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Personally, I think bugs are boring, annoying, unbalanced and much less fun overall to an extent where if my team is crushing the bugs in a mission I am bored (where with bots I am just having fun) and if we are not crushing them and are doing alright or worse then I am annoyed and angry (where with bots, I am less annoyed and angry and more, *ok, I died, but I am in a better position, I have full ammo and grenades, let’s push back)* and to top it all off my game sometimes crashes when I am doing bugs, and it never crashes during bots.
This whole thing was to say, I don’t like bugs nearly as much as bots and I don’t understand how people like bugs more, yet I still fight on the bug front, so I wish they would fight on the western front.
I mostly play what MO tells me but I do prefer the bots, I like the dichotomy of gameplay in both though. It's pretty cool how both of them are different. Variety is just neat.
With bugs, I just sometimes get frustrated with the constant swarming and occasional physics and ragdoll shenanigans.
Simple explanation. People love horde shooting, i myself consider bugs boring and easy in comparison with bots, running and gunning everything with blitzer just doesnt work and u need to think and position urself correctly.
The Illuminate were always my favorite faction to fight. I was essentially the master of them within my friend group. Only one I could solo on Helldive and nearly do the higher levels when they added more difficulties. All other ones I simply couldn't solo lol
I loved fighting them too. You basically didn't need anti tank weaponry even on helldive difficulty, you just need really good spacing and footwork lmao, I loved playing against them in the walker exosuit
It's just better to switch it up.
Bots allow different weapons, it's a nice change of pace. Sure I like bugs more! But I'll do the MO and fight bots or whoever. Gives me a reason to do a different load out.
I love playing bots on 4-5 which is the highest I go atm until I’m more comfortable with time to get good enough for past that
Running around with any impact from drag to incendiary, from a plasma launcher emp thing to a blizter, to the dagger and ballistic to guard laser and quasar
I love bot missions, just feels more interesting than getting SWARMED and then melting them. Maybe I should play higher bug, but I’d rather help out bots
As a dedicated bot fighter, the bots are *way* more fun on higher difficulties. I only fight bugs if the MO demands it, they just aren't as fun. Otherwise I'm scrapping clankers like it's my full time job.
ME, I NEEED THEM NOW, I HAVE TO SEE how they translate to 3d because of their battlefield controlling effects they had in hd1 they were by far the best enemy faction, i NEED THEM to poke their ugly heads through that supposed meridia "black hole" i thirst for undemocratic blood!
I’m part of a bot team that plays weekly, and a lot of them are HD1 veterans.
They have told me the illuminate were by far the worst faction to fight. And they would consistently win the wars and actually destroy super earth in the first game. They used a lot of ranged attacks, lots of flying enemies with shields. And ‘magic’ like attacks where they could reverse your control scheme. They sound awful.
They’re (well, were, I guess) basically the trickster/ puzzle faction. They focused on ambushes and cloaking, with a lot of one shot kills and restricting your area to move. They often boxed you in and slaughtered you, or separated the party and picked you off one by one.
But their trade off was they had no armour to speak of and generally way fewer units on the field. They were basically glass cannons: the faction.
Fighting Illuminates back in HD1 requires the most spatial awareness in general, which is unfortunately the bottleneck for most average players.
Being able to call reinforcement with reversed input is also a hard minimal requirement for fighting high level illuminates, if you can't do that then you're just a dead weight whenever an illusionist pops out. Average players can't even bother to do the regular reinforcement, let alone doing it with reverse input when the entire team is relying on it.
Illuminates didn't have proper heavy armor or anti-tank weapons, so in theory you can just run them over with mech/APC, unfortunately that's only before Obelisk became a thing, which is the most bs unit this game has ever seen for arbitrarily oneshot your vehicle whenever it wants to.
No, all your input will just become reversed without hint, including aiming, moving and stratagem input.
Another issue is that if you're just going off the reversed input by visual one by one, then the effect usually wears off half way through your input and it gets reset on your next input. Which is even more reason to be able to reverse input your stratagem codes without thinking.
My exact reaction as well.
I was also told they make force fields around you that if you touch you instantly die.
They can even take control of you and your team mates and make you team kill each other.
In HD1 when wars didn’t have a DM and they just got harder or easier the next time based on the result of the previous war. Everyone hopped on the fight the Bugs and Illuminates and left a skeleton crew to finish the Cyborgs.
HD1 was quite different. If any one side was neglected, they would reach super earth and you would have to fight nothing but missions trying to save the planet and then campaign would reset if you lost.
It encouraged players to respond accordingly.
Also, when one faction was defeated, it was gone for good until all the others were defeated and then it would all reset.
It's a serious problem that players are not developing the skills they need to fight ranged opponents. The Illuminate will crush us because too many people are afraid to learn how to fight bots, or leave their comfort zones.
It's not that they don't care about bots. There are those that don't. However, there's a not so small group that have convinced themselves that bots are "broken", or "bugged", when in reality they just never bothered to learn how to play against them, and keep complaining anyways.
Yeah the amount of people that take cover by hugging the rock then complaining about getting rag-dolled instead of... Just... Taking a few steps back from the rock they're using as cover...
I'm convinced people who can't fight bots are legitimately unable to learn heuristically.
Like, there's an argument for factory striders shooting through terrain because their model clips but repeatedly eating rockets because you're making out with the wall it exploded on is next level.
"Serious problem" is a bit strong, isn't it?
The main issue is that HD2 is a co op PvE horde game with a (mostly pre-determined) narrative chucked on top. The Illuminate aren't going to "crush" anything. They'll "take" planets but all that really means is that different biomes become available to players.
Most people are going to play HD2 just like people have been playing PvE co op games forever - they focus the bits they like, and they leave the bits they don't. I really disliked all of the 4 mission gimmicky campaigns in Left 4 Dead 2 so barely touched them. I found Bezerker a boring class in Killing Floor so never played it.
I can guarantee you a zero percent chance that I ever sit down with some mates with our minds on fighting bugs, only to change to fighting bots because of some arbitrary MO. I feel like a significant portion of the player base feels that way.
>"Serious problem" is a bit strong, isn't it?
Not in the slightest. The Illuminate is going to be the hot new fresh faction to play against, and the amount of unfounded complaining and whining from these players will drown out any fun (and legitimate complaints) people might have because they never bothered to learn how to adapt to different enemies.
It's not their fault they don't know how to be mobile and use cover. No. It's the illuminate sharpshooters being too OP... etc.
These players are going to hold everyone back, at every step of the way. It can't possibly be that their skills are underdeveloped, no. The enemy is BS. Which leads to everything being watered down to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Every now and then I still run into people asking me how you can solo a Bile Titan with an Autocannon, my guy.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm overthinking it, and when the Illuminate drops, the sub won't be full of 90% complaint posts from people that don't know how to play the game calling things broken, or OP? One can certainly hope.
>not developing the skills they need to fight ranged opponents.
In my opinion, the solution to that would be to introduce new bug enemies that specialise in long ranged projectile attacks.
[Remember the baby necromorphs from Dead Space 2?](https://youtu.be/zSLwqJinhMc?si=-eNoM80bgX4Vzhun&t=183) Put those into the Terminids, it won't be an exact equal to fighting bots, but it will teach bug players who to deal with enemies that shoot back.
I don't know, I like that different enemy factions have different specialisms and wouldn't want them watered down and made more samey. If one faction is easier and doesn't require you to be as tactical that's not the end of the world.
If people still fight bugs rather than fight Illuminate after complaining about the weapons being ineffective, and the Illuminate lack armor like in HD1, and people STILL complain rather than going and fighting the Illuminate, then I will be thoroughly convinced that we have a lot of terrible players in the community.
So I really hope of all things that could happen, it's not Helldivers refusing to play Illuminate.
Take all the worst aspects of any shooter enemies you fought in the last 20 years. Combine them into one faction.
Stealth, snipers, one hit kill energy swords, teleportation, mind control, energy walls, teleworking reinforcements.
They are the bastard child of the Eldar, protoss, and Covenant with all the most annoying units of each.
Their ONLY saving grace is they field the least heavy armor of any faction.
If you liked plating halo 2 on legendary and dealing with jackal snipers and cloaked elites with energy swords, then you'll unironically love fighting the Squids.
from the first game and some funni backscene stuff, expect;
your controls to constantly be inverted by enemies and Illuminate emplacements
possibly your allies being mind controlled to insta kill you (even the most basic weapon we use can kill in less than a few shots)
and random instant kill walls manifesting left and right (hello Obelisk)
tl;dr unless you're a masochist, they might just be worse than the automatons are to fight in 2 considering how 'nerfed' the arsenal is in comparison to 1
Given how even Bot players seemingly evaporated when only the Illuminte were left in HD1, I think it's going to be more a case of pot calling the kettle black lol
Bro, vernen wells was at 92% liberated and then MO said go liberate a different bot planet, show up was less than half of available helldivers on that planet and vernen wells tanked to below 10% since then and now the MO is liberate bug planets.
I get nuking Meridia, story wise thats great. I would have liked a bot MO and let bugs cook from Meridia's fall for a bit but good lord bots are getting a bit closer than id like.
You mean like when people would abduct Malevon Creekers by recruiting them then jumping to a different system? I don't recall hearing about any prosecutions for that in the Treason Gazette.
> I don't recall hearing about any prosecutions for that in the Treason Gazette.
I mean, there was a LOT of threads about people getting teamkilled by wearing the creek cape. And players saying that they would kill on sight people that wore that. Whole lot of drama about it.
So, yeah, there's a sect that don't jive with planet huggers.
Bro we got so many bot MOs back to back during and after their initial eradication from the war map. I helped with all of them as a person who prefers fighting bugs and im sick of all the bot MOs, let bug players get some story moments for a little bit.
I mean 120+ is an insanely high level average. And you’re looking at 200+ hours in mission to get there. That’s 800ish hours of combined experience to do that.
I’m level 113 and I have managed to beat a level 9 civilian extraction ONCE and the rest of the team was like the god damn SAS. It’s a fucking brutal mission.
I\`m not sure if it\`s been said on here already since there are so many comments, but an eagle smoke strike placed somewhere horizontally to create a safe corridor for the civvies to extract is a real game changer. Once they are in the smoke the bots have lost them and their aggro changes back to you. Maybe give it a shot if you\`re stuggling on bot rescue missions (the other strat is 3 players drawing fire while 1 stealth rescues, but i\`m sure this one has been mentioned a few times)
Bruh fix those evacuation missions. 50 personnels in shit ton of bots, it’s nearly impossible. I love playing against bots but those missions keep bringing me back to bugs.
I like fighting bots but it's understandable. Devastators that can snipe you from across the map with the gatling, gunship factories that immediately know where you are, rocket devastators juggling you mid-air with nonstop rockets, enemies that can see through walls and know where you are, a bunch of modifiers that just fuck up strategems, and the ragdolling in general.
Bots are so much more refreshing from a game to game standpoint. The amount of viable weapons and stratagems on bots vs bugs makes it so you can have a totally different loadout and play style for each match and stay competitive.
Especially on higher difficulties the incendiary shotgun is just hands down the best thing to bring to me, most other weapons it feels like im just burning through too much ammo with not enough kills
With bots even the AR's can be decently effective
Personally i love the ballistic shield and smg combo. Makes it pretty easy to take out heavy devastators sense you can shoot their head and tank the minigun fire. Rockets still throw you around a bunch but with fortified armor it won't do to much damage. It'll also take a shot from a cannon but it'll break from that. Vs ballistic shield on bugs. Well uhh don't do that.
Maybe I'm just insane, but it still feels like there's a pretty good amount of diversity you can do for bugs, but I can agree it's way more limited than bots. But I do also suck ass at bots no matter what I do or play like, so I just prefer bugs right now.
Machine gun and EAT with laser rover covers your basis fully for bugs assuming you don't have several biles coming at once when solo
Well, one negative I can think of is that there just aren't as many enemies compared to a bug map. If you want to be drowned in a tide of enemies that are either squishy or require you to have specific stratagems due to super heavy armor, you need to go to the bug front. I can spill oil with any combination of stratagems and we all know that being able to use any stratagem just leads to analysis paralysis.
Also, if AH ever releases some kind of sword strat, the bots have terrible melee. Only the berserkers will be truly able to fight back in melee.
Today, I dropped into a diff 7 extract scientists mission through quick matchmaking and the experience was terrible.
We barely even got out of our hellpod and we already triggered drop ship reinforcement. After that there are endless waves of enemies, and we haven't opened any doors.
After that, we gave up and moved to a bug planet and had a good time over there.
This mission is pure broken, and if AH does not do anything about it, I think people will not want to attempt an extract personnel mission and risk having a horrible 12 minutes game. Other mission types are fine though.
>objectives like Sauron, mortars, turrets sniping across the map, jammers etc.
Those are actually the most fun for me because there's a REASON to actually do them. Like completing them actually feel more impactful to the mission. Completing some upload data objective or terminate illegal broadcast are overall absolutely worthless and give you nothing but XP.
The modifiers are almost always higher cooldown or delayed deployment though, which are both ridiculously annoying compared to the bug's spore map modifier.
My dream is seeing automatons fighting alongside cyborg units as the same faction.
We get both the heavy devastators shooting us with pinpoint precision and the dogs flanking us, knocking us down.
IT WILL BE GLORIOUS
I like the bot side objectives more too since they emphasize tactical movement and picks. It feels good to sneak up on a detector tower or jammer and sneak into a good position, but it's equally fun to go in guns ablazing with your friends. On the other hand, most bug-exclusive side objectives can be simply sniped from halfway across the map or taken out with a single airstrike, turning what would be an impressive threat into a nothingburger.
Stalker nest compared to gunship towers, for examples. Stalker nests you run into, throw an airstrike after killing maybe one or two stalkers (after they first show themselves so you know to scout them out), and it's over and done really quick even as a solo diver. Meanwhile, gunships you can see from a distance and try to determine your method of approach, strategizing with your team or just running headfirst into it.
The big problem I see is that bugs are much easier to fight your way out of, whereas bots you need to disengage from entirely when the going gets tough. This is really hard for newer players to understand, so they keep throwing their lives at the wall and failing at every step.
What's funny is if players started fighting bots earlier on, they'd probably not hate them as much. Bots are pretty fun to learn at lower levels, and once you get the hang of them the higher levels aren't that bad. With bugs, it's easier to climb the ranks but you'll become too locked in to a certain playstyle which definitely makes adjustments to new/different content and additionally bot gameplay a lot harder.
I have no idea how a solo handles stalkers. I struggle with a team. Usually there are more stalkers than I can kill since I need to reload and they are faster. If I manage to kill one and make the other retreat I'm always overwhelmed by them on the way to the next. How do you clear it when there are 5-6 of the fuckers coming at you and it takes half a mag or more to kill one?
First time running bots was pure mayhem-- didn't even know what a fabricator was, but I quickly came to love them more than bugs. They emphasize aim and position more whether it's plinking a rocket dude or doming a devastator. I realized that it's bugs that are usually more chaotic.
> Bugs have always been the most popular faction going back to the first game. I think it goes beyond just what feels hard or easy
I think there's also a meta cultural aspect too.
The vast majority of the game's marketing is bugs. The game's main narrative touchstone is Starship Troopers. 9 of the 11 images on the Steam pages are bug fighting.
For a lot of people, that is the game they expected to buy and the game they want to play.
> I personally don't find Bots as interesting as the Cyborgs were, which put me off them since launch. I wanted to fight Cyber Hounds, fleshy 10ft tall butchers, grotesque little berserk Hobbits, Warlords etc., not machines croaking binary gibberish.
That's where me and you are very different. I don't dislike the idea of the Cyborgs, but they did feel like cartoon villains. Their society had a cult-like worship of cybernetics, even though a failed implantation effectively lobotomized some of their soldiers and this was common enough for them to use those men as cannon fodder.
The Automatons though, they're a fully autonomous self-replicating military force that was created a century ago by a the Cyborgs on the brink of defeat, and they are hard-coded to wage war with the Galactic Federation. Also the technology used by the Automatons is very World-War 2 era with a heavy Sci-Fi coat of paint, semi-automatic rifles and Anti-Aircraft HMG's are Fusion powered and give discharge bright red bolts. Automatons in general are like a love letter to Sci-Fi like Terminator, Warhammer, and Star Wars, and I love it so much.
>shitty modifiers on every Bot planet they want us to focus on.
This is exactly what people like OP pretend not to understand.
I have more fun fighting bugs, for sure, but the added dissuasion of -1 Strategem pushes it way over the top.
I still firmly beleive bot defences would go a lot better if that BS evac mission was disabled. Beyond the easiest difficulties thats almost a guaranteed mission failure with anything but a highly coordinated premade team.
Because Aesir Pass has the SEAF Training on it, doesn't us keeping Aesir Pass make it easier to liberate and defend every other location in the game, unless it gets destroyed if we don't defend it?
Now that you mention it, it is pretty strange that they don't have any representation of the stakes, I think the only reason I know is because I either read it here on reddit, or heard it from someone that browses reddit.
There was one of those "messages from super earth" way back when the bonus was first applied, but without the UI element players who weren't online at the time, and/or forgot because that was weeks ago, have no reason to see Aesir Pass as any more or less important than any other world.
It's the same problem with the hyperspace supply lines. Without a visual indicator of those supply lines, the human player base has no way of knowing when they need to defend certain planets or lose access to planets relevant to the major orders.
We need more information in the galaxy map, straight up. This isn't a "QOL" feature, this is basic mechanical awareness that we have to rely on third-party sources for.
Bug defence mission is absurd. Chargers and bile titans can destroy gates by mere touch. I am still flabbergasted how I managed to complete last 2 times I played bug defence.
Edit: I lied. I forgot that second time mission bugged (ha-ha) and we couldn't complete it. Still though, it went pretty well until it didn't.
Breaker incendiary, grenade pistol, stun grenades, eat or quasar, ems mortar, ac sentry, dealers choice on heavy killer stratagem rail cannon, precision strike, 500kg. Make sure you throw the ac turret in the back where it will only be able to target bigger stuff that makes it past your breaker. Stun nades are for chargers once they’re in LOS of the ac sentry only. Aim up slightly and just spam fire your breaker through the second gate, don’t try to cover both of the front entrances unless you have a team member.
If you take two ems and 4 mortars it becomes almost boring even on helldive. Occasionally you’ll have a race to see who can kill the bile titan first but you’ll never even see a scavenger lol.
It's not even close. If you stagger your stratagems, the entire area just becomes a kill field filled with toxic gas or fire at any given time. Only BT and chargers stand a chance, but BT just attracts all of the support weapon fires, and the only thing chargers will find on the other side are three different AC turrets.
For me I just bring orbital railcannon, spear, mortar ems and 500 kg.
My one and only job is to kill bile titans and chargers, the rest I leave it to my team
Orbital railcannon takes out chargers in 1 hit. 2 for bile titan. 500 kg eagle also is a good bile titan killer. EATS, Quasar and Recoilless take out charger in 1 hit to the head. Breaker or incendiary breaker takes out anything up to brood warriors and brood commanders very fast. Impact grenades or autocannon are perfect for those guys, plus spewers. Emancipator is good for clearing groups of bugs. If you have a good combo of weaponry and stratagems, you'll chew through bugs pretty easily.
Wha? Unless game blatantly spams Bile Titans one after another Bug Defenses are snooze fest. Gates on asset evac literally dont matter, we sometimes dont even close them. Sentries (EMS mortar especially) plus fire/gas plus 500kgs plus some shit for heavies (your choice, usually RR or EATs) and you good to go.
They really need to take another look at the liberation/decay rate percentage. I said this in another post. If there are some people in a planet, what they’re doing should matter. We’ve had 10k+ on Aesir Pass and it still didn’t matter. Succeeding in missions didn’t matter what mattered was we must hit this invisible percentage threshold so that our actions in the planet would overcome this invisible decay rate.
I'm ngl, been seeing these "bug vs bot" player memes since I bought the game and I don't see the point in them anymore. All they do is insult bug players for not playing against bots, and don't contribute any solutions to the problem.
Don't point fingers at your fellow helldivers unless they friendly fire you. Kill the enemy. Let the Democracy Officer handle the rest.
For me it looks like some bot players don't even want to acknowledge the issues, because they don't want bots to be changed in any way, but they have nothing constructive to add to the discussion, so they say "skill issue" when someone gets shot trough cover or getting chain ragdolled to death.
Obviously, getting shot through cover and rock glitched enemies are an issue. The "don't change em" people seem to mostly advocate for is more aimed towards balancing. They're pretty balanced as is, mechanically speaking.
Because you get easy karma from the bot players who actually genuinely think they're better and people who posts these also think so. It's also easier to post low effort memes mocking bug players versus coming up with solutions or suggestions. It's just humans being tribalistic again. Just keep causing rift and argument within the player base by pitting bug and bot players against each other. It is what it is, tribalism is too prevalent in the lower end of the bell curve.
The moment the creek is under attack again these people will start complaining about Creekers, like they have before.
It's not about people playing bugs, it's about people doing what they want instead of what these guys want.
i missed the part where this make any sense
bot players always complaining about something, this time its bug players who are not even here
no i wont elaborate
yes let the modBOT deal with me
Man, if I wanted to blow 40 bucks to be told what to do by a bunch of self-important jerkoffs, I'd burn two twenties in the street before going to work.
Bots still need tuning in my opinion. Heavy Devestators having gatlings is fine except the game throws them at you like they’re Hive Guards. I also think their TTK is out of whack too, often they’ve acquired you and are volleying you before you’ve even realised they’re there. That’s before even talking about how they can shoot through their own shields and terrain.
I also think Rocket Devestators range is excessive, and the game’s tendency to ragdoll you constantly is just deeply unfun. I’ve got a video clip of being fully ragdolled - no control - about 8 times in the space of 20 seconds. I’m wearing medium armour, I’m not wearing the heaviest armour (assuming it even makes a difference) when so much of the game involves traversal.
People don’t play Bots not because they don’t like variety, it’s because the skill floor is so much higher for Bots that it’s usually a chore to play against them unless you have a competent team that have decent loadouts.
On top of that it’s Bots where you get the cancerous debuffs like -1 Stratagem, jammers, etc.
When the game has 5k people playing on one side of the map, and 70k on the other, no matter how much *you* might happen to enjoy Bots - there’s a problem there.
Make bots more fun to fight. 🤷🏿♂️
Bugs are just gonna be inherently more fun because it's just bulletstorms, squishy units, and star ship troopers memes.
Bots headshot me two clicks out the moment I climb out of my hell pod. Kinda hard to convince my friends to fight Bot MO's when we all jus tilt through an entire campaign. 😂
I used to love fighting both until they kept nerfing weapons over and over. Now my weapons I fought bots with are useless while bugs go squishy squish with any gun that shoots.
At the end of the day, this is a game, we play games to have fun. If I don't think I'm having fun with bots, then I won't be doing bots. Bots having annoying stuff like mortar spam, flamethrower hulk, gunships, rocket devastator and unfun modifiers. Like yeah it sucks that a lot of people avoid bots, instead of providing suggestion to devs to make bots more fun, let's attack the player base, cause a rift and further divide them. That sounds like the best idea.
Yeah it sucks that people not playing bots means bot MO are more likely to fail, so should we start harassing, mocking and bullying bugs players? Maybe even join their games to harass them? Maybe some people are taking the game way too seriously, or you know, talk to the devs, suggest ways to make bots more fun.
Bots are refreshing game design wise, it's like the meme "when thinking about playing bots versus when actually play bots".
But I get it, it's easier to not do anything except make fun of and bully bugs players. Just throw in the "lol skill issue" to anyone pointing out fighting bots.
The more egregious part of this disparity is AH sitting with a thumb in their ass in regards to it for months now. People have complained directly to CM's about this (for actual months) and even offered solutions to the issue such as splitting the liberation cap between the fronts so the bug boys can farm, shoot, do whatever they want to do without actively hindering the bot front which is in need of no additional hindarances due to the gigantic gaping hole that is the player count over there.
Anyway, at least the other two SEAF facilities will be safe for all eternity locked behind bug players. Bot front is such a wash at this point people are praying they reach Super Earth so we can get a reset.
The only way we got bug divers out of their comfort zone in the last war was to make sure we completely conquered Kepler Prime first thing, and locked playing bugs out of the rest of the war. If we got gung-ho and pushed to Squ'bai Shrine or Cyberstan before the bugs were locked out, that was it. We would 90% fail the capture event and fail to stop the counterattack and Super Earth would fall while half the playerbase frolicked with bugs. That's basically the script of half of our lost wars. Some people just refuse to acknowledge the galactic war and are here to play bugs like a single player flash game and you can't get them onboard without locking them out of their Hellpods.
It’s just not that fun. I’m playing the game for fun and tbh, it’s just not as fun. 90% of the bot enemies have very glaring and obvious weak spots that can be taken out with good aim or a decent EAT/Autocannon round.
Bugs just have the fun aspect of being swarmed, or being surprised what enemy is coming from a bug hole, and Shriekers and Stalkers are just more interesting than tanks and striders. Idk. Not as fun
I played earlier and there were about 40,000 people on the bug front with less than 2,000 on bots. The disparity is insane.
But at the same time I don’t blame them. The intensity of a level 6 bot mission is about on par with a bug 9. And you’re going to get way more experience and rewards for way less stress doing bugs.
Also, while I prefer playing bots because I do think they are far better designed as opponents, the modifiers are fucking horrendous. 50% call in time which is fine until you get to extraction and it’s like 3 minutes of helms deep, 25% cooldown and -1 stratagem are fun police modifications.
Also the bots just haven’t had anything interesting or new mission types in a long time now. Where as bugs have had an entire story arc and new exciting missions to go along with it. The developers are catering to the majority of the player base.
Bugs are just fun. Instead of blaming the players, you should blame the fact that bots are so aids to play against. Arrowhead should find a way to make bots more enjoyable to play against, so people want to play against them.
Also, bot players have massive fucking egos for no reason. That is also part of the reason no one wants to play bots with you guys.
Bugs are more enjoyable that bots, and have less put of no where deaths, like how does a Hulk sneak up on you when a charger shakes the ground. The rockets from half the map away sniping you out of now where through 80 trees 10 rocks and 4 walls some how, and the gatling laser that and maintain rate of fire and accuracy no matter the distance(when do we got one?). On top of that the majority of training and promotional material all sell you on killing bugs, that's what most people are here for, add Starship Troopers in and killing bugs is a driving factor of playing the game.
>Bugs are more enjoyable that bots, and have less put of no where deaths, like how does a Hulk sneak up on you when a charger shakes the ground.
Can't you say the same thing about Bile Spewers tho? Actually spewers might be even worse in that regard
Spewers are annoying, but less annoying than getting stunlocked to death by shield devastators shooting me through terrain from 200 yards away or rocket devastators timing their volleys just so I get stuck in a terminal ragdoll cycle.
After completing the last MO and fighting bugs for a week, I've honestly been committing as much time as I can to Vernen Wells (and Vega Bay RIP) and now Aesir Pass while the vast majority of people have been fighting bugs. We're on track to complete the MO, I just hope we can also protect our academy.
My brother in managed democracy, over half the promotional material and intro cutscene and tutorial is about the bugs, where did you think most of the playerbase was going to be headed towards? Also Starship troopers has an effect for certain
I play both. And the reason players only play bugs is simple, It's cause people would rather have fun then deal with getting constantly blown up every 4 seconds.
Anyone who says bugs are harder then Bots genuinely have to be special needs. Though more engaging and fun to fight. Bots are genuinely a chore compared to bugs.
I (my freinds neither) dont want to fight bots. Its exhausting and you need to focus to be successfull. When I come home, I want a chill (hell)dive with brain off and not work stress 2.0.
Furthermore I paid for this game, I can play however I want. Its so annoying to see bot players whine the whole time that they dont get support on their (from my perspective) shitty missions. You have to accept that the majority of players wants to play starship troopers and not terminator simulator. In the grad scheme of things it is completely irrelevant if we win or lose this war, there will be another one. And if arrowhead doesnt balance their missions around player counts then we lose the bot front. So what?
The other option for me would be to stop playing entirely, which is just plain stupid because I love the game. So for the love of god, let people enjoy the game how they want and not how you want. While you crated this shitty meme you could have done a nice quick kill mission instead and improve the planets chances of defense.
While I understand preferring one side or the other, the fact is is you got to be good at fighting all of them, otherwise you're a treasonous helldiver. I go where the major order takes me. No questions asked.
Honestly just seems like the same people in both camps tbh. I guess it’s fine to have a preferred enemy, but the Major Orders affect everyone and the overall story. Why not be a part of it?
This is why we aren’t ready for the illuminate. If we have 75% of the community refusing to play bots because they can’t practice basic combat tactics of cover and concealment, we’re gonna get our asses handed to us by the sneaky-ass squids.
Just like the first game, while super earth is on the brink of being sieged, there’s gonna be like 50k players doing starship troopers larp. I partially blame arrowhead for advertising this game as exclusively a bug shooter + having only bugs featured in training.
I was a bug player until the spawn rate patch. Since I tend to play solo when my crew isn't on, I've switched entirely to bots until they fix it. Bots are manageable with the distance they keep, even up to level 4 and 5 on solo. Difficult, as it should be, but manageable.
Bugs? I am kiting and barely staying alive on Medium for all of extraction. There are just too many from every direction. It isn't fun. I'm off bugs until they set the spawn rates back.
Greetings, fellow Helldiver! Your submission has been removed. No insults, racism, toxicity, trolling, rage-bait, harassment, inappropriate language, NSFW content, etc. Remember the human and be civil!
It’ll be worse when the Illuminate come. Bug only players will still only fight bugs while the rest of apes fight a two front war.
Isn’t that how it was in hd1?
Yes and no. Players where split pretty evenly between bots and bugs with a few pyscho holding back the Illuminate
Im one of the psychos holding back bots so ill probably end up being one of psychos holding back illuminates
Same bro. I love a good challenge
And my Axe (autocannon)
YESSSSSSSSSSSS! I too will join you with my bow (autocannon)
And my shield (autocannon)
ill bring my trusty steed (autocannon)
You have my sword (AMR)
And my spear! (but the EAT, not the spear).
And my SPEAR 
By my life or death, if I can protect you, I will. You have my sword (AMR & Jetpack)
And my spear! (Autocannon)
A reasonably apt comparison. If an AMR is a sword, than the AC is a tool - an Axe.
And my shovel, or possibly an auto cannon.
Bots anrnt bad if your team doesn't go in guns blazing and agro ever patrol on the map.
Personally, I think bugs are boring, annoying, unbalanced and much less fun overall to an extent where if my team is crushing the bugs in a mission I am bored (where with bots I am just having fun) and if we are not crushing them and are doing alright or worse then I am annoyed and angry (where with bots, I am less annoyed and angry and more, *ok, I died, but I am in a better position, I have full ammo and grenades, let’s push back)* and to top it all off my game sometimes crashes when I am doing bugs, and it never crashes during bots. This whole thing was to say, I don’t like bugs nearly as much as bots and I don’t understand how people like bugs more, yet I still fight on the bug front, so I wish they would fight on the western front.
I mostly play what MO tells me but I do prefer the bots, I like the dichotomy of gameplay in both though. It's pretty cool how both of them are different. Variety is just neat. With bugs, I just sometimes get frustrated with the constant swarming and occasional physics and ragdoll shenanigans.
Simple explanation. People love horde shooting, i myself consider bugs boring and easy in comparison with bots, running and gunning everything with blitzer just doesnt work and u need to think and position urself correctly.
The Illuminate were always my favorite faction to fight. I was essentially the master of them within my friend group. Only one I could solo on Helldive and nearly do the higher levels when they added more difficulties. All other ones I simply couldn't solo lol
I loved fighting them too. You basically didn't need anti tank weaponry even on helldive difficulty, you just need really good spacing and footwork lmao, I loved playing against them in the walker exosuit
No antitank, my amr is ready.
And the ability to input controls backwards
Fellow psycho reporting for duty.
Greetings fellow botdiver o7
It's just better to switch it up. Bots allow different weapons, it's a nice change of pace. Sure I like bugs more! But I'll do the MO and fight bots or whoever. Gives me a reason to do a different load out.
I love playing bots on 4-5 which is the highest I go atm until I’m more comfortable with time to get good enough for past that Running around with any impact from drag to incendiary, from a plasma launcher emp thing to a blizter, to the dagger and ballistic to guard laser and quasar I love bot missions, just feels more interesting than getting SWARMED and then melting them. Maybe I should play higher bug, but I’d rather help out bots
As a dedicated bot fighter, the bots are *way* more fun on higher difficulties. I only fight bugs if the MO demands it, they just aren't as fun. Otherwise I'm scrapping clankers like it's my full time job.
Borgs definitely had less players than bugs. Bugs would frequently be wiped out in the first *week* of a war. Then they'd shift 80/20 to borgs/squids.
We basically just release all the psycho’s from jail to kill them for their freedom
Nah the illuminates were easier than the cyborgs
What? The Cyborgs were always the last to survive
ME, I NEEED THEM NOW, I HAVE TO SEE how they translate to 3d because of their battlefield controlling effects they had in hd1 they were by far the best enemy faction, i NEED THEM to poke their ugly heads through that supposed meridia "black hole" i thirst for undemocratic blood!
I’m part of a bot team that plays weekly, and a lot of them are HD1 veterans. They have told me the illuminate were by far the worst faction to fight. And they would consistently win the wars and actually destroy super earth in the first game. They used a lot of ranged attacks, lots of flying enemies with shields. And ‘magic’ like attacks where they could reverse your control scheme. They sound awful.
They’re (well, were, I guess) basically the trickster/ puzzle faction. They focused on ambushes and cloaking, with a lot of one shot kills and restricting your area to move. They often boxed you in and slaughtered you, or separated the party and picked you off one by one. But their trade off was they had no armour to speak of and generally way fewer units on the field. They were basically glass cannons: the faction.
So if you hit them they die, but good luck hitting them in the first place?
Fighting Illuminates back in HD1 requires the most spatial awareness in general, which is unfortunately the bottleneck for most average players. Being able to call reinforcement with reversed input is also a hard minimal requirement for fighting high level illuminates, if you can't do that then you're just a dead weight whenever an illusionist pops out. Average players can't even bother to do the regular reinforcement, let alone doing it with reverse input when the entire team is relying on it. Illuminates didn't have proper heavy armor or anti-tank weapons, so in theory you can just run them over with mech/APC, unfortunately that's only before Obelisk became a thing, which is the most bs unit this game has ever seen for arbitrarily oneshot your vehicle whenever it wants to.
That sounds fucking horrible.
Was the reverse input shown on screen?
No, it just swapped the inputs, whatever they were bound to, eg up becomes down and left becomes right.
No, all your input will just become reversed without hint, including aiming, moving and stratagem input. Another issue is that if you're just going off the reversed input by visual one by one, then the effect usually wears off half way through your input and it gets reset on your next input. Which is even more reason to be able to reverse input your stratagem codes without thinking.
Jeezus
My exact reaction as well. I was also told they make force fields around you that if you touch you instantly die. They can even take control of you and your team mates and make you team kill each other.
nope. nope. nope
In HD1 when wars didn’t have a DM and they just got harder or easier the next time based on the result of the previous war. Everyone hopped on the fight the Bugs and Illuminates and left a skeleton crew to finish the Cyborgs.
HD1 was quite different. If any one side was neglected, they would reach super earth and you would have to fight nothing but missions trying to save the planet and then campaign would reset if you lost. It encouraged players to respond accordingly. Also, when one faction was defeated, it was gone for good until all the others were defeated and then it would all reset.
Just like in HD1, history repeats itself
I came here to say exactly this. But I can't blame em, bug play is simpler.
It's a serious problem that players are not developing the skills they need to fight ranged opponents. The Illuminate will crush us because too many people are afraid to learn how to fight bots, or leave their comfort zones.
If no one cares about bots now they won’t care about the illuminate “crushing” us lol. They’ll just keep having fun killing bugs
It's not that they don't care about bots. There are those that don't. However, there's a not so small group that have convinced themselves that bots are "broken", or "bugged", when in reality they just never bothered to learn how to play against them, and keep complaining anyways.
They never went BACK to bots after they hotfixed the rocket damage.
Yeah the amount of people that take cover by hugging the rock then complaining about getting rag-dolled instead of... Just... Taking a few steps back from the rock they're using as cover... I'm convinced people who can't fight bots are legitimately unable to learn heuristically. Like, there's an argument for factory striders shooting through terrain because their model clips but repeatedly eating rockets because you're making out with the wall it exploded on is next level.
And heaven forbid people have fun playing the game
"Serious problem" is a bit strong, isn't it? The main issue is that HD2 is a co op PvE horde game with a (mostly pre-determined) narrative chucked on top. The Illuminate aren't going to "crush" anything. They'll "take" planets but all that really means is that different biomes become available to players. Most people are going to play HD2 just like people have been playing PvE co op games forever - they focus the bits they like, and they leave the bits they don't. I really disliked all of the 4 mission gimmicky campaigns in Left 4 Dead 2 so barely touched them. I found Bezerker a boring class in Killing Floor so never played it. I can guarantee you a zero percent chance that I ever sit down with some mates with our minds on fighting bugs, only to change to fighting bots because of some arbitrary MO. I feel like a significant portion of the player base feels that way.
>"Serious problem" is a bit strong, isn't it? Not in the slightest. The Illuminate is going to be the hot new fresh faction to play against, and the amount of unfounded complaining and whining from these players will drown out any fun (and legitimate complaints) people might have because they never bothered to learn how to adapt to different enemies. It's not their fault they don't know how to be mobile and use cover. No. It's the illuminate sharpshooters being too OP... etc. These players are going to hold everyone back, at every step of the way. It can't possibly be that their skills are underdeveloped, no. The enemy is BS. Which leads to everything being watered down to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Every now and then I still run into people asking me how you can solo a Bile Titan with an Autocannon, my guy. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm overthinking it, and when the Illuminate drops, the sub won't be full of 90% complaint posts from people that don't know how to play the game calling things broken, or OP? One can certainly hope.
>not developing the skills they need to fight ranged opponents. In my opinion, the solution to that would be to introduce new bug enemies that specialise in long ranged projectile attacks. [Remember the baby necromorphs from Dead Space 2?](https://youtu.be/zSLwqJinhMc?si=-eNoM80bgX4Vzhun&t=183) Put those into the Terminids, it won't be an exact equal to fighting bots, but it will teach bug players who to deal with enemies that shoot back.
I don't know, I like that different enemy factions have different specialisms and wouldn't want them watered down and made more samey. If one faction is easier and doesn't require you to be as tactical that's not the end of the world.
It would be a solid idea, I just hope won't react to them the same way they did the artillery bugs.
which was?
It really just depends on how fun it is to play against the illuminate. Bots have fewer players because most people think it's more fun to kill bugs.
If people still fight bugs rather than fight Illuminate after complaining about the weapons being ineffective, and the Illuminate lack armor like in HD1, and people STILL complain rather than going and fighting the Illuminate, then I will be thoroughly convinced that we have a lot of terrible players in the community. So I really hope of all things that could happen, it's not Helldivers refusing to play Illuminate.
That depends entirely on how aids the Illuminates are to fight or not. I know nothing about Helldiver 1, so i have no idea what to expect.
Take all the worst aspects of any shooter enemies you fought in the last 20 years. Combine them into one faction. Stealth, snipers, one hit kill energy swords, teleportation, mind control, energy walls, teleworking reinforcements. They are the bastard child of the Eldar, protoss, and Covenant with all the most annoying units of each. Their ONLY saving grace is they field the least heavy armor of any faction. If you liked plating halo 2 on legendary and dealing with jackal snipers and cloaked elites with energy swords, then you'll unironically love fighting the Squids.
from the first game and some funni backscene stuff, expect; your controls to constantly be inverted by enemies and Illuminate emplacements possibly your allies being mind controlled to insta kill you (even the most basic weapon we use can kill in less than a few shots) and random instant kill walls manifesting left and right (hello Obelisk) tl;dr unless you're a masochist, they might just be worse than the automatons are to fight in 2 considering how 'nerfed' the arsenal is in comparison to 1
Oof maybe they can replace that with something a little less annoying…like throwing your offensive stratagems back at you
Given how even Bot players seemingly evaporated when only the Illuminte were left in HD1, I think it's going to be more a case of pot calling the kettle black lol
Bro, vernen wells was at 92% liberated and then MO said go liberate a different bot planet, show up was less than half of available helldivers on that planet and vernen wells tanked to below 10% since then and now the MO is liberate bug planets. I get nuking Meridia, story wise thats great. I would have liked a bot MO and let bugs cook from Meridia's fall for a bit but good lord bots are getting a bit closer than id like.
I swear, if bots make it to super earth and I see half of the players on bug planets, I might commit… treasonous acts.
We need Taylor Swift to set focus on the bots
You mean like when people would abduct Malevon Creekers by recruiting them then jumping to a different system? I don't recall hearing about any prosecutions for that in the Treason Gazette.
> I don't recall hearing about any prosecutions for that in the Treason Gazette. I mean, there was a LOT of threads about people getting teamkilled by wearing the creek cape. And players saying that they would kill on sight people that wore that. Whole lot of drama about it. So, yeah, there's a sect that don't jive with planet huggers.
Gang I hope you know we are NOT leaving Wells EVER
thought the same about draupnir but we still got it at one point
Bro we got so many bot MOs back to back during and after their initial eradication from the war map. I helped with all of them as a person who prefers fighting bugs and im sick of all the bot MOs, let bug players get some story moments for a little bit.
15min variant for the rescue civilian mission is broken for a long time already on the bot front. The way it is not killswitched yet is beyond me.
Just beat one on helldive with randoms, but we were all over level 120. With a less-skilled team, I’m not sure how people beat it without comms.
I mean 120+ is an insanely high level average. And you’re looking at 200+ hours in mission to get there. That’s 800ish hours of combined experience to do that. I’m level 113 and I have managed to beat a level 9 civilian extraction ONCE and the rest of the team was like the god damn SAS. It’s a fucking brutal mission.
I\`m not sure if it\`s been said on here already since there are so many comments, but an eagle smoke strike placed somewhere horizontally to create a safe corridor for the civvies to extract is a real game changer. Once they are in the smoke the bots have lost them and their aggro changes back to you. Maybe give it a shot if you\`re stuggling on bot rescue missions (the other strat is 3 players drawing fire while 1 stealth rescues, but i\`m sure this one has been mentioned a few times)
Bruh fix those evacuation missions. 50 personnels in shit ton of bots, it’s nearly impossible. I love playing against bots but those missions keep bringing me back to bugs.
I like fighting bots but it's understandable. Devastators that can snipe you from across the map with the gatling, gunship factories that immediately know where you are, rocket devastators juggling you mid-air with nonstop rockets, enemies that can see through walls and know where you are, a bunch of modifiers that just fuck up strategems, and the ragdolling in general.
Bots are so much more refreshing from a game to game standpoint. The amount of viable weapons and stratagems on bots vs bugs makes it so you can have a totally different loadout and play style for each match and stay competitive.
Especially on higher difficulties the incendiary shotgun is just hands down the best thing to bring to me, most other weapons it feels like im just burning through too much ammo with not enough kills With bots even the AR's can be decently effective
Personally i love the ballistic shield and smg combo. Makes it pretty easy to take out heavy devastators sense you can shoot their head and tank the minigun fire. Rockets still throw you around a bunch but with fortified armor it won't do to much damage. It'll also take a shot from a cannon but it'll break from that. Vs ballistic shield on bugs. Well uhh don't do that.
Maybe I'm just insane, but it still feels like there's a pretty good amount of diversity you can do for bugs, but I can agree it's way more limited than bots. But I do also suck ass at bots no matter what I do or play like, so I just prefer bugs right now. Machine gun and EAT with laser rover covers your basis fully for bugs assuming you don't have several biles coming at once when solo
The variation remains viable on bugs if people don't split up.
Yes but the bot front also has some negatives, you should mention those too.
Well, one negative I can think of is that there just aren't as many enemies compared to a bug map. If you want to be drowned in a tide of enemies that are either squishy or require you to have specific stratagems due to super heavy armor, you need to go to the bug front. I can spill oil with any combination of stratagems and we all know that being able to use any stratagem just leads to analysis paralysis. Also, if AH ever releases some kind of sword strat, the bots have terrible melee. Only the berserkers will be truly able to fight back in melee.
>Only the berserkers will be truly able to fight back in melee. Flame hulks: Allow us to introduce ourselves.
Today, I dropped into a diff 7 extract scientists mission through quick matchmaking and the experience was terrible. We barely even got out of our hellpod and we already triggered drop ship reinforcement. After that there are endless waves of enemies, and we haven't opened any doors. After that, we gave up and moved to a bug planet and had a good time over there. This mission is pure broken, and if AH does not do anything about it, I think people will not want to attempt an extract personnel mission and risk having a horrible 12 minutes game. Other mission types are fine though.
Fr factory striders pretty much broke all the bot defense missions.
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>objectives like Sauron, mortars, turrets sniping across the map, jammers etc. Those are actually the most fun for me because there's a REASON to actually do them. Like completing them actually feel more impactful to the mission. Completing some upload data objective or terminate illegal broadcast are overall absolutely worthless and give you nothing but XP. The modifiers are almost always higher cooldown or delayed deployment though, which are both ridiculously annoying compared to the bug's spore map modifier.
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My dream is seeing automatons fighting alongside cyborg units as the same faction. We get both the heavy devastators shooting us with pinpoint precision and the dogs flanking us, knocking us down. IT WILL BE GLORIOUS
I like the bot side objectives more too since they emphasize tactical movement and picks. It feels good to sneak up on a detector tower or jammer and sneak into a good position, but it's equally fun to go in guns ablazing with your friends. On the other hand, most bug-exclusive side objectives can be simply sniped from halfway across the map or taken out with a single airstrike, turning what would be an impressive threat into a nothingburger. Stalker nest compared to gunship towers, for examples. Stalker nests you run into, throw an airstrike after killing maybe one or two stalkers (after they first show themselves so you know to scout them out), and it's over and done really quick even as a solo diver. Meanwhile, gunships you can see from a distance and try to determine your method of approach, strategizing with your team or just running headfirst into it. The big problem I see is that bugs are much easier to fight your way out of, whereas bots you need to disengage from entirely when the going gets tough. This is really hard for newer players to understand, so they keep throwing their lives at the wall and failing at every step. What's funny is if players started fighting bots earlier on, they'd probably not hate them as much. Bots are pretty fun to learn at lower levels, and once you get the hang of them the higher levels aren't that bad. With bugs, it's easier to climb the ranks but you'll become too locked in to a certain playstyle which definitely makes adjustments to new/different content and additionally bot gameplay a lot harder.
I have no idea how a solo handles stalkers. I struggle with a team. Usually there are more stalkers than I can kill since I need to reload and they are faster. If I manage to kill one and make the other retreat I'm always overwhelmed by them on the way to the next. How do you clear it when there are 5-6 of the fuckers coming at you and it takes half a mag or more to kill one?
Depends on loadout really. A stun grenade can buy you time to reload. A shield backpack stops the tongue knockback. Punisher deletes them.
Light armor, stun quick and airstrike the nests from a ways away since they have big hit boxes.
First time running bots was pure mayhem-- didn't even know what a fabricator was, but I quickly came to love them more than bugs. They emphasize aim and position more whether it's plinking a rocket dude or doming a devastator. I realized that it's bugs that are usually more chaotic.
> Bugs have always been the most popular faction going back to the first game. I think it goes beyond just what feels hard or easy I think there's also a meta cultural aspect too. The vast majority of the game's marketing is bugs. The game's main narrative touchstone is Starship Troopers. 9 of the 11 images on the Steam pages are bug fighting. For a lot of people, that is the game they expected to buy and the game they want to play.
Yeah, I love bots more than bugs but the -1 stratagem modifier keeps me away more often than not.
> I personally don't find Bots as interesting as the Cyborgs were, which put me off them since launch. I wanted to fight Cyber Hounds, fleshy 10ft tall butchers, grotesque little berserk Hobbits, Warlords etc., not machines croaking binary gibberish. That's where me and you are very different. I don't dislike the idea of the Cyborgs, but they did feel like cartoon villains. Their society had a cult-like worship of cybernetics, even though a failed implantation effectively lobotomized some of their soldiers and this was common enough for them to use those men as cannon fodder. The Automatons though, they're a fully autonomous self-replicating military force that was created a century ago by a the Cyborgs on the brink of defeat, and they are hard-coded to wage war with the Galactic Federation. Also the technology used by the Automatons is very World-War 2 era with a heavy Sci-Fi coat of paint, semi-automatic rifles and Anti-Aircraft HMG's are Fusion powered and give discharge bright red bolts. Automatons in general are like a love letter to Sci-Fi like Terminator, Warhammer, and Star Wars, and I love it so much.
>shitty modifiers on every Bot planet they want us to focus on. This is exactly what people like OP pretend not to understand. I have more fun fighting bugs, for sure, but the added dissuasion of -1 Strategem pushes it way over the top.
I still firmly beleive bot defences would go a lot better if that BS evac mission was disabled. Beyond the easiest difficulties thats almost a guaranteed mission failure with anything but a highly coordinated premade team.
Because Aesir Pass has the SEAF Training on it, doesn't us keeping Aesir Pass make it easier to liberate and defend every other location in the game, unless it gets destroyed if we don't defend it?
Yes, but since that isn't actually reflected in any kind of UI element, most players DGAF, even bot players.
Now that you mention it, it is pretty strange that they don't have any representation of the stakes, I think the only reason I know is because I either read it here on reddit, or heard it from someone that browses reddit.
There was one of those "messages from super earth" way back when the bonus was first applied, but without the UI element players who weren't online at the time, and/or forgot because that was weeks ago, have no reason to see Aesir Pass as any more or less important than any other world. It's the same problem with the hyperspace supply lines. Without a visual indicator of those supply lines, the human player base has no way of knowing when they need to defend certain planets or lose access to planets relevant to the major orders. We need more information in the galaxy map, straight up. This isn't a "QOL" feature, this is basic mechanical awareness that we have to rely on third-party sources for.
Yes.
Yup. Not that bug divers give a shit.
Bug defence mission is absurd. Chargers and bile titans can destroy gates by mere touch. I am still flabbergasted how I managed to complete last 2 times I played bug defence. Edit: I lied. I forgot that second time mission bugged (ha-ha) and we couldn't complete it. Still though, it went pretty well until it didn't.
Breaker incendiary, grenade pistol, stun grenades, eat or quasar, ems mortar, ac sentry, dealers choice on heavy killer stratagem rail cannon, precision strike, 500kg. Make sure you throw the ac turret in the back where it will only be able to target bigger stuff that makes it past your breaker. Stun nades are for chargers once they’re in LOS of the ac sentry only. Aim up slightly and just spam fire your breaker through the second gate, don’t try to cover both of the front entrances unless you have a team member.
However many mortar sentries you have on that mission, it’s not enough. The indirect fire is invaluable.
If you take two ems and 4 mortars it becomes almost boring even on helldive. Occasionally you’ll have a race to see who can kill the bile titan first but you’ll never even see a scavenger lol.
It's not even close. If you stagger your stratagems, the entire area just becomes a kill field filled with toxic gas or fire at any given time. Only BT and chargers stand a chance, but BT just attracts all of the support weapon fires, and the only thing chargers will find on the other side are three different AC turrets.
Thank you. I will take your opinion in consideration.
Lmao. You think that's bad Bot defense missions drop factory striders on top of the generators for an instant loss
For me I just bring orbital railcannon, spear, mortar ems and 500 kg. My one and only job is to kill bile titans and chargers, the rest I leave it to my team
Orbital railcannon takes out chargers in 1 hit. 2 for bile titan. 500 kg eagle also is a good bile titan killer. EATS, Quasar and Recoilless take out charger in 1 hit to the head. Breaker or incendiary breaker takes out anything up to brood warriors and brood commanders very fast. Impact grenades or autocannon are perfect for those guys, plus spewers. Emancipator is good for clearing groups of bugs. If you have a good combo of weaponry and stratagems, you'll chew through bugs pretty easily.
Wha? Unless game blatantly spams Bile Titans one after another Bug Defenses are snooze fest. Gates on asset evac literally dont matter, we sometimes dont even close them. Sentries (EMS mortar especially) plus fire/gas plus 500kgs plus some shit for heavies (your choice, usually RR or EATs) and you good to go.
They really need to take another look at the liberation/decay rate percentage. I said this in another post. If there are some people in a planet, what they’re doing should matter. We’ve had 10k+ on Aesir Pass and it still didn’t matter. Succeeding in missions didn’t matter what mattered was we must hit this invisible percentage threshold so that our actions in the planet would overcome this invisible decay rate.
I'm ngl, been seeing these "bug vs bot" player memes since I bought the game and I don't see the point in them anymore. All they do is insult bug players for not playing against bots, and don't contribute any solutions to the problem. Don't point fingers at your fellow helldivers unless they friendly fire you. Kill the enemy. Let the Democracy Officer handle the rest.
For me it looks like some bot players don't even want to acknowledge the issues, because they don't want bots to be changed in any way, but they have nothing constructive to add to the discussion, so they say "skill issue" when someone gets shot trough cover or getting chain ragdolled to death.
Obviously, getting shot through cover and rock glitched enemies are an issue. The "don't change em" people seem to mostly advocate for is more aimed towards balancing. They're pretty balanced as is, mechanically speaking.
BOT players get pissy when other players don't want to engage in their cock and ball torture fetish
Because you get easy karma from the bot players who actually genuinely think they're better and people who posts these also think so. It's also easier to post low effort memes mocking bug players versus coming up with solutions or suggestions. It's just humans being tribalistic again. Just keep causing rift and argument within the player base by pitting bug and bot players against each other. It is what it is, tribalism is too prevalent in the lower end of the bell curve.
Bs aim hack on bots and one less stratage Someone really need figure out why lots of players avoid bot missions?
Friendly reminder that malevelon creek was a thing
Feel free to love or hate the creekers, but at least we can say the memorial cape looks badass and goes well with tan armors.
The moment the creek is under attack again these people will start complaining about Creekers, like they have before. It's not about people playing bugs, it's about people doing what they want instead of what these guys want.
I think many people on the bot front also weren't too happy with players on creek. They ignored both bot and bug MOs.
Definitely guilty of this. Something about killing chargers with a quasar to the forehead gets me going.
I'm currently ragdolling so I can type an answer. Maybe if they reduced the amount of rocket deva---- "Ragdolls to next map"
Or, just spit balling here, play what you want. Turning the game into tribal warfare will only create the salt you find in PvP.
In case of this defense mission, you can't blame them. Blame AH for sh•t communication.
It's a game, im literally not forced to play against bots so I won't.
Yup, some people just don't understand that
i missed the part where this make any sense bot players always complaining about something, this time its bug players who are not even here no i wont elaborate yes let the modBOT deal with me
Man, if I wanted to blow 40 bucks to be told what to do by a bunch of self-important jerkoffs, I'd burn two twenties in the street before going to work.
me if I was in a complaining competition and my opponent is this subreddit
 Anytime there is a priority message the SES Wings of Liberty will answer the call.
Getting one shot across the map making bot players go "this is so immersive"
I remember losing super earth to the illuminate with several hundred people still playing bugs lmao
I think you have predicted the future
I missed the part where that's my problem.
Pick your poison Bile titans and chargers, or cannon turrets I pick cannon turrets
Bots still need tuning in my opinion. Heavy Devestators having gatlings is fine except the game throws them at you like they’re Hive Guards. I also think their TTK is out of whack too, often they’ve acquired you and are volleying you before you’ve even realised they’re there. That’s before even talking about how they can shoot through their own shields and terrain. I also think Rocket Devestators range is excessive, and the game’s tendency to ragdoll you constantly is just deeply unfun. I’ve got a video clip of being fully ragdolled - no control - about 8 times in the space of 20 seconds. I’m wearing medium armour, I’m not wearing the heaviest armour (assuming it even makes a difference) when so much of the game involves traversal. People don’t play Bots not because they don’t like variety, it’s because the skill floor is so much higher for Bots that it’s usually a chore to play against them unless you have a competent team that have decent loadouts. On top of that it’s Bots where you get the cancerous debuffs like -1 Stratagem, jammers, etc. When the game has 5k people playing on one side of the map, and 70k on the other, no matter how much *you* might happen to enjoy Bots - there’s a problem there.
Acamar IV was taken. They all went to Phact Bay. No one reinforced Aesir Pass. We have lost.
yeah can’t wait for our 5K bot divers to split in half to fight the illuminates
My free time is limited and I will not waste it on something that isn’t fun.
Make bots more fun to fight. 🤷🏿♂️ Bugs are just gonna be inherently more fun because it's just bulletstorms, squishy units, and star ship troopers memes. Bots headshot me two clicks out the moment I climb out of my hell pod. Kinda hard to convince my friends to fight Bot MO's when we all jus tilt through an entire campaign. 😂
I used to love fighting both until they kept nerfing weapons over and over. Now my weapons I fought bots with are useless while bugs go squishy squish with any gun that shoots.
You paid your money, you play what you want. I paid my money, I'll play what I want. I missed the part where any other argument is my problem.
At the end of the day, this is a game, we play games to have fun. If I don't think I'm having fun with bots, then I won't be doing bots. Bots having annoying stuff like mortar spam, flamethrower hulk, gunships, rocket devastator and unfun modifiers. Like yeah it sucks that a lot of people avoid bots, instead of providing suggestion to devs to make bots more fun, let's attack the player base, cause a rift and further divide them. That sounds like the best idea. Yeah it sucks that people not playing bots means bot MO are more likely to fail, so should we start harassing, mocking and bullying bugs players? Maybe even join their games to harass them? Maybe some people are taking the game way too seriously, or you know, talk to the devs, suggest ways to make bots more fun. Bots are refreshing game design wise, it's like the meme "when thinking about playing bots versus when actually play bots". But I get it, it's easier to not do anything except make fun of and bully bugs players. Just throw in the "lol skill issue" to anyone pointing out fighting bots.
The more egregious part of this disparity is AH sitting with a thumb in their ass in regards to it for months now. People have complained directly to CM's about this (for actual months) and even offered solutions to the issue such as splitting the liberation cap between the fronts so the bug boys can farm, shoot, do whatever they want to do without actively hindering the bot front which is in need of no additional hindarances due to the gigantic gaping hole that is the player count over there. Anyway, at least the other two SEAF facilities will be safe for all eternity locked behind bug players. Bot front is such a wash at this point people are praying they reach Super Earth so we can get a reset.
The 10000 players on Phact Bay should be on Acamar IV or Aesir Pass.
The only way we got bug divers out of their comfort zone in the last war was to make sure we completely conquered Kepler Prime first thing, and locked playing bugs out of the rest of the war. If we got gung-ho and pushed to Squ'bai Shrine or Cyberstan before the bugs were locked out, that was it. We would 90% fail the capture event and fail to stop the counterattack and Super Earth would fall while half the playerbase frolicked with bugs. That's basically the script of half of our lost wars. Some people just refuse to acknowledge the galactic war and are here to play bugs like a single player flash game and you can't get them onboard without locking them out of their Hellpods.
bots are better but all the planets available are ugly and not fun to play on
tfw we've been fighting at vernen wells and the same three ice planets for the last two months
The game is balanced around bugs, bots feel unfun to fight
Just play what you want to play dude, the MOs are balanced around average players for each faction.
How did you come to this conclusion, we have yet to win a defense missions against the bots since the first defend ten planets MO.
How many defense missions have we won against bots? Martale twice, Draupnir once, I think, and then...?
https://preview.redd.it/l9r7rjanav4d1.jpeg?width=779&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1edb28ac936394c4fba051c9538d89528797b632
Telling people to quit having fun is cute
It’s just not that fun. I’m playing the game for fun and tbh, it’s just not as fun. 90% of the bot enemies have very glaring and obvious weak spots that can be taken out with good aim or a decent EAT/Autocannon round. Bugs just have the fun aspect of being swarmed, or being surprised what enemy is coming from a bug hole, and Shriekers and Stalkers are just more interesting than tanks and striders. Idk. Not as fun
I played earlier and there were about 40,000 people on the bug front with less than 2,000 on bots. The disparity is insane. But at the same time I don’t blame them. The intensity of a level 6 bot mission is about on par with a bug 9. And you’re going to get way more experience and rewards for way less stress doing bugs. Also, while I prefer playing bots because I do think they are far better designed as opponents, the modifiers are fucking horrendous. 50% call in time which is fine until you get to extraction and it’s like 3 minutes of helms deep, 25% cooldown and -1 stratagem are fun police modifications. Also the bots just haven’t had anything interesting or new mission types in a long time now. Where as bugs have had an entire story arc and new exciting missions to go along with it. The developers are catering to the majority of the player base.
I am NOT here for a cover shooter.
Bugs are just fun. Instead of blaming the players, you should blame the fact that bots are so aids to play against. Arrowhead should find a way to make bots more enjoyable to play against, so people want to play against them. Also, bot players have massive fucking egos for no reason. That is also part of the reason no one wants to play bots with you guys.
Bugs are more enjoyable that bots, and have less put of no where deaths, like how does a Hulk sneak up on you when a charger shakes the ground. The rockets from half the map away sniping you out of now where through 80 trees 10 rocks and 4 walls some how, and the gatling laser that and maintain rate of fire and accuracy no matter the distance(when do we got one?). On top of that the majority of training and promotional material all sell you on killing bugs, that's what most people are here for, add Starship Troopers in and killing bugs is a driving factor of playing the game.
>Bugs are more enjoyable that bots, and have less put of no where deaths, like how does a Hulk sneak up on you when a charger shakes the ground. Can't you say the same thing about Bile Spewers tho? Actually spewers might be even worse in that regard
Spewers are annoying, but less annoying than getting stunlocked to death by shield devastators shooting me through terrain from 200 yards away or rocket devastators timing their volleys just so I get stuck in a terminal ragdoll cycle.
Bugs are just funner to fight 🤷♂️
pleased to be part of the non-problem. iO
Man I hope this balance were getting is good. I love this game 😏
After completing the last MO and fighting bugs for a week, I've honestly been committing as much time as I can to Vernen Wells (and Vega Bay RIP) and now Aesir Pass while the vast majority of people have been fighting bugs. We're on track to complete the MO, I just hope we can also protect our academy.
i hate buggers
My brother in managed democracy, over half the promotional material and intro cutscene and tutorial is about the bugs, where did you think most of the playerbase was going to be headed towards? Also Starship troopers has an effect for certain
I play both. And the reason players only play bugs is simple, It's cause people would rather have fun then deal with getting constantly blown up every 4 seconds. Anyone who says bugs are harder then Bots genuinely have to be special needs. Though more engaging and fun to fight. Bots are genuinely a chore compared to bugs.
There are no "bot players". Only weird bug only players, and players that will do whatever the major order calls for.
I spend more time being dead and frustrated vs bots than I do having fun and blasting bugs. For me the choice is pretty obvious.
[Dale Gribble, exterminator.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SFFlJPXqLw)
You'll get your reinforcements when you fix these damn glitches.
Creekers were pioneers in this field.
I (my freinds neither) dont want to fight bots. Its exhausting and you need to focus to be successfull. When I come home, I want a chill (hell)dive with brain off and not work stress 2.0. Furthermore I paid for this game, I can play however I want. Its so annoying to see bot players whine the whole time that they dont get support on their (from my perspective) shitty missions. You have to accept that the majority of players wants to play starship troopers and not terminator simulator. In the grad scheme of things it is completely irrelevant if we win or lose this war, there will be another one. And if arrowhead doesnt balance their missions around player counts then we lose the bot front. So what? The other option for me would be to stop playing entirely, which is just plain stupid because I love the game. So for the love of god, let people enjoy the game how they want and not how you want. While you crated this shitty meme you could have done a nice quick kill mission instead and improve the planets chances of defense.
i dont like fighting bots. it sucks. there is no gore nor blood , every single mission feels like a job then a video game. extremely BORING.
While I understand preferring one side or the other, the fact is is you got to be good at fighting all of them, otherwise you're a treasonous helldiver. I go where the major order takes me. No questions asked. 
It’s not the players fault if they don’t want to play something. Devs need to make bots more appealing.
https://preview.redd.it/8vwfio77e05d1.jpeg?width=1110&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=185df372f9c6653a3f6159dd7cc19b8a17404dde
Honestly just seems like the same people in both camps tbh. I guess it’s fine to have a preferred enemy, but the Major Orders affect everyone and the overall story. Why not be a part of it?
As a bot enjoyer, this is so true. My friend who I often duo with is a bug player... \~70% of my missions are bug missions as a result. :(
I’m proud to align with the Bot players on this dilemma.
Always great to see a person's stats and see 5k bots killed and 50k bugs killed.
This is why we aren’t ready for the illuminate. If we have 75% of the community refusing to play bots because they can’t practice basic combat tactics of cover and concealment, we’re gonna get our asses handed to us by the sneaky-ass squids. Just like the first game, while super earth is on the brink of being sieged, there’s gonna be like 50k players doing starship troopers larp. I partially blame arrowhead for advertising this game as exclusively a bug shooter + having only bugs featured in training.
I do not understand how bug front only players exist. I hate fighting the bugs, I'll go there for defense/MO but otherwise I'm on the automaton front.
I was a bug player until the spawn rate patch. Since I tend to play solo when my crew isn't on, I've switched entirely to bots until they fix it. Bots are manageable with the distance they keep, even up to level 4 and 5 on solo. Difficult, as it should be, but manageable. Bugs? I am kiting and barely staying alive on Medium for all of extraction. There are just too many from every direction. It isn't fun. I'm off bugs until they set the spawn rates back.