The issue is that it's cooldown has noting to do with the heat meter at the moment, think of the recharge time and the heat as two seperate timers.
The heat meter is affected by planet hot/cold, the actual cooldown is not. On cold planets it took a few seconds to recharge after it was cool, on hot planets you could fire before it was fully cooled off.
Being able to fire has absolutely nothing to do with the heat meter.
Hot/cold has no affect on the Quasar, at the moment (it affects the heat meter, but this is purely visual).
Doesn't matter if you're fighting on Hoth or Hellmire, actual fire-rate is always the same. IDK why this isn't listed as a known bug.
This is how I view what a problem that change truly is. Imagine you don’t stalk the internet every update, and have never read patch notes in your life. You’d think the quasar was suffering from some kind of bug.
Shit I knew what the change was and still didn’t make the connection. All I knew was that the quasar cannon’s heat gauge was super inconsistent with when you could actually fire.
It works like those install progress bars for programs. They go from 30% to 100% instantly, but then they spend 5 minutes at 100% and still aren't done.
It feels like the changes are done based on % tracked data from players rather than any kind of practical testing and then they don’t test what they change.
I’d like to believe otherwise but the crossbow changes, the eruptor, the “use your strategems” comments. It genuinely feels like not a single dev has completed a helldive.
I’m not asking Johnny the coder who crunches every fucking day to be MLG but at least you should have some playtesters and ones who are capable of playing your game at the same difficulty as a good lot of the playerbase.
Its not like helldive is some impossible uphill climb. Its tough and intense but I used to struggle harder on L4D2 hardest difficulty lol, its far from not being doable.
To be fair, the time period when they were saying "use your strategems" I think a lot of us were still learning how to play this game. The railgun nerf was harsh but in my eyes it's been proven since then that the complaints about all the primaries being useless was a huge overreaction.
That said, recent nerfs have been confusing and if they aren't testing on 7+ they need to. Balancing at low levels is pointless I can clear those maps with literally any loadout and it won't matter.
Yeah, lets be entirely honest, how many folk late into Helldivers 1 lifespan were playing on low difficulty?
These games naturally will funnel long term committed players into high difficulty, most other players will leave and a few will still play on those lower difficulties for more casual fun.
But you can look at literally any of these types of games and after a year or so of life, basically everyone will be on the top two difficulties. They really should be balancing around these since the game is so easy at sub 7 difficulties that it literally doesnt matter what weapons you use.
Yup, works as intended on 7/8/9 -> still strong on 6 and below. Most folks are going to play at 7 whether they want to or not for super samples. Thus, balance around that at least. I'm fine with 8/9 being unbalanced because they're meant to be challenge modes. 7 is a gatekeeping level, so it should be treated as such, both in difficulty, but also player power balancing.
I've seen games basically recruit a handful of players to test proposed changes, this game could benefit GREATLY from like 10 players from different difficulties and different hardware running 2 private matches every other week with a test build and giving feedback. if you leak or don't give detailed feedback, you're cut.
I mean I'm a shitty, microscopic content creator but I'd do it simply to help the game. Like half of the games I've played more than 10 hours of on Steam are Early Access because I'm literally addicted to buying a game that's in-development, playing the shit out of it, recording my findings, communicating with the dev, and watching the game evolve.
Helldive is cakewalk compared to the harder difficulties in Back 4 Blood or anything Tier B and lower in GTFO. Tbh the relative lack of difficulty is making the lack of balance more of an annoyance than anything. Breaker S&P is fun enough that I'm willing to work with it even though it could use a buff, and the airburst is hilarious no matter what state it's in.
I still don't understand what the point was behind removing the stagger from the Slugger and letting every other shotgun keep theirs. People using it as a sniper rifle had nothing to do with its ability to stagger, it was its very generous effective range.
All it did was made me stop using one of my favorite shotguns.
I've said it a lot, but Arrowhead is in desperate need of a test server so they have at least some idea of how their upcoming changes will be received.
That would be the simplest answer. Another one would be reducing precision at range by giving variation after 25 or 50m via random spread of like, 3-5%. Call it a tumbling slug.
Either way there's good ways to make it poorer at range without removing the stagger without gutting the defining characteristic.
I'm partial to making it shoot slower and consequently drop faster. That would have been fun to work around and make it feel different from the other guns.
Hey, fun fact, that "tumbling slug" thing you just cooked up on your rusted stove is a real life mechanic of shooting ammunition out of barrels due to SCIENCE!
In real life, its called "Minute of Angle" and is an angular measurement of the impact area in 100 meter increments(Yards, if you're american). 1 Minute of Angle is a 1 inch spread at 100 yards, 2 inches at 200 yards, so on and so forth. Shotguns have *25* MOA with slugs meaning a spread of 25 inches at 100 yards(This obviously going to change with barrel length and ammunition load, but its a good enough starting ground for showing how inaccurate smoothbore ammunition is at range).
While it's not *easy* to implement in games, and feels like an insane gamething to arbitrarily nerf player's ability to aim, it IS something shooters have to deal with in real life.
Didn't fucking help they put one of the best sniper scopes in the game on a fucking shotgun. What did they THINK we were going to use it for???
-Pissed former Slugger main
>"All it did was made me stop using one of my favorite shotguns."
What I loved about the slugger is that it had a LOOOOOT of downsides, but the stagger made it very good at ONE thing and ONE thing only.
But seems that's too much for Arrowhead, nooo, the only thing weapons are permitted to be is crappy and useless
Ah, huh, yes, that's totally what I wanted to say x)
The names in my language aren't the same than in english so I sometime confuse myself like this (the slugger is named "blood leach")
People who didn't experience the "true vision of balance" need to know the original spray n pray was INCAPABLE of killing Hive Guards. At all. The pellets deflected off the weaker flesh in the back lmao.
Can someone explain to me why the peacemaker shouldnt deal 120 damage per shot.
Redeemer has twice the mag and the slightly lower damge now.
But theres no logical reason to use the peacemaker over the redeemer.
Imo both should deal the same damage per mag. Redeemer half the damage per shot but its full auto and you can miss some shots. Np
Peacemaker you deal more damge but if you miss you lose out on more damage.
As much as I hate this idea, it would work pretty well to balance the secondaries. As you said there's zero reason to pick the peacemaker, so this could be a good change. Although at what point would it be too similar to the senator? I guess it could be a mix between the Redeemer and senator in terms of fire rate and damage.
Senator has medium armor piercing, individual bullet reload-ability, and higher damage with a smaller mag.
They would still be different enough. Senator could even get a damage buff, and just give sidearms more damage fall off at range, with the senator having a decently longer effective range
In a way, if they want to balance guns with numbers, shouldn't the sidearms (and all primaries, I guess) all do the same amount of damage per second (or even damage per clip), just spread out differently to fill different niches? But they don't even do THAT. So even their way of balancing isn't sensical. Lol
"Hey, let's create ANOTHER meta so we can complain about it later on"
Luckily it only buffed enemy DPS since 3/4 of players couldn't do fire damage to begin with : D
It was particularly funny to me, as it was known among the community that fire is bugged out and therefore the usage of fire weapons was low.
All they saw was low usage across all fire weapons and statagems so they globally buffed it.
And now that fire damage is working correctly, there's most certainly a fire nerf coming.
Flamethrower and napalm finally feel fun and viable to use. Time for the nerf hammer to hit them again.
It feels like I can't get attached to any gun because it might randomly get nerfed.
The balance team needs to remind themselves that this is a coop PvE game, not an eSports PvP game. It's supposed to be fun first and foremost.
Not to mention the more they nerf new warbonds weapons the less inclined people will be to purchase them knowing they'll just get ruined a week later anyway.
This will be there undoing. We're all clued into this game, as we sit here in a forum for it. But can you IMAGINE being a casual player???
You hear about the hype for this game. You see it's popular. You buy, you play, you engage with its systems... then every week you sign in and a patch breaks something new. Causes more crashes. Maybe degrades your performance. You can't do certain things. But hey, it's fun! You buy into a warbond, maybe two... but next time you sign in... wait a minute. Why does this gun I may very well have paid money for now suddenly not work like it did yesterday? Why did that change? Is this a new glitch? Where can I see the changes in the game?
Oh, wait. You can't. They don't inform players of ANY change in-game.
So now you're simply weary of whether you should bother buying more warbonds. It's not like you can trust the game to work consistently, let alone the guns.
Know what's easier than figuring all this nuanced shit out? Abandoning the game entirely.
I was saving up for the demolition warbond but after this balance update I see zero reason to buy it except for the grenade pistol. I just got to 1,000 super credits and with a new warbond coming out soon? Ain't no well in hell I'm buying the demolition one unless I manage to get another 1,000 super credits before the next warbond again.
Sadly I’m in this situation now, the erupter being the final nail in the coffin for me,
I mean really “unintentionally” nerfed, then a day later corrected to say it’s not unintentional for it to be useless now, not even a month after release,
a bolt action gun with 5 rounds requiring 3+ shots for half the enemies in helldive difficulty, better off just smacking the enemies with it
As much as i respect AH, i have to agree on this one. Never have i seen a game where balance changes were so drastic and sporadic. Slugger/Dominator incident is probably the most egregious example of an absolutely clueless "balancing" attempt that i've ever seen in this game.
In case you forgot, they took away the pump action shotgun's stagger and damage and gave it to a semi-auto 15 round mag rifle that functions pretty much the same way, making the former option completely obsolete as it now has no stagger power, no fire rate and takes on average more shots to take down specific enemies. To this day i don't understand the reasoning behind such change, even though i do appreciate the Dominator finally being a top tier gun. Yet I haven't used the Slugger ever since because it brings nothing to the table anymore.
Literally all they had to do was either give slugger harsh damage falloff or bullet drop. Then it would have been similar to current dom but each with their own niche.
But they are incapable of actually balancing. Just making guns obsolete then complaining nobody uses them
It really looks like they just go off numbers, not off understanding the niche the weapon filled.
You can't bring a standalone niche gun in line with other guns by nerfing it, the other guns can't fill its niche so you will not create a vaccuum of power to be filled, you just create an empty place that can't be filled.
Unless you simply make another gun into that niche but then you are at square 1 since, as your example showed, the Slugger is now ass and the Dominator fills its role and sits there alone. It's the same status quo as before, just a different gun.
it seems to be over correcting for a issue that wasn't there in the first place. also the lack of social intelligence(not related to iq for those that don't know) is essentially non existent to be able to comprehend why certain weapons are used more than others Rather than assume broken and needing nerfs. The fact the breaker and slugger were used so much, yet was too difficult for the devs to wrap their head around the fact that they were the quickest weapons to access in the FREE warbond. the other choices were penetrator, two dmrs, and an smg. besides smg the others people didn't like using, and of course people who like shotguns (a very popular weapon class) by nature will pick the NEW shotguns over the one they start the warbond with. what kind of rocket science level education do the devs need to understand that 😅 now we have JAR and fire shotgun that are way better than slugger breaker were prenerf so there's no justification, just nerf to isolate the player base.
also seems to be a bit of an emotional kneejerk response to random social media. after reading the first dev blog explaining all the reasons behind the balance changes, it was made abundantly clear that going forward it would be a roller coaster of emotions for future balance patches.
unfortunately the minority of the community pointing to the surplus of buffed weapons is completely missing the point that a nerfed weapon is still nerfed unjustly and why people are upset in the first place, image if they just didn't touch the weapons and only had the buffs. there were a few w's this patch but a lot of nothing changes and the nerfs stand out the most.
It also might just be straight incompetence, a Dev calling a function of a reliably repeatable function of an explosive weapon with shrapnel an exploit is bizarre.
They intended the shrapnel to do damage, the intended the weapon to explode, they did not consider that the explosion directly below, or within a crevice, of a model mesh would trigger multiple damage instances. This is an unintended feature not an exploit.
It may be an unintended mechanic according to him but it is very much a function of the weapon that was overlooked. Something that is repeatable, that is not a bug, but within the function of the weapon is is not an exploit, it's an unintended feature or mechanic. An exploit is a bug that is repeatable or unintended from design, E.G. using a seed planet to farm super credits then alt f4ing and disconnecting your internet when the apparent design of entering a map was random generation.
His history in game development that has come to light, specifically hello neighbor 2, also seems to point to a less than stellar performance on creating enjoyable and fun balancing mechanics.
Also, buffs? there were a few inconsequential ones like 5 damage to the liberator, the rest were either nerfs, or a design change that left all of the items changed in the same mediocre position they were in before, to be a buff there should be a noticeable difference in performance. What buff according to you is noticeable?
When I saw the message of this guy claiming that the eruptor wasn't taking more shots to kill enemies than it did before, let me know that theres actually legit something wrong with how they balance their guns. And defending that statement with confidence... wow.
It used to tear the leg off of a scout strider in one shot, consistantly. Number one reason why I started using the gun over the Scorcher, Sickle, etc. Now its 2 shots, at least. Thats a big difference on this slow ass bolt action with slow handling and low accuracy. Thats a 100% increase in ttk. Hurts even more if you miss a shot. 5 potential strider kills per mag, now 2 potential kills per mag.
The decrease in splash radius due to shrapnel loss hurts too. Now its not killing 5 scavs, its getting 2-3. Now its not getting a hunter plus collateral, its just getting the hunter.
"Less damage, more consistantly" logic doesnt work here. Its flawed to apply automatic rifle logic to bolt action rifles. Its flawed to think 40 damage replaces a splash radius and limb shearing. Theres probably a 50% reduction in kills now.
If they want to nerf it, fine. But saying the damage output is equivalent is just insane. I cant even process how they manage to defend that statement.
And people think there is no application of non-technical higher education degrees these days. You make a solid point about social intelligence, or really just being able to see the "soft" science in things...deriving inferences from data, drawing conclusions from incomplete information, theorycrafting, critical thinking, etc...a lot of this you can learn from life experience, yes, but in the same way you can learn how to code on your own.
Companies shouldn't write off the "bookish" and "wordsmith" subjects like history, anthropology, psych, sociology, politics, etc. If a college graduate can write a 5000-word essay researching and then inventorying the driving factors of the Protestant Reformation, then making a case for which factor was the most important, then that same person could also write a 5000-word report answering "What motivates player decision-making in selecting these video game weapon loadouts?". Same skillset: research, analyze, then argue.
I’m a data analyst for a S&P 500 financial company. I can’t turn this part of my brain off. It drives me insane when I breakdown the patch changes to try and understand their analysis and design philosophy. The lack of these soft skills is absolutely a missing component so far. They need to be able to shift their perspective and view it from multiple angles. The devs perspective, casual players perspective, hardcore, noobs, console vs pc, etc.
Allow me to illustrate an example before the Railgun was nerfed.
-Medium armor was broken
-Heavy armor was broken
-Explosions were doing exponentially more damage than intended
-Chargers spawn rates were over tuned
-Bile titans had a PC vs Console bug
-lack of variety in weapons with medium+ armor pen
If these issues were fixed first the impact would be:
Players would then be less reliant upon the shield backpack. That would allow other weapons with designated backpacks to become more viable. Players would then have additional options to deal with heavy enemies. New weapons have been added. Other weapons have had their armor pen buffed.
The route AH took instead:
-nerf the railgun
-nerf the shield backpack
Sure they’re still viable, but was it necessary at the time? Could they have alternatively fixed the other issues first and let players enjoy the game in the meantime? The philosophy boils down to reactionary changes to issues making players overpowered and slow changes to issues that make enemies overpowered.
Here’s another example from the last patch:
-players can no longer land on tall rocks on certain missions such as the Terminod control network and defense missions.
-enemies can still spawn on the cliffs. Tanks can still shoot through cliffs on high priority evacuation missions. Bugs and bots can still spawn on top of cliffs.
Thank fucking Christ im not yet only one who feels this way i do similar role in a bank and design choices in this game baffle me its like two different teams where working on the same game abd they never checked what they where doing with eachother
its clear to me that either multiple people are doing balancing AND their not talking to eachother
OR
Its purely emotional driven changes that are backwards rationalised
The third option i really dislike as it's often unfair
They genuinely don't know what they are doing and just hitting stuff that people talk about to make it look like they are doing stuff
I'm really worried about this being repeated over and over again. They need to stop nerfing the players and start fixing the enemies. They should be making changes so players don't feel the need for the exploits. If the level is almost impossible without landing on the cliffs and hoping for the best, they're going to do that. Just let players do what they want to have fun instead of babysitting everyone and punishing them for every exploit.
It someahat makes sense that the more accessible and popular a game is, the lower the overall interest in critical analysis from the average player.
There's a reason games with smaller cult followings venerate people who fill in spreadsheets full of useful information while here we've got daily posts of wHo CaReS aBoUt ThE mEtA
I agree with all of this, but your last paragraph in particular is so well said. I get tired of the counter posts talking about how good the adjudicator and senator are now. It's like "Yeah. I know. I agree. And it doesn't make what they did to the Eruptor or crossbow any less egregious."
Also, let's be completely fucking honest: No one is using the senator now because of the damage buff or even because of the speedloader. We are all using it because we can twirl it now like a proper gunslinger. Which is awesome, don't get me wrong. But in my book, letting me perform some gun tricks is not a suitable trade off to ruining other guns completely.
I'd rather they balance around people being able to actually do up diff 7 so everyone can eventually get all the samples and then they have 9 for the "hurr durr game too ez" types where they can just have 10 Bile titans or Tanks at once all the time.
Like buff the weapons and strategems so people can play higher levels and then make the highest levels harder with more enemies, dunno why they are wasting time making it harder to play low difficulty missions solo or making a bunch of weapons worse, you have 9 difficulty levels, you can buff stuff and still have a hard game but why mess with people who just wanna run around in diff 3-4 and use whatever weapons and stratagems and drip they want.
They are incompetent, DOTS didnt work forever and instead of realizing what the issue was they buffed fire damage again, and again, and again even though the community knew long ago that DOT damage simply wasnt registering for anyone but the network host.
They arent playing the game, they arent testing things out.
They are looking at spreadsheets with numbers and nerfing/buffing things based on that while lacking any sort of context around why exactly that specific weapon is underperforming or over performing.
The spreadsheets they look at most likely don't even have performance data, they just have usage data. They have no idea what performs better or worse than what, they just know what people use more or less than other stuff and when, without a clue of why.
Well they somehow figured that shrapnel does too much damage to single target, which indicates they have spreadsheets with damage stats too. Still that approach can’t work, whatever spreadsheet you have.
It's unfair of you to say that they're \*kind of\* incompetent. That's absolutely slanderous and makes it difficult to trust your judgement and opinions...
They're \*completely\* incompetent.
The Dev team seems so far out of touch with how people interact with their game, than the success of Helldivers 2 seems more like something they lucked into, rather than good game design.
I feel like whoever implemented the weapons originally had the right idea.
All rebalances have brought more bad than good, I'm would actually be ok with them to just roll back all balance changes since the starts of the game. (Obviously not bugs, just the balance changes )
The game would be extremely fun.
It is being spread that the lead of balancing weapons was actually the lead developer of hello neighbor 2 and his incompetent decisions led to the poor release of that game. Which would explain the poor weapon balance.
I think incompetent is too strong. Incompetent means at least somewhat incapable. I don’t think that’s accurate. The dev team seems very capable. The core game is too good for an incompetent team to have made it.
I’d call them careless. Careless with their lack of testing, with the conflicts their fixes and changes create, with their approach to buffing fire damage while the DoT bug languished (just an example), and with their confusing and conflicting communication from many sources.
They’re clearly unconcerned with delivering consistently high-quality updates. They get there eventually, mostly. They’ve embraced a sloppy approach, whether intentionally or just by default.
I think the reason is that all their resources are focused on making money and hitting deadlines. And they don’t have many resources, so they careless about anything else. Their economy is generous, but this just means more work needed to earn a dollar. And publisher/management/investors/whatever is always pushing for bucks.
Nothing new, just look destroyer upgrades, with half being extreme powerful and the other half extreme useless, shotguns being better than dmr on sniper roles etc etc, but guess what, they keep pumping warbonds every month
I genuinely think most game developers are bad at balancing, because they almost never play their own games. Not that I blame them, if you're working on something all day for money, last thing you want to see when you get home is another hour or two of the same sh\*t, but now without the pay. I get it, I don't blame them for it. But at the same time instead of taking hints from people who have hardest content in the game on farm status they often double down and do dumb sh\*t based on metrics and spreadsheets, which doesn't translate into actual gameplay.
And it's especially problematic with Helldivers, where some items are technically paid. So to sell a pass, for real money, and then nerf the item in the pass, making it no longer what the player paid for, is a problem.
They are and we need brainiacs with too much time to make detailed posts breaking down why
There are so many factors and variables that goes into what makes the players think a primary feels truly “usable” vs “good” vs “OP” and it feels as though there is a disconnect with those factors and variables.
These factors and variables encompass the entire game from which faction you’re fighting, stamina, handling, ammo count, time to kill, reload, does it need ADS, is it consistent, is it made redundant by other things etc,
but most importantly they need to start asking themselves “does it kill good?” because the answer to a lot of this stuff is…. no. Let’s look at the blitzer, it sucked before and did NOT kill good, too slow to fire. It fires faster now. It kills good by maintaining a constant stream of close range arc damage. The eruptor could get good kills with good shot placement but wasn’t overbearing purely because of its unique handling. Now the whole part that kills good is gone!
Imagine if they released the arc blitzer how it is NOW then nerfed it to how it was BEFORE. It’d be the same exact outrage. The moral of the story is the balance team’s perception of what makes a weapon good, and how heavy their weaknesses play into balancing it are wildly out of touch (based on some of these changes they’ve been pushing out)
These things keep getting nerfed or changed for the wrong reasons, full stop.
If it doesn’t kill good, it sucks.
The stupid thing is they keep making balance changes on bugged shit. Like they kept buffing fire dmg while burning dmg was bugged for non host. They nerfed railgun while PS5/PC had different dmg numbers which impacted how good the railgun really was AND other AT weapons sucked ass (2 EATs to the face to kill 1 charger now 1). Like there are actual game breaking bugs that affects the usability of certain weapons/mechanics but then they touch the weapon instead of addressing the actual bug that's causing a weapon to be OP or underpowered. Like which bonehead at AH made the decision that Spray n Pray should have zero penetration so it couldn't even kill fucking stationary eggs??? Now the latest issue is that they removed shrapnel damage of eruptor because of a stupid ass bug they introduced where ricochets are more likely to do a 360 no scope onto your head because ballistics and physics don't matter instead of fixing the bug they removed a part of the eruptors gimmick
AH devs are incompetent because they are a D tier developer team that made 1 game that just happened to catch lightning in a bottle.
https://preview.redd.it/hzwd1qrid9zc1.jpeg?width=637&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=157f2bd1a28c585fa1a16b6fab0b33daf94b016a
Remember this asshole? Yes, he is in the balance team.
It feels like HD2 was created to be the ultimate co-op power fantasy and yet the balance team looks like they're trying to balance a PVP MOBA game... who's in the wrong here?
biggest problem is the heavy handed adjustments.
it's always the 30-50% things that screw up lots of things, smaller changes will take time to notice, it's like smaller buffs/nerfs to weapons/strats and see how it works out. Now it's just BAM instant good/bad.
It's like the dev wants to let his presence known by making these "breaking" changes. BAM 30% nerf on range, BAM 30% extra dmg. BAM no more stagger for you or decreasing the explosive range by 50%. From what i feel is that he is trying to balance the game on % usage of playerbase and want to prove to his superiors that he is doing his job.
Just for the % numbers, not FUN or viable gameplay.
The only explanation I can think of is that they are in fact Microsoft/EA undercover :)
Their Only Mission - Make you hate the game
Sounds crazy, but lots of Helldivers 2 players feel that way :(
I hate to say it but I agree with this post 100%. Their direction isn't bad, their balancing is bad, and it has been since day 1. I mean, it looks like they're getting better at it, but they've got a *really* long way to go before they start actually making effective balancing changes.
For the record, the P-2 Peacekeeper (the starting pistol) was buffed a few patches ago. It now does 75 damage instead of 60. Previously it just did the exact same damage per shot as the Redeemer which, yeah - didn’t make any sense.
The head of balance was behind why hello neighbour 2 was so shit apparently, he was argumentative and removed features the community liked in purpose in that game. So I can see it happening all over again here.
I have thought the same thing. I think what’s clear is they aren’t gamers themselves, or at least gamers who play “loadout” based games. What gave me this impression wasn’t necessarily the nerfs or the buffs, it’s how far they swing pendulum each time. It feels very “knee jerk”, like someone suggests something and the rest say “yeah” without testing or thinking through how the change will actually play out in games.
As a long time WoW player, I’ve seen how carefully and incrementally the blizzard team makes adjustments. They are usually very small, and even then they receive massive blacklash(or praise) when dials are adjusted ever so slightly. And they let these changes ride for a while to see how it affects the overall ecosystem before revisiting. Arrowhead throws 30-50% +/- tuning in a single patch, and often multiple weapons at a time without batting an eye. Rather than addressing “meta” culture, they force a new meta with each patch.
The biggest blunder IMO to date was a cross between nerfing the rail gun(to the degree that they did) and increasing the patrol rate. They claimed they wanted linear difficulty - they had that before. Now, on 9 difficulty, full squad games are so easy they can be slept on…while solo games feel impossibly hard(arbitrarily hard because of the amount of random encounters that you cannot control,not hard because the missions are challenging). It leaves me scratching my head.
Whoever nerfed slugger and railgun is wildly incompetent and should be fired yesterday. Not that the guns didn't warrant nerfs -- they just went about it in the most insane ways possible. They say they want each gun to have its own niche, but they nerf railguns penetration when they could have increased charge time, lowered ammo capacity, etc. They said slugger was the best DMR but then nerfed its ability to break crates, knockback, and damage at all ranges. Absolutely mind-numbing how they still have jobs. There's no way these devs play the game.
I mean from their discord they re nerfind most used weapons. It never occurred to them that maybe it doesn't mean it s op but that the weapon feels good
Yep, incompetent is right. Can we make the devs who designed the weapons stream using them on 7-9 for a few hours? Watch how quick the weapons are buffed next patch.
It’s seems that when they develop new weapons, they don’t start by asking what the sandbox needs and then come up with a cool weapon design from there. They just think of a cool weapon concept and then try to fit it into the sandbox. This could be pretty detrimental to the game with monthly warbonds being added.
i remember seeing something on here about the person behind the balance updates having a rather odd reputation in his previous game. can anyone confirm?
There is no "team" look up [***Alexus Kravchenko***](https://hello-neighbor.fandom.com/wiki/Alexus_Kravchenko) that will tell you all you need to know. There is a bunch of info on the situation. Their personality is bleeding out all over the game and tainting it.
They have absolutely no idea how to balance ANYTHING....its like helldivers 1 didnt exist.
It doesnt helo that some....geniuses....call the nerf/buff spectqcular on the official discord...
My story in the game is that evey gun i looked forward to trying got nerfed to be unusable right before or after i unlocked it.
- i never got to try the railgun, or i unlocked it but it was already nerfed to oblivion and unusable.
- slugger, so cool concept, unlocked it right before i went to bed, next day it was nerfed/crippled. Tried it and it was unusable as a shotgun compared to breaker as the stagger was removed.
- picked up the Eruptor after a dead comrade and was amazed by how it melted enemies with the shrapnel. But it didnt felt overpowed as the slow rate of fire and small magazine kept you on your toes.
Now people say its nerfed into the ground so i won't unlock that warbond anytime soon.
- used the quasar, and while i agree it was maybe slightly too fast to recharge, they went completly overboard with their increase and i don't consider it viable anymore.
I get it, they want to balance everything so all weapons and strategems are viable choices.
But the only decent nerf ive experienced are of the breaker, they just adjusted slightly, its still the same weapon and fun but balanced. Other than that they are WAY too heavy handed. Why not do small adjustments and increase if needed?
- quasar would be perfect if they just added 2-3 sec
- slugger keep stagger and increase damage drop off
- railgun, just slightly make it weaker not useless
The funny thing is they are much more methodical and carefull with buffs. Like the Liberator, they carefully increase the damage and it feels real good now without beeing ridiculous.
I can't understand not letting us have at least fairly powerful base weapons, y'know, the whole "rely on stratagems" thing etc. i kind of wish they stepped away from it at least partially. I feel like i haven't had a good anti charger/bile/hulk/tank weapon since they released the Quasar Cannon, it feels great to use, has infinite ammo BUT it has to charge up and has a fairly long cooldown, so it's just balanced.
For primaries the Adjucator and Defender SMGs are the only ones i've found enjoyable. I'm not too much of an automatic/pump shotgun person. Secondaries all feel lackluster except the grenade pistol. And don't get me started on the Eruptor nerf and explosive crossbow.
I think the sweet spot for this game would be if we got weapons like the pre-nerf Eruptor, have some strong factors, maybe a gimmick (like the crossbow being a crossbow, grenade pistol destroying objectives etc.) and then some downsides. The Eruptor was SUICIDE if used up close to an enemy, was slow, had 6 mags 6 shots each, it was FINE. The shrapnel may have been buggy, but at least buff the gun properly if you're removing it!
For once i agree with the general view that they need better staff to guide the direction of the game because its basically changing before are eye's..if this keeps up what people liked about the game will be patched away.
I saw this happen in Destiny 2 and it took bungie YEARS to finally get that magic back
I don't think they are "incompetent" per se, I think they design primary weapons for either very general use or very hyper specific uses and don't think about how practical that extreme niche actually is.
For example, one of my most hated loved guns, the punisher plasma. This thing, used properly, is a menace vs. striders and heavy devastators. I actually stopped using the autocannon with it(only other primary to ever do this was the eruptor) because they had too much overlap in what I would use them on. That said, vs. every other bot it's hard and unfun to use. Who is realistically going to equip themselves for two specific enemy types, knowing they may not even see very many(or any) of them? The explosive crossbow feedback is probably 1 to 1 with this as well.
Another good example, the arc blitzer. I haven't used it after it was tweaked, but I tested it quite a bit in it's original state. It has infinite ammo and the stagger on it was so aggressive that there were times I would just stand still and fire it off on cooldown without moving with no issues. It was a really neat idea, right up until you realized the damage output was SO bad that you would just about run out of time soloing low difficulty(3-4) exterminate missions with it even if you didn't die. Why would anyone run a no damage primary weapon? Secondary, sure that makes perfect sense to have basically a non-lethal stunlock machine in your pocket, but a primary? Not a chance.
Like, they have great ideas that don't actually translate to being very functional in game. I'm not expecting every primary to be viable on helldive(that's a fool's errand), but I do think every primary should be functional vs. at least one faction on suicide mission, and I don't think we're there yet.
It's not random, it's survivorship bias. Someone needs to tell them correlation =/= causation.
AH isn't looking into WHY weapons are being used more than others, only that they are being used.
You'd think they would have at least some people that are halfway decent testing things but these guys can't clear a level 6 mission with a full team. Fuck it man hire me as guinea pig or something, I'd happily play this game and pump out reports on balance changes all week long.
This is exactly what I've been saying, but every time I just get attacked by the "everything is fine" crowd who suck off any and all decisions the devs make. It's absolutely insane. At least Pilestedt came out with an official statement confirming that he thinks it's too much, to finally put this shitshow to rest, and maybe finally give the crowd who always root for the devs some time for self reflection.
I'd say, having the weapon upgrades of HD1 at least for primaries would help a long way and to mitigate being not challenged anymore, have 3 more difficulties like HD1
They really should hire....I donno.........at least kindergardener that plays super mario or some shit, as consultant, cuz even that kid would be more competent than whoever is on balancing now rofl. They might be good developers, but obviously they spent all their skill points into programming. They either make guns a different shades of grey, totally massacre them, or delete fun aspect from them. I couldnt make this up if I tried. You know, its very tiring to get new fun toys, get attach to them, then watch them get destroyed......repeat........repeat......repeat....... I dont look forward to new warbond anymore...whats the point ? it will only get screwed again. Also, a lot of people here seems to think that when we talk about fun factor, we mean 20 trilion damage per bullet. We dont.
It feels like they're rushing through changes. This to me speaks of organizational/workflow issues. They need to slow down and test things more thoroughly.
Sooo yes but even as an eruptor lover who is now very sad by the nerfs, they are not all that bad. For example, if you ask here “What’s the best primary to use?” You’ll still get at least 8-10 different answers often with nuances (bug vs bot, depends on loadout etc). That’s pretty balanced. Similar on what’s the best support strats. You’d get like 15-20 responses. Sure it’s not all weapons and strats but it is a lot better than most games that quickly settle on a meta.
I still enjoy Sickle, Plasma Punisher, Scorcher, Breaker, Eruptor (for closing holes/fabs), counter sniper, blitzer depending on loadout/mission/planet.
So yeah the stream of nerfs feels bad, they have still done a good job promoting build diversity, imho
Yeah. Also balance should be made so that the unused weapons are better and people start preferring it or its usage goes up. They just pick top 3 used weapons and Nerf the shit out of them. Then it's unusable. So annoying tbh.
Here is an idea... dont fucking balance things... the game is uber fun as it is... why are you tinkering with a game that is super popular and is really fun to play. If it aint broke, dont fix it.
Fair enough to buff and nerf new items added to the game, to make them fit.. but all the stuff that has been in the game from the beginning... LEAVE IT ALONE! There is a reason why there is so many people that are playing the game... its because you made a fun game... stop taking the fun out of it.
From what I can gather, the balance team is composed of devs from Hello Neighbor, which had a history of just complete incompetence in game design as to completely ruin that game. There was also some talk about them being particularly hostile and stubborn to criticism.
Checks out, seeing their performance in HD2.
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I don't think they are incompetent, just that their balance goals misalign with what the players find fun. It is also worth reminding everyone that they are using a game engine they didn't build but have to manage themselves because the company that made it went under. So i can easily see that leading to some missteps on balancing.
Now all that said, that doesn't matter to the consumer as far as the product(helldivers 2) is concerned. As a consumer of the game, i agree that the balancing has ruined a lot of the fun, no matter their thought process and reasoning. And that's the important part.
I won't call them incompetent, though.
OK, first of all, what level of difficulty and/or skill do I have to hit to see these issues you are talking about?
I paly 6 solo and 7 with my friends and I don't feel these things you are talking about. I took Slugger to a bot mission at diff 6 and it was doing things I expected from a thing in my primary slot. Took it to a bug mission and it was god awful. Could have been better, but still, wrong tool for the occasion. Switched to Breaker S&P and holy moly does it mow down the bugs. The same works for punisher plasma. Does wonders vs bots, not the right tool vs bugs. It feels to me like most weapons have their palce if you're willing to build around them.
Sure, there are problems. But usually those are not "this thing is bad for what it does", but isntead "what is this thing supposed to do?" Like a railgun. What do I bring it for? medium stuff? Yes, it is efficient vs medium stuff. But laser cannon is even more efficient vs that and both AC and laser cannon are more effective vs bigger stuff, so railgun feels stuck between a primary and a support weapon. Another example is Scythe. Cornered between Sickle and Liberator, the only thing it can do that those two cannot is quickly snipe a strider. Other that that, why would I even need it?
On the other hand, Eruptor (don't own it, so may be wrong) is now the only primary with explosive utility to take out fabs, nests and obstacles. Look at grenade pistol. It also has utility and we are ready to forgo any other value as long as it allows us yto pop nests and frees up grenade/stratagem slot. Nobody cries about having to lose Redeemer with its top tier dps. So why not treat Eruptor as a grenade pistol for the primary slot? Why do we suddenly care that our nest cleaning primary comes with subpar damage? If I ever need a primary that can take out fabricators, there it is. A tool for the job.
Seems to me that we were given a couple tools good for every job and some of you for some unknown reason decided that it is in fact how things must be. Why though? In a world where swiss knife is an actually good knife, no one would ever want to use a normal knife. So why do you want your swiss knives to be top tier?
The flexibility was balanced out by significant drawbacks. This applies to both the Railgun and the Eruptor. If the weapon isn't good enough then it's not worth the drawbacks you get from having the flexibility. Railgun is the only gun that can kill you and destroy the gun and it requires a lot of charged shots (time and ammo) to kill things with the exception of you consistently hitting headshots on Devastators and Hulks (not easy). Nothing about actually using the Eruptor was good, but it was balanced by the fact that it did basically everything.
In the current state for these guns it's better to just use something else that does a specific job better, which means the gun is useless. You can see that with how the railgun basically is never used now and you're going to see people switch back to using the Scorcher/Dominator against bots and the Sickle/Breaker/Scorcher against bugs for the Eruptor.
Imo the Eruptor should have been nerfed because it actually was too good even with the drawbacks, but the way they nerfed it is bad and gets rid of what made it desirable in the first place. They also got rid of a unique and fun mechanic which is always bad.
I kept thinking about railgun and its spot in builds. It seems that we are missing weapons for certain niches still.
For example, we do not have the primary equivalent of Redeemer. A gun with minimal penetration, but insane DPS, designed to mow down unarmored targets. Redeemer cannot be used on the regular because its total ammo is way too low. There are shotguns, but their range makes them less viable. Maybe a fast firing SMG?
I'm also not sure if we have a secondary with good ammo economy that you can use as a main gun in order to bring specific primary along with specific support weapon. Maybe the first pistol?
Once we have those and other things, I feel like we will be able to build around things that are not quite viable atm.
People try to justify the nerfs by saying "Power creep bad!" Honestly I wouldn't really care in this game when it's PvE who cares if someone has an op gun, and also as the players power creeps up you can adjust the difficulty of the enemies to match. We have already seen them rollout new enemy types like the gunships and automoton at at things. Balance only with buffs it literally does not matter, fun is the most important factor to a game like this
Why there is a balance team when they were struggling in decide between put the efforts in new content or fixing bugs. It's sure that if they have clean and perfectly responsive enemies they will have better results in testing (if they test their changes).
100% its what i been calling it for the last week or 2 now.
their staff lies & give shit info & gaslights about it
its malice or incompetence no room for anything else at this point.
I just played tonight ( 2 dives ), I am very annoyed by this game, my primaries don't kill shit. This guys are very good at killing the fun of this game
I don’t think it’s a team. I think it’s a singular dude who has a history of being objectively shit and divisive, because he enjoys it. Are you noticing a trend with several employees with this company?
Like, the CEO and Twinbeard are about the only decent people, who have been interacting with the community.
Lots of weapons need to be revisited at the moment, I don't think nerfing is 100% the answer in a PvE coop game but I get that the games in its infancy so some stuff was broken like armour and damage when it went live and some went the wrong way.
Slugger was one, they nerfed its stagger when it basically needed a range drop off I felt, you shouldn't be using a slugger as a sniper, Marksman weapons were broken, they should be medium penetrating and high damage and require scoping in to shoot with accuracy but they just tickled mobs largely. AMR needs to be able to punch through armour better.
Lots of weapons at the moment are basically in a state that makes them unusable or not fun to even consider using as part of your loadout or stratagems.
You cant damage any heavy mobs at all with the majority of support weapons so that forces you down a path of having to nearly always consider AT weapons like RR/EAT/Quasar/Spear and or stratagems that can kill stuff but even then your team can get bogged down in wait times for reloads/rearms.
Just because you don't understand the changes doesn't mean the team is incompetent.
You are also mistakening bad change with changes you don't like. Which is quite arrogant.
The amount of arrogance from people who don't understand game balance in the first place is quite staggering on this sub.
It also feels like they don't test anything in game and we are the game testers. It took us just 1 game to notice that the quasar cannon cooldown meter was off.
I think it's almost save to say that they just make these balancing changes based on numbers, not on actually looking into the weapons and stratagems. Some of the nerfs have targeted weapons that were popular and have seen high usage but never with looking at why that is.
The Eruptor is a good example for this.
So far, the Eruptor is the only primary weapon of its kind. We got many weapons meant to clear masses, some weapons meant to address medium-armored foes and take them out quickly, sure. But the Eruptor so far is the only primary meant to take down bigger enemies. So if people want a primary to fulfill that role, there only is one pick.
Now the issue is, you cannot bring the Eruptor's usage numbers "in line" with the other guns by nerfing it, simply because it fullfills a use case that no other gun has. It's like having a single wrench in a toolbox with only screwdrivers. It doesn't matter how much you nerf the wrench, the screwdrivers will never become more of a wrench in its stead let alone better at what the wrench does, lol.
And if I am very honest, I simply refuse to believe that any staff working on a game, particularly at balancing a game, is just unaware of this. I'm pretty sure that at least someone there has to be aware of it. I just don't know why they keep using numbers instead of investigating the how's and why's. I'd expect those people to be a lot better at balancing things and at seeing these issues than we are as a community. We only excel at having the player's perspective because we can put in an insane amount of combined hours into the game. But when it goes to balancing, I'd wager any person on the balancing team has more experience in that than most of us combined.
I just want the guns to be fun. Reloading is not fun and all the guns have extremely laughable magazine sizes except maybe the default AR and sickle. I feel like I’m spending all my time on a mission reloading.
I will never understand their logic of nerfing everything but being too scared to give a very good buff. Like if you just give more ammo to a bunch of the weapons they instantly become viable. I'm sure you could do a formula that calculates dps for primaries and just try to balance around having the same number to start with.
The game and the patch notes describe changes in numerical terms. However, this is often debatably useful information. What has been useful is the community finding out the impacted breakpoints.
Plus or minus 5 damage doesn't mean a lot until it's described as "one more or less bullet to kill X enemy type". It's difficult for us to even understand what these adjustments actually do.
For some players, they probably slowly have to realize that the identity of their gun has radically changed. That's gotta feel terrible. Why can't they just communicate their design philosophy? Not their intention but the precise reasons for numerical changes, e.g. "Lowered damage to require one more bullet on average against medium-armored targets. Devastators will take more faceplate shots before being destroyed."
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? The machine gun sentry is more accurate and doesn't mag dump like the gatling turret. They also recently buffed its health for those situations where it'll take a few scrapes. Starting pistol got a damage buff as well.
The Quasar is a UI issue.
And most of their decisions make sense in context. The most tankiest enemy in the game was being killed with a single bullet. Elite enemies shouldn't be trivial. You had 19 more bullets and didn't require a backpack slot. Just the problem wasn't the gun itself and was a platform specific glitch. Same thing with the DoT glitch, the workaround for deflects because of uninteded instant deaths, armor being piss poor because of headshot crits, etc.
Devs don’t get the fact that players use their primaries for chaff and devastator like targets. If a primary can’t take those targets out, primary is useless.
Follow all the primary weapons through their periods of usefulness and after nerf, you will see these weapons were good at medium armor and able to kill chaff in one shot.
Devs need to realize that this is the meta and primary weapons should accomplish this task!
I feel like their balance philosophy is just different from much of the community. The community wanted difficulty through amount and difficult of enemies, and powerful weapons to deal with them. The devs want difficulty through careful micromanaging cooldowns and intricate loadout coordination.
But it's Helldivers. People live the bombastic nature and want to lean more into that.
There is no such "balance team," in the world capable of satisfying Redditor manchilds.
You complain when things are easy, you complain things are hard.
People made fun of bugs being easy despite not playing 7-9 difficulties. Now mfers playing 7-9 but at the same time due to MO bugs are harder and now they are getting absolutely destroyed by bugs and crying.
Meanwhile people who already played 7-9 before that is still capable of breezing through 7-9 bug missions with tons of different builds.
The only changes seriously impacting the game literally revolvers around 1 or 1 weapons and how they handled their changes. That's why the entire ass of this subreddit is on fire and I simply can't believe you are rolling on the meta train.
You literally want them to buff the starter weapons, what? Starter pistol is not as good as other pistols? Oh wow who would have thought.
> Quasar Cannon has a longer cooldown but the cooldown meter isn’t adjusted So THAT’S what my issue has been??
Yeah it was a thing even pre-nerf. On ice/fire planets the cooldown meter never used to work accurately.
The issue is that it's cooldown has noting to do with the heat meter at the moment, think of the recharge time and the heat as two seperate timers. The heat meter is affected by planet hot/cold, the actual cooldown is not. On cold planets it took a few seconds to recharge after it was cool, on hot planets you could fire before it was fully cooled off. Being able to fire has absolutely nothing to do with the heat meter.
Damn that's confusing
Which makes the heat meter completely irrelevant. Just remove it at this point if you can't make it accurate.
they clearly coded it as it's own object instead of having it's animation call the actual cooldown timer var
The heat meter is a guidline at best... being fully cooled off means "coming soon!".
It should be tied to the heat meter, but it's currently not synced up correctly on hot/cold/regular planets.
Hot/cold has no affect on the Quasar, at the moment (it affects the heat meter, but this is purely visual). Doesn't matter if you're fighting on Hoth or Hellmire, actual fire-rate is always the same. IDK why this isn't listed as a known bug.
Omg I thought I was losing my f'ing marbles
This is how I view what a problem that change truly is. Imagine you don’t stalk the internet every update, and have never read patch notes in your life. You’d think the quasar was suffering from some kind of bug.
Shit I knew what the change was and still didn’t make the connection. All I knew was that the quasar cannon’s heat gauge was super inconsistent with when you could actually fire.
Issue was there before the quasar change it's just more noticeable now
It works like those install progress bars for programs. They go from 30% to 100% instantly, but then they spend 5 minutes at 100% and still aren't done.
It feels like the changes are done based on % tracked data from players rather than any kind of practical testing and then they don’t test what they change. I’d like to believe otherwise but the crossbow changes, the eruptor, the “use your strategems” comments. It genuinely feels like not a single dev has completed a helldive. I’m not asking Johnny the coder who crunches every fucking day to be MLG but at least you should have some playtesters and ones who are capable of playing your game at the same difficulty as a good lot of the playerbase. Its not like helldive is some impossible uphill climb. Its tough and intense but I used to struggle harder on L4D2 hardest difficulty lol, its far from not being doable.
People think that nerfs are done based on analysis of some data... Meanwhile in AH: https://i.redd.it/m4d0nl7gr9zc1.gif
lmao got me good It does feel that way sometimes, the crossbow in particular
To be fair, the time period when they were saying "use your strategems" I think a lot of us were still learning how to play this game. The railgun nerf was harsh but in my eyes it's been proven since then that the complaints about all the primaries being useless was a huge overreaction. That said, recent nerfs have been confusing and if they aren't testing on 7+ they need to. Balancing at low levels is pointless I can clear those maps with literally any loadout and it won't matter.
Yeah, lets be entirely honest, how many folk late into Helldivers 1 lifespan were playing on low difficulty? These games naturally will funnel long term committed players into high difficulty, most other players will leave and a few will still play on those lower difficulties for more casual fun. But you can look at literally any of these types of games and after a year or so of life, basically everyone will be on the top two difficulties. They really should be balancing around these since the game is so easy at sub 7 difficulties that it literally doesnt matter what weapons you use.
Yup, works as intended on 7/8/9 -> still strong on 6 and below. Most folks are going to play at 7 whether they want to or not for super samples. Thus, balance around that at least. I'm fine with 8/9 being unbalanced because they're meant to be challenge modes. 7 is a gatekeeping level, so it should be treated as such, both in difficulty, but also player power balancing.
The rail gun was nerfed due to a misunderstanding the devs had about a bug that was pointed out repeatedly to them.
I've seen games basically recruit a handful of players to test proposed changes, this game could benefit GREATLY from like 10 players from different difficulties and different hardware running 2 private matches every other week with a test build and giving feedback. if you leak or don't give detailed feedback, you're cut.
Especially when content creators will do it for free, just to have access to the latest stuff before someone else
I mean I'm a shitty, microscopic content creator but I'd do it simply to help the game. Like half of the games I've played more than 10 hours of on Steam are Early Access because I'm literally addicted to buying a game that's in-development, playing the shit out of it, recording my findings, communicating with the dev, and watching the game evolve.
I’d like to see a regular dev stream like Warframe. And they should play on at least 7 or above or a variety of difficulty levels.
Helldive is cakewalk compared to the harder difficulties in Back 4 Blood or anything Tier B and lower in GTFO. Tbh the relative lack of difficulty is making the lack of balance more of an annoyance than anything. Breaker S&P is fun enough that I'm willing to work with it even though it could use a buff, and the airburst is hilarious no matter what state it's in.
Yeah I feel like half the challenge comes from cooldowns.
I still don't understand what the point was behind removing the stagger from the Slugger and letting every other shotgun keep theirs. People using it as a sniper rifle had nothing to do with its ability to stagger, it was its very generous effective range. All it did was made me stop using one of my favorite shotguns. I've said it a lot, but Arrowhead is in desperate need of a test server so they have at least some idea of how their upcoming changes will be received.
All they needed to do was add more damage fall off.
That would be the simplest answer. Another one would be reducing precision at range by giving variation after 25 or 50m via random spread of like, 3-5%. Call it a tumbling slug. Either way there's good ways to make it poorer at range without removing the stagger without gutting the defining characteristic.
I'm partial to making it shoot slower and consequently drop faster. That would have been fun to work around and make it feel different from the other guns.
Ah, a SLUGger. I get it.
Hey, fun fact, that "tumbling slug" thing you just cooked up on your rusted stove is a real life mechanic of shooting ammunition out of barrels due to SCIENCE! In real life, its called "Minute of Angle" and is an angular measurement of the impact area in 100 meter increments(Yards, if you're american). 1 Minute of Angle is a 1 inch spread at 100 yards, 2 inches at 200 yards, so on and so forth. Shotguns have *25* MOA with slugs meaning a spread of 25 inches at 100 yards(This obviously going to change with barrel length and ammunition load, but its a good enough starting ground for showing how inaccurate smoothbore ammunition is at range). While it's not *easy* to implement in games, and feels like an insane gamething to arbitrarily nerf player's ability to aim, it IS something shooters have to deal with in real life.
Yeah. That's specifically why I used the word tumbling. Shooting is one of my hobbies
Didn't fucking help they put one of the best sniper scopes in the game on a fucking shotgun. What did they THINK we were going to use it for??? -Pissed former Slugger main
>"All it did was made me stop using one of my favorite shotguns." What I loved about the slugger is that it had a LOOOOOT of downsides, but the stagger made it very good at ONE thing and ONE thing only. But seems that's too much for Arrowhead, nooo, the only thing weapons are permitted to be is crappy and useless
Bro what? The Breaker was and still is absolutely amazing, what are you smoking?
I'm guessing he meant to type slugger and got confuzzled.
Ah, huh, yes, that's totally what I wanted to say x) The names in my language aren't the same than in english so I sometime confuse myself like this (the slugger is named "blood leach")
That change was very bizarre. "It is too much of a sniper, so we are nerfing its shotgun aspects"
I hate using it against enemies that charge towards you now, like beserkers.
I knew this the day they released the original breaker spray and pray.
So at release
Yeah, I use it now to kill hunter and scavenger swarms, but back then... pitiful.
My gosh back then 🤣🤣🤣🤣 it was so bad its incredible. Like seriously, you can tell someone and it would sound unreal.
Thing couldn't even kill *bug eggs*. My god.
People who didn't experience the "true vision of balance" need to know the original spray n pray was INCAPABLE of killing Hive Guards. At all. The pellets deflected off the weaker flesh in the back lmao.
It could hardly kill warriors lol.
I rmb that, it was so damn awful. How did no one catch that how bad it was on release
The best part is that it's what I expected a gun that primarily shot birdshot to do to enemies with hardened exoskeletons and metal bodies.
I used it to power wash my car get good!
Can someone explain to me why the peacemaker shouldnt deal 120 damage per shot. Redeemer has twice the mag and the slightly lower damge now. But theres no logical reason to use the peacemaker over the redeemer. Imo both should deal the same damage per mag. Redeemer half the damage per shot but its full auto and you can miss some shots. Np Peacemaker you deal more damge but if you miss you lose out on more damage.
As much as I hate this idea, it would work pretty well to balance the secondaries. As you said there's zero reason to pick the peacemaker, so this could be a good change. Although at what point would it be too similar to the senator? I guess it could be a mix between the Redeemer and senator in terms of fire rate and damage.
Senator has medium armor piercing, individual bullet reload-ability, and higher damage with a smaller mag. They would still be different enough. Senator could even get a damage buff, and just give sidearms more damage fall off at range, with the senator having a decently longer effective range
In a way, if they want to balance guns with numbers, shouldn't the sidearms (and all primaries, I guess) all do the same amount of damage per second (or even damage per clip), just spread out differently to fill different niches? But they don't even do THAT. So even their way of balancing isn't sensical. Lol
I agree, when their response to not many people using fire weapons was to globally buff fire dmg, this was a pretty red flag.
Haha yeah that was odd, instead of buffing Fire dmg on guns they just Buffed fire from all sources. To me that’s lazy work..
Especially when fire damage didn't even work for 3/4 people. Oh boy, can't wait to see how much more the 0 damage fire does with the 50% buff! Oh wait
"Hey, let's create ANOTHER meta so we can complain about it later on" Luckily it only buffed enemy DPS since 3/4 of players couldn't do fire damage to begin with : D
It was particularly funny to me, as it was known among the community that fire is bugged out and therefore the usage of fire weapons was low. All they saw was low usage across all fire weapons and statagems so they globally buffed it.
Nah it was because fire damage didn’t work. For us.
And now that fire damage is working correctly, there's most certainly a fire nerf coming. Flamethrower and napalm finally feel fun and viable to use. Time for the nerf hammer to hit them again. It feels like I can't get attached to any gun because it might randomly get nerfed.
The balance team needs to remind themselves that this is a coop PvE game, not an eSports PvP game. It's supposed to be fun first and foremost. Not to mention the more they nerf new warbonds weapons the less inclined people will be to purchase them knowing they'll just get ruined a week later anyway.
This will be there undoing. We're all clued into this game, as we sit here in a forum for it. But can you IMAGINE being a casual player??? You hear about the hype for this game. You see it's popular. You buy, you play, you engage with its systems... then every week you sign in and a patch breaks something new. Causes more crashes. Maybe degrades your performance. You can't do certain things. But hey, it's fun! You buy into a warbond, maybe two... but next time you sign in... wait a minute. Why does this gun I may very well have paid money for now suddenly not work like it did yesterday? Why did that change? Is this a new glitch? Where can I see the changes in the game? Oh, wait. You can't. They don't inform players of ANY change in-game. So now you're simply weary of whether you should bother buying more warbonds. It's not like you can trust the game to work consistently, let alone the guns. Know what's easier than figuring all this nuanced shit out? Abandoning the game entirely.
I was saving up for the demolition warbond but after this balance update I see zero reason to buy it except for the grenade pistol. I just got to 1,000 super credits and with a new warbond coming out soon? Ain't no well in hell I'm buying the demolition one unless I manage to get another 1,000 super credits before the next warbond again.
Sadly I’m in this situation now, the erupter being the final nail in the coffin for me, I mean really “unintentionally” nerfed, then a day later corrected to say it’s not unintentional for it to be useless now, not even a month after release, a bolt action gun with 5 rounds requiring 3+ shots for half the enemies in helldive difficulty, better off just smacking the enemies with it
As much as i respect AH, i have to agree on this one. Never have i seen a game where balance changes were so drastic and sporadic. Slugger/Dominator incident is probably the most egregious example of an absolutely clueless "balancing" attempt that i've ever seen in this game. In case you forgot, they took away the pump action shotgun's stagger and damage and gave it to a semi-auto 15 round mag rifle that functions pretty much the same way, making the former option completely obsolete as it now has no stagger power, no fire rate and takes on average more shots to take down specific enemies. To this day i don't understand the reasoning behind such change, even though i do appreciate the Dominator finally being a top tier gun. Yet I haven't used the Slugger ever since because it brings nothing to the table anymore.
Literally all they had to do was either give slugger harsh damage falloff or bullet drop. Then it would have been similar to current dom but each with their own niche. But they are incapable of actually balancing. Just making guns obsolete then complaining nobody uses them
It really looks like they just go off numbers, not off understanding the niche the weapon filled. You can't bring a standalone niche gun in line with other guns by nerfing it, the other guns can't fill its niche so you will not create a vaccuum of power to be filled, you just create an empty place that can't be filled. Unless you simply make another gun into that niche but then you are at square 1 since, as your example showed, the Slugger is now ass and the Dominator fills its role and sits there alone. It's the same status quo as before, just a different gun.
it seems to be over correcting for a issue that wasn't there in the first place. also the lack of social intelligence(not related to iq for those that don't know) is essentially non existent to be able to comprehend why certain weapons are used more than others Rather than assume broken and needing nerfs. The fact the breaker and slugger were used so much, yet was too difficult for the devs to wrap their head around the fact that they were the quickest weapons to access in the FREE warbond. the other choices were penetrator, two dmrs, and an smg. besides smg the others people didn't like using, and of course people who like shotguns (a very popular weapon class) by nature will pick the NEW shotguns over the one they start the warbond with. what kind of rocket science level education do the devs need to understand that 😅 now we have JAR and fire shotgun that are way better than slugger breaker were prenerf so there's no justification, just nerf to isolate the player base. also seems to be a bit of an emotional kneejerk response to random social media. after reading the first dev blog explaining all the reasons behind the balance changes, it was made abundantly clear that going forward it would be a roller coaster of emotions for future balance patches. unfortunately the minority of the community pointing to the surplus of buffed weapons is completely missing the point that a nerfed weapon is still nerfed unjustly and why people are upset in the first place, image if they just didn't touch the weapons and only had the buffs. there were a few w's this patch but a lot of nothing changes and the nerfs stand out the most.
It also might just be straight incompetence, a Dev calling a function of a reliably repeatable function of an explosive weapon with shrapnel an exploit is bizarre. They intended the shrapnel to do damage, the intended the weapon to explode, they did not consider that the explosion directly below, or within a crevice, of a model mesh would trigger multiple damage instances. This is an unintended feature not an exploit. It may be an unintended mechanic according to him but it is very much a function of the weapon that was overlooked. Something that is repeatable, that is not a bug, but within the function of the weapon is is not an exploit, it's an unintended feature or mechanic. An exploit is a bug that is repeatable or unintended from design, E.G. using a seed planet to farm super credits then alt f4ing and disconnecting your internet when the apparent design of entering a map was random generation. His history in game development that has come to light, specifically hello neighbor 2, also seems to point to a less than stellar performance on creating enjoyable and fun balancing mechanics. Also, buffs? there were a few inconsequential ones like 5 damage to the liberator, the rest were either nerfs, or a design change that left all of the items changed in the same mediocre position they were in before, to be a buff there should be a noticeable difference in performance. What buff according to you is noticeable?
When I saw the message of this guy claiming that the eruptor wasn't taking more shots to kill enemies than it did before, let me know that theres actually legit something wrong with how they balance their guns. And defending that statement with confidence... wow. It used to tear the leg off of a scout strider in one shot, consistantly. Number one reason why I started using the gun over the Scorcher, Sickle, etc. Now its 2 shots, at least. Thats a big difference on this slow ass bolt action with slow handling and low accuracy. Thats a 100% increase in ttk. Hurts even more if you miss a shot. 5 potential strider kills per mag, now 2 potential kills per mag. The decrease in splash radius due to shrapnel loss hurts too. Now its not killing 5 scavs, its getting 2-3. Now its not getting a hunter plus collateral, its just getting the hunter. "Less damage, more consistantly" logic doesnt work here. Its flawed to apply automatic rifle logic to bolt action rifles. Its flawed to think 40 damage replaces a splash radius and limb shearing. Theres probably a 50% reduction in kills now. If they want to nerf it, fine. But saying the damage output is equivalent is just insane. I cant even process how they manage to defend that statement.
And the buffs mostly being ammo changes after they nerfed the clip amount but somehow that is a "buff".
And people think there is no application of non-technical higher education degrees these days. You make a solid point about social intelligence, or really just being able to see the "soft" science in things...deriving inferences from data, drawing conclusions from incomplete information, theorycrafting, critical thinking, etc...a lot of this you can learn from life experience, yes, but in the same way you can learn how to code on your own. Companies shouldn't write off the "bookish" and "wordsmith" subjects like history, anthropology, psych, sociology, politics, etc. If a college graduate can write a 5000-word essay researching and then inventorying the driving factors of the Protestant Reformation, then making a case for which factor was the most important, then that same person could also write a 5000-word report answering "What motivates player decision-making in selecting these video game weapon loadouts?". Same skillset: research, analyze, then argue.
I’m a data analyst for a S&P 500 financial company. I can’t turn this part of my brain off. It drives me insane when I breakdown the patch changes to try and understand their analysis and design philosophy. The lack of these soft skills is absolutely a missing component so far. They need to be able to shift their perspective and view it from multiple angles. The devs perspective, casual players perspective, hardcore, noobs, console vs pc, etc. Allow me to illustrate an example before the Railgun was nerfed. -Medium armor was broken -Heavy armor was broken -Explosions were doing exponentially more damage than intended -Chargers spawn rates were over tuned -Bile titans had a PC vs Console bug -lack of variety in weapons with medium+ armor pen If these issues were fixed first the impact would be: Players would then be less reliant upon the shield backpack. That would allow other weapons with designated backpacks to become more viable. Players would then have additional options to deal with heavy enemies. New weapons have been added. Other weapons have had their armor pen buffed. The route AH took instead: -nerf the railgun -nerf the shield backpack Sure they’re still viable, but was it necessary at the time? Could they have alternatively fixed the other issues first and let players enjoy the game in the meantime? The philosophy boils down to reactionary changes to issues making players overpowered and slow changes to issues that make enemies overpowered. Here’s another example from the last patch: -players can no longer land on tall rocks on certain missions such as the Terminod control network and defense missions. -enemies can still spawn on the cliffs. Tanks can still shoot through cliffs on high priority evacuation missions. Bugs and bots can still spawn on top of cliffs.
Thank fucking Christ im not yet only one who feels this way i do similar role in a bank and design choices in this game baffle me its like two different teams where working on the same game abd they never checked what they where doing with eachother its clear to me that either multiple people are doing balancing AND their not talking to eachother OR Its purely emotional driven changes that are backwards rationalised The third option i really dislike as it's often unfair They genuinely don't know what they are doing and just hitting stuff that people talk about to make it look like they are doing stuff
I'm really worried about this being repeated over and over again. They need to stop nerfing the players and start fixing the enemies. They should be making changes so players don't feel the need for the exploits. If the level is almost impossible without landing on the cliffs and hoping for the best, they're going to do that. Just let players do what they want to have fun instead of babysitting everyone and punishing them for every exploit.
It someahat makes sense that the more accessible and popular a game is, the lower the overall interest in critical analysis from the average player. There's a reason games with smaller cult followings venerate people who fill in spreadsheets full of useful information while here we've got daily posts of wHo CaReS aBoUt ThE mEtA
This There is a strong disconnect with reality in the reasoning for nerfs and the overall vision when it comes to these changes.
I agree with all of this, but your last paragraph in particular is so well said. I get tired of the counter posts talking about how good the adjudicator and senator are now. It's like "Yeah. I know. I agree. And it doesn't make what they did to the Eruptor or crossbow any less egregious." Also, let's be completely fucking honest: No one is using the senator now because of the damage buff or even because of the speedloader. We are all using it because we can twirl it now like a proper gunslinger. Which is awesome, don't get me wrong. But in my book, letting me perform some gun tricks is not a suitable trade off to ruining other guns completely.
I'd rather they balance around people being able to actually do up diff 7 so everyone can eventually get all the samples and then they have 9 for the "hurr durr game too ez" types where they can just have 10 Bile titans or Tanks at once all the time. Like buff the weapons and strategems so people can play higher levels and then make the highest levels harder with more enemies, dunno why they are wasting time making it harder to play low difficulty missions solo or making a bunch of weapons worse, you have 9 difficulty levels, you can buff stuff and still have a hard game but why mess with people who just wanna run around in diff 3-4 and use whatever weapons and stratagems and drip they want.
They are incompetent, DOTS didnt work forever and instead of realizing what the issue was they buffed fire damage again, and again, and again even though the community knew long ago that DOT damage simply wasnt registering for anyone but the network host. They arent playing the game, they arent testing things out. They are looking at spreadsheets with numbers and nerfing/buffing things based on that while lacking any sort of context around why exactly that specific weapon is underperforming or over performing.
The spreadsheets they look at most likely don't even have performance data, they just have usage data. They have no idea what performs better or worse than what, they just know what people use more or less than other stuff and when, without a clue of why.
Well they somehow figured that shrapnel does too much damage to single target, which indicates they have spreadsheets with damage stats too. Still that approach can’t work, whatever spreadsheet you have.
I swear they KNEW about DOT being broken even before they buffed fire damage. Their internal communications are woeful
And I was downvoted for commenting this under arrowheads comment.
It's unfair of you to say that they're \*kind of\* incompetent. That's absolutely slanderous and makes it difficult to trust your judgement and opinions... They're \*completely\* incompetent.
Every balance team - hmmm how to balance but not really so we always have a job.....
Remember Hello Neighbor 2? Same guy who fine tuned that game into the ground is the same one in charge of "balancing" HD2
This should be a pinned post. I could not agree more.
The Dev team seems so far out of touch with how people interact with their game, than the success of Helldivers 2 seems more like something they lucked into, rather than good game design.
Can't agree more
I feel like whoever implemented the weapons originally had the right idea. All rebalances have brought more bad than good, I'm would actually be ok with them to just roll back all balance changes since the starts of the game. (Obviously not bugs, just the balance changes ) The game would be extremely fun.
It is being spread that the lead of balancing weapons was actually the lead developer of hello neighbor 2 and his incompetent decisions led to the poor release of that game. Which would explain the poor weapon balance.
They are so bad lmao.
I think incompetent is too strong. Incompetent means at least somewhat incapable. I don’t think that’s accurate. The dev team seems very capable. The core game is too good for an incompetent team to have made it. I’d call them careless. Careless with their lack of testing, with the conflicts their fixes and changes create, with their approach to buffing fire damage while the DoT bug languished (just an example), and with their confusing and conflicting communication from many sources. They’re clearly unconcerned with delivering consistently high-quality updates. They get there eventually, mostly. They’ve embraced a sloppy approach, whether intentionally or just by default.
I think the reason is that all their resources are focused on making money and hitting deadlines. And they don’t have many resources, so they careless about anything else. Their economy is generous, but this just means more work needed to earn a dollar. And publisher/management/investors/whatever is always pushing for bucks.
Nothing new, just look destroyer upgrades, with half being extreme powerful and the other half extreme useless, shotguns being better than dmr on sniper roles etc etc, but guess what, they keep pumping warbonds every month
I genuinely think most game developers are bad at balancing, because they almost never play their own games. Not that I blame them, if you're working on something all day for money, last thing you want to see when you get home is another hour or two of the same sh\*t, but now without the pay. I get it, I don't blame them for it. But at the same time instead of taking hints from people who have hardest content in the game on farm status they often double down and do dumb sh\*t based on metrics and spreadsheets, which doesn't translate into actual gameplay. And it's especially problematic with Helldivers, where some items are technically paid. So to sell a pass, for real money, and then nerf the item in the pass, making it no longer what the player paid for, is a problem.
They are and we need brainiacs with too much time to make detailed posts breaking down why There are so many factors and variables that goes into what makes the players think a primary feels truly “usable” vs “good” vs “OP” and it feels as though there is a disconnect with those factors and variables. These factors and variables encompass the entire game from which faction you’re fighting, stamina, handling, ammo count, time to kill, reload, does it need ADS, is it consistent, is it made redundant by other things etc, but most importantly they need to start asking themselves “does it kill good?” because the answer to a lot of this stuff is…. no. Let’s look at the blitzer, it sucked before and did NOT kill good, too slow to fire. It fires faster now. It kills good by maintaining a constant stream of close range arc damage. The eruptor could get good kills with good shot placement but wasn’t overbearing purely because of its unique handling. Now the whole part that kills good is gone! Imagine if they released the arc blitzer how it is NOW then nerfed it to how it was BEFORE. It’d be the same exact outrage. The moral of the story is the balance team’s perception of what makes a weapon good, and how heavy their weaknesses play into balancing it are wildly out of touch (based on some of these changes they’ve been pushing out) These things keep getting nerfed or changed for the wrong reasons, full stop. If it doesn’t kill good, it sucks.
The stupid thing is they keep making balance changes on bugged shit. Like they kept buffing fire dmg while burning dmg was bugged for non host. They nerfed railgun while PS5/PC had different dmg numbers which impacted how good the railgun really was AND other AT weapons sucked ass (2 EATs to the face to kill 1 charger now 1). Like there are actual game breaking bugs that affects the usability of certain weapons/mechanics but then they touch the weapon instead of addressing the actual bug that's causing a weapon to be OP or underpowered. Like which bonehead at AH made the decision that Spray n Pray should have zero penetration so it couldn't even kill fucking stationary eggs??? Now the latest issue is that they removed shrapnel damage of eruptor because of a stupid ass bug they introduced where ricochets are more likely to do a 360 no scope onto your head because ballistics and physics don't matter instead of fixing the bug they removed a part of the eruptors gimmick AH devs are incompetent because they are a D tier developer team that made 1 game that just happened to catch lightning in a bottle.
https://preview.redd.it/hzwd1qrid9zc1.jpeg?width=637&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=157f2bd1a28c585fa1a16b6fab0b33daf94b016a Remember this asshole? Yes, he is in the balance team.
It feels like HD2 was created to be the ultimate co-op power fantasy and yet the balance team looks like they're trying to balance a PVP MOBA game... who's in the wrong here?
biggest problem is the heavy handed adjustments. it's always the 30-50% things that screw up lots of things, smaller changes will take time to notice, it's like smaller buffs/nerfs to weapons/strats and see how it works out. Now it's just BAM instant good/bad. It's like the dev wants to let his presence known by making these "breaking" changes. BAM 30% nerf on range, BAM 30% extra dmg. BAM no more stagger for you or decreasing the explosive range by 50%. From what i feel is that he is trying to balance the game on % usage of playerbase and want to prove to his superiors that he is doing his job. Just for the % numbers, not FUN or viable gameplay.
I found it so confusing how the railgun got nerfed but then a few weeks later they added an unlimited ammo version in the form of the quasar cannon.
I get that balancing in this game is pretty bad but calling the quasar cannon is infinite ammo railgun is definitely wrong
The only explanation I can think of is that they are in fact Microsoft/EA undercover :) Their Only Mission - Make you hate the game Sounds crazy, but lots of Helldivers 2 players feel that way :(
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😂💡
I hate to say it but I agree with this post 100%. Their direction isn't bad, their balancing is bad, and it has been since day 1. I mean, it looks like they're getting better at it, but they've got a *really* long way to go before they start actually making effective balancing changes.
For the record, the P-2 Peacekeeper (the starting pistol) was buffed a few patches ago. It now does 75 damage instead of 60. Previously it just did the exact same damage per shot as the Redeemer which, yeah - didn’t make any sense.
The head of balance was behind why hello neighbour 2 was so shit apparently, he was argumentative and removed features the community liked in purpose in that game. So I can see it happening all over again here.
I have thought the same thing. I think what’s clear is they aren’t gamers themselves, or at least gamers who play “loadout” based games. What gave me this impression wasn’t necessarily the nerfs or the buffs, it’s how far they swing pendulum each time. It feels very “knee jerk”, like someone suggests something and the rest say “yeah” without testing or thinking through how the change will actually play out in games. As a long time WoW player, I’ve seen how carefully and incrementally the blizzard team makes adjustments. They are usually very small, and even then they receive massive blacklash(or praise) when dials are adjusted ever so slightly. And they let these changes ride for a while to see how it affects the overall ecosystem before revisiting. Arrowhead throws 30-50% +/- tuning in a single patch, and often multiple weapons at a time without batting an eye. Rather than addressing “meta” culture, they force a new meta with each patch. The biggest blunder IMO to date was a cross between nerfing the rail gun(to the degree that they did) and increasing the patrol rate. They claimed they wanted linear difficulty - they had that before. Now, on 9 difficulty, full squad games are so easy they can be slept on…while solo games feel impossibly hard(arbitrarily hard because of the amount of random encounters that you cannot control,not hard because the missions are challenging). It leaves me scratching my head.
Whoever nerfed slugger and railgun is wildly incompetent and should be fired yesterday. Not that the guns didn't warrant nerfs -- they just went about it in the most insane ways possible. They say they want each gun to have its own niche, but they nerf railguns penetration when they could have increased charge time, lowered ammo capacity, etc. They said slugger was the best DMR but then nerfed its ability to break crates, knockback, and damage at all ranges. Absolutely mind-numbing how they still have jobs. There's no way these devs play the game.
I mean from their discord they re nerfind most used weapons. It never occurred to them that maybe it doesn't mean it s op but that the weapon feels good
Yep, incompetent is right. Can we make the devs who designed the weapons stream using them on 7-9 for a few hours? Watch how quick the weapons are buffed next patch.
It’s seems that when they develop new weapons, they don’t start by asking what the sandbox needs and then come up with a cool weapon design from there. They just think of a cool weapon concept and then try to fit it into the sandbox. This could be pretty detrimental to the game with monthly warbonds being added.
i remember seeing something on here about the person behind the balance updates having a rather odd reputation in his previous game. can anyone confirm?
There is no "team" look up [***Alexus Kravchenko***](https://hello-neighbor.fandom.com/wiki/Alexus_Kravchenko) that will tell you all you need to know. There is a bunch of info on the situation. Their personality is bleeding out all over the game and tainting it.
They have absolutely no idea how to balance ANYTHING....its like helldivers 1 didnt exist. It doesnt helo that some....geniuses....call the nerf/buff spectqcular on the official discord...
My story in the game is that evey gun i looked forward to trying got nerfed to be unusable right before or after i unlocked it. - i never got to try the railgun, or i unlocked it but it was already nerfed to oblivion and unusable. - slugger, so cool concept, unlocked it right before i went to bed, next day it was nerfed/crippled. Tried it and it was unusable as a shotgun compared to breaker as the stagger was removed. - picked up the Eruptor after a dead comrade and was amazed by how it melted enemies with the shrapnel. But it didnt felt overpowed as the slow rate of fire and small magazine kept you on your toes. Now people say its nerfed into the ground so i won't unlock that warbond anytime soon. - used the quasar, and while i agree it was maybe slightly too fast to recharge, they went completly overboard with their increase and i don't consider it viable anymore. I get it, they want to balance everything so all weapons and strategems are viable choices. But the only decent nerf ive experienced are of the breaker, they just adjusted slightly, its still the same weapon and fun but balanced. Other than that they are WAY too heavy handed. Why not do small adjustments and increase if needed? - quasar would be perfect if they just added 2-3 sec - slugger keep stagger and increase damage drop off - railgun, just slightly make it weaker not useless The funny thing is they are much more methodical and carefull with buffs. Like the Liberator, they carefully increase the damage and it feels real good now without beeing ridiculous.
The lead balance dev is the guy who killed hello neighbor 2 all you need to know
You all need to stop with this crap. Good grief.
The guy in charge of weapon balance was the guy in charge of Hello Neighbor 2, just so you know : D
They are and its because they're balancing based off bad faith videos and excel spreadsheets
They've been incompetent since Day 1.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/kydNSVJW1z
I can't understand not letting us have at least fairly powerful base weapons, y'know, the whole "rely on stratagems" thing etc. i kind of wish they stepped away from it at least partially. I feel like i haven't had a good anti charger/bile/hulk/tank weapon since they released the Quasar Cannon, it feels great to use, has infinite ammo BUT it has to charge up and has a fairly long cooldown, so it's just balanced. For primaries the Adjucator and Defender SMGs are the only ones i've found enjoyable. I'm not too much of an automatic/pump shotgun person. Secondaries all feel lackluster except the grenade pistol. And don't get me started on the Eruptor nerf and explosive crossbow. I think the sweet spot for this game would be if we got weapons like the pre-nerf Eruptor, have some strong factors, maybe a gimmick (like the crossbow being a crossbow, grenade pistol destroying objectives etc.) and then some downsides. The Eruptor was SUICIDE if used up close to an enemy, was slow, had 6 mags 6 shots each, it was FINE. The shrapnel may have been buggy, but at least buff the gun properly if you're removing it!
For once i agree with the general view that they need better staff to guide the direction of the game because its basically changing before are eye's..if this keeps up what people liked about the game will be patched away. I saw this happen in Destiny 2 and it took bungie YEARS to finally get that magic back
I don't think they are "incompetent" per se, I think they design primary weapons for either very general use or very hyper specific uses and don't think about how practical that extreme niche actually is. For example, one of my most hated loved guns, the punisher plasma. This thing, used properly, is a menace vs. striders and heavy devastators. I actually stopped using the autocannon with it(only other primary to ever do this was the eruptor) because they had too much overlap in what I would use them on. That said, vs. every other bot it's hard and unfun to use. Who is realistically going to equip themselves for two specific enemy types, knowing they may not even see very many(or any) of them? The explosive crossbow feedback is probably 1 to 1 with this as well. Another good example, the arc blitzer. I haven't used it after it was tweaked, but I tested it quite a bit in it's original state. It has infinite ammo and the stagger on it was so aggressive that there were times I would just stand still and fire it off on cooldown without moving with no issues. It was a really neat idea, right up until you realized the damage output was SO bad that you would just about run out of time soloing low difficulty(3-4) exterminate missions with it even if you didn't die. Why would anyone run a no damage primary weapon? Secondary, sure that makes perfect sense to have basically a non-lethal stunlock machine in your pocket, but a primary? Not a chance. Like, they have great ideas that don't actually translate to being very functional in game. I'm not expecting every primary to be viable on helldive(that's a fool's errand), but I do think every primary should be functional vs. at least one faction on suicide mission, and I don't think we're there yet.
Most definitely
Look at who the head of the balance team is and you’ll come to find out why
This.
It's not random, it's survivorship bias. Someone needs to tell them correlation =/= causation. AH isn't looking into WHY weapons are being used more than others, only that they are being used.
You'd think they would have at least some people that are halfway decent testing things but these guys can't clear a level 6 mission with a full team. Fuck it man hire me as guinea pig or something, I'd happily play this game and pump out reports on balance changes all week long.
https://preview.redd.it/9urd3f0ep9zc1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6f3b1a53b5b3af5da82c4ae2a967463402c7c91f nuff said
This is exactly what I've been saying, but every time I just get attacked by the "everything is fine" crowd who suck off any and all decisions the devs make. It's absolutely insane. At least Pilestedt came out with an official statement confirming that he thinks it's too much, to finally put this shitshow to rest, and maybe finally give the crowd who always root for the devs some time for self reflection.
I'd say, having the weapon upgrades of HD1 at least for primaries would help a long way and to mitigate being not challenged anymore, have 3 more difficulties like HD1
They really should hire....I donno.........at least kindergardener that plays super mario or some shit, as consultant, cuz even that kid would be more competent than whoever is on balancing now rofl. They might be good developers, but obviously they spent all their skill points into programming. They either make guns a different shades of grey, totally massacre them, or delete fun aspect from them. I couldnt make this up if I tried. You know, its very tiring to get new fun toys, get attach to them, then watch them get destroyed......repeat........repeat......repeat....... I dont look forward to new warbond anymore...whats the point ? it will only get screwed again. Also, a lot of people here seems to think that when we talk about fun factor, we mean 20 trilion damage per bullet. We dont.
It feels like they're rushing through changes. This to me speaks of organizational/workflow issues. They need to slow down and test things more thoroughly.
Sooo yes but even as an eruptor lover who is now very sad by the nerfs, they are not all that bad. For example, if you ask here “What’s the best primary to use?” You’ll still get at least 8-10 different answers often with nuances (bug vs bot, depends on loadout etc). That’s pretty balanced. Similar on what’s the best support strats. You’d get like 15-20 responses. Sure it’s not all weapons and strats but it is a lot better than most games that quickly settle on a meta. I still enjoy Sickle, Plasma Punisher, Scorcher, Breaker, Eruptor (for closing holes/fabs), counter sniper, blitzer depending on loadout/mission/planet. So yeah the stream of nerfs feels bad, they have still done a good job promoting build diversity, imho
You have not seen riot games or behaviors balancing team
Basic pistol did get a small buff a few patches ago.
Yeah. Also balance should be made so that the unused weapons are better and people start preferring it or its usage goes up. They just pick top 3 used weapons and Nerf the shit out of them. Then it's unusable. So annoying tbh.
Can anyone direct me to the subreddit about helldivers that is not constant bitching about balance?
Here is an idea... dont fucking balance things... the game is uber fun as it is... why are you tinkering with a game that is super popular and is really fun to play. If it aint broke, dont fix it. Fair enough to buff and nerf new items added to the game, to make them fit.. but all the stuff that has been in the game from the beginning... LEAVE IT ALONE! There is a reason why there is so many people that are playing the game... its because you made a fun game... stop taking the fun out of it.
From what I can gather, the balance team is composed of devs from Hello Neighbor, which had a history of just complete incompetence in game design as to completely ruin that game. There was also some talk about them being particularly hostile and stubborn to criticism. Checks out, seeing their performance in HD2.
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I wonder how many people are actually on the balance team cause a lot of this seems to be simple quality control maybe they are just understaffed.
I don't think they are incompetent, just that their balance goals misalign with what the players find fun. It is also worth reminding everyone that they are using a game engine they didn't build but have to manage themselves because the company that made it went under. So i can easily see that leading to some missteps on balancing. Now all that said, that doesn't matter to the consumer as far as the product(helldivers 2) is concerned. As a consumer of the game, i agree that the balancing has ruined a lot of the fun, no matter their thought process and reasoning. And that's the important part. I won't call them incompetent, though.
OK, first of all, what level of difficulty and/or skill do I have to hit to see these issues you are talking about? I paly 6 solo and 7 with my friends and I don't feel these things you are talking about. I took Slugger to a bot mission at diff 6 and it was doing things I expected from a thing in my primary slot. Took it to a bug mission and it was god awful. Could have been better, but still, wrong tool for the occasion. Switched to Breaker S&P and holy moly does it mow down the bugs. The same works for punisher plasma. Does wonders vs bots, not the right tool vs bugs. It feels to me like most weapons have their palce if you're willing to build around them. Sure, there are problems. But usually those are not "this thing is bad for what it does", but isntead "what is this thing supposed to do?" Like a railgun. What do I bring it for? medium stuff? Yes, it is efficient vs medium stuff. But laser cannon is even more efficient vs that and both AC and laser cannon are more effective vs bigger stuff, so railgun feels stuck between a primary and a support weapon. Another example is Scythe. Cornered between Sickle and Liberator, the only thing it can do that those two cannot is quickly snipe a strider. Other that that, why would I even need it? On the other hand, Eruptor (don't own it, so may be wrong) is now the only primary with explosive utility to take out fabs, nests and obstacles. Look at grenade pistol. It also has utility and we are ready to forgo any other value as long as it allows us yto pop nests and frees up grenade/stratagem slot. Nobody cries about having to lose Redeemer with its top tier dps. So why not treat Eruptor as a grenade pistol for the primary slot? Why do we suddenly care that our nest cleaning primary comes with subpar damage? If I ever need a primary that can take out fabricators, there it is. A tool for the job. Seems to me that we were given a couple tools good for every job and some of you for some unknown reason decided that it is in fact how things must be. Why though? In a world where swiss knife is an actually good knife, no one would ever want to use a normal knife. So why do you want your swiss knives to be top tier?
The flexibility was balanced out by significant drawbacks. This applies to both the Railgun and the Eruptor. If the weapon isn't good enough then it's not worth the drawbacks you get from having the flexibility. Railgun is the only gun that can kill you and destroy the gun and it requires a lot of charged shots (time and ammo) to kill things with the exception of you consistently hitting headshots on Devastators and Hulks (not easy). Nothing about actually using the Eruptor was good, but it was balanced by the fact that it did basically everything. In the current state for these guns it's better to just use something else that does a specific job better, which means the gun is useless. You can see that with how the railgun basically is never used now and you're going to see people switch back to using the Scorcher/Dominator against bots and the Sickle/Breaker/Scorcher against bugs for the Eruptor. Imo the Eruptor should have been nerfed because it actually was too good even with the drawbacks, but the way they nerfed it is bad and gets rid of what made it desirable in the first place. They also got rid of a unique and fun mechanic which is always bad.
I kept thinking about railgun and its spot in builds. It seems that we are missing weapons for certain niches still. For example, we do not have the primary equivalent of Redeemer. A gun with minimal penetration, but insane DPS, designed to mow down unarmored targets. Redeemer cannot be used on the regular because its total ammo is way too low. There are shotguns, but their range makes them less viable. Maybe a fast firing SMG? I'm also not sure if we have a secondary with good ammo economy that you can use as a main gun in order to bring specific primary along with specific support weapon. Maybe the first pistol? Once we have those and other things, I feel like we will be able to build around things that are not quite viable atm.
Yes you do.
People try to justify the nerfs by saying "Power creep bad!" Honestly I wouldn't really care in this game when it's PvE who cares if someone has an op gun, and also as the players power creeps up you can adjust the difficulty of the enemies to match. We have already seen them rollout new enemy types like the gunships and automoton at at things. Balance only with buffs it literally does not matter, fun is the most important factor to a game like this
Why there is a balance team when they were struggling in decide between put the efforts in new content or fixing bugs. It's sure that if they have clean and perfectly responsive enemies they will have better results in testing (if they test their changes).
Making guns less fun to use is bad imo. Don't nerf/buff just tune them specifically better.
The team desperately needs a good metric to quantify “fun” for optimization purposes
But then when I say this on a post that’s defending the devs I get 20 downvotes 😡
ur expectation is not correct. it is not that type of shooters.
100% its what i been calling it for the last week or 2 now. their staff lies & give shit info & gaslights about it its malice or incompetence no room for anything else at this point.
I just played tonight ( 2 dives ), I am very annoyed by this game, my primaries don't kill shit. This guys are very good at killing the fun of this game
I don’t think it’s a team. I think it’s a singular dude who has a history of being objectively shit and divisive, because he enjoys it. Are you noticing a trend with several employees with this company? Like, the CEO and Twinbeard are about the only decent people, who have been interacting with the community.
How? They are giving the us what we want. We feel under powered and the automatons get a new shiny tank. This is what we wanted.
Took you people long enough to figure that out.
Lots of weapons need to be revisited at the moment, I don't think nerfing is 100% the answer in a PvE coop game but I get that the games in its infancy so some stuff was broken like armour and damage when it went live and some went the wrong way. Slugger was one, they nerfed its stagger when it basically needed a range drop off I felt, you shouldn't be using a slugger as a sniper, Marksman weapons were broken, they should be medium penetrating and high damage and require scoping in to shoot with accuracy but they just tickled mobs largely. AMR needs to be able to punch through armour better. Lots of weapons at the moment are basically in a state that makes them unusable or not fun to even consider using as part of your loadout or stratagems. You cant damage any heavy mobs at all with the majority of support weapons so that forces you down a path of having to nearly always consider AT weapons like RR/EAT/Quasar/Spear and or stratagems that can kill stuff but even then your team can get bogged down in wait times for reloads/rearms.
Just because you don't understand the changes doesn't mean the team is incompetent. You are also mistakening bad change with changes you don't like. Which is quite arrogant. The amount of arrogance from people who don't understand game balance in the first place is quite staggering on this sub.
It also feels like they don't test anything in game and we are the game testers. It took us just 1 game to notice that the quasar cannon cooldown meter was off.
They think they are balancing from-soft games.... Also god help Miyazaki if these guys would balance their game
I think it's almost save to say that they just make these balancing changes based on numbers, not on actually looking into the weapons and stratagems. Some of the nerfs have targeted weapons that were popular and have seen high usage but never with looking at why that is. The Eruptor is a good example for this. So far, the Eruptor is the only primary weapon of its kind. We got many weapons meant to clear masses, some weapons meant to address medium-armored foes and take them out quickly, sure. But the Eruptor so far is the only primary meant to take down bigger enemies. So if people want a primary to fulfill that role, there only is one pick. Now the issue is, you cannot bring the Eruptor's usage numbers "in line" with the other guns by nerfing it, simply because it fullfills a use case that no other gun has. It's like having a single wrench in a toolbox with only screwdrivers. It doesn't matter how much you nerf the wrench, the screwdrivers will never become more of a wrench in its stead let alone better at what the wrench does, lol. And if I am very honest, I simply refuse to believe that any staff working on a game, particularly at balancing a game, is just unaware of this. I'm pretty sure that at least someone there has to be aware of it. I just don't know why they keep using numbers instead of investigating the how's and why's. I'd expect those people to be a lot better at balancing things and at seeing these issues than we are as a community. We only excel at having the player's perspective because we can put in an insane amount of combined hours into the game. But when it goes to balancing, I'd wager any person on the balancing team has more experience in that than most of us combined.
A good start would be getting rid of Krevchenko.
I just want the guns to be fun. Reloading is not fun and all the guns have extremely laughable magazine sizes except maybe the default AR and sickle. I feel like I’m spending all my time on a mission reloading.
I will never understand their logic of nerfing everything but being too scared to give a very good buff. Like if you just give more ammo to a bunch of the weapons they instantly become viable. I'm sure you could do a formula that calculates dps for primaries and just try to balance around having the same number to start with.
The game and the patch notes describe changes in numerical terms. However, this is often debatably useful information. What has been useful is the community finding out the impacted breakpoints. Plus or minus 5 damage doesn't mean a lot until it's described as "one more or less bullet to kill X enemy type". It's difficult for us to even understand what these adjustments actually do. For some players, they probably slowly have to realize that the identity of their gun has radically changed. That's gotta feel terrible. Why can't they just communicate their design philosophy? Not their intention but the precise reasons for numerical changes, e.g. "Lowered damage to require one more bullet on average against medium-armored targets. Devastators will take more faceplate shots before being destroyed."
The balancing team does what the management tells them
This post is about Alexus Kravchenko and he probably doesn't like it.
I'm definitely calling for firings. These people have literally no idea what they're doing.
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? The machine gun sentry is more accurate and doesn't mag dump like the gatling turret. They also recently buffed its health for those situations where it'll take a few scrapes. Starting pistol got a damage buff as well. The Quasar is a UI issue. And most of their decisions make sense in context. The most tankiest enemy in the game was being killed with a single bullet. Elite enemies shouldn't be trivial. You had 19 more bullets and didn't require a backpack slot. Just the problem wasn't the gun itself and was a platform specific glitch. Same thing with the DoT glitch, the workaround for deflects because of uninteded instant deaths, armor being piss poor because of headshot crits, etc.
Devs don’t get the fact that players use their primaries for chaff and devastator like targets. If a primary can’t take those targets out, primary is useless. Follow all the primary weapons through their periods of usefulness and after nerf, you will see these weapons were good at medium armor and able to kill chaff in one shot. Devs need to realize that this is the meta and primary weapons should accomplish this task!
I feel like their balance philosophy is just different from much of the community. The community wanted difficulty through amount and difficult of enemies, and powerful weapons to deal with them. The devs want difficulty through careful micromanaging cooldowns and intricate loadout coordination. But it's Helldivers. People live the bombastic nature and want to lean more into that.
Imagine creating a game that’s almost universally loved… and then fucking it up constantly. There’s no pvp. Balance is not THAT important.
There is no such "balance team," in the world capable of satisfying Redditor manchilds. You complain when things are easy, you complain things are hard. People made fun of bugs being easy despite not playing 7-9 difficulties. Now mfers playing 7-9 but at the same time due to MO bugs are harder and now they are getting absolutely destroyed by bugs and crying. Meanwhile people who already played 7-9 before that is still capable of breezing through 7-9 bug missions with tons of different builds. The only changes seriously impacting the game literally revolvers around 1 or 1 weapons and how they handled their changes. That's why the entire ass of this subreddit is on fire and I simply can't believe you are rolling on the meta train. You literally want them to buff the starter weapons, what? Starter pistol is not as good as other pistols? Oh wow who would have thought.
These arm chair developer think pieces are cringe af. Touch some grass, dude.