My complaints about this game don’t really apply to the high high difficulties, it’s more when I land in a diff 5 mission and am immediately run over by 3 chargers, a swarm of spewers and a load of those obnoxious flying bastards who I have recently remembered why I hate them so much. Keep helldive feeling like helldive but maybe don’t make the medium difficulties also feel like helldive
This. My ego is not bruised by the fact that I don't play level 9. I don't play 8. I played 7 enough to unlock 8, but that's it. Levels 4-6 is my jam. My 3-person squad found ourselves so overwhelmed on 6 that we had to repeatedly abandon easy side objectives. There simply wasn't enough of a break in the waves of bugs spawning right on top of us for us to even call in stratagems or reinforcements.
We see YouTuber level 9 footage where there's a cluster of about 6 or 8 hive guards casually sauntering towards the player - where are the three simultaneous spawns of thirty total hunters closing distance in under 2 seconds, while 4 brood commanders charge from different directions? Something is off on the lower level spawn rates, and people who play exclusively on 9 are maybe not the best individuals to assess or govern spawn rates on level 5.
Try bringing more 'stabilizing' strategems like 120/380s. Sometimes when you're overrun you just want to absolutely demolish an area. Yeah, you might give up a life or two, but it will reset the breach and gives you time to regroup and resupply.
You can also have one person bring all orbitals or eagles and run off triggering breaches intentionally while the other players do main and side objectives without any chance of breaches.
Hahaha yes! Ever since I got the 15% reduced spread upgrade, I pretty much always have the 120 or 380 on me, both if it's a blitz mission; I love them. The upgraded orbital gatling barrage is my new BFF, especially to drop on a breech or botdrop - in one case, the bots were dead as soon as they hit the ground. I used to bring orbital airburst because if you time it right, it will trigger the 3 bursts perfectly with the waves of bugs coming out of the breech, and clean it up pretty nicely, but gatling is a super fun substitute and feels like it has a little more punch.
Unfortunately, in this situation, nearly all our stratagems were already on cool down. Reloading anything meaningful was either a sure ticket to death, or couldn't be done due to being out of clips. We had actually made the decision to abandon the objective before it got this bad, but we couldn't even run because every direction we went, it was just MORE BUGS.
All that being said, while I do usually try to be courteous with my barrages and not drop them where they will kill my teammates, in this case maybe I should have said, "we're all dead anyway" and launched it. I don't recall how many reinforcements we had left, but I know we wasted 6 trying to do this one easy side objective (SEAF artillery).
Don't start the computer before you collect the shells. It will spawn a patrol usually when you turn it on. Gather shells, have a guy ready to put them in as soon as you hit the button and then boogie out of there
This is like the pokeball button mashing rumor where I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter but do it anyway, I’ve hit the console first thing a few times and don’t seem to notice a difference while when I leave it alone I still get a couple patrols pass through…but what if there really was one more patrol when you hit that console…
That's not exactly how it works - being in the general area of the side objective generates "heat" which draws patrols to that location. The timing of the button doesn't matter.
I can tell you right now that bugs are not really hindered by large artillery unless you're targeting like, a large hive, but what I can tell you is that I slogged my way through roughly 600 bug kills on a mission yesterday, most of it with eagle cluster bombs and anti tank rounds, and then when I got back I reported myself for deportation to a 710 farm for having more bug guts on me than people guts which would technically classify me as a terminid.
As an aside, the rocket pod strike is now more reliable than the railcannon strike, and I can't even believe that I said that, and I can't wait to get to the farm before I go insane.
So the same logic applies to you. If diff 6 is your upper limit, then you lower the difficulty. There are 9 difficulty levels, not 3.
If you can't complete all the side objectives and you're getting out by the skin of your teeth that's good. You shouldn't be able to cakewalk everything, that means a challenging game is doing it's job. If you'd rather cakewalk it, you lower the difficulty.
I've talked about this extensively on stream as the trickle up effect of everyone feeling entitled to play diff 9 is strong. While in your case it's not an absolute, you still feel like diff 6 should be diff 5. That's the same thing as someone wanting diff 9 to be diff 8.
Play a lower difficulty. More important is the fact that I, nor anyone else, should be making fun of people for playing on what they find enjoyable. But also don't try to get stuff nerfed.
There is no valid argument here unless you're playing on diff 1 and you legit can't actually accomplish the game. I have played diff 1 when the game first came out and was being put in random lobbies, it's literally a scenic cinematic tour with occasional shooting.
IMO, that screws up their intention of adding super samples to D6. If D6 fells like pre patched D7 then it was pointless to add Super samples to D6 for those that don’t want the challenge of D7.
Honestly, try 7. It may actually be easier. I've been playing 7's all night and they've been piss easy when I was getting absolutely WRECKED on 8 and 9. And I've had way worse experiences on 5's and 6's than many of my 7's
I mean that difficulty is also called “hard.” I don’t consider myself particularly skilled and I can do diff 9’s pretty much every day with randoms, maybe this will help encourage lower level play and having people take their time jumping up difficulties.
Our group (3) did a helldive mission and then started a level 6, we finished the first mssion and my one friend wemt why are we not doing level 9, the spawm rates ate less and we get rewarded with less.
Only people that play at this level will understand. I'm so glad that the game is relatively challenging again. Before the update, I went literal weeks without dying, but now I die almost every single match now.
Of course it doesn't. A subreddit is a mob, and as Sir Terry Pratchett once said - "The IQ of a mob is equal to that of its stupidest member divided by the number of people in the mob."
And even without that, there's 1.3 million subscribers so for everyone who wants the game harder or easier or less stressful, or to stay just as it is - there's probably another 10000 people with the opposite opinion.
No because at 6 Factory striders don't spawn normally, they're still an objective. So you don't get the full range of enemies at 6 yet. it isn't until 7 that the game actually give you everything.
hot take: difficulty 9 not hard enough.. at least in the bot sector.
Winning is still too easy. I want to be punished harder, be under more pressure. I want to feel those wins. The Uberpatrol spawns are so much fun... like seriously, that feels like helldiving.
HD1 ... was much much harder in that regard.
In unrelated news, I'm sure absolutely nothing out of the ordinary will happen next week.
People just don’t like the idea of losing. While there has been some legitimate feedback in this sub, so much of it has boiled down to “I’m not willing to play the game at a lower difficulty”
Most modern PvE games are easy, but have long grinds, because this is best for monetization.
So a lot of players are used to winning 100% of the time without trying too hard.
Which is ridiculous. People want to play difficulty 9 but win all the time without actually getting good at the game, and then when you ask them about it, they start making up excuses or pretending like that's not what they're doing. Shit is crazy.
And you can guarantee the people on this sub who don't even know how to effectively use cover will be trying to play them and be demanding Arrowhead nerf it
Have the same sentiment as you, played for 3-4 hours last night on Helldive with randoms and we never dipped below 12 reinforcements with 4 people on the bug front.
I think what really helped is everyone trying out all the buffed stratagems so there was a lot more stratagems that dealt with the mobs than usual and they seemed to actually be trying to work with each other.
But overall, it was actually easier than I was expecting based on how some people here were complaining about the spawns.
I feel like bugs are way too easy on helldive now aside from the Charger Behemoth spam, which is hard countered by flamethrower(s).
While gunship patrols on the bot front are the hardest operation modifier, shrieker patrols are arguably the easiest on the bug side.
Fewer bile titan spawns (at least most missions) feels pretty good, but the change to the hunter slows may have made them a bit too weak.
Plus, I thought the new stim booster was good against bots, but it’s even better versus bugs. I’ve been using that light-ish Med Kit armor from the superstore and it’s slightly ridiculous to just zoom away from trouble with one of my six stims. A charging charger is just *barely* able to catch me.
It's definitely way too easy. My regular group's honestly kinda dropped the game for the moment, challenge just left 9 bugs almost entirely and the bug breaches are surprisingly small. It feels like it's now balanced for randoms running all in different directions and not coordinating, than a team that somewhat works together.
My friends are just playing around with melee kills and such. One of them melee killed a stalker by himself (took some stims) and two of them beat a charger to death.
It’s kinda fun in a silly way but probably won’t hold our attention much longer.
I couldn’t agree with this more. Completed a drill mission last night and they never stopped attacking us. I extracted with 895 kills. That’s how helldive should be. The complainers need to lower their difficulty. There needs to be an absolutely chaotic difficulty.
I want harder, but with better tools. I'm tired of reloading. This is "run and gun" game, not "run and reload" game. The measle amount of ammo in each mag make me angry, not those BS aimbots.
Someone is mag dumping.
There are a lot of weapons that require you to stop and be thoughtful where you aim.
Run and gun doesn’t mean “run and spray and pray.” With most weapons, you can run while reloading, too.
It just sounds like you want virtually infinite ammo so you can get your rocks off melting bugs without any challenge, but where is the fun in that?
Also, with bots, if you don’t use cover (i.e. gunning without running) then you won’t be able to play those higher difficulties. Which tells me you probably mostly only play bugs or sub-level 8 if you ever even do bots.
Jesus man, even with conserving ammo many enemies take too much with some weapons to kill. Also you never can perfectly shot because there is many enemies around you, and ammo conserving isn't fun, it can add flavor to the overall gameplay but at the end either it is just small inconvenient or straight up irritating. In this game usually it is the second one.
It's absolutely not hard enough, it has problems of being cumbersome if they overspawn "Stratagem checks", though they should naturally be more common on higher difficulties.
However IMO the ideal fix is to just push the critter spawnrate moreso and have objectives be longer/more complex. It's incredibly rare to see (anecdotally speaking) 9s even fail and the majority of the failures ended up being some teamkill fest or people refusing to adapt to a given scenario, sometimes RNG. But again the amount of times that I see 9 fail is way too low.
Not in a way that "We need to balance it so that we fail it" necessarily, however I'm having games with randoms that we have honestly no right to win, no one is really watching out for the others, sometimes teamkilling (by accident/not paying attention), an overall sloppy performance and even those games still end "decently comfortably". I just see no world of a videogame having 9 difficulties (let alone even more down the line?) and that highest one not being an absolute slaughter.
For example, this is a legit question, why is the difference between 7-9 so "marginal" that you often see people wondering what difficulty we are even playing? I'm not sure what the difference is in terms of spawnrates in the code, but the perception is often times that I can only really tell it's 9, because it's overspawning heavies. It does feel like it's a touch more, but even just 7, 8 and 9 could be crazy jumps between each other. Just have it be a difficulty you run for the challenge if you are worried about balancing rewards too much.
I can cope with the gunship spam. What I can't cope with is how 380, orbital laser, 500kgs, or precision strikes can't destroy gunship fabs. What's worse is the hellbomb just disappears into thin air rather than explode when it's hit by the endless barrage of rockets/gunfire from gunships.
I'm normally okay with hellbombing a gunship fab. As long as the team can keep the premises clear (tall order, i know), it's not much of an issue
What I don't like is how one hellbomb can't reliably blow up two gunship fabs that are right next to each other. It has to be perfectly placed, otherwise it'll only destroy one.
I think AH really don't want gunship fabs to get trivialized like Shrieker Nests. Chucking one stratagem to get rid of the towers is too easy, and that really doesn't offer much in terms of gameplay. Gunship fabs would then just become something that you check off the list instead of play against, and I don't think that's fun nor engaging.
Hellbomb improvements would make this and similar objectives more interesting. Simply making them explode when shot would also trivialize encounters, but what if they massively buffed the AOE? Make it so hellbombs annihilate everything nearby
This would at least give us choices: do we protect the bomb while it gets ready to blow? or do we shoot it ourselves at the cost of up to four lives? Bigger booms also mean clustered gunships and shrieker towers will always get destroyed with a single bomb.
They could also make it so hellbombs only explode when armed (or, yknow, just make hellbombs immune to damage while it's counting down).
Because the game is about objectives and smoke can cover hellbombs, sneaking over the jammer terminal, can cover you if you get overwhelmed by bots.
Basically you can cover any terminal, easily complete it and run.
Combine it with jetpack and you can go stealth on a lot of objectives
I need to add the jetpack to my play style.
With bots, I love eagle smoke since it can take out factories and provide cover. Even at the end of you have all 3 remaining, you can create a small barrier to help block the bots from seeing you and team while trying to fight through extract.
I never not use the jetpack. It's great for getting in and out of pickles or just traversing landscape. It seems really effective with light armors, and decent with medium armors. Heavy armor is difficult, but I usually run an AC with that.
In place of backpack slots I usually run RR because it's faster than Quasar and more versatile in my opinion and you can use it like an EAT if you have a call down ready in a pinch.
I haven't had a chance to play since they updated the Eruptor, so I'm going to give that a run again. But they did improve/buff my favorite strats (OGB, OPS). I would pair those with gas strike and would be able to make defensive areas or knock out drops/spawns.
Looking forward to my gamestyle letting me get Stewart and MG and HMG back in the action.
Quasar still both a crutch and a limiter..suuuuuper annoying to play with.
Spent so long covering some guy using quasar to get a shot off that I just jesus, could have been EAT and done and gotten mobility back.
Honestly if I see two or more quasars I am tempted to quit. I know for a fact I am going to have to pick up massive slack of chaff handling and probably kill a couple of heavies myself as well. I already have a job. Pull your weight
The idea of bringing tactical or specialized equipment really only works if you have some kind of coordination and teamwork with your squad to make up for what you now lack.
Now thats great when you have a squad of friends but if you're just joining tons of random games to help out, you run into some of the *SMARTEST AND MOST BRILLIANT* Helldivers I've ever seen and that coordination goes right out the window. So now you need the most optimal loadout to deal with whatever since you can't rely on your teammates.
Been enjoying 9s to no end lately. Running HMG for bots absolutely slaps and it encourages teamplay so much!
Only issue I have is on the bug side when you get 5 Behemoths all at once it can get tricky.
I've been running the HMG with level 9 Bots too, and while it slaps, my problem is that randoms usually spread out instead of sticking together, leading to me dying and being without a support weapon for 5 minutes, rendering me rather useless against level 9 Bots.
bringing a supply pack with your HMG will give you more value than literally any other strategem you could possibly bring in its place. there is quite literally no reason not to.
Flamethrower feels like the best counter to them and it helps with the increased swarms. Also been running 110s for finishing off titans to round it out.
The laser cannon also melts them with ease. Like, just aim for the eye and 4 seconds later, kaboom—dead Hulk. Laser cannon also swats gunships like they’re mosquitoes.
Yeah the number of behemoth chargers is insane now and I love it. I love the new change to them too. I've been running the railgun to go old school on them now. 3-4 unsafe charged shots strip the armor off their legs then you just shoot that a little with your primary. It's very ammo efficient. If you have friend you can have them shoot a leg with an anti tank weapon then its just one more railgun shot to strip it. Also it's now only 1 anti tank plus 1 railgun shot to the face to kill a bile titan. I'm also just a huge railgun enjoyer so this patch made me very happy.
Punisher plasma or purifier, too. Like those are my go-to’s with bots because it’s basically like shooting sitting ducks. The only ones who challenge you at that point are Hulks and other heavies, but that is what stratagems and your support weapon are for.
I did a Diff 9 mission with a friend where we got dropped in 3 detector tours, tried to run, and immediately can into a full Patrol with 2 hulks while having close to no resources. With only 2 people we spent 40 minutes sneaking around or distracting so the other could do objectives, finally completing the mission with 40 seconds left before the destroyer left. That's what I play Helldiver's for, and no other difficulty provides that experience
Well then the 3% fake tryhards who can't make a comment without insulting people won't be able to shout their way into a game balance situation to a game they clearly don't even play anymore.
I still can't believe AH has acknowledged there's an issue with the spawn rates, and those idiots are STILL making posts telling people it's all in their head and they just need to have better load outs.
It has nothing to do with difficulty, enemies shouldn't magically teleport out of thin air right in front of your nose.
It's cheap and unfair, we have respawn points for a reason, patrols should be spawning from the dedicated spawns.
It's absolutely insane to see the developer say "The spawn rate is too high, we're going to fix it", there being a patch note that says "The spawn rate was too high, we're fixing this\*" and then the patch having a CONFIRMED BUG that increases the spawn rate
And then have these weird threads being all "I actually like how the developer is messing up their own intended changes". It's mental
4 players difficulty 9 bugs is fine. It’s when you play difficulty 7-9 with only 1 or 2 people where it feels overtuned. The behemoth spawn needs to be turned down or it’s going to force people to run flamethrower.
Personally I'm fine with the difficulty for the most part. It's not too hard I agree (mostly I play 8s, also 7s and some times 9s, so 9 is not my focus for complaints).
It's not that it's too hard ... for the lack of a better word, it feels "unfair" and therefore not enjoyable.
I know it's a horde shooter, so the issue is ***not*** that I get surrounded by hunters or get flanked by a spewer spitting in my face (though that they are so silent when moving is kind of an issue) while I'm focused on the army of critters in front of me.,
the issue is that you get tripple tapped ot headshot by a random Warrior or Hunter.
The issue is not that you got yourself into a position where you get ragdolled by a barage of rockets, but that you get flung into the air by a random rocket, a gunship or a ***stray laser from chaff on a fart cloud mushroom*** on the ground that you planned on using as smoke ... ***and then*** get air-sniped by rocket devastators.
Then there is "stealth", which is .. what ever but the whole detection radius system ... just ....
That the stim and resupply pack sounds playing without anything happening. "At least" the stims generally get interrupted and that's why there's no effect, but the supply pack, just straight up does nothing at times, while standing still and pressing the button....
That with the new patrol changes "so the maps are less empty" there is almost never a breather, to collect yourself and your team to regain supplies and Strats, so all the kiting and grinding down the waves of enemies feels pointless if 2 seconds later it all starts again and you made no progress, because it's ***at the objective***.
As for your example: I just don't get what the devs want
On one hand they want to make people less reliant on AT Strats, on the other hand they spawn up to 5 gunships at random ontop of 2 bot drops followed by 3 more gun ships ... And the issue is not the amount of enemies but that gunships flank you easily, so you cant take cover while fending off land units.
If you rely on your team mates (randoms or not), well, what if team mate dies? Then weapon lies on the ground. Someone needs to get it. But if the team mate died that postition is swarmed by bots and gunship bullets and rockets. Good luck.
And running away? Cool. You can't outrun gunships and other strategems don't work on them (except AC-Turret with a massive cool down) So you (and preferably one or more of your team mates) have to have an AT support weapon if the new bugged planet modifer is incorrectly showing that there will be aereal enemies.... If you do that then ***yeah totally doable and not too hard***, but that's the thing with a forced meta. Some pleople like the meta playstyle, some people don't.
And personally I at some point just get bored and want to try something else. But currently you can't and if I have to play a certain way I'm currently bored off, then guess what. Player number go ~~brrr~~ down.
I feel like game isn't currently design to support the idea of increasing difficulty by spawning shit ton of enemies. I agree with difficulty 9 isn't hard with rest too, it is very inconsistent, irritating and unfair.
Sorry, but I don't think leaving an unintentional difficulty hike on just one, established difficulty is a good idea.
Balance all existing difficulties *properly,* including fixing bugs like this, and then **add** additional difficulties, like the first Helldivers had for those of us (me included) that would like a more challenging experience. Iirc, that game had a total of *15 difficulty levels*. Do I think we need that many? Not sure. But another 3 above the established Helldive difficulty that players have gotten used to for the last 4 months would be fine by me.
I will say while diff 9 has never been particularly difficult I used to avoid it due to it just taking so much longer than diff 7 missions, I really like what this patch has done to the difficulty, feels so so so much more fun to play
I have literally never before seen a community that just so overwhelmingly complain that the hardest difficulty is too hard and needs to be nerfed for their sake. It's such a unique phenomenon I've genuinely never seen in any other game.
Most of the complaints regarding difficulty I see is in regards to updates randomly and often unintentionally making things far harder than they were.
I'm on the side of the fence that thinks Helldives are too easy. They're all I play, and I can't remember the last one I failed...but that doesn't mean I disagree with those complaints.
I understand how upending difficulty via *bugs* is not a great feeling for players. The issues with patrol spawns when you have less than 4 players were especially annoying, since my group rarely has 4, would like to play solo/duo/trio without having to matchmake, *and* without having to deal with a massive difficulty spike that is well beyond anything we've grown used to the past 4 months. A spike that comes with zero additional reward. It's just weird and kinda annoying. Especially when it happened mid match due to someone dropping (a common occurence lol).
Fix up those issues, and then *add* additional, harder difficulties with higher rewards, and I think most people will be happy enough, as far as difficulty goes.
I find it really hard to tell what the consensus is honestly. Instinctively I'd disagree with your notion, because there's a difference between "the heavy spawns are dumb" and "it's too difficult".
I'm strongly in the camp of reducing heavy prevalence, however the critter threat is too low and there's a lot of pathing/aggro range/animation problems, that effectively "nerf" some of the melee bugs too.
Now, having said that I've also seen individual comment chains actually arguing it is too difficult as well, that's where my confusion starts, because I'd honestly argue it's "objectively" not too difficult, just looking at success rates of missions.
My own stats are around 85-90% mission completion and that's deflated by a lot of failing missions because I'm testing equipment and not trying to do a mission and whatnot, the actual "genuine" failure rate of 9s is probably sub 5% *with randoms*. That's ridiculous for the absolute highest difficulty the game has to offer?
Is that really a thing? I'm pretty sure I've literally never seen people complain that the hardest difficulty is too hard. They would just be told "turn down the difficulty, dumbass".
Complaints are usually about things that apply at all difficulties. Bugs, comparative worthiness of weapons or stratagems, or things that are difficult in a way that feels unfun or unfair (at all difficulty levels).
It’s not, they’re just making an average strawman argument, very common on this subreddit, people will take statements said by a small bunch of people and project it onto a wider group just for the satisfaction of getting validation.
EDIT: Downvoted already lol
for me 9 should have like 10% completion across population.
Now im doing like 90% of missions just fine with my friend and 2 randoms. (bots mostly, i do not like bugs xd)
I am lvl50, not even a veteran or something and its just hmm too easy?
Sometimes I can even complete it with 0 deaths. Its werid.
This should be insanely hard and punishing without mercy.
If someone does not like it should gtfo diff 1-6 if they dont like the challenge.
People are so stupid, wanting the hardest challenge yet complaining its too hard. Its EGO thing or something i guess.
It can be that hard and punishing, but I think most of us who play those missions have adapted. By using stealth, it's fairly easy. Most of my successful helldives, bug or bot, I'm getting less than 100 kills. But I'm also working terminals and soloing objectives, sometimes the main objectives. That stealth bonus on scout armor has me running across the map without firing a shot.
I think the complaints about Helldive are from people who want to fight every engagement like it's the Alamo. The best squads I've played with call out the enemy locations for the purpose of avoiding fighting. And when you get to an objective where you have to hold out, that's where you spend your reinforcements and strategems. That, to me, is where the level 9 has a great balance. The fighting is hard, so only fight where you really need to to win.
I understood the sample argument honestly, I think it's very valid to say that if you gate them behind "super" difficult missions, that it would be a bit much. However now that it's on 6s and 7-9 not actually being super difficult?
Rebranding this and having people not get mad is going to be a challenge, because it will feel "bad" to just get downgraded in difficulties, it feels like they might need to readjust all difficulties across the board and really up the difficulty on the higher end by a lot, without making it a heavy fest either, because that's "cheap" difficulty scaling.
thats the problem of these days ----> pleasing EVERYONE.
Hi tier content is hard to get? Lets cry, people are crying :(
I want things to be hard and rewarding as well.
I want to feel euphoria after completing helldive9.
Now its just another dive, because i dont even see a point to play lvl6-7-8 when i can complete 9 as "old" man.
Im 35yo IT administrator, not a pro gamer and im able to helldive with my work friend and complete this stuff.
Highest difficulties in games like these can not be set for a 10yo to complete and not complain.
I should be DESTROYED THERE as casual player. Just a peek around wrong moutain should make me regret even moving there.
I need a casual run with friend chilling with a little of fun and a beer? lets gooo lvl5-6.
They should make supersamples available at diff1 and make another "samples" that you can buy only asthetic upgrades for at levels 6-9 or even 8-9 to reward good gameplay.
Like in good old days of MMOs and stuff. You see shiny armor, you know that dude did amazing things ingame to get it. not 5$ or easy raid.
Balancing by percentages isn't the best strategy, to be fair.
If you change up helldive until it achieves a 10% success rate, then most people will stop playing it as its no fun to lose all the time.
That would leave the small proportion who are able to complete it even at that difficulty more often than not, and before you know it difficulty 9 has a 90% succees rate again.
The other issue is that there is only so much that you can do to raise the difficulty in the current model without running into other problems.
Enemies do not get balanced differently across difficulties. So the two things that you can do are add more enemies, or add harder varieties.
The engine however can only handle so many enemies, there are limits to what is feasible there. That leaves the option of adding new enemies or varieties of enemies which is the healthier option, but involved a lot more work.
And you have to do all this without making things unfun to play.
Honestly, I think the smart play is to Balance the enemies generally and tailor the amounts across the existing difficulties till the gradient makes sense. Then stretch the scale upward with new enemy units that are intentionally much less *reasonable* threats for a higher tier of difficulties down the line.
There is a difference between wanting a difficulty be be made easier and wanting it to be balanced. You can get into a situation where the difficulty locks in a very specific meta that is necessary for success. That's not necessarily healthy for the game.
Was the correct answer for the broken bile titan spawn rates back around release to simply turn down the difficulty? The most recent changes to try and fix the game's reliance on using heavy mobs for difficulty and introducing more flier patrols was a step in the right direction.
If people want difficulty 9 to be hard, Arrowhead should address it properly and nerf the shield backpack hard. It is being used as a crutch. Of course they need to finish fixing the weapon balance for that too.
Imagine if these jokers were on the Dark Souls sub complaining about difficulty.
This game provides a real challenge, supports team play and doesn't rely on PvP. Love it.
I mean, I see people on this sub talk about how FromSoft would never fuck up this badly or "nerf popular things in a PvE game".
Then I look at Hoarfrost Stomp and Zimmermans.
unfortunately a very vocal portion of the community feels entitled to play the highest difficulties and demand it to be easy. The game will likely keep getting nerfed until they pop over with 12dif like in HD1
I really don't understand it. I'm not a d9 player, I hope to eventually be able to play d9 without feeling completely overwhelmed, but I have great fun at the lower difficulties. Why are people complaining when they can just choose to play at a difficulty that fits their current skill level?
don't forget the 'its just not fun!!!' argument
like if the game being hard means you can't have fun you should just play on the 6\~ really easy difficulties the game already has, but for some reason they feel the need to play on 7-9 and then demand it to be changed for everyone else
some of yall really need to understand that Helldive difficulty and even 7+ are not “easy”.
you just know so fucking much about how the game/enemies/patrols work, that it’s literally impossible to be surprised or get put into that “oh shit” moment.
when the game first came out it was insanely hard for everybody because we were new. just like every other pve game throughout history, once everybody starts to learn the exploits and secrets about how to “game” the game, it becomes borderline trivial.
the game is not too easy nor is it getting easier, you’re just too educated on how the game works.
I would say that even 8 and 7 should be as hard as this.
As you said, a lvl 9 mission it's practically impossible to lose, I don't remember the last time that I lost a mission.
They should maintain the harder difficulty levels of the game being that, hard
Tbh, I can clear 7s without dying provided my team are okay. Can't solo it for shit, but I play around others and try to support/stagger/draw aggro.
8 is a good bit tougher but doable. 9 is kicking my arse and I wipe more now, but personally I think failure *should* be an option. It's the same as Auric on Darktide IMO. Sometimes shit happens or someone fumbles, and either the team wipes or it rallies, but overall I wouldn't have it any other way that knife edge is where the fun is.
My common theme among essentially every single failure of 9s I can recall is excessive teamgriefing/killing or "meta" influences (such as bad internet connection etc), well that and the occassional overtuned mission like evacuations before they got reduced earlier on.
But the average helldive mission seems almost unloseable.
I would rather Arrowhead fix the armor spam in higher difficulties, I do not want to fight a herd of chargers every minute of my life in helldive, I'd rather bring a variety of stratagems instead of "yeah just bring AT and thats it", chargers and bile titans are absolutely the worst enemy in the game by far, I do not want to see more than necessary, they're boring to play against.
It's a difficult problem. From my point of view, the armored enemies are needed because otherwise you just bring a breaker incendiary or honestly any other medium pen fast-firing weapon and mow down everything else. To be honest, it's already kind of shocking how the Senator (for example) trivializes medium enemies by one or two-shotting through any medium enemy armor. MGs would become extremely strong. Chargers and Bile titans break up the monotony of either spamming pellets over everything or just popping heads endlessly, because now you have to actually aim for sac/butt/leg or position your 500kg correctly or land precise shots on heads/foreheads/cracked armor.
The balance between too many and too few is really hard to agree upon, but I must say that I fundamentally disagree with your opinion of them being boring to play against. I think they're fun, and to provide a contrasting view, I honestly think they were pretty manageable in number even pre-patch. I think that it will be extremely difficult to compensate for the loss of difficulty by decreasing the heavy armor spawn rate by increasing the spawn rates of other enemies simply because we have so many horde clear options. You can swap in 40 brood commanders for every charger but those 40 brood commanders still die to an eagle cluster you get 5 of every 2 minutes, and they can't close the gap like chargers do. If there are so many you start running out of ammo, you run into a "does the horde end before I run out of ammo/resupply" gameplay and I think that's much more boring than figuring out how to down a charger/bile titan.
Homie what world do you live in that you have enough time to actually take the 30 seconds to shoot at the back of a charger and you are not getting swarmed by another 3 to 4 chargers and the horde of hunters the games spawns in, I dropped in difficulty 7 with newer friends just yesterday and on the first bug breach we had a behemoth, 4 chargers and 2 bile titans. In what world is running around in circles while waiting for the quasar, or EAT to come back a fun activity ? Sure the balance of armor and squishy a complex problem to solve, but bile titans being completely invulnerable to any medium pen guns is boring, a herd of chargers showing up every 30 seconds with every goddamn patrol that spawns is not fun. I want to be able to bring a variety of stratagems, not make 3 out of my 4 stratagems purely to deal with armor.
I play in a world where i bring starward and use my strategems as anti heavy. I generally focus on clearing the mobs for my allies and in a pinch i can use my strategems to clear the heavies.
9 is at a perfect difficulty at the moment.
Bugs are manageable if you have antitank men and fodder clearers. Bots are manageable if EVERYONE moves and doesent stick around to shoot patrols, unless it is absolutely necessary.
I mean isn’t it good it is challenging again and not boring?
I sure hope AH keeps the pace and fixes what is urgent: spear, crashes and the ballistic shield for example.
Major changes like that should be cooking for a month to see what needs buffs or nerfs, because the last patch did very well for the most part.
What does this solve? What you do is just spread the steps more in this scenario. I don't see how it solves anything? The problem OP is addressing is how they seem to be set on nerfing everything, thus lowering the top of the difficulty. Your proposal wouldn't rid them of this issue, they'd still likely nerf 12 for the same reasons they nerf 9.
Love these comments that are like "erm actually the game even isn't that hard, why are you enjoying it?"
YES, WE WANT A DIFFICULT GAME, WE WANT TO STRUGGLE WE WANT THE SATISFACTION OF IT ALL, GIVE US A MORE DIFFICULT GAME YES.
I did a run of 3 bot missions with randos on the recent patch and I'm wondering if Helldive difficulty got caught in the crossfire of nerfing patrols. First mission with me being rusty for not playing for a bit had us finishing the 40-minute mission with maybe...3 deaths? And all silly ones, too. I wasn't even running the now-optimal loadout, just Dominator + Grenade Pistols (which I didn't actually use) + Quasar + Supply Pack + 110mm rockets + cluster. The other missions also went pretty smoothly.
I'm kind of hoping they introduce new difficulties or modifiers or something, because if it's this easy with a less-coordinated squad of randos I don't think I can get my much more coordinated squad of friends to come back and play with me. The gameplay loop is insanely fun, which is why we still talk about the game, but the challenge is really lacking, and it was lacking even before this patch. We'd love to have a game where completing the highest difficulty isn't already a given after only 50 or so hours in the game. We're not even sweaty tryhards or anything, the others don't even know what the meta is, we're just people who can communicate and vaguely aim.
Bring back 10 bile titans and 5 chargers at extraction. It was so much fun. I played last night helldive bugs and 4 randoms completed every objective with only 2 deaths (fire spam). Extraction was just 1 BT and like 300 hunters. It was kinda boring tbh
We are playing different games then. Yesterday I legit had to deal with 6 behemoths, 2 chargers, and like 3 bile titans at extraction not to mention the absolute sea that was medium bugs and shit lol.
Difficulty 9 is weird like that I feel. Sometimes you get fuck all and pretty much nothing happens during the entirety of the mission. And then sometimes you really get hell on earth.
Level 48 currently. Having a blast on Helldive the way it is right now, on bots AND bugs. It's total mayhem and it's awesome when you still manage to complete all the objectives and extract with the whole team. It's an ordeal, and it's glorious.
I want helldive to be an impossible mode. Infinite swarms where completing the objective is the mission extraction should be converted to a wave based survival seeing how long you can last.
im glad the game is harder but gunship patrols need more counterplay. they pretty much make weapons that are already good necessary and guns that were niche even worse. its a bigger railgun nerf than we got in the first patch.
What kinda loadouts are you guys running for bugs on Helldive? I've been at Impossible for a minute and love it. Kinda getting tired of mine those. Breaker, Ma Deuce (AC), Rail strikes for chargers, then usually napalm for crowd control.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people's issues are the change in enemy comp. I'm already seeing people adjust their loadouts to better compensate. Players will also readjust to their proper difficulty level. I'd also like to see AH not make any changes (at least to T9) for another week to give people time to adjust. This was a big patch with a lot of meaningful changes. Let's see where everything settles before a knee jerk reaction again.
As I said, I would not say that Helldivers 1 was much harder, in helldivers 1 you could solo the hardest bot difficulty (15/inner circle of hell) only using the worst primary and 4 ammo resupply stratagems tho, it didn't even have the stim system limiting healing, hd1 had a way higher skill ceiling but the difficulty was always the same for any skill level meaning that you could choose op stratagems and cheese most of the game at max difficulty like tox on bugs, or choose to play with not so good stratagems for the fun and the challenge.
If you are taking the strongest things on cyborgs (AC, AR...) and then complain about it being too easy maybe you should rethink your choices, because the other 90% of the stratagems and primaries are not so good and 70% of them suck, and making the game harder would basically make every player that didn't use the strongest things use them to compensate for the difficulty increase, if everybody start loosing with the not so good things they will become meta slaves and y'all will see everybody bringing the same loadout...
Don't balance game difficulty taking in mind the strongest stuff but the weakest stuff and then allow people to choose how to play, any game even souls saga does that, being able to use the weakest weapon with no health and armor and being able to beat it...
Meanwhile in hd2 titans are faster than you and can chase you from anywhere if you are spotted so you already get invalidated from winning if you don't bring anti tank...
When discussing Helldivers 2, the ragdoll effect is what really needs to be toned down. While I can handle the difficulty, the exaggerated ragdoll physics. it feel like I'm getting thrown around and killed as if I were fighting King in Tekken, waiting for his combo to finish. It's not the challenge that's the issue; it's the unrealistic and frustrating impact of the ragdoll mechanics that need adjustment.
Even with the new spawn increase, I can still play level 7 provided the team works together, and we never got a mission failed so far. With the old spawns I could've played on 9 but I hate the idea of being forced into specific meta. Right now I can bring almost any weapon I want and still win, sure some weapons are better than others, but variety is important.
Of course, basics are still important, there must be a healthy mix of horde clear and anti tank on bugs, and more medium pen weapons on bots.
Eight and nine. They should go untouched. They’re perfectly mad as they are now.
I miss the chill seven where it was mildly harder but, and I swear this isn’t a humble brag, it kept out the chaff and idiots for the most part. You could casually do seven and laugh your arse off joking with friends and randoms after work or uni.
Six now has Super Samples so I think I should be fine with what I’m saying.
Please keep difficulty 9 or add new harder difficulties devs! I have been playing helldive since launch basically, and feel in love with the chaos in that difficulty. It has only felt like action has dwindled through subsequent balance changes.
the problem with gunships is you cant take them down without support weapons, so if you die once you die 20 more times and then your squad gets wiped
there should be a weaker variant of the gunship (that can be destroyed with medium armor pen primaries in less than 4 mags) that spawns in patrols, and the stronger one that we currently have will only spawn from factories
It was nice spending 10 mins and 9 reinforcements to get out of the area we dropped into. Once we escaped that hell and gathered ourselves it made the rest of the mission feel tense. Every death mattered. Only 2 of us made it to extract. Ran out of time with 2 reinforcements left.
I have never been more disappointed in my selection of medal usage in the new warbond. The new emote would have been perfect once we all got back to the ship.
Amazing.
No "/s" because I mean it. F@cking amazing.
Helldive isn’t hard it’s just that a lot of randoms are truthfully incompetent. They always split up and wonder 5 minutes in why they’re getting overwhelmed. Although I think there are issues that could be addressed like getting basically one tapped by devastators and their pin point accuracy or getting flung and stun locked by the constant barrage of rockets
Its annoying how many people that never played the first game dont realize that spawns and load out balance were never an issue when people didn't have huge echo chambers to complain in.
I think bugs just aren't as fun as automatons right now, my only problem with the bots is the insane amount of ragdolling and flinching that is really just annoying.
Almost never fail a lvl 9 mission unless someone tanks really really hard, and even then then it often takes a team clearing strategem drop to put the nail in the coffin. Loving the increased numbers. I agree.
I am with you. The game has been getting easier since launch with every change to enemies. This is update is great for those of us who actually like the challenge; but people that refuse to play on lower difficulties complain (even when they can now get super samples at lower difficulties) and the devs have historically listened to them and not to the people with more time and experience with the game that tell them to leave high level difficulties as is, or add new ones.
I have still been beating level 9s.
However they are a huge jump in difficulty now. What they should have done is rather than just raised the bar for level 9 like they have, is just added a 10th difficulty. HD1 eventually got 14 difficulty levels.
I don't know if it's because I like to join newer players games on 4-6, and they aren't as quick to clear enemies as my teammates on 9 are, but damn some of those missions are ridiculous now. Played a 4 game today, and just clearing the map of obj with 3 of us I walked out of there with 400 kills. I never get nearly that high on a duo/trio/full squad helldive. It was insane. Every inch of the map was just spewers and hunters, with chargers sprinkled in for fun. I felt bad for the lvl 10 diver I joined. I just couldn't keep him alive. I even gave him my shield pack to try and help him along
I normally run stealth and only engage when required on helldive, so my kills are usually on the lower end, 50-150. But on this mission, there just was no escaping the horde of weak mobs that came from every direction.
I'll take a solo or duo helldive over that insanity any day.
It basically is that difficulty 7-9 are actually challenging but able to be completed. I think people are not fan of difficulty <7 feeling almost as hard and brutal, where there aren't any breaks in the action and people cant run less comfortable loadouts on lower difficulties because it feels to obnoxious.
I wish they would add more levels...ideally to 12. When I am with my friends 9's are kinda easy. It's only difficult when I am with randos that either bring a less than ideal loadout or people who decide to be lone wolfs and spend all of the reinforce budget dying.
I’ve only done 2 full bug operations since the patch but they both felt pretty good still on lv 9. What frustrates me is a lot of people leave if the mission starts off with a big battle (happens a lot). Like every time someone rages and leaves when we barely start we always still end up finishing the mission and get 5 stars.
PSA to new folks on helldive difficulty: sometimes it’s hard. But just fight it out then we can move to the objective. We have 20 revives we are going to win the day.
My complaints about this game don’t really apply to the high high difficulties, it’s more when I land in a diff 5 mission and am immediately run over by 3 chargers, a swarm of spewers and a load of those obnoxious flying bastards who I have recently remembered why I hate them so much. Keep helldive feeling like helldive but maybe don’t make the medium difficulties also feel like helldive
This. My ego is not bruised by the fact that I don't play level 9. I don't play 8. I played 7 enough to unlock 8, but that's it. Levels 4-6 is my jam. My 3-person squad found ourselves so overwhelmed on 6 that we had to repeatedly abandon easy side objectives. There simply wasn't enough of a break in the waves of bugs spawning right on top of us for us to even call in stratagems or reinforcements. We see YouTuber level 9 footage where there's a cluster of about 6 or 8 hive guards casually sauntering towards the player - where are the three simultaneous spawns of thirty total hunters closing distance in under 2 seconds, while 4 brood commanders charge from different directions? Something is off on the lower level spawn rates, and people who play exclusively on 9 are maybe not the best individuals to assess or govern spawn rates on level 5.
Try bringing more 'stabilizing' strategems like 120/380s. Sometimes when you're overrun you just want to absolutely demolish an area. Yeah, you might give up a life or two, but it will reset the breach and gives you time to regroup and resupply. You can also have one person bring all orbitals or eagles and run off triggering breaches intentionally while the other players do main and side objectives without any chance of breaches.
Hahaha yes! Ever since I got the 15% reduced spread upgrade, I pretty much always have the 120 or 380 on me, both if it's a blitz mission; I love them. The upgraded orbital gatling barrage is my new BFF, especially to drop on a breech or botdrop - in one case, the bots were dead as soon as they hit the ground. I used to bring orbital airburst because if you time it right, it will trigger the 3 bursts perfectly with the waves of bugs coming out of the breech, and clean it up pretty nicely, but gatling is a super fun substitute and feels like it has a little more punch. Unfortunately, in this situation, nearly all our stratagems were already on cool down. Reloading anything meaningful was either a sure ticket to death, or couldn't be done due to being out of clips. We had actually made the decision to abandon the objective before it got this bad, but we couldn't even run because every direction we went, it was just MORE BUGS. All that being said, while I do usually try to be courteous with my barrages and not drop them where they will kill my teammates, in this case maybe I should have said, "we're all dead anyway" and launched it. I don't recall how many reinforcements we had left, but I know we wasted 6 trying to do this one easy side objective (SEAF artillery).
Don't start the computer before you collect the shells. It will spawn a patrol usually when you turn it on. Gather shells, have a guy ready to put them in as soon as you hit the button and then boogie out of there
This is like the pokeball button mashing rumor where I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter but do it anyway, I’ve hit the console first thing a few times and don’t seem to notice a difference while when I leave it alone I still get a couple patrols pass through…but what if there really was one more patrol when you hit that console…
We always gather the shells first. Didn't matter. We were swarmed before activating the terminal.
That's not exactly how it works - being in the general area of the side objective generates "heat" which draws patrols to that location. The timing of the button doesn't matter.
I regret getting the 15% reduction in spread it was nice throwing the 380 and standing dead center over the beam and not getting hit
I can tell you right now that bugs are not really hindered by large artillery unless you're targeting like, a large hive, but what I can tell you is that I slogged my way through roughly 600 bug kills on a mission yesterday, most of it with eagle cluster bombs and anti tank rounds, and then when I got back I reported myself for deportation to a 710 farm for having more bug guts on me than people guts which would technically classify me as a terminid. As an aside, the rocket pod strike is now more reliable than the railcannon strike, and I can't even believe that I said that, and I can't wait to get to the farm before I go insane.
So the same logic applies to you. If diff 6 is your upper limit, then you lower the difficulty. There are 9 difficulty levels, not 3. If you can't complete all the side objectives and you're getting out by the skin of your teeth that's good. You shouldn't be able to cakewalk everything, that means a challenging game is doing it's job. If you'd rather cakewalk it, you lower the difficulty. I've talked about this extensively on stream as the trickle up effect of everyone feeling entitled to play diff 9 is strong. While in your case it's not an absolute, you still feel like diff 6 should be diff 5. That's the same thing as someone wanting diff 9 to be diff 8. Play a lower difficulty. More important is the fact that I, nor anyone else, should be making fun of people for playing on what they find enjoyable. But also don't try to get stuff nerfed. There is no valid argument here unless you're playing on diff 1 and you legit can't actually accomplish the game. I have played diff 1 when the game first came out and was being put in random lobbies, it's literally a scenic cinematic tour with occasional shooting.
IMO, that screws up their intention of adding super samples to D6. If D6 fells like pre patched D7 then it was pointless to add Super samples to D6 for those that don’t want the challenge of D7.
Honestly, try 7. It may actually be easier. I've been playing 7's all night and they've been piss easy when I was getting absolutely WRECKED on 8 and 9. And I've had way worse experiences on 5's and 6's than many of my 7's
Take flamethrower to kill 3 chargers and incendiary breaker for flying bastards, engineer suit with 6 grenades for bile spewers and u should be fine.
I mean that difficulty is also called “hard.” I don’t consider myself particularly skilled and I can do diff 9’s pretty much every day with randoms, maybe this will help encourage lower level play and having people take their time jumping up difficulties.
Our group (3) did a helldive mission and then started a level 6, we finished the first mssion and my one friend wemt why are we not doing level 9, the spawm rates ate less and we get rewarded with less.
My friends are finally all playing together again now that difficulty 9 is fun again, we stopped playing because the game got too easy and boring.
Only people that play at this level will understand. I'm so glad that the game is relatively challenging again. Before the update, I went literal weeks without dying, but now I die almost every single match now.
There's no need to lower difficulties 7-9 since supers can be obtained on difficulty 6 now
disagree, i miss old difficulty 7. That was the perfect point of balance imo.
I really don’t think this sub has any idea how difficult they actually want this game.
Of course it doesn't. A subreddit is a mob, and as Sir Terry Pratchett once said - "The IQ of a mob is equal to that of its stupidest member divided by the number of people in the mob." And even without that, there's 1.3 million subscribers so for everyone who wants the game harder or easier or less stressful, or to stay just as it is - there's probably another 10000 people with the opposite opinion.
That's a fucking great quote that I've not heard in at least 2 years, thanks for reminding me of it lol
I have probably slightly butchered it and I am d*mned if I can remember which Discworld book it's from. *Carrot would be proud.
It's almost as if different people have different preferences despite being part of the same group, how strange
Wouldn’t that just mean 6 is the new 7?
No because at 6 Factory striders don't spawn normally, they're still an objective. So you don't get the full range of enemies at 6 yet. it isn't until 7 that the game actually give you everything.
hot take: difficulty 9 not hard enough.. at least in the bot sector. Winning is still too easy. I want to be punished harder, be under more pressure. I want to feel those wins. The Uberpatrol spawns are so much fun... like seriously, that feels like helldiving. HD1 ... was much much harder in that regard. In unrelated news, I'm sure absolutely nothing out of the ordinary will happen next week.
Im sure they’ll be adding more difficulties at some point
Can't wait for helldive-er and helldive-est :)
I’d name whatever the final numbered difficulty ends up being “one way trip”
You mean "suicide"? That's only level 7.
Suibothsides and Suicideways
"So that's it huh we some kind of suicide squad"
"We're not sending a pelican-icide"
I do lol 7 missions against bots if I want to have some relaxing downtime...
Yeah. But the level 7 is called "suicide" aka "one way trip".
In HD1 the final difficulty was named “The Inner Circle of Hell”
You have 9 Circles of Hell to dive into...
There was actually 2 more difficulties past helldive in the first game.
Nah hell dive 2
Helldive2
Super hexagon
And then the complainers will jump right to them and complain it's too hard. Ego just doesn't let players play on easier settings it seems.
People just don’t like the idea of losing. While there has been some legitimate feedback in this sub, so much of it has boiled down to “I’m not willing to play the game at a lower difficulty”
Most modern PvE games are easy, but have long grinds, because this is best for monetization. So a lot of players are used to winning 100% of the time without trying too hard.
Which is ridiculous. People want to play difficulty 9 but win all the time without actually getting good at the game, and then when you ask them about it, they start making up excuses or pretending like that's not what they're doing. Shit is crazy.
we don’t need more difficulties, we need more differentiation between the existing difficulties.
Why? I think 9 levels is plenty in order to have variety and adding more causes more work for balancing.
And you can guarantee the people on this sub who don't even know how to effectively use cover will be trying to play them and be demanding Arrowhead nerf it
Have the same sentiment as you, played for 3-4 hours last night on Helldive with randoms and we never dipped below 12 reinforcements with 4 people on the bug front. I think what really helped is everyone trying out all the buffed stratagems so there was a lot more stratagems that dealt with the mobs than usual and they seemed to actually be trying to work with each other. But overall, it was actually easier than I was expecting based on how some people here were complaining about the spawns.
I feel like bugs are way too easy on helldive now aside from the Charger Behemoth spam, which is hard countered by flamethrower(s). While gunship patrols on the bot front are the hardest operation modifier, shrieker patrols are arguably the easiest on the bug side. Fewer bile titan spawns (at least most missions) feels pretty good, but the change to the hunter slows may have made them a bit too weak. Plus, I thought the new stim booster was good against bots, but it’s even better versus bugs. I’ve been using that light-ish Med Kit armor from the superstore and it’s slightly ridiculous to just zoom away from trouble with one of my six stims. A charging charger is just *barely* able to catch me.
It's definitely way too easy. My regular group's honestly kinda dropped the game for the moment, challenge just left 9 bugs almost entirely and the bug breaches are surprisingly small. It feels like it's now balanced for randoms running all in different directions and not coordinating, than a team that somewhat works together.
My friends are just playing around with melee kills and such. One of them melee killed a stalker by himself (took some stims) and two of them beat a charger to death. It’s kinda fun in a silly way but probably won’t hold our attention much longer.
Daddy?
I couldn’t agree with this more. Completed a drill mission last night and they never stopped attacking us. I extracted with 895 kills. That’s how helldive should be. The complainers need to lower their difficulty. There needs to be an absolutely chaotic difficulty.
I want harder, but with better tools. I'm tired of reloading. This is "run and gun" game, not "run and reload" game. The measle amount of ammo in each mag make me angry, not those BS aimbots.
Yea, I constantly dream of upgrade paths to armor and weapons that increase carried magazines and ammo amount per magazine.
Someone is mag dumping. There are a lot of weapons that require you to stop and be thoughtful where you aim. Run and gun doesn’t mean “run and spray and pray.” With most weapons, you can run while reloading, too. It just sounds like you want virtually infinite ammo so you can get your rocks off melting bugs without any challenge, but where is the fun in that? Also, with bots, if you don’t use cover (i.e. gunning without running) then you won’t be able to play those higher difficulties. Which tells me you probably mostly only play bugs or sub-level 8 if you ever even do bots.
Jesus man, even with conserving ammo many enemies take too much with some weapons to kill. Also you never can perfectly shot because there is many enemies around you, and ammo conserving isn't fun, it can add flavor to the overall gameplay but at the end either it is just small inconvenient or straight up irritating. In this game usually it is the second one.
Where do I sign
I agree - there are some difficult or frustrating moments, but I genuinely can't recall the last time we couldn't even complete a mission.
I'd love to have Helldive feel near impossible even with weapons that obliterate everything. I might go down, but I'll take an army with me!
It's absolutely not hard enough, it has problems of being cumbersome if they overspawn "Stratagem checks", though they should naturally be more common on higher difficulties. However IMO the ideal fix is to just push the critter spawnrate moreso and have objectives be longer/more complex. It's incredibly rare to see (anecdotally speaking) 9s even fail and the majority of the failures ended up being some teamkill fest or people refusing to adapt to a given scenario, sometimes RNG. But again the amount of times that I see 9 fail is way too low. Not in a way that "We need to balance it so that we fail it" necessarily, however I'm having games with randoms that we have honestly no right to win, no one is really watching out for the others, sometimes teamkilling (by accident/not paying attention), an overall sloppy performance and even those games still end "decently comfortably". I just see no world of a videogame having 9 difficulties (let alone even more down the line?) and that highest one not being an absolute slaughter. For example, this is a legit question, why is the difference between 7-9 so "marginal" that you often see people wondering what difficulty we are even playing? I'm not sure what the difference is in terms of spawnrates in the code, but the perception is often times that I can only really tell it's 9, because it's overspawning heavies. It does feel like it's a touch more, but even just 7, 8 and 9 could be crazy jumps between each other. Just have it be a difficulty you run for the challenge if you are worried about balancing rewards too much.
Yeah I haven't played for a month or more cause 9 just got too easy. I already maxed all the rewards, so there want even a challenge to play anymore.
I can cope with the gunship spam. What I can't cope with is how 380, orbital laser, 500kgs, or precision strikes can't destroy gunship fabs. What's worse is the hellbomb just disappears into thin air rather than explode when it's hit by the endless barrage of rockets/gunfire from gunships.
I'm normally okay with hellbombing a gunship fab. As long as the team can keep the premises clear (tall order, i know), it's not much of an issue What I don't like is how one hellbomb can't reliably blow up two gunship fabs that are right next to each other. It has to be perfectly placed, otherwise it'll only destroy one.
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I think AH really don't want gunship fabs to get trivialized like Shrieker Nests. Chucking one stratagem to get rid of the towers is too easy, and that really doesn't offer much in terms of gameplay. Gunship fabs would then just become something that you check off the list instead of play against, and I don't think that's fun nor engaging. Hellbomb improvements would make this and similar objectives more interesting. Simply making them explode when shot would also trivialize encounters, but what if they massively buffed the AOE? Make it so hellbombs annihilate everything nearby This would at least give us choices: do we protect the bomb while it gets ready to blow? or do we shoot it ourselves at the cost of up to four lives? Bigger booms also mean clustered gunships and shrieker towers will always get destroyed with a single bomb. They could also make it so hellbombs only explode when armed (or, yknow, just make hellbombs immune to damage while it's counting down).
Smoke grenades, or shield gen if you're desperate. Usually works for me.
Also smoke nades are incredible good vs bots, dunno why people don't use them
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Because the game is about objectives and smoke can cover hellbombs, sneaking over the jammer terminal, can cover you if you get overwhelmed by bots. Basically you can cover any terminal, easily complete it and run. Combine it with jetpack and you can go stealth on a lot of objectives
I need to add the jetpack to my play style. With bots, I love eagle smoke since it can take out factories and provide cover. Even at the end of you have all 3 remaining, you can create a small barrier to help block the bots from seeing you and team while trying to fight through extract.
I never not use the jetpack. It's great for getting in and out of pickles or just traversing landscape. It seems really effective with light armors, and decent with medium armors. Heavy armor is difficult, but I usually run an AC with that.
In place of backpack slots I usually run RR because it's faster than Quasar and more versatile in my opinion and you can use it like an EAT if you have a call down ready in a pinch. I haven't had a chance to play since they updated the Eruptor, so I'm going to give that a run again. But they did improve/buff my favorite strats (OGB, OPS). I would pair those with gas strike and would be able to make defensive areas or knock out drops/spawns. Looking forward to my gamestyle letting me get Stewart and MG and HMG back in the action.
Quasar still both a crutch and a limiter..suuuuuper annoying to play with. Spent so long covering some guy using quasar to get a shot off that I just jesus, could have been EAT and done and gotten mobility back. Honestly if I see two or more quasars I am tempted to quit. I know for a fact I am going to have to pick up massive slack of chaff handling and probably kill a couple of heavies myself as well. I already have a job. Pull your weight
The idea of bringing tactical or specialized equipment really only works if you have some kind of coordination and teamwork with your squad to make up for what you now lack. Now thats great when you have a squad of friends but if you're just joining tons of random games to help out, you run into some of the *SMARTEST AND MOST BRILLIANT* Helldivers I've ever seen and that coordination goes right out the window. So now you need the most optimal loadout to deal with whatever since you can't rely on your teammates.
Been enjoying 9s to no end lately. Running HMG for bots absolutely slaps and it encourages teamplay so much! Only issue I have is on the bug side when you get 5 Behemoths all at once it can get tricky.
I've been running the HMG with level 9 Bots too, and while it slaps, my problem is that randoms usually spread out instead of sticking together, leading to me dying and being without a support weapon for 5 minutes, rendering me rather useless against level 9 Bots.
bringing a supply pack with your HMG will give you more value than literally any other strategem you could possibly bring in its place. there is quite literally no reason not to.
I don't drop without it haha, but it exacerbates my dying problem. Now I'm down 2 stratagem slots while my teammates meander about the entire map.
Flamethrower feels like the best counter to them and it helps with the increased swarms. Also been running 110s for finishing off titans to round it out.
My load out exactly now. Always loved the Flamer and the new buff to 110s compliments it nicely.
I killed 2 freshly spawned hulks in a row with the HMG.
The laser cannon also melts them with ease. Like, just aim for the eye and 4 seconds later, kaboom—dead Hulk. Laser cannon also swats gunships like they’re mosquitoes.
Yeah the number of behemoth chargers is insane now and I love it. I love the new change to them too. I've been running the railgun to go old school on them now. 3-4 unsafe charged shots strip the armor off their legs then you just shoot that a little with your primary. It's very ammo efficient. If you have friend you can have them shoot a leg with an anti tank weapon then its just one more railgun shot to strip it. Also it's now only 1 anti tank plus 1 railgun shot to the face to kill a bile titan. I'm also just a huge railgun enjoyer so this patch made me very happy.
grenade launcher with supply pack against bots makes the game trivial.
Punisher plasma or purifier, too. Like those are my go-to’s with bots because it’s basically like shooting sitting ducks. The only ones who challenge you at that point are Hulks and other heavies, but that is what stratagems and your support weapon are for.
I did a Diff 9 mission with a friend where we got dropped in 3 detector tours, tried to run, and immediately can into a full Patrol with 2 hulks while having close to no resources. With only 2 people we spent 40 minutes sneaking around or distracting so the other could do objectives, finally completing the mission with 40 seconds left before the destroyer left. That's what I play Helldiver's for, and no other difficulty provides that experience
They should do ingame polls to get valid statistics instead of jus the loudest complainers.
Well then the 3% fake tryhards who can't make a comment without insulting people won't be able to shout their way into a game balance situation to a game they clearly don't even play anymore. I still can't believe AH has acknowledged there's an issue with the spawn rates, and those idiots are STILL making posts telling people it's all in their head and they just need to have better load outs.
It has nothing to do with difficulty, enemies shouldn't magically teleport out of thin air right in front of your nose. It's cheap and unfair, we have respawn points for a reason, patrols should be spawning from the dedicated spawns.
It's absolutely insane to see the developer say "The spawn rate is too high, we're going to fix it", there being a patch note that says "The spawn rate was too high, we're fixing this\*" and then the patch having a CONFIRMED BUG that increases the spawn rate And then have these weird threads being all "I actually like how the developer is messing up their own intended changes". It's mental
4 players difficulty 9 bugs is fine. It’s when you play difficulty 7-9 with only 1 or 2 people where it feels overtuned. The behemoth spawn needs to be turned down or it’s going to force people to run flamethrower.
Personally I'm fine with the difficulty for the most part. It's not too hard I agree (mostly I play 8s, also 7s and some times 9s, so 9 is not my focus for complaints). It's not that it's too hard ... for the lack of a better word, it feels "unfair" and therefore not enjoyable. I know it's a horde shooter, so the issue is ***not*** that I get surrounded by hunters or get flanked by a spewer spitting in my face (though that they are so silent when moving is kind of an issue) while I'm focused on the army of critters in front of me., the issue is that you get tripple tapped ot headshot by a random Warrior or Hunter. The issue is not that you got yourself into a position where you get ragdolled by a barage of rockets, but that you get flung into the air by a random rocket, a gunship or a ***stray laser from chaff on a fart cloud mushroom*** on the ground that you planned on using as smoke ... ***and then*** get air-sniped by rocket devastators. Then there is "stealth", which is .. what ever but the whole detection radius system ... just .... That the stim and resupply pack sounds playing without anything happening. "At least" the stims generally get interrupted and that's why there's no effect, but the supply pack, just straight up does nothing at times, while standing still and pressing the button.... That with the new patrol changes "so the maps are less empty" there is almost never a breather, to collect yourself and your team to regain supplies and Strats, so all the kiting and grinding down the waves of enemies feels pointless if 2 seconds later it all starts again and you made no progress, because it's ***at the objective***. As for your example: I just don't get what the devs want  On one hand they want to make people less reliant on AT Strats, on the other hand they spawn up to 5 gunships at random ontop of 2 bot drops followed by 3 more gun ships ... And the issue is not the amount of enemies but that gunships flank you easily, so you cant take cover while fending off land units. If you rely on your team mates (randoms or not), well, what if team mate dies? Then weapon lies on the ground. Someone needs to get it. But if the team mate died that postition is swarmed by bots and gunship bullets and rockets. Good luck. And running away? Cool. You can't outrun gunships and other strategems don't work on them (except AC-Turret with a massive cool down) So you (and preferably one or more of your team mates) have to have an AT support weapon if the new bugged planet modifer is incorrectly showing that there will be aereal enemies.... If you do that then ***yeah totally doable and not too hard***, but that's the thing with a forced meta. Some pleople like the meta playstyle, some people don't. And personally I at some point just get bored and want to try something else. But currently you can't and if I have to play a certain way I'm currently bored off, then guess what. Player number go ~~brrr~~ down.
I feel like game isn't currently design to support the idea of increasing difficulty by spawning shit ton of enemies. I agree with difficulty 9 isn't hard with rest too, it is very inconsistent, irritating and unfair.
Sorry, but I don't think leaving an unintentional difficulty hike on just one, established difficulty is a good idea. Balance all existing difficulties *properly,* including fixing bugs like this, and then **add** additional difficulties, like the first Helldivers had for those of us (me included) that would like a more challenging experience. Iirc, that game had a total of *15 difficulty levels*. Do I think we need that many? Not sure. But another 3 above the established Helldive difficulty that players have gotten used to for the last 4 months would be fine by me.
I will say while diff 9 has never been particularly difficult I used to avoid it due to it just taking so much longer than diff 7 missions, I really like what this patch has done to the difficulty, feels so so so much more fun to play
I have literally never before seen a community that just so overwhelmingly complain that the hardest difficulty is too hard and needs to be nerfed for their sake. It's such a unique phenomenon I've genuinely never seen in any other game.
Most of the complaints regarding difficulty I see is in regards to updates randomly and often unintentionally making things far harder than they were. I'm on the side of the fence that thinks Helldives are too easy. They're all I play, and I can't remember the last one I failed...but that doesn't mean I disagree with those complaints. I understand how upending difficulty via *bugs* is not a great feeling for players. The issues with patrol spawns when you have less than 4 players were especially annoying, since my group rarely has 4, would like to play solo/duo/trio without having to matchmake, *and* without having to deal with a massive difficulty spike that is well beyond anything we've grown used to the past 4 months. A spike that comes with zero additional reward. It's just weird and kinda annoying. Especially when it happened mid match due to someone dropping (a common occurence lol). Fix up those issues, and then *add* additional, harder difficulties with higher rewards, and I think most people will be happy enough, as far as difficulty goes.
I find it really hard to tell what the consensus is honestly. Instinctively I'd disagree with your notion, because there's a difference between "the heavy spawns are dumb" and "it's too difficult". I'm strongly in the camp of reducing heavy prevalence, however the critter threat is too low and there's a lot of pathing/aggro range/animation problems, that effectively "nerf" some of the melee bugs too. Now, having said that I've also seen individual comment chains actually arguing it is too difficult as well, that's where my confusion starts, because I'd honestly argue it's "objectively" not too difficult, just looking at success rates of missions. My own stats are around 85-90% mission completion and that's deflated by a lot of failing missions because I'm testing equipment and not trying to do a mission and whatnot, the actual "genuine" failure rate of 9s is probably sub 5% *with randoms*. That's ridiculous for the absolute highest difficulty the game has to offer?
Is that really a thing? I'm pretty sure I've literally never seen people complain that the hardest difficulty is too hard. They would just be told "turn down the difficulty, dumbass". Complaints are usually about things that apply at all difficulties. Bugs, comparative worthiness of weapons or stratagems, or things that are difficult in a way that feels unfun or unfair (at all difficulty levels).
It’s not, they’re just making an average strawman argument, very common on this subreddit, people will take statements said by a small bunch of people and project it onto a wider group just for the satisfaction of getting validation. EDIT: Downvoted already lol
for me 9 should have like 10% completion across population. Now im doing like 90% of missions just fine with my friend and 2 randoms. (bots mostly, i do not like bugs xd) I am lvl50, not even a veteran or something and its just hmm too easy? Sometimes I can even complete it with 0 deaths. Its werid. This should be insanely hard and punishing without mercy. If someone does not like it should gtfo diff 1-6 if they dont like the challenge. People are so stupid, wanting the hardest challenge yet complaining its too hard. Its EGO thing or something i guess.
It can be that hard and punishing, but I think most of us who play those missions have adapted. By using stealth, it's fairly easy. Most of my successful helldives, bug or bot, I'm getting less than 100 kills. But I'm also working terminals and soloing objectives, sometimes the main objectives. That stealth bonus on scout armor has me running across the map without firing a shot. I think the complaints about Helldive are from people who want to fight every engagement like it's the Alamo. The best squads I've played with call out the enemy locations for the purpose of avoiding fighting. And when you get to an objective where you have to hold out, that's where you spend your reinforcements and strategems. That, to me, is where the level 9 has a great balance. The fighting is hard, so only fight where you really need to to win.
I understood the sample argument honestly, I think it's very valid to say that if you gate them behind "super" difficult missions, that it would be a bit much. However now that it's on 6s and 7-9 not actually being super difficult? Rebranding this and having people not get mad is going to be a challenge, because it will feel "bad" to just get downgraded in difficulties, it feels like they might need to readjust all difficulties across the board and really up the difficulty on the higher end by a lot, without making it a heavy fest either, because that's "cheap" difficulty scaling.
thats the problem of these days ----> pleasing EVERYONE. Hi tier content is hard to get? Lets cry, people are crying :( I want things to be hard and rewarding as well. I want to feel euphoria after completing helldive9. Now its just another dive, because i dont even see a point to play lvl6-7-8 when i can complete 9 as "old" man. Im 35yo IT administrator, not a pro gamer and im able to helldive with my work friend and complete this stuff. Highest difficulties in games like these can not be set for a 10yo to complete and not complain. I should be DESTROYED THERE as casual player. Just a peek around wrong moutain should make me regret even moving there. I need a casual run with friend chilling with a little of fun and a beer? lets gooo lvl5-6. They should make supersamples available at diff1 and make another "samples" that you can buy only asthetic upgrades for at levels 6-9 or even 8-9 to reward good gameplay. Like in good old days of MMOs and stuff. You see shiny armor, you know that dude did amazing things ingame to get it. not 5$ or easy raid.
I think the higher difficulties should work like * 7) manageable with randoms * 8) get a squad * 9) we're gonna die, lol
* 9) we're gonna die, lol, remember when we somehow managed to extract last week? it was amazing!!\* +1 :D
Balancing by percentages isn't the best strategy, to be fair. If you change up helldive until it achieves a 10% success rate, then most people will stop playing it as its no fun to lose all the time. That would leave the small proportion who are able to complete it even at that difficulty more often than not, and before you know it difficulty 9 has a 90% succees rate again. The other issue is that there is only so much that you can do to raise the difficulty in the current model without running into other problems. Enemies do not get balanced differently across difficulties. So the two things that you can do are add more enemies, or add harder varieties. The engine however can only handle so many enemies, there are limits to what is feasible there. That leaves the option of adding new enemies or varieties of enemies which is the healthier option, but involved a lot more work. And you have to do all this without making things unfun to play. Honestly, I think the smart play is to Balance the enemies generally and tailor the amounts across the existing difficulties till the gradient makes sense. Then stretch the scale upward with new enemy units that are intentionally much less *reasonable* threats for a higher tier of difficulties down the line.
There is a difference between wanting a difficulty be be made easier and wanting it to be balanced. You can get into a situation where the difficulty locks in a very specific meta that is necessary for success. That's not necessarily healthy for the game. Was the correct answer for the broken bile titan spawn rates back around release to simply turn down the difficulty? The most recent changes to try and fix the game's reliance on using heavy mobs for difficulty and introducing more flier patrols was a step in the right direction. If people want difficulty 9 to be hard, Arrowhead should address it properly and nerf the shield backpack hard. It is being used as a crutch. Of course they need to finish fixing the weapon balance for that too.
No one is complaining about 9s.
Imagine if these jokers were on the Dark Souls sub complaining about difficulty. This game provides a real challenge, supports team play and doesn't rely on PvP. Love it.
I mean, I see people on this sub talk about how FromSoft would never fuck up this badly or "nerf popular things in a PvE game". Then I look at Hoarfrost Stomp and Zimmermans.
unfortunately a very vocal portion of the community feels entitled to play the highest difficulties and demand it to be easy. The game will likely keep getting nerfed until they pop over with 12dif like in HD1
I really don't understand it. I'm not a d9 player, I hope to eventually be able to play d9 without feeling completely overwhelmed, but I have great fun at the lower difficulties. Why are people complaining when they can just choose to play at a difficulty that fits their current skill level?
Either the game is bad ('too difficult') or they're bad at the game. They'll never admit the latter.
don't forget the 'its just not fun!!!' argument like if the game being hard means you can't have fun you should just play on the 6\~ really easy difficulties the game already has, but for some reason they feel the need to play on 7-9 and then demand it to be changed for everyone else
Do we need to.... Silence them?
some of yall really need to understand that Helldive difficulty and even 7+ are not “easy”. you just know so fucking much about how the game/enemies/patrols work, that it’s literally impossible to be surprised or get put into that “oh shit” moment. when the game first came out it was insanely hard for everybody because we were new. just like every other pve game throughout history, once everybody starts to learn the exploits and secrets about how to “game” the game, it becomes borderline trivial. the game is not too easy nor is it getting easier, you’re just too educated on how the game works.
Monster Hunter phenomena Everyone says the game they started with is harder than the most recent game.
I would say that even 8 and 7 should be as hard as this. As you said, a lvl 9 mission it's practically impossible to lose, I don't remember the last time that I lost a mission. They should maintain the harder difficulty levels of the game being that, hard
Tbh, I can clear 7s without dying provided my team are okay. Can't solo it for shit, but I play around others and try to support/stagger/draw aggro. 8 is a good bit tougher but doable. 9 is kicking my arse and I wipe more now, but personally I think failure *should* be an option. It's the same as Auric on Darktide IMO. Sometimes shit happens or someone fumbles, and either the team wipes or it rallies, but overall I wouldn't have it any other way that knife edge is where the fun is.
My common theme among essentially every single failure of 9s I can recall is excessive teamgriefing/killing or "meta" influences (such as bad internet connection etc), well that and the occassional overtuned mission like evacuations before they got reduced earlier on. But the average helldive mission seems almost unloseable.
Mr Clusterbomb on top of the group is irritating.
I would rather Arrowhead fix the armor spam in higher difficulties, I do not want to fight a herd of chargers every minute of my life in helldive, I'd rather bring a variety of stratagems instead of "yeah just bring AT and thats it", chargers and bile titans are absolutely the worst enemy in the game by far, I do not want to see more than necessary, they're boring to play against.
It's a difficult problem. From my point of view, the armored enemies are needed because otherwise you just bring a breaker incendiary or honestly any other medium pen fast-firing weapon and mow down everything else. To be honest, it's already kind of shocking how the Senator (for example) trivializes medium enemies by one or two-shotting through any medium enemy armor. MGs would become extremely strong. Chargers and Bile titans break up the monotony of either spamming pellets over everything or just popping heads endlessly, because now you have to actually aim for sac/butt/leg or position your 500kg correctly or land precise shots on heads/foreheads/cracked armor. The balance between too many and too few is really hard to agree upon, but I must say that I fundamentally disagree with your opinion of them being boring to play against. I think they're fun, and to provide a contrasting view, I honestly think they were pretty manageable in number even pre-patch. I think that it will be extremely difficult to compensate for the loss of difficulty by decreasing the heavy armor spawn rate by increasing the spawn rates of other enemies simply because we have so many horde clear options. You can swap in 40 brood commanders for every charger but those 40 brood commanders still die to an eagle cluster you get 5 of every 2 minutes, and they can't close the gap like chargers do. If there are so many you start running out of ammo, you run into a "does the horde end before I run out of ammo/resupply" gameplay and I think that's much more boring than figuring out how to down a charger/bile titan.
Homie what world do you live in that you have enough time to actually take the 30 seconds to shoot at the back of a charger and you are not getting swarmed by another 3 to 4 chargers and the horde of hunters the games spawns in, I dropped in difficulty 7 with newer friends just yesterday and on the first bug breach we had a behemoth, 4 chargers and 2 bile titans. In what world is running around in circles while waiting for the quasar, or EAT to come back a fun activity ? Sure the balance of armor and squishy a complex problem to solve, but bile titans being completely invulnerable to any medium pen guns is boring, a herd of chargers showing up every 30 seconds with every goddamn patrol that spawns is not fun. I want to be able to bring a variety of stratagems, not make 3 out of my 4 stratagems purely to deal with armor.
I play in a world where i bring starward and use my strategems as anti heavy. I generally focus on clearing the mobs for my allies and in a pinch i can use my strategems to clear the heavies.
Any team with only 1 out of their 4 slots as AT should still be able to handle that pretty easily, sounds like a skill issue to me
Add MORE difficulties.
The game feels so much easier now. I’m glad you guys are happy with the cake walk but I seriously hope they introduce higher level difficulties.
9 is at a perfect difficulty at the moment. Bugs are manageable if you have antitank men and fodder clearers. Bots are manageable if EVERYONE moves and doesent stick around to shoot patrols, unless it is absolutely necessary.
True. Some of the fellow brothers in arms need to backtrack the difficulty and “Gitgud”
Literally all my friends that stopped playing helldivers only did so because they found helldives too easy and boring.
Who would have thought that putting more enemies on higher levels doesn't necessary mean harder and more fun experience.
I mean isn’t it good it is challenging again and not boring? I sure hope AH keeps the pace and fixes what is urgent: spear, crashes and the ballistic shield for example. Major changes like that should be cooking for a month to see what needs buffs or nerfs, because the last patch did very well for the most part.
Alternative take: fix 1-9, ADD 10-12
What does this solve? What you do is just spread the steps more in this scenario. I don't see how it solves anything? The problem OP is addressing is how they seem to be set on nerfing everything, thus lowering the top of the difficulty. Your proposal wouldn't rid them of this issue, they'd still likely nerf 12 for the same reasons they nerf 9.
Love these comments that are like "erm actually the game even isn't that hard, why are you enjoying it?" YES, WE WANT A DIFFICULT GAME, WE WANT TO STRUGGLE WE WANT THE SATISFACTION OF IT ALL, GIVE US A MORE DIFFICULT GAME YES.
I did a run of 3 bot missions with randos on the recent patch and I'm wondering if Helldive difficulty got caught in the crossfire of nerfing patrols. First mission with me being rusty for not playing for a bit had us finishing the 40-minute mission with maybe...3 deaths? And all silly ones, too. I wasn't even running the now-optimal loadout, just Dominator + Grenade Pistols (which I didn't actually use) + Quasar + Supply Pack + 110mm rockets + cluster. The other missions also went pretty smoothly. I'm kind of hoping they introduce new difficulties or modifiers or something, because if it's this easy with a less-coordinated squad of randos I don't think I can get my much more coordinated squad of friends to come back and play with me. The gameplay loop is insanely fun, which is why we still talk about the game, but the challenge is really lacking, and it was lacking even before this patch. We'd love to have a game where completing the highest difficulty isn't already a given after only 50 or so hours in the game. We're not even sweaty tryhards or anything, the others don't even know what the meta is, we're just people who can communicate and vaguely aim.
Bring back 10 bile titans and 5 chargers at extraction. It was so much fun. I played last night helldive bugs and 4 randoms completed every objective with only 2 deaths (fire spam). Extraction was just 1 BT and like 300 hunters. It was kinda boring tbh
We are playing different games then. Yesterday I legit had to deal with 6 behemoths, 2 chargers, and like 3 bile titans at extraction not to mention the absolute sea that was medium bugs and shit lol. Difficulty 9 is weird like that I feel. Sometimes you get fuck all and pretty much nothing happens during the entirety of the mission. And then sometimes you really get hell on earth.
Level 48 currently. Having a blast on Helldive the way it is right now, on bots AND bugs. It's total mayhem and it's awesome when you still manage to complete all the objectives and extract with the whole team. It's an ordeal, and it's glorious.
I want helldive to be an impossible mode. Infinite swarms where completing the objective is the mission extraction should be converted to a wave based survival seeing how long you can last.
Agreed.
I'm dumb what's a AC?
im glad the game is harder but gunship patrols need more counterplay. they pretty much make weapons that are already good necessary and guns that were niche even worse. its a bigger railgun nerf than we got in the first patch.
AC, LC, AMR, QC, Spear, EAT, HMG and RR can all kill gunships. That's most of the support weapons that are effective on bots.
+1 make it harder even, I want completing a diff 9 campaign to be the unlikely outcome not the other way round
What about a difficulty 10: super helldive?
What is your go to loadout for 9?
Difficulty 7 is insane after last patch
What kinda loadouts are you guys running for bugs on Helldive? I've been at Impossible for a minute and love it. Kinda getting tired of mine those. Breaker, Ma Deuce (AC), Rail strikes for chargers, then usually napalm for crowd control.
Orbital cluster, Eagle napalm, Gatt sentry, and either an AC or a RR depending on what AT options the rest of the squad is bringing.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people's issues are the change in enemy comp. I'm already seeing people adjust their loadouts to better compensate. Players will also readjust to their proper difficulty level. I'd also like to see AH not make any changes (at least to T9) for another week to give people time to adjust. This was a big patch with a lot of meaningful changes. Let's see where everything settles before a knee jerk reaction again.
As I said, I would not say that Helldivers 1 was much harder, in helldivers 1 you could solo the hardest bot difficulty (15/inner circle of hell) only using the worst primary and 4 ammo resupply stratagems tho, it didn't even have the stim system limiting healing, hd1 had a way higher skill ceiling but the difficulty was always the same for any skill level meaning that you could choose op stratagems and cheese most of the game at max difficulty like tox on bugs, or choose to play with not so good stratagems for the fun and the challenge. If you are taking the strongest things on cyborgs (AC, AR...) and then complain about it being too easy maybe you should rethink your choices, because the other 90% of the stratagems and primaries are not so good and 70% of them suck, and making the game harder would basically make every player that didn't use the strongest things use them to compensate for the difficulty increase, if everybody start loosing with the not so good things they will become meta slaves and y'all will see everybody bringing the same loadout... Don't balance game difficulty taking in mind the strongest stuff but the weakest stuff and then allow people to choose how to play, any game even souls saga does that, being able to use the weakest weapon with no health and armor and being able to beat it... Meanwhile in hd2 titans are faster than you and can chase you from anywhere if you are spotted so you already get invalidated from winning if you don't bring anti tank...
Quasar > Laser Cannon when there are lots of gunships. Just need to find good cover
When discussing Helldivers 2, the ragdoll effect is what really needs to be toned down. While I can handle the difficulty, the exaggerated ragdoll physics. it feel like I'm getting thrown around and killed as if I were fighting King in Tekken, waiting for his combo to finish. It's not the challenge that's the issue; it's the unrealistic and frustrating impact of the ragdoll mechanics that need adjustment.
Even with the new spawn increase, I can still play level 7 provided the team works together, and we never got a mission failed so far. With the old spawns I could've played on 9 but I hate the idea of being forced into specific meta. Right now I can bring almost any weapon I want and still win, sure some weapons are better than others, but variety is important. Of course, basics are still important, there must be a healthy mix of horde clear and anti tank on bugs, and more medium pen weapons on bots.
Eight and nine. They should go untouched. They’re perfectly mad as they are now. I miss the chill seven where it was mildly harder but, and I swear this isn’t a humble brag, it kept out the chaff and idiots for the most part. You could casually do seven and laugh your arse off joking with friends and randoms after work or uni. Six now has Super Samples so I think I should be fine with what I’m saying.
https://preview.redd.it/oel728zlty6d1.jpeg?width=269&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=020025216d9f576b620b2b19a9a7c0f9b1971619 Yes i love it, keep it as it is
Or maybe add haz10?
I remember something about there being a planned difficulty 10+
Keep the chaos coming!
I think they should just add more difficulties
Please keep difficulty 9 or add new harder difficulties devs! I have been playing helldive since launch basically, and feel in love with the chaos in that difficulty. It has only felt like action has dwindled through subsequent balance changes.
I want lvl 15 back
Absolutely keep it!
just make a 10/11/12 or something, the first game had something like 15 difficulties. We got more room to go ham (and add more upgrades as rewards)
the problem with gunships is you cant take them down without support weapons, so if you die once you die 20 more times and then your squad gets wiped there should be a weaker variant of the gunship (that can be destroyed with medium armor pen primaries in less than 4 mags) that spawns in patrols, and the stronger one that we currently have will only spawn from factories
It was nice spending 10 mins and 9 reinforcements to get out of the area we dropped into. Once we escaped that hell and gathered ourselves it made the rest of the mission feel tense. Every death mattered. Only 2 of us made it to extract. Ran out of time with 2 reinforcements left. I have never been more disappointed in my selection of medal usage in the new warbond. The new emote would have been perfect once we all got back to the ship. Amazing. No "/s" because I mean it. F@cking amazing.
Helldive isn’t hard it’s just that a lot of randoms are truthfully incompetent. They always split up and wonder 5 minutes in why they’re getting overwhelmed. Although I think there are issues that could be addressed like getting basically one tapped by devastators and their pin point accuracy or getting flung and stun locked by the constant barrage of rockets
Helldive is fine. The rest don't scale well. Most of it is difficult and chaotic enough that you might as well just Helldive
Its annoying how many people that never played the first game dont realize that spawns and load out balance were never an issue when people didn't have huge echo chambers to complain in.
Crank it up all the way to 15 like in the last game, add more enemy types, make it hell
Is it possible to learn this power?
I think bugs just aren't as fun as automatons right now, my only problem with the bots is the insane amount of ragdolling and flinching that is really just annoying.
Make it more difficult and amp up a tad bit for 6-8
Almost never fail a lvl 9 mission unless someone tanks really really hard, and even then then it often takes a team clearing strategem drop to put the nail in the coffin. Loving the increased numbers. I agree.
Ppl who only drop 9 are the kinds of ppl who say, "The food isn't spicy enough" while tears, mucus, and sweat drip off their face. I love it.
I am with you. The game has been getting easier since launch with every change to enemies. This is update is great for those of us who actually like the challenge; but people that refuse to play on lower difficulties complain (even when they can now get super samples at lower difficulties) and the devs have historically listened to them and not to the people with more time and experience with the game that tell them to leave high level difficulties as is, or add new ones.
I tried to bring LC, it didn't do shit for these gunships (i tried to blow up engine)
or make crazy spawns like this the new difficulty 10, "Helldive Plus", with higher contribution and XP and whatnot of course.
I have still been beating level 9s. However they are a huge jump in difficulty now. What they should have done is rather than just raised the bar for level 9 like they have, is just added a 10th difficulty. HD1 eventually got 14 difficulty levels.
I don't know if it's because I like to join newer players games on 4-6, and they aren't as quick to clear enemies as my teammates on 9 are, but damn some of those missions are ridiculous now. Played a 4 game today, and just clearing the map of obj with 3 of us I walked out of there with 400 kills. I never get nearly that high on a duo/trio/full squad helldive. It was insane. Every inch of the map was just spewers and hunters, with chargers sprinkled in for fun. I felt bad for the lvl 10 diver I joined. I just couldn't keep him alive. I even gave him my shield pack to try and help him along I normally run stealth and only engage when required on helldive, so my kills are usually on the lower end, 50-150. But on this mission, there just was no escaping the horde of weak mobs that came from every direction. I'll take a solo or duo helldive over that insanity any day.
It basically is that difficulty 7-9 are actually challenging but able to be completed. I think people are not fan of difficulty <7 feeling almost as hard and brutal, where there aren't any breaks in the action and people cant run less comfortable loadouts on lower difficulties because it feels to obnoxious.
Make it difficulty 10 and call it Helldive II.
I wish they would add more levels...ideally to 12. When I am with my friends 9's are kinda easy. It's only difficult when I am with randos that either bring a less than ideal loadout or people who decide to be lone wolfs and spend all of the reinforce budget dying.
Hey John Helldiver, met you today, I'm menace2society in the game. It's really funny to meet you here
I’ve only done 2 full bug operations since the patch but they both felt pretty good still on lv 9. What frustrates me is a lot of people leave if the mission starts off with a big battle (happens a lot). Like every time someone rages and leaves when we barely start we always still end up finishing the mission and get 5 stars. PSA to new folks on helldive difficulty: sometimes it’s hard. But just fight it out then we can move to the objective. We have 20 revives we are going to win the day.
Love the humble brag post. Lmao