r/HelldiversMasochists

Why must you rob us of glory AH I was having fun trying to figure out how to beat a defense mission with them 😭

For anyone who missed it there was a bug where 3 planets being invaded by the void were spawning a ridiculous amount of Harvesters. On defense missions it was ONLY Harvesters and tons of them to the point it would crash the game.

It is so stupid. What game is balanced around its HARDEST difficulty being fair and forgiving? NO GAME And yet you see this take being said by a ton of people. There's 10 difficulties for a reason balancing the game around making 6 the "normal" difficulty is totally fair! 7,8,9 and 10 should be reserved for those who want a challenge and 6 for the people who want to feel like an unstoppable force. 5 and below for new players or people looking to lay back and just relax without much thought.

I genuinely dont understand how some people think this idea is bad. The game never asks you to play in a difficulty above 6 but some people will act like any difficulty under 8 doesnt exist and they will complain that the game isnt challenging enough. They dont actually want to have a difficult game they want to play on the highest difficulty but it should still be easy.

Making 6 be as challenging as super helldive today will lose you nothing except mega bases and 2 enemy variants which act the same as their original variants ever since the alpha commander was made to be a brain dead enemy because God forbid you have to be slightly stratategic against one enemy that dies in 5 seconds anyway.

And i guess if you really wanted to make sure even players on lower difficulties can access these enemy vairants and mega bases make mega bases their own 12 minute blitz missions on difficulties 6 and below but 7-10 will always have a mega base and the brood commander and the strider have a small chance to spawn as there upgraded variants. Done. No locked content and no reason to complain about difficulty

The problem the Illuminate now is they are essentially a slower, worse version of the bugs. Crushers are significantly slower than Bile Titans or Chargers, Wretched are worse hunters, having only 50 hp limbs and having a less effective leap strike (no acid spit to slow). Voteless and Fleshmobs present far less threat than swarms of hive guards, brood commanders, or especially alpha warriors.

Of the Illuminate on the void planet, the most common enemies can all be easily kited. The 'meta' is light armor, preferably the +10% speed pilot armor, or the anti-ragdoll armor simply so the stupid void plants dont knock you over. A laser rover and a scythe handles every enemy but crushers helmets and Harvester legs, which a bolt pistol can handle. Just running like a maniac between objectives works incredibly well.

The spawns also don't seem as dense, whatever they did when they lowered watchers by 190% (classic arrowhead tiny balance changes) seems to have lowered patrol density by that much. Seaf troops are mopping up most of the enemies on the map even without player assistance. The spawns for the new objectives also seems extremely low. The Aquifier drill nuke I've had complete without any warp ships arriving, or they 'deploy' nothing via their tractor beam.

My theory is the map is so littered with interactable objects like destructible trees, void plants, spore mines, fuel barrels, etc that it's eating up the resource count and capping the number of enemies that can spawn. I bet if it was a desert or ice world we'd see Cyberstan levels of spawns for better or worse.

The other issue I have is, no cultists aside, this update doesn't really feel like the Illuminates home turf. I was really, really hoping that nearly two years later this would be Arrowhead 'finishing' the Illuminate faction. Give them a mega base, preferably with some sort of big star wars shield generator you have to go inside on foot and disable so you can't just pound it with orbitals first. Make outposts that feel like outposts. The new Warp Gate outposts are somehow even weaker than the standard warp ship encampments. The ships at least have shields, the warp gates are destroyed by a simple AT grenade of your choice.

If nothing else this was THE update to make the Illuminate feel like an entrenched faction we are at war with. The warp ship camps fit the hit and run skirmish invasions they did prior to super earth, but with nearly 6 months in the void you'd think it would be converted into a collection of fortress worlds. Where more permanent industry and infrastructure produce war material for the Great Host. At the very least, we should see large colony/landing ships that are being used as quasi-permanent settlements litter the surface.

I would absolutely love a mission type that is basically an endless last stand.

One of my favorite parts of Helldivers 2 is when a normal 40 minute mission goes completely off the rails. You finish the objective, reach extraction, call the Pelican and suddenly the entire map seems to come down on you.

Enemies from every direction. Stratagems constantly going out. Reinforcements dropping everywhere. Everyone firing at anything that moves while the extraction timer slowly ticks down.

Sometimes those two minutes are absolute chaos.

And sometimes you stand there wondering where the enemies are.

The current defense mission where you wait for the ships to evacuate scratches a similar itch, but not quite. The enemies come in scripted waves, mostly from predictable directions, and once the team knows where to set up it can become pretty easy to control.

What I want is the opposite.

Give us a position and tell us:

Hold it for as long as you can.

No fixed number of waves. No eight ships and then you are done. No safe direction.

Enemies should be able to attack from all sides like they do during normal extraction. The longer you survive, the worse it gets.

At first it might be normal patrols and breaches/drop ships.

Then more heavies start appearing.

Then multiple breaches at once.

Then the game basically starts asking, "Okay, but how many Factory Striders can four Helldivers actually deal with?"

Let the difficulty keep escalating until the squad is eventually overwhelmed.

Maybe every few minutes you reach another reward tier, so surviving 5, 10, 15, 20+ minutes gives increasingly better rewards. You could even have an emergency extraction available at certain intervals, giving the squad the choice between getting out with what they earned or staying and gambling everything on another few minutes.

I don't even care if the game eventually becomes completely unfair.

It should.

The entire point would be that you are not expected to win forever.

You are four Helldivers, surrounded, running out of ammunition, calling down everything Super Earth has left while the enemy keeps coming.

I want the kind of mission where after 20 minutes there is fire everywhere, half the defensive position is gone, someone is screaming that their 500kg is still on cooldown and the squad collectively realizes:

"Oh. We're not getting out of this one."

That is the Helldivers 2 experience I want more of.

How does one enjoy 24 crushers bumrushing you

As a veteran Helldiver, I always knew that explosions were powerful. Talk about the "explosive meta" was common back in the day, although I always assumed it referred to weapons like the Eruptor and Crossbow.

I knew explosion had compunding effects that made them more effective than their actual damage suggests. But it wasn't until the recent patch that I really understood (although I still not 100% confident about the maths) just how busted explosion damage calculations are on most enemies.

For those who don't know, explosions, assuming they are large enough, deal damage to the main health pool of an enemy for every body part they hit. Yes, even the ones with 100% ExDR (counterintuitively).

If the limb does have less than 100% ExDR, the damage is reduced accordingly, and then again multiplied by the "damage transfer to main health" (not 100% confident on that though).

What it essentially boils down to:

1. If an enemy has limbs with 100% ExDR or 100% transfer to main, explosive damage is essentially multiplied for for every limb hit.

That's how a simple Grenade Launcher with 400 damage can take out a Crusher with 4 shot. Because each GL shot is actually dealing >1600 damage to the main health pool.

It's no wonder explosive weapons feel so random at times. Because their damage is.

Who came up with a system in which the number of limbs amplifies the damage taken by an enemy?

What a busted system that is impossible to balance.

I know, it's a ground based game and all that. But considering the real power of a helldiver is the super destroyer he commands, it makes sense that advanced species like squids and cyborgs should have way more super destroyer disrupting tactics than just orbital cannons. Those cannons don't really disrupt our super destroyers, which also doesn't make sense. If the cannons are being attacked by 4 destroyers right above them, those destroyers should be their prime target. This sounds fucking crazy but the cannons should either force destroyers out of low orbit or even be able to destroy them lol.

The squid overship should also give super destroyers some kind of debuff or create a mega energy shield around the area that makes it tougher for ordinance/supplies to come down.

We could even have eagle debuffs on those maps because the eagles should honestly be busy defending the destroyers up in orbit from bot and squid equivalents, or something like that.

https://preview.redd.it/ei2ltjlpl4kh1.png?width=1805&format=png&auto=webp&s=a060597e41862fe5a8f493bfbeada4a3133932ff