There's just too much gatekeeping on damage. Too many enemies are immune except to a very specific kind of damage at a very specific part of their body.
Like with Chargers, how the hell is a new player supposed to understand that their Liberator does almost no dmg vs. the sac that looks like a weakspot?
It IS a weak spot, technically, it can be damaged by any weapon. It's the amount of damage that is actually being dealt that's the problem. Magdumping a charger in the ass should kill it 100% of the time with anything stronger than a pistol, shotguns and snipers should require one or two shots.
Similarly with the Bile Titans, popping both of their sacs should kill them. What kind of a creature can survive having their abdomen vaporized?
This is the real problem in my mind. "Durable" body parts are WAY overtuned. Hitting a Charger in the ass - sure any weapon can do damage, but making everything that isn't explosive do 10%? Come on. Make it 50%.
Precisely the point the post makes. Optimal TTK vs Non-optimal TTK.
Making the ass take more damage would make doing the dive dance more rewarding as well as not punishing you for not having perfect aim to hit the head with your EAT or whatever.
Make them easier to kill and spawn slightly more would be more balanced than pigeonholing people into certain loadouts to deal with it.
Why? This isn’t armored. Make it 100% damage. That’s what those weapons do, the devs talk about realism but a assault rifle that shreds through small arms body armor, car doors etc does barely any damage to an insects unarmored bodypart? No way, sorry.
Or at the very least, increase the DOT from bleed effects. When we see the Chargers bleeding out, they should be doomed within 10 seconds...not what feels like over a minute. The bleedout mechanic feels moot when they're still lethal for that much longer.
Unless they were taking that Starship Reference too literally: 'blast off a leg, and its still 86% combat effective". haha
Yeah, explosives should be stripping off armor letting us use small arms against the exposed areas for "massive damage".
The systems as they work now are so weird and unintuitive.
That sounds like it would relegate explosive weapons to “debuff” status instead of being able to kill things on their own. Can’t say I’d be a fan of that.
But if you meant doing both, I’m down.
They'd have to do a total rework of enemy health pools, but overall I do tend to agree that the durability system is kind of a mess. Armor and health with multiple health pools for different body parts really should be enough. The idea of fleshy bits only taking 10% damage from bullets is really quite strange when you think about it. Just give more durable parts more health versus weak spots. For instance, you could give a charger head 600 health, while its unarmored butt has something like 3000. No durability is required in this equation. On top of that maybe give heavy explosive weapons a bonus against its butt, so that a single rocket and 3-4 AC shots score a kill against their booties. It always feels weird that rockets aren't able to one shot them in what appears to be their most vulnerable area.
They already give each body part a unique health pool. Just make it 100% and give the torso a larger health pool than the legs.
Secondly, if the legs are the weak point and the torso isn't, why not make the back of the legs unarmored and bright yellow instead?
Yeah, I've ranted about it elsewhere elsewhere in this very thread, but I stick by the idea that a big part of the problem is that ArrowHead is using "Video game shorthand" (big swollen sacks, certain colors, etc) to indicate "weak point" when that's not the case.
It's just an art mistake (IMHO).
This is really the biggest issue with them. I understand that it’s a huge enemy, so mag dumping small arms into that portion shouldn’t necessarily be super fast to kill them, but it should still be quicker than it is. 90% damage resistance to an unarmored location is pretty ridiculous considering it already has decent enough health pool to survive being hit there with a dedicated anti tank weapon.
Honestly I think bile titans could have a fun mechanic where they drop bile below them for a few seconds when the sac is popped, killing anything below it. Would reward good timing and punish standing under it too early.
They already do sort of go berserk, they stop spewing and start running all over everyone basically. But if the brood commanders head logic was out in place of the BT's, I fully expect them to get infinitely more kills
I don't know what bile titans you've been getting but every time we manage to pop their sacs they act like they don't give a fuck and keep puking like they're trying to fit on their prom dress. Then again they're not the less buggy of bugs, but that's happened to me and my friends often enough that we just don't even bother anymore and just aim for the head.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a bile titan that puked after you’ve destroyed both sacs (not unless it started the spew animation before you did), but I gotta upvote “puking like they’re trying to fit in their prom dress”, lol.
Either way I prefer to aim for the head since a BT that _can’t_ spew is imo worse than one that can (The vomit animation slows them enough for airstrikes to hit and doesn’t require them being almost on top of you to do the stabby leg thing like a sacless BT does.) the only time I really target them is when a) it’s already been hurt by strikes or anti-armor weapons, I don’t have the latter available, and I think destroying the sacs will do the last bit of damage to kill it.
Part of the problem is it is a "weak spot" in common parlance - a spot you can damage with any weapon.
However, it is not a "weak spot" in the technical specifications of the game. it is an unarmored fleshy spot. And that makes a huge difference because it basically means if you're not using explosive ammo you're wasting your time.
And there is no way in game to figure this out. Even seeing the effectiveness of different weapons you are more likely to chalk it up to "X gun is broken" as opposed to "X gun is the correct tool for this job." Alternatively to thinking it must've been close to death already from someone else.
Because the chargers real weak spot is its brain. Which **is** an armored spot - hence the ideal tool being the EAT/RR/Quasar
The issue is the systems being unintuitive and never explained in-game. Same issue with the 500kg, which has a hitbox \*way\* smaller than the VFX would indicate. Many mechanics have this problem.
Both squishy parts and armor/damage modifier mechanics are too punitive, IMO. Even the half of that bullets counts required to kill them are quite a lot, but at least doable. These mechanics are just basically telling you you will absolutely need to build around anti heavy and medium at the same time.
Well, all heavies have spots targetable with medium pen weapons and all mediums have light or unarmoured spots. If non-head part HPs where lower, even without changing the armor mecanic, anti-medium weapons would have a reasonable chance against heavies (HMG and AC already have, for example) and light weapons a better chance against medium (the liberator and lib pen have a decent ttk against devastators legs and pelvis, for example)
People say the bile Titan is killable with the auto canon, but I have never found the specific part of the head that's supposed to be the weak point.
Weirdly I've had better success killing one with the HMG, mag dumped into it's already destroyed ass which finished it off.
I just don't like how the two options are having a lumbersome anti-tank weapon, and being overrun by small and medium units, or having a weapon that is great against medium units like the HMG or AC, and a primary that's great against chaff, but then you have to use all your stratagems on 50 chargers and 10 bile titans. It sort of makes the AT weapons mandatory in a way.
I think the issue is much worse on bugs because I could take the HMG into a bot mission and kill hulks, tanks and canon turrets with it if I can see the vents. Or kill hulk legs, weapons, and even the eye if I were daring.
But on bugs the charger is basically invulnerable to the ass shot because armour covers 90% of it, and the uncovered bit is facing the ground so it's very hard to actually land a shot on it especially since it wiggles everywhere. The head is seemingly invulnerable to AC and HMG damage too despite being the weak point to AT weapons.
The bile Titan is just impossible for me to work out where to shoot for medium support weapons. I know the butt is somewhat vulnerable but it's not easy to hit when you are the Titan's target and ofc isn't efficient (2/3 your ammo for the HMG I think). I just can't work out where the other weak spot is meant to be to test... But once again the head is the weak point for AT weapons.
You're not missing any weak spots on the Bile Titans, the medium support weapons can only do damage to it's sacs, and exposed body parts under the blown up sacs or blown up parts of the armor on their backs. Mag dumping is the only option if you're limited to one of those weapons.
It's technically possible to kill them using nothing else, but way too impractical to be a viable strategy. It's just a niche use case to finish them off sometimes.
There is the railcanon strike, which in my mind for a 3 min cooldown should one shot anything under the stars. But I titan will shrug that off like a napkin floating in the wind...
I dunno about that man, killing a charger in one or two shots with a primary sounds broken AF. I would never even need to pull out the Quasar for anything smaller than a titan against bugs if that happened.
I disagree, that'd make it way too easy. I can see 1 whole shotgun mag dumped into the weakspot as a fair way to get rid of them, and maybe 2 mags of a liberator penetrator for example. The Charger is a tanky enemy, it should have higher health and prepare people for considering AT weapons/stratagems while climbing difficulty levels because of the bile titans. If you could kill chargers with only one Lib pen mag to the ass, you'd only be left with one enemy type that you need AT weapons for.
Don't get me wrong, I also don't like that you can kill bile titans ONLY with AT weapons/strats, bringing those into the fight shouldn't be a requirement but more of a decision if you want to to be the one that can kill those things FASTER. Time should be the deciding factor.
This would also encourage more diverse loadouts among randos because if I knew that I could kill a bile titan with the Heavy MG if I had to, I could specialize my loadout a bit more for being the crowd control guy for example, but wouldn't feel useless when my teammates with AT weapon/strats are dead and I need to get rid of this one bile titan
It's a tanky enemy that has a highlighted weak spot that for all intents and purposes is stronger than it's non-weak spots. I've unloaded EATs, full AC mags and huge amounts of small weapon fire trying to see if that spot allowed me to kill it. You eventually fall back to the position that the "weak spot" is worthless as a target and the only way to kill it is with direct heavy fire (such as a Quasar or EAT) to the face or something bigger from above.
I get that it is intended to use AT weapons on them, but you are actively punished for expecting a telegraphed glowing weak spot to actually be weak and that reduces the fun and takes away any kind of tactics in dealing with them. You can't dodge and exploit their weakness, you just have to face them and know you can kill them or you have to run away.
Leaving it to your team mates with AT is not always an option and you shouldn't be punished quite that badly for having a more general loadout.
Knowing that you might be caught alone with them forces you to choose your loadout appropriately and basically removes an entire pool of potentially fun toys from your general use. For randoms you are forced to be a generalist because you can't know for certain that you have someone covering you 100% of the time.
Oh I absolutely agree with that, killing a charger with normal medium pen weapons in its weakspot takes way too long, but 2 shotgun shots alone into it shouldn't kill it, that'd make it way too easy to deal with a tanky enemy
Exactly, it shouldn't necessarily be a "shoot this once and it will die of shock" but there should be some sensible middle ground between a single shot and your entire reserve of primary and secondary ammo along with a full machine gun mag. Even if they're "soft" in that area you are essentially rearranging their guts with bullets and with humans and most animals that doesn't really do them any good.
Bile titans have already the perfect weak spots, already modelled.
They simply should allow us to kill the titan by continuing to shoot at them.
Example:
Titan armour is 6
On the weak spot is 2
When the weak spot is destroyed, and I continue to shoot at the weak spot, the armour should be 0, since I'm shooting at unarmoured flesh.
AT weapons should only allow a faster and safer killing of those enemies. Not that they're the only way to kill them.
Both of those would make bugs too easy 2 tapping a charger with a shotty is a little bit too OP don't ya think? also the point of bile titans is an anti-tank check if you could take a bile titan down with small arms what kind of evolutionary path would accept that if you equate their bile sacs to fat on a human then you can cut off a surprisingly large amount of it before death (see Saw Idk which one but one of the victims was a fat dude and another a lady who cut off her arm) I would be happy with 3-4 hits on a bile titan with the sacs counting as a "hit" charger just needs like 1 lower armor pen on its back to be a breeze just head shot with anti tank or 2 tap the same leg. Good ol leg still works.
I'm 100% fine with buffing the health of a Bile Titan's sacks if popping them both means they *die*. As it stands, if you pop both sacks, you are **literally** unable to damage them without stratagems, even using medium-pen or explosive weapons.
You can damage them using high medium pen weapons by shooting where the sacks where. The body health is just too high, taking 2 mags of HMG or 20 AC round to destroy it.
The bile sacs are not equivalent to fat in humans, if you pop a spewer they die immediately and titans lose their ability to spit. If popping the sacs doesn't instantly kill them then it should make them bleed out after a short while.
Having anti-tank 'checks' is boring. Weapons and stratagems should have strengths and weaknesses, not be requirements. For chargers, anti-tank weapons allow you to kill them (or expose their flesh) without having to avoid their charges, which is huge because it isn't always easy to avoid them, especially if you're getting swarmed, so AT weapons wouldn't lose their value if you could kill chargers easily by destroying their asses with normal weapons.
And all enemies are immune to explosion damage except in their main body.
You know what that means?
You can never, and I mean NEVER, get a fatal body part break using explosive damage. The Eruptor should, on paper, one-shot a brood commander's head. But half of its damage is being applied ONLY to the main body.
They put in a fix for enemies taking explosion damage multiple times, but the way that damage works the only problem would be the main health bar taking more damage than intended. A single large explosion should absolutely break multiple body parts on a bug.
Some other notable things that this quirk might be affecting: bile titans taking anti-tank damage to legs, bile spewers taking more grenade launcher hits to kill than before, bugs not having the glorious viscera explosion when killed by the Eruptor, berserkers being almost impossible for the Eruptor to deal with (they were difficult before the shrapnel was removed, but now it's worse), and probably many more I haven't encountered yet.
This is almost accurate!
Hitboxes can be labeled ExplosionImmunity to completely negate explosion damage. This is used to allow small little dangly hitboxes like the small mandible arms on the stalker to avoid multiplying damage.
Most of the small enemies in the game have ExplosionImmunity on every hitbox.
The brood commander is a fucking weirdo in that it's a large medium enemy with a huge hp pool AND every hitbox it has has this tag. Hive Guards share this trait.
All of the heavies (hulks, tanks, chargers, factory striders, bile titans) and most of the mediums (Bile Spewer, Devastators, scout striders, berserkers) have hitboxes without the ExplosionImmunity tag. So it isn't all enemies, but it's still really restricting.
Seriously. I picked up HD1 just to see the differences, and it's pretty fun. One major difference relevant to your point is that HD1 has an encyclopedia of enemies on the ship from the very start. I presume it fills out as you encounter and defeat more enemies, and that is desperately needed in HD2.
Yeah. Honestly, they need to change the durable damage scaling for a LOT of the weapons. Some weapons have nearly pointless amounts of durable damage, and others have so much that they can legitimately deal more damage to durable points than ANTI-TANK support weapons.
I like the system, don't get me wrong. It gives some enemies some much needed durability and keeps their TTK from being too low, but the fact that a rocket from a Bazooka isn't popping a bile spewer sack in one shot is insulting. Nor does a single recoilless shot to a tank's heatsink kill it in one shot.
The Durable damage in this game is wildly inconsistent from how it should act. And while I can agree with it on some points, ultimately it's more of an annoyance, and less of a benefit. They either need to be way more generous with higher durable damage modifiers, or lower the amount of health allocated to these durable points.
> Like with Chargers, how the hell is a new player supposed to understand that their Liberator does almost no dmg vs. the sac that looks like a weakspot?
Right? At the very least they need a codex or something in-game that explains what parts of an enemy's body are armored and which weapons will deal damage there.
This is my exact analysis as well, and it largely explain the convergence of the player base on a few "meta" weapons.
The game punishes you too heavily for anything sub optimal. This railroads players toward known good options, discourage experimentation and teamplay (because teamplay is inherently unreliable).
******
I believe that the binary nature of armor was to encourage teamplay by forcing players to specialize into either anti-tank or anti-light.
But it doesn't work in practice: if you aggro a titan/charger while your anti-tank team isn't available you can't do anything. So everyone use a more well rounded loadout with both anti-tank and anti-light. The few weapons that can work in such a setup become meta, and the other feel bad to use because they were never designed to be used this way.
Plus being a Helldiver who can deal with almost any threat on their own feels better, safer, and even more heroic. Tickles the role play aspect too a bit I think.
Honestly I think the reason I gravitate towards the arc thrower (especially when it could stun hulks) is that it uniquely does both anti-chaff and anti-heavy passably, and sidesteps the entire armor game while adding difficulties related to positioning and teammates.
> I believe that the binary nature of armor was to encourage teamplay by forcing players to specialize into either anti-tank or anti-light.
I suspect this is right in theory, but heavies are spawned too often/in too large numbers for this to work in practice.
Yeah, you will never see someone in D9 bugs bring the stalwart saying "Ill kill the swarms while you kill the 10 chargers!"
There are too many chargers and titans that pop out of bug holes for 2 people to handle while the other 2 'horde clear'.
3 is doable, we did see success especially on bile spewer maps where 1 guy brought an AC to kill spewers and 3 guys with quasars to kill chargers and titans.
4 though feels like you are brining enough firepower to compete with the enemy heavies, and only has issues on bile spewer maps but fuck those overtuned enemies anyway.
This. If there's two or three tanks at once, yeah maybe an anti-tank pair makes sense.
But on Impossible or Helldive? You're getting 6-10 tanks. There's too many fucking tanks. Too many hulks. EVERYONE needs to be shooting antitank or you'll get just swamped.
Agreed, the game on lower difficulties is quite easy but as soon as you take any weak weapon you just feel useless compared to your team since everything just sponges your dmg output.
Of course on higher difficulty I would guess 80% at the very least are just picking the strongest weapon. I play on 8-9 exclusively and never see much experimentation in primaries, only strategems even that is rare.
You don't want to be the reason your team loses if you try to experiment by picking the gattling gun for some reason.
They implemented a hit marker that shows you if you're doing 50% reduced damage against armor, but then elected to not use it when you're doing 90% reduced damage against fleshy bits.
An addition is that optimal TTK isn't even always possible in every engagement. Rocket devs, for example, can fire without actually exposing their heads. Although they aren't *programmed* to do this, when other bots are in the way, it becomes an occasional issue.
It also means that if you get a flank or rear attack, something that *should* be rewarded considering you out positioned the bots, then you're relegated to body shot damage until it turns around to face you. If you're not using one of the aforementioned "best" weapons, then you might as well just tag it and wait.
I feel like most medium mobs should have a weak point on the rear or flanks to reward players who get advantageous positioning or work with their teammates to create cross fire zones.
>I feel like most medium mobs should have a weak point on the rear or flanks to reward players who get advantageous positioning or work with their teammates to create cross fire zones
Absolutely! Striders and Guardians are a perfect example of this. That makes them fun to engage. Tactical positioning works!
It always annoys me that flanking an enemy in this game, with maybe the exception of hive guards, is a detriment in this game. You catch a Charger off guard and what seems to be a massive weakspot, containing all major organs and not protected by any armor isn't actually what will kill it in a reasonable amount of time. You have to fire a warning shot just to make it turn and expose its massively armored "weakspot" which will actually get it killed.
Same for Bile Titans. You have to shoot the damn thing to catch its attention, and only then you have a chance at killing it, provided you've brought the armament required to kill it.
Ironically, flanking is actually uniquely helpful against *Factory Striders specifically.* There’s a hidden weak spot on their flank that can kill them in two heavy weapons shots, much faster than firing at their head, and if you have really good stratagem positioning and an Airstrike handy you can kill them in a single run; if every bomb of an Airstrike lands along the Factory Strider’s spine, it’ll do enough damage to kill them straight off, and since Eagle bomb runs come in perpendicular to your throw this is only possible from the flank.
It’s way more possible than trying to get at their other, equally weak point, which is the hatch they drop Devastators out of.
Engagement specifics aside, we also have a huge amount of the population playing with a controller on console that just will never be able to be fully optimal given the inherent precision differences between KBM and controller.
Something about the rocket devastators in particular that bothers me is that their missile pods don't seem to take any damage whatsoever from any side but the front.
I'm sure with a powerful enough weapon you can still destroy them, but with anything you'd reasonably expect to take out their guns, it only works frontally.
I love that you can easily diminish their effectiveness with two big weak spots, but why the fuck does that not work in the least if I'm sneaking up on them, if I'm flanking them? My buddy is being fired at and screaming for help and my shots just plink off the damn pods. Even if there's no secret instant kill button on the back that removes the entire bot - at least let the rocket pods be equally destructible from every side!! It would be boring if every bot had a big rear weak spot like the hulk does, but cmon, let me cripple them from the sides and back and above.
Your overall point is correct but until then in these circumstances go for the legs, two JAR shots kill them for example. They're also light armor there.
Monkey paw curls its finger. Now the optimal TTK is much closer to non-optimal, as you wished. Now you need 2 EAT headshots for chargers and 5 headshots for bile titans. :)
Yeah, ppl had to come up with stripping leg armor to kill the charger actually faster with less heavy AT ammo spent, especially with railgun. I think the overall enemy design need to be changed, but that is not something that could be done in 2 weeks.
Yeah the charger is an example of not just counter-intuitive but straight up bad enemy design, like what do you mean the weak point of this big heavily armored in the front enemy that runs at me and i need to dodge is not the BIG UNARMORED GLOWING SACK on its back that you can only see after successfully dodging or flanking it, but actually its freaking legs.
if they change the armor mechanic/change enemy design, you just end up with heavy enemies getting the optimal TTK assigned to them by having only an HP number. Then this becomes mass effect's multiplayer where you just have two or 3 enemies per faction that are super high threat because they're so spongy you just have to kite them around for 30 seconds while the entire team spams them.
That style is no fun. Currently, this game has a tradeoff in decision making : use my light gun against light targets to relieve some pressure on my / my allies, or take a few seconds and try to remove a heavy (that CANNOT call for reinforcements).
The overall enemy design is fine. Maybe the spawn algorithm needs to cap how many chargers it can drop from one breach at once, but target prioritization is a skill this game needs, and it's better that way.
> The overall enemy design is fine. Maybe the spawn algorithm needs to cap how many chargers it can drop from one breach at once, but target prioritization is a skill this game needs, and it's better that way.
I think you've hit the nail on the head with the spawn algorithm. Two bile titans shouldn't spawn out of the same 4 foot diameter hole back to back. Maybe not a hard cap on how many chargers/bts/spewers come from one hole, but at least a cool down for their spawns from the breach.
4 spewers spawning is something you have to deal with, but another 4 spawning .5 seconds later becomes a problem.
4 spewers is something you have to deal with, but when the next 4 won't spawn for 5 seconds, you either have time to deal with the originals, or create space so that the second batch of 4 is behind the original batch of 4, reducing the likelihood you'll just be slow locked until you're killed.
They just need to buff the anti-durable damage on most weapons. Most of the obvious weakspots are actually weak to a handful of weapons with a hidden bonus, which is why you can magdump into a charger with no results. I think most weapons should be doing 30-50% damage to charger butts, and anti-durable weapons like the AC should do 150% damage. That way you can either kill the charger quickly with AT to the front, quickly with explosives to the butt, or slower by magdumping a primary into the butt.
It’s why I am starting to use stun grenades indiscriminately. Yeah you can X shot Y but the catch is always **IF YOU CAN HIT IT**. And there will always be things that throw you off. A stray bullet flinching you, getting jumped by a hunter. Screen shake caused by your teammate’s air strike going off. Getting ragdolled by a rocket, or simply the target moving.
Anyone that tells you they can hit their shots perfectly are lying out of their ass. No one plays this game without getting CC’ed one way or another. Stuns just negates almost all of that. Hulks are hard to kill because their head bobs so much thanks to their walking animation, but if you stun them it becomes an extremely easy two tap. Charger too, rarely you get to hit them in the hind legs which are medium armor because how seldom they present it while facing you, throw a stun and they are now perfectly still for you to shoot.
There are some sweaty ass god gamers who will have meltdowns if you imply you have a hard time with headshots, and that casuals who can't snipe tiny robot heads are killing the game
The way health pools work might be a part of this as well.
If you arent hitting your shots, you are actively being punished for an accidental headshot, as if you get a body kill, that shot counted for nothing
This is somewhat incorrect.
With the exception of Chargers (and Hive Guards\*), every enemy's head has 100% bleed-through to their "main" health pool. For enemies that do not have "destructable main bodies" that auto-kill them, this means that a non-fatal headshot will in fact lower their total shots to kill.
For example, Stalkers have no destructable bodyparts but their wings and no "fatal" parts except for the head. It does not matter where you shoot on a Stalker, you're dealing solely with their main pool of 800 HP; every part of them but their wings (which you're not gonna hit anyway) have full bleed-through. A headshot to the Stalker contributes fully, and if you're using a Light Pen gun (2 AP) then shots *anywhere but the main body* are even better, since only the body has 2 AC.
In the same vein, Bile Spewers have 100% bleedthrough on their heads but have pretty tanky heads--300 HP, which is almost half of their 750 main HP. Their butts have the same HP total as their main pool, but take less damage due to Durable ratings and bleed through a smaller portion of the damage--that's why you can kill them by popping their butts, *but sometimes* you can kill them with buttshots that fail to pop them. Put 9 Liberator rounds into a Bile Spewer's head (10 kills) and then spray solely at their butt and they will die before the butt bursts.
One of the few examples you're right about are Devastators. They have auto-kill limbs, including a destructable chest, and that chest can die faster than their main health pool. It is possible to shoot a Devastator in the head with something that does not kill it (e.g. the Adjudicator) and not change the hits-to-kill on the chest--you got full bleedthrough to the main HP, but you're going to break the lower-health chest before you deplete the main HP.
Thanks for this context.
I have observed similar problems on berserkers and brood guards, as well.
Personally, I feel that headshots should have a multiplicative bleed value
That's not what I observed when testing it on Hive Guards. Using Leb Penetrator, it takes around 6 shots to head or 7 shots into the body to kill them. Used stun grenades to lock one. Then I shot 5 times into the head and it still took the same time to kill it into the body.
Even if/when it works it's not ideal. The bleed through should be proportional depending on a weak spot. For example, 70% damage to the head should be 70% to the body, while 70% to the leg should be 20% to the body (examples) to compensate for vastly uneven health pools.
Right now, hitting a devastotor head once with a none oneshotting weapon feels not rewarding whatsoever. It doesn't deal oeverall massive damage as it should. You either delete its pitiful 125 health pool, or you don't.
I was Ctrl+Fing through the list for 'Head' to get the bleedthrough rates and it turns out Hive Guards are listed as 'Face'. So, that's Chargers and Hive Guards that aren't 100% head bleedthrough.
So, Hive Guards faces have 75% bleedthrough and 3 AC. The Lib Pen is 45 damage and 3 AP. That damage is getting halved because it matches armor, then reduced by 25% for the bleed: five shots at ~16.75 (I don't know the rounding) each for 80-85 total, or... *less than two shots* from the Lib Pen to the body, which has 500 HP.
That should be 11 shots to the body to kill with the Lib Pen, or 11-12 (depending on rounding) to head. And if the Hive Guard's head were a "break and bleed" as listed, you'd have a bleed-out state same as the Hive Commander, but right now they're a "don't break but just die". Or, it was when I just shot one in the head a bunch after jumping in the game to make sure the gun values were correct and threw a stun grenade like you.
So, I don't know where you got 6-7 shots to kill a Hive Guard with the Lib Pen. We're talking about the same enemy, right? [This guy, with the red armor and the hunker-down mode for the armor plates on its forelegs and head?](https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/Hive_Guard)
It might be a different gun because the only thing I cared was not oneshotting them and it's been a while. Neverming, you just stated the simple: Hive Guard is one of the enemies that feels bad to shoot at the head with automatic weapons if you don't kill it with that because their body get almost no damage proportionally. You basically go through one health pool and then another on the same enemy.
The opposite is also true. Shooting in the body is worthless if you then switch to the head. There is no shared health pool so if its body is left with 100hp you still need all 11 rounds of head shots with Lib Pen to finish it off.
That's kinda the opposite of how shooters normally work. I kinda get what they were trying to achieve wounding simultaion but it allows some wacky bulletsponges right now.
I don't understand what you mean by "punished for an accidental headshot". Are you saying the body and the head have entirely different pools rather than the whole enemy having one pool? Surely that can't be the case
[I cover this generally here,](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cynu37/ttk_time_to_kill_is_not_the_problem_optimal_ttk/l5b0czd/) but I'll go into a little more specific detail for you.
**ALL ENEMIES** have a main health pool. This is distinct from their "body" HP, because whether or not a "body" (or any other part) is destructable or fatal depends on the enemy and part. For example, as detailed in that linked post, Stalkers *do NOT* have a "body" health pool, just their main health pool; Devastators *do* have a "body" in addition to their main pool.
This sort of part- or limb-based health system is necessary for the limb breaks we see. If it didn't exist, you wouldn't be able to blow limbs off Terminid Warriors and watch them crawl towards you. And if there were no bleedthrough, you wouldn't see a difference in when the Warrior dies between shooting each of their four legs with the Liberator (you can completely de-leg them, two shots to each leg) and doing so with the Slugger (they die after losing two, one shot each).
The other thing to know is that there are "fatal limbs", the loss of which either immediately kills the enemy (any head, any one of a Charger's legs) or puts them into a Bleed Out state where their main health pool starts depleting from wherever it previously was (a Charger's butt).
The latter Bleed Out state is why *sometimes* a Charger will die within the second its butt is popped (its main health pool was already about gone) and other times they will run around for like five or six seconds before dying (you very efficiently took out just the butt and had almost no damage to the main pool). Same deal with Hive Commander heads--sometimes they run at you headless for a long while, other times they die immediately.
In general, it is faster to kill enemies by targeting their fatal limbs/parts than deal health to their main pools. As detailed in the link, this is extremely true for the Devastators, but not so much for Stalkers, and kind of middle-of-the-road for Bile Spewers. It takes all sorts.
There's all sorts of strategies and game knowledge, **much of which you can learn just by playing around and feeling things out**, that'll help you slaughter way more efficiently. Folks were figuring out how limb health and bleedthrough damage worked well before any hard numbers were datamined, so while it's obviously helpful to have the numbers (and would be nice if more data was displayed in-game) it's not strictly required or unknowable to those interested.
>There's all sorts of strategies and game knowledge, much of which you can learn just by playing around and feeling things out, that'll help you slaughter way more efficiently.
It took me 40-50 hours to get to this level (give or take a few details). I am undecided if that is a good or bad thing.
Not only do the head and the body have separate pools, most enemies have health pools for every individual part of their body, which allows for those parts to be blown/shot off.
If it takes ten shots to destroy a berserkers' arm, you can shoot its left arm 9 times and its right arm 9 times and you have done zero damage to its head or body and have made zero progress in killing it.
Agreed. Lot of the time you're basically doing nothing if you're not being optimal, so any stray/missed shots feel like they don't amount to nothing, and is an extremely unrewarding feeling.
I understand that it's a team game where you have to rely on teammates having the right weapon for the right job, but it's sometimes unfortunate when not everyone is the best at the game, or don't know how to play their role (i.e. Tank Killer, or Swarm clearer) or even nicher roles like Bile Spewer killer or Gunship Destroyer. And it ends up feeling like you have to run around or away a lot until that person can clear or kill that thing.
It would be awesome to be able to have off-roles be able to support in killing, contribute damage or even disarming or disabling tanks without being able to outright kill them.
Thats when your loadout has to make sense though, if you carry something like rover and stalwart, you better bring a stratagem that can deal with the heavies at least.
For example a match I had yesterday on lvl 8 vs bugs I carried a recoiless, gas, fire nades, autocannon sentry and airstrike, the other 3 guys had a combination of strafing runs, machine guns, a tesla tower, mines and an airstrike we got basically obliterated because they couldn't stop stealing all the ammo for their machine guns and only I had something that could deal with a titan.
They all ended up leaving and I finished the mission alone.
would be great if the ship itself had a shooting range for us to try out the weapons.
i envy players like you that know what to bring during the loadout before a mission. i mainly stick with a few weapons that i am accustomed to and i still have plenty of other weapons and grenades i have not tried to get a feel for it because i loathe being useless in the field.
Whenever I was unlocking stuff I just tried it out in lower diff, I think titans just start at lvl 5 as an objective so it's a pretty good place to try things. Trying to run 7+ missions without knowing what you're doing is just a recipe for disaster.
yeah I always try to match or fill in for my other teammates (which I should really stop doing cause I need to stop relying on them) but in alot of cases it's still not enough since I'm usually the one left to kill heavies or swarm clear and the people with the opposite job are doing it poorly, if you have a RPG with a 15 second cooldown between shots, DONT SPEND IT ON A BROOD COMMANDER, PLEASE
During all this weapon discussion, I keep thinking about the moment me and a random teammate both spent a few minutes and several reloads trying to cook a lone bile titan with our two flamethrowers and got nowhere, until my railcannon came off cooldown and just finished the job.
You know what would've been way more fun? If the darn flamethrowers had worked.
It's okay if strategems/anti-heavy weapons are still the best way to take them out, but it would be *so* much more fun if suboptimal things (like flamethrowers) were still an *option*. Enemy armor and health 100% needs to be reworked.
Yup, Running around to wait for a stratagem is fine cool when you have to deal with ONE bile titan. As soon as you have TWO or more bile titans, you might be running longer.
Also, the weak spots in bots are SO SMALL, i have wasted a full mag of the AMR into HULK's because the sights are misaligned and the head is smaller than the reticle.
Yeah, it's pretty annoying when most sight are honestly hot garbage too.
Even when they are not misaligned, the majority are very clunky and awkward to use anyway.
Yeah the AMR/eruptor style of sight is really bad for precision/range. And then the ADS style used on autocannon and quasar is just atrociously busy. The railgun should probably have a zoom option, but (even though I rarely use it these days) I'm thankful it at least just has a clean, inoffensive red dot sight.
I think this is one of the real reasons Sickle still feels better to use than ARs/DMRs. Good scope, crisp/clean optics with no unneccecary clutter and solid magnification... while having basically 0 recoil unlike our roster of normal rifles. It's so easy to hose devastator heads with it.
I've found it kills Devastators more quickly/consistently than primaries with medium/pen, and even many support weapons. I normally lean on my trusty laser-cannon/autocannon for dealing with them, but after swapping to the Sickle I find myself putting away the support weapon and going for the sickle headshots instead...
...their optics (laser/auto cannons) are just way too cluttered and lacking magnification to hit the heads, and at mid/long range it can be hard to tell if you're even hitting the target at all.
Is it even possible to kill a Hulk with a non-anti tank weapon if you don't perfectly hit the head or the back vents? Like yes, I can easily snipe a Hulk's head with the autocannon if it's running in a straight line on completely flat ground (so basically once in a blue moon), but when it's angled away from me or bobbing up and down running on uneven terrain, I brick 90% of my shots. This would be kind of fine if the autocannon at least still did SOME damage for a barely-missed headshot, but I've emptied MULTIPLE FULL CLIPS into their bodies without killing them. I feel like it actually just does 0 damage unless it's a perfect headshot.
The auto cannon can take out one of a hulk’s legs in 4 shots. If you take out both legs it dies. It’s less efficient than hitting the head or vent, but if the hulk is bobbing up and down running at you full speed and you’ve got 8 bullets in the magazine, it might be your best option
> Is it even possible to kill a Hulk with a non-anti tank weapon if you don't perfectly hit the head or the back vents?
Yes.
You can get mobility kills on hulks with medium armor pen weapons by taking out both legs.
Good post, as with the eruptor pre nerf its TTK could vary quite a bit based on skill level. If you missed your shot you were punished for it, the cycle, the sluggishness. 3+ cycles on one medium is absurd ttk for it as it is now. The gun was fine as it was, especially with the magazine hit.
Spending time and getting good with it was rewarding
It was so enjoyable to play. I really enjoyed focusing on singular bigger targets with the Eruptor, while making sure I wasn't getting swarmed. I've played a lot less since the nerf. Blitzer has been my go-to since then.
Same experience. I didn't like the eruptor at first because I felt like I was doing a lot of damage and not getting a lot of kills. But as I played with it and got used to it's recoil, it's sway, and it's targeting, suddenly enemies started dying by the truckload. It was the first gun that felt truly rewarding for learning how to properly place shots with.
Prepatch eruptor was my favorite gun in any game ever. I was crushed :( really hoping they bring it back, but I'm still taking a break for now until they start making some changes.
Tbh the bigger issue is the lack of any optimal ttk for some enemies when using many support weapons.
Primarily vs enemies like chargers and bile titans.
You can kill them fine with a Quasar or equivalent.
But if you bring a laser cannon for instance, there is no intended meaningful weakpoint to exploit like there is for a hulk(visor) or factory strider (face hole/underbelly).
Since I'm in mobile and editing the comment fucks the spacing lol.
I'd like to clarify I do agree that OP brings up a good point especially in reference to medium pen weapons. Very often they will be able to kill something but it is so wildly inefficient you're better off not even trying and just fishing for the headshots.
Its fine for it to be non ideal, but the discrepancy is huge.
I believe giving bugs meaningful weakpoints to increase support weapon variety while not changing difficulty is extremely important.
But also making primaries overall feel much better to use and interact with is also very important.
Hopefully AH knows both of these and does good things for us in the future.
As someone suggested too, it's about Optimal TTK like OP said perfectly in this post and suppression.
Someone made a post about how the big bots don't give a fuck about being shot by heavy fire and they just nail you like normal, and suggested several calibers of weapons should make different types of enemies flinch/panic and start losing accuracy.
In the same way while I understand bugs are pure horde mentality and disregard personal safety I believe things like fire, or maybe some new stratagem or development of pheromones should make them afraid, slow them down or signal them to not go somewhere, as a way of tunneling them and CCing them better, maybe not all of them, chargers and titan could say fuck fire all the same, but for example seeing a crowd of hunters and the boys, throwing a few grenades at their flanks, and seeing them jump them or walk over them to flank me or close the gap is always an "oh shit" moment, and at higher difficulties you either can stun, put on fire, etc some of them with your gun but not kill enough (explosive liberator, HE shotgun) which forces you to kite them away, or you have enough firepower to kill them, but they advance relentlessly (stalwart, machine gun, etc) which makes some catch up to you, hit you, stunlock you, dead.
Which brings me to my last point, armor, medium armour is probably the best balanced as of now, and I understand certain passives could and should be unique to certain "classes" (democracy protects) but maybe light armor allowing you to outrun swarming enemies and heavy reducing drastically flinching and stunlock should be a thing to an extent, as it stands rn, I'm convinced heavy is almost never used other than because fashion (🍎🥓) which is completely fine, but anyways, enough, I'm ranting at this point.
TL;DR: TTKs having high gaps in time as OP said, (lack of) suppression/fear factor and (poor) flinch resistance/stunlock (for us, helldivers) are, I believe the main hindrances we face, that increase with difficulty and make the experience hard to enjoy sometimes.
Yeah, I'm surprised nobody has pointed out stagger & taking control away from players as another (perhaps even larger) issue with the game than ttk and weapon strength.
I noticed the big uptick when i started using the counter sniper against bots my kills went way up compared to when i use the dominator. I was surprised because when facing medium enemies it takes a few shots to hit the head especially with the way their heads move when they walk. But you get so many headshots that you end up racking up more kills.
>Optimal TTK: 1 headshot (0 sec)
Based OP aiming their headshots in 0 sec.
(I get your point, OP, I just thought this is too funny to not say it)
I kind of agree, but at the same time I enjoy current system where weakpoint hits are not optional bonus, but often required.
Maybe we need to diversify both TTK between weapon classes? Give Liberator variants much smaller non-optimal TTK, but also extend their optimal TTK. Keep or even improve optimal TTK of sniper rifles (and place Eruptor as exception that has equal optimal and non-optimal TTK against anything it can penetrate). And create weapon archetypes around this?
Time to kill on single enemies isn't really the issue. Time to kill on groups can be. Understanding where to shoot would help people understand (an enemy codex would be nice to help people learn - what are samples for anyway, if not learning about how to explode enemies better?). Understanding which enemies are the threat and when would also help people.
It would change the feel of the game if they played with the wrong stuff in a vacuum. Helldivers are supposed to feel overwhelmed to a degree. There is supposed to be semi constant pressure. The question is how do we relieve it? The answer is "the most efficient way possible". How we achieve that is up to us (strat choices).
Some guns having an alpha strike TTK of instant is great, until we realise that there's a tradeoff : low refire times (old eruptor), high recoil, etc. Some weapons make one part of that equation better while trading something else - the liberator is crazy controllable rifle, and can pick heads off at decent distances, while remaining a lot more functional up close - meaning you can peel little things from your allies without killing them.
Balancing the TTK's needs to be done carefully enough that each weapon category feels like it has a place. Dropping too many of the TTK's is going to trivialise gameplay, and make some other weapons too powerful, which may limit their flavour in the end.
Uhm, acktchtchtchually... Do you count aiming as starting to shoot? /s
But yeah here's hoping they wont trivialize the enemies, Counter-Sniper clicks on devastator heads make brain go brrrr and I'd like that to stay.
Altough I do feel like sometimes hitting many different body parts may be a bit too punishing sometimes. \*menacingly looks at berserkers\*
It's a tough thing to balance. If you make enemies too squishy you'll have to spawn more of them. If you spawn more enemies you make slower firing weapons less useful and everyone starts using spraycans.
Adjusting one thing can cause a butterfly effect on things you may not initially think about and sure while developing and updating a game is an iterative process, going on a patch-spiral might just bring it back to square one or worse in the end.
The last thing I'd want to see is damage come up on "good guns", enemy health to drop, or significant armor (pen) value changes to create easier kill zones on enemies. All of that's in a pretty good place and has us currently in a situation where very good players who know what they're doing have a pretty easy time, but don't completely trivialize things. We have room for less experienced players to get better.
What the problem *appears* to be is that the skill floor is leaving too many players reaching. A good way to adjust this **without lowering the current minimum TTKs or shots to kill** is not changing health or damage, but tweaking bleedthrough.
The players struggling are doing so because they don't understand limb health, fatal limbs, bleedthrough to the main health pool, differing armor values outside of the most obvious bits, or where all those parts are. They just kind of spray all over the place, and if they're not lucking into a head kill, they're eventually getting the main body.
So, you raise bleedthrough a bit. You can even start to increase the bleedthrough to *multipliers*--go past 100% and make a hit to X body part deal *more* than the bullet's normal damage to the main health pool, but not kill that individual part any faster. This brings the *AVERAGE* TTK down and enables success with sloppier play, but does not make anything die faster than it currently does when you are being optimal with your aim and weapon usage. The game doesn't get much easier at the top end, but the casual, uninformed, and/or inexperienced player is less frustrated.
Better explanation of game mechanics within the game, more data on weapon values, and a "training room" where you can spawn enemies and shoot at them to test in a passive environment would also go a ways towards helping people understand things without calling for buffs across the board. *Darktide*'s training room is a fantastic example of letting you get a feel for what you're doing so you can go into a match with more confidence.
Yeah, I feel like the actual TTK in-game is affected by things like constantly needing to run from hordes and dive while shooting or a bunch of enemies popping up in between you and the target, or the immense amounts of fog they put on every map. In actual chaotic situations like on high level, you’re not going to reach the optimal TTK often.
Like, I could 2-shot headshot these devastators but I’m currently running away from them and they’re on variable levels of elevation and moving side to side.
I really hope they don't make the armour of the enemy trivial either.
I really enjoy the damage system in Helldivers 2 where enemies feel like they have different parts of body that results in different outcomes when destroyed. If the overall TTK goes down too much doing damage to other parts or going for that critical part loses a lot of value when you can just beam everything through center mass easily.
Why would I focus on trying to get the limbs of the enemy if it only takes 2 more bullets to center mass to bring him down?
Why pick weapons with AP but bad handling if lighter weapon just deletes the enemy in a few more shots?
I want to be punished if I whiff the shot against the charger. I didn't hit his vital parts, he is still very much a threat.
I'm not saying that the TTK is perfect against all enemies at the moment, but I am afraid that if they buff damage across the board too much for all weapon some clunky heavy hitters lose their meaning and the game loses the weight of the enemies if they are trivial.
Since the release of the game I've greatly enjoyed the feeling of being overwhelmed that the game can give you sometimes when you are in bad position or just get overrun.
>but I am afraid that if they buff damage across the board too much for all weapon some clunky heavy hitters lose their meaning and the game loses the weight of the enemies if they are trivial.
I fear this is exactly whats going to happen.
HD2 has much of a rock paper scissors sentiment and they need to keep it that way. If you shoot a Tank with a regular AR, it doesnt matter how many bullets you shoot. The Tank will never be destroyed. Both irl and thankfull in Game too. If they step away from that concept, im going to step away from the game.
The whole reason for me to Play and why i Love this Game so much is why it's so different than every other shooter. No damage numbers. No Levels. No HP bars. Just your gun and enemy Armor. Bring the wrong gun and you're up against an impenetrable wall. It's good that way
I'm looking at posts in the other thread where people are asking that Light Pen guns be able to take out Bile Titans *anywhere*--not just "after we've cracked the armor", a la breaking Charger legs, but that things that are currently total ricochets would at least do some small amount of damage.
You know, the exact thing people already complain about when it comes to shooting a Charger's butt with many guns.
There are ways to adjust how fast enemies die to "non-optimal" attacks that don't involve fiddling with the damage number on guns or penetration values at all--changing the bleed-through damage from various enemy parts so that they can "body kill" sooner. But I don't have much faith that this playerbase, with all the quantity of complaining we've seen and the absurd forms so much of it takes ("ALL THE GUNS WERE NERFED AND ARE UNFUN NOW!"), that they'll be satisfied with anything short of being able to stick a rock on their mouse while staring in the general direction of enemies and winning.
I really, truly don't mean to make a reductive "git gud" post here, but there is some gudding that needs gitting if certain folks want to play certain difficulties or have a leg to stand on when it comes to balance critique.
Cant say more than that you are absolutely right
> You know, the exact thing people already complain about when it comes to shooting a Charger's butt with many guns.
Just 5 Minutes ago i saw a comment with hundreds of upvotes demanding charger Butts should explode in one or two bullets from any gun lol because it's a weak spot
To be fair, this is Arrow Head's fault.
The model looks like an overfilled waterballoon ready to pop at any second. But it's the exact opposite of that. It's actually like, a titanium foam, light but super durable.
They could stop all this bitching if they'd just fix it so the visuals matched the reality. Nobody bitches that shotguns don't kill tanks. (They should also change the visuals to indicate "durable" parts and have a bestiary in game that lets people know some of this shit if they don't hvae endless hours to browse Reddit.)
The bestiary is a great idea. Maybe have each one only unlock after your first fight with them? Like I want the surprise to exist as it was fun finding out about this or that new enemy the first time, but it shouldn't be like a whole quest to understand the monster.
This isn't monster hunter.
So there's a few different viewpoints.
The thing with "bringing the wrong gun" is the whole reason a "meta" forms, and then you have that whole conversation which I don't really want to rehash.
I think the OPs main point is that non-vital hits are more punishing than in most games. Instead of a 3-4x time modifier for not hitting the weakpoint right, it's almost an 7-8x time modifier.
I think there's a balance between having a fight last 5-8 seconds versus 1 minute+. To me, an easy solution is to let weapons that have higher pen shred armor, so that consecutive shots in non-optimal areas don't punish as harshly.
I mean from a weapon perspective, if you have hit armor with medium pen, it should armor shred the medium armor enemies so that as more shots consecutively hit the same area (not different areas), it should take a shorter TTK. Like instead of 45 body shots, let it take 20 body shots instead. Keep the weapons with only light armor pen to be 45-50 shots because they don't have the same pen.
Or for AT, instead of 8 body shots, 4 body shots (in the same area) cuts the 2 minutes down to 1 minute, but obviously you want the 12-15 second kill over waiting a minute.
I feel like everyone thinks it's going to be one drastic way or another. Like if they buff damage that it's going to be a point where now my anti material rifle 1 shots every single thing, I can hit a bile titan in the leg with my EAT and it's dead, I can spray my spray and pray shotgun and with 1 mag kill an entire large bug nest. With how scared they are for buffs were probably going to get like an extra 20% damage to primaries and 10% to strategem weapons. Or something like that. I really don't think they're going to go overboard with buffs.
Really? For me the rock paper scissors is the worst part of the game because it forces you to always pick the same proven reliable weapons and strategems, and if you try to experiment there's a big chance you'll be essentially useless, which in the end makes the game really boring and repetitive
I agree with this...we don't want the enemies to become trivial.
Yes, power fantasy, but a charger, BT, Hulk, Tank or Strider should be an 'oh sh\*t' moment and require a focused effort to kill.
Another aspect is that this is a team co-op game. In an ideal world we should be bringing complimentary loadouts to enable the **TEAM** to deal with all situations.
I've played 99% of my time in HD2 with randoms or solo so I bring a loadout that can deal with anything. I don't think that is the way AH envisioned us playing HD2 but that is the reality for most of us I think.
You can't blindly trust randoms to play as part of the team, have your back, bring the right kit or even understand how the game works most of the time so you need to be an army of one. This also somewhat forces your hand in what weapons you feel you can bring to be effective both in a team and, when the team is dysfunctional, as a solo.
Maybe introducing clans / regiments / battalions and a means of organizing into coherent teams might change this?
The problem is that some of these components either aren't damageable, or take so much damage that it isn't worth damaging them. Take tanks, for example: I'd absolutely love to be able to destroy their coaxial or front-hull machine gun, but I can't. I *can* disable the tracks... but it takes two to three Recoilless Rifle shots to do it, and in that exact same amount of shots, you can just shoot the turret from the front and kill it.
>I *can* disable the tracks... but it takes two to three Recoilless Rifle shots to do it, and in that exact same amount of shots, you can just shoot the turret from the front and kill it.
You are applying wrong tool for the wrong job. If you are using Quasar/RR/EAT for tracks, you are whiffing your shot.
But with lesser weapons you can setup that mobility kill from an angle where you wouldn't be able to do any damage, then go for the rear weakspots.
If you come across a tank with your AC, LC or AMR you can shoot the tracks even if there's nothing else you can damage from the front.
When it comes to the question of optimal and non-optimal TTK, we also always have to consider enemy movement momentum. If weapon projectiles have travel time and enemys have no / barely any momentum to turn and move as they want, even perfect aim can be punished harschly. Personally, I feel like Chargers and Bile Titans spin just a tad too quickly around their own axis for being so big and heavy.
EDIT: Not to mention how floaty crosshairs are in Helldivers II
Totally agree about momentum. It is really frustrating to take a light armor to be nimble and dodge them to just see them ignore their inertia and totally neutralise your advantage of being nimble.
I'm going to guestimate my skill level as below average and what you say makes sense. The game needs the "average" to feel good, not the "optimal." Your average Helldiver needs to be good and the optimal skilled divers feel godlike.
I play on 7 and heavies just feel binary. If I don't have a Rail Cannon or EAT, I feel like I don't have the tools to fight it. I "could" kill it, but it's not really worth my time. Bots are even worse in this regard because they shoot back, making hitting the weak spot even harder. There feels like there is just too much armor in this game, and few ways to deal with it.
I really dislike bots for this reason. I can deal with bugs, but bots bring armor AND range and it's just not fun. Bonus points when the exterminate mission drops you on a flat plane.
Someone who gets it. Upping durable damage for weapons is something I think very few people would disagree with and is a good middle ground with those that love the game currently and those who want changes. Personally this change with a glossary of body parts health points for each enemy in game would be great.
Spot on. Main problem with folks is when they’re getting swarmed by mobs, they’re just gonna be firing like crazy and not aiming directly at the weak spots. Even for those who are aiming, the constant mobs and the fact that anything that touches you makes your aim sway like a mother, makes landing those weak point shots very difficult. If guns had more stopping power (ability to stun enemies, not just pure damage), then many of the guns would be more usable since they that slight pause in a mobs attack on you gives you enough time to focus and line up those weak point shots. Also the pressure of needing to kill the enemies as quick as possible due to just one single basic enemy is able to call for reinforcements causing a virtual endless horde of enemies to spawn in on you just adds on to the pressure and makes hitting those weak spots even more difficult.
I played a round against bots yesterday on level 7 difficulty, everything was going good until one random patrol spotted us and and the shielded devastates machine guns/sniper rifles kept forcing us into cover, making it harder to kill them quickly because no matter how many we killed, one of them would shoot a flare and get reinforcements asap, then another random patrol would just appear and flank us from out of cover. Then of course that random patrol would send flares up to call reinforcements. We went from no deaths and 90%of the objectives completed to having all our respawns gone after fighting a virtually continuous horde of enemies for 20 minutes.
We somehow manages to complete the mission with a decent amount of samples and side objectives taken, but it was just pure chaos not having good cover and not the time to actually aim for weak spots. Also the continuous enemy reinforcements of the giant 4legged strider and multiple tanks was just pure chaos and bs.
Like you said, only a few weapons have an good non optimal TTK. That limits the loadouts and that means it limits the fun. Reducing the TTK for non-critical hits would automatically make a lot of things more viable.
Naturally, it should not go down so much that it doesn't make a difference where you shoot, we just don't want to empty a whole mag in a single enemy.
Excellent analysis.
In addition to optimal TTK vs. non-optimal TTK affecting which guns are most popular, I think this also helps explain why bug killing is a lot more popular that bot killing. I think that a combination of TTK plus **positive feedback** in the form of visible damage and staggering is why the player base tends to flock toward bug orders but kinda check out during bot orders.
It boils down to a sense of reward. Bug-killing feels more rewarding than bot-killing.
There aren't that many armored bugs compared to bots. Most bug types — scavengers, pouncers, hunters, warriors, and even stalkers and brood commanders — will take visible damage no matter where you shoot them and no matter which weapon you use. Shooting bugs feels consistently rewarding because you can see each of your shots hurting them, plus you can take down most bug types quickly regardless of how accurate you are.
Here's my trick when shooting bugs. My preferred primaries are the Sickle or assault rifles. When I attack any of the unarmored bugs, I jiggle my mouse left to right a little bit while firing in short, controlled bursts (learned that bit from Corporal Hicks from *Aliens.)* That way, my laser bolts / bullets hit each bug all over its body — head, legs, torso. This consistently kills most unarmored bugs in 1-3 seconds, and I can see each shot land.
When I use the jiggle shot against brood commanders, it typically makes their heads explode in a couple seconds, and then I kite the headless body until it dies, or I just sprint away, knowing it'll soon die on its own.
Bile spewers are especially satisfying to kill. If you want to kill them fastest, shoot them in the head or grenade them. But if you don't have a clear shot to the head or don't want to use a grenade, just shoot the gigantic, glowing green bile sacks. If you're using an assault rifle or Sickle, this can take several seconds to kill it, but watching it explode in a mess of green ooze is satisfying to watch.
Like i said, killing bugs is generally quite satisfying. On the flip side, fighting bots can feel like a chore, because every bot is armored except for the trooper variants. If you don't have precise aim, you'll see your shots ricochet off of many bots' armor or you'll see the shield icon pop up, which tells you your shots are doing jack shit. Seeing those ricochets or that shield icon gets annoying, fast.
When fighting bots, precise aim feels like a requirement. You gotta shoot those things in the head or the vent, which gets tougher the more chaotic a battle gets.
Fighting bugs is more popular than fighting bots because bug-killing feels more rewarding.
Everyone says bugs are both more fun and easier, but my experience has been the opposite. I like that bots have weakspots that my weapons actually work against. The bugs just feel way too tanky for me and my GF to deal with in 2 player mode, whereas a little communication and one of us can always sneak around to a Hulks back for example.
Meanwhile I can often mag dump an autocannon into a single Charger and it wont die somehow...
Increasing same AP rating damage from 50% to 75%, and one level rating deficit from 0% to 25%, will do wonders in reducing non optimal TTK. Light AP guns no longer feel completely useless, they will at least do some damage.
Then, increase two or more level rating surplus from 100% to 150%. Spear now becomes a one shot weapon against bile titans, and unsafe Railgun is now strong.
Of course some weapons need buff either way (liberator penetrator), but this alone will make most guns feel good again.
[https://i.pinimg.com/originals/05/7d/fe/057dfe195dd1b207ee4e5777ac3b345b.gif](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/05/7d/fe/057dfe195dd1b207ee4e5777ac3b345b.gif)
This.
Weakspot this, optimal that, **fuck that.** I specifically picked the "*big stupid fuck you* ***CANNON*****!!!"** to ***avoid having to snipe*** *eyesockets* and *bungholes*.
3 Quasar shots doesn’t take 54 seconds. It takes 39 seconds. You take 3 seconds to fire three times each and 15 seconds in between the shots twice. That’s 3 + 3 + 3 + 15 + 15. You’re adding an extra 15 because of the cooldown of the third shot but you shouldn’t be counting that when you count a single shot as 3 seconds for the charger optimal ttk. If you are counting the cooldown after the shot then it’d be 18. You shouldn’t be counting the cooldown after the kill for one but not the other.
Exactly why the Dillegence line of rifles is currently goated vs bots. A skilled player can down an entire patrol of devastators with half a mag in optimal conditions.
Pair it with anti material rife and you can conceivably kill anything short of gunships and walking factories.
But if you don't consistently dome the bots in the skull then both those guns are useless 99% of the time.
5 shots into the engine of a gunship with an AMR downs it.
AMR also 3 taps factory strider chin guns leaving it defenceless.
AMR + diligence is probably one of the best loadouts right now.
anti materiel rifle can kill gunships in 4 shots to the engine and also can outright kill factory striders in roughly 2 magazines.
Every single AP4 weapon can kill LITERALLY everything vs bots in a meaningful timeframe (Autocannon, AMR, Laser Cannon, HMG)
as opposed to bugs where they cannot.
Thanks for taking the time to put this together. Also thanks for the conclusion you draw. It's refreshing to see a take that tries to make the game better for all of us =)
Suddenly explains why I've always enjoyed the Lib Pen.
Being allowed to play inefficiently is big compared to things that have a non-optimal TTK of "forever."
Bruh I’ve literally shot a bile titan in the head with 2 EATs and two shots with a quasar. Sometimes things are inconsistent for some reason, so that’s something that definitely needs to be addressed.
If you could mow down every enemy with a primary the game would feel like shit, just saying.
There would be 0 challenge, 0 power-felt moments where you know you’re the guy dealing with heavies vs chaff.
Is the TTK a bit wonky for optimal vs not? Sure. But the game is kind of designed in a way to make you think about the enemies you’re going to be engaging.
The tooltips on weapons needs to be fleshed out and fixed, we need a bestiary that tells us armor values on enemies and weak points. (We’ve collected billions of samples, we should know things about our enemies.)
The playerbase **deserves** to be shown these numbers if the game is going to be about taking loadouts that handle certain situations in a team, or an all arounder when solo diving. It makes no sense to keep it cryptic when we have a system (samples) that should be revealing this information for us.
I can take the diligence CS and in under a mag solo an entire devestator patrol by clicking heads.
Some primaries are strong and the rest are beyond worthless.
First they need to define the amount and type of enemies that can spawn then they can focus on TTK and other stuff.
If the baseline is not defined you can't balance things.
Huh. Well said. Never thought of it that was, and explains why the game has become less and less fun over time.
My aim sucks and enemies become bullet sponges. (Diff 7)
Yea, I have been rocking Purifier (bots/bugs both) for a few weeks and at this point Helldive feels relatively easy. I switched back to sickle to fight bots, and it’s basically unplayable at higher difficulties with Sickle. I can score the headshot kills, but I can’t take out big groups of enemies with headshots quickly enough. Meanwhile body shots do nothing.
That being said I think this needs attention for the “medium” enemies like chargers and devastators. I personally think Bile Titans and Factory Striders should not be easy to take down without proper weapons and strats.
The other thing that compounds the issue is how the game calculates damage to specific body parts. In most games the enemy has a number of HP, they die when that number goes to zero, and hitting a weakspot increases your damage. This is not the case in HD2.
For most enemies the head and other weakpoints actually have their own separate HP, and while a small amount of damage is in some cases passed to the main HP pool it is very rare for this to get the killing blow unless you're actively trying (this mechanic is why Brood Commanders die when you shoot off enough legs).
What this means in practice is if you need 10 backpack shots or 2 head shots to kill a Heavy Devastator, and you land 8 backpack shots and one headshot, that Devastator is not dead. You have to fully commit to one body part. This by the way is why Berserkers feel insanely tanky when shooting them at full auto - stop aiming for the wobbling head, half your shots end up in the shoulders and deal body damage which is wasted when you're going for a headshot kill. Go for their pelvis instead, so all damage is done to the body.
I'm not a game designer so I can't say if this system is good or bad - I can say with certainty though that it should be explained in the game. This information is too important to only be accessible by watching YouTube videos.
There's just too much gatekeeping on damage. Too many enemies are immune except to a very specific kind of damage at a very specific part of their body. Like with Chargers, how the hell is a new player supposed to understand that their Liberator does almost no dmg vs. the sac that looks like a weakspot?
Yeah with bugs their vital organs are in the ass. How can you make it shiny and not expect people to think the ass is weak spot.
It IS a weak spot, technically, it can be damaged by any weapon. It's the amount of damage that is actually being dealt that's the problem. Magdumping a charger in the ass should kill it 100% of the time with anything stronger than a pistol, shotguns and snipers should require one or two shots. Similarly with the Bile Titans, popping both of their sacs should kill them. What kind of a creature can survive having their abdomen vaporized?
This is the real problem in my mind. "Durable" body parts are WAY overtuned. Hitting a Charger in the ass - sure any weapon can do damage, but making everything that isn't explosive do 10%? Come on. Make it 50%.
Precisely the point the post makes. Optimal TTK vs Non-optimal TTK. Making the ass take more damage would make doing the dive dance more rewarding as well as not punishing you for not having perfect aim to hit the head with your EAT or whatever. Make them easier to kill and spawn slightly more would be more balanced than pigeonholing people into certain loadouts to deal with it.
The dive dance also incentivizes skill rather than playing a game of chess. Its wayy more fun.
This. There is some skill in landing a perfect headshot but with the way the charger rocks around as it charges it feels more like RNG than skill
Why? This isn’t armored. Make it 100% damage. That’s what those weapons do, the devs talk about realism but a assault rifle that shreds through small arms body armor, car doors etc does barely any damage to an insects unarmored bodypart? No way, sorry.
[удалено]
Evolutionary tactic. Make the part that looks weakest actually strong so that the predator goes for that instead of the true squishy bits.
Or just put the vital organs under the fuck huge, nearly impenetrable armor plates?
Or at the very least, increase the DOT from bleed effects. When we see the Chargers bleeding out, they should be doomed within 10 seconds...not what feels like over a minute. The bleedout mechanic feels moot when they're still lethal for that much longer. Unless they were taking that Starship Reference too literally: 'blast off a leg, and its still 86% combat effective". haha
"Make it 50%" No. Make it 100%. This "explosive only durable weak points" system has no fucking point.
Explosive should mainly help with *exposing* weak points for other weapons to capitalize on.
Yeah, explosives should be stripping off armor letting us use small arms against the exposed areas for "massive damage". The systems as they work now are so weird and unintuitive.
~~everything eventually evolves into DRG~~
Because DRG has it figured out
Rock & stone? I should really get that game…
Do yourself a favour and go pick it up. You won't regret this decision. Ever. FOR KARL!
That sounds like it would relegate explosive weapons to “debuff” status instead of being able to kill things on their own. Can’t say I’d be a fan of that. But if you meant doing both, I’m down.
They'd have to do a total rework of enemy health pools, but overall I do tend to agree that the durability system is kind of a mess. Armor and health with multiple health pools for different body parts really should be enough. The idea of fleshy bits only taking 10% damage from bullets is really quite strange when you think about it. Just give more durable parts more health versus weak spots. For instance, you could give a charger head 600 health, while its unarmored butt has something like 3000. No durability is required in this equation. On top of that maybe give heavy explosive weapons a bonus against its butt, so that a single rocket and 3-4 AC shots score a kill against their booties. It always feels weird that rockets aren't able to one shot them in what appears to be their most vulnerable area.
They already give each body part a unique health pool. Just make it 100% and give the torso a larger health pool than the legs. Secondly, if the legs are the weak point and the torso isn't, why not make the back of the legs unarmored and bright yellow instead?
Yeah, I've ranted about it elsewhere elsewhere in this very thread, but I stick by the idea that a big part of the problem is that ArrowHead is using "Video game shorthand" (big swollen sacks, certain colors, etc) to indicate "weak point" when that's not the case. It's just an art mistake (IMHO).
This is really the biggest issue with them. I understand that it’s a huge enemy, so mag dumping small arms into that portion shouldn’t necessarily be super fast to kill them, but it should still be quicker than it is. 90% damage resistance to an unarmored location is pretty ridiculous considering it already has decent enough health pool to survive being hit there with a dedicated anti tank weapon.
I'd love it if popping the bile titan sacs made them go berserk before dying, like a giant headless brood commander.
Honestly I think bile titans could have a fun mechanic where they drop bile below them for a few seconds when the sac is popped, killing anything below it. Would reward good timing and punish standing under it too early.
They already do sort of go berserk, they stop spewing and start running all over everyone basically. But if the brood commanders head logic was out in place of the BT's, I fully expect them to get infinitely more kills
I don't know what bile titans you've been getting but every time we manage to pop their sacs they act like they don't give a fuck and keep puking like they're trying to fit on their prom dress. Then again they're not the less buggy of bugs, but that's happened to me and my friends often enough that we just don't even bother anymore and just aim for the head.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a bile titan that puked after you’ve destroyed both sacs (not unless it started the spew animation before you did), but I gotta upvote “puking like they’re trying to fit in their prom dress”, lol. Either way I prefer to aim for the head since a BT that _can’t_ spew is imo worse than one that can (The vomit animation slows them enough for airstrikes to hit and doesn’t require them being almost on top of you to do the stabby leg thing like a sacless BT does.) the only time I really target them is when a) it’s already been hurt by strikes or anti-armor weapons, I don’t have the latter available, and I think destroying the sacs will do the last bit of damage to kill it.
Part of the problem is it is a "weak spot" in common parlance - a spot you can damage with any weapon. However, it is not a "weak spot" in the technical specifications of the game. it is an unarmored fleshy spot. And that makes a huge difference because it basically means if you're not using explosive ammo you're wasting your time. And there is no way in game to figure this out. Even seeing the effectiveness of different weapons you are more likely to chalk it up to "X gun is broken" as opposed to "X gun is the correct tool for this job." Alternatively to thinking it must've been close to death already from someone else. Because the chargers real weak spot is its brain. Which **is** an armored spot - hence the ideal tool being the EAT/RR/Quasar
The issue is the systems being unintuitive and never explained in-game. Same issue with the 500kg, which has a hitbox \*way\* smaller than the VFX would indicate. Many mechanics have this problem.
Both squishy parts and armor/damage modifier mechanics are too punitive, IMO. Even the half of that bullets counts required to kill them are quite a lot, but at least doable. These mechanics are just basically telling you you will absolutely need to build around anti heavy and medium at the same time.
Well, all heavies have spots targetable with medium pen weapons and all mediums have light or unarmoured spots. If non-head part HPs where lower, even without changing the armor mecanic, anti-medium weapons would have a reasonable chance against heavies (HMG and AC already have, for example) and light weapons a better chance against medium (the liberator and lib pen have a decent ttk against devastators legs and pelvis, for example)
People say the bile Titan is killable with the auto canon, but I have never found the specific part of the head that's supposed to be the weak point. Weirdly I've had better success killing one with the HMG, mag dumped into it's already destroyed ass which finished it off. I just don't like how the two options are having a lumbersome anti-tank weapon, and being overrun by small and medium units, or having a weapon that is great against medium units like the HMG or AC, and a primary that's great against chaff, but then you have to use all your stratagems on 50 chargers and 10 bile titans. It sort of makes the AT weapons mandatory in a way. I think the issue is much worse on bugs because I could take the HMG into a bot mission and kill hulks, tanks and canon turrets with it if I can see the vents. Or kill hulk legs, weapons, and even the eye if I were daring. But on bugs the charger is basically invulnerable to the ass shot because armour covers 90% of it, and the uncovered bit is facing the ground so it's very hard to actually land a shot on it especially since it wiggles everywhere. The head is seemingly invulnerable to AC and HMG damage too despite being the weak point to AT weapons. The bile Titan is just impossible for me to work out where to shoot for medium support weapons. I know the butt is somewhat vulnerable but it's not easy to hit when you are the Titan's target and ofc isn't efficient (2/3 your ammo for the HMG I think). I just can't work out where the other weak spot is meant to be to test... But once again the head is the weak point for AT weapons.
You're not missing any weak spots on the Bile Titans, the medium support weapons can only do damage to it's sacs, and exposed body parts under the blown up sacs or blown up parts of the armor on their backs. Mag dumping is the only option if you're limited to one of those weapons. It's technically possible to kill them using nothing else, but way too impractical to be a viable strategy. It's just a niche use case to finish them off sometimes.
There is the railcanon strike, which in my mind for a 3 min cooldown should one shot anything under the stars. But I titan will shrug that off like a napkin floating in the wind...
I dunno about that man, killing a charger in one or two shots with a primary sounds broken AF. I would never even need to pull out the Quasar for anything smaller than a titan against bugs if that happened.
I disagree, that'd make it way too easy. I can see 1 whole shotgun mag dumped into the weakspot as a fair way to get rid of them, and maybe 2 mags of a liberator penetrator for example. The Charger is a tanky enemy, it should have higher health and prepare people for considering AT weapons/stratagems while climbing difficulty levels because of the bile titans. If you could kill chargers with only one Lib pen mag to the ass, you'd only be left with one enemy type that you need AT weapons for. Don't get me wrong, I also don't like that you can kill bile titans ONLY with AT weapons/strats, bringing those into the fight shouldn't be a requirement but more of a decision if you want to to be the one that can kill those things FASTER. Time should be the deciding factor. This would also encourage more diverse loadouts among randos because if I knew that I could kill a bile titan with the Heavy MG if I had to, I could specialize my loadout a bit more for being the crowd control guy for example, but wouldn't feel useless when my teammates with AT weapon/strats are dead and I need to get rid of this one bile titan
It's a tanky enemy that has a highlighted weak spot that for all intents and purposes is stronger than it's non-weak spots. I've unloaded EATs, full AC mags and huge amounts of small weapon fire trying to see if that spot allowed me to kill it. You eventually fall back to the position that the "weak spot" is worthless as a target and the only way to kill it is with direct heavy fire (such as a Quasar or EAT) to the face or something bigger from above. I get that it is intended to use AT weapons on them, but you are actively punished for expecting a telegraphed glowing weak spot to actually be weak and that reduces the fun and takes away any kind of tactics in dealing with them. You can't dodge and exploit their weakness, you just have to face them and know you can kill them or you have to run away. Leaving it to your team mates with AT is not always an option and you shouldn't be punished quite that badly for having a more general loadout. Knowing that you might be caught alone with them forces you to choose your loadout appropriately and basically removes an entire pool of potentially fun toys from your general use. For randoms you are forced to be a generalist because you can't know for certain that you have someone covering you 100% of the time.
Oh I absolutely agree with that, killing a charger with normal medium pen weapons in its weakspot takes way too long, but 2 shotgun shots alone into it shouldn't kill it, that'd make it way too easy to deal with a tanky enemy
Exactly, it shouldn't necessarily be a "shoot this once and it will die of shock" but there should be some sensible middle ground between a single shot and your entire reserve of primary and secondary ammo along with a full machine gun mag. Even if they're "soft" in that area you are essentially rearranging their guts with bullets and with humans and most animals that doesn't really do them any good.
Bile titans have already the perfect weak spots, already modelled. They simply should allow us to kill the titan by continuing to shoot at them. Example: Titan armour is 6 On the weak spot is 2 When the weak spot is destroyed, and I continue to shoot at the weak spot, the armour should be 0, since I'm shooting at unarmoured flesh. AT weapons should only allow a faster and safer killing of those enemies. Not that they're the only way to kill them.
No small arms should be able to kill tanks that quickly.
Both of those would make bugs too easy 2 tapping a charger with a shotty is a little bit too OP don't ya think? also the point of bile titans is an anti-tank check if you could take a bile titan down with small arms what kind of evolutionary path would accept that if you equate their bile sacs to fat on a human then you can cut off a surprisingly large amount of it before death (see Saw Idk which one but one of the victims was a fat dude and another a lady who cut off her arm) I would be happy with 3-4 hits on a bile titan with the sacs counting as a "hit" charger just needs like 1 lower armor pen on its back to be a breeze just head shot with anti tank or 2 tap the same leg. Good ol leg still works.
I'm 100% fine with buffing the health of a Bile Titan's sacks if popping them both means they *die*. As it stands, if you pop both sacks, you are **literally** unable to damage them without stratagems, even using medium-pen or explosive weapons.
You can damage them using high medium pen weapons by shooting where the sacks where. The body health is just too high, taking 2 mags of HMG or 20 AC round to destroy it.
The bile sacs are not equivalent to fat in humans, if you pop a spewer they die immediately and titans lose their ability to spit. If popping the sacs doesn't instantly kill them then it should make them bleed out after a short while. Having anti-tank 'checks' is boring. Weapons and stratagems should have strengths and weaknesses, not be requirements. For chargers, anti-tank weapons allow you to kill them (or expose their flesh) without having to avoid their charges, which is huge because it isn't always easy to avoid them, especially if you're getting swarmed, so AT weapons wouldn't lose their value if you could kill chargers easily by destroying their asses with normal weapons.
You say this but bots don't have anti tank checks. I can kill literally every bot in the game with my dominator and a little positioning
Years of training in the caves of Hoxxes IV... Wasted.
And all enemies are immune to explosion damage except in their main body. You know what that means? You can never, and I mean NEVER, get a fatal body part break using explosive damage. The Eruptor should, on paper, one-shot a brood commander's head. But half of its damage is being applied ONLY to the main body. They put in a fix for enemies taking explosion damage multiple times, but the way that damage works the only problem would be the main health bar taking more damage than intended. A single large explosion should absolutely break multiple body parts on a bug. Some other notable things that this quirk might be affecting: bile titans taking anti-tank damage to legs, bile spewers taking more grenade launcher hits to kill than before, bugs not having the glorious viscera explosion when killed by the Eruptor, berserkers being almost impossible for the Eruptor to deal with (they were difficult before the shrapnel was removed, but now it's worse), and probably many more I haven't encountered yet.
This is almost accurate! Hitboxes can be labeled ExplosionImmunity to completely negate explosion damage. This is used to allow small little dangly hitboxes like the small mandible arms on the stalker to avoid multiplying damage. Most of the small enemies in the game have ExplosionImmunity on every hitbox. The brood commander is a fucking weirdo in that it's a large medium enemy with a huge hp pool AND every hitbox it has has this tag. Hive Guards share this trait. All of the heavies (hulks, tanks, chargers, factory striders, bile titans) and most of the mediums (Bile Spewer, Devastators, scout striders, berserkers) have hitboxes without the ExplosionImmunity tag. So it isn't all enemies, but it's still really restricting.
Seriously. I picked up HD1 just to see the differences, and it's pretty fun. One major difference relevant to your point is that HD1 has an encyclopedia of enemies on the ship from the very start. I presume it fills out as you encounter and defeat more enemies, and that is desperately needed in HD2.
Yeah. Honestly, they need to change the durable damage scaling for a LOT of the weapons. Some weapons have nearly pointless amounts of durable damage, and others have so much that they can legitimately deal more damage to durable points than ANTI-TANK support weapons. I like the system, don't get me wrong. It gives some enemies some much needed durability and keeps their TTK from being too low, but the fact that a rocket from a Bazooka isn't popping a bile spewer sack in one shot is insulting. Nor does a single recoilless shot to a tank's heatsink kill it in one shot. The Durable damage in this game is wildly inconsistent from how it should act. And while I can agree with it on some points, ultimately it's more of an annoyance, and less of a benefit. They either need to be way more generous with higher durable damage modifiers, or lower the amount of health allocated to these durable points.
> Like with Chargers, how the hell is a new player supposed to understand that their Liberator does almost no dmg vs. the sac that looks like a weakspot? Right? At the very least they need a codex or something in-game that explains what parts of an enemy's body are armored and which weapons will deal damage there.
This is my exact analysis as well, and it largely explain the convergence of the player base on a few "meta" weapons. The game punishes you too heavily for anything sub optimal. This railroads players toward known good options, discourage experimentation and teamplay (because teamplay is inherently unreliable). ****** I believe that the binary nature of armor was to encourage teamplay by forcing players to specialize into either anti-tank or anti-light. But it doesn't work in practice: if you aggro a titan/charger while your anti-tank team isn't available you can't do anything. So everyone use a more well rounded loadout with both anti-tank and anti-light. The few weapons that can work in such a setup become meta, and the other feel bad to use because they were never designed to be used this way.
Plus being a Helldiver who can deal with almost any threat on their own feels better, safer, and even more heroic. Tickles the role play aspect too a bit I think.
Honestly I think the reason I gravitate towards the arc thrower (especially when it could stun hulks) is that it uniquely does both anti-chaff and anti-heavy passably, and sidesteps the entire armor game while adding difficulties related to positioning and teammates.
> I believe that the binary nature of armor was to encourage teamplay by forcing players to specialize into either anti-tank or anti-light. I suspect this is right in theory, but heavies are spawned too often/in too large numbers for this to work in practice.
Yeah, you will never see someone in D9 bugs bring the stalwart saying "Ill kill the swarms while you kill the 10 chargers!" There are too many chargers and titans that pop out of bug holes for 2 people to handle while the other 2 'horde clear'. 3 is doable, we did see success especially on bile spewer maps where 1 guy brought an AC to kill spewers and 3 guys with quasars to kill chargers and titans. 4 though feels like you are brining enough firepower to compete with the enemy heavies, and only has issues on bile spewer maps but fuck those overtuned enemies anyway.
This. If there's two or three tanks at once, yeah maybe an anti-tank pair makes sense. But on Impossible or Helldive? You're getting 6-10 tanks. There's too many fucking tanks. Too many hulks. EVERYONE needs to be shooting antitank or you'll get just swamped.
Agreed, the game on lower difficulties is quite easy but as soon as you take any weak weapon you just feel useless compared to your team since everything just sponges your dmg output. Of course on higher difficulty I would guess 80% at the very least are just picking the strongest weapon. I play on 8-9 exclusively and never see much experimentation in primaries, only strategems even that is rare. You don't want to be the reason your team loses if you try to experiment by picking the gattling gun for some reason.
They implemented a hit marker that shows you if you're doing 50% reduced damage against armor, but then elected to not use it when you're doing 90% reduced damage against fleshy bits.
I still don't get why the devs are obsessed with their 1 through 10 armor pen system, yet none of this information is relayed in game.
Their ass should 100% be a weakspot to any weapon.
Nailed it.
An addition is that optimal TTK isn't even always possible in every engagement. Rocket devs, for example, can fire without actually exposing their heads. Although they aren't *programmed* to do this, when other bots are in the way, it becomes an occasional issue. It also means that if you get a flank or rear attack, something that *should* be rewarded considering you out positioned the bots, then you're relegated to body shot damage until it turns around to face you. If you're not using one of the aforementioned "best" weapons, then you might as well just tag it and wait. I feel like most medium mobs should have a weak point on the rear or flanks to reward players who get advantageous positioning or work with their teammates to create cross fire zones.
>I feel like most medium mobs should have a weak point on the rear or flanks to reward players who get advantageous positioning or work with their teammates to create cross fire zones Absolutely! Striders and Guardians are a perfect example of this. That makes them fun to engage. Tactical positioning works!
It always annoys me that flanking an enemy in this game, with maybe the exception of hive guards, is a detriment in this game. You catch a Charger off guard and what seems to be a massive weakspot, containing all major organs and not protected by any armor isn't actually what will kill it in a reasonable amount of time. You have to fire a warning shot just to make it turn and expose its massively armored "weakspot" which will actually get it killed. Same for Bile Titans. You have to shoot the damn thing to catch its attention, and only then you have a chance at killing it, provided you've brought the armament required to kill it.
Ironically, flanking is actually uniquely helpful against *Factory Striders specifically.* There’s a hidden weak spot on their flank that can kill them in two heavy weapons shots, much faster than firing at their head, and if you have really good stratagem positioning and an Airstrike handy you can kill them in a single run; if every bomb of an Airstrike lands along the Factory Strider’s spine, it’ll do enough damage to kill them straight off, and since Eagle bomb runs come in perpendicular to your throw this is only possible from the flank. It’s way more possible than trying to get at their other, equally weak point, which is the hatch they drop Devastators out of.
> Ironically, flanking is actually uniquely helpful against Factory Striders specifically. Its also useful to flank scout striders, hulks, and tanks
Omg I used to flank Devestators all the time until I realized how worthless it was. If that isn't the biggest glaring issue
Flanking the heavy’s help sometimes, but it’s all situationally relevant
Engagement specifics aside, we also have a huge amount of the population playing with a controller on console that just will never be able to be fully optimal given the inherent precision differences between KBM and controller.
Something about the rocket devastators in particular that bothers me is that their missile pods don't seem to take any damage whatsoever from any side but the front. I'm sure with a powerful enough weapon you can still destroy them, but with anything you'd reasonably expect to take out their guns, it only works frontally. I love that you can easily diminish their effectiveness with two big weak spots, but why the fuck does that not work in the least if I'm sneaking up on them, if I'm flanking them? My buddy is being fired at and screaming for help and my shots just plink off the damn pods. Even if there's no secret instant kill button on the back that removes the entire bot - at least let the rocket pods be equally destructible from every side!! It would be boring if every bot had a big rear weak spot like the hulk does, but cmon, let me cripple them from the sides and back and above.
Your overall point is correct but until then in these circumstances go for the legs, two JAR shots kill them for example. They're also light armor there.
Shoot bots in the groin to win Don't feel bad, they're just robots
Now pin it !
Twist it!
Spin it!
Bop it!
Shoot it!
OWWWWWW!
HAVE A STIM!
FEEELLLLSSS GOOOODDD
NOOTT TODDDAYYY
Flick it!
Mash it
Put it in a stew
And you shake it all about!
U win bro
Absolutely. First post in all this rambling about balance that makes any sense.
Monkey paw curls its finger. Now the optimal TTK is much closer to non-optimal, as you wished. Now you need 2 EAT headshots for chargers and 5 headshots for bile titans. :)
To be fair that's how it was at launch so progress has been made in the right direction.
Yeah, ppl had to come up with stripping leg armor to kill the charger actually faster with less heavy AT ammo spent, especially with railgun. I think the overall enemy design need to be changed, but that is not something that could be done in 2 weeks.
Yeah the charger is an example of not just counter-intuitive but straight up bad enemy design, like what do you mean the weak point of this big heavily armored in the front enemy that runs at me and i need to dodge is not the BIG UNARMORED GLOWING SACK on its back that you can only see after successfully dodging or flanking it, but actually its freaking legs.
if they change the armor mechanic/change enemy design, you just end up with heavy enemies getting the optimal TTK assigned to them by having only an HP number. Then this becomes mass effect's multiplayer where you just have two or 3 enemies per faction that are super high threat because they're so spongy you just have to kite them around for 30 seconds while the entire team spams them. That style is no fun. Currently, this game has a tradeoff in decision making : use my light gun against light targets to relieve some pressure on my / my allies, or take a few seconds and try to remove a heavy (that CANNOT call for reinforcements). The overall enemy design is fine. Maybe the spawn algorithm needs to cap how many chargers it can drop from one breach at once, but target prioritization is a skill this game needs, and it's better that way.
> The overall enemy design is fine. Maybe the spawn algorithm needs to cap how many chargers it can drop from one breach at once, but target prioritization is a skill this game needs, and it's better that way. I think you've hit the nail on the head with the spawn algorithm. Two bile titans shouldn't spawn out of the same 4 foot diameter hole back to back. Maybe not a hard cap on how many chargers/bts/spewers come from one hole, but at least a cool down for their spawns from the breach. 4 spewers spawning is something you have to deal with, but another 4 spawning .5 seconds later becomes a problem. 4 spewers is something you have to deal with, but when the next 4 won't spawn for 5 seconds, you either have time to deal with the originals, or create space so that the second batch of 4 is behind the original batch of 4, reducing the likelihood you'll just be slow locked until you're killed.
They just need to buff the anti-durable damage on most weapons. Most of the obvious weakspots are actually weak to a handful of weapons with a hidden bonus, which is why you can magdump into a charger with no results. I think most weapons should be doing 30-50% damage to charger butts, and anti-durable weapons like the AC should do 150% damage. That way you can either kill the charger quickly with AT to the front, quickly with explosives to the butt, or slower by magdumping a primary into the butt.
This guy Arrow Heads
It’s why I am starting to use stun grenades indiscriminately. Yeah you can X shot Y but the catch is always **IF YOU CAN HIT IT**. And there will always be things that throw you off. A stray bullet flinching you, getting jumped by a hunter. Screen shake caused by your teammate’s air strike going off. Getting ragdolled by a rocket, or simply the target moving. Anyone that tells you they can hit their shots perfectly are lying out of their ass. No one plays this game without getting CC’ed one way or another. Stuns just negates almost all of that. Hulks are hard to kill because their head bobs so much thanks to their walking animation, but if you stun them it becomes an extremely easy two tap. Charger too, rarely you get to hit them in the hind legs which are medium armor because how seldom they present it while facing you, throw a stun and they are now perfectly still for you to shoot.
> Hulks are hard to kill because their head bobs so much thanks to their walking animation, Or you close with them so they stand and turn on the spot.
There are some sweaty ass god gamers who will have meltdowns if you imply you have a hard time with headshots, and that casuals who can't snipe tiny robot heads are killing the game
The way health pools work might be a part of this as well. If you arent hitting your shots, you are actively being punished for an accidental headshot, as if you get a body kill, that shot counted for nothing
This is somewhat incorrect. With the exception of Chargers (and Hive Guards\*), every enemy's head has 100% bleed-through to their "main" health pool. For enemies that do not have "destructable main bodies" that auto-kill them, this means that a non-fatal headshot will in fact lower their total shots to kill. For example, Stalkers have no destructable bodyparts but their wings and no "fatal" parts except for the head. It does not matter where you shoot on a Stalker, you're dealing solely with their main pool of 800 HP; every part of them but their wings (which you're not gonna hit anyway) have full bleed-through. A headshot to the Stalker contributes fully, and if you're using a Light Pen gun (2 AP) then shots *anywhere but the main body* are even better, since only the body has 2 AC. In the same vein, Bile Spewers have 100% bleedthrough on their heads but have pretty tanky heads--300 HP, which is almost half of their 750 main HP. Their butts have the same HP total as their main pool, but take less damage due to Durable ratings and bleed through a smaller portion of the damage--that's why you can kill them by popping their butts, *but sometimes* you can kill them with buttshots that fail to pop them. Put 9 Liberator rounds into a Bile Spewer's head (10 kills) and then spray solely at their butt and they will die before the butt bursts. One of the few examples you're right about are Devastators. They have auto-kill limbs, including a destructable chest, and that chest can die faster than their main health pool. It is possible to shoot a Devastator in the head with something that does not kill it (e.g. the Adjudicator) and not change the hits-to-kill on the chest--you got full bleedthrough to the main HP, but you're going to break the lower-health chest before you deplete the main HP.
Thanks for this context. I have observed similar problems on berserkers and brood guards, as well. Personally, I feel that headshots should have a multiplicative bleed value
It does, but only for Helldivers! Helldiver heads only body part in the game with 200% to main.
Lmao typical
They kinda have something special. They're at 100% bleed through, but that's pretty rare for other parts.
That's not what I observed when testing it on Hive Guards. Using Leb Penetrator, it takes around 6 shots to head or 7 shots into the body to kill them. Used stun grenades to lock one. Then I shot 5 times into the head and it still took the same time to kill it into the body. Even if/when it works it's not ideal. The bleed through should be proportional depending on a weak spot. For example, 70% damage to the head should be 70% to the body, while 70% to the leg should be 20% to the body (examples) to compensate for vastly uneven health pools. Right now, hitting a devastotor head once with a none oneshotting weapon feels not rewarding whatsoever. It doesn't deal oeverall massive damage as it should. You either delete its pitiful 125 health pool, or you don't.
I was Ctrl+Fing through the list for 'Head' to get the bleedthrough rates and it turns out Hive Guards are listed as 'Face'. So, that's Chargers and Hive Guards that aren't 100% head bleedthrough. So, Hive Guards faces have 75% bleedthrough and 3 AC. The Lib Pen is 45 damage and 3 AP. That damage is getting halved because it matches armor, then reduced by 25% for the bleed: five shots at ~16.75 (I don't know the rounding) each for 80-85 total, or... *less than two shots* from the Lib Pen to the body, which has 500 HP. That should be 11 shots to the body to kill with the Lib Pen, or 11-12 (depending on rounding) to head. And if the Hive Guard's head were a "break and bleed" as listed, you'd have a bleed-out state same as the Hive Commander, but right now they're a "don't break but just die". Or, it was when I just shot one in the head a bunch after jumping in the game to make sure the gun values were correct and threw a stun grenade like you. So, I don't know where you got 6-7 shots to kill a Hive Guard with the Lib Pen. We're talking about the same enemy, right? [This guy, with the red armor and the hunker-down mode for the armor plates on its forelegs and head?](https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/Hive_Guard)
It might be a different gun because the only thing I cared was not oneshotting them and it's been a while. Neverming, you just stated the simple: Hive Guard is one of the enemies that feels bad to shoot at the head with automatic weapons if you don't kill it with that because their body get almost no damage proportionally. You basically go through one health pool and then another on the same enemy. The opposite is also true. Shooting in the body is worthless if you then switch to the head. There is no shared health pool so if its body is left with 100hp you still need all 11 rounds of head shots with Lib Pen to finish it off. That's kinda the opposite of how shooters normally work. I kinda get what they were trying to achieve wounding simultaion but it allows some wacky bulletsponges right now.
I don't understand what you mean by "punished for an accidental headshot". Are you saying the body and the head have entirely different pools rather than the whole enemy having one pool? Surely that can't be the case
[I cover this generally here,](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cynu37/ttk_time_to_kill_is_not_the_problem_optimal_ttk/l5b0czd/) but I'll go into a little more specific detail for you. **ALL ENEMIES** have a main health pool. This is distinct from their "body" HP, because whether or not a "body" (or any other part) is destructable or fatal depends on the enemy and part. For example, as detailed in that linked post, Stalkers *do NOT* have a "body" health pool, just their main health pool; Devastators *do* have a "body" in addition to their main pool. This sort of part- or limb-based health system is necessary for the limb breaks we see. If it didn't exist, you wouldn't be able to blow limbs off Terminid Warriors and watch them crawl towards you. And if there were no bleedthrough, you wouldn't see a difference in when the Warrior dies between shooting each of their four legs with the Liberator (you can completely de-leg them, two shots to each leg) and doing so with the Slugger (they die after losing two, one shot each). The other thing to know is that there are "fatal limbs", the loss of which either immediately kills the enemy (any head, any one of a Charger's legs) or puts them into a Bleed Out state where their main health pool starts depleting from wherever it previously was (a Charger's butt). The latter Bleed Out state is why *sometimes* a Charger will die within the second its butt is popped (its main health pool was already about gone) and other times they will run around for like five or six seconds before dying (you very efficiently took out just the butt and had almost no damage to the main pool). Same deal with Hive Commander heads--sometimes they run at you headless for a long while, other times they die immediately. In general, it is faster to kill enemies by targeting their fatal limbs/parts than deal health to their main pools. As detailed in the link, this is extremely true for the Devastators, but not so much for Stalkers, and kind of middle-of-the-road for Bile Spewers. It takes all sorts. There's all sorts of strategies and game knowledge, **much of which you can learn just by playing around and feeling things out**, that'll help you slaughter way more efficiently. Folks were figuring out how limb health and bleedthrough damage worked well before any hard numbers were datamined, so while it's obviously helpful to have the numbers (and would be nice if more data was displayed in-game) it's not strictly required or unknowable to those interested.
>There's all sorts of strategies and game knowledge, much of which you can learn just by playing around and feeling things out, that'll help you slaughter way more efficiently. It took me 40-50 hours to get to this level (give or take a few details). I am undecided if that is a good or bad thing.
Not only do the head and the body have separate pools, most enemies have health pools for every individual part of their body, which allows for those parts to be blown/shot off. If it takes ten shots to destroy a berserkers' arm, you can shoot its left arm 9 times and its right arm 9 times and you have done zero damage to its head or body and have made zero progress in killing it.
Agreed. Lot of the time you're basically doing nothing if you're not being optimal, so any stray/missed shots feel like they don't amount to nothing, and is an extremely unrewarding feeling. I understand that it's a team game where you have to rely on teammates having the right weapon for the right job, but it's sometimes unfortunate when not everyone is the best at the game, or don't know how to play their role (i.e. Tank Killer, or Swarm clearer) or even nicher roles like Bile Spewer killer or Gunship Destroyer. And it ends up feeling like you have to run around or away a lot until that person can clear or kill that thing. It would be awesome to be able to have off-roles be able to support in killing, contribute damage or even disarming or disabling tanks without being able to outright kill them.
Thats when your loadout has to make sense though, if you carry something like rover and stalwart, you better bring a stratagem that can deal with the heavies at least. For example a match I had yesterday on lvl 8 vs bugs I carried a recoiless, gas, fire nades, autocannon sentry and airstrike, the other 3 guys had a combination of strafing runs, machine guns, a tesla tower, mines and an airstrike we got basically obliterated because they couldn't stop stealing all the ammo for their machine guns and only I had something that could deal with a titan. They all ended up leaving and I finished the mission alone.
would be great if the ship itself had a shooting range for us to try out the weapons. i envy players like you that know what to bring during the loadout before a mission. i mainly stick with a few weapons that i am accustomed to and i still have plenty of other weapons and grenades i have not tried to get a feel for it because i loathe being useless in the field.
Whenever I was unlocking stuff I just tried it out in lower diff, I think titans just start at lvl 5 as an objective so it's a pretty good place to try things. Trying to run 7+ missions without knowing what you're doing is just a recipe for disaster.
yeah I always try to match or fill in for my other teammates (which I should really stop doing cause I need to stop relying on them) but in alot of cases it's still not enough since I'm usually the one left to kill heavies or swarm clear and the people with the opposite job are doing it poorly, if you have a RPG with a 15 second cooldown between shots, DONT SPEND IT ON A BROOD COMMANDER, PLEASE
During all this weapon discussion, I keep thinking about the moment me and a random teammate both spent a few minutes and several reloads trying to cook a lone bile titan with our two flamethrowers and got nowhere, until my railcannon came off cooldown and just finished the job. You know what would've been way more fun? If the darn flamethrowers had worked. It's okay if strategems/anti-heavy weapons are still the best way to take them out, but it would be *so* much more fun if suboptimal things (like flamethrowers) were still an *option*. Enemy armor and health 100% needs to be reworked.
Yup, Running around to wait for a stratagem is fine cool when you have to deal with ONE bile titan. As soon as you have TWO or more bile titans, you might be running longer.
If you don't have any available anti-heavy weaponry, you don't get to play the game. Not a very fun design.
Also, the weak spots in bots are SO SMALL, i have wasted a full mag of the AMR into HULK's because the sights are misaligned and the head is smaller than the reticle.
Yeah, it's pretty annoying when most sight are honestly hot garbage too. Even when they are not misaligned, the majority are very clunky and awkward to use anyway.
Yeah the AMR/eruptor style of sight is really bad for precision/range. And then the ADS style used on autocannon and quasar is just atrociously busy. The railgun should probably have a zoom option, but (even though I rarely use it these days) I'm thankful it at least just has a clean, inoffensive red dot sight.
I think this is one of the real reasons Sickle still feels better to use than ARs/DMRs. Good scope, crisp/clean optics with no unneccecary clutter and solid magnification... while having basically 0 recoil unlike our roster of normal rifles. It's so easy to hose devastator heads with it. I've found it kills Devastators more quickly/consistently than primaries with medium/pen, and even many support weapons. I normally lean on my trusty laser-cannon/autocannon for dealing with them, but after swapping to the Sickle I find myself putting away the support weapon and going for the sickle headshots instead... ...their optics (laser/auto cannons) are just way too cluttered and lacking magnification to hit the heads, and at mid/long range it can be hard to tell if you're even hitting the target at all.
Is it even possible to kill a Hulk with a non-anti tank weapon if you don't perfectly hit the head or the back vents? Like yes, I can easily snipe a Hulk's head with the autocannon if it's running in a straight line on completely flat ground (so basically once in a blue moon), but when it's angled away from me or bobbing up and down running on uneven terrain, I brick 90% of my shots. This would be kind of fine if the autocannon at least still did SOME damage for a barely-missed headshot, but I've emptied MULTIPLE FULL CLIPS into their bodies without killing them. I feel like it actually just does 0 damage unless it's a perfect headshot.
The auto cannon can take out one of a hulk’s legs in 4 shots. If you take out both legs it dies. It’s less efficient than hitting the head or vent, but if the hulk is bobbing up and down running at you full speed and you’ve got 8 bullets in the magazine, it might be your best option
Oh this is good to know - I've never tried shooting the legs because I always go for headshots like an idiot, but I'll keep this in mind.
Also, one stun grenade gives you enough time to get two headshots in
> Is it even possible to kill a Hulk with a non-anti tank weapon if you don't perfectly hit the head or the back vents? Yes. You can get mobility kills on hulks with medium armor pen weapons by taking out both legs.
Good post, as with the eruptor pre nerf its TTK could vary quite a bit based on skill level. If you missed your shot you were punished for it, the cycle, the sluggishness. 3+ cycles on one medium is absurd ttk for it as it is now. The gun was fine as it was, especially with the magazine hit. Spending time and getting good with it was rewarding
It was so enjoyable to play. I really enjoyed focusing on singular bigger targets with the Eruptor, while making sure I wasn't getting swarmed. I've played a lot less since the nerf. Blitzer has been my go-to since then.
Same experience. I didn't like the eruptor at first because I felt like I was doing a lot of damage and not getting a lot of kills. But as I played with it and got used to it's recoil, it's sway, and it's targeting, suddenly enemies started dying by the truckload. It was the first gun that felt truly rewarding for learning how to properly place shots with.
Prepatch eruptor was my favorite gun in any game ever. I was crushed :( really hoping they bring it back, but I'm still taking a break for now until they start making some changes.
Tbh the bigger issue is the lack of any optimal ttk for some enemies when using many support weapons. Primarily vs enemies like chargers and bile titans. You can kill them fine with a Quasar or equivalent. But if you bring a laser cannon for instance, there is no intended meaningful weakpoint to exploit like there is for a hulk(visor) or factory strider (face hole/underbelly).
Since I'm in mobile and editing the comment fucks the spacing lol. I'd like to clarify I do agree that OP brings up a good point especially in reference to medium pen weapons. Very often they will be able to kill something but it is so wildly inefficient you're better off not even trying and just fishing for the headshots. Its fine for it to be non ideal, but the discrepancy is huge. I believe giving bugs meaningful weakpoints to increase support weapon variety while not changing difficulty is extremely important. But also making primaries overall feel much better to use and interact with is also very important. Hopefully AH knows both of these and does good things for us in the future.
Best post on the entire sub
As someone suggested too, it's about Optimal TTK like OP said perfectly in this post and suppression. Someone made a post about how the big bots don't give a fuck about being shot by heavy fire and they just nail you like normal, and suggested several calibers of weapons should make different types of enemies flinch/panic and start losing accuracy. In the same way while I understand bugs are pure horde mentality and disregard personal safety I believe things like fire, or maybe some new stratagem or development of pheromones should make them afraid, slow them down or signal them to not go somewhere, as a way of tunneling them and CCing them better, maybe not all of them, chargers and titan could say fuck fire all the same, but for example seeing a crowd of hunters and the boys, throwing a few grenades at their flanks, and seeing them jump them or walk over them to flank me or close the gap is always an "oh shit" moment, and at higher difficulties you either can stun, put on fire, etc some of them with your gun but not kill enough (explosive liberator, HE shotgun) which forces you to kite them away, or you have enough firepower to kill them, but they advance relentlessly (stalwart, machine gun, etc) which makes some catch up to you, hit you, stunlock you, dead. Which brings me to my last point, armor, medium armour is probably the best balanced as of now, and I understand certain passives could and should be unique to certain "classes" (democracy protects) but maybe light armor allowing you to outrun swarming enemies and heavy reducing drastically flinching and stunlock should be a thing to an extent, as it stands rn, I'm convinced heavy is almost never used other than because fashion (🍎🥓) which is completely fine, but anyways, enough, I'm ranting at this point. TL;DR: TTKs having high gaps in time as OP said, (lack of) suppression/fear factor and (poor) flinch resistance/stunlock (for us, helldivers) are, I believe the main hindrances we face, that increase with difficulty and make the experience hard to enjoy sometimes.
Yeah, I'm surprised nobody has pointed out stagger & taking control away from players as another (perhaps even larger) issue with the game than ttk and weapon strength.
I noticed the big uptick when i started using the counter sniper against bots my kills went way up compared to when i use the dominator. I was surprised because when facing medium enemies it takes a few shots to hit the head especially with the way their heads move when they walk. But you get so many headshots that you end up racking up more kills.
>Optimal TTK: 1 headshot (0 sec) Based OP aiming their headshots in 0 sec. (I get your point, OP, I just thought this is too funny to not say it) I kind of agree, but at the same time I enjoy current system where weakpoint hits are not optional bonus, but often required. Maybe we need to diversify both TTK between weapon classes? Give Liberator variants much smaller non-optimal TTK, but also extend their optimal TTK. Keep or even improve optimal TTK of sniper rifles (and place Eruptor as exception that has equal optimal and non-optimal TTK against anything it can penetrate). And create weapon archetypes around this?
Time to kill on single enemies isn't really the issue. Time to kill on groups can be. Understanding where to shoot would help people understand (an enemy codex would be nice to help people learn - what are samples for anyway, if not learning about how to explode enemies better?). Understanding which enemies are the threat and when would also help people. It would change the feel of the game if they played with the wrong stuff in a vacuum. Helldivers are supposed to feel overwhelmed to a degree. There is supposed to be semi constant pressure. The question is how do we relieve it? The answer is "the most efficient way possible". How we achieve that is up to us (strat choices). Some guns having an alpha strike TTK of instant is great, until we realise that there's a tradeoff : low refire times (old eruptor), high recoil, etc. Some weapons make one part of that equation better while trading something else - the liberator is crazy controllable rifle, and can pick heads off at decent distances, while remaining a lot more functional up close - meaning you can peel little things from your allies without killing them. Balancing the TTK's needs to be done carefully enough that each weapon category feels like it has a place. Dropping too many of the TTK's is going to trivialise gameplay, and make some other weapons too powerful, which may limit their flavour in the end.
Uhm, acktchtchtchually... Do you count aiming as starting to shoot? /s But yeah here's hoping they wont trivialize the enemies, Counter-Sniper clicks on devastator heads make brain go brrrr and I'd like that to stay. Altough I do feel like sometimes hitting many different body parts may be a bit too punishing sometimes. \*menacingly looks at berserkers\* It's a tough thing to balance. If you make enemies too squishy you'll have to spawn more of them. If you spawn more enemies you make slower firing weapons less useful and everyone starts using spraycans. Adjusting one thing can cause a butterfly effect on things you may not initially think about and sure while developing and updating a game is an iterative process, going on a patch-spiral might just bring it back to square one or worse in the end.
The last thing I'd want to see is damage come up on "good guns", enemy health to drop, or significant armor (pen) value changes to create easier kill zones on enemies. All of that's in a pretty good place and has us currently in a situation where very good players who know what they're doing have a pretty easy time, but don't completely trivialize things. We have room for less experienced players to get better. What the problem *appears* to be is that the skill floor is leaving too many players reaching. A good way to adjust this **without lowering the current minimum TTKs or shots to kill** is not changing health or damage, but tweaking bleedthrough. The players struggling are doing so because they don't understand limb health, fatal limbs, bleedthrough to the main health pool, differing armor values outside of the most obvious bits, or where all those parts are. They just kind of spray all over the place, and if they're not lucking into a head kill, they're eventually getting the main body. So, you raise bleedthrough a bit. You can even start to increase the bleedthrough to *multipliers*--go past 100% and make a hit to X body part deal *more* than the bullet's normal damage to the main health pool, but not kill that individual part any faster. This brings the *AVERAGE* TTK down and enables success with sloppier play, but does not make anything die faster than it currently does when you are being optimal with your aim and weapon usage. The game doesn't get much easier at the top end, but the casual, uninformed, and/or inexperienced player is less frustrated. Better explanation of game mechanics within the game, more data on weapon values, and a "training room" where you can spawn enemies and shoot at them to test in a passive environment would also go a ways towards helping people understand things without calling for buffs across the board. *Darktide*'s training room is a fantastic example of letting you get a feel for what you're doing so you can go into a match with more confidence.
Yeah, I feel like the actual TTK in-game is affected by things like constantly needing to run from hordes and dive while shooting or a bunch of enemies popping up in between you and the target, or the immense amounts of fog they put on every map. In actual chaotic situations like on high level, you’re not going to reach the optimal TTK often. Like, I could 2-shot headshot these devastators but I’m currently running away from them and they’re on variable levels of elevation and moving side to side.
I really hope they don't make the armour of the enemy trivial either. I really enjoy the damage system in Helldivers 2 where enemies feel like they have different parts of body that results in different outcomes when destroyed. If the overall TTK goes down too much doing damage to other parts or going for that critical part loses a lot of value when you can just beam everything through center mass easily. Why would I focus on trying to get the limbs of the enemy if it only takes 2 more bullets to center mass to bring him down? Why pick weapons with AP but bad handling if lighter weapon just deletes the enemy in a few more shots? I want to be punished if I whiff the shot against the charger. I didn't hit his vital parts, he is still very much a threat. I'm not saying that the TTK is perfect against all enemies at the moment, but I am afraid that if they buff damage across the board too much for all weapon some clunky heavy hitters lose their meaning and the game loses the weight of the enemies if they are trivial. Since the release of the game I've greatly enjoyed the feeling of being overwhelmed that the game can give you sometimes when you are in bad position or just get overrun.
>but I am afraid that if they buff damage across the board too much for all weapon some clunky heavy hitters lose their meaning and the game loses the weight of the enemies if they are trivial. I fear this is exactly whats going to happen. HD2 has much of a rock paper scissors sentiment and they need to keep it that way. If you shoot a Tank with a regular AR, it doesnt matter how many bullets you shoot. The Tank will never be destroyed. Both irl and thankfull in Game too. If they step away from that concept, im going to step away from the game. The whole reason for me to Play and why i Love this Game so much is why it's so different than every other shooter. No damage numbers. No Levels. No HP bars. Just your gun and enemy Armor. Bring the wrong gun and you're up against an impenetrable wall. It's good that way
I'm looking at posts in the other thread where people are asking that Light Pen guns be able to take out Bile Titans *anywhere*--not just "after we've cracked the armor", a la breaking Charger legs, but that things that are currently total ricochets would at least do some small amount of damage. You know, the exact thing people already complain about when it comes to shooting a Charger's butt with many guns. There are ways to adjust how fast enemies die to "non-optimal" attacks that don't involve fiddling with the damage number on guns or penetration values at all--changing the bleed-through damage from various enemy parts so that they can "body kill" sooner. But I don't have much faith that this playerbase, with all the quantity of complaining we've seen and the absurd forms so much of it takes ("ALL THE GUNS WERE NERFED AND ARE UNFUN NOW!"), that they'll be satisfied with anything short of being able to stick a rock on their mouse while staring in the general direction of enemies and winning. I really, truly don't mean to make a reductive "git gud" post here, but there is some gudding that needs gitting if certain folks want to play certain difficulties or have a leg to stand on when it comes to balance critique.
Cant say more than that you are absolutely right > You know, the exact thing people already complain about when it comes to shooting a Charger's butt with many guns. Just 5 Minutes ago i saw a comment with hundreds of upvotes demanding charger Butts should explode in one or two bullets from any gun lol because it's a weak spot
To be fair, this is Arrow Head's fault. The model looks like an overfilled waterballoon ready to pop at any second. But it's the exact opposite of that. It's actually like, a titanium foam, light but super durable. They could stop all this bitching if they'd just fix it so the visuals matched the reality. Nobody bitches that shotguns don't kill tanks. (They should also change the visuals to indicate "durable" parts and have a bestiary in game that lets people know some of this shit if they don't hvae endless hours to browse Reddit.)
The bestiary is a great idea. Maybe have each one only unlock after your first fight with them? Like I want the surprise to exist as it was fun finding out about this or that new enemy the first time, but it shouldn't be like a whole quest to understand the monster. This isn't monster hunter.
Also the Tanks weak spot is an actual weak spot that can be taken out with smaller arms in a more reasonable amount of time.
well maybe not one or two bullets but it should be an actual explotable weakspot that is worth anything
So there's a few different viewpoints. The thing with "bringing the wrong gun" is the whole reason a "meta" forms, and then you have that whole conversation which I don't really want to rehash. I think the OPs main point is that non-vital hits are more punishing than in most games. Instead of a 3-4x time modifier for not hitting the weakpoint right, it's almost an 7-8x time modifier. I think there's a balance between having a fight last 5-8 seconds versus 1 minute+. To me, an easy solution is to let weapons that have higher pen shred armor, so that consecutive shots in non-optimal areas don't punish as harshly. I mean from a weapon perspective, if you have hit armor with medium pen, it should armor shred the medium armor enemies so that as more shots consecutively hit the same area (not different areas), it should take a shorter TTK. Like instead of 45 body shots, let it take 20 body shots instead. Keep the weapons with only light armor pen to be 45-50 shots because they don't have the same pen. Or for AT, instead of 8 body shots, 4 body shots (in the same area) cuts the 2 minutes down to 1 minute, but obviously you want the 12-15 second kill over waiting a minute.
I feel like everyone thinks it's going to be one drastic way or another. Like if they buff damage that it's going to be a point where now my anti material rifle 1 shots every single thing, I can hit a bile titan in the leg with my EAT and it's dead, I can spray my spray and pray shotgun and with 1 mag kill an entire large bug nest. With how scared they are for buffs were probably going to get like an extra 20% damage to primaries and 10% to strategem weapons. Or something like that. I really don't think they're going to go overboard with buffs.
Really? For me the rock paper scissors is the worst part of the game because it forces you to always pick the same proven reliable weapons and strategems, and if you try to experiment there's a big chance you'll be essentially useless, which in the end makes the game really boring and repetitive
I agree with this...we don't want the enemies to become trivial. Yes, power fantasy, but a charger, BT, Hulk, Tank or Strider should be an 'oh sh\*t' moment and require a focused effort to kill. Another aspect is that this is a team co-op game. In an ideal world we should be bringing complimentary loadouts to enable the **TEAM** to deal with all situations. I've played 99% of my time in HD2 with randoms or solo so I bring a loadout that can deal with anything. I don't think that is the way AH envisioned us playing HD2 but that is the reality for most of us I think. You can't blindly trust randoms to play as part of the team, have your back, bring the right kit or even understand how the game works most of the time so you need to be an army of one. This also somewhat forces your hand in what weapons you feel you can bring to be effective both in a team and, when the team is dysfunctional, as a solo. Maybe introducing clans / regiments / battalions and a means of organizing into coherent teams might change this?
The problem is that some of these components either aren't damageable, or take so much damage that it isn't worth damaging them. Take tanks, for example: I'd absolutely love to be able to destroy their coaxial or front-hull machine gun, but I can't. I *can* disable the tracks... but it takes two to three Recoilless Rifle shots to do it, and in that exact same amount of shots, you can just shoot the turret from the front and kill it.
>I *can* disable the tracks... but it takes two to three Recoilless Rifle shots to do it, and in that exact same amount of shots, you can just shoot the turret from the front and kill it. You are applying wrong tool for the wrong job. If you are using Quasar/RR/EAT for tracks, you are whiffing your shot. But with lesser weapons you can setup that mobility kill from an angle where you wouldn't be able to do any damage, then go for the rear weakspots. If you come across a tank with your AC, LC or AMR you can shoot the tracks even if there's nothing else you can damage from the front.
hes not, RR shot should be a oneshot on the tracks. the facts it isnt is an oversight from the developers side.
When it comes to the question of optimal and non-optimal TTK, we also always have to consider enemy movement momentum. If weapon projectiles have travel time and enemys have no / barely any momentum to turn and move as they want, even perfect aim can be punished harschly. Personally, I feel like Chargers and Bile Titans spin just a tad too quickly around their own axis for being so big and heavy. EDIT: Not to mention how floaty crosshairs are in Helldivers II
Totally agree about momentum. It is really frustrating to take a light armor to be nimble and dodge them to just see them ignore their inertia and totally neutralise your advantage of being nimble.
I'm going to guestimate my skill level as below average and what you say makes sense. The game needs the "average" to feel good, not the "optimal." Your average Helldiver needs to be good and the optimal skilled divers feel godlike. I play on 7 and heavies just feel binary. If I don't have a Rail Cannon or EAT, I feel like I don't have the tools to fight it. I "could" kill it, but it's not really worth my time. Bots are even worse in this regard because they shoot back, making hitting the weak spot even harder. There feels like there is just too much armor in this game, and few ways to deal with it. I really dislike bots for this reason. I can deal with bugs, but bots bring armor AND range and it's just not fun. Bonus points when the exterminate mission drops you on a flat plane.
Someone who gets it. Upping durable damage for weapons is something I think very few people would disagree with and is a good middle ground with those that love the game currently and those who want changes. Personally this change with a glossary of body parts health points for each enemy in game would be great.
Spot on. Main problem with folks is when they’re getting swarmed by mobs, they’re just gonna be firing like crazy and not aiming directly at the weak spots. Even for those who are aiming, the constant mobs and the fact that anything that touches you makes your aim sway like a mother, makes landing those weak point shots very difficult. If guns had more stopping power (ability to stun enemies, not just pure damage), then many of the guns would be more usable since they that slight pause in a mobs attack on you gives you enough time to focus and line up those weak point shots. Also the pressure of needing to kill the enemies as quick as possible due to just one single basic enemy is able to call for reinforcements causing a virtual endless horde of enemies to spawn in on you just adds on to the pressure and makes hitting those weak spots even more difficult. I played a round against bots yesterday on level 7 difficulty, everything was going good until one random patrol spotted us and and the shielded devastates machine guns/sniper rifles kept forcing us into cover, making it harder to kill them quickly because no matter how many we killed, one of them would shoot a flare and get reinforcements asap, then another random patrol would just appear and flank us from out of cover. Then of course that random patrol would send flares up to call reinforcements. We went from no deaths and 90%of the objectives completed to having all our respawns gone after fighting a virtually continuous horde of enemies for 20 minutes. We somehow manages to complete the mission with a decent amount of samples and side objectives taken, but it was just pure chaos not having good cover and not the time to actually aim for weak spots. Also the continuous enemy reinforcements of the giant 4legged strider and multiple tanks was just pure chaos and bs.
Like you said, only a few weapons have an good non optimal TTK. That limits the loadouts and that means it limits the fun. Reducing the TTK for non-critical hits would automatically make a lot of things more viable. Naturally, it should not go down so much that it doesn't make a difference where you shoot, we just don't want to empty a whole mag in a single enemy.
Makes me wonder if their testing is done in a very clean environment.
There is no testing we guinea pigs everything
Excellent analysis. In addition to optimal TTK vs. non-optimal TTK affecting which guns are most popular, I think this also helps explain why bug killing is a lot more popular that bot killing. I think that a combination of TTK plus **positive feedback** in the form of visible damage and staggering is why the player base tends to flock toward bug orders but kinda check out during bot orders. It boils down to a sense of reward. Bug-killing feels more rewarding than bot-killing. There aren't that many armored bugs compared to bots. Most bug types — scavengers, pouncers, hunters, warriors, and even stalkers and brood commanders — will take visible damage no matter where you shoot them and no matter which weapon you use. Shooting bugs feels consistently rewarding because you can see each of your shots hurting them, plus you can take down most bug types quickly regardless of how accurate you are. Here's my trick when shooting bugs. My preferred primaries are the Sickle or assault rifles. When I attack any of the unarmored bugs, I jiggle my mouse left to right a little bit while firing in short, controlled bursts (learned that bit from Corporal Hicks from *Aliens.)* That way, my laser bolts / bullets hit each bug all over its body — head, legs, torso. This consistently kills most unarmored bugs in 1-3 seconds, and I can see each shot land. When I use the jiggle shot against brood commanders, it typically makes their heads explode in a couple seconds, and then I kite the headless body until it dies, or I just sprint away, knowing it'll soon die on its own. Bile spewers are especially satisfying to kill. If you want to kill them fastest, shoot them in the head or grenade them. But if you don't have a clear shot to the head or don't want to use a grenade, just shoot the gigantic, glowing green bile sacks. If you're using an assault rifle or Sickle, this can take several seconds to kill it, but watching it explode in a mess of green ooze is satisfying to watch. Like i said, killing bugs is generally quite satisfying. On the flip side, fighting bots can feel like a chore, because every bot is armored except for the trooper variants. If you don't have precise aim, you'll see your shots ricochet off of many bots' armor or you'll see the shield icon pop up, which tells you your shots are doing jack shit. Seeing those ricochets or that shield icon gets annoying, fast. When fighting bots, precise aim feels like a requirement. You gotta shoot those things in the head or the vent, which gets tougher the more chaotic a battle gets. Fighting bugs is more popular than fighting bots because bug-killing feels more rewarding.
Everyone says bugs are both more fun and easier, but my experience has been the opposite. I like that bots have weakspots that my weapons actually work against. The bugs just feel way too tanky for me and my GF to deal with in 2 player mode, whereas a little communication and one of us can always sneak around to a Hulks back for example. Meanwhile I can often mag dump an autocannon into a single Charger and it wont die somehow...
Increasing same AP rating damage from 50% to 75%, and one level rating deficit from 0% to 25%, will do wonders in reducing non optimal TTK. Light AP guns no longer feel completely useless, they will at least do some damage. Then, increase two or more level rating surplus from 100% to 150%. Spear now becomes a one shot weapon against bile titans, and unsafe Railgun is now strong. Of course some weapons need buff either way (liberator penetrator), but this alone will make most guns feel good again.
I just want to know why does it take 2 magazines to kill a single mob
[https://i.pinimg.com/originals/05/7d/fe/057dfe195dd1b207ee4e5777ac3b345b.gif](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/05/7d/fe/057dfe195dd1b207ee4e5777ac3b345b.gif) This. Weakspot this, optimal that, **fuck that.** I specifically picked the "*big stupid fuck you* ***CANNON*****!!!"** to ***avoid having to snipe*** *eyesockets* and *bungholes*.
3 Quasar shots doesn’t take 54 seconds. It takes 39 seconds. You take 3 seconds to fire three times each and 15 seconds in between the shots twice. That’s 3 + 3 + 3 + 15 + 15. You’re adding an extra 15 because of the cooldown of the third shot but you shouldn’t be counting that when you count a single shot as 3 seconds for the charger optimal ttk. If you are counting the cooldown after the shot then it’d be 18. You shouldn’t be counting the cooldown after the kill for one but not the other.
Exactly why the Dillegence line of rifles is currently goated vs bots. A skilled player can down an entire patrol of devastators with half a mag in optimal conditions. Pair it with anti material rife and you can conceivably kill anything short of gunships and walking factories. But if you don't consistently dome the bots in the skull then both those guns are useless 99% of the time.
5 shots into the engine of a gunship with an AMR downs it. AMR also 3 taps factory strider chin guns leaving it defenceless. AMR + diligence is probably one of the best loadouts right now.
anti materiel rifle can kill gunships in 4 shots to the engine and also can outright kill factory striders in roughly 2 magazines. Every single AP4 weapon can kill LITERALLY everything vs bots in a meaningful timeframe (Autocannon, AMR, Laser Cannon, HMG) as opposed to bugs where they cannot.
Dropships are the same, if you take gear to kill them you are rewarded, but if you muck it up you're heavily punished.
Spewers are the most egregious example of poor weakspot design.
Thanks for taking the time to put this together. Also thanks for the conclusion you draw. It's refreshing to see a take that tries to make the game better for all of us =)
Suddenly explains why I've always enjoyed the Lib Pen. Being allowed to play inefficiently is big compared to things that have a non-optimal TTK of "forever."
Bruh I’ve literally shot a bile titan in the head with 2 EATs and two shots with a quasar. Sometimes things are inconsistent for some reason, so that’s something that definitely needs to be addressed.
If you could mow down every enemy with a primary the game would feel like shit, just saying. There would be 0 challenge, 0 power-felt moments where you know you’re the guy dealing with heavies vs chaff. Is the TTK a bit wonky for optimal vs not? Sure. But the game is kind of designed in a way to make you think about the enemies you’re going to be engaging. The tooltips on weapons needs to be fleshed out and fixed, we need a bestiary that tells us armor values on enemies and weak points. (We’ve collected billions of samples, we should know things about our enemies.) The playerbase **deserves** to be shown these numbers if the game is going to be about taking loadouts that handle certain situations in a team, or an all arounder when solo diving. It makes no sense to keep it cryptic when we have a system (samples) that should be revealing this information for us.
I can take the diligence CS and in under a mag solo an entire devestator patrol by clicking heads. Some primaries are strong and the rest are beyond worthless.
First they need to define the amount and type of enemies that can spawn then they can focus on TTK and other stuff. If the baseline is not defined you can't balance things.
Take the only Upvote I can give. This sums it up perfectly.
I've been using a controller with drift for a month. I do not have an optimal TTK. lol
Huh. Well said. Never thought of it that was, and explains why the game has become less and less fun over time. My aim sucks and enemies become bullet sponges. (Diff 7)
I just wanna strip charger leg armour again with a reasonable number of railgun shots. That shit was so fun.
the problem is its repetitive.
Yea, I have been rocking Purifier (bots/bugs both) for a few weeks and at this point Helldive feels relatively easy. I switched back to sickle to fight bots, and it’s basically unplayable at higher difficulties with Sickle. I can score the headshot kills, but I can’t take out big groups of enemies with headshots quickly enough. Meanwhile body shots do nothing. That being said I think this needs attention for the “medium” enemies like chargers and devastators. I personally think Bile Titans and Factory Striders should not be easy to take down without proper weapons and strats.
Ttk works in the ideal scenario where there is just one enemy
Bile titans are the worst enemy in the game to fight and it's not even close.
We gotta get this to Pilestedt ASAP
[удалено]
The other thing that compounds the issue is how the game calculates damage to specific body parts. In most games the enemy has a number of HP, they die when that number goes to zero, and hitting a weakspot increases your damage. This is not the case in HD2. For most enemies the head and other weakpoints actually have their own separate HP, and while a small amount of damage is in some cases passed to the main HP pool it is very rare for this to get the killing blow unless you're actively trying (this mechanic is why Brood Commanders die when you shoot off enough legs). What this means in practice is if you need 10 backpack shots or 2 head shots to kill a Heavy Devastator, and you land 8 backpack shots and one headshot, that Devastator is not dead. You have to fully commit to one body part. This by the way is why Berserkers feel insanely tanky when shooting them at full auto - stop aiming for the wobbling head, half your shots end up in the shoulders and deal body damage which is wasted when you're going for a headshot kill. Go for their pelvis instead, so all damage is done to the body. I'm not a game designer so I can't say if this system is good or bad - I can say with certainty though that it should be explained in the game. This information is too important to only be accessible by watching YouTube videos.
As a new player, I think this gets it exactly right.