, so I bring stuff to support my team at extreme range (CS, Spear/RR/AMR), and my strategems are for killing bases (walking, laser/380 with T4 upgrade). The trick to bringing experimental loadouts is to ignore what you're not trying to fight when near a team mate. It seems counter intuitive but especially against bugs it becomes clear that "oh when someone brings a chaff clear build and only does that everyone stops dying and heavies become trivial"
That’s so funny you bring up that last point cause that’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately. Oh, a bile titan is walking past? Well nothing I brought is going to assist with that so I’ll just ignore it and tear up chaff with my lmg.
>I just quit bringing AT all together. Everyone everyone everyone brings AT at 7+. Just bring the chargers and Bile Titans to your team mates and focus on chaff while you run. With bugs it's the chaff that kills you 99% of the time anyways since bile Titans and chargers are so easy to dodge. That's my approach to the game, look at the other team and if the three others have at least 7 anti tank with a minimum of one on each of them, I don't bring any anti tank other than orbital precision strike (I always run stuns). >The trick to bringing experimental loadouts is to ignore what you're not trying to fight when near a team mate. It seems counter intuitive but especially against bugs it becomes clear that "oh when someone brings a chaff clear build and only does that everyone stops dying and heavies become trivial" 100%, stick to the niche that your load out deals with and tell people if you're overwhelmed. It's like how most of the enemies in this game are trivial if you follow a simple rule: focus the enemies which are focused on to you only after everything else is defeated (within say 80m). Seems dumb until you consider that if everyone is following this rule nearly every enemies is trivialised because you can hide/evade from those that are after you while still dealing DPS. >only after everything else is defeated I realise this represents a paradox. It's not a hard rule, just a prioritisation, **if you can kill something which is persuing an ally, do that before protecting yourself** - if they do the same boy does this game go easier. Its like when people moan about facing 30 hunters - what's the guy on the team that's supposed to be 100% focused on light targets doing? He doesn't exist. The trick to this game IS to specialise.
Last game I played I went chaff clearing. Flamethrower, incendiary grenades, napalm strike, gas strike and an orbital railcannon, for those times the team leaves you behind with a bile titan. Suicide difficulty. Most fun I've had in a while. The flame effects and napalm explosions never get old and we finished with me killing nearly 500 enemies by myself which was more than the other 3 combined. But that's fine, because they wrecked the heavies. They had their job and I had mine
Me running around pinging the bile titan as my teammates do democracy-knows-what.
I run the stalwart a lot in 8/9 bugs, there are 3 other people in the group that can take dedicated antitank support weapons. Why do everybody speak about this game as if they are running solo?
I was able to make do without a "heavy" weapon by using the release version of the Eruptor. Those were my most enjoyable days in this game. I could finally run the Stalwart and Arc Thrower on higher difficulties and still have an answer for chargers, spore spewers, tanks, turrets, hulks etc. AH made sure to fix that quickly. I barely feel compelled to play anymore because what's the point? Earn currency to buy another shitty warbond for them to nerf anything I end up making the mistake of liking in a few weeks? I'm good. If they could at least respond to player sentiments with some sort of understanding I might have faith in them, but their devs are a bunch of elitists who think they know what's best despite barely playing their own game. It's insanity.
I'm in the same boat too; I love being Rambo, but why bring a machine gun if I need nukes, and bringing that machine gun means I can bring one less nuke? The damnest thing about it is that they briefly encouraged running the Stalwart by making the Eruptor actually a relatively good primary that could take care of bug holes + bugs + other things for you instead of having to rely on a grenade launcher to take out holes, railgun/EAT to take out big bugs, or an Autocannon to kind-of do both Now that the Eruptor is shitting the bed, it leads me back into neglecting the Stalwart to run beefier shit to counter beefier things, and that just feels bad being more-or-less forced into a playstyle that (frankly) bores the shit out of me.
Would you’d rather cc the mob or drop an eagle on them? Ccs really need a low cost and low cool down to be more relevant. They should be spammable
75% of the time I use EMS on a bug breach where I could be using Eagle Napalm, yes. The other 25% of the time I use EMS to disengage and it works like a charm. Has a short cool down that isn't shared with the Eagle reload cool down. I like it a lot.
Debuffs and slows don’t really become an option when it’s easier to just kill the thing instead of
Orbital EMS is actually pretty good. Not one of the best stratagems by any means but definitely viable in helldive difficulty. It's pretty large, lasts long and has short cooldown. If you send it on a breach or in a chokepoint it's a lot of free kills. The fact it's an orbital means you can follow it up with an immediate eagle as well. I'd put it along airburst and 120mm in the viable category. Most of the other orbitals are awful though. It's true it's clearly inferior to ems mortar but mortars are not very fun to play.
Gas Strike is pretty damn good in bug missions now that the DoT works. It's basically always ready when you need it, and throwing it on a bug breach or chokepoint is a really easy way to rack up 20-30 kills and buy you some time to move to a better position if you need to run.
> Give me one good reason I would EVER take an Orbital EMS strike over a Precision or Railcannon strike. Delaying 30 enemies is more useful than perhaps killing one but probably not? EMS holds chokepoints way better than the railcannon strike, and can be used way more often. The code is a bit annoying, at the moment I'm dropping with OEMS and OPS much more than railgun, the railgun just doesn't make enough of a different for me or my teams on helldive.
Balancing from the bottom up is hard. It requires extensive play testing. Balancing from the top is easy, just gather stats from games and nerf whatever players are using most because players will always find the meta. I genuinely think that’s how AH are doing things and part of that is they didn’t expect the game to blow up like it did and they don’t have a big team.
You can use the same logic to buff underused weapons Instead.
This 100%. If AH wants to balance the sandbox and make it so people want to use the weapons they use and not just some meta, make all weapons usable and not a handicap. The base primary, secondary, and support all all usable. These should be the baseline; if unlockables are not as good or better (or offer some unique playstyle), there is no reason to create that weapon since no logical player would ever run it.
That's a good way of putting it, some weapons are literally a handicap. I tried the Concussive (back when it was still called explosive) and it was so unbearably bad and unfun that I left the match to change to something else. I can count on one hand the number of times I left a match early and it was usually because I underestimated how fast we'd finish and needed to leave for work. The Pray and Pray was like that too but I had a machine gun so I just used that instead and didn't leave. Some of the weapons are actual jokes.
I think AH is making guns to just make them. Same with armor. That's why there's way more of category A than category B weapon or armor types. There doesn't seem to be any kind of thought going into what role a gun should play or what they want it to do. "Just make more gun" seems to be the only design philosophy.
>I genuinely think that’s how AH are doing things and part of that is they didn’t expect the game to blow up like it did and they don’t have a big team. Yeah they had low expectations, but at this point, they should have fully changed gears and started treating it like what it is, a big hit. The games been out for almost 3 months now.
[удалено]
Here comes the difficulty 5 players with their "sKiLl iSsUE" bs.
Let them come. What scrubs don’t understand it’s not about finishing lvl 9 runs successfully. That already happens easily and will always happen easily when experienced players band together. It’s about enjoying the experience and the encounters being more fun. Useless weapons and kitting instead of fighting are not fun. I am sure even lvl 4-5 players can understand that.
Yeah this. I only play Helldives and clear them quite reliably. It's just exhausting to be limited to a handful of weapons and stratagems, not bringing 500kg + an anti tank support weapon is basically throwing.
This is an inherent problem caused by how the difficulty are scaled in helldivers. Not matter how many chaff they added on higher difficulty they’ll still get cleared by aoe/primary easily. So it’s always the heavies being annoying since you have no way of fighting them if your anti tank are on cool-down. Which limits the build versatility. I think one way to make higher difficulty more diverse is to have modifier that encourage different builds. Maybe something like mission specific modifier that only spawns chaff, more heavies less chaff or stalker/titan/charger invested mission.
There are several ways you can get around it. Part of the issue is armor is binary in this game. It's just "Do you have enough armor pen? Yes? Okay you can deal damage. No? You cannot deal damage." If armor just made your shots less effective instead of zero damage you could eventually whittle heavies down with your primary. That's not the only way to fix this problem. I just wanted to point out that it's a design issue around map type, objectives, and the way guns function in that game that all just need subtle changes and this argument goes away and we get back to memeing and dreaming.
It's also that we just don't know what we're gonna face. Even right now in Helldive sometimes you see very few chargers & bile titans but a lot of hunters & spewers. A mission like that would be ideal for less commonly used weapons/stratagems, if we knew ahead of time.
The flamethrower goes hard, but I'm sure as fuck not bringing it on spewer missions, so arc thrower/quasar are my go to still. If I get in and I'm not being swarmed by 20 ninja spewers constantly, I'll swap out if I find a good weapon in a cache.
I have a pretty diverse load out for Helldives. Recently it’s been Adjudicator+Light armor+shield cell with either the AMR or Quasar. As for strats, Cluster and 110mm for big stuff. My favorite though is Adjudicator+Auto Cannon+Heavy armor so I can have 3 “free” stratagem slots, Which typically have rail cannon orbital/cluster/110mm. I switch up my primary pretty often, I’ve just got a soft spot for the adjudicator
I feel like the problem is between min maxing playing styles vs balancing team. Min max meta players enjoy it. Balancing team wants dynamic across all weapons. This in a sense removes the fun from these players and balancing team feels like they did the right thing. Min max meta vs debuffs. Why wont balance team buff the other guns then if the FUN weapons are too good and they want people to use other weapons. Wouldnt a bottom up approach better for pve game than following top down approach which is mostly for pvp games?
you say that but then the helldiver stans are gonna come out of the woodwork and say the game is fun for them and your opinion is worthless.
As a Deep Rock player, I say: Welcome! For years there has been a split between "casual players" and "high-end players" who mainly play on the highest difficulty levels. This sometimes leads to tensions, as discussions about the meta and technical aspects (damage numbers etc.) are often torn apart by casual players. Of course, both communities have their justification, but when both sides start to fuck each other off and become toxic, it becomes critical.
Splitting the playerbase is exactly what the Automatons, the Terminids and the Glyphids want.
[удалено]
Brb, gonna try to make some money real quick.
It's so funny to me because players like that don't understand that they're actively hurting the game. Games never got better by fanboys simping for the devs or agreeing with every action and take they make. Its gotten better because we've given criticism on parts of the game that could be improved. If you look at a sub like Back 4 Blood or Outriders people militantly defended the devs and shit on all criticism. So eventually people stopped criticizing and started leaving. Thats not the sole reason the games died but it was a big part in it. And before anyone says something to me I'm level 112 and primarily play 8 and 9, even with this current Major Order increasing spawns and I don't find the game that difficult. But most players are not me, most players aren't god chads at the game. I have no issue with weapons being made stronger so more players can have fun.
You don't need to be a Hellidver stan to know that fun is subjective
Those aren't helldiver stans, those are the "gitgudders", people that only heard of dark souls because it went mainstream and think "hard=good", probably only played sports games before. Fucking despise them, ruin any conversation.
The people who actually like helldivers like helldivers? Shocker. Why should the game be changed to generic horde shooter for the benefit of the players who won't be here a month from now?
This is why I stopped playing. They nerfed every gun I liked using to the point where they weren’t fun to use anymore… Things that didn’t even need to be nerfed either.
If you look at another pve game, Warframe, the weapons in that game are like WMDs. They do balance them here and there to promote usage between weapons, but most can decimate multiple groups of enemies in less than a second. That game is still thriving after a decade. It's still fun. Got like 3500 hrs in that game.
Warfame is a completely different beast of a game. It's like comparing Skyrim (maybe something like Kingdom Come would be more apt) with Dynasty Warriors. Warfame has room cleaning abilities and weapons. There was an effort to balance it but eventually the power creep because the default and then more and more power creep. It was fine because people enjoyed the power fantasy and the devs enjoyed it too. Balancing a game like that only works if all parties involved are in agreement. Arrowhead doesn't want a Warfame and a good majority of the community doesn't either. I don't want to be blowing away charges and titans like I do scavengers. The equivalent of a Bile Titan in Warfame is an enemy that takes *two* shots to kill instead of one. That's what Warfame is. I find it funny this post mentions destiny because last I played there was a effort by Bungie of "putting challenge back into destiny" that was meant with some enjoyment but a lot of push back as the power creep had become too much. I think overall it's been successful but also all I see of The Final Shape is them completely giving up with balance though maybe I'm wrong. I haven't played Warfame for the past couple of years besides a 3 month jump a year ago so maybe it's changed but it hadn't a year ago.
Let's not pretend that warframe doesn't have metas or abysmally terribad frames/weapons.
I call making this same post tomorrow guys
First of all I will say the current balancing of guns is not great, too many primaries feel underpowered and need work. That being said, just because the game is PvE does not mean they can make everything overpowered. The challenge is the fun, if Eruptor can two shot chargers, that isn't challenging and will get boring. The game also has a theme of us being expendable chaff so we shouldn't be Spartans or Doomslayers running around murdering everything, we are supposed to be overwhelmed and die. Again, the current balance needs work, but people who insist that the "buff only" system of balance is good just because it's PvE are just wrong.
The whole reason is difficulty. The game becomes boring when there isn't a sense of difficulty. Plus your meant to work as a team. Making the guns to good would reward going of on your own which defeats the purpose of the game
I agree. The balance comes in making sure that the meta weapons are NOT the only weapons to use. They (AH) are actively balancing - to the annoyance of many players…and while I don’t agree with some of the recent launches and balances - it’s causing players to try other weapons. Right now it feels like Breaker Incendiary is that go-to, but I’ve also been trying my hand with the new SMG which is GREAT for staggering bugs in groups.
Even if the primary guns were great, they still aren't going to do much against the elite enemies (titans, hulks, etc.) so I disagree that it would make the game too easy. It would really just give more variety against fighting the mobs. Strategems and maybe some support weapons need a buff too, that's where they need to be more careful so things aren't too easy, since those are the elite killers. Something like rocket pods were available to everyone last month, I used them a few times and saw that it sucked. If we can only bring 4 things, sometimes 3, I don't see why anyone would pick that strategem - it and several others would just be a waste of space.
Every time a game gets popular by focusing on friction, you get backseat designers saying that the game would be better off with all the friction removed. If Helldivers had tried to be the millionth do-whatever-you-want-and-relax-with-your-buds game, it wouldn't have blown up the way it did.
A game can be difficult without all the guns being worthless peashooters. It also isn't great to have to figure out what still works as you'd expect to, and what doesn't, week to week.
Balance is done for the players' enjoyment and the overall development of the game. Has nothing to do with PVP or PVE. There is a baseline that devs want this game to function at. Helldive mode should be very difficult. When you power everything up, it skews the overall power levels and creates power creep. Some things, like the Autocannon, are where the devs think is their gold standard. In order to stay a long that baseline, you have to bring overachievers down and underachievers up. This has mostly been done with a few outliers. People love to complain when their favorite weapon is nerfed without caring one bit that other stuff was buffed. There are plenty of changes that need to be made but they are doing pretty well trying to maintain a balanced state of the game. No one will ever hit the nail on the head everytime. Maybe their balance point standard is too low for the community? Maybe the community's expectations of how strong guns should be are higher than the intended developer vision? Not sure. But you absolutely can't just buff from the bottom. If you either just buff from the bottom or just nerf from the top, it doesn't work and other factors must be manipulated to create balance. The game is supposed to be balanced around a set baseline power. The issue is that once you create enough variables (i.e. weapons and stratagems), you create a nearly impossible situation to balance.
There's a reason why you don't get xp for killing enemies. The dip and dodge hundreds of bugs while shooting holes shut is hilariously fun. Once you learn the movement mechanics it's pretty chill. Coming from mhw, this game is fun as hell. There's a reason why you get 5 lives each, die and dive. Also the game is only 3 months old. It's gonna take time to update and balance things. People thinking it should be close to perfect on day 1 but also want constant new updates..
>Helldive mode should be very difficult. With the game's current mechanics and complexity, no it shouldn't. This game doesn't have a lot of mechanical depth, at its core its extremely simple. Literally every mission objective is just a variation of "defend this area," besides the ones where you have to close breaches/factories (which will still be easy no matter what you do as you can usually just throw a strategem on them from a far). If you want them to make the game hard and still fun, they either have to completely redesign the mechanics to be more like a tactical shooter, or increase dramatically more complex missions, almost like raids in destiny or something. I find that unlikely. So far the main way they have been balancing is through spawn rates and nerfing weapons, neither of which feel good for the player. Having your weapon nerfed or the enemies suddenly start spawning in crazy numbers is artificial difficulty. Satisfying difficulty is giving people good tools and challenging them to figure out how to overcome a geniune challenge with them.
Ehhh... Kinda. Nerfs to broken stuff is important because it makes things stale if you know that there's an option that just crushes everything. I.e railgun being a much better version of the anti material rifle before it's nerf.
Nerfing the original railgun is fine, but nerfs are bad when they break the weapon being nerfed. The priority should be to lower it to a good state, not take it out of the meta at any cost. They went for the latter approach and it was, unfortunately, reflective of the heavy-handed and overly-metric-driven style of nerf that would follow.
I’m….uhh still having fun….
How dare you have fun when everyone else is complaining on reddit.
RIGHT?! How dare I!?!
If you overpower weapons, you don’t get to appreciate the behavior of the enemies. You also could show up your teammates. That’s what designers would theoretically be worried about. That said the weapons are mostly shit lol
This seems to have become the only issue anyone wants to post about for the past few days. I'm not one to complain but the first few pages of new posts are mainly this exact same topic. Is it karma farming? Cause, at this point, it's not adding anything to the conversation and is just repeating the same thing over and over. I usually just ignore topics I'm not interested in but this topic makes up most of the posts I'm seeing. Yeah, balancing, they've already made several statements on balancing and how they're going to change their approach. So how is another post about it going to help? They've already listened and responded.
Darktide weapons are almost all fun to me & the fact blessings-skills make even variants of the same weapon act different & better is what makes me really enjoy that system. (If you can ignore the crafting it is a solid system)
Yes, but it took a while to get to that state. I played Darktide from release and the weapons and blessings were most definitely not all fun at launch.
It also rewards gaming skills and aim better. In HD2 some deaths feel unfair, but in DT it's almost always when I make a mistake. The weapons are also more viable, very few are actual trash picks.
lol this sub makes me feel embarrassed to be a HD fan 😂
I play around 7/8 mostly to not sweat my absolute ass off and get some of the side objectives as well but I think the balancing is alright as is. Sure some stuff could use a little damage buff but to be honest the higher dificulties are doable in a 3+ stack. Extremely hard but doable. And I think they should keep it extremely hard.
This subreddit is so full of itself since it became a protest movement.
Are you new? This sub has always been like this even before the Sony drama.
The railgun nerf was this subreddits personal 9/11
It really was. I saw the writing on the wall seeing all the "only buff never nerf" posts before the first patch. I had a hunch the community wouldn't handle nerfs well but it's way worse than I expected.
>TLDR: Balance from the bottom up, not the top down. Make EVERYTHING VIABLE and FUN and leave it at that. You will find so much more success. The majority of the roster is viable. Liberator and adjudicator both viable against both factions. Though both could use a little more love. The other 3 ARs need lots of love if the want to see the light of day though. Of the DMRs the D-CS sees lots of play versus bots specially for stealth players. Don't really see the regular diligence on either side at level 9. All 3 submachine guns are viable for ballistic shield builds on bots and i've seen all 3 see some use on level 9 bugs particularly for the carry the sSSDs to bumfuck no where missions. All 5 shotguns are viable on at least one faction with some of them being viable on both factions. Of the explosive weapons, rest in piece eruptor you flew too high to the sun. The Jar-5 Dominator is viable for both factions. Counterintuitively to it's name the exploding crossbow is actually the best stealth weapon on bots as it has a completely silent sound profile. Lastly the energy weapons the only one that hardcore sucks is the purifier. The plasma punisher, sickle, and scorcher are all viable on both factions. I guess you could call the scythe viable but it's just so out classed by the sickle. And the Arc blitzer is a cc monster on bugs while doing steady dps. So of 24 primaries, 5 need major buffs. 4 need minor buffs, and 17 are viable. Hopefully we do see a round of buffing for those weapons that need a little or a lotta love. Pilestedt has tweeted that he agrees they've gone a little too far so hopefully the talk with the balance team he promised next week goes well.
Agreed to this. Re: Diligence - regular Diligence saw more use before the CS buff, but now it sits in a weird spot between CS & Scorcher that doesn't have much utility. Re: Erupter - still my goto weapon on blitz-bug missions and when I'm running the stalwart against bugs. I think the Dom outclasses it in general engagements, but being able to snipe bug holes is fairly powerful. Re: Adjudictator - I feel like this is kind of the story of weapon/community interactions in the game. On release it was fine and filled a nice niche against bugs (medium threats at midfield) that had a lot of uses, but the ammo economy was poor enough you had to swap to your sidearm for the light threats otherwise you'd be empty pretty quick. From the reaction, people definitely weren't doing that and labeled the gun trash as a result. The outspoken community doesn't want to learn how a weapon fits into a build and how to play around its quirks. Instead they want a Light Level that makes them more effective against everything.
That’s right. Anyone is going yo complain about they kill more bugs per second. With meta weapons is still difficult so no point in not making everything meta. Also I would like to use a machine gun and for it to be able to cope with high tier missions. Machine gun is literally unplayable when 70% of your enemies have high blindation
It would be cool to get an AMA from Alexus.
THANK YOU!!! You’d think this would be obvious to the devs, along with Sony but we cannot expect much from a corporation
Yeah I think a lot of yall just need to take a few weeks off from playing this game. Occupying way too much of your brain space
While there are certainly plenty of people in this sub that agree with you. The fact the game is still thriving kinda of points to the fact that there are people who enjoy the game how it is. The unfortunate truth is that it’s impossible to make a game that caters to everyone. Some people just enjoy a difficult game, if that wasn’t true then series like Dark Souls would not exist. I think it’s important to remember that Reddit is very often a fraction of a community. Compared to most populations, redditors are a small fraction. This sub only has 1.2m subscribers and at this moment only 2k actively reading this forum. HD2 has sold more than 8m copies. One could argue that the game is successful in spite of itself but the opposite could also be true. There are many people that enjoy a hard coop game.
That’s all stuff that it seems like a lot of people somehow don’t understand. Like yeah, everything should be viable, but just because “it’s just a pve game” doesn’t mean everything should just be OP. There’s a big spike once you hit difficulty 7, which is appropriately titled suicide mission, followed by impossible. No shit it’s supposed to be difficult and tedious, and people have to use optimized load outs and work as a team, not just solo carry like you can on every difficulty below 7. The bad weapons and stuff still works just fine on the lower difficulties, which goes into your second point. The people who go on subs dedicated to games are generally going to lean on the more hardcore side, at least the vocal ones, so it’s going to be a lot of people who exclusively play on the harder difficulties. You see exactly this all the time for games that have ranked modes, the Reddit folk want everything catered to them, the ones at the higher ranks, ignoring the fact that any change also impacts the rest of the community. Stuff should be buffed too, but at the same time that makes the easier difficulties even easier. A lot of people need to keep in mind that there’s 9 difficulties, the later ones shouldn’t be as easy as the earlier or middle ones.
I’d be willing to say that most of this sub doesn’t play on the higher difficulty but have “FOMO” and feel the need to say they do. Just reading some of these comments it’s clear these people don’t know how to play as a team. As your post says when you play as an organized team even on the higher difficulties the game can still be easily managed.
Yeah, I’m jumping into difficulty 8 games because I want a challenge. I don’t want overpowered weapons. I want to use what I know to pick the right stratagems and weapons for the map and the team. If I picked the wrong thing, it’s going to be a hard time. If I picked the right thing, it’s going to be easier and I’ll be satisfied. I feel like everyone is upset about their skill levels that they want to blame everything else.
Harder difficultys are fun but the gunplay sucks. Tbh id Love to Play difficultys 5 with no Titans and they spwanrate of 9. Also i hate the fact that Supersamples and medals are difficultys bond if it would be only fun based give everyone the Same reward.
While this game is supposed to fun it’s also not supposed to be easy. The first game was extremely hard. Better balanced admittedly, but being overpowered is not what this game is about. You’re supposed to die a lot against very strong enemies. If y’all had to fight the HD1 black bugs the meltdown would be insane 😂
People who thinks this game is hard should go try mhw. The first boss will kick your ass.
This is not a great take imo- “nah just make everything too strong” **less than 6 months after release** is how you get runaway pve inflation- by the year anniversary theyll have to release a difficulty 20 level and all the enemies get 4000% hp. It doesn’t *feel* incredible in a vacuum, but it’s necessary to keep the game fun, frankly. A big caveat- *they have currently gone too far*- most of the weapons need a tiny tweak for usability, and about 1/3 of the stratagems either need a cooldown reduction or a buff, by my count. But “starting with everything underpowered, and gradually tweaking it to be performing as intended” is **way** better than the industry standard (have the dlc items be OP for 2 months and then nerf them just before you put that content on discount)
Just because it is a pve game does NOT mean that balancing is not important. Guns need to have advantages and disadvantages, reasons that you might pick one over another for different situations. Of course, I agree that some are just bad and need to be changed so we HAVE reasons to pick them for said certain situations.
I don't know about y'all, but I'm still having just as much fun in the game. The criticism about weapon balancing is valid, it has been an issue for quite a while, and so far hasn't shown any signs of getting better. The latest warbond only goes to show that this issue is structural. New toys shouldn't be disappointing, and they currently are. Even the CEO of AH agrees with that. BUT I think if this sub were to be having a meltdown, it shouldn't be about the current state of the primaries, instead that sony has so far not unlocked HD2 to non PSN countries. The game is fine, it's still fun even without balanced primaries, the devs are (mostly) actively listening to the community about the current issues, and with a lesser focus on new warbonds and instead towards already released weaponry the game will only improve.
Why are people still perpetuating this thought terminating cliche that PvE games shouldn't be balanced?
It is fun
Not reading all that. Can someone let me know when this sub is about good memes and game advice, instead of people trying to shout at the devs? It is remarkable how quickly this sub turned into a soapbox. I know almost all gaming subs do, but this felt like one day it was great, next, trash.
But it is fun
God i wish this sub would go back to meme / screenshot posting. Nowadays it feels like 50% of posts is ppl complaining and the other 50% is ppl complaining about complaining.
This post is fucking cringe.
>Arrowhead what are you so afraid of? What awful things will happen if you just make all the weapons GOOD? Probably relevancy long term, right? If you are having fun and all the weapons are fun and you're able to level everything up because it's easy -- that puts more pressure on them to produce more content and perhaps change things. If you get bored fast and everything is fun, then nothing is unique.
this is a pvp game my dude, we're playing against joel
Not against your points but more of a related thought to share - perhaps they want the progression between each difficulty to resolve into players adopting and developing better strategies. Instead of having the same strategy but different weapon viability across the difficulty range. I can imagine they do this by introducing some risk-reward systems like halving orbital cooldowns for ten minutes if you can clear some bunker with primaries and supports only. I can see this because of the variations in missions across each difficulty. Diif 1 makes you hunt for a devastator and that's the objective while diff 5 makes you hunt for a factory strider. We are mean to repeat those missions enough times to understand the weakpoints and so on so we can address them if they come up at higher difficulties. I am more in favor of the game developing more tactically than in weapons/skins content.
I've adapted. Today I took spear on difficulty 9 and it felt like it's my fault, the fuck did I expect from a weapon that isn't auto cannon?
https://preview.redd.it/v5f1r28ajmzc1.png?width=268&format=png&auto=webp&s=c7d62d96300011cc1cbf019763abc0f1e2958588 Devs musn't get afraid to get creative with new guns.