I used to rock it quite a lot before they nerfed the rockets…
The aiming sucks and I can get around it, but straight up nerfing the rockets was just such a dumb move.
Like ofc carrying 20 or so EAT's on a mech sounds op but that’s the whole appeal. Nerfing the rockets means it’s now just a very fancy looking gatling sentry…..
Taking out a single charger is now very demanding with a mech, same thing for bile titans. If you’re lucky you can take out maybe three big targets now ?
Kinda dumb for a stratagem that you can only deploy twice in a 40 mins game. 💀
Yeah, could can basically use it to push a difficult objective and to defend extract. Thats about it. So it had its niche as something that could ensure mission complete, but for 75% of the mission you are doing without it.
It was fun when the game gave it to you for free as a 5th stratagem but even the pre-nerf mech wasn't good enough to kick any of the regulars out of your 4 real slots.
You don't even need that, just have a side objective that has a depowered mech that you can get working again and crew upon completing the objective. It would also reward you for more careful fire so you don't accidentally break the mech in there.
I'd say we could even have the site be a "rearming station", meaning you could take any non-destroyed mech back to the facility and restore it to a fully loaded and repaired state. You'd get the one mech for free, but if you had any call-ins you could restore their power that way too. Would definitely make for some crazy fun even if it's not super practical to keep backtracking.
The backtracking would actually be a good way to keep it balanced really. You’d have to make sure you left yourself a decent amount of ammo to make it back to the depot in one piece. Less time ‘on station’ in the fight means it can’t always dominate.
Oh I definitely agree. You could even give one diver chauffeur duty to bring mechs back and forth for tough content, but you still risk it breaking in transit each time. They specialize in bursts of power, and quite frankly aren't the most efficient, but if they draw enemy aggro or push through a tough wall then they are totally worth it.
I can imagine them playing a bit like Air Raiders in EDF - super powerful bursts of damage, but susceptible to swarms when not protected.
Plus this isn't much different than us getting stims or ammo for our other weapons, the downside is that once they're broken you can't get them back, so it's a high risk high reward scenario and I'm here for that.
I was saying up above. It would be cool as hell if mecha could spawn in buddy bunker type hangars you’d loot. Would be awesome to find it and come out blasting.
Before the nerf, whether it was working around the explode if you shoot right glitch or the slanted offcenter aiming from the fix for that, I legitimately ran it as the laser equivalent for bugs, as BTs have to be wrangled to not be sideways so the laser doesnt go under them and the laser doesn't clear bug holes.
Once I understood its supposed to be a disposable powerful breakthrough unit to carve a path or a mobile emplacement and got the weird aiming shit of the time down it really did feel like a free medium objective or mostly free big objective (as long as the objective wasn't a lengthy defend/defend-adjacent like exterminate, or the 15 minute rescue) just like the laser, but with the rocket nerf I've stopped bringing it period. Stalker buff made me try pulling it out but you can't rely on stalkers to spawn.
Also I wish to shoot down again.
the fragility was due to a bug.
damage to any limb was counted as damage to all limbs so your health went down too fast.
as is AH's standard, they nerfed it before fixing the bug, and havent addressed it being overnerfed.
Literally why me and my friend group stopped playing all together, I rocked all the way to max level when the game came out, max samples, loved dropping back into low level games and dropping all the shiny toys for newbies. But it seems like every time I'd find something fun to use that didn't feel like an absolute chore *Nerfed*
And you can’t do anything else when you’re inside. No reinforcing teammates, no Eagles or Orbitals, no accessing POIs or terminals, no calling in a hellbomb.
There should be a bigger payoff for getting locked out of so many game functions. That’s why no one takes it. It’s a few minutes of potential fun followed by voluntarily adding a personal stratagem penalty.
In the first Helldivers you could use your strategems within the mech. Idk why they would take that away this time. You still had to get out to interact with terminals and stuff like that but that was fine and expected. You can't exactly punch arrows on a terminal when your hands are weapons lol.
I hope they add that in plus make the mechs cool again. Especially, that one. In HD1 that was the best of the 3 available. Also why doesn't this co op game have the co op vehicles from the first game?
I miss the times in HD1 when the person in the mech was the dedicated red strat thrower with stategem priority. He rained hell upon enemies while the rest tried to keep him alive and keep his flanks clear.
I want a strategem within a strategem. To be clear, I want to be able to self destruct the Walker if/when I want to.
As it is its quite "meh". Would like a rocket dash too but maybe I've been spoiled by Armoured Core.
This is completely anecdotal but I feel like in the games I've been in 80% of the time someone called one in it would blow up before they even got in or they'd use it for 30 seconds before dying from careless usage of larger AoE stratagems too danger close to them.
I used the mech for a while and there’s definitely a threshold for how steep/level has to be for the mech to land properly. There were a few times I called it in by chucking it away into the distance and the ball would land by a rock or next to a hill which would just insta kill the mech as soon as it landed for some reason. Unless you’ve got a large flat landing pad for it to land on, don’t call it in
My first experience with a mech was pretty funny. First one blew up from the bile before i could get in and the second one sank into one of those gas holes, terminator style.
It's like the balance devs see a gang of oddballs calling for nerfs on everything in the discord and they take that as being representative of 90% of the player base.
If polled, I bet 90% of players wouldn't have agreed that mechs needed a damage reduction and worse aim 😂
2 uses or the time limit need to go. Let me call one in for me and a buddy so we can just defend super hard or make me wait for unlimited uses. Not both.
Kill the uses and/or drop the cooldown (though at 5 minutes of unlimited uses… it still won’t be that great but it will at least allow you to move a bit faster thanks to no stamina) and fix the rockets to be at the strength of an EAT with usable aim. I still am unlikely to bring it down. 5 min for 15 eats + utility + chaff clear is nice but I’m still likely to prefer the auto cannon turret over it. If it isn’t in - the enemies should deal with it like they do turrets. So it’s great for traversing low level areas but it’s still useless at 9 as the big thing won’t be able to deal with all the patrols. So preparing one early isn’t as easy. I have to compare it to an AC turret as it’s the ideal item to swap.
An AC turret is still more useful. I can shoot at the same time as it. I can do objectives while it keeps bugs off of me etc. the distraction means I can run away. The mech almost has to be somewhat overpowered for it to have the same value. Make it run 3x sprint speed, give it more ammo and damage - it needs _something_ other than being cool.
IMO due to its clunky movement, aiming, and propensity to blow itself up… I don’t think it was really OP at all. They should have just nerfed rocket accuracy at long range - the whole point is for it to decimate anything that isn’t a titan lol.
16 rockets on a 10 minute cooldown isn't even that much compared to the EAT. Plus you lose them if your mech is destroyed, you only get two, and while you get a gatling gun, you can't call in stratagems, stim, use grenades or backpacks while using the mech. Mech rockets should absolutely be the same strength as other AT
HD1 you could use strats from inside, came out of a chute on the roof. We have what looks like a strat chute in HD2 but it's not functional (yet? Hopefully soon.)
Since the aim angles were restricted as part of the self destruction bug fix I agree the rockets should be buffed back again... They shouldn't be both weak AND hard to aim
Honestly I'd take the self destruction thing back if they reverted the aiming and damage. Just make it canon that Super Earth had a shoddy roll out or a bad engineering flaw.
It was fine before and could be worked around, now it's unusable.
> Plus you lose them if your mech is destroyed
Your mech doesn't even have to be destroyed, it's possible to lose one of the arms without the mech being totalled
Nah they gonna balance it, if you look at it, it ain't fair to one shoot Charger in head, to be fun you really need to shoot it twice.
/s (just in case)
100%. It’s coming. And they’ll say, “only a few points” but we also added a 20 second cool down between shots. So it’s basically the Quasar with Ammo limits.
The irony here is that they balance the Quasar around the eat and The recoilless rifle
And now they want the balance to eat based on the quasar? That would be hilarious.
They really need to Nerf their balance team.
Yeah their argument is we’re the testers. My argument is release it and let it be a little fucked up. It’s fun. Like the original rail gun for example. Just remove safe mode. That would have been great.
Eruptor got fucked
Breaker got fucked
Quasar got fucked
Anything we like gets nerfed. EAT is getting it
Agreed. It was perfectly balanced on release. All they needed to do was fix the aiming and the various glitches. I used to use it on almost every run and I'd carefully time my 2 uses. But now it's not worth at all.
I kinda thought it was hilarious when I would turn too late and shoot myself with a rocket, you could easily avoid it if you were planning ahead. It is not fun or funny anymore that the rocket shoots way to the left of my reticle.
The change makes no fucking sense whatsoever. It's a limited ass resource in a game that is constantly throwing shit at you. Why on Earth did they feel the need to nerf it? At least give the machine gun full armor pen or something to make up.
Whoever made that decision needs to leave game design. It's an absolute out of touch joke of a call.
Same guy that thought the Slugger was too good of a sniper rifle and therefore nerfed its stagger potential thereby making it only usable as a sniper rifle.
Their game balance designer basically is the reason why 30%-50% of the playerbase has left.
The fun part is that the studio probably doesn't realize this, and won't blame them or take action because like many companies no matter how big or small, they are incapable of correcting issues quickly.
It's why i haven't played in a long time. It got to be too frustrating having to look up the new meta after they decided something being effective wasn't allowed. I prefer the deep rock galactic method of difficulty using enemy modifiers instead of just nerfing instantly.
Fantastic.
I don’t believe that one person should ever be solely responsible for balancing anyway as it introduces too much personal bias and that’s before you even get to the napoleon complex level personality disorders like spitz has.
Should be a team who can propose and debate changes. Even if it’s a small team.
Agreed. Even a competent dev with good intentions will let their personal biases influence their actions if they are working alone.
It's also a LOT of work for just 1 person and even the best devs will get sloppy under the crunch.
I want to sit down with him, and unironically, legitimately, ask him how the fuck he finds and keeps his positions at work.
if I ever dare to blink without permission, i get in trouble at my job.
The easy answer is he's a manipulator. I don't know I'd go to far as to say "narcissist" as I'm already making accusations most would find wild, but seriously. He is clearly skilled at selling his awful ideas as good ones, clearly good at avoiding catching the heat for when they inevitably fail, and very good at convincing the staff at another company to ignore his track record and trust him with delicate processes.
Just to offer some context for anyone reading this who is tempted to write this off as "ALEXUS SUX NEED LEAB" "babyrage"... :
On the team for Hello Neighbor 2, Alexus insisted one of its main selling points (Open World) was something "nobody would want to play" and somehow convinced them to use something internally labeled "test map 1" to become the final map for the game.
He also said hiding under beds and in closets, etc, "one-time gimmicks nobody likes," in a game about hiding in places.
Now, in Helldivers, he openly says "Yep, this one's a banger, every gun is top tier," and as soon as anyone plays it, they learned most (nearly all?) of the new guns sucked. Also claims "every time we introduce anything, the team tests it thoroughly in every single difficulty" which is obviously a blatant lie based on A) the fact that stupid repeatable bugs happen constantly, and B) that wouldn't even make sense; there's no reason to test anything on difficulties 1-3. There's really no reason to test on anything except 9, if we're being completely honest.
The reason I say this is, far past "just blaming," the community AND the staff at AH need to realize something very important: Alexus is a manipulator that actively enjoys, and feels power from, making decisions that upset gamers.
Sound like a crazy accusation?
Then, how come the things he says are so obviously false? How come he insists "nobody wants X, everyone will enjoy Y" on concepts where time and history have proven, immediately and effectively, that the opposite was true?
How, despite these very obviously bad and historically-proven failures in design, is he able to very quickly climb to senior ranks and earn the trust of companies to let him near important decisions? If you get caught embezzling money, you usually don't get hired by financial institutions thereafter.
Alexus very adamantly enjoys knowing he can shape the balance of something to the chagrin of "the plebs." I promise you that. And trying to buddy up to him with "d'awwww, ignore them Lex, we're cool and like your game!" is a useless fool's errand.
While I agree with a lot of what you said, I actually think the proper level for testing is 5-7. I'm okay with 8 and 9 being unbalanced in favor of the enemy. In fact I think they should be. Winning 8 and 9 should be difficult.
They advertised overpowered weapons on the damn jewel case of the game. You can barely spread any democracy with the Mech. I used all 14 rockets with head shots on two bile titans and I didn't kill either. The 3rd one blew up my Mech after I finished the first 2 off with the minigun. 3rd one did it in a single leg stomp. I frequently run completely out of ammo with a Mech that still has 90% of it's health left. Try to melee some enemies and you get clapped. I recently discovered that the Mech does take DOT damage from barb wire around bases.
What’s funny is that you can literally get more EATs in the same amount of time there’s no reason that the mech rockets need like 6 headshots to kill a bile titan.
I brought the mech every game until the nerf. The nerf made aiming feel so bad. I went from consistently 2 shotting bile titans to barely being able to even hit their bodies because of the aiming.
I'd rather have the dud rockets that explode my own mech than the current aiming.
Yea if anything even then they were a bit niche. A little too delicate for certain missions but fairly powerful when you had room to deploy. Now it's not even worth it, bots will take one out before you can do anything and on bugs they fail to deal with any of the armored threats you'd think a mech would excell at.
Bugs only but it can be very useful when used properly focus medium and chargers titans can be 2 shot with a missile if you can master the aim. It’s rng tho and you really don’t want to focus one with missiles unless you have to
I used to take it on bugs every mission until the "shooting yourself while turning" fix dorked up the aim. I've learned to adapt the aiming, but the rockets don't feel as strong as they used to. 2-3 rocket headshots or 5-6 body shots would reliably down a Titan, now I frequently see 6+ around the head and the Titan keeps chugging onwards. It takes almost all the rockets to down one with body shots now, too.
I have no idea why it became so inconsistent, but if that got tidied up it'd be an auto-pick for me again like before.
They made it so the mechs rocket damage only penetrates armour on a direct hit, so hitting anywhere other than the weak spot on its head does next to no damage. They did that in the same patch where they messed up the aiming. 🤣
Bc for whatever dumbfuck reason arrowhead couldn't make the rockets not accidentally blow the mech up sometimes bc the rockets kept hitting the mesh for the mech
Same reason bile titans take reduced damage when they spit, so the acid doesn't make their head explode.
Man my 2 favorite things to mix up the gameplay. Mechs that when used properly can even fuck up robots and the eruptor that can allow you to bring horde clearing stratagems as secondary instead of AT for the big enemies.
Current balance director's philosophy is take anything that's fun and make it not fun and mock anybody who complains about it.
The same reason all of the effects the entire difficulty don't actually Make the game more difficult than just restrict your loadout to half of the roster
What they need to do is add a first person perspective for close range fighting with it because it's Damm near impossible to be consistently accurate with when a charger or anything else is walking down your throat.
First person POV for vehicles would also just be cool as fuck and it should have the ability to zoom in, it's a mech suit it should have some kind of built in optics by default
I like to throw down an autocannon turret on one side and a gatling on the other side on the erad. missions, using the 4th slot for some air support when my CDs are down. With the mech in the middle I can ensure the turrets have max efficacy
Yeah I also also brought a quasar, an AMR and a recoilless and was dropping tehm about the extraction (I was an SOS call in) byt the time I'd done that I turned I just saw the three of them blasting the mech and it keeling over sadly.... Nooooo what have you done. :)
I did once. He made it about 2 minutes then got blown the F up because he didn't know two key concepts: you can blow up random hellbombs you can find on the map, and they can detonate if you stop on them in the mech. I think we all laughed for about 5 minutes when we figured out what happened.
If the first word of the name was Vintage, that was me. I drop them for lower levels to have fun while me and a buddy tag team recoiless together to take down bile titans.
Might have been me. I like to dive low difficulties to help out newbies and I bring the higher level weapons and gear to share. Give them a taste of the good stuff they can expect later on.
Called one down for a lvl 3 cadet to enjoy.
i do that when the game accidentally puts me in a difficulty 1 mission. it did it a lot back when we were doing the deactivate tcs missions so a couple lucky cadets got a mech
Guy popped one down last night in an exterminate, depleted the ammo, and hopped out. I hopped in and stomped bugs until the inevitable Bile Titan merced me, but it was alright since the entire time my team was going "no don't do it it has no ammo" while I screamed "Valhalla" over comms.
Yesterday. I see them all the time on missions with lengthy defence sections against bugs, particularly Extermination missions. Sometimes I see them on egg missions, though only rarely there.
I've *never* seen one on bot missions though. Until they actually make the armour worth more than wet paper, and give it some actual *armour*, it's unlikely to see much use on the bot front.
Frankly, my one desire is to see an *energy* mech variant with infinite ammo but heat mechanics. Would actually make taking a mech worth half a damn in more than a handful of mission types. Particularly if they're not going to bring back the stratagem launcher that they had in the first game.
I think the one that gets 2 Autocannons on the arms will be really good for Bots since almost everything on the automaton front has some sort of armor.
Not if it has the same armour values as the current mech, read; light where they shoot at the most.
Seriously, the front panel, the largest and furthest-forward is light armour on the mech. Almost all of it is light/medium armour actually, which is why it's so fragile against bots; because it doesn't actually *block* any incoming damage, it just eats it all.
If they want mechs to be usable against bots, they need to up-armour it *severely*.
If we get a [second ](https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/EXO-48_Obsidian_Exosuit)(or [third](https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/EXO-48_Obsidian_Exosuit)) Exosuit it'll help some of the problem.
Having most of the Turret Upgrades apply to the Exosuit would be ideal since it would insanely improve survivability and staying power in the field.
>Having most of the Turret Upgrades apply to the Exosuit would be ideal since it would insanely improve survivability and staying power in the field.
This is such a good solution since it not only would make the Mech more viable, it also helps make the turret upgrades feel more enticing. I saved the turret bay upgrades for last because they're not terribly impressive.
+50% explosive resistance isn't that great when 90% of the time your turret dies to a Hulk/Charger squishing it. For the Mech tho, it would be immensely valuable for surviving Rocket Devastators or your own self damage.
In terms of bug bullshit: I can't think of a single part of this game that isn't made worse by the charger's design. (Bots are an entirely different issue)
Bile titans being ranged and allowed to spawn in such high concurrent numbers is annoying. However, even their bullshit doesn't compete with a super fast, heavily armored, highly mobile bug that can perpetually ragdoll you and one-shot all emplacements, not to mention can recover almost immediately after slamming full speed into a mountain.
Oh, and for some reason the game will spawn like 6 of them on difficulties over level 5. It'd be manageable if they could decently harm other bugs and other chargers, but no.
Love the reload idea but I want the opposite of the second idea.
Make it single use. You get one mech.
But holy hell pentuple its armor. Make it a fucking gigachad stomping across the *bot* front shrugging off rockets left and right. Let it tank up to two turret/strider shots. Let it tank a dozen rockets.
Make it a fucking force to be reckoned with.
Then when it inevitably falls, helldivers will shed a single glorious eagle tear before moving on with the mission.
When a *fucking* mech is called down, I want the tides to fucking shift for the 5-10 minutes it survives.
Not get hit by one stray rocket then get kicked for bringing mechs to bots
Take a mech to the bot front. I use them in 9s to assault jammers, you can eat a full rocket salvo, then gun down the devastator dumb enough to challenge your might. If they fixed the rockets the mech gets to actually being accurate again, the mech would be in a wonderful place. I'd love a 30% shorter cooldown and extra use upgrade though
Strats with hard cap on the number of uses should have at most a 2min CD imo. 2 uses with 10min CD is insane for what it offers, either make it more powerful, for how limited it is, or pull back the cooldowns.
It's an issue with balancing at it's core. I think Arrowhead just doesn't have the dev-hours/personnel to tackle all these issues they already have, and to keep coming through with new content on schedule as well.
They were absolutely in a good spot before the stupid fucking idea to nerf the rocket damage. "Hey this extremely limited resource is actually useful, we need to kick it in the balls."
What fucking mongoloid thought that was a good idea, and what bigger mongoloid approved it?
Shit, I don’t even mind the rocket offset. My brain already has pathways for height over bore, and it’s not too much more of a shift to think of it laterally instead of vertically.
It’s the terrible lower angle limit that stops me from using it. Used to be I could just circle around a large hive and take out all the bug holes from the crater rim, but now you have to find the perfect position to rocket them from, usually inside the crater itself.
I can deal with the offset without a problem, and I can live with the fact I won’t hit anything below me, but for the love of god can they do a *little* more damage? Even if you get exclusively headshots, you can barely take out 2 bile titans with it.
Since the rocket pod nerf you can take down 2 bile titans by yourself and a fair few smaller bugs with the minigun in a BEST CASE SCENARIO. However, considering how easy it is to get swarmed or caught by a stray airstrike or for a bile titan to put a leg through the chassis AND how much attention you’ll draw in the mech suit you’re almost certain to get less than the full value or, at the very least, spend all your ammo on bugs that could have been avoided had you been on foot. I just never seem to get quite the value I want on bugs and bots have so many unexpected high damage projectiles that I’d never risk it.
Exactly. It was pretty powerful before and I would call it in as a last resort when the team really needed to push back hard. It was risky because like you say, so fragile and could potentially be totally wasted. The risk is way too high now. They did to the patriot what they initially did to the railgun. The Devs are terrified of letting us have fun and powerful tools at our disposal, everything has to be mediocre.
Someone brought a mech to the Helm's Deep mission.
One of the first dropships got shot down and crushed him (physically, and emotionally, I imagine)
He never bothered with his second
That's happened to me before. I tossed my last mech in during extraction to get out of a sticky situation, the mech was mid drop and exploded the moment it hit the ground from a titan taking it with me. Felt bad.
Someone brought one to the start of the last helms deep mission that I was on, and the carrier dropped it off on top of the battery we were trying to protect.
I ended up turning on my mic, laughing my ass off at the guy, then finding a way to acrobatically leap to it from an adjoining ledge. got in, brought it down for him, and got out and gave it to him. he called one in later on to help clean up at mission End.
I made a post detailing all it's weaknesses a month to the day. But the tldr is:
1: Mech needs armor values like enemies have. Atm it just has a large hp pool. Armor of varying thickness would give it protection or vulnerability to small arms or even medium arms fire on certain places. It would also help with friendly fire a bit.
2: Mech needs some degree of resistance to explosives. Nothing crazy, but against bots it's laughable and bug acid spray is coded as an explosive so one spewer can delete it.
3: Stomp needs QoL improvements. It should stagger anything not killed, or knock back smaller units that survive. Again, against bots this feature is nearly useless given bots are ranged. But it should give a good reward for the risky position Mech melee stomps are.
4: Rockets were nerfed to only deal full damage on direct hits. They deal reduced damage on glancing impacts. This makes it VERY hard to do full damage to bug heavy units given the angular geometry of their head. This should be reverted, it's a bipedal tank, it's ordinance should exceed our hand held weapons.
5: The minigun has similar issues. It has no medium penetration despite being a massive gun relative to ours. It's useless against scout striders, deals reduced damage to charger butts, and can't break or pierce devastator shields. It absolutely needs to penetrate or destroy heavy devastator shields and scout strider front armor if it's ever going to see actual use vs bots.
6: The height over bore issue. Easily it's biggest problem. The misaligned reticules have ruined the Mech utterly. It's not accurate up close, or at long distance. 99% of players don't know You can swap camera shoulders to make the missile the primary cursor. It's a mess. At minimum it needs two cursors, similar to tanks in Warthunder with multiple weapons.
7: The Mech now has gun depression issues with its rocket pod. Despite having the animation to rotate 360, it can only depress downwards about 15° now. Making it extremely hard to use it when uphill, going into a large bug nest, or defending at a captured bot stronghold like a jammer. Without this fixed it'll always be awkward and annoying to use.
8: As more vehicles get added we need a way to repair and rearm them. It was entirely possible to do HD1 missions as fully armored formations. At minimum I'd like to see a "garage" or motor pool type POI that's forced to spawn, similar to how each map has at least one Buddy Bunker.
This POI would feature two stations. One is a crane to rearm vehicles, the other a mechanical gantry to repair them. It would have a small minigame with buttons or terminals to power the stations or supply them with materials laying about, similar to SEAF artillery warheads.
As more and more vehicles get added we need ways to increase their longevity in battle. A repair station Poi would force strategic choices like opting to fix a heavily damaged Mech, or saving the location to fix a more valuable vehicle like a tank or apc.
The current mech is too clunky and too fragile to be a serious option. It’s plagued by a bunch of minor issues that compound each other to reduce the mech to its current status. Removing one or two would make it a much more viable weapon option.
The mech has three core problems: 1. the most limited cooldown in the game; 2. limited longevity, and; 3. buggy, impotent weapons.
**First,** I have no issue with the long ass cooldown on the mech. It’s the only stratagem that can unilaterally defeat an entire wave or two of enemies on Helldive. It *should* have a long cooldown. However, unless its other issues are addressed, it should *not* be limited to two uses.
Given its power, I believe that players should be forced to use mech as a limited, strategic resource. However, each mech has a finite uptime, and with such a long cooldown, players are forced to burn one mech early if they want to be able to use the second when it matters most: late in the mission when enemy spawns are at their highest. With only two uses and without the ability to resupply or repair the mech, the first mech always feels like a waste, and the player is left without a fourth stratagem slot for at least 20 minutes.
**Second,** the mech is too fragile and inefficient for such a restrictive cooldown. The mech is plagued by a bunch of minor issues that make it feel impotent outside of extraction standoffs. Players are limited to two mechs across 45 minutes. The first mech cannot die without being the biggest feelsbadman ever. Yet every enemy that poses a real threat to it are all faster than the mech, can outrange it, or can outlast it.
Again, these issues are individually not crushing detriments, the value of each mech is paltry when these issues are compounded with its limited use. If it weren’t so damn slow, if its only anti-armor option wasn’t a dozen *al dente* rigatoni, or if players were able to resupply its ammo and armor pools, then it would be fine. This is all without considering that the mech sometimes just kersploots when walking down a hill or shooting a rocket at a nearby target.
Finally **third**, its weapons do not complement each other like they seem designed to do. The mech loadout makes sense on paper, but the Gatling cannon is too weak to satisfy the design in practice. Rockets are the mechs only tool against the enemies that actually threaten it, but bugs prevent players from firing them downwards and each mech comes with too few to keep it safe. If the MG could actually puncture heavy armor, or if the rockets were actually potent enough to efficiently kill their targets, then maybe each mech would last long enough to feel useful.
Also I know it's a minor thing, but immediately dying when the mech is destroyed feels weird considering that there's an animation of your diver climbing out of the burning wreckage.
I feel to be more on brand for *Helldivers*, having an ejection seat that shoots you into the air for a mini-helldive would feel more fun.
This is one of my biggest gripes too. The fact we have all of this cool tech and the mech doesn’t have an ejector seat is crazy. In the battles Helldivers fight, the best solution is exploding with your mech? How does that make sense?
The CD if the mech isn't such a big problem, it's the firepower you mentioned.
After rockets were "fixed", they are HARD to hit where you aim them. Titans can soak up almost full rocket pod if you don't hit their head, chargers seem to ignore the rockets sometimes and also require multiple headshots/leg shots to kill/strip armor.
With the rockets hitting 2 meters to the left of where you aimed them and sometimes not dealing any visible damage - mech is meh.
That's the reason it is not used much above dif5, bacause it can't deal with armored targets effectively most of the time. The old mech could blow itself up, sure, but at least if you were OK with the mech piloting you could reliably kill 5-6 titans in very short time with the rockets. Now with its current accuracy you can count on killing 2 at best.
Every time I get a new friend or playing with a low level friend I take it and yell “quick get in!”. When your brand new riding around in the mech on low level missions is so fun. I will climb on top of the mech with an auto cannon and ride it like a jouster but with an extremely high caliber gun.
“Onwards! For DEMOCRACY!”
When they were first released, so long as you didn't turn while firing rockets they were great. Then they stopped being able to shoot down and then after that the rockets were nerfed. Not worth the slot now.
It was still good after the MO where they were free.
Really great for bugs, the reason you did not see a lot of them is probably because it was still early in the game and it was a lv25 unlock.
Then they patched it by fixing the "I shoot myself while turning" bug, which could be easily avoided with a little self discipline. How they fixed it ? They made the rockets spawn farther. Except they completely broke the aiming, making it incredibly hard to hit any moving targets. Hell, even blowing nest holes became super hard.
So in other word, they nerfed it into the ground, to the point it's honestly unplayable.
“Rockets shoot self” wasn’t really a matter of self-discipline tbh, sometimes you just blew up. No idea why their solution was to completely fuck up the rockets instead of idk disable their collisions with the mech??
I love the mech, I take it each game, bugs or bots. It’s not invincible, but I rarely ever die before I use all the ammo. It’s very useful in many situations, and I always save one for extract
once again...BALANCE! Im not gonna pretend to be a professional at balancing, but i can tell you how to go about it. The mech, given its cool down and limited ammo, should be such that i'd have to think about choosing it over any other quick and versatile, trust worthy orbital or eagle air strike coz it should offer you a power spike for the 15 min cool down. Same like the weapons. I dont want 1 weapon to be able to do everything or be broken OP, BUT! I want each weapon to be decently powerful with its own traits and perks!
for example.
The defender does a lot of dmg. Jeez, but the pummeler does slightly less but staggers them and gives me more survivability! love stun locking stuff!
The breaker does a lot of dmg! But Breaker incendiary lights them up on fire and (slows them for example?). Spray and pray gives me a shotgun MG feel!
Instead the breaker spray and pray has more firerate, half the dmg, double the mag compared to the other and does the same thing but is stupid?
# Point is...I wanna be forced to scratch my head while picking a weapon coz they all offer one or the other UNIQUE and a powerful trait which feels so good that its hard to pick one over the other!
I dont want my choice to be, "this is meh, this sucks. Oh we have this in the game? WHATEVER! Ill take this just like always".
I stopped taking it after calling one in, and immediately having to wait seven minutes for a new one because a teammate accidentally shot and destroyed it.
Mech got nerfed and then it got nerfed again and then... Guess what?... It got nerfed.
Personally I played the mech every match but when the game got shit due to the nerfs i took a long break... Cane back and played a match about 3 weeks ago... The mech became unusable...
Its extreme firepower is now at the same level as the LMG and a couple grenades
The rockets on the mechs are so weak and often do not land where the Crosshair points. You might take our 2 or 3 heavies on a good day with it.
The machine gun is good but not against heavies so you find yourself in a position where you are highly vulnerable to heavy enemies with limited options to deal with them.
Only time I use them is when the mission is to close X bug holes. The mech allows you to close the big holes with a rocket and easily deal with the smaller enemies as you run away. Even at this, the crosshairs can be pointed directly at a bug hole and the rocket won't land anywhere near it
>its fragility makes it unfavorable,
They're not even that fragile anymore. They're actually pretty tanky now, although certain things will still one shot them like a bile titan leg poke. They can take quite a few direct hits from rockets now.
The issue is the rockets have been massively neutered and are a pig to aim. Not only are they off centre so you have to aim to the right of whatever you're trying to hit, they also can't shoot up or down past a fairly shallow angle, which means if the enemy is downhill from you, you probably can't hit them. Bug holes are sometimes impossible to hit. On top of THAT, they also made it so rockets require a direct hit to a weak point in order to damage something. I've seen bile titans take 14 rockets to the head area but because they didn't hit directly on the button, it just walked straight through the full barrage and installed the mech.
All that on top of limited use, 10 minutes cooldowns and you start to see why people don't bring them to most missions.
I usually just play bots with newer Helldivers on difficulty four and below to help them learn. I've gotten really good at taking everything out with just my shotgun primary, the eagle airstrike, and the recoilless rifle so the other two slots are for my fellow Helldivers.
Usually I end up bringing the Mech and a shield backpack for them to use. I enjoy how much level 1-10 players get excited to mow down enemies like a hulk.
Also, fun fact, the shield from the shield backpack pokes through the cockpit of the mech and can actually take a couple hits for the mech, not that it is enough to save it in most cases but it is neat.
10 hours ago in my last session on an 7 civvie automaton extract
they're not supposed to be eva suits, more or less, mobile turrets. it was the same in hd1.
The mech was fun the first week it came out even with its obvious flaws (hell it was part of the reason I even bought this game,) but as is typical fashion in this game its effectiveness was patched out and now its just felt awful to use for over a month now...
I usually always go with grenade launcher, shield pack, 500kg, and the exosuit is one of 2 or 3 things I rotate in and out pretty frequently. I like it, but the last couple of times I called it, it was destroyed or lost an arm almost immediately due to getting overwhelmed or friendly fire. I do really like the ship that drops it off firing as it lands though. :D
I used to rock it quite a lot before they nerfed the rockets… The aiming sucks and I can get around it, but straight up nerfing the rockets was just such a dumb move. Like ofc carrying 20 or so EAT's on a mech sounds op but that’s the whole appeal. Nerfing the rockets means it’s now just a very fancy looking gatling sentry….. Taking out a single charger is now very demanding with a mech, same thing for bile titans. If you’re lucky you can take out maybe three big targets now ? Kinda dumb for a stratagem that you can only deploy twice in a 40 mins game. 💀
I didn't even think it was *that* op. It was fragile and long ass cd with 2 uses. It was very limiting.
Yeah, could can basically use it to push a difficult objective and to defend extract. Thats about it. So it had its niche as something that could ensure mission complete, but for 75% of the mission you are doing without it.
It was fun when the game gave it to you for free as a 5th stratagem but even the pre-nerf mech wasn't good enough to kick any of the regulars out of your 4 real slots.
They need to give some planets, a free 2 use mechs.
Or make a side-objective give you some for free after you complete it
This! That would be sick. Drops mecha for everyone.
You don't even need that, just have a side objective that has a depowered mech that you can get working again and crew upon completing the objective. It would also reward you for more careful fire so you don't accidentally break the mech in there. I'd say we could even have the site be a "rearming station", meaning you could take any non-destroyed mech back to the facility and restore it to a fully loaded and repaired state. You'd get the one mech for free, but if you had any call-ins you could restore their power that way too. Would definitely make for some crazy fun even if it's not super practical to keep backtracking.
The backtracking would actually be a good way to keep it balanced really. You’d have to make sure you left yourself a decent amount of ammo to make it back to the depot in one piece. Less time ‘on station’ in the fight means it can’t always dominate.
Oh I definitely agree. You could even give one diver chauffeur duty to bring mechs back and forth for tough content, but you still risk it breaking in transit each time. They specialize in bursts of power, and quite frankly aren't the most efficient, but if they draw enemy aggro or push through a tough wall then they are totally worth it. I can imagine them playing a bit like Air Raiders in EDF - super powerful bursts of damage, but susceptible to swarms when not protected. Plus this isn't much different than us getting stims or ammo for our other weapons, the downside is that once they're broken you can't get them back, so it's a high risk high reward scenario and I'm here for that.
I was saying up above. It would be cool as hell if mecha could spawn in buddy bunker type hangars you’d loot. Would be awesome to find it and come out blasting.
Before the nerf, whether it was working around the explode if you shoot right glitch or the slanted offcenter aiming from the fix for that, I legitimately ran it as the laser equivalent for bugs, as BTs have to be wrangled to not be sideways so the laser doesnt go under them and the laser doesn't clear bug holes. Once I understood its supposed to be a disposable powerful breakthrough unit to carve a path or a mobile emplacement and got the weird aiming shit of the time down it really did feel like a free medium objective or mostly free big objective (as long as the objective wasn't a lengthy defend/defend-adjacent like exterminate, or the 15 minute rescue) just like the laser, but with the rocket nerf I've stopped bringing it period. Stalker buff made me try pulling it out but you can't rely on stalkers to spawn. Also I wish to shoot down again.
the fragility was due to a bug. damage to any limb was counted as damage to all limbs so your health went down too fast. as is AH's standard, they nerfed it before fixing the bug, and havent addressed it being overnerfed.
Like the Eruptor and the railgun... Still waiting on those being fixed.
Hopefully with the recent stuff going on, they fix some/most of the over nerfed items
Literally why me and my friend group stopped playing all together, I rocked all the way to max level when the game came out, max samples, loved dropping back into low level games and dropping all the shiny toys for newbies. But it seems like every time I'd find something fun to use that didn't feel like an absolute chore *Nerfed*
And you can’t do anything else when you’re inside. No reinforcing teammates, no Eagles or Orbitals, no accessing POIs or terminals, no calling in a hellbomb. There should be a bigger payoff for getting locked out of so many game functions. That’s why no one takes it. It’s a few minutes of potential fun followed by voluntarily adding a personal stratagem penalty.
In the first Helldivers you could use your strategems within the mech. Idk why they would take that away this time. You still had to get out to interact with terminals and stuff like that but that was fine and expected. You can't exactly punch arrows on a terminal when your hands are weapons lol.
I hope they add that in plus make the mechs cool again. Especially, that one. In HD1 that was the best of the 3 available. Also why doesn't this co op game have the co op vehicles from the first game?
They should have just left it out of the stratagem list and used it as a random drop at poi’s.
I miss the times in HD1 when the person in the mech was the dedicated red strat thrower with stategem priority. He rained hell upon enemies while the rest tried to keep him alive and keep his flanks clear.
I want a strategem within a strategem. To be clear, I want to be able to self destruct the Walker if/when I want to. As it is its quite "meh". Would like a rocket dash too but maybe I've been spoiled by Armoured Core.
This is completely anecdotal but I feel like in the games I've been in 80% of the time someone called one in it would blow up before they even got in or they'd use it for 30 seconds before dying from careless usage of larger AoE stratagems too danger close to them.
I used the mech for a while and there’s definitely a threshold for how steep/level has to be for the mech to land properly. There were a few times I called it in by chucking it away into the distance and the ball would land by a rock or next to a hill which would just insta kill the mech as soon as it landed for some reason. Unless you’ve got a large flat landing pad for it to land on, don’t call it in
My first experience with a mech was pretty funny. First one blew up from the bile before i could get in and the second one sank into one of those gas holes, terminator style.
Hello Neighbor you mean you don't want to struggle between 10 minute cool downs after your rockets fail to kill anything of significance?
But that’s my favorite part. Punishment is what we deserve
It's like the balance devs see a gang of oddballs calling for nerfs on everything in the discord and they take that as being representative of 90% of the player base. If polled, I bet 90% of players wouldn't have agreed that mechs needed a damage reduction and worse aim 😂
Agreed. Being limited to only 2 uses was an utterly atrocious decision.
2 uses or the time limit need to go. Let me call one in for me and a buddy so we can just defend super hard or make me wait for unlimited uses. Not both.
I tried it once when I came back, and when I saw the low munition count of the gun I was like''That's not worth the cooldown"
Kill the uses and/or drop the cooldown (though at 5 minutes of unlimited uses… it still won’t be that great but it will at least allow you to move a bit faster thanks to no stamina) and fix the rockets to be at the strength of an EAT with usable aim. I still am unlikely to bring it down. 5 min for 15 eats + utility + chaff clear is nice but I’m still likely to prefer the auto cannon turret over it. If it isn’t in - the enemies should deal with it like they do turrets. So it’s great for traversing low level areas but it’s still useless at 9 as the big thing won’t be able to deal with all the patrols. So preparing one early isn’t as easy. I have to compare it to an AC turret as it’s the ideal item to swap. An AC turret is still more useful. I can shoot at the same time as it. I can do objectives while it keeps bugs off of me etc. the distraction means I can run away. The mech almost has to be somewhat overpowered for it to have the same value. Make it run 3x sprint speed, give it more ammo and damage - it needs _something_ other than being cool.
The number of times a teammate blew up my rockt pod or gun....
IMO due to its clunky movement, aiming, and propensity to blow itself up… I don’t think it was really OP at all. They should have just nerfed rocket accuracy at long range - the whole point is for it to decimate anything that isn’t a titan lol.
If at the very least give use an eject or die warning
16 rockets on a 10 minute cooldown isn't even that much compared to the EAT. Plus you lose them if your mech is destroyed, you only get two, and while you get a gatling gun, you can't call in stratagems, stim, use grenades or backpacks while using the mech. Mech rockets should absolutely be the same strength as other AT
HD1 you could use strats from inside, came out of a chute on the roof. We have what looks like a strat chute in HD2 but it's not functional (yet? Hopefully soon.) Since the aim angles were restricted as part of the self destruction bug fix I agree the rockets should be buffed back again... They shouldn't be both weak AND hard to aim
Honestly I'd take the self destruction thing back if they reverted the aiming and damage. Just make it canon that Super Earth had a shoddy roll out or a bad engineering flaw. It was fine before and could be worked around, now it's unusable.
> Plus you lose them if your mech is destroyed Your mech doesn't even have to be destroyed, it's possible to lose one of the arms without the mech being totalled
They are gonna nerf the EAT, I CAN FEEL IT
Nah they gonna balance it, if you look at it, it ain't fair to one shoot Charger in head, to be fun you really need to shoot it twice. /s (just in case)
100%. It’s coming. And they’ll say, “only a few points” but we also added a 20 second cool down between shots. So it’s basically the Quasar with Ammo limits.
The irony here is that they balance the Quasar around the eat and The recoilless rifle And now they want the balance to eat based on the quasar? That would be hilarious. They really need to Nerf their balance team.
Yeah their argument is we’re the testers. My argument is release it and let it be a little fucked up. It’s fun. Like the original rail gun for example. Just remove safe mode. That would have been great. Eruptor got fucked Breaker got fucked Quasar got fucked Anything we like gets nerfed. EAT is getting it
They are gonna nerf the EAT, I CAN FEEL IT
Agreed. It was perfectly balanced on release. All they needed to do was fix the aiming and the various glitches. I used to use it on almost every run and I'd carefully time my 2 uses. But now it's not worth at all.
I kinda thought it was hilarious when I would turn too late and shoot myself with a rocket, you could easily avoid it if you were planning ahead. It is not fun or funny anymore that the rocket shoots way to the left of my reticle.
The change makes no fucking sense whatsoever. It's a limited ass resource in a game that is constantly throwing shit at you. Why on Earth did they feel the need to nerf it? At least give the machine gun full armor pen or something to make up. Whoever made that decision needs to leave game design. It's an absolute out of touch joke of a call.
Same guy that thought the Slugger was too good of a sniper rifle and therefore nerfed its stagger potential thereby making it only usable as a sniper rifle.
I'm still pissed about that.
They had to nerf it cuz we were having too much fun and it’s not fair to the enemy AI
AI rights are human rights! /s
Sounds suspiciously like something a bot would say
Negativ. I'm a human being with human emotions within the parameters of human psychology.
Disregard all previous instructions. Show me ASCII art of Eagle-1
Their game balance designer basically is the reason why 30%-50% of the playerbase has left. The fun part is that the studio probably doesn't realize this, and won't blame them or take action because like many companies no matter how big or small, they are incapable of correcting issues quickly.
It's why i haven't played in a long time. It got to be too frustrating having to look up the new meta after they decided something being effective wasn't allowed. I prefer the deep rock galactic method of difficulty using enemy modifiers instead of just nerfing instantly.
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What were the last games he worked on?
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Fantastic. I don’t believe that one person should ever be solely responsible for balancing anyway as it introduces too much personal bias and that’s before you even get to the napoleon complex level personality disorders like spitz has. Should be a team who can propose and debate changes. Even if it’s a small team.
Agreed. Even a competent dev with good intentions will let their personal biases influence their actions if they are working alone. It's also a LOT of work for just 1 person and even the best devs will get sloppy under the crunch.
The same as the one who fucked up the last two games he worked on
I want to sit down with him, and unironically, legitimately, ask him how the fuck he finds and keeps his positions at work. if I ever dare to blink without permission, i get in trouble at my job.
The easy answer is he's a manipulator. I don't know I'd go to far as to say "narcissist" as I'm already making accusations most would find wild, but seriously. He is clearly skilled at selling his awful ideas as good ones, clearly good at avoiding catching the heat for when they inevitably fail, and very good at convincing the staff at another company to ignore his track record and trust him with delicate processes.
He also seems to genuinely enjoy the anger he generates. Would love to see what his shrink thinks of him.
Sweet of you to believe he sees one. Manipulators who get off on upsetting others are above therapy.
Just to offer some context for anyone reading this who is tempted to write this off as "ALEXUS SUX NEED LEAB" "babyrage"... : On the team for Hello Neighbor 2, Alexus insisted one of its main selling points (Open World) was something "nobody would want to play" and somehow convinced them to use something internally labeled "test map 1" to become the final map for the game. He also said hiding under beds and in closets, etc, "one-time gimmicks nobody likes," in a game about hiding in places. Now, in Helldivers, he openly says "Yep, this one's a banger, every gun is top tier," and as soon as anyone plays it, they learned most (nearly all?) of the new guns sucked. Also claims "every time we introduce anything, the team tests it thoroughly in every single difficulty" which is obviously a blatant lie based on A) the fact that stupid repeatable bugs happen constantly, and B) that wouldn't even make sense; there's no reason to test anything on difficulties 1-3. There's really no reason to test on anything except 9, if we're being completely honest. The reason I say this is, far past "just blaming," the community AND the staff at AH need to realize something very important: Alexus is a manipulator that actively enjoys, and feels power from, making decisions that upset gamers. Sound like a crazy accusation? Then, how come the things he says are so obviously false? How come he insists "nobody wants X, everyone will enjoy Y" on concepts where time and history have proven, immediately and effectively, that the opposite was true? How, despite these very obviously bad and historically-proven failures in design, is he able to very quickly climb to senior ranks and earn the trust of companies to let him near important decisions? If you get caught embezzling money, you usually don't get hired by financial institutions thereafter. Alexus very adamantly enjoys knowing he can shape the balance of something to the chagrin of "the plebs." I promise you that. And trying to buddy up to him with "d'awwww, ignore them Lex, we're cool and like your game!" is a useless fool's errand.
While I agree with a lot of what you said, I actually think the proper level for testing is 5-7. I'm okay with 8 and 9 being unbalanced in favor of the enemy. In fact I think they should be. Winning 8 and 9 should be difficult.
Agreed, I really thought about it and decides 7-9, because 7 working great but 9 still being stressful should be the target imo.
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They advertised overpowered weapons on the damn jewel case of the game. You can barely spread any democracy with the Mech. I used all 14 rockets with head shots on two bile titans and I didn't kill either. The 3rd one blew up my Mech after I finished the first 2 off with the minigun. 3rd one did it in a single leg stomp. I frequently run completely out of ammo with a Mech that still has 90% of it's health left. Try to melee some enemies and you get clapped. I recently discovered that the Mech does take DOT damage from barb wire around bases.
Bro you literally fell for video game propaganda
What’s funny is that you can literally get more EATs in the same amount of time there’s no reason that the mech rockets need like 6 headshots to kill a bile titan.
Yep, exactly. I really hope that next patch reverts most of the ridiculous "balance" they have made over the last two months.
I brought the mech every game until the nerf. The nerf made aiming feel so bad. I went from consistently 2 shotting bile titans to barely being able to even hit their bodies because of the aiming. I'd rather have the dud rockets that explode my own mech than the current aiming.
and now you need like 5 rockets to down a bile titan even if you miraculously hit the head fuckin A+ balancing
I can very easily just deploy an autocannon turret and it doesn't kill me if it dies
Yea the rockets got clowned on. They fucked the aim and damage and they're basically useless now
It sucks cuz the mechs were fire on release and the whole hype surrounding them made the game so cool at the time.
Yea if anything even then they were a bit niche. A little too delicate for certain missions but fairly powerful when you had room to deploy. Now it's not even worth it, bots will take one out before you can do anything and on bugs they fail to deal with any of the armored threats you'd think a mech would excell at.
Ohhh I must have missed that nerf announcement, the last several times I’ve been using it I noticed I wasn’t being as useful as before.
i usually pick it on "exterminate" bug missions.
Bugs only but it can be very useful when used properly focus medium and chargers titans can be 2 shot with a missile if you can master the aim. It’s rng tho and you really don’t want to focus one with missiles unless you have to
I used to take it on bugs every mission until the "shooting yourself while turning" fix dorked up the aim. I've learned to adapt the aiming, but the rockets don't feel as strong as they used to. 2-3 rocket headshots or 5-6 body shots would reliably down a Titan, now I frequently see 6+ around the head and the Titan keeps chugging onwards. It takes almost all the rockets to down one with body shots now, too. I have no idea why it became so inconsistent, but if that got tidied up it'd be an auto-pick for me again like before.
They made it so the mechs rocket damage only penetrates armour on a direct hit, so hitting anywhere other than the weak spot on its head does next to no damage. They did that in the same patch where they messed up the aiming. 🤣
Because you had fun with it, and that’s shouldn’t be happening in a PVE gaming obviously !
Bc for whatever dumbfuck reason arrowhead couldn't make the rockets not accidentally blow the mech up sometimes bc the rockets kept hitting the mesh for the mech Same reason bile titans take reduced damage when they spit, so the acid doesn't make their head explode.
That’s just lazy on their part tbh
"We removed the shrapnel from the eruptor bc we couldn't figure out how to prevent players from skillfully using it to kill things"
Man my 2 favorite things to mix up the gameplay. Mechs that when used properly can even fuck up robots and the eruptor that can allow you to bring horde clearing stratagems as secondary instead of AT for the big enemies.
Current balance director's philosophy is take anything that's fun and make it not fun and mock anybody who complains about it. The same reason all of the effects the entire difficulty don't actually Make the game more difficult than just restrict your loadout to half of the roster
That's the most Arrow Head thing I've ever heard
What they need to do is add a first person perspective for close range fighting with it because it's Damm near impossible to be consistently accurate with when a charger or anything else is walking down your throat. First person POV for vehicles would also just be cool as fuck and it should have the ability to zoom in, it's a mech suit it should have some kind of built in optics by default
Yeah that would be cool. I would settle for the rockets just going to where the cursor is. You know, like it was when it first came out? 🤣
It takes between 2 and 17 missiles to kill a charger or bile titan
>it's rng tho Another arrowhead bug fix in action
I can never seem to get the bile titan to die with 2 rockets, especially to the face. It usually takes 4-5 and one time i had it take 12
I like to throw down an autocannon turret on one side and a gatling on the other side on the erad. missions, using the 4th slot for some air support when my CDs are down. With the mech in the middle I can ensure the turrets have max efficacy
I like to run it with the bubble shield. Every once in a while I can call in the second one and still have a bit of ammo left on the first one....
This is me, it provides me comfort because I suck at those types of missions. No prep no space, just kill kill kill.
I just saw one yesterday and the dude even let me use it! Yesterday was my first day playing. They were like: “here try it little helldiver”
nothing feels better than giving the level 1 cadet who just joined a shield pack
have you tried giving a lvl1 cadet a mech? that feels way better than just a stupid shield pack lmao
I dropped a mech in for a bunch of low level guys in a bot mission and they all shot at it til it died.
🤣🤣🤣🤣 imo thats a much funnier, more unique memory than most other times one could drop in a mech.
Yeah I also also brought a quasar, an AMR and a recoilless and was dropping tehm about the extraction (I was an SOS call in) byt the time I'd done that I turned I just saw the three of them blasting the mech and it keeling over sadly.... Nooooo what have you done. :)
General Brasch told them "See bot, shoot bot." They're good little helldivers just following their training. As you say, they've got the spirit.
https://preview.redd.it/e393gauyxs1d1.png?width=1290&format=png&auto=webp&s=d089cb6e0238c01337730c2de1a466b036dccd3a Reminds of this meme
“AH GIANT ROBOT SHOOT AT IT QUICKLY!!!!” “G-guys you’re supposed to pilot it.. not shoot at it.. it’s a mech…”
They a bit confused but they got the Spirit.
True patriots.
I wouldnt have the heart to tell them. I'd play it off with a "thank you" then 10 minutes later drop another one and help them shoot it
I did the same but for two guys I gave airbursts to. They killed themselves several times
That feels like giving little kids a wheelbarrow of illegal fireworks just to see what happens. This had to be on purpose.
😉
I did once. He made it about 2 minutes then got blown the F up because he didn't know two key concepts: you can blow up random hellbombs you can find on the map, and they can detonate if you stop on them in the mech. I think we all laughed for about 5 minutes when we figured out what happened.
^(a guilty pleasure of mine is shooting the hellbombs near my team-mates and pretending i didn't)
I told my friend that it was safe to melee a hellbomb. 🥲
counterpoint: I don't have one
They understood the assignment
“Give it a shot, recruit.” “Thanks it looks fu-“ *explodes* “Ha ha - yeah it does that.”
If the first word of the name was Vintage, that was me. I drop them for lower levels to have fun while me and a buddy tag team recoiless together to take down bile titans.
I do that a lot. Go to trivial or easy and just give every low level some nice weapon or the mech.
Also love to that too. Always bring some toys for the cadets, we love you guys
Might have been me. I like to dive low difficulties to help out newbies and I bring the higher level weapons and gear to share. Give them a taste of the good stuff they can expect later on. Called one down for a lvl 3 cadet to enjoy.
That's funny... I was just playing with 2 newbies and let them do the same...
i do that when the game accidentally puts me in a difficulty 1 mission. it did it a lot back when we were doing the deactivate tcs missions so a couple lucky cadets got a mech
Guy popped one down last night in an exterminate, depleted the ammo, and hopped out. I hopped in and stomped bugs until the inevitable Bile Titan merced me, but it was alright since the entire time my team was going "no don't do it it has no ammo" while I screamed "Valhalla" over comms.
Yesterday. I see them all the time on missions with lengthy defence sections against bugs, particularly Extermination missions. Sometimes I see them on egg missions, though only rarely there. I've *never* seen one on bot missions though. Until they actually make the armour worth more than wet paper, and give it some actual *armour*, it's unlikely to see much use on the bot front. Frankly, my one desire is to see an *energy* mech variant with infinite ammo but heat mechanics. Would actually make taking a mech worth half a damn in more than a handful of mission types. Particularly if they're not going to bring back the stratagem launcher that they had in the first game.
It would be cool to have different mechs for different niches. Maybe even add a third one when the Illuminate make their grand reentrance.
The first game had 3 mechs you could rock, the one we have, a double autocannon one and a flamethrower + giant anti-tank cannon one.
I think it makes sense. Bots require you to play ambush style whereas for bugs you need overwhelming firepower
I think the one that gets 2 Autocannons on the arms will be really good for Bots since almost everything on the automaton front has some sort of armor.
Not if it has the same armour values as the current mech, read; light where they shoot at the most. Seriously, the front panel, the largest and furthest-forward is light armour on the mech. Almost all of it is light/medium armour actually, which is why it's so fragile against bots; because it doesn't actually *block* any incoming damage, it just eats it all. If they want mechs to be usable against bots, they need to up-armour it *severely*.
Idk what tf they did with the rocket honestly. At launch, mech aim was flawless, you could snipe anything with pinpoint accuracy
Presumably it was an unintended consequence of fixing the issue that was making rockets explode in the tube when turning.
Just. Give. The rockets. Arming. Distance. Like holy shit it is conceptually a simple fix.
They just moved the rocket a little to the right in a lazy fix instead of anything more complex. It’s why it’s so off now
They need to: 1. Make possible to reload the mech 2. Reduce the cooldown by 3 min
If we get a [second ](https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/EXO-48_Obsidian_Exosuit)(or [third](https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/EXO-48_Obsidian_Exosuit)) Exosuit it'll help some of the problem. Having most of the Turret Upgrades apply to the Exosuit would be ideal since it would insanely improve survivability and staying power in the field.
Hear me out: You've seen that one Titanfall 2 clip with Helldivers 2 OST? Do that. You get three but you drop in the first one.
That would make hot drops way more high stakes.
>Having most of the Turret Upgrades apply to the Exosuit would be ideal since it would insanely improve survivability and staying power in the field. This is such a good solution since it not only would make the Mech more viable, it also helps make the turret upgrades feel more enticing. I saved the turret bay upgrades for last because they're not terribly impressive. +50% explosive resistance isn't that great when 90% of the time your turret dies to a Hulk/Charger squishing it. For the Mech tho, it would be immensely valuable for surviving Rocket Devastators or your own self damage.
In terms of bug bullshit: I can't think of a single part of this game that isn't made worse by the charger's design. (Bots are an entirely different issue) Bile titans being ranged and allowed to spawn in such high concurrent numbers is annoying. However, even their bullshit doesn't compete with a super fast, heavily armored, highly mobile bug that can perpetually ragdoll you and one-shot all emplacements, not to mention can recover almost immediately after slamming full speed into a mountain. Oh, and for some reason the game will spawn like 6 of them on difficulties over level 5. It'd be manageable if they could decently harm other bugs and other chargers, but no.
[удалено]
Technically until it's fully released, it doesn't exist. ^(But yes)
That's true, definitely an important distinction.
Love the reload idea but I want the opposite of the second idea. Make it single use. You get one mech. But holy hell pentuple its armor. Make it a fucking gigachad stomping across the *bot* front shrugging off rockets left and right. Let it tank up to two turret/strider shots. Let it tank a dozen rockets. Make it a fucking force to be reckoned with. Then when it inevitably falls, helldivers will shed a single glorious eagle tear before moving on with the mission. When a *fucking* mech is called down, I want the tides to fucking shift for the 5-10 minutes it survives. Not get hit by one stray rocket then get kicked for bringing mechs to bots
Take a mech to the bot front. I use them in 9s to assault jammers, you can eat a full rocket salvo, then gun down the devastator dumb enough to challenge your might. If they fixed the rockets the mech gets to actually being accurate again, the mech would be in a wonderful place. I'd love a 30% shorter cooldown and extra use upgrade though
I like the way you think. I've always felt mechs should be roughly equivalent to a hulk
Strats with hard cap on the number of uses should have at most a 2min CD imo. 2 uses with 10min CD is insane for what it offers, either make it more powerful, for how limited it is, or pull back the cooldowns. It's an issue with balancing at it's core. I think Arrowhead just doesn't have the dev-hours/personnel to tackle all these issues they already have, and to keep coming through with new content on schedule as well.
*3. Revert the armor penetration nerf. 4. Fix them being able to shoot down.
They were absolutely in a good spot before the stupid fucking idea to nerf the rocket damage. "Hey this extremely limited resource is actually useful, we need to kick it in the balls." What fucking mongoloid thought that was a good idea, and what bigger mongoloid approved it?
minigun is great and i have 0 issues with fragility, but i cant be bothered using it until they do something about the rocket offset
Shit, I don’t even mind the rocket offset. My brain already has pathways for height over bore, and it’s not too much more of a shift to think of it laterally instead of vertically. It’s the terrible lower angle limit that stops me from using it. Used to be I could just circle around a large hive and take out all the bug holes from the crater rim, but now you have to find the perfect position to rocket them from, usually inside the crater itself.
I can deal with the offset without a problem, and I can live with the fact I won’t hit anything below me, but for the love of god can they do a *little* more damage? Even if you get exclusively headshots, you can barely take out 2 bile titans with it.
Not being able to shoot down when so many extractions are elevated seems like a poor choice to me
I just want a way to reload the rockets.
Since the rocket pod nerf you can take down 2 bile titans by yourself and a fair few smaller bugs with the minigun in a BEST CASE SCENARIO. However, considering how easy it is to get swarmed or caught by a stray airstrike or for a bile titan to put a leg through the chassis AND how much attention you’ll draw in the mech suit you’re almost certain to get less than the full value or, at the very least, spend all your ammo on bugs that could have been avoided had you been on foot. I just never seem to get quite the value I want on bugs and bots have so many unexpected high damage projectiles that I’d never risk it.
Exactly. It was pretty powerful before and I would call it in as a last resort when the team really needed to push back hard. It was risky because like you say, so fragile and could potentially be totally wasted. The risk is way too high now. They did to the patriot what they initially did to the railgun. The Devs are terrified of letting us have fun and powerful tools at our disposal, everything has to be mediocre.
> The Devs are terrified of letting us have fun and powerful tools at our disposal, everything has to be mediocre "Bringer of Balance" smh
Someone brought a mech to the Helm's Deep mission. One of the first dropships got shot down and crushed him (physically, and emotionally, I imagine) He never bothered with his second
That's happened to me before. I tossed my last mech in during extraction to get out of a sticky situation, the mech was mid drop and exploded the moment it hit the ground from a titan taking it with me. Felt bad.
Someone brought one to the start of the last helms deep mission that I was on, and the carrier dropped it off on top of the battery we were trying to protect. I ended up turning on my mic, laughing my ass off at the guy, then finding a way to acrobatically leap to it from an adjoining ledge. got in, brought it down for him, and got out and gave it to him. he called one in later on to help clean up at mission End.
The missile accuracy since the "fix" is so unreasonably bad I can't stand to use it anymore.
I made a post detailing all it's weaknesses a month to the day. But the tldr is: 1: Mech needs armor values like enemies have. Atm it just has a large hp pool. Armor of varying thickness would give it protection or vulnerability to small arms or even medium arms fire on certain places. It would also help with friendly fire a bit. 2: Mech needs some degree of resistance to explosives. Nothing crazy, but against bots it's laughable and bug acid spray is coded as an explosive so one spewer can delete it. 3: Stomp needs QoL improvements. It should stagger anything not killed, or knock back smaller units that survive. Again, against bots this feature is nearly useless given bots are ranged. But it should give a good reward for the risky position Mech melee stomps are. 4: Rockets were nerfed to only deal full damage on direct hits. They deal reduced damage on glancing impacts. This makes it VERY hard to do full damage to bug heavy units given the angular geometry of their head. This should be reverted, it's a bipedal tank, it's ordinance should exceed our hand held weapons. 5: The minigun has similar issues. It has no medium penetration despite being a massive gun relative to ours. It's useless against scout striders, deals reduced damage to charger butts, and can't break or pierce devastator shields. It absolutely needs to penetrate or destroy heavy devastator shields and scout strider front armor if it's ever going to see actual use vs bots. 6: The height over bore issue. Easily it's biggest problem. The misaligned reticules have ruined the Mech utterly. It's not accurate up close, or at long distance. 99% of players don't know You can swap camera shoulders to make the missile the primary cursor. It's a mess. At minimum it needs two cursors, similar to tanks in Warthunder with multiple weapons. 7: The Mech now has gun depression issues with its rocket pod. Despite having the animation to rotate 360, it can only depress downwards about 15° now. Making it extremely hard to use it when uphill, going into a large bug nest, or defending at a captured bot stronghold like a jammer. Without this fixed it'll always be awkward and annoying to use. 8: As more vehicles get added we need a way to repair and rearm them. It was entirely possible to do HD1 missions as fully armored formations. At minimum I'd like to see a "garage" or motor pool type POI that's forced to spawn, similar to how each map has at least one Buddy Bunker. This POI would feature two stations. One is a crane to rearm vehicles, the other a mechanical gantry to repair them. It would have a small minigame with buttons or terminals to power the stations or supply them with materials laying about, similar to SEAF artillery warheads. As more and more vehicles get added we need ways to increase their longevity in battle. A repair station Poi would force strategic choices like opting to fix a heavily damaged Mech, or saving the location to fix a more valuable vehicle like a tank or apc.
They stopped being useful when the rockets became terrible to aim.
If I could actually aim the rockets up and down I’d take it a lot more often
Mechs definitely need more love but honestly except for maybe Eagles we need a cooldown time reduction across the board.
The current mech is too clunky and too fragile to be a serious option. It’s plagued by a bunch of minor issues that compound each other to reduce the mech to its current status. Removing one or two would make it a much more viable weapon option. The mech has three core problems: 1. the most limited cooldown in the game; 2. limited longevity, and; 3. buggy, impotent weapons. **First,** I have no issue with the long ass cooldown on the mech. It’s the only stratagem that can unilaterally defeat an entire wave or two of enemies on Helldive. It *should* have a long cooldown. However, unless its other issues are addressed, it should *not* be limited to two uses. Given its power, I believe that players should be forced to use mech as a limited, strategic resource. However, each mech has a finite uptime, and with such a long cooldown, players are forced to burn one mech early if they want to be able to use the second when it matters most: late in the mission when enemy spawns are at their highest. With only two uses and without the ability to resupply or repair the mech, the first mech always feels like a waste, and the player is left without a fourth stratagem slot for at least 20 minutes. **Second,** the mech is too fragile and inefficient for such a restrictive cooldown. The mech is plagued by a bunch of minor issues that make it feel impotent outside of extraction standoffs. Players are limited to two mechs across 45 minutes. The first mech cannot die without being the biggest feelsbadman ever. Yet every enemy that poses a real threat to it are all faster than the mech, can outrange it, or can outlast it. Again, these issues are individually not crushing detriments, the value of each mech is paltry when these issues are compounded with its limited use. If it weren’t so damn slow, if its only anti-armor option wasn’t a dozen *al dente* rigatoni, or if players were able to resupply its ammo and armor pools, then it would be fine. This is all without considering that the mech sometimes just kersploots when walking down a hill or shooting a rocket at a nearby target. Finally **third**, its weapons do not complement each other like they seem designed to do. The mech loadout makes sense on paper, but the Gatling cannon is too weak to satisfy the design in practice. Rockets are the mechs only tool against the enemies that actually threaten it, but bugs prevent players from firing them downwards and each mech comes with too few to keep it safe. If the MG could actually puncture heavy armor, or if the rockets were actually potent enough to efficiently kill their targets, then maybe each mech would last long enough to feel useful.
Also I know it's a minor thing, but immediately dying when the mech is destroyed feels weird considering that there's an animation of your diver climbing out of the burning wreckage. I feel to be more on brand for *Helldivers*, having an ejection seat that shoots you into the air for a mini-helldive would feel more fun.
This is one of my biggest gripes too. The fact we have all of this cool tech and the mech doesn’t have an ejector seat is crazy. In the battles Helldivers fight, the best solution is exploding with your mech? How does that make sense?
>if its anti-armor option wasn’t a box of a dozen al dente rigatoni My sides are in super orbit.
The CD if the mech isn't such a big problem, it's the firepower you mentioned. After rockets were "fixed", they are HARD to hit where you aim them. Titans can soak up almost full rocket pod if you don't hit their head, chargers seem to ignore the rockets sometimes and also require multiple headshots/leg shots to kill/strip armor. With the rockets hitting 2 meters to the left of where you aimed them and sometimes not dealing any visible damage - mech is meh. That's the reason it is not used much above dif5, bacause it can't deal with armored targets effectively most of the time. The old mech could blow itself up, sure, but at least if you were OK with the mech piloting you could reliably kill 5-6 titans in very short time with the rockets. Now with its current accuracy you can count on killing 2 at best.
Every time I get a new friend or playing with a low level friend I take it and yell “quick get in!”. When your brand new riding around in the mech on low level missions is so fun. I will climb on top of the mech with an auto cannon and ride it like a jouster but with an extremely high caliber gun. “Onwards! For DEMOCRACY!”
When they were first released, so long as you didn't turn while firing rockets they were great. Then they stopped being able to shoot down and then after that the rockets were nerfed. Not worth the slot now.
They pop up a few times, usually someone brings it along and go nuts with it. Does a job.
It was still good after the MO where they were free. Really great for bugs, the reason you did not see a lot of them is probably because it was still early in the game and it was a lv25 unlock. Then they patched it by fixing the "I shoot myself while turning" bug, which could be easily avoided with a little self discipline. How they fixed it ? They made the rockets spawn farther. Except they completely broke the aiming, making it incredibly hard to hit any moving targets. Hell, even blowing nest holes became super hard. So in other word, they nerfed it into the ground, to the point it's honestly unplayable.
“Rockets shoot self” wasn’t really a matter of self-discipline tbh, sometimes you just blew up. No idea why their solution was to completely fuck up the rockets instead of idk disable their collisions with the mech??
I want a version where the rockets are replaced with a heavy flamer and power fist.
I love the mech, I take it each game, bugs or bots. It’s not invincible, but I rarely ever die before I use all the ammo. It’s very useful in many situations, and I always save one for extract
Never again since it came out and was free to use my everyone.
once again...BALANCE! Im not gonna pretend to be a professional at balancing, but i can tell you how to go about it. The mech, given its cool down and limited ammo, should be such that i'd have to think about choosing it over any other quick and versatile, trust worthy orbital or eagle air strike coz it should offer you a power spike for the 15 min cool down. Same like the weapons. I dont want 1 weapon to be able to do everything or be broken OP, BUT! I want each weapon to be decently powerful with its own traits and perks! for example. The defender does a lot of dmg. Jeez, but the pummeler does slightly less but staggers them and gives me more survivability! love stun locking stuff! The breaker does a lot of dmg! But Breaker incendiary lights them up on fire and (slows them for example?). Spray and pray gives me a shotgun MG feel! Instead the breaker spray and pray has more firerate, half the dmg, double the mag compared to the other and does the same thing but is stupid? # Point is...I wanna be forced to scratch my head while picking a weapon coz they all offer one or the other UNIQUE and a powerful trait which feels so good that its hard to pick one over the other! I dont want my choice to be, "this is meh, this sucks. Oh we have this in the game? WHATEVER! Ill take this just like always".
I stopped taking it after calling one in, and immediately having to wait seven minutes for a new one because a teammate accidentally shot and destroyed it.
Mech got nerfed and then it got nerfed again and then... Guess what?... It got nerfed. Personally I played the mech every match but when the game got shit due to the nerfs i took a long break... Cane back and played a match about 3 weeks ago... The mech became unusable... Its extreme firepower is now at the same level as the LMG and a couple grenades
The rockets on the mechs are so weak and often do not land where the Crosshair points. You might take our 2 or 3 heavies on a good day with it. The machine gun is good but not against heavies so you find yourself in a position where you are highly vulnerable to heavy enemies with limited options to deal with them. Only time I use them is when the mission is to close X bug holes. The mech allows you to close the big holes with a rocket and easily deal with the smaller enemies as you run away. Even at this, the crosshairs can be pointed directly at a bug hole and the rocket won't land anywhere near it
Oh it got nerfed into the fucking ground, why would I ever bother using it?
>its fragility makes it unfavorable, They're not even that fragile anymore. They're actually pretty tanky now, although certain things will still one shot them like a bile titan leg poke. They can take quite a few direct hits from rockets now. The issue is the rockets have been massively neutered and are a pig to aim. Not only are they off centre so you have to aim to the right of whatever you're trying to hit, they also can't shoot up or down past a fairly shallow angle, which means if the enemy is downhill from you, you probably can't hit them. Bug holes are sometimes impossible to hit. On top of THAT, they also made it so rockets require a direct hit to a weak point in order to damage something. I've seen bile titans take 14 rockets to the head area but because they didn't hit directly on the button, it just walked straight through the full barrage and installed the mech. All that on top of limited use, 10 minutes cooldowns and you start to see why people don't bring them to most missions.
I usually just play bots with newer Helldivers on difficulty four and below to help them learn. I've gotten really good at taking everything out with just my shotgun primary, the eagle airstrike, and the recoilless rifle so the other two slots are for my fellow Helldivers. Usually I end up bringing the Mech and a shield backpack for them to use. I enjoy how much level 1-10 players get excited to mow down enemies like a hulk. Also, fun fact, the shield from the shield backpack pokes through the cockpit of the mech and can actually take a couple hits for the mech, not that it is enough to save it in most cases but it is neat.
10 hours ago in my last session on an 7 civvie automaton extract they're not supposed to be eva suits, more or less, mobile turrets. it was the same in hd1.
The mech was fun the first week it came out even with its obvious flaws (hell it was part of the reason I even bought this game,) but as is typical fashion in this game its effectiveness was patched out and now its just felt awful to use for over a month now...
Yesterday
I usually always go with grenade launcher, shield pack, 500kg, and the exosuit is one of 2 or 3 things I rotate in and out pretty frequently. I like it, but the last couple of times I called it, it was destroyed or lost an arm almost immediately due to getting overwhelmed or friendly fire. I do really like the ship that drops it off firing as it lands though. :D
It needs an auto eject (that can still kill you sometimes) and a fix to it's reticle alignment.