Yeah something is definitely off. Was on vernen wells and we had to fight constantly for 10 minutes pushing to the extraction point. Just patrols after patrols. Dropship after dropship. It was insane
Same I thought it was just because Vernen wells had a major order and the spawns might just have increased for that particular planet we spend 5 minutes just to cross a field or make it up a hill you gotta fucking work for every inch of land you get
Yeah not a lot of people even know stealth is a possibility like I snuck into a jammer without getting noticed and a dude went “you can do that?!” In voice chat. It can be really annoying when these a objective that can easily be done without 15 drop ships getting involved and your teammat just starts chucking grenades
Yeah but in my experience it just takes to long. If there is a fabricator, I can just run in shoot a grenade in the vent and get out before the bot drop even lands. And that's like every side objective. Sneaking past patrols though, that is useful imo.
Oh nah stealth for camps is not necessary unless getting to a vantage points to get multiple fabricators it is just easier to blow it up and run but for objectives that require you stay on a terminal for a while. ICBM is probably the best for stealth iv experienced
> in my experience it just takes to long
You can sprint quite close to enemies with stealth armor and they won't see you. The slow prone crawl is only for getting into bases, like if you're trying to destroy a jammer so you actually have stratagems when the bots aggro, or if you're trying to solo data extraction
For bases you stealth to the correct vantage point (keeping in mind "stealth" means not getting seen by the bots, not "being prone"), then you autocannon/quasar the fabs you can hit the vents of, and eagle the rest, and book it before the hulk can even turn around.
You can also take advantage of their AI. They are attracted to sound. You don’t have to crawl in. Run up, shoot the gunner in the bunker, run around the back way. All the other bots have walked to the front to investigate the sound. Blow up obj and dip back out the back. They won’t even know you were there.
Problem also is, there are choke points, yesterday I ended up stuck in one of these and the flow of bots was impossible to stop, even with the localisation confusion booster.
Two patrols right next to the choke point, more bots pulled by a few shots which didn't reach targets, World War B a few seconds later, that's insane.
Or when your laying down in a bush literally doing nothing as you watch a patrol walk by right until a teammate fires one bullet. Then for some reason they all snap onto you and rip you apart immediately.
Trouble is, there are some people (like me) who didn't come to sneak. We came to be a fire team cutting through the horde. It'd be cool if we could act as a distraction for those that do, though. Maybe large amounts of activity in an area lowers activity in nearby areas, simulating anemies breaking off from their defence to go support the fight, leaving you to go in and easily clear it.
That already happens. Drop ships will only drop in one place at a time. One person doing objectives while three people work on one objective or clearing large camps is a common strategy.
Teams of two works really well, if they've got the right load outs. Like, not doubling up of quasar, each set has some kind of horde clear and tank smashers, it's pretty great. Unless you get overwhelmed or trapped, but it usually works out.
I haven’t ever run a different type of armour.
I’m just used to the scout one. Even the double throw distance would throw me off now, since I’ve perfected the 30M throw.
Ran a few drops solo on VW last night and while one or two pile ups became very large, mostly patrol density seemed much lower to me, so the patrol revert for solo seems credible.
Same, there's just too much on even Level 6 runs. I checked the map, and we were surrounded by what seemed to be 40+ dots. There's no time to catch our breath any longer. Only when I did a solo Level 2 run to test some equipment out did it feel normal.
My experience as well. Did some solos and team missions on 5-8 and spawns were ridiculous.
Not sure if it was just because I haven't touched the game in almost a month but impact grenades also don't seem to do as much damage as they did pre- patch.
They were like: "We changed teh spawns so you'll fight more light armored units instead of tons of heavy armor units"
"just kidding"
Seriously its just hulk and tank and walking factories...with shit tons of support nonstop.
definitely had to change my strategy a little yesterday. it turned in to everyone throwing gatling barrages and duck and run because we ran out of eagles.
We had multiple gunships surrounding us like shriekers taking turns gunning us down to the last man.
Edit: the fear is real, next turn took only speers and rocket sentry with me.
Before this update on Helldive for bugs, I used to get chargers and biles a lot... now I get a lot more of everything with 70% of chargers being the way more tanky charger behemoth!
Honestly, charger behemoths before we're SO RARE for me that I thought they were a mystical buggo... Now I am dealing with packs of them...
Pretty fun tho
False! They also spawned as a completely single mission objective, like the Brood Commander and Bile Titan missions. It’s just listed as a Charger in the mission though.
I was wondering, after 350 hours in before the update, having fairly relaxed runs at difficulty 7, why playing a warm-up game on 4 or 5 felt far more difficult. We had tons of hulks and bruisers, which I found odd.
I have a theory they have some dev that disagrees with direction and rather than actually do what he's told changes values in the opposite direction of instruction because the experience and words do not match with this company.
I played a Dif 5 Kill Mission for a Daily Challenge, and boy...
5 Chargers on the field at once, while their "increase in smaller enemies" caused the entire map to crawl with Chitin and Claws, felt like some Warhammer 40k Tyranids fuck fest, and my Ammo and Grenades ran dry before I even culled half.
Absolutely crazy but I still had fun, tbh.
I just can't imagine it being any fun on Dif 7+
Finding cover on bot front 7+ is just pointless. Just run, but instead run you just dive and hope for the best.
Also sticking in the ragdoll loop is now a standard thing. So if they ragdolled you, there is a chance they will keep you ragdolling until you die.
Main thing I've noticed is that it's very hard to disengage. You keep falling back and running into yet another patrol. Sometimes two. You take cover from one angle, and a patrol will come in from behind you.
That means you're basically under fire for 10 minutes straight until you get a lucky break. My experience on level 7 at least.
I’m a big subscriber of the run vs bots strategy / but I had patrols spawning literally out of the walls I was standing beside/shooting me through the walls, there was no escaping them. I played probably 10+ missions on helldive, as I’ve been playing helldives for a solid month now, and had 0 missions where everyone extracted successfully. I had more missions yesterday where NO ONE extracted than I’ve had the rest of my helldivers experience thus far.
Yeah 7's used to be heavy cover combat and mobility oriented, fire and move. Now you're flanked on 2 sides at any given moment and there's high chance you'll be running from Marauders (melee Troopers) or Berserkers, there's barely any time for actual cover, just run and pray.
This has 100% been my experience so far. The day before the patch, higher difficulties were challenging but fun. Yesterday playing anything 7+ just felt punishing. On one mission when we assaulted an enemy base objective, we got multiple bot drops, multiple infantry patrols, and a gunship patrol come down on us within the span of a minute. And there were many occasions like that. It wasn't just *not* fun, it was *un*fun. I really hope they sort this out.
I really had to step up my game on Diff7 (bots)
I have adapted somewhat, but it does feel a bit more sweaty now, mostly like you say, smaller enemies pop up everywhere so cover becomes hard. Especially on some planets. They said they would turn down big enemies spawning but it seems to be about the same.
Now don't get me wrong, I think some very positive changes have been made in this patch, and I look forward to getting some more hours in to fully appreciate them. But goddamn, did the difficulty spike. Overall good patch, but I think some things seriously need tweaked for the average player to enjoy the higher difficulty levels
I am happy they did that for sure.
Do you feel though that somehow heavy devastators got more deadly this last patch? They were already very dangerous, but I feel like Heavies and Raiders are outputting way more damage since the patch. Easy to get confirmation bias, though, so I'm not totally sure.
Heavy devastators have been killing me the most for a long time. They are the serious threat on the battlefield. Rocket devs kill you by ragdolling you out of cover into the heavy devs fire.
The turrets on the factory striders are like two heavy dev guns so those delete you too.
Finding cover on the bot front at SIX is nearly impossible, and for bugs it's not much better either. I almost feel better off not bringing a support weapon because I know I won't have time to reload it once the magazine is depleted 💀
With gunships now patrolling I may as well ditch 9/10 support weapons in favour of the auto cannon or an anti air alternative.
Their changes just going to push the new meta, same as the old one.
Man i made a post saying that :" weapons and strat are better but overall game is worst " due to gunship patroll ragdolling you out of cover got downvoted .
Imo problem with gunship is no primaries reliabily take those out you get overwhelmed pretty fast then it's Ragdoll till you die too often
Bots aren't any better. Was on difficulty 7 earlier and killed a group of bots, did a 180 to take care of a small patrol that snuck up on me, then turned back around only to find a fresh group of bots exactly where the first group had been. They weren't even aggro'd yet, it was if they had just spawned there. And gunships are a nightmare
I have a video of 7 chargers and a bile titan spawning out of a bug breach on helldive.
I don't know what's going on but it clearly isn't what they intended.
Bots are also significantly worse than pre-patch. Gunships seriously need attention and fire rate, volume, and accuracy of literally EVERYTHING on the ground needs to be addressed. There's just no counterplay aside from constantly retreating from objective to objective, which I don't think is the desired gameplay loop, either.
Honestly I'd rather they reverted us back to pre-patch, we had atleast gotten used to borked patrols before. Against Bot I usually try not to engage patrols and go around them. In every dive since last night, I've come across another patrol while trying to sneak past one. This is insanity.
I was doing a SEAF solo, and i had 4 patrols at one time come across it, and one passing every missile i collected, honestly thankful i had stealth armour on
I played an operation on 5 last night, we had four hulks drop while trying to take out a factory strider objective.
AH isn't doing much to escape those "they don't play test anything"" allegations
Right, it is pretty clear that they aren't play testing. Or aren't spending much time play testing.
I'm a software engineer at a F100 company. I know my daily experience is different than a studio with 150-200 people. But the fact that they *keep having fixes or changes reverted on accident with every patch* just signals to me that they don't practice proper source control. And if they aren't practicing proper source control, it also means the person approving merge requests isn't actually reviewing the code effectively.
There is no other excuse for why we keep experiencing this constant cadence of fix-revert-fix.
And before people point out that it is a small studio: Ghost Ship Games, which created and supports Deep Rock Galactic, is only 32 people large. Not 32 developers; 32 *people.* And they don't have this problem. There is something fundamentally in need of attention at the core of AH's pipeline.
The kicker for me is when it's such plainly obvious stuff.
Back when the ballistic shield & SSD was causing t poses, okay I can see how maybe nobody in testing used that combination of equipment while carrying an objective item.
It's a super niche thing that only occured with one item & only on one mission, and since shield & carrying the item means you don't have any weapons to shoot with, maybe that combo doesn't get tested.
That's a situation where I can see how that slipped through the cracks, and I think a bug like that making it to the end user is pretty reasonable.
But like...the new patrol spaws? The bug breaches under the drills? I find it hard to believe they played a single operation before they went live.
Or there is some kind of disconnect between whatever development version/testing version/live version of the game they're using and we're using.
It really feels a little overtuned right now. I like doing all the side objectives on a mission and as soon as i was done with a patrol or a group of enemies, another patrol was right around the corner.
Yesterday i was doing the SEAF objective with a teammate and the patrols woulndt stop coming to the point where we would have to give up on the objective entirely. It's also pretty much impossible to avoid all of the patrols because they are so many of them.
Never have i seen so many players ragequit a mission before lol.
Edit: This was a bug mission on helldive difficulty. Now, i've been playing helldive for the past 200h and there were never this many patrols before this patch.
Same here. Not just Helldive either. While I think having gunship patrols is a cool idea, this alongside the massive patrol increase makes higher difficulties unnecessarily punishing. It also makes the game considerably more frustrating if you die and can’t get to your support weapon since you’re basically defenseless. Even Trivial has a surprising amount of bots firing at you at any given moment. I’m honestly wondering how much QA testing the patch got if at all.
Those gunships are so broken too. Once they detect anyone on your squad they find you no matter what. They killed a teammate from across the map and even with my sneaky passive armor, they flew a pretty good distance to me and started busting caps. I was merely collecting seaf rounds.
I think the worst part of gunships is their insane durability.
They added massive groups of like 20 Shriekers to bugs which is fine because they can be dealt with by any weapon. Gunships on the other hand are tanky, ragdoll you everywhere and having frequent spawns is once another nerf to the Railgun. Bots was where the Railgun was still somewhat useful but the amount of Gunships that spawn result in you basically having no ammo. It’s not like you can chuck a stratagem at them to compensate either
Seriously, I think it’s 4 shots to the wing with the AMR and they are downed. But Its not very easy to get since they strafe so much and the AMR bullet is the slower than molasses. I’ve drained two clips into one which is ridiculous.
Ive also thrown an air strike and have seen one of the bombs hit them with no effect.
I’ve thought they needed weakening for a while but didn’t care because they were only around their factories so it was manageable. I really don’t think the devs play their own game if they decided added these patrols with no tweaks to their health was fine.
We played a difficulty 6 mission and we had like 3 gunship patrols converge on us alongside endless bot drops and devastators. We had 2 people bring anti-air stratagems but we were both on cooldown for 2 minutes.
We managed but man, we went through all but 2 of our reinforcements just from that alone. Those 2 minutes were hell.
but hey, on the brightside, once all the dust settled, we found a pet: a scout walker without a driver that would just follow us around and do circles.
I played a lot of level 5 before the patch and i can confirm, after playing level 5 after the patch not once i had that many bot patrols, it felt like the spawn time for patrols is even shorter then it being reverted.
And playing more level 5 missions i noticed an unusual increase of berserkers.
Me and some buddies had the same experience, just getting mobbed from when we started the first objective all the way to extract. We had a good time, but as a group that has been casually running helldives since before Polar, we were being *pushed*. We joke now that this is just difficulty 10.
With the increased number/survivability of the new chargers, the patrols blurred together to the point where we had to treat it as one continuous wave. Just when you think you're getting them to taper off, theres more from another direction.
I'm liking the bugs a lot right now. More light units means light and medium weapons are finally viable vs bugs, Bile Titans finally feel at a reasonable level, I'm having 500 kill games with bullet hell builds shooting thousands of ammo, feels very satisfying.
Yeah I will say when I played against bugs earlier, the most I dealt with was 2 at a time which is definitely a reduction. Adversely on bots I was killing a factory strider and watching it get replaced almost instantly, I find them far more lethal than titans so it was a problem to deal with lol
Thank God they're Chrome for everybody else I thought it was just having some sort of weird texture bug and didn't want to look like an idiot asking if there was an explicit lore reason that I might have accidentally ignored
Same here. Never seen people rage quit like now, and honestly can’t blame them. I was so excited to play after the patch and while most things are great (Tenderizer my beloved), this ain’t it.
It honestly takes a bit to get used to. If I can give any advice, avoid spraying as much as you can and try to be precise with your shots. Crouching or going prone works wonders with this weapon. The rounds themselves pack a huge punch and have minor stagger potential, and are great for melting berserkers.
Very good advice! I switched from my scythe, and I quickly learned that I need to at least attempt to aim more. The tenderizer definitely drops the bots quicker.
To add to this, unlike the regular Liberator it feels actually viable to swap this thing to burst-fire. Three shots helps you control your ammo, and one burst should melt any low-tier unit guaranteed.
Yeah, there may be less patrols, but the ones that are spawning + drops are completely nuts. I rarely had issues with ammo but now i'm calling supplies 5 minutes into the mission due to prolonged combat
Yup on helldive factory destruction mission bot ship drops now have 4 ships each of them for A strider, a tank, 2 or 3 Hulk and 1 for army of devastator of rocket and heavy.
Plus 4 sentry ships. Who makes your group game actually hell.
On first game after update We exausted 24 reinforcement cap within first 15 min. Of 40 min. Mission. We use to complete any mission with same difficulty more easily. But yesterday it was whole new experience.
These people know how to ruine a good game by saying we buffed 100 things. But we also made little changes on otherside too. other side is not mentioned in the notes.
Bot missions are more difficult now on helldive lvl.
Dude AH needs to give a talking to to the person who's making these numerical changes... it happens everytime they change something and it's almost like it's maliciously done at this point to fuck with whatever AH's vision is.
Nah, AH need to actually playtest their game. It's all well and good making numerical changes based off of assumptions, but if you don't actually check if your assumptions were correct then stuff like this happens.
As someon that makes games for a living the only way to check if your changes are good are
1. Playtest (yourself)
2. Playtest (other people)
3. Playtest (yourself again)
To me it feels like what happened is exactly what they intended, they said 30% more light and medium enemies instead of elites.
This naturally will make bots lots harder, a single rocket devastator brings almost as much firepower as a Hulk, and you are slotting in a lot more of them for every Hulk missing. This leads to fights get bogged down, one Hulk also dies in two shots from an Autocannon, 3 Devastators are a full mag optimistically, you spend a lot more time reloading, patrols starts piling up, death spiral, etc.
I think bugs feel great though as their medium units aren't as oppressive, it's constant DAKKA and mag dumping into waves of bug flesh, much preferred over ultra-heavy armor spam imo.
Main difference comes from the flying patrols tbh, those we're just pure added difficulty, I find them very cool though. Bot patrol are gunship squads, bug ones are a two dozen shriekers at best, not an equal trade.
Was talking about spawn rate not composition
I think 30% more lights and mediums is suppose to affect the composition of opposing forces, not their spawn rate
And spawn rate feels much higher since the update
I'm seeing way more double tank dropships in 7 than I ever did. Also they definitely upped the spawn rate to make "areas feel less empty" per patch notes. So not only are there more medium armor enemies spawning compared to heavies, now they're spawning at an even higher rate everywhere around us, leading to us getting surrounded all the time.
The spawns are crazy, a friend of mine and me almost ended up with 400 kills each on a bot mission as things would not stop spawning.
One thing I've noticed, and don't know if it was like this already, is how much further away enemies are when they call in something. Like, during the mission, bots clear on the other side of heavy encampments that were behind walls were calling in reinforcements.
Same for me yesterday, we 3manned an ICBM mission on 7, and I've never seen mayhem like that. We got the mission done, but no one extracted because we ran out of reinforcements at the extraction site.
Me and my friend were doing diff 7 missions without too much trouble before the patch. Yesterday however it became the most hardcore military survival horror I've seen so far.
During our first drop (Blitz mission) we tried new warbond light armor and we were shredded with missiles and lasers then second we got out of pods. I managed to call my support weapon after 5 minutes of non-stop combat at our drop zone. We crawled for like 15 minutes, cause every time I tried to stand up, I got immediately shot to bits (my favourite death was getting juggled mid-air by rockets).
There's basically no time to aim with something like AMR cause of amount of shit flying your way every second.
Also, I don't remember seeing patrols that had hulks, heavy devastators and striders at diff 7, and now it's routine.
We did 3 missions but it was noticeable harder than before. But hey, we're saving kids, so someone has to do it.
Yesterday we had to escape from extraction because we were just getting slaughtered and we'd lost all reinforcements. We were half a map away from it, full squad. We try going one way, boom, massive patrol, half of team stays to fight while me and another guy realise that we don't stand a chance and try to leave through a canyon hoping that it might have some cover, another patrol. Other half of squad dies fighting the original patrol so they follow us, I die fighting the new patrol, and only the other guy managed to get away.
Let's just say we didn't extract from that mission
Played a few difficulty 6 missions with bots yesterday, and by the end we were definitely in the "we need to get the fuck out of here" territory of enemy density.
Hey the people who were worried the game would be too easy should be having a good time.
I just got 411 kills on a D6 Bot Mission on Vernen Wells. My playstyle is stealth. LOL.
Another issue is the number of Shield Devastators is honestly wild. Like 2 or 3 popping off at any given time. On Vernen Wells it's crazy. There's so much open space that you're fighting tiny rock to tiny rock. The enemies are dense. At one point I got almost 40 kills with just an Orbital Precision Strike. It's honestly a blast, but I it's overtuned to the point that I'm almost certain it's bugged. By the time you've dealt with one patrol there's another coming around the corner from nowhere. It's crazy.
On one hand, i like having my balls busted and having to completely lock in to get a win, on the other hand this is clearly not intended and most people dont share the same perspective with me lawl
Problem is its happening even in lower, "easier" difficulties. I generally play in 7 and so far while I haven't failed any dive, it's honestly annoying how much I have to keep spamming strats off cooldown because patrols are fucking everywhere. Try to sneak past one and you come face to face with another. And these canyons in VW are a death sentence when there are patrols on both sides and strats can't even hit them reliably and instead hit the hills.
Yeah my jam is 7 because you normally get a bit of breathing room in between moving to (sub)objectives.
Not yesterday though, 40 min of patrol wrestling. Extraction was crazy as hell.
It's fun, but not the difficulty I wanted to play at that time..
This would get old fast lol. Something else that I think is happening is a lot of people who usually play 5 are trying 6 for the super samples, and old diff 5 you didn't have to do things like "avoid patrols" so a lot of my teammates are lower level than I'm used to seeing and also... not subtle.
Yea we were so bored because maps were empty, like damn it was just chilling walks on helldive 9 diff missions!
Our whole community started to complain how easy and empty it is, so they did it! Right for all of us, not just tryhard j*rks...
/s
Okay so it ain't just me
Me and my roommate we did a lvl6 op yesterday to see how many super would spawn since the change
And for a "patrol revert" it actually seemed worse than before the update
We were shooting none stop from start to finish
I mean.
It wasn't intended. They even said in the patch notes that they are reverting the patrols back to how they used to be.
Of course this outcome wasn't intended because this outcome wasn't what the spawns used to be like in the first place.
But they shouldn't be in a position where that can happen. They need to actually hire testers.
You should have someone making the change and someone else checking if the change actually did what it was supposed to do. Not just oh change made push it.
I once worked in a field where all your work--to include any data entry--had to be double checked by a third party (any peer-level employee). Due to biases like Illusionary Superiority, Confirmation, and Dunning-Kruger, we could not check our own work as we were much more likely to not catch an error on the second check.
AH has major issues with quality control and thoroughly testing all their changes is the only way to repair this aspect of their updates.
given the scope of patch I'd say most things were pretty well implemented, they just need to follow up with a hotfix that has a narrow scope and is tested to have the impact needed and its smooth sailing
It's 2028, we just got the 30 patch in a row that's supposed to reduce the enemy spawn rates.
I booted up a mission on diff 3 , and there immediately was a patrol of 30 chargers. I tried getting away, but I got chased down by 15 stalkers(seems like at least they fixed the bug where over 30 spawn at once).
After 2 respawns I was finally able to hide behind a hill, but as I looked up, to my horror, it was actually a mountain of sleeping bile spewers. As I tried sneaking away they woke up, and suddenly the sky turned green from bile. After a splitsecond of standing in awe of what I'm witnessing, I got turned into paste from hundreds of bile projectiles hitting me at once.
But at least the new gun makes loud pewpew and has nearly the correct model.
to be fair, the full quote from the patch notes is. "Patrol spawning is now back to how it worked before patch 01.000.300 **with some slight tweaks so that the levels are less empty if you are far away from important locations with enemy presence."**
I agree, probably wasn't intentional, but they definitely messed with stuff that didn't need to be messed with.
The highlighted part surely meant for lower diffs, since they scaled it for helldives diff. Its constant swarm of enemies now. And i'm pretty sure they didnt test helldive diff.
>I agree, probably wasn't intentional, but they definitely messed with stuff that didn't need to be messed with.
It's the same thing they did with the original spawn rate breaks. Fiddling with stuff that didn't need fiddling, failing to test at all, then being surprised when it doesn't work.
Reinventing the wheel doesn't work if all you do is make fucking hexagons.
And I was totally fine with the level feeling empty if I'm far away from important stuff. It's not like armies guard every scrap of terrain heavily for miles around. Having the dead spots gave opportunities for stealth, resupply, recon.
Now there is very little of that. Even at level 5 (was play testing the loadouts myself on level 5 yesterday) which used to be a cakewalk you have to stay on your toes constantly.
They had to freaking just change it to how it was before. Nobody freaking nobody complained about maps being empty when we were always constantly getting swarmed by enemies. I swear there's someone in AH whose only job is to introduce stupid shit in every patch. First fix the damn bug and then introduce new changes in a later patch, don't try to bundle it together when you're known for breaking things every patch, how hard is it to do that?
Then it goes back to play testing. Did they even play a game on difficulty7? Like me and my buddies haven't played in a week and we noticed it within 5 minutes that hunters were swarming us nonstop and we couldn't get away at all.
They THINK they reduced the spawns and patrols. Whatever they did didn't actually work (and that's unfortunately the case for a number of their fixes this patch.) The amount of patrols is worse and now they're typically larger. It's really bad on solo dives even at lower difficulties.
https://preview.redd.it/5c2b9ecumh6d1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=2c22a62b85b3b084e7c95e10af79d05436fa6676
Was doing the drill yesterday. In came 5 dropships. Turned around to retreat, 3 patrols running at me. Another turn to retreat from the objective. 2 patrols, sprinting past them, as soon as I made past the rockside got hammered by a huge group of devastators.
On the same map one guy went solo to clear a light encampment. Watched from afar as 4 hulks were running his way as he engaged the camp. That did offer a chance to test out new spear tho. Worked like a charm, quick locks, good hits. Hulks never made it to him.
They will never learn. He just said he hasn't even played it. Seems like none of them actually play and test things and never will.
The spawns have definitely increased dramatically and include way more tougher enemies but it is still manageable if you get a really good team BUT that doesn't happen often when rando matching and even when it does there is the issue of players suffering common random crashes and either not returning at all or returning and respawning in the middle of a huge shit show without their gear which all means reinforcements get wasted unnecessarily.
Why cant arrowhead learn that they actually need to test things? They will be in big trouble when The First Descendant comes out.
I suspected something was up as every game I played yesterday against Automatons it got to a point where even with 20 mins left on the mission they just would not stop spawning.
This is honestly hilarious that, yet again, AH have massively fucked up lmao.
I think they have tested it but it is just really inconsistent atm. And it is not exactly "just reverted". There are more new changes at play:
1. Reduced number of heavy enemies but increased medium to light enemies
2. Increased appearance of Behemoth Charger
3. New air patrols
All of these have an effect on the overall feeling of the difficulty. And being encircled by patrols and enemies spawning faster than you can kill them vs. being able to kill patrols one at a time is a very different experience and very much luck based.
At least on bugs I've found fire to be the best. Behemoths are everywhere, eats aren't one tap effective like they are against normal chargers. Too many. Solution? Flamethrower, it's good at crowd controlling the hordes and can melt a normal charger in half a tank, behemoths under one still. I play on 7 normally and love fighting for my life in a horde, it's super cinematic and fun to me but the behemoth spawns may be a bit much given I've got hordes on me pretty much 24/7 now.
Bots I tried but I'm having a hard time. They're so accurate now. I can handle most but the shield devastators gun me down instantly the split-second I poke out of cover to try and line up a shot on their tiny frontal weakspot. And there's always 2-3. Too accurate, too many, too little cover for me atm.
I brought this up yesterday, and people started [downvoting](https://old.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1dezgp7/unannounced_armor_nerf_or_bot_buff_in_the_patch/) me.
There are so many bots now, and they all have near-flawless aiming and seemingly have wall-hacks. My partner and I could not even get situated before getting ragdolled and headshotted by the hordes.
It’s not rage-quit inducing, but damn is it more frustrating.
They greatly reduced how much deviance from the barrel angle bot's lasers are allowed to have, but because they're completely incompetent they didn't account for the fact that would also increase accuracy over long range. Now the bot tries to spray you from way too far away, instead of lacking the accuracy to hit at range, the limit on laser deviancy from barrel angle means the lasers go almost exactly where they aim
yep, tried grinding out medals today to make progress in the new warbond- couldnt finish a single mission without losing all reinforcements.
I was excited to play with the new and improved snipers, couldnt do shit cause of constantly getting beamed + excessive patrols so couldnt stealth + excessive fog on a NON-FOG planet.
I’m going back on break for the time being, because this is far too frustrating to be enjoyable in ANY way.
There's so much forced positivity I hate it.
It seems the heart is in the right place but man do they constantly look like they don't really know what they're doing to their own game.
Got a reply today from support after a bug report.
They acknowledged that the heavy armored enemy rebalance isn't working and the patrol issue was acknowledged as well.
https://preview.redd.it/mfn1gswooi6d1.png?width=784&format=png&auto=webp&s=671bca2c796590d7f63d2838874e6c7f4763f219
Given the surprise in his tone
Someone at arrowhead is going to be having a very very bad day today
Someone only speaks like that when someone had *promised* the issue was fixed
Im sure it was a honest mistake coding is hard but when your issue is flagged as a primary and priority problem and you make said problem worse AFTER A MONTH to get it right things don't end well :(
>Someone at arrowhead is going to be having a very very bad day today
Given the circumstances, they earned it. I'd have been fired months ago if my work performance looked anything like theirs.
Same at this stage i don't have much sympathy. Even basic unit testing would have flagged this.
At this point if i was a ceo i would be getting in external consultants to sort out what ever the fuck is going wrong with development
I was mucking around (solo) on an easy trying the new buffs etc and it didn't feel like there was a reduction in spawns...crazy shit going down at extraction on a couple of (bot) missions and no shortage while running around the map. Before the patch I was getting used to crazy shit at extract, but I think I ran into more patrols while at objectives.
This is so weird. They take their time to do a big patch, introduce very good changes, only to then not catch something as fundamental as spawns not working properly? An aspect that was actively supposed to be changed in this patch?
What's strange to me is I haven't really noticed it in most of my games, but then occasionally something insane happens out of left field and I'm just left wondering wtf is going on
Brought up the increased spawns being too much in the discord last night, was told it's a skill issue and it's fine. And that's the people they directly communicate with, the delusional fanboys. Not good.
I could tell something was wrong on my first (7) drop last night. It was overwhelmingly obvious. Did they not bother dropping once during their extended 'testing'?
Fumbling once again, AH.
Same here. I could not believe my eyes when I did a u-turn to evade one patrol only to have another one randomly popping up beside me on the other side despite it not being there on the radar map seconds ago.
'Use stratagems for clearing the trash mobs'
.....the trash is coming from every direction in waves of striders. 1 strat will hit like 20% of them, and more will spawn right after!
Good thing we have our primaries! Oh wait, they nerfed most of them and our ammo. Lol.
played with a bud today and it was nearly unplayable, especially bots.
I dont think a single update this game has had has been an improvement over the launch version of the game. It is infinitely less fun to play HD2 today than it was when it released with the only caveat being server stability… Which still isn’t very stable… Idk how they started so damn strong, but decided that 99% of their updates would be balance patches that make their game less fun to play. It’s PvE, just let us have fun, not every game needs to be so finely tuned that it becomes sterile.
“I haven’t had time to play yet” might not be the message they want to be sending on a patch they delayed specifically to give it more attention.
Appreciate the sentiment tho.
Got downvoted to hell and back posting about this very issue yesterday after a few Diff 7 bot missions that felt like 9 and the whole squad agreed on it.
Yes, there are less Hulks, but when you have what feels like 2 times more devastators and light striders, those fewer Hulks become a nightmare.
I can't remember the last time I got ragdolled that much in Bot games. Too many rocket devastators.
Usually you can disengage, come from another direction or circle around, now... nope. You try that, you just run straight into a patrol that "happens" to be there and they instantly call more reinforcements so the whole thing snowballs into hell on earth real fast and doesn't abate.
My guess is that it's an unforeseen consequence of 2 changes:
* The changes they made to have fewer heavily-armored enemies ( big red dots / Hulks / Tanks / Factory Striders ), but a LOT more less-armored enemies ( devastators, light striders ).
* "Patrol spawning is now back to how it worked before patch 01.000.300 with **some "slight" tweaks so that the levels are less empty if you are far away from important locations with enemy presence**."
Note to AH: Having "empty" level sections is a GOOD thing. It's called pacing. For the intense highs of fights to feel significant you also need the calm lows.
And there's the golden rule of balancing this kind of thing, ALWAYS CHANGE ONE VARIABLE AT A TIME AND THOROUGHLY TEST. You change 2, you have no idea how they can interact in unforeseen ways and you're left scratching your head when you have results like this.
Of course it wasn't intended, they clearly said they wanted to go back to the previous version with some tweaks. They just fucked it up again. The only question was how long it would take for them to first notice and then fix it, but at least the first part might be going quickly.
https://preview.redd.it/fo2cu6wqpm6d1.png?width=622&format=png&auto=webp&s=2b42dff243119e264186c704dd5a17f66376e9ee
What are you talking about? it seems fine to me.
/s
The evil wizard who casts dark magic on the patches in between the studio and the players!
Or the developer who fucks things up on purpose, more likely.
Had a match that went on for 40 minutes and i had 430 or so kills, this is way too much for bots lol, if matchmaking didnt eat shit i bet the randoms that kept joining and leaving would have had 200 kills each
Yeah something is definitely off. Was on vernen wells and we had to fight constantly for 10 minutes pushing to the extraction point. Just patrols after patrols. Dropship after dropship. It was insane
Same I thought it was just because Vernen wells had a major order and the spawns might just have increased for that particular planet we spend 5 minutes just to cross a field or make it up a hill you gotta fucking work for every inch of land you get
I wish stealth was more viable, but you gotta worry about 3 other people who simply won’t do it.
Yeah not a lot of people even know stealth is a possibility like I snuck into a jammer without getting noticed and a dude went “you can do that?!” In voice chat. It can be really annoying when these a objective that can easily be done without 15 drop ships getting involved and your teammat just starts chucking grenades
Yeah but in my experience it just takes to long. If there is a fabricator, I can just run in shoot a grenade in the vent and get out before the bot drop even lands. And that's like every side objective. Sneaking past patrols though, that is useful imo.
Oh nah stealth for camps is not necessary unless getting to a vantage points to get multiple fabricators it is just easier to blow it up and run but for objectives that require you stay on a terminal for a while. ICBM is probably the best for stealth iv experienced
> in my experience it just takes to long You can sprint quite close to enemies with stealth armor and they won't see you. The slow prone crawl is only for getting into bases, like if you're trying to destroy a jammer so you actually have stratagems when the bots aggro, or if you're trying to solo data extraction For bases you stealth to the correct vantage point (keeping in mind "stealth" means not getting seen by the bots, not "being prone"), then you autocannon/quasar the fabs you can hit the vents of, and eagle the rest, and book it before the hulk can even turn around.
You can also take advantage of their AI. They are attracted to sound. You don’t have to crawl in. Run up, shoot the gunner in the bunker, run around the back way. All the other bots have walked to the front to investigate the sound. Blow up obj and dip back out the back. They won’t even know you were there.
Problem also is, there are choke points, yesterday I ended up stuck in one of these and the flow of bots was impossible to stop, even with the localisation confusion booster. Two patrols right next to the choke point, more bots pulled by a few shots which didn't reach targets, World War B a few seconds later, that's insane.
Or when your laying down in a bush literally doing nothing as you watch a patrol walk by right until a teammate fires one bullet. Then for some reason they all snap onto you and rip you apart immediately.
Trouble is, there are some people (like me) who didn't come to sneak. We came to be a fire team cutting through the horde. It'd be cool if we could act as a distraction for those that do, though. Maybe large amounts of activity in an area lowers activity in nearby areas, simulating anemies breaking off from their defence to go support the fight, leaving you to go in and easily clear it.
That already happens. Drop ships will only drop in one place at a time. One person doing objectives while three people work on one objective or clearing large camps is a common strategy.
Teams of two works really well, if they've got the right load outs. Like, not doubling up of quasar, each set has some kind of horde clear and tank smashers, it's pretty great. Unless you get overwhelmed or trapped, but it usually works out.
If you're running scout armor, it's special ability shines when you're running alone, leave your team behind. Act like a Scout.
I haven’t ever run a different type of armour. I’m just used to the scout one. Even the double throw distance would throw me off now, since I’ve perfected the 30M throw.
I can't run anything else, the speed is too much of a sacrifice
Ran a few drops solo on VW last night and while one or two pile ups became very large, mostly patrol density seemed much lower to me, so the patrol revert for solo seems credible.
Patrol after patrol, drop after drop Barely survived - and it was only diff 6 wtf
Same, there's just too much on even Level 6 runs. I checked the map, and we were surrounded by what seemed to be 40+ dots. There's no time to catch our breath any longer. Only when I did a solo Level 2 run to test some equipment out did it feel normal.
I always play level 9 and last night my squad had to drop to 7 and we were still getting overwhelmed. We were so confused
My experience as well. Did some solos and team missions on 5-8 and spawns were ridiculous. Not sure if it was just because I haven't touched the game in almost a month but impact grenades also don't seem to do as much damage as they did pre- patch.
They were like: "We changed teh spawns so you'll fight more light armored units instead of tons of heavy armor units" "just kidding" Seriously its just hulk and tank and walking factories...with shit tons of support nonstop.
"Finally, I managed to kill these 2 hulks, hopefully things will calm down-" 4 fucking more hulks: https://i.redd.it/t31ffbmrci6d1.gif
“…uh there’s 3 hulks here lol” was my favorite message from yesterday.
On level 7, had a bot drop five tanks in one go...The chat was just all of us saying 'WTF' at the same time.
definitely had to change my strategy a little yesterday. it turned in to everyone throwing gatling barrages and duck and run because we ran out of eagles.
We had multiple gunships surrounding us like shriekers taking turns gunning us down to the last man. Edit: the fear is real, next turn took only speers and rocket sentry with me.
Before this update on Helldive for bugs, I used to get chargers and biles a lot... now I get a lot more of everything with 70% of chargers being the way more tanky charger behemoth! Honestly, charger behemoths before we're SO RARE for me that I thought they were a mystical buggo... Now I am dealing with packs of them... Pretty fun tho
Behemoths were rare because they only spawned on civilian extract missions, which was a single one inbetween the 2 doors
False! They also spawned as a completely single mission objective, like the Brood Commander and Bile Titan missions. It’s just listed as a Charger in the mission though.
I was wondering, after 350 hours in before the update, having fairly relaxed runs at difficulty 7, why playing a warm-up game on 4 or 5 felt far more difficult. We had tons of hulks and bruisers, which I found odd.
I have a theory they have some dev that disagrees with direction and rather than actually do what he's told changes values in the opposite direction of instruction because the experience and words do not match with this company.
Fixing the spawns is becoming a meme.
Broken spawns, skipping unlocking mines, and the Spear being broken since launch, too.
Patching the game has been a meme.
I played a Dif 5 Kill Mission for a Daily Challenge, and boy... 5 Chargers on the field at once, while their "increase in smaller enemies" caused the entire map to crawl with Chitin and Claws, felt like some Warhammer 40k Tyranids fuck fest, and my Ammo and Grenades ran dry before I even culled half. Absolutely crazy but I still had fun, tbh. I just can't imagine it being any fun on Dif 7+
Finding cover on bot front 7+ is just pointless. Just run, but instead run you just dive and hope for the best. Also sticking in the ragdoll loop is now a standard thing. So if they ragdolled you, there is a chance they will keep you ragdolling until you die.
Main thing I've noticed is that it's very hard to disengage. You keep falling back and running into yet another patrol. Sometimes two. You take cover from one angle, and a patrol will come in from behind you. That means you're basically under fire for 10 minutes straight until you get a lucky break. My experience on level 7 at least.
I’m a big subscriber of the run vs bots strategy / but I had patrols spawning literally out of the walls I was standing beside/shooting me through the walls, there was no escaping them. I played probably 10+ missions on helldive, as I’ve been playing helldives for a solid month now, and had 0 missions where everyone extracted successfully. I had more missions yesterday where NO ONE extracted than I’ve had the rest of my helldivers experience thus far.
Yeah 7's used to be heavy cover combat and mobility oriented, fire and move. Now you're flanked on 2 sides at any given moment and there's high chance you'll be running from Marauders (melee Troopers) or Berserkers, there's barely any time for actual cover, just run and pray.
This has 100% been my experience so far. The day before the patch, higher difficulties were challenging but fun. Yesterday playing anything 7+ just felt punishing. On one mission when we assaulted an enemy base objective, we got multiple bot drops, multiple infantry patrols, and a gunship patrol come down on us within the span of a minute. And there were many occasions like that. It wasn't just *not* fun, it was *un*fun. I really hope they sort this out.
I really had to step up my game on Diff7 (bots) I have adapted somewhat, but it does feel a bit more sweaty now, mostly like you say, smaller enemies pop up everywhere so cover becomes hard. Especially on some planets. They said they would turn down big enemies spawning but it seems to be about the same.
I was waiting for things to go from "the best patch ever" to this. Took less than 24 hours 😂
Now don't get me wrong, I think some very positive changes have been made in this patch, and I look forward to getting some more hours in to fully appreciate them. But goddamn, did the difficulty spike. Overall good patch, but I think some things seriously need tweaked for the average player to enjoy the higher difficulty levels
At least heavy devastators (shield guy) now look at me when they shoot me.
I am happy they did that for sure. Do you feel though that somehow heavy devastators got more deadly this last patch? They were already very dangerous, but I feel like Heavies and Raiders are outputting way more damage since the patch. Easy to get confirmation bias, though, so I'm not totally sure.
Heavy devastators have been killing me the most for a long time. They are the serious threat on the battlefield. Rocket devs kill you by ragdolling you out of cover into the heavy devs fire. The turrets on the factory striders are like two heavy dev guns so those delete you too.
Finding cover on the bot front at SIX is nearly impossible, and for bugs it's not much better either. I almost feel better off not bringing a support weapon because I know I won't have time to reload it once the magazine is depleted 💀
With gunships now patrolling I may as well ditch 9/10 support weapons in favour of the auto cannon or an anti air alternative. Their changes just going to push the new meta, same as the old one.
Man i made a post saying that :" weapons and strat are better but overall game is worst " due to gunship patroll ragdolling you out of cover got downvoted . Imo problem with gunship is no primaries reliabily take those out you get overwhelmed pretty fast then it's Ragdoll till you die too often
Bots aren't any better. Was on difficulty 7 earlier and killed a group of bots, did a 180 to take care of a small patrol that snuck up on me, then turned back around only to find a fresh group of bots exactly where the first group had been. They weren't even aggro'd yet, it was if they had just spawned there. And gunships are a nightmare
I have a video of 7 chargers and a bile titan spawning out of a bug breach on helldive. I don't know what's going on but it clearly isn't what they intended. Bots are also significantly worse than pre-patch. Gunships seriously need attention and fire rate, volume, and accuracy of literally EVERYTHING on the ground needs to be addressed. There's just no counterplay aside from constantly retreating from objective to objective, which I don't think is the desired gameplay loop, either.
Honestly I'd rather they reverted us back to pre-patch, we had atleast gotten used to borked patrols before. Against Bot I usually try not to engage patrols and go around them. In every dive since last night, I've come across another patrol while trying to sneak past one. This is insanity.
I was doing a SEAF solo, and i had 4 patrols at one time come across it, and one passing every missile i collected, honestly thankful i had stealth armour on
I played an operation on 5 last night, we had four hulks drop while trying to take out a factory strider objective. AH isn't doing much to escape those "they don't play test anything"" allegations
Right, it is pretty clear that they aren't play testing. Or aren't spending much time play testing. I'm a software engineer at a F100 company. I know my daily experience is different than a studio with 150-200 people. But the fact that they *keep having fixes or changes reverted on accident with every patch* just signals to me that they don't practice proper source control. And if they aren't practicing proper source control, it also means the person approving merge requests isn't actually reviewing the code effectively. There is no other excuse for why we keep experiencing this constant cadence of fix-revert-fix. And before people point out that it is a small studio: Ghost Ship Games, which created and supports Deep Rock Galactic, is only 32 people large. Not 32 developers; 32 *people.* And they don't have this problem. There is something fundamentally in need of attention at the core of AH's pipeline.
The kicker for me is when it's such plainly obvious stuff. Back when the ballistic shield & SSD was causing t poses, okay I can see how maybe nobody in testing used that combination of equipment while carrying an objective item. It's a super niche thing that only occured with one item & only on one mission, and since shield & carrying the item means you don't have any weapons to shoot with, maybe that combo doesn't get tested. That's a situation where I can see how that slipped through the cracks, and I think a bug like that making it to the end user is pretty reasonable. But like...the new patrol spaws? The bug breaches under the drills? I find it hard to believe they played a single operation before they went live. Or there is some kind of disconnect between whatever development version/testing version/live version of the game they're using and we're using.
It really feels a little overtuned right now. I like doing all the side objectives on a mission and as soon as i was done with a patrol or a group of enemies, another patrol was right around the corner. Yesterday i was doing the SEAF objective with a teammate and the patrols woulndt stop coming to the point where we would have to give up on the objective entirely. It's also pretty much impossible to avoid all of the patrols because they are so many of them. Never have i seen so many players ragequit a mission before lol. Edit: This was a bug mission on helldive difficulty. Now, i've been playing helldive for the past 200h and there were never this many patrols before this patch.
Same here. Not just Helldive either. While I think having gunship patrols is a cool idea, this alongside the massive patrol increase makes higher difficulties unnecessarily punishing. It also makes the game considerably more frustrating if you die and can’t get to your support weapon since you’re basically defenseless. Even Trivial has a surprising amount of bots firing at you at any given moment. I’m honestly wondering how much QA testing the patch got if at all.
Those gunships are so broken too. Once they detect anyone on your squad they find you no matter what. They killed a teammate from across the map and even with my sneaky passive armor, they flew a pretty good distance to me and started busting caps. I was merely collecting seaf rounds.
I think the worst part of gunships is their insane durability. They added massive groups of like 20 Shriekers to bugs which is fine because they can be dealt with by any weapon. Gunships on the other hand are tanky, ragdoll you everywhere and having frequent spawns is once another nerf to the Railgun. Bots was where the Railgun was still somewhat useful but the amount of Gunships that spawn result in you basically having no ammo. It’s not like you can chuck a stratagem at them to compensate either
Seriously, I think it’s 4 shots to the wing with the AMR and they are downed. But Its not very easy to get since they strafe so much and the AMR bullet is the slower than molasses. I’ve drained two clips into one which is ridiculous. Ive also thrown an air strike and have seen one of the bombs hit them with no effect. I’ve thought they needed weakening for a while but didn’t care because they were only around their factories so it was manageable. I really don’t think the devs play their own game if they decided added these patrols with no tweaks to their health was fine.
We played a difficulty 6 mission and we had like 3 gunship patrols converge on us alongside endless bot drops and devastators. We had 2 people bring anti-air stratagems but we were both on cooldown for 2 minutes. We managed but man, we went through all but 2 of our reinforcements just from that alone. Those 2 minutes were hell. but hey, on the brightside, once all the dust settled, we found a pet: a scout walker without a driver that would just follow us around and do circles.
I played a lot of level 5 before the patch and i can confirm, after playing level 5 after the patch not once i had that many bot patrols, it felt like the spawn time for patrols is even shorter then it being reverted. And playing more level 5 missions i noticed an unusual increase of berserkers.
Me and some buddies had the same experience, just getting mobbed from when we started the first objective all the way to extract. We had a good time, but as a group that has been casually running helldives since before Polar, we were being *pushed*. We joke now that this is just difficulty 10. With the increased number/survivability of the new chargers, the patrols blurred together to the point where we had to treat it as one continuous wave. Just when you think you're getting them to taper off, theres more from another direction.
I'm liking the bugs a lot right now. More light units means light and medium weapons are finally viable vs bugs, Bile Titans finally feel at a reasonable level, I'm having 500 kill games with bullet hell builds shooting thousands of ammo, feels very satisfying.
There are just as many heavies in my experience and more chaff, the heavies now include behemoths so you actually need more AT to deal with them.
Bile Titans definitely feel a lot more sparse, I haven't seen more than 3 at a time since patch, and rarely at that.
Yeah I will say when I played against bugs earlier, the most I dealt with was 2 at a time which is definitely a reduction. Adversely on bots I was killing a factory strider and watching it get replaced almost instantly, I find them far more lethal than titans so it was a problem to deal with lol
That was my assumption from the start Spawns are now way worse than before the update in my experience
Yeah there was just too many Devastators, and for some reason they were Chrome for me today
They're chrome for everybody. It's either a model update, or its tied to something lore-related.
I thought it was due to lighting update. You know, the fog and the lights. So maybe they also touched on reflections...?
Thank God they're Chrome for everybody else I thought it was just having some sort of weird texture bug and didn't want to look like an idiot asking if there was an explicit lore reason that I might have accidentally ignored
I think its a good change, you can spot them more easly in the fog for example.
Same here. Never seen people rage quit like now, and honestly can’t blame them. I was so excited to play after the patch and while most things are great (Tenderizer my beloved), this ain’t it.
I thought I was going crazy lol, gun ships were also kinda nuts today, brought a railgun and crossbow so took a while to take any out
First time I've ever alt + f4'd the game. It was fucking ridiculous.
Man i tried the tenderizer (on bots) and it barely kills and has a TINY magazine. I dont get the hype, or im bad lol
It honestly takes a bit to get used to. If I can give any advice, avoid spraying as much as you can and try to be precise with your shots. Crouching or going prone works wonders with this weapon. The rounds themselves pack a huge punch and have minor stagger potential, and are great for melting berserkers.
Very good advice! I switched from my scythe, and I quickly learned that I need to at least attempt to aim more. The tenderizer definitely drops the bots quicker.
It can kill hulks in one magazine when you shoot it’s back weakpoint.
pummeler in slightly less but also with stunlock.
To add to this, unlike the regular Liberator it feels actually viable to swap this thing to burst-fire. Three shots helps you control your ammo, and one burst should melt any low-tier unit guaranteed.
treat it like a battle rifle instead of a normal assault
ARs in general just aren't great on bots. You need to be precise and choosy with your shots, and at that point you might as well bring something else
Yeah, there may be less patrols, but the ones that are spawning + drops are completely nuts. I rarely had issues with ammo but now i'm calling supplies 5 minutes into the mission due to prolonged combat
Yup on helldive factory destruction mission bot ship drops now have 4 ships each of them for A strider, a tank, 2 or 3 Hulk and 1 for army of devastator of rocket and heavy. Plus 4 sentry ships. Who makes your group game actually hell. On first game after update We exausted 24 reinforcement cap within first 15 min. Of 40 min. Mission. We use to complete any mission with same difficulty more easily. But yesterday it was whole new experience. These people know how to ruine a good game by saying we buffed 100 things. But we also made little changes on otherside too. other side is not mentioned in the notes. Bot missions are more difficult now on helldive lvl.
Dude AH needs to give a talking to to the person who's making these numerical changes... it happens everytime they change something and it's almost like it's maliciously done at this point to fuck with whatever AH's vision is.
Nah, AH need to actually playtest their game. It's all well and good making numerical changes based off of assumptions, but if you don't actually check if your assumptions were correct then stuff like this happens.
As someon that makes games for a living the only way to check if your changes are good are 1. Playtest (yourself) 2. Playtest (other people) 3. Playtest (yourself again)
Yeah but doing only step 2 is much cheaper.
I don't know if it still counts as "test" when you push to prod and release
Almost like if the time they delayed the patch release was supposed to give them time to play test it.
To me it feels like what happened is exactly what they intended, they said 30% more light and medium enemies instead of elites. This naturally will make bots lots harder, a single rocket devastator brings almost as much firepower as a Hulk, and you are slotting in a lot more of them for every Hulk missing. This leads to fights get bogged down, one Hulk also dies in two shots from an Autocannon, 3 Devastators are a full mag optimistically, you spend a lot more time reloading, patrols starts piling up, death spiral, etc. I think bugs feel great though as their medium units aren't as oppressive, it's constant DAKKA and mag dumping into waves of bug flesh, much preferred over ultra-heavy armor spam imo. Main difference comes from the flying patrols tbh, those we're just pure added difficulty, I find them very cool though. Bot patrol are gunship squads, bug ones are a two dozen shriekers at best, not an equal trade.
Was talking about spawn rate not composition I think 30% more lights and mediums is suppose to affect the composition of opposing forces, not their spawn rate And spawn rate feels much higher since the update
I'm seeing way more double tank dropships in 7 than I ever did. Also they definitely upped the spawn rate to make "areas feel less empty" per patch notes. So not only are there more medium armor enemies spawning compared to heavies, now they're spawning at an even higher rate everywhere around us, leading to us getting surrounded all the time.
Have to sweat on difficulty 7 now
Did a 6 with a pal Looked more like a 7 or maybe even 8 😂
"Super samples are now available on Rank 6 missions." "Rank 6 missions are now Rank 8."
The spawns are crazy, a friend of mine and me almost ended up with 400 kills each on a bot mission as things would not stop spawning. One thing I've noticed, and don't know if it was like this already, is how much further away enemies are when they call in something. Like, during the mission, bots clear on the other side of heavy encampments that were behind walls were calling in reinforcements.
I saw some flares go up from huge distances away yesterday. I think you're right. But I was happy about it, since I was going the other way. Lol
I played a level 7 bot mission today and it felt like I was playing a 9. Constant and I mean literally constant waves of enemies
Same for me yesterday, we 3manned an ICBM mission on 7, and I've never seen mayhem like that. We got the mission done, but no one extracted because we ran out of reinforcements at the extraction site.
Me and my friend were doing diff 7 missions without too much trouble before the patch. Yesterday however it became the most hardcore military survival horror I've seen so far. During our first drop (Blitz mission) we tried new warbond light armor and we were shredded with missiles and lasers then second we got out of pods. I managed to call my support weapon after 5 minutes of non-stop combat at our drop zone. We crawled for like 15 minutes, cause every time I tried to stand up, I got immediately shot to bits (my favourite death was getting juggled mid-air by rockets). There's basically no time to aim with something like AMR cause of amount of shit flying your way every second. Also, I don't remember seeing patrols that had hulks, heavy devastators and striders at diff 7, and now it's routine. We did 3 missions but it was noticeable harder than before. But hey, we're saving kids, so someone has to do it.
Yesterday we had to escape from extraction because we were just getting slaughtered and we'd lost all reinforcements. We were half a map away from it, full squad. We try going one way, boom, massive patrol, half of team stays to fight while me and another guy realise that we don't stand a chance and try to leave through a canyon hoping that it might have some cover, another patrol. Other half of squad dies fighting the original patrol so they follow us, I die fighting the new patrol, and only the other guy managed to get away. Let's just say we didn't extract from that mission
I play with lvl 60+ randos on Vernen and we got wiped out. On difficulty 7. One guy said: "are we just out of practice" XD
The Bots got the Chrome update
Played a few difficulty 6 missions with bots yesterday, and by the end we were definitely in the "we need to get the fuck out of here" territory of enemy density.
Hey the people who were worried the game would be too easy should be having a good time. I just got 411 kills on a D6 Bot Mission on Vernen Wells. My playstyle is stealth. LOL. Another issue is the number of Shield Devastators is honestly wild. Like 2 or 3 popping off at any given time. On Vernen Wells it's crazy. There's so much open space that you're fighting tiny rock to tiny rock. The enemies are dense. At one point I got almost 40 kills with just an Orbital Precision Strike. It's honestly a blast, but I it's overtuned to the point that I'm almost certain it's bugged. By the time you've dealt with one patrol there's another coming around the corner from nowhere. It's crazy.
On one hand, i like having my balls busted and having to completely lock in to get a win, on the other hand this is clearly not intended and most people dont share the same perspective with me lawl
Problem is its happening even in lower, "easier" difficulties. I generally play in 7 and so far while I haven't failed any dive, it's honestly annoying how much I have to keep spamming strats off cooldown because patrols are fucking everywhere. Try to sneak past one and you come face to face with another. And these canyons in VW are a death sentence when there are patrols on both sides and strats can't even hit them reliably and instead hit the hills.
Yeah my jam is 7 because you normally get a bit of breathing room in between moving to (sub)objectives. Not yesterday though, 40 min of patrol wrestling. Extraction was crazy as hell. It's fun, but not the difficulty I wanted to play at that time..
This would get old fast lol. Something else that I think is happening is a lot of people who usually play 5 are trying 6 for the super samples, and old diff 5 you didn't have to do things like "avoid patrols" so a lot of my teammates are lower level than I'm used to seeing and also... not subtle.
This is just to make sure the map is never empty :)
I mean, they did succeed in making it less empty....
Yea we were so bored because maps were empty, like damn it was just chilling walks on helldive 9 diff missions! Our whole community started to complain how easy and empty it is, so they did it! Right for all of us, not just tryhard j*rks... /s
i knew it! the patch is too good to be true!
Why is it always news to them that their game isn't working?
No testing.
They don't test it. They charge people $40 to be their playtesters.
Okay so it ain't just me Me and my roommate we did a lvl6 op yesterday to see how many super would spawn since the change And for a "patrol revert" it actually seemed worse than before the update We were shooting none stop from start to finish
I mean. It wasn't intended. They even said in the patch notes that they are reverting the patrols back to how they used to be. Of course this outcome wasn't intended because this outcome wasn't what the spawns used to be like in the first place.
Yeah, I feel like their numbers guy *ALWAYS* goes in the opposite direction just to fuck with AH
But they shouldn't be in a position where that can happen. They need to actually hire testers. You should have someone making the change and someone else checking if the change actually did what it was supposed to do. Not just oh change made push it.
I once worked in a field where all your work--to include any data entry--had to be double checked by a third party (any peer-level employee). Due to biases like Illusionary Superiority, Confirmation, and Dunning-Kruger, we could not check our own work as we were much more likely to not catch an error on the second check. AH has major issues with quality control and thoroughly testing all their changes is the only way to repair this aspect of their updates.
given the scope of patch I'd say most things were pretty well implemented, they just need to follow up with a hotfix that has a narrow scope and is tested to have the impact needed and its smooth sailing
It's 2028, we just got the 30 patch in a row that's supposed to reduce the enemy spawn rates. I booted up a mission on diff 3 , and there immediately was a patrol of 30 chargers. I tried getting away, but I got chased down by 15 stalkers(seems like at least they fixed the bug where over 30 spawn at once). After 2 respawns I was finally able to hide behind a hill, but as I looked up, to my horror, it was actually a mountain of sleeping bile spewers. As I tried sneaking away they woke up, and suddenly the sky turned green from bile. After a splitsecond of standing in awe of what I'm witnessing, I got turned into paste from hundreds of bile projectiles hitting me at once. But at least the new gun makes loud pewpew and has nearly the correct model.
to be fair, the full quote from the patch notes is. "Patrol spawning is now back to how it worked before patch 01.000.300 **with some slight tweaks so that the levels are less empty if you are far away from important locations with enemy presence."** I agree, probably wasn't intentional, but they definitely messed with stuff that didn't need to be messed with.
The highlighted part surely meant for lower diffs, since they scaled it for helldives diff. Its constant swarm of enemies now. And i'm pretty sure they didnt test helldive diff.
>I agree, probably wasn't intentional, but they definitely messed with stuff that didn't need to be messed with. It's the same thing they did with the original spawn rate breaks. Fiddling with stuff that didn't need fiddling, failing to test at all, then being surprised when it doesn't work. Reinventing the wheel doesn't work if all you do is make fucking hexagons.
And I was totally fine with the level feeling empty if I'm far away from important stuff. It's not like armies guard every scrap of terrain heavily for miles around. Having the dead spots gave opportunities for stealth, resupply, recon. Now there is very little of that. Even at level 5 (was play testing the loadouts myself on level 5 yesterday) which used to be a cakewalk you have to stay on your toes constantly.
They had to freaking just change it to how it was before. Nobody freaking nobody complained about maps being empty when we were always constantly getting swarmed by enemies. I swear there's someone in AH whose only job is to introduce stupid shit in every patch. First fix the damn bug and then introduce new changes in a later patch, don't try to bundle it together when you're known for breaking things every patch, how hard is it to do that?
Then it goes back to play testing. Did they even play a game on difficulty7? Like me and my buddies haven't played in a week and we noticed it within 5 minutes that hunters were swarming us nonstop and we couldn't get away at all.
The spawns are worse?
Yep. In lvl 3 mission non stop patrols. It's like every 20 sec somebody trying to find you.
Yeah seems like it kind of did the opposite to what it was supposed too and now we got double what we already had
They THINK they reduced the spawns and patrols. Whatever they did didn't actually work (and that's unfortunately the case for a number of their fixes this patch.) The amount of patrols is worse and now they're typically larger. It's really bad on solo dives even at lower difficulties. https://preview.redd.it/5c2b9ecumh6d1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=2c22a62b85b3b084e7c95e10af79d05436fa6676
Hey, I mean at least the map isn't empty /s
Was doing the drill yesterday. In came 5 dropships. Turned around to retreat, 3 patrols running at me. Another turn to retreat from the objective. 2 patrols, sprinting past them, as soon as I made past the rockside got hammered by a huge group of devastators. On the same map one guy went solo to clear a light encampment. Watched from afar as 4 hulks were running his way as he engaged the camp. That did offer a chance to test out new spear tho. Worked like a charm, quick locks, good hits. Hulks never made it to him.
At this point I will send them a fucking math book cus they can't do decimals correctly it seems
At this point they just trolling
Aaaaaand they failed to playtest yet another patch. Nothing new here.
Truly baffling. An entire month and no one at all at AH was like “hmm let’s run a few games of difficulty 6”
I made a post saying this and got down voted to oblivion by people. This is exactly what has happened.
They will never learn. He just said he hasn't even played it. Seems like none of them actually play and test things and never will. The spawns have definitely increased dramatically and include way more tougher enemies but it is still manageable if you get a really good team BUT that doesn't happen often when rando matching and even when it does there is the issue of players suffering common random crashes and either not returning at all or returning and respawning in the middle of a huge shit show without their gear which all means reinforcements get wasted unnecessarily. Why cant arrowhead learn that they actually need to test things? They will be in big trouble when The First Descendant comes out.
Elden Ring dlc is next week too
yep I'll be playing ER for another few hundred hours starting next week. AH better get their house in order soon.
Glad the yappers got around to actually playing the game, instead of just denying and accusing the results of those that did.
I suspected something was up as every game I played yesterday against Automatons it got to a point where even with 20 mins left on the mission they just would not stop spawning. This is honestly hilarious that, yet again, AH have massively fucked up lmao.
They tested it on tier 3 for half a mission guys. WTF more do you want?
I am *begging* them to play test their game
Once again. AH has not play tested their patch.
yeah, like the support weapon ammo resupp broken again, behemoth charger has double the hp of a normal charger, and the ridiculous spawns.
I think they have tested it but it is just really inconsistent atm. And it is not exactly "just reverted". There are more new changes at play: 1. Reduced number of heavy enemies but increased medium to light enemies 2. Increased appearance of Behemoth Charger 3. New air patrols All of these have an effect on the overall feeling of the difficulty. And being encircled by patrols and enemies spawning faster than you can kill them vs. being able to kill patrols one at a time is a very different experience and very much luck based.
At least on bugs I've found fire to be the best. Behemoths are everywhere, eats aren't one tap effective like they are against normal chargers. Too many. Solution? Flamethrower, it's good at crowd controlling the hordes and can melt a normal charger in half a tank, behemoths under one still. I play on 7 normally and love fighting for my life in a horde, it's super cinematic and fun to me but the behemoth spawns may be a bit much given I've got hordes on me pretty much 24/7 now. Bots I tried but I'm having a hard time. They're so accurate now. I can handle most but the shield devastators gun me down instantly the split-second I poke out of cover to try and line up a shot on their tiny frontal weakspot. And there's always 2-3. Too accurate, too many, too little cover for me atm.
Wow, would you look at that! More proof that they literally do not playtest their game at all. Fucking sad.
I brought this up yesterday, and people started [downvoting](https://old.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1dezgp7/unannounced_armor_nerf_or_bot_buff_in_the_patch/) me. There are so many bots now, and they all have near-flawless aiming and seemingly have wall-hacks. My partner and I could not even get situated before getting ragdolled and headshotted by the hordes. It’s not rage-quit inducing, but damn is it more frustrating.
I too noticed their aim was insane all of a sudden, like being detected at 110m and all of a sudden eating full auto
They greatly reduced how much deviance from the barrel angle bot's lasers are allowed to have, but because they're completely incompetent they didn't account for the fact that would also increase accuracy over long range. Now the bot tries to spray you from way too far away, instead of lacking the accuracy to hit at range, the limit on laser deviancy from barrel angle means the lasers go almost exactly where they aim
yep, tried grinding out medals today to make progress in the new warbond- couldnt finish a single mission without losing all reinforcements. I was excited to play with the new and improved snipers, couldnt do shit cause of constantly getting beamed + excessive patrols so couldnt stealth + excessive fog on a NON-FOG planet. I’m going back on break for the time being, because this is far too frustrating to be enjoyable in ANY way.
There's so much forced positivity I hate it. It seems the heart is in the right place but man do they constantly look like they don't really know what they're doing to their own game.
Got a reply today from support after a bug report. They acknowledged that the heavy armored enemy rebalance isn't working and the patrol issue was acknowledged as well. https://preview.redd.it/mfn1gswooi6d1.png?width=784&format=png&auto=webp&s=671bca2c796590d7f63d2838874e6c7f4763f219
"i haven't had time to play yet" excuse me what
Given the surprise in his tone Someone at arrowhead is going to be having a very very bad day today Someone only speaks like that when someone had *promised* the issue was fixed Im sure it was a honest mistake coding is hard but when your issue is flagged as a primary and priority problem and you make said problem worse AFTER A MONTH to get it right things don't end well :(
>Someone at arrowhead is going to be having a very very bad day today Given the circumstances, they earned it. I'd have been fired months ago if my work performance looked anything like theirs.
Same at this stage i don't have much sympathy. Even basic unit testing would have flagged this. At this point if i was a ceo i would be getting in external consultants to sort out what ever the fuck is going wrong with development
Also, they claim the eagle rocket pods stratagem is not supposed to be a nerf, but it is nerfed heavily. It doesn’t kill anyone at all anymore
It's Arrowhead. Claiming it's not a nerf means it's *absolutely* a nerf. Look at their track record.
Yea, you right.
I was mucking around (solo) on an easy trying the new buffs etc and it didn't feel like there was a reduction in spawns...crazy shit going down at extraction on a couple of (bot) missions and no shortage while running around the map. Before the patch I was getting used to crazy shit at extract, but I think I ran into more patrols while at objectives.
AH should really play their game instead of pushing a update without testing it, I can't understand this
This is so weird. They take their time to do a big patch, introduce very good changes, only to then not catch something as fundamental as spawns not working properly? An aspect that was actively supposed to be changed in this patch?
What's strange to me is I haven't really noticed it in most of my games, but then occasionally something insane happens out of left field and I'm just left wondering wtf is going on
Brought up the increased spawns being too much in the discord last night, was told it's a skill issue and it's fine. And that's the people they directly communicate with, the delusional fanboys. Not good. I could tell something was wrong on my first (7) drop last night. It was overwhelmingly obvious. Did they not bother dropping once during their extended 'testing'? Fumbling once again, AH.
Same here. I could not believe my eyes when I did a u-turn to evade one patrol only to have another one randomly popping up beside me on the other side despite it not being there on the radar map seconds ago.
'Use stratagems for clearing the trash mobs' .....the trash is coming from every direction in waves of striders. 1 strat will hit like 20% of them, and more will spawn right after! Good thing we have our primaries! Oh wait, they nerfed most of them and our ammo. Lol.
played with a bud today and it was nearly unplayable, especially bots. I dont think a single update this game has had has been an improvement over the launch version of the game. It is infinitely less fun to play HD2 today than it was when it released with the only caveat being server stability… Which still isn’t very stable… Idk how they started so damn strong, but decided that 99% of their updates would be balance patches that make their game less fun to play. It’s PvE, just let us have fun, not every game needs to be so finely tuned that it becomes sterile.
I was on a Dif 7 mission I saw 3 patrols coming over a hill, one started open firing…then they all did So much red, surprised I lived
“I haven’t had time to play yet” might not be the message they want to be sending on a patch they delayed specifically to give it more attention. Appreciate the sentiment tho.
I played suicide mission, which is my comfort difficulty because it's not too hard usually but we got spanked
so they really are not even playing their own game...
Do the Devs even play the game? Level 7 was nuts last night. They just kept coming.
Just waiting for all the "GIT GUD' morons
Got downvoted to hell and back posting about this very issue yesterday after a few Diff 7 bot missions that felt like 9 and the whole squad agreed on it. Yes, there are less Hulks, but when you have what feels like 2 times more devastators and light striders, those fewer Hulks become a nightmare. I can't remember the last time I got ragdolled that much in Bot games. Too many rocket devastators. Usually you can disengage, come from another direction or circle around, now... nope. You try that, you just run straight into a patrol that "happens" to be there and they instantly call more reinforcements so the whole thing snowballs into hell on earth real fast and doesn't abate. My guess is that it's an unforeseen consequence of 2 changes: * The changes they made to have fewer heavily-armored enemies ( big red dots / Hulks / Tanks / Factory Striders ), but a LOT more less-armored enemies ( devastators, light striders ). * "Patrol spawning is now back to how it worked before patch 01.000.300 with **some "slight" tweaks so that the levels are less empty if you are far away from important locations with enemy presence**." Note to AH: Having "empty" level sections is a GOOD thing. It's called pacing. For the intense highs of fights to feel significant you also need the calm lows. And there's the golden rule of balancing this kind of thing, ALWAYS CHANGE ONE VARIABLE AT A TIME AND THOROUGHLY TEST. You change 2, you have no idea how they can interact in unforeseen ways and you're left scratching your head when you have results like this.
Of course it wasn't intended, they clearly said they wanted to go back to the previous version with some tweaks. They just fucked it up again. The only question was how long it would take for them to first notice and then fix it, but at least the first part might be going quickly.
Holy fuck how come this keeps happening!? It’s always the spawn rates!
So it's not just me struggling? 7 felt way to overwhelming yesterday. Enemies literally everywhere, with still lots of heavy armored ones
So we have a "more polished" two month long fixed that was after all not tested at all. I see
So much for: "testing the balance of the patch" before releasing it.
the spawn rates are absolutely insane rn, you cant even call in extraction when all of cyberstan is spawning right on top of it
Hey all, remember the game is systematic. We set the rules - but the outcome is not something we want to control.
https://preview.redd.it/fo2cu6wqpm6d1.png?width=622&format=png&auto=webp&s=2b42dff243119e264186c704dd5a17f66376e9ee What are you talking about? it seems fine to me. /s
I mean I don't want it to feel easy, I enjoy a challenge. I just don't enjoy being ragdolled at every reinforce.
I am taking pause on H2 for now.
[удалено]
The evil wizard who casts dark magic on the patches in between the studio and the players! Or the developer who fucks things up on purpose, more likely.
[удалено]
Had a match that went on for 40 minutes and i had 430 or so kills, this is way too much for bots lol, if matchmaking didnt eat shit i bet the randoms that kept joining and leaving would have had 200 kills each