Helldivers 2 (PS5/PC)

[fishbowlhead]

Railgun has been utterly trashed, it’s just useless now. It’s not like it was easy to use anyway, if you missed your were toast anyway.

[Tobal]

Can't argue with that, it can't be used in safe mode against any armoured target which is the reason to have it, you can somewhat get back to its original power risking it with safety mode off (holding reload for gun options), but then the time to charge is 4 seconds along with super slow movement when doing so isn't worth it and it still takes 4 near death risking blowups shots to peal 1 leg armour off.

I have no idea how people are suppose to deal with 3+ chargers on you at 5 level+, ATM's have 70/80sec cooldown for 2 shots, best not miss those front legs, and the flamethrower can cook them in 3/4 of a can but you risk killing yourself so easily as anything on fire will set you alite for massive damage, including bugs on fire bumping into you.

I hope it isn't a sign of things to come, the balance should have to buff the useless weapons.

One match tonight had some nob, using the arc thrower constantly hitting me and others with it, and if not that then wayward grenades.. shot that stupid little crap in the face when he sat on the flight out, worth the boot.

[fishbowlhead]

Multiple matches last night on Extreme difficulty we were getting spammed with 4 chargers, dozens of armoured med size and bile titans all spawning out of a random bug hole, oh plus 100 stalkers, for the whole match, non stop, every match.

The new difficulty spike is just beyond ridiculous, and everything has more hp or armour now, whatever the devs say.

Its just not fun.

[Lebowski]

This is the problem with live service as a whole, you get these constant balancing patches where they take your builds and break them, it wasn't as if the rail gun was OP it just an extremely effective at getting rid of annoying enemy, and making them manageable. the problem was it made every other weapon of this type redundant as people saw chargers as the biggest problem so took the rail gun.

Apparently their armour is now weaker after a charge so the best tactic is to dodge their charge then immediately retaliate the flamethrower is supposed to be pretty good for taking them on and has the added bonus of being able to burn all the smaller stuff around them too for some great crowd control.

[fishbowlhead]

I tried the flamethrower multiple times last night and the only thing that's effective for is setting light to the adds then the adds set light to you and your whole squad, the chargers just laughed at it

[Tobal]

Just reading up on the ****storm one of arrowsheads devs caused in the discord (along with one of the community managers), basically gaslight the community over the balance patch to point the head of the company put out a communication to apologise about it.

my description of all his messages

"It's ok to remove brainless playstyles, use your stratagems more, LOL"

Also saw the march warbond trailer, handful of new basic weapons.

[fishbowlhead]

Ah yes how silly of us we will just use the 3min cool down stratagems to deal with the 50 stalkers jumping right on top of us non stop.

On another note if we don’t liberate Tai Kwan then no mechs as the automatons have invaded the planet where they are built, very clever stuff.

[hudson]

[Tobal]

Amazing for 45 seconds then you're out of ammo with no reloads, best to just treat it was walking turret to take a big nest out or titan, also make sure a charger doesn't ram you, that's instant death to a heavily armoured tank somehow. Armour is still a problem, just no point in going anything to light for speed and stamina regen as high defence armour is only effective on weakest bugs melee attack, so long as they don't tickle or slime you for that slow debuff and shooting interruption which then makes you a sitting duck for pure stunlock from everything else.

I've given up trying to make the charge rifle work with the safely off, 3 to 4 very risky full charge shots just to get the armour off of 1 bug, all while trying to avoid everything zerg rushing you. Gone back to the autocannon for now while working on clearing one location of 3 missions on level 6, to get level 7 open.

[hudson]

I really can't tell if you like this game or not, Tobal

[fishbowlhead]

Mechs are fun but they in no way address the 10 chargers with now supped up armour bum F’ing you all at once.

[Tobal]

I enjoy the game and when i get into a team of people talking it can be great experience working as team to call out strats ahead of chucking them, i'll even pop my headset on which i did yesterday with 2 spanish guys that also spoke some english.

However there is a clear disconnect between the gameplay dev's and community, where it seems like they do not play their own game to understand why players pick these loadouts/playstyles at higher levels (something i've dealt with for 20 years with ffxi, and recently Dead by Daylight and Apex so i can sense it here), where they just look at spreadsheet sheet of numbers for loadout picks and make a lazy and quick decision. Here difficulty isn't just smarter enemies and/or placements (think halo) it's just throwing heavily armoured monsters at you constantly with no way to deal with them, it isn't fun and unfortunately it is the only way to get super samples. They could do with looking at how Darktide does it at higher levels, you'll always have options on low cooldowns and even allow you to recover quickly should **** hit the fan, where HD2 is just snowballing forever.

A balance view would be the time spent levelling your stratagems would lower all cooldowns below 1 minute by the time you need to go to level 6-9. If they don't want to go that route i think the only way is to allow for a full recovery, promote just taking the L, rather than calling in dives over an dover and then land all the players away from the fighting a minute of peace.

[fishbowlhead]

It will just end up in the graveyard of games that became live service because it was good out the gate, then once again gets ruined because no life streamers live in something not designed for it, and ruin it for 99% of the player base that just plays for an hour ever other day.

[Tobal]

I do love it when you're on the last of 3 for 3 missions done straight for last hour and a bit, and right at the end of waiting for extraction, suddenly a black screen and i'm back in my ship, alone with no rewards/recognition for it.

[fishbowlhead]

Had this on a defend mission over the weekend, luckily none of the longer ones this time but I have had the same situation at the end of a 45min mission, just boom, dumped.