u/WaywardOath

Yesterday I had made a post about Bug-Front secondaries and asked people for their opinions on a few that I didn't quite enjoy. Some of the responses I got were pretty insightful and I have spent more time with some of the weapons to better understand when—or if—I would find them useful. That's all well and good, but then I noticed a pretty funny trend.

Despite me ranking it really low, not one person tried to correct me on how to use the Verdict.

This struck me as odd, and so I gave it the good ol' 3 front run-around for a bit to try and see if maybe some people missed some stuff, and here were my findings.

Terminids: The Verdict may just be without a doubt, the worst bug-front secondary in the entire game. I do not say that hyperbolically. For a gun that sells itself as the Medium-Pen high-damage pistol, you would probably be impressed to hear that it has ZERO unique breakpoints against some of the most common enemies when compared to the Peacemaker. Hunters still take 1 headshot or 2 bodyshots, and Warriors still take 2 headshots.

Just about the only unique 'niche' this weapon has is taking out an Alpha Commander in 4 shots to the head, but I'd consider this a pretty big stretch when just about any other conventional secondary can do similar work. Hell, even the Bushwhacker can one-shot an Alpha Commander by comparison.

Honestly if I'm missing something about the weapon please let me know, but as far as bugs are concerned, this thing feels like a complete waste.

Automatons: This was surprising, but I did actually manage to carve a niche out for this weapon on the Automatons just about instantly, using the simple fact that it shares the same one-shot potential as every Marksman Rifle in the game, provided you're within ~15-20 meters of an Automaton. That means:

Devastator? 1-shot in the head. Berserker? Same dealio. Smaller Bots? Instant-kill on center-mass. For a weapon that has 10 shots per magazine, being able to break 10 kills quickly gives it one specific use case over the Talon (the other headshot-machine in the secondary slot), since you can kill 10 enemies hypothetically with 1 magazine. As a matter of fact it actually overpenetrates small bots, so getting 2 kills with 1 shot isn't just possibly, it's oddly frequent on higher difficulties.

Illuminate: This one's a stretch, but the Verdict has one use here: 2-shotting Overseers to the head. The reason I don't think this is as good here is simply that—like with the Automatons—the Talon exists. You're not often going to be rushed down by more than one or two Overseers at a time either, so the heat-buildup on the Talon is pretty much a non-issue. Still, the Verdict's serviceable here. It's just a shame nobody plays the Illuminate.

MASSIVE TL;DR: Please correct me if you feel I'm wrong but the Bots seems to be the only place that it even remotely makes sense to equip this weapon.

It's no secret that EAT Allocation is perhaps one of the silliest designed boosters in the entire game (in my personal opinion, only being beaten out by Motivational Shocks). The sad part about this is that it's a fascinating concept in general, and yet it's left in the dust. Since its announcement I've seen loads of suggestions for how to fix it, but especially with a new survey out, I figured a graphic on the simplest change would be a fitting thing to post.

Just make it a communal EAT call-in shared by the team. Hellbombs to it, Resupplies do it. Just do it with an EAT and you're golden. Having an extra EAT Call-in across the entire team is far from overpowered, and honestly while much better it probably wouldn't even break 10% usage tops.

Also, it'd have the added bonus on making more players see the light on EATs being one of the best utilities in the entire game. Win-win!

I'll try and do the ones that inspire me, but I don't have an eternity. Gimme some good ones Helldivers, make the Ministry of Science proud.

This is a joke concept I spent frankly too much time on after a fun night of giggling and goofing around with a friend of mine in game. One photoshop session later and this monstrosity was born.

The GL-777 Roulette really encapsulates that 'let it ride' attitude Helldivers innately come equipped with. Each round you load is completely randomized, meaning only democracy manifest knows what'll happen with each pull of the trigger.

Also according to my friend who helped come up with this, we can't tell what ammo is which because every Helldiver is colorblind.

Okay this one's a first for me. I've seen assets pop out of existence before or downscale, I haven't seen them turn into a rave for my personal amusement.

Is this Automaton cloaking technology?

Okay no but seriously, this sort of thing shouldn't be happening. Making enemies despawn is one thing, making them and myself entirely invisible is a whole different can of worms.

The balancing state of Helldivers is a very interesting case study, being one of the only games I can think of which had such a drastic change in the viability of equipment, or the state of certain enemies over the course of its lifetime.

So, what's an old tidbit about the game that would sound completely absurd to a new player? My example is how Thermites used to be the worst grenade by a mile.

On release these things were as close to useless as possible. Their DoT was the primary benefit of them, which interestingly, didn't stack with multiple Thermites, meaning you needed to throw one at a time to damage heavier enemies like Chargers. Worse, this was when DoT effects didn't work for non-hosts, so sometimes they'd do literally no damage to enemies. It wasn't until 5 months later that they turned into the monsters we know them as today.

One of the biggest issues that a lot of people have with the Illuminate is enemy variety, and I really don't think that's much of a secret. Funny enough, another common thread I saw a lot during the Illuminate event was that fighting them on the source planet was, the most fun they've been. There's frankly a pretty good reason for this:

The Illuminate really just, don't have that many enemies.

I'm going to try and avoid some buzzwords that have been floating around ever since certain interviews (and way before that, too), but the fact of the matter is from a purely numbers-perspective, the Illuminate just don't have the variety the other factions do. Making this chart was merely a way to visualize what I mean by that.

An explanation I've sort of anticipated is that the Illuminate are younger than the other two factions, so they haven't had as much time to make enemies for them. Frankly, the numbers just don't support it. While I don't think the '1 enemy every X days' is a good metric (mainly because, y'know, the game didn't launch with 1 enemy in each faction), it is a good way of seeing just how many enemies are in each faction based on time they've released.

No matter what form they come in, there's really no denying that the Illuminate have the least amount of enemies in the game. Hell, their entire faction makes up a number less than a single seed of the Automatons. Most of their variants aren't reskins with new behavior or weapons like the other Subfactions, but rather entirely unique enemies that just don't have a counterpart on the main faction.

There really isn't a greater point to this post beyond this information, but to me at least, this is the most glaring flaw in how the Illuminate have sat for the past almost-two-years.

Greetings Helldivers! Funny story—this idea came after I said that a reverse-engineered Automaton-tech reward could potentially include armor. Frankly I only said it for the drip, but then the most obvious follow-up question started to bother me: what armor passive would Automaton armor even provide?

Well, that's when Integrated Cooling occurred to me. Automatons have laser-based weaponry like we do, but bizarrely they have no sense of regard for heat-meters, and changing ice. Clearly they must have technology capable of cooling their weaponry better than ours, which would make it the perfect bit of tech to steal for spreading Managed Democracy!

Personally I don't believe a passive like this would be terribly unbalanced, but I'm very curious for your thoughts on it, as always!

Everybody's got a hot take in this game. Some are hotter than others, but there's always something you can say about the game that'll get you nuked basically no matter where you go to talk about it. Lemme hear 'em! You can bother to explain them, you don't gotta, you can even discuss mine or existing people's hot takes if you want. It's a free galaxy.

Mine (and the image is somewhat related) is that I really don't get the Coyote love. Pretty much just like the Hyena, I consider it a solidly 'okay' gun (even before its fire nerf), and have never understood why it sits at the top of the use-chart every update. It is the most store-brand flavor you can get.

Enjoy this silly image I threw together for this post.

Okay so I just got back from a riveting conversation in yesterday's 'We should give the Deadeye Heavy Penetration' thread, and after combing through the conversation thoroughly I came to the realization that people don't consider a weapon's personal-protection as a valid stat when talking about its balance.

The Deadeye isn't terribly picked on the Bot Front, and there's a few reasons for that, but almost nobody discusses how its stagger-force compared to other options is a huge part in what makes it stand apart from other options.

Flat out, if you're shooting at something, it can't shoot back. This remains true on the Bug Front (though most players don't bring DMRs there, so I'm not going to really try and make that argument).

So, what gives? It can't be that people aren't dying enough to think a weapon keeping them safe is a problem, and yet any weapon whose defining benefit is 'keeps the user safer than other choices' is usually dismissed here specifically as 'not as good as just killing the thing'.

Genuinely, I want to understand your viewpoint on this better. Please help me understand why there are people out there who think the Deadeye needs a Heavy-Penetration buff to be a viable weapon (and to a lesser extent, why do people not see the benefit in weapons like the Liberator Concussive and Gas Grenades).

Thanks to inspiration from u/arcaderdude 's post this morning, I come with a horribly edited abomination.

No greenbeards were harmed in the making of this meme.

It's me. I'm the fool.

I made the mistake of looking at my hours the other day when someone asked how long I've played. Here I thought dwarves were immune to psychological damage...

Shooting Spitball or Barrage Infector shots is undoubtedly a ton of fun, but just like Power-Attacking a Leech, nothing beats the fun of blocking them up close and personal.

Ages ago now (actually it was the post that made me make an account) I floated this concept, but it's been so long that it felt worth mentioning again...

Give us an Overclock for the LOK that can remotely reload sentries! This wonderful weapon shouldn't be the ONLY primary that doesn't have sentry interaction. You're telling me we can Wormhole Special a dwarf but we can't Wormhole Special a bullet? I refuse to believe it.

Management. I know you're listening. I'll stop complaining about the Jetty Boot machine acting up if you give the people what they need.

The wish to beat my own High Score is strong. The urge to intentionally score on a funny number is stronger.

Yes DRG HUD. How did you know I wanted to deposit in the Engineer?

Helios, it is 3 in the morning. What do you think you’re doing out here?

Is that Woolo safe? Should I rescue it?

Stripper clips go brrr, but the undying light of liberty cannot be bested.

The Mewtwo thing is still probably one of the funniest course of events to happen in this game's recent history. It's almost too easy—and makes you wonder what they're planning for this upcoming Finale event to just give this to everyone.