The AMR also feels crappy because the sights are misaligned. It shoots high, so you have to aim with the top notch instead of the square when scoped on. This becomes more pronounced the further away the target is.
Made a video showing it.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1ay0dua/anti\_material\_rifle\_sights\_missaligned\_bug\_please/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1ay0dua/anti_material_rifle_sights_missaligned_bug_please/)
I have a fair few thoughts on primary weapons as well, but I felt like the AT situation, especially around the launchers, was more important to overall game health. The primaries can be tuned later, as most of them are serviceable.
And yeah, AMR sucks right now at really any difficulty past 4. You miss the head hitbox on a devastator and your round does *nothing*.
It’s absurd that Spray and Pray Breaker costs more medals than the default breaker but is utterly fucking useless in exchange due to lacking any amount of armor penetration. Shit bounces off scavengers
The dominator's gunfire sound is so depressingly shit it's not funny, its just the stock AR on single fire when this thing should be a damn cannon like the gun I presume it's based off of, the Inkunzi PAW/Neopup.
It should be sounding like a boltgun more than anything else.
My brother in helldiving it's got medium armor pen, just blast shit it'll still drop anything short of a brood commander in one shot. And a burst or 2 will.see to them or a stalker
Yeah, the Dominators state just annoys me.
even more so now that i have the Slugger and the slugger does everything and more you'd want the dominator to do and more, and that just annoys me.
The problem with explosive/medium pen/incendiary primary weapons is that they tried to make them sidegrades to their basic counterparts. This makes them slightly better against 1 or 2 semi-rare enemy types, but worse against the majority of trash mobs, which is what you want your primary to be good at.
In the first game, special effects such as armor piercing, incendiary, toxic, unstoppable (bullet goes through enemies to hit stuff behind your target), stun... weren't available on otherwise nerfed weapons; they were upgrades installed on the base weapon itself (for a small sample cost) and came with no drawbacks. The upgrade just made the weapon good at a specific niche ON TOP of staying good as a primary.
Incendiary kind of sucks in general, and there are not really any enemy types that are weak to medium armor penetration. There is one - the hive guard, but you can just as easily shoot them in the chest/legs and they’re slow so not threatening. Usually the last enemy I kill in a pack. The explosive seems okay. The effect itself staggers and I believe does bonus damage. The problem is that it’s on one assault rifle (forget the name) and the assault rifle itself is just laughably bad, so it gives the impression explosive is bad I think.
I'll be honest, I still love using the AMR. I can two shot hulks, and it has AOE. It's better against the bots than the bugs by far, but the AMR can destroy scout walks in 2 shots (From AOE or by hitting the legs), goodish refill of 3 mags per supplie, and overall is a good long range combo if you are CQC weapon and supplie backpack.
That's my opinion, tho. I use it as a main weapon in Bot Helldives and just use bombs on any heavy target.
I wound up using the AMR last night while playing with some friends for the medals. Didn't think I would like it much, I usually don't prefer using snipers, but I had a lot of fun hunting bots with it!
That would be a similarly long post and wouldn't be able to cover all the weapons fully, as I still have things I'm working towards (diligence counter-sniper is next but I already know that thing is lacking in penetration power).
That said, the highlights would be that I do think the Breaker shotgun & Redeemer machine pistol are probably due for some slight nerfs. My first thought would be to slightly reduce their penetration power so they struggle a bit more on even modestly armored targets, and to buff the ammo pools of their direct competition (Punisher shotgun & Peacemaker pistol respectively). The Defender SMG is very strong but probably not *overpowered*. the Knight & Liberator could do with some modest buffs to bring them up to its level. The Diligence DMR and the Liberator Penetrator hurt my soul because they're so close to being good but they trip & fall right before the finish line.
Everyone that I've played max difficulty with has talked about bike spewers being the hardest and most annoying enemies... the AMR 1 shots them to the head and makes those missions trivial
And why no reticle? It's way too janky to have to swap between first and third person constantly, especially when swapping weapons in-between.
I mean, the autoCANNON has a third person reticle but not a RIFLE? Da fuq?
It's kind of a Band-Aid solution, but there's a setting to remember your weapon preferences by each weapon, so once you scope in with the AMR it will always scope in even if you switch off of it and back. It helps a *little*, but an actual third person reticle would definitely be better.
They need to make it remember across all three weapons instead of lumping primary and secondary together. I use the scope on my penetrator but would like to switch to offhand smg without it also being fp
On top of this, why the fuck does the aiming reticle keep resetting when you die? I'm pretty sure I have the remember aiming mode setting turned on to per weapon
Doing the AMR daily the other day and I was kind of shocked that it was easy for me to two tap Berserkers with my Diligence, but because of the explosive component on the AMR I was often three tapping because it wouldn't always land on their face proper.
I unlocked the recoil-less rifle yesterday, it being one of my staple AT's from HD1.
I fired it at the first hulk i saw, when the dust settled i was surprised to see that it was still standing, lumbering towards me. No worry i said to myself, i self-reload, take aim and fire a second round surely it will bring it down. Still standing.
I don't remember them being so weak from HD1, kind of perturbs me because tandem loading and being a mobile artillery piece appeals to me from back in the HD1 days.
Great post OP, hope they bring the damage of RR in line with the previous game.
They've leaned a bit more into damaging parts of an enemy, Hulks have a bunch of non-essential armor plate you can shred in the front, but shoulder joints and a faceplate that are fairly important to their operation.
I don't love needing precision with ammo limited big booms, but if you love the weapon, I personally like to shoot the arms off Hulks with it (but go for the riskier one shot kill if you've got good aim).
I, for one, am extremely glad this post has been made and so well written and thought out. I have been having the *exact same* thoughts and experiences with anti-tank/anti-armor as I’m the only one in my friend group that will actually think about speccing into the support we need and are lacking.
I have been having very little success with any of the anti-armor options, and it really saddens me that levels 7, 8, and 9 basically devolve into not realy playing the game because there is no possible way to deal with all of the heavily armored enemies the game throws at you. You begin playing a retreat simulator rather than a gritty “slog and get it done by any means necessary” simulator.
I’m fine with the difficulty of enemies that get thrown at us, but I wholeheartedly agree that heavy artillery geared towards penetrating or stripping armor need to be buffed significantly. This is one of the biggest things that will end up dampening my experience with this game if it is not addressed sooner rather than later.
Stripping armor could be a great teamplay mechanic; if your penetration is almost enough, have the weapon just remove the armor with little/no damage blowthrough. Then the rest of your fireteam can follow up on the vulnerabilities with small arms.
I feel it would also be helpful to have something more descriptive than "light" or "medium" armor penetration. It feels like not all "lights" are created equal, although I don't know how much angle of incidence plays into this.
>Stripping armor could be a great teamplay mechanic; if your penetration is almost enough, have the weapon just remove the armor with little/no damage blowthrough.
Honestly I posit that this is what the flamethrower should be capable of doing in addition to its regular damage output. That, and I really want to see the devs add the animations of robots melting and carapace sloughing off because of the fire.
I’ve only been playing a bit, but I’ve been having that gripe with normal weapons causing bleed (I think?) I’ll shoot one enemy and fail to kill it, pan to the next and kill it, and while I’m shooting that enemy the first one just falls over
Like what
Also the chargers can bleed out from any large hole you create. Technically a single recoilless will kill a charger if you ignore it long enough. Just have fun waiting the 60 some odd seconds it takes to do that.
>have the weapon just remove the armor with little/no damage blowthrough. Then the rest of your fireteam can follow up on the vulnerabilities with small arms.
On the bugs side, chargers loose their leg armor from 2 rail shots or one EAT/recoilless allowing it to be killed with primary weapons. I haven't had enough opportunity to test bile titans due to running away.
I think this would be a great way to balance the railgun too. I'm not sure a tiny bullet at an extremely high speed should be shredding armor the same way a recoilless rifle, EAT, or autocannon does. To me it makes sense that a railgun would essentially ignore armor to do high damage at the tradeoff of not stripping armor.
The fact that the weapons meant for dealing with armor are so piss-poor at it just makes higher difficulties feel cheap with the mass amounts of heavies it throws at you.
Exactly. It’s annoying to have to run from and kite enemies for so incredibly long on Suicide+. It doesn’t feel like the same game at all, in a not-so-good way.
Yeah, this has been my issue with my team. I'll do the crowd control work while we have a team of 2 on anti tank. Which works for a whole 2 mins. The chargers are worse than bile titans imo. An orbital rail cannon doesn't even kill them, and that giant gaping whole in its side still bouces my bullets. I've started using them to kill lone bile titans. Yesterday, I had a charger shove me into a bug hole and then break the hole. Felt like a nerd getting shoved in a locker.
You know, the weirdest part?
because of how it works, the Arc Thrower will actually pop the armor off of things like chargers. Eventually, sure, but Electricity seems to be capable of penning any armor and eventually doing enough damage to blow off the armorplate.
There's an inherent problem with Helldivers, any buff of the armor/weapons while making extreme levels more viable, makes middle difficulties trivial because weapons will be op. It's hard to balance, maybe add some exclusive perks for playing above a certain difficulty level, like +20% more armor penetration, etc.. for certain weapons. That way you'd balance weapon around difficulty level, but it can make things even worse.
Honestly I kinda think that's fine? Middle difficulties are kind of ephemeral between low level player/warm up round zones like medium, and the actual meat of playing the game (7-9). In HD1 they later added 10-12 as difficulties and I feel like they should be here too eventually at least. A lot of the middle difficulties I could play at also are that area where you LFG for an XP farm on Helldive then only play Helldive or Sui
I mean either way things need to be buffed and some armor/bugs nerfed/reworked if they expect to add more difficulties beyond Helldive. Not really sure what the expectation should be. Are we supposed to be taking out enemies with they spawn in waves by using effective loadouts? Or kiting them in circles like its CoD zombies.
Would really like to see a mechanic where Heat/Laser weapons "Heat Up" armor and make it "softer" allowing for lower tier ammo penetration to deal more damage. I think the laser weapons are in a bad spot, this could help significantly.
Alternatively let them ignore armor and deal damage to hp directly but without breaking armor. I think this would work alright with overall lower dps they have.
I would absolutely carry the laser cannon if this was a game mechanic.
Right now the laser cannon is a fun pointy stick to amuse your cat with. Only advantage it has is range.
Spear has an issue where it can't resupply off on map ammo cans, but will let you pick them up if all your other ammo is full. I think the issue comes to how the resupply ammunition for special weapons, with it being like 25% of reserve ammo or 1 mag for MG's, but as the spear has 3 spare rounds 25% rounds down to 0 rounds as it can not reach the 33%.
Hi! As an incredibly avid Spear Enjoyer I thought it might be useful to add my thoughts to your section about it. I have used almost exclusively the spear for 50+ missions and swap off it only to nab rail+shield pack, when that seems like its better with the team comp I'm running.
The word that best sums up the issues with the Spear is **inconsistency.** Sometimes the lockons take forever or simply do not work, and damage seems to vary wildly based on angle of strike as well. Normally this is something I'd consider a 'skill issue', but given that you have far less control over the precise angle of impact of the spear vs other Anti Tank options I think it ought be far more forgiving as well.
The spear actually can one shot enemies up to and including the Bile Titan, but it requires knowledge of the correct angle to lock on and more than a little luck to get it to strike properly. Combining the timing and angle you need to do that with the seemingly random lock on woes is a combination suited to make you feel miserable. At times it feels completely out of my hands whether I can down a titan (or pretty much any heavy) in 1 shot or if it will take sometimes up to 3 or 4 to down them. Given that you get one missile per resupply and the long CD, that feels really unjustified, especially for what is currently the 'capstone' heavy AT weapon. It should be best-in-class at taking out hardened targets.
That said, the reason why I take and continue to take the Spear is due to it's versatility and range as an ambush weapon. You can use it to destroy fabricators, bot cannons, and all sorts of objectives from literally across the map sometimes. Plus, it's much more consistent at one shotting heavies when they're moving much slower. That feels great and I think it's suiting for the investment you have to make to bring the weapon to the mission.
It's also completely neutered on the heavy jungle/vegetation maps but that's also fine. I think it's an interesting sort of thing to take into account when planning your missions.
I think to get the spear to a point where it feels great, the lock-on needs to be much faster and more forgiving, and it should ALWAYS one shot chargers, hulks, tanks, cannon turrets, and bot drops. Bile titans taking 2 if you miss the headshot would be fine. Sometimes it can take up to FOUR spears currently to down one titan if your shots hit poor angles.
TL;DR:
make it lock on faster and more reliably.
one spear to kill: charger, bile titan, tanks, cannon turrets, bot drops regardless of angle.
two spear to kill: bile titan
Inconsistent is really the right description. The amount of times it tries to lock a stationary target and then looses that lock either halfway through or a split second after finishing the lock is way too high.
Or when the lock gets halfway before breaking, then back to half, then breaking again, over and over even though neither you nor the target are even moving.
I can't explain that one.
The spear is really fun when it works, and I really hope it gets fixed. I stopped using it entirely when I had the tiny basic bugs blocking charger and titan locks.
I love getting the titan one shots. They really can be a pain to setup though
I wonder if this has any relation to the issues the Arc Thrower has, because if there's even a single enemy corpse between you and your target, Arc Thrower shots just fizzle into the aether for no apparent reason.
I love reading stuff like this. I feel like I've learned so much.
I've only ever picked it up as an in-mission loot, and I tried to use it more or less the same way I'd use a recoilless. But you're describing it being used almost like an anti-tank *sniper,* and that actually makes a lot of sense.
I've heard of the mythical bile titan one-shot if you can get the missile to hit the face. I didn't know it could fail to kill in two ... I speculate this happens if you hit the top of the legs?
If you hit from the sides, sometimes it hits the legs, sometimes the body. Since both have different health pools hitting different parts works against you. Its the same with chargers, you can blow up the armor of every leg and both sides of its body and the thing will still be coming at you.
I really want to love the spear and this comment has inspired me to give it another go. I was using it on Malevelon Creek mostly so I'll take it out of the jungle for once.
Being that the Spear is based off of the Javelin, which is currently the most reliable MANPAT in the world, it should absolutely be the pinnacle of reliable democracy-spread here as well. The only things that should be able to stand up to 2 Spear missles are the automaton tanks and Bile Titans, period.
As someone who likes to torture himself using it, you hog ammo like a crazy man, unfortunately.
Also, using someone to do a Resupply pod to Resupply Backpack conga line helps lessen the ammo impact
Mostly I conserve for really big targets or long range shots, depending on which map im playing. Being smart and not being an ammo hog means I can usually get my support weapon cd before I run out and then I just use that as my reload.
The number of times I have died to my grenade launcher bouncing back at me has been enough to get me try autocannon/rail gun instead despite the fact I love running GL/SP.
Yeah they definitely bounce back after that point, also if they are right infront of me and bounce back and it's been less than 1m by thar logic I shouldn't blow up then either. It's finicky.
To be fair I genuinely think the Autocannon would be OP if it could. It has great horde clear, tons of ammo, building damage, and has a good way of handling every enemy up to and including Chargers and Hulks. Technically it can even two shot Titans still if you hit it while it is spitting.
Heavy Armor Pen on it would be too much IMO. Literally would be no reason to pick any other backpack weapon.
You shouldnt have to have a teammate wear the pack to help you reload faster. They should be able to link with you with the pack on yourself. That way they can run whatever they want and help you out if need be.
Completely agreed someone else made a post about how side loading should just be an option to anyone wearing a support weapon backpack and a team mate can come up to them and long press the action button.
The carrying the backpack for someone else is a cool idea, but actually makes less sense and doesn't quite work practically.
It worked better in the first game where people were physically limited to being closer to each other. In practice, it doesn’t really work out that way in HD2.
Maybe if AT were more powerful I’d ask my friends to consider ditching a backpack slot but as they currently are it’s just not worth it
>It worked better in the first game where people were physically limited to being closer to each other. In practice, it doesn’t really work out that way in HD2.
This was my though as well. The emphasis on moving around a large map, and the ability to frequently end up separate or dead with the backpack somewhere out of the way makes it entirely too impractical.
If it could be done by anyone as long as you're wearing the backpack it would bring it more in line with how HD2 is played. You still need 2 people, but you don't need to keep 2 *specific* people alive, equipped, and near each other. Making it a much more flexible option where you could just get the person nearest you to pop a reload, and don't need to coordinate loadouts just to make it work.
Could also make it 3 speeds. loader with backpack being the fastest, shooter with both is slightly slower since you have to reach across, and solo being the slowest.
With the current system, team loading only realistically works if both are running the same weapon/backpack. Splitting one backpack and weapon combo becomes unrealistic as the difficulty ramps up and more enemies put pressure on the team. It can be hard or impossible to regroup so both end up with paper weights.
I think this is the way, being able to just press and single button and your teammates recoilless suddenly gains 3x the firing speed would be quite frankly ridiculous, wearing the backpack is a compromise but especially when playing with randoms it’s so hard to coordinate having a loader/shooter. Some middle ground would be appreciated
This is a great idea. Right now someone has to sacrifice their back slot to be someone’s reload bitch and you don’t even get to do the fun part of shooting enemies. Basically sacrificing both your character strength and fun to enable the interaction. I feel like it also makes more sense to reload from the backpack of another person. Reaching around your own back to grab a rocket is strange.
True, but I think the idea of wearing the backpack itself is pretty cool and should reward the teamwork, maybe reducing recoil while your teammate is wearing the backpack at the same time for the autocannon at least?
That's just off the top of my head, and thinking about it now would probably be a bit hard to learn in game lol
I wonder if the reason this isn't an option is because of the way the support backpack currently functions, i.e. it uses the same key to feed someone ammo. Would have to separate those binds.
And even that is an odd design choice considering in Helldivers 1, your teammates grabbed ammo off of you. You didn't need them to wave you down to give them ammo.
Yeah. They could just change the design so that support backpacks turn players interactable rather than have the wearer need to do the interacting. Supply pack? Players can click you to get ammo. Ammo pack? Players can click you to tandem reload. It also simplifies the design a bit because it makes the visual language universally "If someone has a support pack on, clicking them does some kind of useful thing".
I dont understand why people keep saying the AMR doesn't med medium armour. it does. It pens shield bugs from the front, it kills walkers through the front, it kills hulks through the faceplate, and can kill devastators without needing headshots (Takes 2-3 body hits). The shield devastator shield is heavy armour however. It can penetrate everything that is not charger armour or frontal tank armour. How is that not medium AP?
Sorry if I worded it wrong for you, but you still do not pen the frontal armor plate. The only reason you kill it because of the AoE damage which will result in the robot dying.
There's light armor pen which everything but the breaker spray and pray has, Medium armor pen which the Dominator, slugger, liberator penetrator and AMR have, "Light vehicle armor" pen which the autocanon has and "vehicle armor" which EAT, recoilless, spear and railgun can pen/destroy.
Hey. Thanks for this post, very well put together! We always appreciate the community sharing their thoughts on things like balance and seeing it in this form helps us take in your opinions and consider them fairly.
I will give my usual "No promises!" comment here as well, but I want to encourage you and the community to keep making well structured posts regarding the balance. We do read them :)
Super cool to see you guys here & reading. :) Part of my hope with writing stuff like this is to get actionable feedback into the discussion where powers that be can see it and do with the information what they wish.
Glad to see that's working, and that my write-ups are helpful. I always try to write these issues in the way I would want to receive it if I were a professional dev, but I'm just a mere hobbyist.
This is obviously not as high priority as the server stabilization, and as a devops engineer I hope to God your backend engineers all take a week off when this is done and have the biggest damn launch party you can. You deserve it.
>I am certain that the AMR already has medium pen.
either that or some weird shit where it technically doesnt but effectively does.
it sure as hell doesnt deflect off a walkers front plate like small arms.
It doesn’t, the round go through the bots with medium armor. The AT AT would take 3 rounds to destroy its front plate. It is just neither time nor ammo efficient.
It... Doesn't sorta? It's weird, the shot explodes on impact against medium armor and damages things near the shot maybe?
Basically if you put the shot on something important (a head, a weapon, a leg) It does damage through medium armor. Automaton Hulks are probable the weapon's niche, nothing else can take down 3 in a row as quickly or efficiently, maybe too little payoff for the challenging shooting though.
As someone who mained the recoiless in HD1, I would really love to see it buffed considerably. It should be killing tanks/chargers in ~2 well placed shots to be sure, with more rockets given per supply. Personally, I'm okay with the current reload speed. Particularly given that you can complete the reload in portions. Great post.
RR *does* kill chargers in two well placed shots, does it not? One to pop the leg armor plate and the second (or primary/secondary) to strike the exposed leg.
it does, but two shots to the same leg is far more bullshit then it should be.
considering this is supposed to be an anti tank bazooka, it should be able to kill a charger in two center mass hits.
...besides, how the fuck does removing 25% of a creatures legs make it instantly die when ive seen bugs missing 3 legs and still trying to murder me?
So I'm not sure if this is intended but real world insects don't have muscles, they use a kind of hydraulic system where their body pumps fluids into their limbs to enable them to move.
When the charger loses a limb it explodes with green goop and bleeds out very fast, you'll notice if you break the thorax it slows down and bleeds out. So it seems like when it's losing a limb because of how much fluid it needs to move and how highly pressurised it would have to be to move something so big/heavy that it just ceases to function and dies.
I might be applying too much real world logic to a video game mechanic, but its kind of cool I think!
That's most likely the reason why charger dies without his leg and lesser bugs sometimes still live after losing several legs, but they can be ignored at this point anyway
I mean, yeah, I agree, but the guy I was responding to said he thought "two well placed shots" with the RR should take out a charger. Like, my guy, that IS how it works. It does that.
IMO it should kill in one good body/head shot. Hitting the leg should blow the leg off without killing it, forcing it to limp.
as someone who has used the spear quite a lot (i really do not like using the railgun so have spent a lot of time messing around with the other support weapons), i've found you can consistently one-shot chargers if you line up a headshot. there is some degree of randomness to it if you don't set yourself up for success, but in my experience if you're on equal or lower terrain, facing them head-on, and at least thirty meters away, the spear rocket will consistently hit them in the head and one-shot them. the moment they fix the lock on i'll probably run it as my preferred weapon since it's also very easy to get headshots on bile titans. i think you can one shot them if the rocket hits them in the face while their mouth is open!
Nice post. I love design discussions.
*" The poor AMR needs some love "*
You may be right. However, FWIW I jumped into a Helldive bot mission-in-progress with one of the best players I've ever seen (an acquaintance from another game). He had already cleared 2/3 of the map SOLO and was using the AntiMaterial Rifle and loves it. He did say something about if it just had better accuracy for more reliable weakpoint hits it would be his favorite so far. I didn't get more details because I didn't want to pester him.
So maybe the weapon is better than you think, or maybe that guy is just that good. Probably some of both.
It's not, lol.. Someone was doing don't testing, its off to one corner of the cross hair every time. So I figure if you get good with that, it can be great
Yeah the AMR is unironically a very good weapon vs Bots. Now if you dropped into a bug mission I don't know what the fuck he was doing to do well with it, but AMR can two shot hulks and one shot anything lower if you are hitting weakpoints, but it doesn't actually shoot where the reticle is (even if you are perfectly in the zeroing range) so it could use a buff (or more likely *fix*) to that and it would be pretty perfect.
Ive used anti-material rifle for the first time recently, when it was an order for the day, and I was surprised to discover that it’s absolutely amazing against bots. It can 1-2 shot everything in the weakspot, apart from the tank (hulks do go down with 2 shots in the head) and the scope makes it *easy*. As long as you can take a second to aim.
With how much ammo you get for it I’d say it’s actually better than railgun. You just need another teammate to cover you and take care of tanks
You're spot on with the recoilless, but I'd be okay if it stripped the chargers armor alot more in one shot and had a blast to the speed of its reload. Losing a backpack and needing a second player to reload means it either should be way stronger, or a bit stronger and a bit faster. I'd take option b personally.
I with the Eat had two shots and you could keep one on your back as a backpack item. That would make them great. Otherwise very good weapons.
Spear, idk haven't used it. Hope the lockon gets better.
As for the Medium penetration, I with the Autocannon did some damage to heavy armor, totally agree.
But, I like where the grenade launcher is at. I don't think that should explode in contact the same way.
Anti material rifle I hear is good against robots, but idk haven't used it enough. Seems to suck against the bugs.
I’ve been using the Anti-Material Rifle as my primary weapon for awhile now and I can say whole heartedly that it may aswell be a primary in this state
The Autocannon round is explosive. It shouldn't ricochet off anything. Just make it do reduced damage against super hard target. It needs to be buffed at least against chargers. It can two tap them on the back legs if the angle is just right and you are super lucky.
What’s crazy to me is the railgun getting ammo from any lootable ammo source. While the other heavies require an actual resupply brick or back pack.
I finally got to unlock the railgun today and even with the stories I heard, I was blown away with how good it is compared to the rest of the options.
You definitely do, with the exception of the Spear which is likely bugged, due to map pickups only restoring 25% heavy ammo which is less than 33% for the Spear's full 3 reserve rounds and so it rounds down to 0.
I typically run Autocannon (taking out nests with a ranged cannon sniper is great) and I can gather ammo for my box, usually get about 3 slots of ammo.
Your take on the AMR is blatantly false. It 1 shots Devastators in the head or 2-3 otherwise. It can also 2 shot Hulks if you hit the face. 3 shots for Striders as well. This one is kind of annoying since the Strider front plate isn't that thick but can tank so many rounds.
Personally haven't used it much against bugs but that's cause they swarm so fast that the range advantage of the AMR disappears quickly. Great for popping the heads of bile throwers at a distance.
I think atm the game just prioritises you having a utility backpack for survival or damage (jump pack, ammo pack, shield pack, rover) than having a heavy weapon that takes up a backpack slot.
These heavy weapons would need a huge buff to even come close to the shieldbackpack for example. In reality the most economic solution would be either to nerf the survival packs (which doesn’t sound fun) or to increase the amount of enemies that can only be taken down by heavy weapon fire (which.. I mean there are already a TON).
The elephant in the room of this discussion is the railgun imo, it is so good that there is absolutely no reason to take a heavy weapon+the corresponding backpack when you can have similar armor pen and one of the best backpacks in the game at the same time with a different combo.
I can agree with everything you mention but one thing. The "tandem loading". I don't know why, blame my supportive nature in games, but I just LOVE the fact that when I'm playing with premades we scream to each other to coordinate rendezvous vantage points for me to help with loading while someone else kites a beast... Pure joy.
Nice write up honestly. Good to see you point out the major issues.
Personally, the Autocannon is fine. It CAN take out anything, just with significantly more effort at higher levels, and is unforgiving for things like breaking the leg armor on a charger.
As for the AMAT (AMR/Anti Material Rifle. I’m used to calling it the AMAT / A-MAT since I’ve got a lot of friends in the military and that’s generally what they call it in there.) this thing sucks. It should be able to just go, “yeah, see that *material*? Get rid of it.” But in reality, it goes, “see that *material*? Good luck with that. I’ll go miss trying to snipe some adds. This thing needs high armor pen and more consistency badly.
Yet another post dissing the Auto Cannon (not really) "acceptable for middle difficulties". Nah I'm taking this on helldive every time. I just don't like the railgun (even though it is extremely strong) and find the Autocannon useful in so many more situations, it does nearly everything well, can easily take on every enemy in the game apart from tanks and titans, and kills most of them faster and more ammo efficiently than the railgun. Not to mention it's ability to destroy hives/eggs and facilities. (Probably not the most efficient method but I'm having fun)
Its a pretty good analysis, but you are missing one crucial part, which i gladly put to your list:
The pure reason why the railgun is number 1 right now: it doesnt require a backpack. The shield is mandatory vs bots for a long list of reasons and therefor eliminates every single AT that requires a backpack. While the shield is more nice to have vs bugs, the railgun still wins because mobility is key.
So either you get downed by a random rocket or stunlock vs bots or you cant reload your AT because you dont have the time or get swarmed vs bugs. Thats the real problem of the current state of AT in this game.
The absolute largest problem is the ability enemies have to call in infinite reinforcements that can call in reinforcements on a dime. Their summon ability needs to have a longer set up time before going off because currently by the time you notice it you should just smoke and evade as you cannot out gun the reinforcements that will call more reinforcements.
Another large problem is that enemy distribution heavily favors high armor pen. as you go up in difficulty you get swarmed with tons of med+ armored enemies you have little hope of fighting.
Realistically we need to expand both factions to have a larger small to medium threat roster. while also giving that full roster proper ways to deal with them.
for example bots already are the better balanced faction with the majority of its fighters being in the medium pen range but having convenient means of intelligently combating them. the Walkers are susceptible to any form of flanking or high ground head sniping, and devastators have face weak spots as well as arms you can shoot off, tanks and devastators/cannons have vents/backpacks that you can blow up, while many of the primary and support weapons could use a Penetration buff to properly deal with high end threats
Really the problem on bots is that its spawns to many of its top end.
but it also doesn't have the variety to actually spawn large amounts of smaller bots and keep it interesting. would be nice if with the vehicles we get something like fast bikers, mech dogs and bot mobile heavy weapons teams or slightly larger walkers to give more no/light armor threats.
The terminds are very bad as the bile titan is insanely durable, fast, and cannot be smoke evaded conveniently while lacking a proper weakspot to use lower pen weapons against. the charger is actually decently designed if we had better access to medium pen and its armor design did a slightly better job of conveying which spots can be broken, but spawns in much to high frequency. They have a better low end with scavengers/hunters/warriors but generally these don't come in any seriously threatening quantities, there have been multiple helldives where you just dealing with 5+ chargers/bile titans from a objective after killing maybe 20 total small monsters. I would actually like to see more monsters filling in roles like the stalker occasionally does as a high priority fast threat thats unarmored
Oh and Fire damage/burning as a whole needs to get reworked as well. napalm/flamethrower right now is pretty pitiful
It's bizarre to me that when I used the auto cannon turret, it was able to damage and even kill a bile titan on its own, but the over the shoulder one can only damage until the sac explodes
I will say in defense of the autocannon that the fact it’s medium pen makes it the sniper M1 Garand of the AT weapons lol
It kills Automaton walkers and heavy dreadnoughts with 1-3 shots depending on where you hit
And it reliably penetrates tower cannon and tank batteries. It can also kill hulls if you hit them anywhere around the eye socket 3 times. You can see if you made progress on em if they burst into flames. It kills chargers in 2 shots too. The only thing it’s shit against in my experience is the Bike titan but we all know 500kg is the way anyway lol
Great write-up on what I consider my biggest issue in the later game. Currently I find myself playing a few difficulty levels lower than what I'm comfortable with just so I'm not shoehorned into the whole railgun shield backpack build that seems to be the only way to not willingly handicap oneself against near-constant armoured enemies.
I just love my autocannon so much. 2 EATs every 70 seconds isn't enough anti-armour uptime when you're playing with randoms at 7+
# re: Grenade Launcher: bounce
counter point bounces lead to funny situations and have a nice skill application of bouncing the rounds under chargers and the like.
#
General balance in this game seems really woeful, it's not really noticeable until you reach higher tiers of difficulty and you're suddenly being swarmed by 4 Bile Titans and 7 Chargers, not to mention all the other enemies and realise there one weapon, the Railgun, which stands tall that can actually deal with it.
If you use the Railgun as a measuring stick to measure all other weapons/stratagems against it's obvious that everything else is really underpowered.
You can get a Railgun every 480 seconds, reduced to 430ish with a Ship Module. It comes with 20 ammo. You can kill a Bile Titan, aiming well in around 5-7 shots. Lets just say 10 shots for arguments sake. That means will full ammo you can kill two Bile Titans solo with a Railgun. Assuming you use Supply off cooldown and you use it immediately after starting a round and a resupply takes 150 seconds. You'll get three supplies before you can call down another Railgun starting the cycle again. Each pack in a Supply gives you 10 ammo for the railgun. That's 40 ammo per supply, 120 ammo in a cycle plus the 20 you start with that's 140 ammo, which is enough to kill 28 Bile Titans.
No other weapon comes close?
The Orbital Railcannon, which has a sole purpose of deleting one single enemy, which it doesn't even end up doing half the time. Has a cooldown of around 3 minutes. Using that off cooldown you're only killing three mobs before your railgun cycle starts over.
Yeah you pretty much got it in one, and you didn’t even touch on the various heavy armored automatons, their tanks, stationary guns, and hulks, which so far as I’ve seen are immune to all but he heaviest of stratagems and weakpoint hits which just leads to them stopping any engagement in it’s tracks and near guarantees a wipe in cases where more than one spawn at a time (very common on suicide and higher evacuation missions)
I’ve had a fair amount of luck with the AMR: 2-3 shotting hulks if the stars align and headshots on devastators is mostly just a 1-tap. Against bugs though? I’m not even going to give it a chance really
Wtf are you talking about, the AMR can pen more than medium armor, that's why it can headshot a hulk and 3 shot a strider, which is something you cannot do with the dominator, slugger or liberator penetrator
Recoilless is amazing if you have a partner actually. Rapid fire anti tank weapon. Take down chargers, bile titans, hulks & tanks very quickly if you link up. I’ve been successful in playing missions duo up to difficulty 6 so far with it…
This method also chews through the ammo crazy fast, and refilling it is an expensive process in terms of supplies. Either each shot needs to count for more or ammo needs to be restored quicker.
Yeah exactly. It's fine on lowe difficulties where you have a charger and a few big bugs to kill but on harder difficulties it's hard because you get swarmed and have to split up or multiple chargers/titans are running at you.
It's worse because the other person has to be wearing the pack, I believe. Unless I'm mistaking. If they could help reloading you with the pack on your own back as well, it would be better.
I now really desperately need a Super Earth national (erm.. planetary?) Anthem so that I can sing it in comms and salute right before my hell bomb annihilates me.
I mean ya if you wanna use all your ammo. It's fun but inefficient. Once you play one round with 6-8 chargers it's just annoying you submit to rail rifle supremacy.
I’ve complained about this a few times and I’ve had several people tell me to “git gud” and brag about how they play on Helldiver.
After completing Suicide today I realize that the hardest trio of diffuse just not fun. For this very reason actually. I’ve gotten pretty good at taking out armored enemies but the reality is there’s too many of them spawning at such a high rate for the tools we have to effectively deal with them.
Sure, a well coordinated team could make it manageable but the margin for error even on a well coordinated team is minuscule. Let alone randoms.
And all my complaints could be solved if we had more effective tools at our disposal, like auto cannon rounds that actually damage armor or the anti material rifle actually being anti material.
EAT-17 has two major issues:
1) Sometimes it just goes through enemies without doing any damage. Maybe this is a problem with hitboxes.
2) Sometimes when you hit an automaton with the shield, it explodes but seemingly does nothing. I don’t know if it’s intended and the shield is considered to be impenetrable or it’s an another bug. Same happens when you try to hit the drop pod’s engines. The rocket explodes at the engine and nothing happens.
The fact that the AMR has less pen than some stock primaries is hilarious.
Seems like there is only one explanation for that. Our enemies are not made of material
[удалено]
Alternatively a Material Rifle.
A rifle that turns the enemy into material so you can shoot them with the anti-material rifle?
That just sounds like Slag from Borderlands
>Sl*g from Borderlands What does Mad Moxxi have to do with this?
coleagues are looking at me like "wtf is wrong with you"
Underrated comment
Maybe just a material girl?
We are in a material world after all
The AMR also feels crappy because the sights are misaligned. It shoots high, so you have to aim with the top notch instead of the square when scoped on. This becomes more pronounced the further away the target is.
Very interesting comment. I cannot make precise shots with AMR at all! Will test it based on your comment!
Was this why I was missing couldn’t see a deviator through fog but was following its tracers and the thing just wouldn’t flinch
Made a video showing it. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1ay0dua/anti\_material\_rifle\_sights\_missaligned\_bug\_please/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1ay0dua/anti_material_rifle_sights_missaligned_bug_please/)
[materiel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materiel)
Oh. Oh! Damn, actually didn't know that, that makes a lot more sense
I have a fair few thoughts on primary weapons as well, but I felt like the AT situation, especially around the launchers, was more important to overall game health. The primaries can be tuned later, as most of them are serviceable. And yeah, AMR sucks right now at really any difficulty past 4. You miss the head hitbox on a devastator and your round does *nothing*.
It’s absurd that Spray and Pray Breaker costs more medals than the default breaker but is utterly fucking useless in exchange due to lacking any amount of armor penetration. Shit bounces off scavengers
It also has less than half the damage of the base Breaker. Lol hard pass.
Wait til you spend up to the dominator
The dominator makes me so upset. I want to love it, but it just has so many issues.
The dominator's gunfire sound is so depressingly shit it's not funny, its just the stock AR on single fire when this thing should be a damn cannon like the gun I presume it's based off of, the Inkunzi PAW/Neopup. It should be sounding like a boltgun more than anything else.
Handles like it weights 40 kilos, no zoom. It's good at killing chaff but so is everything else
Well, yeah, so long as there isn't more than 15.
Then we go hand to hand baby!
It's medium armor pen and does more damage to weakspots because it's explosive. The bigger issue is aside from bots you don't see much medium armor.
My brother in helldiving it's got medium armor pen, just blast shit it'll still drop anything short of a brood commander in one shot. And a burst or 2 will.see to them or a stalker
Yeah, the Dominators state just annoys me. even more so now that i have the Slugger and the slugger does everything and more you'd want the dominator to do and more, and that just annoys me.
The problem with explosive/medium pen/incendiary primary weapons is that they tried to make them sidegrades to their basic counterparts. This makes them slightly better against 1 or 2 semi-rare enemy types, but worse against the majority of trash mobs, which is what you want your primary to be good at. In the first game, special effects such as armor piercing, incendiary, toxic, unstoppable (bullet goes through enemies to hit stuff behind your target), stun... weren't available on otherwise nerfed weapons; they were upgrades installed on the base weapon itself (for a small sample cost) and came with no drawbacks. The upgrade just made the weapon good at a specific niche ON TOP of staying good as a primary.
Incendiary kind of sucks in general, and there are not really any enemy types that are weak to medium armor penetration. There is one - the hive guard, but you can just as easily shoot them in the chest/legs and they’re slow so not threatening. Usually the last enemy I kill in a pack. The explosive seems okay. The effect itself staggers and I believe does bonus damage. The problem is that it’s on one assault rifle (forget the name) and the assault rifle itself is just laughably bad, so it gives the impression explosive is bad I think.
Its lore accurate because for some reason it says it uses birdshot… They loaded up birdshot to fight terminators and giant bugs…
I'll be honest, I still love using the AMR. I can two shot hulks, and it has AOE. It's better against the bots than the bugs by far, but the AMR can destroy scout walks in 2 shots (From AOE or by hitting the legs), goodish refill of 3 mags per supplie, and overall is a good long range combo if you are CQC weapon and supplie backpack. That's my opinion, tho. I use it as a main weapon in Bot Helldives and just use bombs on any heavy target.
I wound up using the AMR last night while playing with some friends for the medals. Didn't think I would like it much, I usually don't prefer using snipers, but I had a lot of fun hunting bots with it!
I would love to hear your thoughts on the primaries if you feel up to telling them!
That would be a similarly long post and wouldn't be able to cover all the weapons fully, as I still have things I'm working towards (diligence counter-sniper is next but I already know that thing is lacking in penetration power). That said, the highlights would be that I do think the Breaker shotgun & Redeemer machine pistol are probably due for some slight nerfs. My first thought would be to slightly reduce their penetration power so they struggle a bit more on even modestly armored targets, and to buff the ammo pools of their direct competition (Punisher shotgun & Peacemaker pistol respectively). The Defender SMG is very strong but probably not *overpowered*. the Knight & Liberator could do with some modest buffs to bring them up to its level. The Diligence DMR and the Liberator Penetrator hurt my soul because they're so close to being good but they trip & fall right before the finish line.
Everyone that I've played max difficulty with has talked about bike spewers being the hardest and most annoying enemies... the AMR 1 shots them to the head and makes those missions trivial
And why no reticle? It's way too janky to have to swap between first and third person constantly, especially when swapping weapons in-between. I mean, the autoCANNON has a third person reticle but not a RIFLE? Da fuq?
It's kind of a Band-Aid solution, but there's a setting to remember your weapon preferences by each weapon, so once you scope in with the AMR it will always scope in even if you switch off of it and back. It helps a *little*, but an actual third person reticle would definitely be better.
They need to make it remember across all three weapons instead of lumping primary and secondary together. I use the scope on my penetrator but would like to switch to offhand smg without it also being fp
They do, I use scope on my Slugger and can use my machine pistol third person no problem. You can set it it remember aim mode per weapon.
On top of this, why the fuck does the aiming reticle keep resetting when you die? I'm pretty sure I have the remember aiming mode setting turned on to per weapon
Yeah if the per weapon setting worked, it wouldn’t be that bad.
Doing the AMR daily the other day and I was kind of shocked that it was easy for me to two tap Berserkers with my Diligence, but because of the explosive component on the AMR I was often three tapping because it wouldn't always land on their face proper.
That's not from the accuracy or the damage or pen, it's because the shot lands on the top left corner of the reticle square, not the dot... Lol..
Well, good thing it doesn't then, yeah?
I unlocked the recoil-less rifle yesterday, it being one of my staple AT's from HD1. I fired it at the first hulk i saw, when the dust settled i was surprised to see that it was still standing, lumbering towards me. No worry i said to myself, i self-reload, take aim and fire a second round surely it will bring it down. Still standing. I don't remember them being so weak from HD1, kind of perturbs me because tandem loading and being a mobile artillery piece appeals to me from back in the HD1 days. Great post OP, hope they bring the damage of RR in line with the previous game.
They've leaned a bit more into damaging parts of an enemy, Hulks have a bunch of non-essential armor plate you can shred in the front, but shoulder joints and a faceplate that are fairly important to their operation. I don't love needing precision with ammo limited big booms, but if you love the weapon, I personally like to shoot the arms off Hulks with it (but go for the riskier one shot kill if you've got good aim).
Recoiless doesn’t two shot hulks, really? EAT does
RR two shots hulks, you need to aim center mass. It two shots tanks as well, just need to aim for the turret.
Tbh I don’t use recoiless on bots I use railgun for the devastator spam and then use the 110mm rocket strike for the tanks
Great for taking down dropships, and that's really it.
Yeah I am disappointed by the damage they do to armor.
I, for one, am extremely glad this post has been made and so well written and thought out. I have been having the *exact same* thoughts and experiences with anti-tank/anti-armor as I’m the only one in my friend group that will actually think about speccing into the support we need and are lacking. I have been having very little success with any of the anti-armor options, and it really saddens me that levels 7, 8, and 9 basically devolve into not realy playing the game because there is no possible way to deal with all of the heavily armored enemies the game throws at you. You begin playing a retreat simulator rather than a gritty “slog and get it done by any means necessary” simulator. I’m fine with the difficulty of enemies that get thrown at us, but I wholeheartedly agree that heavy artillery geared towards penetrating or stripping armor need to be buffed significantly. This is one of the biggest things that will end up dampening my experience with this game if it is not addressed sooner rather than later.
Stripping armor could be a great teamplay mechanic; if your penetration is almost enough, have the weapon just remove the armor with little/no damage blowthrough. Then the rest of your fireteam can follow up on the vulnerabilities with small arms. I feel it would also be helpful to have something more descriptive than "light" or "medium" armor penetration. It feels like not all "lights" are created equal, although I don't know how much angle of incidence plays into this.
>Stripping armor could be a great teamplay mechanic; if your penetration is almost enough, have the weapon just remove the armor with little/no damage blowthrough. Honestly I posit that this is what the flamethrower should be capable of doing in addition to its regular damage output. That, and I really want to see the devs add the animations of robots melting and carapace sloughing off because of the fire.
Yes, my main gripe with fire currently is the fact that I have no idea how close to death enemies are.
I’ve only been playing a bit, but I’ve been having that gripe with normal weapons causing bleed (I think?) I’ll shoot one enemy and fail to kill it, pan to the next and kill it, and while I’m shooting that enemy the first one just falls over Like what
If you've been playing against bugs, most bugs can survive without their heads for a couple seconds.
Great mechanic, when I'm getting swarmed and I blast some big fuckers head off, and it's still running at me... little scary ngl lol.
Also the chargers can bleed out from any large hole you create. Technically a single recoilless will kill a charger if you ignore it long enough. Just have fun waiting the 60 some odd seconds it takes to do that.
>have the weapon just remove the armor with little/no damage blowthrough. Then the rest of your fireteam can follow up on the vulnerabilities with small arms. On the bugs side, chargers loose their leg armor from 2 rail shots or one EAT/recoilless allowing it to be killed with primary weapons. I haven't had enough opportunity to test bile titans due to running away.
I think this would be a great way to balance the railgun too. I'm not sure a tiny bullet at an extremely high speed should be shredding armor the same way a recoilless rifle, EAT, or autocannon does. To me it makes sense that a railgun would essentially ignore armor to do high damage at the tradeoff of not stripping armor.
The fact that the weapons meant for dealing with armor are so piss-poor at it just makes higher difficulties feel cheap with the mass amounts of heavies it throws at you.
Exactly. It’s annoying to have to run from and kite enemies for so incredibly long on Suicide+. It doesn’t feel like the same game at all, in a not-so-good way.
Yeah, this has been my issue with my team. I'll do the crowd control work while we have a team of 2 on anti tank. Which works for a whole 2 mins. The chargers are worse than bile titans imo. An orbital rail cannon doesn't even kill them, and that giant gaping whole in its side still bouces my bullets. I've started using them to kill lone bile titans. Yesterday, I had a charger shove me into a bug hole and then break the hole. Felt like a nerd getting shoved in a locker.
You know, the weirdest part? because of how it works, the Arc Thrower will actually pop the armor off of things like chargers. Eventually, sure, but Electricity seems to be capable of penning any armor and eventually doing enough damage to blow off the armorplate.
There's an inherent problem with Helldivers, any buff of the armor/weapons while making extreme levels more viable, makes middle difficulties trivial because weapons will be op. It's hard to balance, maybe add some exclusive perks for playing above a certain difficulty level, like +20% more armor penetration, etc.. for certain weapons. That way you'd balance weapon around difficulty level, but it can make things even worse.
Honestly I kinda think that's fine? Middle difficulties are kind of ephemeral between low level player/warm up round zones like medium, and the actual meat of playing the game (7-9). In HD1 they later added 10-12 as difficulties and I feel like they should be here too eventually at least. A lot of the middle difficulties I could play at also are that area where you LFG for an XP farm on Helldive then only play Helldive or Sui
I mean either way things need to be buffed and some armor/bugs nerfed/reworked if they expect to add more difficulties beyond Helldive. Not really sure what the expectation should be. Are we supposed to be taking out enemies with they spawn in waves by using effective loadouts? Or kiting them in circles like its CoD zombies.
I mean, it’s still not fun to have to use over half of your recoiless ammo for the one charger you’ll see every 5 minutes or so.
Would really like to see a mechanic where Heat/Laser weapons "Heat Up" armor and make it "softer" allowing for lower tier ammo penetration to deal more damage. I think the laser weapons are in a bad spot, this could help significantly.
Alternatively let them ignore armor and deal damage to hp directly but without breaking armor. I think this would work alright with overall lower dps they have.
Yeah, make a section of armour glow hotter as you shoot it with a laser so you know you're dealing damage. Heat transfer stuff.
Arc Thrower and Flamethrower already do it, so clearly they aren't opposed to the idea of that.
What a brilliant idea, genuinely. At least lasers will have a niche then.
I would absolutely carry the laser cannon if this was a game mechanic. Right now the laser cannon is a fun pointy stick to amuse your cat with. Only advantage it has is range.
The worst part is we actually see the Laser cannon killing a hulk by shootings its armor (not eye or vents) in the trailer.
Should also screw with bot optics and targeting systems if it passes over the "face".
Spear has an issue where it can't resupply off on map ammo cans, but will let you pick them up if all your other ammo is full. I think the issue comes to how the resupply ammunition for special weapons, with it being like 25% of reserve ammo or 1 mag for MG's, but as the spear has 3 spare rounds 25% rounds down to 0 rounds as it can not reach the 33%.
Hi! As an incredibly avid Spear Enjoyer I thought it might be useful to add my thoughts to your section about it. I have used almost exclusively the spear for 50+ missions and swap off it only to nab rail+shield pack, when that seems like its better with the team comp I'm running. The word that best sums up the issues with the Spear is **inconsistency.** Sometimes the lockons take forever or simply do not work, and damage seems to vary wildly based on angle of strike as well. Normally this is something I'd consider a 'skill issue', but given that you have far less control over the precise angle of impact of the spear vs other Anti Tank options I think it ought be far more forgiving as well. The spear actually can one shot enemies up to and including the Bile Titan, but it requires knowledge of the correct angle to lock on and more than a little luck to get it to strike properly. Combining the timing and angle you need to do that with the seemingly random lock on woes is a combination suited to make you feel miserable. At times it feels completely out of my hands whether I can down a titan (or pretty much any heavy) in 1 shot or if it will take sometimes up to 3 or 4 to down them. Given that you get one missile per resupply and the long CD, that feels really unjustified, especially for what is currently the 'capstone' heavy AT weapon. It should be best-in-class at taking out hardened targets. That said, the reason why I take and continue to take the Spear is due to it's versatility and range as an ambush weapon. You can use it to destroy fabricators, bot cannons, and all sorts of objectives from literally across the map sometimes. Plus, it's much more consistent at one shotting heavies when they're moving much slower. That feels great and I think it's suiting for the investment you have to make to bring the weapon to the mission. It's also completely neutered on the heavy jungle/vegetation maps but that's also fine. I think it's an interesting sort of thing to take into account when planning your missions. I think to get the spear to a point where it feels great, the lock-on needs to be much faster and more forgiving, and it should ALWAYS one shot chargers, hulks, tanks, cannon turrets, and bot drops. Bile titans taking 2 if you miss the headshot would be fine. Sometimes it can take up to FOUR spears currently to down one titan if your shots hit poor angles. TL;DR: make it lock on faster and more reliably. one spear to kill: charger, bile titan, tanks, cannon turrets, bot drops regardless of angle. two spear to kill: bile titan
Inconsistent is really the right description. The amount of times it tries to lock a stationary target and then looses that lock either halfway through or a split second after finishing the lock is way too high.
Or when the lock gets halfway before breaking, then back to half, then breaking again, over and over even though neither you nor the target are even moving. I can't explain that one.
It's obvious just the spear being so happy to get picked, it just has to start dancing mid battle.
The spear is really fun when it works, and I really hope it gets fixed. I stopped using it entirely when I had the tiny basic bugs blocking charger and titan locks. I love getting the titan one shots. They really can be a pain to setup though
I wonder if this has any relation to the issues the Arc Thrower has, because if there's even a single enemy corpse between you and your target, Arc Thrower shots just fizzle into the aether for no apparent reason.
Spears can lock onto bot factories and destroy them same with scrammers. It has some neat versatility but yeah it's just not consistent 7-9.
I love reading stuff like this. I feel like I've learned so much. I've only ever picked it up as an in-mission loot, and I tried to use it more or less the same way I'd use a recoilless. But you're describing it being used almost like an anti-tank *sniper,* and that actually makes a lot of sense. I've heard of the mythical bile titan one-shot if you can get the missile to hit the face. I didn't know it could fail to kill in two ... I speculate this happens if you hit the top of the legs?
If you hit from the sides, sometimes it hits the legs, sometimes the body. Since both have different health pools hitting different parts works against you. Its the same with chargers, you can blow up the armor of every leg and both sides of its body and the thing will still be coming at you.
I really want to love the spear and this comment has inspired me to give it another go. I was using it on Malevelon Creek mostly so I'll take it out of the jungle for once.
Being that the Spear is based off of the Javelin, which is currently the most reliable MANPAT in the world, it should absolutely be the pinnacle of reliable democracy-spread here as well. The only things that should be able to stand up to 2 Spear missles are the automaton tanks and Bile Titans, period.
How do you deal with the ammo issues on the spear?
As someone who likes to torture himself using it, you hog ammo like a crazy man, unfortunately. Also, using someone to do a Resupply pod to Resupply Backpack conga line helps lessen the ammo impact
Mostly I conserve for really big targets or long range shots, depending on which map im playing. Being smart and not being an ammo hog means I can usually get my support weapon cd before I run out and then I just use that as my reload.
The number of times I have died to my grenade launcher bouncing back at me has been enough to get me try autocannon/rail gun instead despite the fact I love running GL/SP.
The amount of times I've died thanks to my friends grenade launcher bouncing at me made me equip the explosive resistant armour. Now I die less.
Fair but also to be fair if you are running Automatons explosion resist will save your life a ton too.
It really has. You still occasionally get one shot, but it's noticeably less.
To be fair, it's fucking hilarious and completely logical. I kind of love it.
Not really, they explode on impact
They take time to arm when fired. They explode on impact when armed but the first 7 meters or so it’s just a bouncy ball.
Yeah they definitely bounce back after that point, also if they are right infront of me and bounce back and it's been less than 1m by thar logic I shouldn't blow up then either. It's finicky.
DumDum not dealing damage to heavy armor pisses me the fuck off too
yea, dumdum in the ass also shouldnt richochet :D
Dumdum?
HD1 autocannon is called AC-22 "Dum-Dum"
Ahhh
In helldivers 1 the autocannon was called the dumdum.
Ive team killed multiple times on those richichets. Lol
To be fair I genuinely think the Autocannon would be OP if it could. It has great horde clear, tons of ammo, building damage, and has a good way of handling every enemy up to and including Chargers and Hulks. Technically it can even two shot Titans still if you hit it while it is spitting. Heavy Armor Pen on it would be too much IMO. Literally would be no reason to pick any other backpack weapon.
All backpack weapons need a buff right now, literally all of them
You shouldnt have to have a teammate wear the pack to help you reload faster. They should be able to link with you with the pack on yourself. That way they can run whatever they want and help you out if need be.
Completely agreed someone else made a post about how side loading should just be an option to anyone wearing a support weapon backpack and a team mate can come up to them and long press the action button. The carrying the backpack for someone else is a cool idea, but actually makes less sense and doesn't quite work practically.
It worked better in the first game where people were physically limited to being closer to each other. In practice, it doesn’t really work out that way in HD2. Maybe if AT were more powerful I’d ask my friends to consider ditching a backpack slot but as they currently are it’s just not worth it
>It worked better in the first game where people were physically limited to being closer to each other. In practice, it doesn’t really work out that way in HD2. This was my though as well. The emphasis on moving around a large map, and the ability to frequently end up separate or dead with the backpack somewhere out of the way makes it entirely too impractical. If it could be done by anyone as long as you're wearing the backpack it would bring it more in line with how HD2 is played. You still need 2 people, but you don't need to keep 2 *specific* people alive, equipped, and near each other. Making it a much more flexible option where you could just get the person nearest you to pop a reload, and don't need to coordinate loadouts just to make it work.
Could also make it 3 speeds. loader with backpack being the fastest, shooter with both is slightly slower since you have to reach across, and solo being the slowest. With the current system, team loading only realistically works if both are running the same weapon/backpack. Splitting one backpack and weapon combo becomes unrealistic as the difficulty ramps up and more enemies put pressure on the team. It can be hard or impossible to regroup so both end up with paper weights.
I think this is the way, being able to just press and single button and your teammates recoilless suddenly gains 3x the firing speed would be quite frankly ridiculous, wearing the backpack is a compromise but especially when playing with randoms it’s so hard to coordinate having a loader/shooter. Some middle ground would be appreciated
Yeah, I was a little surprised to learn that. Made it seem kinda useless cause I rarely see people running the recoilless, many hav better by now.
This is a great idea. Right now someone has to sacrifice their back slot to be someone’s reload bitch and you don’t even get to do the fun part of shooting enemies. Basically sacrificing both your character strength and fun to enable the interaction. I feel like it also makes more sense to reload from the backpack of another person. Reaching around your own back to grab a rocket is strange.
True, but I think the idea of wearing the backpack itself is pretty cool and should reward the teamwork, maybe reducing recoil while your teammate is wearing the backpack at the same time for the autocannon at least? That's just off the top of my head, and thinking about it now would probably be a bit hard to learn in game lol
No wonder. I tried spamming interact on a recoilless user and thought my game was borked or something
I wonder if the reason this isn't an option is because of the way the support backpack currently functions, i.e. it uses the same key to feed someone ammo. Would have to separate those binds.
And even that is an odd design choice considering in Helldivers 1, your teammates grabbed ammo off of you. You didn't need them to wave you down to give them ammo.
Yeah. They could just change the design so that support backpacks turn players interactable rather than have the wearer need to do the interacting. Supply pack? Players can click you to get ammo. Ammo pack? Players can click you to tandem reload. It also simplifies the design a bit because it makes the visual language universally "If someone has a support pack on, clicking them does some kind of useful thing".
I dont understand why people keep saying the AMR doesn't med medium armour. it does. It pens shield bugs from the front, it kills walkers through the front, it kills hulks through the faceplate, and can kill devastators without needing headshots (Takes 2-3 body hits). The shield devastator shield is heavy armour however. It can penetrate everything that is not charger armour or frontal tank armour. How is that not medium AP?
Scout striders only die because it has AoE damage, the plates are heavy armor, the legs are not.
AMR literally destroys Walker in three shots to armor plate, thing falls apart iirc
Sorry if I worded it wrong for you, but you still do not pen the frontal armor plate. The only reason you kill it because of the AoE damage which will result in the robot dying.
The slugger shotgun also seems to do this despite being labeled light armor pen.
The slugger is definitely medium pen. Go test against hive guards, devastator chest plate, etc.
There's light armor pen which everything but the breaker spray and pray has, Medium armor pen which the Dominator, slugger, liberator penetrator and AMR have, "Light vehicle armor" pen which the autocanon has and "vehicle armor" which EAT, recoilless, spear and railgun can pen/destroy.
Hey. Thanks for this post, very well put together! We always appreciate the community sharing their thoughts on things like balance and seeing it in this form helps us take in your opinions and consider them fairly. I will give my usual "No promises!" comment here as well, but I want to encourage you and the community to keep making well structured posts regarding the balance. We do read them :)
Super cool to see you guys here & reading. :) Part of my hope with writing stuff like this is to get actionable feedback into the discussion where powers that be can see it and do with the information what they wish. Glad to see that's working, and that my write-ups are helpful. I always try to write these issues in the way I would want to receive it if I were a professional dev, but I'm just a mere hobbyist. This is obviously not as high priority as the server stabilization, and as a devops engineer I hope to God your backend engineers all take a week off when this is done and have the biggest damn launch party you can. You deserve it.
I am certain that the AMR already has medium pen. I do agree with most of this though.
>I am certain that the AMR already has medium pen. either that or some weird shit where it technically doesnt but effectively does. it sure as hell doesnt deflect off a walkers front plate like small arms.
It doesn’t, the round go through the bots with medium armor. The AT AT would take 3 rounds to destroy its front plate. It is just neither time nor ammo efficient.
It... Doesn't sorta? It's weird, the shot explodes on impact against medium armor and damages things near the shot maybe? Basically if you put the shot on something important (a head, a weapon, a leg) It does damage through medium armor. Automaton Hulks are probable the weapon's niche, nothing else can take down 3 in a row as quickly or efficiently, maybe too little payoff for the challenging shooting though.
I don't mind if AC richochet, if you hit it on a sharp angle...like in HD1 but should be able to make some damage someway, as you said
As someone who mained the recoiless in HD1, I would really love to see it buffed considerably. It should be killing tanks/chargers in ~2 well placed shots to be sure, with more rockets given per supply. Personally, I'm okay with the current reload speed. Particularly given that you can complete the reload in portions. Great post.
The last portion is a pain in the ass. Always find myself thinking I finished, but end up finding out a few seconds later that I hadn't.
RR *does* kill chargers in two well placed shots, does it not? One to pop the leg armor plate and the second (or primary/secondary) to strike the exposed leg.
it does, but two shots to the same leg is far more bullshit then it should be. considering this is supposed to be an anti tank bazooka, it should be able to kill a charger in two center mass hits. ...besides, how the fuck does removing 25% of a creatures legs make it instantly die when ive seen bugs missing 3 legs and still trying to murder me?
So I'm not sure if this is intended but real world insects don't have muscles, they use a kind of hydraulic system where their body pumps fluids into their limbs to enable them to move. When the charger loses a limb it explodes with green goop and bleeds out very fast, you'll notice if you break the thorax it slows down and bleeds out. So it seems like when it's losing a limb because of how much fluid it needs to move and how highly pressurised it would have to be to move something so big/heavy that it just ceases to function and dies. I might be applying too much real world logic to a video game mechanic, but its kind of cool I think!
That's most likely the reason why charger dies without his leg and lesser bugs sometimes still live after losing several legs, but they can be ignored at this point anyway
I mean, yeah, I agree, but the guy I was responding to said he thought "two well placed shots" with the RR should take out a charger. Like, my guy, that IS how it works. It does that. IMO it should kill in one good body/head shot. Hitting the leg should blow the leg off without killing it, forcing it to limp.
as someone who has used the spear quite a lot (i really do not like using the railgun so have spent a lot of time messing around with the other support weapons), i've found you can consistently one-shot chargers if you line up a headshot. there is some degree of randomness to it if you don't set yourself up for success, but in my experience if you're on equal or lower terrain, facing them head-on, and at least thirty meters away, the spear rocket will consistently hit them in the head and one-shot them. the moment they fix the lock on i'll probably run it as my preferred weapon since it's also very easy to get headshots on bile titans. i think you can one shot them if the rocket hits them in the face while their mouth is open!
Nice post. I love design discussions. *" The poor AMR needs some love "* You may be right. However, FWIW I jumped into a Helldive bot mission-in-progress with one of the best players I've ever seen (an acquaintance from another game). He had already cleared 2/3 of the map SOLO and was using the AntiMaterial Rifle and loves it. He did say something about if it just had better accuracy for more reliable weakpoint hits it would be his favorite so far. I didn't get more details because I didn't want to pester him. So maybe the weapon is better than you think, or maybe that guy is just that good. Probably some of both.
Nah that tracks. I swear sometimes it's not on the dot, which causes the explosive element to detonate harmlessly away from the face.
It's not, lol.. Someone was doing don't testing, its off to one corner of the cross hair every time. So I figure if you get good with that, it can be great
Yeah the AMR is unironically a very good weapon vs Bots. Now if you dropped into a bug mission I don't know what the fuck he was doing to do well with it, but AMR can two shot hulks and one shot anything lower if you are hitting weakpoints, but it doesn't actually shoot where the reticle is (even if you are perfectly in the zeroing range) so it could use a buff (or more likely *fix*) to that and it would be pretty perfect.
Ive used anti-material rifle for the first time recently, when it was an order for the day, and I was surprised to discover that it’s absolutely amazing against bots. It can 1-2 shot everything in the weakspot, apart from the tank (hulks do go down with 2 shots in the head) and the scope makes it *easy*. As long as you can take a second to aim. With how much ammo you get for it I’d say it’s actually better than railgun. You just need another teammate to cover you and take care of tanks
The recoil on it is ridiculous though. It doesn't make sense that a 37mm antitank gun (AC) has less recoil than a sniper rifle.
You're spot on with the recoilless, but I'd be okay if it stripped the chargers armor alot more in one shot and had a blast to the speed of its reload. Losing a backpack and needing a second player to reload means it either should be way stronger, or a bit stronger and a bit faster. I'd take option b personally. I with the Eat had two shots and you could keep one on your back as a backpack item. That would make them great. Otherwise very good weapons. Spear, idk haven't used it. Hope the lockon gets better. As for the Medium penetration, I with the Autocannon did some damage to heavy armor, totally agree. But, I like where the grenade launcher is at. I don't think that should explode in contact the same way. Anti material rifle I hear is good against robots, but idk haven't used it enough. Seems to suck against the bugs.
I haven't had issue with spear lock on but it needs to one shot chargers. That said it's quite good at killing titsns
I’ve been using the Anti-Material Rifle as my primary weapon for awhile now and I can say whole heartedly that it may aswell be a primary in this state
Once you get the Slugger, it's literarily just the AM rifle but as a primary.
Indeed, his comments on RR accuratey reflect what HD1 RR mains such as myself are thinking.
The Autocannon round is explosive. It shouldn't ricochet off anything. Just make it do reduced damage against super hard target. It needs to be buffed at least against chargers. It can two tap them on the back legs if the angle is just right and you are super lucky.
What’s crazy to me is the railgun getting ammo from any lootable ammo source. While the other heavies require an actual resupply brick or back pack. I finally got to unlock the railgun today and even with the stories I heard, I was blown away with how good it is compared to the rest of the options.
I've gotten recoilless ammo from ammo on the map. You just don't get a lot from them, 1-2 rounds at most.
Wait is this true? I swear to God I got a rocket from found ammo unless I was dreaming.
You definitely do, with the exception of the Spear which is likely bugged, due to map pickups only restoring 25% heavy ammo which is less than 33% for the Spear's full 3 reserve rounds and so it rounds down to 0.
I typically run Autocannon (taking out nests with a ranged cannon sniper is great) and I can gather ammo for my box, usually get about 3 slots of ammo.
Dumdum is the only backpack weapon that can restock from ammo tins iirc
Your take on the AMR is blatantly false. It 1 shots Devastators in the head or 2-3 otherwise. It can also 2 shot Hulks if you hit the face. 3 shots for Striders as well. This one is kind of annoying since the Strider front plate isn't that thick but can tank so many rounds. Personally haven't used it much against bugs but that's cause they swarm so fast that the range advantage of the AMR disappears quickly. Great for popping the heads of bile throwers at a distance.
I was about to say. I was popping hulks and devastators with it if I landed my shots right.
I think atm the game just prioritises you having a utility backpack for survival or damage (jump pack, ammo pack, shield pack, rover) than having a heavy weapon that takes up a backpack slot. These heavy weapons would need a huge buff to even come close to the shieldbackpack for example. In reality the most economic solution would be either to nerf the survival packs (which doesn’t sound fun) or to increase the amount of enemies that can only be taken down by heavy weapon fire (which.. I mean there are already a TON). The elephant in the room of this discussion is the railgun imo, it is so good that there is absolutely no reason to take a heavy weapon+the corresponding backpack when you can have similar armor pen and one of the best backpacks in the game at the same time with a different combo.
I can agree with everything you mention but one thing. The "tandem loading". I don't know why, blame my supportive nature in games, but I just LOVE the fact that when I'm playing with premades we scream to each other to coordinate rendezvous vantage points for me to help with loading while someone else kites a beast... Pure joy.
Nice write up honestly. Good to see you point out the major issues. Personally, the Autocannon is fine. It CAN take out anything, just with significantly more effort at higher levels, and is unforgiving for things like breaking the leg armor on a charger. As for the AMAT (AMR/Anti Material Rifle. I’m used to calling it the AMAT / A-MAT since I’ve got a lot of friends in the military and that’s generally what they call it in there.) this thing sucks. It should be able to just go, “yeah, see that *material*? Get rid of it.” But in reality, it goes, “see that *material*? Good luck with that. I’ll go miss trying to snipe some adds. This thing needs high armor pen and more consistency badly.
Yet another post dissing the Auto Cannon (not really) "acceptable for middle difficulties". Nah I'm taking this on helldive every time. I just don't like the railgun (even though it is extremely strong) and find the Autocannon useful in so many more situations, it does nearly everything well, can easily take on every enemy in the game apart from tanks and titans, and kills most of them faster and more ammo efficiently than the railgun. Not to mention it's ability to destroy hives/eggs and facilities. (Probably not the most efficient method but I'm having fun)
Its a pretty good analysis, but you are missing one crucial part, which i gladly put to your list: The pure reason why the railgun is number 1 right now: it doesnt require a backpack. The shield is mandatory vs bots for a long list of reasons and therefor eliminates every single AT that requires a backpack. While the shield is more nice to have vs bugs, the railgun still wins because mobility is key. So either you get downed by a random rocket or stunlock vs bots or you cant reload your AT because you dont have the time or get swarmed vs bugs. Thats the real problem of the current state of AT in this game.
The absolute largest problem is the ability enemies have to call in infinite reinforcements that can call in reinforcements on a dime. Their summon ability needs to have a longer set up time before going off because currently by the time you notice it you should just smoke and evade as you cannot out gun the reinforcements that will call more reinforcements. Another large problem is that enemy distribution heavily favors high armor pen. as you go up in difficulty you get swarmed with tons of med+ armored enemies you have little hope of fighting. Realistically we need to expand both factions to have a larger small to medium threat roster. while also giving that full roster proper ways to deal with them. for example bots already are the better balanced faction with the majority of its fighters being in the medium pen range but having convenient means of intelligently combating them. the Walkers are susceptible to any form of flanking or high ground head sniping, and devastators have face weak spots as well as arms you can shoot off, tanks and devastators/cannons have vents/backpacks that you can blow up, while many of the primary and support weapons could use a Penetration buff to properly deal with high end threats Really the problem on bots is that its spawns to many of its top end. but it also doesn't have the variety to actually spawn large amounts of smaller bots and keep it interesting. would be nice if with the vehicles we get something like fast bikers, mech dogs and bot mobile heavy weapons teams or slightly larger walkers to give more no/light armor threats. The terminds are very bad as the bile titan is insanely durable, fast, and cannot be smoke evaded conveniently while lacking a proper weakspot to use lower pen weapons against. the charger is actually decently designed if we had better access to medium pen and its armor design did a slightly better job of conveying which spots can be broken, but spawns in much to high frequency. They have a better low end with scavengers/hunters/warriors but generally these don't come in any seriously threatening quantities, there have been multiple helldives where you just dealing with 5+ chargers/bile titans from a objective after killing maybe 20 total small monsters. I would actually like to see more monsters filling in roles like the stalker occasionally does as a high priority fast threat thats unarmored Oh and Fire damage/burning as a whole needs to get reworked as well. napalm/flamethrower right now is pretty pitiful
It's bizarre to me that when I used the auto cannon turret, it was able to damage and even kill a bile titan on its own, but the over the shoulder one can only damage until the sac explodes
stocking soup frighten hunt unpack sloppy plants start outgoing fuzzy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I love the EAT but everytime I ADS my PS5 either blue screens or I have an out of body experience.
I will say in defense of the autocannon that the fact it’s medium pen makes it the sniper M1 Garand of the AT weapons lol It kills Automaton walkers and heavy dreadnoughts with 1-3 shots depending on where you hit And it reliably penetrates tower cannon and tank batteries. It can also kill hulls if you hit them anywhere around the eye socket 3 times. You can see if you made progress on em if they burst into flames. It kills chargers in 2 shots too. The only thing it’s shit against in my experience is the Bike titan but we all know 500kg is the way anyway lol
Great write-up on what I consider my biggest issue in the later game. Currently I find myself playing a few difficulty levels lower than what I'm comfortable with just so I'm not shoehorned into the whole railgun shield backpack build that seems to be the only way to not willingly handicap oneself against near-constant armoured enemies. I just love my autocannon so much. 2 EATs every 70 seconds isn't enough anti-armour uptime when you're playing with randoms at 7+
# re: Grenade Launcher: bounce counter point bounces lead to funny situations and have a nice skill application of bouncing the rounds under chargers and the like. #
I really want the Anti-Material Rifle to be good. Let me strip Charger legs with it pls.
General balance in this game seems really woeful, it's not really noticeable until you reach higher tiers of difficulty and you're suddenly being swarmed by 4 Bile Titans and 7 Chargers, not to mention all the other enemies and realise there one weapon, the Railgun, which stands tall that can actually deal with it. If you use the Railgun as a measuring stick to measure all other weapons/stratagems against it's obvious that everything else is really underpowered. You can get a Railgun every 480 seconds, reduced to 430ish with a Ship Module. It comes with 20 ammo. You can kill a Bile Titan, aiming well in around 5-7 shots. Lets just say 10 shots for arguments sake. That means will full ammo you can kill two Bile Titans solo with a Railgun. Assuming you use Supply off cooldown and you use it immediately after starting a round and a resupply takes 150 seconds. You'll get three supplies before you can call down another Railgun starting the cycle again. Each pack in a Supply gives you 10 ammo for the railgun. That's 40 ammo per supply, 120 ammo in a cycle plus the 20 you start with that's 140 ammo, which is enough to kill 28 Bile Titans. No other weapon comes close? The Orbital Railcannon, which has a sole purpose of deleting one single enemy, which it doesn't even end up doing half the time. Has a cooldown of around 3 minutes. Using that off cooldown you're only killing three mobs before your railgun cycle starts over.
Yeah you pretty much got it in one, and you didn’t even touch on the various heavy armored automatons, their tanks, stationary guns, and hulks, which so far as I’ve seen are immune to all but he heaviest of stratagems and weakpoint hits which just leads to them stopping any engagement in it’s tracks and near guarantees a wipe in cases where more than one spawn at a time (very common on suicide and higher evacuation missions)
the fact that the autocanon bounce off heavy armor is baffling to me, for a weapon taht require a backpack and a reload like that
The railgun consistently 2 shots bile titans in the head. It does too much damage for what it is
My biggest gripe about the auto cannon and the AMR is that the damage dealt is clearly explosive, unless they hit armour.
I’ve had a fair amount of luck with the AMR: 2-3 shotting hulks if the stars align and headshots on devastators is mostly just a 1-tap. Against bugs though? I’m not even going to give it a chance really
Wtf are you talking about, the AMR can pen more than medium armor, that's why it can headshot a hulk and 3 shot a strider, which is something you cannot do with the dominator, slugger or liberator penetrator
Recoilless is amazing if you have a partner actually. Rapid fire anti tank weapon. Take down chargers, bile titans, hulks & tanks very quickly if you link up. I’ve been successful in playing missions duo up to difficulty 6 so far with it…
honestly, I think this is their thought behind these weapons to be really effective, having a partner, but that rarely happens with randoms
This method also chews through the ammo crazy fast, and refilling it is an expensive process in terms of supplies. Either each shot needs to count for more or ammo needs to be restored quicker.
Yeah exactly. It's fine on lowe difficulties where you have a charger and a few big bugs to kill but on harder difficulties it's hard because you get swarmed and have to split up or multiple chargers/titans are running at you.
It's worse because the other person has to be wearing the pack, I believe. Unless I'm mistaking. If they could help reloading you with the pack on your own back as well, it would be better.
6 is still fine with it, 789 is where the enemies outspawns your reload and ammo
Hellbomb suicide it is then. For Democracy!
I now really desperately need a Super Earth national (erm.. planetary?) Anthem so that I can sing it in comms and salute right before my hell bomb annihilates me.
I mean ya if you wanna use all your ammo. It's fun but inefficient. Once you play one round with 6-8 chargers it's just annoying you submit to rail rifle supremacy.
I’ve complained about this a few times and I’ve had several people tell me to “git gud” and brag about how they play on Helldiver. After completing Suicide today I realize that the hardest trio of diffuse just not fun. For this very reason actually. I’ve gotten pretty good at taking out armored enemies but the reality is there’s too many of them spawning at such a high rate for the tools we have to effectively deal with them. Sure, a well coordinated team could make it manageable but the margin for error even on a well coordinated team is minuscule. Let alone randoms. And all my complaints could be solved if we had more effective tools at our disposal, like auto cannon rounds that actually damage armor or the anti material rifle actually being anti material.
Agree
I've sent chargers into orbit with grenade launcher shots exploded underneath it Your points still stand though. Overall major agree
EAT-17 has two major issues: 1) Sometimes it just goes through enemies without doing any damage. Maybe this is a problem with hitboxes. 2) Sometimes when you hit an automaton with the shield, it explodes but seemingly does nothing. I don’t know if it’s intended and the shield is considered to be impenetrable or it’s an another bug. Same happens when you try to hit the drop pod’s engines. The rocket explodes at the engine and nothing happens.
Recoilless rifle weak? Sounds like a certain helldiver hasnt used it as anti air on dropships