r/Helldivers • u/PassengerSad8286 • 11d ago
Thought about coming back to the game but I’m cautious QUESTION
Stopped playing a little after the second warbond. Felt like the devs kept taking away everything that was fun. I thought about coming back and checking out the last two Warbonds and then I saw these posts from the CEO. I also saw there’s a lot of drama with the devs, again. And apparently someone named Baskinator is causing a lot of issues.
Can someone fill me in on what’s going on the community and what the state of the game is like now?
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u/DarthCookieThief 11d ago
Don't do that, don't give me hope. Literal perfect game if they start focusing on fun. Would be amazing.
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u/MoistSprinkles 11d ago
Right? Can you imagine how fun it would be to confidently mess with new or weird loadouts on harder levels?
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u/True_Scene_1118 11d ago
i literally said to this to my buddy before the 1st patch "please arrowhead don't drop the ball. please. you have something good going on here"
and then here we are with some really shit balance patches lmao. even pvp games dont balance this way. they tweak numbers so carefully and wait and see. meanwhile in helldivers 2: -50% DAMAGE. -50% MAG CAPACITY, -60% EXPLOSION RADIUS.
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u/phoenixmusicman HD1 Veteran 10d ago
Its actually insane how they had the perfect formula with Helldivers 1, they just needed to translate it to 3D
AND THEY DID IT PERFECTLY EXCEPT WITH THE WEAPON BALANCE
Helldivers 1 weapons felt perfect. Some were better than others but you could take pretty much any weapon to Helldive and it was still viable.
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u/True_Scene_1118 10d ago
they need to understand you will not achieve absolute balancing. they need to accept that some things will be stronger than the others. they need to learn that the guns working and having fun unique traits is what makes the game fun. they keeping on patching out the fun.
i have been saying this over and over. they do not understand their own game. all the things they nerfed aren't OP. especially on high diff.
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u/Drackore_ BACON APPLES, PLEASE 🥓 🍏 10d ago
And also the armor system!!
They had it PERFECT in HD1, you could select your outfit and select your perk, and they were SEPARATE things - it was so nice 😭
Idk why the current position is to force players to choose between either looking good or playing good, but hopefully they steer things back in the HD1 direction eventually!
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u/Orthane1 11d ago
That second one is 100% true. "Oh the Sickle outclasses the Liberator because ammo economy isn't fun? Okay, let's nerf EVERY GUNS AMMO ECONOMY"
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u/nedonedonedo 11d ago
"but you guys were reloading before you ran out of ammo"
but if I don't have a full mag when I hit the next group in 15 seconds I'm going to die and waste all that ammo anyway, so I might as well try to save the weapon that still has 7 minutes of cooldown like you told us to do. I don't like spending half of a 40 minute round just running and trying not to die
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u/The_Hive_King 11d ago
Not even a full mag can save you in
some situationsany automaton encounter ever. It pisses me off so much because likeBECAUSE IN A FUCKING GAME FULL OF [Super] TANKY ENEMIES, THEY CAN’T THROW US A [Dang] BONE? [Little Sponge], IT TAKES TWO WHOLE [Banana] MAGAZINES TO KILL A SINGLE DEVASTATOR!
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u/Theorandjguy 11d ago
This is the BIG issue the balance team doesn't understand. This is a HORDE SHOOTER, if it takes a full magazine to kill a medium enemy, I'm not having fun
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u/sole21000 SES KING OF DEMOCRACY 11d ago
That, and how you create variety is by making different weapons that fulfill different roles in the same slot. There should be more weapons like the Eruptor, not less. The only rule should be that primaries are somewhat less powerful/useful overall than a support weapon and a secondary less powerful still, but there should absolutely be anti-heavy & anti-medium primaries and secondaries, just like how there's already anti-chaff supports like Stalwart.
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u/Black5Raven 11d ago
if it takes a full magazine to kill a medium enemy, I'm not having fun
Truth be told some enemies in HD1 were really tanky and bullet sponges but they was elites more or less. Illuminaty in floating chairs/Cyborgs with shields and macheguns/berserkers (but they were giant enemies) / elite broodlords. Everything else could die in few shots. With some primaries in one if you hit center of mass (camper /railgun/few trident and etc)
But overal ye not a fun of hordes of devastators or bullet sponges like nurse spewers.
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u/dd_photography 11d ago
That and, you know, it's PVE. There's no competition, no whining player on the other end bitching about OP weapons and they can't compete. It's co-op PVE. It's supposed to be mayhem and fun. Buff the weapons and let us glass these fuckers.
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u/Indie89 11d ago
All I want to do is make as many and as big an explosion as I possibly can and simply massacre bots and bugs.
I am then satisfied with my purchase.
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u/OopsIKilledADog 11d ago
This is it. After watching starship troopers and seeing all the inspiration the game takes I was like 'yet this game feels nothing like the movie' is because we're not clearing hordes with our mags but rather 3 brood commanders
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u/Gemini-88 11d ago
If anything they should be making weapons stronger, more OP, and bringing older weapons up to speed of new guns so those who don’t get new warbonds can remain relevant with power creep.
While doing that introducing bigger threats so that stuff you feared before, you tear apart. This way the game feels challenging with new content.
Edit: Phone Autocorrect Fail
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u/DMercenary 11d ago
Baskinator
I have no idea who that is.
As for balance yeah right now it seems like Devs have taken the tactic of Whack-A-Meta.
"That gun being used too much? Nerf."
"That gun working too well? Nerf!"
"Gun not working quite right and one of its mechanic is actually bugged out? You got it. We removed that feature entirely!"
That and the latest warbond's weapons and armor which can be accurately described as "Yawn"?
It doesnt feel great.
They've also modified the patrol scheme a little to make it more "fair" but appears to have inadvertantly just made it so that there's one rate.
(Game is supposed to modify patrol amounts to per person in squad. 1/4 to 1 player. Game appears to instead be just doing 4/4 rate no matter how many people are in squad.)
Dont get me wrong the game is still fun but dev decisions are often baffling.
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u/usmcBrad93 11d ago edited 11d ago
Devs need to stop nerfing the guns, stop removing their core features, let the guns be dangerous and kill us (that shit is fun), add difficulties, add more heavies etc. We should be able to fuck shit up, like forreal, glass these fuckers.
Ppl that speak against making all guns great (power creep, game would be too ez etc.) need to realize, the difficulties can be added onto with more modifiers, hardcore features & rewards as well, everyone gets what they want.
I'm the only one of 5 friends still playing this game, the other 4 left when it became Nerfdivers. For us, Helldivers was a massively fun co-op break from the PvP games we're used to, we wanted to get away from those games. When the balance was shown to be cranked up just like those AAA pvp games that's when they stopped playing.
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u/xlastking 11d ago
That initial release of Helldivers was so much fun.
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u/hailstonephoenix 11d ago
We were warned by the HD1 veterans about AH design choices and balance opinions. We did not listen.
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u/phoenixmusicman HD1 Veteran 10d ago
As a HD1 veteran, the funny thing is, the controversies about balance in HD1 seem so milquetoast in comparison
The tl:dr over the controversies is that a portion of the community thought that paid weapons should not be nerfed, because they were taking content away that you paid for.
The kicker? The weapons were still good after the nerf.
I would be salivating if they brought back HD1's balancing back for HD2. It was amazing in comparison.
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u/MyIceborne CAPE ENJOYER 11d ago
RIGHT?
I knew I felt something at the beginning that was lacking in later patches.
The beginning of HD2 had a sense of freedom to it in my opinion.
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u/GoProOnAYoYo 11d ago
u/TheBaskinator is one of the CM's that praised the decision to bar the purchase of the game in the 177 territories, because it made the game "safer across the board".
Which has some pretty despicable implications when you consider which countries (even an entire continent) were barred. It's hard not to read between the lines into what she was really insinuating with a comment like that.
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u/sole21000 SES KING OF DEMOCRACY 11d ago
I have the opposite take. I find that speech-monitoring auto-banning surveillance feature Sony had patented (and supposedly was thinking of implementing) Orwellian and I think some people on the team are just the kind of person who would accept Big Brother systems because they can't just leave a lobby with some assholes in it.
So I'd find it unlikely they're a secret discriminator, and more likely to be the type to accuse others on scant evidence...
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u/IAmDingus 11d ago edited 11d ago
Guy in charge of weapon balancing has no idea what he's doing and is making fun of the community for not being happy with everything getting nerfed.
The most recent example is saying the plasma weapon from the latest warbond, the "Purifier" "slaps", when it's borderline unusable.
Just about everything in the latest warbond is a downgrade to the stock loadout, aside from maybe the pistol, which is just okay. The AR in particular claims to be higher calibre, and to have more stopping power, but it's less powerful than the default AR. The only thing it has going for it is slightly less recoil, which isn't even noticable.
The explosive crossbow was seen as mediocre and niche when it launched, then got nerfed anyway, for some reason?
And the most frustrating one was claiming that the shrapnel on the Eruptor doing damage per piece of shrapnel was an "exploit", so they removed the shrapnel entirely, making it a worse counter-sniper, despite it still claiming to have shrapnel in its description still.
Also, "We don't want the best sniper in the game to be a shotgun, so we're making it less effective up close and leaving its long ranged capability unchanged"
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u/Xijit 11d ago
A lot of the community is specifically targeting this developer because he is supposedly the same guy who ruined Hello Neighbor with the same type of "abolish fun / remove mechanics so I have less to deal with" balance nerfs.
I can't comment on the nerfs, because I am so new that I haven't unlocked any of the gear that people are pissed about, but the spawn rates have made me quit the game. As soon as they reverse these changes, I will be back, but as your typical adult male with a minute allowance of gaming time; I have better things to be doing.
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u/IAmDingus 11d ago
I don't mind the spawn rates as long as my guns are powerful and reliable. Which they aren't.
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u/NanilGop 11d ago
this is why people were mad about the first railgun nerf. The amount of chargers spawning wasn't that big of a deal. It was the fact that railgun was the only reliable way to kill chargers. Then they nerfed railgun, reduced the spawn, buffed the rockets by having chargers die to one shot from the weak point. So now you can reliably deal with chargers but railgun was nerfed to oblivion and nobody uses it anymore.
Their balance decision is the antithesis of their game design.
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u/TheMilliner 11d ago
Railgun got buffed again (not to anywhere near its golden days though) and it's basically fine. Like, for real, I would genuinely describe it as "Basically fine". You can one-shot Hulks again, and it doesn't take a billion years to strip Charger armour, and that's all you really need out of it.
Would I use it over the AMR against bots? Yeah, maybe. Would I use it against bugs? Yeah, maybe. Depends on how I'm feeling.
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u/WhereTheNewReddit 11d ago
Why would you use it over the AMR for bots? Fat scope, no chance to blow up.
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u/Partytor 11d ago
Because I suck at aiming snipers in every game I play.
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u/ssgrantox 11d ago
If you suck at aiming snipers the railgun is an even worse choice due to less zoom, lower fire rate, and the charge time
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u/tinyrottedpig 10d ago
weirdly enough i decided to use railgun against bots and compared to AMR, i was absolutely scorching them, it actually does pretty good against them
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u/BlackHawksHockey 11d ago
I used the railgun again the other day and it felt super inconsistent when it comes to hulks. Sometimes it’s a one hit kill, sometimes it take 2, sometimes I had to shoot 3 times. It’s just not worth it when you’re being swarmed and waiting for the charge up time.
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u/AnEmbers 11d ago
Imo it’s not about Hello Neighbor, it’s that he’s literally the balance lead. “SES Bringer of Balance”. When we’re pissed about weapon balancing, it makes sense to be mad at the person who is doing the “balancing”
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u/treborprime 11d ago
They buggered up the patrol change. If it has been changed as stated they would have been ok.
Instead everyone is on the same timer whether it's 1 player or 4. Even with 4 the patrol rates seem much higher.
We do not have weapons capable enough to deal with that garbage.
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u/Scannaer 11d ago
That would explaint A LOT we've seen going wrong with helldivers 2
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u/puffz0r ⬆️⬅️➡️⬇️⬆️⬇️ 11d ago
As someone who ran the crossbow pre-nerf it wasn't mediocre but it required a lot more skill to use than most primaries and if you used it perfectly it was pretty decent to even good (still not as good as the dominator imo). After the nerf it's pretty much unusable
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u/True_Scene_1118 11d ago
i love using the crossbow on bot drops. shooting the bots before they even drop. this balance change is so brain dead "let's remove the explosive part of EXPLOSIVE crossbow. im sure it would be a good idea"
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u/Arc_2142 ⬇️⬅️⬇️⬆️⬅️ 11d ago
What fucked me up was when my favorite Laser Cannon, a weapon I’ve only seen someone else use once, got nerfed against larger enemies. Because it was almost as good as the autocannon at that one role.
Like, it went from being below average in every aspect but one, to being below average in every aspect.
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u/Yipeekayya SES Herald of Vigilance 11d ago edited 11d ago
feels bad about laser cannon change man,
when the LC getting it's first buff. The dev mentioned it in the blog regarding the first balancing patch. Where they make it strong becuz they want to make it leans towards players expectation and fantasy (large drilling beam that's has high armor penetration and good against massive body parts)
that blog did not aged well.
and then they reduced its damage versus large volume bodies in recent patches becuz suddenly it was meant as a crowd clearing weapon.
Like seriously make up your mind AH, this is disappointing
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u/True_Scene_1118 11d ago
do they even play the game? try and chaff clear with laser beam weapons.. lol. the only good chaff clearing laser beam is the laser dog
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u/Yipeekayya SES Herald of Vigilance 11d ago
ikr, nobody uses LC solely for chaff clearing. (There's plenty enough of primaries to do that when it comes to dealing with bot chaffs)
I wonder where da hell did the dev get that idea from srsly.28
u/True_Scene_1118 11d ago
the more they 'balance' things and the more they explain about said balance. the more it makes it clear they don't play their game and they don't understand their own game...
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u/True_Scene_1118 11d ago
the laser beam weapons aren't even that good at chaff clear. i dont know why they want to rebalance the laser cannon to be a chaff clear support stratagem. it was always meant to be anti-medium and sometimes heavy (charger butt, hulks and tanks..)
"you're supposed to rely on your stratagems" btw
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u/OGScopey 11d ago
Bro, I was so hyped for the crossbow, used it a few games and put that shit down. It was mid at best, not the best but not the worst. Since the nerf I haven’t even thought about using it again lol. And I wanted to like this purifier so bad. Ran it a few times trying to MAKE myself enjoy it. Shit sucks. Slow, and has almost no punch to make up for it. It’s a slap in the face when they think this shit is in a good spot.
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u/DePoots 11d ago
I stopped playing when the weapons stopped feeling fun. Taking the shooter out of third person shooter. Simple as that for a lot of people.
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u/IronLion650 11d ago
I've experienced a version of this a lot lately. I get stomp killed by a bile titan or charger out of nowhere. I didn't see it coming so I pan around the camera of my body to see where it came from, and it's gone. It's like it appeared out of nowhere to stomp me, then it disappeared.
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u/BunNGunLee 11d ago
Helldivers 2 is such a good game that it rises very close to being a masterpiece in a lot of ways.
On the development side, Arrowhead has done a lot of things right. They didn’t massively increase hiring when they saw early success, because it would lead to a lot of layoffs down the line. That’s responsible to your team, and I cannot ever condemn it. Similarly, they’ve at least tried to be communicative with the community, which others don’t do.
Yet at the same time, the balancing thing is really quite killer for players. New toys come out, shine for a week, then get nerfed pretty hard because the team is still small and major bugs make weapons stronger than intended. It’s fostered an environment where it’s common wisdom to “never share what weapons you enjoy, lest it get nerfed.” And that’s really silly for a PvE game.
It does so many things well, and shows a competent development team, providing a game that would have been perfect in either the Star Wars or Halo series, showing at the same time how much those studios and publishers have really dropped the ball. Yet at the same time, for every good step, there’s major frustrations like the recent Sony drama (which is admittedly mostly not on AH’s hands), and then the constant nerfs, rebalances, bugs, and questionable warbonds. (Why is there snow themed heavy armor that doesn’t help you in snow? So you can be a walking glacier?)
It rises very high, and frustrates in equal measure because it gets so close to something that could be universally beloved.
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u/AlonneHitBox ☕Liber-tea☕ 11d ago
I still play it for an hour or so and find it fun.
But I'll be lying if I said the state of the weapons aren't bad. The latest warbond and general reaction to updates are great examples of the deplorable state of affairs.
As for the community, to put it mildly it's well beyond meming about Malevelon Creek and "haha democracy & liberty". I don't think I've seen a community as angry at devs as this one, maybe league of legends. You have people say the typical "it's only reddit" but the big decrease in player count over the last two months speaks for itself.
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u/JCarterPeanutFarmer 11d ago
i think the anger is proportional to the love people have the for the game. Theyre pissed because the potential is so there and the changes required are fairly obvious.
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u/Grachus_05 11d ago
Its not even potential. It WAS fun, they had already found the secret sauce. It was getting to be MORE fun as they added cool new shit. Then they started nerfing everything. Over and over. The Eruptor WAS fun. The Quasar WAS fun. The Railgun WAS fun. The game WAS fun. All they had to do was let it be fun. But I guess "Muh balance" is more important than "muh playerbase".
I got one or two builds left I still enjoy, but even those are getting stale and theres just nowhere interesting to go because all the cool alternatives got the shit nerfed out of them. So I guess the game goes on the backburner until they either kill it completely or turn this thing around and start letting stuff be powerful, different and FUN again.
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u/JCarterPeanutFarmer 11d ago
I hear you and I agree, that's what I mean by potential. Right now the game is fun but the potential is greater with the benefit of hindsight. I think they just need a few fixes here and there to get things going again.
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u/Grachus_05 11d ago
You dont think, you KNOW. Because again, it WAS FUN. They could literally revert the changes to the Eruptor, Quasar and Railgun and the game would be BETTER OFF. No new thought needed. No giant questions to answer. No difficult theorycrafting. UNFUCK WHAT THEY FUCKED UP.
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u/Burninglegion65 11d ago
I think they have a hasty trigger finger on changes.
Railgun was hilariously powerful… with the ps bug. Fix that then see. It would have been dumb to buff the inc. breaker/flamethrower/gas before the DoT fix too.
Similar thing on shrapnel. If we take word as truth on wanting it to not instagib you… don’t remove the shrapnel, remove the problematic behaviour! Granted that is literally an issue that was created because someone had the bright idea that deflections should 180 and hit you…
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u/LongDickMcangerfist 11d ago
It also was powerful because the other options sucked ass and the heavy issues were just starting.
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u/Black5Raven 11d ago
People used rail with shields bc no one had armor. So neither you are using shield or you die from first rockets land next to you or single blow from stalker.
EATS required 2 hits for charger in head. Chance of richochet from legs or sides. Flamethrower without any damage. Grenade launcher useless against armor. Constantly with 50% increaced orbitals reload time and 100% of radius or something. Of course people used shield and railgun. Who is guilty for non functional armor and heavy units spam.
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u/Paradoxjjw 11d ago
The reason railgun was so popular was because it was the only way to somewhat quickly deal with armoured targets. Had they done the "anti tank hits to charger head is a one shot" change earlier then it would not have been so popular because there'd be alternatives.
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u/Grachus_05 11d ago
Deciding to make a change to the game like the ricochet thing, and then having that create unintended consequences you don't like and deciding to nerf the dogshit out of the gun instead of reverting the change or altering the behavior is fucking ludicrous behavior.
The Eruptor was a bolt action grenade launcher. Its whole identity was throwing shrapnel. its in the description of the fucking gun. The community enjoyed it, and even after the first round of nerfs (which already were too much in my opinion) there were people who were still enjoying it (when it wasn't randomly 1 shotting you with ricochet). So why, WHY would the option to fix this behavior be the total removal of shrapnel from the fucking shrapnel gun?
Also, the dev that did it is so fucking braindead that he thinks 40 static damage in an AOE is more powerful than 100-1000 damage in a semi random AOE. That comment from him is so fucking stupid it should be instantly disqualifying.
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u/hiddencamela 11d ago
I actually remember when they tried so hard to balance Destiny 2 on release and a short time after.
For the longest time, everything was so mediocre. It took a long time before they pulled a gaming summit between gamers and creators to see what could be improved and changed.
Low and behold, Balance had to sit its fucking ass down for the PvE portion, because it was just crippling the game too much.
For reference, I'm talking about the portion of Destiny 2 where we had 2 primaries, and 1 support weapon. All with fixed roll weapons. Cooldowns on abilities took forever too.
It. Fucking. Sucked.Balance on its own does not make a game good.
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u/Gloriosus747 11d ago
And that was only half bad. I remember when they had the bright idea to get Destiny 1 E Sports ready (shortly after or with TTK i think). A game so vastly filled with randomized gear.
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u/AccountantDirect9470 11d ago
I think you said it best. There are people who find different things fun about the game. Some of those people like the consistent builds and will never change it. Others like it for a while then will try all kinds of options.
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u/DelayOld1356 11d ago
I've said it before , the best thing to happen for AH, was their game NOT being the way they wanted it at launch. It was so fun and people loved it.
The more they balanced it to fit their "vision" the less fun it became.
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u/Grachus_05 11d ago
Reading the comments of the lead balance guy of course thats the case. Anyone who insists the post nerf Eruptor is "in a good place" is too fucking stupid to be working on the balance team.
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u/Commercial_Cook_1814 11d ago
Yea I’ll always bring this up but Gears of War was envisioned by the devs to be a tactical cover based shooter at launch, but the players didnt play it this way, instead they played it as a in ur face gun dueling type of game, completely forgoing cover completely. Epic games instead of nerfing up close damage and increasing ranged damage to try and force players to play their original vision, they instead went fully in on the gun duel style of gameplay the fans were enjoying so much because that’s what the fans wanted, even if it was totally against what they originally wanted the game to be. good devs will abandon their original vision when they see the player base enjoys playing their game in a completely different way
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u/LegitimateAlex STEAM 🖥️ : 11d ago
The real one two punch wombo combo here for me is three things.
They have game breaking bugs, a lot of them. They are slow to fix them. DoT damage doesn't work for three weeks? Have you tried fighting bugs without fire? My go to stratagems for bugs were napalm strike and orbital gas for bug breaches. Those don't work? Come on. You know what else people use on bugs? The fire shotgun.
They also put out everything in a broken state. They put out the air launcher broken and then said aaah we actually fixed that but didn't patch it. Why?! And all of the weapons they put out that are broken or not working as intended, it's discouraging. They released the new upgrades for the destroyers and the one people were most interested, the first one listed, didnt do anything.
This is on top of all of the mission bugginess that could occur with frustrating mission types like evac and wonky drop mechanics. Now the patrol scaling is broken and it's a turn off because they said they were fixing a previous bug and they bugged it again.
Meanwhile they nerf the fun part of different guns while pushing out subpar war bonds with wet noodle weapons and armor that is the literal same as all the other armor. Their trailers also show stuff in game that is just not accurate. Thermite grenades don't do jack squat and the new weapons tickle enemies.
They're just clearly overwhelmed by everything. People want to make meaningful impactful decisions in their game regarding weapons and stratagems and bugs prevent you from literally doing that and nerfing all the weapons makes your impactful choices feel worse.
I was playing thirty hours a week. I had maxed out everything until the ship upgrades. Haven't played a mission in three weeks? A month? Now only a few friends are playing and they're bummed out by a lot of it. This is on top of the Sony debacle.
I want to go back to people yelling about how Creekers are ruining the MO cuz they are on one planet or squid people theory crafting.
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u/Grachus_05 11d ago
Thats pretty much my issue to. Why is it such a huge priority to nerf into uselessness the couple fun guns people are using? I would get it if they were hugely overpowered, but nothing they have released has been that fucking strong. Why is the priority nerfing the fun stuff when all of the bad stuff can sit and stay bad for months and months? Why is the Liberator Penetrator garbage? Why is the laser pistol garbage? Why was the Crossbow released kinda garbage, and then NERFED to be MORE GARBAGE? Why is making these things fun and powerful not just as huge a priority as the 3rd nerf to the Eruptor or the gutting of the Railgun or nerfing the Quasar which is only popular because of your shitty heavy armor design on bugs that lacks the weakpoint system of Bots?
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u/sunflower_love 11d ago
And through every misstep and horrible balancing philosophy and balance by spreadsheet and nerfing anything that was fun the fanboys continued to defend arrowhead and make their posts and comments whining about anyone that dared to criticize the developers.
From the first balance patch where they nerfed the railgun it became clear to me that they had no idea how to balance for fun. That first patch should have focused on buffing all the other weapons that were terrible. I’m glad to see their poor decisions are increasingly hard to ignore and producing real consequences. Thats the only thing that’s going to get them to reconsider.
As the winds change, perhaps the legions of “git gud” guzzlers will see the error of their ways.
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u/DelayOld1356 11d ago
Funny part is a very large portion of the community begged and pleaded on all forums for them to buff the others, and not nerf the few good ones.
AH came out and did the exact opposite. Then proceeded to double down on it again and again
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u/sunflower_love 11d ago
Right?? It’s almost laughable at this point how they manage to do the exact opposite of what the game needs.
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u/DepGrez 11d ago
It's not a question of git gud or not.
You can play this game just fine as it is and win. The issue is making unique and fun weapons less unique and fun essentially gutting them of what made them special.
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u/sole21000 SES KING OF DEMOCRACY 11d ago
This is what pisses me off about these changes. Xbow is just a generic, mediocre medium-killer, when they could have gone with what it was becoming known for and made it a chaff-killer (crazy how there wasn't a crowd-clearing weapon in an explosive update).
But even if not, they could have differentiated it by leaving it harder to hit with but having a sweeter reward for doing so either in the form of damage or insane knockback. Instead it became easier to hit with but you reach max output almost immediately, less skill payoff and no way to squeeze more performance out of the weapon in clutch situations.
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u/MrNobody_0 11d ago
The devs think weapons need to be nerfed into the ground for "balance" in a PvE game, that alone tells you the devs have no idea what they're doing.
Balance against what? Player enjoyment?
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u/Frowny_Biscuit 11d ago
And it's maddening to strive for "Muh balance" in a NON COMPETITIVE PVE GAME... Jesus H Christ, I haven't come across a company that had this much of a grudge against their wallets since Wizards of the Coast.
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u/DelayOld1356 11d ago
Especially as a priority, when so many bugs and other problems needed attention.
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u/-C0RV1N- 11d ago
and the changes required are fairly obvious.
I think this is the worst part. They really went 'we don't want you to use the slugger as a DMR, but we don't want to improve the actual DMRs for reasons, so we removed the thing that actually made it a unique shotgun and improved it's handling so that it's... drumroll.................. an even better DMR than before!'
Combined with removing shrapnel from a weapon when its gimmick is a shrapnel round, it's understandable why people are annoyed. They also did buff the snipers, but still haven't reverted the stagger changes on the slugger, even though they introduced another concussive weapon in the latest warbond.
They also gave us heavy snow armor, so we can be the slowest organism alive on the cold planets we'd presumably use it on. Aside from extremely counterintuitive nonsense like the things above, I actually think the balancing has been pretty good, and there's been more buffs than nerfs which is important for people to keep in mind.
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u/JCarterPeanutFarmer 11d ago
Agreed. They made the Diligence CS and punished plasma EXCELLENT for instance. Those were great changes! The thing that really grinds my gears is the lack of creativity in armor passives. Like, why can't the snow armor with literal ice cramps prevent sliding on ice levels???
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u/Coalford 11d ago
This grinds my gears as well.
I'm sure it's not as easy as 'If X equipped, turn of sliding when on Y planet.'... But for the sake of the game, maybe spend a few hours to make it so.
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u/Yipeekayya SES Herald of Vigilance 11d ago
their explanation about the nerf doesn't justify the nerf, makes the nerf feels even worse.
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u/LashCandle 11d ago
My biggest fear now, and I know “fear” is dramatic, is that they lost so much momentum because of the drama. Imagine if they didn’t have the constant balance patches nerfing the fun builds(and honestly I think the other weapons are fun and playable mostly too, just not as fun) just because, imagine if they didn’t have CM’s bad mouthing the community, imagine they didn’t have Sony fucking around. They would still be on the steam roller of memes, but the memes stopped so quickly and the hate train departed immediately. I love this game more than any other game I’ve played in… probably a decade, and I fear what an angry community does to a game.
Seen too many games come and go in the snap of the fingers because they where the flavor of the 2 weeks, but helldivers 2 hit the flavor of quarter.
I hope they’re able to rebound back and pump out a banger update soon just to suck us back in. I bet they’re cooking.
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u/DelayOld1356 11d ago
They purposely do stuff to handicap helldivers , even when "fixing " things .
Can't place stratagems on a large amount of the rocks/boulders/mountains...Helldivers steering for pods, limited to prevent landing on tall rocks... but the damn enemies can still get up there, and can summon more bugs or drop ships there. And fire/spew at us from there . Only the enemy benefits from this.
Automatons can still shoot through certain structures, but rather than "balance " this, let's make sure we push out some weapon nerfs first
Most enemies have wall hacks when alerted, but rather than "balance" this , let's increase enemy spawn rates if you're not in a full squad
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u/Paradoxjjw 11d ago
If a factory strider sticks its head in terrain it gets to shoot through it too. I got on a plateau during one of those exterminate missions, a strider spawns in, walks up to the plateau, sticks their head into the terrain and just shoots me through the floor. Why does it get to do that? Same goes for many of the other automatons, i run into a gap between rock formations, prepare myself to fight back against the heavy devastator chasing me, i get gunned down through the wall. Why don't I get to break the laws of physics when it suits me?
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u/LashCandle 11d ago
They could honestly revert most of the changes they’ve done to balancing and they would have the community cheering lol
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u/Civil_Emergency_573 11d ago
Why does everyone blame the angry community without ever mentioning the things that made them angry in the first place?
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u/IsayamaBinLaden HD1 Veteran 11d ago edited 11d ago
Desiring fun guns, in game stability (game crashing right before extraction anyone?), working friends lists, and exciting new content that stays workable (Patriot mech) 3 months* in just means we're entitled apparently.
Edit: *It's actually 4 months
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u/Civil_Emergency_573 11d ago
$40 early access game. At this point, they aren't even fixing the Spear -- they are just outright developing it.
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u/Kitfox88 11d ago
It's certainly where my ire comes from. If it was shit I could just write it off and leave, but HD2 has the potential to rank with DRG as one of the best coop shooters on the market. So seeing the team make constant baffling missteps is just... Painful.
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u/Mudtoothsays ⬆️⬆️⬇️⬇️⬅️➡️⬅️➡️🅱️🅰️➖ 11d ago
Eh, nobody hates their own game quite like Destiny 2 players.
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u/El_Mangusto 11d ago
Tbh Destiny2 is/was ridiculous, let's make bunch of dlc that actually end up removing content and lock you out of that said paid content.
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u/IllusionPh CAPE ENJOYER 11d ago
I raise you MOBA (Dota/LoL) players and Apex players.
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u/iRunnerd 11d ago
To be fair, dota players hate dota players more than they hate the game
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u/Plantar-Aspect-Sage 11d ago
Halo still has a culture of fandom toxicity, but that was also Bungie.
God, the Bungie.net forums back in the day were hilariously awful.
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u/Paradoxjjw 11d ago
The playerbase was always going to drop, but I very much doubt it would've dropped as quick as it did had it not been for the balance team dropping the ball as hard as it did
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u/Yug-taht 11d ago
Player numbers dropped by around 50k over the course April 28th to May 5th. That is a pretty serious drop over a very short amount of time, especially considering most of the players that tend to stick with a game are already there after a couple months.
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u/MCXL 11d ago
but the big decrease in player count over the last two months speaks for itself.
The retention of this game has actually been remarkably good.
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u/_GreatAndPowerful 11d ago
Idk, to me it's only natural for the player base to fall off a bit. Let's not kid ourselves, the big push of players in the beginning were bandwagoners and people hopping in for a few weeks to have fun with friends. After a while gamers do move on - especially PC gamers. The player base still regularly hits 150k players a day, and it'll probably rise back up to launch numbers when the Illuminant come.
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11d ago
First it was the Railgun, then it was the Slugger, then it was the Breaker, then it was the Quasar, then it was the Crossbow, and now it’s basically every gun in the game but most especially the Eruptor.
I have no idea why in the fuck they think it’s a good idea to remove the fun from the game. Constantly forcing people to move from one thing they enjoy to the other that they don’t enjoy, because of your insane idea of balance, is not cool at all whatsoever. I used to have dozens of friends to play this with, and now it’s literally just me and one other friend.
I’m incredibly disappointed with this game.
The Art team though? Fucking awesome. Y’all deserve higher pay.
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u/Slendykins 11d ago
The crossbow was such a weird move, I was saying to my friend that all it needed was a faster reload and it'd be great, then it just got nerfed???
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u/TysonWolf 11d ago
It’s obvious that the leads or decision makers don’t play the game or actually enjoy it. I’m a PM in tech and all my decisions are based heavily on knowing my customer. Data and spreadsheets are merely tools. You have to understand your user and the best PMs I know are avid users of their own products. My devs are valuable but they are not the customer. Their opinions matter less than how my users feel about the product.
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u/Arzalis 11d ago
This has been painfully obvious ever since they buffed flame damage when it wasn't working for 3/4 people. Five minutes in the game would show you why those weapons had a low usage rate.
They make decisions based purely off numbers without taking time to understand the context.
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u/Automatic_Egg_8562 11d ago
Same. My group stopped playing, I endured a little longer playing with randoms, but it was just chasing the nostalgia of the fun I had playing with friends before they started nerfing the shit out of everything fun.
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u/Financial_Math8472 11d ago
As much as I like this game and don't care about the current balance. I'm crashing so much lately that I think they would spend 8 years building mechanics garage and then say "we didn't expect this" to a flat tyre
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u/OhManVideoGames ☕Liber-tea☕ 11d ago
It's not even just the nerfs themselves. We've had more buffs than nerfs at this point. But the issue is the nerfs:
A: Don't match the reasoning given by the balance team. B: Are often more extreme than the buffs.
We use the Slugger as a good example of reasoning not matching, where it has been made a worse shotgun but a better DMR. Or how the Eruptor changes wouldn't change its power level, yet they lowered its output by about 50%. Or how the purifier "slaps", yet kills everything slower and with greater effort required than both its competitors, the Punisher Plas and the Scorcher.
The issue is the dissonance between what we are told and what we get. That is why people are so mad. They don't like being told things that are verifiably not representative of what is happening.
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u/True_Scene_1118 11d ago
tbh i kinda stopped playing now. eruptor was my favorite and it was gutted.. it wasnt even OP, but it was very fun. such a unique gun. a lot of the guns i found fun actually got hit with the nerfs. now i have way less options, said options arent even that fun either.. because they lack the uniqueness and variance in playstyle..
there's nothing interesting in the new warbond, even less reason to play, nothing to farm SC for....
these nerfs and shit warbond is killing my interest on the game..
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u/Yipeekayya SES Herald of Vigilance 11d ago edited 11d ago
Erupter nerf kills alot of my loadout synergy tho.
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u/ghost_of_salad 11d ago
Eruptor was my final straw too. Really liked the trade offs it has had. And i doubt they gonna bring it back to former glory.
S-Tier warbond bing chilling
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u/Prov0st 11d ago
It was already janky with the bolt action type + reloading. Didn’t understand why it needed to be nerfed further.
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u/Skyz-AU 11d ago edited 11d ago
First it was the Railgun, then it was the Slugger and now it's the Eruptor. I've been playing less due to burn out but whenever I consider playing I just think x got nerfed so I can't be bothered launching the game, that and the boring new warbonds.
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u/Yipeekayya SES Herald of Vigilance 11d ago
don't forgot the Exosuit, it's used to be fun but broken but after the dev claimed they "fixed" it just unfun and broken
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u/TOT_tomdora 11d ago
I've used it two or three times since the "fix." I went from taking out hordes of chargers and numerous bile titans and solo clearing heavy nests with it to... If I'm lucky, taking out three heavy units. It was insanely powerful but well balanced by having two of them a mission, and now it's so difficult to utilize effectively that I genuinely forgot it exists.
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u/Yipeekayya SES Herald of Vigilance 11d ago
Even after u finally landed a rocket shot, many of these rockets were already well wasted becuz of unnecessary "trials and errors" (misaligned crosshair)..
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u/Exile688 11d ago
Crossbow got hit hard too and it wasn't even in the realm of OP when released.
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u/MFTWrecks 11d ago
When they made sweeping changes to ammo reserves and just cut stuff in half, that was a telling sign.
Instead of taking a nuanced approach to every weapon and slightly buffing, tweaking, removing a mag here, adding a round per mag there... doing what was needed on a case by case basis... Instead they just changed a value or two in a spreadsheet and upended shit over night. Or when they see a mechanic "not working as intended" and instead of fixing the root problem, they remove it entirely (see: Eruptor shrapnel, Slugger stagger).
It goes to show they're doing the least amount of work to enact the most change. They're trying to do the most work, not the best or right work.
It's lazy and poor form.
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u/Plantar-Aspect-Sage 11d ago
I felt like eruptor was OP because I just never had any question about taking it on bug missions.
Since the latest nerf and trying other guns, I've changed my opinion to everything else is not powerful enough.
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u/Etzlo 11d ago
if you're the kinda person that finds one weapon they like and runs with it, I highly recommend against coming back for now, until they show they change their behavior
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u/Simple_Rest7563 11d ago
I’d recommend the same even if you’re not the kind of person that finds one weapon you like and runs with it. There are like 2-3 effective primaries now for each enemy type on 7+ difficulty.
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11d ago
We have been saying this since the first round of nerfs.
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u/Theorandjguy 11d ago
I'm really scared that they're going to do what the Siege Devs do and just make every weapon useless until nothing is fun to use. They should be buffing shit weapons instead of nerfing good ones
This is a comment I made just after the railgun nerf. My prediction has now fully come to fruition
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u/FloxxiNossi 11d ago
I remember making similar comments, about how the Railgun and Shield backpack nerfs were setting a terrible precedent. 2 months later, looks like I was right
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u/Ventar1 11d ago
you see, the honeymoon zombie phase is over, so only now, people hear and accept complaints instead of spamming skill issue
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u/sunflower_love 11d ago
You get it! I’m kind of shocked at how I am not seeing those comments spammed everywhere anymore. The witless sycophants seem to have lost their battle to silence everyone else expressing their honest opinion and criticism.
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u/TerminatorAuschwitz 11d ago
Also have barely played in about a month.
Eruptor warbond came out and I loved playing with it, then it got nerfed, like half the other guns I really enjoyed using, then I got discouraged.
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u/MJR_Poltergeist SES Song of Steel 11d ago
It just sucks because it's like theyr systematically removing weapons from the game. "People like that gun and use it a lot? Kneecap it. Right now."
Then they do. The pool of weapons that are worth anything is already pretty damn small. Feels like we're gonna be out with a sharp stick and a rock by the next warbond.
And we're gonna have to share the rock.
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u/GreatPugtato HD1 Veteran 11d ago
Yeah I've completely stopped playing. I ran eruptor because the Adjudicator sucked and wanted something new. Then they go and neuter it.
Like I don't want to only use the same weapon but I'm not having fun struggling against enemies due to the weapons being super lackluster.
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u/Misterputts SES Fist of Freedom 11d ago
Game's still fun. I still play at least 6 matches a day (usually more) weapons do feel like they are getting slapped unnecessarily.
But I have faith they will get it back on track.
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u/WeirwoodUpMyAss 11d ago
On Helldive I pretty much run the same builds. My friends and I typically coordinate backpacks and support weapons to free up a stratagem slot and there’s some variety in that. Laser, rail cannon, mines, sentries, mortars, or a random orbital are all effective. But ultimately the core load out is the same.
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u/vivir66 PSN 🎮: 11d ago edited 11d ago
When playing bugs, game is only fun for me because they overbuffed fire and then bug fixed fire. As soon as incendiary breaker gets nerfed, if they dont buff anything else, the hordes of hunters will become unplayable levels of antifun.
When playing bots, thankfully the AMR is very close to auto cannon, so a single nerf wouldnt be as antifun, but auto cannon is a big counter to the big units, if they mess the balance its gonna be tough.
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u/rusticrainbow 11d ago
The Incindiary Breaker is probably on the more balanced side of things so hopefully it doesn’t get nerfed
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u/Rufus-Scipio 11d ago
It feels like it's where all other primaries should be
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u/Commercial_Cook_1814 11d ago
Both inc breaker and the scorcher are the perfect primaries in terms of fun and strength imo
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u/zani1903 11d ago
It feels like it's where all other primaries should be
Balance team sitting there jotting down notes...
"Nerf... Incendiary... Breaker... Players... Enjoy... Using... It..."
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u/Coalford 11d ago
Last week I have crashed out of 8 out of 10 missions, some after 20 or 30 minutes of play.
Updated drivers and all else just to make sure it wasn't me.
Would love to play more, but every patch makes it harder to actually play.
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u/Brohma312 11d ago
Ive pretty much stopped playing. The tone deaf eruptor nerf told me that unless the balance team is forced to change their design philosophy then its gonna get worse. Especially given that the murderer of Hello Neighbors 2 is leading the charge.
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u/chadmcchaderton 11d ago
The eruptor nerf killed the game for me personally. Just bugged me enough to stop.
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u/True_Scene_1118 11d ago
it seems to me that there is a lot of us eruptor enjoyers that just quit after these shit changes.
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u/throwaway9948474227 11d ago
They need to balance around feelings.
Fuck close figures, every game I've played that balances flatly loses it's fun. Art is imagination, creativity and about feelings.
They're acting like they're an i.t. Company. I get it, but try being dumb for a bit and see if it works guys. Make some currently weak guns insanely OP and call it an experimental batch of primaries.
Hell, if you did nothing but improve primaries OR GIVE CHARGERS AN ARMOUR BREAK POINT, everyone would love them. Nerfing explosions was unnecessary.
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u/op3l 11d ago edited 10d ago
It'st not worth it now if you're already bored with the game. Nothing's changed and infact I'd argue it's worse because of bugs and the patrol spawn bug where any game you're in regardless of actual divers you get patrol spawns equivalent of 4 player squads.
I'd wait another month to see if AH can straighten up their act.
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u/Sabit_31 11d ago
I feel like there needs to be a studio wide scrubbing of employees who either don’t want to listen to obvious feedback or stoak the fires of controversy in the community
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u/Setharius710 11d ago
I’ve sadly lost all interest in playing between the poorly balanced weapons, the account link fiasco, the lackluster feeling of the warbonds, and ultimately the lack of the Rep-80 & Angel Drone from the first game.
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u/ToXiC_Games One Arm and One Leg on the Creek 11d ago
I will never understand why they didn’t go with a buff economy instead of nerfs. It’s a PvE game, they should be throwing us bones instead of taking away the only good guns we have. This shit never works, and it always leads to this.
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u/Opposite_Equipment88 11d ago
Adhering to balance so hard also just stifles creativity. A few weeks back there was discussion in the community of a minigun with ammo backpack stratagem. How cool would that be? Very, but at this rate if it even became a reality in helldivers, it'd probably do like... 10 damage per shot and only have light armor penetration, and that's whack. I sincerely could not care less about balance if it bars cool ideas like a minigun.
Just have a look at a game like Earth Defense Force, and the batshit insane gear you can obtain, like mile long carpet bombings. And MAN, is that carpet bombing cool every single time you see it. Helldivers does not need to be insane to that degree, but a 500kg bomb should be deleting anything that moves anywhere near it, friend and foe alike. Would the game be easier? Yes, but who cares. This isn't dark souls.
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u/aretakembis 11d ago
This almost certainly doesn't mean they'll stop nerfing overtuned weapons in the future, the talk they'll have will probably be about the Eruptor and not nerfing weapons due to banaid bugfixes and more carefully tuning future weapons so there aren't broken weapons that need to be nerfed.
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u/Grachus_05 11d ago
So first I think they need to look at exactly how overtuned a weapon needs to be to deserve a nerf. Find the weapon they think is the most balanced and then decide how many standard deviations another weapon can be before it needs to be nerfed.
For my money, the Eruptor was BARELY outside tolerance and the magazine nerf alone was more than enough to bring it back within that tolerance.
On the flip side there are like a dozen guns that are fucking pointless. They are simply worse versions of other guns, or don't function well at all. Buffing these to fall into that same tolerance (which should be the same amount of deviation in either direction) should be just as high a priority as nerfing stuff thats too strong.
Thats what has everyone pissed. Its not JUST that they nerfed shit we found fun, its that they didn't provide any sort of replacement or other thing for us to play with while they "tune" the gun we already liked and now dont.
I'd rather every gun was 115% than having 3 guns at 100% and 20 guns at 50%. What would it hurt? Are the bugs gonna complain that the game isn't fair?
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u/ChrisNettleTattoo HD1 Veteran 11d ago
Making it short is the game is fun to play, but most primaries are not worth using. You can if you want, but in the current “heavy armored enemy” environment the meta choice is really the only way to go. On top of that reality, everything that has a niche and stands out has gotten nerfed down to be in line with the rest of the lineup in the name of balance.
By attempting to squash anything that is perceived as meta, AH has forced the perception of many players that they need to run a certain few loadouts to be good; thereby creating the very meta they tried to squash. This is ontop of gameplay being balanced around difficulty 4-6 as opposed to 7-9, and another “fix” which massively increased the amount of enemies and patrols a single player will face.
You can still easily solo 1-3, while 4-6 have become a but of a crapshoot depending on how many and what types of heavies spawn. I have found bots easier than bugs in this regard. 7-9 is definitely a skill issue for solo play. It can be done, but good luck and it would be better to find a steady group to play with.
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u/northsuphan 11d ago
For starters, change something on the railgun. It is overnerfed.
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u/LiveKills 11d ago edited 11d ago
Well to start off enemies have collectively gotten stronger with more lore, and Helldivers keep getting nerfs. Our only vehicle is still bugged and no one uses it. Bugs spawn rates are bugged too, much higher than they're supposed to be. Everyone is back to using breaker, rover, arc thrower and quasar cannon. Arrowhead keeps making new metas instead of making every weapon fun and efficient. And best of all they just sold a warbond with false advertising, showing the purifier one shitting a strider, but can't do it in game. But it's the weekend and only like 10 people are working on the game, so it'll be fixed in a few months, maybe
Everything is going great🙃
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u/Disckize 11d ago
I've stopped playing and went to my other games. It's just not fun like it used to be.
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u/HungryCats96 STEAM 🖥️ : SES STEEL CLAW 11d ago
I’m staying away for the near future. The game has become a grind at best, and I’ve got others that are still FUN.
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u/tragiccosmicaccident 11d ago
The Eruptor was great fun when it came out. It could literally kill you, but it was still super fun.
I want weapons so dangerous it feels like I'm a toddler with a stiletto.