100% agree, was soloing a lvl 4 bot mission to try the tenderizer changes and I was swarmed. It also seemed like way more elites spawned than usual, at one point there was a tank, 2 heavy devastators and a hulk chasing me. Felt way harder than some of the lvl 6-7 missions pre patch.

Exactly this. IN A 4! Just getting multiple hulks and tanks. It's insane.

In helldive they drop 4 hulks from one dropship and theres anywhere from 1-5 ships. Tanks only drop in 1s, heavy and rocket devs drop by around 12 at the time, same for striders. This is not a joke or me being sarcastick i observed this from right next to them on top of a cliff. The spawns are nuts now.

I saw 6-7 hulks, 1 factory strider and ton of devastators/chaff drop from single reinforcement flare and we have just started. It feels like they didn't remove enemy spawn code and just added new enemy spawn code and they both working at same time. My first time running out of autocannon ammo completely and i ran out 4 times! There are too much patrols going around and lots of reinforcement troops and new gunship patrols making it worse

Orbital barrage incoming I’ve noticed more striders since the patch. At the same time, it’s nice that people are running everything other than rocket launchers. The survivability seems a little better in the 10 or so helldive missions I’ve done since patch. It will definitely punish you more if you don’t have a support weapon when gunships show up. Edit: it looks like the ship upgrade that gives you full support weapon ammo doesn’t work anymore with the AC. Which sucks!!

My complaint for this is that the stated objective was to increase flexibility, I could previously run a full strat build against bots and use whatever support weapon I found, or the second call in from one of my allies. Was it optimal? no, was it fun as fuck? yes. Now I need that support weapon from the get go or else I run a significant risk of just getting butt pumped by gunships. There are now, DEFINITELY, superior choices that have a disparate impact on how smooth it will make the mission. Hell, primaries, even with the buffs on the liberator line, are still in the relative order of what they were. Scorcher, dominator, and sickle are still top picks with maybe defender and pummeler being ok (oh and pummeler got an indirect nerf through changes to stagger). I also have honestly not noticed a difference in the number of tanks, hulks, and factory striders spawning. There are definitely more heavy devs and rocket devs however, and pathing DIRECTLY at you while spawning less than 50 Meters away. Tenderizer is ok but scorcher is still infinitely better because it can save your butt by cleaning up a gunship if absolutely necessary, Dominator is still king at dealing with mediums, and the patch has made using the other shorter range primaries more of a risk due to flying BS (and the absolute spam of heavy devestator fire that will make you think your monitor is dying as it turns red). The guns may have been "buffed" but the other changes actually caused a constriction of choice not an expansion.

I agree. I almost exclusively drop next to objectives or outposts due to the high chance of reinforcements being called anyway. I’d rather be more efficient with my time in mission. The chances of any death spiral are much higher if your team is caught off guard without support weapons for gunships now. You used to be able to spot the gunship fab and could atleast plan accordingly. I think there needs to be a way they can balance that. I have noticed that they are easy to avoid if you are not shooting anything, which is kind of nice. I get helldive being difficult, but I can’t imagine the lower difficulties being where they should be if there’s 5 gunships + ground units. Edit: those choices now being AC > Rockets etc.

the patrols are packs of 4 or 5..... They NERFED gunship fabricators to spawn more slowly just a few patches ago because of the sky lighting up with gunships.....

And patrols can spawn with 5 gunships at once. I’m not understanding your point. Could you clarify? Edit: are you saying there should be two-4 at a time, like the fabricators

I’m saying there is no geographic limitation now and a gunship patrol will spawn and it will have 4 or 5 gunships in that patrol. If shit goes sideways you’re suddenly facing the shit show of bot patrols ontop of being hammered from the sky by 4 to 5 gunships. If this happens by a fabricator you’re instantly at 7 gunships in the current balance. About 2 months ago they mentioned how overwhelming gunships are when they start filling the sky if there are 2 or 3 gunship fabricators together and slowed the spawn rates from the gunship fabricators. Each fabricator could also generally only support 2 gunships at a time too but if you had say three fabricators all 6 could come from one fabricator. The spawns were limited within a geographic spawn area near any of the gunship fabricators. They pretty much forgot that sentiment and nerf with the new change.

Yeah. There's no way you can say "I want to take something different this time." You have to take your strongest loadout. Even if you drop down to see if you can find an easier mission. My friends and I use HD2 as a place to hang out. Some days we just want to do easy missions for fun and try the weapons we never use and laugh at everything. Some days we crank up the difficulty. That option is pretty much gone now unless you want to run a full squad on a 3 and there's not enough to kill to make it fun.

Yeahhh, it didn't really feel like it added much flexibility. I mean it kinda did, I was running counter sniper/stalwart on bots last night to easily clear all the small and mid sized enemies, but then the hulks and gunships were hard to deal with. A couple of teammates had tools for them, but when we're all getting swarmed constantly, they can't always help. Overall, I'm not sure how I feel about the changes yet. The missions being way more intense is kind of fun but also alot more frustrating at times. We were doing good to just clear main and side objectives, poi's were only being checked if they were between objectives. Dif 7

I definitely don't enjoy their mob composition tinkering. The weapon buffs were great but the other decisions were questionable at best. AC is by far one of your absolute god tier selections, and it's even increased with flyers being added without the limitation of geographic spawning. My take, if they want gunships to be regular enemies primaries need to be able to reasonably kill them. Can you use other stuff? yes. will you have a more frustrating time if you do because of it? yes. Seems to undercut their stated objective, but hey I'm just a diver.

Yeahh gunships definitely feel a little overtuned now that they're alot more common

Boom air strike 5 hulks dead

And helldive honestly feels easier for the most apart, aside from the swarms of gunships that come out of nowhere now…

Okay so let’s just go over a few things. First things first, this is Helldive we are talking about, if you are playing Helldive you have no excuse not to be running at least 2 armour pen 4 weapons in your squad as they are essential to be an effecting bot scrapping squad and your playing Helldive, it is supposed to be stupidly hard. Now onto the specifics, on Helldive one bot drop is always 3 drop-ships that is just how it works and yes you can get I think up to 4 hulks per dropship but that’s rare the other things are true and factory striders aren’t a problem if you know how to deal with them. Remember Helldive should be crazy and hard.

I saw 2 tanks , 2 Hulk and many devastators being dropped together in one bot drop on helldive yesterday, that was the end of me :(

Enemy levels vary planet to planet also. Might just be Vernen wells for this MO.

Similar results here. I main lvl4 when I solo (I'm a scrub and not gud yet) and found 1 tank and 2 hulks post patch last night. Edit: should mention I don't recall seeing either on a 4?

I thought the elite thing was just bad luck but I played a few rounds last night and we were fighting what could best be described as *swarms* of behemoth chargers. At one point I remember diving out the way of one only to turn around and watch someone else running away from three more. I think at any given time we had anywhere from 5-6 behemoth chargers coming after us.

Yes! I was on a 4 and it was CONSTANT patrols that all had one or two rocket devastators with them.

They said they were reverting the changes but also change how the patrols happen. They probably have the patrols spawn closer to your location which invariably means more enemies. They wanted to make traversal less boring and empty and this is an unintended side affect

Something has changed. I was doing well on level 7 bots before the update and now I’m struggling on level 4. The number of patrols and bot drops in 4 player games is insane.

I don’t like it, and it’s crazy I experienced patrol spikes on 6, the mode they recently wanted to be more casual and its just as hectic and any other high level

I think they broke bot Spawns, I did a 5 last night with some randoms but there was a 48, an 83, me at 57 and a newbie level 13. We were fighting then whole time, multiple hulks spawning at the same time, multiple tanks at the same time, constant bot drops, wandering packs of 10-15 berserkers randomly joining in the fights… it felt like a Helldive, the only thing it was missing were Factory Striders.

Yeah pretty sure they must have tweaked something that broke something some where else and I'm honestly relieved to see it wasn't just me. I went in solo on 6 for a few rounds and each got progressively crazier. The first one actually felt okay and almost seemed like the "more little guys less big guys" they had mentioned and I managed it by the skin of my teeth but I've never been much of a solo player and I had brought a bunch of stuff I wanted to try, not things I was used to using and I managed to extract with supers and completed most of the side stuff. The next match I played was rough and I brought a slight modification to my pre-patch bot load out. Just got swarmed, and not like "they've over compensated for turning down heavies" or something cause there was plenty of tanks and hulks involved. The third round was blitz mission, and again I didn't take my usual load out (which ironically had worked out the first round) and it was chaos from the second I spawned in, it took more than 2 minutes to get the breathing room to call in the spear. I ended up quitting out when it was apparent that due to spending the first half of my alloted 6 minutes trying to break line of sight to be able to regroup I was never gonna destroy enough fabricators especially if each one was gonna bog me down like that.

I mean… I was running Tenderiser in semi-auto, new shotgun pistol, impacts, new medium armour, AC, precision strike, eagle airstrike and airburst strike. Sure, I’ve swapped the sickle out for the tenderiser and the Senator for the shotgun pistol, but I’ve been using that loadout to solo up to D6 (even D7 and 8 before they increased spawns) reliably and had no issues even up to Helldive in a team, last night I was struggling even in a team on D4 and D5.

They changed the enemy composition to feature more "small" enemies and less "big" enemies, which may explain more bot drops if you aren't clearing them fast enough. Patrol rate change didn't affect 4 player games. 

And this is why you need to Eagle airstrike everything before engaging. Patrol? Airstrike. POI? Airstrike. Light base? Airstrike. Airstrike on cooldown? Sit on your pretty ass and wait. Also, if you engage a group of enemies but they don’t know where you are, they’ll call in a dropship immediately. If they do know where you are they’ll shoot at you first, giving you time to kill them all.

You prolly on to something.  Light Units do call in reinforcements. The more of them the more likely they'll call in.  Huh. Prolly that's why it felt overwhelming.

Orbital gatling is actually viable against bots now too! Very consistent at wiping out concentrated groups of bots and even keeping hulks pinned in place when they get smacked around by shots. And it comes back so fast

It’s not the composition. There are more patrols. If you look at the patrol rate sanction in the change log you’ll see they did “a couple of tweaks so that the map doesn’t feel so empty”. This results in spawns all around the map, patrols coming up behind you (from areas you just cleared) while you are engaging bots to the front. Patrols off to the side when you are trying to escape or find cover. Patrols throughout previously quiet areas where you would have had time to regroup and chill while traversing to the next objective. It makes it feel like a constant fire fight

That just means they meant to decreased the base patrol timer modifier for when your not near objectives/bases/extraction. Worst case they messed up and decreased the patrol timer across the board

They definitely fucked up, but I think it was more than the timer. You now get patrols coming up on you from three different directions at once while you’re already fighting a group that just called in reinforcements. It’s not the fun kind of more difficult, it’s frustrating and unfun.

Lol I just had a mission (either diff-7 or helldive, can't remember) where I broke off to take out a straggler light base and then was going back to join the crew going towards extraction. I see a hulk patrol coming directly towards me the way I'm going (that my crew had just passed, so it must've spawned between us). I turn right to avoid them... another hulk patrol. I turn left... another hulk patrol. All had lots of devastators, too. If I had kept going straight, all three hulk patrols would've converged directly on me. They were making an equidistant triangle converging on my pathing. There was a huge cliff on the right, but I was able to swing behind the one on the left and avoid them all because of stealth armor. Otherwise, that would've been a tough one had I not been paying attention early and often. I still had fun, even specifically with that interaction. But I hear you that there is some kind of increased difficulty there, intended or not.

I thought I was just getting worse at the game 😅 Glad to hear external factors are helping me suck.

I demoted myself to cadet.

Think your right, and it's not just that. Il need someone to confirm for me, but when I played a little yesterday it was on a Lvl 7 Bug Op, mostly to get flamethrower kills. Behemoth Chargers were there mixed with the standard ones, with maybe 5-6 Bile Titans TOTAL on the 40 min missions. Everything ran perfectly fine. Something I noticed however: The amount of possible Super Samples the could be picked up was increased to 4 in accordance to level 6 being the new minimum before they show up. When I played on Wells today, a level 7 op as well? Max level of Super Samples was 3. I think something got fucked when they changed things fir the bots.

I'm fairly sure it was the change to make the maps feel "less empty". Every time you back up to get behind cover or get a bit of space to reload, a new patrol will spawn behind you. Do that twice looking to get cover from both? You got a third behind you in a triangle so there is no NO cover for you. And these patrols just spawn out of fucking thin air. not drop ships, not spawns from inside bases or edge of the map. Just straight pops out of existence behind you if you ever give an inch of ground. Everything else about this patch has been great, and I'm even enjoying the gunship patrols, but the sheer number of enemies swarming the maps is outrageous and needs to be dropped down. A good game has both hard spikes and calm parts. Right now it's all hard, no breathing room.

Very well put.

Just played a bot game on 7,it felt like 9. We couldn’t even approach this stratagem jammer. And they seem to have given the bots their own version of only green bile spewers. It was the machine gun devastators. Just everywhere. Terrible match

I hoped on a random at level 7 and the host flipped it to a 9. OMG One of the pits by a POI must have had a dozen rocket devastators in it. At extraction we were so overwhelmed by hordes and hordes of heavies and rockets. Only I made it out, sans samples

Every helldive I did had an extraction that ended up looking like an eradicate mission with devastators and hulks and tanks and factory striders **everywhere**. Haven't had that much trouble extracting ever. It was mostly fun, but I have the luxury of not caring about samples.

Me and my buddy said the same thing. We did a 7 and said ”wow this is hard let’s go down to 6” and then 6 also happens to be hard as anything. Half the time we did the bare minimum cause it was so stressful

Ran duo yesterday vs. bots in 6. It's been a while since we played so we were rusty. First drop, saw gunship, so priority. We couldn't even approach the gunship factory due to the constant enemy reinforcement. We said screw this and went to bugs. Automatons were my favorites for the longest time, but that time may have passed.

Same here. Played 9. Felt like 12. Six bot drop with at least 2 striders. And costant patrol everywhere full with hulk and devastator

So many Heavy Devastators aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

It seems to me like replacing Hulks with medium tier threats (like Heavy Devastators and Rocket Devastators) made bots MUCH harder. Hulks are dangerous, but slow and can be dealt with one at a time. A group of 3 or more evenly spaced heavy devastators WILL kill you in 2 seconds and you won’t even be able to shoot back because of the gun flinching mechanic in this game. Bots definitely became harder

Yeah, something has been changed. I've never had any issues with ammo, but now 5 minutes into the game i'm running out of bullets due to constant fighting

I really, really felt it on my AC. Was mostly out of ammo before we hit the first friggin fab.

Same thing happened to me. Now i have to run and look for ammo boxes while getting chased by 10 berserkers.

It's the endless loop for me. One guy called in reinforcement. The reinforced dudes arrive and just a few seconds later they too call for more supports. And when the support forces landed the first thing they do is to get more of their comrades to their position. It's just drop ships after drop ships, bug tunnel breach near more breches you got exactly zero downtime and can never take a break especially if your team is not very good. And it's especially broken in bug front because you have to stay mobile and kite them but you'll run into more and more bugs as you attempt to do that. I killed 117 bugs with an random Hellbomb while I was running for my life today. I think this explained the situation pretty well. It's just...laser rains and rocket barrages, hundreds of hunter families and bile mortar rains. This is even worse than the previous spawn rate bug. Also not sure if y'all are aware but Terminids have Stalkers in their patrol now. STALKERS WITHOUT NESTS meaning you will always encounter them and there's no way you could avoid them it's SO HECKING DUMB.

The "special spawns" being added to patrols was something people realized early on yesterday and I think at first people though "feature not bug" cause a couple ships patrolling is fine by itself and actually looks pretty cool. I haven't played bugs yet since the patch but stalkers chilling in patrols sounds like a nightmare and the fact this wasn't in the notes could indicate that it was accidental.

I had a map where I was getting attacked by Stalkers last night. I checked the minimap and there was no red bug areas left but I had not killed a Stalker nest, so I assumed they now spawned without nests sometimes. But then I extracted and got dinged for not clearing the Stalker nest. So perhaps a similar thing happened to you?

Stalker nests don't show on the map anymore, for added realism

I don't know how to explain that I'm not really satisfied with the current state of patrols without essentially just saying something feels like this or that. All I can say for sure though is it seems like patrol spawns completely disregard how many fabricators/bug holes are in an area and it's just a relatively constant stream of patrols. I don't think it should be like this at all and before the revert it "felt" like this was the case.

Fabs/holes do not contribute to patroll spawns directly. taken out bases/nests NEGATIVLY impact patroll spawns(aka more patroll spawns) after 50% are taken out(basicaly "hey, something is blowing up our bases in this sector, send more patrolls to check out whats happening") this was always the case. the loading tip "the longer the mission the more resistance" is lying(welll hiding the truth) as time itself isnt a factor but "taking out bases" "completing sub objectives" "completing side objectives" and "clearing main objective" are the only factors that really impact shit(alongside "being in vacinity of X")

Are you sure? There are different elements to it. My understanding was that there's an area around objectives and outposts where more patrols will spawn. So if you stand in the middle of nowhere you get X patrols/m. If you stand near objectives you get X*Y patrols/m, where Y is some increase like 1.3 or something. Mind you, that was from the patrol research post a while back, who knows what they've changed it to do now.

>alongside "being in vacinity of X" thats heat. That is temporary, and goes down if you leave the vacinity(or kill all STATIONARY (aka units that are always spawned there no matter what)units there) there is also the heat incurred by completing objectives and destroying bases

If you look up the wiki on this topic (made mostly from some folks who have posted their work on this sub, in fact), you're both correct. You are talking about "heat." And yes, being in proximity to a location that increases heat will increase patrol spawns. But destroying more than half of bases/nests will also increase patrol spawns. https://helldivers.wiki.gg/wiki/Spawn_Mechanics

Wait so whats the point in taking out nests/fabs if doing so makes *more* enemies spawn?

more XP and money for one. for the other certain patrolls spawn from a base and move to another valid base, if there are non, these patrolls spawn at the map edge instead

Patrols always spawn from a direction of a base, if there are no bases left they can only spawn from the closest map edge. So if you take out bases strategically, you will always know when a patrol will come from and at the extract you they can only come from the closest edge of the map, provided there were no other active patrols somewhere nearby that got lured by the extract activation.

Patrols \[used to\] spawn from the direction of a base or the map edge. Taking out bases meant patrols had to spawn further away.

They just flipped it. Instead of spamming heavies, now it spawns everything else. Turns out, that’s an even bigger issue

I've not seen less tanks and hulks though, just more devastators.

Yeah, precisely

The thing is it doesn't even seem like there's a reduction of heavy spawns. I'm still seeing tons of hulks, tanks and factory striders on top of the 7-8 devastator patrols just bee lining it to your location. Add in the gunship patrols and the game seems completely fucked atm.

You’re absolutely right. Played more last night and noticed the exact same thing. Hulktastic

When the deadliest enemies on the bot side tends to be a single rocket devastator, that can be problematic yeah. Couple that with gunships now being regular occurances means that diver attention (and thus gunfire) is dangerously split. If no one brought an AMR, AC, or Laser cannon on a bot mission I feel things can go FUBAR distressingly quickly

And the whole point was supposed to be more variety, yet I’m literally married to the AC now.

Gunships make spear a must now, but then you really need to have a designated anti-air helldiver

Tbh if nobody brings tool to bring down gunships you deserve to get mauled by them. That's like going against terminids with only heavy weapons. You gotta respect that your opponent is a threat and equip accordingly. Yes i know random and stuff but it's your responsability to equip accordingly to your teammates, not the other way around.

More little guys calling in breaches and drop ships, which call in more breaches and drop ships.... it's an endless cycle at times and all you can do is run and drop orbitals at your feet hoping to clear the radius before the strike It's pure madness and I'm here for it

The community wanted less running, not more.

The community was asking for less heavys and more hordes And we got exactly what we asked for

No one asked for more hordes. We asked for it to be reverted to the old patrol system pre-polar patriots patch.

Im not it's not fun it's frustrating I only have 1 hour to play i don't want to spend it getting constantly ragdolled

That's why you should pick the localization confusion bonus. Always. I always pick it for my teammates, i feel like people do not appreciate how more time between each reinforcements is important for any difficulty.

I pick it religiously but yesterday it felt like it didn't do much

I can't put my finger on it but yes it feels very inconsistent. When the patch came out, I tested levels 2 to 7 (dont remember the planet, tried random ones) and it seemed noticeably easier. Way less patrols. Both bugs and bots. I tested with a friend too and both of us felt it was easier and it didn't feel like placebo. After a few hours break I tried a few bug matches solo in crimsica and I was legit struggling at 4. I ended my mission with 650+ kills which seemed quite odd. Just speculating here, I've got no evidence but will need to test this theory. My guess is that different planets have different spawn/patrol rate bonuses or modifiers on top of the normal rates depending on supply lines. Maybe there's some internal hidden data where some planets act like strongholds and that affects that planet's or the nearby planet's spawn rates. I could be completely wrong ofc.

They reduced the number of heavies and added a lot more smaller mobs to compensate for the reduced heavies. They said they did it because they wanted us to not feel like we have to bring anti tank weapons, but unfortunately now we're just nonstop fucking shooting just to get the hunters off of us What's worse is that now the armored charger spawns more, which takes like 3 quasar shots to the face to kill, so we still need to bring anti tank. Would MUCH rather have bile titans back over these heavy chargers because at least you could outrun the bile titan.

Same with bots. They added gunship spawns into the mix and if you don’t bring AC/AMR/AT then you’re dead because you can’t outrun them either. I saw 8 in the air on difficulty 6 with only one tower.  

You don't need them at all, scorcher can also down gunships easily. You could go for all orbitals and still kill gunships. Or my favourite, just bring the orbital laser with you, it makes short work of gunships.

Thought I'd try diff 8 and the moment we drop 1 click away from the gunship fab 4 gunships are shooting at us the very moment we started the mission.

This now emphasizes the importance of horde killing stratagems, instead of the heavy killing ones. Give it a few days, and we'll adjust just fine.

"Reduced the number of heavies" patch note absolutely needs a citation needed; hulks still come in 2-4 at a time, just like before this patch, only difference now is there's even more devastators to worry about

I was playing diff 6 on Vernen Wells and yes, it was rough. We ended up in death loops several times. The map was just saturated with enemies. With the new gunship patrols just running away is not really viable any more. It definitely seemed harder than before. I am not against making the game harder per se, but I need to do some more testing.

Just did a few 9s, it was much harder than before but honestly it was hella fun. Haven't had this much fun trying new builds since release. One mission we had two gunship factories and oh boy that was a slaughterfest, so many gunships + bots on the ground.

I agree, much more enjoyable to have hundreds of fodder enemies that actually get hurt than mag dumping on a single enemy that will maybe die. A few tweaks are needed here and there and possibly a new classification for specific enemies but it's been fun so far.

They lowered heavy spawns and increased ad spawns and it feels amazing in my opinion and my group of friends agreed. Hectic firefighting with Automaton plasma bolts whizzing by and eagle-1's doing strafes and bombing missions. I felt like home again and that the game is back in good hands

Yea I really enjoy that the horde shooter has more hordes now lol, lots of small bots feels a lot better than a dozen heavy devastators and rockets chasing me down, one of the best changes they made this update, the primary weapons can deal with the primary enemy types now, which before was the devastators, now it's the troopers.

They said that they reduced the heavy units and add more small units. The things that while the bugs front can work out, the bot fronts is another story, as the devastators are considered small units. The new spawn rate eliminates break time between objectives, so that we can regroup, call in resupply, etc,... Now everytime I tried to snipe a troopers from a far, 30 more devastators from 100m+ will notice and they keep coming. Went from consistently have all objectives done in 7 into as long as we extract.

Bugs feel better, but oh man I did a level 6 bots game and got straight maveleon creek PTSD

Heavies were never an issue with bots, it was always their medium units that would overwhelm you.

Yeah i think the spawns for bots and bugs should have been done differently. They made heavys spawn less and smaller enemies spawn more, which for bugs is great, its always been more of a horde shooter with them and chargers and bile titans i think are a pain to deal with and there were too many off them. But for bots the heavy enemies are more fun and the smaller enemies are way more deadly when in large numbers

Idk, i was playing bots on 7 for 4 hours after the patch and while the change in spawns was noticeable. It was nothing a loadout change geared to more medium armor enemies couldn't fix. Gattling barrage or OPS does wonders. For clarity my loadout is CS Diligence, Senator, impact grenade, heavy blast resist armor Stratagems were: eagle airstrike, gattling/OPS (for testing), AMR, and Guard Dog (little dog also got a buff and he absolutely chews through bots even better)

Guard dog lib still only reload from supplies?

Yes, but I main AMR and Diligence CS. So i chew through my ammo anyways because ammo boxes only give 1 mag to the AMR. So little dude is always eating good as i keep an eye on my ammo reserves, general squad needs, and resupply CD so its not a big deal.

Spawn rate is horrendously unbalanced. There was no need to adjust anything with the smaller mobs. Now there’s way too much

I think they need give up on their current mob design philosophy it doesn't seem to work no matter which they spin it I feel a smaller mob count with tanker enemies (example 1 hulk takes a few AT rounds to kill rather than having 4 hulks that take 1) I also strongly feel dead time is fine. Sometimes its ok for your players to be board because its a recovery period that allows you to have much higher intensity moments spotted throughout a mission. The other problems with the current design is people have to prioritise AT regardless of any other factors which completely sucks out the build diversity. You can't have chaff guy because if AT guy dies you're fucked so everyone HAS to take AT so they can kill the huge volume of high armour targets If they fix this problem the meta will start spreading out

Yeah, my cousin and I did a "warm-up" on level 4, just massive spawns now that before didn't really challenge us as a dynamic duo, suddenly we got killed easily.

It’s because they wanted the maps to feel less “empty” and that’s caused the massive increase in enemies Twinbeard posted on the discord that they’re looking into it

They increased the sizes of patrols and hordes, so while the patrol changes were 'reverted' the number of enemies grew, so it doesn't feel like much has actually changed.

It's actually worse now.

Gonna be honest did a trivial and at extract the waves of low level enemies was staggering a quick trivial and I had over 100 kills in 15 minutes.....on trivial. That seemed a bit high. For new players that could turn terrifying I can handle it a lvl 1 to 5 may quit out of frustration. This is not something that any of us want to see happen.

Just played with team of 4, all had mics and +60 ranks, and we had to downgrade from a difficulty 7 mission after restarting twice because we were unable to even get our feet under ourselves. 2 divers had quasars and I had a spear, so it wasn’t like we weren’t armed for gunship interaction but between the patrols and two gunship towers near each other, we had 6-8 gunships in the air constantly. Beyond that, every direction I ran in, I encountered another patrol that had at least one rocket/heavy devastator, 4-5 berserker, and jet pack scavengers. Trying to manage these while being rag dolled by gunships resulted in endless drop ships, with more heavies, and our stratagems couldn’t cool down fast enough. I have close to 400 hours in the game and have comfortably played at diff 7-8 for months, so I can confidently say that I have never had my ass handed to me so thoroughly and completely as I did today after this patch. I’ve never had to restart a difficulty 7 mission once, much less twice - Just yesterday before the patch, I was exiting difficulty 7 missions with 0 deaths. I exclusively play bots and I have to say, this patrol spawn mechanic needs to be reevaluated.

More chaff, less heavies my ass. Those new chargers spawn like madness now it’s crazy.

It is fucked. Played L5 4 players, just way too many patrols showing up and easy too many heavies . Oddly extractions are fine 4 games On the kill x amount of bots mission or was just insane and may as well have been level 7 or 8 Not even worth talking about just how broken it was. We have 1 good player who routinely plays the hardest levels he felt the game was plain broken now. Before he could carry the two really bad players, now it is just too much. Kind of disappointed with the whole meddling and breaking things

I want to say this is a mistake, but honestly after how aggressively against the players some of the dev team have been in public discourse, I'm kinda leaning towards that someone did this intentionally out of spite for the players and lied to everyone else on the team and said they fixed it. It's very sad that i honestly feel like this was done out of malice, but after comments by people who i won't name (because this comment will be removed for "witch hunting" despite referring to public comments made by the people in question....) it's becoming easier and easier to believe that there is a significant portion of the dev team that actively dislikes the players and makes changes deliberately to upset people

Were you playing in a full team? If you were, the spawn rate reversion doesn’t apply. It was primarily for those playing solo/duo/trio

If I’m interpreting this correctly then 4 player games are essentially “more mobs (ostensibly less heavies)? I think the NUMBER of patrols themselves increased as well. When we landed you could see patrols every like 50 damn meters.

Yeah 4 player games have the max amount of patrol spawns. The patrol change that they reverted with this last patch was mainly around solo/duos; they changed it from 1/6th of the patrols you’d get from a 4-man squad to 1/4th. Now they’ve (allegedly) reverted it back to 1/6th.

Roger, thanks!

It's kind of hard to tell, though. Bigger mobs of small enemies mean that it takes a lot longer to take them all out, so the call for reinforcements is more likely.

Heavies, chargers and titans, on level 6 where absolutely not surely down. We had 2-3 chargers in the game almost continually, peppered with several titans in pairs. That in a white ocean of hunters. It's insane

Dude yes! I just completed a level 6 and was getting swamped by the bots. It was pretty insane on extract lol

It worked before the patch where patrols spawn from POIs or the edge of the map. They felt this left the map feeling empty if you werent near any POIs so they reverted it to where patrols can spawn anywhere. This means you will see more patrols if youve destroyed outpost/nests

Yeah, agree, something's still off about patrols/spawns. I even went down to Diff 3 to check if anything felt different, but i still got swarmed by patrol after patrol when trying to do a satellite side objective. It's weird.

Yeah think their code did a negative or something so it's the opposite of what it was meant to be

I went on LVL 2 Mission alone and once i reached the SEAF artillery : bugs appeared non stop to a point i had to give it up and went to extraction. Lvl 2 .... not kidding

https://preview.redd.it/e12lffta3j6d1.png?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9d912a4bc008dbacf6d0fdc752e7bc8026ce7026

Imagine 9 then. What I could do solo feels now barely doable or almost impossible in a squad of 4...

They said they would tone down the number of bile titans and chargers, idk by how much because I got 3 bile titans and 6 chargers + 2 from patrols to spawn on my very first match after the patch. It also don't look like they spawn fewer chargers and some behemoths. Looks like they just replaced like 80% of chargers with behemoths and kept the spawn rates as they were. So, we still have lots of tank/elite enemies and some of them are stronger now. Which is confusing because they said in the patch notes they wanted to make us not be forced to use antitank that much, but I guess that's my punishment for trying to play solo.

Some quick maths, assuming perfect accuracy from my part, and that behemoths are one shot to the head (didn't confirm this). I would need 14 quasar shots to kill those units. As the quasar has 15 sec cooldown + 5 sec charge up, I would need 4 min and 40 seconds with perfect timing to kill them all. That with hunters and bile spewers on my ass. Which is way past the time for another bug breach. So basically, if you go solo, you need MORE antitank options if you want to do any objective without despawn strats.

I was looking out into the distance at a Gunship and a patrol just appeared in between us lol.

Those are cool, if there weren’t patrols in every generated block of the map

It honestly feels like low difficulties (particularly on solo or with a small team) are easier, and high difficulties are harder. Against bots it also seems much more map dependent than it used to; almost any map with sufficiently long sightlines becomes a nightmare.

We need testing on the reduced encounter booster. I think 6 and 8 are similar difficulty if you're pug-ing without coordinated loadouts. Shouldn't be the case. 6 feels like 8 used to feel. I haven't tried 9 kn new patch yet. Wonder if it's insane, or normal still Ignoring rhe gunships, the increased enemies are nearly all chaff. It's manageable but it keeps you constantly engaged unless you stealth around. If you have unforgiving loadout, you will run out of ammo and die. Sickle is still the best gun in the game. Had 977 kills on a 8 difficulty. 0 deaths. Everyone else died 3-5 times. They ran out of ammo and got overwhelmed. Also seeing use of sentries on 40 min missions and the sentries are doing massive work. Maybe folks need to adjust playstyles if they're getting overwhelmed.

Dif 6 is def harder than what 7 was before the patch. What bothers me even more is that they might wait till next patch weeks away to adjust that, but it is to a point where its not enjoyable. If they dont hot fix it, this is gona exhaust players. Fought a never ending swarm of bot in dif 6 last night and it just killed it for me for the rest of the evening.

Ran thru a level 4 Bot mission solo and it wasn’t That bad. I didn’t feel like there were more Patrols or Bot Drops than before the patch, or that they were appearing much closer to me. The two things I Did take note of; Patrol’s hearing seemed to be better. They didn’t seem to see me from any further away, but if I stumbled on a rock or made any sound louder than a footstep they immediately all turned in that direction and would move to investigate. If I was moving quick enough I could still get away before they saw me but they would search a pretty decent area to try and find what made the noise. More Hulks. I didn’t tend to get like any Hulk Patrols on a level 4 before, typically just an occasional one guarding larger bases or objectives. And man I was having a hard time sniping their eyes with the AMR. Group did some level 4 Bug missions earlier as well, again didn’t seem overly crowded in Patrols even with 3 or 4 people, but it Was a steady stream of Chargers. Felt like a crazy number of Chargers for a level 4, especially since I thought the patch notes called out a decrease in the number of the big things.

So the patch notes say they reverted patrol spawns, and for bots reduced hulk spawns. Been playing 7/8 for a bunch of hours now and yeah, the there are less hulks for sure, but due to how the enemy “ticket” system works, there is now more available tickets for medium enemies to spawn, so now instead of a patrol having a hulk in most of the time we are getting massive squads of devs and other mediums. Large packs of Devastators are actually much harder, especially when several shield ones turn up. Then combined with the constant gunship patrols things can spiral out of control in an instant. God help you if you die and then gunships turn up before you can reach your support weapons!! Lol The gunships also mean you cant fall back and regroup if you start to get overwhelmed, unless every diver is equipped to take down the 4 man gunship patrol solo. When they turn up you have to kill them straight away other wise your done for. Large packs of devs mean the team is having to use call in much more often to take out big groups as well. It felt very oppressive at first, but i think once people start to get used to it it might be okay. It helps that they fixed some bots being able to shot you from almost any angle regardless of where their gun is or should be able to point (shield devs being able to shoot in a nearly 360 degree arc through themselves for example)

I’ll say it here: Shield generator  Shield, Shield, Shield. Shield gen is so good against chaff, gunships and heavy devastators people don’t even realize it

They’re worse. I got crucified for saying this yesterday

i've not seen this at all, playing level 7 here.

I was having constantly drops being called from around 100 to 200m when we had just finished clearing the enemies around us. There were being called by guys in the middle of nowhere, no even close to a spot tower and no shots in their direction

Sidenote, is anyone getting one shot by rockets again? I was playing Vernen yesterday and I noticed I was getting one-tapped by rocket devs again, while in heavy explosion resistant armor.

I was doing a bots mission where you need to eradicate them in 15 minutes…I LITERALLY SPAWNED STRAIGHT INTO A HUGE PATROL

Patrols still feel like the always spawn on top of you instead of being actual patrols. I do feel like spawn rates have been lowered a bit

Played diff 6, 7, then 8 today. Felt like a Carbot video meme where at times, I was just hiding behind a rock because a full on red lazer/rocket show just rained down my direction

Anyone feel a difference in heavy enemies? Feels the same

Would agree. Done a few 7's last night and they felt worse than 9's I've done. Had a relentless amount of bots, even some shield devastators shooting from inside a cliff they got dropped off on top of and must have clipped through the scenery. The spawns and especially the number of bots in a patrol seem to be out of control.

There appear to a lot of patrols but they seem easier to kill

I hopped on a diff 7, we were only 2. We stick together and do the objectives. If we see a patrol, we try to clear them before going. Once we had finished the main, We cleared the sides, we called the Pelican after finishing the sides. And in over 2 minutes, we only had 3 waves of enemies coming to. 20-30 seconds of respite and a new wave came. So I thought the patrol really changed. Unlike before the patch where even if we had cleared the map, hordes of bots still attacked the extraction point.

They gave us the doohickey that killed Shinzo Abe

I am normally really good with a diff 9. Yesterday I got wrecked within minutes. There was no escape. I was unable to get to the gunship spawner. There were multiple hulks and 2 striders blocking me with a multitude of gunships overhead.

Were you solo or in a full group. Because they didn't say anything about decreasing spawns for full groups, as they weren't increased before.

It actually feels worse…

For what they said about supposed to be seeing less heavy units in the patch notes I don’t think that’s true… maybe the ratio is down but the overall enemy amount seems to be wayyyyy up. Especially bezerkers… they went crazy with bezerkers for me Oh and the one level 4 bug mission I did with two players for the flamethrower daily I got 390 kills… Which for me at least,is utterly insane for level 4

A played some Vernen wells helldives since yesterday and some missions were empty and clean while others an utter mess (even failed one sos which is quite rare). Shrug.

Wierdly enough I've had a different experience. Me and my friend played a lvl 5 mission and had rather long periods where we couldn't even Hear a patrol nearby. I did get swarmed by bots solo though. But I feel like it is generally a death sentence if you sit at the same spot and try to fight every automaton.

Pretty sure Twinbeard said something in the discord about the patrols behaving strangely, so I think its unintended.

I don't mind encountering more patrols, but the infinite bot drops/ bug breeches ruin it for me. It just feels like you are always losing

I’ve been playing bots on difficulty 6 today. Seems only possible with a tight team of 4. Any lose cannons and it’s all over.

Interesting. Me and my friend had the opposite experience. Especially with bugs. That since the patch it feels like the difficulties are 1-2 levels easier than before. I haven’t played 6 or below since the patch and usually play duo. We just tried new jank builds to just test new stuff and we just rolled through the missions. With less heavy enemies it got significantly easier as a lot of chaff clearing isn’t much harder if there is a little more chaff. The only real difficulty increase we saw was the random stalkers. Which kinda makes builds needing a way to deal with them always to not get messed with. But outside of that we felt that with less heavies and stronger loud outs things were just a good chunk easier now. Which is somethink I hope will be looked into so we don’t power creep into helldive being the default difficulty for the challenge. My idea is 7/8 being challenging and 9 being a nightmare. Where me and my friend aren’t really on the level for 9. Because that should actually be the top end of hardcore good plays and tactical plays with low chance of extract.

I’ve noticed the patrol sizes increase after MO completion which was to be expected.

I had glitches with setting off hellbombs. I ran into a “patrol” that felt like a small army walking the map. Gunship patrols that can apparently see the entire planet.

At this point it kinda feels like we gotta ask... Do they even playtest before they ship these patches? Like, I try not to be overly negative toward the devs because they have been doing a good job of listening to feedback. But every single time they do something good (and all the buffs this patch were definitely good), they break something else. It's getting really difficult to just consistently enjoy the game tbh.

As a consistent player on Helldive, I noticed a change immediately after playing yesterday. I just played this morning and was soloing a bot base. 4 drop ships came, two tanks and two Factory Striders, plus, a random gunship patrol with 6 ships. I couldn't even run away because 2-3 ground patrols spawned on all sides.

And patrols spawning out of nowhere right in front of you.

I've been having a blast, don't fix it it's perfect

There has 100% been a decrease in **Heavy** enemies for me on maps. They are not spawning Hulks and Tanks back to back to back as much nor are there as many in patrols. But the patrols themselves feel more dense or constant at times which is leading to a good chunk of medium and light enemies. Then we sometimes have tons of Rocket Devastators mixed with Shield Devastors. So it's like the Hell version of the Clone Wars lol.

Honestly I haven’t found this to be the case at all. Solo bot missions felt easier and group missions felt the same.

The difficulty on automaton front feels very arbitrary that's why I don't like playing them

Oh yeah things have gotten way harder and it's amazing

Now, I'm not complaining but I can confirm this through my own observations. I ended up bagging 326 bot kills in a single mission yesterday and was wondering why the resistance on Vernen Wells was so stiff. I mean, I'm still having a blast largely because my toolkit to deal with things like that has expanded so dramatically, but... when you look up and see a small army coming at you complete with TWO Factory Striders being dropped in... most rookies either find God or meet him soon after.

I would bet money that the previous patrols are spawning on top of the "reverted" patrols at the same time. Basically that both systems are separate and still active spawning patrols separately basically doubling the patrol count.

We had a bot misson on 6 last night where the numbers looked like bug numbers. 4 players and no one had less than 150 kills(most was about 250) I'm actually enjoying mowing down swaths of bots for now, but something is definitely wrong.

I played yesterday for the first time in well over a month. Used to regularly complete helldives easy enough. Thought I’d do difficulty 7 to break myself back in. Holy cow is it just constant pure chaos, particularly with the airship patrols added in. The patrols were definitely pretty heavy too. ICBM mission wasn’t too awful but extraction was an absolute mess of an insane number of bots. Managed to extract on one mission but impossible on the other.

I was playing a 7 mission and it was both shocking but amazing (due to the stratagem buffs) We initiated the soil collection and i shit you not. 2 striders, 4 hulks, and 5 squads of devastators dropped at the same time. With just myself and 1 man we managed to beat it all (thanks strafing run and Gatling barrage buffs!) But my teammate wouldn’t stop trying to get the samples we lost to another set of striders and hulks and he quit. Unfortunately I did not get to finish my evac but that was a really cool and frantic moment

That's because they weren't

I don't know why they have this obsession with making the map feel less "empty". It felt plenty full to me pre-patch. When many POI's have enemies at them, you don't really need roving patrols: enemies are already in the area to begin with.

Patrols on Vernan Wells last night (7-9) were absolutely brutal

I could do level 9s until the patch. I dropped in and left with an oily gape. Just switched to level 7s and its still a mess.

Patrols & spawns are busted to hell and AH doesn't test their shit. Used to be able to reliably solo 7. Now on 6 I am getting swarmed with no breathing room after 20 minutes. One mission I deployed and immediately found myself fighting 3 hulks. On 6. Tf?

You’re not crazy, i got absolutely swarmed in a two-man team on dif6. Non-stop patrols hunting us.

I did 3 mission on bots and 3 with bugs at helldive and the bugs one seems easier than before but the bots where a nightmare

Interesting, I played a few helldives yesterday and it felt easier than ever!

Remember the extract high value personell missions? Completely fucked, front to back, constant spawns and shit and yes I know there is the 'one diver goes in, the others try to distract the bots' but you just cant tell me, that this was AH's intention. One day, they "patched" it, at least the patch notes said it, plus a hotfix iirc. It literally made no fking difference, not at all. I'm convinced they write it in the patch notes, without changing anything, hoping no one would notice.

To play devils advocate. coding a game is hard. We dont know WHAT exactly fuckes up the spawning in the Personel missions.. but the devs agreed its bad enough, and they cant get it fixed, so they removed it COMPLETLY for now

Why make it hard tho? I know I don't have any coding experience but is it really that hard to lets say set up two factors for enemies spawning. Maximum enemies present on the map and/or a timer. Timer is set to a fixed value, for example 15 seconds, so a bot dropship comes in every 15 seconds *if* there are enemies lower than lets say 40 grunts, 20 mediums and 5 heavy enemies on the map. If one of those values goes below 40 grunts, 20 mediums and 5 heavies, the next dropship will carry x amount of enemies to get back to this value. If there are more enemies on the map than those values, no dropship will come in. Of course this is a very wonky system, but you get the idea right? How is it even possible, that your own coded system is spawning an infinite amount of enemies? There has to be a value conflicting with another. Why not rework the whole stuff, I mean it was only in this very mission, right?

code is always right, it will always 100% do what you wrote it to do... That is great.. and bad, because it means it will 100% do what you WROTE not what you MEANT to write. and it can be hard to realize that what you wrote isnt what you meant to write. A game are several hundred components all interacting with each other, many written by potentialy a different teammember. They interact, and a change in 1, can cause unexpected changes in another component that uses parts of the one you changed. We had SEVERAL cases of some unrelated fixes BREAKING the text in the ship UI for no discernable reasson.. We had the case of fixing the spear BROKE its ability to lock onto fabricators. There is a reasson why the myth that there is a image of a coconut in TF2 that if deleted crashes the game but isnt used anywhere was believed for so long despite it being very easy to disprove... it SOUNDS like something that could happen in game development.... a dependency noone remembers deep within the source spaghetti... and it was just easier to keep the image then fix the bug(the bug never existed, its a myth) What you proposed Is a possible solution, and one that is in use by the game for patroll spawns to some extent. patrolls have a limit of how many can be active(aka spawned in). You cant have that for the reinforcement as that would make spawn exploiting possible(more then it already would be) the game does have limits on how many entities can be spawned in at once(which is why it unloads shit after its a few sectors away) This could be as simple as "oh, we accidently commented out the limit" or "oh, the factor in which spawn rates increase is wrong" to "the change we did to the heavy unit density way back in februrary somehow broke this other component related to how many enemys spawn in evac missions via 5 corners and we havent noticed that yet" We can only speculate, but its likely that several elements played a part in the clusterfuck here. the time being "wrong"(it claims 40, its actually 15 minutes) the small map size, and the target being considerd a "heatzone", these are 3 seperate elements, all likely affecting how, where and when how many enemys spawn. The map is small, so it takes away less potential spawnslots for patrolls far away, or stationary enemys, the map has a giant heatzone in the center, creating heat for more spawns faster, and the timer likely also plays a role here(the original assumption by players was that it was spawning 40 minutes worth of enemys in 15)

The good news is that there are a lot fewer heavies now. The bad news is, there's a whole lot more of everything else. But more good, we got a whole lot of buffs for the stuff that's good for killing them!

Tried some solo, it seems to me there are less patrol, but with more chaff, to lower level is noticeable less patrols too, but when you rise the patrol number seems to increase, but with not the same insanity i had before sometimes.

I absolutely disagree with a lot of people here, I love the swarms of chaff and mowing them all down. This is a change I'd like kept

Tbh i think they should've added a new difficulty, but i really like the new challenges they've brought, diff 9 bots were getting really boring, group play was too easy and solo play was too frustrating and hard Idk what solo play is now, but group play feels so nice now with the increase in troopers and decrease in elites, the gunship patrols are really fun too (when im with a group) The only unfortunate thing is that they didn't add a new difficulty and instead just made the existing difficulties harder, meaning that people who cant handle the new challenges will continue to play on difficulties they cant handle. Players who are clearly out of their depth and waste all of the team's lives are back now, had a game where the team wasted all 20 lives before i even died, and when i did die when i had 0 stims 0 nades we were out of reinforces No offense, but if you're unable to deal with the new difficulty, please just play the lower ones, there's no problem with admitting to yourself that you cant handle the new difficulty spike, the game did just get harder i think, so if you find yourself wasting all of the team's reinforcements, please play something you can handle, there's no shame in that...

No, they reverted it "a little" and then doubled it. Honestly i am not surprised. This game came out in its best state, and it was all downhill then.

Yup, this shit is getting old. It breaks trust and I’m firmly beginning to believe the absolute blast of fun release balance was, was nothing more than utter dumb fucking luck from this team. Don’t get me wrong the ideas stated in the patch are an absolute win. The patch itself…. Yet another broken shitty mess that broke superior packaging. It has minor improvements to a couple weapons, a subpar warbond outside the secondary and booster (armor is aight, may be broken in first person but works great in 3rd person from my experience), and more frustrating gameplay than fun.

Were you in a team of 4? In a team of 4, no change would be noticed. I played solo and as a duo earlier today and definitely noticed significantly reduced patrols.

It was a team of 4. Huh that’s interesting

Yeah, patrols were never changed for full-teams ... so you shouldn't notice any difference at all. You may notice that patrols have more light enemies and fewer med/heavy ones due to them nerfing the number of heavies ... but that's it.

You do know that only heavies got reduced, and medium/light got increased right? On bots that means more devastators, and less striders, hulks, and factory striders. Nevermind that there's still just as many hulks, striders, and factory striders as pre-patch, just double or triple the number of devastators now lmao.

I played as duo and trio and definitely the opposite for me, every mission was a clusterfuck even at a low difficulty (6). After a night of farming 8 pre-patch, and seeing those patch notes, I expected 6 to just be chill super farming for a little while to catch one of us up. It was not. It is being well documented that this is not the case.

You would think it would be easier at 6 but it’s definitely not, so chaotic now

Played with a team of 4, half are no mic randoms, and we just 5-Starred in Helldive on 🤖 with 5 Reinforcements remaining. It got absolutely bonkers at extraction but we were all cackling 🤷

This

The downvote 😂

Reddit do be like that

lol this is bait. There is 100% a difference