I loved the latest balance update so much that I actually wanted to suggest the below for the next patch - hoping to get a job with the Balance team, thanks Arrowhead! - EAT call in time increased to 69 seconds - Arc Thrower now only chains between Helldivers and kills you all instantly - Grenade Launcher Pistol magazines reduced by 100% - I actually killed something with the Slugger this morning so reduce Slugger damage by 85% and slugs ricochet killing the closest Helldiver in your vicinity - Equipping the Incendiary Breaker instantly sets you ablaze and you lose 10 levels - Stalkers movement speed increased by 600% and they have dual shoulder Rail Cannons that no scope you - All weapons reload times Increased by 500% - Hellpods nuclear detonate the moment you leave them, instantly killing you and your fellow Helldivers - Bile Spewer vomit range increased by 500% and vomit can't be dodged (if you die by vomit - you will spawn in with vomit on you and will die by the vomit again) - 5% of the player base have given the Blitzer praise, so the Blitzer now fires backwards - All bots and bugs are immune to electric damage - Increase Railgun damage by 25% - Reduce Railgun damage by 250% - Equipping Railgun in loading screen automatically bans you and your family - Increase Hunter spawn rate every time you aim down sights - Bug holes now spawn Drop Ships that shoot Bug Holes that spawn more Drop Ships - Chargers can fly - Every Scavenger is now a Charger - Various crash fixes but this has introduced more varied crashes
You got me in the first half. Not gonna lie. I'm going to steal a joke I read on discord; "All Helldivers wear helmets in game. Please remove them for balancing." Or something along those lines.
@@TheOuterCircle flying chargers. I am sure it will happen. But they will fly in the same manner as assblasters from tremors because they cant have wings as weak spots
I HAVE RAN INTO A FLYING CHARGER BEFORE. DON'T. REMIND ME. PLEASE OUTER CIRCLE, THEY TOOK MY PLASMA CANNONS IN HORUS HERESY AND THREW THEM INTO THE DIRT PLEASE DONT TAKE THIS TOO. Caps aside, your comment here is golden
id pay good money to see the balance team play on 9 vs bots and if they think that this is a good game, its certainly not the same game that i bought and fell in love with. Eversince the gunship update, everything went to shit.
@@shikarileto191after that mess there's been a series of nerfs to the most used weapons based almost entirely on how much the weapon is used. They just released a patch that nerfed fire damage to be effectively useless right before dropping a warbond based around fire. People are pissed
Nah, there's an even more simple answer that is more in line with his online behavior. He's just a sadist who gets his rocks off pissing people off. He's literally just a rage baiter.
@@justinfaulcon9498 It does normally work out pretty well, actually. And in lots of cases, imbalance in single player games is a genuine problem that threatens to undermine classics. System Shock 2 is one of the best games ever made. Single player only. The grenade launcher is busted. Like, the shipped version of the game has a bug which accidentally makes it do twice as much damage as its supposed to. It is the strongest weapon in the game, and makes it so that all of the exotic and heavy weapons are not worth investing the skill points into. It doesn't necessarily ruin the game, but when you figure it out, it actually does ruin the game. You are supposed to be sneaking and hiding and rationing your supplies, not killing everything all the time. Deus Ex is one of the best games ever made. Single player only. The GEP gun is busted. It's not actually a bug, but it is an hilariously effective lockpick that will blast open many doors, as well as killing robots and really anything else. This breaks the balance of the game, because you aren't supposed to be able to access ALL of the hidden items and caches you can find in the game. You have a set number of tools and lockpicks to use, but suddenly you have double the amount for free and now you can get everything and you are very overpowered. The reason why these weren't a big deal at the time was simply because word travelled much more slowly. But if it was well known about enough that when I borrowed SS2 in 2000 I was told "Oh yeah, the grenade launcher is way overpowered" then it was a pretty big problem, and I specifically had to stay away from the grenade launcher just to experience the game as it was supposed to be played. Games should not force you to do that. Games should be balanced.
@@lostalone9320 that's fine when it's totally game breaking, otherwise it's just lazy. they did the right thing with the machine gun/orbital barrage buff patch, people had hope, then they fucked it all up again.
Devs about to be like, "uhh super earth mandates slugs only be used within 50m or you get a fine because the super president had his super doggo hit by a stray slug once 🥺"
I'm not even kidding, one of the massive reasons why I play bots is because if I'm fighting bugs, you know, a horde enemy that rushes you, my primary can't hurt half of them with how much more armour they have than the literal metal men.
Yeah, tbh any time I get killed by bots I pretty much know what I did wrong and can figure out a solution. Usually when getting killed by bugs it just feels like bs. Oh look a swarm, better run. "No, the small enemy that's faster than you hit you once and slowed you down. Now you die". So what's the solution to that? Kill them all at once before they can hit me? With what weapon?
Automaton become bs when there are too much rockets around. Or when you snipe that fabricator with autocannon from across the map and the guy operating emplaced mg starts sending salvoes your way. But give me a ballistic shield, pummeler, sawed off/nade pistol and laser cannon with some stun nades and we can go to town in style.
Long story short. I mained flamer for a long time now. With aggressive stormtrooper like playstyle focused on clearing hordes of enemies and chargers to keep my team safe from those threats. Escalation of Freedom came with "more realistic fire effects". I launched one mission to look into changes and uninstalled the game If AH dont want me to have fun I will just go elswhere. Were fun is allowed.
@@marcusflutist1230 exactly. Flamer was high risk weapon and it was S tier weapon on TERMINID front. Against automaton it was... Well it was. It existed. Just like incendiary breaker. Flamer was very well designed and extremely fun to use but not without flaws. Also devs said we need to use stratagems to deal with haevy armour. If I remember correctly old flamer is a stratagem lol.
More like when game devs that dont play their own game think they know better... reminds me of the old warhammer fantasy mmo from mythic... they also knew best, told their players that they are wrong and they are right cause they have all the metrics yadayadayada... and then people simply left and went back to WoW
@@braydoxastora5584 They do play it.... at level 5, and many of them seem to not understand the gameplay mechanics, during that livestream which was half-Sony staff and half-Arrowhead, we saw: They tried to shoot down gunships with breaker incendiary, tried to shoot a bot tank in the front for a full magazine of breaker incendiary, spent 10 seconds trying to fire an empty weapon, ran out of reinforcement on level 5, tried to melee a bruiser. I guess their spreadsheets said that the shotgun should melt armored enemies. They must not have metrics that tell them that the breaker killed chargers by hitting areas with shredded armor. The balance team devs balance stats around level 5. Very few armored enemies spawn on 5. This explains a lot of the nerfs that the game has received.
@@braydoxastora5584 many game developers have talked about how between 12+ hour shifts for 6 - 7 days a week doesn't give you much time to play anything at all once you consider commute times and family obligations
@@GalladeTheWarrior They should be playing on company time as part of their job, that's the whole point. If they can't play the game they won't understand what needs to change and what doesn't.
for all those people who say get good or the game is too easy I'm sorry you got too good at the game you're a victim of your own success. this is the best video I have seen on this subject so far.
boi howdy!!!!!! that is a real piece of work, and people think that them moving to fix stuff now is ok??? after they abandoned EVERY SINGLE other version besides PC. these modern devs are absolutely fried
I don't think I've ever seen a game with such incompetent balancing. I know balance is complained about in many games, but this is the first time I've thought that the developer has absolutely no idea what they're doing.
I think a good chunk of the problem is that the game doesn't have classes or even roles. Since everyone gets free choice of all of the strats and weapons, that hugely exacerbates how much imbalance ends up impacting your experience. It's one reason why DeepRock and Killing Floor have less of these problems (not zero, but less) because your team has to include a mix of classes so even if each class only has one S tier weapon, at least you don't see literally every person in the game using them.
Its just looks like a kneejerk reaction to people soloing helldive. We made a really hard game. I just solod the hardest difficulty Ok cool, now try it with no bullets. Wha??
Yeah, this debate reminds me a bit of the Total War difficulty levels. Where the game is balanced around the Normal difficulty and as you turn it up 90% of your units (i.e. your tools) become useless and you will resort to spamming ranged units That's how it feels in helldivers. You have 30 primaries and 40 or so stratagems to choose from, but 80% or more are useless on difficulty level 7 or higher. And the primaries are all quite useless anyway, since they are only good against the smallest enemies. Every mission feels quite samey eventually
But that's true of almost every game at the higher levels... Including Warhammer! All of us at this channel know that a bunch of units are just bad, and a bunch of units are not going to play well at a tournament, and while there is some range, if you want to play at the higher levels you have to really maximise what you bring. Same for MtG and Hearthstone. Same for Darktide! We had the SAME THING where players yelled "NO NERFS THIS IS PVE" even though, at one time, the Vet was busted good and the power sword was legitimately broken; not actually acting as it was intended to.
That's a pretty major difference, one makes things harder by just buffing the enemies's melee stats until melee becomes worthless without a lot of buffs to overcome the massive advantage given, or not interacting with that feature at all, meanwhile on high difficulties of helldiver 2 you just get a lot of all enemy type, so you drown in what you can't deal with and big surprise the bugs being a melee swarm faction are a DPS check, a DPS check a solo player can't take on particular when hrs doing things like rushing into a place he knows a lot of bugs are chilling because he just died there after he tried to cheese them
@@calebbarnhouse496 I agree that Helldivers needs to do SOMETHING with how they use enemy types. As it stands, you have to pick your strats before you know what enemies you encounter, so often times I'll finish a mission having lugged an RR around and only have fired it twice. But its still the right choice, because sometimes you get a LOTS of heavies to kill, and you don't know until they start spawning. So you take the AT, and that's that. As long as there is any chance of heavy armour, you need a support weapon to tackle it.
To be fair to total war, that's sort of how military tactics and strategy evolved IRL. Heavy calvary and massed infantry all fell to just massing archers and raining entire walls of arrows down on people.
@@MisterZimbabwe that's just not true, warfare constantly envolved in each war to make up for short comings and strengths, arrows never dominated other forms of units off the battlefield, that only happened well after guns were adopted, and even then calvary used sabers and lances regularly even into ww1, hell that's discounting use of bayonets, which are still being trained on to this day, melee may be rare today, but it happens
There’s a lot of things that suck now, but the one thing I hate the most is when one of the 300 hunters on the screen gets me when I’m trying to stim or reload, and they prevent me from stimming or reloading, and then I get mobbed to death.
Community: We feel forced into using the least nerfed weapons at high difficulties because you've shit on everything else. AH: I feel a rumble *spews shit balancing everywhere* Community: We're sick of getting shit on. AH: Why are you leaving? *drops trousers*
I don't mind difficulty, its just the developers have a poor understanding of what makes a difficult game good, they're pulling all the wrong levers, you can make a player feel overwhelmed without making them feel impotent
"Hmm, this weapon has a high pick rate because it's good, and this weapon has a low pick rate because it's bad...I've got it! They'll have an equal pick rate if they're both bad!"
This type of anti-fun behavior is so ubiquitous across all types of media and even real life. It’s too common: authority figures don’t want people to have fun. If it becomes „too easy“ to have a good time, believe it that a rule/law/ban isn’t far off. I’m this game it’s inconvenient and shitty, but as a rule across humanity it’s pure evil.
No, you miss the point entirely. Games are fun because we overcome challenges. Remember, you can always go play on dif 3 if you want; go and just use whatever guns you like and treat it like a sandpit. No-one is stopping you. So why don't you do that? Isn't it fun to just kill everything all the time? No? Why not?
@@lostalone9320 get your Heinlein on, "That which is given has no value. Rewards must be earned!" This is very true, we want the challenge, but there are comfortable challenges, and uncomfortable ones. I went away with the scouts recently, camping up in the mountains in the snow. Now, I could have slept under a survival shelter all night, and proved how tough a man I am. Or, I could sleep in a cabin by a pot belly stove. They're both challenges, I've slept in awful conditions before, I've already overcome that challenge, so who am I impressing? Maybe I wanted a nice night with other like-minded people camping. That is Helldivers 2, sure, I've beaten my share of level 9's, but sometimes I want to take it back a notch, so I'll drop down to level 6. Sometimes I want to try a new weapon, it's ok at 6, but at 9 it's a miserable experience and I have to put my tryhard pants on. Suddenly, I'm achieving a hard task, but it isn't rewarding. It's miserable, like sleeping in the snow.
@@TheOuterCircle But you're arguing against your own point here - Why not just play on 6 if you are finding 6 is fun? Why do you NEED to play on 9 with every weapon? Why does it have specific meaning to you that you can complete 9s with every gun, if the only goal of the game is to have fun? Why not just adjust the challenge to the gun?
Challenges are fine, but getting weapons nerfed is not a challenge, that's just an arbitrary decision. Imagine waking up one day and your deek is two inches shorter. Nobody would be happy about it because of the "added challenge"
@lostalone9320 Are you saying that I need to read a wiki in order to know which gun to bring? Just to have fun? Why have a bunch of options then? Why not just have a few? It would certainly free you of the misconception that you have options. If there is a weapon I like and I'm good with it why not allow it to be viable in its own way? Otherwise why should I bother to learn it when my time could be spent elsewhere learning to use a different weapon?
Me and all my friends did too. Not only that we called all this balance issues out back in the first few months of the launch of this game, they nerfed the OP railgun, which was fine because it was absolutely cracked. But then they just didn't stop nerfing things. Watching that gameplay made me wither, it has only gotten compoundedly worse since launch.
The fact you can go 48 minutes about the balancing problems alone speaks volumes, especially since it's just one of the three punches that killed the game's playerbase.
All games lose players after launch. Seriously. They do. All of them. It's to be expected that most players are not sticking around for the long haul. For me, I am normally going to a Major Order that has 30k to 50k people playing on the MO planets. That is not a dead player base.
@lostalone9320 you don't see positive growth for a month and have a consistent player base for two more on a scale of CS:GO then just as quickly have a 95%+ drop naturally. It is literally the greatest defiance of the observed patterns you think you're citing.
@@GalladeTheWarrior But DRG has never had a big player base. HD2 came out with an artificially high player count, because of how viral it was at launch, and now it is dropping off. DRG has never had that, and they continue to grow up to their natural saturation point. Oh and they continue to grow because people who tried Darktide or HD2 want to play something similar and pick up DRG on deep discount. The point is that DRG is a slow and steady performer, HD2 is still performing miles above it, even as it loses players.
From all of the weapon leak videos to date, armor deflection seems to be turned off when they're testing weapons and it shows. There's no way the Spray & Pray could've released while being unable to even penetrate an egg if it wasn't.
It's funny because I just never enjoyed DRG at all. I don't like the movement mechanics, and I don't like the art style. And I get that people really like it, but even playing with RL friends it couldn't get me excited at all.
@@lostalone9320 not much to discuss. You don't like DRG. thats basically all you say in your post. I am perfectly fine with that but no clue what you want me to add to that. like the thing you dislike i enjoy, and the balancing is not overbearing and usually when people don't use something the devs try to buff the thing thats not being used. Free content and good monetization practices. Overall its my go to for co-op shooter. not to mention tiny filespace and good optimization.
Thats the thing, Arrowhead devs *are* idiots and always have been. Look up their history - their leadership has always made terrible, naive business decisions. Employing Alexus as lead balance dev is just another. Give me back my flame weapons, AH, and buff all the unused stuff. Just roll back all the nerfs, ffs. There are some misconceptions in this video about game mechanics but I'm not going to be pedantic about them. Appreciate the intent.
Which misconceptions? The part where his description of how the strategems work makes it sound like he hasn't actually used 90% of them himself? Or perhaps the part where his portrayal of 'the average player' seems to be that they'd be of equivalent intelligence to whoever was put in charge of making the stratagem sample videos(as in, too stupid to think of the arcane idea of 'walk around and shoot the squishy bits')?
@@JDunamis So, other folks can answer this question better than I, but I’ll explain as best I can. It’s a reference to a feature of the 2nd Edition Horus Heresy tabletop rules. It boils down to the fact that a large amount of your mainline battle tanks and artillery weapons are stuck with an armor piercing (AP) value of 4. At the end of the day, this means that artillery can’t take out space marines, and it definitely can’t take out the typical 1st wave of terminators (some of which can reroll their saves against area effect weapons) your opponent is going to send. That’s a problem because your expensive artillery is now a glorified paperweight against some of the most common infantry in the game - and then there’s your tanks which don’t do much better on account of being direct-fire weapons. This is especially bad for Imperial Army (and Imperial Militia, and sometimes Mechanicum) players, because this trend makes their only advantage from the previous edition (mechanized support) useless against the most often-played armies of Heresy: space marines. When you roll in other factors like those same weapons having too small a blast radius (3”) to efficiently affect the enemy formation or having too little Strength (often 7) to inflict Instant Death (When Strength equals 2x target’s Toughness) on said basic marines, you’re in for a bad time. TL;DR - The devs at Games Workshop can’t balance for armies they don’t play, and they refuse to repair the faults in their system after too little play testing from too small a pool of testers (probably). Macca’s got a video on it some months back if you’re still interested.
The more I hear about the more I think: Arrowhead has survival bias, they look at the usage times and declared this is because those weapons and equipments are overpowered instead of the other ones being weak.
Err, OC... Are you aware that the original leadership team behind the choices that made this game the sensation it was back at launch, have all been deposed from their positions after standing up to Sony and quite a few of their own subordinates? TLDR: The leadership that created and steered the original setup are all gone at this point and have been replaced by standard gaming company leadership pod-people.
@@doodleEeto They don't necessarily have to be laid off to be taken off the leadership. They probably transferred the leadership to crappier roles to try and get them to quit on their own.
Corrections for boosters at 17:05: Vitality booster does affect your hp, or at least effective hp. It gives you 20% damage resistance on all limbs (head, torso, arms, legs). A portion of that damage is transferred to your main hp. (Note that servo assisted armor passive only affects arms and legs, but does stack with the booster). [1] Muscle enhancement does not affect your mantling speed and actually does alleviate (not eliminate) environmental effects like snowstorms. If you see knee high stepping animation like running through snow, it alleviates most of it. [2] To be clear, it doesn't excuse the devs for poor information clarity. The boosters are very obtuse and weapon stats aren't much better. There is a hidden stat called durable damage and enemies have differing amounts of durable resistance on various body parts. That's why some guns just feel like it doesn't do anything despite being shot in the soft fleshy bit like charger butts. Or that various enemy parts have differing armor class and weapons only state light or medium armor penetration. I believe if your weapon's hidden armor penetration value matches the part's class value, it does half damage. If it exceeds it, it does full damage. Anything less will do no damage. 1 - How Health Works in Helldivers 2 - Eravin 2 - Motivational Shocks vs Muscle Enhancement - cashcrop_
Seems like they are only listening to their echo chamber of a discord and thus are siloed into a narrow view of their game tyrannically policed by the most crazed and radical ideologically correct mods.
This, so much this. With the latest patch they said something like "some people think the game is too easy, some that it's too hard. It's difficult to balance from the pov of who to listen to." Absolutely missing the fact that, outside of the Yes-Men in their Discord, the overwhelming majority think it's a slog.
No. The slugger shoots slugs. Slugs are for all ranges. Also, why do the enemies have invincibility frames when they melee! I have had way too many times when I punch a bug but because it attacked at the same time, the enemy gets a free hit. That is enough evidence for me that AH doesn't care about the players, they care about the AI enemies instead.
The way they've done these nerfs, it seems they take personal offense at any Bugs or Bots being killed. I wonder if they use that "balancing spreadsheet" for fortune-telling or something, their inexplicable obsession with use rates has killed this game.
The team reload component is even worse than you displayed. Not only does it take up a backpack slot for you to use it by yourself, but it also takes up a teammate's backpack slot because THEY have to wear the ammo backpack in order to reload YOUR gun faster on top of them being unable to fight while they assist you. This makes zero sense to me.
I've played like 200 hrs since 1.0, brought friends on to play, made sure they had a good time. I like to try out weird or unusual loadouts on level 7 and even on helldive. I am pretty disappointed with the update. I've been playing the new swamp planet, and just having my team get wiped by two bile titans + an impaler, and its so lame. You basically cannot hurt these enemies, unless you hit them with stratagems. Then the game spawns so many of them, that there isnt enough firepower in the deck to possibly kill them. I keep reading the CEO whinge about, "who should we listen to? The people who want buffs, or the people who say it's way too easy?" Who the f*** is saying it's way too easy? I've never once seen this, all summer. Arrowhead acts like its a faction thats totally equal to the "buff the primary" players. Where are they? Are they playing Helldive? I was having a game the other day on the swamp planet, the flag raising mission, playing on level 8. Everyone got wiped on between the last objective and the extract, and these were seasoned players. My team would respawn and basically instantly die. There were two bile titans and an impaler on the field (and a massive swarm of bugs). We had spent every stratagem we had on the huge armored enemies. We got cleaned out, every bomb and laser. But it waant enough. And in the chaos, after we started dying, most of the team had gotten separated from their support weapons. It would be two-three minutes before my stratagems cooled down. Until those came in, i literally could not harm the most dangerous enemies on the field, and I could barely run from the swarm. It just felt like an eternity, running, respawning, and occasionally ineffectively shooting at the swarm. And of course, im just getting my a** whipped, I'm constantly stimmimg to stay alive and throw respawns, im shooting those explosive fire things, I'm funneling and grouping enemies. It felt like an eternity, just watching the timer roll for two and a half minutes. And at some point, I was like, "what the hell is this? What the hell am I doing? Two days ago, i _loved_ this game." Unless something changes soon, i am ready to shelve it. I am just having a bad time. I can handle losing and dying, I like the challenge. But it just feels so lame that there's this whole tier of enemies where it's _impossible_ to kill them, unless you hit them with one of 3 stratagems (orbital laser, rail cannon, eagle bomb) or one of the four support weapons that hurt them (missiles, auto cannon). At least with the factory strider, if you disarm it, you can walk underneath it and shoot its belly. The bile titan, you can pop all of the sacks, crack its armor... and if you don't kill it, you're screwed. Because there's no way to harm it with support weapons, once the sacks are popped. The cracked armor is an illusion, bullets still bounce off it. Same for the impaler. I'm just having a bad time on that swamp planet, the flag raising map.
This is pretty much where I’m at. I think they’ve increased the difficulty such that you now need to be part of a semi-cohesive team to be successful. You need to have a buddy that you run around with, one person should be running a horde clear weapon because primaries aren’t good enough. You probably need to all be on mics so that you can tell everyone you’ve got that charger or bile titan and you don’t double up on killing that one guy, because you need all the stratagems. But playing with randoms doesn’t give you that. You don’t know who these people are. Most games no one is using a mic. I’ve never had a single random game where anyone has vocally coordinated their loadouts with another person to make sure they are complimentary. Now I just feel like I’m dying a lot, and once you die, it’s hard to regain your footing. Nothing feels like it works right now. All the antitank weapons suck right now. All the primaries suck right now. I do see how they have some percentage of people who think the game is too easy. Like you watch all the popular youtubers and the videos are all about them dominating level 10 and they make it look easy. They call in stratagems perfectly every time in a third of a second. They know exactly where to hit an enemy that avoids the broken hitboxes. They know exactly how many bullets each enemy takes on each limb. They’re not throwing their last 500 kg and having the Bile Titan move and it misses and then spending the next 3 minutes without a stratagem. But like you said, those people aren’t the reality I see. At best, before the patch, maybe 1 out of 10 squads at level 7 does it feel like I’m in a team that is sufficiently skilled that the mission feels too easy. And the raising the flag missions are so bad now that you have to kill every enemy AND they keep respawning constantly. It’s like there’s no way to kill all of them. Instead you just run out of all your ammo and stratagems
unfortunately, if you keep playing the game, the devs dont see the problem, you are still playing so the balance change wasnt negative there needs to be a mass exodus of players if you want the devs to notice
The real solution would seem to be that there should be obvious 'super enemies' which require high skill and precision to defeat, which spawn VERY rarely on low levels, but more on high levels. The super enemies should be immune to various op strats, forcing you to kite, dodge and so on. That way someone playing as you did on level 7 doesn't encounter what you did, which is "Everything is invincible, and nothing works", and instead would notice discrete points of challege, pushing them to optimize and improve their skills for those identifiable challenge points. While the Bile Titan was there, and was powerful, it just seemed to be a damage sink, and it honestly seemed that even if you killed it, then it would mean nothing. Everything else would still kill you easily.
The problem with bigger enemies is not skill but cooldowns. Even if the orbital had killed the Titan, he still had at least two Chargers and an Impaler. If, and this is a big if, if he managed to use his Launcher he could kill one of those. After that is 3 minutes of running around because you have nothing to deal with heavies.
I don't know how they messed this up, because Left 4 Dead basically perfected this formula years ago - the tough enemies spawn rarely and in positions where you can (generally) engage them safely. They also don't tend to spawn alongside other enemies so that the player can direct their focus to them. Here, the developers just throw everything at you and go "Yeah, that's balanced." Difficulty is literally just more enemies showing up, and the game suffers immensely for it. The game needs to rebalance its entire spawn logic of enemies if Chargers are supposed to be mid-tier enemies. The weapons we have aren't great, and need rebalancing themselves, but a significant part of the problem is enemy spawn logic. It's too overbearing.
Remember hd1 when they made ammo so scarce that kinetic weapons were totally unviable? everyone ran energy weapons, so they nerfed energy weapons. Light armour is meta because the best way to win the game is to refuse to engage with it
But then again, at launch I was CONSTANTLY running out of primary ammo even on the lowest difficulty levels because I just didn't know how to play. I was kinda mad how unfun it was to having to scrounge for ammo all the time, and not reload half a mag. But those are core mechanics. The point is that you have to use your resources well. I have no idea if HD1 went too far, but obviously the amount of ammo going around is a huge factor in terms of balance.
That's not at all why people ran energy weapons in 1. People did it to save stratagem slots for things other than ammo, and because laser damage was overturned AF. Stop lying about the past. I was there for it
@@ComicGladiator not at all. People naturally gravitate to easier to use things. Not having to track primary ammo and not have to reload is the #1 reason why they were used. Even if they didn't do as good of damage as they did (which other ammo using weapons did better even) people would have used them. Also OP is just flat out wrong about ammo. You were never supposed to scavenge ammo off the map to survive in 1. You brought that shit with you. should probably have clarified what I meant by overtuned. The damage is very solid and it does just as much as several other weapons while not having the reloading downtime. It's infinite ammo sustain is actually a thing (unlike in HD2 where it doesn't start cooling down immediately). Other primaries absolutely do better than laser weapons, they just require ammo to use. Breaker is absolutely cracked and hits everything in effective range because it's got blowthrough rounds. Several others including railgun have that as well. Having a diverse set of primaries is usually better than everyone running laser weapons. Also some of the laser ones were bugged and ignored armor. Don't remember which off hand. Given your comment wrongly stating what my argument is it's very clear you haven't played HD1 at all so you wouldn't know this, but there's tons of viable ways to play the game and loadouts you can run even at difficulties beyond helldive (12).
But hasn't it always been evident that they hate people who don't play the game their way? I do remember them mocking single player or saying something pretty ignorant about soloing at least. But the fact is, even at higher levels you're pretty much forced into metas that they've created and this act of balancing it like PVP has gotten old, fast.
@@calebbarnhouse496 It should mean fun.. Point is they make the fun things terrible because players arent using what the devs want them to use. Happens all the time in gaming and basically ruins every single game it happens in. Ends up with devs chasing players away from the things they actually enjoy because the devs want them to use something else, then they dont buff what they want them to use and keep nerfing what they want to use
@@Tosicc567 except they aren't, they merf what's brokenly strong, the railgun was absolutely busted before it's nerf, granted that was nerfed to hard, but things like the quazer cannon got a 5 second extra cooldown added to it and it's still considered a good weapon, that's how busted it was, people took the broken weapons in mass because players will optimize the fun out of a game because they get more short term happy chemical
@@calebbarnhouse496 clearly they aren't optimising fun out of stuff if y'know they're enjoying it hahahaha What lots of Devs have is use charts, if something goes higher than the rest they nerf it based on popularity. Happens in R6 siege heaps and basically most PvP games. Doing it in a pve game is hilarious
@@lostalone9320 skill issue my ass. Pathetic rage bait attempt. Does skill issue mean I need to swap everything to something else? What do you mean exactly? Have you seen developers stream? Did you type that then?
@@lostalone9320 are you special needs? Or do you want to play devil's advocate? Helldive 9 with fully upgraded flamer became like 3 times worse. And you type skill issue? Are you dumb?
It's mot quite a 30% health boost, it's a limb boost which bleeds over into raw health. I'm underselling it in the video, but it's not well communicated in the game was more my point, it's not just straight health.
@@Reaper9-4 No, from what I've gathered the head of the balance team was in charge of the balance for a game called Hello Neighbor and he destroyed that game too through his "balancing."
Btw I'm playing lvl 10 as if its easy but i agree with you with most of what ur saying. The nerfs are stupid and makes the game harder and less fun. Rip my r36 eruptor and the breaker.
barely 10 min in, im just shaking with anger. If the slugger is meant for close quarter, with does it have a scope attached and do 170 less damage then the punisher...and there are so many other strats and weapons that have these inconsistencies
I’m convinced they got our message but just don’t care. They wanted to make a miserable, hardcore game, but accidentally made a fun one. Can’t have that.
I called it looong ago when the first set of nerfs hit, i said back then that the philosophy the dev are presenting has led many good games down the garbage shoot, and everyone was like "oh stop being paranoid and pessimistic" its pattern recognition, these devs have the same arrogant statements of "we are listening" "give us feedback" and then turning around and telling you "you are not conforming to our vision". They treat a pve game balance like its pvp and the bugs and bots are complaining about the players being too powerful. They need to stop taking their own game so seriously and remember a game is suppose to be fun to play. The most disingenous statement made was that fire was changed due to "realism" where was this realism when the thermite gernade came out, because that should melt through all armor. But no realism only exists when they want an excuse to take away player power.
all you had to do was read the balancing dev blog on why he balanced the way he did and everything was a red flag showing no understanding of how a good game is made and displayed zero social intelligence, one of the most important qualities for balance
Absolutely this. I love when people talk about how enemies just immediately know your location the instant you alert the entire base. I want to run by and toss some stratagems into a base to clear the majority of enemies but it’s just a damn good way to get reinforcements called onto your head. MAYBE the enemies could see the arc of the stratagem ball thing and investigate the area it came from but surely they’d be too busy panicking and running for cover once a orbital barrage begins slaughtering them. And no way would they call reinforcements in the middle of all that chaos, they’d wait till it’s over. With the bugs maybe not, they might not think ahead like the bots would.
This is why I love EDF Most of the weapons suck too, but there are 100's per class, so the few that "stick" are still in the dozens rather than single digits, and from the sheer bulk a few zany ones are good in niches. Furthermore there's no end-game loop to speak of, but all missions are bespoke with zero RNG, you can feel the design within every single one, individual spawns, which enemies/order of operation/tactics to be aware of, etc. and the self-imposed drive to want to complete the hundred+ missions on Inferno difficulty (for some people in Solo mode and/or doing it with all classes) makes the game last longer & with no feeling of a boring routine. Certain missions can take multiple sessions to complete with hundreds of failed attempts and the feeling of accomplishment is amazing. Zero life-service to speak of either, just the usual couple DLC mission packs per release. No Dev meddling, constant balanace discord/social media drama, yadda yadda. What you see is what you get.
I'd say a big factor is that in EDF, your weapons don't have limited ammo. (Rare exception excluded.) This means you aren't in the resource panic loop HD2 has going. Additionally, it's weapons are tuned around enormous hordes or dealing enormous spike damage to massive targets. HD2's primary weapons are tuned around small, brief skirmishes against unarmored targets and being actually secondary weapons to the call in 'support' weapons, which are tuned around small, brief skirmishes against mostly unarmored targets, with the assumption of downtime in-between engagements. Downtime that ceased to exist post change to enemy spawning/call in/breaches.
First they came for the breaker and i said, well fair enough, then they came for the slugger....well damn, then railgun, and it was like sigh really? ok. Then they came for the sickle and the quasar, well...hell that was my loadout my go to....ok hmm OH this is fun haha shrapnel is insane!......Yup that was ermm ermmm BUGGED YES BUG!..... You pieces of crap Arrowhead............FINE!......ok new loadout flameboyant, flamethrower is fun i can kill chargers and ill use breaker for the small medium bugs and grenade side arm for all around use. It is alot of fun! Everyone is using them because they are so good and fun! Arrowhead: YEAAAAHHH! i see you are having fun there....riiggghhhtt let me just nerf them...reason?....we saw you were using it alot and it seems to be abit EASY for you while playing this game. Honestly enough is enough, they play on difficulty 5 and balance it according to that and still it is not over, they still got commando change so it wont destroy automaton spawners, and game is still locked out over 170+ countries, i just cant anymore. Next time i find a new go to loadout they will nerf it as well, uninstalled and game put on hidden, i just cant do it anymore.
You're not alone in this assessment. In particular, this joke Alexus K. seems like the type of kid who would bring the ball to the park then angrily take his ball home when the other kids played other than how he wanted to. These nimrods forgot that we are their paid customers, to their detriment. I'll never again buy a game from these arrogant twits.
Just wanted to point out that the orbital airburst is fantastic for shutting down bug breaches. Biggest problem with it is that most teammates are unaware that it's a triple strike with a huge and inconsistent blast radius, and will subsequently walk into it and die. Apart from that I think I agree with this 100%.
Like if you agree. You can fix balance issues by hiring one or two people for $15/hr remote to read feedback and create the list of things to test in alpha beta testing. It's not hard. What are the devs actually struggling with? You could even have that job include playing the game 10 hours a week so they can better understand the feedback they are reading. There's more nuiance to this, but to me it seems devs get lost once they launch their game or they never knew simple stuff like this to begin with.
Oh no, he's found another source of salt. His power ever grows... On a serious note though, I've been playing since day one of the first game and the way this has gone is just straight disappointing. I think you bring up a good point with the difference between high level players cheesing everything and average players not cheesing. Pretty much if you try to stand your ground, you will get obliterated, no question. The thing that most people don't really seem to understand is that all difficulties are still contributing to the war effort, you don't have to build up to max and never play anything lower ever again. But because of online gaming being what it is, gamers gotta flex so they want to play at the highest just so they can say they can. But, very few people can actually complete those max level missions without cheesing big time. While I could reason at some level that this game does require you to have at least some tactical knowledge, the game also does not make even the slightest effort to teach you anything of the sort. Weak points are not obvious, marked points are actually strong points because they only take damage from the mysterious "structural" damage type, the symbol that pops up when your weapon bounces off a targets armor is never explained whatsoever, not to mention the armor types and levels have got to be one of the most concoluted systems ever and "medium armor penetrating" can actually be a completely different level depending on the weapon. Many of the changes they've made have been for the sake of "realism". Alright I can get behind that to a degree, it's a funny joke to have a universe as ridiculous as this one, meanwhile trying to use a realistic physics engine. But then all of a sudden they nerf flame damage for the sake of "realism", meanwhile a flamethrower irl is literally more effective than what we get in game now after this most recent change. The reason being: a real flamer spews flammable liquid that seaps into cracks and sticks to and burns anything it touches. Our flamethrower in Helldivers is essentially a really big blowtorch, a blowtorch that apparently can't cook a large bug anymore. Weird. But the change that bothers me most is the addition of the Impaler. Of all the enemies that is the one that feels the most unfair to fight. As a bot player I am used to dealing with rocket devastators en masse, I'm aware of the infinite ragdoll meme, but Jesus christ the Impaler is worse. It can't attack you beyond line sight, through walls, even if you're behind cover. It has the health and armor of a bile titan, cannot be staggered, cannot be disarmed, and only exposes it's weak pont while it's attacking. If you get caught by it's tentacle attack once, you are screwed, you will be ragdolled into oblivion because it attacks faster than you can get up from ragdoll. As soon as one shows up, your position is compromised, your only option is to kill it immediately *if you can see it*, or it will kill your entire squad with ease. Shooting the tentacles does not harm it or disarm it. Shooting it while it's attacking does not stun it or delay the attack. It has no minimum range so it can protect itself in its "vulnerable" state. There is nothing about the Impaler that says "Yeah it's tough, but if you know what you're doing you can take it out." No, it just makes the game worse, this update succeeded in taking away from the game by adding to it. TLDR: even a massive helldivers simp like me is getting tired of this bs
So why not just play a less difficult level until you built your rhythm again. Bro you say you play bots!!! To me you’re a legend. I can deal with bugs but bots!!!! Hell no
@rainbowwarpig3536 Impalers can appear from level 5, and I have seen them as normal patrols at 6. That's not really high difficulty. And I didn't even tested difficulty 4 to see if there are Impalers there.
@@rainbowwarpig3536 Because the jump in difficulty once Impalers appears is astronomical. Below the difficult they appear the game is far too easy. Once they start spawning it is exponentially harder and may as well be a roll of the dice wether you can win the engagement or not. If enemies are blocking the path you need to run to escape their attack, you will die and there is nothing you can do except have some kind of recognition ability. The margin of error is far too small even on difficulty 6.
@@rainbowwarpig3536why would someone not want to experience the new content? if the new content is poor quality it needs to be spoken about. the idea to stay quiet and play level 1 difficulty supposed to make the game better for everyone? there are creative ways to make something very hard without it being tedious to overcome or q knowledge check of what you have to bring for specific enemies making more things obsolete. unfortunately all of it's issues (and more) come from rushing content out instead of testing it thoroughly. this is not a good practice and shows a lot in bots too with devastators and gunships especially, i suppose with the developers track record saying anything doesn't really matter so it is a bit if a waste of energy, but a lot of people feeling the same frustration with a game they like a lot and get told they are just bad at the game can read similar experiences and know they aren't a failure and its the game thats the problem
100% I freaking can’t stand the impaler. It’s a garbage overpowered frustrating piece of $h!t enemy to fight. The game only got worse from it. As usual with AH bug enemies it has way too much armor. You should be able to shoot the tentacles with a primary and stun or destroy them. The range of the impaler needs to be modest and reasonable. The ragdoll is obnoxious as hell and a death sentence. It won’t consistently die to a rail cannon strike which is BS because that stratagem has a long cooldown and on level 7 they spawn these things a lot. This game just gets worse and worse. Constantly more obnoxious bullshit enemies while I get weaker and am constantly being stunned and ragdolled and waiting for cooldowns. I’m getting really sick of it.
Maybe instead of making the slugger less accurate, handle worse, stagger less and do less damage, they should have created an upgrade system where people can make the version of the slugger that they like.
@@JackdotC I think different ammo types would basically achieve this- AP would do more damage and over penetrate unarmored enemies, slugs would do less damage but still stagger A version of the breaker that shoots slugs could be cool too
@@JackdotC oh definitely buff the snipers, they’re kind of useless. The trouble with the primary weapons is that they can’t become more effective than the support weapons, otherwise it won’t even be worth picking them as a stratagem. Another explosion or turret is much better than more ammo for your primary, which you can find on the map anyway. If you buff railguns and AMR, then you have room to buff the snipers. As it is, those support weapons are just okay. No one thinks the game is too easy, certainly not the vast majority of players. Arrowhead has plenty of room to dish out the buffs across the board.
the vitality booster increases your main health significantly. well to be more specific it improves your armor and damage reduction. I believe it essentially turns 50 armor into about 120, and medium armor become better than 95% of heavy armor. it is arguably the best booster in the game, and it also makes you immune to acid damage for some reason. the muscle enhancement does work on environmental effects like blizzards, idk where you got that it doesn't. it even works on acid from biles and hunters allowing you to essentially ignore the debuff (meaning it is just straight up better than motivational shocks)
Can we get a real estate agency to check their office building for gas leaks? Maybe there is a CO2 buildup due to bad ventilation there or other hazardous fumes.. I had my suspicions before, but after the last patch, im actually worried
Game's pretty easy with a full team on highest difficulty, can easily beat both bugs and bots without dying. Don't care about solo because I'm not a Nigel no friends. Making everything more tedious isn't fun. Simple as. The people running the shop are incompetent and unwise. The people licking their boots are as funny as they are sad (very).
As a fellow 300+ hour diver I couldn't agree more. It's like the devs randomly stumbled upon this game from somebody else and now they have no clue what to do with it whatsoever. Also I really don't thin they take the worldbuilding or finer details of the game seriously whatsoever. Planets will randomly have new moons in new patches, bile titans and factory strider still freeze instead of dying properly, and it's all too easy to get stuck on things or god forbid underneath the map. Not to mention the balance is just silly. Certain things are infinitely more usable and useful than others especially in terms of stratagem and weapon balance yet instead of improving the weaker options (strafing run, jetpack, laser rifle ect.) they just ruin the power fantasy they've created with certain things to try and bring them down the the level of lameness the other options possess. in the past the monument to this issue was the railgun, then the slugger, then the eruptor, and soon the commando... the devs don't take their game and it's design and fine details within it seriously. Its a total clown fiesta. Very well put video.
I read something that made a bit too much sense; If you have a popular game played by hundreds of thousands across the globe, servers are gonna cost a lot over time Now, if you just pull the plug on the game, you face massive backlash and those pesky wallets with humans attached to them may not open for Helldivers 3 BUT if you slowly make the game miserable to play, you'll naturally bleed players much quicker, ergo don't need as many servers? The cash shop is not priced aggressively enough and I don't think there are enough """Recurring revenue streams""" to make the phantom investor happy.
Went back to DRG so fast I was a blur after seeing the kind of moderators they hire and backwards balancing philospohy, wish they werent killing their own game
Vitality booster absolutely increases your health, or rather, reduces all incoming damage by 20%, which thanks to numbers rounding down, makes it way better than plus 20% when it comes to things like damage over time effects.
One of my gripes with the game is the amount of lives or reinforcements should not be limited to the number of players. OR they need to let us have infinite retries. It's a bit too easy to die on accident or simply outside of our control, especially with teamates who don't quite understand how to play around one another.
Everything AH has done since launch has been a reactionary, emotional counter to try and stop solo Helldives at the highest difficulties. And they chased off 90% of their player base running that fools errand.
The problem in general is the concern over “balancing.” It’s a PvE game. Just make it fun and let people kill bugs and robots. The developers seem like they are trying to beat the players and win themselves. They’re going to end up winning the death of their player-base and game.
I am done waiting for things to get better, done waiting for arrowhead to actually listen to reason and player feedback instead of empty promises on communication, for the foreseeable future its rock and stone my brothers, and when space marine 2 comes out, we march for Maccrage.
If weapons and strategems were more "realistic" like Arrowhead has said they wanted to focus on, a lot of those guns and bombs would be far more useful...
This video is perfect...I...tried to explain this time and time again to other players and the response is...... get gud...what's your loadout...or let the door hit you. I'm like dude...I actually pay for the DLC, I play Helldive...they keep removing my options at high levels, it's repetitive because of the few viable options, and my frustration ticks up with each nerf.
Primaries should be what it is. Primaries. not a secondary. but a "Prime" gun like Optimus "Prime" Strong and Reliable. A Space Marine with one Primary weapon can take on an army. But in HD2. Primaries are so weak that you are FORCED to sacrifice a stratagem slot for a "Support" weapon cuz primaries are so weak they cant kill anything big. thus leaving us with 3 strikes stratagem. Then if you take a defensive backpack or strategem, you are left with 2 strike strategem.
I loved the latest balance update so much that I actually wanted to suggest the below for the next patch - hoping to get a job with the Balance team, thanks Arrowhead!
- EAT call in time increased to 69 seconds
- Arc Thrower now only chains between Helldivers and kills you all instantly
- Grenade Launcher Pistol magazines reduced by 100%
- I actually killed something with the Slugger this morning so reduce Slugger damage by 85% and slugs ricochet killing the closest Helldiver in your vicinity
- Equipping the Incendiary Breaker instantly sets you ablaze and you lose 10 levels
- Stalkers movement speed increased by 600% and they have dual shoulder Rail Cannons that no scope you
- All weapons reload times Increased by 500%
- Hellpods nuclear detonate the moment you leave them, instantly killing you and your fellow Helldivers
- Bile Spewer vomit range increased by 500% and vomit can't be dodged (if you die by vomit - you will spawn in with vomit on you and will die by the vomit again)
- 5% of the player base have given the Blitzer praise, so the Blitzer now fires backwards
- All bots and bugs are immune to electric damage
- Increase Railgun damage by 25%
- Reduce Railgun damage by 250%
- Equipping Railgun in loading screen automatically bans you and your family
- Increase Hunter spawn rate every time you aim down sights
- Bug holes now spawn Drop Ships that shoot Bug Holes that spawn more Drop Ships
- Chargers can fly
- Every Scavenger is now a Charger
- Various crash fixes but this has introduced more varied crashes
Honestly, just replace all enemies with wheel skeletons (in different sizes) from dark souls. Perfect game right there!
You got me in the first half. Not gonna lie. I'm going to steal a joke I read on discord;
"All Helldivers wear helmets in game. Please remove them for balancing." Or something along those lines.
@@TheOuterCircle flying chargers. I am sure it will happen. But they will fly in the same manner as assblasters from tremors because they cant have wings as weak spots
Thank you for making my day. I was looking forward to play this game again and I am super frustrated with lack of ammo and dmg, but this crack me up 😀
I HAVE RAN INTO A FLYING CHARGER BEFORE. DON'T. REMIND ME. PLEASE OUTER CIRCLE, THEY TOOK MY PLASMA CANNONS IN HORUS HERESY AND THREW THEM INTO THE DIRT PLEASE DONT TAKE THIS TOO.
Caps aside, your comment here is golden
The devs did a stream where they were trying to kill a tank by shooting incendiary weapons at it
..
WOW
They were down to 6 respawns at diff 6
Those weren't the devs.
It was some Playstation marketing people.
@@knaltor my understanding is it was 2 devs and 2 sony people
id pay good money to see the balance team play on 9 vs bots and if they think that this is a good game, its certainly not the same game that i bought and fell in love with. Eversince the gunship update, everything went to shit.
im starting to think the hello neighbor guy might actually be doing this on purpose to gain that severance fee
Alexus (Bringer Of Balance) is in your walls...
Huh? Explain? I don't technically play hell divers anymore. Ever since the whole Sony drama happened a while back?But yeah, can someone explain?
@@shikarileto191after that mess there's been a series of nerfs to the most used weapons based almost entirely on how much the weapon is used. They just released a patch that nerfed fire damage to be effectively useless right before dropping a warbond based around fire. People are pissed
@@shikarileto191 apparently this guy that does most of the terrible nerfs is the same guy that destroyed hello neighbor
Nah, there's an even more simple answer that is more in line with his online behavior. He's just a sadist who gets his rocks off pissing people off. He's literally just a rage baiter.
never seen a supply of community goodwill go up in flames so quickly
Halo has entered the chat but yes this game fuckin fell off with all the constant nerfs IN A PVE GAME
@@justinfaulcon9498 They nerf stuff in single player games too bro.
@@lostalone9320 yeah and it always works out well . . . or not
@@justinfaulcon9498 It does normally work out pretty well, actually. And in lots of cases, imbalance in single player games is a genuine problem that threatens to undermine classics.
System Shock 2 is one of the best games ever made. Single player only. The grenade launcher is busted. Like, the shipped version of the game has a bug which accidentally makes it do twice as much damage as its supposed to. It is the strongest weapon in the game, and makes it so that all of the exotic and heavy weapons are not worth investing the skill points into. It doesn't necessarily ruin the game, but when you figure it out, it actually does ruin the game. You are supposed to be sneaking and hiding and rationing your supplies, not killing everything all the time.
Deus Ex is one of the best games ever made. Single player only. The GEP gun is busted. It's not actually a bug, but it is an hilariously effective lockpick that will blast open many doors, as well as killing robots and really anything else. This breaks the balance of the game, because you aren't supposed to be able to access ALL of the hidden items and caches you can find in the game. You have a set number of tools and lockpicks to use, but suddenly you have double the amount for free and now you can get everything and you are very overpowered.
The reason why these weren't a big deal at the time was simply because word travelled much more slowly. But if it was well known about enough that when I borrowed SS2 in 2000 I was told "Oh yeah, the grenade launcher is way overpowered" then it was a pretty big problem, and I specifically had to stay away from the grenade launcher just to experience the game as it was supposed to be played. Games should not force you to do that. Games should be balanced.
@@lostalone9320 that's fine when it's totally game breaking, otherwise it's just lazy. they did the right thing with the machine gun/orbital barrage buff patch, people had hope, then they fucked it all up again.
Whats funny is slugs were meant to kill things at 180m+. Shotguns made to shoot slug rounds only even have rifling for fucks sake.
No no, you don’t understand. It’s for realism that they don’t want it to do that tho. Because shotgun is short range. /s
Devs about to be like, "uhh super earth mandates slugs only be used within 50m or you get a fine because the super president had his super doggo hit by a stray slug once 🥺"
they put slam firing shotguns in the game but we can’t get bandoliers for the ARs
I'm not even kidding, one of the massive reasons why I play bots is because if I'm fighting bugs, you know, a horde enemy that rushes you, my primary can't hurt half of them with how much more armour they have than the literal metal men.
They stealth buffed bot armour before realizing it was a horrendous idea and reversed it back.
Yeah, tbh any time I get killed by bots I pretty much know what I did wrong and can figure out a solution.
Usually when getting killed by bugs it just feels like bs. Oh look a swarm, better run. "No, the small enemy that's faster than you hit you once and slowed you down. Now you die". So what's the solution to that? Kill them all at once before they can hit me? With what weapon?
@@Colonel-Sigma Fucking exactly.
Automaton become bs when there are too much rockets around. Or when you snipe that fabricator with autocannon from across the map and the guy operating emplaced mg starts sending salvoes your way.
But give me a ballistic shield, pummeler, sawed off/nade pistol and laser cannon with some stun nades and we can go to town in style.
Bro, seriously!! I don’t play bots because I get ragged dolled around and feel like I’m letting my random players down😂…….life is a trip
Long story short.
I mained flamer for a long time now. With aggressive stormtrooper like playstyle focused on clearing hordes of enemies and chargers to keep my team safe from those threats.
Escalation of Freedom came with "more realistic fire effects". I launched one mission to look into changes and uninstalled the game
If AH dont want me to have fun I will just go elswhere. Were fun is allowed.
My dude - If one weapon clears hordes AND chargers, that covers 95% of all the bug enemies. Is that really what balance looks like?
@@lostalone9320if you have to consistently risk your own skin to use it? Yeah, it's a fair tradeoff
@@lostalone9320 I didnt ask for balance in PvE game. I asked for fun. My fun was taken away so I am gone.
@@marcusflutist1230 exactly. Flamer was high risk weapon and it was S tier weapon on TERMINID front.
Against automaton it was... Well it was. It existed. Just like incendiary breaker.
Flamer was very well designed and extremely fun to use but not without flaws.
Also devs said we need to use stratagems to deal with haevy armour. If I remember correctly old flamer is a stratagem lol.
@@marcusflutist1230 Oh so you DO like balance? Just only for the guns you like, good to know.
Is it really the wrong message when the devs only ever revert their dumbest decisions when the entire community yells at them?
Takes a special kind of troglodyte to nerf players and buff enemies at the same time.
Arrowhead and Bungie walk into a bar
More like when game devs that dont play their own game think they know better... reminds me of the old warhammer fantasy mmo from mythic... they also knew best, told their players that they are wrong and they are right cause they have all the metrics yadayadayada... and then people simply left and went back to WoW
You think they dont play their own game?
@@braydoxastora5584 There's entire studios that take pride in that fact. See: Naughtydog.
@@braydoxastora5584 They do play it.... at level 5, and many of them seem to not understand the gameplay mechanics, during that livestream which was half-Sony staff and half-Arrowhead, we saw: They tried to shoot down gunships with breaker incendiary, tried to shoot a bot tank in the front for a full magazine of breaker incendiary, spent 10 seconds trying to fire an empty weapon, ran out of reinforcement on level 5, tried to melee a bruiser.
I guess their spreadsheets said that the shotgun should melt armored enemies. They must not have metrics that tell them that the breaker killed chargers by hitting areas with shredded armor. The balance team devs balance stats around level 5. Very few armored enemies spawn on 5. This explains a lot of the nerfs that the game has received.
@@braydoxastora5584 many game developers have talked about how between 12+ hour shifts for 6 - 7 days a week doesn't give you much time to play anything at all once you consider commute times and family obligations
@@GalladeTheWarrior They should be playing on company time as part of their job, that's the whole point. If they can't play the game they won't understand what needs to change and what doesn't.
for all those people who say get good or the game is too easy I'm sorry you got too good at the game you're a victim of your own success.
this is the best video I have seen on this subject so far.
It really is a good video. Simple with a calm discussion of issues. No rants just truth
did the helldiver devs attend the same seminars as the 7 days to die devs?
boi howdy!!!!!! that is a real piece of work, and people think that them moving to fix stuff now is ok??? after they abandoned EVERY SINGLE other version besides PC.
these modern devs are absolutely fried
I don't think I've ever seen a game with such incompetent balancing. I know balance is complained about in many games, but this is the first time I've thought that the developer has absolutely no idea what they're doing.
I think a good chunk of the problem is that the game doesn't have classes or even roles. Since everyone gets free choice of all of the strats and weapons, that hugely exacerbates how much imbalance ends up impacting your experience. It's one reason why DeepRock and Killing Floor have less of these problems (not zero, but less) because your team has to include a mix of classes so even if each class only has one S tier weapon, at least you don't see literally every person in the game using them.
From what I've heard about the stream that they did, the devs do not, in fact, know what they're doing.
Overwatch balancing is pretty close to this.
Its just looks like a kneejerk reaction to people soloing helldive. We made a really hard game.
I just solod the hardest difficulty
Ok cool, now try it with no bullets.
Wha??
Have you heard a studio called Bungie?
Yeah, this debate reminds me a bit of the Total War difficulty levels. Where the game is balanced around the Normal difficulty and as you turn it up 90% of your units (i.e. your tools) become useless and you will resort to spamming ranged units
That's how it feels in helldivers. You have 30 primaries and 40 or so stratagems to choose from, but 80% or more are useless on difficulty level 7 or higher. And the primaries are all quite useless anyway, since they are only good against the smallest enemies. Every mission feels quite samey eventually
But that's true of almost every game at the higher levels... Including Warhammer! All of us at this channel know that a bunch of units are just bad, and a bunch of units are not going to play well at a tournament, and while there is some range, if you want to play at the higher levels you have to really maximise what you bring. Same for MtG and Hearthstone. Same for Darktide! We had the SAME THING where players yelled "NO NERFS THIS IS PVE" even though, at one time, the Vet was busted good and the power sword was legitimately broken; not actually acting as it was intended to.
That's a pretty major difference, one makes things harder by just buffing the enemies's melee stats until melee becomes worthless without a lot of buffs to overcome the massive advantage given, or not interacting with that feature at all, meanwhile on high difficulties of helldiver 2 you just get a lot of all enemy type, so you drown in what you can't deal with and big surprise the bugs being a melee swarm faction are a DPS check, a DPS check a solo player can't take on particular when hrs doing things like rushing into a place he knows a lot of bugs are chilling because he just died there after he tried to cheese them
@@calebbarnhouse496 I agree that Helldivers needs to do SOMETHING with how they use enemy types. As it stands, you have to pick your strats before you know what enemies you encounter, so often times I'll finish a mission having lugged an RR around and only have fired it twice. But its still the right choice, because sometimes you get a LOTS of heavies to kill, and you don't know until they start spawning. So you take the AT, and that's that. As long as there is any chance of heavy armour, you need a support weapon to tackle it.
To be fair to total war, that's sort of how military tactics and strategy evolved IRL. Heavy calvary and massed infantry all fell to just massing archers and raining entire walls of arrows down on people.
@@MisterZimbabwe that's just not true, warfare constantly envolved in each war to make up for short comings and strengths, arrows never dominated other forms of units off the battlefield, that only happened well after guns were adopted, and even then calvary used sabers and lances regularly even into ww1, hell that's discounting use of bayonets, which are still being trained on to this day, melee may be rare today, but it happens
There’s a lot of things that suck now, but the one thing I hate the most is when one of the 300 hunters on the screen gets me when I’m trying to stim or reload, and they prevent me from stimming or reloading, and then I get mobbed to death.
Oh my gosh yes!! So effing frustrating.
Community: We feel forced into using the least nerfed weapons at high difficulties because you've shit on everything else.
AH: I feel a rumble *spews shit balancing everywhere*
Community: We're sick of getting shit on.
AH: Why are you leaving? *drops trousers*
I don't mind difficulty, its just the developers have a poor understanding of what makes a difficult game good, they're pulling all the wrong levers, you can make a player feel overwhelmed without making them feel impotent
"Hmm, this weapon has a high pick rate because it's good, and this weapon has a low pick rate because it's bad...I've got it! They'll have an equal pick rate if they're both bad!"
This type of anti-fun behavior is so ubiquitous across all types of media and even real life. It’s too common: authority figures don’t want people to have fun. If it becomes „too easy“ to have a good time, believe it that a rule/law/ban isn’t far off. I’m this game it’s inconvenient and shitty, but as a rule across humanity it’s pure evil.
No, you miss the point entirely. Games are fun because we overcome challenges. Remember, you can always go play on dif 3 if you want; go and just use whatever guns you like and treat it like a sandpit. No-one is stopping you. So why don't you do that? Isn't it fun to just kill everything all the time? No? Why not?
@@lostalone9320 get your Heinlein on, "That which is given has no value. Rewards must be earned!" This is very true, we want the challenge, but there are comfortable challenges, and uncomfortable ones. I went away with the scouts recently, camping up in the mountains in the snow. Now, I could have slept under a survival shelter all night, and proved how tough a man I am. Or, I could sleep in a cabin by a pot belly stove. They're both challenges, I've slept in awful conditions before, I've already overcome that challenge, so who am I impressing? Maybe I wanted a nice night with other like-minded people camping. That is Helldivers 2, sure, I've beaten my share of level 9's, but sometimes I want to take it back a notch, so I'll drop down to level 6. Sometimes I want to try a new weapon, it's ok at 6, but at 9 it's a miserable experience and I have to put my tryhard pants on. Suddenly, I'm achieving a hard task, but it isn't rewarding. It's miserable, like sleeping in the snow.
@@TheOuterCircle But you're arguing against your own point here - Why not just play on 6 if you are finding 6 is fun? Why do you NEED to play on 9 with every weapon? Why does it have specific meaning to you that you can complete 9s with every gun, if the only goal of the game is to have fun? Why not just adjust the challenge to the gun?
Challenges are fine, but getting weapons nerfed is not a challenge, that's just an arbitrary decision. Imagine waking up one day and your deek is two inches shorter. Nobody would be happy about it because of the "added challenge"
@lostalone9320 Are you saying that I need to read a wiki in order to know which gun to bring? Just to have fun? Why have a bunch of options then? Why not just have a few? It would certainly free you of the misconception that you have options. If there is a weapon I like and I'm good with it why not allow it to be viable in its own way? Otherwise why should I bother to learn it when my time could be spent elsewhere learning to use a different weapon?
Team reloading should not require having the same or dropping then picking up a backpack just to reload someone for 0.7 seconds.
I stopped playing when they decided to f*** over people with the playstation network and that they want to attack their own community
Me and all my friends did too.
Not only that we called all this balance issues out back in the first few months of the launch of this game, they nerfed the OP railgun, which was fine because it was absolutely cracked. But then they just didn't stop nerfing things.
Watching that gameplay made me wither, it has only gotten compoundedly worse since launch.
The fact you can go 48 minutes about the balancing problems alone speaks volumes, especially since it's just one of the three punches that killed the game's playerbase.
All games lose players after launch. Seriously. They do. All of them. It's to be expected that most players are not sticking around for the long haul. For me, I am normally going to a Major Order that has 30k to 50k people playing on the MO planets. That is not a dead player base.
@lostalone9320 you don't see positive growth for a month and have a consistent player base for two more on a scale of CS:GO then just as quickly have a 95%+ drop naturally.
It is literally the greatest defiance of the observed patterns you think you're citing.
@@lostalone9320 that's just not true. Deep Rock Galactic has had ups and downs but overall its playerbase has slowly grown over time
@@GalladeTheWarrior But DRG has never had a big player base. HD2 came out with an artificially high player count, because of how viral it was at launch, and now it is dropping off. DRG has never had that, and they continue to grow up to their natural saturation point. Oh and they continue to grow because people who tried Darktide or HD2 want to play something similar and pick up DRG on deep discount. The point is that DRG is a slow and steady performer, HD2 is still performing miles above it, even as it loses players.
Man the nerfs are crippling. It’s made me stop playing.
I havent played since they nuked the Sony players.
Funny thing is that it never really got fixed. The pc version is still delisted in all of those areas
Your loss, we're having a blast!
@@kapitan19969838uh idk about that one
@@kapitan19969838who are you speaking for with your 1 like?
@@mistake1197 Ahh, the ad populum falacy strikes again!
Go ahead, google it
From all of the weapon leak videos to date, armor deflection seems to be turned off when they're testing weapons and it shows.
There's no way the Spray & Pray could've released while being unable to even penetrate an egg if it wasn't.
And this is why i am happy with my DRG.
It's funny because I just never enjoyed DRG at all. I don't like the movement mechanics, and I don't like the art style. And I get that people really like it, but even playing with RL friends it couldn't get me excited at all.
@@lostalone9320 k
@@ravenseeker8267 Oh I'm sorry, I thought we were going to discuss something here. Don't let me stop you though dude.
@@lostalone9320 not much to discuss. You don't like DRG. thats basically all you say in your post. I am perfectly fine with that but no clue what you want me to add to that.
like the thing you dislike i enjoy, and the balancing is not overbearing and usually when people don't use something the devs try to buff the thing thats not being used. Free content and good monetization practices. Overall its my go to for co-op shooter. not to mention tiny filespace and good optimization.
They want your soul. Follow Jesus Christ, God is very real everyone. Please read the word!!!
Thats the thing, Arrowhead devs *are* idiots and always have been. Look up their history - their leadership has always made terrible, naive business decisions. Employing Alexus as lead balance dev is just another.
Give me back my flame weapons, AH, and buff all the unused stuff. Just roll back all the nerfs, ffs.
There are some misconceptions in this video about game mechanics but I'm not going to be pedantic about them. Appreciate the intent.
Which misconceptions? The part where his description of how the strategems work makes it sound like he hasn't actually used 90% of them himself? Or perhaps the part where his portrayal of 'the average player' seems to be that they'd be of equivalent intelligence to whoever was put in charge of making the stratagem sample videos(as in, too stupid to think of the arcane idea of 'walk around and shoot the squishy bits')?
I don’t play Helldivers, but this seems like a thinly-veiled AP 4 argument.
You're not wrong. It's basically the same problem
What is AP 4? Just here to learn
@@JDunamis So, other folks can answer this question better than I, but I’ll explain as best I can. It’s a reference to a feature of the 2nd Edition Horus Heresy tabletop rules.
It boils down to the fact that a large amount of your mainline battle tanks and artillery weapons are stuck with an armor piercing (AP) value of 4. At the end of the day, this means that artillery can’t take out space marines, and it definitely can’t take out the typical 1st wave of terminators (some of which can reroll their saves against area effect weapons) your opponent is going to send. That’s a problem because your expensive artillery is now a glorified paperweight against some of the most common infantry in the game - and then there’s your tanks which don’t do much better on account of being direct-fire weapons.
This is especially bad for Imperial Army (and Imperial Militia, and sometimes Mechanicum) players, because this trend makes their only advantage from the previous edition (mechanized support) useless against the most often-played armies of Heresy: space marines. When you roll in other factors like those same weapons having too small a blast radius (3”) to efficiently affect the enemy formation or having too little Strength (often 7) to inflict Instant Death (When Strength equals 2x target’s Toughness) on said basic marines, you’re in for a bad time.
TL;DR - The devs at Games Workshop can’t balance for armies they don’t play, and they refuse to repair the faults in their system after too little play testing from too small a pool of testers (probably). Macca’s got a video on it some months back if you’re still interested.
I just want to play Helldivers, but this isn't helldivers anymore.
The more I hear about the more I think: Arrowhead has survival bias, they look at the usage times and declared this is because those weapons and equipments are overpowered instead of the other ones being weak.
Err, OC...
Are you aware that the original leadership team behind the choices that made this game the sensation it was back at launch, have all been deposed from their positions after standing up to Sony and quite a few of their own subordinates?
TLDR: The leadership that created and steered the original setup are all gone at this point and have been replaced by standard gaming company leadership pod-people.
oh god
it all makes sense now
That BRIDGE effect in motion...
Goddamnit, another bioware situation
Do you have some receipts for that info? I don't remember AH laying off staff even during February sony debacle
@@doodleEeto They don't necessarily have to be laid off to be taken off the leadership. They probably transferred the leadership to crappier roles to try and get them to quit on their own.
Corrections for boosters at 17:05:
Vitality booster does affect your hp, or at least effective hp. It gives you 20% damage resistance on all limbs (head, torso, arms, legs). A portion of that damage is transferred to your main hp. (Note that servo assisted armor passive only affects arms and legs, but does stack with the booster). [1]
Muscle enhancement does not affect your mantling speed and actually does alleviate (not eliminate) environmental effects like snowstorms. If you see knee high stepping animation like running through snow, it alleviates most of it. [2]
To be clear, it doesn't excuse the devs for poor information clarity. The boosters are very obtuse and weapon stats aren't much better. There is a hidden stat called durable damage and enemies have differing amounts of durable resistance on various body parts. That's why some guns just feel like it doesn't do anything despite being shot in the soft fleshy bit like charger butts. Or that various enemy parts have differing armor class and weapons only state light or medium armor penetration. I believe if your weapon's hidden armor penetration value matches the part's class value, it does half damage. If it exceeds it, it does full damage. Anything less will do no damage.
1 - How Health Works in Helldivers 2 - Eravin
2 - Motivational Shocks vs Muscle Enhancement - cashcrop_
Seems like they are only listening to their echo chamber of a discord and thus are siloed into a narrow view of their game tyrannically policed by the most crazed and radical ideologically correct mods.
This, so much this.
With the latest patch they said something like "some people think the game is too easy, some that it's too hard. It's difficult to balance from the pov of who to listen to."
Absolutely missing the fact that, outside of the Yes-Men in their Discord, the overwhelming majority think it's a slog.
No. The slugger shoots slugs. Slugs are for all ranges. Also, why do the enemies have invincibility frames when they melee! I have had way too many times when I punch a bug but because it attacked at the same time, the enemy gets a free hit. That is enough evidence for me that AH doesn't care about the players, they care about the AI enemies instead.
The way they've done these nerfs, it seems they take personal offense at any Bugs or Bots being killed. I wonder if they use that "balancing spreadsheet" for fortune-telling or something, their inexplicable obsession with use rates has killed this game.
The weapon balancing in this game is so baffling
"Spreadsheet balancing" is a huge problem in 40k as well. It all comes full ~Circle~
The team reload component is even worse than you displayed. Not only does it take up a backpack slot for you to use it by yourself, but it also takes up a teammate's backpack slot because THEY have to wear the ammo backpack in order to reload YOUR gun faster on top of them being unable to fight while they assist you. This makes zero sense to me.
the reason they nerfed fire weapons is because they knew they were about to burn their reputation
I've played like 200 hrs since 1.0, brought friends on to play, made sure they had a good time. I like to try out weird or unusual loadouts on level 7 and even on helldive.
I am pretty disappointed with the update. I've been playing the new swamp planet, and just having my team get wiped by two bile titans + an impaler, and its so lame. You basically cannot hurt these enemies, unless you hit them with stratagems. Then the game spawns so many of them, that there isnt enough firepower in the deck to possibly kill them.
I keep reading the CEO whinge about, "who should we listen to? The people who want buffs, or the people who say it's way too easy?" Who the f*** is saying it's way too easy? I've never once seen this, all summer. Arrowhead acts like its a faction thats totally equal to the "buff the primary" players. Where are they? Are they playing Helldive?
I was having a game the other day on the swamp planet, the flag raising mission, playing on level 8. Everyone got wiped on between the last objective and the extract, and these were seasoned players. My team would respawn and basically instantly die. There were two bile titans and an impaler on the field (and a massive swarm of bugs).
We had spent every stratagem we had on the huge armored enemies. We got cleaned out, every bomb and laser. But it waant enough.
And in the chaos, after we started dying, most of the team had gotten separated from their support weapons. It would be two-three minutes before my stratagems cooled down. Until those came in, i literally could not harm the most dangerous enemies on the field, and I could barely run from the swarm.
It just felt like an eternity, running, respawning, and occasionally ineffectively shooting at the swarm. And of course, im just getting my a** whipped, I'm constantly stimmimg to stay alive and throw respawns, im shooting those explosive fire things, I'm funneling and grouping enemies.
It felt like an eternity, just watching the timer roll for two and a half minutes. And at some point, I was like, "what the hell is this? What the hell am I doing? Two days ago, i _loved_ this game."
Unless something changes soon, i am ready to shelve it. I am just having a bad time. I can handle losing and dying, I like the challenge. But it just feels so lame that there's this whole tier of enemies where it's _impossible_ to kill them, unless you hit them with one of 3 stratagems (orbital laser, rail cannon, eagle bomb) or one of the four support weapons that hurt them (missiles, auto cannon).
At least with the factory strider, if you disarm it, you can walk underneath it and shoot its belly. The bile titan, you can pop all of the sacks, crack its armor... and if you don't kill it, you're screwed. Because there's no way to harm it with support weapons, once the sacks are popped. The cracked armor is an illusion, bullets still bounce off it. Same for the impaler.
I'm just having a bad time on that swamp planet, the flag raising map.
This is pretty much where I’m at. I think they’ve increased the difficulty such that you now need to be part of a semi-cohesive team to be successful. You need to have a buddy that you run around with, one person should be running a horde clear weapon because primaries aren’t good enough. You probably need to all be on mics so that you can tell everyone you’ve got that charger or bile titan and you don’t double up on killing that one guy, because you need all the stratagems. But playing with randoms doesn’t give you that. You don’t know who these people are. Most games no one is using a mic. I’ve never had a single random game where anyone has vocally coordinated their loadouts with another person to make sure they are complimentary. Now I just feel like I’m dying a lot, and once you die, it’s hard to regain your footing. Nothing feels like it works right now. All the antitank weapons suck right now. All the primaries suck right now.
I do see how they have some percentage of people who think the game is too easy. Like you watch all the popular youtubers and the videos are all about them dominating level 10 and they make it look easy. They call in stratagems perfectly every time in a third of a second. They know exactly where to hit an enemy that avoids the broken hitboxes. They know exactly how many bullets each enemy takes on each limb. They’re not throwing their last 500 kg and having the Bile Titan move and it misses and then spending the next 3 minutes without a stratagem.
But like you said, those people aren’t the reality I see. At best, before the patch, maybe 1 out of 10 squads at level 7 does it feel like I’m in a team that is sufficiently skilled that the mission feels too easy.
And the raising the flag missions are so bad now that you have to kill every enemy AND they keep respawning constantly. It’s like there’s no way to kill all of them. Instead you just run out of all your ammo and stratagems
unfortunately, if you keep playing the game, the devs dont see the problem, you are still playing so the balance change wasnt negative
there needs to be a mass exodus of players if you want the devs to notice
The real solution would seem to be that there should be obvious 'super enemies' which require high skill and precision to defeat, which spawn VERY rarely on low levels, but more on high levels. The super enemies should be immune to various op strats, forcing you to kite, dodge and so on. That way someone playing as you did on level 7 doesn't encounter what you did, which is "Everything is invincible, and nothing works", and instead would notice discrete points of challege, pushing them to optimize and improve their skills for those identifiable challenge points.
While the Bile Titan was there, and was powerful, it just seemed to be a damage sink, and it honestly seemed that even if you killed it, then it would mean nothing. Everything else would still kill you easily.
The problem with bigger enemies is not skill but cooldowns. Even if the orbital had killed the Titan, he still had at least two Chargers and an Impaler. If, and this is a big if, if he managed to use his Launcher he could kill one of those. After that is 3 minutes of running around because you have nothing to deal with heavies.
Rocket pods + any explosive weapon. Can take out 3 heavies per rearm. Throw in OPS, and that's a 4th.
Granted, it sucks taking rocket pods to bugs.
@@juan0808What makes this worse is by the time you take out the those bigger units they have already respawned and now you can’t do the obj
I don't know how they messed this up, because Left 4 Dead basically perfected this formula years ago - the tough enemies spawn rarely and in positions where you can (generally) engage them safely. They also don't tend to spawn alongside other enemies so that the player can direct their focus to them.
Here, the developers just throw everything at you and go "Yeah, that's balanced." Difficulty is literally just more enemies showing up, and the game suffers immensely for it. The game needs to rebalance its entire spawn logic of enemies if Chargers are supposed to be mid-tier enemies. The weapons we have aren't great, and need rebalancing themselves, but a significant part of the problem is enemy spawn logic. It's too overbearing.
@@OKMBVideosnailed it.
Remember hd1 when they made ammo so scarce that kinetic weapons were totally unviable? everyone ran energy weapons, so they nerfed energy weapons.
Light armour is meta because the best way to win the game is to refuse to engage with it
But then again, at launch I was CONSTANTLY running out of primary ammo even on the lowest difficulty levels because I just didn't know how to play. I was kinda mad how unfun it was to having to scrounge for ammo all the time, and not reload half a mag. But those are core mechanics. The point is that you have to use your resources well. I have no idea if HD1 went too far, but obviously the amount of ammo going around is a huge factor in terms of balance.
That's not at all why people ran energy weapons in 1. People did it to save stratagem slots for things other than ammo, and because laser damage was overturned AF. Stop lying about the past. I was there for it
@@roar104 So your argument is "they didn't screw up by forcing you away from X, they screwed up by forcing you towards Y."
@@ComicGladiator not at all. People naturally gravitate to easier to use things. Not having to track primary ammo and not have to reload is the #1 reason why they were used. Even if they didn't do as good of damage as they did (which other ammo using weapons did better even) people would have used them. Also OP is just flat out wrong about ammo. You were never supposed to scavenge ammo off the map to survive in 1. You brought that shit with you.
should probably have clarified what I meant by overtuned. The damage is very solid and it does just as much as several other weapons while not having the reloading downtime. It's infinite ammo sustain is actually a thing (unlike in HD2 where it doesn't start cooling down immediately). Other primaries absolutely do better than laser weapons, they just require ammo to use. Breaker is absolutely cracked and hits everything in effective range because it's got blowthrough rounds. Several others including railgun have that as well. Having a diverse set of primaries is usually better than everyone running laser weapons. Also some of the laser ones were bugged and ignored armor. Don't remember which off hand.
Given your comment wrongly stating what my argument is it's very clear you haven't played HD1 at all so you wouldn't know this, but there's tons of viable ways to play the game and loadouts you can run even at difficulties beyond helldive (12).
These guys are DETERMINED to Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory.
But hasn't it always been evident that they hate people who don't play the game their way? I do remember them mocking single player or saying something pretty ignorant about soloing at least. But the fact is, even at higher levels you're pretty much forced into metas that they've created and this act of balancing it like PVP has gotten old, fast.
Why nerfs exist in an entirely PvE game is completely beyond my understanding.
ikr just bring up everything else, instead of making everything unusable make everythign usable! Crazy thought for game devs...
Because PVE doesn't mean easy
@@calebbarnhouse496 It should mean fun.. Point is they make the fun things terrible because players arent using what the devs want them to use. Happens all the time in gaming and basically ruins every single game it happens in. Ends up with devs chasing players away from the things they actually enjoy because the devs want them to use something else, then they dont buff what they want them to use and keep nerfing what they want to use
@@Tosicc567 except they aren't, they merf what's brokenly strong, the railgun was absolutely busted before it's nerf, granted that was nerfed to hard, but things like the quazer cannon got a 5 second extra cooldown added to it and it's still considered a good weapon, that's how busted it was, people took the broken weapons in mass because players will optimize the fun out of a game because they get more short term happy chemical
@@calebbarnhouse496 clearly they aren't optimising fun out of stuff if y'know they're enjoying it hahahaha What lots of Devs have is use charts, if something goes higher than the rest they nerf it based on popularity. Happens in R6 siege heaps and basically most PvP games. Doing it in a pve game is hilarious
I came back to the game after Sony disaster. Went on Helldive 9 with Flamer, Breaker Inc, grenade pistol. I almost deleted the game after (again)
Sounds like a skill issue TBH.
@@lostalone9320 skill issue my ass. Pathetic rage bait attempt. Does skill issue mean I need to swap everything to something else? What do you mean exactly? Have you seen developers stream? Did you type that then?
@@vitaliyred622 Yes, I literally mean that you need to equip things suited to what you are playing. Why is that a problem?
@@lostalone9320 are you special needs? Or do you want to play devil's advocate? Helldive 9 with fully upgraded flamer became like 3 times worse. And you type skill issue? Are you dumb?
@@lostalone9320defending the game like your life depends on it 😂
The vitality enhancement booster literally makes you take 30% less damage, not increase limb hp
Hellpod Space Optimization, Vitality Enhancement, Stamina Enhancement and Experimental Infusion is the optimal booster selection.
It's mot quite a 30% health boost, it's a limb boost which bleeds over into raw health. I'm underselling it in the video, but it's not well communicated in the game was more my point, it's not just straight health.
Still acts like an hp buffer
I hope Devs watch this video cause most of it makes sense and they should listen.
Definitely need to get rid of that Hello Neighbor guy for gross incompetence.
Is this some kind of gen z reference I'm not getting ?@@musicninja98
@@Reaper9-4 No, from what I've gathered the head of the balance team was in charge of the balance for a game called Hello Neighbor and he destroyed that game too through his "balancing."
Car analogy was perfect. Thank you for that.
Btw I'm playing lvl 10 as if its easy but i agree with you with most of what ur saying.
The nerfs are stupid and makes the game harder and less fun.
Rip my r36 eruptor and the breaker.
barely 10 min in, im just shaking with anger. If the slugger is meant for close quarter, with does it have a scope attached and do 170 less damage then the punisher...and there are so many other strats and weapons that have these inconsistencies
I’m convinced they got our message but just don’t care. They wanted to make a miserable, hardcore game, but accidentally made a fun one. Can’t have that.
I called it looong ago when the first set of nerfs hit, i said back then that the philosophy the dev are presenting has led many good games down the garbage shoot, and everyone was like "oh stop being paranoid and pessimistic" its pattern recognition, these devs have the same arrogant statements of "we are listening" "give us feedback" and then turning around and telling you "you are not conforming to our vision". They treat a pve game balance like its pvp and the bugs and bots are complaining about the players being too powerful. They need to stop taking their own game so seriously and remember a game is suppose to be fun to play.
The most disingenous statement made was that fire was changed due to "realism" where was this realism when the thermite gernade came out, because that should melt through all armor. But no realism only exists when they want an excuse to take away player power.
all you had to do was read the balancing dev blog on why he balanced the way he did and everything was a red flag showing no understanding of how a good game is made and displayed zero social intelligence, one of the most important qualities for balance
They still need feedback after 6 months? Probably they just like the thrill of seeing the community angry.
subbed for the accent, stayed for the Liber-TEA!
Remember when my flamethrower shot bullets? NO? me neither.
Arrowhead: REALISM!
Absolutely this.
I love when people talk about how enemies just immediately know your location the instant you alert the entire base.
I want to run by and toss some stratagems into a base to clear the majority of enemies but it’s just a damn good way to get reinforcements called onto your head.
MAYBE the enemies could see the arc of the stratagem ball thing and investigate the area it came from but surely they’d be too busy panicking and running for cover once a orbital barrage begins slaughtering them.
And no way would they call reinforcements in the middle of all that chaos, they’d wait till it’s over.
With the bugs maybe not, they might not think ahead like the bots would.
This is why I love EDF
Most of the weapons suck too, but there are 100's per class, so the few that "stick" are still in the dozens rather than single digits, and from the sheer bulk a few zany ones are good in niches.
Furthermore there's no end-game loop to speak of, but all missions are bespoke with zero RNG, you can feel the design within every single one, individual spawns, which enemies/order of operation/tactics to be aware of, etc. and the self-imposed drive to want to complete the hundred+ missions on Inferno difficulty (for some people in Solo mode and/or doing it with all classes) makes the game last longer & with no feeling of a boring routine. Certain missions can take multiple sessions to complete with hundreds of failed attempts and the feeling of accomplishment is amazing.
Zero life-service to speak of either, just the usual couple DLC mission packs per release. No Dev meddling, constant balanace discord/social media drama, yadda yadda. What you see is what you get.
I'd say a big factor is that in EDF, your weapons don't have limited ammo. (Rare exception excluded.) This means you aren't in the resource panic loop HD2 has going. Additionally, it's weapons are tuned around enormous hordes or dealing enormous spike damage to massive targets. HD2's primary weapons are tuned around small, brief skirmishes against unarmored targets and being actually secondary weapons to the call in 'support' weapons, which are tuned around small, brief skirmishes against mostly unarmored targets, with the assumption of downtime in-between engagements. Downtime that ceased to exist post change to enemy spawning/call in/breaches.
I thought I was coming crazy because of the stim delay and reload delay. Yet nobody was talking about these two issue
Yeah I didn’t know this happened but I’ve been constantly pissed about it and dying a lot more. When did this hit?
Helldivers. It's now a kiting simulator.
First they came for the breaker and i said, well fair enough, then they came for the slugger....well damn, then railgun, and it was like sigh really? ok. Then they came for the sickle and the quasar, well...hell that was my loadout my go to....ok hmm OH this is fun haha shrapnel is insane!......Yup that was ermm ermmm BUGGED YES BUG!.....
You pieces of crap Arrowhead............FINE!......ok new loadout flameboyant, flamethrower is fun i can kill chargers and ill use breaker for the small medium bugs and grenade side arm for all around use. It is alot of fun! Everyone is using them because they are so good and fun!
Arrowhead: YEAAAAHHH! i see you are having fun there....riiggghhhtt let me just nerf them...reason?....we saw you were using it alot and it seems to be abit EASY for you while playing this game.
Honestly enough is enough, they play on difficulty 5 and balance it according to that and still it is not over, they still got commando change so it wont destroy automaton spawners, and game is still locked out over 170+ countries, i just cant anymore.
Next time i find a new go to loadout they will nerf it as well, uninstalled and game put on hidden, i just cant do it anymore.
You're not alone in this assessment. In particular, this joke Alexus K. seems like the type of kid who would bring the ball to the park then angrily take his ball home when the other kids played other than how he wanted to. These nimrods forgot that we are their paid customers, to their detriment. I'll never again buy a game from these arrogant twits.
Very thoughtful analysis of design as experienced by the player. Thank you!
thank you for sharing your pov, glad i am not they only only with those thoughts
It's so funny how they really had almost the entire internet united in loving their game and have since thrown it all away completely.
Just wanted to point out that the orbital airburst is fantastic for shutting down bug breaches. Biggest problem with it is that most teammates are unaware that it's a triple strike with a huge and inconsistent blast radius, and will subsequently walk into it and die.
Apart from that I think I agree with this 100%.
Like if you agree. You can fix balance issues by hiring one or two people for $15/hr remote to read feedback and create the list of things to test in alpha beta testing. It's not hard. What are the devs actually struggling with? You could even have that job include playing the game 10 hours a week so they can better understand the feedback they are reading.
There's more nuiance to this, but to me it seems devs get lost once they launch their game or they never knew simple stuff like this to begin with.
Absolutely on point.
Oh no, he's found another source of salt. His power ever grows...
On a serious note though, I've been playing since day one of the first game and the way this has gone is just straight disappointing.
I think you bring up a good point with the difference between high level players cheesing everything and average players not cheesing. Pretty much if you try to stand your ground, you will get obliterated, no question. The thing that most people don't really seem to understand is that all difficulties are still contributing to the war effort, you don't have to build up to max and never play anything lower ever again. But because of online gaming being what it is, gamers gotta flex so they want to play at the highest just so they can say they can. But, very few people can actually complete those max level missions without cheesing big time.
While I could reason at some level that this game does require you to have at least some tactical knowledge, the game also does not make even the slightest effort to teach you anything of the sort. Weak points are not obvious, marked points are actually strong points because they only take damage from the mysterious "structural" damage type, the symbol that pops up when your weapon bounces off a targets armor is never explained whatsoever, not to mention the armor types and levels have got to be one of the most concoluted systems ever and "medium armor penetrating" can actually be a completely different level depending on the weapon.
Many of the changes they've made have been for the sake of "realism". Alright I can get behind that to a degree, it's a funny joke to have a universe as ridiculous as this one, meanwhile trying to use a realistic physics engine. But then all of a sudden they nerf flame damage for the sake of "realism", meanwhile a flamethrower irl is literally more effective than what we get in game now after this most recent change. The reason being: a real flamer spews flammable liquid that seaps into cracks and sticks to and burns anything it touches. Our flamethrower in Helldivers is essentially a really big blowtorch, a blowtorch that apparently can't cook a large bug anymore. Weird.
But the change that bothers me most is the addition of the Impaler. Of all the enemies that is the one that feels the most unfair to fight. As a bot player I am used to dealing with rocket devastators en masse, I'm aware of the infinite ragdoll meme, but Jesus christ the Impaler is worse. It can't attack you beyond line sight, through walls, even if you're behind cover. It has the health and armor of a bile titan, cannot be staggered, cannot be disarmed, and only exposes it's weak pont while it's attacking. If you get caught by it's tentacle attack once, you are screwed, you will be ragdolled into oblivion because it attacks faster than you can get up from ragdoll. As soon as one shows up, your position is compromised, your only option is to kill it immediately *if you can see it*, or it will kill your entire squad with ease. Shooting the tentacles does not harm it or disarm it. Shooting it while it's attacking does not stun it or delay the attack. It has no minimum range so it can protect itself in its "vulnerable" state.
There is nothing about the Impaler that says "Yeah it's tough, but if you know what you're doing you can take it out." No, it just makes the game worse, this update succeeded in taking away from the game by adding to it.
TLDR: even a massive helldivers simp like me is getting tired of this bs
So why not just play a less difficult level until you built your rhythm again. Bro you say you play bots!!! To me you’re a legend. I can deal with bugs but bots!!!! Hell no
@rainbowwarpig3536 Impalers can appear from level 5, and I have seen them as normal patrols at 6. That's not really high difficulty. And I didn't even tested difficulty 4 to see if there are Impalers there.
@@rainbowwarpig3536
Because the jump in difficulty once Impalers appears is astronomical.
Below the difficult they appear the game is far too easy. Once they start spawning it is exponentially harder and may as well be a roll of the dice wether you can win the engagement or not. If enemies are blocking the path you need to run to escape their attack, you will die and there is nothing you can do except have some kind of recognition ability. The margin of error is far too small even on difficulty 6.
@@rainbowwarpig3536why would someone not want to experience the new content? if the new content is poor quality it needs to be spoken about. the idea to stay quiet and play level 1 difficulty supposed to make the game better for everyone? there are creative ways to make something very hard without it being tedious to overcome or q knowledge check of what you have to bring for specific enemies making more things obsolete. unfortunately
all of it's issues (and more) come from rushing content out instead of testing it thoroughly. this is not a good practice and shows a lot in bots too with devastators and gunships especially, i suppose with the developers track record saying anything doesn't really matter so it is a bit if a waste of energy, but a lot of people feeling the same frustration with a game they like a lot and get told they are just bad at the game can read similar experiences and know they aren't a failure and its the game thats the problem
100% I freaking can’t stand the impaler. It’s a garbage overpowered frustrating piece of $h!t enemy to fight. The game only got worse from it. As usual with AH bug enemies it has way too much armor. You should be able to shoot the tentacles with a primary and stun or destroy them. The range of the impaler needs to be modest and reasonable. The ragdoll is obnoxious as hell and a death sentence. It won’t consistently die to a rail cannon strike which is BS because that stratagem has a long cooldown and on level 7 they spawn these things a lot. This game just gets worse and worse. Constantly more obnoxious bullshit enemies while I get weaker and am constantly being stunned and ragdolled and waiting for cooldowns. I’m getting really sick of it.
I just realized. Max0r said to triple the defense budget. The devs probably misread it as "cut it into a third".
Maybe instead of making the slugger less accurate, handle worse, stagger less and do less damage, they should have created an upgrade system where people can make the version of the slugger that they like.
Or just, keep it the way it was? And buff the other snipers? If a shot gun is the best sniper primary in the game, you messed up
@@JackdotC I think different ammo types would basically achieve this- AP would do more damage and over penetrate unarmored enemies, slugs would do less damage but still stagger
A version of the breaker that shoots slugs could be cool too
@@JackdotC oh definitely buff the snipers, they’re kind of useless.
The trouble with the primary weapons is that they can’t become more effective than the support weapons, otherwise it won’t even be worth picking them as a stratagem. Another explosion or turret is much better than more ammo for your primary, which you can find on the map anyway.
If you buff railguns and AMR, then you have room to buff the snipers. As it is, those support weapons are just okay.
No one thinks the game is too easy, certainly not the vast majority of players. Arrowhead has plenty of room to dish out the buffs across the board.
The problem with the recent nerf is all fire weapons were affiliated by it and they changed how explosive weapons work on armor as well
This game went from making you feel like a badass to making you feel pathetic and weak no matter what weapon you bring.
I uninstalled the game after 350 hours, I'm fed up with the crashes, bugs, and their weird balancing
The impaler has a range of 200+ meters (possibly infinite) so I don’t blame you for not knowing where the hell it is
I have over 600 hours in game and they haven’t asked me at all about what I think.
the vitality booster increases your main health significantly. well to be more specific it improves your armor and damage reduction. I believe it essentially turns 50 armor into about 120, and medium armor become better than 95% of heavy armor. it is arguably the best booster in the game, and it also makes you immune to acid damage for some reason.
the muscle enhancement does work on environmental effects like blizzards, idk where you got that it doesn't. it even works on acid from biles and hunters allowing you to essentially ignore the debuff (meaning it is just straight up better than motivational shocks)
Can we get a real estate agency to check their office building for gas leaks? Maybe there is a CO2 buildup due to bad ventilation there or other hazardous fumes.. I had my suspicions before, but after the last patch, im actually worried
A comment about the rocket turret, in the last (good) patch they actually changed it to be a longer ranged, single shot heavy killer.
Ive been vocal about their stupid nerfing methods ever since the rail gun nerf. They dont understand what a meta is or why it forms.
Everybody seems to forget how they butchered thr Eruptor, I don't see anyone ia using this gun after the huge nerf.
Game's pretty easy with a full team on highest difficulty, can easily beat both bugs and bots without dying. Don't care about solo because I'm not a Nigel no friends.
Making everything more tedious isn't fun. Simple as.
The people running the shop are incompetent and unwise. The people licking their boots are as funny as they are sad (very).
I will come back to helldivers 2 when the buggy comes out.
As a fellow 300+ hour diver I couldn't agree more. It's like the devs randomly stumbled upon this game from somebody else and now they have no clue what to do with it whatsoever. Also I really don't thin they take the worldbuilding or finer details of the game seriously whatsoever. Planets will randomly have new moons in new patches, bile titans and factory strider still freeze instead of dying properly, and it's all too easy to get stuck on things or god forbid underneath the map. Not to mention the balance is just silly. Certain things are infinitely more usable and useful than others especially in terms of stratagem and weapon balance yet instead of improving the weaker options (strafing run, jetpack, laser rifle ect.) they just ruin the power fantasy they've created with certain things to try and bring them down the the level of lameness the other options possess. in the past the monument to this issue was the railgun, then the slugger, then the eruptor, and soon the commando... the devs don't take their game and it's design and fine details within it seriously. Its a total clown fiesta. Very well put video.
Y’all stay hydrated and God bless
I read something that made a bit too much sense;
If you have a popular game played by hundreds of thousands across the globe, servers are gonna cost a lot over time
Now, if you just pull the plug on the game, you face massive backlash and those pesky wallets with humans attached to them may not open for Helldivers 3
BUT if you slowly make the game miserable to play, you'll naturally bleed players much quicker, ergo don't need as many servers? The cash shop is not priced aggressively enough and I don't think there are enough """Recurring revenue streams""" to make the phantom investor happy.
Went back to DRG so fast I was a blur after seeing the kind of moderators they hire and backwards balancing philospohy, wish they werent killing their own game
Turrets should never shoot at mechs. Mechs need a no fire zone around the center of mass.
Vitality booster absolutely increases your health, or rather, reduces all incoming damage by 20%, which thanks to numbers rounding down, makes it way better than plus 20% when it comes to things like damage over time effects.
No bugs armor should be so strong that it's it can take multiple hits from an anti tank round
One of my gripes with the game is the amount of lives or reinforcements should not be limited to the number of players. OR they need to let us have infinite retries. It's a bit too easy to die on accident or simply outside of our control, especially with teamates who don't quite understand how to play around one another.
Everything AH has done since launch has been a reactionary, emotional counter to try and stop solo Helldives at the highest difficulties. And they chased off 90% of their player base running that fools errand.
I used to love this game. Used to
You are spot on here mate
Hell-nerfers 2 or Nerf-divers 2?
Nerf-divers 2 sounds like a nerf game.
@@sniperstg2 which one do you prefer? lol
@@justinfaulcon9498 definitely nerf-divers lol. Sounds more marketable than Hell-nerfers.
@@sniperstg2 🤣🤣🤣
We don't fight for super earth, we fight for super nerf
The problem in general is the concern over “balancing.” It’s a PvE game. Just make it fun and let people kill bugs and robots. The developers seem like they are trying to beat the players and win themselves. They’re going to end up winning the death of their player-base and game.
I love the constant fart clouds restricting visibility because uh... Just git gud okay?
I am done waiting for things to get better, done waiting for arrowhead to actually listen to reason and player feedback instead of empty promises on communication, for the foreseeable future its rock and stone my brothers, and when space marine 2 comes out, we march for Maccrage.
I dig the Conan intro music ;-)
If weapons and strategems were more "realistic" like Arrowhead has said they wanted to focus on, a lot of those guns and bombs would be far more useful...
This video is perfect...I...tried to explain this time and time again to other players and the response is...... get gud...what's your loadout...or let the door hit you. I'm like dude...I actually pay for the DLC, I play Helldive...they keep removing my options at high levels, it's repetitive because of the few viable options, and my frustration ticks up with each nerf.
Primaries should be what it is. Primaries. not a secondary. but a "Prime" gun like Optimus "Prime" Strong and Reliable. A Space Marine with one Primary weapon can take on an army. But in HD2. Primaries are so weak that you are FORCED to sacrifice a stratagem slot for a "Support" weapon cuz primaries are so weak they cant kill anything big. thus leaving us with 3 strikes stratagem. Then if you take a defensive backpack or strategem, you are left with 2 strike strategem.
I don't understand all the nerfs to a non competitive game
This was a great video.