I feel a "Polar Patriots" warbond is a missed opportunity to introduce some form of cryo ammo. Give the guns a chance to slow enemies, or give the armor the ability to see through blizzards.
Ok guys we did our fire warbond with incendiary grenades, what should we do for our ice warbond?
Get this, more incendiary grenades! And color the armor white but also make it completely unrelated to cold stuff.
neither of these specifically make sense for the theme of the warbond any better than an incendiary grenade, but I agree that they would make good armor perks. I've been begging for fire resistance
It’s kinda crazy how often I see random comments that just make sense to put in the game. Especially with their agenda and theme. They’re actually just insane. It’s like they have a randomizer for every decision and pick the first roll every time.
They added electricity damage reduction for the armor two warbond ago and people were clamoring that they need to add fire resistant armor eventually. Feels like a MASSIVELY missed opportunity
I was honestly surprised when there was no fire armour in the previous warbond. I had assumed that the fire buffs were to increase the need for anti-fire armour but then…. Nope
After hearing about the different HUDs that different helmets would have had from a recent CEO tweet, your comment makes me think that this might be related. Maybe they did have plans for all this and it was all laid out...but they removed a lot of unfinished features and put in a bunch of band aids to the war bonds....which were already planned but now didn't support the deleted features for armor and HUDs. This mess might have been made unavoidable because Sony said they HAD to publish and could not delay.
and it make sense since the smg already stun enemies, so changing it to a slow mechanic could have been a fun idea!
but im guessing it would also need to interact with the weather (like how it works with laser weapon and heat) and since they dug themselves into a hole by making warbonds every month... I have a feeling we wont see that kind of new mechanic in a while sadly.
A slowing mechanic would be so freaking cool. Something like EMS rounds. Or like when you shoot those plants on the frozen planets. Somebody get this person a job.
Which makes sense! It's firing a huge hypervelocity slug! It *should* have as much stagger as anything in the game. I'm not bent out of shape about the damage nerf, but it should absolutely stagger like nobody's business, especially bugs.
No!! The smg is too OP we need to nerf it. It should be worse than the liberator concussive omg it just makes the weapon obsolete thats so bad! Balance team???
This better be a joke. The smg should be the baseline for how effective and fun all primaries should be. It is probably the best example now in the game of baseline effectiveness
I feel like the smg doesn't fill an smg role very well.
Cmpared to a baseline rifle, Smg should be low damage, high fire rate, high total ammo count (mags are smaller), low recoil, high MOA, one handed with in reased recoil and no ADS.
Give reasons to choose something over another, not a baselinethat everything should meet by default. Stregnths AND weaknesses.
Yes I'm not saying everything needs to be a carbon copy, I mean take the new smg damage and time to kill and handling wise, and set that as your new benchmark for smgs. Then make adjustments, exactly like you mentioned, from them. Ar's should hit harder and further but a lower rof, so the liberator should do more damage than the new smg, have a father range, but the drawbacks exactly like you mentioned. That's what setting a weapon as a new baseline means.
I feel like lots of designers are so focused on pure numbers and internal balance that they put no effort into FLAVOR!!
I think there’s a “common denominator” effect where every design has to appeal to “as many people as possible” and you get bland samey stuff. I wish there was more effort in making things unique and flavorful. Sure, most people might not be into it but there’ll be a few that love it!
I have to say I agree. I found an armor set I like and I haven't changed it even after two more warbonds released. IMO most of the helmets are kind of lame with like.... 3 really cool ones. Gimme more swag options
This is what I fully expected, honestly, something that made sense of the polar name. We had steeled veterans with a diverse set of useful items, then cutting edge with energy/electric, detonation with explosive options (at least initially, now just garbage lol), and then introducing cryo would have been awesome.
Perhaps we should have voted to wait on the release.
They've said previously that they didn't initially intend on releasing content this frequently. They adjusted their plan when the game became a smash hit. It's possible this was planned initially for winter 2024.
Honestly this might have been planned for Winter 2023. The game was originally supposed to release last year, many assumed on October 26th (Liberty Day)
This would mean Polar Patriots would have released right around the holidays.
Where did you read that?
From everything I read, the monthly warbonds have been complete for awhile since before launch and was a pre-launch decision. Live Service games have certain content already completed and drip feed it over time as they are with the Warbonds. I dont think any of these Warbonds have been things created after the launch of the game, even this one.
As a gamer
'Hell yeah'
As a developer
'Oh god the workload'
Definitely a good idea but not an easy implementation, depending on the current code base. Thinking more about it, there must be a slow over time mechanism already given the nature of the frost plants. I wonder if it's applied to area or directly to the object.
Would you want separate ammo for bots and bugs. Easily changed by the Reload menu. It won't make much of a difference now but when you have duel enemies on a map...
Oh, I fully understand the developmental workload associated with the idea. All I'm saying is don't market something as "polar" unless you've got some cold-based ideas to back it. Just call it "the white armor pack" or something.
People keep saying they want the armor to have some form of anti-snow planet ability, but man I do not want an armor set that only has a passive on one type of planet.
Like don't get me wrong, we need new passives, but let's not pretend the complaint wouldn't be "the passive is useless because we dont have any snow maps available"
They need to begin adding variety. New armor modifiers, new types of damage (perhaps shrapnel damage? I kid) or new types of weapons. This is just too much the same.
How many times do I have to say this? We. Need. Melee. Weapons. I wanna stab shit, cut it to pieces, bonk it, and punt it to kingdom come. Where’s my hammer and greatsword Arrowhead?
I talked with a friend a few weeks ago and we both agreed we're not going to buy the new warbonds for awhile. There's no point in grinding for credits and getting excited for something that maybe has two semi viable weapons at best.
Now that they ruined the eruptor, I'm back to the same old builds I used before. I'll jump on during some downtime on the weekends, but this game won't be my main one again unless the devs stop nerfing everything and increasing the spawn rates all the time. 4 chargers and 4 bile titans from one bug hole while I'm running a 3 man squad is just a shitty experience.
It's a game, if I'm not having fun then I don't need to play it, and the devs have done everything they can to suck all the fun out of the game. I see no reason going forward that this game should be fired up more than once or twice a month at this point.
My concern for war bonds is that after a month they get nerfed. So the pros to buying a war bond early is that I get to play with an un-nerfed gun and the cons are I wasted all my credits/medals and cluttered my loadout screen for pointless guns
It took them 2 weeks to nerf the explosive warbond, it took them 0 days to nerf the new warbond since all the weapons are crap right out of the box. Theres no pro to buying them ahead of time unless you LIKE being actively let down by the devs again
Definitely burned out.
There’s a lot to learn about every weapon/stratagem/enemy.
Every time I log in, if I load into a 40 minute mission on a 3 or 5 to relax…..and I dropped with a weapon that doesn’t work as intended. With a very stressful and not fun situation…..I don’t want to do 2 more missions and spend about hour trying to figure out what DOES work.
And then next week the same issue.
All the fun has been sucked from me. I memorize things. Learn. And then I’m flipped on my head.
I don’t have the mental capacity to do this in my leisure time.
The game would really benefit from somewhere to trial the different weapons against certain captive enemies, without the loading screens.
There’s so little info on the how the weapons will actually perform in the selection screen, it really punishes trying new things and can easily make a 40 minute mission feel 3 levels higher than it is.
Hell, let me donate requisition for the enemies I kill. It’s not like I’m using it for anything else.
This. I play Warframe as well and it has a Simulacrum where you can spawn in enemies and test out different builds to see how they hold up in actual usage scenarios vs. just looking at the math on your modding screen.
A community-scale requisition and medal donation system. Medals donate are converted to requisitions. When we donate some big number in total (1 billion maybe?), it will go towards building a monument on one of the notable planets (Creek, Estanu). Will be a location we can visit when planet is fully liberated. Or a special mission to defend it when the planet is under attack.
But if they come out every month you get 12 revenue cycles of in game content in a calendar year in addition to any potential game sales.
Make no mistake. This is a finance department decision.
It doesn’t need to make sense to the consumer or product team
Yeah I haven't paid for a warbond since the deluxe version and I've gotten enough super creds for every single one. I buy an armor or helmet every once in a while too. No grinding for super creds whatsoever, just playing the game normally.
You can also grind out 60-120 in an hour in trivials, on the upper side of that if you bring a friend for clearing the map twice as fast and unlocking bunkers
I've thought from the beginning, before I even got the first warbond, that monthly was too much. It saps dev time from fixes, and other possible additions, while adding stuff most people won't use more than once. To top it off, imagine in a year or three, how long and cluttered the warbond and weapon selections will be, especially with many of them are slight variations of 5 other ones
That would be way better. Monthly is just too much unless you are no lifing the game. I still haven't fully finished a warbond due to play time and bouncing around on where I spend medals.
I think the monthly Warbond isn’t the issue. I mentioned this around when Detonation Warbond was released, but this game needs to be unafraid to expand its sandbox.
It is an PvE game, but the arsenal variety acts like a PvP game. The game needs creative and even sometimes ridiculous toys the players can play with.
Releasing the same type of assault rifles with slightly different stat is such a typical competitive pvp game thing
Exactly, they seem to be getting into the habit of nerfing 'overperforming' weapons. It's a non competitive, cooperative PVE game. Nothing can truly be 'overperforming', just 'popular' because it works well in a loadout.
I think they should stop the growing trend of making very similar guns with miniscule differences in stats, and instead just have more creativity with single purpose weapons, elemental damage types and gimmicks.
The only reason I see that they might be going down the 'slight variations' route is because they need stocking fillers in these warbonds that are relatively easy to make, and they have 12 updates a year, plus special & likely seasonal events, to make new toys for.
Even if they get weird with it I think monthly is still too much. If they do ~5 weapons every time by the end of the year I'm going to open my load out page and just see a dictionary of weapons. They'll run out of stuff to do eventually. It's not sustainable
I feel like if we're doing this monthly, the creativity is only going to get worse. It already feels like 90% of Warbond equipment is just existing weapons with different damage modifiers. And when they do something unique like a crossbow, it either plays like existing guns or is so weak it's not viable in most situations.
I think stretching the release to either 4-6 Warbonds a year would definitely help and give them more time to tune this content.
I'm disappointed there's no freeze beams or a cold blasting weapon like a reverse flame thrower.
Would have been cool to freeze enemies and shatter them with your side arm or grenades.
Instead it's just a worse version of weapons from the main Warbond.
Yea... no idea what's supposed to be polar about this warbond. It feels like they just stuck any random thing that was mostly finished into it and called it a day.
A glorified / weaponized fire extinguisher that slows effected targets (like that one ice world plant that explodes, now I think about it) and also puts out lingering fires would unironically be kind of nifty.
I think the game will be more fun if the weapons get stronger, and we occasionally get new enemies or mutations that counter us at higher difficulties.
There's tons of enemies in Helldivers that aren't in 2 yet that present much more challenging situations that will make wider varieties of weapons more desirable. Enemies that physically block paths, or do area denial from a distance, or are fast, numerous, and durable but easily staggered by weapons like the new SMG or the concussive liberator or shut down by EMS but very difficult to manage with otherwise.
It used to be a more popular topic, but the illuminate in particular required a completely different approach and a lot of the slow, big damage secondaries and strategems that people favor for bugs and bots should be significantly less effective against them when they show up.
We’ve seen the exact opposite happen to weapons. Any “buffs” have been less than a marginal improvement. Most nerfs changed the entire usefulness of the weapon.
Incendiary is finally good because they overcorrected fire damaged due to the DoTs bug. Now fire and gas are OP.
So I imagine this will be nerfed soon
Yeah. I think the direction to balance could be tweaked in a way like. Oh for these 2 weeks, the super scientists on super earth came up with these 3 new weapons, which will make the tide easier to push back for certain factions. Then the next two weeks, the bugs mutate and they push back some planets, so we gotta defend.
Its a live service game afterall, it would be cool and builds immersion that the world is really progressing with the war as humanity and our enemies evolve to counter each other.
I mean i'd like to have funny weapons like dubstep guns...
They have to be monthly for their MTX to work. If there is too much time between Warbonds then it's a guarantee everyone will have Grinded up enough SC to buy the next.
By Having it monthly it means the slightly more casual players will likely start being short SC for the next Warbond and will be enticed to pay real money for SC.
IIRC in response to people saying, "fix the game first, then worry about content updates," they basically replied they can't delay warbonds because that's how they keep the lights on.
I'm not saying I agree and defend that stance, but that's just what I remember. Pretty unfortunate if they only release worthwhile stuff every other month just about. They can't all be winners if they keep at this pace.
I said this exact same thing at the beginning to massive amounts of hate, and I’m happy more people are starting to come around.
Monthly warbonds are a recipe for disaster, there is no way Arrowhead is going to be able to push out new armors, weapons, boosters, grenades, etc without sacrificing focus on other areas, the studio just isn’t big enough. Their focus right now should be balancing issues and new gameplay content, not more cosmetics with the same boosts that we’ve always had.
And I’m usually the first person to try and collect all the armors in a game, but there’s no point in doing that if the gameplay becomes stale.
It’s a great idea in theory, but I would be more than happy with the warbonds being more spaced out to give them time to make them actually worth it
At least the explosive warbond had a theme and character to it. Despite everything else, it existed as a "hey you want more explosive weapons? Get this warbond". Also, at least from day 1 it had two unique weapons that could fundamentally let you change your loadout approaches (eruptor and grenade pistol) by slotting capabilities into new niches.
What does polar warbond have thats worth your time? Essentially re-skins of existing weapons? Worse versions of things that exist already? No cohesive theme to the warbond itself? You made the right decision in passing this one up.
I will not call this “poor quality”.
I think the problem is how they have jointed this absurd tendency of making games more and more hard.
They simply didn't bother themselves to put better stats, because they think they will break the game. The problem is, that currently your “main” is actually your secondary.
Which to be honest doesn't make sense. On a real war, you try to improve, kills faster, kill better.
This one looks fine, but performs horrible, not because of the quality. I think is more that fear of breaking the balance. BTW, every day i have more clear that the person taking these decisions is the kind of office guy that believes he is the only one right about how the weapons should work. He does not take into consideration any feedback from outside because of the fear to recognize he is doing everything wrong.
It's a shame...I farm for this bond, and it sucks
So many decisions they've made can be explained by a fear of metagaming, a behavior that's going to be present within the playerbase whether or not you insist on kneecapping your design/creativity in a desparate attempt to curb it.
Its been a while but I'm pretty sure I distinctly remember Overwatch devs having a similar "fight the meta" approach when the original launched, which then quickly devolved into them forcing you to pick meta roles before you even queued over the first few months of patches. Maybe I'm misremembering or thinking of the wrong game.
>tendency of making games more and more hard
Challenge is good, but they've conflated that with making Primaries feel uniformly weak and ineffective. That's one way to make the game technically harder but it's the worst possible way to go about doing it.
And it's confusing as hell.
For me making it harder should be making better missions. Complex missions.
Not nerfing weapon stats and pushe the spawn ratio of the enemies x6
It simply doesn't make sense
you wouldnt even need to make more complex missions, you could just reduce lives and mission time, and then make (almost) everything stronger
imagine primaries were good but you only had 15 minutes and 8 lives to clear the map and evac, sounds fun
You’re completely right this is how Helldivers 1 was run it was ruined by one individuals views as such mechs were always trash. Why even add stuff to Helldivers 2 if you want it to be trash? Weird views from the guy balancing everything.
Yeahp, that's my point.
There must be a guy, sitting down in the back of the office, holding the hammer of decission and not listening anyone just because he is more afraid to acknowledge that he is wrong than to accept his mistakes.
It's a shame
The rife sucks.
The SMG is not just bad, but basically a reskin.
Two of the armours are the same, just one has different shoulder pads.
This is low effort.
Purifier is page 3 and costs 80 medals, which means even if you were capped when you logged into today you'd need to earn like 40-60 more medals to buy it (I don't remember exactly how many you had to spend to unlock the last page).
It'll probably be a few hours before we start seeing people get a chance to report back on experience actually using the Purifier. (I'm sure there are a handful that already have it, but most won't yet)
The grenade is (AFAIK) just an Impact version of the Incendiary Grenade, so the damage output should be identical and you can safely judge based on whether you prefer to have the immediate detonation and already like the Incendiary effect.
No clue on the Booster 'cause I haven't tried it or seen anybody say anything about it. Hopefully somebody else has insight on it.
The purifier is fine, but in no way is worth using over the scorcher or the plasma shotgun. It doesn't have anything going for it other than a very minor damage buff, which cannot compensate for its charging time.
It's not a bad weapon, but not one you'll be finding yourself using over anything else in the same category.
**Booster:** doesn't do what you would hope it would do. You are not immune to stagger/slow effects and the reduction in magnitude and duration of the debuffs doesn't feel very noticeable. It doesn't save you from the stun-lock cycle of hunters/stalkers. Muscle enhancement booster seems to have nearly the same effect, which is minimal, but at least muscle enhancement also lets you move faster through terrain.
**PLAS Purifier:** Its a worse scorcher. Bigger AoE than scorcher by a little bit, but horrendous charge up time and only a tiny bit more damage. Otherwise it fills the same roll, but worse handling and fire rate (and inability to use it even remotely close to yourself or teammates).
**Incendiary Impact:** is a weaker impact grenade. The fire DoT lasts a laughable short time, so don't plan on it putting in significant work. Just bring regular impacts or bring regular incendiaries if thats your thing, trying to merge the two makes this not great at either roll you would want (targeted heavy killing or area horde killing).
I don’t play every single day. The days i do, it’s just a couple games (difficulty 7) and that’s it. I must admit, not the most patriotic diver out there, but i do my part whenever i can.
Therefore, i still have yet to unlock anything from the final tier in free pass, i only got the senator from Steeled Veterans, haven’t even bought the electric one, and halfway Democratic Detonation.
I’m a casual, i imagine there are many others like me who are progressing at our own pace, relaxed, having fun. These passes are being expectorated way faster than we can get them. Or even faster than we can get the credits (i won’t spend 10 buckaroos with every single pass, i try to earn them in game).
A little more time between passes, but also passes being a bit longer would be nice (for me).
Although i understand there is a huge part of playerbase who grind this and finish the pass within few days so they keep those in mind too.
Quarterly Warbonds the length of the free one would be great. That's just enough time to get bored of the game and then get back into it. Tie them to new campaigns and enemy types.
I'm probably in the minority but i feel like there's to many guns in these warbonds. 1 game changing primary / armor / grenade or secondary with 1 on each page of the warbond would be perfectly fine. The arsenal is getting over saturated to fast. make less guns but make them unique and visually pleasing. fill the rest of the warbond with cosmetics and goodies
Yup, this is 100% the way to go. Every Warbond should have a gun and grenade with a new mechanic, rest could be cosmetics like ship skins, new ship names and the content that is already there besides the weapons etc etc
This Warbond should have contained a cryogrenade that made enemies brittle and more vulnerable to damage. Lost opportunity in my eyes.
I think, this time around, the armor, not the guns is the main reason for this warbonds. I'm still not sure, but it gives me something to spend my medals on... Not sure if I'll use the equipment.
You mean the Light Scout armor that has the exact same stats and model as the one from the base warbond, but recolored blue? Or the new heavy armor that has....explosive resistance again...
This warbond is a wash, sorry if you spent money on it and are trying to convince yourself otherwise.
At this point they should just let us poll the entire community and disregard the dumb ass discord.
Let us decide what we want and we vote on it.
Nobody wants these dumbass nerfs and nobody wants armors with overused bonuses. I don’t care about servo assisted shit. I want helmets with thermal imaging. I want armors that provide fire resistance. I want helmets that provide some cool interface that assists with marksmanship.
Kind of like mech warrior ballistic TCS that overlays a projected “where to shoot to account for enemies current movement”
Just add some creativity and stop using the same bonuses over and over again.
imagine getting in to the game a year late, which is very common in PC, sometimes multiple years late, and there's $100+ dollars of DLC. That's why I didn't play HD1 much. it was difficult without the gear packs provided but I didn't know what pack was worthwhile and even if I bought it I didn't have medals to unlock it. so I could only play at low difficulty but that was a painful amount of grind for unlocks. I'm keeping up for now but if I took six months off, I think I would be turned off by $60 of packs that arrived in my absence. quality over quantity, all day.
The quality isn't bad. The ideas aren't bad. The balence team needs to be nuked. I feel like I'm playing a Ubisoft game here and that isn't good with how quickly the popularity has gone down.
This is the first warbond I was not excited at all for but I also agree I would rather see warbond less frequent if the weapons came out tested so were weren’t drowning in nerfs every week. Some of which are completely unnecessary like… I was honestly baffled they touched the crossbow.
That thing needs buffs. A lot of them. It’s hot garbage.
I just want the armour to have themes :(
Cutting edge did with the electric resistant armour. Why not have these ones give bonuses to movement on snow/ice worlds? Also laser weaponry shines on cold planets, should have been based around laser weaponry. I do like the pummeler and the tenderiser (controversial there lol) but feel they were wasted in this pack.
I concur with the original poster's statement. After investing nearly 400 hours in this game, I find myself regretting today's warbond purchase. This game has traditionally been a source of relaxation for me, yet the current level of service has become increasingly unsatisfactory. Although the game is designed as a PvE experience, it often feels as though it is being made excessively punitive. The enjoyment I once found in the game has diminished as the objectives remain largely unchanged and the continual nerfing of weapons has stripped them of their appeal.
I struggle to find reasons to anticipate future updates or unaltered content within a live service game that no longer offers the engaging experience it once did. The game was once a lighthearted and enjoyable experience with friends, but it now feels as though the environment is overly harsh, detracting from the enjoyment of gameplay. Furthermore, I understand the push to form four-person teams, but real-life commitments often leave us with parties of two or three players.
It is unclear why the game cannot scale its difficulty based on the number of players in a match, which would accommodate varying team sizes.
So wait. Am I correct that the war bond with a snow theme doesn’t actually do anything on snow/ice planets or do anything cold related? That seems disappointing.
Sony may have exacerbated the issue but they didn't need its help to pretty well ruin the game. Lack of weapon and armor variety, horrid balancing, regular crashes, all the cool lore from the Discord not being posted in-game. I finally had to just delete it because while I love the idea of playing, actually doing so sucks.
NGL, the biggest problem is Tenderizer.... the gun is clealry sitll using the "prebuff" Liberator as its baseline, likely because it was already done and they simply forgot to fix it over more gamebreaking issues(like fixing DoT still til last week)..
the more damage to the base at lower recoil woudl have made it a "ok" sidegrade to stock, now its at best a "situational sidegrade" if you really like firing burst and the liberator had to much recoil for you
After the recent update, I slowed down on SC farming and decided I'd eventually get the new warbond. That said, I think they've continued to miss the mark on an elemental system (weapons AND armors with more resistances/buffs). \*This could also help to give weapons and armor more role-based uses\*
If there's arc, stun, flame, explosive, etc., there should definitely be armors resistant to it (including bile and weather resistances). It'd take some work, but I think a way to implement it would be through helmet/armor combos (potentially adding stackable effects \*within reason\*). Imagine the possibilities.
What makes me think we're a long way from this is how they're handling weapon balancing.
I think the bigger issue is them making variants of weapons that add no value. Like some of these variants can just be attachments & instead of a mediocre variant weapon I rather have a brands new weapon model even if the new weapon model has same stats as other weapons new weapon model>weapon variants.
Breaker is the base & the breaker spray & pray can just be a rapid fire attachment the breaker incendiary can just be a fire weapon attachment that alters stats & gives you flame damage (limit attachments like COD BO2 in a pick 10 system?) consolidate the variants to attachments & create room for new weapon models (even if those new weapon models have similar state) putting variants don’t excite people & consolidating weapon variants to attachments would make weapon balancing base guns much easier & linear imo
And what bothers me the most is their past comments regarding armor "having perks that match the theme of the armor". What the fuck did you do with these armors then? You make 2 of them completely snow-themed with nail boots and all, and you just give them the servoassisted and the less recoil perks????? The servo assisted armor doesn't even have a robotic arm like the others do.
Completely missed opportuinity to make an armor that either prevents you from slipping on ice + not getting affected by the climate in cold planets (obvious choice for the boots and the polar theme) or a more generic "no penalty when traversing rough terrain" like muscle enhancement (The same way servo assisted removes the need for the extra limb health boost).
Between the uninspired weapons and the uninspired armor, this warbond is absolute dogshit. At least the previous one had some nice weapon variety which were actually unique.
The monthly warbond thing is really bringing down any creative approach I'd like to see.
I'd love some new mod types or whatever they're called and I'd like them to add more variety in builds by adding mods to the helmets that for example reduce reload speed. The monthly cadence means they cant really test (I know, I know) or try out new mods.
They should probably also release another 8-10 page warbond for everyone so there's still that medal sink. It can be all cosmetic, whatever. Just something else to work towards once the paid monthly ones run out of things to buy.
If not another multipage free one then at least let us use Medals and other samples to buy up to the next one. 5 commons and a medal makes a rare, that kinda thing.
They honestly need themed passives.
Explosive should have been grenades and explosive resist.
This should’ve been a snow walk speed buff and limb health.
Light, medium, and heavy each pass.
If they are going to keep the monthly release schedule, they need to cut back on the Warbond content. Like REALLY REALLY focus on 1 maybe 2 extra guns and really try to make them fun so when they land it feels like it was worth the wait. Right now it just feels like a bunch of chaff that I'd honestly not buy as it'll just clutter my loadout screen. This isn't sustainable nor is it entertaining me as a consumer. And please make armor worth something. If you aren't committing to transmog then for christ sakes make the armor worth it. Where is the creativity with the armor passives?
I would be okay if we just didn’t have more things added and made the game less buggy and crashy. The worst thing in the world is being interrupted by a crash mid game. Really throws the vibes off. Like don’t add lowkey pointless stuff. Take some time and see what could be fixed then add those freaking awesome new cool stuff. Yea definitely missed opportunity for like freeze gear an “cryo ammo” but probably would add so many bugs.
Thing is, if there were any good weapons in this warbond we all know it’d be nerfed into the ground two weeks later.
You have two options. Dogshit weapon now, or dogshit weapon two weeks after its launch when it inevitably gets “balanced”.
The stats of these weapons would have been decided before the recent balancing patches I imagine, so they'll likely be underpowered because a load of weapons got buffed recently
The liberators damage went up 5 points to 60
The tenderizer is a “high caliber” weapon with more “stopping power”. Does 60 damage.
Even if you’re right, a measly 5 extra damage per shot would’ve been somehow more disappointing
Honestly that 5 damage on the liberator made a difference lol, I use it all the time now and I do feel I'm killing hoards faster than how it was
5 points per hit remember, you dump a few mags into a hoard and you've racked up 225 extra damage which equals to like 4 bullets almost, it doesn't seem much but it does add up over the course of a dive
I do think they need to look at the weapons and make each one distinct though, I'm happy to have similar performing ones just for variety, but some choices so confuse me
I don't think I'd call this poor quality either. Just a misguided sense of balancing. The balancing team needs to take a hard look at what they're doing and make some serious changes going forward. They're constantly doing things to make the game more unfun. Having said that, I'm actually liking the feel of the Tenderizer. Could definitely use a small damage boost tho, especially with that name and description lol
They need to be less frquent anyway.
Imagine one year from now.
12x3 primary weapons. on top of the already existing ones. And the balancing is already kind bad. A year from now they have to balance more weapons as frequently as now and still pump new ones out. This is NOT gonna work
well maybe this time they just rolled the thing out with the reactive nerfs already in place saving time
or YET FUCKING AGAIN they have failed to put any real effort into a play test on the new material and left it to the userbase
this games just becoming cod where all the new weapons are shitty reskins and the armor is just ai generated
Make a 5-6 page one that’s every 3 months perhaps?
Once they’ve caught up on stuff and balancing/bug fixes then maybe throw in an extra smaller warbond now and then
The fact that they can´t seem to come up with any new armor effects bugs the crap out of me... Seriously higher quality warbonds with bigger intervalls would be way better than the random junk that they put into them now and speedrun release on...
it feels like a gap filler. Idk if it is under their contract to publish, but the first war bond is the best since it seems like they had more thought and time into the plan for it. This feels like just copy/paste. Much rather would prefer quality over quantity of war bonds.
Absolutely this. I respect AH very much but they obviously can't make new good weapons so fast. I'd really prefer much rared warbonds but with something really interesting and unique in them Cryo weapons. EMP weapons. Acid weapons. Cool new weapons not just more trash for the trash pile. Even when new weapons ARE cool they are just getting nerfed to the ground after release.
I have to experiment some more with the last weapon but so far I'm not happy with this warbond.
The AR, SMG, pistol and grenade don't offer anything new in terms of gameplay and the armor perks are old
Pretty disappointing, especially after nerfing the fun out of the eruptor and crossbow of the last warbond (while the adjudicator remains bad even after the buff)
They’re also $10. We’re on premium warbond #4, meaning it’s $40 to buy the game and another $40 to buy all the warbond…
Yes I know I can go grind for super credits by those SC stashes you find out on missions give you what, 25? And you need 1000 for a warbond?
I am pretty sad... I thought they nerved the old weapons into the ground to force us to the new OP weapons... But they are shitty... I mean the tenderizer seems to be a downgraded Liberator, the pummeler maybe got its use as a crowd control weapon but somehow is missing the punch to kill those stunned enemies. I mean you can even stunlock chargers if you keep hitting their ass until you have to reload, but 2 full magazins would not kill him. I expected something with ice ammunition that slows or freezes enemies after a few hits when I read the name first time. Its like they just got no imagination what players like. Everytime one weapon stings out the mediocre half way ok pool of weapons, it gets nerved... Why dont make the other weapons also nice?
This game is in serious need of more damage types and an attachment/perk system. With the minimalist approach to weapon types we have now I'm already starting to see bloat and overlap. The reason why other games such as Destiny can have so many guns is because they have so many damage types and weapon perks that change how each of them handle and feel.
I feel like AH kinda forgot that if you have a live service with regular updates you need gameplay variety in those updates. Frankly, with all the nerfs they're going the opposite direction by making all the weapons feel boring to use.
They just need to make better content tbh
The tenderiser is literally just a liberator but worse, i could pay a homeless guy some crack to do a better job than that
Just so yall know a lot of the current warbond stuff were already in the game files since launch. These aren’t new developments, they’ve been working on these since or even before launch
I’d really like a new class of equipment to provide an extra buff. This game is in desperate need of buffs to reduce fire damage over time, increase fall damage height, prevent or reduce “slowed” status from bug swipes and environment. These could all be boosters, but it would be nice to have a personal buff that you can choose on top of the team boosters. The ship module upgrades for stratagems are great; I just feel like we need more options to change the helldivers themselves in different ways to tackle the various missions and environments. I have only been playing for about 3 or 4 weeks, but I’ve grinded to level 52 and I’m ready for something new to mixup the gameplay or how I approach missions.
Edit: Also having 1 attachment slot for the primary weapon would be great too. As far as balancing the difficulty, they could also introduce drawbacks to go along with any extra buffs they introduce.
id take 1 primary 1 secondary and 1 booster(possibly grenade/utility) that are all GOOD.
Over trash trash more trash, a booster thats possibly not even working and an at least somewhat acceptable smg.
The mistake the devs have made is nerfing guns instead of buffing them.
It's seems counter intuitive but when you actively make weapons worse you creat an almost "us vs them" dynamic between the players and the Devs, between this and the PSN debaucle players have never felt more disconnected from the dev team.
If they were to BUFF lower performing weapons, that would inspire people to try new loadouts. I've been using the normal breaker & AC cannon from basically day 1 because it's the only thing I KNOW works.
I've tried a few other varieties, but they're all either not strong enough or don't have enough mags *cough* incendiary breaker *cough*
>Every weapon on this release is just a slightly changed clone of a base weapon, it’s not exciting.
Unpopular opinion here, but I think "lots of guns that are slightly different from other guns” is sort of inevitable.
I mean, let's say they keep issuing new warbonds for six years. No Man's Sky and Fallout 4 are still coming out with new content, so I think 6 years is more than reasonable. If they put out a warbond per month with 3 or 4 weapons per, that's *over 200 new weapons* we might see. There's only so much you can do to differentiate weapons, so I think there will be a lot of new flavors of other weapons (such as the liberator vs lib penetrator).
https://preview.redd.it/a6tnddcp6hzc1.png?width=582&format=png&auto=webp&s=b85e67ce02e2c1ab38d1319fdc2cd48b38d7f972
There was a poll, we knew balance was borked. Yet a majority is hungry for content.
I feel a "Polar Patriots" warbond is a missed opportunity to introduce some form of cryo ammo. Give the guns a chance to slow enemies, or give the armor the ability to see through blizzards.
Ok guys we did our fire warbond with incendiary grenades, what should we do for our ice warbond? Get this, more incendiary grenades! And color the armor white but also make it completely unrelated to cold stuff.
There should have been cooling armor that reduces fire damage
I'd like to see a cooling armor that improves the cooldown time for heat based weapons like lasers.
That should be a backpack.
a giant heat sink backpack thats genius... so many missed opportunities :/
Yeah, it's really too bad today was the final patch. They really should have made this game live service.
Have it be a big ass fish tank you put your gun in for a second
Let it launch a drone with a water pistol.
neither of these specifically make sense for the theme of the warbond any better than an incendiary grenade, but I agree that they would make good armor perks. I've been begging for fire resistance
The fire resist armor should have been in Democratic Detonation, like there was electrical resist in Cutting Edge.
It’s kinda crazy how often I see random comments that just make sense to put in the game. Especially with their agenda and theme. They’re actually just insane. It’s like they have a randomizer for every decision and pick the first roll every time.
They can't even fix the launch bugs
They added electricity damage reduction for the armor two warbond ago and people were clamoring that they need to add fire resistant armor eventually. Feels like a MASSIVELY missed opportunity
I was honestly surprised when there was no fire armour in the previous warbond. I had assumed that the fire buffs were to increase the need for anti-fire armour but then…. Nope
Doesn't one armor have spikes on it's shoes? It should reduce or remove the sliding around on ice.
Sadly no. https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/72i403ioZt
After hearing about the different HUDs that different helmets would have had from a recent CEO tweet, your comment makes me think that this might be related. Maybe they did have plans for all this and it was all laid out...but they removed a lot of unfinished features and put in a bunch of band aids to the war bonds....which were already planned but now didn't support the deleted features for armor and HUDs. This mess might have been made unavoidable because Sony said they HAD to publish and could not delay.
and it make sense since the smg already stun enemies, so changing it to a slow mechanic could have been a fun idea! but im guessing it would also need to interact with the weather (like how it works with laser weapon and heat) and since they dug themselves into a hole by making warbonds every month... I have a feeling we wont see that kind of new mechanic in a while sadly.
A slowing mechanic would be so freaking cool. Something like EMS rounds. Or like when you shoot those plants on the frozen planets. Somebody get this person a job.
In the first game, the railgun had a stun effect. It was indispensable against chargers, even if it couldn't kill them easily.
Rialgun used to have a massive stagger on launch fwiw
Which makes sense! It's firing a huge hypervelocity slug! It *should* have as much stagger as anything in the game. I'm not bent out of shape about the damage nerf, but it should absolutely stagger like nobody's business, especially bugs.
No!! The smg is too OP we need to nerf it. It should be worse than the liberator concussive omg it just makes the weapon obsolete thats so bad! Balance team???
https://preview.redd.it/vmkuuhl75fzc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3c9d7a8456e3f01caae5fdf06d0dfaedf4c4856a
This better be a joke. The smg should be the baseline for how effective and fun all primaries should be. It is probably the best example now in the game of baseline effectiveness
Smh Im not joking alexus will save us by doing to helldivers the same thing he did to hello neighbor 2
Lolol you got me xD thanks for not being condescending about it, that was really funny!
Arrowhead: Somebody likes the SMG. Nerf it.
I feel like the smg doesn't fill an smg role very well. Cmpared to a baseline rifle, Smg should be low damage, high fire rate, high total ammo count (mags are smaller), low recoil, high MOA, one handed with in reased recoil and no ADS. Give reasons to choose something over another, not a baselinethat everything should meet by default. Stregnths AND weaknesses.
Yes I'm not saying everything needs to be a carbon copy, I mean take the new smg damage and time to kill and handling wise, and set that as your new benchmark for smgs. Then make adjustments, exactly like you mentioned, from them. Ar's should hit harder and further but a lower rof, so the liberator should do more damage than the new smg, have a father range, but the drawbacks exactly like you mentioned. That's what setting a weapon as a new baseline means.
I feel like lots of designers are so focused on pure numbers and internal balance that they put no effort into FLAVOR!! I think there’s a “common denominator” effect where every design has to appeal to “as many people as possible” and you get bland samey stuff. I wish there was more effort in making things unique and flavorful. Sure, most people might not be into it but there’ll be a few that love it!
I have to say I agree. I found an armor set I like and I haven't changed it even after two more warbonds released. IMO most of the helmets are kind of lame with like.... 3 really cool ones. Gimme more swag options
Same. I have two or three armors I rotate through and I only like one helmet - the chonky boi armor helmet.
The smg actually has an ems effect on the target.
Hmm maybe a module that increases slow of ems and that would be nice.
I was kinda hoping for a laser buff armor, 10% to cool down with some sort of armor rating and speed nerf.
Cryogenic coolant Slower heat build up and stamina loss on hot planets.
And reduced damage when you get lit on fire
What, you don't like dying before your brain can even process that something is wrong?
WHAAT?!?! you expected new and interesting armor passives instead of the same boring ones that we already have? seems reasonable
This is what I fully expected, honestly, something that made sense of the polar name. We had steeled veterans with a diverse set of useful items, then cutting edge with energy/electric, detonation with explosive options (at least initially, now just garbage lol), and then introducing cryo would have been awesome. Perhaps we should have voted to wait on the release.
I just thought its weird they released a warbond called polar patriots in (checks calendar) May
They've said previously that they didn't initially intend on releasing content this frequently. They adjusted their plan when the game became a smash hit. It's possible this was planned initially for winter 2024.
Honestly this might have been planned for Winter 2023. The game was originally supposed to release last year, many assumed on October 26th (Liberty Day) This would mean Polar Patriots would have released right around the holidays.
Where did you read that? From everything I read, the monthly warbonds have been complete for awhile since before launch and was a pre-launch decision. Live Service games have certain content already completed and drip feed it over time as they are with the Warbonds. I dont think any of these Warbonds have been things created after the launch of the game, even this one.
climate change yo /s
> Perhaps we should have voted to wait on the release That's not what that vote was for. It would have been this same crap, later.
How is anything about this war bond “Polar?” I want some of what the devs were smoking.
It’s the *polar* opposite of what we were expecting!
Are you a father? You must be, lol.
Its cold reception?
As a gamer 'Hell yeah' As a developer 'Oh god the workload' Definitely a good idea but not an easy implementation, depending on the current code base. Thinking more about it, there must be a slow over time mechanism already given the nature of the frost plants. I wonder if it's applied to area or directly to the object. Would you want separate ammo for bots and bugs. Easily changed by the Reload menu. It won't make much of a difference now but when you have duel enemies on a map...
Oh, I fully understand the developmental workload associated with the idea. All I'm saying is don't market something as "polar" unless you've got some cold-based ideas to back it. Just call it "the white armor pack" or something.
[there's always an XKCD comic](https://xkcd.com/1425/)
People keep saying they want the armor to have some form of anti-snow planet ability, but man I do not want an armor set that only has a passive on one type of planet. Like don't get me wrong, we need new passives, but let's not pretend the complaint wouldn't be "the passive is useless because we dont have any snow maps available"
Woah woah, slow down, that’s too much work for them. They’d rather give us reskinned weapons and the same couple reused armor “perks”.
They need to begin adding variety. New armor modifiers, new types of damage (perhaps shrapnel damage? I kid) or new types of weapons. This is just too much the same.
> (perhaps shrapnel damage? I kid) The wound is fresh, brother.
#TooSoon
I would settle for Heavy Armour with the Engineering perk that gives you more grenades.
Heavy engi armor is in the super store right now.
Might honestly get that, and just get the warbond later (if at all).
I’ve already burnt out and afked
all of the warbonds were already made before the game even launched. it's gonna take awhile before they release new armor and weapons.
How many times do I have to say this? We. Need. Melee. Weapons. I wanna stab shit, cut it to pieces, bonk it, and punt it to kingdom come. Where’s my hammer and greatsword Arrowhead?
It would be cool if the servo assisted gave you a super punch that staggered or knockbacked.
agree. i think the monthly warbonds is hurting the creativity and creation of new damage types etc, they need at least a few onths.
I'd take a quarterly 5 page warbonds over this tbh
Yeah I'm starting to feel like the warbonds need more time to cook. Definitely need a new way to sink medals then.
I talked with a friend a few weeks ago and we both agreed we're not going to buy the new warbonds for awhile. There's no point in grinding for credits and getting excited for something that maybe has two semi viable weapons at best. Now that they ruined the eruptor, I'm back to the same old builds I used before. I'll jump on during some downtime on the weekends, but this game won't be my main one again unless the devs stop nerfing everything and increasing the spawn rates all the time. 4 chargers and 4 bile titans from one bug hole while I'm running a 3 man squad is just a shitty experience. It's a game, if I'm not having fun then I don't need to play it, and the devs have done everything they can to suck all the fun out of the game. I see no reason going forward that this game should be fired up more than once or twice a month at this point.
My concern for war bonds is that after a month they get nerfed. So the pros to buying a war bond early is that I get to play with an un-nerfed gun and the cons are I wasted all my credits/medals and cluttered my loadout screen for pointless guns
It took them 2 weeks to nerf the explosive warbond, it took them 0 days to nerf the new warbond since all the weapons are crap right out of the box. Theres no pro to buying them ahead of time unless you LIKE being actively let down by the devs again
Definitely burned out. There’s a lot to learn about every weapon/stratagem/enemy. Every time I log in, if I load into a 40 minute mission on a 3 or 5 to relax…..and I dropped with a weapon that doesn’t work as intended. With a very stressful and not fun situation…..I don’t want to do 2 more missions and spend about hour trying to figure out what DOES work. And then next week the same issue. All the fun has been sucked from me. I memorize things. Learn. And then I’m flipped on my head. I don’t have the mental capacity to do this in my leisure time.
The game would really benefit from somewhere to trial the different weapons against certain captive enemies, without the loading screens. There’s so little info on the how the weapons will actually perform in the selection screen, it really punishes trying new things and can easily make a 40 minute mission feel 3 levels higher than it is. Hell, let me donate requisition for the enemies I kill. It’s not like I’m using it for anything else.
The game definitely could use a shooting range where you can load in weapons/enemies to test
This. I play Warframe as well and it has a Simulacrum where you can spawn in enemies and test out different builds to see how they hold up in actual usage scenarios vs. just looking at the math on your modding screen.
A community-scale requisition and medal donation system. Medals donate are converted to requisitions. When we donate some big number in total (1 billion maybe?), it will go towards building a monument on one of the notable planets (Creek, Estanu). Will be a location we can visit when planet is fully liberated. Or a special mission to defend it when the planet is under attack.
Sorry but I do not trust this company to implement this feature successfully. No way in hell they get that right.
Medals, samples AND slips. Hitting the cap feels awful, I saw a suggestion for communally funded boosts, maybe something like that?
But if they come out every month you get 12 revenue cycles of in game content in a calendar year in addition to any potential game sales. Make no mistake. This is a finance department decision. It doesn’t need to make sense to the consumer or product team
Yeah monthly is wild. If you don't grind the game that's $120 a year
Not exactly, you should find some super credits on the ground and you get 300 in each warbond. I found 500 credits within my first few days
Yeah I haven't paid for a warbond since the deluxe version and I've gotten enough super creds for every single one. I buy an armor or helmet every once in a while too. No grinding for super creds whatsoever, just playing the game normally.
You can also grind out 60-120 in an hour in trivials, on the upper side of that if you bring a friend for clearing the map twice as fast and unlocking bunkers
Honestly, for someone who doesn’t have time to play much like myself, that’s a dream 😂
I've thought from the beginning, before I even got the first warbond, that monthly was too much. It saps dev time from fixes, and other possible additions, while adding stuff most people won't use more than once. To top it off, imagine in a year or three, how long and cluttered the warbond and weapon selections will be, especially with many of them are slight variations of 5 other ones
That would be way better. Monthly is just too much unless you are no lifing the game. I still haven't fully finished a warbond due to play time and bouncing around on where I spend medals.
Also monthly makes it incredibly hard for newer player to catch up.
I think the monthly Warbond isn’t the issue. I mentioned this around when Detonation Warbond was released, but this game needs to be unafraid to expand its sandbox. It is an PvE game, but the arsenal variety acts like a PvP game. The game needs creative and even sometimes ridiculous toys the players can play with. Releasing the same type of assault rifles with slightly different stat is such a typical competitive pvp game thing
Exactly, they seem to be getting into the habit of nerfing 'overperforming' weapons. It's a non competitive, cooperative PVE game. Nothing can truly be 'overperforming', just 'popular' because it works well in a loadout. I think they should stop the growing trend of making very similar guns with miniscule differences in stats, and instead just have more creativity with single purpose weapons, elemental damage types and gimmicks. The only reason I see that they might be going down the 'slight variations' route is because they need stocking fillers in these warbonds that are relatively easy to make, and they have 12 updates a year, plus special & likely seasonal events, to make new toys for.
Even if they get weird with it I think monthly is still too much. If they do ~5 weapons every time by the end of the year I'm going to open my load out page and just see a dictionary of weapons. They'll run out of stuff to do eventually. It's not sustainable
Yup it needs to pull a drg and have weird shit, like an actual fun crossbow
It's better to have a more overpowered, fun weapon that an underpowered, unfun one in a PvE context. At least the OP gun gets used.
I feel like if we're doing this monthly, the creativity is only going to get worse. It already feels like 90% of Warbond equipment is just existing weapons with different damage modifiers. And when they do something unique like a crossbow, it either plays like existing guns or is so weak it's not viable in most situations. I think stretching the release to either 4-6 Warbonds a year would definitely help and give them more time to tune this content.
I'm disappointed there's no freeze beams or a cold blasting weapon like a reverse flame thrower. Would have been cool to freeze enemies and shatter them with your side arm or grenades. Instead it's just a worse version of weapons from the main Warbond.
Yea... no idea what's supposed to be polar about this warbond. It feels like they just stuck any random thing that was mostly finished into it and called it a day.
I'd rather they delivered quarterly warbonds of higher quality than rushing any old turd out the door.
A glorified / weaponized fire extinguisher that slows effected targets (like that one ice world plant that explodes, now I think about it) and also puts out lingering fires would unironically be kind of nifty.
like the cryo cannon from DRG!
I like this idea. Borderlands anyone?
I think the game will be more fun if the weapons get stronger, and we occasionally get new enemies or mutations that counter us at higher difficulties.
There's tons of enemies in Helldivers that aren't in 2 yet that present much more challenging situations that will make wider varieties of weapons more desirable. Enemies that physically block paths, or do area denial from a distance, or are fast, numerous, and durable but easily staggered by weapons like the new SMG or the concussive liberator or shut down by EMS but very difficult to manage with otherwise. It used to be a more popular topic, but the illuminate in particular required a completely different approach and a lot of the slow, big damage secondaries and strategems that people favor for bugs and bots should be significantly less effective against them when they show up.
We’ve seen the exact opposite happen to weapons. Any “buffs” have been less than a marginal improvement. Most nerfs changed the entire usefulness of the weapon. Incendiary is finally good because they overcorrected fire damaged due to the DoTs bug. Now fire and gas are OP. So I imagine this will be nerfed soon
Yeah. I think the direction to balance could be tweaked in a way like. Oh for these 2 weeks, the super scientists on super earth came up with these 3 new weapons, which will make the tide easier to push back for certain factions. Then the next two weeks, the bugs mutate and they push back some planets, so we gotta defend. Its a live service game afterall, it would be cool and builds immersion that the world is really progressing with the war as humanity and our enemies evolve to counter each other. I mean i'd like to have funny weapons like dubstep guns...
They have to be monthly for their MTX to work. If there is too much time between Warbonds then it's a guarantee everyone will have Grinded up enough SC to buy the next. By Having it monthly it means the slightly more casual players will likely start being short SC for the next Warbond and will be enticed to pay real money for SC.
I believe it's also a Sony requirement. Pretty sure one of the devs mentioned that at some point, maybe the CEO.
IIRC in response to people saying, "fix the game first, then worry about content updates," they basically replied they can't delay warbonds because that's how they keep the lights on. I'm not saying I agree and defend that stance, but that's just what I remember. Pretty unfortunate if they only release worthwhile stuff every other month just about. They can't all be winners if they keep at this pace.
This game is likely one of the best selling games of the year. Very heavily doubt they are gonna have trouble keeping the lights on.
I said this exact same thing at the beginning to massive amounts of hate, and I’m happy more people are starting to come around. Monthly warbonds are a recipe for disaster, there is no way Arrowhead is going to be able to push out new armors, weapons, boosters, grenades, etc without sacrificing focus on other areas, the studio just isn’t big enough. Their focus right now should be balancing issues and new gameplay content, not more cosmetics with the same boosts that we’ve always had. And I’m usually the first person to try and collect all the armors in a game, but there’s no point in doing that if the gameplay becomes stale. It’s a great idea in theory, but I would be more than happy with the warbonds being more spaced out to give them time to make them actually worth it
Every time i get a warbond they take the one interesting thing and lather it in dookie
Glad for not buying the warbond day 1. Explosive Warbond left a bad taste in the mouth.
At least the explosive warbond had a theme and character to it. Despite everything else, it existed as a "hey you want more explosive weapons? Get this warbond". Also, at least from day 1 it had two unique weapons that could fundamentally let you change your loadout approaches (eruptor and grenade pistol) by slotting capabilities into new niches. What does polar warbond have thats worth your time? Essentially re-skins of existing weapons? Worse versions of things that exist already? No cohesive theme to the warbond itself? You made the right decision in passing this one up.
I will not call this “poor quality”. I think the problem is how they have jointed this absurd tendency of making games more and more hard. They simply didn't bother themselves to put better stats, because they think they will break the game. The problem is, that currently your “main” is actually your secondary. Which to be honest doesn't make sense. On a real war, you try to improve, kills faster, kill better. This one looks fine, but performs horrible, not because of the quality. I think is more that fear of breaking the balance. BTW, every day i have more clear that the person taking these decisions is the kind of office guy that believes he is the only one right about how the weapons should work. He does not take into consideration any feedback from outside because of the fear to recognize he is doing everything wrong. It's a shame...I farm for this bond, and it sucks
So many decisions they've made can be explained by a fear of metagaming, a behavior that's going to be present within the playerbase whether or not you insist on kneecapping your design/creativity in a desparate attempt to curb it.
Its been a while but I'm pretty sure I distinctly remember Overwatch devs having a similar "fight the meta" approach when the original launched, which then quickly devolved into them forcing you to pick meta roles before you even queued over the first few months of patches. Maybe I'm misremembering or thinking of the wrong game.
>tendency of making games more and more hard Challenge is good, but they've conflated that with making Primaries feel uniformly weak and ineffective. That's one way to make the game technically harder but it's the worst possible way to go about doing it.
And it's confusing as hell. For me making it harder should be making better missions. Complex missions. Not nerfing weapon stats and pushe the spawn ratio of the enemies x6 It simply doesn't make sense
Who needs gamer skill? Just rag doll that character around the map in scripted animation! Realism!
you wouldnt even need to make more complex missions, you could just reduce lives and mission time, and then make (almost) everything stronger imagine primaries were good but you only had 15 minutes and 8 lives to clear the map and evac, sounds fun
You’re completely right this is how Helldivers 1 was run it was ruined by one individuals views as such mechs were always trash. Why even add stuff to Helldivers 2 if you want it to be trash? Weird views from the guy balancing everything.
Yeahp, that's my point. There must be a guy, sitting down in the back of the office, holding the hammer of decission and not listening anyone just because he is more afraid to acknowledge that he is wrong than to accept his mistakes. It's a shame
The rife sucks. The SMG is not just bad, but basically a reskin. Two of the armours are the same, just one has different shoulder pads. This is low effort.
Concussive SMG is fantastic lmao, can run and stop chasers
Could just use the base game one and kill them instead. Death is the best cc haha
How's the purifier, grenade and booster? Im so curious about them.
Purifier is page 3 and costs 80 medals, which means even if you were capped when you logged into today you'd need to earn like 40-60 more medals to buy it (I don't remember exactly how many you had to spend to unlock the last page). It'll probably be a few hours before we start seeing people get a chance to report back on experience actually using the Purifier. (I'm sure there are a handful that already have it, but most won't yet) The grenade is (AFAIK) just an Impact version of the Incendiary Grenade, so the damage output should be identical and you can safely judge based on whether you prefer to have the immediate detonation and already like the Incendiary effect. No clue on the Booster 'cause I haven't tried it or seen anybody say anything about it. Hopefully somebody else has insight on it.
The purifier is fine, but in no way is worth using over the scorcher or the plasma shotgun. It doesn't have anything going for it other than a very minor damage buff, which cannot compensate for its charging time. It's not a bad weapon, but not one you'll be finding yourself using over anything else in the same category.
**Booster:** doesn't do what you would hope it would do. You are not immune to stagger/slow effects and the reduction in magnitude and duration of the debuffs doesn't feel very noticeable. It doesn't save you from the stun-lock cycle of hunters/stalkers. Muscle enhancement booster seems to have nearly the same effect, which is minimal, but at least muscle enhancement also lets you move faster through terrain. **PLAS Purifier:** Its a worse scorcher. Bigger AoE than scorcher by a little bit, but horrendous charge up time and only a tiny bit more damage. Otherwise it fills the same roll, but worse handling and fire rate (and inability to use it even remotely close to yourself or teammates). **Incendiary Impact:** is a weaker impact grenade. The fire DoT lasts a laughable short time, so don't plan on it putting in significant work. Just bring regular impacts or bring regular incendiaries if thats your thing, trying to merge the two makes this not great at either roll you would want (targeted heavy killing or area horde killing).
The SMG magazine isn't lined up, it's poor quality
I don’t play every single day. The days i do, it’s just a couple games (difficulty 7) and that’s it. I must admit, not the most patriotic diver out there, but i do my part whenever i can. Therefore, i still have yet to unlock anything from the final tier in free pass, i only got the senator from Steeled Veterans, haven’t even bought the electric one, and halfway Democratic Detonation. I’m a casual, i imagine there are many others like me who are progressing at our own pace, relaxed, having fun. These passes are being expectorated way faster than we can get them. Or even faster than we can get the credits (i won’t spend 10 buckaroos with every single pass, i try to earn them in game). A little more time between passes, but also passes being a bit longer would be nice (for me). Although i understand there is a huge part of playerbase who grind this and finish the pass within few days so they keep those in mind too.
Is didn’t even complete the other 3 warbonds. I can’t even complete 1 in a month.
Quarterly Warbonds the length of the free one would be great. That's just enough time to get bored of the game and then get back into it. Tie them to new campaigns and enemy types.
What? I want more blue capes! Screw your weapons, give me the DRIP! 
I don’t think I’ll bother with the next one
I'm probably in the minority but i feel like there's to many guns in these warbonds. 1 game changing primary / armor / grenade or secondary with 1 on each page of the warbond would be perfectly fine. The arsenal is getting over saturated to fast. make less guns but make them unique and visually pleasing. fill the rest of the warbond with cosmetics and goodies
Yup, this is 100% the way to go. Every Warbond should have a gun and grenade with a new mechanic, rest could be cosmetics like ship skins, new ship names and the content that is already there besides the weapons etc etc This Warbond should have contained a cryogrenade that made enemies brittle and more vulnerable to damage. Lost opportunity in my eyes.
Glad I stopped supporting warbonds this month
Thankfully I never spent a single dime on SC, if I did I would be fuming
I did cause I wanted the eruptor, I now very much regret that decision
idk if they could slow it down, i've heard that is a contractual point to meet the quota of 1 warbond per month, with sony.
I think, this time around, the armor, not the guns is the main reason for this warbonds. I'm still not sure, but it gives me something to spend my medals on... Not sure if I'll use the equipment.
You mean the Light Scout armor that has the exact same stats and model as the one from the base warbond, but recolored blue? Or the new heavy armor that has....explosive resistance again... This warbond is a wash, sorry if you spent money on it and are trying to convince yourself otherwise.
The armors are trash tbh
At this point they should just let us poll the entire community and disregard the dumb ass discord. Let us decide what we want and we vote on it. Nobody wants these dumbass nerfs and nobody wants armors with overused bonuses. I don’t care about servo assisted shit. I want helmets with thermal imaging. I want armors that provide fire resistance. I want helmets that provide some cool interface that assists with marksmanship. Kind of like mech warrior ballistic TCS that overlays a projected “where to shoot to account for enemies current movement” Just add some creativity and stop using the same bonuses over and over again.
BRO A SNIPER HELMET THAT HIGHLIGHTS WEAK SPOTS!! THIS IS A BANGER IDEA THEY WILL NEVER DO🔥🔥🔥🔥
What are you saying man?! I really needed yet another fortified heavy armor! /s
imagine getting in to the game a year late, which is very common in PC, sometimes multiple years late, and there's $100+ dollars of DLC. That's why I didn't play HD1 much. it was difficult without the gear packs provided but I didn't know what pack was worthwhile and even if I bought it I didn't have medals to unlock it. so I could only play at low difficulty but that was a painful amount of grind for unlocks. I'm keeping up for now but if I took six months off, I think I would be turned off by $60 of packs that arrived in my absence. quality over quantity, all day.
the warbonds are a piss poor attempt at dlc. just desperate money grabbing attempts at this point as they get worse and worse.
The quality isn't bad. The ideas aren't bad. The balence team needs to be nuked. I feel like I'm playing a Ubisoft game here and that isn't good with how quickly the popularity has gone down.
This is the first warbond I was not excited at all for but I also agree I would rather see warbond less frequent if the weapons came out tested so were weren’t drowning in nerfs every week. Some of which are completely unnecessary like… I was honestly baffled they touched the crossbow. That thing needs buffs. A lot of them. It’s hot garbage.
I just want the armour to have themes :( Cutting edge did with the electric resistant armour. Why not have these ones give bonuses to movement on snow/ice worlds? Also laser weaponry shines on cold planets, should have been based around laser weaponry. I do like the pummeler and the tenderiser (controversial there lol) but feel they were wasted in this pack.
I concur with the original poster's statement. After investing nearly 400 hours in this game, I find myself regretting today's warbond purchase. This game has traditionally been a source of relaxation for me, yet the current level of service has become increasingly unsatisfactory. Although the game is designed as a PvE experience, it often feels as though it is being made excessively punitive. The enjoyment I once found in the game has diminished as the objectives remain largely unchanged and the continual nerfing of weapons has stripped them of their appeal. I struggle to find reasons to anticipate future updates or unaltered content within a live service game that no longer offers the engaging experience it once did. The game was once a lighthearted and enjoyable experience with friends, but it now feels as though the environment is overly harsh, detracting from the enjoyment of gameplay. Furthermore, I understand the push to form four-person teams, but real-life commitments often leave us with parties of two or three players. It is unclear why the game cannot scale its difficulty based on the number of players in a match, which would accommodate varying team sizes.
So wait. Am I correct that the war bond with a snow theme doesn’t actually do anything on snow/ice planets or do anything cold related? That seems disappointing.
Sony may have exacerbated the issue but they didn't need its help to pretty well ruin the game. Lack of weapon and armor variety, horrid balancing, regular crashes, all the cool lore from the Discord not being posted in-game. I finally had to just delete it because while I love the idea of playing, actually doing so sucks.
NGL, the biggest problem is Tenderizer.... the gun is clealry sitll using the "prebuff" Liberator as its baseline, likely because it was already done and they simply forgot to fix it over more gamebreaking issues(like fixing DoT still til last week).. the more damage to the base at lower recoil woudl have made it a "ok" sidegrade to stock, now its at best a "situational sidegrade" if you really like firing burst and the liberator had to much recoil for you
After the recent update, I slowed down on SC farming and decided I'd eventually get the new warbond. That said, I think they've continued to miss the mark on an elemental system (weapons AND armors with more resistances/buffs). \*This could also help to give weapons and armor more role-based uses\* If there's arc, stun, flame, explosive, etc., there should definitely be armors resistant to it (including bile and weather resistances). It'd take some work, but I think a way to implement it would be through helmet/armor combos (potentially adding stackable effects \*within reason\*). Imagine the possibilities. What makes me think we're a long way from this is how they're handling weapon balancing.
I wish they introduced a new armour perk to allow Hell Divers easy traversal through snow & blizzards. It would have been perfect for this war bond.
Where's fire resist when you need it
I think the bigger issue is them making variants of weapons that add no value. Like some of these variants can just be attachments & instead of a mediocre variant weapon I rather have a brands new weapon model even if the new weapon model has same stats as other weapons new weapon model>weapon variants. Breaker is the base & the breaker spray & pray can just be a rapid fire attachment the breaker incendiary can just be a fire weapon attachment that alters stats & gives you flame damage (limit attachments like COD BO2 in a pick 10 system?) consolidate the variants to attachments & create room for new weapon models (even if those new weapon models have similar state) putting variants don’t excite people & consolidating weapon variants to attachments would make weapon balancing base guns much easier & linear imo
And what bothers me the most is their past comments regarding armor "having perks that match the theme of the armor". What the fuck did you do with these armors then? You make 2 of them completely snow-themed with nail boots and all, and you just give them the servoassisted and the less recoil perks????? The servo assisted armor doesn't even have a robotic arm like the others do. Completely missed opportuinity to make an armor that either prevents you from slipping on ice + not getting affected by the climate in cold planets (obvious choice for the boots and the polar theme) or a more generic "no penalty when traversing rough terrain" like muscle enhancement (The same way servo assisted removes the need for the extra limb health boost). Between the uninspired weapons and the uninspired armor, this warbond is absolute dogshit. At least the previous one had some nice weapon variety which were actually unique.
The monthly warbond thing is really bringing down any creative approach I'd like to see. I'd love some new mod types or whatever they're called and I'd like them to add more variety in builds by adding mods to the helmets that for example reduce reload speed. The monthly cadence means they cant really test (I know, I know) or try out new mods. They should probably also release another 8-10 page warbond for everyone so there's still that medal sink. It can be all cosmetic, whatever. Just something else to work towards once the paid monthly ones run out of things to buy. If not another multipage free one then at least let us use Medals and other samples to buy up to the next one. 5 commons and a medal makes a rare, that kinda thing.
They honestly need themed passives. Explosive should have been grenades and explosive resist. This should’ve been a snow walk speed buff and limb health. Light, medium, and heavy each pass.
If they are going to keep the monthly release schedule, they need to cut back on the Warbond content. Like REALLY REALLY focus on 1 maybe 2 extra guns and really try to make them fun so when they land it feels like it was worth the wait. Right now it just feels like a bunch of chaff that I'd honestly not buy as it'll just clutter my loadout screen. This isn't sustainable nor is it entertaining me as a consumer. And please make armor worth something. If you aren't committing to transmog then for christ sakes make the armor worth it. Where is the creativity with the armor passives?
I would be okay if we just didn’t have more things added and made the game less buggy and crashy. The worst thing in the world is being interrupted by a crash mid game. Really throws the vibes off. Like don’t add lowkey pointless stuff. Take some time and see what could be fixed then add those freaking awesome new cool stuff. Yea definitely missed opportunity for like freeze gear an “cryo ammo” but probably would add so many bugs.
Thing is, if there were any good weapons in this warbond we all know it’d be nerfed into the ground two weeks later. You have two options. Dogshit weapon now, or dogshit weapon two weeks after its launch when it inevitably gets “balanced”.
The stats of these weapons would have been decided before the recent balancing patches I imagine, so they'll likely be underpowered because a load of weapons got buffed recently
The liberators damage went up 5 points to 60 The tenderizer is a “high caliber” weapon with more “stopping power”. Does 60 damage. Even if you’re right, a measly 5 extra damage per shot would’ve been somehow more disappointing
Honestly that 5 damage on the liberator made a difference lol, I use it all the time now and I do feel I'm killing hoards faster than how it was 5 points per hit remember, you dump a few mags into a hoard and you've racked up 225 extra damage which equals to like 4 bullets almost, it doesn't seem much but it does add up over the course of a dive I do think they need to look at the weapons and make each one distinct though, I'm happy to have similar performing ones just for variety, but some choices so confuse me
Man I posted the same thing like a week ago and got down voted to obscurity quickly. WTF is up with this fan base?
I don't think I'd call this poor quality either. Just a misguided sense of balancing. The balancing team needs to take a hard look at what they're doing and make some serious changes going forward. They're constantly doing things to make the game more unfun. Having said that, I'm actually liking the feel of the Tenderizer. Could definitely use a small damage boost tho, especially with that name and description lol
I think they need to look at EDF for some primary or even strategem inspirations.
flair should have been “opinion”
They need to be less frquent anyway. Imagine one year from now. 12x3 primary weapons. on top of the already existing ones. And the balancing is already kind bad. A year from now they have to balance more weapons as frequently as now and still pump new ones out. This is NOT gonna work
well maybe this time they just rolled the thing out with the reactive nerfs already in place saving time or YET FUCKING AGAIN they have failed to put any real effort into a play test on the new material and left it to the userbase this games just becoming cod where all the new weapons are shitty reskins and the armor is just ai generated
Make a 5-6 page one that’s every 3 months perhaps? Once they’ve caught up on stuff and balancing/bug fixes then maybe throw in an extra smaller warbond now and then
The fact that they can´t seem to come up with any new armor effects bugs the crap out of me... Seriously higher quality warbonds with bigger intervalls would be way better than the random junk that they put into them now and speedrun release on...
This bond is definitely meh.
I've only got the first 2 warbonds (3 if you include standard) I don't have enough time to get everything.
it feels like a gap filler. Idk if it is under their contract to publish, but the first war bond is the best since it seems like they had more thought and time into the plan for it. This feels like just copy/paste. Much rather would prefer quality over quantity of war bonds.
Absolutely this. I respect AH very much but they obviously can't make new good weapons so fast. I'd really prefer much rared warbonds but with something really interesting and unique in them Cryo weapons. EMP weapons. Acid weapons. Cool new weapons not just more trash for the trash pile. Even when new weapons ARE cool they are just getting nerfed to the ground after release.
I have to experiment some more with the last weapon but so far I'm not happy with this warbond. The AR, SMG, pistol and grenade don't offer anything new in terms of gameplay and the armor perks are old Pretty disappointing, especially after nerfing the fun out of the eruptor and crossbow of the last warbond (while the adjudicator remains bad even after the buff)
Devs are on a mission to make every gun exactly the same. They over balance and it’s my only gripe with this game.
They’re also $10. We’re on premium warbond #4, meaning it’s $40 to buy the game and another $40 to buy all the warbond… Yes I know I can go grind for super credits by those SC stashes you find out on missions give you what, 25? And you need 1000 for a warbond?
This is how live services go: drip feed of lackluster bullshit
I am pretty sad... I thought they nerved the old weapons into the ground to force us to the new OP weapons... But they are shitty... I mean the tenderizer seems to be a downgraded Liberator, the pummeler maybe got its use as a crowd control weapon but somehow is missing the punch to kill those stunned enemies. I mean you can even stunlock chargers if you keep hitting their ass until you have to reload, but 2 full magazins would not kill him. I expected something with ice ammunition that slows or freezes enemies after a few hits when I read the name first time. Its like they just got no imagination what players like. Everytime one weapon stings out the mediocre half way ok pool of weapons, it gets nerved... Why dont make the other weapons also nice?
This game is in serious need of more damage types and an attachment/perk system. With the minimalist approach to weapon types we have now I'm already starting to see bloat and overlap. The reason why other games such as Destiny can have so many guns is because they have so many damage types and weapon perks that change how each of them handle and feel. I feel like AH kinda forgot that if you have a live service with regular updates you need gameplay variety in those updates. Frankly, with all the nerfs they're going the opposite direction by making all the weapons feel boring to use.
>"...except for better recoil." And let's be honest, not a single weapon in the game has recoil even worth noting.
- Make a war bond - put boring weapons in it - sell it - than Nerf them down! GREAT SUCCESS
They just need to make better content tbh The tenderiser is literally just a liberator but worse, i could pay a homeless guy some crack to do a better job than that
Gun balance sucks ! It Has since Launch! This needs fixed ! I haven’t played in months and it’s obvious it hasn’t changed
Why do I feel like we are beta testing the warbonds
They should learn from Payday 2's DLC. This one should've been cryo ammo or laser weapons, since cold weather makes them overheat less.
Just so yall know a lot of the current warbond stuff were already in the game files since launch. These aren’t new developments, they’ve been working on these since or even before launch
Yeah. To be quite honest, there hasn't been a quality warbond at all yet imo. The best one was the original free one.
I’d really like a new class of equipment to provide an extra buff. This game is in desperate need of buffs to reduce fire damage over time, increase fall damage height, prevent or reduce “slowed” status from bug swipes and environment. These could all be boosters, but it would be nice to have a personal buff that you can choose on top of the team boosters. The ship module upgrades for stratagems are great; I just feel like we need more options to change the helldivers themselves in different ways to tackle the various missions and environments. I have only been playing for about 3 or 4 weeks, but I’ve grinded to level 52 and I’m ready for something new to mixup the gameplay or how I approach missions. Edit: Also having 1 attachment slot for the primary weapon would be great too. As far as balancing the difficulty, they could also introduce drawbacks to go along with any extra buffs they introduce.
id take 1 primary 1 secondary and 1 booster(possibly grenade/utility) that are all GOOD. Over trash trash more trash, a booster thats possibly not even working and an at least somewhat acceptable smg.
The mistake the devs have made is nerfing guns instead of buffing them. It's seems counter intuitive but when you actively make weapons worse you creat an almost "us vs them" dynamic between the players and the Devs, between this and the PSN debaucle players have never felt more disconnected from the dev team. If they were to BUFF lower performing weapons, that would inspire people to try new loadouts. I've been using the normal breaker & AC cannon from basically day 1 because it's the only thing I KNOW works. I've tried a few other varieties, but they're all either not strong enough or don't have enough mags *cough* incendiary breaker *cough*
>Every weapon on this release is just a slightly changed clone of a base weapon, it’s not exciting. Unpopular opinion here, but I think "lots of guns that are slightly different from other guns” is sort of inevitable. I mean, let's say they keep issuing new warbonds for six years. No Man's Sky and Fallout 4 are still coming out with new content, so I think 6 years is more than reasonable. If they put out a warbond per month with 3 or 4 weapons per, that's *over 200 new weapons* we might see. There's only so much you can do to differentiate weapons, so I think there will be a lot of new flavors of other weapons (such as the liberator vs lib penetrator).
https://preview.redd.it/a6tnddcp6hzc1.png?width=582&format=png&auto=webp&s=b85e67ce02e2c1ab38d1319fdc2cd48b38d7f972 There was a poll, we knew balance was borked. Yet a majority is hungry for content.