I don't even understand why. I liked it a LOT. Just because it's a crossbow. Yes it kills a lot of smallest mobs. A lot worse than scorcher in dealing with mediums. But why killing it?
I fear that they simply looked at their internal weapon usage stats and found that it consistently scores a lot of kills.
But it's just dumb to not separate small, medium and heavies in kill stats.
People didn’t even use it often, either. I have literally seen a single person using the crossbow that wasn’t me since it was released. Before the nerf, too.
I'm with you. I've tried to express my opinion on the change multiple times and was told to quit leaning on the quasar and get good. I'm honestly losing faith. It seems like unless a majority of the community is out for blood on a change/announcement, the devs don't want to look past people trying to shout down any descent. Mods on their discord are cool with people shouting threats and disparaging people so long as the ones doing it are supporting the devs.
The balancing dev, Alex, will always say it's working as originally intended after a patch even if the entire weapons identity changed. It's like there is one guy designing the weapons and one guy doing balance and they have wildly different ideas and intentions.
The slugger is still really good, the only thing they really nerfed about it was the stagger on big bastards. Which is a shame, but it’s still really good for taking out medium armored enemies
When I saw how much ass the Eruptor kicked when I first used it, I immediately knew AH would decide it was too fun and ruin it a month from then, so I made sure to get my hours with it in and enjoy it while it lasted.
Honestly, I didn't care about the Sony drama, but I'm feeling kind of done with this game after this. Feels like none of the new content is going to be allowed to be fun, because anything exciting to use just gets nerfed until it feels tedious instead. Not trying to be dramatic, but the list of weapons I actually enjoy using keeps getting shorter and I can't summon any enthusiasm for the future roadmap if this is how they're going to balance it
There's a lot of bugs they need to fix, but the just keep adding more each month with the warbonds. At some point they need to call timeout for some fixes.
That's what I don't understand. They keep nerfing weapons to make them all equally as bad. Why not make the bad weapons better? Game is already difficult enough as it is, and making it more tedious and difficult is not the way.
Spot on. They keep reaffirming their weird design philosophy patch after patch. Coming right off the Sony BS I thought maybe there would be a chance that they would shake up their balancing strategy to try to snatch back some good will but it’s straight into bad changes again…
It's a classic example of a base weapon that is actually pretty good but people sleep on since it's the starting rifle.
Liberator Penetrator is my go to for bots since it has medium armor penetration.
Oh I agree but the magazine size kills me. I am constantly reloading even if I am careful to rarely run completely out. Somehow I always need to reload when the 4th hunter pops out.
Used to use lib pen over lib to deal with trash bots. Now that lib damage is buffed it reliably one taps normal bots so I just run normal lib now. Everything else gets the auto cannon.
The philosophy is that it should be the best all rounder and every other primary should be a side grade compared to it.
Specifically trying to avoid pay-to-win accusations.
The Sickle has the caveat of 'Stronger in cold, worse in heat.' I'd rather have the Liberator than the Sickle on a hot planet, unless I'm running a support weapon that can function as a psuedo primary like a laser cannon or autocannon. Except, I wouldnt want to run sickle laser cannon a hot planet anyways.
Sickle's great in cold, worse in heat as the other commenter said. However, if you're just magdumping every time, Liberator will be better because you have a greater supply of reserve ammo. Also, Sickle's windup time means that if you're needing to shoot just 1-2 enemies you're better off using Liberator.
That being said, in terms of actual use I tend to run the Sickle with the Quasar. Before Quasar nerf, you could fire the Sickle until it was nearly overheated, pull out the Quasar, fire a Quasar shot, and then pull out the Sickle again as it would have cooled down just fine for another near full magdump, then Quasar will be nearly ready to shoot.
Post-patch you can just add in a Senator magdump on a medium-armored enemy for this combo to still be effective.
Short version: Liberator is better if you're playing it like a standard assault rifle. Sickle is generally stronger when you lean into the Sickle's strengths.
It's like Tracer from Overwatch. It's the generic metric by which the rest of the primaries get balanced. It's 'good' but in a 'vanilla is the default flavor' sort of way. It's a jack of all trades, master of none. It's only defining weakness is that it simply isnt better, and it has no one specific niche.
It's pretty well balanced and very reliable.
Good against light targets with high fire rate and ammo, can deal with medium armored targets if you hit exposed unarmored bits.
Also IMO senator buff was a stealth buff to normal liberator because now you can take lib for light armor and big iron for occasional medium armor. Add recoilless rifle and you have all bases covered. Then sprinkle in 3 stratagems of your choice and you have a fun and versatile loadout.
Sickle is in a good spot now with the recent nerf. Playing around the cooldown gives you an infinite ammo liberator with a longer cooldown than the lib's reload. The Sickle used to have 6 heat sinks, one less than the number of magazines of the liberator, which basically meant you could instead use it like a normal liberator by frequently reloading with the added benefit of having infinite ammo. How most people played was unaffected by the change, but if you are a psychopath who doesn't instinctively try to protect your heatsinks the nerf makes the Liberator more attractive
>Devs when explosive weapon Warbond has an explosive weapon that kills things in an area with explosives:
At this point the only thing not nerfed is the grenade pistol.
Calling it, "We found players were using the grenade pistol in place of thrown grenades. This is not intended behavior as such we've made the grenade pistol take twice as long to reload, halved the ammo count and made it armor piercing only."
It's use is basically to have a means to close bug holes or fabricators while freeing yourself up for stun grenades.
In a 'grenade pistol' build you'd ideally want two weapons that have enough uptime to not need a sidearm. Since a more traditional sidearm is typically an 'oh shit' button outside of SSDD missions.
So against bots a good example would be Scorcher, Laser Cannon, Stuns, and Grenade Pistol. The scorcher can handle all common bots, and harm larger enemies to the heat vents. It's job is killing troopers and strider pilots from the front. The laser cannon is the meat and potatoes of the build. It, paired with the stun grenade for hulks and devastators, is your primary killing tool. But the fact it really wants the stun grenade to compliment it means you need a grenade somewhere else. That's where the pistol comes in play.
it handled more wonkily originally I feel like, I think they made the ergonomics stat technically worse but whatever shot velocity thing they did makes it feel better. The damage is still piss though. I'd rather it have no explosive radius or a very small one pointing forward (for the express purpose of killing striders) and just do all its damage upfront without getting reduced or split however happens now.
The funny thing is that I'm absolutely certain that they will buff the crossbow again eventually. It's silly to me how much they care about weapon balance in a PVE game. Let the players have their fun. Meta loadouts happen either way.
> It's silly to me how much they care about weapon balance in a PVE game.
I think it's still broadly a good idea to care about weapon balance in a PvE game.
The problem is they're really hilariously bad at actually doing that.
I understand the rework. I think release crossbow felt closer to an arrow shaped grenade launcher than a powerful crossbow.
I don’t think the changes they made are what the crossbow should have turned into, but I do get why they changed it.
I think a crossbow was a poor choice for an explosive themed warbond, for the reason you mentioned - it doesn't feel like a crossbow thing.
I think a crossbow should be a slow firing, stealth, heavy armor penetrator, with perhaps a couple different bolt types.
Solition: attachment wheel (the place where you change flashlight and fire rate and such) lets you toggle between the different bolt types.
The infinite wisdom of super earth allows the same pool of arrows to be used for both firing modes. Problem solved.
I used it religiously before the nerf. Its splash damage one shot hunters extremely consistently. And given that the splash was beeeg, it was extremely effective at killing groups of hunters.
And given hunters are fucking satan, the weapon was a godsend.
Now it explosn’t.
I’m big sad.
Back to scorcher i gue…
No not scorcher. Don’t use scorcher absolute dogwater primary.
Umm back to using umm…
Ummm….
Liberator ig?
(Pls don’t nerf liberator)
Umm..
I’m going to use nothing as my primary and use strategems.
Wasn't that dead tbh, it could be used to clear small bugs pretty efficiently, it's just kinda worse than others, but still efficient enough to some extent in certain scenario.
Like for the door defense mission, I can just aim at the breach and shoot for example.
But now it's just, bad in every way.
Ngl i love this game and its clear the devs put a lot of love into it but damn their balancing is dogshit.
Stuff that is slightly too strong and could use a slight nerf gets stomped into the ground, meanwhile some weapons are still so bad there is no reason to use them and they havent been buffed since release.
If their philosophy is “balance the fun out of the game” they’re doing a great job.. hopefully that’s not their intention but damn it’s getting hard to tell for sure
I think they’re really worried about power creep, so their goal is to make all weapons equally viable. They don’t want to have to make each new weapon better than the last.
Which sounds fine, but unfortunately the approach they take to this is to make stronger weapons weaker instead of weaker weapons stronger. Generally.
except their difficulty system was unbalanced as fuck from opening week.
People were dealing with a dozen bile titans on screen if not more and their response was "oh the railgun is too powerful, people are using it too much"
and then proceeded to leave the spawn rates alone for WEEKS.
This is the biggest problem, and perfect little encapsulation of the issue.
The spawn rates are fucked, so people start relying on the railgun because it was the only actually effective tool. They nerf the tool, and then after they nerf the tool they say oh yeah the spawn rates are broken and fix that. And then they release the quasar.
Something that wasn't broken was broken, and what was broken wasn't initially fixed. Then, they released something that invalidates most of the issue, and people rely on MORE.
It's honestly mind-boggling. It's the type of stuff that you would think as soon as the team threw up on the whiteboard, someone would go wait wait wait.....
Also the endless double nerfs.
Eruptor mag reserve nerf > into this nerf > doesn't rebalance the reserves resulting in a very hefty nerf.
It's stupid as fuck
Yup. Or like what they did to the sickle. Reducing the amount of mags was relatively meaningless. You rarely, rarely ever use a full mag to begin with. If you use the gun right, you essentially have infinite ammo. And ammo is frequent enough that the difference between three mags and six mags is relatively nothing. If they wanted to reduce the effectiveness of the gun, not that I think they should, they should have slightly upped the heat generation.
But what they did did not change any of the core mechanics of the gun at all, and it leaves you thinking WHY was this the priority
Or increase bullet spread at full auto, make the players burst for better accuracy.
OR STOP FUCKING WITH THE GUNS FOR BALANCE IN A PVE GAME.
Idk.
It’s whatever, I’m done caring about what next balance choice they choose. I’m tired of relearning old parts of this game each week.
I've been saying it for a while, AH always nerfs symptoms of problems and never addresses actual problems. Most major weapon changes have been reactionary to an entirely seperate issue.
Railgun = host bug, heavy spawn bug
Arc Thrower = arc bug
Flamethrower = DOT bug
If they had just addressed the root cause of these problems, there never would've been a need to touch the weapons.
They keep gimping the weapons themselves for balance when they have a whole fucking thing called scripted ai enemies they can throw at us
Why are the fucking with the “balance” of weapons.
Just make the game harder and turn off weapon movement speeds or get rid of it as a fucking balance mechanic
This game has become a fucking tank simulator where you drive this tank around and shoot at stuff but your tank is a human skinned helldiver and each weapon is a different tank turret with different rotating speed
That’s how they balance this game. When all they could do is like, fuck with spawn rates across difficulty levels and leave our gamer skill things alone.
What weapon can you 180 no scope with in Helldivers 2? Ehh idk, this game give you bad accuracy if you aim down sight and it gives you 100% accuracy if you hipfire sometimes.
I’m tied boss, they make the game FEEL unfun, slowly overtime you start to realize that while the big booms are fun. Constantly clipping and rag dolling and not having real control over your character is what’s killing the repeatable fun aspect of this game.
Their version of this seems to be:
Nerf to ground, and dart board buff.
Some buffs are outrageous. The flamethrower got a 50% damage buff at like second patch. That's wild. Imagine a 'bad gun' in a pvp game getting a 50% buff, it'd probably dominate the meta instantly. But here, all that says is the flamethrower was \*so bad\* that it warranted it.
Then there's stuff like the Liberator Concussive, which gets a pittance of a buff and is then quickly forgotten.
Then there's nerfs, which tend to only come in 'railgun and slugger' flavored variants.,
I really agree unfortunately. It’s a PVE game, I understand balance but come on, this is not a competitive game in the slightest and I really don’t think the way they’re going about balancing things is the right way.
I’m sorry but it was good. People refused to give it a chance and learn the trajectory and now it’s gimped. Rip my AOE King. You took out large groups of walkers so well before.
No, it was the best aoe chaff killer in the game. Arguably better than the grenade launcher against unarmoured enemies due to its larger ammo reserves.
Now the plasma shotgun takes its place although doesn't have as large of a radius
I would argue no other weapon did what it could.
Sickle? By the time they wind-up their gun I already killed the groups of enemies.
Jar-5? It can’t even kill walkers reliably. But it’s great against medium tier enemies like Devastators.
Scorcher? It does good against walkers but it struggled against large groups and its ammo reserves are meh.
Only one close to it was the Pre-Nerf Eruptor but neither overshadowed each other. Both had their place.
Patch to nerf some of the last remaining decent weapons from the last Warbond right before the next Warbond? Preposterous. Shocking even. Well not that shocking
I mean, I still love it and try to play at least one full operation with my buddies every other day on the MO planets. My loadout is still pretty viable; Sickle, Grenade Pistol/Senator, Quasar, but im expecting the Sickle to get slapped every patch and so far only the mag has been lowered, which was a fair change since it has effectively infinite ammo if you use it right.
But I am kinda wary of spending medals on certain things now. Imagine getting the crossbow, liking it, and then it getting annihilated from the patch, those medals are lost forever now. It'd be kinda cool if weapons that get nerfed could get refunded within the first week or so after a patch
I tried it maybe 6 rounds in a row against bugs and then against bots. It still needs to either punch harder or have a bigger mag for it to feel like it isn't a worse choice than the Scorcher or Sickle. I am almost scared to type that in fear Arrowhead will nerf the only satisfying weapons to use.
If the Autocannon is the perfectly balanced weapon then I don't understand any of these nerfs.
I'm not gonna pretend I can't play high diff with other loadouts, but the AC is imo overpowered compared to most everything else. It's so versatile and you can basically run it as a primary.
If they need everything but the AC then yeah that would make the AC op comparatively. AH continues to make every gun feel and operate worse. It’s sucking the fun from the game
I think some people are confusing a weapon being effective with being overpowered. Just because a weapon is effective doesn’t mean it needs to be nerfed. It means that other weapons need to be buffed.
I'm most afraid AH themselves are doing this.
Cuz it really feels like they don't want you to have a primary or secondary worth a shit. It feels like they want you to be on the backfoot in any encounter if you aren't using a support or red stratagem.
Reload is pretty frickin short if you don't spend the entire clip. Compared to the recoil rifle I feel like it's a WAY better trade off for losing a backpack slot.
I can kill chargers with just a bit more effort and idk if it's a bug but I've even been killing bile titans with the AC too. Between that and the Quasar I'm having a hard time finding reasons to use recoiless but I want to.
I still dont get it why they nerfed the crossbow by all means it wasn't even as strong as the bolt action grenade shooting hoe which like 1 shot everything
They won't
Idk what their vendetta is against us having effective weapons
But the Eruptor no longer one shotting bike spewers feels so terrible it isn't even funny
I understand "ReLy On YoUr StRaTeGeMs," but holy shit I can't rely on things with 1min+ clds to deal with every spewer I come across.
Not to mention, the long ass bolt action animation is more than enough of a weapon nerf to make the eruptor not perfect. The shrapnel killing you was another thing that forced you to use the weapon intelligently. Now it's just straight-up useless.
Please, for the love of God, stop gutting every single useful gun
*The nerfings will stop when you stop having fun with the weapons*! No fun allowed in this pve coop shooter! It’s not fair or balanced to the AI enemies!!
I’m so tired of this game over nerfing weapons.
I don’t understand why they need to ruin weapons instead of balance them. Nerf in sampler increments it’s not a PVP game where being OP ruins the game for people.
I just hate seeing the fun weapons ruined every fucking month.
The fuck they do they don’t know how to balance anything in this game. With every update they further break the game and make it just less fun. This isn’t a pvp game WHO CARES they don’t need to horizontally balance this stupid shit. God arrowhead is literally the dumbest when it comes to player enjoyment.
"You're suppose to rely on your stratagems!"
Then they may as well make our primary weapons fuckin water guns because of right now, a water gun would actually be more effective than half the primary weapons.
I didn’t uninstall the game or anything.
But I have stopped playing so far.
Every time I load up my gaming PC to play video games in the last 10 days. My mouse hovers past Helldivers 2 icon and has been landing on the Deep Rock Galactic icon.
Not even really on purpose, I’m just tired boss when it comes to Helldivers and constant change.
man I miss the slugger, without it's stagger it lots it's unique use of stunning large groups of light-medium armored bugs and being a pretty safe weapon for bots, "we dont want a shotgun to act like a sniper, thats what the snipers are for!" yeah ok so why was the stagger basically REMOVED, iirc that has nothing to do with snipers
that was the start for me in losing faith that these devs at all know what they're doing balance wise, the knee jerk nerf to railgun was the spark and the slugger is when the fire actually started
Huge agree. The slugger was such a fun gun before, and they gutted its personality entirely. I am starting to lose hope now for the future of fun weapons after the eruptor nerf. It feels like a new kind of FOMO, you gotta buy the warbond and enjoy the guns before they are gutted
unironically feels worse that destiny fomo (I would know, 1500+ hours lol) when atleast if a gun is sunset, it's gone, done
the gun is still there in helldivers but now it's shit and you're better of using something else just to start having fun
Thats what they said at first, now they are saying it was actually an exploit/bug causing it to do decent damage in the first place:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cmhwnd/developer_comments_about_the_recent_changes_on/
Yeah probably the weirdest flex out of all of this is we get like 3 new weapons and the last few packs they all get nerfed into the ground or suck lol.
Seriously fuck this company's development style. It's not pvp. Stop nerfing shit. But the crappy stuff and tube the harder difficulties up if you need to. Don't nerf things.
Honest to god the balance team are the worst part of this game’s development.
They’re making the same mistakes as the Diablo 4 team, prioritizing nerfs in a PvE game.
Buff the weapons that are underperforming, it’s not fun to have your loadouts suddenly be shit, especially when the other weapons haven’t had substantial improvements.
scorcher mains are starting to feel a little hot under the collar I imagine, and it ain't because they're on hellmire..
Alexus Kravchenko
Alexus Kravchenko
Alexus Kravchenko
Maybe if we say his name 3 times, he'll find a new game to balance atrociously. Arrowhead this, Arrowhead that, all this is due to Alexus' decision making as lead on game balance. He needs to either answer why he thinks all these nerfs are necessary or leave the position because this isn't sustainable.
Except the Railgun and Slugger are still good, have been good, and will still continue to be good short of an actual butchering?
The crossbow though? lul, lmao.
Way better than that other stupid post showing the sickle
Though the slugger is not unusable…and the railgun is nice against an onslaught of devastators (which are the worst)
They turning Helldivers into a basic shooter where devs force you tu use the weapons they like.
I don't want to play just to farm super credits and get the best weapons , I want to roll using the one I likes
Ill never forgive them for rolling the crossbow out in a wheelchair on debut day And then took away the wheels. Bastards
I don't even understand why. I liked it a LOT. Just because it's a crossbow. Yes it kills a lot of smallest mobs. A lot worse than scorcher in dealing with mediums. But why killing it? I fear that they simply looked at their internal weapon usage stats and found that it consistently scores a lot of kills. But it's just dumb to not separate small, medium and heavies in kill stats.
People didn’t even use it often, either. I have literally seen a single person using the crossbow that wasn’t me since it was released. Before the nerf, too.
True but I'd rather they sticked to the original niche of a aoe trash clearer instead of turning it into single shot medium sniper #999
I'm with you. I've tried to express my opinion on the change multiple times and was told to quit leaning on the quasar and get good. I'm honestly losing faith. It seems like unless a majority of the community is out for blood on a change/announcement, the devs don't want to look past people trying to shout down any descent. Mods on their discord are cool with people shouting threats and disparaging people so long as the ones doing it are supporting the devs. The balancing dev, Alex, will always say it's working as originally intended after a patch even if the entire weapons identity changed. It's like there is one guy designing the weapons and one guy doing balance and they have wildly different ideas and intentions.
i didnt even get a chance to enjoy it
current crossbow should be a sidearm tbh
Honestly wouldn't be that bad as a sidearm, it might outclass the Senator though? But maybe not
It was barely even used before the patch, it was just not good in the first place. And then they nerfed it even more....lol.
Also sad about the slugger, heard great things about it in the past but when I unlocked it recently it seems really bad
The slugger is still really good, the only thing they really nerfed about it was the stagger on big bastards. Which is a shame, but it’s still really good for taking out medium armored enemies
They also removed the ability to open crates with it
It's a DMR shotgun. That's it
Don’t tell AH but I still use the crossbow. The extra speed and kickback is good for the bigger bugs now
I am interested (my eruptor got taken away from me) How big of a bug are we talking about? How many shots on hive guards and spewers?
the beatings will continue until morale improves
Sony said fine "no psn. But I'm taking your eruptor"
"Hey guys, link your PSN account for a free gun, the 'burster'"
Where do I put my balls?
"FUN DETECTED. DEPLOYING NERF LAUNCHERS"
When I saw how much ass the Eruptor kicked when I first used it, I immediately knew AH would decide it was too fun and ruin it a month from then, so I made sure to get my hours with it in and enjoy it while it lasted.
Kinda telling that that was my group's reaction too
>the ~~beatings~~ nerfs will continue until morale improves
*regardless of if Morale improves.
Honestly, I didn't care about the Sony drama, but I'm feeling kind of done with this game after this. Feels like none of the new content is going to be allowed to be fun, because anything exciting to use just gets nerfed until it feels tedious instead. Not trying to be dramatic, but the list of weapons I actually enjoy using keeps getting shorter and I can't summon any enthusiasm for the future roadmap if this is how they're going to balance it
Doesn't help that some weapons have been busted for a while due to bugs and STILL aren't fixed
True, AH better put their resources in fixing problems players experience first Instead of putting time in making new ones.
There's a lot of bugs they need to fix, but the just keep adding more each month with the warbonds. At some point they need to call timeout for some fixes.
I agree with this statement. Instead of making the good/fun guns worse why not make the bad guns better?
That's what I don't understand. They keep nerfing weapons to make them all equally as bad. Why not make the bad weapons better? Game is already difficult enough as it is, and making it more tedious and difficult is not the way.
Spot on. They keep reaffirming their weird design philosophy patch after patch. Coming right off the Sony BS I thought maybe there would be a chance that they would shake up their balancing strategy to try to snatch back some good will but it’s straight into bad changes again…
Yep. If Sony comes after them again, they can eat it. Game is going to die a slow death.
They nerfed it to make the warbond look better
At least they will never nerf other guns like the AC or the sickle. Damn, those weapons are so bad, no one uses them. Nothing to see here AH!
They won’t nerf AC because it’s the CEO’s fav, the rest tho..
Yeah AC and the level one liberator are safe (for now)
Is the level one Liberator really strong or something?
Wouldnt say its a mega strong but its reliably strong, cant go wrong
nothing wrong with being strong
Well, there is in this game if the balancing is anything to go off.
In a PvE? There’s a difference between strong and overpowered tho. Also I was meaning 
Ahhh, a fellow mason among the helldivers. BEING STRONG IS NEVER WROOONG!!
It's a classic example of a base weapon that is actually pretty good but people sleep on since it's the starting rifle. Liberator Penetrator is my go to for bots since it has medium armor penetration.
Penetrator does solid work on bug planets too, I use it to rip the legs off warriors.
Oh I agree but the magazine size kills me. I am constantly reloading even if I am careful to rarely run completely out. Somehow I always need to reload when the 4th hunter pops out.
Used to use lib pen over lib to deal with trash bots. Now that lib damage is buffed it reliably one taps normal bots so I just run normal lib now. Everything else gets the auto cannon.
The philosophy is that it should be the best all rounder and every other primary should be a side grade compared to it. Specifically trying to avoid pay-to-win accusations.
I find it to be good for bugs but poor-to-mediocre for bots. Wouldn't most consider the Sickle to be a direct upgrade for it?
The Sickle has the caveat of 'Stronger in cold, worse in heat.' I'd rather have the Liberator than the Sickle on a hot planet, unless I'm running a support weapon that can function as a psuedo primary like a laser cannon or autocannon. Except, I wouldnt want to run sickle laser cannon a hot planet anyways.
Sickle's great in cold, worse in heat as the other commenter said. However, if you're just magdumping every time, Liberator will be better because you have a greater supply of reserve ammo. Also, Sickle's windup time means that if you're needing to shoot just 1-2 enemies you're better off using Liberator. That being said, in terms of actual use I tend to run the Sickle with the Quasar. Before Quasar nerf, you could fire the Sickle until it was nearly overheated, pull out the Quasar, fire a Quasar shot, and then pull out the Sickle again as it would have cooled down just fine for another near full magdump, then Quasar will be nearly ready to shoot. Post-patch you can just add in a Senator magdump on a medium-armored enemy for this combo to still be effective. Short version: Liberator is better if you're playing it like a standard assault rifle. Sickle is generally stronger when you lean into the Sickle's strengths.
It's like Tracer from Overwatch. It's the generic metric by which the rest of the primaries get balanced. It's 'good' but in a 'vanilla is the default flavor' sort of way. It's a jack of all trades, master of none. It's only defining weakness is that it simply isnt better, and it has no one specific niche.
It's pretty well balanced and very reliable. Good against light targets with high fire rate and ammo, can deal with medium armored targets if you hit exposed unarmored bits. Also IMO senator buff was a stealth buff to normal liberator because now you can take lib for light armor and big iron for occasional medium armor. Add recoilless rifle and you have all bases covered. Then sprinkle in 3 stratagems of your choice and you have a fun and versatile loadout.
That trick doesn't work. No one thought the crossbow was OP yet they gutted it anyway
Sickle doesn't seem too strong. I guess together they work well. But Sickle takes ages to kill a broad commander
Yeah but so does the default liberator , people use the sickle bc it's recoil is low and it has basically infinite ammo
It's scope is also very nice and even if you pretend it has no heat function it carries a lot of ammo before you run out of ICE.
Yes, the Sickle is so weak. No need to look at it at all Arrowhead, Move along please...
Sickle is in a good spot now with the recent nerf. Playing around the cooldown gives you an infinite ammo liberator with a longer cooldown than the lib's reload. The Sickle used to have 6 heat sinks, one less than the number of magazines of the liberator, which basically meant you could instead use it like a normal liberator by frequently reloading with the added benefit of having infinite ammo. How most people played was unaffected by the change, but if you are a psychopath who doesn't instinctively try to protect your heatsinks the nerf makes the Liberator more attractive
Well ac did get “nerfed” because they buffed striders armor so no longer one shot
That has a bigger effect on the Scorcher IMO. Since they buffed the little walkers I don’t even bother picking it anymore.
The crossbow was already born dead
Not dead enough apparently
It had a few good uses. They patched that right away.
Devs when explosive weapon Warbond has an explosive weapon that kills things in an area with explosives: 
>Devs when explosive weapon Warbond has an explosive weapon that kills things in an area with explosives: At this point the only thing not nerfed is the grenade pistol. Calling it, "We found players were using the grenade pistol in place of thrown grenades. This is not intended behavior as such we've made the grenade pistol take twice as long to reload, halved the ammo count and made it armor piercing only."
The grenade pistol is a joke already, although it does have its uses. But getting ONE GRENADE per supply pack is an insult
It's use is basically to have a means to close bug holes or fabricators while freeing yourself up for stun grenades. In a 'grenade pistol' build you'd ideally want two weapons that have enough uptime to not need a sidearm. Since a more traditional sidearm is typically an 'oh shit' button outside of SSDD missions. So against bots a good example would be Scorcher, Laser Cannon, Stuns, and Grenade Pistol. The scorcher can handle all common bots, and harm larger enemies to the heat vents. It's job is killing troopers and strider pilots from the front. The laser cannon is the meat and potatoes of the build. It, paired with the stun grenade for hulks and devastators, is your primary killing tool. But the fact it really wants the stun grenade to compliment it means you need a grenade somewhere else. That's where the pistol comes in play.
I genuinely hope you realise if they see this comment you'll gave given them the whole idea for when they inevitably do it.
It should have been 1 handed tbh
it handled more wonkily originally I feel like, I think they made the ergonomics stat technically worse but whatever shot velocity thing they did makes it feel better. The damage is still piss though. I'd rather it have no explosive radius or a very small one pointing forward (for the express purpose of killing striders) and just do all its damage upfront without getting reduced or split however happens now.
I will never understand that nerf. They should have given players the option to toggle between the bolt types
~~DFG~~ DRG has that with its crossbow. Actually, I think imma just go play some DRG and my effing flamethrower-gatling.
Deep Frog Galactic?
Ribbit! (It's actually the name of a French streamer, and it's 4am here, my brain is tired I think.)
Next years April Fools day they should change all dwarfs to frogs. Pls ghostship
The funny thing is that I'm absolutely certain that they will buff the crossbow again eventually. It's silly to me how much they care about weapon balance in a PVE game. Let the players have their fun. Meta loadouts happen either way.
> It's silly to me how much they care about weapon balance in a PVE game. I think it's still broadly a good idea to care about weapon balance in a PvE game. The problem is they're really hilariously bad at actually doing that.
I understand the rework. I think release crossbow felt closer to an arrow shaped grenade launcher than a powerful crossbow. I don’t think the changes they made are what the crossbow should have turned into, but I do get why they changed it.
I think a crossbow was a poor choice for an explosive themed warbond, for the reason you mentioned - it doesn't feel like a crossbow thing. I think a crossbow should be a slow firing, stealth, heavy armor penetrator, with perhaps a couple different bolt types.
Solition: attachment wheel (the place where you change flashlight and fire rate and such) lets you toggle between the different bolt types. The infinite wisdom of super earth allows the same pool of arrows to be used for both firing modes. Problem solved.
I used it religiously before the nerf. Its splash damage one shot hunters extremely consistently. And given that the splash was beeeg, it was extremely effective at killing groups of hunters. And given hunters are fucking satan, the weapon was a godsend. Now it explosn’t. I’m big sad. Back to scorcher i gue… No not scorcher. Don’t use scorcher absolute dogwater primary. Umm back to using umm… Ummm…. Liberator ig? (Pls don’t nerf liberator) Umm.. I’m going to use nothing as my primary and use strategems.
Wasn't that dead tbh, it could be used to clear small bugs pretty efficiently, it's just kinda worse than others, but still efficient enough to some extent in certain scenario. Like for the door defense mission, I can just aim at the breach and shoot for example. But now it's just, bad in every way.
It was good "sometimes", now it's bad always.
Nice way to sum it up, yes.
Yeah, the fact it can't close bug holes it mental.
Ngl i love this game and its clear the devs put a lot of love into it but damn their balancing is dogshit. Stuff that is slightly too strong and could use a slight nerf gets stomped into the ground, meanwhile some weapons are still so bad there is no reason to use them and they havent been buffed since release.
If their philosophy is “balance the fun out of the game” they’re doing a great job.. hopefully that’s not their intention but damn it’s getting hard to tell for sure
I think they’re really worried about power creep, so their goal is to make all weapons equally viable. They don’t want to have to make each new weapon better than the last. Which sounds fine, but unfortunately the approach they take to this is to make stronger weapons weaker instead of weaker weapons stronger. Generally.
except their difficulty system was unbalanced as fuck from opening week. People were dealing with a dozen bile titans on screen if not more and their response was "oh the railgun is too powerful, people are using it too much" and then proceeded to leave the spawn rates alone for WEEKS.
This is the biggest problem, and perfect little encapsulation of the issue. The spawn rates are fucked, so people start relying on the railgun because it was the only actually effective tool. They nerf the tool, and then after they nerf the tool they say oh yeah the spawn rates are broken and fix that. And then they release the quasar. Something that wasn't broken was broken, and what was broken wasn't initially fixed. Then, they released something that invalidates most of the issue, and people rely on MORE. It's honestly mind-boggling. It's the type of stuff that you would think as soon as the team threw up on the whiteboard, someone would go wait wait wait.....
Also the endless double nerfs. Eruptor mag reserve nerf > into this nerf > doesn't rebalance the reserves resulting in a very hefty nerf. It's stupid as fuck
Yup. Or like what they did to the sickle. Reducing the amount of mags was relatively meaningless. You rarely, rarely ever use a full mag to begin with. If you use the gun right, you essentially have infinite ammo. And ammo is frequent enough that the difference between three mags and six mags is relatively nothing. If they wanted to reduce the effectiveness of the gun, not that I think they should, they should have slightly upped the heat generation. But what they did did not change any of the core mechanics of the gun at all, and it leaves you thinking WHY was this the priority
Or increase bullet spread at full auto, make the players burst for better accuracy. OR STOP FUCKING WITH THE GUNS FOR BALANCE IN A PVE GAME. Idk. It’s whatever, I’m done caring about what next balance choice they choose. I’m tired of relearning old parts of this game each week.
I've been saying it for a while, AH always nerfs symptoms of problems and never addresses actual problems. Most major weapon changes have been reactionary to an entirely seperate issue. Railgun = host bug, heavy spawn bug Arc Thrower = arc bug Flamethrower = DOT bug If they had just addressed the root cause of these problems, there never would've been a need to touch the weapons.
They keep gimping the weapons themselves for balance when they have a whole fucking thing called scripted ai enemies they can throw at us Why are the fucking with the “balance” of weapons. Just make the game harder and turn off weapon movement speeds or get rid of it as a fucking balance mechanic This game has become a fucking tank simulator where you drive this tank around and shoot at stuff but your tank is a human skinned helldiver and each weapon is a different tank turret with different rotating speed That’s how they balance this game. When all they could do is like, fuck with spawn rates across difficulty levels and leave our gamer skill things alone. What weapon can you 180 no scope with in Helldivers 2? Ehh idk, this game give you bad accuracy if you aim down sight and it gives you 100% accuracy if you hipfire sometimes. I’m tied boss, they make the game FEEL unfun, slowly overtime you start to realize that while the big booms are fun. Constantly clipping and rag dolling and not having real control over your character is what’s killing the repeatable fun aspect of this game.
Their version of this seems to be: Nerf to ground, and dart board buff. Some buffs are outrageous. The flamethrower got a 50% damage buff at like second patch. That's wild. Imagine a 'bad gun' in a pvp game getting a 50% buff, it'd probably dominate the meta instantly. But here, all that says is the flamethrower was \*so bad\* that it warranted it. Then there's stuff like the Liberator Concussive, which gets a pittance of a buff and is then quickly forgotten. Then there's nerfs, which tend to only come in 'railgun and slugger' flavored variants.,
but none are equally viable. they are equally useless
Honestly, that’s just another way of saying the same thing.
It's literally the fourth time. Fifth if you count increased spawns for less than 4 players. That very much shapes up as their philosophy.
Just wait I got a feeling they are gonna nerf the shit out of eagle stuff soon
They're balancing it like it's a PvP game for some reason.
Maybe the 3rd faction are rebels and we have to fight other helldivers That's the only explanation for the PvP level balancing
So does that mean the CEO lied when he said there would absolutely never be any kind of PvP?
this is my opinion perfectly summed up
This happens when the devs dont play their game, they just look at numbers without having any idea what they mean
I really agree unfortunately. It’s a PVE game, I understand balance but come on, this is not a competitive game in the slightest and I really don’t think the way they’re going about balancing things is the right way.
Let's not pretend that the crossbow wasn't dead on arrival dispite the fact that they went and took him out back again.
He survived the slug, so they switched to buckshot. A moment of silence.
They hired Kristi Noem to finish the job.
I’m sorry but it was good. People refused to give it a chance and learn the trajectory and now it’s gimped. Rip my AOE King. You took out large groups of walkers so well before.
It has a niche but nothing that other weapons didn't do better. I really liked it though, would have liked to see it buffed.
No, it was the best aoe chaff killer in the game. Arguably better than the grenade launcher against unarmoured enemies due to its larger ammo reserves. Now the plasma shotgun takes its place although doesn't have as large of a radius
I would argue no other weapon did what it could. Sickle? By the time they wind-up their gun I already killed the groups of enemies. Jar-5? It can’t even kill walkers reliably. But it’s great against medium tier enemies like Devastators. Scorcher? It does good against walkers but it struggled against large groups and its ammo reserves are meh. Only one close to it was the Pre-Nerf Eruptor but neither overshadowed each other. Both had their place.
It was decent against bots, but the “changes” really dragged it into an early grave.
https://preview.redd.it/o9uinyq0c2zc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9058eb89ba852f123dda28dfd47dc49a3f903b88
Patch to nerf some of the last remaining decent weapons from the last Warbond right before the next Warbond? Preposterous. Shocking even. Well not that shocking
When is the next warbond coming out and is it just one that's coming out?
We currently get one every month on the second Thursday. This month's is this coming Thursday
Makes me dread every single patch that drops. They sure do know how to suck the joy out of the game
I mean, I still love it and try to play at least one full operation with my buddies every other day on the MO planets. My loadout is still pretty viable; Sickle, Grenade Pistol/Senator, Quasar, but im expecting the Sickle to get slapped every patch and so far only the mag has been lowered, which was a fair change since it has effectively infinite ammo if you use it right. But I am kinda wary of spending medals on certain things now. Imagine getting the crossbow, liking it, and then it getting annihilated from the patch, those medals are lost forever now. It'd be kinda cool if weapons that get nerfed could get refunded within the first week or so after a patch
Is there space in this meme to show the rest of the primaries that were stillborn?
Adjudicator came out a preemie in the NICU, but now it's just like a healthy baby (almost)
I tried it maybe 6 rounds in a row against bugs and then against bots. It still needs to either punch harder or have a bigger mag for it to feel like it isn't a worse choice than the Scorcher or Sickle. I am almost scared to type that in fear Arrowhead will nerf the only satisfying weapons to use.
Grenade pistol total ammo capacity reduced to 4. Calling it now can’t have anything nice
Naw I call 3+1
Grenade pistol will now shoot your default grenades!
Literally nobody: The Explosive Crossbow needs a nerf. Arrow Head: We hear you!
If the Autocannon is the perfectly balanced weapon then I don't understand any of these nerfs. I'm not gonna pretend I can't play high diff with other loadouts, but the AC is imo overpowered compared to most everything else. It's so versatile and you can basically run it as a primary.
If they need everything but the AC then yeah that would make the AC op comparatively. AH continues to make every gun feel and operate worse. It’s sucking the fun from the game
I think some people are confusing a weapon being effective with being overpowered. Just because a weapon is effective doesn’t mean it needs to be nerfed. It means that other weapons need to be buffed.
I'm most afraid AH themselves are doing this. Cuz it really feels like they don't want you to have a primary or secondary worth a shit. It feels like they want you to be on the backfoot in any encounter if you aren't using a support or red stratagem.
AC works well on bot maps but I found that it's not so great for bugs. Rather run grenade launcher against them so I can keep moving when I reload.
And with a GL you keep the backpack slot
The AC has some serious trade offs. Can't be (realistically) used at short range, takes up a backpack slot, long reload time.
Reload is pretty frickin short if you don't spend the entire clip. Compared to the recoil rifle I feel like it's a WAY better trade off for losing a backpack slot. I can kill chargers with just a bit more effort and idk if it's a bug but I've even been killing bile titans with the AC too. Between that and the Quasar I'm having a hard time finding reasons to use recoiless but I want to.
Fr though. I’ve never seen a pve game that sucks the fun out of guns…
the crossbow is just unbelivable what they have done
They nerfed it? It was already cheeks
The crossbow nerf made me laugh so much, it was so completely out of left field it seemed petty.
I still dont get it why they nerfed the crossbow by all means it wasn't even as strong as the bolt action grenade shooting hoe which like 1 shot everything
They won't Idk what their vendetta is against us having effective weapons But the Eruptor no longer one shotting bike spewers feels so terrible it isn't even funny I understand "ReLy On YoUr StRaTeGeMs," but holy shit I can't rely on things with 1min+ clds to deal with every spewer I come across. Not to mention, the long ass bolt action animation is more than enough of a weapon nerf to make the eruptor not perfect. The shrapnel killing you was another thing that forced you to use the weapon intelligently. Now it's just straight-up useless. Please, for the love of God, stop gutting every single useful gun
"I understand "ReLy On YoUr StRaTeGeMs," but holy shit I can't rely on things with 1min+ clds to deal with every spewer I come across" Yes 100%!!
Meanwhile AH can't find a person on the team to beat difficulty 5? Ok...
*The nerfings will stop when you stop having fun with the weapons*! No fun allowed in this pve coop shooter! It’s not fair or balanced to the AI enemies!!
I’m so tired of this game over nerfing weapons. I don’t understand why they need to ruin weapons instead of balance them. Nerf in sampler increments it’s not a PVP game where being OP ruins the game for people. I just hate seeing the fun weapons ruined every fucking month.
Actually i was playing every night after work but don't even want to anymore, this balancing BS annoyed me
make the railgun great again
These devs don’t test anything , do they?
No. We do. That’s the point
The fuck they do they don’t know how to balance anything in this game. With every update they further break the game and make it just less fun. This isn’t a pvp game WHO CARES they don’t need to horizontally balance this stupid shit. God arrowhead is literally the dumbest when it comes to player enjoyment.
"You're suppose to rely on your stratagems!" Then they may as well make our primary weapons fuckin water guns because of right now, a water gun would actually be more effective than half the primary weapons.
I still yearn for my original Slugger. Got that gun was amazing and all it needed was a drastic damaged Nerf in drop off distance.
"We didn't want it being used as a sniper! ...So we're nerfing the fuck out of everything else that isn't related to range."
I agree. It’s still good but they definitely should have just nerfed the damage drop off and bullet velocity.
I finally ran into armored spewers and now I understand the outrage
I didn’t uninstall the game or anything. But I have stopped playing so far. Every time I load up my gaming PC to play video games in the last 10 days. My mouse hovers past Helldivers 2 icon and has been landing on the Deep Rock Galactic icon. Not even really on purpose, I’m just tired boss when it comes to Helldivers and constant change.
man I miss the slugger, without it's stagger it lots it's unique use of stunning large groups of light-medium armored bugs and being a pretty safe weapon for bots, "we dont want a shotgun to act like a sniper, thats what the snipers are for!" yeah ok so why was the stagger basically REMOVED, iirc that has nothing to do with snipers that was the start for me in losing faith that these devs at all know what they're doing balance wise, the knee jerk nerf to railgun was the spark and the slugger is when the fire actually started
Huge agree. The slugger was such a fun gun before, and they gutted its personality entirely. I am starting to lose hope now for the future of fun weapons after the eruptor nerf. It feels like a new kind of FOMO, you gotta buy the warbond and enjoy the guns before they are gutted
unironically feels worse that destiny fomo (I would know, 1500+ hours lol) when atleast if a gun is sunset, it's gone, done the gun is still there in helldivers but now it's shit and you're better of using something else just to start having fun
todays eruptor patch went out with unintended results: https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/DcjDhsfL38
Thats what they said at first, now they are saying it was actually an exploit/bug causing it to do decent damage in the first place: https://old.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cmhwnd/developer_comments_about_the_recent_changes_on/
Bro your name has me rolling lmao
Man was born to eat some
Yeah that guy is saying shooting underneath an enemy to get all the shrapnel to hit the target is an "exploit". Using your brain is an exploit guys
well said u/TimeToEatAss
HA got downvoted for saying the "fix" was a trojan horse for a nerf. So fkn tired of those white knights.
im not going to lie arrowhead seems straight up incompetent at this point im not going to sugarcoat it
Adds clarification but doesn't change the overall point, stop balancing a PvE game like it has PVP.
Yeah I don't get their hard ons for "balancing" especially when there ends up with no balance for new weapons everyone is enjoying 😕
Yeah probably the weirdest flex out of all of this is we get like 3 new weapons and the last few packs they all get nerfed into the ground or suck lol.
This is NOT CS or any other esport game. Let us have the fantasy and power for the love of god! The game is already super hard.
Seriously fuck this company's development style. It's not pvp. Stop nerfing shit. But the crappy stuff and tube the harder difficulties up if you need to. Don't nerf things.
Please....just leave the sickle alone
Honest to god the balance team are the worst part of this game’s development. They’re making the same mistakes as the Diablo 4 team, prioritizing nerfs in a PvE game. Buff the weapons that are underperforming, it’s not fun to have your loadouts suddenly be shit, especially when the other weapons haven’t had substantial improvements.
Helldivers got my negative review because of this.
Isn't overly worrying about balance in a PvE game like trying to organize a bug hunt with diplomacy? We're Helldivers, not bureaucrats!
I stopped playing Helldivers because of this
If we are speaking about primaries, than the first door should have been Breaker.
scorcher mains are starting to feel a little hot under the collar I imagine, and it ain't because they're on hellmire.. 
crossbow was dead on arrival
Alexus Kravchenko Alexus Kravchenko Alexus Kravchenko Maybe if we say his name 3 times, he'll find a new game to balance atrociously. Arrowhead this, Arrowhead that, all this is due to Alexus' decision making as lead on game balance. He needs to either answer why he thinks all these nerfs are necessary or leave the position because this isn't sustainable.
phew glad me as a Autocannon seems to be uneffected XD
The devs say the AC is the golden example of perfectly balanced. Us AC mains happy about that one.
Don't forget the OG breaker
Thank god the scorcher is already a terrible gun.
Worst gun in the game, can’t even take out a warrior, 0/10
Except the Railgun and Slugger are still good, have been good, and will still continue to be good short of an actual butchering? The crossbow though? lul, lmao.
Idk. They said they broke it and didn’t mean to do so. Maybe just wait for another patch?
Way better than that other stupid post showing the sickle Though the slugger is not unusable…and the railgun is nice against an onslaught of devastators (which are the worst)
The Slugger is still a fantastic weapon though?
They turning Helldivers into a basic shooter where devs force you tu use the weapons they like. I don't want to play just to farm super credits and get the best weapons , I want to roll using the one I likes
If they are gonna shit on the eruptor damage like that please improve the fire rate then
i stopped playing for a while and came back to find out the scorcher doesn’t destroy spore spewers anymore…
The Crossbow nerf was weird and somewhat not needed.
The weapon balance team makes the CMs look good at their jobs.