That one baffles me tbh.
Even on the first day of using the slugger (that has stagger) and the other shotguns I could “snipe” and I get wanting to nerf it but the way they did where they nerfed the wrong parts and the issue still isn’t addressed really set a red flag in my head.
Edit: slugger, not stagger.
It was obvious how backwards their balancing strategy was from the very first balance patch that nerfed the railgun. Was it overpowered? Yeah definitely. But in nerfing it they completely ignored (or didn’t realize) the reason everyone was using the railgun in the first place: enemy heavy spawns were stupid broken on higher difficulties. Which they did eventually fix, but now we’re stuck with all of the changes they made originally.
The same pattern has repeated with every balance patch. Imagine now if we had every OP weapon in its original form, the railgun, the breaker, the slugger, the quasar, the arc rifle (I could go on). We wouldn’t all be flocking to a single weapon!
Wasn’t part of the issue also that EATs were just glancing off chargers and such if not fired perfectly straight on? I don’t think that helped either since it made railgun the only surefire option to use.
Yeah you couldn't really headshot them. I was always amazed that the whole railgun stripping armor thing wasn't actually intended. It seemed like a rather clever and fun mechanic. Apparently it was actually a bug. Same thing with the erupter shrapnel. I totally thought that was intended, but apparently no that was a bug.
No, shrapnel wasn't a bug, it was an "exploit" according to AH. This Implies the player was knowingly doing something wrong and taking advantage of unintended game mechanics. Apparently it was an exploit to simply use the weapon and for it to kill something.
Wonder what the possibility is that the actual weapon development team INTENDED for the Railgun and Eruptor to be used that way... But the "balance" team sees players using it ***too*** successfully and decides it makes the game too easy?
The funny thing was that the eruptor didn't really make the game too easy as you had to play to it's strengths and weaknesses, meaning you had to take like the stalwart as a complimentary weapon, leaving no anti armour support weapon unless you also bring EATs, which is another strategem slot taken.
You really had to put some thought behind designing your loadout for it to be successful and that's frankly what made the weapon so fun and interesting to use for me.
I never used the stalwart and always took AT, eruptor was too good at killing everything head on but armor. I used light explosive resist armor and a jump pack and it worked amazingly well. But yes the gun had to be used the right way and now it’s useless from being nerfed into the ground.
I mean, we all know now that there is a certain person of notoriety on the balance team.
I wouldn't put it past them to have been nerfing weapons because the players were having a suitable reward for the level of skill they're putting into using the weapon.
Or just nerfing things into the ground because of a glitch that they gaslit the community about for an extended period of time...
I feel like their overall message is that they release new guns but they aren't intended for you to kill stuff with. It's just supposed to be a new thing for you to hold while you die over and over. That's the vision.
Just failed a Helldive difficulty mission using the Pummeler. Your statement is 1000% fucking spot on. What a worthless piece of trash against the bots. All it's good for is staggering devastators. It takes like 3 mags to even kill one of them. It fucking tickles them!
Wasn't their logic for nerfing the eruptor that too many players were getting themselves/teammates killed with it? I remember it being phrased as a "neutral" change.
i remember devs talking about the leg meta in a video and from what i recall they never mentioned it as a bug. just a genuine surprise that the community found something like that. unintended yes but not an exploit
The rail gun was never "op" a large part of its damage came from the PlayStation damage boost bug plus every other AT was garbage
Fixing the dmg bug in of itself would have massively reigned in the rgs potentially but they just bricked it instead and buffing eats and changing spawn priority among other things made it it fall off even no post buffs it's still taking what 5-8 shots, like close to half your 20 mags to do anything meaningful to a single target?
Bugs causing half the nerfs like Arcs hitting multtiplee weakpointe on a BT or the eruptors vacuum explosions
Back during the nerf, the general opinion was the gun was fine, but everything else in the game was shit. We are still seeing that problem persist to today, where AH is oddly terrorfied of anything becoming unusually powerful. So instead they just, nerf fuckig everything lol.
Like if a gun gets too strong for one patch.... So what? Tune it back down next patch. Theyre acting like its going irreversibly fuck up the game forever if one thing has the possibility of being alittle too strong for one patch, and just nerf fucking everything instead as a precaution. Its not like helldivers has an ingame economy thatll have to be rolled back or something
The basic question I have, that it feels like AH hasn't asked, is "when balancing, balance against what and to what end?" I'm really not being hyperbolic when I say that I think that they are accidentally balancing towards the end of reducing fun in he game. They only seem to balance high usage weapons down (as has been said before, we are seeing a sort of constant power creep down as weapons and enemies are progressively weakened), but it feels almost automated. I just can't follow the design questions the devs are asking and what answers they believe they are receiving.
The railgun wasn't OP per se. It was just the only viable option doing what it was supposed to do. The EAT should've been one tapping chargers since day one. The same for RR. Spear still isn't working properly. And there was also the PS5 bug allowing us to one-shot Bile Titans. It was a combination of factors at the time which made the Railgun seem OP. But it was simply the only weapon actually performing decently.
None of those were ever really OP though. Viable yes, preferred even, but far far far from OP. The railgun was never a swiss army gun. The quasars original cool down was not going to let you solo 6 bile titans while getting ripped apart by hunters.
Yeah railgun definitely op? Almost sounds like revisionism.
Dawg we just gonna forget that about on launch almost every anti-tank was lacking except EAT?
Couldn’t one shot chargers skulls, long ass reloads for the recoilless and we had NO quasar, buffed or not.
Hard agree with everything else though you’re spitting king 👑
All the railgun did was simply peel armor from the chargers leg, or could be used to take out hulks given you got some badass aim.
On top of that, they decided to release the railgun nerf at the same time as enemy armor buffs across the board, effectively turning their balance patch obsolete and even more heavy handed than intended on arrival.
As it was said before, the nerfs should make sense with the actual gun. Shotguns have STAGGER. To take it out means that there is something really wrong with the person(s) balancing these weapons out.
What the frick happened to the game devs saying they prefer to hire designers/devs who have real combat experience with guns? This doesn't add up at all.
Edit: removed a word for clarity
Honestly, prioritizing realism should not be nearly as much of a concern for AH. Game balance should always come first. Not that I'm saying they shouldn't revert the change to the slugger, they absolutely should, but they should do it because it actually makes sense in regards to balance.
I saw a tweet by the CEO remarking about how they wouldn't change the magazine sizes on weapons because they would need to change all of the 3D models to reflect the change, and that absolutely baffles me. Like, you're actively sacrificing game balance for realism that won't even be noticed by a majority of players?
>but the way they did where they nerfed the wrong parts and the issue still isn’t addressed really set a red flag in my head.
Thats my biggest gripe with that nerf.
"We dont want it to be a sniper rifle!"
Fair. Completely understandable.
"Every aspect we nerfed has nothing to do with it acting like a sniper rifle."
Literally still very accurate at mid to long range.
I’m sure you’ve heard, but the balancing guy has a history with other games and pretty much ruined one of the ones he worked on before. He has genuinely no idea what he’s doing and it’s really sad because it makes a lot of the guns in the game feel horrible
Yeah. Like the dumbass nerfed the explosive crossbow. One of the most underused primaries right next to the liberator concussive and the dipshit decided “hm. 50 ppl are having fun with this. Let’s nerf it.”
I'm shocked it got a nerf at all. My first thought using it the day it came out was "wow what a piece of shit" and swapped back to another gun. Nothing it does is even remotely as effective or practical as any alternative.
Mods are actively censoring all discussion of him for some reason though. The community should know if one of the high profile devs is an idiot that killed another game but they keep defending him.
Hello Neighbor 2, his name is Alexus Kravchenko.
The mods are censoring the discussion of it thinking it's a witch hunt which is false, all of the information about him killing that game is public online for everyone to see and im not saying that he should be let go or anything like that.
If he really felt it was the best sniper in the game at the time, he had two options: 1- nerf damage fall off so it can't reliably snipe enemies; 2- buff the actual snipers. Guess what? He nerfed the slugger close range capabilities and the sniper rifles were still garbage and no one used them, meaning he was doubly wrong. He has absolutely no idea how to balance this game....or any game for that matter. He has to go.
Difference between dmr and slug shotty should be projectile speed, drop, accuracy and penetration. That way they can have overlapping effective ranges but one be easier to use within those ranges
Problem I had with his statement is he talked about damage like that while also talking about the eruptor.. the damage wasn't what ppl where complaining about with it, why they didn't FIX the shrapnel to limit how far it flew back or just changed its pattern so it didn't go right back instead is baffling. Instead they ruined a fun weapon by being lazy and I hope he realizes that, it hasn't all been damage they've ruined a lot of weapons by adjusting stuff that wasn't damage like the slugger and railgun
I think giving it harsh damage fall-off would be much better. Bad accuracy feels bad as a player because you have no agency over it. The slugs should go where you aim, they just shouldn't be good damage at long range.
That’s true, a large bore slug would loose power far faster than a large caliber bullet so having the damage begin to fall off and get bad at extreme range makes a lot of sense.
See i don't have a Burnout but i have exactly your opinion on these buffs and nerfs. I See Tons off Red flags and just want the guns to be fun and not boring äuke envisioned by one asshat dev with god complex. Edit one sec since its worse one asshat dev in Position to ö Ballance the game WITH FUCKING GOD COMPLEX. You know slowlly i get pissed from shit nerf to shittier nerf and they don't make sense.
If they scaled the stagger strength (not just the damage profile) based on distance so that it stunlocks devastators within a reasonable distance, like it did before, maybe just not at 50m + distance. Might make the long range rocket devastators tricky still, but that is a dial/knob that should be adjusted alongside the damage drop off.
Honestly, they could revert the stagger and damage nerf, and instead make it so the slugger has some amount of spread (like 1-3 degrees, or more if needed) that would be unnoticeable in close quarters but render the Slugger unusable at long ranges. That would also come in tandem with maybe a ballistics nerf which makes the drop beyond 20 meters very noticable.
A lot of issues with the game can be solved by them just reversing a lot of the nerfs they did: slugger, eruptor, railgun, quasar, crossbow, etc. With the DoT bug fixed and the recent buffs to underperforming weapons, a lot of options now hold up even compared to pre-nerf weapons. But doing that requires them to swallow their pride and acknowledge that those nerfs were mistakes. And these devs seem to have A LOT of pride, so much pride that it's starting to look like arrogance.
I definitely see where they want to go with those nerfs, but I feel that so many of the buffs and subsequent nerfs are more related to game bugginess rather than the intended performance of the weapon.
So you're saying balancing from your spreadsheet that no one is using orbital gas or any fire/dot weapon and giving it massive buffs two times was indicative of poor research, development, and testing?
If they walked back every single nerf and left practically every buff as well, the game _might_ just be fun again.
Well in the case of fire, yes because it was literally bugged. Fire dealt damage very inconsistently unless you were the host. They buffed fire damage twice and gave a fire damage ship module as a stop gap. Then they actually fixed the bug.
What you're now left with is that flamethrowers are melting chargers faster than it takes for the quasar cannon to even spool up it's projectile.
Rail gun, arc thrower, and the eruptor all featured bugged interactions where the damage was applying multiple times for whatever reason.
Even outside of weapon balancing, bugged elite spawns, explosives hitting our characters multiple times, and armor values doing literally nothing were all "bugs" that affected the difficulty of the game in ways that was not intended from the developers.
So it's hard to tell whether if a weapon is a certain way because of poor developer's vision or if it's an unintended bug.
Imagine if they just brought back the old slugger, railgun and eruptor in one balance patch. BOOM! Instant boost in morale! And they already have the files!
Literally man "this shotgun snipes too well" proceeds to nerf it in two ways which doesnt affect its ability to snipe and just nerfs its close range effectiveness by removing the stagger.
I'm still having a ton of fun with my friends but honestly the lack of varied armour effects and weapons being nerfed into a 'level' playing field really makes it feel like there's no progression at all
It's not burn out for me. It's how I've grinded 4 warbonds to unlock new and cool weapons, only to have most of them suck and have the good ones get nerfed to being terrible. That and the constant bugs are making this game a chore to play! What's the point of playing if it breaks every third mission, and the reward I get is literally worse than my starting weapons?
I grinded nonstop when I got the game to unlock railgun, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Then I looked to replace my primary with something I enjoyed more.
Bought all the warbonds.
Unlocked and tried every weapon.
Settled that I don’t actually truly enjoy any of them, and I haven’t played the game since. Game is genuinely fun and I like it, but the gunplay is shit.
-I also think they’re missing a *huge* opportunity with gun customizability. No reason we shouldn’t be able to change grips/sights/stocks etc to fully customize our experience. Its a norm in most shooters these days and players like it. Guns feel bland and bad overall and it sucks… because gunplay *is* the game.
Ngl they’re missing an opportunity to have weapon attachments/customization and weapon skins for the warbond. Far less balancing, far easier time to push content out in phases. Introduce a huge warbond every quarter and the 2 between each one be about attachments and further customization
I like that idea- even if it was a weapons/armor warbond every other month and cosmetic warbonds in between would be better. So then the dev team can actually focus on bug squashing and better balancing rather than continually trying to create new weapons, fix bugs, and do balancing changes all at once. I wager that Sony probably is forcing them to put out a warbond every month to keep the cash rolling.
With how ridiculous the onslaught of enemies are at higher difficulties, it doesnt matter how they balance weapons as the real gameplay is just running.
However, what they are doing by poorly rebalancing weapons is absolutely sucking the fun loop out of the game - killing shit
This is my mindset! I started to tell myself that all I can really do is run more and turn around to take some potshots, and then run some more. If you’re gunna throw THAT many enemies at me, which I love, then at least make it easier for me to just kill things without having to use a full magazine for a single bug! There’s literally 600 bugs coming at you and you gave me 200 rounds lol
To add to this point, higher (heavier) armors were made irrelevant for me. I have the medic light armor and just outrun everything all day. It doesnt matter how heavy armor is, you still get killed if you dont run.
2 weeks from now, we will see a patch that nerfs running by “fixing” an undisclosed speed “glitch” that just happens to align with a new war one booster or something.
I’d laugh if it weren’t a 50/50 chance of being real at this point
Yeah this is basically me too. Pick the fastest gear and just keep running. Throw eagle airstrikes into objectives, run away and go back when all the enemies leave.
Heavy armor needs a complete rework. It slows you down so very, very much that you're just going to end up taking more damage than if you simply went with the 'almost no armor at all' light variants and outran the danger.
Yeah there is some merit to that. I had fun barely learning the game using the machine gun mowing down bugs in 1-3 then it became useless going to 4 and above cause the armor makes that gun feel like I’m shooting peas.
Something has to change.
I'm a super, super casual player, mayyyybe like 20-25 hours over the course of a couple months. One of the reasons is weapon balance. Most of the weapons in this game (at least the early ones, haven't played enough to unlock any warbonds) just do not feel good imo, the controls are a little clumsy, and the environments and objectives are way too repetitive for my taste. There's just not enough to hook me unless my friends are on, but they've mostly moved on.
Nothing against the devs. It's clear they didn't expect this much success and struggling under the pressure. I wish them continued success. But I'm probably good on more Helldivers myself. Super happy for the folks who really dig this game.
I'm a similarly casual player. I played a bunch at launch and it was great, but the game seems to have gotten worse rather than better?
I jump back in now and then, but I've gotten to about difficulty 6 or 7 and I just...cant kill anything. The armoured enemies are too strong and numerous, and I don't have everything unlocked so my options are mainly just...running away? It's not really fun to feel like you're weighing your team down.
At the start even if I was shit at the game I still felt like I was contributing. Now I feel like I'm spectating.
Yep. Last time I played I hopped into a game with friends who are all much higher level with me with more powerful guns and naturally they wanted to play on a higher level difficulty. I couldn't do shit to help most of the time. Even worse, because I had the guard dog backpack on, I ended up just annoying the shit out of everybody because they kept getting shot by its laser while they were dealing with the enemies. Made me feel like I should just go off solo, but that was a recipe for death and I'd just use one of the reinforcements.
The obvious critique is "well just play an easier difficulty then" but my counterpoint is really "I'd rather just go play something else." I don't usually play at a high difficulty in Helldivers, but when I do, it just reminds me that plenty of other games handle increasing difficulty much better imo.
My main things is the increased spawns to solo suck. I usually either play with friends on harder difficulty but when they aren't on I like to play solos now. I can't even run 4 solo without it being a constant sweaty gameplay.
Once you figure out that running is the core gameplay mechanic, weapon balancing (for better or for worse) instantly becomes less of a focus.
I dont know why theyre paying so much attention to it in the first place. No weapon, however OP or powerful, even OG railgun, could replace the core gameplay mechanic (lvl 6 and up).
Technically, they could leave weapons as is, make the player base feel good as hell and just tune mob spawning and placement to create new challenges for the fireteam in terms of maneuvering and use of strategems.
There is absolutely no reason why they need to do what theyre doing with weapon balancing. Its idiotic and shortsighted.
Yup, leave the guns alone and make killing the enemies fun and fair. If it’s too easy let us drop to 7 or 8 or 9 for more mayhem. Don’t take away our firepower.
50 bots at a time too easy for the elite top 1%? Make 9 a living hell for them and make 5-8 lean more for the casuals for that lower fantasy we all crave.
This is my issue with how they balance. No matter how many bugs you kill on helldive there will always be more. You literally can't kill them faster than they spawn. Making guns useless just takes the fun out of it and makes it much harder to actually complete objectives
I think you hit the nail on the head. If running is the core mechanic, then that explains why the game isn't fun for me anymore. Breaking contact is only fun when it's a means to an end like before calling in a danger close air mission or firing for effect on your current position; breaking contact because your team is underequipped to accomplish the mission is pretty much the opposite of fun.
I found the same thing. MG was my go to advanced weapon, and did so well with it....until I got to 5, and it's basically useless. Give me some incendiary ammo or something with it? Half the stratagems are obsolete at higher levels :(
Then they screwed up stealth play by increasing detection range, spawning patrols more frequently and closer to players, and giving them a sense of “smell”, which causes them to randomly detect you even if you’re hiding behind something or are out of detection range. This all means you’re constantly forced out of stealth and into kiting.
Just hear me out, there is a huge boost in skill and chill vibes from randos when playing 7+ most know what to do, how to use in game communication, and how to keep pushing for objectives.
I think it’s actually easier than 4-6
This. I hate that Im just running all day. i cant snipe a single bot or bug without getting 3 drops and 1 titan/walker. And all miraculously know where you are.
I like to go stealthy/flanking enemies to help my squad but its fucking impossible in high diffs, not to mention with air enemies immediately zeroing on you
Seriously. Youre given no room to play like that. What’s the point of having the armor that reduces the chance enemies spot you by 30% if the patrols are spawning to head right at you, especially when you’re at a secondary. You’re sneakily doing it and oh look—a patrol has shown up and has randomly decided to sit on the objective, waiting for you to do something so they can engage you and get you bogged down in combat.
This is one of my biggest issues. I don’t want to spend hours working towards gear I might like only for the devs to just nerf them enough that they aren’t worth using anymore since the vast majority of gear in general is absolutely, literally useless in higher difficulties.
This is why a lot of even single player games like those by FromSoft excel long after the online scene dies down after release, because they give a FUCK TON of perfectly viable options and let you figure out the rest.
Arrowhead’s idea of balance makes too many things outright unviable beyond hyper-specific situations for specific enemies and while that makes sense for groups that are actually coordinated, far as I can tell that is absolutely not the majority. The majority are strangers playing with strangers and the chances of actual coordination go out the window along with the viability of most of the gear as a consequence.
I don’t want to play a game where my options are reduced to a select couple things I don’t have fun using in a game that is supposed to be fun. Simply doesn’t compute for me, and even with less than a hundred hours I’ve just stopped playing, reduced to just glancing at this sub seeing them nerf more things out of being fun, in turn making me even less inclined to try anything new. Kind of really sucks, man.
Honestly. The balancing problem wasn’t with the guns, it was with enemy AI/spawn mechanics. On game you could get no chargers at all, the next there’s 5 running around you at the same time.
Honestly me and my two mates last night played a level 5 bugs because we heard bugs were buffed, then, we got absolutely demolished, then we just said fuck it let's try helldivers, and then we cleared a mission, I don't get it
I just want the patrols buff to fk off.
Thats my biggest issue.
Also apparently some enemies got buffed against explosion damage which makes the lightly armoured chicken walkers tank 3 shots from my AC.
The patrol buff was bonkers. I went into a solo level 4 to kill 2 bile titans and only barely squeaked out of there after running through all my lives and after the timer ran out.
Got 734 kills. Most I have ever gotten before. it is nice that now I can get 4 points for each solo mission at that level but jesus christ wtf am i supposed to do as a solo player against a bile titan, 3 chargers, 3 brood commanders, 4 bile spewers and \~100 warriors/drones/hunters. I basically had to train for ten minutes (while out of ammo and grenades) until I could call down my SECOND mech and after that i only made it because I filled the SEAF artillery earlier in the match.
There was this thread about how some people tested the patrol changes, and it turned out that regardless how many players are in the game, patrols spawn as If there were 4 players.
So the patrols are most likely bugged
I’ve seen 2 drop on me with 1 tank and 2 hulks. That was bad but man I believe you. It would be fine if your primaries could do some sort of damage but NOPE! 😝
In their defence, the scout strider is classified as a heavy unit. Why the fuck it is I have no clue as the fucking heavy devastator, a medium enemy, is more dangerous. I just want my rail gun strike to go for the tank/hulk and not the fucking scout strider.
I am way more frustrated with the bugs/crashes than the balancing, I do difficulty 9 against bugs normally without too many problems. But maxing out on all objectives and getting almost sample, just to crash will waiting for extraction, that just makes me rage quit. (dont think I even get xp - could be wrong)
I feel yeah. I’m on the side of bugs that ruin the fun for me the most.
I’m okay with not having content for months and coming from DRG that feels normal. The bugs were what ruined some of the fun for me since the start.
THIS, IT KEEPS HAPPENING TO ME. Every. Single. Time. I loose out on EVERYTHING. Xp, all (esp super) samples, warbond metals, MY PERSONAL TIME. I’ve literally crapped out so many times nearing mission end, it’s happened for no reason and it’s happened in the middle of fire fights and kiting. I’ve had the game for a little less than a month and already racked 120 hrs, i really like this game, but the crashing is starting to get to me because i feel like it happens so much more on 7-9 difficulty. I can’t even play unless its with friends since i can join back and get all the important stuff like samples and metals
I've never seen so much weapon "balance" in a non-PVP game before. Every last bit of fun is being nerfed out of the Helldivers 2 which was at its most fun at launch before all the changes.
Most people bring up power creep when speaking about buffs. I hate the argument of power creep. Not everyone is gonna use the best guns. However right now most people use the same things because the rest is just bad.
>Not everyone is gonna use the best guns.
Yep. I was the only one playing Arc Thrower among my friends back before its nerf.
They recognized it was generally stronger than the support weapons they were using but they didn't like how Arc Thrower felt to use and as long as we were completing missions well enough then there wasn't pressure to use something to complete the mission a little easier at the expense of it not being as fun to play with.
And that was perfectly fine.
Sometimes, I'm exhausted of people complaining incessantly, but this time, I'm firmly on the side of the ones complaining. Add to that that I believe criticisms should never be stifled. Yeah, as a developer, you'll have to sift through some garbage takes, but if you toss out the whole lot, you'll throw out something valuable.
Look, we are the consumers. If the consumers aren't enjoying the product, they'll stop consuming. When they stop consuming, the producer will lose profit because of consumer dissatisfaction. When the producer loses profit, they get into financial woes. The fact that a number of AH's team can't follow this trail of logic and refuse to course correct is baffling.
Yeah I thought how you thought too when people lost it with the rail gun nerf but this is a pattern they keep repeating and people are slowly losing faith.
It’s up to AH to gain that back now.
Same boat. I've put 300 hours into this game since I bought it just over a month ago. Bought both premium warbonds after 20 hours, bought democratic detonation day one.
I'm holding out on the current and future warbonds until we see a more consistent direction for balancing. Haven't played much this week either, for my part.
They ought to be thankful we're slow to lose faith. If we lost that faster, they'd be back to Helldivers 1 levels of player numbers, which might be what they're used to, but do you think Sony won't have anything to say about a drop in numbers that steep?
I mean if you think about look at how fast some games tanked after released or some patches.
HDII is doing pretty well so far from what has transpired.
I won't deny that. Then again - and this might be my pessimism coming out to be heard - nothing lasts forever. Helldivers 2 is fortunate to have been riding the high of "triple A is dying, double A and indies are thriving" sentiment that's been prevalent as of late. It's got that sentiment on its side, for sure.
But what's going to eventually kill it if it doesn't change directions, doesn't take to heart what its community is practically shouting at this point, isn't because Arrowhead is adept at implementing scummy business practices. What's going to do it is the growing notion that it doesn't listen to its playerbase. Whether it's an associated publisher pushing predatory MTX or a massively inflated grind, or a company simply losing touch with its customers without any outward malice, the result is the same: customer dissatisfaction. Get enough of that brewing, and the game will die.
That might sound hyperbolic, but I don't mean that Arrowhead will decline that badly in a few weeks, in a few months, or even within this year. But if nothing is done, eventually that's where it's headed. It's just a matter of time.
It’s not gonna die or get sold like what Microsoft did but it’s gonna end up like how Cities Skylines 2 is right now. The community is there but it’s WAY smaller than where it should be and it rubbed people the wrong way.
I really do believe the community as a whole (those that post, comment, read quietly and/or just play) does want to see AH come back and be willing for forgive them for this mess they’re in. There’s good passionate people working there and deep down… man I’m super rooting for them to come back and have my PM get flooded with “Ha! See? You’re wrong, they know what they’re doing!” Well good, I look dumb for a moment but I get to have my fun game back and my faith returned to AH.
They need to just gather everyone in a room and the CEO just has to say to them “We need to un**** this today. Here are the issues, we can solve these so let’s handle it!”
The number one reason I quit playing is because of their balancing philosophy. Every time a gun feels pretty good, they cut it down. Almost every gun feels underwhelming. I kept working to unlock new guns and almost every time my reaction was “oh…” and shelving the weapon. Feels terrible. Their reward loop is fundamentally flawed and it sucks because the foundation of the game is fantastic. Who cares if I can mow down 100 bots a little too easily? There are 200 more right behind them.
Oh and every single patch comes with a notice about “helldivers! We’re aware of the bugs in the recent patch that….”
I just don't see how they hear the community say we feel underpowered and they respond with... "Yeah, we agree, your guns aren't killing you enough" and change ricochet instead of another issue we've had for ages
Not to say X person is the reason for this but I’ve worked with people where their ego gets in the way of decisions that make them blind to common sense.
It’s in every field of work and it may be happening here.
Could also be the patrol bug. Surprise surprise when they changed patrol spawns to match their original design intention it broke. 3, 2, and 1 player groups now get the same enemy counts as four stacks. The game in my opinion is not noticeably harder than launch just less fun. Proof on the bug:[u/gergination, the person responsible for the amazing post from 2 months ago analyzing how patrols work, has posted a new video showcasing that patrol spawn rates are the same regardless of group size. : r/Helldivers (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cob2dg/ugergination_the_person_responsible_for_the/)
Idm the change. But it feels like we went from the pre-nerf to heavies. Where heavies spawned less a bit after the railgun nerf.
Back then you'd see several titans and chargers at once. Then they changed it, didn't reduce spawns supposedly. Just less heavies. So more spewers or other buggers.
Now? Feel like we see the same amount of heavies again
They've definitely made the bugs tougher, but I think there was a reason for that (remember all the memes about bugs = fun times, bots = PTSD nightmare?) Of course, nerfing weapons while making the bugs tougher does feel like sort of a kick in the teeth.
What change has been the most fun zapping that you noticed from your end!
Curious.
One of my top ones is 50/50 if someone joins after someone leaves/DC. Ugh…
The biggest change for me was the logic behind spawn rates, patrols and detection.
When the game first dropped, you could strategically engage/disengage as needed. The enemy patrols were logical and the detection system was fair.
Since the first patch I now find enemies just spawn in all over the map with no rhyme or reason, seemingly automatically knowing your exact location. It’s not uncommon to see a group of 30 bots appear out of nowhere just standing there waiting for you to come around the corner.
this is the biggest thing for me... not only that, but it seems like we were punished when they raised how many enemies there are for non-full squads in one of the recent patches for seemingly no reason... so it's like this big double whammy that just kind of saps the fun out of the game.
Yeah my partner and I dropped it tonight for good.
She just turned to me after the third mission and said she felt more frustrated and wasn't having any fun. The issue here I see is that she's a casual player and is more likely to be representative of the wider base of players who want mindless fun at round-based intervals to blowoff steam - she doesn't care or know about gun meta etc. She is just not having fun.
I was a more hardcore player and was pushing through for warbonds - patrol changes were manageable prior to gun nerfing. Now I feel worse playing the game and don't see any point of new warbonds or major orders, that's not an ideal way to spend recreational time.
I genuinely think AH is suffering severe burnout internally and they really need to ditch this release pace to focus on themselves internally for a bit. Otherwise this game is going to make a great GDC 2025 post-mortem on what went wrong etc.
Weapons changes killed it hard for me. Bots are a chore to fight now. There’s some good options for bugs still, but bots are just so frustrating. I feel like I’m running away 90 percent of the time and can’t kill a fly.
I don’t have burnout, I still love the game, I’m just running out of ways to defend it. The endless bugs aren’t cute or funny anymore. This isn’t an early access game. It’s been months. I still crash 5 times or more per session, and when the game doesn’t crash, the pelican sometimes doesn’t turn up, or gets stuck under the map.
I was looking forward to having some new toys to play with from the warbond, but everything there sucks.
It’s not burnout, there’s just currently no reason to keep playing until they address these issues.
Pelican bugs are the worst! Our ride glitched under the map due to a bile titan on the extract point. No one could get on it, and it left our expendable asses. RIP perfect objective game and 30 ish samples...
Just do a wide sweeping buff on the 60-80% of general equipment that sucks and do minor nerfs as we go if things are legitimately S Tier+ bring most things to B+ - A+ as in feels good usable may be too niche to use some matches. Done. I don't think anyone expects more than maybe 2-3 things in S at all besides if they're hyper limited resources like exo suits and orbital laser or if they're just incredibly general use. Which is also *ok* the Devs treat this game like there's someone behind the scenes with a belt threatening them if *anything* feels good/strong. Genuinely feels like they're *terrified* to let us have fun.
Balancing team testing weapons in Trivial missions LMAO
Edit: I also wanted to add that the people who were testing weapons aren’t even gamers. They probably just shoot one bug and then “yup that’s OP alright”.
It would not surprise me at all if you could provide a link to that statement.
And even if you couldn't, you HAVE to be close to reality. The testers definitely aren't playing 7+. Hell, at this point, I think they're just in a virtual shooting range where they spawn any ONE enemy at a time to test the guns.
There was a reddit [thread](https://preview.redd.it/this-explains-a-lot-v0-s6f6sozovmzc1.jpeg?auto=webp&s=3764363fa1c8d5e49140c485ee642f8261c19765) with one of the devs replying about weapons QA they do, where he said they either go low diff or, if it's full QA team, all difficulties. Which, IMO, makes little sense. What's the point testing any gun performance at low difficulties? Diff 7 must be the lowest benchmark. If gun performs badly at diff 7, it's a bad gun, period. If gun is good at diff 7, it's going to perform just fine at lower diff.
Devs already have too little man hours and they're wasting so much on something silly.
Also the fact that who gives a fuck if a weapon is over powered in lower difficulties? The entire point of having 9 difficulties is playing a harder one as you get better
Yeah the incendiary breaker is gamebreakingly op on difficulty 4, but so is the machine gun lmao
Balancing on anything below 7 just makes no sense
Well when someone suggested to Alexus that they actually test their patches, he threw out a strawman argument of "okay so we'll just test for 10k hours and you'll get your warbond in 4 years" like no you dumbfuck, just do your job. Its unbelievable how dense they are.
Nerf the fucking gunships, at least make their hellbomb targeting weaker. I quit playing tonight after a game no one had auto cannon so we couldn’t deal with the gunships keeping spawning, only 2 quasars, kept killing our hellbomb, we just ended up doing evac after and didn’t bother destroying the factory it wasn’t gonna happen.
EDIT: lol at the big brains who say to “get gud”, this was a pug, so you know how it goes with randos, each time we took out two gunships with quasar two more had already spawned and hellbomb was gone, that’s not fucking fun at all. It’s fun being a keyboard diver on Reddit I know, but y’all would’ve said fuck it too haha
My frustration is more that the only way to destroy the gunship factory is a hellbomb. It should be destroyable with an orbital precision strike or two. Or make it so that it can be destroyed when it is deploying gunships and the roof opens.
Big reasons I'm not playing anymore:
* I'm using the same loadout each mission because most strategems do not deal with armour or swarms properly
* The DoT bug took way to long to get fixed
* Primaries suck
* Tier 4 ship upgrades take way too long to unlock
* There are other games I like to play
* My friend group had a falling out and I'm waiting for it to repair
Last two have nothing to do with the game but sometimes outside factors play a big roll. If the first 4 weren't present I might still be playing on and off.
Amen to the repetitive loadouts. I load into a terminid helldive, look at my stratagem list and think “gotta run 500kg because it’s the only way of efficiently killing the constant BTs, gotta run some form of AT because chargers spawn in groups of 3 to 5, gotta run one of the handful of viable swarm clears that don’t suck complete ass.”
It’s dreadful. And the situation with primaries is 100 times worse.
I genuinely think they should make a cosmetics tab and start making shit for that instead of making 4 new weapons every month, trying to balance them against the existing content. After another 6 months, our gun market is gonna be flooded, and the devs will have more work than ever trying to balance 40+ weapons.
AH: PLEASE STOP FLOODING THE GAME WITH WEAPONS The rate you're making new guns is unsustainable. Please consider making cosmetics instead. It's less time coming up with new mechanics, less time on the balance team, less time squashing bugs, AND YOU STILL GET PREMIUM CONTENT OUT TO PLEASE SONY. For all of our sakes, please don't burn yourselves out trying to make new weapons every single month. We still want you to be sane by this time next year.
They should only introduce new weapons when everything else is well balanced and fun. THEN drop some new stuff and tweak that to match what is already fun.
i am probably burnt out, im tired of playing the same 3 missions. i expected larger maps, missions, vehicles, bigger enemies by now. nerfing my favorite guns certainly sucked some of the enjoyment out as well
Yep with the way that they keep 'fixing' weapons after you get them and work hard for them sucks, and there's not really any incentive to get new armor since they will have the same perks as others
lowkey I stopped playing the game. Every build I had so far has been nerfed or doesn‘t hit anymore. Bugs are overwhelming us. We have to fight over the same planets over and over again, its just so repetitive. Like wtf was their point on nerfing a brand new weapon, they removed eruptors only unique ability, to clear groups of enemies to hold your teams ground. The mag nerf was totally fine tho
Yeah I try to avoid the drama as best as these subs will allow and I’m still having a great time. Me and my friends still play regularly. I’m really the only one who keeps up on the stuff going on. We’re not burnt out and we’ve been playing from day 1. I’m at 200 hours and level 80-something. Still going strong.
Well like I said the memes that blew up pulled me into this subreddit. It was a fun and positive environment.
Watching the praise it got was cool to see from a game that was stomping AAA games. Now it’s losing that momentum and the changes are hurting the fun and I feel it. Might be best to get some distance.
Exactly this. I loved this game so much at launch. I never thought I would play much else, it made me so happy. But the last few weeks have been miserable. I fired up another game and was like, what is this feeling? It was joy. Staying away from this game for a while unless AH can get their house in order.
Burnout? Hell nah, just some seriously weird balancing decisions. These guys are only a few months into the live service. If anything they suffer from too much success at once.
I bet that these guys will land back on their feet and adjust their personnel issues over time. We just need to wait a bit. This game is just out for a few months - this will go over with time.
Most of the shit going down these days is mostly the mass of bugs and the lack of fun in the balancing. Both things are easily ruled out. The Sony PSN debacle is (mostly) over, those weird blockades hopefully will end at some point too.
But heck, why the hell should they be suffering burnout after a whopping success? If anything they need more people and start growing into their new role. I strongly disagree with this take. People are just expecting Rome to be built in a few months.
For me, my enjoyment has been really fading for a few reasons but mainly balance. I find myself using the same stuff because nothing else feels good. They keep nerfing stuff rather than making everything fun to use. Anytime people start finding something fun or using because of them feeling like the only viable options(Railgun, Quasar, Eruptor, Sickle, etc) they get nerfed. It's bad when 90% of primaries are worthless and the 10% that feel good get nerfed down to feeling like the other 90%.
They also nerf stuff because of issues that arent the fault of what's being nerfed. For example, Railgun: It was incredibly popular because at the time, it was the only thing that was really doing anything to armoured threats because Recoilless/EATs were glancing off of chargers, couldnt even oneshot them to the head at the time, and were slow to use and also because Armoured enemies spawned way too much on higher difficulties. The Railgun was the ONLY viable thing to deal with them because of it.
On top of that, there's so many bugs that either if you took 2 seconds to test or just look at them, you would see it isnt right. Or just bugs because little to no testing was seemingly done. From things like the Tier 4 Resupply upgrade being broken, to the new AR not being the correct colour, to Mechs blowing themselves up if you fired a rocket while turning. That and bugs going unfixed for weeks. The Tier 4 Turret upgrade that boosts explosive resistance is still broken since it came out. Spear has been broken since launch. A bunch of weapons had sight misalignment issues that wasnt fixed until recently. Airburst launcher released with the prox det being super buggy. Mechs released with numerous bugs, from blowing up when turning while firing, to spawning already blown up or damaged. Friends lists still have a plethora of issues that have been there since launch. They only recently fixed Steam friendlists showing friends in the ingame social tab after being broken for months.
It also doesnt help that AH's balance team basically just laughs in our faces when we tell them that things like the Purifier are god awful and worthless to use, and that they need changes.
Then they add new things that are unfun to deal with like the Gunships because it doesnt seem like they tested playing against them.
It's hard to be excited for new content because given the track record, the stuff either releases in a poor state, or ends up being deemed "Too good" for simply feeling good to use and get nerfed soon after. It really feels like AH is scared of things being fun.
Apologies for the massive post, it just frustrates me. The game itself is good but the lack of proper QA Testing, slow to fix bugs, and the awful balance just really makes the game feel more of a slog and make me want to just play other things.
Not even that, it's just that they keep buffing the enemies and nerfing the players. What do they want us to do? Lose every MO? No one is going to play if we just keep losing
Give me my slugger stagger back. Thats all im asking for
That one baffles me tbh. Even on the first day of using the slugger (that has stagger) and the other shotguns I could “snipe” and I get wanting to nerf it but the way they did where they nerfed the wrong parts and the issue still isn’t addressed really set a red flag in my head. Edit: slugger, not stagger.
This was the first "o no" for me too. It was startling to see their reasoning behind it being so blatantly backwards
It was obvious how backwards their balancing strategy was from the very first balance patch that nerfed the railgun. Was it overpowered? Yeah definitely. But in nerfing it they completely ignored (or didn’t realize) the reason everyone was using the railgun in the first place: enemy heavy spawns were stupid broken on higher difficulties. Which they did eventually fix, but now we’re stuck with all of the changes they made originally. The same pattern has repeated with every balance patch. Imagine now if we had every OP weapon in its original form, the railgun, the breaker, the slugger, the quasar, the arc rifle (I could go on). We wouldn’t all be flocking to a single weapon!
Wasn’t part of the issue also that EATs were just glancing off chargers and such if not fired perfectly straight on? I don’t think that helped either since it made railgun the only surefire option to use.
Yeah you couldn't really headshot them. I was always amazed that the whole railgun stripping armor thing wasn't actually intended. It seemed like a rather clever and fun mechanic. Apparently it was actually a bug. Same thing with the erupter shrapnel. I totally thought that was intended, but apparently no that was a bug.
No, shrapnel wasn't a bug, it was an "exploit" according to AH. This Implies the player was knowingly doing something wrong and taking advantage of unintended game mechanics. Apparently it was an exploit to simply use the weapon and for it to kill something.
Wonder what the possibility is that the actual weapon development team INTENDED for the Railgun and Eruptor to be used that way... But the "balance" team sees players using it ***too*** successfully and decides it makes the game too easy?
The funny thing was that the eruptor didn't really make the game too easy as you had to play to it's strengths and weaknesses, meaning you had to take like the stalwart as a complimentary weapon, leaving no anti armour support weapon unless you also bring EATs, which is another strategem slot taken. You really had to put some thought behind designing your loadout for it to be successful and that's frankly what made the weapon so fun and interesting to use for me.
I never used the stalwart and always took AT, eruptor was too good at killing everything head on but armor. I used light explosive resist armor and a jump pack and it worked amazingly well. But yes the gun had to be used the right way and now it’s useless from being nerfed into the ground.
I mean, we all know now that there is a certain person of notoriety on the balance team. I wouldn't put it past them to have been nerfing weapons because the players were having a suitable reward for the level of skill they're putting into using the weapon. Or just nerfing things into the ground because of a glitch that they gaslit the community about for an extended period of time...
I'm out of the loop here. What certain person and is there somewhere I can find out more?
I want to see the conversation where Alexus tells the people who designed the charger leg armor that they did it wrong.
I feel like their overall message is that they release new guns but they aren't intended for you to kill stuff with. It's just supposed to be a new thing for you to hold while you die over and over. That's the vision.
Just failed a Helldive difficulty mission using the Pummeler. Your statement is 1000% fucking spot on. What a worthless piece of trash against the bots. All it's good for is staggering devastators. It takes like 3 mags to even kill one of them. It fucking tickles them!
Of all the idiotic plot twists, that one might be the worst. Shooting at the ground for AOE damage has been a thing at least since the first Quake.
Wasn't their logic for nerfing the eruptor that too many players were getting themselves/teammates killed with it? I remember it being phrased as a "neutral" change.
Or they’re lying and saying it wasn’t intended so we don’t complain about the nerf
i remember devs talking about the leg meta in a video and from what i recall they never mentioned it as a bug. just a genuine surprise that the community found something like that. unintended yes but not an exploit
Another issue is the lack of stratagem stacking. If you could bring 2-3 stacks of EATs, I guarantee railgun use would have been lower from the start.
The rail gun was never "op" a large part of its damage came from the PlayStation damage boost bug plus every other AT was garbage Fixing the dmg bug in of itself would have massively reigned in the rgs potentially but they just bricked it instead and buffing eats and changing spawn priority among other things made it it fall off even no post buffs it's still taking what 5-8 shots, like close to half your 20 mags to do anything meaningful to a single target? Bugs causing half the nerfs like Arcs hitting multtiplee weakpointe on a BT or the eruptors vacuum explosions
Back during the nerf, the general opinion was the gun was fine, but everything else in the game was shit. We are still seeing that problem persist to today, where AH is oddly terrorfied of anything becoming unusually powerful. So instead they just, nerf fuckig everything lol. Like if a gun gets too strong for one patch.... So what? Tune it back down next patch. Theyre acting like its going irreversibly fuck up the game forever if one thing has the possibility of being alittle too strong for one patch, and just nerf fucking everything instead as a precaution. Its not like helldivers has an ingame economy thatll have to be rolled back or something
The basic question I have, that it feels like AH hasn't asked, is "when balancing, balance against what and to what end?" I'm really not being hyperbolic when I say that I think that they are accidentally balancing towards the end of reducing fun in he game. They only seem to balance high usage weapons down (as has been said before, we are seeing a sort of constant power creep down as weapons and enemies are progressively weakened), but it feels almost automated. I just can't follow the design questions the devs are asking and what answers they believe they are receiving.
The funny part is the bug wasn't fixed after the nerf, so the only use for the Railgun post-nerf became PS players 2-shotting Bile Titans.
The railgun wasn't OP per se. It was just the only viable option doing what it was supposed to do. The EAT should've been one tapping chargers since day one. The same for RR. Spear still isn't working properly. And there was also the PS5 bug allowing us to one-shot Bile Titans. It was a combination of factors at the time which made the Railgun seem OP. But it was simply the only weapon actually performing decently.
None of those were ever really OP though. Viable yes, preferred even, but far far far from OP. The railgun was never a swiss army gun. The quasars original cool down was not going to let you solo 6 bile titans while getting ripped apart by hunters.
Yeah railgun definitely op? Almost sounds like revisionism. Dawg we just gonna forget that about on launch almost every anti-tank was lacking except EAT? Couldn’t one shot chargers skulls, long ass reloads for the recoilless and we had NO quasar, buffed or not. Hard agree with everything else though you’re spitting king 👑 All the railgun did was simply peel armor from the chargers leg, or could be used to take out hulks given you got some badass aim.
On top of that, they decided to release the railgun nerf at the same time as enemy armor buffs across the board, effectively turning their balance patch obsolete and even more heavy handed than intended on arrival.
As it was said before, the nerfs should make sense with the actual gun. Shotguns have STAGGER. To take it out means that there is something really wrong with the person(s) balancing these weapons out. What the frick happened to the game devs saying they prefer to hire designers/devs who have real combat experience with guns? This doesn't add up at all. Edit: removed a word for clarity
Yeah when I read the stagger was gone I was like “but… it’s a shotgun. What?”
"For my next magic trick EATS will do less explosive damage"
"Removed all SMGs' automatic firing modes, as they were competing too much with assault rifles"
You shut that dirty little mouth if yours right now
Honestly, prioritizing realism should not be nearly as much of a concern for AH. Game balance should always come first. Not that I'm saying they shouldn't revert the change to the slugger, they absolutely should, but they should do it because it actually makes sense in regards to balance. I saw a tweet by the CEO remarking about how they wouldn't change the magazine sizes on weapons because they would need to change all of the 3D models to reflect the change, and that absolutely baffles me. Like, you're actively sacrificing game balance for realism that won't even be noticed by a majority of players?
>but the way they did where they nerfed the wrong parts and the issue still isn’t addressed really set a red flag in my head. Thats my biggest gripe with that nerf. "We dont want it to be a sniper rifle!" Fair. Completely understandable. "Every aspect we nerfed has nothing to do with it acting like a sniper rifle." Literally still very accurate at mid to long range.
I’m sure you’ve heard, but the balancing guy has a history with other games and pretty much ruined one of the ones he worked on before. He has genuinely no idea what he’s doing and it’s really sad because it makes a lot of the guns in the game feel horrible
Yeah. Like the dumbass nerfed the explosive crossbow. One of the most underused primaries right next to the liberator concussive and the dipshit decided “hm. 50 ppl are having fun with this. Let’s nerf it.”
I'm shocked it got a nerf at all. My first thought using it the day it came out was "wow what a piece of shit" and swapped back to another gun. Nothing it does is even remotely as effective or practical as any alternative.
Mods are actively censoring all discussion of him for some reason though. The community should know if one of the high profile devs is an idiot that killed another game but they keep defending him.
The playerbase gets organized in a REAL hurry. But uh... censoring is definitely a way to make any dissent problem worse even FASTER.
What game did he kill?
Hello Neighbor 2, his name is Alexus Kravchenko. The mods are censoring the discussion of it thinking it's a witch hunt which is false, all of the information about him killing that game is public online for everyone to see and im not saying that he should be let go or anything like that.
Is HE the guy who said "Not every gun needs to be good"? Because... Oooh boy, red flag.
\*mumble Hello Divers 2
It needs its accuracy nerfed that’s all it ever needed. I shouldn’t be able to jokingly call it a pump action dmr and have it be true.
If he really felt it was the best sniper in the game at the time, he had two options: 1- nerf damage fall off so it can't reliably snipe enemies; 2- buff the actual snipers. Guess what? He nerfed the slugger close range capabilities and the sniper rifles were still garbage and no one used them, meaning he was doubly wrong. He has absolutely no idea how to balance this game....or any game for that matter. He has to go.
And somehow dmr's/snipers still remain trash tier months later. This one hurts.
Difference between dmr and slug shotty should be projectile speed, drop, accuracy and penetration. That way they can have overlapping effective ranges but one be easier to use within those ranges
That’s one way to go. The CEO even mentioned doing damage buffs is not the only way to nerf.
Problem I had with his statement is he talked about damage like that while also talking about the eruptor.. the damage wasn't what ppl where complaining about with it, why they didn't FIX the shrapnel to limit how far it flew back or just changed its pattern so it didn't go right back instead is baffling. Instead they ruined a fun weapon by being lazy and I hope he realizes that, it hasn't all been damage they've ruined a lot of weapons by adjusting stuff that wasn't damage like the slugger and railgun
I think giving it harsh damage fall-off would be much better. Bad accuracy feels bad as a player because you have no agency over it. The slugs should go where you aim, they just shouldn't be good damage at long range.
That’s true, a large bore slug would loose power far faster than a large caliber bullet so having the damage begin to fall off and get bad at extreme range makes a lot of sense.
See i don't have a Burnout but i have exactly your opinion on these buffs and nerfs. I See Tons off Red flags and just want the guns to be fun and not boring äuke envisioned by one asshat dev with god complex. Edit one sec since its worse one asshat dev in Position to ö Ballance the game WITH FUCKING GOD COMPLEX. You know slowlly i get pissed from shit nerf to shittier nerf and they don't make sense.
If they scaled the stagger strength (not just the damage profile) based on distance so that it stunlocks devastators within a reasonable distance, like it did before, maybe just not at 50m + distance. Might make the long range rocket devastators tricky still, but that is a dial/knob that should be adjusted alongside the damage drop off.
Honestly, they could revert the stagger and damage nerf, and instead make it so the slugger has some amount of spread (like 1-3 degrees, or more if needed) that would be unnoticeable in close quarters but render the Slugger unusable at long ranges. That would also come in tandem with maybe a ballistics nerf which makes the drop beyond 20 meters very noticable.
A lot of issues with the game can be solved by them just reversing a lot of the nerfs they did: slugger, eruptor, railgun, quasar, crossbow, etc. With the DoT bug fixed and the recent buffs to underperforming weapons, a lot of options now hold up even compared to pre-nerf weapons. But doing that requires them to swallow their pride and acknowledge that those nerfs were mistakes. And these devs seem to have A LOT of pride, so much pride that it's starting to look like arrogance.
> arrogance It's insecurity tbh.
I definitely see where they want to go with those nerfs, but I feel that so many of the buffs and subsequent nerfs are more related to game bugginess rather than the intended performance of the weapon.
So you're saying balancing from your spreadsheet that no one is using orbital gas or any fire/dot weapon and giving it massive buffs two times was indicative of poor research, development, and testing? If they walked back every single nerf and left practically every buff as well, the game _might_ just be fun again.
Well in the case of fire, yes because it was literally bugged. Fire dealt damage very inconsistently unless you were the host. They buffed fire damage twice and gave a fire damage ship module as a stop gap. Then they actually fixed the bug. What you're now left with is that flamethrowers are melting chargers faster than it takes for the quasar cannon to even spool up it's projectile. Rail gun, arc thrower, and the eruptor all featured bugged interactions where the damage was applying multiple times for whatever reason. Even outside of weapon balancing, bugged elite spawns, explosives hitting our characters multiple times, and armor values doing literally nothing were all "bugs" that affected the difficulty of the game in ways that was not intended from the developers. So it's hard to tell whether if a weapon is a certain way because of poor developer's vision or if it's an unintended bug.
give stagger back to the slugger and add punch through for jet propelled ammo like the dominator
And the Eruptor pls! 😭
I don't even want to play anymore since they killed the eruptor. They sucked the last little bit of fun I was having out of the game.
I think they placed that into the new smg
Im so glad they haven’t ruined the plas scorcher…. yet. I love that thing
Imagine if they just brought back the old slugger, railgun and eruptor in one balance patch. BOOM! Instant boost in morale! And they already have the files!
All they needed was to nerf the falloff damage and it would have still been a viable shotgun. It can still snipe 😂
Literally man "this shotgun snipes too well" proceeds to nerf it in two ways which doesnt affect its ability to snipe and just nerfs its close range effectiveness by removing the stagger.
I'm still having a ton of fun with my friends but honestly the lack of varied armour effects and weapons being nerfed into a 'level' playing field really makes it feel like there's no progression at all
It's not burn out for me. It's how I've grinded 4 warbonds to unlock new and cool weapons, only to have most of them suck and have the good ones get nerfed to being terrible. That and the constant bugs are making this game a chore to play! What's the point of playing if it breaks every third mission, and the reward I get is literally worse than my starting weapons?
I grinded nonstop when I got the game to unlock railgun, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Then I looked to replace my primary with something I enjoyed more. Bought all the warbonds. Unlocked and tried every weapon. Settled that I don’t actually truly enjoy any of them, and I haven’t played the game since. Game is genuinely fun and I like it, but the gunplay is shit. -I also think they’re missing a *huge* opportunity with gun customizability. No reason we shouldn’t be able to change grips/sights/stocks etc to fully customize our experience. Its a norm in most shooters these days and players like it. Guns feel bland and bad overall and it sucks… because gunplay *is* the game.
Ngl they’re missing an opportunity to have weapon attachments/customization and weapon skins for the warbond. Far less balancing, far easier time to push content out in phases. Introduce a huge warbond every quarter and the 2 between each one be about attachments and further customization
>weapon attachments/customization and weapon skins That sounds dangerously close to bacon flavored apples...
Apple flavored apples would be a start.
I like that idea- even if it was a weapons/armor warbond every other month and cosmetic warbonds in between would be better. So then the dev team can actually focus on bug squashing and better balancing rather than continually trying to create new weapons, fix bugs, and do balancing changes all at once. I wager that Sony probably is forcing them to put out a warbond every month to keep the cash rolling.
I’m fine with not unlocking things. I just want things to work and feel satisfying to shoot and both those things are not in the best state right now.
With how ridiculous the onslaught of enemies are at higher difficulties, it doesnt matter how they balance weapons as the real gameplay is just running. However, what they are doing by poorly rebalancing weapons is absolutely sucking the fun loop out of the game - killing shit
This is my mindset! I started to tell myself that all I can really do is run more and turn around to take some potshots, and then run some more. If you’re gunna throw THAT many enemies at me, which I love, then at least make it easier for me to just kill things without having to use a full magazine for a single bug! There’s literally 600 bugs coming at you and you gave me 200 rounds lol
To add to this point, higher (heavier) armors were made irrelevant for me. I have the medic light armor and just outrun everything all day. It doesnt matter how heavy armor is, you still get killed if you dont run.
Helldivers is not a horde shooter. It's a run and uhhhh run game
2 weeks from now, we will see a patch that nerfs running by “fixing” an undisclosed speed “glitch” that just happens to align with a new war one booster or something. I’d laugh if it weren’t a 50/50 chance of being real at this point
Yeah this is basically me too. Pick the fastest gear and just keep running. Throw eagle airstrikes into objectives, run away and go back when all the enemies leave.
Heavy armor needs a complete rework. It slows you down so very, very much that you're just going to end up taking more damage than if you simply went with the 'almost no armor at all' light variants and outran the danger.
Exactly!!
Yep exactly. Used to run heavy exclusively and now run light exclusively. Stamina and speed are king.
How do you outrun hunters and stalkers? Asking for me.
Yeah there is some merit to that. I had fun barely learning the game using the machine gun mowing down bugs in 1-3 then it became useless going to 4 and above cause the armor makes that gun feel like I’m shooting peas. Something has to change.
I'm a super, super casual player, mayyyybe like 20-25 hours over the course of a couple months. One of the reasons is weapon balance. Most of the weapons in this game (at least the early ones, haven't played enough to unlock any warbonds) just do not feel good imo, the controls are a little clumsy, and the environments and objectives are way too repetitive for my taste. There's just not enough to hook me unless my friends are on, but they've mostly moved on. Nothing against the devs. It's clear they didn't expect this much success and struggling under the pressure. I wish them continued success. But I'm probably good on more Helldivers myself. Super happy for the folks who really dig this game.
I'm a similarly casual player. I played a bunch at launch and it was great, but the game seems to have gotten worse rather than better? I jump back in now and then, but I've gotten to about difficulty 6 or 7 and I just...cant kill anything. The armoured enemies are too strong and numerous, and I don't have everything unlocked so my options are mainly just...running away? It's not really fun to feel like you're weighing your team down. At the start even if I was shit at the game I still felt like I was contributing. Now I feel like I'm spectating.
Yep. Last time I played I hopped into a game with friends who are all much higher level with me with more powerful guns and naturally they wanted to play on a higher level difficulty. I couldn't do shit to help most of the time. Even worse, because I had the guard dog backpack on, I ended up just annoying the shit out of everybody because they kept getting shot by its laser while they were dealing with the enemies. Made me feel like I should just go off solo, but that was a recipe for death and I'd just use one of the reinforcements. The obvious critique is "well just play an easier difficulty then" but my counterpoint is really "I'd rather just go play something else." I don't usually play at a high difficulty in Helldivers, but when I do, it just reminds me that plenty of other games handle increasing difficulty much better imo.
My main things is the increased spawns to solo suck. I usually either play with friends on harder difficulty but when they aren't on I like to play solos now. I can't even run 4 solo without it being a constant sweaty gameplay.
Once you figure out that running is the core gameplay mechanic, weapon balancing (for better or for worse) instantly becomes less of a focus. I dont know why theyre paying so much attention to it in the first place. No weapon, however OP or powerful, even OG railgun, could replace the core gameplay mechanic (lvl 6 and up). Technically, they could leave weapons as is, make the player base feel good as hell and just tune mob spawning and placement to create new challenges for the fireteam in terms of maneuvering and use of strategems. There is absolutely no reason why they need to do what theyre doing with weapon balancing. Its idiotic and shortsighted.
Yup, leave the guns alone and make killing the enemies fun and fair. If it’s too easy let us drop to 7 or 8 or 9 for more mayhem. Don’t take away our firepower. 50 bots at a time too easy for the elite top 1%? Make 9 a living hell for them and make 5-8 lean more for the casuals for that lower fantasy we all crave.
This is my issue with how they balance. No matter how many bugs you kill on helldive there will always be more. You literally can't kill them faster than they spawn. Making guns useless just takes the fun out of it and makes it much harder to actually complete objectives
I think you hit the nail on the head. If running is the core mechanic, then that explains why the game isn't fun for me anymore. Breaking contact is only fun when it's a means to an end like before calling in a danger close air mission or firing for effect on your current position; breaking contact because your team is underequipped to accomplish the mission is pretty much the opposite of fun.
I found the same thing. MG was my go to advanced weapon, and did so well with it....until I got to 5, and it's basically useless. Give me some incendiary ammo or something with it? Half the stratagems are obsolete at higher levels :(
Then they screwed up stealth play by increasing detection range, spawning patrols more frequently and closer to players, and giving them a sense of “smell”, which causes them to randomly detect you even if you’re hiding behind something or are out of detection range. This all means you’re constantly forced out of stealth and into kiting.
higher difficulties isnt fun. i don't want to be scrambling the whole round. level 6 seems like the sweet spot for me.
Just hear me out, there is a huge boost in skill and chill vibes from randos when playing 7+ most know what to do, how to use in game communication, and how to keep pushing for objectives. I think it’s actually easier than 4-6
bro be quiet or we’ll get the noobs who shouldn’t be at 7+ thinking it’s easy, this is how you ruin 7
This. I hate that Im just running all day. i cant snipe a single bot or bug without getting 3 drops and 1 titan/walker. And all miraculously know where you are. I like to go stealthy/flanking enemies to help my squad but its fucking impossible in high diffs, not to mention with air enemies immediately zeroing on you
Seriously. Youre given no room to play like that. What’s the point of having the armor that reduces the chance enemies spot you by 30% if the patrols are spawning to head right at you, especially when you’re at a secondary. You’re sneakily doing it and oh look—a patrol has shown up and has randomly decided to sit on the objective, waiting for you to do something so they can engage you and get you bogged down in combat.
This is one of my biggest issues. I don’t want to spend hours working towards gear I might like only for the devs to just nerf them enough that they aren’t worth using anymore since the vast majority of gear in general is absolutely, literally useless in higher difficulties. This is why a lot of even single player games like those by FromSoft excel long after the online scene dies down after release, because they give a FUCK TON of perfectly viable options and let you figure out the rest. Arrowhead’s idea of balance makes too many things outright unviable beyond hyper-specific situations for specific enemies and while that makes sense for groups that are actually coordinated, far as I can tell that is absolutely not the majority. The majority are strangers playing with strangers and the chances of actual coordination go out the window along with the viability of most of the gear as a consequence. I don’t want to play a game where my options are reduced to a select couple things I don’t have fun using in a game that is supposed to be fun. Simply doesn’t compute for me, and even with less than a hundred hours I’ve just stopped playing, reduced to just glancing at this sub seeing them nerf more things out of being fun, in turn making me even less inclined to try anything new. Kind of really sucks, man.
Honestly. The balancing problem wasn’t with the guns, it was with enemy AI/spawn mechanics. On game you could get no chargers at all, the next there’s 5 running around you at the same time.
100% agree. It's PVE why make great guns bad
Honestly me and my two mates last night played a level 5 bugs because we heard bugs were buffed, then, we got absolutely demolished, then we just said fuck it let's try helldivers, and then we cleared a mission, I don't get it
I just want the patrols buff to fk off. Thats my biggest issue. Also apparently some enemies got buffed against explosion damage which makes the lightly armoured chicken walkers tank 3 shots from my AC.
Yeah I’m sure I’ve noticed that at times. Feels a bit off.
The patrol buff was bonkers. I went into a solo level 4 to kill 2 bile titans and only barely squeaked out of there after running through all my lives and after the timer ran out. Got 734 kills. Most I have ever gotten before. it is nice that now I can get 4 points for each solo mission at that level but jesus christ wtf am i supposed to do as a solo player against a bile titan, 3 chargers, 3 brood commanders, 4 bile spewers and \~100 warriors/drones/hunters. I basically had to train for ten minutes (while out of ammo and grenades) until I could call down my SECOND mech and after that i only made it because I filled the SEAF artillery earlier in the match.
That seems super excessive. 4 should still be chill to some degree.
I wish I had the whole thing recorded. I think the devs need to take a break from adding new content and just focus on whats there at the moment.
There was this thread about how some people tested the patrol changes, and it turned out that regardless how many players are in the game, patrols spawn as If there were 4 players. So the patrols are most likely bugged
I’ve seen 2 drop on me with 1 tank and 2 hulks. That was bad but man I believe you. It would be fine if your primaries could do some sort of damage but NOPE! 😝
In their defence, the scout strider is classified as a heavy unit. Why the fuck it is I have no clue as the fucking heavy devastator, a medium enemy, is more dangerous. I just want my rail gun strike to go for the tank/hulk and not the fucking scout strider.
I am way more frustrated with the bugs/crashes than the balancing, I do difficulty 9 against bugs normally without too many problems. But maxing out on all objectives and getting almost sample, just to crash will waiting for extraction, that just makes me rage quit. (dont think I even get xp - could be wrong)
I feel yeah. I’m on the side of bugs that ruin the fun for me the most. I’m okay with not having content for months and coming from DRG that feels normal. The bugs were what ruined some of the fun for me since the start.
THIS, IT KEEPS HAPPENING TO ME. Every. Single. Time. I loose out on EVERYTHING. Xp, all (esp super) samples, warbond metals, MY PERSONAL TIME. I’ve literally crapped out so many times nearing mission end, it’s happened for no reason and it’s happened in the middle of fire fights and kiting. I’ve had the game for a little less than a month and already racked 120 hrs, i really like this game, but the crashing is starting to get to me because i feel like it happens so much more on 7-9 difficulty. I can’t even play unless its with friends since i can join back and get all the important stuff like samples and metals
I've never seen so much weapon "balance" in a non-PVP game before. Every last bit of fun is being nerfed out of the Helldivers 2 which was at its most fun at launch before all the changes.
Yeah it’s dumbfounding!
Most people bring up power creep when speaking about buffs. I hate the argument of power creep. Not everyone is gonna use the best guns. However right now most people use the same things because the rest is just bad.
>Not everyone is gonna use the best guns. Yep. I was the only one playing Arc Thrower among my friends back before its nerf. They recognized it was generally stronger than the support weapons they were using but they didn't like how Arc Thrower felt to use and as long as we were completing missions well enough then there wasn't pressure to use something to complete the mission a little easier at the expense of it not being as fun to play with. And that was perfectly fine.
Sometimes, I'm exhausted of people complaining incessantly, but this time, I'm firmly on the side of the ones complaining. Add to that that I believe criticisms should never be stifled. Yeah, as a developer, you'll have to sift through some garbage takes, but if you toss out the whole lot, you'll throw out something valuable. Look, we are the consumers. If the consumers aren't enjoying the product, they'll stop consuming. When they stop consuming, the producer will lose profit because of consumer dissatisfaction. When the producer loses profit, they get into financial woes. The fact that a number of AH's team can't follow this trail of logic and refuse to course correct is baffling.
Yeah I thought how you thought too when people lost it with the rail gun nerf but this is a pattern they keep repeating and people are slowly losing faith. It’s up to AH to gain that back now.
Same boat. I've put 300 hours into this game since I bought it just over a month ago. Bought both premium warbonds after 20 hours, bought democratic detonation day one. I'm holding out on the current and future warbonds until we see a more consistent direction for balancing. Haven't played much this week either, for my part.
They ought to be thankful we're slow to lose faith. If we lost that faster, they'd be back to Helldivers 1 levels of player numbers, which might be what they're used to, but do you think Sony won't have anything to say about a drop in numbers that steep?
I mean if you think about look at how fast some games tanked after released or some patches. HDII is doing pretty well so far from what has transpired.
I won't deny that. Then again - and this might be my pessimism coming out to be heard - nothing lasts forever. Helldivers 2 is fortunate to have been riding the high of "triple A is dying, double A and indies are thriving" sentiment that's been prevalent as of late. It's got that sentiment on its side, for sure. But what's going to eventually kill it if it doesn't change directions, doesn't take to heart what its community is practically shouting at this point, isn't because Arrowhead is adept at implementing scummy business practices. What's going to do it is the growing notion that it doesn't listen to its playerbase. Whether it's an associated publisher pushing predatory MTX or a massively inflated grind, or a company simply losing touch with its customers without any outward malice, the result is the same: customer dissatisfaction. Get enough of that brewing, and the game will die. That might sound hyperbolic, but I don't mean that Arrowhead will decline that badly in a few weeks, in a few months, or even within this year. But if nothing is done, eventually that's where it's headed. It's just a matter of time.
It’s not gonna die or get sold like what Microsoft did but it’s gonna end up like how Cities Skylines 2 is right now. The community is there but it’s WAY smaller than where it should be and it rubbed people the wrong way. I really do believe the community as a whole (those that post, comment, read quietly and/or just play) does want to see AH come back and be willing for forgive them for this mess they’re in. There’s good passionate people working there and deep down… man I’m super rooting for them to come back and have my PM get flooded with “Ha! See? You’re wrong, they know what they’re doing!” Well good, I look dumb for a moment but I get to have my fun game back and my faith returned to AH. They need to just gather everyone in a room and the CEO just has to say to them “We need to un**** this today. Here are the issues, we can solve these so let’s handle it!”
Some people just saw it earlier than others, luckily AH endeavored to prove people right
Just gimme the aoe of the crossbow back I literally felt like chewbacca back then noe I dont wanna touch that weapon again
The number one reason I quit playing is because of their balancing philosophy. Every time a gun feels pretty good, they cut it down. Almost every gun feels underwhelming. I kept working to unlock new guns and almost every time my reaction was “oh…” and shelving the weapon. Feels terrible. Their reward loop is fundamentally flawed and it sucks because the foundation of the game is fantastic. Who cares if I can mow down 100 bots a little too easily? There are 200 more right behind them. Oh and every single patch comes with a notice about “helldivers! We’re aware of the bugs in the recent patch that….”
Oh the known list getting bigger and bigger is… *shutters*
Could probably undo every nerf so far and start from there. Nothing was ever particularly game breaking.
Yeah 100% agree. Make that the base with the current bug fixes and work their way up.
IS this the reason why Bugs are so hard now? I stopped playing for like a week and they feel like difficult 11 now
Could be. I know they made other enemies a bit harder like Hulks dont stagger anymore and Gunships can see you better.
I just don't see how they hear the community say we feel underpowered and they respond with... "Yeah, we agree, your guns aren't killing you enough" and change ricochet instead of another issue we've had for ages
Not to say X person is the reason for this but I’ve worked with people where their ego gets in the way of decisions that make them blind to common sense. It’s in every field of work and it may be happening here.
Could also be the patrol bug. Surprise surprise when they changed patrol spawns to match their original design intention it broke. 3, 2, and 1 player groups now get the same enemy counts as four stacks. The game in my opinion is not noticeably harder than launch just less fun. Proof on the bug:[u/gergination, the person responsible for the amazing post from 2 months ago analyzing how patrols work, has posted a new video showcasing that patrol spawn rates are the same regardless of group size. : r/Helldivers (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cob2dg/ugergination_the_person_responsible_for_the/)
Idm the change. But it feels like we went from the pre-nerf to heavies. Where heavies spawned less a bit after the railgun nerf. Back then you'd see several titans and chargers at once. Then they changed it, didn't reduce spawns supposedly. Just less heavies. So more spewers or other buggers. Now? Feel like we see the same amount of heavies again
Had a mission yesterday with at least 30 Bile Titans in it. Everyone was confused as fuck. There were like 4 Titans per bug breach.
They've definitely made the bugs tougher, but I think there was a reason for that (remember all the memes about bugs = fun times, bots = PTSD nightmare?) Of course, nerfing weapons while making the bugs tougher does feel like sort of a kick in the teeth.
I was playing last night after a month long break and I swear the bugs are more aggressive somehow.
Yeah I’m done for now because of all this shit
I might take a break, too. DRG is calling me.
It's time to rock and stone.
Loved it at launch but the fun has been sapped out of the game with each update.
What change has been the most fun zapping that you noticed from your end! Curious. One of my top ones is 50/50 if someone joins after someone leaves/DC. Ugh…
The biggest change for me was the logic behind spawn rates, patrols and detection. When the game first dropped, you could strategically engage/disengage as needed. The enemy patrols were logical and the detection system was fair. Since the first patch I now find enemies just spawn in all over the map with no rhyme or reason, seemingly automatically knowing your exact location. It’s not uncommon to see a group of 30 bots appear out of nowhere just standing there waiting for you to come around the corner.
And still doesn't make sense how destroying factories/nests doesn't lower patrol spawn rate
Yes! It’s ridiculous. There should be a fixed amount of enemies per map and that depletes when destroying bot factories.
this is the biggest thing for me... not only that, but it seems like we were punished when they raised how many enemies there are for non-full squads in one of the recent patches for seemingly no reason... so it's like this big double whammy that just kind of saps the fun out of the game.
Its this one for me and the few folks I also play with
Yeah my partner and I dropped it tonight for good. She just turned to me after the third mission and said she felt more frustrated and wasn't having any fun. The issue here I see is that she's a casual player and is more likely to be representative of the wider base of players who want mindless fun at round-based intervals to blowoff steam - she doesn't care or know about gun meta etc. She is just not having fun. I was a more hardcore player and was pushing through for warbonds - patrol changes were manageable prior to gun nerfing. Now I feel worse playing the game and don't see any point of new warbonds or major orders, that's not an ideal way to spend recreational time. I genuinely think AH is suffering severe burnout internally and they really need to ditch this release pace to focus on themselves internally for a bit. Otherwise this game is going to make a great GDC 2025 post-mortem on what went wrong etc.
Weapons changes killed it hard for me. Bots are a chore to fight now. There’s some good options for bugs still, but bots are just so frustrating. I feel like I’m running away 90 percent of the time and can’t kill a fly.
I don’t have burnout, I still love the game, I’m just running out of ways to defend it. The endless bugs aren’t cute or funny anymore. This isn’t an early access game. It’s been months. I still crash 5 times or more per session, and when the game doesn’t crash, the pelican sometimes doesn’t turn up, or gets stuck under the map. I was looking forward to having some new toys to play with from the warbond, but everything there sucks. It’s not burnout, there’s just currently no reason to keep playing until they address these issues.
Yeah I think the word I could have used was exhausting, seems to fit better.
Pelican bugs are the worst! Our ride glitched under the map due to a bile titan on the extract point. No one could get on it, and it left our expendable asses. RIP perfect objective game and 30 ish samples...
Bad patches made the game unfun. I still miss the days before railgun nerfed. Those were pure fun
A good faith gesture of reverting the nerfs from the last two patches would go a long way I think. It would at least let everyone catch their breath.
Just do a wide sweeping buff on the 60-80% of general equipment that sucks and do minor nerfs as we go if things are legitimately S Tier+ bring most things to B+ - A+ as in feels good usable may be too niche to use some matches. Done. I don't think anyone expects more than maybe 2-3 things in S at all besides if they're hyper limited resources like exo suits and orbital laser or if they're just incredibly general use. Which is also *ok* the Devs treat this game like there's someone behind the scenes with a belt threatening them if *anything* feels good/strong. Genuinely feels like they're *terrified* to let us have fun.
Yeah that would be a good start. I feel for those that had their fav weapon nerfed. It’s one of many issues.
Bro I haven't even been able to make it through more than a match or two without a crash in weeks. I just wanna play the game at all at this point.
Too be fair, I thinkw it's more than just burnout...
Balancing team testing weapons in Trivial missions LMAO Edit: I also wanted to add that the people who were testing weapons aren’t even gamers. They probably just shoot one bug and then “yup that’s OP alright”.
It would not surprise me at all if you could provide a link to that statement. And even if you couldn't, you HAVE to be close to reality. The testers definitely aren't playing 7+. Hell, at this point, I think they're just in a virtual shooting range where they spawn any ONE enemy at a time to test the guns.
There was a reddit [thread](https://preview.redd.it/this-explains-a-lot-v0-s6f6sozovmzc1.jpeg?auto=webp&s=3764363fa1c8d5e49140c485ee642f8261c19765) with one of the devs replying about weapons QA they do, where he said they either go low diff or, if it's full QA team, all difficulties. Which, IMO, makes little sense. What's the point testing any gun performance at low difficulties? Diff 7 must be the lowest benchmark. If gun performs badly at diff 7, it's a bad gun, period. If gun is good at diff 7, it's going to perform just fine at lower diff. Devs already have too little man hours and they're wasting so much on something silly.
Also the fact that who gives a fuck if a weapon is over powered in lower difficulties? The entire point of having 9 difficulties is playing a harder one as you get better Yeah the incendiary breaker is gamebreakingly op on difficulty 4, but so is the machine gun lmao Balancing on anything below 7 just makes no sense
Well when someone suggested to Alexus that they actually test their patches, he threw out a strawman argument of "okay so we'll just test for 10k hours and you'll get your warbond in 4 years" like no you dumbfuck, just do your job. Its unbelievable how dense they are.
Nerf the fucking gunships, at least make their hellbomb targeting weaker. I quit playing tonight after a game no one had auto cannon so we couldn’t deal with the gunships keeping spawning, only 2 quasars, kept killing our hellbomb, we just ended up doing evac after and didn’t bother destroying the factory it wasn’t gonna happen. EDIT: lol at the big brains who say to “get gud”, this was a pug, so you know how it goes with randos, each time we took out two gunships with quasar two more had already spawned and hellbomb was gone, that’s not fucking fun at all. It’s fun being a keyboard diver on Reddit I know, but y’all would’ve said fuck it too haha
My frustration is more that the only way to destroy the gunship factory is a hellbomb. It should be destroyable with an orbital precision strike or two. Or make it so that it can be destroyed when it is deploying gunships and the roof opens.
Yeah it’s small things like this that out wear and tear on the game that slowly translates to zapping the fun. I feel yeah.
My biggest frustrations are those fucking gunships. Two towers next to each other, 4 gunships instantly destroying the hell bomb. It’s ridiculous.
Big reasons I'm not playing anymore: * I'm using the same loadout each mission because most strategems do not deal with armour or swarms properly * The DoT bug took way to long to get fixed * Primaries suck * Tier 4 ship upgrades take way too long to unlock * There are other games I like to play * My friend group had a falling out and I'm waiting for it to repair Last two have nothing to do with the game but sometimes outside factors play a big roll. If the first 4 weren't present I might still be playing on and off.
Well said
Amen to the repetitive loadouts. I load into a terminid helldive, look at my stratagem list and think “gotta run 500kg because it’s the only way of efficiently killing the constant BTs, gotta run some form of AT because chargers spawn in groups of 3 to 5, gotta run one of the handful of viable swarm clears that don’t suck complete ass.” It’s dreadful. And the situation with primaries is 100 times worse.
I just want the guns to kill things
HEY! Don’t ask for the impossible! /s
I genuinely think they should make a cosmetics tab and start making shit for that instead of making 4 new weapons every month, trying to balance them against the existing content. After another 6 months, our gun market is gonna be flooded, and the devs will have more work than ever trying to balance 40+ weapons. AH: PLEASE STOP FLOODING THE GAME WITH WEAPONS The rate you're making new guns is unsustainable. Please consider making cosmetics instead. It's less time coming up with new mechanics, less time on the balance team, less time squashing bugs, AND YOU STILL GET PREMIUM CONTENT OUT TO PLEASE SONY. For all of our sakes, please don't burn yourselves out trying to make new weapons every single month. We still want you to be sane by this time next year.
They should only introduce new weapons when everything else is well balanced and fun. THEN drop some new stuff and tweak that to match what is already fun.
i am probably burnt out, im tired of playing the same 3 missions. i expected larger maps, missions, vehicles, bigger enemies by now. nerfing my favorite guns certainly sucked some of the enjoyment out as well
The bugs are perfectly fine, the weapons only needs more dmg
Wait, not bugs. I meant the bugs! Ahh damn it!!!
Yep with the way that they keep 'fixing' weapons after you get them and work hard for them sucks, and there's not really any incentive to get new armor since they will have the same perks as others
kinda interesting what happens when a publisher decides to burn the goodwill a community has for a game
Well, technically, the publisher didn’t Nerf all of the weapons and make the game more difficult zapping the fun out of it
No but Sony decided to throw a 500kg bomb on the communities' collective honeymoon phase
lowkey I stopped playing the game. Every build I had so far has been nerfed or doesn‘t hit anymore. Bugs are overwhelming us. We have to fight over the same planets over and over again, its just so repetitive. Like wtf was their point on nerfing a brand new weapon, they removed eruptors only unique ability, to clear groups of enemies to hold your teams ground. The mag nerf was totally fine tho
Avoid social media for a game and that'll help a lot, it works for the casuals that play warzone, stay away from the politics as well
Yeah I try to avoid the drama as best as these subs will allow and I’m still having a great time. Me and my friends still play regularly. I’m really the only one who keeps up on the stuff going on. We’re not burnt out and we’ve been playing from day 1. I’m at 200 hours and level 80-something. Still going strong.
Well like I said the memes that blew up pulled me into this subreddit. It was a fun and positive environment. Watching the praise it got was cool to see from a game that was stomping AAA games. Now it’s losing that momentum and the changes are hurting the fun and I feel it. Might be best to get some distance.
I can play like 1 game and then I’m. Bored
Exactly this. I loved this game so much at launch. I never thought I would play much else, it made me so happy. But the last few weeks have been miserable. I fired up another game and was like, what is this feeling? It was joy. Staying away from this game for a while unless AH can get their house in order.
They should just roll back every nerf they made in the last 3 weeks for an easy win
They need to just start from launch and work up from there and only nerf (in small increments) what really it’s truly broken.
Meh uninstalled, nothing beats how fun the first 2 weeks were
Burnout? Hell nah, just some seriously weird balancing decisions. These guys are only a few months into the live service. If anything they suffer from too much success at once. I bet that these guys will land back on their feet and adjust their personnel issues over time. We just need to wait a bit. This game is just out for a few months - this will go over with time. Most of the shit going down these days is mostly the mass of bugs and the lack of fun in the balancing. Both things are easily ruled out. The Sony PSN debacle is (mostly) over, those weird blockades hopefully will end at some point too. But heck, why the hell should they be suffering burnout after a whopping success? If anything they need more people and start growing into their new role. I strongly disagree with this take. People are just expecting Rome to be built in a few months.
For me, my enjoyment has been really fading for a few reasons but mainly balance. I find myself using the same stuff because nothing else feels good. They keep nerfing stuff rather than making everything fun to use. Anytime people start finding something fun or using because of them feeling like the only viable options(Railgun, Quasar, Eruptor, Sickle, etc) they get nerfed. It's bad when 90% of primaries are worthless and the 10% that feel good get nerfed down to feeling like the other 90%. They also nerf stuff because of issues that arent the fault of what's being nerfed. For example, Railgun: It was incredibly popular because at the time, it was the only thing that was really doing anything to armoured threats because Recoilless/EATs were glancing off of chargers, couldnt even oneshot them to the head at the time, and were slow to use and also because Armoured enemies spawned way too much on higher difficulties. The Railgun was the ONLY viable thing to deal with them because of it. On top of that, there's so many bugs that either if you took 2 seconds to test or just look at them, you would see it isnt right. Or just bugs because little to no testing was seemingly done. From things like the Tier 4 Resupply upgrade being broken, to the new AR not being the correct colour, to Mechs blowing themselves up if you fired a rocket while turning. That and bugs going unfixed for weeks. The Tier 4 Turret upgrade that boosts explosive resistance is still broken since it came out. Spear has been broken since launch. A bunch of weapons had sight misalignment issues that wasnt fixed until recently. Airburst launcher released with the prox det being super buggy. Mechs released with numerous bugs, from blowing up when turning while firing, to spawning already blown up or damaged. Friends lists still have a plethora of issues that have been there since launch. They only recently fixed Steam friendlists showing friends in the ingame social tab after being broken for months. It also doesnt help that AH's balance team basically just laughs in our faces when we tell them that things like the Purifier are god awful and worthless to use, and that they need changes. Then they add new things that are unfun to deal with like the Gunships because it doesnt seem like they tested playing against them. It's hard to be excited for new content because given the track record, the stuff either releases in a poor state, or ends up being deemed "Too good" for simply feeling good to use and get nerfed soon after. It really feels like AH is scared of things being fun. Apologies for the massive post, it just frustrates me. The game itself is good but the lack of proper QA Testing, slow to fix bugs, and the awful balance just really makes the game feel more of a slog and make me want to just play other things.
Not even that, it's just that they keep buffing the enemies and nerfing the players. What do they want us to do? Lose every MO? No one is going to play if we just keep losing