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The reason the railgun was popular was because it was the only effective way to deal with chargers. To nerf that and leave other AT weapons / charger health and armor untouched is really fucking stupid.
I played a few games after the patch and I came to a similar opinion. I don’t think the railgun was the real issue. The chargers were the issue and people were using the railgun because it was by far the best option against chargers.
I don’t think the railgun needed such a nerf. I think the flamer buff and breaker nerf together would’ve brought railgun numbers down, because flamer is now crazy good against chargers while also being good against patrols. At least you would’ve had to choose between the range of the railgun or the crowd control of the flamer. Now I’m just going to be using the flamer, which creates the same issue as before just with a different gun.
Hard agree.
Arrowhead published a blog post where they went into detail about their design philosophy: https://www.arrowheadgamestudios.com/2024/03/balancing-the-firepower-in-helldivers-2/
I did not like the subtle arrogance behind their rationale here for the changes.
Subtle arrogance? It seems like a completely reasonable and well thought out post. People read way too much into normal posts.
I think what I didn’t like is: I could maybe agree with their line of thought for the changes they made to the weapons. I don’t like that they prioritized these as the first balance patch.
As many have said it was meta because of the abundance of chargers/heavy enemies in 7-9 for folks trying to get the super samples.
Before the high difficulties felt chaotic but at least doable. Now… it still is but it’s even more running and kiting. To me it’s a less fun gameplay loop.
And the “arrogance” is probably perceived from the other dev comments like “get good” “stop clutching your pearls” “goodbye crutches”. If that’s how the devs feel, it’s easy to imagine the balance person, who prioritized removing tools vs making the reason the tools were needed first, thinks the same way.
I rather disliked the whole ‘your primary weapon is not supposed to be the weapon you primarily use’. Fine then rename them to small, medium, large or something instead of leading me to believe I should be able to kill a smaller horde without a Destroyer or Eagle.
It feels like the game balance team hasn’t played the game on the higher difficulties. If your primary weapon isn’t supposed to be able to deal with tanks, then your strategems are your only option. But nerfing the railgun without giving us other alternatives makes killing massive amounts of tanks impossible. I doubt the buffs to the flamethrower and laser cannon are going to be enough.
Meh, I disagree. With the “meta” loadout of breaker, shield, and railgun, even helldiver difficulty can be relatively easy as long as you can avoid getting surrounded. If the goal is to always feel like you need to work together and barely make it out alive, these changes make sense. I personally prefer that there isn’t one correct way to play the higher difficulties.
I personally prefer that there isn’t one correct way to play the higher difficulties.
I agree that there should be many viable ways to at higher difficulties. I just think that nerfing the only way that seems to work without providing alternatives doesn’t seem like the way to go about making that happen.
The man in the ivory tower even says under the railgun heading that they are aware that one of the reasons the railgun is popular is because other anti-armor sucks.
Respectfully sir that’s like the only reason. Your CEO said on Twitter that the ass of a charger is not a weak point, merely an unarmored point; well all the same I need my partner to get the charger to face the other way to hit its butt since I need multiple recoilless rounds to kill it.
Maybe my friends are too drunk but with the shield and the railgun we still get about three bile titans per breach and breaches retrigger regularly. With automatons it is easy for us to kite circularly, thereby reducing the number of patrols we drag in, but the speed of bugs leads us to back pedal across the map. If you care to share advice I would welcome it.
Mostly just “keep moving”. If you spread out a bit, generally one person or group will take most of the heat while things are relatively quiet for the others. Heat team basically just has to keep running while the other team does the objective. If a bug hole opens up on the objective, run away and circle back. Chargers and hunters seem the most capable of catching up, but the hunters are pretty easy to kill. For the chargers, they seem almost hard coded to take a longer stagger if you dive out of the way instead of just moving out of their turn radius, so you can dodge a charge and gain a little more time to escape.
Don’t underestimate smoke, it can be pretty handy in keeping things off your back. Call down supplies often, even if you can’t necessarily get to them all. They have a pretty short cool down so don’t be afraid to waste a few or take multiple if no one else is nearby. Honestly I wouldn’t worry about bile titans too much unless they’re on an objective (or are an objective). They can be outrun and will eventually lose interest, and their attacks have fairly limited range with a big windup.
Granted I haven’t tried all this since the update so take it with a grain of salt. I do plan to try it again this weekend so I’ll report back.
Played today. The buffs are not nearly enough.
Yeah, we were struggling with heavies playing just on Hard. We didn’t even bother to play anything higher than that.
I don’t think it’s arrogant, I think it’s actually really interesting how they talk about the “fantasy” of the game. I get not everyone plays the game for the same reason, but I understand the devs’ vision of the game really being about the feel of being a hero against the odds, not having the most effecient loadout or unlocking everything as fast as possible.
I’m getting irrationally angry at everyone crying about the hard difficulties being “too hard”. Diff 7, which is the last “mandatory” difficulty to obtain everything in the game, has decent balance imo. It’s not easy by any stretch but it’s not impossible, or even “too hard”. It’s challenging and can definitely get very chaotic, even if you bring your A-game, and that’s good.
The chargers work pretty well with a shot from the recoilless rifle in one of the front legs followed by a magazine of the primary gun in the now exposed leg.
HMG + recoilless also works pretty well, rocket in leg and 1-2 seconds with the HMG and he’s gone.
Only downside is the reload time so if you have 2 or more chargers somebody has to kite them while you reload.
Aside from the HMG and recoilless both being support weapons, it’s not really feasible to use the recoilless if there are multiple of them, not to mention ammo concerns
But the HMG is not a support weapon and the railgun is? I don’t quite get the point.
We can take down 4 chargers at the same time with this strategy with 2 people with recoilless. More than that and the orbital laser or railcannon have to come out.
Oh I thought you meant the machine gun as in the support weapon machine gun, my bad. Forgot about the emplacement one
The expendable AT rifle and recoilless rifle are both more effective against chargers than the railgun is, with the exception of a high number of chargers at once. They both take off leg armor in one hit and stagger the chargers.
…unless they nerfed those too.
Easy thing to say when you’re only playing up to 5. Where my group stands, playing 7-9, the rail gun, with its higher dps, is the gun we need to complete ops.
I realize you address the number of chargers in your comment, but this change also cripples players that are more solo oriented.
Seems like the laser cannon is supposed to sort of fill some of that gap.
No the laser cannon is supposed to be an lmg that you don’t need to reload. It only got its buff because people were confused about a weapon with ‘cannon’ in the name, that you have to rest on your shoulder, getting completely blocked by armor. But initially the lascan was completely in line with other laser weapons.
Even the orbital laser weapon only kills chargers and bile titans by reapplying the fire DoT unless you strip top armor first. And the scythe primary weapon is a complete waste of everyone’s time since it is eclipsed by any DMR.
Always pretty lame to see weapon nerfs in pvm games since I couldn’t care less what someone’s abusing to hit their endgame quicker.
I don’t play with randoms so for me the fun of stonger gear is that I can fill the rest of my gear with joke gear. Sometimes my group will rock all mines and mortar sentry to try and blow each other up.
Edit: the railgun did need a nerf tho I mainly mean like the other smaller weapon changes.
Im fine with it, it means the game is more balanced overall and other builds become equally viable. At the end of the day it gives more choices for players.
The railgun was kinda gross with how much ammo it had and how easily it could deal with chargers in safe mode
Yup, just switch to unsafe mode. It’s still great.
Nah, it takes ~4 unsafe shots to strip a charger leg now, so a little over twice as long.
You are probably not shooting unsafe shots. Just switching to unsafe isn’t enough, you have to let it charge above where the safe mode stops. They literally didn’t change anything about the unsafe shots so it should still take 2 hits with these (disclaimer: it may be bugged though. I saw the writing on the wall and stopped using the railgun a while ago, and have still not used one since)
Safe shots now just bounce off the armor entirely so trust me it’s easy to tell if you’re on safe. Anyway here’s video proof of a guy testing it on unsafe mode: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4qWchqvay44
He can get it in 3 if he gets a high charge buts it’s more like 4-5 on average.
always fine with balancing things but this just feels like the usual trend all games have these days where they’ll nerf first then a month from now have a list of buffs.
I could see the urgency of nerfing the railgun because I imagine every little gremlin is abusing it rn. It’s always the small nerfs like -3 rounds in the breaker that I roll my eyes at and wished they’d just wait until they roll out the buffs to do those.
I’m not going to see any gameplay changes while I’m running from 2 bile titans plus horde and my breaker plunks 3 less times.
I don’t see them rolling out major buffs. They are being very careful to avoid power creep. All the people that want Helldives to be a walk in the park are playing the wrong game. Also they can just lower the difficulty and be fine.
You can’t just lower the difficulty and progress though, mats are difficulty gated and with how absolutely gross and ridiculous the player base got (5 missions in a row getting kicked right at extraction) I only solo. :(
Easy solution, just be the host
I haven’t played the game but damn, that’s shitty.
Twenty bucks there’s gonna be a big ol post that gets a lot of attention for adding +1 round to ten different guns a month from now.
I’m not sure where you’re getting the “blank wants blank to be blanker” vibes from but you go off.
I personally love the difficulty and to me this is just Nazi Zombies in a reskin. Where the harder difficulties are higher waves… so you’ve gotta run a train, your guns are really only for panic situations, and sometimes the train catches up to you before you grab your packed gun, so you lose it.
That’s wasn’t directed at you directly, that’s why I said lots of people and not you. I’ve just seen a lot of people complaining about it.
I generally agree with your take. I just don’t think they will do a significant buff to anything they debuffed any time soon. I think they are trying to push the players to be more versatile.
Odd energy.
They also nearly doubled the recoil of the breaker. That’s a huge deal.
Nope, not a huge deal at all. Still don’t feel any recoil when using the breaker.
Eh, I rarely shoot anything with my breaker besides dumping into a stalker/solo in the way stranglers. On harder difficulties it’s just not worth trying to accurately hit any weak spots on like chargers or anything else that would require precise aiming.
Oof those extermination missions were always a fun end-cap after doing 30+ minute intense missions. Shame to see them extended.
Yeah, if they were concerned about people spamming those and nothing else, then I wish they’d balance the rewards / mission effort, rather than just extending the mission time.
Who gives a shit about people spamming then? They only drop common samples so at best all anyone can get from spamming them is xp, credits, warbonds, and the first tier of ship module upgrades if they grind them.
There’s no value in XP after 20, no value in credits past your first ~50k when you have all the strategems you’re interested in, warbonds are nice but mostly useless except for the boosters and breaker (which just got nerfed), and the first tier ship modules are just quality of life improvements which everyone should be able to get easily anyways after 20 hrs of play.
Because people spamming those missions aren’t completing operations, which means they don’t contribute to major orders at all, and lower the medal output rate.
Also IIRC they even contribute to making these major orders harder, because cancelling an operation counts as failing it
Then fix the issue with the medal output rate
There’s no issue to fix?
Is there a name for the phenomenon when a company or group has access to all of the metrics for a product or good then makes foolish decisions using that information?
Right now Arrowhead can deflect all criticism of their actions by saying “we made this decision based on the numbers” while ignoring the fact that metrics aren’t magic numbers blindly meant to be followed, you are supposed to use them to discover underlying reasons for why those numbers exist in the first place.
This patch is a big L for me and a bad omen for what is to come of this game if the devs are making their decisions like this.
Why? The changes seem pretty sensible in regards to what was clearly above and below the power curve?
For the railgun specifically, it was about the only actually effective way to deal with the multiple chargers the game likes to throw at you constantly. Now you’re pretty much fucked.
Should have brought other options up. Shifted the curve right rather then left.
Yeah I just made a similar comment. At the higher levels, you have more tank enemies than are practical to deal with using orbitals and airstrikes alone. The railgun was the only thing feasible to deal with wave after wave of tanks. Taking that away without giving alternatives is a major blow to level 7 and above.
The railgun is still effective, you just have to use the overcharge mode and be precise, they specifically left the overcharge mode at the same damage potential.
They also buffed other weapons, including the flamethrower and the laser Cannon’s wieldiness and armor penetration. This is also the very first balance patch, it’s not gonna be perfect, it already wasn’t perfect, try out some other options and strategies and see how they seesaw the balance. I think if they keep it up they’ll get it right.
It’s not the same potential, though. It takes about 4 unsafe shots to strip chargers leg armor for example. Before it was 2 safe shots. That’s over twice as long and twice as much ammo.
They specify that to retain the damage output you have to target headshots and “other specific weakpoint shots to maintain maximum damage efficiency”. That’s a bit vague, but it’s not quite a full range damage debuff
The leg is the closest thing to a weak point that a charger has, though.
Their butt is the true unarmored weak spot, I usually main autocannon and circle around and just blast the butt, once it explodes they start bleeding out and change to a slower animation set
That’s what they mean though. Weakspots multiply the damage received. Their only lever without redesigning the way weakspots function is to drop base damage.
The Arc Thrower for example ignores armor but does relatively low damage, however sometimes it will oneshot a beefier enemy when the arc hits a weakspot. Even with the flamethrower it is better to hit the charger’s armored leg because that is a weakspot on that enemy.
Hard agree. Played a 7 today and it felt really bad. Without balancing other weapons to make them viable, they just nerfed the only gun that can do shit.
I love the autocannon gun, but it’s useless against bugs and only good against automatons.
I’ll be sitting this patch out. It just wasn’t fun to play with these changes.
I don’t know if there’s a term for that, but imo Rocket League had the same thing going for years. The game used to always queue a team based on the MMR of the highest ranked team member. People complained they couldn’t play the game with their super low level friends in competitive play, so they changed it so it would average the rank between team members.
The reason I always hated this change was because an average bronze player can barely compete with an average silver player, and etc through the ranks. If you play in 2v2, then you can have a bronze and gold player against two silvers and the game thinks it’s a fair fight. In reality, the gold player is likely going to run circles around both of the silvers while the bronze player barely needs to do anything except try and interfere with the silver team’s defence for it to be no competition at all. I can only imagine the problem would have been even worse in 3v3 matches.
At least before when everyone queued by the highest ranked member’s MMR, then you had to be selective about who you brought with to make sure they can carry their weight. After the change, they streamlined the smurfing and boosting problems the game already has.
Tried bringing it up in community discussions but the whole community (especially at the time) wanted to do nothing but circle jerk Psyonix’s dicks with that same argument: “well Psyonix has the data and you don’t, so how do you know this is a problem? They have the data and they made the change so clearly it must not be a problem”
Not gonna lie, I’m a little concerned after this patch. I don’t think it’s entirely unfair to make comparisons to the first game seeing as it’s a sequel (up to you to agree/disagree). But with this patch especially, the philosophy differences between the two are becoming more apparent.
In 1, there was almost no primary that was useless altogether. Certainly no support or AT that was useless. And even at the high levels the armor spam wasn’t as ridiculous and we had more reliable tools to deal with it.
If they want things to be harder, why did they change the reinforce system to be objectively easier? That system change is my single biggest 1>2 gripe.
This after seeing one of the devs back this balance patch by constantly (and imo not so professionally, but I’m a boomer like that I guess) on Discord chide people not happy about the changes to “just go play an idle game” if they want an easy power fantasy cake walk.
Like I said, major concerns for me. The response to this will tell the tale. I never could get into DRG primarily because they seemed to prioritize difficulty balancing way over having fun in combat. Same thing with Deadlink which should have been a fave of mine. I really hope to not see HD2 go that route when I’ve touted HD1 as one of my faves and a contender for best coop game of all time for years now.
And even at the high levels the armor spam wasn’t as ridiculous and we had more reliable tools to deal with it.
We have very different memories of this game. I remember the tanks spam at higher levels was even more egregious than in HD2. However I do agree that the anti amor options were basically all better. Especially in the stratagems department
I love the flame thrower.
