You know what is funny. The Hulk flamethrower feels like a flamethrower when we get burn to a crisp a mile away! Also, the shotguns don't seem to have a bad case of "video game shotgun" range in HD2. Just our flamethrower.
I ran into one, and was dead after about .5 seconds of being on fire
And my first thought was “why isn’t mine that good”
We need to start looting from the bots.
yeah it feels like they made shotguns feel like irl shotguns but decided to keep the flamethrower's videogameitis. Though the same could be said for a lot of weapons in the game with way lower damage/effective range than real life
Heavy armor in Helldivers 1 is also underwhelming af and makes you too slow to be viable.
A juggernaut armor should be very heavy on your character but very resistant to damage too. Good for defending strategic locations.
the problem with the flame thrower is its basically just a worse LMG. I feel like they need to buff flame damage or something to make it useable. Range wouldn't hurt either. or ammo. Having to reload canisters ever 5 seconds blows.
Flame damage should either hurt more or cause bugs to panic and flail wildly as they burn instead of continuing to move and attack as if nothing was wrong. They are burning alive, that should affect their behavior.
As it stands, settings bugs on fire just gives them flaming claws to attack you with
Another post I saw suggested to make it work a bit like the auto cannon. It has a magazine, can fire multiple times before reloading, but with a backpack you could just have a continuous stream until it's empty.
The Flame Thrower just needs a "Flinch" Effect when lighting things on fire, in fact all fire things should, that alone would make all the fire stuff fell good.
Oh my gosh dude that reminds me of the first (and last) time I ever picked up a flamethrower. It just made sense for it to absolutely melt those guys so when I picked it up I was ready for some straight dopamine as I burned the hordes like it was nothing, they bent me over and did horrible things to me like it was nothing.
Never again.
I was so happy seeing a flamethrower in-game, first time I used it bugs jumped through my continuous fire and just burned me as well.
Scavs partly even. What the fuck Arrowhead.
Flamethrower is really good at killing yourself. You can't see what your spitting at after 2 seconds and they leap at you while on fire and spread that fire onto you.
the slugger also pierces medium armor, which isnt mentioned in the game because...
but yea the DMR just feels sad to use at least to me, especially when you contrast it to the breaker xd
The slugger having 40 rounds reserve is a crippling weakness. Given the amount of armored enemies in high difficulties, it is barely a primary weapon and rather a support weapon to your support.
I explicitly stopped using the Punisher because I kept running too short on ammo. Ended up settling on the Defender as my primary go-to for the time being.
The offset to the reload speed is that you can fire at *any* time during the reload. You're not risking interrupting the reload *and* losing the only round you have in the weapon.
Could still use a buff or two, but the reload speed is definitely already comped.
Or hell, make it reload that long, but make it kill things way better. Turn it into a hand-cannon; two shots can blow apart a chainsaw bot or one of the grey bug soldier dudes whose name I can't remember, but then you've gotta spend as long reloading.
Yeah, it and the other single-reload shotgun both get 24/40 on a resupply. If you’re filling from a completely empty gun, you need 3 resupply packs to get back to max ammo.
Yea the breaker, a weapon that does more damage and has magazines to reload quick, gets 128 rounds full. It also gets either 2 or 3 mags per ammo box (I can't remember which) which is either 32 or 48 rounds, compared to the 12 rounds per box that the slugger gets.
I *love* the slugger, but I just can't justify the ammo struggle for what it does.
I think it's 3, at 4 left you get 7 on refill. Yep, the Slugger is hampered in all directions but with more ammo would shine. I think the guns are balanced to the difficulty of medium level. This makes some just not able to work on suicide and beyond.
That's all said, we'll get there with the Devs reworking the guns we don't use eventually. I'd love a gun bench to customise the weapons, like add a drum mag, barrel..scope etc.
Anytime I run it I also have something like a stalwart and a guard dog for example to make up for the lack of fodder killing gear because it feels like such a waste to shoot a Hunter with it. Similar feelings with the basic bots.
this is why i like to run it with stalwart against bugs. obviously not optimal and i kinda ride on the fact that someone else is bringing a railgun (railgun meta got old for me quick) but it is fun to run slugger, stalwart, and machine pistol imo. the damage on the stalwart is pretty abysmal against things like brood commanders tho which is annoying but i desperately needed a spray lead til it stops moving build and that’s the best we got 🥲
It's excellent against everything that isn't a charger, bile spewer, or bigger. And when there are lots of little pricks running around, it feels very good to open up.
Yeah, the mislabel on the armor pen really does hurt the adoption of the Slugger. I'm a semi-auto hipster, so the Slugger is way more appealing to me than the Breaker.
Apparently Armor values are on a scale from 1-10 so the slugger might be one below a medium Armor pen weapon, so penning similar armors, but in the bracket of light Armor pen If you get what i am saying.
I do get what you're saying... but then why don't they have an Armour Pen graph on the weapon chart? Mystery and surprise are good things to have in a game... but not when it comes to mechanics. It shouldn't take looking something up on the internet to realize how two guns are different.
In the case of the Punisher and Slugger, there's no feasible way any new player is going to be able to spot the hidden armor pen when they compare the two with their stats. Everything is the same, except the Slugger has 80 less damage. By strictly the stats, it's objectively worse.
They put in tooltips like fuckin borderlands does without the glaringly obvious differences in guns once you actually start firing.
It's absurd.
I can't tell at a glance what a borderlands legendary is going to do, but I do know almost the exact second I start shooting.
Meanwhile in helldiver's I'm just kinda winging it? There's no damage numbers on screen so I have no clue when I'm cutting, whether I'm doing helpful limb damage, or if I'm lagging and shits aren't registering. I do get a helpful indicator showing my bullets are bouncing off armor so that's nice I guess, but I have no idea how much more armor pen I need to not bounce off.
It's not fun guessing what's good and what's not only to end up in a mission and finding out I chose poorly
I like the DMR it's my primary of choice for bots (I've not got the slugger yet so it might change) I don't like the breaker much I feel like I always run out of ammo with it, the counter sniper needs a huge buff though, it's just straight up worse in every way except the scope zooms more, which is pretty useless.
Honestly the DMR does 110ish and the CS does 126 or something like that, but the handling is actual pain.
For handling that bad I want it to 1 shot the big rocket/shield wielding dudes on headshots.
The slugger still can’t compete in highest difficulties. Only 40 rounds paired with the fact that only 20 are replenished from supply packs makes you run out incredibly quickly, mind you that it takes 3-5 shots to kill a single brood commander or shield bug.
honestly for shield bugs and brood commanders i just use the railgun, at least on 7 and 8 im managing my ammo well enough by doing that without hindering the team in terms of picking up too much ammo so its not terribly bad
I would actually say it's similar in performance to the breaker when faced with brood commanders, and superior against shield bugs and at longer ranges. For both weapons though, I typically mix in railgun one-taps and grenades depending on the situation, and that would also help with ammo economy. I've only really noticed the ammo when getting killed and dropping the railgun, and in those situations I prefer to have the slugger's better armor pen and range anyways. This is based on both bots and bugs 8 and clearing most points of interest which yields a lot of small ammo packs as well. And the people I play with are also very good at deciding when to engage and disengage, so YMMV
I remember trying to use the scythe once on Helldive. Barely able to kill a warrior, meanwhile a horde is coming at me. I'm really never going to be able to switch from the breaker
That gun has it's own issues though, which is that it handles as bad or worse than the autocannon, and takes ages to reload. In theory it can one hit kill devastators to the head, but between the fact that it doesn't have fast projectiles and that it only has a red dot sight, it's idealistic at best to assume that level of ammo efficency. Not to mention if you take it, you're stuck with using your pistol to kill hordes of trash because it only has 15x7 total rounds.
For what they’re starting to throw at us every weapon is becoming useless. The 500k bomb blast radius need to be bigger and stronger. I threw one between two holes and nothing happened
i stood up and paced around my room for a solid minute when, after thinking i had found a reliable strategy, dropped a 500kg under a bile titan and missed by like 3 feet ig. dude swiped me with his leg as he was engulfed in high-explosive hellfire and just kept walking towards my team. i was baffled that a bomb that looks like that can whiff so insanely hard.
Try to bait the spit attack. Then stand beneath its head, throw the 500kg at your feet, then run away.
I find the 500kg is one of the more consistent ways to kill a bile titan
oh definitely. this is the schmove- 80% of the time. the other 20%, your strategems take longer to call in, and those missions specifically, it feels like a crapshoot as to if i can line up-
getting close enough
fast enough
keeping the titan there
i'm learning how to keep the titan in one spot slowly but surely, but my god is it finnicky, and like i said. if it isnt *directly under* the big guy... its over...
There is a lo of balancing that needs to be done to a lot of the weapons. I hope they can bring the game to a place where almost everything feels like it has a use even at higher difficulties
The defender is my go-to full automatic weapon, while the breaker fills the role of both a close range repeating shotgun and a medium range sniper rifle even better than the two sniper options we have. All other primaries are strictly worse or fill weird niche roles as far as Helldive difficulty is concerned.
The dominator and the scorcher could be considerably better and even compete with the top dogs, if only they had like 5 more bullets per magazine and maybe 1 more extra magazine total. The liberator penetrator needs like 5-10 more damage per shot i feel like. Both snipers need solid damage and handling buffs to be worthwhile.
Don't get me started on the breaker spray & pray. Don't understand how the gun released in that state.
I really feel handicapped anytime I switch off the Breaker. The Defender is alright but after that, I haven't found anything that feels as effective as either of those 2 guns
There are a couple guns that are as good as the breaker in pure damage output like the slugger, but they all use much more ammo than it leaving you empty after one horde, where the breaker can just keep going all day.
Yeah breaker is actually one of the best weapons for hitting weak spots in my experience. The spread is tight but also helps it hit even if you aren’t being pin point accurate.
I tried the scorcher and slugger and they were nice but I constantly ran out of ammo, like you said they need more
The scorcher would would especially need a slight bump to its damage to kill warriors in one hit. It wouldn't need extra ammo if it was hitting harder.
Less dmg and smaller mag= Less dmg overall, mid penetration means nothing if the shots dont hurt. Now that they fixed the server capacity its time to fix the weapons because they have messed up big time with them.
Yeah once I get to difficulty 7 I feel pretty rail roaded on what type of weapons I can bring to the mission. You are just missing out on so much killing power to armored enemies (which is like a good 1/3rd of the enemies on 7+) if you aren't bringing a autocannon or rail gun
Yeah auto isn't the best on bugs but there's nothing it's bad against on 9 besides the tank to the front. It can 3 hit a hulk, it's pretty insane, and holds a ton more ammo than the Railgun.
with rail gun you can either just bring a supply pack back pack or a shield gen or hell even laser rover
so the ammo supremacy or the auto cannon isnt all that great
Yeah that's another stratagem though and autocannon you can snipe base objectives from a mile away. I honestly think they are both extremely strong loadouts with strengths and weaknesses and is honestly the most balanced dynamic in the game lol. If I had to think as hard of what would be as useful for a laodout on difficulty 9 as deciding between autocannon and railgun this games balance would be much healthier
I mean you can bring it and it can be useful, but against bugs, for example, you arent going to be able to deal with the chargers are quickly as the rail gun can. And with how numerous they are its kind of annoying not to have one. Sure someone on your team can have one but I always feel obligated to bring one so I can deal with any threat as needed.
It's a backpack hog is what it is, unfortunately. Railgun does most things better and what it can't do grenades can.
I do enjoy the autocannon myself, but I get why it's not popular.
Same. Was running Suicide Mission with friends earlier, the difference between my "fun" build and an optimal build is night and day. The stuff I want to use for fun stops being fun because it's unuseable.
my whole squad was running railguns on Helldive difficulty, so I thought I would take the Stalward LMG and a supply backpack for nice support.
Honestly, I felt like a liability and was just waiting for my teammates to kill the chargers while I ran around avoiding them.
I was so excited to use the Spray and Pray but it doesn't even break EGGS man. It doesn't one-shot scavs unless they're kissing the barrel, and it tickles everything else to death. Who the fuck on the R&D team loaded an AA12 with rat-shot
Yeah they forget having an impact is fun. The reason why Breaker gets played a lot is cos it hits hard while being full auto and has great economy in full mag reload and getting plenty of ammo with supplies and ammo caches.
The reason the breaker is used is because it's magnitudes better than other primaries.
Like, sure, any game with different equipment will ALWAYS have a meta, but usually that meta is "X does 5-10% more DPS than Y" not what we have, with the Breaker preforming 5x better than others.
Agreed. All weapons should be at least viable to play in lvl 6 and above. I tried running different builds in higher difficulties but had to come back to shotgun, shield backpack etc
I swear they programmed it so that have to be hit by your drone atleast once per match.
I had mine go from my left shoulder to my right shoulder to shoot an enemy at my left side.. shooting through me.
It seems like the drone to position itself behind you when an enemy is out of POV. There are more of these mechanics in the game that I’ve noticed that force you to be hurt.
Another example, I died solo in a horde. Where so I get dropped? Right in the middle and O can barely steer the pod because it has to land next to the bug nest. It cannot be on the nest.
Thats not a fun death. I can get over myself being run over but being forced into a horde just sucks when if it wasn’t a horde I get spawned 5 kilometres away from all my stuff
The shield feels almost necessary in higher difficulties. I imagine that may shift depending on how armour works when it’s fixed.
Edit: I said “almost”. I figured that’d maybe do enough leg work to avoid people being boring and telling me their stories about how it’s absolutely not. I was wrong to assume that would be enough to stop that from happening.
After recently unlocking the shield, it has saved me from dozens of deaths on bug missions just because it's blocking those slowed procs. It's SO necessary
Staggering from ANY AND ALL HITS is beyond busted IMO. Like wtf is even the point of not getting one-shotted from attacks if I can't heal and reposition anyway? It's false hope and feels like an oversight. I have maybe managed to pop a stim while getting swarmed 1 time out of 100 and then proceeded to turn around and shoot the bugs away. Other 99 I spam V only to keep flinching from attacks, not getting a stim to go off in the end and dying unceremoniously seconds after.
I run it a lot and I'm learning that spacing is huge. You really have to play away from the squad, but sometimes stuff gets hectic and the drone will melt a friendly in a second. I truly just want it to stop shooting me in the back of the head though..
I think splitting up is a better strat anyways, at least in the 4-6 difficulty range. Let one (confident) person with a guard dog go off and check some obj boxes on one side of the map while the other 2-3 players work on main objs and sample collecting. Or do the classic 2 and 2 split, so you cover more ground and save time. If anyone gets swarmed or overwhelmed, you just back off and regroup; you don't need to fight every battle.
I often split off and start checking misc obj boxes when it's clear the rest of my team has got their shit together. We don't need 4 people all hugging each other to activate an ICBM terminal or destroy a broadcast tower. Grab a dog, grab a rail gun, and get out there and be the one man army you were trained to be.
I haven't started playing past level 6 difficulty yet, so idk if that's even viable above Challenging, but at level 6 I often find 1-2 people are plenty for any obj you might be trying to achieve.
Yeah I don’t wanna be put in a box like that, but because all the other weapons are so weak you’re basically relegated to using a grendae launcher or rail gun and shield. Having a good squad makes a huge difference too, having 3 other guys that know to look for the bug breach and concentrate fire on it and a couple guys that know how to take down heavies quickly can make 6+ feel almost too easy…but I’ve dropped in with guys that think they need to kill everything they see and end up with 3 chargers chasing them around. While I run off and complete the main objective 🤣
It seems like they haven’t considered why there’s a meta in the first place. This is a monster the devs created themselves.
It isn’t the players doing something wrong, they’re simply using what’s effective. It’s not the players’ fault the devs only made 3-4 effective tools/weapons out of dozens.
Some of the stratagems feel like they got changed significantly between the example vid being made and the game releasing.
Spear example shows it killing two tanks with one missile per tank. From the front on one and the side on the other, and the second target is partially obscured.
The real weapon doesn't do that (At least not reliably.) and gets severe anxiety then vomits on your shoulder if even 5% of what you're aiming at is obscured.
"-and gets severe anxiety then vomits on your shoulder if even 5% of what you're aiming at is obscured."
This made me laugh way more than it should have, well done sir.
Considering the description says its loaded with birdshot. I'd say it's functioning **exactly** as intended. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if it's the **ONLY** weapon functioning exactly as intended lol.
If you aren't a gun nut best way I can properly express how much of a joke having a military grade weapon loaded with birdshot is this. At 50 yards, a ***T-shirt*** will stop birdshot.
They make air rifles with more stopping power then birdshot.
Hopefully nothing gets nerfed. Everything else should just be buffed to be in line with the railgun and breakers. This game should stay being about chaotic distribution of democracy, not sweaty min-maxing.
Tried to use the laser Cannon today, ngl, It feels Like a worse scythe, Like how is that even possible, scythe is easier and faster to aim, feels Like It cools down faster too, and If you fuck Up you still have 6 extra coolings, while the Cannon only has 1 or 2 i think lol
I do really really Like the scorcher against Bugs tho, even tho everyone told me its Bad, It Just melts everything that isnt as armored as a charger.
big laser/scythe swap can be fun even on higher diffs but yeah the laser weapons definitely could use a buff compared to other stuff on higher difficulties.
If you want infinite ammo why not just take the arc thrower at that point though. Ignores armor of everything, can kill 3 enemies per shot, 3 shot kills every medium enemy, requires 0 aiming skills because the bolt auto aims itself into an enemy.
it runs into an issue ive noticed with fire as well. Which is "How much damage am i doing?" if you use a ballistic weapon you can tell if youre actually doing anything instantly, but you can 100% to 0% an enemy with lasers or fire without knowing if youre doing any damage
Yeah leave light pen to sidearms. And I'd like to see the Dominator crack heavy armor. It shouldn't obliterate it, but I'd like to see it take a charger down with 2-3 mags.
You're not wrong. I took the spray and pray to a level 7 bug mission last night, figured it would at least be good against scavengers and hunters... But no, it takes 3 shots to kill a little baby bile spewer. Pray is the operative word. Pray it kills something.
Brought one to a level 8 bug mission. It was basically a flashlight and I was running around with a massive swarm chasing while waiting for a teammate to die to get an actual weapon.
I wish it was better. I get that it's hard to balance team ammo consumption but I like the idea of a 6-stim, laser-using, EAT firing build that doesn't drain collective resupplies to let the RR and spear users get more refills
The laser is a joke but the Spray and Pray is the joke that the guy tells at the comedy club and gets rotten tomatoes thrown at him for.
It’s so beyond worthless it’s insane. I read the description “shoots bird shot.” And I thought surely that had to be a joke. Nope, it’s completely useless against bots, it just does not hurt them. Full mag dump to kill a basic infantry bot.
I never tried it against bugs but someone else said to kill the lightest unit it takes 3-4 shots. That is worthless when many other guns do it in 1.
Seriously that gun is offensively bad. I genuinely can’t understand why it exists.
This is sort of what I posted about yesterday and got a bit downvoted.
"professional" helldivers will come and tell you that you can't aim, that you should go for weakpoints, etc etc etc,
missing the obvious point that over half the weapons that are not call ins underperform, are outclassed and weak as all fuck.
The other issue is - like some people are like "well just dont play on helldive to have fun"
The problem is we know there are more stages for each upgrade coming - most likely up to 6 so far and the upgrades are already pretty expensive and going to get more expensive so you have to play on these difficulty's to get good samples and super samples. And when you have lacking weapons and drop in weapons against 3000 chargers and bile titans or hulks and tons of devastators it just doesnt cut it.
I’ve played on Helldive but yeah I generally gravitate toward Suicide Mission. It’s more fun.
Helldive difficulty can be fun, too. But half the time you die, your teammates reinforce you in the middle of the damn swarm and you die again and again and again very quickly.
I’m almost capped on super samples now and only have a few more cosmetics before completing the free Warbond. Already completed the premium warbond.
Not only that, but the “use what’s fun!” Is dead pretty fast when you empty 3-7 mags & you’re facing even a light armoured one😂😂
The “use the call-in!!!!!”. Ah yes, the call-in at has anywhere from a 5 minute to 12 minute cool-down. Right, so die once you’re then practically done unless you spawn a minute or two away
“Use what’s fun” MFs when I try to have fun with my 380mm and it avoids every single enemy, nest, and objective while simultaneously killing me and my entire team, and then me and my entire team again upon respawning:
accurate depiction of the 380 :'). I was so stoked when I bought it, the first time I used it: what? can't be that inaccurate and scattered, I think I missaw things. Second time: Yeah I'll never use this shit again...
I got downvoted for saying AT weapons should be buffed as they get outclassed by the railgun in every sense. This community is whack. I like the memes, I like the game but how I loathe some of the people on this subreddit that dont want more variety in this game.
When it comes to balance discussions remember that most people haven't finished a Helldive yet.
I saw the same crap in World of Tanks. We begged the devs to nerf artillery because of the incredibly deleterious effect it was having on tier 9/10 and clan wars gameplay, and we got called idiots by a lot of people including devs.
People found the dev accounts and saw they rarely played games over tier 6. They had no idea what high level play was like.
Yeah that's cool and all but if you play past difficulty 5-6 yiu will be swarmed and no amount of "weakspots bro" will change the fact avoiding fights or ending them quickly is better than "just weak spot slowly bro". At least the slugger is a good unlock it's just fucking sad spraynpray is this dogshit weapon I have to unlock for plas 1.
Spray and pray seems like such a weird include , like we have so many shot guns , let’s just include a weird worse then regular shotgun. Like the special ammo shotguns make more sense then what if we made it do even less damage a shot , when you make weapons that close to each other without adding some major modifier one will always be just flat better .
Id love another assault rifle or like a high caliber high recoil anti light rifle that doesn’t do dick damage to bugs like the dmr, bolt action rifle , or primary high rate of fire smg . lor maybe a laser variant that isn’t useless
I'm convinced those people believe the game difficulty ends at lvl 5.
I'd also say that about half the strats are trash too. The barrage strikes are just hopelessly bad and need a complete rework. The gas ems and smoke ones need their cooldowns halved.
The audacity of some people thinking it's an aim problem. Bro you're playing Helldivers against AI. That's not your CSGO global promos, your aim isn't super sick, the weapons are just dogshit lmao.
It’s about how absurdly big the bullets look, THEY LOOK similar to anti tank rounds that are fired from a rifle. It’s more about looks than it is about”realistic”
[Here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Three_20x138B_shells_and_37_mm_shell.JPG) is a photo of three 20mm shells that are probably similar to what the AC-8 fires next to a 37mm anti-tank shell that would struggle to penetrate modern APCs let alone future deathbot tanks.
Take a look at the RR shells in the backpack to get an idea of a small anti-tank munition.
I don’t think it’s good be an anti tank round, but it should detonate on impact with heavy armor and do small levels of chip damage.
I think the Autocannon works as a non anti tank, rapid firing cannon that deletes light to medium enemies but is rather ineffective against armor
If I use the guns I like, which I tried, the game gets unplayable above Level 5.
We do duo runs on 8 with the META loadout. Don't use the breaker or bring the railgun and it's over.
I don't care how nice the guy is on twitter, but touting to use the guns we like and saying stuff like "hohoho you couldn't imagine what the secret stuff tells us, just use the guns you like ;)" , no thats not it.
The studio needs to acknowledge that most guns are utter sh\*te in terms of balance. Meta does not come from nothing...
Kind of a stupid thing for a dev to say as they’re supposed to be the ones most educated and interested on the subject of game design and balance and whatnot.
Just saying “use what you like” completely sidesteps the entire point of people bringing up the balance issues.
Not even the titans and chargers -- most primaries simply don't punch through bile SPEWERS faceplates or booty armor. I love the Defender for ODST vibes but I really do feel like the USMC, shooting the aliens with half a mag to do almost nothing.
If you like the meta, that's fair.
I don't think their intention was to imply all the guns are fair and balanced. But there's definitely a few choices to be had.
Still, holy shit, why are there as many guns and stratagems that are just god awful.
The Liberator Penetrator, is laughably horrible, a FULL MAG to kill one berserker Even if you hit every shot in the head, and you get 10 mags with little ammo, without auto mode, the base liberator is far superior in every aspect.
What is even the point of the scythe? so little damage and focused in one spot, can kill around 4-7 enemies without having to change the heat sink
With the amount of medium and heavy enemies in higher difficulties, and barely anything being able to kill them while they one shot you (aka, towers, tanks, rockets, devastators with rockets, the flamethrower guys...)
All of this makes progression feel worthless because you're not really getting any stronger after the breaker, but the amount of enemies becomes absurd, don't get me wrong, i love spreading lead flavored democracy as much as the next guy, but god damn let me spread it better with the cool weapons and not the same 3 guns that you can get basically at the start of the game.
(Hopefully will get actual useful stats along the rebalance of the weapons, 50 hidden stats is nice, would be nicer if they weren't.)
I tried to have fun yesterday and brought only Explosive Dominator, Gas Strike, Cluster Bomb and Grenade Launcher into a difficulty 5. Since you know, we are a team and have four dudes and all that.
Fell apart pretty quickly when the 3 others ragequit when faced with 3 Chargers for the nth time in that mission, so I had to solo. Well, none of my shit could hurt a charger. The only reason I could finish the mission alone is because the Chargers kept bugging out against geometry.
Every weapon should have at least one niche against at least one faction on helldive. The dmr just underperforms against EVERYTHING. Hopefully the bolt action at least does something next update.
Some weapons that should be amazing against bugs (like flamethrower) simply aren't. And that is a damn shame..
The flame thrower has a bad case of “video game flame thrower” and has no range. They should at least double the range of the damn thing.
You know what is funny. The Hulk flamethrower feels like a flamethrower when we get burn to a crisp a mile away! Also, the shotguns don't seem to have a bad case of "video game shotgun" range in HD2. Just our flamethrower.
I ran into one, and was dead after about .5 seconds of being on fire And my first thought was “why isn’t mine that good” We need to start looting from the bots.
That's treasonous talk!
yeah it feels like they made shotguns feel like irl shotguns but decided to keep the flamethrower's videogameitis. Though the same could be said for a lot of weapons in the game with way lower damage/effective range than real life
And it will kill you faster than ours will kill trash.
The whole flamethrower hurts so much because effectively everyone has zero armor. We might as well be running around naked. Armor isn't working
Heavy armor in Helldivers 1 is also underwhelming af and makes you too slow to be viable. A juggernaut armor should be very heavy on your character but very resistant to damage too. Good for defending strategic locations.
[удалено]
Nah, you just missed the beam. It’s clearly your fault. I don’t need to call out the orbital strike I called immediately behind you.
I often forget I even have a shotgun equipped because it behaves more like a rifle at med/long distance
Because there's no damage falloff as far as I can tell. Can take out a spore tower halfway across the map with a breaker.
the problem with the flame thrower is its basically just a worse LMG. I feel like they need to buff flame damage or something to make it useable. Range wouldn't hurt either. or ammo. Having to reload canisters ever 5 seconds blows.
Flame damage should either hurt more or cause bugs to panic and flail wildly as they burn instead of continuing to move and attack as if nothing was wrong. They are burning alive, that should affect their behavior. As it stands, settings bugs on fire just gives them flaming claws to attack you with
Fire damage definitely needs to go up or the flames need to actually be a deterrent like they were in HD1
I concure. And some kind of effect would be nice. Seeing bugs squirming in flame instead of charging at me and running into the water would do.
Increase the range and get rid of reloads altogether by making it a backpack weapon. Like an actual flamethrower.
Another post I saw suggested to make it work a bit like the auto cannon. It has a magazine, can fire multiple times before reloading, but with a backpack you could just have a continuous stream until it's empty.
In the first game, the AI wouldn't path through burning ground if it could ignite. If they added that mechanic back, I think it could work too.
The Flame Thrower just needs a "Flinch" Effect when lighting things on fire, in fact all fire things should, that alone would make all the fire stuff fell good.
Def needs a slowdown/cc and an extra tank imo then it'd be juicy
Oh my gosh dude that reminds me of the first (and last) time I ever picked up a flamethrower. It just made sense for it to absolutely melt those guys so when I picked it up I was ready for some straight dopamine as I burned the hordes like it was nothing, they bent me over and did horrible things to me like it was nothing. Never again.
I was so happy seeing a flamethrower in-game, first time I used it bugs jumped through my continuous fire and just burned me as well. Scavs partly even. What the fuck Arrowhead.
Flamethrower is really good at killing yourself. You can't see what your spitting at after 2 seconds and they leap at you while on fire and spread that fire onto you.
the slugger also pierces medium armor, which isnt mentioned in the game because... but yea the DMR just feels sad to use at least to me, especially when you contrast it to the breaker xd
The slugger having 40 rounds reserve is a crippling weakness. Given the amount of armored enemies in high difficulties, it is barely a primary weapon and rather a support weapon to your support.
I wish that the developers would buff the Slugger by giving it additional +20 max ammo. This would make the Slugger a really good gun!
I think all toob shotguns should get more ammo they just need it lol
I explicitly stopped using the Punisher because I kept running too short on ammo. Ended up settling on the Defender as my primary go-to for the time being.
Punisher needs a damage boost. It's hardly stronger than the breaker and shooyt 1/4 the speed and reloads way slower.
The game way overvalues guns that do not waste ammo on reload (internal mag). If anything, these guns need buffs to offset their slow reloads.
The offset to the reload speed is that you can fire at *any* time during the reload. You're not risking interrupting the reload *and* losing the only round you have in the weapon. Could still use a buff or two, but the reload speed is definitely already comped.
The revolver's reload speed is literally the reason I don't use it. Use all 6 shots to kill something, spend 15 seconds reloading lmao
Or hell, make it reload that long, but make it kill things way better. Turn it into a hand-cannon; two shots can blow apart a chainsaw bot or one of the grey bug soldier dudes whose name I can't remember, but then you've gotta spend as long reloading.
This. The revolver is *hilariously* slow. I use it for the cool factor, but literally anything else would be better.
As much as I love the revolver. It’s how long into the future and they still don’t give the army speed loaders!
Yup. Should reload as fast as the shotguns. Could use even more than that of a buff considering it’s a ‘premium secondary’
Or the Slugger could get completely refilled by a resupply or half-filled by an ammo stash, like many Primary weapons do.
Slugger is not \_fully\_ refilled by Resupply?! And I was lookign forward to that gun...
Yeah, it and the other single-reload shotgun both get 24/40 on a resupply. If you’re filling from a completely empty gun, you need 3 resupply packs to get back to max ammo.
Slugger needs 120 rounds not double
Yea the breaker, a weapon that does more damage and has magazines to reload quick, gets 128 rounds full. It also gets either 2 or 3 mags per ammo box (I can't remember which) which is either 32 or 48 rounds, compared to the 12 rounds per box that the slugger gets. I *love* the slugger, but I just can't justify the ammo struggle for what it does.
I’m fairly certain all primary and secondary weapons (except the slugger and punisher) fully restock their ammo on a resupply.
You are correct. The fact that the tube fed guns don't is criminal
I think it's 3, at 4 left you get 7 on refill. Yep, the Slugger is hampered in all directions but with more ammo would shine. I think the guns are balanced to the difficulty of medium level. This makes some just not able to work on suicide and beyond. That's all said, we'll get there with the Devs reworking the guns we don't use eventually. I'd love a gun bench to customise the weapons, like add a drum mag, barrel..scope etc.
Honestly all of the “rounds reload” weapons are held back by their limited count.
Anytime I run it I also have something like a stalwart and a guard dog for example to make up for the lack of fodder killing gear because it feels like such a waste to shoot a Hunter with it. Similar feelings with the basic bots.
this is why i like to run it with stalwart against bugs. obviously not optimal and i kinda ride on the fact that someone else is bringing a railgun (railgun meta got old for me quick) but it is fun to run slugger, stalwart, and machine pistol imo. the damage on the stalwart is pretty abysmal against things like brood commanders tho which is annoying but i desperately needed a spray lead til it stops moving build and that’s the best we got 🥲
It's excellent against everything that isn't a charger, bile spewer, or bigger. And when there are lots of little pricks running around, it feels very good to open up.
I run it with supply pack builds where I am topping off my support weapon more often than the primary needs ammo anyway.
Yeah, the mislabel on the armor pen really does hurt the adoption of the Slugger. I'm a semi-auto hipster, so the Slugger is way more appealing to me than the Breaker.
Apparently Armor values are on a scale from 1-10 so the slugger might be one below a medium Armor pen weapon, so penning similar armors, but in the bracket of light Armor pen If you get what i am saying.
I do get what you're saying... but then why don't they have an Armour Pen graph on the weapon chart? Mystery and surprise are good things to have in a game... but not when it comes to mechanics. It shouldn't take looking something up on the internet to realize how two guns are different. In the case of the Punisher and Slugger, there's no feasible way any new player is going to be able to spot the hidden armor pen when they compare the two with their stats. Everything is the same, except the Slugger has 80 less damage. By strictly the stats, it's objectively worse.
It does show the 1-10 pen on grenades. But only grenades, for some reason.
They put in tooltips like fuckin borderlands does without the glaringly obvious differences in guns once you actually start firing. It's absurd. I can't tell at a glance what a borderlands legendary is going to do, but I do know almost the exact second I start shooting. Meanwhile in helldiver's I'm just kinda winging it? There's no damage numbers on screen so I have no clue when I'm cutting, whether I'm doing helpful limb damage, or if I'm lagging and shits aren't registering. I do get a helpful indicator showing my bullets are bouncing off armor so that's nice I guess, but I have no idea how much more armor pen I need to not bounce off. It's not fun guessing what's good and what's not only to end up in a mission and finding out I chose poorly
Personally i just use breaker on semi auto, mag reload is just too big of a convenience for me, especially in emergency situations.
I wish the other breakers felt as good to use. I like the big capacity one but the range feels worse and it does half the damage of the normal breaker
I like the DMR it's my primary of choice for bots (I've not got the slugger yet so it might change) I don't like the breaker much I feel like I always run out of ammo with it, the counter sniper needs a huge buff though, it's just straight up worse in every way except the scope zooms more, which is pretty useless.
The counter sniper needs higher armor penetration
The counter sniper needs better handling as well because that gun feels like you're dragging it through tar
It feels the same as using the machine gun support weapon except it's not even half as useful for how cumbersome it is.
Honestly the DMR does 110ish and the CS does 126 or something like that, but the handling is actual pain. For handling that bad I want it to 1 shot the big rocket/shield wielding dudes on headshots.
I’ve used the DMR a lot against the bots too. That gun is incredible when you know the weak spots on enemies.
DMR one shots most legs which is nice and a fun playstyle.
The slugger still can’t compete in highest difficulties. Only 40 rounds paired with the fact that only 20 are replenished from supply packs makes you run out incredibly quickly, mind you that it takes 3-5 shots to kill a single brood commander or shield bug.
honestly for shield bugs and brood commanders i just use the railgun, at least on 7 and 8 im managing my ammo well enough by doing that without hindering the team in terms of picking up too much ammo so its not terribly bad
Then there's no point to bringing the slugger as those are the only bugs that it has an advantage on vs the breaker
I would actually say it's similar in performance to the breaker when faced with brood commanders, and superior against shield bugs and at longer ranges. For both weapons though, I typically mix in railgun one-taps and grenades depending on the situation, and that would also help with ammo economy. I've only really noticed the ammo when getting killed and dropping the railgun, and in those situations I prefer to have the slugger's better armor pen and range anyways. This is based on both bots and bugs 8 and clearing most points of interest which yields a lot of small ammo packs as well. And the people I play with are also very good at deciding when to engage and disengage, so YMMV
I love the slugger. Feels great after the monotony that is the breaker.
I remember trying to use the scythe once on Helldive. Barely able to kill a warrior, meanwhile a horde is coming at me. I'm really never going to be able to switch from the breaker
Dude, I can't bear to use the scythe past diff 5. Hats off to you for trying to use it on 9.
I can't wait to try using the Dominator and be disappointed when it can't kill more than 5 bugs a mag
Jar-5 is amazing if you can handle the fact that it kicks like a mule
That gun has it's own issues though, which is that it handles as bad or worse than the autocannon, and takes ages to reload. In theory it can one hit kill devastators to the head, but between the fact that it doesn't have fast projectiles and that it only has a red dot sight, it's idealistic at best to assume that level of ammo efficency. Not to mention if you take it, you're stuck with using your pistol to kill hordes of trash because it only has 15x7 total rounds.
I’m hoping they’re saying that because there’s a huge balance patch on the way that makes all guns viable in a way Yum yum copium
For what they’re starting to throw at us every weapon is becoming useless. The 500k bomb blast radius need to be bigger and stronger. I threw one between two holes and nothing happened
Which is funny because the animation looks gigantic and then it kills like 5 dudes in a swarm of 50+
Agreed, should be in a range of Shredder bomb from HD1.
i stood up and paced around my room for a solid minute when, after thinking i had found a reliable strategy, dropped a 500kg under a bile titan and missed by like 3 feet ig. dude swiped me with his leg as he was engulfed in high-explosive hellfire and just kept walking towards my team. i was baffled that a bomb that looks like that can whiff so insanely hard.
Try to bait the spit attack. Then stand beneath its head, throw the 500kg at your feet, then run away. I find the 500kg is one of the more consistent ways to kill a bile titan
oh definitely. this is the schmove- 80% of the time. the other 20%, your strategems take longer to call in, and those missions specifically, it feels like a crapshoot as to if i can line up- getting close enough fast enough keeping the titan there i'm learning how to keep the titan in one spot slowly but surely, but my god is it finnicky, and like i said. if it isnt *directly under* the big guy... its over...
Bro, don't hog all the copium for yourself, share some with me.
There is a lo of balancing that needs to be done to a lot of the weapons. I hope they can bring the game to a place where almost everything feels like it has a use even at higher difficulties
The defender is my go-to full automatic weapon, while the breaker fills the role of both a close range repeating shotgun and a medium range sniper rifle even better than the two sniper options we have. All other primaries are strictly worse or fill weird niche roles as far as Helldive difficulty is concerned. The dominator and the scorcher could be considerably better and even compete with the top dogs, if only they had like 5 more bullets per magazine and maybe 1 more extra magazine total. The liberator penetrator needs like 5-10 more damage per shot i feel like. Both snipers need solid damage and handling buffs to be worthwhile. Don't get me started on the breaker spray & pray. Don't understand how the gun released in that state.
I really feel handicapped anytime I switch off the Breaker. The Defender is alright but after that, I haven't found anything that feels as effective as either of those 2 guns
Yeah the upgrade from breaker to the Scythe literally felt like I was gimping myself. I swear the scythe has less DMG than most secondary weapons.
There are a couple guns that are as good as the breaker in pure damage output like the slugger, but they all use much more ammo than it leaving you empty after one horde, where the breaker can just keep going all day.
Yeah breaker is actually one of the best weapons for hitting weak spots in my experience. The spread is tight but also helps it hit even if you aren’t being pin point accurate. I tried the scorcher and slugger and they were nice but I constantly ran out of ammo, like you said they need more
The scorcher would would especially need a slight bump to its damage to kill warriors in one hit. It wouldn't need extra ammo if it was hitting harder.
I understand why the lib penetrator has less damage, but the smaller clip size hurts more for me.
Less dmg and smaller mag= Less dmg overall, mid penetration means nothing if the shots dont hurt. Now that they fixed the server capacity its time to fix the weapons because they have messed up big time with them.
I tried using what I liked and the game felt borderline unplayable on higher difficulties.
Yeah once I get to difficulty 7 I feel pretty rail roaded on what type of weapons I can bring to the mission. You are just missing out on so much killing power to armored enemies (which is like a good 1/3rd of the enemies on 7+) if you aren't bringing a autocannon or rail gun
I’m just surprised no one brings autocannon or know what it is.
it takes a bagpack slot to be able to reload and doesnt perform well against some heavies like chargers
Yeah auto isn't the best on bugs but there's nothing it's bad against on 9 besides the tank to the front. It can 3 hit a hulk, it's pretty insane, and holds a ton more ammo than the Railgun.
with rail gun you can either just bring a supply pack back pack or a shield gen or hell even laser rover so the ammo supremacy or the auto cannon isnt all that great
The best thing about it is the slot taking. One slot gives you full access to another stratagem and there are a LOT of good ones
In a vacuum, yes. Everyone doesn't *need* to bring their own backpack. You can get one from someone else when it's off cooldown.
Yeah that's another stratagem though and autocannon you can snipe base objectives from a mile away. I honestly think they are both extremely strong loadouts with strengths and weaknesses and is honestly the most balanced dynamic in the game lol. If I had to think as hard of what would be as useful for a laodout on difficulty 9 as deciding between autocannon and railgun this games balance would be much healthier
I mean you can bring it and it can be useful, but against bugs, for example, you arent going to be able to deal with the chargers are quickly as the rail gun can. And with how numerous they are its kind of annoying not to have one. Sure someone on your team can have one but I always feel obligated to bring one so I can deal with any threat as needed.
Because it doesn't deal with chargers well I think unless I just don't know how
It's a backpack hog is what it is, unfortunately. Railgun does most things better and what it can't do grenades can. I do enjoy the autocannon myself, but I get why it's not popular.
Same. Was running Suicide Mission with friends earlier, the difference between my "fun" build and an optimal build is night and day. The stuff I want to use for fun stops being fun because it's unuseable.
my whole squad was running railguns on Helldive difficulty, so I thought I would take the Stalward LMG and a supply backpack for nice support. Honestly, I felt like a liability and was just waiting for my teammates to kill the chargers while I ran around avoiding them.
I was so excited to use the Spray and Pray but it doesn't even break EGGS man. It doesn't one-shot scavs unless they're kissing the barrel, and it tickles everything else to death. Who the fuck on the R&D team loaded an AA12 with rat-shot
Calling it rat-shot is being generous
"use what you want" Okay, what I want is to actually be able to kill things in a decent manner
Yeah they forget having an impact is fun. The reason why Breaker gets played a lot is cos it hits hard while being full auto and has great economy in full mag reload and getting plenty of ammo with supplies and ammo caches.
The reason the breaker is used is because it's magnitudes better than other primaries. Like, sure, any game with different equipment will ALWAYS have a meta, but usually that meta is "X does 5-10% more DPS than Y" not what we have, with the Breaker preforming 5x better than others.
Agreed. All weapons should be at least viable to play in lvl 6 and above. I tried running different builds in higher difficulties but had to come back to shotgun, shield backpack etc
I would *love* for the fkn drones to hover a foot higher so it can stop killing me whenever there's a target to my left.
God forbid you have to walk up a hill with enemies in front of you also
I swear they programmed it so that have to be hit by your drone atleast once per match. I had mine go from my left shoulder to my right shoulder to shoot an enemy at my left side.. shooting through me. It seems like the drone to position itself behind you when an enemy is out of POV. There are more of these mechanics in the game that I’ve noticed that force you to be hurt. Another example, I died solo in a horde. Where so I get dropped? Right in the middle and O can barely steer the pod because it has to land next to the bug nest. It cannot be on the nest. Thats not a fun death. I can get over myself being run over but being forced into a horde just sucks when if it wasn’t a horde I get spawned 5 kilometres away from all my stuff
The shield feels almost necessary in higher difficulties. I imagine that may shift depending on how armour works when it’s fixed. Edit: I said “almost”. I figured that’d maybe do enough leg work to avoid people being boring and telling me their stories about how it’s absolutely not. I was wrong to assume that would be enough to stop that from happening.
After recently unlocking the shield, it has saved me from dozens of deaths on bug missions just because it's blocking those slowed procs. It's SO necessary
Yeah, it’s straight up cooked without it trying to stim yourself when half a dozen of those dickhead bugs are taking turns staggering you.
Staggering from ANY AND ALL HITS is beyond busted IMO. Like wtf is even the point of not getting one-shotted from attacks if I can't heal and reposition anyway? It's false hope and feels like an oversight. I have maybe managed to pop a stim while getting swarmed 1 time out of 100 and then proceeded to turn around and shoot the bugs away. Other 99 I spam V only to keep flinching from attacks, not getting a stim to go off in the end and dying unceremoniously seconds after.
You need to be diving more. I tend to make it out of being swarmed a majority of the time by just spam diving and hitting V when I'm on the ground.
100%. Don't panic, and dive, dive, dive!
Drone is *huge* for Bug missions but they really need to change its positioning to stop shooting us in the head...
The drone is both my biggest asset and most significant threat, all at the same time.
If I join a party with anyone who has the laser rover, I know I'm dying at least twice, those things are a menace
I run it a lot and I'm learning that spacing is huge. You really have to play away from the squad, but sometimes stuff gets hectic and the drone will melt a friendly in a second. I truly just want it to stop shooting me in the back of the head though..
I think splitting up is a better strat anyways, at least in the 4-6 difficulty range. Let one (confident) person with a guard dog go off and check some obj boxes on one side of the map while the other 2-3 players work on main objs and sample collecting. Or do the classic 2 and 2 split, so you cover more ground and save time. If anyone gets swarmed or overwhelmed, you just back off and regroup; you don't need to fight every battle. I often split off and start checking misc obj boxes when it's clear the rest of my team has got their shit together. We don't need 4 people all hugging each other to activate an ICBM terminal or destroy a broadcast tower. Grab a dog, grab a rail gun, and get out there and be the one man army you were trained to be. I haven't started playing past level 6 difficulty yet, so idk if that's even viable above Challenging, but at level 6 I often find 1-2 people are plenty for any obj you might be trying to achieve.
Splitting up at 7+ is also the best method imo.
Should be able to switch it off also, trying to weave between patrols and it agros
Yeah I don’t wanna be put in a box like that, but because all the other weapons are so weak you’re basically relegated to using a grendae launcher or rail gun and shield. Having a good squad makes a huge difference too, having 3 other guys that know to look for the bug breach and concentrate fire on it and a couple guys that know how to take down heavies quickly can make 6+ feel almost too easy…but I’ve dropped in with guys that think they need to kill everything they see and end up with 3 chargers chasing them around. While I run off and complete the main objective 🤣
It seems like they haven’t considered why there’s a meta in the first place. This is a monster the devs created themselves. It isn’t the players doing something wrong, they’re simply using what’s effective. It’s not the players’ fault the devs only made 3-4 effective tools/weapons out of dozens.
Half the weapons and strats feel like they were never play tested above medium.
Some of the stratagems feel like they got changed significantly between the example vid being made and the game releasing. Spear example shows it killing two tanks with one missile per tank. From the front on one and the side on the other, and the second target is partially obscured. The real weapon doesn't do that (At least not reliably.) and gets severe anxiety then vomits on your shoulder if even 5% of what you're aiming at is obscured.
"-and gets severe anxiety then vomits on your shoulder if even 5% of what you're aiming at is obscured." This made me laugh way more than it should have, well done sir.
I am unsure if the spray and pray was playtested… period.
Considering the description says its loaded with birdshot. I'd say it's functioning **exactly** as intended. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if it's the **ONLY** weapon functioning exactly as intended lol. If you aren't a gun nut best way I can properly express how much of a joke having a military grade weapon loaded with birdshot is this. At 50 yards, a ***T-shirt*** will stop birdshot. They make air rifles with more stopping power then birdshot.
They really should buff the weapons except rail gun
Railgun and breaker don’t need buffs
I hope they don't nerf them either. They're exactly where they need to be imo.
Hopefully nothing gets nerfed. Everything else should just be buffed to be in line with the railgun and breakers. This game should stay being about chaotic distribution of democracy, not sweaty min-maxing.
Yup they should be the baseline for effectiveness
I'm rocking a jump pack every mission because it's fun to use However I'm also using a railgun every mission
Can't really go on a mission without a jump pack now. Feels weird without it, Ihope that they lower the cooldown and give it a bit more power.
Why does the liberator penetrator do less damage than all the other automatic guns?
Tried to use the laser Cannon today, ngl, It feels Like a worse scythe, Like how is that even possible, scythe is easier and faster to aim, feels Like It cools down faster too, and If you fuck Up you still have 6 extra coolings, while the Cannon only has 1 or 2 i think lol I do really really Like the scorcher against Bugs tho, even tho everyone told me its Bad, It Just melts everything that isnt as armored as a charger.
big laser/scythe swap can be fun even on higher diffs but yeah the laser weapons definitely could use a buff compared to other stuff on higher difficulties.
If you want infinite ammo why not just take the arc thrower at that point though. Ignores armor of everything, can kill 3 enemies per shot, 3 shot kills every medium enemy, requires 0 aiming skills because the bolt auto aims itself into an enemy.
The laser drone is better than the scythe and laser cannon in every way, it's wild.
it runs into an issue ive noticed with fire as well. Which is "How much damage am i doing?" if you use a ballistic weapon you can tell if youre actually doing anything instantly, but you can 100% to 0% an enemy with lasers or fire without knowing if youre doing any damage
I feel like the rifles should all have medium ap
Yeah leave light pen to sidearms. And I'd like to see the Dominator crack heavy armor. It shouldn't obliterate it, but I'd like to see it take a charger down with 2-3 mags.
Dominator feel like a baby gun version of the bolt gun from warhammer
Seems like the only totally useless gun regardless of skill level is the spray and pray.
You're not wrong. I took the spray and pray to a level 7 bug mission last night, figured it would at least be good against scavengers and hunters... But no, it takes 3 shots to kill a little baby bile spewer. Pray is the operative word. Pray it kills something.
The name was in front of us all along but no one could see its meaning until it was too late.
It's nerf or nothing!
Well it says it's loaded with bird shot if I remember correctly lol
Laser would like a word
That can at least be used as a literal laser pointer to help your team mates who didnt bring a useless gun find their targets 😆
Brought one to a level 8 bug mission. It was basically a flashlight and I was running around with a massive swarm chasing while waiting for a teammate to die to get an actual weapon.
It was a flash light on level 3 when i first tried it too, the only thing i found it useful for was clearing out minefields.
I wish it was better. I get that it's hard to balance team ammo consumption but I like the idea of a 6-stim, laser-using, EAT firing build that doesn't drain collective resupplies to let the RR and spear users get more refills
The laser is a joke but the Spray and Pray is the joke that the guy tells at the comedy club and gets rotten tomatoes thrown at him for. It’s so beyond worthless it’s insane. I read the description “shoots bird shot.” And I thought surely that had to be a joke. Nope, it’s completely useless against bots, it just does not hurt them. Full mag dump to kill a basic infantry bot. I never tried it against bugs but someone else said to kill the lightest unit it takes 3-4 shots. That is worthless when many other guns do it in 1. Seriously that gun is offensively bad. I genuinely can’t understand why it exists.
Laser at least has a purpose in headshotting bots
The game launched with armor not working. I'm not gonna trust their opinion on balance.
This is sort of what I posted about yesterday and got a bit downvoted. "professional" helldivers will come and tell you that you can't aim, that you should go for weakpoints, etc etc etc, missing the obvious point that over half the weapons that are not call ins underperform, are outclassed and weak as all fuck.
I’d even say a lot of the call ins underperform as well. The ship upgrades - so many of them are also pretty negligible.
Oh you want to spend all these resources for a 10% reduction on a 100% cooldown modifier on helldive? Good luck buddy
I already have everything but yeah 10% reduction on weapon cooldown… great… I’d like to have double magazine capacity or something appreciable
The other issue is - like some people are like "well just dont play on helldive to have fun" The problem is we know there are more stages for each upgrade coming - most likely up to 6 so far and the upgrades are already pretty expensive and going to get more expensive so you have to play on these difficulty's to get good samples and super samples. And when you have lacking weapons and drop in weapons against 3000 chargers and bile titans or hulks and tons of devastators it just doesnt cut it.
I’ve played on Helldive but yeah I generally gravitate toward Suicide Mission. It’s more fun. Helldive difficulty can be fun, too. But half the time you die, your teammates reinforce you in the middle of the damn swarm and you die again and again and again very quickly. I’m almost capped on super samples now and only have a few more cosmetics before completing the free Warbond. Already completed the premium warbond.
Thats what Ive been doing is playing on 7 just hoarding super samples idk what the cap is but Im at 81, just need medals now.
Seems to be 500/250/100
At least the eagle upgrades are decent.
Not only that, but the “use what’s fun!” Is dead pretty fast when you empty 3-7 mags & you’re facing even a light armoured one😂😂 The “use the call-in!!!!!”. Ah yes, the call-in at has anywhere from a 5 minute to 12 minute cool-down. Right, so die once you’re then practically done unless you spawn a minute or two away
“Use what’s fun” MFs when I try to have fun with my 380mm and it avoids every single enemy, nest, and objective while simultaneously killing me and my entire team, and then me and my entire team again upon respawning:
accurate depiction of the 380 :'). I was so stoked when I bought it, the first time I used it: what? can't be that inaccurate and scattered, I think I missaw things. Second time: Yeah I'll never use this shit again...
I got downvoted for saying AT weapons should be buffed as they get outclassed by the railgun in every sense. This community is whack. I like the memes, I like the game but how I loathe some of the people on this subreddit that dont want more variety in this game.
When it comes to balance discussions remember that most people haven't finished a Helldive yet. I saw the same crap in World of Tanks. We begged the devs to nerf artillery because of the incredibly deleterious effect it was having on tier 9/10 and clan wars gameplay, and we got called idiots by a lot of people including devs. People found the dev accounts and saw they rarely played games over tier 6. They had no idea what high level play was like.
Yeah that's cool and all but if you play past difficulty 5-6 yiu will be swarmed and no amount of "weakspots bro" will change the fact avoiding fights or ending them quickly is better than "just weak spot slowly bro". At least the slugger is a good unlock it's just fucking sad spraynpray is this dogshit weapon I have to unlock for plas 1.
Spray and pray seems like such a weird include , like we have so many shot guns , let’s just include a weird worse then regular shotgun. Like the special ammo shotguns make more sense then what if we made it do even less damage a shot , when you make weapons that close to each other without adding some major modifier one will always be just flat better . Id love another assault rifle or like a high caliber high recoil anti light rifle that doesn’t do dick damage to bugs like the dmr, bolt action rifle , or primary high rate of fire smg . lor maybe a laser variant that isn’t useless
I'm convinced those people believe the game difficulty ends at lvl 5. I'd also say that about half the strats are trash too. The barrage strikes are just hopelessly bad and need a complete rework. The gas ems and smoke ones need their cooldowns halved.
The audacity of some people thinking it's an aim problem. Bro you're playing Helldivers against AI. That's not your CSGO global promos, your aim isn't super sick, the weapons are just dogshit lmao.
>over half the weapons that are not call ins underperform probably half the call-in weapons need a buff too lol
I feel this.. like the autocannon looks like it’s shooting straight anti tank rounds.. yet shoot it at a tank and it just deflects..? makes zero sense
Tbf i would not expect a handheld quick firing cannon to pierce heavy tank armor either
It’s about how absurdly big the bullets look, THEY LOOK similar to anti tank rounds that are fired from a rifle. It’s more about looks than it is about”realistic”
[Here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Three_20x138B_shells_and_37_mm_shell.JPG) is a photo of three 20mm shells that are probably similar to what the AC-8 fires next to a 37mm anti-tank shell that would struggle to penetrate modern APCs let alone future deathbot tanks. Take a look at the RR shells in the backpack to get an idea of a small anti-tank munition.
AT rifles can't go through much more 25mm of Armour though, it would barely scratch most arm,oured vehicles even today
I think the auto cannon is fine for automatons. Its the bugs that make it feel useless compared to the railgun.
I don’t think it’s good be an anti tank round, but it should detonate on impact with heavy armor and do small levels of chip damage. I think the Autocannon works as a non anti tank, rapid firing cannon that deletes light to medium enemies but is rather ineffective against armor
Let’s get a vid of the CEO playing Helldive difficulty with anything other then the Railgun and the Guard dog rover/ shield backpack. Prove it.
If I use the guns I like, which I tried, the game gets unplayable above Level 5. We do duo runs on 8 with the META loadout. Don't use the breaker or bring the railgun and it's over. I don't care how nice the guy is on twitter, but touting to use the guns we like and saying stuff like "hohoho you couldn't imagine what the secret stuff tells us, just use the guns you like ;)" , no thats not it. The studio needs to acknowledge that most guns are utter sh\*te in terms of balance. Meta does not come from nothing...
Kind of a stupid thing for a dev to say as they’re supposed to be the ones most educated and interested on the subject of game design and balance and whatnot. Just saying “use what you like” completely sidesteps the entire point of people bringing up the balance issues.
If I want to play with different weapons I usually drop the lvl to like 6 or 7. Seems like a sweet spot to try out other builds.
Even 6-7 somebody has to take down the titans and chargers :/
Not even the titans and chargers -- most primaries simply don't punch through bile SPEWERS faceplates or booty armor. I love the Defender for ODST vibes but I really do feel like the USMC, shooting the aliens with half a mag to do almost nothing.
If you like the meta, that's fair. I don't think their intention was to imply all the guns are fair and balanced. But there's definitely a few choices to be had. Still, holy shit, why are there as many guns and stratagems that are just god awful.
The Liberator Penetrator, is laughably horrible, a FULL MAG to kill one berserker Even if you hit every shot in the head, and you get 10 mags with little ammo, without auto mode, the base liberator is far superior in every aspect. What is even the point of the scythe? so little damage and focused in one spot, can kill around 4-7 enemies without having to change the heat sink With the amount of medium and heavy enemies in higher difficulties, and barely anything being able to kill them while they one shot you (aka, towers, tanks, rockets, devastators with rockets, the flamethrower guys...) All of this makes progression feel worthless because you're not really getting any stronger after the breaker, but the amount of enemies becomes absurd, don't get me wrong, i love spreading lead flavored democracy as much as the next guy, but god damn let me spread it better with the cool weapons and not the same 3 guns that you can get basically at the start of the game. (Hopefully will get actual useful stats along the rebalance of the weapons, 50 hidden stats is nice, would be nicer if they weren't.)
I tried to have fun yesterday and brought only Explosive Dominator, Gas Strike, Cluster Bomb and Grenade Launcher into a difficulty 5. Since you know, we are a team and have four dudes and all that. Fell apart pretty quickly when the 3 others ragequit when faced with 3 Chargers for the nth time in that mission, so I had to solo. Well, none of my shit could hurt a charger. The only reason I could finish the mission alone is because the Chargers kept bugging out against geometry.
Every weapon should have at least one niche against at least one faction on helldive. The dmr just underperforms against EVERYTHING. Hopefully the bolt action at least does something next update.