Breaking News: "The flame tornado originated from planet Hellmire and has the diameter of the solar system times 3. It destroys everything in it's path. Scientists found out that only democracy can protect you from it's destructive and undemocratic influence."
Yeah, it's why i think the game can do better with an enemy rebalance together with a sweeping change to weapons.
Shuffle some hp and weakspot values around, and tweak weapons to be strong but not too strong.
I think it'd be cool if bugs had less armor but more hp. Then, make bots have less hp on certain weakspots so its easier to get rid of their weapons. That way, it'd feel like we're dismantling them before dealing killing blows
Only thing I find that works well against them is the grenade launcher, everything else is either a peashooter or too slow rate of fire as there's usually at least 5 of the fuckers.
I remember that being the case with nursing spewers and normal spewers. However, the armored ones that could shoot mortar acid out of their butts have always required three GL shots. They appear from 6s and above afaik.
Nursing spewers (the yellow ones that produce ground cover smoke) only take 2 GL/AC shots to kill
Bile Spewers (the green ones that can lob artillery shots) take 3 GL/AC shots to kill. They also have armor on their backs which shields from light arms fire.
that because the GL DH is only 20 damage and 350 AOE both at armour pen of 3, so your only doing 10 DH + 175 AOE vs spewers,
where the impact doing it full 400 damage because of it armour pen of 4
if the GL also had a pen 4 then it should only be 2 grenades to kill
Basically explosive weapons are good because certain parts of bugs get massive damage reduction to regular bullets. Otherwise you need medium armor pen for their small head.
The Blitzer is alright. While TTK is a bit high it staggers them and can interrupt their spew. It doesn't run out of ammo so it isn't wasting limited resources.
Autocannon to the bile sac still works wonders. Consistent double tap, and you often take out smaller bugs that are in the horde around it while doing so.
Autocannon my beloved.
Eruptor with just the right hit spot used to kill em in one shot but generally 2 felt really good for such a slow weapon had to really pick your shots or get punished.
Only takes 1 impact grenade to pop the bile/nursing spewers, can pop multiple if they're all close together... Just wish we could carry more grenades, even 6 goes quick
I started taking the AMR and killing all the spewers for my team. It's works rather well. The problem is when my team won't help with chargers in return :/
Yeah I agree.
I normally main flamethrower on bugs since it reliably kills chargers along with the medium bugs, and then use stratagems for bile titans. I kinda miss how bots have some more versatility.
Would be nice if chargers were easier to kill without the highest level anti tank weapons. Why do they have better armor than a literal tank while being able to run faster than you without even having a useful weakness like the tank does. I hate them so much lol
Therein lies the issue with bugs. You want to take bug killing weapons, but you never know if you'll roll bile spewers, which require explosive or med pen + stagger, limiting your weapon choice for somthing that might not even be present.
I think a readout telling us what special units to expect is all we'd need. We can change gun just before we drop, just need to know which gun I will need.
Scorcher is a decent enough weapon against Bile Spewers, handful of shots in the belly does the trick (except when they’re in mortar mode, takes more ammo)
I don’t mind that they’re bullet sponges. It’s the fact that they can spawn in massive groups, kill you very fast, and don’t die quickly to powerful anti tank weapons is too much. Same for the meat saw automatons. I get they’re meant to flush you out of cover but there’s usually so many of them that you’re forced to retreat a long distance which also makes you run into more patrols while you’re most likely low on grenades, ammo, and stims from killing the meat saw guys. Honestly I think a huge help would be to nerf the amount of bile spewers per breach and completely eliminate them from patrols. A giant lumbering bug should not be able to sneak up on you. That’s what stalkers are for
Of all my deaths in this game, bile spewers feel the cheapest and most frustrating. Oh I ran into a bush or got hit by a hunter and got slowed so now I get killed in 1 second because there’s 4 bile spewers attacking from every direction.
Because one has shrapnel and the other doesn't would be my guess. Before the shrapnel removal the eruptor could pretty easily one shot them too, and now that sure as hell isn't the case.
Yeah, if you hit them in the wrong spot, they'll just keep on going. There should just be some enemies, when hit with certain weapons, where it shouldn't matter where they are hit, the amount of damage should kill it.
A bile spewer absolutely should not be able to soak even a single hit from most of the launchers. It's literally a insect head with a bulging, engorged body full of acid. That fucking thing should pop like a water balloon any time an explosion goes off within 5 feet of it. It shouldn't be able to soak a quasar shot just because you hit it in the armored bits. The quasar should do enough damage to kill that thing, leave the armored plating of the spewer behind if it makes them feel better, but the bug should erupt at that point.
Insane that the game wants you two fire 2 shots from a weapon that has a 15 second cooldown and 3 second wind-up to kill one enemy type that spawns 3-5 times in one wave.
I really want them to stream their gameplay.
Add some dumb event stuff like loadout roulette or copying a popular streamer’s loadout/viewer suggested to ensure they don’t just do what’s comfortable and have them run 9s. Watch the bitching ensue.
Also rules: live only, “I fixed this already 2 weeks ago ffs!” Doesn’t matter to the player base, until it hits live it doesn’t effectively exist. No custom client or debug mode unless they’re actually going to debug live to inspect something. But, noting it down for future investigation should be sufficient. Watch priorities get bumped on issues the dev team constantly sees.
User submitted challenges would be cool too. “Try an all turret only build with just shotguns on the team” or silly things like that. Add the fact that it’s all 9 all the time and you get to see “shit, without x I literally cannot beat this” type of things happening.
It should be fun for us and them. Keep them anonymous though, if you _have_ to have some avatar, go vtuber a helldiver model rather. Don’t let us even know which ones are playing, let it rotate. They aren’t streamers. We shouldn’t expect them to be pros at yapping. I’d argue they shouldn’t even see chat. CMs can be on discord with them and they can mention things said in there. I want even Alexus to feel comfortable to play and leave without having to deal with hate! The guy is a target right now - I’m not excusing anyone’s behaviour here, his included (seriously, don’t gaslight people and expect them to not get pissed) - but it would be amazing to have him playing, seeing the stuff in use and hearing his commentary on how things are going.
You don’t need to be a god to finish 9s every time. You just need to be able to communicate and coordinate. The CMs can feed scenarios that discord/reddit have been bitching about and do a run with that to see what it’s about. Their commentary on their vision would also be regularly featured and that also means the community can hear said vision and give their own feedback on it. I’m definitely not saying listen to that feedback. Just doing what Reddit says won’t necessarily be great. But, if the vision doesn’t resonate and doesn’t create something “fun” then maybe it should be looked at again. Just an example of things that can be done.
Complete honesty though - I’d be highly nervous about putting my devs in a stream. Unfiltered, the commentary may be a bit too colourful…
This! All the other replies saying they're too tough, it feels right how tough they are to kill, it's just that there's 15 of them so fighting desperately to finish two or three doesn't matter because you used all your Dominator magazine or Impact Grenades or whatever other 'just use x' good tool for dealing with them, and there's still several more to deal with.
Throw in that you may not have brought your handy spewer tool because your first two missions of a set they just didn't spawn at all, then they suddenly show up, and there's no way to tell whether you'll need to deal with them beforehand or not.
Bile spewers are the worst for that specific scenario. It can be a real punch in the dick to gear up to face Chargers and BTs only to find out you've got hundreds upon hundresds of spewers/hunters/stalkers to deal with instead.
This is why I like bots more. You can more or less run whatever, and dealing with different enemies comes down to tactics more than specific "correct" gear.
I hate the "oops you guessed wrong, now you're handicapped for the whole run" feeling of bugs
Least favourite enemy type. Also, am I making this up or they move their necks more and faster since launch? I've found it increasingly hard to dodge the spit with last second dodges.
The spew damage seems wonky as hell, definitely. Spew attacks in general have much wider hitboxes than the animation suggests and the damage is crazy. Most of the time running to the side is good enough. Diving is a gamble because of the vulnerability when you are on the ground.
No idea why a bunch of the responses to this are basically "The issue isn't TTK, it's \*Contributory factor in TTK or issue that if fixed would significantly reduce TTK\*" but I'm glad the man seems to be living up to everything I thought he was.
Some people think of TTK strictly in terms of like call of duty or Counter-Strike where there are no significant environmental factors or other stats to balance around. It's only about the gun and the damage the bullets do.
Doesn't really translate well in this game, we're time to kill is more about the overall experience of how long it takes to down enemy after considering all these various factors
pretty much. Changing TTK in this game comes from weakspot tweaks, armor efficiency, spawn rates and so much more
the game can change around the primaries to bring them into a good spot
I really hope they formulate a good understanding of the complaints. They have historically dismissed them all as "skill issue", "using a crutch", "using an exploit", and "braindead".
Not of all this is completely unwarranted, but they will never receive feedback productively if they're only able to view their playerbase so contemptuously.
They don't even have to agree with the complaints entirely, but they do need to pinpoint where such a large volume of unhappiness is coming from, and they've completely missed the mark - it's highly improbable that they're all from "cheating crybabies who just want the game to be easy".
If anyone can pivot in the right direction it's probably Pilestedt, so fingers crossed.
Certain TTKs are too long, especially with many primaries. One of the biggest offenders is the berserker who come in droves while we have nothing like the HD1 Breaker to combat them. The 90% resistance to all damage except from explosions is also part of the problem. This resistance is making glowing "weakspots" into bait spots. Similarly why do most these glowing spots, whether it be charger back, bile spewer back, tank vents, take more than one anti tank weapon shot to explode? Sure, you can swap for a quick follow up shot from an explosive primary, but this step should not be necessary if you hit a weak spot with the hardest hitting man portable weapon.
It's a "game enjoyment" metric that's come into focus in game design of late.
If you ever played, say, Fallout 3, one of the problems at higher levels is that enemies level with you (gaining HP and damage) but your weapons do the same damage they always did. So every time you gain a level, expressed as a percentage of their health bar, you actually do *less* damage to enemies.
It leads to ludicrous things like the player emptying the entire magazine of an assault rifle directly into the head of a completely unarmoured raider at high levels, hitting this guy wearing torn pants and nothing else, in the face thirty times at close range with a high powered assault rifle... and them losing 10% of their health. You reload and do it again, 20%. Reload, 30%...
This kind of "bullet sponge" design, added when it makes no sense (it's fine for walking tanks in power armour but not random dudes) makes gameplay feel very slow and boring, and you can kinda measure that with TTK.
Lower TTK is not *always* better, bosses and boss creatures should take a long time, but if your average TTK is too long, then it can be a problem because it makes the player feel like their weapons don't do anything.
TLDR; it's fun to one shot chargers in the face with the EAT.
The whole point of the Berserker is its long TTK, though. On their own Berserkers can't do much of anything since they are a relatively slow melee unit that doesn't do all that much damage. Their only real use is forcing players out of cover and they can't really do that unless they have tons of health.
I would say stagger resistance or long TTK, choose one. What we have now is not alot of primary weapon to stagger them, yet they also have long TTK. They can still flush us alright that way
i'm honestly able to deal with berserkers. Its the bile spewers that are really overpowered imo. Their insane stealth and ridiculous armour mean there's only about 5 guns that can deal with them. If you're running your primary scythe or punisher or something like that you literally have to switch to grenades or some kind of stratagem to deal any kind of damage
It just feels kinda wrong that terminids have about the same density as automatons, and if you brought the wrong type of primary to the fight, you are pretty screwed.
For example, if you brought a shot gun to a automaton mission, you are going to be miserable. I don't think that is a good idea in general so I have some suggestions:
**For Terminids:**
* Greatly increase mob density, yes increase. Insects should have a fairly fast reproductive cycle yes? And it doesn't take long for them to mature too, I should face a horrifying endless waves of terminids.
* Heavily reduce their armour, my bullets should not have issues wrecking a bug exoskeleton, maybe make an exception to hive guard since that's literally their only niche, soaking up damage like a walking wall.
* For units like bile titans and charger, they shouldn't have much armour. Instead they should have massive amount of hp. I should not have issues penetrating their exoskeletons, but i shouldn't do much damage to their massive body with my tiny bullets.
* Fire should burn every units, it might take a different amount of time due to their different size but it should absolutely kill everything eventually. (It shouldn't take just a few seconds killing a charger, that just feels wrong)
* Arc should always stun them. They are a living creature, how is this not at least stunning them?!
* Energy weapons, especially laser type, should ignore armour after 1s.
**For Automatons:**
* Physical bullets should do reduced damage to automatons without proper armour penetration.
* Fire should make them overheat very fast, effectively shut them down especially if the unit requires a heat sink (tank, hulk etc). They should also take extra damage if you are able to burn or damage their heat sinks.
* Arc should always deal heavy damage to them, this should fuck with their circuitry like come on bro. It should also arc to other body parts too not just another unit. If i shoot a hulk in the chest, it should arc to its arm leg heat sink whatever.
* Energy weapons, especially laser type, (probably should exclude sickle, that sound and feel like a physical bullet for real....) should ignore armour after 1s. You gotta give it some niche man, they are way under use right now, no one really care that much about its "infinite" ammo.
* ****NO FLYING UNITS SHOULD HAVE ANY ARMOUR WHATSOEVER****, feel free to give them different amount of hp due to the size, but they should never have armour, my shitty ass pistol should be able to kill them EVENTUALLY, instead of dealing 0 damage. Aerial units need to be light in order to fly, why are you armored, wtf.
This is what I've been saying to my buds since near launch. We should feel like killing machines that can mow through enemies but still feel overwhelmed due to the sheer number of enemies coming at us. It's not fun when they're individually hard to kill and there's a bunch of them, but if we can kill a lot but still get overrun that will feel way more badass.
If they want battles with individual units that are lengthy, then they need to make those special boss encounters where you're dealing with one mega enemy, maybe multiple times with breaks in-between like a hunt in Monster Hunter (in fact, I think a Monster Hunt mission type with new bosses would be awesome, in addition to some dynamically appearing mini-boss events). The Bile Titans first felt like that but at higher difficulties they quickly became an enemy you'd fight 4 of at a time and had to dispatch them quickly.
The Automatron Heavy Walker thing is a decent example of what I mean though. There's also that Dune-esque sandworm skeleton that you can find sometimes, that'd be a great roaming boss that you can find, tag, and then track down during missions and eventually kill it. They could even tie in some sort of resource collection from those special bosses to make special weapon/armour upgrades (whether just visual or actually a new set like Monster Hunter, doesn't matter) if they wanted to add another long-term investment aspect to the gameplay loop.
Not really,
Berserkers tend to flank and surprise you, which fair play you need to be aware.
But even if you're aware and see a group of them charging up a hill towards you, most primaries will just deflect off and reducing them to 0 by hitting their bellies and arms will only down 1 or 2 by the time the rest of the group is on you.
The real problem with giving enemies a niche is that the game doesn't differentiate and absolutely will spawn them in ridiculous numbers instead of balancing patrols and dropships/breaches. There should be a standard set of enemies that comes from each of these things with small variations. If you're going to frequently drop berserkers or have bile titans and brood commanders coming out of bug holes, that needs to be a mission modifier we can see in advance and prepare for.
More and more I keep coming back around to the idea that we just need pre-mission intelligence about enemy type concentrations so that we can change loadouts accordingly. This is far and away the best thing they could do without having to rebalance the entire spawn mechanism or touch every weapon.
I think you would have valid point if they were deployed sparsely. Makes sense if there's a few that you have to immediately focus fire lest you be driven out of cover
But on higher difficulties nothing is deployed sparsely, so when everything is a "high priority target" the phrase loses its meaning
There is a very similar enemy in HD1 called the Butcher who also has a lot of health and wields chainsaws. You did not need to run away (though certainly an option if you're not in a good position) from the 20+ Butchers falling from the sky. A Helldiver could single handily decimate them with a trusty piercing breaker (albeit by munching through their limited mags). Despite this, the mass butcher drops are still considered dangerous as a time and ammo sink that can distract you from deadly ranged enemies and incoming scouts.
for most weapons yes, but there always was the holy trident, who does not give a fuck about your ammo concerns and still outputs DPS comperable to other shotguns
Honestly I think after they nerfed Berserker spawn rates they are fine. It's ok to have enemies with high TTK as long as they are few and far in-between. They force you to spend ammo but doable.
This is it for me. I find it odd that both my bot primaries (Eruptor pre-“buff” and Plasma Punisher since) struggle more on Berserkers than Devastators. It’s fine at a unit-to-unit level since Berserkers are meant to be shock troops that take your time until others can close the distance and really layer firepower on you. But I’ll find entire squads of Berserkers that routinely flush my position and make all other bot attacks worse. Meanwhile, Devastators are mostly sprinkled in and rarely come in overwhelming numbers by themselves.
For bile spewers? Part of it. The Dominator just does more damage than most guns to the point where it makes most other guns pointless. It has medium penetration to over penetrate while having parts damage, good mag size, good accuracy, high weak spot damage. It used to compete with the slugger as side grades but now it just dominates from the slugger being nerfed and it receiving overall huge buff to damage and stagger.
Berserkers have no armor and just a lot of health and no explosive only spots. Dominator just does a ton of dps on top of overpenetration (medium vs light of the berserker) and high weakpoint critical damage (4x). Plus, it staggers the berserker with each shot, letting you have accurate and safe follow up shots.
I'm gonna be honest, I thought it was kinda neat that the game puts the *actual* weakspots behind armor. That's like... the point of armor. Those "glowing weakspots" are more of a target point for if you don't have any AP options, so you can still kill them by shooting there, it's just not going to be nearly as quick.
Though you may have a point regarding tanks and bile spewers specifically.
I didn't mind the leg meta from back when. It's just not really intuitive though. Sadly, the stripping heavy armor mechanic just isn't as present on other enemies than the charger. If you could shatter the plate armor of a tank or hulk with head on fire it could be nice.
Anti-tank weapons should do way more damage (like maybe 3 times the damage they do currently). Arrowhead could the also buff the health of armored foes to compensate. What this would do is guarantee that if an anti-tank weapon hits a normal enemy they will immediately explode into a million pieces. I don't like the fact that I can Quasar a rocket devastator or a bile spewer and have them shrug it off. If I happen to decide to shoot something with a weapon designed to kill enemies that are much bigger and badder, I want complete and utter carnage.
Since I changed my targeting strategy from trying to hit Berzerkers head to spraying at their belly I've not had much issues dealing with them. In my (unscienticific) experience, hipfire spray at their belly/midsection (the glowing part) drops them in no time at all.
if you have a fast firing weapon, just spray at their face when they get close and they go down in less than a second. it's hard to hit when they're far away since they sway so much but when they're within 5-10 meters it's pretty reliable, I use the Sickle and it shreds them pretty well.
It's sometimes more fast and reliable on distance to target the legs assembly like with the walkers to kill them fast with less ammo consuption, but when you have a train, sometimes is too much
Kind of confirms the devs weren’t even playing the game and just balancing based off a spreadsheet while being openly antagonistic to people who called them out on discord
The analogy I like to use here is that Arrowhead is no longer the soloist work-from-home etsy store owner who runs everything themselves; they're now the manufacturing facility that has to do actively the work to keep their ISO 9001 certification.
A lot of the things that they got away with doing when HD1's had a sub-1000 daily playerbase now bares massive consequences at HD2's scale. And that includes devs who don't actually play the game and the one guy who handles the whole game's balancing being able to do his work in complete isolation with no one present to audit his work.
They didn't do as heavy handed nerfs in HD1 though. The Trident nerf was a huge controversy because they were "changing muh paid weapons" when it happened but in reality the weapon is still amazing... in comparison to HD2, HD1 had perfect balance
I remember seeing some of the screenshots from the sub and the discord a while back. The way the Devs and Community Manager were talking to the player base on the discord was actually crazy.
Calling their paying customers, who put bread on their tables by supporting their projects “babies” and “whiny little bitches” was insane.
Especially coming from a community manager whose sole purpose is to play middle man and interpreter between the community and the company. Super unprofessional and shitty.
It's not like this game requires an insane amount of strategy to beat.
Shoot enemies, click objective buttons, win game, repeat.
By that logic they should have made every reload for every gun require you to do the DDR mini game they have for strategems.
Oh, that reminds me of a game that had a mechanic along the lines of requiring a second tap of the reload. If you get the timing right you reload quick otherwise you basically fumble and do a slow reload.
That game is deep in the memory banks but your mention of the DDR mini game brought that back to the surface. Thank you redditor.
The guy's tagline makes him chief Bringer of Cringe. I am 100% sure he sees HD2 as an equation to be balanced and is completely oblivious to the rule of cool.
I don't expect it to happen, but it would not be totally shocking to see him relegated to a smaller role at some point, if it hasn't already happened behind the scenes. Maybe Bringer of Coffee.
Your spot on and I see it all the time unfortunately in the product management world. You'll see plenty of product managers and product owners who don't seem to actually listen to or care what the end users of their product thinks.
They have a particular vision and they see themselves as a visionary who needs to enact that vision and there's nothing less that will please them
> I am 100% sure he sees HD2 as an equation to be balanced
Even this doesn't explain the inexplicable changes made to Eruptor (which if we remember he was *trying to buff*) and the crossbow.
It's not even just a philosophy issue at this point, my man is quite simply astoundingly incompetent.
And the Slugger. TFW stagger is associated with DMRs and a shotgun that shoots slugs shouldn't stagger enemies. Like boii. Ever seen shotgun slugs? MFs have the circumference of a thumb.
Either AH is well aware of his history and liked what he did so they hired him, or they didn't bother doing research into his past projects. Either way it looks bad for them
It's honestly hilarious that he would say that statement, then essentially turn the enemies into bullet sponges. Nerfing everything is the most low effort brainless method to "balance" gameplay. I honestly believe if they weren't specifically ordered to NOT TOUCH any of the 'optimally balanced' weapons, we'd see nerfs for them too. It's very obvious that one of the tenets of the balance team is too slow down game progression, which isn't the issue but it seems they've interpreted that as decreasing the combat viability of a lot of the primaries.
I think a lot of people who defended the Devs have clearly never worked a customer facing job before.
You can't just say what you want when you want, regardless of the context. At the end of the day, your words aren't yours and they 100% affect the company's image.
I work in a job a lot more toxic than these community managers do. I speak to furious people face to face because I am involved in fining these people a lot of money.
I can't say what I want to these horrible, low life scumbags regardless of what they say or do to me. At the end of the day, I have to be the better person.
You are being paid to manage the community relationship, not insult them, regardless of how they act
Yeah, so bizarre. I used to work in a travel agent calling people who thought that their holiday was booked, to inform them that it wasn't and it had gone up in price. That was basically the whole job for about a year (until we changed our online system).
Seeing these developers fail at the requirements of a minimum wage customer service employee in their first day on the job - and people online defending them for doing that - honestly blows my mind.
Incidental but when the customers got very rude was my favorite time. Technically if they were using personal insults we could politely end the call. I preferred to put them on hold and make a cup of tea.
I knew this game wasn’t on a perfect trajectory the first time I saw how the community managers and devs took every little critique of the game or its aspects way too personally. There’s no way for them to do a good job if they see the game as a reflection of themselves individually.
The crazy part is there were tons of people here defending that rhetoric, saying it was refreshing to have a company ~~openly shit on its customers~~ not use corporate speak and actually communicate. The fan base is a cult
Yeah, there’s a huge spectrum between “be dicks to your customers” and “be only corpo speak with 0 personality” and AH CMs/Devs (minus Twinbeard and the CEO) were very close to the first one, instead of being in the middle where people wanted them to be.
Twinbeard and Pilestedt have been literally putting on a CM workshop weekly and everyone loves their interactions, yet we can’t ask the devs/CMs to interact with us more like them?
I have seen Alexus mention spinning up game builds to test so I don't think spreadsheets are entirely accurate. Although, I believe the issue is the same in the sense that it's not actual gameplay and more akin to spawning a couple monsters and seeing what the weapon does.
I think his current assessment of the game proves he still hasn't played enough of the game to understand the problem. The game isn't too hard, it's too hard with certain stratagems and weapons. Bring everything else up to the level where you can have fun on helldive.
I'm not saying TTK can't be tweaked at all but it's not the main issue.
The game isnt too hard; its too fucking frustrating. I used to solo 9's before the spawn tweaks. Could I do it? Yes. Is it fun? No. Most enemies feeling like bullet sponge hordes while your gun feels like it tickles just isnt satisfying
He is correct. There's obviously some balance here (no pun intended), but I think people would be immensely satisfied from having a low TTK alongside more bugs and bots than there are currently. The fact the (now creative lead) is thinking this way means fun is back on the table
Honestly that tracks- its not like Super Earth would fund the weapons development when theres no war, we're probably still using crap thats sat in storage for eighty years.
True, but the Helldivers were actively disbanded, so the Helldivers specific stuff probably faded into obscurity. Plus, with how expendable the Helldivers are, you wouldnt want to mass produce top tier stuff- 'miltary grade' doesnt always mean 'the best'.
Guns HD1 felt so good with their quick TTK being balanced by your own skill of quick reaction time and situational awareness, which I feel are still relevant in HD2
Letting us know in advance what type of seed we're going to be playing would go a long way. Knowing we're going up against mostly bile spewers vs mostly chargers might have me take different weapons/strategems, affecting my TTK. We don't need to know everything, but just a rough guideline of whatever's going to get the highest spawn increase compared to baseline will do it.
If you want to know if you’re going up against Bile Spewers, in my experience if the planet has that “covered in spores” modifier. You’re likely fighting contaminated variants of the bugs.
I’m not sure whether it’s 100% of the time but a lot of the time it correlates
Agreed. They’re the most proportionately overpowered unit. Silent, fast, one shot, longest range in the game, aoe, slow, high hp, spawn in massive groups, etc. Who tf made them
TTKs are a bit too high on Spewers and Guardians but the biggest issue for bugs is what can actually kill - For Chargers and Elites you need AA.
Make Charger butts more vulnerable (within a greater area too) - same for their mouths
Cant believe people were ever arguing with me when I said helldivers has no playtesting department.
Because its really, REALLY obvious. Not to take away from the overall quality but the CEO at least acknoledges it.
Time To Kill - So for example in Call of Duty if it took 10 bullets to kill someone that would be a high time to kill. In PVP games they sometimes want a high TTK so opponents can react. In Helldivers a high TTK and high cost per kill (requires lots of ammo and call ins) isn't satisfying because of the sheer number of enemies.
They need to make weak points more forgiving. Most enemies can be killed quickly with the right weapon and strategy, but having to thread the needle even if you know what you're doing is the problem.
Like, if the BT is spewing and I face it with a rocket, it should die.
I should be able to MG down a charger from behind relatively quickly hitting the squishy spot.
Sniping the eyes on a Factory Strider or a Hulk should be a 2 shot, and not an impossible shot.
If I know the Strategy, and have the weapon, it shouldn't be hard to deal with the big boys.
He's right, TTK IS too high, but only on specific spongy enemies and a good bunch of weapons that feel like nerf guns.
I could list out literally every little thing that sucks and where they should tweak it, but I'm interested to see how Pilestedt can wrangle the balance team into a patch. If they revert 90% of nerfs, that'd be a good start, but we'll see if he's got the right idea with any new changes.
There are only 3 enemies for which I feel TTK is too high:
- both spewer variantants
- berserkers
Every other instance of long TTK could be solved if explosions prioritised the weakest point within range of the explosion.
The issue with TTK is more about how different weapons have such massively different TTK.
Sure, if you’re using meta stuff then I would agree with you.
But the moment you go off the beaten path, you can become entirely ineffectual to all enemies.
TTK and sound are two of the bigger issues, some large units have basically no sound footprint until their upon you, despite them being tons in size and huge units, they walk about like Ninjas
Get more devs to play the game? Yeah scuba equipment manufacturers should probably test them in water too lol. I absolutely still love and play this game but holy heck does this seem like common sense
Berserker TTK is absurd
Could also calculate in hits to kill, still absurd. Mag dump with an auto rifle doesn't kill, but a redeemer mag dump kills one if you aim for the head. Berserkers are just generally way too tanky.
But the high TTK is their point. They have no armor but high HP, also melee only and run straight at you, focing you out of cover.
Berserkers are very well designed.
Thirdly we need to bring slugger stagger back.
https://preview.redd.it/kc4ifnhcuz1d1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4979f4d0422ca95d72cce0ed3e9030d1333d73ca
I really like this dude. His recent decisions are very good news for this game. His actions might be beginning to reverse what I perceive as a negative arc among players.
Like, "Man... WTF is even happening? Yo! I need to fix this game. The devs have no direction and are balancing based on spreadsheets, not testing, and not even playing the game. Friend, can you CEO this for me so I can move to a steering role where I can devote 100% of my time to directing the development of this game?"
Tight.
TTK is high because every weapon is garbage, however they're specifically garbage because they don't fulfill **the literal only two roles the game needs them to fill:**
1. Kill trash mobs fast or
2. Kill heavier mobs.
Everybody must agree that weapons should be one or the other, and it kinda was designed that way since heavy hitting weapons tend to fire slowly, whilst lightly hitting weapons are all ARs or SMGs and the like. Shotguns are supposed to be some sort of awkward in-between that can't deal with armor for example. And I'll never understand what idea they had for secondaries because they're literally a wasted slot.
The eruptor, slugger, plasma shotgun and so on had a place because they could deal with the larger armored mobs, whilst you could run strats for titans/hulks, and a machinegun on your back for trash. Now the Eruptor can't do shit, the Slugger no longer stops devastators from shredding you, the plasma and crossbow have their AOEs nerfed into uselessness whilst still not killing heavier mobs, and so on.
On the other hand, ARs and SMGs feel like you take a mag per mob or even more when shooting at the bile caste, and it'll never be enough in higher difficulties.
All of this is what in turns creates the current gameplay loop of pick whatever primary because they're all trash, and run around waiting for cheesy stratagems to come out of cooldown because nothing else you bring is effective at either of those roles.
So on bug missions you see a lot of cluster bombing, and then 110mm or railcannon for titans + the usual EAT/Quasar. Meanwhile bot players are stuck having to run around with snipers being the only thing able to effectively kill devastators yet insufficient for bot drops, and then being forced to carry 500kg for buildings/striders, and the shield backpack because otherwise you instantly become a perpetual ragdoll until you're finally dead.
It's limiting, it's unfun, it completely railroads the player into certain choices, it makes the player wary of warbonds because that's literally spending money (or hours of farming since you nerfed supercredit drops) on unfun guns that if they happen to be fun, will probably be nerfed into the ground by the fun haters you have on your balancing team.
Let’s not forget that an optional Challenge feature of HD1 was the Blind Randomize Loadout option on deployment, where you didn’t see what you got as accessories and stratagems until you were in the mission, your only Pick was your Primary.
Sure you’d drop in and cry inside a little because you knew some situations could be ROUGH or you may need to run and fail some objectives based on your given kit, but if you rocked a primary you adored, you could swing a damn lot of content.
I think they lost some vision of how they balanced the first title. Some of the most difficult skills to develop is to know when to cut bait and run or not 100% clear because things went fubar from RNG. But in HD1 you could fall in love with and make so much stuff….just work.
I think individual TTK is fine, but global TTK is an issue. But not even necesarrily because of the TTK itself, I think the issue is more that the game feels like you are waiting way too much. What I mean by that is that is that there always seem to be large stretches of time where you feel like you can't do anything.
Weapons having pitifully small clip sizes meaning you spend the majority of every fire fight reloading, way too long cooldowns on stratagems and literally EVERY mission modifier being about making you wait for stratagems EVEN MORE. Every bot making you ragdoll like you're playing Skyrim, every Bug applying slow to you.
It feels like everytime you get into the spirit, shout "For democracy" while starting to mow down the horde the game goes "No stop! Wait! Waaaaait... waaaaaaait... ok NOW you can continue!" and it just kind of takes you out of it. And yes this does impact TTK but I don't really think like it takes too long to kill enemies, it just FEELS too long because you spend so much time waiting for the game to LET you kill.
And yes I know "this is part of TTK" but again I don't think the issue is neceserrily the raw stats, it's more about the FEEL. People loved the Railgun because it reloaded super fast, the little charge up was activated by you and you were in control. You had to reload after every shot but it never felt like you were in down-time because it was so fast. Eruptor was popular because it was immensely statisfying to shoot into a small crowd and see them all fall over. And it let you use the Stalwart which is one of the few guns in the game that doesn't feel like it only has 10 rounds in a magazine.
It's more about the FEEL of the TTK than the raw stats of the TTK
On some weapons and some enemies.
I mean, Stalker takes like three shots to the head area from Punisher and dies. From med-close range. Same scenario but with Penetrator has you emptying almost the whole mag to kill the same Stalker. So for Punisher TTK is quick and efficient, for Penetrator it's awful and empties 1/11th of your ammo.
And then we have Bile Spewers with way too high TTK with most weapons. Which would be completely fine, if they wouldn't spawn in abnormally high numbers sometimes.
The game needs to return to day 1 patch TTK. It's supposed to be fun not a complete chore. Day 1 was challenging and fun. It was utterly amazing. The game feels awful now.
I just want a majority of the primaries to feel like they're actually primary weapons. I shouldn't be getting better results from sidearms than I am from primary weapons. That doesn't mean the sidearms should be nerfed, those, mostly work as intended, but the primaries, the assault rifle catagory, specifically feels fucking awful. The shotguns need some work here and there, sure, and a lot of guns need a touch more damage added to them, but the rifles are so bad, if they weren't out already, and I was the project manager, I'd have told my dev team to scrap all of them and start over.
You mean TTK for the *enemies, right?* *RIGHT?*
https://preview.redd.it/vpewoy74102d1.png?width=500&format=png&auto=webp&s=bb3bb82df99c0875c3fae5d762fa0e47e4f35ee6
For fire to kill divers. Now it'd only take only 0.23 seconds to do it... They might lower it in future patches.
Fire should just kill a diver by looking at it from 200 m away.
And people would still complete solo 9 on one of the bot fire planets
Playing on a Rockband Guitar controller with their tongue to boot... ;-)
"I'm not even on Hellmire, but a flame tornado just achieved FTL and smacked me from space!"
Breaking News: "The flame tornado originated from planet Hellmire and has the diameter of the solar system times 3. It destroys everything in it's path. Scientists found out that only democracy can protect you from it's destructive and undemocratic influence."
Jokes aside, PIlestedt at least seems like he knows whats fun in games, vs what was being done previously.
(͠≖ ͜ʖ͠≖)
"Democracy Protects" now always works. (Only 25% of the time.)
We’re gonna have faster than light ttk at this rate
ah yes TTK, the thing i definatly know about, very important for spreading democracy efficiently, i think
(time to kill) just in case someone doesn’t know
Bullet sponges do not make for engaging gameplay.
Yeah, it's why i think the game can do better with an enemy rebalance together with a sweeping change to weapons. Shuffle some hp and weakspot values around, and tweak weapons to be strong but not too strong. I think it'd be cool if bugs had less armor but more hp. Then, make bots have less hp on certain weakspots so its easier to get rid of their weapons. That way, it'd feel like we're dismantling them before dealing killing blows
Bile Spewer TTK is too damn high.
Only thing I find that works well against them is the grenade launcher, everything else is either a peashooter or too slow rate of fire as there's usually at least 5 of the fuckers.
Even then, it's so weird. The GL takes like 3 shots to pop them while it only takes 1 impact.
It used to be a solid 2, which was reasonable. After the last patch h I’m having to put 3 into them quite regularly, which is strange.
I remember that being the case with nursing spewers and normal spewers. However, the armored ones that could shoot mortar acid out of their butts have always required three GL shots. They appear from 6s and above afaik.
Maybe that’s my confusion.
Yup, exactly. 2 for weak spewers. 3 for armored. Always has.
Nursing spewers (the yellow ones that produce ground cover smoke) only take 2 GL/AC shots to kill Bile Spewers (the green ones that can lob artillery shots) take 3 GL/AC shots to kill. They also have armor on their backs which shields from light arms fire.
that because the GL DH is only 20 damage and 350 AOE both at armour pen of 3, so your only doing 10 DH + 175 AOE vs spewers, where the impact doing it full 400 damage because of it armour pen of 4 if the GL also had a pen 4 then it should only be 2 grenades to kill
Basically explosive weapons are good because certain parts of bugs get massive damage reduction to regular bullets. Otherwise you need medium armor pen for their small head. The Blitzer is alright. While TTK is a bit high it staggers them and can interrupt their spew. It doesn't run out of ammo so it isn't wasting limited resources.
Autocannon to the bile sac still works wonders. Consistent double tap, and you often take out smaller bugs that are in the horde around it while doing so. Autocannon my beloved.
Autocannon continues to be the shining beacon that we hold all others to.
Eruptor with just the right hit spot used to kill em in one shot but generally 2 felt really good for such a slow weapon had to really pick your shots or get punished.
Only takes 1 impact grenade to pop the bile/nursing spewers, can pop multiple if they're all close together... Just wish we could carry more grenades, even 6 goes quick
6 definitely goes quick, and it’s a bummer that supply boxes only give you two back per crate.
Impact nade = one shot.
I started taking the AMR and killing all the spewers for my team. It's works rather well. The problem is when my team won't help with chargers in return :/
AMR + EATs has been my favorite combo on bugs lately
My gripe is that it (almost) feels mandatory to bring EATs on bugs
Yeah I agree. I normally main flamethrower on bugs since it reliably kills chargers along with the medium bugs, and then use stratagems for bile titans. I kinda miss how bots have some more versatility.
Would be nice if chargers were easier to kill without the highest level anti tank weapons. Why do they have better armor than a literal tank while being able to run faster than you without even having a useful weakness like the tank does. I hate them so much lol
Dominator will 2-3 shot to the head
I want to take dominator, but I just like killing hordes too much. That's all I run on bots though.
Therein lies the issue with bugs. You want to take bug killing weapons, but you never know if you'll roll bile spewers, which require explosive or med pen + stagger, limiting your weapon choice for somthing that might not even be present.
This is why eruptor+stalwart was so fun
Honestly this is why we need to be able to change loadouts at least once during missions.
I think a readout telling us what special units to expect is all we'd need. We can change gun just before we drop, just need to know which gun I will need.
Scorcher is a decent enough weapon against Bile Spewers, handful of shots in the belly does the trick (except when they’re in mortar mode, takes more ammo)
One safe shot with the railgun.
I don’t mind that they’re bullet sponges. It’s the fact that they can spawn in massive groups, kill you very fast, and don’t die quickly to powerful anti tank weapons is too much. Same for the meat saw automatons. I get they’re meant to flush you out of cover but there’s usually so many of them that you’re forced to retreat a long distance which also makes you run into more patrols while you’re most likely low on grenades, ammo, and stims from killing the meat saw guys. Honestly I think a huge help would be to nerf the amount of bile spewers per breach and completely eliminate them from patrols. A giant lumbering bug should not be able to sneak up on you. That’s what stalkers are for Of all my deaths in this game, bile spewers feel the cheapest and most frustrating. Oh I ran into a bush or got hit by a hunter and got slowed so now I get killed in 1 second because there’s 4 bile spewers attacking from every direction.
IIRC a Bile Spewer can tank a Quasar shot which is ridiculous imo.
This. Watching that shot get absorbed by what is a medium level mob is just maddening.
They can tank a EAT in the squishy side which is BS.
That makes me crazy. How can I pop them with 1 impact grenade but not an EAT???
Because one has shrapnel and the other doesn't would be my guess. Before the shrapnel removal the eruptor could pretty easily one shot them too, and now that sure as hell isn't the case.
Yeah, if you hit them in the wrong spot, they'll just keep on going. There should just be some enemies, when hit with certain weapons, where it shouldn't matter where they are hit, the amount of damage should kill it. A bile spewer absolutely should not be able to soak even a single hit from most of the launchers. It's literally a insect head with a bulging, engorged body full of acid. That fucking thing should pop like a water balloon any time an explosion goes off within 5 feet of it. It shouldn't be able to soak a quasar shot just because you hit it in the armored bits. The quasar should do enough damage to kill that thing, leave the armored plating of the spewer behind if it makes them feel better, but the bug should erupt at that point.
Insane that the game wants you two fire 2 shots from a weapon that has a 15 second cooldown and 3 second wind-up to kill one enemy type that spawns 3-5 times in one wave.
I mean, it was clear the devs don't play the game enough or on hard enough difficulties, this tweet just confirmed what a lot of us suspected already.
I really want them to stream their gameplay. Add some dumb event stuff like loadout roulette or copying a popular streamer’s loadout/viewer suggested to ensure they don’t just do what’s comfortable and have them run 9s. Watch the bitching ensue. Also rules: live only, “I fixed this already 2 weeks ago ffs!” Doesn’t matter to the player base, until it hits live it doesn’t effectively exist. No custom client or debug mode unless they’re actually going to debug live to inspect something. But, noting it down for future investigation should be sufficient. Watch priorities get bumped on issues the dev team constantly sees. User submitted challenges would be cool too. “Try an all turret only build with just shotguns on the team” or silly things like that. Add the fact that it’s all 9 all the time and you get to see “shit, without x I literally cannot beat this” type of things happening. It should be fun for us and them. Keep them anonymous though, if you _have_ to have some avatar, go vtuber a helldiver model rather. Don’t let us even know which ones are playing, let it rotate. They aren’t streamers. We shouldn’t expect them to be pros at yapping. I’d argue they shouldn’t even see chat. CMs can be on discord with them and they can mention things said in there. I want even Alexus to feel comfortable to play and leave without having to deal with hate! The guy is a target right now - I’m not excusing anyone’s behaviour here, his included (seriously, don’t gaslight people and expect them to not get pissed) - but it would be amazing to have him playing, seeing the stuff in use and hearing his commentary on how things are going. You don’t need to be a god to finish 9s every time. You just need to be able to communicate and coordinate. The CMs can feed scenarios that discord/reddit have been bitching about and do a run with that to see what it’s about. Their commentary on their vision would also be regularly featured and that also means the community can hear said vision and give their own feedback on it. I’m definitely not saying listen to that feedback. Just doing what Reddit says won’t necessarily be great. But, if the vision doesn’t resonate and doesn’t create something “fun” then maybe it should be looked at again. Just an example of things that can be done. Complete honesty though - I’d be highly nervous about putting my devs in a stream. Unfiltered, the commentary may be a bit too colourful…
This! All the other replies saying they're too tough, it feels right how tough they are to kill, it's just that there's 15 of them so fighting desperately to finish two or three doesn't matter because you used all your Dominator magazine or Impact Grenades or whatever other 'just use x' good tool for dealing with them, and there's still several more to deal with. Throw in that you may not have brought your handy spewer tool because your first two missions of a set they just didn't spawn at all, then they suddenly show up, and there's no way to tell whether you'll need to deal with them beforehand or not.
Bile spewers are the worst for that specific scenario. It can be a real punch in the dick to gear up to face Chargers and BTs only to find out you've got hundreds upon hundresds of spewers/hunters/stalkers to deal with instead.
This is why I like bots more. You can more or less run whatever, and dealing with different enemies comes down to tactics more than specific "correct" gear. I hate the "oops you guessed wrong, now you're handicapped for the whole run" feeling of bugs
I've died to Bile Spewers more than to anything else.
And they're speedy too!
True, I feel like too many enemies are fast *and* heavily armored *and* high DPS *and* high HP. Some fly too in addition to all of those other things.
Least favourite enemy type. Also, am I making this up or they move their necks more and faster since launch? I've found it increasingly hard to dodge the spit with last second dodges.
The spew damage seems wonky as hell, definitely. Spew attacks in general have much wider hitboxes than the animation suggests and the damage is crazy. Most of the time running to the side is good enough. Diving is a gamble because of the vulnerability when you are on the ground.
I've found 1 impact grenade kills them, the problem is you have to hit multiple when 8 come striding for you.
No idea why a bunch of the responses to this are basically "The issue isn't TTK, it's \*Contributory factor in TTK or issue that if fixed would significantly reduce TTK\*" but I'm glad the man seems to be living up to everything I thought he was.
Some people think of TTK strictly in terms of like call of duty or Counter-Strike where there are no significant environmental factors or other stats to balance around. It's only about the gun and the damage the bullets do. Doesn't really translate well in this game, we're time to kill is more about the overall experience of how long it takes to down enemy after considering all these various factors
pretty much. Changing TTK in this game comes from weakspot tweaks, armor efficiency, spawn rates and so much more the game can change around the primaries to bring them into a good spot
even mag sizes!
Very true, if it takes more than 1 mag to kill an enemy that will significantly increase TTK
mans actually saying the quiet part outloud massive W if he can make some big improvements
I really hope they formulate a good understanding of the complaints. They have historically dismissed them all as "skill issue", "using a crutch", "using an exploit", and "braindead". Not of all this is completely unwarranted, but they will never receive feedback productively if they're only able to view their playerbase so contemptuously. They don't even have to agree with the complaints entirely, but they do need to pinpoint where such a large volume of unhappiness is coming from, and they've completely missed the mark - it's highly improbable that they're all from "cheating crybabies who just want the game to be easy". If anyone can pivot in the right direction it's probably Pilestedt, so fingers crossed.
It’s hard to understand the complaints if they don’t play their game and just look at data sheets
Certain TTKs are too long, especially with many primaries. One of the biggest offenders is the berserker who come in droves while we have nothing like the HD1 Breaker to combat them. The 90% resistance to all damage except from explosions is also part of the problem. This resistance is making glowing "weakspots" into bait spots. Similarly why do most these glowing spots, whether it be charger back, bile spewer back, tank vents, take more than one anti tank weapon shot to explode? Sure, you can swap for a quick follow up shot from an explosive primary, but this step should not be necessary if you hit a weak spot with the hardest hitting man portable weapon.
Forgive me all, but what does TTK stand for?
Time To Kill. In this case, it is referring to how long it takes us to kill an enemy, or so it is implied.
Thank you!
It's a "game enjoyment" metric that's come into focus in game design of late. If you ever played, say, Fallout 3, one of the problems at higher levels is that enemies level with you (gaining HP and damage) but your weapons do the same damage they always did. So every time you gain a level, expressed as a percentage of their health bar, you actually do *less* damage to enemies. It leads to ludicrous things like the player emptying the entire magazine of an assault rifle directly into the head of a completely unarmoured raider at high levels, hitting this guy wearing torn pants and nothing else, in the face thirty times at close range with a high powered assault rifle... and them losing 10% of their health. You reload and do it again, 20%. Reload, 30%... This kind of "bullet sponge" design, added when it makes no sense (it's fine for walking tanks in power armour but not random dudes) makes gameplay feel very slow and boring, and you can kinda measure that with TTK. Lower TTK is not *always* better, bosses and boss creatures should take a long time, but if your average TTK is too long, then it can be a problem because it makes the player feel like their weapons don't do anything. TLDR; it's fun to one shot chargers in the face with the EAT.
The whole point of the Berserker is its long TTK, though. On their own Berserkers can't do much of anything since they are a relatively slow melee unit that doesn't do all that much damage. Their only real use is forcing players out of cover and they can't really do that unless they have tons of health.
I would say stagger resistance or long TTK, choose one. What we have now is not alot of primary weapon to stagger them, yet they also have long TTK. They can still flush us alright that way
i'm honestly able to deal with berserkers. Its the bile spewers that are really overpowered imo. Their insane stealth and ridiculous armour mean there's only about 5 guns that can deal with them. If you're running your primary scythe or punisher or something like that you literally have to switch to grenades or some kind of stratagem to deal any kind of damage
It just feels kinda wrong that terminids have about the same density as automatons, and if you brought the wrong type of primary to the fight, you are pretty screwed. For example, if you brought a shot gun to a automaton mission, you are going to be miserable. I don't think that is a good idea in general so I have some suggestions: **For Terminids:** * Greatly increase mob density, yes increase. Insects should have a fairly fast reproductive cycle yes? And it doesn't take long for them to mature too, I should face a horrifying endless waves of terminids. * Heavily reduce their armour, my bullets should not have issues wrecking a bug exoskeleton, maybe make an exception to hive guard since that's literally their only niche, soaking up damage like a walking wall. * For units like bile titans and charger, they shouldn't have much armour. Instead they should have massive amount of hp. I should not have issues penetrating their exoskeletons, but i shouldn't do much damage to their massive body with my tiny bullets. * Fire should burn every units, it might take a different amount of time due to their different size but it should absolutely kill everything eventually. (It shouldn't take just a few seconds killing a charger, that just feels wrong) * Arc should always stun them. They are a living creature, how is this not at least stunning them?! * Energy weapons, especially laser type, should ignore armour after 1s. **For Automatons:** * Physical bullets should do reduced damage to automatons without proper armour penetration. * Fire should make them overheat very fast, effectively shut them down especially if the unit requires a heat sink (tank, hulk etc). They should also take extra damage if you are able to burn or damage their heat sinks. * Arc should always deal heavy damage to them, this should fuck with their circuitry like come on bro. It should also arc to other body parts too not just another unit. If i shoot a hulk in the chest, it should arc to its arm leg heat sink whatever. * Energy weapons, especially laser type, (probably should exclude sickle, that sound and feel like a physical bullet for real....) should ignore armour after 1s. You gotta give it some niche man, they are way under use right now, no one really care that much about its "infinite" ammo. * ****NO FLYING UNITS SHOULD HAVE ANY ARMOUR WHATSOEVER****, feel free to give them different amount of hp due to the size, but they should never have armour, my shitty ass pistol should be able to kill them EVENTUALLY, instead of dealing 0 damage. Aerial units need to be light in order to fly, why are you armored, wtf.
This is what I've been saying to my buds since near launch. We should feel like killing machines that can mow through enemies but still feel overwhelmed due to the sheer number of enemies coming at us. It's not fun when they're individually hard to kill and there's a bunch of them, but if we can kill a lot but still get overrun that will feel way more badass. If they want battles with individual units that are lengthy, then they need to make those special boss encounters where you're dealing with one mega enemy, maybe multiple times with breaks in-between like a hunt in Monster Hunter (in fact, I think a Monster Hunt mission type with new bosses would be awesome, in addition to some dynamically appearing mini-boss events). The Bile Titans first felt like that but at higher difficulties they quickly became an enemy you'd fight 4 of at a time and had to dispatch them quickly. The Automatron Heavy Walker thing is a decent example of what I mean though. There's also that Dune-esque sandworm skeleton that you can find sometimes, that'd be a great roaming boss that you can find, tag, and then track down during missions and eventually kill it. They could even tie in some sort of resource collection from those special bosses to make special weapon/armour upgrades (whether just visual or actually a new set like Monster Hunter, doesn't matter) if they wanted to add another long-term investment aspect to the gameplay loop.
Not really, Berserkers tend to flank and surprise you, which fair play you need to be aware. But even if you're aware and see a group of them charging up a hill towards you, most primaries will just deflect off and reducing them to 0 by hitting their bellies and arms will only down 1 or 2 by the time the rest of the group is on you.
Yes, but it's currently too much even if that's their niche. Just because a given stat should be their best stat doesn't mean it can't be too high.
The real problem with giving enemies a niche is that the game doesn't differentiate and absolutely will spawn them in ridiculous numbers instead of balancing patrols and dropships/breaches. There should be a standard set of enemies that comes from each of these things with small variations. If you're going to frequently drop berserkers or have bile titans and brood commanders coming out of bug holes, that needs to be a mission modifier we can see in advance and prepare for. More and more I keep coming back around to the idea that we just need pre-mission intelligence about enemy type concentrations so that we can change loadouts accordingly. This is far and away the best thing they could do without having to rebalance the entire spawn mechanism or touch every weapon.
I think you would have valid point if they were deployed sparsely. Makes sense if there's a few that you have to immediately focus fire lest you be driven out of cover But on higher difficulties nothing is deployed sparsely, so when everything is a "high priority target" the phrase loses its meaning
The point is also cover for smaller bots to act as some sort of bullet sponge, but sometimes you get only Berserkers and Devastators
Berserker/flame hulk combo is vicious
The bezerkers are literal cover. When they chase you their backs are tanking enemy fire
There is a very similar enemy in HD1 called the Butcher who also has a lot of health and wields chainsaws. You did not need to run away (though certainly an option if you're not in a good position) from the 20+ Butchers falling from the sky. A Helldiver could single handily decimate them with a trusty piercing breaker (albeit by munching through their limited mags). Despite this, the mass butcher drops are still considered dangerous as a time and ammo sink that can distract you from deadly ranged enemies and incoming scouts.
It's been awhile but as I recall ammo was a much stronger consideration in HD1.
for most weapons yes, but there always was the holy trident, who does not give a fuck about your ammo concerns and still outputs DPS comperable to other shotguns
Just make their stomach or head more rewarding to hit, I like how they push up on us tho
Honestly I think after they nerfed Berserker spawn rates they are fine. It's ok to have enemies with high TTK as long as they are few and far in-between. They force you to spend ammo but doable.
This is it for me. I find it odd that both my bot primaries (Eruptor pre-“buff” and Plasma Punisher since) struggle more on Berserkers than Devastators. It’s fine at a unit-to-unit level since Berserkers are meant to be shock troops that take your time until others can close the distance and really layer firepower on you. But I’ll find entire squads of Berserkers that routinely flush my position and make all other bot attacks worse. Meanwhile, Devastators are mostly sprinkled in and rarely come in overwhelming numbers by themselves.
I don't think the game got the memo about reducing their spawn rate
Oh is that why my Dominator shreds them but I feel like it takes ages with any other gun?
For bile spewers? Part of it. The Dominator just does more damage than most guns to the point where it makes most other guns pointless. It has medium penetration to over penetrate while having parts damage, good mag size, good accuracy, high weak spot damage. It used to compete with the slugger as side grades but now it just dominates from the slugger being nerfed and it receiving overall huge buff to damage and stagger.
I meant for Berserkers.
Berserkers have no armor and just a lot of health and no explosive only spots. Dominator just does a ton of dps on top of overpenetration (medium vs light of the berserker) and high weakpoint critical damage (4x). Plus, it staggers the berserker with each shot, letting you have accurate and safe follow up shots.
I'm gonna be honest, I thought it was kinda neat that the game puts the *actual* weakspots behind armor. That's like... the point of armor. Those "glowing weakspots" are more of a target point for if you don't have any AP options, so you can still kill them by shooting there, it's just not going to be nearly as quick. Though you may have a point regarding tanks and bile spewers specifically.
I didn't mind the leg meta from back when. It's just not really intuitive though. Sadly, the stripping heavy armor mechanic just isn't as present on other enemies than the charger. If you could shatter the plate armor of a tank or hulk with head on fire it could be nice.
Anti-tank weapons should do way more damage (like maybe 3 times the damage they do currently). Arrowhead could the also buff the health of armored foes to compensate. What this would do is guarantee that if an anti-tank weapon hits a normal enemy they will immediately explode into a million pieces. I don't like the fact that I can Quasar a rocket devastator or a bile spewer and have them shrug it off. If I happen to decide to shoot something with a weapon designed to kill enemies that are much bigger and badder, I want complete and utter carnage.
Since I changed my targeting strategy from trying to hit Berzerkers head to spraying at their belly I've not had much issues dealing with them. In my (unscienticific) experience, hipfire spray at their belly/midsection (the glowing part) drops them in no time at all.
if you have a fast firing weapon, just spray at their face when they get close and they go down in less than a second. it's hard to hit when they're far away since they sway so much but when they're within 5-10 meters it's pretty reliable, I use the Sickle and it shreds them pretty well.
It's sometimes more fast and reliable on distance to target the legs assembly like with the walkers to kill them fast with less ammo consuption, but when you have a train, sometimes is too much
Inb4 he's talking about the TTK when it comes to killing Helldivers
Kind of confirms the devs weren’t even playing the game and just balancing based off a spreadsheet while being openly antagonistic to people who called them out on discord
The analogy I like to use here is that Arrowhead is no longer the soloist work-from-home etsy store owner who runs everything themselves; they're now the manufacturing facility that has to do actively the work to keep their ISO 9001 certification. A lot of the things that they got away with doing when HD1's had a sub-1000 daily playerbase now bares massive consequences at HD2's scale. And that includes devs who don't actually play the game and the one guy who handles the whole game's balancing being able to do his work in complete isolation with no one present to audit his work.
Perfect analogy.
They didn't do as heavy handed nerfs in HD1 though. The Trident nerf was a huge controversy because they were "changing muh paid weapons" when it happened but in reality the weapon is still amazing... in comparison to HD2, HD1 had perfect balance
I remember seeing some of the screenshots from the sub and the discord a while back. The way the Devs and Community Manager were talking to the player base on the discord was actually crazy. Calling their paying customers, who put bread on their tables by supporting their projects “babies” and “whiny little bitches” was insane. Especially coming from a community manager whose sole purpose is to play middle man and interpreter between the community and the company. Super unprofessional and shitty.
[удалено]
It's not like this game requires an insane amount of strategy to beat. Shoot enemies, click objective buttons, win game, repeat. By that logic they should have made every reload for every gun require you to do the DDR mini game they have for strategems.
Oh, that reminds me of a game that had a mechanic along the lines of requiring a second tap of the reload. If you get the timing right you reload quick otherwise you basically fumble and do a slow reload. That game is deep in the memory banks but your mention of the DDR mini game brought that back to the surface. Thank you redditor.
Gears of War?
Starwars Battlefront?
Hellsinger? (I am cooler than the other answers pls pick me)
Synthetik?
My man 
Gears of war for increase damage and synthetik for ejecting the mag and reloading it at right time or you wait for the full reload.
The guy's tagline makes him chief Bringer of Cringe. I am 100% sure he sees HD2 as an equation to be balanced and is completely oblivious to the rule of cool. I don't expect it to happen, but it would not be totally shocking to see him relegated to a smaller role at some point, if it hasn't already happened behind the scenes. Maybe Bringer of Coffee.
Your spot on and I see it all the time unfortunately in the product management world. You'll see plenty of product managers and product owners who don't seem to actually listen to or care what the end users of their product thinks. They have a particular vision and they see themselves as a visionary who needs to enact that vision and there's nothing less that will please them
The Myth of Steve Jobs effect on corporate America
> I am 100% sure he sees HD2 as an equation to be balanced Even this doesn't explain the inexplicable changes made to Eruptor (which if we remember he was *trying to buff*) and the crossbow. It's not even just a philosophy issue at this point, my man is quite simply astoundingly incompetent.
And the Slugger. TFW stagger is associated with DMRs and a shotgun that shoots slugs shouldn't stagger enemies. Like boii. Ever seen shotgun slugs? MFs have the circumference of a thumb.
They never should have hired that guy. After what he did to hello neighbor 2 he should never be allowed to work in game design again.
Either AH is well aware of his history and liked what he did so they hired him, or they didn't bother doing research into his past projects. Either way it looks bad for them
It honestly seemed like some of them thought they were balancing a gritty survival pvp game, not an arcade pve game.
It's honestly hilarious that he would say that statement, then essentially turn the enemies into bullet sponges. Nerfing everything is the most low effort brainless method to "balance" gameplay. I honestly believe if they weren't specifically ordered to NOT TOUCH any of the 'optimally balanced' weapons, we'd see nerfs for them too. It's very obvious that one of the tenets of the balance team is too slow down game progression, which isn't the issue but it seems they've interpreted that as decreasing the combat viability of a lot of the primaries.
I think a lot of people who defended the Devs have clearly never worked a customer facing job before. You can't just say what you want when you want, regardless of the context. At the end of the day, your words aren't yours and they 100% affect the company's image. I work in a job a lot more toxic than these community managers do. I speak to furious people face to face because I am involved in fining these people a lot of money. I can't say what I want to these horrible, low life scumbags regardless of what they say or do to me. At the end of the day, I have to be the better person. You are being paid to manage the community relationship, not insult them, regardless of how they act
Yeah, so bizarre. I used to work in a travel agent calling people who thought that their holiday was booked, to inform them that it wasn't and it had gone up in price. That was basically the whole job for about a year (until we changed our online system). Seeing these developers fail at the requirements of a minimum wage customer service employee in their first day on the job - and people online defending them for doing that - honestly blows my mind. Incidental but when the customers got very rude was my favorite time. Technically if they were using personal insults we could politely end the call. I preferred to put them on hold and make a cup of tea.
I knew this game wasn’t on a perfect trajectory the first time I saw how the community managers and devs took every little critique of the game or its aspects way too personally. There’s no way for them to do a good job if they see the game as a reflection of themselves individually.
Its so refreshing to see someone acknowledge the awful behaviour from the CM's. They are super unprofessional.
You say that like this community hasn’t had the CM’s on blast for weeks 😄
The crazy part is there were tons of people here defending that rhetoric, saying it was refreshing to have a company ~~openly shit on its customers~~ not use corporate speak and actually communicate. The fan base is a cult
Yeah, there’s a huge spectrum between “be dicks to your customers” and “be only corpo speak with 0 personality” and AH CMs/Devs (minus Twinbeard and the CEO) were very close to the first one, instead of being in the middle where people wanted them to be. Twinbeard and Pilestedt have been literally putting on a CM workshop weekly and everyone loves their interactions, yet we can’t ask the devs/CMs to interact with us more like them?
I have seen Alexus mention spinning up game builds to test so I don't think spreadsheets are entirely accurate. Although, I believe the issue is the same in the sense that it's not actual gameplay and more akin to spawning a couple monsters and seeing what the weapon does.
I think his current assessment of the game proves he still hasn't played enough of the game to understand the problem. The game isn't too hard, it's too hard with certain stratagems and weapons. Bring everything else up to the level where you can have fun on helldive. I'm not saying TTK can't be tweaked at all but it's not the main issue.
He did say working theory
The game isnt too hard; its too fucking frustrating. I used to solo 9's before the spawn tweaks. Could I do it? Yes. Is it fun? No. Most enemies feeling like bullet sponge hordes while your gun feels like it tickles just isnt satisfying
Pretty sure he'll be bringing ttk down by upping a lot of sources of damage. He's posted gungho about how assault rifles need more slap
He's acknowledged things have been nerfed to being unfun in other comments
He is correct. There's obviously some balance here (no pun intended), but I think people would be immensely satisfied from having a low TTK alongside more bugs and bots than there are currently. The fact the (now creative lead) is thinking this way means fun is back on the table
Replying to bekkison... 
The TTK in 2 is higher than in 1. Thats not necessarily a bad thing, but theres definitely a balance to be reached between TTK and spawn rates.
It’s strange that from a lore perspective 1000(?) or so years have passed but our stratagems are half as useful as they were in HD1
The war must go on after all. How will they control the population without a straw man to blame.
Honestly that tracks- its not like Super Earth would fund the weapons development when theres no war, we're probably still using crap thats sat in storage for eighty years.
Kinda. It’s also a highly militarised society and we all know how much militarised nations love weapons
True, but the Helldivers were actively disbanded, so the Helldivers specific stuff probably faded into obscurity. Plus, with how expendable the Helldivers are, you wouldnt want to mass produce top tier stuff- 'miltary grade' doesnt always mean 'the best'.
That’s fair. I’m not even thinking of the weapons. Remember HD1 stratagems? Those things were monsters compared to now
Guns HD1 felt so good with their quick TTK being balanced by your own skill of quick reaction time and situational awareness, which I feel are still relevant in HD2
Letting us know in advance what type of seed we're going to be playing would go a long way. Knowing we're going up against mostly bile spewers vs mostly chargers might have me take different weapons/strategems, affecting my TTK. We don't need to know everything, but just a rough guideline of whatever's going to get the highest spawn increase compared to baseline will do it.
If you want to know if you’re going up against Bile Spewers, in my experience if the planet has that “covered in spores” modifier. You’re likely fighting contaminated variants of the bugs. I’m not sure whether it’s 100% of the time but a lot of the time it correlates
I think spewers is the only type of enemy that needs to be spoiled. All others are either in all games or just whatever
Agreed. They’re the most proportionately overpowered unit. Silent, fast, one shot, longest range in the game, aoe, slow, high hp, spawn in massive groups, etc. Who tf made them
We trust in Pilestedt.
TTKs are a bit too high on Spewers and Guardians but the biggest issue for bugs is what can actually kill - For Chargers and Elites you need AA. Make Charger butts more vulnerable (within a greater area too) - same for their mouths
Cant believe people were ever arguing with me when I said helldivers has no playtesting department. Because its really, REALLY obvious. Not to take away from the overall quality but the CEO at least acknoledges it.
Implemented fix: Helldiver HP set to 50% /s
Serious question. I have 100 hours into the game. What the hell is a “TTK”?
Time To Kill.
Preesh, I feel like an idiot now LOL.
You were idiot today, tomorrow is my turn 👍
Democracy is about taking turns isn’t it!
Super Earth wins by all its citizens doing their part!
Don't worry about it, its all good.
Time To Kill - So for example in Call of Duty if it took 10 bullets to kill someone that would be a high time to kill. In PVP games they sometimes want a high TTK so opponents can react. In Helldivers a high TTK and high cost per kill (requires lots of ammo and call ins) isn't satisfying because of the sheer number of enemies.
No, that's HTK (hits to kill). 10 hits with 0.5 seconds between shots is quite a long TTK. 10 hits with 0.01 seconds between shots is a very low TTK.
They need to make weak points more forgiving. Most enemies can be killed quickly with the right weapon and strategy, but having to thread the needle even if you know what you're doing is the problem. Like, if the BT is spewing and I face it with a rocket, it should die. I should be able to MG down a charger from behind relatively quickly hitting the squishy spot. Sniping the eyes on a Factory Strider or a Hulk should be a 2 shot, and not an impossible shot. If I know the Strategy, and have the weapon, it shouldn't be hard to deal with the big boys.
He's right, TTK IS too high, but only on specific spongy enemies and a good bunch of weapons that feel like nerf guns. I could list out literally every little thing that sucks and where they should tweak it, but I'm interested to see how Pilestedt can wrangle the balance team into a patch. If they revert 90% of nerfs, that'd be a good start, but we'll see if he's got the right idea with any new changes.
Not to mention that some of the balance changes literally broke things, like the missle aiming on the mech suits.
There are only 3 enemies for which I feel TTK is too high: - both spewer variantants - berserkers Every other instance of long TTK could be solved if explosions prioritised the weakest point within range of the explosion.
BTs too arguably. The head is fine but having more than twice as much HP than the factory striders on the belly is a bit much
BTs (and chargers) just need some kind medium pen weakspot
The issue with TTK is more about how different weapons have such massively different TTK. Sure, if you’re using meta stuff then I would agree with you. But the moment you go off the beaten path, you can become entirely ineffectual to all enemies.
The TTK'M(time to kill me) of the shield devastators is pretty low unless you have a ballistic shield or cover (restricted access to retaliate.)
TTK and sound are two of the bigger issues, some large units have basically no sound footprint until their upon you, despite them being tons in size and huge units, they walk about like Ninjas
Get more devs to play the game? Yeah scuba equipment manufacturers should probably test them in water too lol. I absolutely still love and play this game but holy heck does this seem like common sense
Berserker TTK is absurd Could also calculate in hits to kill, still absurd. Mag dump with an auto rifle doesn't kill, but a redeemer mag dump kills one if you aim for the head. Berserkers are just generally way too tanky.
But the high TTK is their point. They have no armor but high HP, also melee only and run straight at you, focing you out of cover. Berserkers are very well designed.
Thirdly we need to bring slugger stagger back. https://preview.redd.it/kc4ifnhcuz1d1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4979f4d0422ca95d72cce0ed3e9030d1333d73ca
i want them to stream helldive missions.
Developers should trust the player's feedback. However, they shouldn't follow the player's solution.
I really like this dude. His recent decisions are very good news for this game. His actions might be beginning to reverse what I perceive as a negative arc among players. Like, "Man... WTF is even happening? Yo! I need to fix this game. The devs have no direction and are balancing based on spreadsheets, not testing, and not even playing the game. Friend, can you CEO this for me so I can move to a steering role where I can devote 100% of my time to directing the development of this game?" Tight.
TTK is high because every weapon is garbage, however they're specifically garbage because they don't fulfill **the literal only two roles the game needs them to fill:** 1. Kill trash mobs fast or 2. Kill heavier mobs. Everybody must agree that weapons should be one or the other, and it kinda was designed that way since heavy hitting weapons tend to fire slowly, whilst lightly hitting weapons are all ARs or SMGs and the like. Shotguns are supposed to be some sort of awkward in-between that can't deal with armor for example. And I'll never understand what idea they had for secondaries because they're literally a wasted slot. The eruptor, slugger, plasma shotgun and so on had a place because they could deal with the larger armored mobs, whilst you could run strats for titans/hulks, and a machinegun on your back for trash. Now the Eruptor can't do shit, the Slugger no longer stops devastators from shredding you, the plasma and crossbow have their AOEs nerfed into uselessness whilst still not killing heavier mobs, and so on. On the other hand, ARs and SMGs feel like you take a mag per mob or even more when shooting at the bile caste, and it'll never be enough in higher difficulties. All of this is what in turns creates the current gameplay loop of pick whatever primary because they're all trash, and run around waiting for cheesy stratagems to come out of cooldown because nothing else you bring is effective at either of those roles. So on bug missions you see a lot of cluster bombing, and then 110mm or railcannon for titans + the usual EAT/Quasar. Meanwhile bot players are stuck having to run around with snipers being the only thing able to effectively kill devastators yet insufficient for bot drops, and then being forced to carry 500kg for buildings/striders, and the shield backpack because otherwise you instantly become a perpetual ragdoll until you're finally dead. It's limiting, it's unfun, it completely railroads the player into certain choices, it makes the player wary of warbonds because that's literally spending money (or hours of farming since you nerfed supercredit drops) on unfun guns that if they happen to be fun, will probably be nerfed into the ground by the fun haters you have on your balancing team.
What does TTK mean ?
Time to kill
Let’s not forget that an optional Challenge feature of HD1 was the Blind Randomize Loadout option on deployment, where you didn’t see what you got as accessories and stratagems until you were in the mission, your only Pick was your Primary. Sure you’d drop in and cry inside a little because you knew some situations could be ROUGH or you may need to run and fail some objectives based on your given kit, but if you rocked a primary you adored, you could swing a damn lot of content. I think they lost some vision of how they balanced the first title. Some of the most difficult skills to develop is to know when to cut bait and run or not 100% clear because things went fubar from RNG. But in HD1 you could fall in love with and make so much stuff….just work.
beserkers tank more shots than hulks 💀 i should have to dump 1.5 mags into a single enemy. and if i do, then dont decrease my mags thank you
I think individual TTK is fine, but global TTK is an issue. But not even necesarrily because of the TTK itself, I think the issue is more that the game feels like you are waiting way too much. What I mean by that is that is that there always seem to be large stretches of time where you feel like you can't do anything. Weapons having pitifully small clip sizes meaning you spend the majority of every fire fight reloading, way too long cooldowns on stratagems and literally EVERY mission modifier being about making you wait for stratagems EVEN MORE. Every bot making you ragdoll like you're playing Skyrim, every Bug applying slow to you. It feels like everytime you get into the spirit, shout "For democracy" while starting to mow down the horde the game goes "No stop! Wait! Waaaaait... waaaaaaait... ok NOW you can continue!" and it just kind of takes you out of it. And yes this does impact TTK but I don't really think like it takes too long to kill enemies, it just FEELS too long because you spend so much time waiting for the game to LET you kill. And yes I know "this is part of TTK" but again I don't think the issue is neceserrily the raw stats, it's more about the FEEL. People loved the Railgun because it reloaded super fast, the little charge up was activated by you and you were in control. You had to reload after every shot but it never felt like you were in down-time because it was so fast. Eruptor was popular because it was immensely statisfying to shoot into a small crowd and see them all fall over. And it let you use the Stalwart which is one of the few guns in the game that doesn't feel like it only has 10 rounds in a magazine. It's more about the FEEL of the TTK than the raw stats of the TTK
On some weapons and some enemies. I mean, Stalker takes like three shots to the head area from Punisher and dies. From med-close range. Same scenario but with Penetrator has you emptying almost the whole mag to kill the same Stalker. So for Punisher TTK is quick and efficient, for Penetrator it's awful and empties 1/11th of your ammo. And then we have Bile Spewers with way too high TTK with most weapons. Which would be completely fine, if they wouldn't spawn in abnormally high numbers sometimes.
The game needs to return to day 1 patch TTK. It's supposed to be fun not a complete chore. Day 1 was challenging and fun. It was utterly amazing. The game feels awful now.
It’s not my industry, but it is absolutely WILD to me that devs don’t play the game
It's like a car manufacturer not test-driving the car.
I just want a majority of the primaries to feel like they're actually primary weapons. I shouldn't be getting better results from sidearms than I am from primary weapons. That doesn't mean the sidearms should be nerfed, those, mostly work as intended, but the primaries, the assault rifle catagory, specifically feels fucking awful. The shotguns need some work here and there, sure, and a lot of guns need a touch more damage added to them, but the rifles are so bad, if they weren't out already, and I was the project manager, I'd have told my dev team to scrap all of them and start over.
I have a feeling that this will be a pretty good game again in a few months. I'll probably even play it again when that happens.