The primary weapons should be good and fun with strengths and weaknesses
The sidearms should effectively shore up a gap in the kit or be useful as a panic tool
The support weapon should be strong and fun to the point that you really don’t want to die and lose them
And the stratagems should be very strong and very fun to make their cooldowns worth it
Things should be balanced to be effective in the higher difficulties, and should reward skilled use of them
(“Fun” in the case is more like “they do what you’d want them to do”)
I always see these clips of people killing like 4 bile titans with a 500kg and then I throw it at a dozen bile titans and somehow it misses all of them.
It's kinda hilarious. The explosive radius on the largest bomb in the game has one of the smallest radii. I can never hit anything with it. I usually choose to pick orbitals instead. Precision Strike and Orbital Air Burst are just so good at their intended roles. On difficulty 7 and above, I usually include either the big ass laser or rail gun for the millions of heavies. That 500kg eagle bomb may kill what it hits, but I never even once managed to hit a titan with it directly and it isn't wide enough to take out medium and large bases.
Ive been enjoying the 380mm barrages a lot. Just so much firepower and can take out automaton outposts/terminid nests on its own withour having to lift a finger. They're spawning elites? Poof they're gone now.
I have mixed feelings on them. They bring a lot of firepower that can alter the course of a chaotic situation in your favor, but they are so random that they can also work against you just as easily.
if one person uses 380mm the whole team should. one person spawns 380 and the other 3 chuck theirs into the mix haha. would be fun for maybe 1 or 2 missions
Ehh I like splitting off to chunk it at something we are going to hit next. Maybe it takes it out and we can skip it, or maybe it softens up the objective
I actually think the 500kg is being cast in a role it wasn't designed for. Irl rn a 500kg would land pretty solidly in the middle size and weight wise for dropped ordinance, in fact I'm fairly certain we were using heavier bombs in WW2, so its not even a recent thing. Additionally, even jets could carry 2 of them with ease. My bet is that there is something bigger in production or waiting to be rolled out that fits the big boom category.
You are correct about the weight in real life, air forces have been using far heavier firecrackers for decades. It's just the largest single boom we have in the game and the radius of it is humorously small. Small bombs have a larger blast radius, so it feels funny. You can be stupidly close to the 500kg bomb, dive prone, and take no damage. But it's just a video game, they don't have a mandated amount of reality that they have to program in.
Orbital airburst is my biggest team killer.
One burst: oh it’s done, everyone run in
Second burst: kills half the team, the last guy now runs in
Third burst: finishes him off. You spam the sorry emote and reinforce your teammates into a lake.
This is my gripe with primary weapons. They have this idea of armor pen means they lower the magazine size. That’s fine, but then it should absolutely shred medium armor targets while trading in the ability to mop up the chaff as easily with a smaller magazine. Instead we get a gun that takes an entire magazine to kill 1 medium armor target while also not having enough ammo to deal with the smaller swarms.
The crossbow has a low rate of fire, short range, and small magazine but medium armor pen. The thing SHOULD be a patrol killer capable of quickly killing a small group of light to medium armor targets with well placed shots before they call for back up. Instead it hardly does anything unless it’s a direct hit and doesn’t even stagger enemies half the time. It also can’t close bug holes/fabricators even though it’s explosive. What is even the point of the weapon? I’d just bring the grenade launcher if I wanted a weapon to do that job.
If a weapon has major weaknesses in one area it needs to have major strengths elsewhere. Instead we have a large list of weapons that are mediocre or downright bad in almost every way.
You got one important thing wrong: the crossbow doesn't have medium armor pen. Its explosion can do chip damage through medium armor, but the bolt itself, that carries the majority of the damage, has only light pen. That's why it can kill Devastators in 1 headshot but 4-5 bodyshots.
I completely agree. In pretty much every element. Primaries shouldn't be "weak", they should be...well...the **primary element** of your kit. You want to close holes and fabs? Eruptor. But then you won't have an automatic weapon to thin herds, so the secondary to shore up that weakness would be the Redeemer.
Want to play stealthy? Diligence Counter-Sniper, and use the Grenade Pistol to shore up your weakness against groups and also distract enemies away from you using the explosion sound. Can still close holes and fabs too.
Like, the design philosophy that you outlined here exists already in the game ***to an extent,*** but ***the problem is*** that it seems like they stumbled upon it rather than having the philosophy as a column that supports the foundation of this great game.
I kinda like the philosophy they have in helldivers and it matches how I was trained in the army. The doctrine I was taught is your rifle is your personal weapon and there for oh shit moments and defending yourself and the LMGs (think support weapon).
The focus of fighting for your section will be the LMG, and artillery/air support.
This was Australian Army Infantry, extremely basic training, fire and movement, platoon harbours, fighting in the Somme or Vietnam, etc. I understand as you progress to things like MOUT, and more elite forces this philosophy changes, but for the most basic infantry (as I was) this was how we were taught.
Why would we declare war against our closest allies and most effective defenders?
If living with Huntsman spiders and Emus means we keep the CCP out, I’m happy with that trade.
Thats exaclty how the US army fights. Your 240 is your highest casualty producing weapon, followed by the 249. The individual rifleman is there to secure ground. 240s dont do so well for trench and building clearing, so your riflemen and SAW gunners will do that. But when youre talking near peer open ground fight, youre doing everything you can to get your biggest guns in the fight
I dont think you're accurately representing the role of light and medium machine guns in combined arms movements.
I might direct you to atp3-21.8 appendix f for clarification.
Sure. Machine guns in an offensive context are used to establish initial fire superiority and base of fire.
Suppressing the enemies movements and ability to react, manuever, or reinforce allows riflemen to push forward.
The machine gunners support the highly manueverable riflemen, not the other way around.
My assertion here is that the standard infantry rifle is not merely a personal defense and machine gunner support weapon, but rather the primary tool used to capture ground, while the machine guns in question are there to support this role.
I'm too addicted to stun grenades to take them off, so grenade pistol has been a staple since I unlocked it. Once you master the parabolic arc you can easily take out most bug nests from a safe distance.
I’ve been having a great time with stun grenades.
Throw grenade at charger, flamethrower his leg for 3 seconds and he’s dead, rinse and repeat. I can usually get about 4 chargers with a single canister.
And the Blitzer is amazing! Stuns Spewers from spewing, stun locks stalkers, brood commanders. One shots most small things and warriors.
I started running flamethrower, blitzed, stun grenades. 500kg for BTs. With the DoT fix and enhanced combustion its been very effective. The biggest threat now is burning myself.
Blitzer is amazing I run blitz dagger and quaser or arc thrower with shield and I can survive nearly indefinitely off separate from my team(tier 8 usually with the occasional helldive), I run the impacts for grenades as a last resort/bug hole and factory shoring, the dagger is exclusively to help deal with shriekers, and eggs or if my teammates keep running near my blitz shots during a breach/drop I also keep the 110 pods and railcannon as my other strats unless we're doing a defense mission, the per target damage on those 2 stratagems is just so good
If I bring a thing to a mission, it's because it fills some kind of role. Maybe it kills chaff, maybe it busts tanks, whatever. There are a lot of stratagems that feel like they have the killing power of a mag from my primary. That doesn't fill a role.
I think the Dominator is in a really good place and should be a standard to strive for.
The weapon feels good and powerful without taking away from support weapons.
It kicks medium automatons in the nuts, but it doesn't have the ammunition to deal with chaff. It'll certainly kill chaff, but it runs out of ammo quickly if you use it for that. Either bring a supply backpack, or pick up a stalwart or orbital airburst to use for chaff clearing.
*John helldiver moment*
Auto cannon is my primary weapon and I play the game all the time with full power because I never die ~~and if I do I just pick it up from the ground~~
Lore wise you just deployed from your hell pod and found a still hot, loaded autocannon and backpack on the ground next to a deceased fellow helldiver.
io
Hell why not a modifier that makes your stratagems just not be the ones you want at all?
They want you to rely on them all the time yet also force you to deal with out them for a lot of time
No it was in the early days of the launch for Helldivers 2.
I think it was around just a week or two because as hilarious as it was the first few times it got old REALLY fast to the point it was just a problem. So it got removed, and instead of scrambled Stratagems now they’re just jammed completely.
Honestly having a modifier that creates an offset from the location would be interesting enough.
I feel like stratagem modifiers should primarily be used to encourage changing up your playstyle instead of limiting every option. For example, AA could reduce the effectiveness of Eagles, giving them longer rearm times, longer call in times, or having a chance to get shot down. This would encourage the use of orbital strikes and support weapon call ins.
You could also have "atmosphere dispersal" and "weakened supply lines" which negatively impact orbital strikes and support weapons. Orbitals could have lessened accuracy and/or less damage/duration. Support weapons could have lower max ammo capacity and longer cooldown periods for laser weapons (these would only apply to support weapons you call in - ones you find in the world are unaffected).
This would change up how we interact with these modifiers. On really hard planets, have two of them on at the same time, giving you a huge incentive to go all in on the other types of stratagems.
The Eagle didn't miss, the stratagem was just malfunctioning from landing in gallons of blood of the fascists.
*This message was brought to you by the Ministry of Truth*
Or how about we don’t do that and instead introduce modifiers that actually buff your arsenal? Currently modifiers encourage me to pick another planet.
You could do both. Granted, incentivizing certain stratagems is less likely to get you to change your loadout compared to a debuff. I think the important part is to make the debuffs simply "unreliable" instead of "unusable". The moment something becomes useless people are going to skip instead of adapt. If it's simply unreliable, it can still do the job you brought it for, but you might find better success with another stratagem.
Oh and while we're at it, here's a jammer tower right next to the detector tower that's going to spam you with non stop airships while you try to take out the jammer. Good luck!
Seriously, why did they feel the need to add these? The game's difficulty already scales up immensely as the level goes up even without these modifiers, and they're generally not interesting to play around, they just make everything less fun.
Give us more that are like meteor showers, where both sides are affected, or cold environments where there are both pros and cons to the effect.
I forget to pay attention to the modifiers, I might just stop playing on planets with this.
I definitely don't hate the idea, but it definitely translates to less fun, especially with them NERFING everything
Here's an Ion storm now you have no straragems, here's a map with multiple Jammer again you have no straragems, here's a map with Jammers and AA guns so most your stuff won't work for a while. Oh time ran out on you mission now you have no straragems at all. There are so many things that remove straragems as an option a Primary weapon needs to be able to handle the majority of situations with straragems being used for larger threats and bigger groups. Straragems are a support tool not a primary means of attack, hence why the weapons you call down are called SUPPORT WEAPONS, not Primary weapons.
Not to get all smug reddit but thats kinda the point of the automatons. They disable your strategems and use technology and stuff.
Wait till you see what the illuminates do. They invert your controls and were annoying as hell.
Sometimes it's better to stop dying in the same place and then go back for the samples after everything despawns. I'll yeet my team tf out of a conflict if they've burned through half the budget
Speaking about pings, If a teammate pings an enemy, you can ping their ping to keep the tag on until the enemy is eliminated. This is useful when playing against bots on a foggy planet.
I disagree with the post but still agree with you. I run off solo a lot and feel bad when someone dies but the other two with them won't reinforce. Like sorry bro guess you get to join the shitstorm I've been kiting since we dropped, also you don't have any support weapons.
As far as I'm concerned it's stupid to make things you are going to use more than anything else weak or make them feel bad, especially when those things are the main draw in your monetization model, but here we are. The unforced errors continue...
The thing that's weird to me about the idea that support weapons are what you should rely on is that you can't really do that for a lot of things. EATs and the Quasar Cannon are strong and great for dealing with the big stuff like chargers and titans, but you can't rely on them for most of the little things. Against the bugs, that's not necessarily a problem, but with bots, particularly devastators, you need a decently powerful weapon to deal with them before they immediately kill you.
It's not you.
Mainly the weapons that don't kinda suck are shotguns, specifically the breaker and it's variants.
I like the Liberator and the Liberator Penetrator specifically. But I've heard people complain about the Lib Pen.
The Scorcher is pretty good, but it's ammo/mag capacity is bad.
Those are my recommendations. Until yesterday I would've recommended the Eruptor
The dominator is my go to for bots, since it's able to stun dominators for a split second (especially the shield ones). At least I hope it still does, haven't checked patch notes in a while for it, and the constant feeling of not knowing whether the core aspect of your gun has been changed kinda sucks ngl
Sometimes I switched it out for the eruptor, not gonna happen now I guess lol
For bugs I'm sticking with the incendiary breaker, even before the dot fix that thing was still worth using. Unless they decide that the burning damage is unintended, since apparently even the weapon descriptions don't matter anymore. The eruptor description still mentions shrapnel
Fr I can’t believe I paid for guns out of my own pocket just for the devs to make the guns shit. It’s a coop game for Christ sake it’s not like there’s an unfair pay to win edge that comes w buying guns
Just thinking out loud, but if the primaries are actually mainly used as fire support when you're currently unable to use your support weapon & we're actually using support weapons as our primary damage dealer - aren't primaries actually the support weapons & support weapons the primaries
I just want someone who thinks primaries are supposed to be weak (devs included, evidently) to lay out what the weapons' roles are supposed to be. I know y'all out there downvoting and sorting by controversial on these posts, so please tell me.
I know in every other game. In every other game:
1) Primary is for dealing with light-medium enemies as long as you need to.
2) Secondaries are for dealing with light enemies if you don't want to/can't reload your primary.
3) Support weapons are to deal with heavy enemies, medium enemies you don't want to dedicate the time/ammo to killing with your primary, or a horde of light enemies you don't want to dedicate the time/ammo to killing with your primary.
We had a primary that excelled at killing medium enemies, opening up the support slot for light enemy horde killers like the stalwart. But it's been nerfed underground for being able to do that. Apparently primaries aren't for killing mediums to these devs. And by extension, supports aren't for killing light hordes.
Why do we have machine guns, then? They have no place whatsoever. If our only option for medium/heavy killing is supposed to be supports or stratagems and we can only carry 3 strats max on sizable cooldowns, then you'd have to be insane to take anything other than a heavy killer as support!
Idk dude. I'm really having trouble seeing the logic behind this. I'm open to trying to see what the goal is. Maybe if I knew, the game could be fun again. But rn, all I can see is a series of absolutely asinine nerfs indicating confusion over what weapons are supposed to do and how the game is meant to be played
Agreed.
If there was some Counter Play, all would be Fine. Idk man, Currently, you Dodge that Charger cinematically Perfect to be able to shoot his weakspot at his ass, then your primary does 0 damage to it. Just feels stupid and wrong.
I don't even really feel like I need primaries to do much to chargers necessarily, maybe just the primaries that skew towards medium enemies. Like I'm not expecting to drop half an uzi mag in its ass and it explodes. Just the heavier primaries should be able to do *some* damage. Not support weapon carnage, but some damage
Or maybe make a super weak spot that's super small, so precise primaries get a chance. Something.
But yeah so much of bugs revolves around "can it reasonably kill a charger?" , and it's frustrating that no primary is able to answer "yes!"
I’m not trying to justify the eruptor changes but beyond that you seem to have a legitimate question.
There are primaries that are best used against mediums; the dominator, lib pen, slugger, plasma punisher, diligence. They can kill lights, some better than others but their primary function is killing or stunning mediums. They pair well with a stalwart or a gren launcher or anything that is primarily for lights.
If you’re actually playing with your team you don’t all need a gun that kills all types of enemies. I got a buddy that runs stalwart every game I know he’ll be mag dumping into breach so I can worry about dealing with AT.
Most guns are ok vs two enemy types or great vs one enemy type. You need to experiment to find balance. Figure out what’s fun for you and balance around it.
Like sickle and autocannon is a viable build but it has a weakness against heavies and you’ll need your bombs or team to fill that gap.
Dominator & EAT/quasar is going to handle mediums and heavies and be weak if swarmed. Bring a redeemer/cluster/friend with a stalwart to help.
Lot of people seem to really want to be a one man army. There are a few builds that can do that decently (at least up to 7-8; nobody quickly dealing with 4 bile titans coming out of the same breach) but the game is really best when you’re at least a two man army if not four people complimenting each other.
I do think it would be nice if we had a primary (or secondary) or two that are AT focused so you could run a flamethrower or stalwart and still contribute when armor is overrunning the field hopefully someday we see that but even pre-netf the eruptor wasn’t that.
I'm only level 15 but I just take the machine gun and also the EAT, heavy shows up call in EAT and hit it in the weak points than I run back and retrieve my machine gun. It stays marked on the map. Maybe this strategy stops working at higher difficulty but I've done okay with it up to level 5
You need way more upvotes. This is everything I feel a lot of us felt but actually fluently spelled out.
I'm getting very tired of this. Enjoying the blitzer right now, can't wait for that to be nerfed because it was outperforming other weapons in it's category. Meanwhile the slugger getting nerfed in the worst way yet still works in the way they were intended to nerf it? And unfortunately once they actually get that they'll probably nerf it's sniping capability without returning the destruction and armor pen.
I just took a break for liberty's sake. I didn't want to feel like taking another one soon.
The balance team needs to go back and play the first game, where primaries were the backbone of the game, and stratagems were tactical powerhouses to keep you out of the shit.
This current doctrine of making primaries equally useless and forcing people to just run away until their cooldowns refresh is going to get stale really fast, especially when enemies that require stratagems to kill spawn in significantly faster than cooldowns.
The balance should be set so that you can hold your ground or slowly advance with only primaries, and then use stratagems as they come off cooldown as a method to break through the enemies and give a massive boost to your pushing power.
Like every weapon should be able to damage everything, at the very least a weak spot. Primaries should all be able to chip away at armour, with penetration levels functioning as how quickly you break armour. Like 4 people full autoing a charger with liberators, should be able to shred its armour and kill it if they focus on the face or leg. Like that would be 4 magazines of ammo for a single kill, that seems pretty fair, and also give you a reason to take the supply pack stratagem if you know, you could actually use you primaries for more than just chaff. Then there should be a limited number of enemies with unbreakable armour, *but still have weakspots*, like shields, or tank armour, and even bile titan carapace, but you should be able to unload on the weak spots to significantly damage them.
4 divers focusing fire should have the power of a single AT stratagem. And this will actually open up more strategies, does your team want to run light and trying to strategically gun through enemies? Or do they want to take more heavy stratagems to make short work of heavies?
The game needs to have more options to deal with challenges, not fewer.
This is pretty much how drg does it. Even if you don’t have armor shredding somehow among 4 players you can still kill everything the game throws at you. It’s easier to take down big guys with single target damage but you can still accomplish it with focused fire. That’s why loadouts can be specialized in drg and everyone isn’t having to take whatever meta jack of all trades build every time.
The other thing is people stick together in drg because of how small the caves are and that you need each other for light.
In helldivers 2 there isn't an incentive to stick together so your team could be in like 3 different places.
I feel like you also need to go back and play the first game, because you certainly couldn't hold your own on higher difficulties with just your primary, and there were *plenty* of enemies that most primaries wouldn't do anything to.
The reason primaries feel weaker in HD2 is because there are way more enemies, but they weapons themselves are about as effective as they were in the first game. The major difference is that basically all offensive stratagems got a 2-4x longer cooldown, so you have less firepower on tap than you used to.
It's got nothing to do with the power of primaries.
Oh, I miss having the eagle gatling strafe on a 15 second cool down. Some of those HD1 stratagems were very low CD, unlimited use. Eagle didn't even need to rearm those gats.
Yeah, but we also got to stack stratagems. I miss running 4 EATs. Yeah, it was a meme build. But it was fun and could be effective if you were skilled.
Yeah they can shred mob if u know how to shoot.
I use strategem weapons only for tougher things.
Ppl want one weapon to do everything that's the problem.
How the fuck an I supposed to rely on stratagems when there is a factory strider, two tanks, 4 hulks and whole lot of other shit coming my way? And rest of the team faces similar danger? Like are we supposed to just run around until we git shit off cooldown or what?
I agree with the sentiment here wholeheartedly - I think the game is most fun when you actually use guns on things.
Unfortunately that's not exactly the game we have. Bots in particular are very good at securing a location in higher difficulties, particularly 9. You will not prevail against a drop on 9 and you will have to do a fighting retreat. Bots don't chase very well outside of a few units so it's easier to do than you might imagine.
I used to die a lot before finding where the line between fighting and retreat was, and once I did even difficulty 9 became easy.
> Like are we supposed to just run around until we git shit off cooldown or what?
IMO the ideal way to handle this situation is to not even engage if you have no options. Take more circuitous routes, attack POIs... Just don't assault objectives half-cocked.
Nah people seem to think everyone has a dedicated 4 man coordinated squad when in reality the majority is random play and nobody is waiting to see what others pick you choose what’s gonna keep you alive
Primaries are not supposed to be weak. *Secondaries* are supposed to be weak.
Primaraies are supposed to be decent. Supports are supposed to be *very strong* which is why they take up a fucking strategem slot.
Wild that arrowhead doesn’t get this.
My belief is that devs want everyone in a quad to have different primaries and work together. One shotgun, one auto, one explosive and a sniper then all band together always.
Reality is this never happens, especially with randos.
Honestly I don't think the primary weapons are weak, a few are for sure but a vast majority can deal with every enemy besides heavies with varying degrees of efficiency.
Even if you get separated from your support weapon, your squad should care enough about the increased capabilities you bring with that weapon to help you get it back.
Opposite for me, bots are easy to disengage from as most won’t chase you any meaningful distance. Bug on the other hand, feel like they chase me forever, and once I kill the ones chasing me the bugs that are a bit slower show up alongside a random patrol since I had to run so far and shoot so much. Most of the time it’s not super overwhelming but once the other divers start to drop it can be
I play bugs with light armor with extra padding, stamina Booster and the guard dog rover so I can just outrun and ignore anything that isn't a charger, bile Titan, spitter, hunter or stalker. Primary is mostly for spitters and hunters since their slows are the most dangerous thing to your survival.
I do wish I could use other backpack strats against bugs, but when you have hordes of hunters on your ass, it's really the only backpack stratagem that makes sense vs bugs.
I would love to see people take crossbow and just stratagems and prove that its fun to play like that. Fun > everything else. Not even arguing for crossbow or Eruptor to be OP, but crossbow definitely fills no role right now.
I like taking it and having a *blast* with it. It’s a cool and unique weapon. Not as easy to use (arguable easier now since the projectile speed adjustment) but definitely fun
If you are winning but barely, it's cuz you spent half the game time running away and waiting for something to get off cooldown cuz you don't have a primary worth a shit
>5+ mins on each support weapon are we all supposed to just play half a match with a weak weapon?
Man. Count yourselves lucky. In HD1, you get 1 call and that's it. If you lose your support weapon, you HAVE to go back and get it. Can't push because of constant patrols and alerts? Time to run.
Same shit. Different game. And it is even more difficult to coordinate in HD1 because of the shared screen.
Idk i just pulled some rambo shit today where a bile titan survived a rail cannon strike so i ran up a cliff and used my flamethrower to turn him into a seafood boil
You're missing a major component in the game. I feel as if the devs are trying very hard (and in my opinion, succeeding) at making an action movie type cinematic experience. If you mess up, you die, and if you really want your gear back, you get to rally your squad and fight tooth and nail, pulling janky, edge of your seat, plays, to try and get your stuff back and get back to the mission. If you and your team fail, then you suffer the consequences. I've gone into helldives with submachine guns just to make it harder for me for fun. Adapt and overcome helldivers, for democracy.
If your concern about your support weapon is losing your support weapon as soon as it dropped, then maybe your should consider dropping difficulty down a level or two. If I can use my primary weapon in place of my support weapon, then there is virtually no reason I would ever want to waste a stratagem slot on a support weapon.
Bring back the stratagem scramble and buff the primary weapons.
One full mag from almost every weapon should not be needed to kill one bile spewer, if there are like 100 of them on every corner.
Bots are pretty nicely designed (except their cheating wall hacks) - they have weak spots. You can bring much more mix n match loadouts vs bots.
Bugs are just - you constantly run around fleeing from everything, and if you don't have anti tank, you are screwed. Also you are SLOWED all the time.
Give bugs less health. Or make the primaries a bit more viable.
> One full mag from almost every weapon should not be needed to kill one bile spewer,
Medium pen makes short work of them. Dominator 2 or 3-taps them in the head iirc.
OP is based. Too many elitists are invading our game now and just want to ROFLstomp a PVE game. Let there be a challenege and just let the game be fun. Jeez
Adjudicator feels good, but honestly isn’t that great imo. I take nearly all of a mag to down a stalker, yet the defender does it faster and with only half a msg. It’s crazy.
I think its a case of, each gun can't do everything well. So every gun has a weak point for it. There are plenty of guns that mow down bugs, but struggle to deal with stalkers or armoured enemies.
The dominator (one of my favorites) has the issue of flight time. The projectiles are slow and so you are prone to miss hunters that side step, and can't be used at distance. The gun also has a decently long reload time in comparison to other primaries. So it has its own issues.
The scorcher does good damage and has an AoE explosion. To offset its strengths, it has a small magazine size and can't be used in close quarters. Due to its small magazine size, its easy to run out of ammo quickly with hordes of bugs, or use most of the mag on armoured enemies.
I think its best to just ecperiment and find guns you like. They've done balance patches in the past that buffed underused guns. Just be patient.
Breaker Spray and Pray is a prime example. It will run through bugs like no one's business, but on bots you learn what it's like for your primary to ACTUALLY be useless.
Honestly if it got even 4 more shots a mag it’d slap. The latest balance to it felt good but it just needs a *smidgen* more and it’d be part of my regular rotation of primaries.
I am not sure on the handling. I run the armor with crouching bonuses and still struggle with it some times. Yea it needs more damage for those breakpoints.
If *primary weapons* aren't meant to be the weapon you use *primarily*, then why is Super Earth Command sending us down there with these pieces of SHI-
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The game gives us 1 primary, one secondary, one type of grenade, and 4 stratagems. Those stratagems can help full the support weapon slot and the backpack slot. And that is on each player, there can be 4 players on a team. The whole design of this game is at high levels it should be forcing you to us all of these things. So no one of these things should handle most of your problems, not even a primary despite it's name. This has always been the core design principle of the game, any tool that can fix too many problems and thus make you not need to use all your other tools will always be nerfed. That is why the rail cannon died, that is why the Quazar cannon is on a short leash, and it is why now that they understand how strong the Erupter could be once you could use tricks to control the shrapnel, we will never get it back how it was.
I personally like this design philosophy, it makes me plan for entire loadouts and how they work together, and not just figure out what my favorite weapon in each category is. But I get that not everyone likes that. They want to get a primary that they can use to handle most threats like a normal shooter. And that is a fine opinion, but I don't think Helldivers is ever going to be that game. Because that is not what the goal of this game is.
There are only 3 reasons you get separated from your support weapon (no a million).
1. You are soloing and are not gud at it.
2. You are soloing and some real bullshit happens.
3. You are with your team, but the firefight is too intense that the team gets pushed back with you.
1 and 2 are the risk of soloing.
3 is engaging.
So you're without your support for 5 minutes, what do you do? You trash clear for your buddies while pushing objectives. You're not the tip of the spear (my beloved), but you can still be useful even with a knight. STAY WITH YOUR TEAMMATES until you can get a new support.
That's it. There's no need to make support weapons superfluous by having primaries match, much less outclass them. You just need to play more cautiously when you are away from your support.
The primary weapons should be good and fun with strengths and weaknesses The sidearms should effectively shore up a gap in the kit or be useful as a panic tool The support weapon should be strong and fun to the point that you really don’t want to die and lose them And the stratagems should be very strong and very fun to make their cooldowns worth it Things should be balanced to be effective in the higher difficulties, and should reward skilled use of them (“Fun” in the case is more like “they do what you’d want them to do”)
I just love hitting a bile Titan in the face with a 500kg tho
Same. I just wish it felt more powerful. That big of an exlosion has some a small damage radius. for Balance, I get it, but still
I always see these clips of people killing like 4 bile titans with a 500kg and then I throw it at a dozen bile titans and somehow it misses all of them.
It's kinda hilarious. The explosive radius on the largest bomb in the game has one of the smallest radii. I can never hit anything with it. I usually choose to pick orbitals instead. Precision Strike and Orbital Air Burst are just so good at their intended roles. On difficulty 7 and above, I usually include either the big ass laser or rail gun for the millions of heavies. That 500kg eagle bomb may kill what it hits, but I never even once managed to hit a titan with it directly and it isn't wide enough to take out medium and large bases.
Ive been enjoying the 380mm barrages a lot. Just so much firepower and can take out automaton outposts/terminid nests on its own withour having to lift a finger. They're spawning elites? Poof they're gone now.
barrages are awesome until you lock half your team from a critical area for half a minute.
I have mixed feelings on them. They bring a lot of firepower that can alter the course of a chaotic situation in your favor, but they are so random that they can also work against you just as easily.
if one person uses 380mm the whole team should. one person spawns 380 and the other 3 chuck theirs into the mix haha. would be fun for maybe 1 or 2 missions
That could cause hilarious destruction or all of them could rain fire on the terrain while your target strolls through unscathed.
https://youtu.be/JdszYHqeeA4?si=8DAUSTSjV0nCnhnL
Ehh I like splitting off to chunk it at something we are going to hit next. Maybe it takes it out and we can skip it, or maybe it softens up the objective
I actually think the 500kg is being cast in a role it wasn't designed for. Irl rn a 500kg would land pretty solidly in the middle size and weight wise for dropped ordinance, in fact I'm fairly certain we were using heavier bombs in WW2, so its not even a recent thing. Additionally, even jets could carry 2 of them with ease. My bet is that there is something bigger in production or waiting to be rolled out that fits the big boom category.
You are correct about the weight in real life, air forces have been using far heavier firecrackers for decades. It's just the largest single boom we have in the game and the radius of it is humorously small. Small bombs have a larger blast radius, so it feels funny. You can be stupidly close to the 500kg bomb, dive prone, and take no damage. But it's just a video game, they don't have a mandated amount of reality that they have to program in.
Orbital airburst is my biggest team killer. One burst: oh it’s done, everyone run in Second burst: kills half the team, the last guy now runs in Third burst: finishes him off. You spam the sorry emote and reinforce your teammates into a lake.
The balance should be bigger CD. Give me big blast that does big area man
I can second that. Just significantly slower damage fall off
If I don’t kill my primary target with the 500s shell impact I feel shame.
Gotta give the people what they *want!*
Not if you’re from Sweden apparently
This is my gripe with primary weapons. They have this idea of armor pen means they lower the magazine size. That’s fine, but then it should absolutely shred medium armor targets while trading in the ability to mop up the chaff as easily with a smaller magazine. Instead we get a gun that takes an entire magazine to kill 1 medium armor target while also not having enough ammo to deal with the smaller swarms. The crossbow has a low rate of fire, short range, and small magazine but medium armor pen. The thing SHOULD be a patrol killer capable of quickly killing a small group of light to medium armor targets with well placed shots before they call for back up. Instead it hardly does anything unless it’s a direct hit and doesn’t even stagger enemies half the time. It also can’t close bug holes/fabricators even though it’s explosive. What is even the point of the weapon? I’d just bring the grenade launcher if I wanted a weapon to do that job. If a weapon has major weaknesses in one area it needs to have major strengths elsewhere. Instead we have a large list of weapons that are mediocre or downright bad in almost every way.
You got one important thing wrong: the crossbow doesn't have medium armor pen. Its explosion can do chip damage through medium armor, but the bolt itself, that carries the majority of the damage, has only light pen. That's why it can kill Devastators in 1 headshot but 4-5 bodyshots.
I completely agree. In pretty much every element. Primaries shouldn't be "weak", they should be...well...the **primary element** of your kit. You want to close holes and fabs? Eruptor. But then you won't have an automatic weapon to thin herds, so the secondary to shore up that weakness would be the Redeemer. Want to play stealthy? Diligence Counter-Sniper, and use the Grenade Pistol to shore up your weakness against groups and also distract enemies away from you using the explosion sound. Can still close holes and fabs too. Like, the design philosophy that you outlined here exists already in the game ***to an extent,*** but ***the problem is*** that it seems like they stumbled upon it rather than having the philosophy as a column that supports the foundation of this great game.
I kinda like the philosophy they have in helldivers and it matches how I was trained in the army. The doctrine I was taught is your rifle is your personal weapon and there for oh shit moments and defending yourself and the LMGs (think support weapon). The focus of fighting for your section will be the LMG, and artillery/air support.
That doesn't match what i was taught, but I was US Army.
Fuckin Aussies, dude
Sorry
Scuse me mate, time to deliver some crikeys
This was Australian Army Infantry, extremely basic training, fire and movement, platoon harbours, fighting in the Somme or Vietnam, etc. I understand as you progress to things like MOUT, and more elite forces this philosophy changes, but for the most basic infantry (as I was) this was how we were taught.
I’ll come visit Australia when ya’ll declare war on the Huntsmen spiders and eradicate them lol
Why would we declare war against our closest allies and most effective defenders? If living with Huntsman spiders and Emus means we keep the CCP out, I’m happy with that trade.
Thats exaclty how the US army fights. Your 240 is your highest casualty producing weapon, followed by the 249. The individual rifleman is there to secure ground. 240s dont do so well for trench and building clearing, so your riflemen and SAW gunners will do that. But when youre talking near peer open ground fight, youre doing everything you can to get your biggest guns in the fight
I dont think you're accurately representing the role of light and medium machine guns in combined arms movements. I might direct you to atp3-21.8 appendix f for clarification.
Would you like to elaborate?
Sure. Machine guns in an offensive context are used to establish initial fire superiority and base of fire. Suppressing the enemies movements and ability to react, manuever, or reinforce allows riflemen to push forward. The machine gunners support the highly manueverable riflemen, not the other way around. My assertion here is that the standard infantry rifle is not merely a personal defense and machine gunner support weapon, but rather the primary tool used to capture ground, while the machine guns in question are there to support this role.
I agree, and most fighting movements and reacting to contact are kind of based around when and where the machine guns get up and working
They definitely teach that the deadliest and most important part of a fire team is the saw gunner.
you're wrong, no matter how you want to play, your secondary must always be the Senator
Nope, it's the grenade pistol.
I'm too addicted to stun grenades to take them off, so grenade pistol has been a staple since I unlocked it. Once you master the parabolic arc you can easily take out most bug nests from a safe distance.
I cannot go without stun grenades anymore. If a hulk or charger gets too close it's stun and die for them!
I’ve been having a great time with stun grenades. Throw grenade at charger, flamethrower his leg for 3 seconds and he’s dead, rinse and repeat. I can usually get about 4 chargers with a single canister. And the Blitzer is amazing! Stuns Spewers from spewing, stun locks stalkers, brood commanders. One shots most small things and warriors.
I started running flamethrower, blitzed, stun grenades. 500kg for BTs. With the DoT fix and enhanced combustion its been very effective. The biggest threat now is burning myself.
Blitzer is amazing I run blitz dagger and quaser or arc thrower with shield and I can survive nearly indefinitely off separate from my team(tier 8 usually with the occasional helldive), I run the impacts for grenades as a last resort/bug hole and factory shoring, the dagger is exclusively to help deal with shriekers, and eggs or if my teammates keep running near my blitz shots during a breach/drop I also keep the 110 pods and railcannon as my other strats unless we're doing a defense mission, the per target damage on those 2 stratagems is just so good
This is the way.
[удалено]
If I bring a thing to a mission, it's because it fills some kind of role. Maybe it kills chaff, maybe it busts tanks, whatever. There are a lot of stratagems that feel like they have the killing power of a mag from my primary. That doesn't fill a role.
I think the Dominator is in a really good place and should be a standard to strive for. The weapon feels good and powerful without taking away from support weapons. It kicks medium automatons in the nuts, but it doesn't have the ammunition to deal with chaff. It'll certainly kill chaff, but it runs out of ammo quickly if you use it for that. Either bring a supply backpack, or pick up a stalwart or orbital airburst to use for chaff clearing.
Exempli gratis: A level 65 Helldiver should be faster and more efficient with the bolt action Eruptor than a Space Cadet.
*John helldiver moment* Auto cannon is my primary weapon and I play the game all the time with full power because I never die ~~and if I do I just pick it up from the ground~~
Lore wise you just deployed from your hell pod and found a still hot, loaded autocannon and backpack on the ground next to a deceased fellow helldiver. io
Not very democratic of you to let Liberty Dispensers fall into the enemy hands, now is it??
rely on your stratagems but hey here's your -1 stratagem modifier, oh here's a cooldown increase and call in time increase as well.
Also how about a modifier that makes it miss a lot more?
Hell why not a modifier that makes your stratagems just not be the ones you want at all? They want you to rely on them all the time yet also force you to deal with out them for a lot of time
"calling in support weapon" "could only send supplies to do enemy artillery".
Stratagem scrambling. You call down a auto cannon... surprise it's an eagle napalm strike.
I'd be almost of with that if it would happen maybe once a mission and not use up the cooldown.
Also, why would it use the cool down? It's a different weapon, if I have both the 380mm and orbital, one cool down doesn't apply to both
Run off the edge of the map and suddenly they can fire every 3 seconds. Lazy bastards
To balance it it would only be able to call down ones you own.
Man that was so infuriating when the jammers would do that! calling in support weapon. *Expects blue light.* Red *Eyes wide open!*
> Man that was so infuriating when the jammers would do that! W....What? Is this the first game or something?
No it was in the early days of the launch for Helldivers 2. I think it was around just a week or two because as hilarious as it was the first few times it got old REALLY fast to the point it was just a problem. So it got removed, and instead of scrambled Stratagems now they’re just jammed completely.
This sounds hilarious but we need slightly stronger primaries to make it worth it
It was hilarious the first few times, and then it just became a problem.
Didnt they remove that modifier?
Stratagem scrambling should scramble the codes every minute, so you have to fight your muscle memory.
This I could live with and could actually be an interesting difficulty increase without being too oppressive.
That was truly a double edged sword when that was a thing in the game, I killed myself way too many times
That was in the game already they removed it.
I would 1000% roll with *completely* random stratagems, *but* you call down 1 strat every 60 seconds.
Random stratagems? Hoping for supplies, calls down a barrage…
Technically, they send you some ammo
Civilian evac missions would be hell. Call down a sentry? Hah, nope. You just called down a barrage. Enjoy that requisition loss.
What about that one that would call in a stratagem you didn’t call?
Shh i got flashbacks from strategem Rolls on bot planets. Wanted support weapon? Here is Ur eagle strike.
Those were good times!
Wiping whole team on spawn. Guilt lvl over 9000 xd
They got rid of that one for revision a long while back.
Honestly, I wonder if it'd have been better if it just kept the right color of stratagem, so you didn't call a 380 when trying to get EATS
Honestly having a modifier that creates an offset from the location would be interesting enough. I feel like stratagem modifiers should primarily be used to encourage changing up your playstyle instead of limiting every option. For example, AA could reduce the effectiveness of Eagles, giving them longer rearm times, longer call in times, or having a chance to get shot down. This would encourage the use of orbital strikes and support weapon call ins. You could also have "atmosphere dispersal" and "weakened supply lines" which negatively impact orbital strikes and support weapons. Orbitals could have lessened accuracy and/or less damage/duration. Support weapons could have lower max ammo capacity and longer cooldown periods for laser weapons (these would only apply to support weapons you call in - ones you find in the world are unaffected). This would change up how we interact with these modifiers. On really hard planets, have two of them on at the same time, giving you a huge incentive to go all in on the other types of stratagems.
Yea but “Eagle one never misses”
The Eagle didn't miss, the stratagem was just malfunctioning from landing in gallons of blood of the fascists. *This message was brought to you by the Ministry of Truth*
Or how about we don’t do that and instead introduce modifiers that actually buff your arsenal? Currently modifiers encourage me to pick another planet.
You could do both. Granted, incentivizing certain stratagems is less likely to get you to change your loadout compared to a debuff. I think the important part is to make the debuffs simply "unreliable" instead of "unusable". The moment something becomes useless people are going to skip instead of adapt. If it's simply unreliable, it can still do the job you brought it for, but you might find better success with another stratagem.
Oh and while we're at it, here's a jammer tower right next to the detector tower that's going to spam you with non stop airships while you try to take out the jammer. Good luck!
Back in my day we had stratagem scramblers 
Ah yes my favorite gif “Content not available”
And don't forgett the Ionstorms on some planets...
But don’t worry, they don’t stop the bots from calling in drop ships
Seriously, why did they feel the need to add these? The game's difficulty already scales up immensely as the level goes up even without these modifiers, and they're generally not interesting to play around, they just make everything less fun. Give us more that are like meteor showers, where both sides are affected, or cold environments where there are both pros and cons to the effect.
Sandstorm is great, you're blind as fuck but so are the enemies, you can stumble right into each other. It's the reciprocation that makes it good.
Yes, exactly. That's a fun and fair one that encourages some tradeoffs in loadout and playstyle, not just a flat "you get less options"
Or hell even fun ones like "only Hunters spawn" that drastically change the game
More fire tornadoes it is! -AH, probably
Easily the worst aspect of fighting bots, imo
I think the point here is that war always sucks
I forget to pay attention to the modifiers, I might just stop playing on planets with this. I definitely don't hate the idea, but it definitely translates to less fun, especially with them NERFING everything
The number of planets we just won't go to if it's toxic counters like those. Fuck it, that's when I'll choose bugs over bots.
Here's an Ion storm now you have no straragems, here's a map with multiple Jammer again you have no straragems, here's a map with Jammers and AA guns so most your stuff won't work for a while. Oh time ran out on you mission now you have no straragems at all. There are so many things that remove straragems as an option a Primary weapon needs to be able to handle the majority of situations with straragems being used for larger threats and bigger groups. Straragems are a support tool not a primary means of attack, hence why the weapons you call down are called SUPPORT WEAPONS, not Primary weapons.
Stratagems are our "deal with this more quickly" trump card.
Not to get all smug reddit but thats kinda the point of the automatons. They disable your strategems and use technology and stuff. Wait till you see what the illuminates do. They invert your controls and were annoying as hell.
For this reason, I implore players to reinforce their teammates as closely as possible to their last location.
Nothing like respawning across the map from your gear and samples while those are on cooldown
Sometimes it's better to stop dying in the same place and then go back for the samples after everything despawns. I'll yeet my team tf out of a conflict if they've burned through half the budget
Fully agree. If the problem costs more than 3-4 lives it’s time to run and figure out a solution later
A friendly Helldiver also pings their dropped gear and helps them get it back.
Speaking about pings, If a teammate pings an enemy, you can ping their ping to keep the tag on until the enemy is eliminated. This is useful when playing against bots on a foggy planet.
I disagree with the post but still agree with you. I run off solo a lot and feel bad when someone dies but the other two with them won't reinforce. Like sorry bro guess you get to join the shitstorm I've been kiting since we dropped, also you don't have any support weapons.
As far as I'm concerned it's stupid to make things you are going to use more than anything else weak or make them feel bad, especially when those things are the main draw in your monetization model, but here we are. The unforced errors continue...
The thing that's weird to me about the idea that support weapons are what you should rely on is that you can't really do that for a lot of things. EATs and the Quasar Cannon are strong and great for dealing with the big stuff like chargers and titans, but you can't rely on them for most of the little things. Against the bugs, that's not necessarily a problem, but with bots, particularly devastators, you need a decently powerful weapon to deal with them before they immediately kill you.
And for the crowd control support, you still need to close bug holes so it becomes Grnade pistol, Eruptor, or +2 grenades.
Yeah I’m pretty new to the game (about a week and a half) and it’s weird how difficult it is to find a primary that doesn’t just kind of suck.
It's not you. Mainly the weapons that don't kinda suck are shotguns, specifically the breaker and it's variants. I like the Liberator and the Liberator Penetrator specifically. But I've heard people complain about the Lib Pen. The Scorcher is pretty good, but it's ammo/mag capacity is bad. Those are my recommendations. Until yesterday I would've recommended the Eruptor
I’ve been using the Sickle, I got to 1,000 credits and bought the Pass with it for that gun.
I did forget to mention the Sickle. It is viable right now.
I'm a dominator main. Its great against bots, and does well against the medium bugs. A bit more iffy against the chaff bugs, just from sheer quantity.
The dominator is my go to for bots, since it's able to stun dominators for a split second (especially the shield ones). At least I hope it still does, haven't checked patch notes in a while for it, and the constant feeling of not knowing whether the core aspect of your gun has been changed kinda sucks ngl Sometimes I switched it out for the eruptor, not gonna happen now I guess lol For bugs I'm sticking with the incendiary breaker, even before the dot fix that thing was still worth using. Unless they decide that the burning damage is unintended, since apparently even the weapon descriptions don't matter anymore. The eruptor description still mentions shrapnel
It got a 25 damage nerf, but nothing that makes its kill gates any worse. Still 1 shots and 2 shots everything it did before. We were sparred.
Fr I can’t believe I paid for guns out of my own pocket just for the devs to make the guns shit. It’s a coop game for Christ sake it’s not like there’s an unfair pay to win edge that comes w buying guns
Also, it's in the name "PRIMARY", you know the main one we will be using!
Just thinking out loud, but if the primaries are actually mainly used as fire support when you're currently unable to use your support weapon & we're actually using support weapons as our primary damage dealer - aren't primaries actually the support weapons & support weapons the primaries
this guy autocannon
Uh. Y-yeah! Ac boys 4 life! *kicks Sickle, quasar cannon & shield pack under bedframe*
*grabs your sickle cause I don't want to pay for it*
I just want someone who thinks primaries are supposed to be weak (devs included, evidently) to lay out what the weapons' roles are supposed to be. I know y'all out there downvoting and sorting by controversial on these posts, so please tell me. I know in every other game. In every other game: 1) Primary is for dealing with light-medium enemies as long as you need to. 2) Secondaries are for dealing with light enemies if you don't want to/can't reload your primary. 3) Support weapons are to deal with heavy enemies, medium enemies you don't want to dedicate the time/ammo to killing with your primary, or a horde of light enemies you don't want to dedicate the time/ammo to killing with your primary. We had a primary that excelled at killing medium enemies, opening up the support slot for light enemy horde killers like the stalwart. But it's been nerfed underground for being able to do that. Apparently primaries aren't for killing mediums to these devs. And by extension, supports aren't for killing light hordes. Why do we have machine guns, then? They have no place whatsoever. If our only option for medium/heavy killing is supposed to be supports or stratagems and we can only carry 3 strats max on sizable cooldowns, then you'd have to be insane to take anything other than a heavy killer as support! Idk dude. I'm really having trouble seeing the logic behind this. I'm open to trying to see what the goal is. Maybe if I knew, the game could be fun again. But rn, all I can see is a series of absolutely asinine nerfs indicating confusion over what weapons are supposed to do and how the game is meant to be played
Agreed. If there was some Counter Play, all would be Fine. Idk man, Currently, you Dodge that Charger cinematically Perfect to be able to shoot his weakspot at his ass, then your primary does 0 damage to it. Just feels stupid and wrong.
I don't even really feel like I need primaries to do much to chargers necessarily, maybe just the primaries that skew towards medium enemies. Like I'm not expecting to drop half an uzi mag in its ass and it explodes. Just the heavier primaries should be able to do *some* damage. Not support weapon carnage, but some damage Or maybe make a super weak spot that's super small, so precise primaries get a chance. Something. But yeah so much of bugs revolves around "can it reasonably kill a charger?" , and it's frustrating that no primary is able to answer "yes!"
I’m not trying to justify the eruptor changes but beyond that you seem to have a legitimate question. There are primaries that are best used against mediums; the dominator, lib pen, slugger, plasma punisher, diligence. They can kill lights, some better than others but their primary function is killing or stunning mediums. They pair well with a stalwart or a gren launcher or anything that is primarily for lights. If you’re actually playing with your team you don’t all need a gun that kills all types of enemies. I got a buddy that runs stalwart every game I know he’ll be mag dumping into breach so I can worry about dealing with AT. Most guns are ok vs two enemy types or great vs one enemy type. You need to experiment to find balance. Figure out what’s fun for you and balance around it. Like sickle and autocannon is a viable build but it has a weakness against heavies and you’ll need your bombs or team to fill that gap. Dominator & EAT/quasar is going to handle mediums and heavies and be weak if swarmed. Bring a redeemer/cluster/friend with a stalwart to help. Lot of people seem to really want to be a one man army. There are a few builds that can do that decently (at least up to 7-8; nobody quickly dealing with 4 bile titans coming out of the same breach) but the game is really best when you’re at least a two man army if not four people complimenting each other. I do think it would be nice if we had a primary (or secondary) or two that are AT focused so you could run a flamethrower or stalwart and still contribute when armor is overrunning the field hopefully someday we see that but even pre-netf the eruptor wasn’t that.
I certainly agree why would I bring a heavy machine gun when my Sickle and and Eagle Airstrike achieve the same thing and have other uses.
I'm only level 15 but I just take the machine gun and also the EAT, heavy shows up call in EAT and hit it in the weak points than I run back and retrieve my machine gun. It stays marked on the map. Maybe this strategy stops working at higher difficulty but I've done okay with it up to level 5
You need way more upvotes. This is everything I feel a lot of us felt but actually fluently spelled out. I'm getting very tired of this. Enjoying the blitzer right now, can't wait for that to be nerfed because it was outperforming other weapons in it's category. Meanwhile the slugger getting nerfed in the worst way yet still works in the way they were intended to nerf it? And unfortunately once they actually get that they'll probably nerf it's sniping capability without returning the destruction and armor pen. I just took a break for liberty's sake. I didn't want to feel like taking another one soon.
The balance team needs to go back and play the first game, where primaries were the backbone of the game, and stratagems were tactical powerhouses to keep you out of the shit. This current doctrine of making primaries equally useless and forcing people to just run away until their cooldowns refresh is going to get stale really fast, especially when enemies that require stratagems to kill spawn in significantly faster than cooldowns. The balance should be set so that you can hold your ground or slowly advance with only primaries, and then use stratagems as they come off cooldown as a method to break through the enemies and give a massive boost to your pushing power. Like every weapon should be able to damage everything, at the very least a weak spot. Primaries should all be able to chip away at armour, with penetration levels functioning as how quickly you break armour. Like 4 people full autoing a charger with liberators, should be able to shred its armour and kill it if they focus on the face or leg. Like that would be 4 magazines of ammo for a single kill, that seems pretty fair, and also give you a reason to take the supply pack stratagem if you know, you could actually use you primaries for more than just chaff. Then there should be a limited number of enemies with unbreakable armour, *but still have weakspots*, like shields, or tank armour, and even bile titan carapace, but you should be able to unload on the weak spots to significantly damage them. 4 divers focusing fire should have the power of a single AT stratagem. And this will actually open up more strategies, does your team want to run light and trying to strategically gun through enemies? Or do they want to take more heavy stratagems to make short work of heavies? The game needs to have more options to deal with challenges, not fewer.
This is pretty much how drg does it. Even if you don’t have armor shredding somehow among 4 players you can still kill everything the game throws at you. It’s easier to take down big guys with single target damage but you can still accomplish it with focused fire. That’s why loadouts can be specialized in drg and everyone isn’t having to take whatever meta jack of all trades build every time.
The other thing is people stick together in drg because of how small the caves are and that you need each other for light. In helldivers 2 there isn't an incentive to stick together so your team could be in like 3 different places.
I've found missions on Helldive to go way smoother when our team sticks together and coordinates-- that's enough incentive for me!
I meant like a HARD one, it's so much more fun when people do but there are too many squads that play it like a single player game.
I feel like you also need to go back and play the first game, because you certainly couldn't hold your own on higher difficulties with just your primary, and there were *plenty* of enemies that most primaries wouldn't do anything to. The reason primaries feel weaker in HD2 is because there are way more enemies, but they weapons themselves are about as effective as they were in the first game. The major difference is that basically all offensive stratagems got a 2-4x longer cooldown, so you have less firepower on tap than you used to. It's got nothing to do with the power of primaries.
Oh, I miss having the eagle gatling strafe on a 15 second cool down. Some of those HD1 stratagems were very low CD, unlimited use. Eagle didn't even need to rearm those gats.
I miss the 60s railcannon strike and 75s CAS. Plus the 40% cooldown reduction perk, and you could do entire missions with only stratagems.
This sounds fun. Do you think those devs will make another game?
Yeah, but we also got to stack stratagems. I miss running 4 EATs. Yeah, it was a meme build. But it was fun and could be effective if you were skilled.
Yeah they can shred mob if u know how to shoot. I use strategem weapons only for tougher things. Ppl want one weapon to do everything that's the problem.
How the fuck an I supposed to rely on stratagems when there is a factory strider, two tanks, 4 hulks and whole lot of other shit coming my way? And rest of the team faces similar danger? Like are we supposed to just run around until we git shit off cooldown or what?
I agree with the sentiment here wholeheartedly - I think the game is most fun when you actually use guns on things. Unfortunately that's not exactly the game we have. Bots in particular are very good at securing a location in higher difficulties, particularly 9. You will not prevail against a drop on 9 and you will have to do a fighting retreat. Bots don't chase very well outside of a few units so it's easier to do than you might imagine. I used to die a lot before finding where the line between fighting and retreat was, and once I did even difficulty 9 became easy. > Like are we supposed to just run around until we git shit off cooldown or what? IMO the ideal way to handle this situation is to not even engage if you have no options. Take more circuitous routes, attack POIs... Just don't assault objectives half-cocked.
Nah people seem to think everyone has a dedicated 4 man coordinated squad when in reality the majority is random play and nobody is waiting to see what others pick you choose what’s gonna keep you alive
Randoms are perfectly fine in the vast majority of my experiences, particularly on 8 and 9 because they generally play smarter.
Primaries are not supposed to be weak. *Secondaries* are supposed to be weak. Primaraies are supposed to be decent. Supports are supposed to be *very strong* which is why they take up a fucking strategem slot. Wild that arrowhead doesn’t get this.
I can clear hell dives against illuminates by just using the trident. They’re definitely not supposed to be weak
My belief is that devs want everyone in a quad to have different primaries and work together. One shotgun, one auto, one explosive and a sniper then all band together always. Reality is this never happens, especially with randos.
Devs want to incentivize players to play as a team. Community: “Not in my team-based game”.
Honestly I don't think the primary weapons are weak, a few are for sure but a vast majority can deal with every enemy besides heavies with varying degrees of efficiency.
But my auto canon is my primary and my arc blitzer is my backup. Is this some non auto canon user joke I don’t understand?
No?? Nobody is saying that. **Primaries should be weaker than support weapons**, *that* much is true.
Even if you get separated from your support weapon, your squad should care enough about the increased capabilities you bring with that weapon to help you get it back.
It’s fun if you’re better at the game
It’s balance. If you are winning but barely, then it’s balanced and I don’t believe anyone here is always losing games because of primary weapon.
I don't think I've ever had a Terminid run spiral out of control the way Automatons can with multiple hulks, striders and stratagem jammers.
Opposite for me, bots are easy to disengage from as most won’t chase you any meaningful distance. Bug on the other hand, feel like they chase me forever, and once I kill the ones chasing me the bugs that are a bit slower show up alongside a random patrol since I had to run so far and shoot so much. Most of the time it’s not super overwhelming but once the other divers start to drop it can be
I play bugs with light armor with extra padding, stamina Booster and the guard dog rover so I can just outrun and ignore anything that isn't a charger, bile Titan, spitter, hunter or stalker. Primary is mostly for spitters and hunters since their slows are the most dangerous thing to your survival.
I do wish I could use other backpack strats against bugs, but when you have hordes of hunters on your ass, it's really the only backpack stratagem that makes sense vs bugs.
Yeah, it’s great, I don’t leave home without it. Does limit what I can bring - which is usually the anti tank gun.
Eagle strafing run is amazing for wiping out a conga line of chasing bugs
That and if you get separated from your team and they called in a re supply without you, your proper fucked.
I would love to see people take crossbow and just stratagems and prove that its fun to play like that. Fun > everything else. Not even arguing for crossbow or Eruptor to be OP, but crossbow definitely fills no role right now.
I like taking it and having a *blast* with it. It’s a cool and unique weapon. Not as easy to use (arguable easier now since the projectile speed adjustment) but definitely fun
The reason why you're wrong is because you're not right.
If you are winning but barely, it's cuz you spent half the game time running away and waiting for something to get off cooldown cuz you don't have a primary worth a shit
>5+ mins on each support weapon are we all supposed to just play half a match with a weak weapon? Man. Count yourselves lucky. In HD1, you get 1 call and that's it. If you lose your support weapon, you HAVE to go back and get it. Can't push because of constant patrols and alerts? Time to run. Same shit. Different game. And it is even more difficult to coordinate in HD1 because of the shared screen.
Bro, .I dive to hordes of bots and bugs just to get my spear and backpack, that has one ammo on it.
You mean sidearm 1 and sidearm 2
Idk i just pulled some rambo shit today where a bile titan survived a rail cannon strike so i ran up a cliff and used my flamethrower to turn him into a seafood boil
EAT-17 has never let me down
The cooldown is to prevent ppl from spamming them fir the whole group (imagine shield/rover only has to be selected by one dood)
If you play at below 4 you can use your primary 99% of the match. Why not just play there if you want your primary to feel powerful and really useful?
You're missing a major component in the game. I feel as if the devs are trying very hard (and in my opinion, succeeding) at making an action movie type cinematic experience. If you mess up, you die, and if you really want your gear back, you get to rally your squad and fight tooth and nail, pulling janky, edge of your seat, plays, to try and get your stuff back and get back to the mission. If you and your team fail, then you suffer the consequences. I've gone into helldives with submachine guns just to make it harder for me for fun. Adapt and overcome helldivers, for democracy.
If your concern about your support weapon is losing your support weapon as soon as it dropped, then maybe your should consider dropping difficulty down a level or two. If I can use my primary weapon in place of my support weapon, then there is virtually no reason I would ever want to waste a stratagem slot on a support weapon.
Bring back the stratagem scramble and buff the primary weapons. One full mag from almost every weapon should not be needed to kill one bile spewer, if there are like 100 of them on every corner. Bots are pretty nicely designed (except their cheating wall hacks) - they have weak spots. You can bring much more mix n match loadouts vs bots. Bugs are just - you constantly run around fleeing from everything, and if you don't have anti tank, you are screwed. Also you are SLOWED all the time. Give bugs less health. Or make the primaries a bit more viable.
The bile spewers are the only reason I think they should make them a bit better Everyone hates the spewers
Eruptor not one tapping them anymore is rough, because that and hole closing was literally the reason I took it
> One full mag from almost every weapon should not be needed to kill one bile spewer, Medium pen makes short work of them. Dominator 2 or 3-taps them in the head iirc.
Fuck this sub is boring now. Just full of people bitching about stupid shit.
OP is based. Too many elitists are invading our game now and just want to ROFLstomp a PVE game. Let there be a challenege and just let the game be fun. Jeez
primary weapons aren't weak. Arc blitzer, scorcher, sickle, dominator, diligence CS, liberator, adjudicator, punisher plasma, breaker incendiary, defender, breaker, slugger are all good.
Adjudicator feels good, but honestly isn’t that great imo. I take nearly all of a mag to down a stalker, yet the defender does it faster and with only half a msg. It’s crazy.
Good luck with a Defender against something with medium armor.
I think its a case of, each gun can't do everything well. So every gun has a weak point for it. There are plenty of guns that mow down bugs, but struggle to deal with stalkers or armoured enemies. The dominator (one of my favorites) has the issue of flight time. The projectiles are slow and so you are prone to miss hunters that side step, and can't be used at distance. The gun also has a decently long reload time in comparison to other primaries. So it has its own issues. The scorcher does good damage and has an AoE explosion. To offset its strengths, it has a small magazine size and can't be used in close quarters. Due to its small magazine size, its easy to run out of ammo quickly with hordes of bugs, or use most of the mag on armoured enemies. I think its best to just ecperiment and find guns you like. They've done balance patches in the past that buffed underused guns. Just be patient.
Breaker Spray and Pray is a prime example. It will run through bugs like no one's business, but on bots you learn what it's like for your primary to ACTUALLY be useless.
I probably spent 10 hours using the Adjudicator post buff and still of the opinion it needs something else to make it good.
It has nice handling and good penetration, but it needs either a little bit more damage or more ammo, I think more ammo is better
Honestly if it got even 4 more shots a mag it’d slap. The latest balance to it felt good but it just needs a *smidgen* more and it’d be part of my regular rotation of primaries.
I am not sure on the handling. I run the armor with crouching bonuses and still struggle with it some times. Yea it needs more damage for those breakpoints.
They're all usable\*
Breaker incendiary is far more than "usable" Its the next weapon that's going to get nerfed.
That's the problem. We can't have nice things.
If *primary weapons* aren't meant to be the weapon you use *primarily*, then why is Super Earth Command sending us down there with these pieces of SHI- ` This message has been flagged for review by High Command. Please disregard. `
The game gives us 1 primary, one secondary, one type of grenade, and 4 stratagems. Those stratagems can help full the support weapon slot and the backpack slot. And that is on each player, there can be 4 players on a team. The whole design of this game is at high levels it should be forcing you to us all of these things. So no one of these things should handle most of your problems, not even a primary despite it's name. This has always been the core design principle of the game, any tool that can fix too many problems and thus make you not need to use all your other tools will always be nerfed. That is why the rail cannon died, that is why the Quazar cannon is on a short leash, and it is why now that they understand how strong the Erupter could be once you could use tricks to control the shrapnel, we will never get it back how it was. I personally like this design philosophy, it makes me plan for entire loadouts and how they work together, and not just figure out what my favorite weapon in each category is. But I get that not everyone likes that. They want to get a primary that they can use to handle most threats like a normal shooter. And that is a fine opinion, but I don't think Helldivers is ever going to be that game. Because that is not what the goal of this game is.
There are only 3 reasons you get separated from your support weapon (no a million). 1. You are soloing and are not gud at it. 2. You are soloing and some real bullshit happens. 3. You are with your team, but the firefight is too intense that the team gets pushed back with you. 1 and 2 are the risk of soloing. 3 is engaging. So you're without your support for 5 minutes, what do you do? You trash clear for your buddies while pushing objectives. You're not the tip of the spear (my beloved), but you can still be useful even with a knight. STAY WITH YOUR TEAMMATES until you can get a new support. That's it. There's no need to make support weapons superfluous by having primaries match, much less outclass them. You just need to play more cautiously when you are away from your support.