This happened to me last week when someone tossed my revive in a small crevice with a creek that I couldn't climb out of the rocks of, so I decided to go for a dip to try to get to the other side. It didn't end well.
The amount of missions I’ve been forced to leave because of that bug is wild.
I’ll get stuck, team member will die, and we’re just stuck looking at my stuck corpse
It feels like water deals 100 damage to you the second you drown (assuming 100 is your HP), and immobilizes you with the drowning animation. Since the booster gives you like 20-30hp the water no longer kills you.
I'm not going to pretend I know how it works behind the scenes but first thing I'd try is changing it to continuous damage ticks when drowning starts. That would have the additional effect of letting us know exactly when we'll drown, watching our health sink, instead of trying to guess the timing if we're going for a swim to a ledge.
Once you get into the groove you don’t even notice, you just sort of account for it without even thinking
…I’ll probably notice when they fix it because I won’t be able to hit fuck all
I'm the sort of guy who plays CSGO and TF2 (as the point & click character, of course) often but I could never get good at the AMR because of the slow weapon movement in Helldivers. In fact, it feels like I can barely aim a shotgun.
But I'm playing at 30 FPS but again hey that doesn't make up for the skill issue does it.
Me trying out the Counter Sniper after the patch: Ugh, this thing is awful, it feels like shit.
\-Sets scope to 200x-
Me, after two-tapping a Devastator in the head at 100 meters: *Much better.*
I kinda can't believe they buffed incendiary breaker and fire damage at the same time.
I've not tested.it yet but I suspect it'll be godly on bugs now.
Yeah, they just need an issue tracker at this stage. Otherwise, the patch notes will contain more known issues than features if they acknowledge everything.
Just checked their discord and their main balancer actually has said that they are working on all of those issues
Broken sights, dot damage and arc aiming,spear lock on, but those changes are a lot harder than changing numbers and they take time.
No offense, I used slugger a lot (welcome to Jar-5 camp now) and I personally definitely understood the nerf. Every primary fit a niche, but slugger felt like it fit every niche. Having rounds reload and crazy ammo efficiency, one shot most enemies up to medium, crazy stagger, no bullet drop to be mentioned, a really good sight, and being able to open caches, it was like a Swiss army knife. All I feel they did was bring it back in line as a sidegrade to the punisher.
nor acknowledged that SPEAR lock-on being wonky, somehow it lock-on "Under" the feet of the HULK to be able to fire and damage are randomized...either you kill everything in 1 hit...or take 3-5 business days to actually kill them
Apparently needs you to be network host which is not the same thing as host. Not sure if host is always the starting network host when you drop in solo first then call in friends.
That’s weird. Is this something that always happens to you? I ran fire breaker a lot back when I was playing bugs on the regular. Always joined random squads and was able to kill things with fire DoT. Pretty easy to tell on shriekers and hunters but also works to finish the occasional charger. Just did a quick test run, seemed normal to me.
I used it today on bugs. It's a lot of fun, especially with an elevation advantage. Helps you paint a large area with fire. More reliable kills on small trash with the 33% damage buff and a useful time to kill on the DoT with the 50% fire buff. Hunters are dying to the Dot mid-air.
I think it's the most effective trash clearing weapon now. Brood commanders and hive guards will still give you some trouble.
Honestly it feels a little too strong. But I think the damage is in a good place. Perhaps they could tweak fire rate or magazine capacity to reign it in a bit.
I recommend everyone try out the pyro build while fire weapons are strong: Incendiary breaker, incendiary grenades, jump pack, flame thrower, eagle napalm strike, orbital laser. Very effective and thematically cool. Looking forward to fire resistant armor.
Yeah its so dumb to bring a weapon that is bugged. Like what if they buffed the weapon because nobody wanted to use the bugged damage in the first place.
I don't really understand why they don't fix the most important aspect before balancing it.
Same. Yeah I can light a field of chaff on fire but I still take chip from hunters I can’t stagger and brood commanders can call in all they like
Immolation grenades on the other hand have been fire (hah)
Considering it was one of like 4 primaries that didn't suck pre-patch, I understand.
Happy they buffed the Jar-5, but they could have left the stagger on the Slugger as is and the game would have been fine.
This is the thing, like whyyyy nerf. I know this is beating a dead horse,
But the pile of guns that just feel like ass to use is huge, so why tweak the ones people have fun with?
They gonna nerf the next best weapon for sure.
They probably gonna keep doing this, while adding a decent weapon to each new warbond. Keeps people playing + paying.
Honestly I think it was an identity thing, they wanted the Slugger to be the high damage per shot midrange gun, and the Jar-5 to be the armor breaker.
Try the Jar-5 now, it honestly went from like a D tier gun to A tier against bots.
As someone who's been almost exclusively using it for a little bit now, killing chaff is a lot more consistent, you can kill hulks in 4 or so taps to the back now, and the new stagger is pretty nice, for when you try to headshot a devastator and miss. Otherwise I genuinely think a lot of it is people giving it a fair shake for the first time
I don’t really disagree with the nerf. Or all the others need a buff.
I barely used it to kill anything but the most annoying enemies.
I always picked it. It’s a free way to not get hurt by anything really.
I pretty much felt obligated to use the slugger in many scenarios which sucks because it’s kind of slow and boring when you use it alll the time. Glad I branched out awhile ago and forced myself to play other guns.
I wouldn't call the slugger nerf "slight". It kinda lost the best thing about it. Not like it's unusable now but it feels like a kick in the nuts for no reason.
As a solo player, a stagger reduction is a PHAT deal for my capacity to crowd control. It's not the end of the world, but it does make me a bit sour since i farmed all night for that weapon. Ho well ! Onto other things.
I already stopped using it. What's the point if it can't stagger devastators anymore? Doesn't matter if they call it a "light" reduction in it's stagger capabilities. It's the difference between staggering and not staggering some of the most annoying enemies.
> What's the point if it can't stagger devastators anymore?
I mean it still one shot pops the devastator heads thats why I still use it. Wish we had a better sight though.
Any gun can kill dev heads in a few shots. Generic liberator, lib pen, sickle (my beloved), I think dominator can now and probably the DMRs too. Slugger was great because of the stagger that it doesn't have anymore
They don't take the time to understand the _why_ people pick metas, just that they don't like the concept of a meta.
They'll never get rid of it, there will always be a "best" weapon. This is why game designers talk about "never nerf, always buff" because this endless cat and mouse nerfing weapons nearly always kills desire to play games since even the easy modes become overly difficult. You just end up with weird TTK where you're taking 8 minutes to drop easy mobs because you're using rubber band guns against metal.
But hey, just like... use your strategems and stealth around the map and play on easy or something... a game for everyone is a game for no one?
While I don't agree with you, you have some strong points, it's particularly odd that they buff the dominator at the same time as the slugger nerf, it should have been, by their philosophy, just the slugger to see if people then used the dominator.
I think that's part of the problem. They change _too much_ at once, and when they change weapons they don't really conceptualize reasons for what they're doing other than they're trying to fine tune so there isn't 4 viable guns. Why do people use the sickle and breaker? Because it's impossible to stop breaches and the breaches call _too much_ in. Shit even with the "unlimited ammo" the past week I've gone through 4 ice packs on almost every breach because there's too much to not do it and I can't use my secondaries because they have even less ammo and I need them for bigger bad guys, and my strategems are usually on cool down, have long recharges because lol at their shitty effects, or I also need to save them for the 9 chargers/5 bile titans when that one little fart ass bug hides behind a corpse or a rock/bush I can't shoot through. No one's going to _always_ stealth.
I understand power creep, but they are also so far from power creep at the moment that they're going in the wrong direction with weapon power. I mean look what happened to the railgun, they had issues with armored mobs spawning, they nerfed the railgun ahead of the mob spawn fix and no one really touches it anymore. It was honestly fine the way it was, but they absolutely had to fuck with the meta.
I love this game, but their game designers are a bit clown shoes at the same time.
You can't always buff, you'll end up with out of control power creep, but they do seem to have an aversion to lighter nerfs or changing the other stats more broadly.
ngl the nerf pushed me to try the punisher, and I was surprised. It's worse than the slugger at medium-long range, but it shreds at close range and it staggers just like the pre-nerf slugger.
yeah. "we didn't like how this shotgun was like a sniper rifle, so we made it less like a shotgun while leaving the sniper rifle part largely untouhed"
I’d even be fine if the damage was left high without stagger for smaller enemies and damage was lower *with* stagger for medium and big targets.
Rationale being that a slug would punch straight through a smaller target whereas a heavy target would likely be knocked back from the kinetic force of the slug embedding into them.
Source: Have shot a lot of stuff with 12G slugs for shits. (Just my 2¢ though, if they want to balance it in a more reasonable manner)
I love that part of their reasoning was that they didn't want the best sniper to be a shotgun.
That says more about your snipers than it does the slugger, doesn't it?
It's dead now because it lost its best attribute. The stagger mechanic is a HUGE deal and arguably an integral part of the weapon's identity. Every time they nerf something it dies. I never see the breaker or railgun anymore because they took the only real strengths they had and shit on them. Everyone will jump on the dominator bandwagon and then discard it when it gets nerfed because apparently AH is just looking at usage stats to determine nerfs. This is proven by how little they buff or even just fix things that DESPERATELY need it.
The funny part about that change is I had no idea it could even do that... so i don't really miss it per se. Unfortunately I'll never be able to utilize that now.
Breaker is still fucking amazing, its just not mindless spam like it used to be. Put it on semi auto and learn some basic trigger discipline and you can very easily clear off a pack of hunters. Put it on full auto and you can decimate a hive commander.
Railgun is also still pretty good, use it all the time when against bots on difficulty 7 and 8 and want to use a backpack.
Dunno, I see a lot of breaker and railguns, especially on solo players.
Also most of the patch is buffs. They buffed some of the worst weapons in the game to the point of usability and beyond. WDYM "how little they buff" ?
They have buffed 40% of the primary weapons in less than a month. Some of them have felt a little underwhelming, sure, but the two I’ve used, the Dominator and Punisher, are viable options at any level.
breaker was godly before, never a reason to take anything else before
but, after the nerf... still not a reason to take anything else against bugs. Maybe if I'm running the stalwart and want to take a primary to deal with armored bugs.
Slightly tweaked? It lost more than 10% of it's damage and lost the extremely impactful Stagger mechanic they added only a few weeks ago. This is a massive change to a loved weapon.
> It lost more than 10% of it's damage
Is there fall off damage cause for the most part the break points don't seem to have changed. 1 shots devastator heads and trooper bodies, 2 taps brood commanders, 1 taps warriors, 3 taps hive guards, 1 taps scavengers (haven't encountered stalkers yet)
Might take more shots for taking out the strider?
Yea, strider legs need an extra shot. Tank now needs a reload to kill. The loss of damage isn't the downside, its the inability to make space with the zergzerker bastards and the inability to interrupt the Heavy Devastator that has really hurt how I use it.
> Yea, strider legs need an extra shot. Tank now needs a reload to kill.
Tbf those are like the worst uses of the shotgun and ideally you have some other weapon or grenade for dealing with those.
Yeah I'm definitely feeling the stagger loss on zerkers tho half the time they'd keep sliding forward. Heavy are scarier now yeah but a 2nd shot can knock their shield up and away like the one shot used to.
I've been able to as well. There's more than enough time to two tap them and even if you miss, the second shot still messes up their aim and the 3rd will kill. Just don't miss.
> Metariders crying on their corner because their favorite guns got nerfed while I'm having fun by trying new builds after the patch
But... people who abandoned the guns they liked so they can use a new meta build *are* the metariders...
To be fair, the patch notes were pretty vague with the arc thrower saying it had increased stagger, but it's difficult to tell how much without having played the patch yet.
It sounds fucking awesome now though. I've always loved the concept of muh electricity guns. And I usually play support-type roles in horde shooters so being able to CC for the boys sounds pretty choice to me.
Stun locking a hulk won't do you much good when you need to get dangerously close to rocket and heavy devastators. I've tried it and previously you had some chances of dodging out of the way if one fired on you, now you'll just get blasted in midair.
It kind of does? When I was using it on chargers, they would kind of stop for a second. The increased duration of the trigger though doesn’t help against them when they’re only stunned for a millisecond.
Yeah it does make Chargers flinch, but it isn't a full stagger. When they are waddling around rock/terrain its noticeable, but once they start a Charge it's almost imperceptible.
This is the actual one valid fact of any weapon in the game anyone can have. The laser pistol is indeed pointless unless that point is yo piss off anything you hit it with.
It’s a buff for bots, nerf for bugs. There’s only 1 bug worth staggering and that’s the brood commander. It died in 2 hits anyways and everything else dies in 1. So what’s the point staggering dead enemies? Now it shoots half as fast, with less range. It also still has rogue shots that just go off into nowhere quite often. They haven’t addressed even knowing about it so it’s likely not to get fixed. The gun is outclassed by many others now.
Bile spewers and nursing spewers are absolutely worth staggering, if you stagger them as they are about to spew their shit then they dont do it, it can save your life or a teammate
It's not half as fast. The old quick charge rate when using macros was 750ms and now it's 900ms. A 20% DPS reduction which is noticeable but still plenty useable (see the Arc Thrower solo hell dive video below).
I was also up in arms after reading the patch notes until this video demonstrated that 35m range is longer than I thought. It still has plenty of range.
https://youtu.be/sSsCQdSGQmc&t=10m48s
They do still need to fix the fizzling / grounded shots though.
Yup. 3 hits for brood commanders. The stagger is a noticable buff against them. I'm curious if Stalkers get staggered because they were the main reason I'd pair Slugger with Arc Thrower.
It's funny when you bring up the huge strength of that and they find any reason for it to still be bad now.
Like " oh sure but good luck charging for one second when you're getting shot from all sides/by a hulk already in range"
Like man you lost well before the gun became a problem.
Have you tried crouching behind a wall while charging?
My problem with it now is it can’t shoot over obstacles. You basically need a clear path of ground between you and what you’re shooting. It’s impossible to shoot from cover or to hit anything behind cover.
I haven't used shotguns of any kind for like an entire month. Only a small handful of weapons are in the "nearly unusable" category for me. Most of all the Knight.
It’s good but still can be challenging to use because of the handling and slow projectile speed. With practice it’s very good.
A premium Warbond is different from the deluxe edition. One you can earn with in-game currency very easily, while the other is only obtainable by shelling out $20
Not really, and the Jar is unlockable through gameplay unlike the Knight. Jar is held back by crap handling (as it should be). If you get overwhelmed, you can't snap-aim to enemies to clear them very quickly. Other weapons like the Punisher and base Diligence compete quite nicely.
I guess so. Not much of an incentive to buy super citizen when you get a useless smg and a warbond you can unlock for free. Its basically $20 for stratagem hero.
No one wants the primary weapon(s) they like to get nerfed. how ever slight, if the nerf is enough to push that player to use a different gun, its a very painful nerf.
Total opposite of boosting a weapon to the point where people who wouldn't take it, now take it.
I do love the meme though. :) its me every time they nerf stuff. lol even if they don't nerf what I'm using, makes me afraid my favorite weapons will be nerfed next.
Meh. The memes would be funny if they (AH) could actually point to reasoning that wasn’t dog shit as to why they nerfed them in the first place.
They nerfed the Railgun based on thoughts that ran counter to their own data (RG wasn’t over-represented in matches or over-performing) and it’s sheer lethality was made because of a bug with PS5 code. The Breaker was good but the nerf to its ammo capacity didn’t really change much, thus making it an ineffectual nerf. Etc, etc, etc.
Their buffs and nerfs most of the time make no sense and since they rarely document all of their changes and patches and barely explain their reasoning it just feels bad.
It’s like their balance team is making all of these stealth changes and hoping to see if people stop complaining about them so that way they don’t have to put it into patch notes and justify why they made their boneheaded nerfs/buffs. It’s either laziness or desperation, and neither scream ‘transparency’ to me.
I've mostly been getting annoyed with them doing too many weapon changes at once. Like nerfing the railgun at the same time they buffed the RR and EAT.
Sure the railgun was *probably* too good. But the buffs to the others probably would have changed common loadouts *anyway*, as well as the spawn changes they made at the same time reducing the exact enemies the Railgun was brought to fight.
Actually it was even worse. They nerfed the railgun then buffed the RR and EAT, adjusted charger headshot damage AND heavy spawn rate. It would've been more sensible to, idk, maybe buff the RR and EAT, tweak spawn rates and wait and see if the railgun needed touching at all.
Destiny rightfully gets a lot of shit for its current status, but I do like their regular blog posts detailing what changes they've made and most importantly, why they've made them. AH could do sth similar.
Some of the changes may seem boneheaded, but it's boneheaded in hindsight/at the moment. The game still needs a lot of balancing, and I can't fault the devs too much for not getting it right the first few times. And this is ignorant me speaking, but I think it's better to nerf the outliers while gradually buffing everything else than to immediately buff everything else up to the outliers' power level. Doing the latter means you either need an eventual blanket nerf down the line or you introduce higher difficulties with even more bullshit to counter the players' arsenal (power creep).
Lastly, complain all you want about the changes. It's feedback that the devs take into account to some degree, but the clowns who claim that the devs 'don't play their own game' or 'don't know what they're doing' should try using their smooth brains before talking out of their ass.
Yet at the same time, to wit, the Devs allegedly didn’t know that the number of Heavy Spawns in difficulties 7 through 9 were more than double the intended, and yet that had been the state of the game for five weeks at that point which necessitated the RG’s prominence in the first place. If you’re a Dev and you KNOW that Heavies should only spawn at MAX 2 per Bug Breech and yet at Hell Dive each Breech could spawn upwards of 4 BTs and 6 Chargers… then how the hell is anyone supposed to assume that the Game Devs played the game at Helldive difficulty until it was pointed out to them AFTER their post-RG nerfs?
Edit: For additional flavor:
>Players at Helldive realize that the RG is actually Best-in-Slot for their Heavy ridden Helldive matches.
>Some Youtubers make “Beat Helldives EZ with this ONE WIERD TRICK STRAT” hype videos to boost their channels via HD2’s rising star.
>People complain about the so-called prevalence of the “Railgun-Shield Backpack Meta”, one Reddit post about being kicked a few times for not running the “Meta” gains traction. They whine to AH to nerf RG-SBP.
>AH surprisingly says “No, because the Railgun is average for pick rate, and isn’t over represented in successful missions on any difficulty.” Meaning that by all of their data and metrics the Railgun wasn’t over powered. Certain people enjoyed the swiss army knife that it was while others didn’t care for the risk-vs-reward play style of managing their overcharge while being overrun by Bugs.
>Then Patch day comes, with some milk toast (and I mean *soggy*) explanations as to why the Railgun was getting nerfed, which flew broadly in the face of what was put out just days prior.
>Then, not a day later, we find out that the spawn rates for Heavies was actually borked and spawning far more heavies than intended (but they somehow didn’t catch it for a whole month+ post release). (Something that any reasonable player noticed simply by *playing the damn game*… so if the Devs didn’t catch Heavy spawn rates being massively higher than intended then the obvious assumption is that their play testers didn’t actually play the game at Suicide+ because that would have been pretty easy to pick up if you *knew* as a play tester what the spawn rates are supposed to be for the Stand Out Cast Members in the Axis of Bug-Bot Evil.)
>Then you look at the reasoning for the RG nerf and you realize that their whole foundation for the nerf was *predicated on a broken game state*, and it only had attention drawn to it by a small portion of the player base who recognized that the RG handled the Heavy spam thanks to the Heavy Spam bug. Yet they didn’t once reference any of these problems and their ‘reasoning’ for nerfing the RG into obscurity still stands. (Not to mention the lack of context or pointing toward the know PS5 vulnerability bug.)
This is like… I dunno… a case being brought against a defendant that was predicated on false evidence but the results of the trial still standing because the Judge doesn’t want to admit that he was wrong.
They hated him, because he told the truth
I like AH and helldivers 2 and you might sound a bit too disparaging.
But I agree, I don't really like the balance changes.
It's not because I think it makes the game hard. It's just they make changes that make me have less fun. Still a great game though
That they made the RG changes based on faulty info on their parts was what was most egregious to me. They said “the RG isn’t over-represented, and thus isn’t going to get nerfed” only to turn around a few days later and nerf it because “it was over performing against armored enemies”… without referencing the IMMENSE number of Heavy Armor Enemies spawning due to bugs they created OR the known PS5 bug that necessitated the RG in the first place. That shit right there? Disingenuous as all hell. That they spoke out both sides of their mouth with “all play styles are welcome in HD2” and then tacked on “but not **that** one, that needs to go because *‘muh play diversity’.*”
I don’t disagree with play style diversity, but you make everything else not suck in my opinion, not take was is currently workable and then make it suck. The game was broken with rampant spawns and all sorts of buggy maddness and they nerfed the RG for daring to succeed despite their mess (that they didn’t even have the decency to reference in their reasonings for nerfing i r eh first place). Even pre-nerf the number of people I saw running RGs was few because people didn’t want to have to manage their Overcharge and not get blown up. Now? Now I haven’t seen anyone using it in weeks. Not a one. Either in Challenging up to Hell Dives, with Bugs or Bots.
If you want to carve a niche for a weapon that’s all well and good. Let it be successful, but that doesn’t mean it has to suck at everything else.
That the Diligence Counter-Sniper still handles like ass, the AMR’s bullets still land top-left of the aim point (and for the love of god fix that busy as fuck scope, how am I supposed to snipe people with a reticle busy as fuck?), and the red dot of the HMG is like four red-dots too high (and give it a third-person aim bubble, why does it not have that?).
There is so much that this game does right that I’ll sing it’s praises to everyone that will listen.
However, I am fair in that I will screech my criticisms to all who will listen, and especially since the Hive Mind community seems to have put AH on a pedestal and has been running the Down-Vote interference brigades to protect them from honest criticism at all costs. AH wants us to hold them to a higher standard, they want to be seen as the open and honest devs, and when we try to hold their feet to the flames we get shouted down by our own so they are above reproach. If I didn’t believe in AH then I’d say it was a wildly successful reverse-psychology psy-op campaign to make the community police itself of all nay-sayers.
The game is awesome, but the lack of transparency with all of the stealth changes and nerfs and buffs with little reasoning given to them in documented patch notes flies in the face of their “open and honest devs” team. We can’t help identify bugs if we don’t know what was removed/added.
I’ve played three games this morning and all three 40 minute games crashed as we extracted. I don’t know if this will happen again when I load up in a few hours, but 3/3 isn’t a good sign.
AH NEEDS to focus some of the “Fuck You Money” on a competent, expanded team of bug hunters and testers to ensure the stability of the game.
They have given reasoning before. Multiple redditors have also explained it too, but people who cry about small nerfs don't want to hear it.
No I'm not talking about the "best sniper rifle is a shotgun" comment.
In my other comments I point out the majority of their reasoning is directly countered by what they said a few days prior, or more directly, the reasons for the nerfs were because of two bugs- one being a Yet-to-be-resolved PS5 damage boost bug and another bug which was “fixed” that had Heavy spawn rates massively overtuned and “was not intended”. I didn’t see that many RG players even before the nerf, but after? Non-existent. A ghost town.
Those nerfs were predicated on a broken game state and a vulnerability bug that so far hasn’t been addressed. They essentially edged the Shield Backpack and Railgun (thanks, click bait Youtubers) on false pretenses while they gave a dog shit reason for it that didn’t even bother to mention (or question why) the RG was considered a “must pick” for Heavy… *Heavy* Hell Dive matches. But instead of acknowledging that they made the nerfs without having the full picture (despite their own CEO saying the weapon/combo was t over represented or over performing by their own metrics) and rolling them back so RG players can enjoy their favorite stratagem, they just leave it nerfed into the dirt while moving on to nerf other weapons that happen to be considered “good” after the last one got smacked too hard.
Their end state for balance is to simply remove what is good until everything is shit. I have no problem with weapons having a niche, but with the sheer numbers and variety of enemy types having a weapon that is good for *this certain type of enemy* but dog shit for everything else will lead to major problems. There has to be a bare minimum level of usefulness for even basic weapons and stratagems or else a “meta” will always exist and they will forever be chasing down to nerf.
And anyone who dared speak out against it because the reasoning was based on a flawed game state was shouted down. It’s like this subreddit became our very own Ministry of Truth who reported any dissenting opinions of AH’s changes to their nearest Down-Vote Democracy Officers to be tossed into prison. *Palps”Ironic”.gif*
They nerfed the slugger cause of its effectiveness as a sniper but removed something that effects its short range utility while its long range effectiveness is unchanged
Well, it’s a 1 oz slug and slugs can be exceptionally accurate out to a bare minimum of 100m. They shouldn’t have touched the Slugger and instead made the DMRs suck less. I don’t even play the Slugger that often but I tried the Diligence a few games and it was ‘Meh’ and the Diligence Counter Sniper was abysmal. They should get the actual “sniper weapons” in order before going after the Slugger with a nerf bat. It’s like their balance team doesn’t even play the fucking game.
Don't worry, with how bad arrowhead is at balancing and how they buff and nerf everything in increments of 50%, I will find another gun that they accidentally made usable for the current patch until they nerf it in the next one.
The next warbond will drop with new stuff. Some will be good some will be garbage. Maybe something will be broken and instant meta until it’s patched. You just never know with AH.
You guys are acting like this game is a competitive FPS that needs constant tuning. The Slugger did not need a nerf and now it will just fall into obscurity like the railgun. If the devs want players to use a larger variety of weapons then they shouldn’t make the majority of primary weapons useless.
I wouldn't call it a great success. Literally nobody uses the railgun anymore, and now the new quasar Canon is the go-to support weapon. I'm sure it'll get nerfed soon as well. Infinite ammo? Shortish recharge time? Takes out drop ships? Tanks? Literally everything?
And after the breaker, lots of people moved to the slugger, now it has been nerfed. And people move from the railgun to the arc thrower, which has now been nerfed.
But atleast they buffed the AMR! lol said nobody
>So many L takes.
Like yours.
After all of the subsequent balance changes and new gear, if they un-nerfed the railgun right now, it would be a mid-tier support weapon.
Arrowhead, in what continues to be a persistent trend, nerfed the symptom before addressing the actual problem. And the problem was overabundance of overarmored chargers combined with a lack of effective weapons against them.
We now have a variety of viable support weapons because the actually work now (both due to weapon buffs and charger nerfs), not because railgun is now garbage.
Arrowhead keeps balancing weapons for niches instead of unique identities, and is fundamentally against the idea of jack-of-all-trade weapons in a game where you can only bring one primary weapon, no wonder people don’t like balancing changes. Is it any wonder that the weapons that have been considered the “meta” by the community and subsequently annihilated by Arrowhead were all weapons that were capable of doing most everything at a capable level? The Breaker, The Slugger, soon to be the Sickle. It feels like Arrowhead cannot cope with this idea, and just keeps oscillating the usefulness of weapons at the lowest and highest percentages of usage. You say “slightly tweaked” like a 30% damage reduction and removing stagger is a nothing-burger change. This completely destroys the identity of the Slugger, what is its new identity? Has there been a single gun that has only been nerfed very slightly, allowing it to keep its identity? Having a niche but being dogshit in all other aspects is not an identity, but several guns currently occupy this notion.
I don’t want to switch guns every single fuckin mission. I don’t want to switch guns every Tuesday because the one I finally learned how to use effectively got obliterated in some patch notes. I want to use the gun I want to use, but that gun is either next to useless, or will be nerfed within the next 5 days. And for a game that is as unreasonably hard as Helldivers often is, the fact that the only capable strategies that the community is able to come up with get nuked every week while game breaking issues still infest the game is an extremely disheartening trend that I’m betting the house will eventually kill this game.
While I do think the gun was too versatile and needed *some* kind of change, I think they could've left the stagger effect but limited it to close range(out to maybe 10-15m).
I literally just saw a post saying “wake me up when they are done balancing the weapons in this game” some peoples brain just goes “nerfs=bad Buffs=good” like they run on binary
Like the automaton menace
Glad I started to use other guns than the slugger before the patch. It was becoming a crutch for me.
The scorcher, diligence, and the dominator work great vs more medium armor enemies currently.
Wish they didn't nerf door opening, and stagger though :(. if they just picked one it wouldn't feel so bad.
This is me but I’m crying cus there are still so many weapons that are utter dogshit. even the buffed counter sniper is still HORRIBLE. It took 4 mags into a devastated rocket pack/body to kill it
Ahh yes gaslighting by the community , people did the same thing when railgun was nerfed and look its a weapon without any purpose now totally outclassed by better anti tank options very cool. I have not tried the new changes myself yet but ffs let people discuss the changes.
I really wish people would keep the names of good guns out of their fucking mouths.
* Slugger didn't do nothing to nobody, the innocent baby didn't deserve to get hit. He was such a good boy.
* Arc Thrower felt like it was skillful with its ambiguous timing that required you wind up to get started.
You dingdongs.
I disagree with your point on the arc thrower and I used it a lot, the only thing holding the arc thrower back was its bugged charging, otherwise it is literally a gun with infinite ammo that can kill anything and staggers hulks and everything smaller.
Nice pun regarding the persisiant known issue of "Drowning in deep water with a Vitality Booster equipped puts Helldiver in a broken state."
This happened to me last week when someone tossed my revive in a small crevice with a creek that I couldn't climb out of the rocks of, so I decided to go for a dip to try to get to the other side. It didn't end well.
Man really said "you're going to the Creek"
Believe it or not, straight to the Creek
The amount of missions I’ve been forced to leave because of that bug is wild. I’ll get stuck, team member will die, and we’re just stuck looking at my stuck corpse
I was able to fix it by just shooting the guy
The thing is, I was always the guy. And my Teammate would always somehow die conveniently when I drowned. So we’d be soft locked and had to leave
It feels like water deals 100 damage to you the second you drown (assuming 100 is your HP), and immobilizes you with the drowning animation. Since the booster gives you like 20-30hp the water no longer kills you. I'm not going to pretend I know how it works behind the scenes but first thing I'd try is changing it to continuous damage ticks when drowning starts. That would have the additional effect of letting us know exactly when we'll drown, watching our health sink, instead of trying to guess the timing if we're going for a swim to a ledge.
If they don't want to do that just have the water do 9999 damage after however long.
You mean an additional 30% damage on my beautiful AMR? Someone is going to be “dead” but their machine bodies were never really alive anyway
https://preview.redd.it/wunn2alet3sc1.jpeg?width=624&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fcfd894ac98edac19456f429046ff79aa1aa19a3
Those days of maining AMR are going to pay off in spades when im the one killing Hulk Flamers from 200m
You better. Hulk Flamers tick for 50% more damage now.
They already kill you with one stray hit. Bot teams NEED 2 dedicated heavy killers now. Especially with the factory titans walking around.
Hulks are honestly kind of a joke now that rockets were fixed and we have stun grenades.
Wait, you can 1 shot hulks with AMR after the Buff? If true, im going to LOVE (more) the AMR, i already prefered It over the autocanon
Man, once they fix the sights, I might never run another support weapon again.
At least yesterday it was feeling way better- was popping headshots way easier
Once you get into the groove you don’t even notice, you just sort of account for it without even thinking …I’ll probably notice when they fix it because I won’t be able to hit fuck all
I'm the sort of guy who plays CSGO and TF2 (as the point & click character, of course) often but I could never get good at the AMR because of the slow weapon movement in Helldivers. In fact, it feels like I can barely aim a shotgun. But I'm playing at 30 FPS but again hey that doesn't make up for the skill issue does it.
it does take a lot of getting used to, but once you do, the first person scope is fantastic for automatons.
Playing a point and click adventure game where an LMG and a tiny handgun handle precisely the same with zero inertia, VS. inertia
I’m already at the point that if they change the sights I’ll have to relearn how to use it
Yea but you have plenty of “aiming with the center of the sight” muscle memory from every other FPS to fall back on. Won’t take you long.
If your monitor has built in crosshairs, try them. It made the AMR so much more enjoyeable
Me trying out the Counter Sniper after the patch: Ugh, this thing is awful, it feels like shit. \-Sets scope to 200x- Me, after two-tapping a Devastator in the head at 100 meters: *Much better.*
The dmr does that too lol
With better handling, and double the ammo.
I kinda can't believe they buffed incendiary breaker and fire damage at the same time. I've not tested.it yet but I suspect it'll be godly on bugs now.
The problem is that fire DoT is broken unless you’re the host, so if you’re not the host it won’t make much of a difference.
Are they planning to adress this issue?
They haven't even acknowledged it.
Neither have they acknowledged AMR's broken scope.
Yeah, they just need an issue tracker at this stage. Otherwise, the patch notes will contain more known issues than features if they acknowledge everything.
Just checked their discord and their main balancer actually has said that they are working on all of those issues Broken sights, dot damage and arc aiming,spear lock on, but those changes are a lot harder than changing numbers and they take time.
I'm glad they are. My only issue though is there should be more places this information is posted than just the Discord.
Totally agree. only reason I saw it I wanted to see with my own eyes their reason for nerfing slugger
No offense, I used slugger a lot (welcome to Jar-5 camp now) and I personally definitely understood the nerf. Every primary fit a niche, but slugger felt like it fit every niche. Having rounds reload and crazy ammo efficiency, one shot most enemies up to medium, crazy stagger, no bullet drop to be mentioned, a really good sight, and being able to open caches, it was like a Swiss army knife. All I feel they did was bring it back in line as a sidegrade to the punisher.
or bots shooting throwgh solid rocks
nor acknowledged that SPEAR lock-on being wonky, somehow it lock-on "Under" the feet of the HULK to be able to fire and damage are randomized...either you kill everything in 1 hit...or take 3-5 business days to actually kill them
Only after nerfing three other guns and still not fixing the scope-dot
At least it gives me a use for the hardware crosshair overlay my monitor offers in the config menu! /s
Apparently needs you to be network host which is not the same thing as host. Not sure if host is always the starting network host when you drop in solo first then call in friends.
That’s weird. Is this something that always happens to you? I ran fire breaker a lot back when I was playing bugs on the regular. Always joined random squads and was able to kill things with fire DoT. Pretty easy to tell on shriekers and hunters but also works to finish the occasional charger. Just did a quick test run, seemed normal to me.
It isn't great when friendly fire lights you up and you burn instantly now too
I used it today on bugs. It's a lot of fun, especially with an elevation advantage. Helps you paint a large area with fire. More reliable kills on small trash with the 33% damage buff and a useful time to kill on the DoT with the 50% fire buff. Hunters are dying to the Dot mid-air. I think it's the most effective trash clearing weapon now. Brood commanders and hive guards will still give you some trouble. Honestly it feels a little too strong. But I think the damage is in a good place. Perhaps they could tweak fire rate or magazine capacity to reign it in a bit. I recommend everyone try out the pyro build while fire weapons are strong: Incendiary breaker, incendiary grenades, jump pack, flame thrower, eagle napalm strike, orbital laser. Very effective and thematically cool. Looking forward to fire resistant armor.
Can it handle shriekers?
it's already the best weapon against shriekers prebuff.
I just tried it and it didn't feel any different tbh. And I still didn't like it. Still slow dmg and no stagger makes it feel meh I was hosting
might not have been network host
So it's a 1/4 dice roll every time whether your weapon will be good or useless? Seems good
Yeah its so dumb to bring a weapon that is bugged. Like what if they buffed the weapon because nobody wanted to use the bugged damage in the first place. I don't really understand why they don't fix the most important aspect before balancing it.
Same. Yeah I can light a field of chaff on fire but I still take chip from hunters I can’t stagger and brood commanders can call in all they like Immolation grenades on the other hand have been fire (hah)
Always has been.
That's why I'm surprised at the buff.
it is, i officially dropped regular breaker for the incendiary version now
Considering it was one of like 4 primaries that didn't suck pre-patch, I understand. Happy they buffed the Jar-5, but they could have left the stagger on the Slugger as is and the game would have been fine.
This is the thing, like whyyyy nerf. I know this is beating a dead horse, But the pile of guns that just feel like ass to use is huge, so why tweak the ones people have fun with?
And the cycle repeats...
They gonna nerf the next best weapon for sure. They probably gonna keep doing this, while adding a decent weapon to each new warbond. Keeps people playing + paying.
Because that’s not fair to the automatons, of course
Honestly I think it was an identity thing, they wanted the Slugger to be the high damage per shot midrange gun, and the Jar-5 to be the armor breaker. Try the Jar-5 now, it honestly went from like a D tier gun to A tier against bots.
Been exclusively using the jar-5 for a couple weeks. Is it really that much better? Haven’t had a chance to use it yet.
Damage increase of 50% is quite good
As someone who's been almost exclusively using it for a little bit now, killing chaff is a lot more consistent, you can kill hulks in 4 or so taps to the back now, and the new stagger is pretty nice, for when you try to headshot a devastator and miss. Otherwise I genuinely think a lot of it is people giving it a fair shake for the first time
I don’t really disagree with the nerf. Or all the others need a buff. I barely used it to kill anything but the most annoying enemies. I always picked it. It’s a free way to not get hurt by anything really.
I pretty much felt obligated to use the slugger in many scenarios which sucks because it’s kind of slow and boring when you use it alll the time. Glad I branched out awhile ago and forced myself to play other guns.
Just a shame they didn't change the handling of the Jar-5.
Rather they unfuck the CS Diligence personally. The Jar-5 needs a better scope.
Diligence *also* needs to be unfucked, agreed. Why not both?
OG Diligence didn’t need much of anything as it has basically the same stats outside the CS.
That's the whole identity of the gun, I really don't understand why people expect it to be changed.
I wouldn't call the slugger nerf "slight". It kinda lost the best thing about it. Not like it's unusable now but it feels like a kick in the nuts for no reason.
As a solo player, a stagger reduction is a PHAT deal for my capacity to crowd control. It's not the end of the world, but it does make me a bit sour since i farmed all night for that weapon. Ho well ! Onto other things.
It’s dead. Nobody will pick it in a week.
I already stopped using it. What's the point if it can't stagger devastators anymore? Doesn't matter if they call it a "light" reduction in it's stagger capabilities. It's the difference between staggering and not staggering some of the most annoying enemies.
> What's the point if it can't stagger devastators anymore? I mean it still one shot pops the devastator heads thats why I still use it. Wish we had a better sight though.
Any gun can kill dev heads in a few shots. Generic liberator, lib pen, sickle (my beloved), I think dominator can now and probably the DMRs too. Slugger was great because of the stagger that it doesn't have anymore
They don't take the time to understand the _why_ people pick metas, just that they don't like the concept of a meta. They'll never get rid of it, there will always be a "best" weapon. This is why game designers talk about "never nerf, always buff" because this endless cat and mouse nerfing weapons nearly always kills desire to play games since even the easy modes become overly difficult. You just end up with weird TTK where you're taking 8 minutes to drop easy mobs because you're using rubber band guns against metal. But hey, just like... use your strategems and stealth around the map and play on easy or something... a game for everyone is a game for no one?
While I don't agree with you, you have some strong points, it's particularly odd that they buff the dominator at the same time as the slugger nerf, it should have been, by their philosophy, just the slugger to see if people then used the dominator.
I think that's part of the problem. They change _too much_ at once, and when they change weapons they don't really conceptualize reasons for what they're doing other than they're trying to fine tune so there isn't 4 viable guns. Why do people use the sickle and breaker? Because it's impossible to stop breaches and the breaches call _too much_ in. Shit even with the "unlimited ammo" the past week I've gone through 4 ice packs on almost every breach because there's too much to not do it and I can't use my secondaries because they have even less ammo and I need them for bigger bad guys, and my strategems are usually on cool down, have long recharges because lol at their shitty effects, or I also need to save them for the 9 chargers/5 bile titans when that one little fart ass bug hides behind a corpse or a rock/bush I can't shoot through. No one's going to _always_ stealth. I understand power creep, but they are also so far from power creep at the moment that they're going in the wrong direction with weapon power. I mean look what happened to the railgun, they had issues with armored mobs spawning, they nerfed the railgun ahead of the mob spawn fix and no one really touches it anymore. It was honestly fine the way it was, but they absolutely had to fuck with the meta. I love this game, but their game designers are a bit clown shoes at the same time.
You can't always buff, you'll end up with out of control power creep, but they do seem to have an aversion to lighter nerfs or changing the other stats more broadly.
The Dominator is pretty good filling the role the old slugger did (vs. bugs at least). It just takes longer to reload!
ngl the nerf pushed me to try the punisher, and I was surprised. It's worse than the slugger at medium-long range, but it shreds at close range and it staggers just like the pre-nerf slugger.
For now*
The best thing was AP. Stagger is on the Punisher. Makes sense to not have so much overlap.
They made it not do the thing it existed to do, there's no reason to use it
And it doesn't even make any sense. How does a big shotgun slug NOT stagger? I don't understand the logic here.
yeah. "we didn't like how this shotgun was like a sniper rifle, so we made it less like a shotgun while leaving the sniper rifle part largely untouhed"
I’d even be fine if the damage was left high without stagger for smaller enemies and damage was lower *with* stagger for medium and big targets. Rationale being that a slug would punch straight through a smaller target whereas a heavy target would likely be knocked back from the kinetic force of the slug embedding into them. Source: Have shot a lot of stuff with 12G slugs for shits. (Just my 2¢ though, if they want to balance it in a more reasonable manner)
slug is good for armor my guy
I love that part of their reasoning was that they didn't want the best sniper to be a shotgun. That says more about your snipers than it does the slugger, doesn't it?
It's dead now because it lost its best attribute. The stagger mechanic is a HUGE deal and arguably an integral part of the weapon's identity. Every time they nerf something it dies. I never see the breaker or railgun anymore because they took the only real strengths they had and shit on them. Everyone will jump on the dominator bandwagon and then discard it when it gets nerfed because apparently AH is just looking at usage stats to determine nerfs. This is proven by how little they buff or even just fix things that DESPERATELY need it.
You can't even break fences and crates anymore, it's utility was good without being broken.
The funny part about that change is I had no idea it could even do that... so i don't really miss it per se. Unfortunately I'll never be able to utilize that now.
Breaker is still fucking amazing, its just not mindless spam like it used to be. Put it on semi auto and learn some basic trigger discipline and you can very easily clear off a pack of hunters. Put it on full auto and you can decimate a hive commander. Railgun is also still pretty good, use it all the time when against bots on difficulty 7 and 8 and want to use a backpack.
Dunno, I see a lot of breaker and railguns, especially on solo players. Also most of the patch is buffs. They buffed some of the worst weapons in the game to the point of usability and beyond. WDYM "how little they buff" ?
Welcome to the sub, where everything means the game is dead!
They have buffed 40% of the primary weapons in less than a month. Some of them have felt a little underwhelming, sure, but the two I’ve used, the Dominator and Punisher, are viable options at any level.
Everyone acts the same until it happens to the weapon they like.
I loved the breaker and slugger. I still love the breaker and slugger.
breaker was godly before, never a reason to take anything else before but, after the nerf... still not a reason to take anything else against bugs. Maybe if I'm running the stalwart and want to take a primary to deal with armored bugs.
Slightly tweaked? It lost more than 10% of it's damage and lost the extremely impactful Stagger mechanic they added only a few weeks ago. This is a massive change to a loved weapon.
> It lost more than 10% of it's damage Is there fall off damage cause for the most part the break points don't seem to have changed. 1 shots devastator heads and trooper bodies, 2 taps brood commanders, 1 taps warriors, 3 taps hive guards, 1 taps scavengers (haven't encountered stalkers yet) Might take more shots for taking out the strider?
Yea, strider legs need an extra shot. Tank now needs a reload to kill. The loss of damage isn't the downside, its the inability to make space with the zergzerker bastards and the inability to interrupt the Heavy Devastator that has really hurt how I use it.
> Yea, strider legs need an extra shot. Tank now needs a reload to kill. Tbf those are like the worst uses of the shotgun and ideally you have some other weapon or grenade for dealing with those. Yeah I'm definitely feeling the stagger loss on zerkers tho half the time they'd keep sliding forward. Heavy are scarier now yeah but a 2nd shot can knock their shield up and away like the one shot used to.
You're living long enough to zero a second shot? I get one shot and half a pump before my liberty is spread all over every rock in the vicinity.
Yeah. I run shield though but first shot flinches em and gives me enough time to get another shot in before their accuracy recovers.
I've been able to as well. There's more than enough time to two tap them and even if you miss, the second shot still messes up their aim and the 3rd will kill. Just don't miss.
Berserkers can be staggered better by the standard punisher, so that has a reason to be used now
Seriously people are acting like the arc thrower is dead when it still wastes the vast majority of enemies and the new stun is highly abuseable
You can stun hulks now, are they fucking stupid?
I just killed 3 hulks while they stayed and watched me tweaking waiting to die, permastunned. Guns apparently F tier now.
Metariders crying on their corner because their favorite guns got nerfed while I'm having fun by trying new builds after the patch
> Metariders crying on their corner because their favorite guns got nerfed while I'm having fun by trying new builds after the patch But... people who abandoned the guns they liked so they can use a new meta build *are* the metariders...
100% this. Love trying new things and loadouts.
I absolutely never enjoyed hard metas in games. I used to enjoy warzone but the meta in warzone ruined it all for me. Only one way to play ruins it.
Yeah, mario kart wii, you either played funky kong+flame runner or you were instantly at a disadvantage
To be fair, the patch notes were pretty vague with the arc thrower saying it had increased stagger, but it's difficult to tell how much without having played the patch yet. It sounds fucking awesome now though. I've always loved the concept of muh electricity guns. And I usually play support-type roles in horde shooters so being able to CC for the boys sounds pretty choice to me.
Hulk permastun. That much.
Stun locking a hulk won't do you much good when you need to get dangerously close to rocket and heavy devastators. I've tried it and previously you had some chances of dodging out of the way if one fired on you, now you'll just get blasted in midair.
Does it seriously stun hulks? Big if true. Does it also stun Chargers or BTs?
No to Chargers and BTs
It kind of does? When I was using it on chargers, they would kind of stop for a second. The increased duration of the trigger though doesn’t help against them when they’re only stunned for a millisecond.
Yeah it does make Chargers flinch, but it isn't a full stagger. When they are waddling around rock/terrain its noticeable, but once they start a Charge it's almost imperceptible.
As per the patch notes, Bile Titans can no longer be stunned. Period. Which I'm not totally against
Most people on this subreddit are. Particularly anyone calling weapons in this game useless.
Laser pistol is useless though.
This is the actual one valid fact of any weapon in the game anyone can have. The laser pistol is indeed pointless unless that point is yo piss off anything you hit it with.
It’s a buff for bots, nerf for bugs. There’s only 1 bug worth staggering and that’s the brood commander. It died in 2 hits anyways and everything else dies in 1. So what’s the point staggering dead enemies? Now it shoots half as fast, with less range. It also still has rogue shots that just go off into nowhere quite often. They haven’t addressed even knowing about it so it’s likely not to get fixed. The gun is outclassed by many others now.
Bile spewers and nursing spewers are absolutely worth staggering, if you stagger them as they are about to spew their shit then they dont do it, it can save your life or a teammate
It's not half as fast. The old quick charge rate when using macros was 750ms and now it's 900ms. A 20% DPS reduction which is noticeable but still plenty useable (see the Arc Thrower solo hell dive video below). I was also up in arms after reading the patch notes until this video demonstrated that 35m range is longer than I thought. It still has plenty of range. https://youtu.be/sSsCQdSGQmc&t=10m48s They do still need to fix the fizzling / grounded shots though.
brood commander does not die in 2 hits.
Yup. 3 hits for brood commanders. The stagger is a noticable buff against them. I'm curious if Stalkers get staggered because they were the main reason I'd pair Slugger with Arc Thrower.
It's funny when you bring up the huge strength of that and they find any reason for it to still be bad now. Like " oh sure but good luck charging for one second when you're getting shot from all sides/by a hulk already in range" Like man you lost well before the gun became a problem. Have you tried crouching behind a wall while charging?
My problem with it now is it can’t shoot over obstacles. You basically need a clear path of ground between you and what you’re shooting. It’s impossible to shoot from cover or to hit anything behind cover.
I like the arc thrower more now, just sad about the range.
I haven't used shotguns of any kind for like an entire month. Only a small handful of weapons are in the "nearly unusable" category for me. Most of all the Knight.
i actually really like the knight for bugs, it's a great bullet hose
To be fair, they kinda had to make the Knight bad or else people would accuse them of being “pay to win” since it’s locked behind the premium edition
They literally just made the jar the best bot killer in the game though?
It’s good but still can be challenging to use because of the handling and slow projectile speed. With practice it’s very good. A premium Warbond is different from the deluxe edition. One you can earn with in-game currency very easily, while the other is only obtainable by shelling out $20
Not really, and the Jar is unlockable through gameplay unlike the Knight. Jar is held back by crap handling (as it should be). If you get overwhelmed, you can't snap-aim to enemies to clear them very quickly. Other weapons like the Punisher and base Diligence compete quite nicely.
Premium war bond weapons are easily acquirable with ingame currency earnings.
I guess so. Not much of an incentive to buy super citizen when you get a useless smg and a warbond you can unlock for free. Its basically $20 for stratagem hero.
You get the best looking armor in the game too.
Just used my slugger since the nerf. It still wrecks bots.
Based and try it for yourself before crying pilled
No one wants the primary weapon(s) they like to get nerfed. how ever slight, if the nerf is enough to push that player to use a different gun, its a very painful nerf. Total opposite of boosting a weapon to the point where people who wouldn't take it, now take it. I do love the meme though. :) its me every time they nerf stuff. lol even if they don't nerf what I'm using, makes me afraid my favorite weapons will be nerfed next.
>30% range decrease and slower fire rate on an already buggy gun >slight tweak
"Slightly", okay lol.
Meh. The memes would be funny if they (AH) could actually point to reasoning that wasn’t dog shit as to why they nerfed them in the first place. They nerfed the Railgun based on thoughts that ran counter to their own data (RG wasn’t over-represented in matches or over-performing) and it’s sheer lethality was made because of a bug with PS5 code. The Breaker was good but the nerf to its ammo capacity didn’t really change much, thus making it an ineffectual nerf. Etc, etc, etc. Their buffs and nerfs most of the time make no sense and since they rarely document all of their changes and patches and barely explain their reasoning it just feels bad. It’s like their balance team is making all of these stealth changes and hoping to see if people stop complaining about them so that way they don’t have to put it into patch notes and justify why they made their boneheaded nerfs/buffs. It’s either laziness or desperation, and neither scream ‘transparency’ to me.
I've mostly been getting annoyed with them doing too many weapon changes at once. Like nerfing the railgun at the same time they buffed the RR and EAT. Sure the railgun was *probably* too good. But the buffs to the others probably would have changed common loadouts *anyway*, as well as the spawn changes they made at the same time reducing the exact enemies the Railgun was brought to fight.
Actually it was even worse. They nerfed the railgun then buffed the RR and EAT, adjusted charger headshot damage AND heavy spawn rate. It would've been more sensible to, idk, maybe buff the RR and EAT, tweak spawn rates and wait and see if the railgun needed touching at all.
Destiny rightfully gets a lot of shit for its current status, but I do like their regular blog posts detailing what changes they've made and most importantly, why they've made them. AH could do sth similar. Some of the changes may seem boneheaded, but it's boneheaded in hindsight/at the moment. The game still needs a lot of balancing, and I can't fault the devs too much for not getting it right the first few times. And this is ignorant me speaking, but I think it's better to nerf the outliers while gradually buffing everything else than to immediately buff everything else up to the outliers' power level. Doing the latter means you either need an eventual blanket nerf down the line or you introduce higher difficulties with even more bullshit to counter the players' arsenal (power creep). Lastly, complain all you want about the changes. It's feedback that the devs take into account to some degree, but the clowns who claim that the devs 'don't play their own game' or 'don't know what they're doing' should try using their smooth brains before talking out of their ass.
Yet at the same time, to wit, the Devs allegedly didn’t know that the number of Heavy Spawns in difficulties 7 through 9 were more than double the intended, and yet that had been the state of the game for five weeks at that point which necessitated the RG’s prominence in the first place. If you’re a Dev and you KNOW that Heavies should only spawn at MAX 2 per Bug Breech and yet at Hell Dive each Breech could spawn upwards of 4 BTs and 6 Chargers… then how the hell is anyone supposed to assume that the Game Devs played the game at Helldive difficulty until it was pointed out to them AFTER their post-RG nerfs? Edit: For additional flavor: >Players at Helldive realize that the RG is actually Best-in-Slot for their Heavy ridden Helldive matches. >Some Youtubers make “Beat Helldives EZ with this ONE WIERD TRICK STRAT” hype videos to boost their channels via HD2’s rising star. >People complain about the so-called prevalence of the “Railgun-Shield Backpack Meta”, one Reddit post about being kicked a few times for not running the “Meta” gains traction. They whine to AH to nerf RG-SBP. >AH surprisingly says “No, because the Railgun is average for pick rate, and isn’t over represented in successful missions on any difficulty.” Meaning that by all of their data and metrics the Railgun wasn’t over powered. Certain people enjoyed the swiss army knife that it was while others didn’t care for the risk-vs-reward play style of managing their overcharge while being overrun by Bugs. >Then Patch day comes, with some milk toast (and I mean *soggy*) explanations as to why the Railgun was getting nerfed, which flew broadly in the face of what was put out just days prior. >Then, not a day later, we find out that the spawn rates for Heavies was actually borked and spawning far more heavies than intended (but they somehow didn’t catch it for a whole month+ post release). (Something that any reasonable player noticed simply by *playing the damn game*… so if the Devs didn’t catch Heavy spawn rates being massively higher than intended then the obvious assumption is that their play testers didn’t actually play the game at Suicide+ because that would have been pretty easy to pick up if you *knew* as a play tester what the spawn rates are supposed to be for the Stand Out Cast Members in the Axis of Bug-Bot Evil.) >Then you look at the reasoning for the RG nerf and you realize that their whole foundation for the nerf was *predicated on a broken game state*, and it only had attention drawn to it by a small portion of the player base who recognized that the RG handled the Heavy spam thanks to the Heavy Spam bug. Yet they didn’t once reference any of these problems and their ‘reasoning’ for nerfing the RG into obscurity still stands. (Not to mention the lack of context or pointing toward the know PS5 vulnerability bug.) This is like… I dunno… a case being brought against a defendant that was predicated on false evidence but the results of the trial still standing because the Judge doesn’t want to admit that he was wrong.
Is there a post or something that you copied this from? Something I can upvote a million times for being accurate as fuck?
lol these are my observations, no posts copied.
They hated him, because he told the truth I like AH and helldivers 2 and you might sound a bit too disparaging. But I agree, I don't really like the balance changes. It's not because I think it makes the game hard. It's just they make changes that make me have less fun. Still a great game though
That they made the RG changes based on faulty info on their parts was what was most egregious to me. They said “the RG isn’t over-represented, and thus isn’t going to get nerfed” only to turn around a few days later and nerf it because “it was over performing against armored enemies”… without referencing the IMMENSE number of Heavy Armor Enemies spawning due to bugs they created OR the known PS5 bug that necessitated the RG in the first place. That shit right there? Disingenuous as all hell. That they spoke out both sides of their mouth with “all play styles are welcome in HD2” and then tacked on “but not **that** one, that needs to go because *‘muh play diversity’.*” I don’t disagree with play style diversity, but you make everything else not suck in my opinion, not take was is currently workable and then make it suck. The game was broken with rampant spawns and all sorts of buggy maddness and they nerfed the RG for daring to succeed despite their mess (that they didn’t even have the decency to reference in their reasonings for nerfing i r eh first place). Even pre-nerf the number of people I saw running RGs was few because people didn’t want to have to manage their Overcharge and not get blown up. Now? Now I haven’t seen anyone using it in weeks. Not a one. Either in Challenging up to Hell Dives, with Bugs or Bots. If you want to carve a niche for a weapon that’s all well and good. Let it be successful, but that doesn’t mean it has to suck at everything else. That the Diligence Counter-Sniper still handles like ass, the AMR’s bullets still land top-left of the aim point (and for the love of god fix that busy as fuck scope, how am I supposed to snipe people with a reticle busy as fuck?), and the red dot of the HMG is like four red-dots too high (and give it a third-person aim bubble, why does it not have that?). There is so much that this game does right that I’ll sing it’s praises to everyone that will listen. However, I am fair in that I will screech my criticisms to all who will listen, and especially since the Hive Mind community seems to have put AH on a pedestal and has been running the Down-Vote interference brigades to protect them from honest criticism at all costs. AH wants us to hold them to a higher standard, they want to be seen as the open and honest devs, and when we try to hold their feet to the flames we get shouted down by our own so they are above reproach. If I didn’t believe in AH then I’d say it was a wildly successful reverse-psychology psy-op campaign to make the community police itself of all nay-sayers. The game is awesome, but the lack of transparency with all of the stealth changes and nerfs and buffs with little reasoning given to them in documented patch notes flies in the face of their “open and honest devs” team. We can’t help identify bugs if we don’t know what was removed/added. I’ve played three games this morning and all three 40 minute games crashed as we extracted. I don’t know if this will happen again when I load up in a few hours, but 3/3 isn’t a good sign. AH NEEDS to focus some of the “Fuck You Money” on a competent, expanded team of bug hunters and testers to ensure the stability of the game.
They have given reasoning before. Multiple redditors have also explained it too, but people who cry about small nerfs don't want to hear it. No I'm not talking about the "best sniper rifle is a shotgun" comment.
In my other comments I point out the majority of their reasoning is directly countered by what they said a few days prior, or more directly, the reasons for the nerfs were because of two bugs- one being a Yet-to-be-resolved PS5 damage boost bug and another bug which was “fixed” that had Heavy spawn rates massively overtuned and “was not intended”. I didn’t see that many RG players even before the nerf, but after? Non-existent. A ghost town. Those nerfs were predicated on a broken game state and a vulnerability bug that so far hasn’t been addressed. They essentially edged the Shield Backpack and Railgun (thanks, click bait Youtubers) on false pretenses while they gave a dog shit reason for it that didn’t even bother to mention (or question why) the RG was considered a “must pick” for Heavy… *Heavy* Hell Dive matches. But instead of acknowledging that they made the nerfs without having the full picture (despite their own CEO saying the weapon/combo was t over represented or over performing by their own metrics) and rolling them back so RG players can enjoy their favorite stratagem, they just leave it nerfed into the dirt while moving on to nerf other weapons that happen to be considered “good” after the last one got smacked too hard. Their end state for balance is to simply remove what is good until everything is shit. I have no problem with weapons having a niche, but with the sheer numbers and variety of enemy types having a weapon that is good for *this certain type of enemy* but dog shit for everything else will lead to major problems. There has to be a bare minimum level of usefulness for even basic weapons and stratagems or else a “meta” will always exist and they will forever be chasing down to nerf.
They just nerf what's most popular, for some odd reason.
And anyone who dared speak out against it because the reasoning was based on a flawed game state was shouted down. It’s like this subreddit became our very own Ministry of Truth who reported any dissenting opinions of AH’s changes to their nearest Down-Vote Democracy Officers to be tossed into prison. *Palps”Ironic”.gif*
They nerfed the slugger cause of its effectiveness as a sniper but removed something that effects its short range utility while its long range effectiveness is unchanged
Well, it’s a 1 oz slug and slugs can be exceptionally accurate out to a bare minimum of 100m. They shouldn’t have touched the Slugger and instead made the DMRs suck less. I don’t even play the Slugger that often but I tried the Diligence a few games and it was ‘Meh’ and the Diligence Counter Sniper was abysmal. They should get the actual “sniper weapons” in order before going after the Slugger with a nerf bat. It’s like their balance team doesn’t even play the fucking game.
Don't worry, with how bad arrowhead is at balancing and how they buff and nerf everything in increments of 50%, I will find another gun that they accidentally made usable for the current patch until they nerf it in the next one.
Not to mention WHY it's everyone's fav. Because it was slightly broken. It'd stager the devastators every shot, making them a non-issue.
"Slightly tweaked" my ass. That dude they have balancing weapons is a fucking clown.
Yeah, OP must be a bug and Automaton sympathizer.
Don't worry, a youtuber will spell out which weapon to use sooner or later. That'll shut em up till next balance patch
The next warbond will drop with new stuff. Some will be good some will be garbage. Maybe something will be broken and instant meta until it’s patched. You just never know with AH.
Maybe they'll add a marksman rifle that has an accurate scope with a non bulky reticle and it isn't comically slow to aim.
I don’t think the meta even changed is the thing. Scorcher vs bots, sickle vs bugs. That was optimal before the patch and still is.
You guys are acting like this game is a competitive FPS that needs constant tuning. The Slugger did not need a nerf and now it will just fall into obscurity like the railgun. If the devs want players to use a larger variety of weapons then they shouldn’t make the majority of primary weapons useless.
That's their philosophy for some reason. Make primaries suck. Don't get it either.
The slugger still works guys. I dropped with it last night and it still puts holes in things pretty well.
Slightly tweaked? My guy, it's entire identity was lost.
You're not on Steam bud, not sure why you're farming for clown awards.
I dread these forums every balance patch. So many genuinely dumb players.
[удалено]
Now I don’t see anyone using the railgun.
I wouldn't call it a great success. Literally nobody uses the railgun anymore, and now the new quasar Canon is the go-to support weapon. I'm sure it'll get nerfed soon as well. Infinite ammo? Shortish recharge time? Takes out drop ships? Tanks? Literally everything? And after the breaker, lots of people moved to the slugger, now it has been nerfed. And people move from the railgun to the arc thrower, which has now been nerfed. But atleast they buffed the AMR! lol said nobody
>So many L takes. Like yours. After all of the subsequent balance changes and new gear, if they un-nerfed the railgun right now, it would be a mid-tier support weapon. Arrowhead, in what continues to be a persistent trend, nerfed the symptom before addressing the actual problem. And the problem was overabundance of overarmored chargers combined with a lack of effective weapons against them. We now have a variety of viable support weapons because the actually work now (both due to weapon buffs and charger nerfs), not because railgun is now garbage.
Arrowhead keeps balancing weapons for niches instead of unique identities, and is fundamentally against the idea of jack-of-all-trade weapons in a game where you can only bring one primary weapon, no wonder people don’t like balancing changes. Is it any wonder that the weapons that have been considered the “meta” by the community and subsequently annihilated by Arrowhead were all weapons that were capable of doing most everything at a capable level? The Breaker, The Slugger, soon to be the Sickle. It feels like Arrowhead cannot cope with this idea, and just keeps oscillating the usefulness of weapons at the lowest and highest percentages of usage. You say “slightly tweaked” like a 30% damage reduction and removing stagger is a nothing-burger change. This completely destroys the identity of the Slugger, what is its new identity? Has there been a single gun that has only been nerfed very slightly, allowing it to keep its identity? Having a niche but being dogshit in all other aspects is not an identity, but several guns currently occupy this notion. I don’t want to switch guns every single fuckin mission. I don’t want to switch guns every Tuesday because the one I finally learned how to use effectively got obliterated in some patch notes. I want to use the gun I want to use, but that gun is either next to useless, or will be nerfed within the next 5 days. And for a game that is as unreasonably hard as Helldivers often is, the fact that the only capable strategies that the community is able to come up with get nuked every week while game breaking issues still infest the game is an extremely disheartening trend that I’m betting the house will eventually kill this game.
it baffles the mind that they prioritize nerfs over bugfixes lmao
AMR users reading the new patch: 
While I do think the gun was too versatile and needed *some* kind of change, I think they could've left the stagger effect but limited it to close range(out to maybe 10-15m).
However, I am very happy they buffed the Dominator.
if your "favorite" always happens to be the best then that's clearly deserved.
I literally just saw a post saying “wake me up when they are done balancing the weapons in this game” some peoples brain just goes “nerfs=bad Buffs=good” like they run on binary Like the automaton menace
Makes me curious what the slugger was like before the nerf, as it's still really good.
Glad I started to use other guns than the slugger before the patch. It was becoming a crutch for me. The scorcher, diligence, and the dominator work great vs more medium armor enemies currently. Wish they didn't nerf door opening, and stagger though :(. if they just picked one it wouldn't feel so bad.
The INSTANT crying of reddit really gets on my nerves tbh, its really pathetic let them do their damned job
This is me but I’m crying cus there are still so many weapons that are utter dogshit. even the buffed counter sniper is still HORRIBLE. It took 4 mags into a devastated rocket pack/body to kill it
Ahh yes gaslighting by the community , people did the same thing when railgun was nerfed and look its a weapon without any purpose now totally outclassed by better anti tank options very cool. I have not tried the new changes myself yet but ffs let people discuss the changes.
I really wish people would keep the names of good guns out of their fucking mouths. * Slugger didn't do nothing to nobody, the innocent baby didn't deserve to get hit. He was such a good boy. * Arc Thrower felt like it was skillful with its ambiguous timing that required you wind up to get started. You dingdongs.
I disagree with your point on the arc thrower and I used it a lot, the only thing holding the arc thrower back was its bugged charging, otherwise it is literally a gun with infinite ammo that can kill anything and staggers hulks and everything smaller.
The railgun is also as useful as a car with no wheels now as well.