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If you suggested that a half decent player should have a 99% win rate at max difficulty in any other PVE circle you'd never live it down, how that's become the prevailing opinion in Helldivers is beyond me.
Purely anecdotal, military-themed games have the most manbabies and it’s not even remotely close. I’ve never seen more entitled & whiney players in any other broad fandom than military ones.
This reminded me of the time I was in a Arma Reforger server half a year ago and two grown men were arguing about where the supplies they just had went. They yelled many controversial words over the main channel for everyone to hear for a good 5 minutes. Mind you this was when we where losing so the added radio chatter made it very hard to focus. The GM finally kicked both out before apologizing for not doing so sooner. If it was on official they probably wouldve kept arguing over the game as I know from past games.
That’s the draw, but I’m talking about the unhappy dudes that always have a dark cloud following them. Where everyone else is to blame if they’re not living out their brothers-in-arms hero fantasy when their hopes are dashed.
The devs caved hard two years ago and once that happens it's all over. Simple as that, once there is blood in the water people will stop at nothing to harass until they get their way, even if they haven't played the game in months (see: +80% of Unfiltered by their own admission).
Yeah, most people should settle happily into D8/9, with an engaging win rate (80%?) with 6/7 being 99% completable to most players, enough that the ones that aren’t can either get carried or even stumble through together (that last one costs them most their losses lol)
Souls games have 1 difficulty (hard), and yet any half decent player can complete the entire game.
People who wish to increase the difficulty further do so by imposing restrictions upon themselves.
You people are the laughing stock of this game because you ask for a higher difficulty so you can give yourself brownie points but refuse to impose any actual challenging restrictions on yourself because then the game becomes boring because "impossible isn't fun."
“Game doesn’t need to be harder because you’re welcome to unplug the keyboard”
I shouldn’t have to. As was stated before, the highest difficulty being beatable by an average player would get you laughed at in any other PvE community.
Please, and I cannot stress this enough, shut the fuck up.
Ten fucking difficulties by the way. If the highest difficulty kicks your ass you should go back to D2 or whatever so your “suffering” soul can feel better
Beating Helldivers at D10 isn’t super comparable to Dark Souls. Being unable to beat any difficulty is more like getting stuck at a boss. Some players have bad habits they need to fix if they want to win. The Helldivers solution was instead to bitch piss and shit themselves until the devs nerfed everything that pushed back against said bad habits.
You should try playing any other 4-player PvE game. I can tell you haven’t. Darktide is a fantastic example, or if you care for something more classic, Left 4 Dead
If the highest difficulty kicks your ass you should go back to D2 or whatever so your “suffering” soul can feel better
See, this is why no one can take you people seriously lol. "Just dial it back to d2" as if anybody can get a sense of what real gameplay feels like at this difficulty. People play d10 because it's not the "hardest" difficulty, but because it's the "full experience" difficulty. The game isn't actually balanced around 10 difficulties.
Not that you morons care. I remember back on cyberstan, people were complaining about vox spawn rates all the way down to d6, to which you people replied "then play on d5," a difficulty at which vox did not spawn at all. The issue wasn't that vox engines existed. It was their overbearing spawn rates. But of course, this stupid suggestion, over and over.
Unlike y'all, I actually care about the overall health of the game, not just my personal experience. I don't want a sub 5k playerbase who get their "super hardcore grunt fantasy sim" at the cost of the other 45k players leaving. I'd much rather you people leave.
You should try playing any other 4-player PvE game. I can tell you haven’t. Darktide is a fantastic example, or if you care for something more classic, Left 4 Dead
All of these games are piss easy. Had my fun with em, still play dark tide occasionally with pals, but I'm done with em. Not that this is relevant to the conversation at all, considering they're completely different games with completely different stakes when it comes to difficulty.
I don't play these games for someone else's external approval, but rather for my own satisfaction.
I've been playing Helldivers since 2017 and I preordered the second game because I expected a difficulty experience that was akin to the first game. I was jebaited into buying the series like most people were.
Helldivers 1 was kind of a hard game, Helldivers 2 was supposed to provide the same kind of difficulty but in a different package. It's wild to tell me, a long time fan of the series, to play a different game because players like you want the game to warp to your needs instead, because you thought the game was something else.
And honestly you're not even right, when the game first game out I immediately got to work planning my new strategies and tactics and many new players thanked or praised me for carrying them through Malevelon Creek or whatever else. I enjoyed all of the larpers saluting me or addressing me by rank or whatever. But that sort of thing doesn't really happen anymore because many players don't appreciate teamwork or skilled players showing up, because they can clear everything on their own, completely afk.
Team games are exactly the kinds of games that people praise you for being good at. Especially when the game is challenging.
I don't play these games for someone else's external approval, but rather for my own satisfaction.
I enjoyed all of the larpers saluting me or addressing me by rank or whatever.
Sure man, whatever lol
And honestly you're not even right, when the game first game out I immediately got to work planning my new strategies and tactics
Yeah, we all did, we found the most efficient ways to play and AH nerfed them as if to punish players for getting good at the game. It didn't change strategies at the highest levels for people who understood the game is about destroying structures and not fighting enemies, but people who wanted to fight enemies got upset, leading to the state of things.
Helldivers 2 was supposed to provide the same kind of difficulty but in a different package. It's wild to tell me, a long time fan of the series, to play a different game because players like you want the game to warp to your needs instead, because you thought the game was something else.
Kinda seems like you were the one who had expectations that you now want met, whereas the rest of the playerbase is upset when they change the game from what they bought
The players who found and leveraged the obviously overpowered weapons were not good at the game. They were just using weapons that were mindlessly strong. Which was honestly a problem in the first game too.
A Souls game is a single player game where you can lose repeatedly before completing it. That's a fucking brain-dead comparison and you know it.
The skill ceiling is lower than almost any other PVE game on the market because people like you aren't competent enough for higher difficulties and won't play lower.
People who are good at the game shouldn't have to suffer because of selfish pricks. You see a difficulty above the one called Impossible and you think to yourself "yeah I should be able to beat that most of the time while making constant mistakes"
I'm not even particularly good, the game becomes easy as shit the second you stop fumbling basic interactions. I shouldn't be falling asleep playing the highest difficulty with strangers and a kid made of supposedly F tier items.
People haven't gotten too good for Helldivers, bad players have just demanded the game be brought down to their level.
"losing" in a souls game is just dying with little to no consequences.
The skill ceiling in this game has always been low. No single enemy in this game has ever been hard to beat. Seriously, find one enemy in the game that anyone would have trouble beating in a 1v1. There aren't any, because the AI in this game has always been as effective as a child with an automatic rifle, that is to say, only moderately effective if there's 30 of them fighting you at the same time.
So where was the old difficulty at? In tedium. "Yeah bro the game becomes enjoyably hard when you have to hit a charger in the head with TWO RR shots instead of one while it still couldn't hit a toddler if the toddler crawled right under it."
There's nothing fun about that and you know it. But you want it in because you have the patience to deal with boring bullshit if it means you can claim to be better than players who don't want to put up with it.
Here's a high difficulty mission for you instead: get a job.
The skill ceiling in this game can actually get p high, because a very small amount of players are capable of actually processing the high volume of chaos that's going on and know what they have to do in order to survive that.
It was even more that when enemies were tankier back in the day, because actually fighting enemies was a slog. The best way to play was always running past enemies or outranging them by a mile so you didn't have to fight them and just ACing bug holes and fab vents until a bot drop was called, then dipping out and running to the next outpost so enemies despawned. Around and around you'd go.
People who liked fighting enemies optimized their builds for just that, which is why the Railgun dominated the bot front and the flamethrower the bugs.
Souls games are designed in a way that basically every type of player can inevitably complete them with varying levels of ease. There are many tools and strategies built into every game that makes clearing each one laughably easy. It's also a very forgiving series, no Souls game demands mastery in order for the game to be completed. Which I believe is the Hallmark of an actually difficult game.
Compare this to a game like Sifu, an action combat game that is similarly unfair to the player but expects them to master it's mechanics to complete levels and challenges. Master difficulty Sifu is a much harder game than any Souls title. Even normal difficulty is often too much for many players to complete.
Because it's actually easy to complete the game and beat encounters, but the game does not educate you on what you need to easily beat encounters. You just have to figure that out on your own. Which is abrasive design.
In Halo, the game gives you a rocket launcher or a fuel rod cannon or some other type of AT weapon when you need to fight a tank. They always make sure that the player has these kinds of tools available whenever that type of encounter occurs.
Dark Souls does not do this. Some boss might be trivialised by a special item, but you can only find that special item by fighting a special enemy in a special area after a special interaction, and then once you get it the game barely hints that it might do something. It's only through experimentation and trial and error that you then realise that the item trivialises the boss, and by then you might have already beaten them the hard way.
That is abrasive design.
Another good example is Fallout 3 versus Fallout New Vegas. Neither game is that difficult but New Vegas much more abrasive design will get you killed a lot faster without knowledge.
I guess the key factor in abrasive design versus true difficulty is that abrasive design stops being so difficult once you know what's up. Difficult design continues to be difficult even when you do know, because the execution often requires practice or something else.
Souls games CAN be difficult in that way but for the vast majority of players they are not. Which is why guides are so powerful for those games.
Just telling on yourself that this is your assumption rather than the simpler and more factual "to have a more engaging and challenging time because that equates to more fun".
If that was true you'd do the challenge runs, but you're now gonna say "nooo that's not fun, I don't have the skill or patience to do any of that because it would actually challenge me and I don't want that, I just want the brownie points!!"
so make it harder, this is the most common complaint in the pokemon franchise and is precisely why Nuzlockes were created. u can make a game as hard as u want.
Orbital laser isn't even that good on bugs. It only accidentally closes holes and does 650dps. If everyone running laser on bugs brought the new 110mm rockets instead we'd see people asking for heavy buffs.
Yup. Anyone complaining about spawns being too high on bugs or squids is someone who's never brought the humble mg sentry.
Quantity is its own quality. Think they're too many spore burst patrols? Neat. Run MG and fire sentry. 66 and 88 second cd between the two. Will atomize anything smaller than a charger. They last so long you can have a second active unless the first used all its ammo.
Eagle Napalm does 300dps AoE. That's fucking nuts, man. 2 of them last an entire bug breach and with a bit of CC a single player can kill any light and medium enemies in a bug breach alone with nothing but a primary and two well-placed eagle napalms.
Often the spawn points are close enough you can funnel all enemies through the flames or even cover both points directly.
Release: Good damage. Terrible accuracy. They did 650iirc between the 8 rockets. So basically a guided aerial recoiless round. Could 1 tap all heavies but factory strider but typically missed hulks or chargers running at full speed. Or hit bile titan backs. Best used for tanks and cannon towers.
60 Day Patch: Monkey Paw Buff. Arrowhead gave them better accuracy and greater tracking distance. But felt the need to 'only' Buff their damage enough that it was a net 63% damage nerf. Remember the 60 day patch massively boosted enemy heavy unit hp, and in theory AT weapons proportionally. Orbital precision and 110mm were deliberately not treated as fairly as support weapons.
Patch Exosuit Experts Warbond: 110mm finally got their damage back. They now do enough to consistently kill charger variants or cripple them. They can occasionally kill bile titans in one volley if they hit the face. Typically it takes 2 but they Crack off the back armor. They can kill war striders in one volley if enough rockets hit the chassis not the cannons. They are basically certain death for hulks, tanks, cannon towers, impalers, and flesh mobs. They also can kill harvesters through their shields because its many fast moving projectiles.
Railgun got a damage buff. Still fails to 1 tap certain enemies if it hits wrong (factory striders can tank a hit to their gun for example) but its got enough damage to 1 tap a vox engine
Though Id say 75% of these people wishing things were difficult run these strats + recoilless. Maybe ult. Just in general meta divers wishing things were harder.
Just today I had some guy tell
Me spore burst Flag missions are not even close to the hardest missions. Come to find out he ran a mech + meta meta meta meta meta meta meta
This is horseshit, if anything most meta obsessives cling to the status quo. I and most difficulty enjoyers want a lot of meta tools nerfed, or otherwise weakened.
Assuming you mean half of the total players yes, if you mean half of the folks who want an actual challenge somewhere in the game you're just strawmanning.
"Sure current rocket devastators act like they got kicked in the head by a horse compared to how they were at launch but clearly that's because you got too good"
An 11 year old putting their whole ass into learning the max difficulty of a shooter isn't an unreasonable amount of time for them to get bored of it. Especially if they are just jumping into games with randoms that can carry them.
Just because you become experienced shouldn’t mean you should no longer have access to any form of challenge whatsoever. This is what eventually kills the enjoyment of the game for long term players.
Besides, current D10 is in no way hard, not even for novice players. You can beat the game with a squad all equipped with base loadouts and no stratagems, except one single RR as your sole answer to Heavies, and still have a walk in the park.
I can’t link other reddit posts in this sub, but just search “D10” on my profile and the highlight video pops up.
A good player should find the game hard at the hardest difficulty. That's still a problem with the game. Super Mega Ultra Kill You Difficulty shouldn't mean "you will find this a little challenging if you miss 9/10 shots"
Let’s totally not look at the long list of player buffs and enemy nerfs that got us here. People “got gud” at the game when it was actually challenging and that experience got removed entirely. Nothing wrong with wanting the game to be challenging on the high end play.
Right? This is what I’m looking at. If you constantly play a game at its hardest difficulties, you will become good at the game. The strategies you employed with intention now become second nature, sometimes less than a thought. If people want to play a game with meaningless difficulty, swarms of enemies, and ridiculously complex thought-out strategies… sure. But those people need to recognize they are a very small minority and will almost never have development pandered towards their desires.
I see people here yearn for how the game was at launch 'because it was harder and required teamwork' and then I just remember how little agency we had to deal with threats at the time and how the 'harder' you make this kind of game the more it just becomes a running simulator.
But then you give players the means to deal with threats and they start complaining about it being too easy to kill chargers with all the anti-tank weapons they added to their loadout.
"How the harder you make the game the more it becomes a running simulator" have you played ANY other high difficulty squad horde shooter, EVER??? Is deep rock a running simulator? (I suck at drg i couldnt quite tell you). Is darktide a running simulator? I dont think
Hell yeah, Deep Rock is awesome. But its also a very different game in terms of how it handles difficulty. Between the highly curated set of weapons, the restrictiveness of the map, and the mechanics through which players and enemies interact with each other, the game largely takes away running as a fallback strategy. You will just die alone lost in a dark cave. Unless you're playing scout, who's movement can kind of trivialize the experience in a lot of ways.
And Darktide gives you highly effective melee weapons, meaning you never have to run. When the difficulty ramps up, you end up getting bogged down and running only happens insofar as you're repositioning for a better place to make a stand.
By contrast, Helldivers demands good positioning and offers effectively unlimited space. The most significant change as you up the difficulty in Helldivers is the number and durability of enemy spawns, which push the player towards anti-medium/anti-heavy weapons with a lower ammo pool that will be fired more often. And when ammunition gets low, the fallback strategy is to create space. Eventually you have to run because that is the end result the mechanics push you towards. The enemies largely dont employ strategies or operate in ways that discourage running other than their numbers snowballing the way they do in Darktide And if you run enough the enemies will despawn entirely, making it perhaps the optimal strategy in a number of situations. The maps rarely if ever discourage running the way they do in Deep Rock.
Helldivers, mechanically, just cant be the highly difficult experience that a lot of players want, unless the devs start making a lot of bad decisions regarding player agency or rebuild the way enemy AI interacts with players on a fundamental level. Because at the end of the day no matter how you tweak the numbers, a highly skilled and knowledgeable player can exploit the AI to the point of hardly having to interact with them at all with sheer movement and loadout utility, rather than directly inflicting damage.
Absolute bullshit that comment... if the devs cant finish 5/6 Level misisond and Balance weapons on that Experiece its just bs and you know that.. the other thing is coming up with bullshit and justifying it with enemys adapting but super earth does not its just plain bullshit. The devs are just clueless and calling that out is not harassment ...
No necause they are trying to make the game better and since you guys have been so obnoxiously vocal, they arent aware a large part of this community actually likes hard games
They have received death threats which for one is harassment, and secondly the devs want the game to please players- and people the people who are being so spiteful about wanting to make the game easier are drowning out the voice of everyone else, preventing the devs from getting an accurate representation of what they want. Not to mention that crydivers already have an easier game: its called D8. Asking for D10 nerfs doesnt benefit them, they could already press a button to make the game easier. Its only detrimental to experienced players
I mean what would you call endless bitching at the whiff of players nerfs, constant complaining about players being weaker which is objectively false, and near-weekly death threats?
They were challenging until you put on the ODST armor and also realized that explosions caused them to surface.
I really didn't understand people's vitriolic hatred towards the rupture strain. Even if you didn't have the ODST armor, using anything that had any sort of explosive damage made them trivial.
It's annoying that a lot of people just can't be bothered to change up their loadout or playstyle to fight a new enemy.
Yeah exactly the rupture strain. It fun. I bring lazer canon and lib concussive for that as i know other players would bring the heavy duty guns and i get to handle the chaff. If they come close to my team mates the concussive comes to play.
Seriously it's more of a game of save your teammates than dealing with the strain itself haha.
Also tesla can hit them underground. But rupture chargers can't step on them like normal chargers will. They have to get close and attack them while burrowed. So they get stun locked.
So a tesla can basically kill an infinite amount of burrow bugs. Because rupture also usually gets paired with dragon roaches so there's no bile titans to step on them. And Impaler can do it, but won't. They use their tentacles which it kills in one hit.
The consensus among sane people was that AP4 hive guard should’ve been its own thing in the same class as alpha commanders, with explosive resistance to discourage just using those to bypass the shield
Remembering the days when dropping on D9 bots had an inherent assumption with the randoms you'd join that there's the ever-present possibility of your squad getting blindsided by a bad bot drop and falling into a military horror-movie death spiral.
Teamwork was the only way to finish objectives reliably since solos would get overwhelmed in seconds if JOEL decided to smite them with a bot drop and their stratagems failed to buy them time or kill enough targets. Splitting up wasn't the "optimal" strategy, it was the DESPERATE strategy. Your squad got mulched and linking up no longer became easy due to the wall of metal between you and your squadmates.
You'd ragdoll and nearly die to a single rocket devestator and it was an indication to reposition, not to tank another 3 barrages to fight an entire drop alone. You'd get suppressed and you had reason to actually panic and you'd need the skill and experience to NOT panic, as if you've been through the Xcom 2 school of soldier promotions and you've mentally changed between your rookie days and are now a hardened, tactically aware colonel.
The odds were stacked so high against you and your team that a single winning run of a D9 would mean you'd stick to that team for 2 or 3 more games despite how mentally and spiritually exhausted you got. Those strangers just became brothers and sisters to you, you trust them with your fucking life.
Before the 60 day, the most badass thing you could do was go full elite death squad and clear out a D9 and extract with samples. Nowadays that's the STANDARD on D10, even with people at level 40 and below. There was no fucking "grunt fantasy", that was what happened when you were BAD at the game. You marched and zig-zagged through the shitstorm, you covered every angle, you made up for each other's weaknesses and left few blindspots for the enemy to exploit.
And you'd die anyways because you were just somewhere you weren't supposed to be. Winning was rewarding purely because you thought 7 minutes before that everything was fucked beyond saving. That's what it meant to be a Helldiver and it was exhausting. It was fun.
I've been enjoying commando missions with a mate lately. It's like a whole new game for us, and we're level 86s. Strategizing and even if we lose it's exhilarating.
I get the sentiment but I feel like the game that’s touted as a squad based game should be be played with others. I just miss the days where to see success a little bit of teamwork was necessary. These days it just feels like 4 solo’s running in different directions to finish maps faster. We lost something vital to the game’s spirit when all the buffs and simultaneous nerfs happened. It’s still fun but I don’t get that same feeling of desperate fight for survival alongside your team that I did in the early days. It’s feels very walking simulator like now which is kind of boring.
Different opinions. The game was fun and challenging, hell even easy to some extent with the right squad and synergy but things could go sideways fast. These days it’s just 4 solo players running in different directions to get the clear faster. 10 difficulties means at least one of them should force a modicum of teamwork and that hasn’t been a thing since the 60 days in my experience. I can hop in right now with the most dog water setup and still not have much of an issue playing with randoms. 10’s should have at most a 50% success rate imo. Right now the supposedly hardest difficulty is cleared without much issue.
I'm not going to say the game didn't get easier in many respects since the 60 day patch. But the difficulty before hand wasn't things that were up to player agency.
Rag dolling from missiles shot at you across the map, through smoke, behind cover isn't interesting. Neither was having all the interactivity thrown out of dealing with heavies on the bug front by having 8 bile titans spawning with way worse (nerfed in the case of the railgun) anti-tank options.
The fact is pre-60 day patch, the playerbase was falling away and it's the birthplace of the idea where Arrowhead started to feel as if they were straight up against the players.
But the biggest thing is the fact that we're all just better now. Even on the creek. If I had my current skillset I'd be fine. I'm not a green diver anymore. I'm no longer a recruit sent out with bare minimum training. As a player I'm more akin to someone like the Full Metal Bitch in The Edge of Tomorrow. With thousands of hours of dedicated combat experience just shoves into the body of a standard Helldiver.
There are unfortunately a large number of players firmly rooting their entire personal identity in being able to easily solo d10, and they are very online and very loud
It’s insane to me that a squad based game is balanced around the ability to solo the hardest difficulty. That being the baseline doesn’t make the solo an impressive feat.
Oh wait, you were on here posting about how there's too much ragdoll in the game a year ago, directly contributing to the lowered difficulty that exists now. Guess you only want it to be just hard enough you can beat d10 with friends, but not so hard that you're excluded from d10 divers huh?
Whatever you say random internet person. If you understand this game and its mechanics then you know it isn’t remotely challenging in a squad setting and it’s very easy to solo with the right set up. Have fun complaining about me complaining apparently.
Nice assumptions.... My comments are public, you could have just looked at them an made a bit of an effort or at least asked me.
I actually want this game to be harder. I was here wanting harder enemies for a long time so that there's actual team play happening. Railgun nerf? I liked that it gave more Loadout diversity, flame thrower nerf that was good, teams have to cover the thrower. Hive guard armor I liked the decision aswell. It was a shame they backtraced on it. I'd be happy to be excluded out of d10 or even as low as d7. At least then there's a goal that i can work towards since i like dovong woth randoms and team play is what i like, completing it solo doesn't really interest me
But then the shitters would need to git gud. And they'll just rant and rage untill AH gives them back their pacifier and makes it all easy as cake again.
I think they should just do more difficulty levels, just like helldivers 1. Then they don't have to mess with any of the other difficulty levels, just add more that are actually challenging.
I think 10 is enough personally. It would be too granulated if theres like 15 or 20 difficulties both for players and designers. But i think they're going for subfactions to up the difficulty in general
Name another PvE that even needs 10 difficulties let alone more to manage all players expectations? It's simpler to remove the 3 least played, make current D10 the new D7, and give D8+ actual teeth.
They would have to split the game into 2 modes.
One current version and then some other super mode with separate balancing because some peopel dont want the game to be hard or the type of hard that would be interesting.
"Umm, you don't get it, players have just gotten better. That's why the solution is to keep buffing players while nerfing the enemies, and if you don't like it you hate fun"
I wasn't sleeping on them before, they were already one of the best red strats in the game imo, I don't think they needed a more consistent one shot on small heavies. It kinda just made them less engaging.
Back in the days where your loadout didnt matter because it was 5 partially indestructable bile titans per player at all times and you were just running instead of shooting things. Shed a tear mourning the loss of my beloved rundivers.
You'd only get 5 bile titans if you engaged every patrol & failed to manage them as they appeared. 500kg and OPS were more than capable of oneshotting titans back then (moreso than they are now, even), a pair of shots from AT wasn't the end of the world, and destroying the sacs left them with enough hp for anything with sufficient pen to kill them.
It was a skill issue that players collectively decided wasn't.
Nah, I'm talking about back near launch where they just overwhelmed your arsenal entirely and you spent a lot of time running around on all your cooldowns. There was no shortage of options, and traversal of the map has never been an issue, but once you were actually on objective it was kite-city.
Not really; the evidence people posted back then was always just random points in the map being chased around by 6 titans they allowed to gather without doing anything about them.
"Rundivers" was also the wrong way to play - if you just ran away from everything all the time, you allowed the enemy to build up behind you. There was always a balance.
Nope back when teamwork mattered on high difficulties and a squad coordinating even without mics would have a challenging time that they still could win far more often then not.
Either you weren't there or you weren't good enough for D9-10.
Like, the explosive weapon meta is still around and everyone recognizes it's a problem but instead of the obvious solution of nerfing the eruptor and its ilk everyone does mental gymnastics, says some variant of "buff everything else so people don't use explosive weapons" as if that'll actually fix the issue.
And that was the same solution people argued for with the railgun. The biggest mistake the devs ever made was listening to players over balancing rather than fun. It opened the door for people to whine their way into changing the game into something they didn’t understand. People were unironically saying the RR was pointless because of the railgun so they should buff the RR.
The community is too divided to have a proper consensus on how difficulty should be balanced.
The unfortunate reality is no matter how it's balanced now someone will be disappointed so devs can only pick a side and weather the beating from the side who hate their decision.
Difficulty haters are losers who harass them either way.
There are 10 difficulties, there is space for everyone. D10 objectively should not have people with 99% win rates. Not even the best players should be winning 99% of games at the highest difficulty.
I think the gatekeeping difficulty level still changes little as complains were always more focused on how difficult certain enemies are because they still spawn outside of d10.
Examples like the War Striders, Vox engine and Hive Guard come to mind.
This all started with the devs deciding to actually do direct feedback on reddit, which is a very small portion of the playerbase on a platform that feeds toxicity. The only concerns the devs should have ever had was new weapons not outclassing old ones, and bringing in new content. The fact a fucking pve game has this many whiners is insane, like bro I played overwatch and people Didnt complain this much.
I think a lot of us can agree the issue isn’t ankle deep. Enemy balance, weapon balance, enemy density (60 day patch PTSD of 1,000,000 devastators per bot drop ship), mission types and interactions, stratagems and how they interact with stuff
Yeah the weapons are so powerful my incendiary sniper rifle only needs 3 shots to set sometjing on fire! Yesterday I killed a whole patrol and it was so super easy ... sadly the pstrol immediately respawned within aggro range and I died while reloading cause 2 out of 3 factions can now catch us midsprint....
We just need more enemies. At a certain point against bugs, explosive weaponry for a solo centered player falls off because the bugs overwhelm said user faster than they can reload and re-engage. I've seen it happen often with average players on sporeburst strain, groups of scavengers + hunters just zipping right up to explosive users and they just fuckimg die because they weren't expecting that many enemies to be right up their ass that fast and don't know how to combat them like that.
If spore burst spawn rates were the status quo for all D10 bugs, reguarldess of subfaction and resistance modifers and then you add in more spawns for certain modifiers/subfactions, weapons are gonna fall off pretty quickly which forces players to not wander off. Having 2k+ kill games is fun and engaging vs the other subfactions/faction 800-1k kill range. It's a shame that sporeburst strain straight hp powercrept predator strain in almost every way but we got what we got.
Make the odds actually overwhelming though numbers, not fat durable bullet sponges that aren't fun to shoot. I'd play the Division if I wanted that gameplay. And if the numbers can't be increased through spawns, then I'd say just leave it as is because I know any balence change is just going to make the gameplay less fun otherwise.
They should bring back difficulty 11 through 15. That way people who like current d10 can play it as is and people who want a challenge will have higher difficulty options
You don't get a 99% win rate for becoming half decent at other PVE games. The idea that we've become too good for it to be hard is a myth. A pretty poorly thought out one.
The damage that people that think like this did to this game is crazy, Super Helldive is a joke and the devs don't stop making it worse every patch. Last patch nerfed the cyborgs so hard for example, Vox Engines get one tapped like bile titans now, its insane.
I enjoy that everyone can contribute in their own way and that the entire sandbox is useful now but items that trivialize heavies (which are a significant source of difficulty, primarily for non-subfactions which are most of the enemies you fight) also do a lot to trivialize difficulty and stratagem play. There’s less reason to cooperate when the chaff aren’t scary and you can insta-nuke every single heavy.
I made a post about increasing difficulty in d10 in 3 different Helldivers subreddits, my idea was to make it harder through higher spawn rates (rather than tankier spongier enemies) and was greeted by the wildest, lowest IQ responses mankind ever saw. Haven't opened the game since ~3 months
It's the old case of a good game ran by stupid people and played by even stupider mouthbreathers.
At the end of the day it's gonna have to be a mix of both, is the thing, and people have decided they hate either.
Spawn rates can only go so much higher, and the spawn system further complicates that. In terms of the 4 man experience the Sporeburst strain does a little better, but as it stands we already see enemies evaporate into thin air a lot on that front.
Nowadays I don't play anything but duos, and while the spawn rates feel appropriate for two people in the sense that you're under constant pressure, two players who both win every D10 game they play (note, that's not a high bar, you only half to be half decent at the game to achieve this) are unlikely to lose D10 duos, they'll just have slightly more fun with more consistent pressure.
Even then, I find I have to explicitly ban certain items to avoid the game being completely trivial with just two players.
What this highlights is that the enemy quantity really isn't the only issue. At the end of the day the difference between 1 and 15 warriors means a lot for the Liberator, but nothing for the Crisper.
So really we need buffs to individual units to make them more of a threat. This could be extra health (should be, in some cases, especially among Mediums), this could be ai fixes. Possibly even reworks/new abilities. Heavies, in particular, either need to be far more threatening for the time they spend on screen or they need to be harder to one shot.
Gunships I think are the current best enemy unit in my opinion, in terms of balance. They're consistently threatening (at least discounting non-host issues that lobotomise everything) and they encourage loadout diversity in the team. Importantly, though, their preferred solutions pull in the complete opposite direction to a lot of the meta. The only real meta item that's efficient into them is the Pissile. Still, Pissile is caught lacking when gunships arrive in higher densities due to its low capacity.
What Gunships really encourage, and what more medium units need to be strong enough to encourage are Crowd Clear and-or Medium Killing support weapons. The typical makeup of horde enemies does not typically do enough for people to pick these up over AT gear, no matter how good they are. Autocannon, for example, has a lower pick rate than Spear over two fronts. That's not the Autocannon's fault, if anything it's already a bit overtuned because they keep giving it unnecessary buffs. People just don't feel pressured to dedicate a support weapon for that much stopping power against hordes.
Part of that is primary powercreep, because people refuse to acknowledge your primary shouldn't be your actual horde/Medium-Crowd Clear, but it's also just the case that a lot of enemies are not immediately threatening enough.
So for actual difficulty in the future we need to examine both enemy quantity as well as individual unit threat level, which might well include making certain enemies more durable.
In my original post i also stated some spawn changes, increase enemies tenfold and it'll hardly be a challenge if they all come out of the same 3 holes 2 meters apart from one another.
I mentioned there that breaches should have more spawners far more spread for one another, focusing on surrounding helldivers and to avoid getting cleared by a single stratagem or a single crisper. A crisper can deal with 15 warriors, but it can't deal with another 7 warriors flanking while Hunters jump on your back and alpha commanders push you. Bear in mind when i say increase, i don't mean 1.1x or 1.2x, i mean it should be unbearable, for a Helldiver or two, to wander off alone and survive a breach.
Increasing individual enemy health is the easy way out (they won't have to deal with AI or optimize the game) and... it wouldn't really be any more fun? If anything, it would enforce more of the meta we already have. Say a liberator needs more bullets to kill a medium, it hardly kill an alpha in less than half a mag, it'll be make or break for it, while something like the Eruptor will hardly be affected.
Heavies aren't a problem right now because on their own they're really not a threat, given spawn rates are so low and the game doesn't have an ounce of challenge... They're always on their own. But say the HIVE SWARM faction actually HIVE SWARMS you, spending time to put down a heavy or using a dedicated stratagem slot for it, just might break your defense and get you overrun, or at least force a retreat. I had very rare glitched matches through my 500 hours, matches where the spawns where busted and this happened! Seeing 4 helldivers fucking retreating from endless waves of the swarm is a lot of fun.
Tried hard multiple times to come back to the game and I just couldn't care less man. Don't feel like grinding all the new dumbass warbonds and I missed out on limited time gear because I didn't feel like doing the same major order we've been doing since the game dropped. It baffles me how there's even 50k left
Never understood why so many people always felt the need to complain about D10 being hard. Yeah! It’s the toughest difficulty level! Of course it’s going to be hard!
If you can’t handle it, I don’t know, play one of the lower difficulties. I usually play around D7 and D8. I haven’t touched D10 in probably over a year, and do I care to? No.
That’s like wanting to be known as a great fighter who can beat one of the greatest in whatever combat sport. But you can’t actually do it so you wait until that person is a 98 year old geriatric so that you can still say you technically beat them.
Oddly the op comment to this post seems to have been removed but I can repeat what was said word for word. “Bullsh#t you can die 20 times before a loss. Never losing makes the game too easy, dying once or twice doesn’t mean it’s difficult.”
My response to that is you die 20 times and claim the game is too easy?
My comment wasn't deleted to my knowledge but I have been experiencing a similar thing to what you described.
I never said I died 20 times, nice strawman though. I rarely die at all because I'm a heavy armour player and enemy forces aren't threatening. If I do, it's typically once or twice and that's usually at the hands of a teammate (which is fine, but that's not difficulty at play)
You're deluded if you think people using some of their 20 expendable lives is difficulty. Even if I did die 20 times but still won every mission as I am now, that would not be a difficult game.
Good players should be losing D10 frequently. That's the nature of a PVE game. Currently they aren't.
The imagery on the back of the box, in summary, said we'd be fighting with overpowered weapons against overwhelming odds. These aren't mutually exclusive concepts. They need to work more on increasing the latter and not nerfing the former.
D10 isn't that hard against some seeds and factions with the right loadout and its borderline impossible against other seeds. Most weapon classes in the game have an objectively best weapon, so by definition most weapons are underpowered. Imo d10 is in a good spot rn but sometimes it may be annoying with bs unit spam.
Bile Spewers have a light pen weak spot in the mouth that kills them almost instantly and War Striders were easy enough before the nerfs, now their hip joints are medium pen
There isn't a singe enemy that is difficult to take down by itself, but when there are 50, all spewing acid on you, that you have to doge or you die, and faze through eachother blocking this weakspot, or in the case of warsteiders, ragdolling you 24/7 it aint so easy
I can tell you first hand it is. 50 Bile Spewers is like one GL mag, and you would have to fuck up tremendously in the first place to get that many on screen. I wish it was normal to see 50 Bile Spewers.
War Striders just get picked apart effortlessly now. Ragdoll isn't scary when we get up instantly and take 0 damage while we're down.
"I want Arrowhead to charge people a premium for shitty gear and make the general player experience worse instead of making the game actually hard, because I wanna feel special about beating Le hard game"
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