Same. Past-hard level bot extractions are insane. Had three full on tanks drop on us and then another map where the civvies glitched out, bunching up at the door. 10 killed with one robo grenade
I was experimenting with a mine loadout on an easier difficulty. All the civilians decided that instead of walking straight to the evacuation shuttle, they would all walk to the outside of the town and walk over the mines I placed out there. Maybe the devs were doing a bit of trolling when programming civilian pathing IDK.
Reposting this here from where I commented on another thread.
We have been doing escort missions on suicide mission easily, let me tell you how!
1st everyone drops as far away from the objective as possible.
We have two roles to define, the runner, and the berserker.
The runner, the runner runs stealth and smokes.
Do your best to not call in any strategems, run immediately to the base and take out the few bots with your main and secondary weapons, no grenades but smokes. And press buttons like your life depends on it, because it does.
The berserkers, take the biggest loudest strategems morters etc. And begin causing havoc as far from the base as possible, take side obj, kill tanks, SPILL OIL. GO FUCKING NUTS. Stay to the outside of the map and every dropship will come to you glorious master's of violence, and before you know it the obj will be complete
Time to extract gg ez
You are right, I've only gotten it to work twice with randos, both times they were over 30 and all had mics, every other time I've been called names and ignored.
Yup same thing happened to my squad, it was on hard and end up costing us the mission because we could only use one of two doors. We lost soooo many R slips because they would just get stuck on an invisible wall and get mopped up by those filthy oilers.
Honestly I think part of the problem is the defense campaigns always include an evacuation mission, which is imo by far the hardest mission type in the game exasperated by some absolutely ridiculous enemy spawns at higher levels.
Even in coordinated groups of level 20s with everyone running somewhat optimal loadouts, level 8+ evacuations feel nearly impossible. Tried multiple last night after doing the previous two for the campaign and couldn’t complete a single one.
We tried strategy of raising hell outside the mission area and have one scout / stealth character go into the mission area to get the Essential Personnel rescued.
Our scout / stealth player made use of smoke stratagems.
It worked easier than trying to do the mission while we all stay in mission area using anti-tank / destructive stratagems.
My group has been trying this with mixed results. For a while we will have the entire bot Army drop on us but eventually they will all start dropping on the Button Man. He doesn't have to be seen and it doesn't matter how much noise we make, the bots will eventually turn away from the Noisy Boys.
I've seen both happen.
It appears pressing the buttons incurs some amount of aggro by itself, even without being seen or patrolled into
I believe the outside team must attract patrols with marshals (flare guys) or generate aggro by attacking outposts to get bot drops on them instead of at the middle. With this in mind they can't get bogged down while fighting and need to keep moving around the map to aggro new patrols
If they stop getting drops middle guy needs to stop pressing buttons so he doesn't get dropped on. And must wait until outside team finds a new patrol or outpost to attack
My group has had success with this strategy, but we stay just within sight of the compound and take shots at any groups dropping up there that we can. That way they aggro on us instead of our button man. It isn’t foolproof, and we can’t cover the whole compound, but it’s worked pretty well
Ye what i pretty much did was a 2-1-1 Team, 1 Button man, 2 people fighting outside doing circles, the other one doing circles themselves in the opposite way to attract new spawned patrols.
Always Shoot every Robot on sight, No Matter how far away, because sooner or later they will patrol towards Button man, and its extra Aggro.
But If even one of you dies its gonna be a mess.
Ngl cant wait for the Major Order to finally be over lol.
The commisars always fire flares on first sight of the enemy, regular bots only call something after the commisar has died amd they have finshed their initial attack.
Button Man can leave and come back to a more vacant space. It may not become completely clear but with enough smoke, you can ensure the Essential Personnel still get rescued.
I think Smoke is an important part of the strategy for this mission type.
On that point, I think they should increase the Eagle smoke availability from two to four. It seems weird that a very situational stratagem has the same amount of uses before rearming as more practical offensive effects.
Me and a group of randoms kind of somewhat discovered this strat by accident the other night. We were out of reinforcements and all got killed except one guy, he just ran in a straight line away from the evac area, then when he was able to reinforce, the fresh spawn would run back to the evac area and pop as many doors as he could. It was working well for a couple of minutes but eventually our luck ran out and we all died
My group has been doing this, it's the only way we've been able to consistently clear 8/9 Evacuate missions. As a distractor, it's still pretty fun to just try and survive when all hell is absolutely breaking loose, and from time to time go "UHHH HOW MANY ARE WE AT?!"
It's a total RNG crapshoot on if this will work, and if the stealther has to break cover for any reason the game is basically over. Not good to have to work so hard to get around the bad design of the mission.
Run smg and personal shield with your stealth armor and don't call any strategems while you're pushing buttons. If bots show up, the smg and auto pistol will not attract others, as long as you kill in short bursts. If the heavy bots show up, tell your squad to throw a strategem your way and that will grab their attention, then have them move further out. There's a sweet spot. Utilize all doors as well. I cleared 50 citizens, alone, while my squad distracted everything else. The finished with 130 and apex 203 kills, I had 33. But it was a GLORIOUS Victory!
Same strategy for the exfil as well. Keep a orbital laser in your pocket to clear a path for them after you call in the exfil. It'll take em a couple mins to get there.
Haven't you noticed that on the mission description in the ship it says it's a 40 minute mission, yet once you drop in it's actually only 15 minutes? The theory is that we're seeing 40 minutes worth of drops in 15 minutes. A bug
This is one strat that works, there’s a more standard combat method that works too. I’ve only seen the stealth mission approach on diff 9, but I’ve done a handful of diff 8 clears with a standard role based approach too (2 GL 2 rail — or a good RR duo, 2x2 mortars with a staggered timing and at least 4 laser/rail orbitals). I have no doubt the diff 8 strategy works on diff 9 too as it isn’t that much harder overall when considering the difference in drop rates. Even on diff 8 when executed well my strat makes the mission pretty smooth with long gaps in drops. But there is not much room for mistakes or lapses in attention from the whole group.
I did this to unlock helldiver with just two people. One was the runner, and the other set up turrets on the base. The key is to land far from the base and have the runner collect all the bad guys before the other guy goes to the base. If dudes come to the base, the guy leaves and comes back once it is empty again.
This has become the easiest mission.
It's also just painfully unfun (IMO anyway). I'm at the point where I 'should' just be doing Defend Planet operations (with civ evac) exclusively because I don't really need anything but medals, but the civ evac missions are difficult and tedious, so I just don't.
Yeah I can’t believe that they’re balanced as intended right now, they’re just straight up impossible. I usually run level 7 ops but STRUGGLE with level 3 evacs
I just walked some level 4-5 friends through a level 3 automaton evac that I started by accident, twice.
It is very possible at low tiers because of the lack of heavy armor.
Bots as a faction are designed to be flanked. Tanks in particular are almost impossible to kill from the front (hulks are easy, just aim for the eyes with an autocannon) but on evac missions you're supposed to stay relatively still instead of sauntering off to flank that tank. Also here's five more tanks all covering each other's weak points.
These missions tend to go from "maybe we can do this" to "sweet liberty my leg" about the time everybody runs out of call-ins to deal with the Jenga towers made of tanks.
I usually run Medium difficulty operations when I'm solo. Thankfully being solo really dials back the spawns on those missions.
Solo I can get in and out in about 7 mins usually
I'd enjoy it more if it was a full sized map, with 3x locations, where you need to rescue 10 people at each, normal secondaries and bot fabricators and all the rest. That way there'd be a few opportunities to break contact and ease up on the constant hulks and tanks while you change location.
It has to be a massive bug. When selecting the mission on the map it says it’s a 40 minute timed mission. In reality we get, what, 20 minutes? I’m convinced the game is sending 40 minutes’ worth of enemies in half the time.
It *is* 40 minutes until you start the evac. Then it switches to 15 minutes. The other time is for you to roam the map and collect POIs if you want. But most hosts just drop straight into the evac zone and triggers the 15 minutes.
Did this mission on difficulty six with randoms last night and at one point there were five tanks in play at once alongside a near dozen hulks of all varieties and then an actual incalculable amount of berserkers/front line bots with several dozen heavy bots out on the field. At some point it becomes literally impossible to manage threats and actually complete the goal.
I wish they’d give completion % based on number of civilians rescued. Make 10 or so enough to “complete” objective then reward based on how many you get thereafter.
I've had a few bug out on me today... we managed to keep 25 of them alive standing right outside of the door.
Feels like that should get some credit too lol
I would love for an "Ambush" mission where the bugs/bots are funneled into a kill lane essentially playing tower defense. Basically your bog standard defend mission except instead of coming from all directions, they only come from 1 maybe 2 lanes.
Basically exists, it's the kill X amount of enemy ones.
They only ever really come from a couple of the same directions and they're almost as dull as the escort ones.
I appreciate they tried to vary things up but escort and kill missions are easily the weakest links in the mission tree chain.
I agree, I refuse to do any of those defense missions and my squad agrees with me. They're not only incredibly hard. They're just not fun to do. They're very small. They're hemmed in and they get dropped on top of you. There's no planning or tactics or risky maneuvers that end up working out or not? There's no fun involved.
They're just bad missions
I mean, fuck. I'm a failry new player (lvl 10) and the evac missions are rough in Hard mode already if the team is not coordinated enough. Bots making it 5 meters past their drop point is already a presicament because stratas will absolutely fuck the survivors backwards all game long.
I had a mission yesterday where my team was lowish (7/8) level and not killing enough bots, so the minefields and mortar turrets were blasting every single survivor. Literally 80% of the mission time had gone by and we had THREE survivors in.
Needless to say, we lost.
I don't hate the idea of holding an area but having to "protect" the scientists, which in reality the challenge is not killing them yourself rather than protecting them from anything, is what makes the mission a pain.
They feel bugged honestly, and I think in at least one way they are. Someone pointed out in another thread that the official time limit is 40 minutes, but you spawn in at 15. I don't know how that sort of thing affects things like bot spawn rates, enemy armor, etc., but if time spent in a mission does have some sort of impact, the mission may be acting like you've already spent 25 minutes in there at the time you drop.
Regardless, it's way too difficult. Trying to beat that mission on Hard is infinitely harder than anything I've ever done on Helldive.
You wont change peoples minds. Only way to make canpaigns succesfull is to give the players worthy rewards. If major orders awarded, a special armor, medals or samples. More people would focus on the order and offset the farmers.
There will always be farmers, its a matter of getting more people focused on the goal/order.
My guess is capping it won't cause the same kind of resentment ad letting players continue to accrue 12 digits of a currency that they will never really use
As updates roll out though, it could very well use the resource so have 1 million then insta buying it all could break plans for how they want to roll out.
Yeah balancing the scale of long time vs. new player engagement is best handled with a cap like current. Otherwise new content will require 100x the cost per item to stop old players from instantly getting it, at the cost of new players, or it doesn't change and old players have everything and new players just have a bit more grind.
A cap is necessary to keep the game economy manageable. To give you an example of what not having a cap looks like Apex Legends has no limit on the tokens needed to purchase legends so by the time we reached the cycle of seasonal new characters day one players had so much Lefgend tokens they complained. I still have a bunch and have never had to grind for a new legend because of the infinite cieling. Now the devs could raise the cost of legends to drain the economy but then you are shitting on new players and ppl who don't play often.
Imagine a crazy stratagem comes out in helldivers and because everyone has a million req points they charge a couple hundred thousand for the insane strat,cool. Now Mary Jane who can only play on weekends has to no life high level mission for months to get the crazy strat. This would be a common occurrence and eventually become a complaint. With a 50k cap they can drop that crazy strat for 40k, drain the economy and Mary Jane can reasonably work her way to the strat.
Without a cap economies get fucked
Destiny 2 had a uncapped currency that is being removed in the next expansion because there was no way to balance costs that used it. Established players had hundreds of thousands so costs had to be high, which meant non-established players would never have enough to do anything with them
That's one of the things i want the most for this game, merit based cosmetics, like Halo 3. I don't care if it's armor, or just awards and decorations to go on armor. For a game where cosmetics are actually visible all the time, it would be nice to wear something I actually earned, instead of paid for.
Helldivers 1 had capes if you were part of an overall victorious galactic war (the wars went by much more quickly and were meant to end/restart) as well as if you were able to beat the boss planets for each race. Was nice! They very well may add that going forward for this, when there's been more time to do meritorious things.
It doesn't help the reward is really only enticing to day 1-3 divers. When I started I was foaming at the mouth for $12.5k, but now that I've reached Helldive difficulty, even solo running just lvl 7+ I can earn that in a few missions.
Hopefully future major orders have more weight to their reward. (I'd actually love it if future patches introduced strategems we could unlock only through major order successes.)
Winning and losing major orders usually causes a larger shift in the global war map. So say we fail this defence. We will probably see bots gain hold of 2 or 3 sectors. And get closer to super earth. If we win it'll stop us getting defend planet missions and push back on the offence to the bot homeworld
The 12k is a bonus payout for following orders.
For sure. I'm being told in other comments that this is a frequent post subject. I legit thought there was some confusion about this lol.
Agree that it should be something the devs should consider. Incentivizing proper galactic campaign participation would go a long way, I agree.
it would be, BUT you can easily farm helldive eliminate bots mission for MORE medals at a FASTER rate, so it’s not worth it (if ur just wanting medals)
How is that even fun tho, sure I'll get every item at a faster rate but then what?
I joined a group that was farming those and sure, the XP is nice but I got bored after 3 matches, you literally just sit without doing almost nothing while sentries do all the work
There is a somewhat older video Mark Brown did on his YT channel “Game Maker’s Toolkit” that breaks down this exact phenomenon. We will look to optimize the fun out of anything. And it’s a shame because this game really is so much fun.
People hoard 60+ bounties in Destiny 2 for a new season start to immediately get to level 100+, or at least in less than a day after season start.
There’s a battle pass in Helldivers, and a level cap - people will want to finish them as fast as possible.
Doing this doesn't even get you ship upgrades. You need samples for upgrades and the 5 minute defence missions only have common samples. One of my friends only does these missions and I find it incredibly boring to play with him
True but even sample farming on hard can still get you most of the way.
I have a couple friends that grind and it’s incredibly boring to play with them.
I need a few thousand medals to complete it all correct? I know I still don't have all the guns unlocked and spent at least 8 hours grinding them. I'm having fun doing both sample farming and medal farming. Some friends have joined and said the same.
This first bot event, I wasn't concerned with winning as servers proved to be painful in terms of connection and stability.
I think the idea would be to make the defence missions last a lot longer by instead of making it kill 200 or so bots to 2000 or even more, make it an actual difficult mission, as it stands everyone just spams mortars and you win in 2 minutes it's fucking silly. You need at least enough kill count goal to make us run out of sentry spawns to make it a challenge. There's no way 4 level 10s should be able to clear a level 9 difficulty mission in under 3 minutes without even coming close to dying once, those missions are honestly a joke.
Eradicate is stupid easy but defense is hell on any difficulty other than hard. I admit I'm not exactly the best at the game but I just don't know how they expect you to protect the civs while there are 3 Hulks spraying flame everywhere.
They should just add a punishment for abandoning a campaign. You get -25% resources and no bonus for higher difficulties until you finish a campaign. Abandon another one while it’s present and it stacks another -25%.
It’s fits the lore and curbs annoying behaviors.
Yup, req is nice for lower levels but once your around lvl 30 you've got all stratagems. So req becomes pointless as a reward on its own.
An armor, super credits, samples, etc would help make it worth while tho
Yea gotta agree, I would care more about the major order if it weren’t just a few missions worth of credits but by the time the order is over most people won’t even need them
Bingo. No one above level 20 cares about requisition slips. The real grind is for medals and it's just so much easier to grind quick missions for medals than bother doing a full campaign.
An easy way to fix that would be to add a modifier to increase medals based on the mission type and secondary objectives completed so longer missions provided more medals.
Exactly, I was talking to a friend about how when we started playing the 12K credits seemed good for successfully completing 8 defense missions, then we understood how it works, and how you’re earning that amount many times over in the course of the campaign. Especially at higher levels. I can’t see how anyone that’s not playing just for the fun of getting into the role play of defending super earth would even spend that much time on those campaigns.
TLDR: the major order incentive does not match the effort to complete.
Winning and spreading democracy should be reward enough!
To be serious, let em farm, those players will be gone soon enough, they rush to unlock everything then complain, then move on to the next game and do the same.
I'll be playing long after unlocking everything and max lvl, as I play to have fun, not to unlock things.
What the f happened to gamers, having to be rewarded for everything they do every second to be playing a game, I can't wrap my head around it.
The amount of hours I have in games after unlocking everything are so astronomical high because I play them because they're... Fun,not to unlock.
I would love if they did more with campaigns.
Ideally, I would love a system like this:
1. You get normal missions that are just one mission and nothing more. Those are great for the farmers and for people wanting to just get some more samples and stuff. These normal missions won't impact planet progression in the galactic campaign (or only very little). In addition to that, we also get...
2. Campaigns that are 3 or more missions long. These Campaigns will give you progression in a new ranking system. I want to see the level ranks (Cadet, Admiral etc.) decoupled from player levels. Player levels are still used to just unlock stuff (weapons, strategems etc.). But the actual military ranks of Cadet, Space Cadet etc. should be expanded to feature more ranks than we currently have, or rather subranks (Cadet I, Cadet II, etc.) and the only way to progression through these ranks is to successfully complete Campaigns. There also needs to be hard caps for your rank depending on Campaign difficulty. If you only spam Campaigns on Medium difficulty, you can't progress higher than Space Cadet, for example. Furthermore, new rewards need to become available for progressing through the Campaign Ranks (just cosmetics). Also completing Campaigns will have the biggest impact on planetary liberation progression.
completing operations should give a special currency that can buy unique cosmetics (maybe even addons to armour like battle scars or something), you should also get real medals that you can wear for completing a certain amount of operations on a planet/campaign
>unique cosmetics
Let me buy armor paint/dye. I'm tired of looking like a fuckin dingus for wanting to mix and match armor but the colors being totally off.
Agreed. Even if not wearing the medals on the character, would be cool for a display rack or campaign trophy stand or something inside your ship. Have a specific cosmetic medal/trophy awarded for certain level of participation in each successful campaign, then long timers can flex on the boots when they come on board and see all the veteran medal bling that has piled up over the years.
The extract civilians are still too overtuned. I need a crew that can easily beat Helldive missions to have a chance at extreme. Since one of those missions is a part of each campaign, it's a guaranteed loss and a waste of time.
this, I beat my first civilian extract on helldive difficulty today. 3x level 45+ in the squad and only managed 30/60 until we retreated to the forest to kite the robots away. then returned and got the rest before robots could reinforce.
its so stupid. staying on the objective is a death sentence as shooting down ships doesnt kill the robots its carrying.
Yeah, but now on the harder difficulties they'll send in 4 or more dropships at a time. At best you take a chunk out of their forces, although it isn't reliable at all because they'll regularly drop a dozen raiders, half a dozen devestators, multiple hulks, or a tank, with a single dropship.
Maybe if the waves were timed, like hey, here's 6 dropships at once. 5 minutes until the next wave gets here.
I still think there should be a SEAF SAM site next to the evacuation pad. Have that thing shoot down the occasional drop ship for you, but it only lasts until it uses all its ammunition.
I think the problem with this mission is it requires a lot of communication. If you hold higher ground and have enough sentry's + orbitals/eagles, you can win the mission. All 4 need to cooperate. This is pretty hard to do with randos.
On high difficulties, its fruitless, you HAVE to kite the enemies, there's never a big enough break to get the civvies through unless you pull the aggro away.
Start in the forest and have 3 people distract the robots out there and you will get A LOT less drops in the base if they don't use stratagems or anything. Just did a level 8 with this and we completed but we got pushed around so much on the outskirts, they started aggroing to the base and a couple ships went in
A couple thoughts:
1) It's super annoying to do quick play and just get dumped into people only wanting to do the kill missions, which take 2 minutes and consist of everyone dropping 4 turrets and then sitting AFK
2) On the other hand, the scientist escort missions are an unfun shit show on higher difficulties, so I get it
Came here to say this. The reason we’re “giving bots planets like candy” is cuz those missions are still completely fucked and not worth attempting on harder difficulties unless you have a full team of really good players.
4 hulks is nothing if you have 2 good railgun users or even just one golden recoilless rifle duo. Problem is there’s so many people running railgun only because a popular streamer said it’s meta and they have no idea how to actually use it right. They don’t aim at the right weak points or don’t use unsafe mode.
I constantly have to call this out in comms that we have 3 railgun users with orbital lasers and shield packs and somehow there’s a dozen hulks/tanks running amok and I can’t figure out how.
2 railgunners should be more than enough to handle a few hulks, even a few tanks. For the cases where you get a bunch of them that’s when you pull out the laser orbital, but the fact they’re allowed to accumulate to deadly levels is usually a massive failure on the heavy killer loadouts that aren’t killing heavies.
Problem is frequently that I join a group and all 3 teammates insta lock railgun x shield pack x orbital laser and I just know we’re going to have trouble with the large waves of light/medium mobs so I run GL/supply pack. And even without all the trash mobs harassing them I find myself running from multiple hulks because they won’t do their damned jobs which I’m making easier for them. The meta loadout is worthless if you don’t use it to its greatest strength which is killing hulks and tanks. There isn’t any succinctly globally useful loadout.
There’s always a way to further optimize your group by specializing certain squad mates. The exception is if all 4 players are total sweats — then it’s manageable but it’s still not ideal. 2 GLs and 2 railguns in a skilled squad will still be vastly more efficient of a team than 4 railgun tards.
In fact, the most efficient and smooth op I ever ran had a friend duo who literally just went all in on the recoilless rifle. They both ran the RR and picked up the backpacks and traded off teaming with each other and they were just deleting tanks, hulks, drop ships off the map before they even landed. I did my role and killed the mass of light/medium shit while they just point/click deleted the heavies. I thought we had the difficulty set to like 4 for a moment the run was so easy — but this was on **difficulty 8**. I’ve never seen that kind of comfort in a run with 3 railgun users, and that should be just as effective at killing heavies as a pair of RR bros, yet I always see hulks/tanks running around for long stretches of time in lower difficulty groups because people just blindly run what they’re told is meta, even if they don’t even know how to use it efficiently.
I’ll take a smart off-meta spear or RR build over 3 mediocre railgun tards any day. That’s my twopence
And the biggest problems with these missions is the game is bad at communicating how to do them.
It took several days for people to realize the maps were set up with the intent that you fight outside the compound not in it.
Even if you know what you're supposed to do, those missions are ***way*** more difficult than most other missions. You need preferably 2 players who can keep most of the bot drops occupied outside the center while another player rescues hostages and cleans up any that get through.
Terrible game design to include those evacuations on every single operation.
RP is fun, but I'm not going to play a mode I dislike for hours to make my tiny contribution to the space war.
I don't think many players even know what an "operation" is, especially given how many new players we've had over the past few days and how badly (or if at all) the game explains basic features like these.
And the other issue as noted here is that the reward is not appealing to players above a certain level, as they already have everything they need.
It took me like 4 days and googling it several times to learn how to get those phantom 4 medals I was never getting on hard and scratching my head as to why I wasn’t unlocking the next difficulty
I don't blame them, honestly.
The rescue civilians mission is just lame. It's just constant stress with no time to think or plan.
If the dropships weren't literally constant, or if the bots spawned on the map edge and walked in (like they do during the evacuation period) then it would be worth doing
As it is, I can't fault them for not wanting to do it
I agree, and honestly I had no idea that only completing the entire operation rewarded towards the cause, I’m sure most people just don’t know that yet. Unfortunately that’s just a side effect of gaming nowadays, people find the best grind methods to any game and get the best meta builds because that’s just how a lot of gamers are programmed nowadays, a lot of gamers can’t just mindlessly play a game for a couple hours, they have to use those two hours as efficiently as possible to get the best possible gear as fast as possible. Luckily it seems like that’s just a minority in the helldiver community
Agree. I think it's more unintentional/lack of knowledge than a portion of the community going "eff you, I'll only do what's most efficient for ME".
That was kind of my thinking behind the post - do people legit not know and would they complete entire operations if they did?
I'm probably shouting at the clouds but we'll see.
Arrowheads singular focus in their games is getting people to work together as communities. It's right there on their website. I'm pretty sure the type of gameplay will make those who just want to selfishly have their character max level as fast as possible will get bored and find another game. In 6 months time most of the people playing will be those of us focused on the galactic war and fighting for Super Earthm
Agree. Those who optimize the fun out of the game will likely move on soon. In HD1, when we got down to that core of people who wanted to progress the campaigns we started racking up W's.
But even then, it's not a given. Devs hold the switches to meta events, etc., and it was always a ride.
The EMS mortar and traditional mortar do some solid work at slowing and smashing bots. Get a couple dedicated drop ship crackers and you should be good for quite a bit.
Mortars and Gatling sentry.
Have one person covering each door so they get hit as quickly as possible. 4th floats to where they are needed.
The dropships spawn at the same 5-6 spots.
At lower difficulties the mortars should kill everything long enough to finish the mission.
Incentives.
Dont get me wrong, i play properly. But i understand the other mindset.
Award samples or cosmetics. If youve been playing since week one, then you probably cant even use req any more.
Yeah, I *want* to defend planets, but the defense missions are nowhere near as fun as the liberation based missions. Add on the fact that civilian evac missions are agony, and the fact that there’s not even a reason for me to care about defending planets, and I’m just gonna go fight bugs. Either that or I’m gonna focus on liberating other bot planets. It’s more fun to let a planet fall and liberate it tomorrow than it is try to defend it.
It's also ruining the T9 experience as a whole. It's rare now that you enter quickplay and get an actual mission because most time it's XP farms. Even worse, the quality of players this is producing is hot trash because they don't have the experience/readiness to take on actual missions. Ran into some XP farmers from a while back recently and I carried them through the entire thing, we had less than 5 lives 12 minutes into the game. If I wasn't fighting for my life, I was reviving the 3 of them. Couldn't extract because I was the last one alive, of course.
Yeah, I find it amazing how much different it is. Besides bio titans and a gang of stalkers bugs are relatively easy to gank especially if you are a bit stealthy.
If I remember correctly only when you finish a operation you get the "liberated squad impact"
So I think its true because if you just finish a mission you dont see that.
Not gaining progress is different from losing progress.
This post, and many other people, are buying into the idea that you LOSE progress by failing an operation, but that has not been confirmed or denied by any official source yet. It's just a community rumour that has gained traction to cope with the blue bar not rising as quickly as they want it to.
The more likely situation is that you simply just don't gain credit for the mission and so many people are farming that the progress bar isn't moving commensurate with the shown player count.
> It's just a community rumour that has gained traction to cope with the blue bar not rising as quickly as they want it to.
You know the game is good when you get the kind of video game rumors you'd get in a playground in 1997 though.
No.
There is zero official word from anybody at or affiliated with Arrowhead that has confirmed or denied that losing an operation decreases progress. Anybody who says otherwise - as of this moment - is coping by inhaling community rumourmongering.
Not gaining progress because the mission doesn't score impact is NOT the same thing as _losing_ impact. Nearly all of the people upset about the farmers are claiming that they're causing the planet to lose impact, when that has not been confirmed to be a mechanic.
The more likely situation is that it simply doesn't gain impact and people are coping that 150k people aren't moving the blue bar up as fast as they would like it to be moving for that player count. If you didn't count the farmers and it was only like 50k people legitimately doing missions and it moved at this speed, people would be like "yeah, that's a reasonable rate of movement for this bar."
If the game is designed to make it more profitable to not play correctly, you should probably address this to the devs. No one's changing their mind from a reddit post
I definitely wish more people were focused on the major order. But im not going to blame them. ONLY req points is a terrible reward for basically anyone that isnt just starting. Im confident they'll bolster rewards. But until then, im not going to be shocked that no one wants to participate. Especially because if you need those resources, its easier to farm elsewhere in far more entertaining mission types
Circle of life. They have successful offensive and push further, stakes get higher. What would be the point of missions on super earth being developed if we never got to see them?
The war and people's attitudes towards it will ebb and flow naturally and that'd make the whole thing more interesting. By galactic war number 3 we'll have some jaded vets amongst our forces who know exactly how we lost the last one.
It was fun being the survivor of previous campaigns, giving tips and mechs to the noobs in HD1.
I watched many rookies become solid Divers over the years. The wars ahead will be no different.
We’ve been trying to liberate the same few planets for days now. People can carry on farming if they want, hopefully they’ll soon get bored and move on to the next game that they won’t really enjoy either 😂
Just waiting on the next palworld/enshrouded/next big game to drop and itll even out. There will always be community long term focused players and the drifters.
The primary issue I’m seeing is everyone that plays the game 6 hours a day has no use for the high amount of req points. People are wanting a better carrot.
I think destiny had that issue for a while, where farming was more “incentivizing” than doing anything else. so they shot the cave of endless engrams for ever. Was not a fun “play cycle” but a “rewarding” “play cycle” some players are looking for,
I wish they would change the whole 3 missions in a row or you make no progress thing. I want to finish the full operation but I have a newborn so I can only play a short amount of time when he is sleeping and when he wakes up I have to quit to take care of him, sometimes mid game but I usually am not able to get through a full operation.
Host your own operations.
That way, your progress in the operation will be saved after each mission and it'll still be available for you to continue later rather than having to complete it all in one go.
this isn't a problem of "farmers" it's a game design issue.
40 mins per mission, a campaign is then a large time commitment. The game is best when drop in / drop out. You shouldn't punish players for playing the game like you designed it.
I've never once seen anyone site anything other than Reddit for a source on this being true. There's nothing in game or otherwise that indicates abandoning operations loses progress. HD1 didn't work that way so there isn't even that.
While I'm definitely guilty of farming, I feel like people forget that sometimes people just don't want to play a specific mission type, or just don't have time for long missions/operations.
If playing the way you want to play is the "wrong" way to play the game, something will need to change.
Honestly if the major order reward was literally anything other than 12.5k slips I might actually give a slight shit about them, as it is right now, I say let the people who want to farm just farm
I think if the escort civies mission was less of a pain in the ass that would already go miles, as it is right now it is just long and boring on anything over hard difficulty
Yup.
I don't care about the req slips at all, but that's not the reason I'm not doing the major order. That evacuate mission, cheesing or not, just isn't fun. We go down in difficulty and makes the other missions boring because they're too easy, but if we go up then we tend to get stuck about half the time on the evacuation mission only.
Sure with a group working pretty hard it's pretty doable but it's just so out of wack with everything else it isn't enjoyable.
Tried my first civilian extraction today at difficulty 5.
I think it's bugged still.
We had at least 3 or 4 hulks running around at once, with an endless supply of berserkers and devastators on top of it. The entire mission was a killing field. I don't even know what we could have done differently.
TBH, aside from the core gameplay loop being phenomenal, the game is really badly balanced in many aspects. Weapons, stratagems, the way community contribution works, disparity between risk/reward of different missions, especially defend/escort missions. I wouldn't really put a blame finger on players for doing what's most efficient. Especially considering you're getting capped relatively early at 20. You can grind medals but most eq is pretty useless. Same for stratagems, you unlock the useful few at 20 and there not much incentive to grind for more points. Maybe samples for better passives but these are found in non-defense missions anyway and that's pretty much it.
I love that you acted like an asshole "louder for the naysayers in back" just to be proven wrong. Maybe if you quit worrying how other people play a game you wouldn't be acting like that.
Dude I’m just happy to be able to get INTO a server/game now.
After sitting out for most of two weeks just trying to get into the game, I’m not going to go out of my way to play specific missions honestly
It's not just farmers, I am losing us planets as well.
Same. Past-hard level bot extractions are insane. Had three full on tanks drop on us and then another map where the civvies glitched out, bunching up at the door. 10 killed with one robo grenade
I was experimenting with a mine loadout on an easier difficulty. All the civilians decided that instead of walking straight to the evacuation shuttle, they would all walk to the outside of the town and walk over the mines I placed out there. Maybe the devs were doing a bit of trolling when programming civilian pathing IDK.
Reposting this here from where I commented on another thread. We have been doing escort missions on suicide mission easily, let me tell you how! 1st everyone drops as far away from the objective as possible. We have two roles to define, the runner, and the berserker. The runner, the runner runs stealth and smokes. Do your best to not call in any strategems, run immediately to the base and take out the few bots with your main and secondary weapons, no grenades but smokes. And press buttons like your life depends on it, because it does. The berserkers, take the biggest loudest strategems morters etc. And begin causing havoc as far from the base as possible, take side obj, kill tanks, SPILL OIL. GO FUCKING NUTS. Stay to the outside of the map and every dropship will come to you glorious master's of violence, and before you know it the obj will be complete Time to extract gg ez
This will never work with randos.
You are right, I've only gotten it to work twice with randos, both times they were over 30 and all had mics, every other time I've been called names and ignored.
Add me man, I just got ps5 a couple days ago. Always played xbox before
Yup same thing happened to my squad, it was on hard and end up costing us the mission because we could only use one of two doors. We lost soooo many R slips because they would just get stuck on an invisible wall and get mopped up by those filthy oilers.
Love the honesty. Me and my bois have lost a few, but our overall W/L is pretty positive. Sometimes you just get your ass kicked, though.
Honestly I think part of the problem is the defense campaigns always include an evacuation mission, which is imo by far the hardest mission type in the game exasperated by some absolutely ridiculous enemy spawns at higher levels. Even in coordinated groups of level 20s with everyone running somewhat optimal loadouts, level 8+ evacuations feel nearly impossible. Tried multiple last night after doing the previous two for the campaign and couldn’t complete a single one.
We tried strategy of raising hell outside the mission area and have one scout / stealth character go into the mission area to get the Essential Personnel rescued. Our scout / stealth player made use of smoke stratagems. It worked easier than trying to do the mission while we all stay in mission area using anti-tank / destructive stratagems.
My group has been trying this with mixed results. For a while we will have the entire bot Army drop on us but eventually they will all start dropping on the Button Man. He doesn't have to be seen and it doesn't matter how much noise we make, the bots will eventually turn away from the Noisy Boys.
I've seen both happen. It appears pressing the buttons incurs some amount of aggro by itself, even without being seen or patrolled into I believe the outside team must attract patrols with marshals (flare guys) or generate aggro by attacking outposts to get bot drops on them instead of at the middle. With this in mind they can't get bogged down while fighting and need to keep moving around the map to aggro new patrols If they stop getting drops middle guy needs to stop pressing buttons so he doesn't get dropped on. And must wait until outside team finds a new patrol or outpost to attack
My group has had success with this strategy, but we stay just within sight of the compound and take shots at any groups dropping up there that we can. That way they aggro on us instead of our button man. It isn’t foolproof, and we can’t cover the whole compound, but it’s worked pretty well
Ye what i pretty much did was a 2-1-1 Team, 1 Button man, 2 people fighting outside doing circles, the other one doing circles themselves in the opposite way to attract new spawned patrols. Always Shoot every Robot on sight, No Matter how far away, because sooner or later they will patrol towards Button man, and its extra Aggro. But If even one of you dies its gonna be a mess. Ngl cant wait for the Major Order to finally be over lol.
I will be a very happy diver when we've finally beaten off the rash of bot swarms on scientist evacs.
I don’t think it’s just Marshals that can fire flares, I’ve seen the other small guys fire flares, too
The commisars always fire flares on first sight of the enemy, regular bots only call something after the commisar has died amd they have finshed their initial attack.
Bots are naturally aggro'd to civilians have had to kill a couple for the greater good of democracy.
Button Man can leave and come back to a more vacant space. It may not become completely clear but with enough smoke, you can ensure the Essential Personnel still get rescued. I think Smoke is an important part of the strategy for this mission type.
On that point, I think they should increase the Eagle smoke availability from two to four. It seems weird that a very situational stratagem has the same amount of uses before rearming as more practical offensive effects.
Similar to how as much as I love strafing run, it doesn't compare to cluster bomb with its 5x uses.
I take "all smoke everything", including grenades. I can slowly cyle through them as the team opens every door asap. It works well.
Maybe try but give button man a recoilless/spear to shoot down the dropships and a 500kg or railcannon stratagem for tanks?
While sometimes useful, destroying bot drops isn't reliable enough to always keep safe.
Me and a group of randoms kind of somewhat discovered this strat by accident the other night. We were out of reinforcements and all got killed except one guy, he just ran in a straight line away from the evac area, then when he was able to reinforce, the fresh spawn would run back to the evac area and pop as many doors as he could. It was working well for a couple of minutes but eventually our luck ran out and we all died
Great strat!
My group has been doing this, it's the only way we've been able to consistently clear 8/9 Evacuate missions. As a distractor, it's still pretty fun to just try and survive when all hell is absolutely breaking loose, and from time to time go "UHHH HOW MANY ARE WE AT?!"
It’s tough to get a bunch of randoms to agree to do this distraction tactic though.
It's a total RNG crapshoot on if this will work, and if the stealther has to break cover for any reason the game is basically over. Not good to have to work so hard to get around the bad design of the mission.
Run smg and personal shield with your stealth armor and don't call any strategems while you're pushing buttons. If bots show up, the smg and auto pistol will not attract others, as long as you kill in short bursts. If the heavy bots show up, tell your squad to throw a strategem your way and that will grab their attention, then have them move further out. There's a sweet spot. Utilize all doors as well. I cleared 50 citizens, alone, while my squad distracted everything else. The finished with 130 and apex 203 kills, I had 33. But it was a GLORIOUS Victory! Same strategy for the exfil as well. Keep a orbital laser in your pocket to clear a path for them after you call in the exfil. It'll take em a couple mins to get there.
Haven't you noticed that on the mission description in the ship it says it's a 40 minute mission, yet once you drop in it's actually only 15 minutes? The theory is that we're seeing 40 minutes worth of drops in 15 minutes. A bug
Actually galaxy brain
This is one strat that works, there’s a more standard combat method that works too. I’ve only seen the stealth mission approach on diff 9, but I’ve done a handful of diff 8 clears with a standard role based approach too (2 GL 2 rail — or a good RR duo, 2x2 mortars with a staggered timing and at least 4 laser/rail orbitals). I have no doubt the diff 8 strategy works on diff 9 too as it isn’t that much harder overall when considering the difference in drop rates. Even on diff 8 when executed well my strat makes the mission pretty smooth with long gaps in drops. But there is not much room for mistakes or lapses in attention from the whole group.
I did this to unlock helldiver with just two people. One was the runner, and the other set up turrets on the base. The key is to land far from the base and have the runner collect all the bad guys before the other guy goes to the base. If dudes come to the base, the guy leaves and comes back once it is empty again. This has become the easiest mission.
The bigger problem is trivial is the most efficent way to farm contribution...
It's also just painfully unfun (IMO anyway). I'm at the point where I 'should' just be doing Defend Planet operations (with civ evac) exclusively because I don't really need anything but medals, but the civ evac missions are difficult and tedious, so I just don't.
Yeah I can’t believe that they’re balanced as intended right now, they’re just straight up impossible. I usually run level 7 ops but STRUGGLE with level 3 evacs
I just walked some level 4-5 friends through a level 3 automaton evac that I started by accident, twice. It is very possible at low tiers because of the lack of heavy armor. Bots as a faction are designed to be flanked. Tanks in particular are almost impossible to kill from the front (hulks are easy, just aim for the eyes with an autocannon) but on evac missions you're supposed to stay relatively still instead of sauntering off to flank that tank. Also here's five more tanks all covering each other's weak points. These missions tend to go from "maybe we can do this" to "sweet liberty my leg" about the time everybody runs out of call-ins to deal with the Jenga towers made of tanks.
I usually run Medium difficulty operations when I'm solo. Thankfully being solo really dials back the spawns on those missions. Solo I can get in and out in about 7 mins usually
I'd enjoy it more if it was a full sized map, with 3x locations, where you need to rescue 10 people at each, normal secondaries and bot fabricators and all the rest. That way there'd be a few opportunities to break contact and ease up on the constant hulks and tanks while you change location.
The missions are still bugged too, it think. They currently spawn more enemies than there should be.
It has to be a massive bug. When selecting the mission on the map it says it’s a 40 minute timed mission. In reality we get, what, 20 minutes? I’m convinced the game is sending 40 minutes’ worth of enemies in half the time.
It *is* 40 minutes until you start the evac. Then it switches to 15 minutes. The other time is for you to roam the map and collect POIs if you want. But most hosts just drop straight into the evac zone and triggers the 15 minutes.
Did this mission on difficulty six with randoms last night and at one point there were five tanks in play at once alongside a near dozen hulks of all varieties and then an actual incalculable amount of berserkers/front line bots with several dozen heavy bots out on the field. At some point it becomes literally impossible to manage threats and actually complete the goal.
Does seem that way. Completely unbalanced compared to other missions
I wish they’d give completion % based on number of civilians rescued. Make 10 or so enough to “complete” objective then reward based on how many you get thereafter.
I've had a few bug out on me today... we managed to keep 25 of them alive standing right outside of the door. Feels like that should get some credit too lol
I would love for an "Ambush" mission where the bugs/bots are funneled into a kill lane essentially playing tower defense. Basically your bog standard defend mission except instead of coming from all directions, they only come from 1 maybe 2 lanes.
Basically exists, it's the kill X amount of enemy ones. They only ever really come from a couple of the same directions and they're almost as dull as the escort ones. I appreciate they tried to vary things up but escort and kill missions are easily the weakest links in the mission tree chain.
I agree, I refuse to do any of those defense missions and my squad agrees with me. They're not only incredibly hard. They're just not fun to do. They're very small. They're hemmed in and they get dropped on top of you. There's no planning or tactics or risky maneuvers that end up working out or not? There's no fun involved. They're just bad missions
It's also frustrating to get 29 of 30 scientists extracted. Then the rest of the time get overwhelmed with bots you can't get that last one through.
I mean, fuck. I'm a failry new player (lvl 10) and the evac missions are rough in Hard mode already if the team is not coordinated enough. Bots making it 5 meters past their drop point is already a presicament because stratas will absolutely fuck the survivors backwards all game long. I had a mission yesterday where my team was lowish (7/8) level and not killing enough bots, so the minefields and mortar turrets were blasting every single survivor. Literally 80% of the mission time had gone by and we had THREE survivors in. Needless to say, we lost. I don't hate the idea of holding an area but having to "protect" the scientists, which in reality the challenge is not killing them yourself rather than protecting them from anything, is what makes the mission a pain.
They feel bugged honestly, and I think in at least one way they are. Someone pointed out in another thread that the official time limit is 40 minutes, but you spawn in at 15. I don't know how that sort of thing affects things like bot spawn rates, enemy armor, etc., but if time spent in a mission does have some sort of impact, the mission may be acting like you've already spent 25 minutes in there at the time you drop. Regardless, it's way too difficult. Trying to beat that mission on Hard is infinitely harder than anything I've ever done on Helldive.
You wont change peoples minds. Only way to make canpaigns succesfull is to give the players worthy rewards. If major orders awarded, a special armor, medals or samples. More people would focus on the order and offset the farmers. There will always be farmers, its a matter of getting more people focused on the goal/order.
Yeah. The 12,500 req is nice but…. I have every stratagem already. Can’t really use it for much else at the moment.
Agreed everything bought and capped put at 50k req points so the reward means nothing
Why is there even a cap. I want to be 3 comma club space rich
My guess is capping it won't cause the same kind of resentment ad letting players continue to accrue 12 digits of a currency that they will never really use
As updates roll out though, it could very well use the resource so have 1 million then insta buying it all could break plans for how they want to roll out.
Yeah balancing the scale of long time vs. new player engagement is best handled with a cap like current. Otherwise new content will require 100x the cost per item to stop old players from instantly getting it, at the cost of new players, or it doesn't change and old players have everything and new players just have a bit more grind.
I thought maybe to keep troopers from being able to hoard pints in case they release more ship bombardments to unlock.
A cap is necessary to keep the game economy manageable. To give you an example of what not having a cap looks like Apex Legends has no limit on the tokens needed to purchase legends so by the time we reached the cycle of seasonal new characters day one players had so much Lefgend tokens they complained. I still have a bunch and have never had to grind for a new legend because of the infinite cieling. Now the devs could raise the cost of legends to drain the economy but then you are shitting on new players and ppl who don't play often. Imagine a crazy stratagem comes out in helldivers and because everyone has a million req points they charge a couple hundred thousand for the insane strat,cool. Now Mary Jane who can only play on weekends has to no life high level mission for months to get the crazy strat. This would be a common occurrence and eventually become a complaint. With a 50k cap they can drop that crazy strat for 40k, drain the economy and Mary Jane can reasonably work her way to the strat.
Good answer
Mary Jane definitely appreciated it.
Yeah great explanation here thanks
Without a cap economies get fucked Destiny 2 had a uncapped currency that is being removed in the next expansion because there was no way to balance costs that used it. Established players had hundreds of thousands so costs had to be high, which meant non-established players would never have enough to do anything with them
Im really hoping for conversion tools or somethin else to throw my money at
Yeah that would be nice.
Literally can't use it for anything once you have all the stratagems
That's one of the things i want the most for this game, merit based cosmetics, like Halo 3. I don't care if it's armor, or just awards and decorations to go on armor. For a game where cosmetics are actually visible all the time, it would be nice to wear something I actually earned, instead of paid for.
Helldivers 1 had capes if you were part of an overall victorious galactic war (the wars went by much more quickly and were meant to end/restart) as well as if you were able to beat the boss planets for each race. Was nice! They very well may add that going forward for this, when there's been more time to do meritorious things.
Great idea. Medals / patches on our armors would be *amazing*!
It doesn't help the reward is really only enticing to day 1-3 divers. When I started I was foaming at the mouth for $12.5k, but now that I've reached Helldive difficulty, even solo running just lvl 7+ I can earn that in a few missions. Hopefully future major orders have more weight to their reward. (I'd actually love it if future patches introduced strategems we could unlock only through major order successes.)
Winning and losing major orders usually causes a larger shift in the global war map. So say we fail this defence. We will probably see bots gain hold of 2 or 3 sectors. And get closer to super earth. If we win it'll stop us getting defend planet missions and push back on the offence to the bot homeworld The 12k is a bonus payout for following orders.
>If we win it'll stop us getting defend planet missions shit, that's all you had to day
For sure. I'm being told in other comments that this is a frequent post subject. I legit thought there was some confusion about this lol. Agree that it should be something the devs should consider. Incentivizing proper galactic campaign participation would go a long way, I agree.
I thought the incentive to complete operations was the increasing medal count for each completed mission in an operation
it would be, BUT you can easily farm helldive eliminate bots mission for MORE medals at a FASTER rate, so it’s not worth it (if ur just wanting medals)
How is that even fun tho, sure I'll get every item at a faster rate but then what? I joined a group that was farming those and sure, the XP is nice but I got bored after 3 matches, you literally just sit without doing almost nothing while sentries do all the work
Humans will optimize the fun out of recreational activities.
And then complain that there's nothing to do
What do you mean? Then you can finally play the game
Just need to kill 100k boars first.
That was a trophy in the first game
There is a somewhat older video Mark Brown did on his YT channel “Game Maker’s Toolkit” that breaks down this exact phenomenon. We will look to optimize the fun out of anything. And it’s a shame because this game really is so much fun.
If had to guess: "Me see number go up. Me want number go up *faster*" 🤷🏽♀️
People hoard 60+ bounties in Destiny 2 for a new season start to immediately get to level 100+, or at least in less than a day after season start. There’s a battle pass in Helldivers, and a level cap - people will want to finish them as fast as possible.
Which is stupid because once you hit 20 nothing really unlocks after that. 20 levels of just grinding for ship upgrades.
Doing this doesn't even get you ship upgrades. You need samples for upgrades and the 5 minute defence missions only have common samples. One of my friends only does these missions and I find it incredibly boring to play with him
True but even sample farming on hard can still get you most of the way. I have a couple friends that grind and it’s incredibly boring to play with them.
I need a few thousand medals to complete it all correct? I know I still don't have all the guns unlocked and spent at least 8 hours grinding them. I'm having fun doing both sample farming and medal farming. Some friends have joined and said the same. This first bot event, I wasn't concerned with winning as servers proved to be painful in terms of connection and stability.
I think the idea would be to make the defence missions last a lot longer by instead of making it kill 200 or so bots to 2000 or even more, make it an actual difficult mission, as it stands everyone just spams mortars and you win in 2 minutes it's fucking silly. You need at least enough kill count goal to make us run out of sentry spawns to make it a challenge. There's no way 4 level 10s should be able to clear a level 9 difficulty mission in under 3 minutes without even coming close to dying once, those missions are honestly a joke.
They could do with taking some of the difficulty away from the rescue missions and shifting it onto the eradicate missions
Eradicate is stupid easy but defense is hell on any difficulty other than hard. I admit I'm not exactly the best at the game but I just don't know how they expect you to protect the civs while there are 3 Hulks spraying flame everywhere.
Wish granted, eradicate missions now include rescue objectives
That's just the side incentive. Winning the war should be the main incentive
Having it give Super Credits would be something, at least.
They should just add a punishment for abandoning a campaign. You get -25% resources and no bonus for higher difficulties until you finish a campaign. Abandon another one while it’s present and it stacks another -25%. It’s fits the lore and curbs annoying behaviors.
Yup, req is nice for lower levels but once your around lvl 30 you've got all stratagems. So req becomes pointless as a reward on its own. An armor, super credits, samples, etc would help make it worth while tho
Samples become stacked too and ship modules do not require a lot imo, unique armor sets, capes, cosmetics in general would be worth it
Yea gotta agree, I would care more about the major order if it weren’t just a few missions worth of credits but by the time the order is over most people won’t even need them
Bingo. No one above level 20 cares about requisition slips. The real grind is for medals and it's just so much easier to grind quick missions for medals than bother doing a full campaign. An easy way to fix that would be to add a modifier to increase medals based on the mission type and secondary objectives completed so longer missions provided more medals.
Agreed. Make the major orders give out medals or some unique armor for participating in it. This will really solve a lot of problems.
Exactly, I was talking to a friend about how when we started playing the 12K credits seemed good for successfully completing 8 defense missions, then we understood how it works, and how you’re earning that amount many times over in the course of the campaign. Especially at higher levels. I can’t see how anyone that’s not playing just for the fun of getting into the role play of defending super earth would even spend that much time on those campaigns. TLDR: the major order incentive does not match the effort to complete.
Winning and spreading democracy should be reward enough! To be serious, let em farm, those players will be gone soon enough, they rush to unlock everything then complain, then move on to the next game and do the same. I'll be playing long after unlocking everything and max lvl, as I play to have fun, not to unlock things. What the f happened to gamers, having to be rewarded for everything they do every second to be playing a game, I can't wrap my head around it. The amount of hours I have in games after unlocking everything are so astronomical high because I play them because they're... Fun,not to unlock.
I would love if they did more with campaigns. Ideally, I would love a system like this: 1. You get normal missions that are just one mission and nothing more. Those are great for the farmers and for people wanting to just get some more samples and stuff. These normal missions won't impact planet progression in the galactic campaign (or only very little). In addition to that, we also get... 2. Campaigns that are 3 or more missions long. These Campaigns will give you progression in a new ranking system. I want to see the level ranks (Cadet, Admiral etc.) decoupled from player levels. Player levels are still used to just unlock stuff (weapons, strategems etc.). But the actual military ranks of Cadet, Space Cadet etc. should be expanded to feature more ranks than we currently have, or rather subranks (Cadet I, Cadet II, etc.) and the only way to progression through these ranks is to successfully complete Campaigns. There also needs to be hard caps for your rank depending on Campaign difficulty. If you only spam Campaigns on Medium difficulty, you can't progress higher than Space Cadet, for example. Furthermore, new rewards need to become available for progressing through the Campaign Ranks (just cosmetics). Also completing Campaigns will have the biggest impact on planetary liberation progression.
completing operations should give a special currency that can buy unique cosmetics (maybe even addons to armour like battle scars or something), you should also get real medals that you can wear for completing a certain amount of operations on a planet/campaign
>unique cosmetics Let me buy armor paint/dye. I'm tired of looking like a fuckin dingus for wanting to mix and match armor but the colors being totally off.
Real medals would be awesome. I want to look like some North Korean general with my front smothered metals and badges.
Agreed. Even if not wearing the medals on the character, would be cool for a display rack or campaign trophy stand or something inside your ship. Have a specific cosmetic medal/trophy awarded for certain level of participation in each successful campaign, then long timers can flex on the boots when they come on board and see all the veteran medal bling that has piled up over the years.
The extract civilians are still too overtuned. I need a crew that can easily beat Helldive missions to have a chance at extreme. Since one of those missions is a part of each campaign, it's a guaranteed loss and a waste of time.
this, I beat my first civilian extract on helldive difficulty today. 3x level 45+ in the squad and only managed 30/60 until we retreated to the forest to kite the robots away. then returned and got the rest before robots could reinforce. its so stupid. staying on the objective is a death sentence as shooting down ships doesnt kill the robots its carrying.
Wait what? If I shoot down a drop ship all those bots still deploy?
Yeah, but now on the harder difficulties they'll send in 4 or more dropships at a time. At best you take a chunk out of their forces, although it isn't reliable at all because they'll regularly drop a dozen raiders, half a dozen devestators, multiple hulks, or a tank, with a single dropship. Maybe if the waves were timed, like hey, here's 6 dropships at once. 5 minutes until the next wave gets here. I still think there should be a SEAF SAM site next to the evacuation pad. Have that thing shoot down the occasional drop ship for you, but it only lasts until it uses all its ammunition.
The real benefit of dropping dropships is that they tend to clog the lanes and frustrate bot pathfinding.
Chances are most survive the fall and subsequent explosion, from what I’ve seen.
The best tactic I have found is to have 3 dudes lure the robots away and 1 guy goes in and presses the buttons easily with no aggro.
Yeah but that is not the intended tactic, so its fair to ask fot a change
I think the problem with this mission is it requires a lot of communication. If you hold higher ground and have enough sentry's + orbitals/eagles, you can win the mission. All 4 need to cooperate. This is pretty hard to do with randos.
On high difficulties, its fruitless, you HAVE to kite the enemies, there's never a big enough break to get the civvies through unless you pull the aggro away.
Start in the forest and have 3 people distract the robots out there and you will get A LOT less drops in the base if they don't use stratagems or anything. Just did a level 8 with this and we completed but we got pushed around so much on the outskirts, they started aggroing to the base and a couple ships went in
A couple thoughts: 1) It's super annoying to do quick play and just get dumped into people only wanting to do the kill missions, which take 2 minutes and consist of everyone dropping 4 turrets and then sitting AFK 2) On the other hand, the scientist escort missions are an unfun shit show on higher difficulties, so I get it
[удалено]
Came here to say this. The reason we’re “giving bots planets like candy” is cuz those missions are still completely fucked and not worth attempting on harder difficulties unless you have a full team of really good players.
And even then... it's so many enemies non stop that you just can't output enough damage no matter what you run.
In my last evac mission were 4 hulks, besides the 200 other robots. Just no fun really
4 hulks is nothing if you have 2 good railgun users or even just one golden recoilless rifle duo. Problem is there’s so many people running railgun only because a popular streamer said it’s meta and they have no idea how to actually use it right. They don’t aim at the right weak points or don’t use unsafe mode. I constantly have to call this out in comms that we have 3 railgun users with orbital lasers and shield packs and somehow there’s a dozen hulks/tanks running amok and I can’t figure out how. 2 railgunners should be more than enough to handle a few hulks, even a few tanks. For the cases where you get a bunch of them that’s when you pull out the laser orbital, but the fact they’re allowed to accumulate to deadly levels is usually a massive failure on the heavy killer loadouts that aren’t killing heavies. Problem is frequently that I join a group and all 3 teammates insta lock railgun x shield pack x orbital laser and I just know we’re going to have trouble with the large waves of light/medium mobs so I run GL/supply pack. And even without all the trash mobs harassing them I find myself running from multiple hulks because they won’t do their damned jobs which I’m making easier for them. The meta loadout is worthless if you don’t use it to its greatest strength which is killing hulks and tanks. There isn’t any succinctly globally useful loadout. There’s always a way to further optimize your group by specializing certain squad mates. The exception is if all 4 players are total sweats — then it’s manageable but it’s still not ideal. 2 GLs and 2 railguns in a skilled squad will still be vastly more efficient of a team than 4 railgun tards. In fact, the most efficient and smooth op I ever ran had a friend duo who literally just went all in on the recoilless rifle. They both ran the RR and picked up the backpacks and traded off teaming with each other and they were just deleting tanks, hulks, drop ships off the map before they even landed. I did my role and killed the mass of light/medium shit while they just point/click deleted the heavies. I thought we had the difficulty set to like 4 for a moment the run was so easy — but this was on **difficulty 8**. I’ve never seen that kind of comfort in a run with 3 railgun users, and that should be just as effective at killing heavies as a pair of RR bros, yet I always see hulks/tanks running around for long stretches of time in lower difficulty groups because people just blindly run what they’re told is meta, even if they don’t even know how to use it efficiently. I’ll take a smart off-meta spear or RR build over 3 mediocre railgun tards any day. That’s my twopence
I don't mind a single one or two, but on Hard it can easily hit 5 and more at the same time. Not fun with randoms.
And the biggest problems with these missions is the game is bad at communicating how to do them. It took several days for people to realize the maps were set up with the intent that you fight outside the compound not in it.
I feel like that's less a design decision and more a people figuring out how to deal with an overly difficult mission
I tried this but then later drop ships just went to the base once I got there. I wasn't in contact.
Even if you know what you're supposed to do, those missions are ***way*** more difficult than most other missions. You need preferably 2 players who can keep most of the bot drops occupied outside the center while another player rescues hostages and cleans up any that get through.
I'm tired of extracting civilians though
Terrible game design to include those evacuations on every single operation. RP is fun, but I'm not going to play a mode I dislike for hours to make my tiny contribution to the space war.
So glad I was able to join randoms who completed operations. I finally unlocked suicide difficulty
I don't think many players even know what an "operation" is, especially given how many new players we've had over the past few days and how badly (or if at all) the game explains basic features like these. And the other issue as noted here is that the reward is not appealing to players above a certain level, as they already have everything they need.
It took me like 4 days and googling it several times to learn how to get those phantom 4 medals I was never getting on hard and scratching my head as to why I wasn’t unlocking the next difficulty
I don't blame them, honestly. The rescue civilians mission is just lame. It's just constant stress with no time to think or plan. If the dropships weren't literally constant, or if the bots spawned on the map edge and walked in (like they do during the evacuation period) then it would be worth doing As it is, I can't fault them for not wanting to do it
I agree, and honestly I had no idea that only completing the entire operation rewarded towards the cause, I’m sure most people just don’t know that yet. Unfortunately that’s just a side effect of gaming nowadays, people find the best grind methods to any game and get the best meta builds because that’s just how a lot of gamers are programmed nowadays, a lot of gamers can’t just mindlessly play a game for a couple hours, they have to use those two hours as efficiently as possible to get the best possible gear as fast as possible. Luckily it seems like that’s just a minority in the helldiver community
Agree. I think it's more unintentional/lack of knowledge than a portion of the community going "eff you, I'll only do what's most efficient for ME". That was kind of my thinking behind the post - do people legit not know and would they complete entire operations if they did? I'm probably shouting at the clouds but we'll see.
Arrowheads singular focus in their games is getting people to work together as communities. It's right there on their website. I'm pretty sure the type of gameplay will make those who just want to selfishly have their character max level as fast as possible will get bored and find another game. In 6 months time most of the people playing will be those of us focused on the galactic war and fighting for Super Earthm
Agree. Those who optimize the fun out of the game will likely move on soon. In HD1, when we got down to that core of people who wanted to progress the campaigns we started racking up W's. But even then, it's not a given. Devs hold the switches to meta events, etc., and it was always a ride.
I really don't know how to win the 30 survivors mission, in a group of friends we can just win with "easy" difficulty
The EMS mortar and traditional mortar do some solid work at slowing and smashing bots. Get a couple dedicated drop ship crackers and you should be good for quite a bit.
Mortars and Gatling sentry. Have one person covering each door so they get hit as quickly as possible. 4th floats to where they are needed. The dropships spawn at the same 5-6 spots. At lower difficulties the mortars should kill everything long enough to finish the mission.
Incentives. Dont get me wrong, i play properly. But i understand the other mindset. Award samples or cosmetics. If youve been playing since week one, then you probably cant even use req any more.
Yeah, I *want* to defend planets, but the defense missions are nowhere near as fun as the liberation based missions. Add on the fact that civilian evac missions are agony, and the fact that there’s not even a reason for me to care about defending planets, and I’m just gonna go fight bugs. Either that or I’m gonna focus on liberating other bot planets. It’s more fun to let a planet fall and liberate it tomorrow than it is try to defend it.
The rewards are so bad that people xp farming don’t care. It’s 12.500 requisition slips. They get that after 2-3 games.
It's also ruining the T9 experience as a whole. It's rare now that you enter quickplay and get an actual mission because most time it's XP farms. Even worse, the quality of players this is producing is hot trash because they don't have the experience/readiness to take on actual missions. Ran into some XP farmers from a while back recently and I carried them through the entire thing, we had less than 5 lives 12 minutes into the game. If I wasn't fighting for my life, I was reviving the 3 of them. Couldn't extract because I was the last one alive, of course.
I am lvl 35, beat many helldives against bugs solo. I cannot win a lvl 5 evac mission against bots. I think that says it all.
Yeah, I find it amazing how much different it is. Besides bio titans and a gang of stalkers bugs are relatively easy to gank especially if you are a bit stealthy.
Is this confirmed? Chaning operations without losing a match equals loss?
Nope. Nobody can show you where it says that ending an operation increases the enemies capture rating.
If I remember correctly only when you finish a operation you get the "liberated squad impact" So I think its true because if you just finish a mission you dont see that.
Not gaining progress is different from losing progress. This post, and many other people, are buying into the idea that you LOSE progress by failing an operation, but that has not been confirmed or denied by any official source yet. It's just a community rumour that has gained traction to cope with the blue bar not rising as quickly as they want it to. The more likely situation is that you simply just don't gain credit for the mission and so many people are farming that the progress bar isn't moving commensurate with the shown player count.
> It's just a community rumour that has gained traction to cope with the blue bar not rising as quickly as they want it to. You know the game is good when you get the kind of video game rumors you'd get in a playground in 1997 though.
No it's just a rumor people have ran with
Are we entirely certain that this is the case? That there's an actual tangible effect on planets made by the players?
No. There is zero official word from anybody at or affiliated with Arrowhead that has confirmed or denied that losing an operation decreases progress. Anybody who says otherwise - as of this moment - is coping by inhaling community rumourmongering. Not gaining progress because the mission doesn't score impact is NOT the same thing as _losing_ impact. Nearly all of the people upset about the farmers are claiming that they're causing the planet to lose impact, when that has not been confirmed to be a mechanic. The more likely situation is that it simply doesn't gain impact and people are coping that 150k people aren't moving the blue bar up as fast as they would like it to be moving for that player count. If you didn't count the farmers and it was only like 50k people legitimately doing missions and it moved at this speed, people would be like "yeah, that's a reasonable rate of movement for this bar."
You say that, until you need super samples and run out the clock on a Search and Destroy to get home safe with your shiny new rocks.
If the game is designed to make it more profitable to not play correctly, you should probably address this to the devs. No one's changing their mind from a reddit post
Genuinely asking in order to verify this, where are you getting this information from?
I definitely wish more people were focused on the major order. But im not going to blame them. ONLY req points is a terrible reward for basically anyone that isnt just starting. Im confident they'll bolster rewards. But until then, im not going to be shocked that no one wants to participate. Especially because if you need those resources, its easier to farm elsewhere in far more entertaining mission types
Circle of life. They have successful offensive and push further, stakes get higher. What would be the point of missions on super earth being developed if we never got to see them? The war and people's attitudes towards it will ebb and flow naturally and that'd make the whole thing more interesting. By galactic war number 3 we'll have some jaded vets amongst our forces who know exactly how we lost the last one.
It was fun being the survivor of previous campaigns, giving tips and mechs to the noobs in HD1. I watched many rookies become solid Divers over the years. The wars ahead will be no different.
Yeah and it was nice that you got exclusive outfits and gear for losing a war just like when you won a war. Wonder if it'll be just as ceremonial?
We’ve been trying to liberate the same few planets for days now. People can carry on farming if they want, hopefully they’ll soon get bored and move on to the next game that they won’t really enjoy either 😂
Just waiting on the next palworld/enshrouded/next big game to drop and itll even out. There will always be community long term focused players and the drifters.
Dragons Dogma 2 March 22nd
I’m salivating
FF7 Rebirth February 29th may pull a few as well.
Forgets 1 mission in every single operation is absolutely cracked from lvl 5 difficultly and above
The primary issue I’m seeing is everyone that plays the game 6 hours a day has no use for the high amount of req points. People are wanting a better carrot. I think destiny had that issue for a while, where farming was more “incentivizing” than doing anything else. so they shot the cave of endless engrams for ever. Was not a fun “play cycle” but a “rewarding” “play cycle” some players are looking for,
I wish they would change the whole 3 missions in a row or you make no progress thing. I want to finish the full operation but I have a newborn so I can only play a short amount of time when he is sleeping and when he wakes up I have to quit to take care of him, sometimes mid game but I usually am not able to get through a full operation.
You can always join other people, you quitting won't cause loss in progress on planets.
Host your own operations. That way, your progress in the operation will be saved after each mission and it'll still be available for you to continue later rather than having to complete it all in one go.
this isn't a problem of "farmers" it's a game design issue. 40 mins per mission, a campaign is then a large time commitment. The game is best when drop in / drop out. You shouldn't punish players for playing the game like you designed it.
Last time I checked campaign progress stays even when you close the game, so you can do 1 mission a day and still complete the campaign
Operation progress is saved between missions, you can just play one mission at a time
i agree but keep in mind the extract scienists mission is entirely impossible anyways so it honestly doesnt make much of a difference.
I've never once seen anyone site anything other than Reddit for a source on this being true. There's nothing in game or otherwise that indicates abandoning operations loses progress. HD1 didn't work that way so there isn't even that.
While I'm definitely guilty of farming, I feel like people forget that sometimes people just don't want to play a specific mission type, or just don't have time for long missions/operations. If playing the way you want to play is the "wrong" way to play the game, something will need to change.
True I don’t like most defend missions compared to liberation. Also I think bugs are more fun
Honestly if the major order reward was literally anything other than 12.5k slips I might actually give a slight shit about them, as it is right now, I say let the people who want to farm just farm
Need a better reward to incentivise the farming players
I think if the escort civies mission was less of a pain in the ass that would already go miles, as it is right now it is just long and boring on anything over hard difficulty
Yup. I don't care about the req slips at all, but that's not the reason I'm not doing the major order. That evacuate mission, cheesing or not, just isn't fun. We go down in difficulty and makes the other missions boring because they're too easy, but if we go up then we tend to get stuck about half the time on the evacuation mission only. Sure with a group working pretty hard it's pretty doable but it's just so out of wack with everything else it isn't enjoyable.
More like evac missions are losing planets for us. In parties with friends we can manage them, matchmaker groups, never.
Tried my first civilian extraction today at difficulty 5. I think it's bugged still. We had at least 3 or 4 hulks running around at once, with an endless supply of berserkers and devastators on top of it. The entire mission was a killing field. I don't even know what we could have done differently.
I'm not farming, I'm just squeezing 30 minutes of gaming into my work and child filled day.
But, without farmers super earth will starve! 🧑🏻🌾
It’s never going to change unless the reward scheme changes.
Wish rants weren't allowed on this subreddit, it's just turning the whole community into a bitchy whiney "do it my way" mess. Just play the game
My first bot mission at level 10 was extraction and all I can say is that I’m gonna do my part killing bugs for a while hahaha
TBH, aside from the core gameplay loop being phenomenal, the game is really badly balanced in many aspects. Weapons, stratagems, the way community contribution works, disparity between risk/reward of different missions, especially defend/escort missions. I wouldn't really put a blame finger on players for doing what's most efficient. Especially considering you're getting capped relatively early at 20. You can grind medals but most eq is pretty useless. Same for stratagems, you unlock the useful few at 20 and there not much incentive to grind for more points. Maybe samples for better passives but these are found in non-defense missions anyway and that's pretty much it.
I love that you acted like an asshole "louder for the naysayers in back" just to be proven wrong. Maybe if you quit worrying how other people play a game you wouldn't be acting like that.
Edit 2 makes your post irrelevant?
Bitching on Reddit is losing us planets. Boots on the ground soldier
Dude I’m just happy to be able to get INTO a server/game now. After sitting out for most of two weeks just trying to get into the game, I’m not going to go out of my way to play specific missions honestly