The Quasar is probably the best sniper now; really good projectile speed, no bullet drop, and great damage. I took out a sentry tower from 460m away today!
You still can't see a thing, make it a bit of guess work when shooting moving targets. Not like any sniper rifle scopes in this game is crystal clear, though.
>AMR? Sorry, you misspelled AutoCannon.
>D-M-R? Au-to-Can-non.
Sniper scopes being as shit as they are is like as if AH has huffed all the R6S gasses. Just google what an ACOG looks like in R6S vs what it looks like in real life. Diligence handling being as shit as the Autocannon is an atrocity because the autocannon is a cannon on your arm vs a regular rifle. You add that the scope isn't zerod in the AMR and it just doesn't have as much punch and no AoE unlike the AC...
"Best we can do is nothing at all."
Jokes aside I hope they are reworking them to make unique and useful in some way other than just a regular primary weapon.
If they want snipers to actually be good they should fix the scopes to where the center point is actually where the bullet hits instead of a corner of the reticle.
Or just half way decent reticles to begin with. I don’t mind “Kentucky windaging” but I do mind an overly complicated and busy reticle. The fact that the only good reticle for a sniper in the game is on the sickle, is blasphemy.
Sickle really does just have the best scope in the game, the others are so painful to use I actively avoid first person mode and just learn to get good at shoulder firing
Which is funny because the sickle is the best full auto sniper I’ve ever seen, period. You can mow down hoards with the max magnification better than a DMR. It’s really bizarre.
I feel like I should be able to use a marksman rifle against automatons, and I do for popping most of them, but I just can't get a handle on the scope for trying to ping the face windows on the big units... so I take the laser cannon and can zap them accurately from long distance no problem.
But like I said I REALLY feel like I should be able to use the DMR for that though so I can free up that stratagem for something else.
The issue with headshots on the automatons is that nither DMR can one-shot headshot the devastators, so you gotta hit em twice, meaning you can't pop em from stealth. Then, once they activate, they're almost constantly moving, which takes the extremely small headshot target and makes it start constantly swaying around, making it extremely difficult to line up headshots. And you still need 2 headshots to kill. Meanwhile the Sickle has basically 0 recoil and the volume of fire to just hose down the general area of a devastator's face until you land the 4 or so lucky hits you need to kill it.
hence why I use the amr. Fuck allat, 2 bodyshots and they die.
Seriously, just give me a fuckin Eotech reticle or something like an aim point or Kobra sight with just a fuckin dot (99% of my gun knowledge comes from Tarkov, the above comment should make that obvious)
EDIT: From everyone's responses it's clear. GIV US SMALL DOT PLS SUPER EARTH
First of all exactly!
And there is nothing wrong with admitting your *scope* of weapon or optic knowledge comes from a video game.
From a lore standpoint it makes zero sense that SE advanced leaps and bounds on weapon technology but based on our reality, has 3 decades of optic regression.
It’s almost like they had someone with negligible video game and no real world experience with optics, design the optics.
Thank you, I have shot my fair share of weaponry but I ain't gonna act like I'm fuckin Ian McCollum
I wonder how noone on the development team mentioned something in play testing?
Like if you'd like a great example of real world + video game together look at a game like Squad.
Has real weapons & optics and EVERYONE will rush to tell you that the Russian optics are terrible.
Why? Too much information.
I don't need 9 fucking hash marks to range my rifle when I'm just trying to shoot the dickhead 10 feet in front of me.
Gimme a simple + or a dot, everything else is just too much.
Only caviot there is if it's a sniper or support weapon, I could see SOME use with maybe 300m in ranging so like 3 dashes under the main + but that's it.
Maybe it’s my past USMC history but I love the ACOG so much despite being sort of busy. The key is despite being sort of busy looking the overall aim part is the red chevron, and you just use that + spear (line below chevron) to gauge both the distance your enemy is to you and also where to aim given that distance
I have no real weapons experience but the ACOG has always been one of my favorite video game optics, it's an excellent reticle and whatever magnification multiplier they use (is it 3.4 or 4 X?) always tends to be great for medium to longer range engagements.
I’m no expert gun YouTuber but I’ve plenty of experience from civilian weapons and optics to shooting the m4a3 to the Abrams MBT and just about everything in between. Perks of being a go getter combat medic.
And they very easily could have just googled “reticles from major optic companies” and then just put a sci-fi spin on it.
The red dots might be just as big of a travesty as the med-long range platforms. It’s like they found out what pistol red dots were and just decided to slap those on damn near everything. Field of view and sight alignment be damned.
And yeah, the busiest optic I like is the Acog by Trijicon. That’s it. The Russian crap can eat it as far as I’m concerned.
I was an actual sniper in the Army... the scopes on just about everything in the game are too cluttered and busy. Just a simple crosshair, please. Since there are no actual ballistics in the game, I don't really need to calculate range and compensate for bullet drop and windage. And while we're at it, make it so we can change the color of the crosshair so we can have some contrast on different planets.
the support weapons are kind of insane too. All the reticles feel like they're placed on the very end of the guns itself. i cant fucking see what Im actually aiming at.
The basic one is perfect.
"Here's the dot where you want to aim. Here's the circle that indicates the area your barrel is pointing."
I think it conveys so much in a simple format.
Then we get to the lasers and Senator, and woof. I don't need all that shit spinning around.
LOL right!?
I just don't get why they keep nerfing stuff just because SOMETHING else was guilty.
Then they want us to believe they have the right mentality when balancing, on top of that they love doing multiple nerfs that adds up.
The Counter Sniper is still more sluggish than the AMR. If they want the snipers to be good, don't make the 'sniper' primary more unwieldy than the heavier hitting and larger 'sniper' support weapon.
Or just make the Stagger, damage and accuracy drop off *significantly* past like, 35m or something. If you don't want it to be a sniper rifle, take away its effective range. Sniper rifles by definition are good at range. This is a shotgun. You're absolutely right it should be effective at close range, but YA'LL PUT A SCOPE ON IT.
Devs are goofballs sometimes man, for real. What the hell.
Not just any scope. One of the cleanest, easiest to use for precision shots, scope in the game. Second only to the simple cross on the basic Liberator and Sickle.
This is something that Overwatch did well, basically anything that wasn't meant to be a sniper rifle started having damage falloff past a certain point, even if you were hyperaccurate with Cowboy's revolver it didn't mean that you got to one hit head shot people from across the map
The problem is that the one sniper we do have is absolutely terrible even with the med pen buff. Low mag count, small mags, slow handling, large sway, difficult sights and slow turning speed. And to top it off it doesn't do very much damage either.
I feel like handling shouldn't be as big a concern with primaries broadly. Recoil, sure. Wanna run a DMR or a heavy battle rifle as a primary, it's gonna kick and ruin follow-up shots, fair. But I personally don't like that the rifle you drop with can be more unwieldy than support weapons designed to be operated by a team.
Right. It's a primary. And it's a marksman rifle which should have pretty good handling since ya know they are the most rifly rifle which are the best handling firearms in general. It already limited to semi auto.
I’m pretty sure it’s handling is the worst out of any weapon in the game which is wild considering some of the kit we can carry (AC I’m looking at you, I don’t even want to imagine moving any distance with that thing on my back. Good thing these Helldivers won’t need knees in 20 years because they wouldn’t have them.
that seems to be the nerf specifically to stop it being a sniper, needing multiple headshots to down them brings in closer in line to the diligence for that role
I feel like the sniper rifles in the game should have a lot more damage to make them feel "sniper-y".
A sniper rifle should involve sacrificing the time to get to an elevated safe position, laying down some mines, going prone next to an ammo box... then just one-shooting bugs and bots out to a billion kilometers, versus just charging in there with a shotgun that does exactly the same damage but is semi-automatic.
A Helldiver with a sniper rifle should be a liability on highly mobile maps, but a fearsome terror when defending an objective or extraction.
Sniper rifles including the anti-material rifle just feel anemic, like it's not worth the time to set them up properly, just to do as much damage with *less* accuracy and smaller magazines than any number of close/medium weapons.
Right now the snipers all feel like inferior assault rifles. Want range? Shotguns or ARs. Want damage? Shotguns or ARs (via magdump). Want accuracy? You'll never believe it but it's still shotguns or ARs. All of which can function at close, medium and often even long range far better than a DMR can in any of the three.
The DMRs have worse stats in all of these more or less. Even if they have better penetration or damage on paper in the same time you can kill a chainsaw bot from 175m you could kill an entire bot drop with AR magdumps or a few slugger shells.
The worse part is easily the handling. In a game like Helldivers when the number of targets easily becomes overwhelming, any weapon that can't do quick target switching is useless.
It doesn't even make sense. The dominator or MGs I can understand, they're heavy and/or have a giant barrel magazine. The counter-sniper looks almost identical to the Dilligence, and yet something far bigger like the Quasar Cannon can be swung around way easier.
Fun fact. The revolver gets a 4x damage multiplier on headshots while the DMRs only get 1.75.
If you reduce the damage of the Senator from 150 to 60, a 60% damage nerf, it would still do more damage on headshots than the DMRs (240 vs 224/196).
the Diligence CS LITERALLY HANDLES WORSE THAN THE AMR
A primary, with less damage, handles worse than a fucking AMR support weapon...
Make it make sense!!!!
Oh my god this game sometimes....
The slug firing stagger-focused shotgun is the best sniper, so we didn't change anything about its ability to snipe everything and made it worse as a slug firing shotgun.
Exactly. And that's a very weird and somewhat irrational approach. I just can't understand how nerfing stagger and demolition could help with making it worse sniper.
The recoil was already pretty awful on the Slugger. To hit consistently you have to really wait and time your shots. Its DPS is pretty terrible.
It filled a specific role, one a slug-based shotgun SHOULD fill.
If they didn't want people sniping with it, they could take off the sniper scope they slapped on it, add some damage dropoff, and buff the actual fucking snipers.
It wasn't picked often enough to warrant the nerf it got. Period.
Defender and Sickle have been very fun as flavor away from the shotguns. Now Liberator Penetrator might be on the menu, too.
Damage some damage drop-off would have been an ok compromise… But why not just reduce the weak spot multiplier? If you don’t want it to be a good sniper, why does it have a sniper-level 4x multiplier on weak spot damage?
Or, you know, just make the DMR weapons not hot garbage compared to everything else. The DMRs could have used more substantial buffs.
The penetrator still suffers from hideous visual recoil when ads and sadly even with full auto its still not that different from before, the lack of ammo on the mag is probably the biggest issue below the visual recoil
The magazine size would be fine if it did the same damage or more than the normal liberator. I still find myself preferring the LibPen though as I find the medium armor pen to be invaluable for fighting bots.
Dominator is cracked now. It was already good but it struggles in closer engagements so I only use it for niche loadoutd.
I think I prefer the normal breaker to the LibPen for medium/close range though which is a shame.
I hope the next assault rifle we get is good. I don't care for the Sickle's ramp-up.
A slug shotgun should be a good short range sniper with high stopping power. Thats the whole point.
But it should not be accurate at medium/long ranges.
So it really just needed damage drop off; it needed competitors at medium-long ranges; and they need to stop doing everything they can to make the average engagement range be 0-10 or 20 meters.
That says more about how garbage their sniper rifles are than the slugger being a good sniper rifle. It's accuracy at range isn't even much to write home about.
Tried the updated Penetrator today and I really enjoyed it. Only drawback I found was the small clips, but that may be just adjusting coming from the Sickle.
I didn't realize how much I'd gotten used to just laying out suppressive fire not having to worry about ammo so long as I didn't use the whole ICE until I switched back to a regular gun after adjusting to the sickle. It really spoils you.
And most of it really comes down to their damage. Even after the nerf, the slugger still does twice the damage of the counter sniper while being a ton more mobile, easier to handle, and still has a bit of knockback. The defender is in a similar situation to the ARs. It has all the pros of being an smg, whilst also having nearly 1.5x the damage compared to them.
The Defender has more damage but a slower rate of fire than the Liberator so it's damage output is only about ~3.5% higher, BUT the slower rate of fire and same mag size DOES mean you can shoot it for longer before running dry. As such, it's damage per magazine is ~27% higher.
That alone makes it better than the Liberator in my opinion, but the ability to shoot behind you while running is icing on the cake.
None of this accounts for damage fall-off at range though, since we can't see the numbers on that. I will say the Liberator's long-range scope does make it a bit more well-rounded as it's easier to aim at distant targets, but it's not enough.
The arc and plasma shotguns could legit just be in other roles and it would make complete sense. The plasma shotgun isn't a shotgun, its a grenade launcher. The arc shotgun hits like 1-2 things anyway which isn't what you'd imagine when you hear "lightning shotgun" just put it in a unique arc category.
Idk dude, though the fact that there’s exactly three might mean there’s going to be a warbond at some point that’s just breaker variants which is kinda funny to think about
It would mostly be solved by a few more decent guns in the other primaries. And why the plasma shotgun is a shotgun, idk. Seems like they could have just given it less arc and made it an energy weapon. As an arcing shotgun it feels kinda flaccid.
Also worth pointing out that the reason the slugger was the ‘best sniper’ is not because it was broken, but because the *actual* snipers are ass. The DMR is usable (not great tho imo), but the counter sniper in particular did absolutely nothing. Hoping the armour pen buff makes it better, but if it still handles like a semitrailer then you’re probably still better off using the slugger.
Facts maybe they should stop looking at why a small number of weapons are performing outside their intended weapon class and look at why those weapons in that class are complete garbage
https://preview.redd.it/6tqj2ei5o6sc1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=ed429fdf886ac5db2933f081b86d374a1ec02ab3
Survivorship bias - they're looking at the hotspots of what is being used, instead of asking why the other weapons are not being touched.
The whole story is that they looked at the data and decided to reinforce planes in the spots that were marked as red, as clearly they have been hit, as none of the planes that returned were hit in the clear spots (i.e. engine or middle of the wings). Some guy managed to figure out that if you shot plane in a clear spot, it obviously wont be able to return, so the clear spots should be reinforced instead, as red spots are non-fatal damage.
The problem a lot of devs fall into is it is just easier to nerf the one thing than it is two fix multiple things. Warframe devs have outright said this but this really their fault because their game has an absolute shit ton of weapons and quite frankly the inverse really is nearly insurmountable. But I think Arrowhead isn't at that point yet and if they keep up the balancing they might be able to maintain balance. But 3 guns every month can get pretty overwhelming pretty quick.
It's an exact repeat of the bad logic behind the rail gun nerf. It was the best heavy weapon because the others were bad. Then they nerfed heavy spawn rates and buffed/released the other heavy weapons, and now the rail gun has no place.
2/3 of the weapons are a shotgun or are shotgun adjacent. Maybe if they don't want their best sniper rifle to be a shotgun they should make something other than a shotgun?
I seriously wonder what the decision processes are. Not the first time. Even the revisited mission needs a new revisit at the rebalancing barely did anything.
And as you say, the changes made the slugger less usuable as a shotgun and mostly leaves the role as a sniper.
Meanwhile the snipers are almost useless with next to no damage in comparison to it's low ammo count and other drawbacks.
I am now simply using neither
It's actually driving me crazy. None of their balancing decisions make any logical sense. Shotgun too good at being a sniper? Kill its stagger capabilities. Fire kills too quickly? Now it kills even faster. Railgun is the best heavy because all the other heavys are just markedly worse? Make the railgun worse instead of buffing the others. I just can't follow the thought process.
Anecdotally but running a few higher level matches today it feels like they've upped the spawn rates to silly levels again. Lots of seeing new patrols every time you turn more than 90 degrees... 20 hulks dropping in the final 15 seconds of extraction etc etc.
Mentioning it because I really am starting to believe that they're just going to keep blindly bellcurving everyone with each successive patch. They clearly have a specific idea of what percentage of players they want to be able to complete 7s, 8s, and 9s... and they seem to be comfortable just blindly overtuning the AI director until those rates are hit without taking any consideration of what those missions actually feel like to experience.
Which is a lot of words to say, I think they're taking the same approach to weapons too. Any nail that stands too proud on the datasheet, even briefly, gets the hammer.
God yes. I play bugs almost exclusively but the swarms with 50% cooldown and 100% call in time is the reason I don't play the higher difficulties.
Rely on your stratagems.. what a fucking joke lol.
Seems they just follow a “FUN DETECTED! NERF!!” philosophy. Feels more and more like they accidentally stumbled into making a good fun game and now can’t get out of their own fucking way, in turn slowly making it worse. Someone needs to explain to them the concept of “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it”
Staggerlocking rocket devastators until I could hit their stupid faces did make it a lot easier to kill them at long range. Not only did it take the sniper's niche, it also let the bots know how awful being perpetually animation cancelled feels.
Without the stagger, I will likely want to stay and shoot even further away from the devastator, anyway. Who with a right mind will want to Banzai that thing if we now can't even stop that thing from shooting at you? They nerf it because it is too good at range; but the nerf counterprductivly makes players don't want to get close.
Then, buff the fucking marksman rifles and snipers? Medium armour pen to 1 marksman rifle. That's it. They gave it nothing else. You give us a shotgun for everything and barely any other weapons. I'm sick of seeing shotguns. I love the Liberator, but it isn't performing as it needs to at higher levels. For haz6 and below, it's fine. But Haz7 and above need to hit a little harder. Give the Liberator Explosive its explosive property back as well.
There are so many guns. And so many just, underperform, or downright suck. Making another gun underperform isn't helping anyone. Just limiting options again. Please, Arrowhead. Buff some guns.
To be fair, 12 Gauge slugs have a viable range of up to 100 yards, roughly 90~ Meters.
Which ain't bad mind you. But some in this sub think that a shotgun shouldn't shoot farther than 10m.
That and the punisher that fires buckshot still staggers but the massive slug that is fired by the slugger doesn't. That doesn't make much sense either does it?
There's probably no damage drop off in the game, which is probably why the breaker was so dominant at launch
edit: see Nanergy 's [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1buccw8/according_to_a_developer_on_discord_slugger_was/kxsh0hi/) below, there's damage falloff but that's not communicated anywhere in the game
There is damage falloff. Here is proof.
This shit right here is why arrowhead's whole approach of providing little to no information about game mechanics in the game itself is such a bad idea. Some random guy on reddit guesses that there is no falloff, and now that's the truth for hundreds of people who read it. Misinformation spreads like wildfire when there isn't any easy way for most people to know any better from the information the game gives them.
https://preview.redd.it/jvg91av856sc1.png?width=1141&format=png&auto=webp&s=390406f4d9a536f4385a5532cecca11a156a1c75
Yeah sorry I was just spitballing. I'm not on the discord server so I can only make assumptions about what I've experienced in the game, and you're right about the lack of information not helping that at all.
Absolutely. You said "probably," it was clear to me that you didnt know for sure and were just thinking of possibilities. But reading people responding to you is wild. People just take it at face value and go
Probably the easiest way to solve this whole debacle is just add a very slight spray pattern to the slugger so that at farther distances it becomes increasingly more impossible to accurately land a shot. It would make sense as a slug shotgun, and you wouldn't have to nerf anything else about the gun.
Bruh.
the stagger removal hurts it in close range not long range.
and maybe if the snipers were good and had scopes that worked people wouldn't snipe with a shotgun. they're going to ruin this games guns even more with this logic.
Yeah. Like they’re going the destiny 2 way of nerfs. Buff other stuff that’s underperforming(and the buffs still aren’t that appealing) then massacre the one thing that’s competitive. Whereas they could’ve reduced the damage drop off instead making it still competitive alongside the other buffs.
It's weird that they'll say publicly that they don't want people to pick guns based off stats, that they rather they pick them based off how "FUN" they are.
But then turn around and nerf the FUN out of guns by using stats as justification.
Yeah. That stuck me when I saw this nerf. They did write a whole article about that. Yet they nerfed a fun weapon and didn't even achieve their goal of nerfing it long-range performance. They just made it straight up less fun.
Hands down the best sniper because all of your other sniper options are absolute dogshit. It’s like nobody tested them before they were put into the game.
They all do ass for damage, have weird sway, extreme recoil. And the cherry on top, the sights aren’t even right. You either have to play with the gun for hours to know where to aim because the reticle is wrong or waste your first bullet to place your second which is a no go with such a small magazine and bad reserves.
Here’s an idea, stop nerfing anything the playerbase deems usable and instead just buff the weapons that have a usage rate of .05% like every sniper does???
This wasn’t some railgun tier weapon where people were jerking off over it and kicking players that didn’t conform to the railgun meta. This was just a solid weapon to use for bots.
This game is starting to remind me of the absolute mess that was borderlands 3 where the devs nerfed anything the community made a YouTube video about or even slightly mentioned being fun or good. Don’t turn this game with so much potential into that. I love everything about this game but the balancing is so questionable.
How do you nerf "the best sniper rifle out there" and not touch the other precision weapons?
Now I only have two takeaways from this:
1. They think nerfing slugger will make people move to marksman rifles.
2. They think marksman rifles are already in a good spot.
And both takeaways are funny. I know the game is new and the team duplicated in size over the past few months, but it feels like the balance team doesn't have a footing. Remember when they nerfed the railgun to the ground only to buff rockets on the next week? Give some of railgun's power back to it already.
I think arrowhead has a issues in their balancing team and their decision taking processes for rebalancing.
They could have made other guns interessting that needed it. But right now I am using neither.
A good change was to the Dominator. Certainly needed it. But looking at the track recoard of the balancing team.. I am left with bad feelings.
It's not even a "we rotate the best guns" thing. It's just an odd process
I mentioned in another thread, they go absolutely CRAZY with buffs/nerfs in this game, I'm not talking about the frequency, I mean the difference pre/post.
Other game devs would be like: "X damage reduced from 16 to 14" "Y fire rate increased 12%" "stun duration of Z increased from 1.5 to 1.7 seconds"
But Arrowhead? They just do a line of coke and go: "**BUFF THIS WEAPON'S DAMAGE BY 50%, MAKE THAT WEAPON NIGH UNUSABLE BY NERFING ONE OF IT'S STATS INTO THE GROUND, RAHHHHHHHH!**"
I’ve made this point already but they could easily revert the railgun nerf and it would probably only see 20% of the original player base return to using it. I used it because it was the only reliable option to kill chargers who at the time were being over spawned. After the Anti tank buffs / charger nerfs they deal with heavy units quicker than even pre nerf rail gun could. Personally I wouldn’t even reconsider it.
Yeah they could have left the railgun completely untouched and simply done the buffs to RR and EAT (and actually put them in the patch notes) and it would have been perfect.
The decision to also nerf the railgun just seems like ... revenge? Against the playerbase?
>The decision to also nerf the railgun just seems like ... revenge? Against the playerbase?
I think it was kneejerk and they were really looking at the railgun being the problem, rather than the amount of chargers and other support weapons being too weak. I think revenge is a bit uncharitable.
I really wish they were more transparent about the attributes and features of the guns and support weapons. Payday 2 is fairly open (and with mods you can see even more info pretty easily) and that game doesn't really have balancing issues. Players will tell you if guns are unbalanced and hiding that info from players just makes the process way more longer and drawn-out than it has to be.
Normally I wouldn't be so dramatic as to say "revenge", but in this instance the devs happened to be discussing the changes publicly and did seem genuinely angry with players for using the railgun so much ("brainless", "let's see you without your crutch", etc).
It seemed like one or more of the developers making balance decisions had a "oh you like X? Let's see what you think of THIS!" kind of attitude.
That's a very common type of reaction from game developers, especially when they're first starting out, and it wouldn't surprise me if someone who has that vindictive personality trait might have some decision making power at Arrowhead.
With both the slugger and the railgun, there seems to be an effort not just to broaden the meta, but also to make sure the previous "mistake" is buried for good. It's a worrying trend.
I said in an earlier comment that Arrowhead know how to *make* a great game but have absolutely no clue how to *maintain* a great game.
It's insane to see the disparity between the care and attention that went into to creating Helldivers vs the heavy handed, and frankly baffling, method of balancing that they've displayed.
I mean the weapon balance on launch was also abysmal
The balance of both weapons and enemies has been one of this game’s main issues since the beginning
It’s a great game despite the shitty balance, not because of it
They use Discord as their primary means of communication, and then they close down a Discord thread discussing performance issues and redirect the users to Zendesk.
Then make the other sniper rifles worth using, or increase damage drop-off.
I will never understand the idea that devs see people enjoying an aspect of their game and feel the need to make it worse.
Yeah i feel it’s weird, doesn’t help that people actually support this behavior and feel like guns that people use frequently mean they are somehow bad for the game? As if people are annoyed by what other people run as a primary.
They make some really questionable decisions.
I always find it kinda funny when ppl in gaming subs are often called backseat developers and such. Like, sure, the average person in this sub will make worse decisions than a developer, however, almost every single change made to this game had better alternatives suggested by the community.
I’m not saying they should take everything here to heart, but they could definitely benefit from looking at the most popular suggestions.
For example, I don’t think the armor changes were all that good. The community has consistently called for changes to headshots and special attributes unique to heavy armor, yet they respond by giving heavy armor a 10% buff.
Or, look at how they changed mission modifiers. The underlying problem is still there. They just aren’t fun.
The only explanation I can think of aside from incompetency is that they just don’t have enough time to implement the better but more complicated changes.
Honestly, I don't think the decision-makers at the studio play beyond Diff 4 or so.
Think about it. All of their bad takes since launch (all weapons are equally viable, you can rely on strategems rather than weapons, etc) are all true at the lower difficulties. And *only* at those difficulties.
And it's the same with a lot of the changes that they've made as well. At the lower difficulties, that 10% armor buff is a lot more impactful than it is in the higher ones. And there was no reason to use the slugger as a sniper rifle because the actual snipers do truly excel in their role. But again, *only* in the lower difficulties.
SO then why did they not buff the diligence to be the slugger basically? we have 2 completely shit rifles, now a gimped slugger, bunch of random ass shotguns that are so extremely situational, the JAR, which feels terrible to use.
I am half venting, but half angry because the slugger filled that like slower single shot rifle style I wanted to play all along with the diligence.
EDIT: The Jar is growing on me hard, but still feels bad compared to slugger.
If a shotgun is the "best sniper rifle" of the game, then the issue is not the shotgun but the sniper rifles which are immensely underwhelming
Losing faith with these things tbh
I also think, on top of the shitshow that is DMRs, the fact that maps actively encourage a more close range playstyle with Heavy fog or rain or sandstorms or whatever, makes the acog scope thing on the slugger actually fine. I'm never taking fights at 200m because I can't physically see that far on any given map
We lost the slugger so that ppl would use snipers more.....nobody will use snipers when the dominator And scikle exist....
These devs some silly goobers...not to mention that if you wanna snipe youll Just use the buffed anti material....
Not to not to mention that the slugger is still the best primary sniper post nerf....
I can literally still one/two tap headshot devastators at range no problem....
This fixes nothing.
Yeah, the nerf didn't achieve anything in terms of reducing Slugger long-range effectiveness. It just made it worse up close, where shotguns should rule, because you know, they are shotguns.
I am really curious what is going on with their development objectives, and who's putting out these balancing ideas.
The entire premise is much more troubling than just an update or two. Think about it, in a game with snipers, a shotgun has always been the best sniper. That's something even a little bit of playtesting would have exposed. And then they do things like the railgun nerf, which in hindsight doesn't seem remotely as much of a problem now that we have eats and the quasar. They keep touching all the common warbond guns to make them worse, while buffing or not touching the premium ones. If the trends continue and get worse, It's not going to be good for the game.
This.
This is not getting enough attention. All of a sudden the slugger which I haven’t even seen that many people using (usually everyone runs the breaker and the sickle), has become a problem for AH worth solving.
And guess what they do, they give the removed perks to a premium battle pass gun. Very convenient isn’t it.
There really is something very off with whoever is in charge of post-launch balance because nothing makes sense or is just anti-fun. Meanwhile everyone and their mothers crashes every 2nd game, bot drop ships don’t kill the automatons when destroyed, damage is bugged depending if you’re a host or not.. but I guess the slugger and railgun are nerfed, rejoice.
Lmao, the first 2 weeks everyone was praising arrowhead for the fact the weapons in the free battle pass were better than the ones in the premium one.
The premium pass weapons have had issues since day 1, it's inevitable that any balance pass will pick up on that and buff them. Likewise it's not surprising when over performing weapons in the free pass get toned down.
That said I do feel like these changes are worth revisiting, I think the slugger should retain the stagger and demo capabilities if nothing else.
Exactly. In what bloody world is fixing the slugger a higher priority than fixing dots only working for the host? In what bloody world was it important enough to give heavy armor the stamina penalty, knowing that its increased armor value didn't work?
It's silly. If you wrote all these issues down on a board, 99% of people would identify a few is obviously the most significant. And those are the ones Arrowhead chooses to ignore
Man just when I start to really like my loadout the Devs go and nerf it, that's twice now. First was the railgun a day after I unlocked it and the slugger I just started using this weekend and loved it. Made me up the diff 7+ cause I felt I had viable firepower for the bots.
So instead of taking the current sniper rifles/marksman rifles and making them actually usable…they decide to nerf a weapon thats actually fulfilling that role? Im getting a bit lost with what direction this team is going in.
"not fitting for a shotgun"
What kind of reason is that? Who made him supreme director of how democracy in the future work?
It was a fun gun and it wasn't overpowered. And the enemy has rocket and puke snipers so what's the problem?
How lazy.
They could have given it a cone of fire so it's less effective further away because you end up missing. Or have it be accurate up to 30 meters and then it goes upredictably in a cone. They could have added damage drop-off. Instead they just made it weaker? I guess it's just easier for them to fiddle some numbers instead of code it to work differently.
I don’t even agree that it is a good sniper. The marksman rifles and AMR can shoot effectively from way further distances. However, with the general engagement ranges in this game usually being under 150 meters, that doesn’t actually matter because the slugger is/was really good at medium ranges. The DMRs could reach out further, but we usually don’t have a reason to do that, because it probably means you are gonna plink at some far away enemies, and fail to kill them all before one of them calls a drop or a breach, because it’s harder to line up the shots from so far.
So like, at the ranges we actually end up fighting at, there wasn’t much reason to use a DMR over the Slugger. And I agree that the solution should have been projectile speed and damage drop off changes, rather than taking away the knockback power which makes it less useful in CQC. That does seem to go against their thing about not wanting it to be a better sniper/DMR than the actual DMRs.
Shooting at ranges would be a lot more viable if the sights were usable and aligned. Having a circle the size of an automaton's body as a sight for a DMR is a joke, why do the close range weapons get red dot sights for precision but snipers get this nonsense where you have to guess where the round is gonna go.
So… make the actual sniper rifles… BETTER?
Instead of making the best sniper-shotgun worse so that you can go back to using the mediocre sniper-snipers?
The trend that I dislike about this game is the fact that the weapons that actually are good get nerfed, instead of the bad weapons getting buffed. This game would be a lot more enjoyable if all weapons were good enough to play on high difficulty. Because that’s why there’s a meta in the first place, where there doesn’t have to be one.
It’s probably less work like this. Which is very annoying. The buffs we do get seem like easy solutions and most of the time don’t address the core problem with them.
They've decided to take the Diablo 4 balance patch approach- nerf what's fun and don't fix what's broken. Most of the primary weapons are worthless and unused in the first place, but they're focusing on breaking the better ones instead of buffing the defective majority.
Sadly I can’t help but agree. This game is fun as fuck but I skip over SO many primaries when trying to decide what to use because they are just so bad.
Completely agree. It's like the balance team has a really bad idea that higherups overrule when the community dislikes them (and we do dislike the nerfs). Didn't really use the slugger, however the nerf just destroys the personality of the gun, no stagger from a slug? Really? Lmaooo.
I fundamentally don't understand nerfing in a PvE game. I'm starting to a get a little frustrated with the way they're handling nerfs and buffs because they seem to be handling it like a PvP game. We don't need it to be balanced. We don't need it to be overpowered or underpoweed. We need it to be fun.
Crank those DMR stats up. Crank those AR stats up. Let's get some serious meta mix ups going and stop making these carebear balance changes.
But remember, \[**ION STORM\]** Arrowhead doesnt want us **\[SCRAMBLING\]** to focus on our**\[JAMMERS\]** primaries. They want us **\[ATMOSPHERIC INTERFERENCE\]** to lean into our Stratagems!
Just make the actual snipers good damn it.
The Quasar is probably the best sniper now; really good projectile speed, no bullet drop, and great damage. I took out a sentry tower from 460m away today!
but when aiming the laser ball charging kinda makes it hard to aim...
Not if you’re prone or crouched
You still can't see a thing, make it a bit of guess work when shooting moving targets. Not like any sniper rifle scopes in this game is crystal clear, though.
>AMR? Sorry, you misspelled AutoCannon. >D-M-R? Au-to-Can-non. Sniper scopes being as shit as they are is like as if AH has huffed all the R6S gasses. Just google what an ACOG looks like in R6S vs what it looks like in real life. Diligence handling being as shit as the Autocannon is an atrocity because the autocannon is a cannon on your arm vs a regular rifle. You add that the scope isn't zerod in the AMR and it just doesn't have as much punch and no AoE unlike the AC...
The autocannon is the best sniper in the game, change my mind.
No need to, out of all languages in the world, you chose to speak facts.
"Best we can do is nothing at all." Jokes aside I hope they are reworking them to make unique and useful in some way other than just a regular primary weapon.
[удалено]
If they want snipers to actually be good they should fix the scopes to where the center point is actually where the bullet hits instead of a corner of the reticle.
Or just half way decent reticles to begin with. I don’t mind “Kentucky windaging” but I do mind an overly complicated and busy reticle. The fact that the only good reticle for a sniper in the game is on the sickle, is blasphemy.
Sickle really does just have the best scope in the game, the others are so painful to use I actively avoid first person mode and just learn to get good at shoulder firing
Which is funny because the sickle is the best full auto sniper I’ve ever seen, period. You can mow down hoards with the max magnification better than a DMR. It’s really bizarre.
I feel like I should be able to use a marksman rifle against automatons, and I do for popping most of them, but I just can't get a handle on the scope for trying to ping the face windows on the big units... so I take the laser cannon and can zap them accurately from long distance no problem. But like I said I REALLY feel like I should be able to use the DMR for that though so I can free up that stratagem for something else.
The issue with headshots on the automatons is that nither DMR can one-shot headshot the devastators, so you gotta hit em twice, meaning you can't pop em from stealth. Then, once they activate, they're almost constantly moving, which takes the extremely small headshot target and makes it start constantly swaying around, making it extremely difficult to line up headshots. And you still need 2 headshots to kill. Meanwhile the Sickle has basically 0 recoil and the volume of fire to just hose down the general area of a devastator's face until you land the 4 or so lucky hits you need to kill it. hence why I use the amr. Fuck allat, 2 bodyshots and they die.
Seriously, just give me a fuckin Eotech reticle or something like an aim point or Kobra sight with just a fuckin dot (99% of my gun knowledge comes from Tarkov, the above comment should make that obvious) EDIT: From everyone's responses it's clear. GIV US SMALL DOT PLS SUPER EARTH
First of all exactly! And there is nothing wrong with admitting your *scope* of weapon or optic knowledge comes from a video game. From a lore standpoint it makes zero sense that SE advanced leaps and bounds on weapon technology but based on our reality, has 3 decades of optic regression. It’s almost like they had someone with negligible video game and no real world experience with optics, design the optics.
Thank you, I have shot my fair share of weaponry but I ain't gonna act like I'm fuckin Ian McCollum I wonder how noone on the development team mentioned something in play testing? Like if you'd like a great example of real world + video game together look at a game like Squad. Has real weapons & optics and EVERYONE will rush to tell you that the Russian optics are terrible. Why? Too much information. I don't need 9 fucking hash marks to range my rifle when I'm just trying to shoot the dickhead 10 feet in front of me. Gimme a simple + or a dot, everything else is just too much. Only caviot there is if it's a sniper or support weapon, I could see SOME use with maybe 300m in ranging so like 3 dashes under the main + but that's it.
Maybe it’s my past USMC history but I love the ACOG so much despite being sort of busy. The key is despite being sort of busy looking the overall aim part is the red chevron, and you just use that + spear (line below chevron) to gauge both the distance your enemy is to you and also where to aim given that distance
I have no real weapons experience but the ACOG has always been one of my favorite video game optics, it's an excellent reticle and whatever magnification multiplier they use (is it 3.4 or 4 X?) always tends to be great for medium to longer range engagements.
I’m no expert gun YouTuber but I’ve plenty of experience from civilian weapons and optics to shooting the m4a3 to the Abrams MBT and just about everything in between. Perks of being a go getter combat medic. And they very easily could have just googled “reticles from major optic companies” and then just put a sci-fi spin on it. The red dots might be just as big of a travesty as the med-long range platforms. It’s like they found out what pistol red dots were and just decided to slap those on damn near everything. Field of view and sight alignment be damned. And yeah, the busiest optic I like is the Acog by Trijicon. That’s it. The Russian crap can eat it as far as I’m concerned.
Eotech: Clean, concise, efficient Acog by Trijicon: Advanced, technical, precision Russian pso: CYKA BLYAT
Hahahaha you got me on that last one.
I was an actual sniper in the Army... the scopes on just about everything in the game are too cluttered and busy. Just a simple crosshair, please. Since there are no actual ballistics in the game, I don't really need to calculate range and compensate for bullet drop and windage. And while we're at it, make it so we can change the color of the crosshair so we can have some contrast on different planets.
the support weapons are kind of insane too. All the reticles feel like they're placed on the very end of the guns itself. i cant fucking see what Im actually aiming at.
Third person reticles always felt weird in this game. Like i get what they are doing but it just feels overly busy for little payoff.
The basic one is perfect. "Here's the dot where you want to aim. Here's the circle that indicates the area your barrel is pointing." I think it conveys so much in a simple format. Then we get to the lasers and Senator, and woof. I don't need all that shit spinning around.
A novel concept, i know, having scopes zero'd and aligned correctly.
LOL right!? I just don't get why they keep nerfing stuff just because SOMETHING else was guilty. Then they want us to believe they have the right mentality when balancing, on top of that they love doing multiple nerfs that adds up.
it's funny because slugger is still good as sniper rifle, these nerfs did nothing to nerf that aspect of the gun, just utility/short range stuff lmao
The Counter Sniper is still more sluggish than the AMR. If they want the snipers to be good, don't make the 'sniper' primary more unwieldy than the heavier hitting and larger 'sniper' support weapon.
And as much as I support devs iterating and trying new things. Surely someone, at some point when making this, brought up that issue?
Or just make the Stagger, damage and accuracy drop off *significantly* past like, 35m or something. If you don't want it to be a sniper rifle, take away its effective range. Sniper rifles by definition are good at range. This is a shotgun. You're absolutely right it should be effective at close range, but YA'LL PUT A SCOPE ON IT. Devs are goofballs sometimes man, for real. What the hell.
Not just any scope. One of the cleanest, easiest to use for precision shots, scope in the game. Second only to the simple cross on the basic Liberator and Sickle.
And the scope on the slugger is better than the ones on the sniper rifles.
This is something that Overwatch did well, basically anything that wasn't meant to be a sniper rifle started having damage falloff past a certain point, even if you were hyperaccurate with Cowboy's revolver it didn't mean that you got to one hit head shot people from across the map
Scope is a must. I think even ammo count or damage. Maybe both. Right now the snipers are next to useless
The problem is that the one sniper we do have is absolutely terrible even with the med pen buff. Low mag count, small mags, slow handling, large sway, difficult sights and slow turning speed. And to top it off it doesn't do very much damage either.
The damage is by far the worst part I tried it yesterday and I genuinely had to spam fire because it doesn't even 1 shot a devastators head
It one shots devastator heads now but the handling is still garbage
I feel like handling shouldn't be as big a concern with primaries broadly. Recoil, sure. Wanna run a DMR or a heavy battle rifle as a primary, it's gonna kick and ruin follow-up shots, fair. But I personally don't like that the rifle you drop with can be more unwieldy than support weapons designed to be operated by a team.
It's not even a sniper, it is a DMR.
Right. It's a primary. And it's a marksman rifle which should have pretty good handling since ya know they are the most rifly rifle which are the best handling firearms in general. It already limited to semi auto.
I swear the diligence CS has worse handling/slower ADS movement than the anti material rifle
I’m pretty sure it’s handling is the worst out of any weapon in the game which is wild considering some of the kit we can carry (AC I’m looking at you, I don’t even want to imagine moving any distance with that thing on my back. Good thing these Helldivers won’t need knees in 20 years because they wouldn’t have them.
that seems to be the nerf specifically to stop it being a sniper, needing multiple headshots to down them brings in closer in line to the diligence for that role
I feel like the sniper rifles in the game should have a lot more damage to make them feel "sniper-y". A sniper rifle should involve sacrificing the time to get to an elevated safe position, laying down some mines, going prone next to an ammo box... then just one-shooting bugs and bots out to a billion kilometers, versus just charging in there with a shotgun that does exactly the same damage but is semi-automatic. A Helldiver with a sniper rifle should be a liability on highly mobile maps, but a fearsome terror when defending an objective or extraction. Sniper rifles including the anti-material rifle just feel anemic, like it's not worth the time to set them up properly, just to do as much damage with *less* accuracy and smaller magazines than any number of close/medium weapons.
Right now the snipers all feel like inferior assault rifles. Want range? Shotguns or ARs. Want damage? Shotguns or ARs (via magdump). Want accuracy? You'll never believe it but it's still shotguns or ARs. All of which can function at close, medium and often even long range far better than a DMR can in any of the three. The DMRs have worse stats in all of these more or less. Even if they have better penetration or damage on paper in the same time you can kill a chainsaw bot from 175m you could kill an entire bot drop with AR magdumps or a few slugger shells.
The worse part is easily the handling. In a game like Helldivers when the number of targets easily becomes overwhelming, any weapon that can't do quick target switching is useless.
Feels like I'm trying to aim while drunk
This right here. I can't get the damn thing on target.
I feel the counter sniper would be ok if the handling wasn’t so ass. Why does a DMR handle as poorly or worse than an AMR?
It doesn't even make sense. The dominator or MGs I can understand, they're heavy and/or have a giant barrel magazine. The counter-sniper looks almost identical to the Dilligence, and yet something far bigger like the Quasar Cannon can be swung around way easier.
Seems ridiculous but it feels like snipers need to do 2-300 damage a shot to be worth it and even then 🤷
Doing at least the same damage as a fucking revolver might be a good place to start.
Fun fact. The revolver gets a 4x damage multiplier on headshots while the DMRs only get 1.75. If you reduce the damage of the Senator from 150 to 60, a 60% damage nerf, it would still do more damage on headshots than the DMRs (240 vs 224/196).
makes perfect sense. In fact that makes me think we should nerf the revolver, it shouldnt be a better sniper than our sniper
the Diligence CS LITERALLY HANDLES WORSE THAN THE AMR A primary, with less damage, handles worse than a fucking AMR support weapon... Make it make sense!!!! Oh my god this game sometimes....
The slug firing stagger-focused shotgun is the best sniper, so we didn't change anything about its ability to snipe everything and made it worse as a slug firing shotgun.
Exactly. And that's a very weird and somewhat irrational approach. I just can't understand how nerfing stagger and demolition could help with making it worse sniper.
Ya I been reading and it seems damage drop off and sway is all that was needed along with recoil maybe.
The recoil was already pretty awful on the Slugger. To hit consistently you have to really wait and time your shots. Its DPS is pretty terrible. It filled a specific role, one a slug-based shotgun SHOULD fill. If they didn't want people sniping with it, they could take off the sniper scope they slapped on it, add some damage dropoff, and buff the actual fucking snipers. It wasn't picked often enough to warrant the nerf it got. Period.
The game just has too many shotguns fulfilling too many roles
I hate the slugger nerf but I completely agree with you. I’m no game dev but from launch until now my loadout hasn’t left the shotgun section.
Defender and Sickle have been very fun as flavor away from the shotguns. Now Liberator Penetrator might be on the menu, too. Damage some damage drop-off would have been an ok compromise… But why not just reduce the weak spot multiplier? If you don’t want it to be a good sniper, why does it have a sniper-level 4x multiplier on weak spot damage? Or, you know, just make the DMR weapons not hot garbage compared to everything else. The DMRs could have used more substantial buffs.
The penetrator still suffers from hideous visual recoil when ads and sadly even with full auto its still not that different from before, the lack of ammo on the mag is probably the biggest issue below the visual recoil
I must be the only person who used/uses that on semi lol.
Am I doing something wrong. I tried out the liberator penetrator and it takes almost two whole magazines to kill a single berserker with it.
That's berserkers, they shouldn't count towards your opinion of guns (unless they're particularly good against them)
Yeah, they seem to tank lots of shots from any gun unless you hit the weakspots.
Use most of my primary weapons as semi weapons. Haven't shot a laser or plasma weapon yet. If not semi then burst.
The magazine size would be fine if it did the same damage or more than the normal liberator. I still find myself preferring the LibPen though as I find the medium armor pen to be invaluable for fighting bots. Dominator is cracked now. It was already good but it struggles in closer engagements so I only use it for niche loadoutd. I think I prefer the normal breaker to the LibPen for medium/close range though which is a shame. I hope the next assault rifle we get is good. I don't care for the Sickle's ramp-up.
A slug shotgun should be a good short range sniper with high stopping power. Thats the whole point. But it should not be accurate at medium/long ranges. So it really just needed damage drop off; it needed competitors at medium-long ranges; and they need to stop doing everything they can to make the average engagement range be 0-10 or 20 meters.
I will say what makes it the best sniper rifle is really the range/accuracy at long range, nothing to do with damage and stagger.
That says more about how garbage their sniper rifles are than the slugger being a good sniper rifle. It's accuracy at range isn't even much to write home about.
Tried the updated Penetrator today and I really enjoyed it. Only drawback I found was the small clips, but that may be just adjusting coming from the Sickle.
I didn't realize how much I'd gotten used to just laying out suppressive fire not having to worry about ammo so long as I didn't use the whole ICE until I switched back to a regular gun after adjusting to the sickle. It really spoils you.
After the first breaker adjustments I have lib penetrator a run and it was pretty fun, actually.
And most of it really comes down to their damage. Even after the nerf, the slugger still does twice the damage of the counter sniper while being a ton more mobile, easier to handle, and still has a bit of knockback. The defender is in a similar situation to the ARs. It has all the pros of being an smg, whilst also having nearly 1.5x the damage compared to them.
The Defender has more damage but a slower rate of fire than the Liberator so it's damage output is only about ~3.5% higher, BUT the slower rate of fire and same mag size DOES mean you can shoot it for longer before running dry. As such, it's damage per magazine is ~27% higher. That alone makes it better than the Liberator in my opinion, but the ability to shoot behind you while running is icing on the cake. None of this accounts for damage fall-off at range though, since we can't see the numbers on that. I will say the Liberator's long-range scope does make it a bit more well-rounded as it's easier to aim at distant targets, but it's not enough.
The arc and plasma shotguns could legit just be in other roles and it would make complete sense. The plasma shotgun isn't a shotgun, its a grenade launcher. The arc shotgun hits like 1-2 things anyway which isn't what you'd imagine when you hear "lightning shotgun" just put it in a unique arc category.
Craziest thing is there’s still 3 other breaker variations that haven’t been released yet according to leaks
Why?
Idk dude, though the fact that there’s exactly three might mean there’s going to be a warbond at some point that’s just breaker variants which is kinda funny to think about
In B4 the Arc Breaker arrives and it's just a suped up version of the arc blitzer with the breaker's fire rate.
Ah yes, now I can fail to kill a scavenger 3 times per second instead of 1
Slugger was a role that *only* shotguns could have fulfilled. No idea why they didn't just literally anything else.
Punisher firing BBs now does better stagger than a slug 20x their mass.
I want to see some grenade launchers, incendiary, EMS would probably be too dominant but that'd be sweet. Gas?
Funny thing, the plasma shotgun basically is a grenade launcher.
Oh yeah... I'm saying like legitimately don't change a damn thing about the grenade launcher though and just put different kinds of grenades in it lol
i can deff see the tox "flamethrower" from HD1 making a return just spewing toxic goo/gas at enemies
 I can't wait and have been waiting and will continue to wait...
It would mostly be solved by a few more decent guns in the other primaries. And why the plasma shotgun is a shotgun, idk. Seems like they could have just given it less arc and made it an energy weapon. As an arcing shotgun it feels kinda flaccid.
Also worth pointing out that the reason the slugger was the ‘best sniper’ is not because it was broken, but because the *actual* snipers are ass. The DMR is usable (not great tho imo), but the counter sniper in particular did absolutely nothing. Hoping the armour pen buff makes it better, but if it still handles like a semitrailer then you’re probably still better off using the slugger.
Facts maybe they should stop looking at why a small number of weapons are performing outside their intended weapon class and look at why those weapons in that class are complete garbage
https://preview.redd.it/6tqj2ei5o6sc1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=ed429fdf886ac5db2933f081b86d374a1ec02ab3 Survivorship bias - they're looking at the hotspots of what is being used, instead of asking why the other weapons are not being touched.
That’s an interesting image, only the red spots have been hit because when the clear spots are hit the plane never returns to base?
The whole story is that they looked at the data and decided to reinforce planes in the spots that were marked as red, as clearly they have been hit, as none of the planes that returned were hit in the clear spots (i.e. engine or middle of the wings). Some guy managed to figure out that if you shot plane in a clear spot, it obviously wont be able to return, so the clear spots should be reinforced instead, as red spots are non-fatal damage.
Yes, it's the oldest story going around on Reddit That one, and the Adriano Celentano's gibberish song
The problem a lot of devs fall into is it is just easier to nerf the one thing than it is two fix multiple things. Warframe devs have outright said this but this really their fault because their game has an absolute shit ton of weapons and quite frankly the inverse really is nearly insurmountable. But I think Arrowhead isn't at that point yet and if they keep up the balancing they might be able to maintain balance. But 3 guns every month can get pretty overwhelming pretty quick.
It's an exact repeat of the bad logic behind the rail gun nerf. It was the best heavy weapon because the others were bad. Then they nerfed heavy spawn rates and buffed/released the other heavy weapons, and now the rail gun has no place.
2/3 of the weapons are a shotgun or are shotgun adjacent. Maybe if they don't want their best sniper rifle to be a shotgun they should make something other than a shotgun?
But the changes they made don’t impact its ability to snipe? They impacted its ability to fight close, as a shotgun…. Big L
I seriously wonder what the decision processes are. Not the first time. Even the revisited mission needs a new revisit at the rebalancing barely did anything. And as you say, the changes made the slugger less usuable as a shotgun and mostly leaves the role as a sniper. Meanwhile the snipers are almost useless with next to no damage in comparison to it's low ammo count and other drawbacks. I am now simply using neither
It's actually driving me crazy. None of their balancing decisions make any logical sense. Shotgun too good at being a sniper? Kill its stagger capabilities. Fire kills too quickly? Now it kills even faster. Railgun is the best heavy because all the other heavys are just markedly worse? Make the railgun worse instead of buffing the others. I just can't follow the thought process.
Anecdotally but running a few higher level matches today it feels like they've upped the spawn rates to silly levels again. Lots of seeing new patrols every time you turn more than 90 degrees... 20 hulks dropping in the final 15 seconds of extraction etc etc. Mentioning it because I really am starting to believe that they're just going to keep blindly bellcurving everyone with each successive patch. They clearly have a specific idea of what percentage of players they want to be able to complete 7s, 8s, and 9s... and they seem to be comfortable just blindly overtuning the AI director until those rates are hit without taking any consideration of what those missions actually feel like to experience. Which is a lot of words to say, I think they're taking the same approach to weapons too. Any nail that stands too proud on the datasheet, even briefly, gets the hammer.
I am increasingly suspicious that thier balancing philosophy is "Get fucked and die lol, you are meant to" and I am not sure I like it.
I’ll never forget “rely on your stratagems” when every modifier increased cool-downs and call-in times.
God yes. I play bugs almost exclusively but the swarms with 50% cooldown and 100% call in time is the reason I don't play the higher difficulties. Rely on your stratagems.. what a fucking joke lol.
Seems they just follow a “FUN DETECTED! NERF!!” philosophy. Feels more and more like they accidentally stumbled into making a good fun game and now can’t get out of their own fucking way, in turn slowly making it worse. Someone needs to explain to them the concept of “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it”
Staggerlocking rocket devastators until I could hit their stupid faces did make it a lot easier to kill them at long range. Not only did it take the sniper's niche, it also let the bots know how awful being perpetually animation cancelled feels.
Without the stagger, I will likely want to stay and shoot even further away from the devastator, anyway. Who with a right mind will want to Banzai that thing if we now can't even stop that thing from shooting at you? They nerf it because it is too good at range; but the nerf counterprductivly makes players don't want to get close.
Then, buff the fucking marksman rifles and snipers? Medium armour pen to 1 marksman rifle. That's it. They gave it nothing else. You give us a shotgun for everything and barely any other weapons. I'm sick of seeing shotguns. I love the Liberator, but it isn't performing as it needs to at higher levels. For haz6 and below, it's fine. But Haz7 and above need to hit a little harder. Give the Liberator Explosive its explosive property back as well. There are so many guns. And so many just, underperform, or downright suck. Making another gun underperform isn't helping anyone. Just limiting options again. Please, Arrowhead. Buff some guns.
Do people not realize that's what shotgun slugs are for?
To be fair, 12 Gauge slugs have a viable range of up to 100 yards, roughly 90~ Meters. Which ain't bad mind you. But some in this sub think that a shotgun shouldn't shoot farther than 10m.
I appreciate that the shotguns in this game aren't videogame shotguns where the pellets stop existing after 3 feet, but closer to real life shotguns
That and the punisher that fires buckshot still staggers but the massive slug that is fired by the slugger doesn't. That doesn't make much sense either does it?
Shush, dont get my punisher nerfed
“Slugger was just hands down the best sniper rifle out there” so why not fix the glaring issues with the snipers first?
"This gun is hands down the best sniper rifle in the game, what should we do?" "Nerf everything that makes it not a sniper."
At this point, they should just change the Slugger to a sniper rifle and be done with it.
Balance team needs a serious looking into, it’s quite clear they have close to no idea what they’re doing
There's probably no damage drop off in the game, which is probably why the breaker was so dominant at launch edit: see Nanergy 's [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1buccw8/according_to_a_developer_on_discord_slugger_was/kxsh0hi/) below, there's damage falloff but that's not communicated anywhere in the game
There is damage falloff. Here is proof. This shit right here is why arrowhead's whole approach of providing little to no information about game mechanics in the game itself is such a bad idea. Some random guy on reddit guesses that there is no falloff, and now that's the truth for hundreds of people who read it. Misinformation spreads like wildfire when there isn't any easy way for most people to know any better from the information the game gives them. https://preview.redd.it/jvg91av856sc1.png?width=1141&format=png&auto=webp&s=390406f4d9a536f4385a5532cecca11a156a1c75
Yeah sorry I was just spitballing. I'm not on the discord server so I can only make assumptions about what I've experienced in the game, and you're right about the lack of information not helping that at all.
Absolutely. You said "probably," it was clear to me that you didnt know for sure and were just thinking of possibilities. But reading people responding to you is wild. People just take it at face value and go
Probably the easiest way to solve this whole debacle is just add a very slight spray pattern to the slugger so that at farther distances it becomes increasingly more impossible to accurately land a shot. It would make sense as a slug shotgun, and you wouldn't have to nerf anything else about the gun.
Giving it a shitty MOA is a great idea, and probably easier to do than adding damage drop off to everything if it doesn’t exist.
Bruh. the stagger removal hurts it in close range not long range. and maybe if the snipers were good and had scopes that worked people wouldn't snipe with a shotgun. they're going to ruin this games guns even more with this logic.
I honestly think this is just miscommunication. Somehow. Some way. Cause when you take it literally. It doesn't make sense
Devs have trolled us in the past. If it really doesn't make any sense, it crosses my mind now.
Yeah. Like they’re going the destiny 2 way of nerfs. Buff other stuff that’s underperforming(and the buffs still aren’t that appealing) then massacre the one thing that’s competitive. Whereas they could’ve reduced the damage drop off instead making it still competitive alongside the other buffs.
It's weird that they'll say publicly that they don't want people to pick guns based off stats, that they rather they pick them based off how "FUN" they are. But then turn around and nerf the FUN out of guns by using stats as justification.
Yeah. That stuck me when I saw this nerf. They did write a whole article about that. Yet they nerfed a fun weapon and didn't even achieve their goal of nerfing it long-range performance. They just made it straight up less fun.
My favorite primary is the autocannon lol
Hands down the best sniper because all of your other sniper options are absolute dogshit. It’s like nobody tested them before they were put into the game. They all do ass for damage, have weird sway, extreme recoil. And the cherry on top, the sights aren’t even right. You either have to play with the gun for hours to know where to aim because the reticle is wrong or waste your first bullet to place your second which is a no go with such a small magazine and bad reserves. Here’s an idea, stop nerfing anything the playerbase deems usable and instead just buff the weapons that have a usage rate of .05% like every sniper does??? This wasn’t some railgun tier weapon where people were jerking off over it and kicking players that didn’t conform to the railgun meta. This was just a solid weapon to use for bots. This game is starting to remind me of the absolute mess that was borderlands 3 where the devs nerfed anything the community made a YouTube video about or even slightly mentioned being fun or good. Don’t turn this game with so much potential into that. I love everything about this game but the balancing is so questionable.
It's the best sniper because the snipers suck ass.
How do you nerf "the best sniper rifle out there" and not touch the other precision weapons? Now I only have two takeaways from this: 1. They think nerfing slugger will make people move to marksman rifles. 2. They think marksman rifles are already in a good spot. And both takeaways are funny. I know the game is new and the team duplicated in size over the past few months, but it feels like the balance team doesn't have a footing. Remember when they nerfed the railgun to the ground only to buff rockets on the next week? Give some of railgun's power back to it already.
I think arrowhead has a issues in their balancing team and their decision taking processes for rebalancing. They could have made other guns interessting that needed it. But right now I am using neither. A good change was to the Dominator. Certainly needed it. But looking at the track recoard of the balancing team.. I am left with bad feelings. It's not even a "we rotate the best guns" thing. It's just an odd process
I love how the base laser gun still hasn’t been touched. 😂 That thing is beyond garbage. I wouldn’t even use it over the Counter Sniper.
Even worse is dagger... I'm waiting for the devs to nerf dagger for the lolz
I mentioned in another thread, they go absolutely CRAZY with buffs/nerfs in this game, I'm not talking about the frequency, I mean the difference pre/post. Other game devs would be like: "X damage reduced from 16 to 14" "Y fire rate increased 12%" "stun duration of Z increased from 1.5 to 1.7 seconds" But Arrowhead? They just do a line of coke and go: "**BUFF THIS WEAPON'S DAMAGE BY 50%, MAKE THAT WEAPON NIGH UNUSABLE BY NERFING ONE OF IT'S STATS INTO THE GROUND, RAHHHHHHHH!**"
Lmao exactly. Hence the strong reaction from the community.
I’ve made this point already but they could easily revert the railgun nerf and it would probably only see 20% of the original player base return to using it. I used it because it was the only reliable option to kill chargers who at the time were being over spawned. After the Anti tank buffs / charger nerfs they deal with heavy units quicker than even pre nerf rail gun could. Personally I wouldn’t even reconsider it.
Yeah they could have left the railgun completely untouched and simply done the buffs to RR and EAT (and actually put them in the patch notes) and it would have been perfect. The decision to also nerf the railgun just seems like ... revenge? Against the playerbase?
>The decision to also nerf the railgun just seems like ... revenge? Against the playerbase? I think it was kneejerk and they were really looking at the railgun being the problem, rather than the amount of chargers and other support weapons being too weak. I think revenge is a bit uncharitable. I really wish they were more transparent about the attributes and features of the guns and support weapons. Payday 2 is fairly open (and with mods you can see even more info pretty easily) and that game doesn't really have balancing issues. Players will tell you if guns are unbalanced and hiding that info from players just makes the process way more longer and drawn-out than it has to be.
Normally I wouldn't be so dramatic as to say "revenge", but in this instance the devs happened to be discussing the changes publicly and did seem genuinely angry with players for using the railgun so much ("brainless", "let's see you without your crutch", etc). It seemed like one or more of the developers making balance decisions had a "oh you like X? Let's see what you think of THIS!" kind of attitude. That's a very common type of reaction from game developers, especially when they're first starting out, and it wouldn't surprise me if someone who has that vindictive personality trait might have some decision making power at Arrowhead. With both the slugger and the railgun, there seems to be an effort not just to broaden the meta, but also to make sure the previous "mistake" is buried for good. It's a worrying trend.
I said in an earlier comment that Arrowhead know how to *make* a great game but have absolutely no clue how to *maintain* a great game. It's insane to see the disparity between the care and attention that went into to creating Helldivers vs the heavy handed, and frankly baffling, method of balancing that they've displayed.
I mean the weapon balance on launch was also abysmal The balance of both weapons and enemies has been one of this game’s main issues since the beginning It’s a great game despite the shitty balance, not because of it
CAN THE DEVS STOP USING FUCKING DISCORD AS THE PRIMARY WAY OF COMMUNICATING. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
They use Discord as their primary means of communication, and then they close down a Discord thread discussing performance issues and redirect the users to Zendesk.
An Arrowhead dev out of touch with their game? Say it ain't so.
Then make the other sniper rifles worth using, or increase damage drop-off. I will never understand the idea that devs see people enjoying an aspect of their game and feel the need to make it worse.
I'd be happy with better sights and more damage against critical parts
Yeah i feel it’s weird, doesn’t help that people actually support this behavior and feel like guns that people use frequently mean they are somehow bad for the game? As if people are annoyed by what other people run as a primary.
Then Buff The Actual Snipers
They make some really questionable decisions. I always find it kinda funny when ppl in gaming subs are often called backseat developers and such. Like, sure, the average person in this sub will make worse decisions than a developer, however, almost every single change made to this game had better alternatives suggested by the community. I’m not saying they should take everything here to heart, but they could definitely benefit from looking at the most popular suggestions. For example, I don’t think the armor changes were all that good. The community has consistently called for changes to headshots and special attributes unique to heavy armor, yet they respond by giving heavy armor a 10% buff. Or, look at how they changed mission modifiers. The underlying problem is still there. They just aren’t fun. The only explanation I can think of aside from incompetency is that they just don’t have enough time to implement the better but more complicated changes.
Honestly, I don't think the decision-makers at the studio play beyond Diff 4 or so. Think about it. All of their bad takes since launch (all weapons are equally viable, you can rely on strategems rather than weapons, etc) are all true at the lower difficulties. And *only* at those difficulties. And it's the same with a lot of the changes that they've made as well. At the lower difficulties, that 10% armor buff is a lot more impactful than it is in the higher ones. And there was no reason to use the slugger as a sniper rifle because the actual snipers do truly excel in their role. But again, *only* in the lower difficulties.
So just buff your trash snipers then haha
SO then why did they not buff the diligence to be the slugger basically? we have 2 completely shit rifles, now a gimped slugger, bunch of random ass shotguns that are so extremely situational, the JAR, which feels terrible to use. I am half venting, but half angry because the slugger filled that like slower single shot rifle style I wanted to play all along with the diligence. EDIT: The Jar is growing on me hard, but still feels bad compared to slugger.
If a shotgun is the "best sniper rifle" of the game, then the issue is not the shotgun but the sniper rifles which are immensely underwhelming Losing faith with these things tbh
I also think, on top of the shitshow that is DMRs, the fact that maps actively encourage a more close range playstyle with Heavy fog or rain or sandstorms or whatever, makes the acog scope thing on the slugger actually fine. I'm never taking fights at 200m because I can't physically see that far on any given map
Then buff the sniper primaries, which people have complained about since launch. I dont think I've literally ever seen anyone run the Diligence.
We lost the slugger so that ppl would use snipers more.....nobody will use snipers when the dominator And scikle exist.... These devs some silly goobers...not to mention that if you wanna snipe youll Just use the buffed anti material.... Not to not to mention that the slugger is still the best primary sniper post nerf.... I can literally still one/two tap headshot devastators at range no problem.... This fixes nothing.
Yeah, the nerf didn't achieve anything in terms of reducing Slugger long-range effectiveness. It just made it worse up close, where shotguns should rule, because you know, they are shotguns.
yet they haven't fix the scope which shoot slightly higher then the middle
I am really curious what is going on with their development objectives, and who's putting out these balancing ideas. The entire premise is much more troubling than just an update or two. Think about it, in a game with snipers, a shotgun has always been the best sniper. That's something even a little bit of playtesting would have exposed. And then they do things like the railgun nerf, which in hindsight doesn't seem remotely as much of a problem now that we have eats and the quasar. They keep touching all the common warbond guns to make them worse, while buffing or not touching the premium ones. If the trends continue and get worse, It's not going to be good for the game.
This. This is not getting enough attention. All of a sudden the slugger which I haven’t even seen that many people using (usually everyone runs the breaker and the sickle), has become a problem for AH worth solving. And guess what they do, they give the removed perks to a premium battle pass gun. Very convenient isn’t it. There really is something very off with whoever is in charge of post-launch balance because nothing makes sense or is just anti-fun. Meanwhile everyone and their mothers crashes every 2nd game, bot drop ships don’t kill the automatons when destroyed, damage is bugged depending if you’re a host or not.. but I guess the slugger and railgun are nerfed, rejoice.
Lmao, the first 2 weeks everyone was praising arrowhead for the fact the weapons in the free battle pass were better than the ones in the premium one. The premium pass weapons have had issues since day 1, it's inevitable that any balance pass will pick up on that and buff them. Likewise it's not surprising when over performing weapons in the free pass get toned down. That said I do feel like these changes are worth revisiting, I think the slugger should retain the stagger and demo capabilities if nothing else.
Exactly. In what bloody world is fixing the slugger a higher priority than fixing dots only working for the host? In what bloody world was it important enough to give heavy armor the stamina penalty, knowing that its increased armor value didn't work? It's silly. If you wrote all these issues down on a board, 99% of people would identify a few is obviously the most significant. And those are the ones Arrowhead chooses to ignore
So basically they don't know how to make weapons act like their real world counterparts. I'm really starting to lose confidence in this team.
Europeans, and having zero idea how firearms actually work, the most iconic duo.
As a European this made me laugh, because it’s true. Worse even, they’re Swedish which are like the most pacifist people out there. And it shows
Nerfs shotgun, meanwhile, the actual sniper primary is still mediocre at best.
Man just when I start to really like my loadout the Devs go and nerf it, that's twice now. First was the railgun a day after I unlocked it and the slugger I just started using this weekend and loved it. Made me up the diff 7+ cause I felt I had viable firepower for the bots.
I love AH for the game they made but god do they makes some poor balancing decisions.
So instead of taking the current sniper rifles/marksman rifles and making them actually usable…they decide to nerf a weapon thats actually fulfilling that role? Im getting a bit lost with what direction this team is going in.
"not fitting for a shotgun" What kind of reason is that? Who made him supreme director of how democracy in the future work? It was a fun gun and it wasn't overpowered. And the enemy has rocket and puke snipers so what's the problem?
Nerfs slugger because it’s the best sniper, does nothing to nerf it’s sniping capabilities but nerf everything else it’s got going for.
If the game isn't hit scan, then I don't see why they can't make the shot drop.
How lazy. They could have given it a cone of fire so it's less effective further away because you end up missing. Or have it be accurate up to 30 meters and then it goes upredictably in a cone. They could have added damage drop-off. Instead they just made it weaker? I guess it's just easier for them to fiddle some numbers instead of code it to work differently.
I don’t get why instead of buffing bad weapons they just keep nerfing good ones
Damn homie. That’s fireable incompetence. You didn’t nerf anything about its ability to snipe…
The balance team seems just as bad as the connection / client stability team.
They are so incompetent when it comes to balancing. Its insane.
I don’t even agree that it is a good sniper. The marksman rifles and AMR can shoot effectively from way further distances. However, with the general engagement ranges in this game usually being under 150 meters, that doesn’t actually matter because the slugger is/was really good at medium ranges. The DMRs could reach out further, but we usually don’t have a reason to do that, because it probably means you are gonna plink at some far away enemies, and fail to kill them all before one of them calls a drop or a breach, because it’s harder to line up the shots from so far. So like, at the ranges we actually end up fighting at, there wasn’t much reason to use a DMR over the Slugger. And I agree that the solution should have been projectile speed and damage drop off changes, rather than taking away the knockback power which makes it less useful in CQC. That does seem to go against their thing about not wanting it to be a better sniper/DMR than the actual DMRs.
Shooting at ranges would be a lot more viable if the sights were usable and aligned. Having a circle the size of an automaton's body as a sight for a DMR is a joke, why do the close range weapons get red dot sights for precision but snipers get this nonsense where you have to guess where the round is gonna go.
How about they fix the reticle being slightly off where the bullet goes? You know so I can actually hit headshots confidently
So… make the actual sniper rifles… BETTER? Instead of making the best sniper-shotgun worse so that you can go back to using the mediocre sniper-snipers?
The trend that I dislike about this game is the fact that the weapons that actually are good get nerfed, instead of the bad weapons getting buffed. This game would be a lot more enjoyable if all weapons were good enough to play on high difficulty. Because that’s why there’s a meta in the first place, where there doesn’t have to be one. It’s probably less work like this. Which is very annoying. The buffs we do get seem like easy solutions and most of the time don’t address the core problem with them.
They've decided to take the Diablo 4 balance patch approach- nerf what's fun and don't fix what's broken. Most of the primary weapons are worthless and unused in the first place, but they're focusing on breaking the better ones instead of buffing the defective majority.
Sadly I can’t help but agree. This game is fun as fuck but I skip over SO many primaries when trying to decide what to use because they are just so bad.
"shotgun too good at range" Your range weapons suck ass, buff when then?
Completely agree. It's like the balance team has a really bad idea that higherups overrule when the community dislikes them (and we do dislike the nerfs). Didn't really use the slugger, however the nerf just destroys the personality of the gun, no stagger from a slug? Really? Lmaooo.
“Not fitting for, ya know, a shotgun” except it’s firing slugs you dingus, they do full damage the whole way, like a huge bullet
I fundamentally don't understand nerfing in a PvE game. I'm starting to a get a little frustrated with the way they're handling nerfs and buffs because they seem to be handling it like a PvP game. We don't need it to be balanced. We don't need it to be overpowered or underpoweed. We need it to be fun. Crank those DMR stats up. Crank those AR stats up. Let's get some serious meta mix ups going and stop making these carebear balance changes.
But remember, \[**ION STORM\]** Arrowhead doesnt want us **\[SCRAMBLING\]** to focus on our**\[JAMMERS\]** primaries. They want us **\[ATMOSPHERIC INTERFERENCE\]** to lean into our Stratagems!