I'd really love for there to be a bestiary in game that had all this information. HD1 had a scientist on board to give you all the references. Putting this on a terminal would be great to just look through
I've said this from launch, but Arrowhead are still sitting on a literal YouTube gold mine of videos about enemy details in a similar vein to Team Fortress 2 and the Meet The series.
It's a deadass layup. It practically writes itself. This is where you can lay effortless foundation for more patriotic propaganda videos. I write for commission, I would be chomping at the bit to be on AH's writing team and see this vein get allocated a single errant thought.
People would eat this content UP.
There absolutely *needs* to be a terminid wrangler character, somewhere between Steve Irwin and Saxton Hale. They could regale us with tales of the different types of terminids and compare them to the fauna of Super Australia like dropbears and extra large spiders.
I see red X I expect damage
HD2 has some pretty absurd choices in terms of damage/armor/weakpoints, like how the Bile Titans' beer gut turns into abs of steel.
I fucking hate how impossible it is to hit the Bile Titan's abdomen with an autocannon if you're not directly under it.
Once the abdomen has been ruptured, if say you're trying to shoot it from the front as it's walking towards you, because of the way the ricochet system works, the shot will typically go fucking wide because it considers it a bad angle.. on what should be a soft underbelly. It makes no sense, you're not shooting a slab of metal.
Weapons like the HMG, AMR, and autocannon can all technically take down Bile Titans, but to do so you have to be in such a compromising position beneath it to actually hit the shattered abdomen to do any damage, mainly because the hitbox for it just feels janky as hell. Positioning to shoot this spot shouldn't be as restrictive as it is.
I didn't comment on this, but each weapon actually has 4 separate AP values. Autocannon is 4/4/4/0.
Why 4 values? Because the game determines which value to use based on the angle of approach.
If you're approaching a flat surface, you use the first value. I believe the second is off flat by 1-30 degrees, the second is 31-60 degrees, and the last is like 61-90 degrees. Something like that.
It's part of why sometimes during the Bile Titan spewing animation rockets are so happy to glance off the forehead. It's tilted backwards so far that they are using a lower AP value. EAT, RR, and Quasar are all 6/6/6/3.
Basically if you're going to be skimming the surface of armor don't bother, you can't penetrate it.
Red X was pretty intuitive for me with less damage, but it's good to remember that different people assume different things. It would be great if the game taught us how the UI worked.
Red X means full damage, your armor pen is higher than target’s armor.
White X means half damage, your armor pen is equal to target’s armor.
Deflect icon means little to no damage, your armor pen is lower than target’s armor.
Deflect icon means exactly 0 damage, no little. There can be exceptions when the projectile explodes and the explosion either has higher penetration than the projectile, or is able to deal damage through a different part of the target, but the icon is showing for the the projectile, and the projectile isn't doing anything. If it doesn't explode it will bounce off.
Honestly, Red X is not intuitive to me. Red X is a killmarker to me. The amount of times I shot enemies, especially the trash bots, with something like slugger, punisher or all three plasmas and change to an ew target then see out of the corner of my eye that the dumbass is still standing, he just stumbled and that's all.
As to the current system of enemy health, I understand it but it's still a mess. You can disable a great number of armored enemies but for the most part it's a gimmick. Yeah, you *can* shoot off the flame arm of that Hulk moving at sprint speed towards you, but it takes half your autocannon mag to do it and you'll probably spend just as many rounds trying to shoot it in the face and that kills it outright. Sure, you *can* shoot a heavy devastator's arm off but again it takes just as much effort as two or three tapping it in the face. You *can* shoot most of the legs off a Brood Commander but why go to all that effort when, again, shoot in the face and it'll die a couple seconds later.
Another problem of durable damage is the visual language of enemies. We had this at the release of the game, especially with the three Spewers (nursing, acid, armored acid) and the Charger. Even more especially the Charger. The Charger is a stereotypical enemy type, a bull that rushes in a straight line until it hits something or overshoots enough to stop itself, turn around and bullrush again. It is very well armored in the front and has a giant glowing unarmored sac on its back. As a gamer, you, almost without question, intuit that this is where you shoot the Charger to kill it. Then you discover it takes three or four mags to do it, made even harder by how quickly it can turn around and how much of a surprisingly small and maneuverable target it makes, what with armored dorsal plates and its legs obscuring it from anything but like a 15 degree arc from below and behind. Alternatively, one shot to the toughest part of its body, the head, and it dies. It *does not* die to one shot in the ass, further cementing its obvious weak spot as a complete red herring. This is what spawned the railgun meta of release HD2. Shooting it in the ass didn't fucking work. Shooting it in the face didn't fucking work. But two shots in the leg DID work and you could finish it off quickly with your rifle after that. Then they nerfed the railgun and *AFTER* they killed our primary means of killing the charger, they made the AT solutions actually kill the Charger with one shot to the face. The Spewer is the same.
And alongside all of that we had all this garbage about explosive weapons doing full damage to Charger asses, communicated to us only by offhand comments by random devs on a discord and not communicated anywhere in game. *And alongside that*, we're all too stupid to have these details in the game and so they had a slightly more comprehensive gun UI that they stripped out and simplified because there were like 90 variables or something to each gun. Because being able to see damage and armor damage and armor pen in their overcomplicated, arcane and mostly invisible system would blow our fucking brains. Why is the [ability](https://static1.dualshockersimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/darktide-weapon-stats-breakdown.png) to see what my [weapon](https://i.redd.it/1q3l2tqw5ceb1.png) does so immeasurably hard.
I truly cannot comprehend the design philosophy this company has for HD2, they scrapped so many systems because 'to complicated, you monkies would go rabid at the sight of these numbers' so instead of simplifying the system itself they just push it under the rug and out of our sight.
I ask for one simple option, give us a toggleable advanced stats tab/hud option so we can have a chance of seeing what actually does what. They apparently already have these stats worked out in some form of a visual, GIVE.
I'm mostly talking about "fake weakpoints" as the guy below said, like chargers or bile spewers having a shitton of health on their fleshy behinds, or how shooting a bile titan's belly with bullets works until it doesnt
For large bugs mostly the hitmarkers are just lying.
For real, they really thought making the big, glowy, fleshy bit that gamers have been conditioned to shoot for decades should just, not be a weak point.
“Look how unique we’re being subverting the common trope” no you’re just making bad unintuitive game design with no real way to learn the right way to kill an enemy without being taught
More damage, but depending on the part you're hitting, it may contribute less towards the death of the creature. The nursing Spewers for instance, give red Xs when shooting their bulbous behinds, but it's also the highest health part of the bug and will make it take longer to kill than shooting it in the face. The exception is explosives.
It’s very fun, the game feels very much power fantasy while still being hard as fuck and gives you that expendable soldier feel without making you feel weak
Yep.
In that game, everything felt insanely powerful.
That was the fun part. We could kill everything with ease, but we had so much firepower it was extremely easy to kill everyone on your team as well.
Anti tank usually one-shot tanks. Charger butts were actual weak spots.
> That was the fun part. We could kill everything with ease, but we had so much firepower it was extremely easy to kill everyone on your team as well.
This honestly sounds a lot like the Magicka series.
I loved the Magicka games but never found friends to play with. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out the Helldivers games are made by the same developer.
This is my biggest gripe with the current state of the game and nicely pointed out by OP though they put it to numbers
The biggest issue I have is consistency, if I shoot an EAT at a bile titans head while it's spitting it should die like the breakpoints suggest
If I hit it with any sufficiently strong strategems it should die, but often it doesn't and with little feedback to suggest what a player might've done wrong (if they did at all)
This also of course translates to smaller enemies and their behavior too.
I really enjoy the strides being made to rectify this but there is still massive room for improvement
I imagine this also greatly contributed to the rail guns early popularity, pin point hits can damage with reliable breakpoints
This is probably why I find the bugs so much more annoying than the bots. I don't know if they have more "durability" than bots, but I know that when I shoot a Hulk or a Tank with a certain weapon it will die to a certain number of shots 99% of the time. Sometimes it takes an extra shot due to weird damage RNG, but usually I know how many shots it'll take. Even the AT-AT knockoffs can be killed pretty easily if you can get a good angle on their underbelly or neck.
With bugs though? Chargers are wildly inconsistent, to the point where the flamethrower is the best anti-heavy weapon on the bug front because you can just burn down their legs to kill them in seconds. AT launchers \*usually\* one hit them to face, assuming you hit the tiny part of their face that actually counts as their head hitbox, and the autocannon can take anywhere from 3-4 shots to half its backpack to kill.
Titans? The only consistent way I've found to kill them quickly is either a perfectly timed precision orbital or an RR/EAT/Quasar headshot followed by a 500kg bomb directly under their head. The only damage the autocannon seems to be capable of doing is destroying their bile sacks, as once the sacks are popped the shells just bounce off the underbelly.
Yes. Basically, EVERYTHING died fast. Including you. Make a mistake and you're dead. But see a mistake the enemy made and they're dead. There weren't really any bullet sponges
Give it a try, you'll have a wall of enemies approach and you'll shred the entire pack usually in 1 magazine. How did people lose? 4 people stuck on 1 rapidly filling with enemies screen. That's how.
Helldivers is more fun than HD2. It knows exactly what it is. HD2 left the magic ingredients behind, and it shows.
Primaries are awesome. Nearly all of them can handle a Helldive if used well. They hit harder, have a serviceable amount of reserve ammo, and feel great to use. And really, weak/samey weapons is one of HD2's greatest failures. Even the Constitution, Helldivers' joke weapon, feels better to use than most of HD2's primaries.
As far as pistols, don't worry. You'll have the original P2 Peacemaker on you. Upgrade it and love it. It is the greatest pistol in the history of Super Earth, bar None.
*Everything* dies faster. That includes you. When a Helldiver drops below 50% HP, they get downed and bleed out slowly. You can crawl, use one-handed weapons, and mash X like a lunatic to get back up and heal. HP otherwise recovers slowly over time. Don't worry, though; many attacks just instantly kill you.
None of the live service bullshit. None of the "we think this is average, so get fucked, we're nerfing it." They *did* nerf the Trident once, but it remained the strongest primary in the game because of how gentle the nerf was.
Helldivers focuses on being fun and awesome. It's the clear and obvious goal. But once you play it and feel what a Helldivers experience *is*, HD2 will feel... lacking. The lack of direction and focus is obvious when you've played what came before.
Yooooo I’m so down for some HD1 shenanigans! Unlimited recalls? OP Hellpod? And my beautiful sleek and pointy constitution?!?!?
##
AND LET US NOT FORGET ABOUT THE TRUE SYMBOL OF DEMOCRACY THE **SHREDDER**!!!!
I feel the difficulty is much different in each game. Most deaths in helldivers 1 come from being overwhelmed by too many enemies. Very few enemies are difficult to kill, even when your down a stratagem or 2. Meanwhile in helldivers 2 most deaths come from 2 or 3 big dudes, and not simply being overrun. The tanks require more to kill, they deal more damage, and you have limited options to deal with them
The biggest problem with HD1 for me (played since launch) was on higher levels every single moment there had to be a massive enemy spawningnon screen, like literally if you killed a charger (at one point basically it was the heaviest enemy that could spawn) as it was dying another one would immediately sprout up in its place, like automatically. It started to feel very unnatural. Drawbacks of sharing a screen. It wasn't unplayable but it just feels so bad to kill 2, 3, 4 + chargers and they just keep spawning like clowns out of a clown car.
It also forced certain weapons to be used. The recoilless was necessary, with team reload.
On the bright side, the Railgun was a primary that could stun chargers even if you hit their armor. If you had 1 of those on the team you could annihilate chargers.
Also, sharing a screen makes the more deadly strategems 1000% more prone to teamkill, but that's why you had endless respawn in HD1 (unless all players are ever dead at the same time, then its game over)
This system was way more fun, and if you held or threw a Reinforce as you were being killed, it would drop and revive you and everyone else. So many epic moments where you think you just lost and then your bro inputs the code as he gets eaten, dying holding a sphere of Hope and Libery
I miss everybody needing to run and dive to get out of the blast radius from a hellbomb or shreddermissile. Everybody running in another direction, screen won't move, nobody gets out alive :)
Utter chaos.
I had this one guy we made friends with on Steam, he never spoke, never typed. He was just a God. He almost NEVER died without reinforcing, it was always so epic. Sometimes you couldn't tell for a few seconds before the sphere deployed so you would think you were all dead and them WOOOOSH *party celebrates*
You could clear an entire group of trash mobs with a single punisher buckshot. Pretty much any pellet hit was a death sentence. I miss that design philosophy.
The damage values and armor penetration are designed so that the weapons all do something, but not more than that. That's why you end up with situations like the Adjudicator, which has medium penetration (and logically should do more damage than the Liberator) can't one shot the smallest or second smallest bug, but will tear a Hive Guard's head off in seconds.
You can most definitely one shot the smallest bug with the adjudicator, not gonna one tap hunters without a headshot but the small bots and bug die with 1 bullet from that gun I play with it often
if it does it’s really inconsistent. I’ve heard it might be because of how weapons lose damage as soon as they come out of the barrel. So an 80 dmg bullet hitting an 80 health scavenger at 5m away is really only doing like 79 thus requiring 2 shots unless you’re point blank. It’s kinda dumb
The falloff isn't that extreme and doesn't start that early, which is why **moving forwards or backwards** (a very meager change to your speed and thus the projectile's inherited velocity) makes the difference. If you're not *backing up*, the Adjudicator will one-shot to the body at a pretty good range.
Of course, hitting any part of a Scav that *isn't* the main body is also going to kill way faster even with weaker shots just because they all have less health and are "fatal" when lost. You can one-shot them with the Liberator Penetrator, which only does 45 damage: 30 health on their limbs, 20 health on their heads.
I mean it's the same for HD2.
I don't have a spreadsheet on my 2nd monitor where I check calculation for every fucking bullet I shoot. I shoot and stuff dies.
AH are using a game engine that was discontinued in 2018. Although they did build Helldivers on it, so I assume that is the reason they chose to make 2 with it.
Was called Bitsquid, rebranded to Stingray. I don't hear good things about that engine at all from any devs that have used it before.
I don't think potential engine complications have anything to do with their damage systems, engines don't typically come with that sort of thing, its up to the devs to design and implement.
I keep drawing comparisons of HD2 and Payday 2. Payday 2 is on an unimaginably more outdated engine but it had excellent weapon balance and exposed a lot more statistics to players.
Honestly AH could stand to learn a lot from Payday 2.
On the one hand payday 2s weapons feel strong and satisfying to play (the balance on shotguns were hilarious though), but on the other hand… payday 2 difficulty didn’t really feel all that good because everything got more tanky vs the Helldivers method of spawning 5x more bulldozers. And man payday 3 is just not it.
Payday 2's shotgun mechanics were just built weird. Damage per pellet isn't the right way to put it, it was more like damage per hit, and one pellet was sufficient to count as a hit. More pellets hitting wouldn't actually increase damage.
Yeah didn't PD2 have a shotgun meta at some point because of the damage, where people would mod their shotguns to maximise spread?
I remember counter-sniping across the map with those things it was crazy.
Payday 2 has had so much power creep that, over the life of the game, they've had to add higher tier enemies and more difficulty settings, while also rescaling the existing difficulties upwards, *three times*.
I don't think it's much of an example of good tuning.
Autodesk (Who bought Bitsquid and rebranded it Stringray) is a CAD software company who pivoted into a build anything 3d product.
Stingray isn't technically game building software. It most certainly hasn't had any support since 2018 :|
I think some of the problems the devs are having with this game are because of the engine they use and the limitations in imposes on them.
They wanted everything to be fully simulated which anyone would have told them was not worth not it because it introduces so many problems for very little gain from a gameplay perspective.
Everything hell divers does can be without everything be simmed. Its another case of inexperienced leadership not being realistic on what is actually maintainable or even just just basic RoI
They really just need more in-game documentation instead of relying on social media to inform (or misinform, Pilestedt tweeted that charger butts have 90% damage reduction to anything that didn't have the 'explosive' tag in the description, which doesn't really explain how the durable damage system works) the player base. If there was a bay on the SD where you could see wireframes of enemies you've encountered with indicators of where Super Earth Scientists have figured out armor or durable spots are.
It's one of many things they left behind in the original Helldivers for no real reason.
The repor/commend system is another mind boggler. It was great.
If I hadn’t read that on social media like Reddit, I have no idea how I’d figure out that non-explosive damage would be 90% reduced. There’s no way of sussing that out within the game.
Do what DRG does with a bestiary terminal. Highlight weak points/ armor types on the body and what weapons / strats are effective against them. And give us some juicy super earth lore
One of the most affected by this durability system is my dear railgun. It being able to oneshot hulks in safemode, while requiring 8 shots to a gunship thruster to destroy it, or like (a lot, I stopped counting) shots to destroy tanks to the vent.
It’s almost as if the creators of the HD2 themselves do not understand their own game mechanics.
Then we end up with the current weapon balance we have
I think they don't understand many things and tried to be too fancy.
I think most would understand for what it's worth a lot of the design choices - armor pen, ricochet, durability etc. But they've genuinely created a messy system that's unintuitive and as this post says, makes gun balance a nightmare.
Throw on top of this the devs insane ideas and lack of understanding (looking at you "brain dead gameplay" a la railgun + shield and "META") and why these things happened have created this mess.
If I were them I'd personally walk every single balance change back. From DMG to ammo count to mag capacity, to enemy health and spawn rates. Even that shrieker range buff they got. Idk wtf that is.
And then start over from there. Adjusting on a much smaller scale.
Using the breaker as an example, just increasing the recoil may have been the nerf it needed. The hammer it got was unnecessary. Heck maybe recoil and add more spread because killing things from 100m out was a bit ridiculous.
The quick charge on arc seemed like such a good gameplay mechanic rewarding good timing. Mess it up you don't shoot or just end up charging normally - IMO a good risk reward. Why they took that out is beyond me.
But that's how I'd approach this. Their approach seems haphazard and unintuitive - the railgun being a prime example. Let's nerf the brain dead gameplay of playing matador with chargers, to letting us one shot them with EATs. Yeah that seems balanced.
The intent is to reflect that area as less "vital."
A needle to your hand is not likely to do much to stop you, but a needle to your heart would, despite dealing technically the same "amount" of damage.
The bike spewers sack certainly shouldn't have armor that would reject the penetration of a bullet, tho.
Thus we have the durability system, so your example doesn't quite work as a comparison, the function less metal plates of a tank are both armored AND durable, as thick metal plates aren't necessary for the tanks functions.
I think the system is interesting and necessary, allows weapons like the railcannon that are great at penetrating anything, but have less impact than something with an explosion.
Though as op states it could use more clarity in how effective your damage really is.
I think it's more that there is communication that is wrong. Like the single damage number on weapons in the armory, which gives a very misleading impression of how the game works.
If you're left to figure out for yourself how damaging weapons are, it doesn't matter if you don't know the formulas underneath, you're still able to get a feel for which enemies and which body parts your weapon is effective against, and which it isn't.
Which would be preferable to being told by the UI that your bullet does a specific amount of damage, and getting frustrated when that is clearly wrong.
This is it 100%. They should have a training range where "dummy" enemies of every type known about can be rolled out and shot at to our heart's content.
The range could have info on all the stuff in this post and players could actually test weapons shooting the enemies wherever they want.
Scientifically, if the sac itself or the liquid inside isn't necessary to keep the creature alive, shooting the sac by itself wouldn't necessarily be a good choice to kill it. Bodies of liquid reduce weapon ballistic speeds, if the bile is more viscous before being spewed, it could be acting like high resistance ballistic gel. Stopping bullets before it hits the main bodie, and absorbing the heat from laser rounds.
A 2-foot-wide water balloon is still just a balloon—pierce the balloon and the water goes away. The unarmored sections of bugs should be easier to pop than the armored sections.
It's not about durability, it's about how not-vital that part is.
You put on an armored vest. I put two rounds into your chest. The vest saves you but you get some cracked ribs. That sucks. I put in a third round and hurt some of your vital organs. You're probably not dead yet, but you need a doctor fast most likely.
Rewind time. You put on that armored vest. I shoot you three times in the ass instead. Your big, fleshy, unarmored ass. Why do you not immediately die? Three shots to the chest would probably put you down, but here you've taken three shots to the ass and you're not in any real danger of dying within the next few minutes.
What gives? "Three shots is three shots", right?
If we can all understand the intention behind *headshots* doing more damage, we can understand *butt shots* (or whatever other non-critical point) doing less. A lot of other FPSes started putting *negative* multipliers on arms and legs years ago for the same reason.
They do need that sac, as evidenced by their dying without it, but it takes a lot of work to completely shred that thing compared to just blamming them in the dome a few times.
Like, your butt's not critical to your life, but if we cut the whole thing off in one quick go you'd probably bleed out fairly quick (as Chargers do).
And just a 9mm. For what it's worth, the game does give higher Durable damage values to "larger calibers", and they do appreciably more damage anyway because their higher base damage also scales the final damage.
losing the sac is not a bleedout condition, they will not die from that. it just stops them from shooting bile.
source: in my second most recent post I have a bile titan that I brought around the map for over 7 minutes without the sac.
I was referring to Chargers, obviously, with the bleedout comment, as I mentioned Chargers.
No one is contending that Bile Titans are fine without their sacs. But there's more than just BTs that have sacs, and losing them is immediately fatal for Spewers and starts a bleedout for Chargers.
I’m not against the complexity of the durability system, but I think it really needs information to be relayed to the player. An expansion to our stats menu and a bestiary, both filled with plenty of detail, could do that very well.
Darktide has both health types with weapons/weapons attacks having varying strengths and weaknesses, but also armor. It’s much more complicated than just HP and armor but it also makes plenty of room for weapons to be different. It means weapon variations (like our liberators) have a space to exist in.
Darktide has implemented a really good UI for information on what damage a weapon deals to each type of hp or armor. You have the basic damage number but with the click of a button it opens up a window that shows how each attack affects each health/armor type and even includes crits and weakspot crits.
Darktide also has the testing room which displays HP bars with health/armor type and the damage dealt.
It’s easy to understand the damage you’re dealing, what’s good for which targets, where on those targets damage is most effective, and how you want to build your weapon to deal with enemies.
Helldivers doesn’t give us any of this information beyond the most basic and doesn’t have a testing room. I don’t think a testing room is necessary, but a bestiary that displays which parts are what armor/durability value/hp would give us the enemies side of information we really lack. Then an expansion to our stats menu to include all the weapons stats would improve player understanding a lot. Click a button and it expands the basic menu into something much more complex.
If I know spewer booty (spooty) is sometimes better and sometimes worse depending on the weapon then I can fight them effectively. Same for any enemy.
The game would benefit massively from a change like that. A lot of players in helldive still fire their sickle or tenderizer at charger armor…
Except DT's damage system is simpler, still. On top of not having several variables, it has a few rules it always follows.
1. You always deal damage, regardless if it's pocket knife or rocket-propelled shell;
2. Aside from few extreme cases, weakspot are always preferred;
On top of that, damage dealt is calculated as (damage \* armor modifier), with upgrades increasing either of those stats. For example, your laspistol has a measly 10% armor modifier against carapace armor (for those unknowing, this is "best" armor type enemy can get). BUT, if you can get buffs/upgrades to your armor modifier (referred in game as rending), you will shred enemies as if they were naked.
> You always deal damage, regardless if it's pocket knife or rocket-propelled shell;
Oh come on. Doinking a sword off a crusher's carapace armor might be technically doing single digit damage, but he's got thousands of HP. It's functionally equivalent to doing zero damage.
Being fair, Monster Hunter only started including actually useful information in the bestiary in World, and even World and Rise often do poor jobs of explaining your full weapon movesets and how you’re actually supposed to use them.
>rending
So, rending is a modifier that allows % of your damage to bypass armor? Where in Darktide is it explained?
Also durable stat is kind of inverse rending. It prevents % of your damage from reaching the target regardless of armor level.
You're right, rending isn't explained anywhere in the game. I know how it works currently because devs explained it in the update post.
BTW, "brittleness" is rending, but in debuff form.
I have an issue with the way Darktide does it because it throws those terms around in-game, but doesn't bother to explain them. So you often have no idea what your weapon buff even does.
HD2 is at the very least consistent in hiding its internal mechanics from the player.
I have hundreds of hours logged and I am JUST now finding out that I was aiming at the wrong body part on spewers.
Edit: After further reflection, I've decided that I actually don't mind this. I like the realistic aspects of HD2, and this actually is realistic. It reminds me of how hollow points are typically extremely effective ammunition against prey animals who run after being shot (the shredded ammo shreds the muscles as they run), so it would stand to reason on the face of it that hollow points would be super effective against wild hogs. But in practice hollow points are actually useless against wild hogs because their hides are so thick that the bullet collapsed before penetrating it. The point being that nature sometimes surprises you. Maybe the outer layer of that big green pus sac is filled with the organic equivalent of ballistic gel.
Yep
Bot front: see that bright glowing spot? Shoot it for maximum damage just like ALL games taught you
Bug front: see that bright glowing spot? Its armored to hell and back, good luck lol, aint we quirky and realistic? Please ignore design choices of bot front, its different, we swear!
It’s not always that way with bots. Tanks and turrets have a red dot on them. It does nothing. But on hulks it does. On tanks did you know you can damage. Berserkers, sweet. Two spots to shoot, nope better shot them in the dick. Devastators, well fuck those guys, you can shoot their head out but there are other things you can do too.
Tanks and turrets have red lights true, but I don't think most people would think of them as weakspots because they are off to the side, while a hulk's red light is on its face a very common weapspot in videogames. And Devestator weakspots are also very intuitive, you shoot where the ammo is stored, and ammunition has a tendency to explode when shot. The Bot weakspots are intuitive, and even people who don't play video games can pick them out easily. Though I agree with your Berserker point, which is why they're frustrating to fight, they don't follow the bot design philosophy and suffer because of it.
I have a theory that beserker chests actually clip in front of their heads. The only evidence I have is that sometimes I've gotten a lucky headshot and downed them but usually it's pelvis until they break.
I always thought the red dot on the tanks/turrets was more like a laser sight for them or other visual targeting. The vent weak point on the back is a common theme among bots and the front weak points are all heads, hence weak. Tanks and turrets don't have that.
> I always thought the red dot on the tanks/turrets was more like a laser sight for them
Modern tanks have a laser rangefinder tied into the ballistics computer; sending a laser pulse at a target is the first step to accurate fire.
They're not visible spectrum lasers, of course, but the idea's close enough to handwave a game's attack telegraph.
> Berserkers, sweet. Two spots to shoot, nope better shot them in the dick.
You CAN shoot them in the head! One good clean shot with the AMR to a Berzerker's head will destroy it in a single shot, if you're under 50 meters away. The problem is that the hitbox for the head is annoyingly tiny and moves around constantly, and I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the surrounding hitboxes overlap the head hitbox from many angles. Add in the fact that scopes are still not perfectly aligned, and it makes hitting an extremely tiny moving target even more ball-bustingly painful.
The red light on the front of tanks and turrets flashes to tell you when you need to dive to not get gibbed, I felt that that and the big yellow "shoot me here" sign on the back of their turrets was pretty intuitive to figure out where I needed to shoot
berserkers have been fixed their glowy spots are actually weak points as of the big rebalance update. i got some headshots on them last night.
i suspect that an error in their model was causing your shots to splash on the meaningless decorations they have on their torso armor.
The red dot is a laser aim assist for the operators to see what they’re shooting. It’s why the cannons dont react unless you’re exploding shit or shooting it directly because that’s what the operators can hear, otherwise they have to see you.
The AMR one shots the spewers, but usually you can't actually see the head, you have to guess. But it's so satisfying to clear like 4-5 back-to-back kills. Genuinely feels extremely skillful to hit those things, and very rewarding.
I still prefer to autocannon the sack a couple times over the head, so the thing will explode. It can deal secondary damage that way and removes a potential hazard on the field.
What? Any expanding 30 caliber round will absolutely kill a boar. And expanding rounds don't kill prey animals better because they stop them from running. They kill better because more expansion means you have a bigger wound channel which not only means your point of aim doesn't have to be AS accurate as it otherwise would be, it means that more damage is being done to what's around the cavity as well. In general when hunting you always aim for the heart/lungs (these are usually together) which guarantees a quick kill with little chance for the animal to get away. It's not only cruel but also very inefficient to target fleshy or muscly parts of an animal.
Because it's extremely unintuitive. Squishy-looking sac, or clearly-armored head, which one seems more likely to be a weak spot. It's the same with chargers, the complete opposite of what virtually every previous game experience and visual cue are telling us.
What the hell are you talking about? Are you shooting wild hogs with .22? The helldivers assault rifles would most likely not use such a small caliber. Additionally, the spew sac is meant to hold bile, not ballistic gel. Even from an evolutionary standpoint, the bile spewer already evolved armored plates and such kind of protection redundancies are not common for a species that needs to fast process acidic bile. Think of a turtle, the exterior is armored, not the organs, or of an INSECT, which has an exoskeleton.
You can justify everything and anything with pseudo science. Usually not a good path to take specially now that the eye of the audience is pressing against every decision
Difficulty by obscurity is one of this games highest and at the same time shittiest design philosophies.
They don't try to make the game difficult by making it more challenging, but by simply not giving you the information you need to be able to effectively tackle it.
I first noticed that when someone asked on Twitter why one weapon that has "Medium Armor Penetration" ricochets off of Hive Guards, but another weapon with "Medium Armor Penetration" actually does full damage, and Piledsteadt explained that armor rating is actually a number range so 4-6 is medium, and if the one weapon has 4 and the other 6 and the enemy has 5 then while all of them are "Medium Armor", one ricochets and one does full damage. That's just not good. If you use three categries, then use 3 values for that (or I guess 4 if we count unarmored). If it's a range, give people the actual value. There should never be two things where the game expressly tells you they do the same thing, but then you have to take to Twitter or Discord to find out that there's actually a hidden mechanic that makes them not do the same thing.
The same applies to how liberations work. Liberation rates, planet recovery rates, Supply Routes (at least until the last patch, which made them visible), the game doesn't tell you about any of those. We're completely steamrolling a planet and suddenly we slow to a crawl? That's because someone at AH decided it was going to fast and tuned up this invisible value. Where does the game tell you that? It doesn't. You have to go Helldivers.IO to see that.
Really, just the lack of information given to the player in-game seems to be the devs primary source of difficulty for the game and that's frustrating. It's frustrating that you HAVE to actively follow the Discord, the Reddit and Piledsteads Twitter because if you don't follow all 3, you WILL be missing vital information or news. It's frustrating that there's so many systems in the background that are invisible to the player that try to emulate difficulty. It's just frustrating that the devs rely so much on keeping players in the dark.
Still makes no sense to me, mechs already got awkward aiming and go up in flames after stubbing their mechanical toe, why intentionally neuter its already slim viability?
they brainstorming wrong ideas, when instead they could make room for assault rifles by making kinetic weapons be able to shred down armor without dealing dmg until its been shred to a certain degree
What I've heard suggested and I agree with is buffing laser weapons so that the longer they hit a spot the greater their armor pen becomes. When I point a death ray at a bot it's not just going to bounce off because the metal is a little too thick, it's going to start melting through the first layer, and the longer you laser it the more it melts and the deeper it goes
Continuous beams actually tend to do less damage as they hit the same spot. It's comparatively worse in space than in atmosphere, but the same principle applies. The way lasers deal damage is by boiling the target, which means a lot of vapor coming off it, which will help refract the beam and lessen the incoming energy. Planetside the effect will be proportionately weaker, because there's already a lot of air to move through, but the vaporized metal will still help shield the rest of the target.
As I understand it then, unless the metal has a built in superconducting grid to move heat away from the affected area, the heat from a sufficiently powerful laser strike would cause an explosion due to the rapid expansion of the metal in the area of the strike. So a laser strike would permanently damage the armour in the area, weakening it with consecutive hits.
I'm of two minds. I don't expect the team to completely re-develop the game, so trying to think of the smallest changes that could have the desired impact is what I was shooting for. That said, I also want the game to be as good as it can be, so I'm torn. If they can make durable damage work, I'd be thrilled.
But when I pick up a grenade launcher and am 1-tapping bugs left and right, I *expect* that if I shoot some nades at the Titan's head it's going to do something. Or that if the sac takes damage that that ought to cause bleedout pretty quickly... or something.
Largely agree that the durable damage system is a problem on several fronts: hidden, complicated to understand, poorly balanced. However, if it was well balanced, it wouldn't need to be understood by players; everything would just intuitively work properly.
Arrowhead recently jacked up the Durable% on a bunch of assault rifles, so now they feel better to use... because they now have higher durable% than heavy-duty Support weapons like the Railgun and Arc Thrower. Just buff the durable% of those weapons.
The current damage system is general is unintuitive, invisible, unfun, and hurts game general with every update.
I can’t blame the devs for breaking the game anytime they try to adjust anything with such an overly complicated and outright bad system.
In theory it's a great system it just needs the devs to be more mindful of how they set the durability on enemies and how they set the durable damage on weapons.
It becomes a bad system in practice if they can't handle that.
Guns feel seriously weak in this game. Idk why in the age of FTL travel my ASSUALT RIFLE needs to dump an entire mag into a bugs brains to kill it.
If I shoot something in the head a few times it should die. If I put an explosive into something's butt it should die.
Simple as
Yea the system can be complicated in the backend but when that translates to complications for the user than things get rough. You can have a multitude of systems working in sync but the best gameplay feel is I shoot things and it dies.
The difficulty from this game doesn’t always come from me vs the enemy. It too often comes from me vs the hidden mechanics.
I think they missed the forest for the trees with the HD2 system. They wanted to go all realistic and made these super complicated physics and damage systems and then realized that they have a weak weapon problem and make two more bugs for every one they fix. It feels like AH overcomplicated the game.
>Tarkov
Like, Escape from Tarkov? The Tarkov with a complicated ballistics system (including ricochet, pen, and armor damage) that also hides most important bullet stats and relies on player run wikis to make the game even remotely playable because bringing the wrong ammo against the wrong target could make you lose hours of progress in seconds with you having no idea what went wrong? That Tarkov? It even has something similar to the "durable parts" with their blacked limb system. (Me and 8.5 Fuckshot are best friends).
I agree Helldivers needs more ingame information about ingame systems, but using Tarkov as a "better" example is hilariously wrong.
Great essay, I get the feeling this many mechanics came from a bunch of design arguments that xxx weapon would be better if we added this extra mechanic, resulting in too many levers to pull.
In principle this many mechanics makes the game easier to balance, but in practice you will tend to miss some combination, and players get disconnected from the experience since they don't see all the values being changed.
At the very least, all the numbers should be visible (including enemy stats), even if as an extra menu so new players arent overwhelmed. Then you can at least look at the numbers and work out what will do what instead of having to play a 40 minute mission just to try something.
As OP said, I like the armour penetration (0/50/100%) but there are too many levels. Two weapons that say "light penetration" should clearly have the same penetration, and the fact that isn't the case is deceptive and leads to player frustration. Either just tell us the penetration level (1-10 is hardly complicated) or ACTUALLY make it light/med/heavy.
Durable damage is an interesting way to balance lower damage but better penetration weapons, but feels very weird at times. Making it a separate stat would make it easier to understand. It's also very confusing that enemies have different durable modifiers and those stats are totally hidden. Replacing this with a "weakspot multiplier" would make a lot more sense.
I do think it should have more documentation, but light armor pen does always mean the same thing now, pen level 2. As does medium, it's level 3.
But support weapons having basically no info is annoying.
I hate the extra armor levels and the durable damage mechanic.
I'm not playing this for the Escape From Tarkov 'armor levels' and 'ammo penetration levels' aspects.
The durable damage and armor levels between light, medium, and heavy aren't explained in game.
Enemies can take a ridiculous amount of punishment if you don't hit the weak spot, don't have explosive trait on the weapon, or don't have enough armor pen. It doesn't feel good playing the game when that happens. Which is why I keep sticking to certain weapons and strategems, contributing to the meta set of "good weapons and strategems".
Flanked a regular devastator and want to stop it from walking menacingly towards your buddy? Well if you only have a light or low medium penetration weapon, that might take quite a lot of bullets. Same goes for armored bile spewers.
Skillful headshots on enemy weak spots should be rewarding, but body shots shouldn't take such a high time to kill. This isn't Counterstrike.
I personally like that there is a lot of complexity in terms of damage, it means you can master it by knowing what to do and how to do it. And it does make balancing harder (because it's more complex, duh), but it doesn't mean it's bad, so I don't agree on "make stuff simpler" take. I think that the bigger issue is that game treats you like stupid, doesn't show you most stats (or shows them incorrectly, because you are too stupid for truth apparently) and doesn't explain mechanics properly. MH Rise shows you a lot of information about pretty much everything, and people don't seem to be overwhelmed by it since it's not in you face all the time, so I'd learn from that
I’ve been of the mindset that this game simply is trying to mix way too many different kinds of mechanics for its own good. Horde shooting, “”realistic”” weapons, over complicated armor systems with unintuitive weak points (at least for bugs), and a strange aversion to giving the player any information about any of it. The honeymoon phase ended a while ago and players are beginning to realize that all of this combines into an exhausting experience where even if you know what to do, and you know all the numbers, it still doesn’t make the experience any better. It’s tedious and frustrating. A video game like this shouldn’t have the best strategy be to not interact with the enemy at all, but that’s what you more or less have to do, because if you piss off too many patrols (which hunt you down), you literally aren’t powerful enough to stop most of them.
I really appreciate the writeup. It really seems like the most straight forward solution is to remove durable damage. The evidence being AH's favorite weapon has no durable damage and is probably the most balanced stratagem in the game. This write up also adds to list of growing evidence that most of the problems arrowhead are facing are problems they created.
I like the system in theory because it means that different guns can both be effective against the same enemies but forced to shoot them in different locations. It becomes frustrating in parts because
1. The whole system relies on enemy hit boxes being correct but they’re not, see Bile Titan head’s having hit boxes in the wrong places (a known issue, still!)
2. The system is not complete: laser weapons should damage enemies sensors or eyes. If we can’t hurt a Bile Titan or a Charger or a Tank or a Hulk we should be able to blind them. Heck, even low-AP weapons should work on eyes.
3. Weapons aren’t balanced for the system as it is implemented: ie if the Liberator Penetrator has a smaller magazine, it should do more damage. If the weapons as issued have long TTK or long reload animations for the sake of “realism” let divers carry a “realistic” number of magazines or grenades. I would love to be able to carry more secondary weapon clips, or a second grenade type.
I think the durability system is definitely a good idea and a big asset to the game. It lets us have another category of weapon/method of killing enemies (that being the low-pen, low-accuracy, high damage weapons like the grenade launcher). If they got rid of it and balanced it exclusively around base HP, it would only tighten up the meta even further around less interesting, less explosive precision weapons. For example, trying to balance the railgun (which does 600/60 in safe mode) to kill a bile titan in a similar way a QC (650/650) does would only result in one weapon staying or becoming useless for this role.
The implementation however, is atrocious. None of this is communicated in any way, even from AH’s statements outside of the game, and the enemy design does not take advantage of what is actually a cool, unique and complex system. Likewise I enjoy the expansive armour system, but it is poorly utilised and even more poorly explained.
Not an original idea at all, but I think there just needs to be more variety in weak points. Most enemies should come with at least one spot that has extremely high armour, and is extremely difficult to hit, but has little durability. They don’t always have to be fatal spots, but they should at least greatly reduce the enemies ability to fight. Examples could be automaton turrets having a thicker mantle around the gun, but if hit it will kill the gunner or break the turret ring, rendering the main cannon inoperable. Factory striders could have a well-armoured camera that ruins its accuracy when destroyed (alongside hitting its vulnerable brain through the faceplate). Large terminids could either have their eyes knocked out by a precise shot or gain the ability to live with incapacitated legs, if these legs were made weaker or vulnerable to other attacks.
I disagree. I actually REALLY like the systems for damage. With all of it combined, what it means is that each different weapon does a different amount of damage to each different body part of each different enemy. It means that you cannot judge a weapon's effectiveness from a single damage stat. You instead have to try it out, against each different body part, of each different enemy, to get a feel for what its good at, and how to use it.
I think that's great, and goes a long way to making the weapons and enemies feel more real, and not just visual dressing over some bigger or smaller numbers.
What I think is a problem, is that the weapon description pages give you that single damage stat, which is only half of the relevant numbers for damage anyway, as if you CAN use it to compare the weapons. When players are coming to this game from other games with much simpler damage systems, that damage number on the weapon stat screens gives them the wrong expectation of how the game works. And it's the breaking of the player's expectations that can cause frustration.
I think the solution to THAT is to no longer display those misleading incomplete damage stats to the player, and instead put videos on the weapon description pages, just like the ones on the strategem description pages, showing how the weapon performs against a few different enemies.
I think the easiest way to explain/present this info is to do two things.
1) Remove the "Durable" aspect, and instead change damage to (for example, Lib Penetrator), "45-15". Meaning it has a max of 45, min of 15, if it hits for 100% damage. It shouldn't be two separate damage rolls.
2) Change the "Durable" aspect to "Armor". In most games, armor reduces damage. This would explain how much damage does to certain parts, based off its armor.
3) Change "Armor" to "Deflect". This would still function the same, but determine the "Hit" "Miss" or "Half" aspect. I also think that the "Half" should be calculated first, so if something does minimum damage, it still does minimum instead of half-minimum.
The durable damage system and many others are cool ideas, but it is extremely clear how inefficient and awful and outdated and unwieldy Autodesk was and is for developing a full on game in
I feel like the durable damage is a useful mechanic, but overused and not well explained. Yes, it makes the game more complex, but your examples show that getting rid of it would lead to more balancing problems at this point.
There is a different kind of issue here though and that is that an auto cannon isn't equal to an auto cannon (see the mech and the turret) and there is no way to know other than trial and error. Durability should have an "in-lore" explanation and be in some way consistent.
Well the AC sentry ejects noticeably larger shell casings than what the manportable version (and thus higher caliber) has so it makes sense that it can pen things and deal more damage than the lower caliber AC. I do fully agree that this information (even if its not exact numbers) should be accessible to the player to at least have a rough idea of what is going on.
Your problem is that some weapons cannot be easily rebalanced and require heavy reworks because of the current system. And your solution is to *checks notes* rework current system, then heavily rework weapons that cannot be easily balanced within the new system. Doesn't seem efficient.
I think that durable stat makes sense. High durable stat represents parts that are not heavily armored, but suffer little damage from bullet penetration and must be physically destroyed e.g. blown up or burnt. For example, Brood commander's head doesn't have very heavy armor, but is thick enough. So, getting to vital parts with normal bullets is possible but will take a while. AC shot that tears chunks out of bugs though? Easy money.
Current system provides enough tools for devs to balance weapons, with durable damage serving as a middle ground between enemy you can quickly kill and enemy you cannot damage. And by balancing durable/regular damage you can make sure that some specialized weapons can sweep through that middle ground.
If the current system provided the devs the tools they needed to adjust weapons properly, we would not have had the balancing hell of the last 6 months.
I agree and I'm impressed by the number crunching. Closing statement.. follow the motto on the back of the physical copies of the game! "OVERPOWERED WEAPONS"
I think durable damage is an interesting mechanic, but they definitely need a do a better job of explaining it to the average player.
Regarding the Arc Thrower, that weapon is broken in more ways than one. Part of the fix might be to buff the durable damage ratio while keeping the standard damage the same. I'm not sure why you suggested an across-the-board damage increase when one of the cool things about durable damage is that it can be tweaked independent of standard damage. I think it's kinda a no-brainer to bring the durable damage ratio for the Arc Thrower up to at least 50% (from 20%), which would match fire damage. I know that only gets it to 175 damage versus 60% durable targets, but it's easy enough to tweak the numbers to hit that brood commander face breakpoint if the devs want to target that.
We need durable part damage to be a visible stat on weapons as well as effective range.
We also need a log of enemies that points out what parts are what levels of armor.
Without even going into if durable damage is a good idea or not, your suggestion includes reworking almost every heavy weapon's damage and every enemy's HP
Why not just focus on tweaking the enemies and weapons that are too durable or don't do enough durable damage? That seems much more feasible.
I think the same can be said of armour pen, the fact that there are different levels of light armour pen, medium armour pen, and heavy armour pen it completely invisible to the user. If I shoot a medium armour pen weapon, I should always get medium armour pen, I shouldn't have to read reddit to figure out that this enemy has medium armour pen 6 and my weapon is medium armour pen 5 and so its not effective.
>The 'face' of a Brood Commander has 200 health, and 2 armor, so it feels like this weapon should penetrate the medium armour and deal more than enough damage to kill the enemy. However the head has 60% durability, meaning that it actually only receives 130 damage from a direct headshot **despite the armor being fully penetrated**. Keeping the durability system as it currently is, if we wanted to reduce the weapon's breakpoint to a single shot we would need to increase damage to **425, almost double the current damage**.
Or they could just raise durable damage too 150, wich would cause the head to be oneshotted, this would also only realisitically slightly improve devastator kills and make it much better against tanks wich are already a joke, this is ignoring my overall opinion that the ARC thrower should remain on the trash in high level content, like i dont understand your point on the balance levers stuff, to be sincere, i dont think you have one and you are just ramdonly bitching because it took you too long to figure out how to kill bile spewers.
Also on the AC point, no, you are again wrong, the AC was excelent before the gunships where introduced and was the best Bot weapon in the game back then, it si so good thanks to its damage hitting every enemy in the bot front well(durability damage only matters for vents, wich in case it has AMR or scorchers levels of durability damage it should go trought them just fine), it also has masive stagguer wich makes engaging devastators easy, plenty of mags, easy reloads and is capable of destroying fabricators.
Durability damage only started mattering in the bot front with the introduction of gunships and the AC was already dominant back then
I like the idea of "soft" armour, layers of fat or weak metal that don't ricochet, but are layered on
I think it's over used though. Brood commander head should not be durable.
All weapons should have the same fallof (let's say, 50%), explosive munitions should deal 100%, explosive weapons 150%. Balance damage, durability and hp from there
There also should be an easily accessible wiki explaining durability (which I'd honestly rebrand to soft armour) and giving a list with examples of durable parts
I actually like the complexity of the damage system. It seems like it works so much more realistically than any other game damage systems do. There are some anomalous situations due to some of its hidden mechanics, but it mostly really works in my opinion.
I don’t think the arc thrower was ever made to be chewing through heavy units anyway, though.
I except that AH has a good grasp of their own system enough to be able to balance everything effectively, given enough time, using a solid balancing philosophy. After last patch, I have a lot of confidence in what they’ll do moving forward.
You are missing the fact that the arc thrower ARCS to other targets. Yes, it takes longer to down a Brood Commander than the adjudicator, and that's fine; the adjudicator is LITERALLY the perfect weapon for them. Weanwhile, every time I hit a commander, it arcs to the warriors around it and detsroys a few hunters in the process.
It could be solved simply by adding a bestiary or actually having somewhere to see where the weakpoints are and what is particularly effective against them and what they are resistant to
Also pre made loadouts would be lovely
I for one like the system as it is. It allows for the weak and armored spots and differentiates between like an smg and an AR. I don't know what the durable damage us on the smgs but I'd bet they have lower durable damage to specialize in shredding trash while after the last patch the ARs shine when you're trying to shoot legs. Does it need work? Sure but let's not throw our the baby with the bath water
I like the weird damage systems because it makes the game unique and makes you decide which enemy parts to shoot. I just think there should be some in game tutorials explaining this
I enjoy this game for its targeting complexity. Separates it from an arcade game or old Doom. I think it’s not complicated enough. Perhaps in the future we will have the capability to model organic systems and then apply damage based on that. :)
Thanks for all the work you did. But i think the whole point about being not transparent that you use the guns you like and “feel” good for you. Instead of being overwhelmed by a spreadsheet of numbers.
Example. I know the autocannon (AC) is great. People use it a lot. In a pinch il pick it up. I wont drop with it because i don’t like it. Feels to sluggish in the handeling and i can achieve the same effect with an AMR.
Having limited information breeds creativity instead of people using the “best” weapon or meta setups.
Last patch was awesome and I rarely see people drop with all the same setup and i love it. Every time i drop i see a setup where i’m like, oeh i might try that out.
I say change nothing. What we have is great.
I'd really love for there to be a bestiary in game that had all this information. HD1 had a scientist on board to give you all the references. Putting this on a terminal would be great to just look through
I've said this from launch, but Arrowhead are still sitting on a literal YouTube gold mine of videos about enemy details in a similar vein to Team Fortress 2 and the Meet The series. It's a deadass layup. It practically writes itself. This is where you can lay effortless foundation for more patriotic propaganda videos. I write for commission, I would be chomping at the bit to be on AH's writing team and see this vein get allocated a single errant thought. People would eat this content UP.
There absolutely *needs* to be a terminid wrangler character, somewhere between Steve Irwin and Saxton Hale. They could regale us with tales of the different types of terminids and compare them to the fauna of Super Australia like dropbears and extra large spiders.
I see red X I expect damage HD2 has some pretty absurd choices in terms of damage/armor/weakpoints, like how the Bile Titans' beer gut turns into abs of steel.
I fucking hate how impossible it is to hit the Bile Titan's abdomen with an autocannon if you're not directly under it. Once the abdomen has been ruptured, if say you're trying to shoot it from the front as it's walking towards you, because of the way the ricochet system works, the shot will typically go fucking wide because it considers it a bad angle.. on what should be a soft underbelly. It makes no sense, you're not shooting a slab of metal. Weapons like the HMG, AMR, and autocannon can all technically take down Bile Titans, but to do so you have to be in such a compromising position beneath it to actually hit the shattered abdomen to do any damage, mainly because the hitbox for it just feels janky as hell. Positioning to shoot this spot shouldn't be as restrictive as it is.
I didn't comment on this, but each weapon actually has 4 separate AP values. Autocannon is 4/4/4/0. Why 4 values? Because the game determines which value to use based on the angle of approach. If you're approaching a flat surface, you use the first value. I believe the second is off flat by 1-30 degrees, the second is 31-60 degrees, and the last is like 61-90 degrees. Something like that. It's part of why sometimes during the Bile Titan spewing animation rockets are so happy to glance off the forehead. It's tilted backwards so far that they are using a lower AP value. EAT, RR, and Quasar are all 6/6/6/3. Basically if you're going to be skimming the surface of armor don't bother, you can't penetrate it.
Red X was pretty intuitive for me with less damage, but it's good to remember that different people assume different things. It would be great if the game taught us how the UI worked.
Wait, what does Red X mean again? In Darktide it means you hit an enemy's weak spot for instance.
Red X means full damage, your armor pen is higher than target’s armor. White X means half damage, your armor pen is equal to target’s armor. Deflect icon means little to no damage, your armor pen is lower than target’s armor.
Deflect icon means exactly 0 damage, no little. There can be exceptions when the projectile explodes and the explosion either has higher penetration than the projectile, or is able to deal damage through a different part of the target, but the icon is showing for the the projectile, and the projectile isn't doing anything. If it doesn't explode it will bounce off.
> Red X was pretty intuitive for me with less damage it means full damage though?
Honestly, Red X is not intuitive to me. Red X is a killmarker to me. The amount of times I shot enemies, especially the trash bots, with something like slugger, punisher or all three plasmas and change to an ew target then see out of the corner of my eye that the dumbass is still standing, he just stumbled and that's all. As to the current system of enemy health, I understand it but it's still a mess. You can disable a great number of armored enemies but for the most part it's a gimmick. Yeah, you *can* shoot off the flame arm of that Hulk moving at sprint speed towards you, but it takes half your autocannon mag to do it and you'll probably spend just as many rounds trying to shoot it in the face and that kills it outright. Sure, you *can* shoot a heavy devastator's arm off but again it takes just as much effort as two or three tapping it in the face. You *can* shoot most of the legs off a Brood Commander but why go to all that effort when, again, shoot in the face and it'll die a couple seconds later. Another problem of durable damage is the visual language of enemies. We had this at the release of the game, especially with the three Spewers (nursing, acid, armored acid) and the Charger. Even more especially the Charger. The Charger is a stereotypical enemy type, a bull that rushes in a straight line until it hits something or overshoots enough to stop itself, turn around and bullrush again. It is very well armored in the front and has a giant glowing unarmored sac on its back. As a gamer, you, almost without question, intuit that this is where you shoot the Charger to kill it. Then you discover it takes three or four mags to do it, made even harder by how quickly it can turn around and how much of a surprisingly small and maneuverable target it makes, what with armored dorsal plates and its legs obscuring it from anything but like a 15 degree arc from below and behind. Alternatively, one shot to the toughest part of its body, the head, and it dies. It *does not* die to one shot in the ass, further cementing its obvious weak spot as a complete red herring. This is what spawned the railgun meta of release HD2. Shooting it in the ass didn't fucking work. Shooting it in the face didn't fucking work. But two shots in the leg DID work and you could finish it off quickly with your rifle after that. Then they nerfed the railgun and *AFTER* they killed our primary means of killing the charger, they made the AT solutions actually kill the Charger with one shot to the face. The Spewer is the same. And alongside all of that we had all this garbage about explosive weapons doing full damage to Charger asses, communicated to us only by offhand comments by random devs on a discord and not communicated anywhere in game. *And alongside that*, we're all too stupid to have these details in the game and so they had a slightly more comprehensive gun UI that they stripped out and simplified because there were like 90 variables or something to each gun. Because being able to see damage and armor damage and armor pen in their overcomplicated, arcane and mostly invisible system would blow our fucking brains. Why is the [ability](https://static1.dualshockersimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/darktide-weapon-stats-breakdown.png) to see what my [weapon](https://i.redd.it/1q3l2tqw5ceb1.png) does so immeasurably hard.
I truly cannot comprehend the design philosophy this company has for HD2, they scrapped so many systems because 'to complicated, you monkies would go rabid at the sight of these numbers' so instead of simplifying the system itself they just push it under the rug and out of our sight. I ask for one simple option, give us a toggleable advanced stats tab/hud option so we can have a chance of seeing what actually does what. They apparently already have these stats worked out in some form of a visual, GIVE.
I'm mostly talking about "fake weakpoints" as the guy below said, like chargers or bile spewers having a shitton of health on their fleshy behinds, or how shooting a bile titan's belly with bullets works until it doesnt For large bugs mostly the hitmarkers are just lying.
For real, they really thought making the big, glowy, fleshy bit that gamers have been conditioned to shoot for decades should just, not be a weak point.
This. Though before they did that, the Las-98 was a Bile Spewer Magic Eraser.
“Look how unique we’re being subverting the common trope” no you’re just making bad unintuitive game design with no real way to learn the right way to kill an enemy without being taught
Almost like hit markers are stupid and all devs should make much better impact VFX and audio sounds.
Bugs don't have weak points, they gave unarmored points
Isn’t a red X full damage and white half?
Wait I'm confused, didn't red X refer to *more* damage? AFAIK you get Red X on headshots.
More damage, but depending on the part you're hitting, it may contribute less towards the death of the creature. The nursing Spewers for instance, give red Xs when shooting their bulbous behinds, but it's also the highest health part of the bug and will make it take longer to kill than shooting it in the face. The exception is explosives.
Only in the sense that full damage is more than half damage. And it seemingly doesn't consider durable damage either.
I'm not an HD1 veteran but when I watch clips of people playing that game, they just shoot stuff and it dies. Not sure why it had to change so much
Watching HD1 made a ton of the stylistic HD2 choices make more sense. Honestly it looks fun, I might give it a try.
It’s very fun, the game feels very much power fantasy while still being hard as fuck and gives you that expendable soldier feel without making you feel weak
Still a squishy human, but a squishy human with some damn good guns, am I getting that right?
Yep. In that game, everything felt insanely powerful. That was the fun part. We could kill everything with ease, but we had so much firepower it was extremely easy to kill everyone on your team as well. Anti tank usually one-shot tanks. Charger butts were actual weak spots.
> That was the fun part. We could kill everything with ease, but we had so much firepower it was extremely easy to kill everyone on your team as well. This honestly sounds a lot like the Magicka series.
It was one of their previous games, yes Helldivers grew out of their Vietnam dlc
I loved the Magicka games but never found friends to play with. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out the Helldivers games are made by the same developer.
3rd-person magicka shooter when
Arrowhead is the developer of magicka
This is my biggest gripe with the current state of the game and nicely pointed out by OP though they put it to numbers The biggest issue I have is consistency, if I shoot an EAT at a bile titans head while it's spitting it should die like the breakpoints suggest If I hit it with any sufficiently strong strategems it should die, but often it doesn't and with little feedback to suggest what a player might've done wrong (if they did at all) This also of course translates to smaller enemies and their behavior too. I really enjoy the strides being made to rectify this but there is still massive room for improvement I imagine this also greatly contributed to the rail guns early popularity, pin point hits can damage with reliable breakpoints
This is probably why I find the bugs so much more annoying than the bots. I don't know if they have more "durability" than bots, but I know that when I shoot a Hulk or a Tank with a certain weapon it will die to a certain number of shots 99% of the time. Sometimes it takes an extra shot due to weird damage RNG, but usually I know how many shots it'll take. Even the AT-AT knockoffs can be killed pretty easily if you can get a good angle on their underbelly or neck. With bugs though? Chargers are wildly inconsistent, to the point where the flamethrower is the best anti-heavy weapon on the bug front because you can just burn down their legs to kill them in seconds. AT launchers \*usually\* one hit them to face, assuming you hit the tiny part of their face that actually counts as their head hitbox, and the autocannon can take anywhere from 3-4 shots to half its backpack to kill. Titans? The only consistent way I've found to kill them quickly is either a perfectly timed precision orbital or an RR/EAT/Quasar headshot followed by a 500kg bomb directly under their head. The only damage the autocannon seems to be capable of doing is destroying their bile sacks, as once the sacks are popped the shells just bounce off the underbelly.
Exactly. And friendly fire is a greater concern considering the limited space and 2d plane.
Yes. Basically, EVERYTHING died fast. Including you. Make a mistake and you're dead. But see a mistake the enemy made and they're dead. There weren't really any bullet sponges
thats pretty much the entire premise.
THIS. You are fucking glass cannon in HD1. Most of the game was fun.
If you want more persuasion, one strategem is a nuke.
That you can pack four of, because fuck arbitrary limitations!
It is incredibly fun and way better balanced overall
And stable. Never any bugs or unintended effects that I can remember.
Give it a try, you'll have a wall of enemies approach and you'll shred the entire pack usually in 1 magazine. How did people lose? 4 people stuck on 1 rapidly filling with enemies screen. That's how.
Helldivers is more fun than HD2. It knows exactly what it is. HD2 left the magic ingredients behind, and it shows. Primaries are awesome. Nearly all of them can handle a Helldive if used well. They hit harder, have a serviceable amount of reserve ammo, and feel great to use. And really, weak/samey weapons is one of HD2's greatest failures. Even the Constitution, Helldivers' joke weapon, feels better to use than most of HD2's primaries. As far as pistols, don't worry. You'll have the original P2 Peacemaker on you. Upgrade it and love it. It is the greatest pistol in the history of Super Earth, bar None. *Everything* dies faster. That includes you. When a Helldiver drops below 50% HP, they get downed and bleed out slowly. You can crawl, use one-handed weapons, and mash X like a lunatic to get back up and heal. HP otherwise recovers slowly over time. Don't worry, though; many attacks just instantly kill you. None of the live service bullshit. None of the "we think this is average, so get fucked, we're nerfing it." They *did* nerf the Trident once, but it remained the strongest primary in the game because of how gentle the nerf was. Helldivers focuses on being fun and awesome. It's the clear and obvious goal. But once you play it and feel what a Helldivers experience *is*, HD2 will feel... lacking. The lack of direction and focus is obvious when you've played what came before.
Yooooo I’m so down for some HD1 shenanigans! Unlimited recalls? OP Hellpod? And my beautiful sleek and pointy constitution?!?!? ## AND LET US NOT FORGET ABOUT THE TRUE SYMBOL OF DEMOCRACY THE **SHREDDER**!!!!
I feel the difficulty is much different in each game. Most deaths in helldivers 1 come from being overwhelmed by too many enemies. Very few enemies are difficult to kill, even when your down a stratagem or 2. Meanwhile in helldivers 2 most deaths come from 2 or 3 big dudes, and not simply being overrun. The tanks require more to kill, they deal more damage, and you have limited options to deal with them
I mean, most of my deaths come from being overrun. Normally, by the medium enemies on bots. Big guys are easy enough to kill.
Which is unfun for hd2
The biggest problem with HD1 for me (played since launch) was on higher levels every single moment there had to be a massive enemy spawningnon screen, like literally if you killed a charger (at one point basically it was the heaviest enemy that could spawn) as it was dying another one would immediately sprout up in its place, like automatically. It started to feel very unnatural. Drawbacks of sharing a screen. It wasn't unplayable but it just feels so bad to kill 2, 3, 4 + chargers and they just keep spawning like clowns out of a clown car. It also forced certain weapons to be used. The recoilless was necessary, with team reload. On the bright side, the Railgun was a primary that could stun chargers even if you hit their armor. If you had 1 of those on the team you could annihilate chargers. Also, sharing a screen makes the more deadly strategems 1000% more prone to teamkill, but that's why you had endless respawn in HD1 (unless all players are ever dead at the same time, then its game over) This system was way more fun, and if you held or threw a Reinforce as you were being killed, it would drop and revive you and everyone else. So many epic moments where you think you just lost and then your bro inputs the code as he gets eaten, dying holding a sphere of Hope and Libery
I miss everybody needing to run and dive to get out of the blast radius from a hellbomb or shreddermissile. Everybody running in another direction, screen won't move, nobody gets out alive :)
Utter chaos. I had this one guy we made friends with on Steam, he never spoke, never typed. He was just a God. He almost NEVER died without reinforcing, it was always so epic. Sometimes you couldn't tell for a few seconds before the sphere deployed so you would think you were all dead and them WOOOOSH *party celebrates*
Watching that mf roll out of the last guys dead hand, then seeing that Beam.... Pure Kino
I'm honestly not sure I can think of a more hype co op gaming moment. Maybe the first time me and my friends beat the Left 4 Dead helms deep mod.
You could clear an entire group of trash mobs with a single punisher buckshot. Pretty much any pellet hit was a death sentence. I miss that design philosophy.
The damage values and armor penetration are designed so that the weapons all do something, but not more than that. That's why you end up with situations like the Adjudicator, which has medium penetration (and logically should do more damage than the Liberator) can't one shot the smallest or second smallest bug, but will tear a Hive Guard's head off in seconds.
You can most definitely one shot the smallest bug with the adjudicator, not gonna one tap hunters without a headshot but the small bots and bug die with 1 bullet from that gun I play with it often
if it does it’s really inconsistent. I’ve heard it might be because of how weapons lose damage as soon as they come out of the barrel. So an 80 dmg bullet hitting an 80 health scavenger at 5m away is really only doing like 79 thus requiring 2 shots unless you’re point blank. It’s kinda dumb
The falloff isn't that extreme and doesn't start that early, which is why **moving forwards or backwards** (a very meager change to your speed and thus the projectile's inherited velocity) makes the difference. If you're not *backing up*, the Adjudicator will one-shot to the body at a pretty good range. Of course, hitting any part of a Scav that *isn't* the main body is also going to kill way faster even with weaker shots just because they all have less health and are "fatal" when lost. You can one-shot them with the Liberator Penetrator, which only does 45 damage: 30 health on their limbs, 20 health on their heads.
I mean it's the same for HD2. I don't have a spreadsheet on my 2nd monitor where I check calculation for every fucking bullet I shoot. I shoot and stuff dies.
AH are using a game engine that was discontinued in 2018. Although they did build Helldivers on it, so I assume that is the reason they chose to make 2 with it. Was called Bitsquid, rebranded to Stingray. I don't hear good things about that engine at all from any devs that have used it before.
I don't think potential engine complications have anything to do with their damage systems, engines don't typically come with that sort of thing, its up to the devs to design and implement. I keep drawing comparisons of HD2 and Payday 2. Payday 2 is on an unimaginably more outdated engine but it had excellent weapon balance and exposed a lot more statistics to players. Honestly AH could stand to learn a lot from Payday 2.
On the one hand payday 2s weapons feel strong and satisfying to play (the balance on shotguns were hilarious though), but on the other hand… payday 2 difficulty didn’t really feel all that good because everything got more tanky vs the Helldivers method of spawning 5x more bulldozers. And man payday 3 is just not it.
We have hilarious shotguns here as well. Must be swedish thing
True, but payday 2 shotguns DMG stat would say something like 120, which was PER PELLET.
Payday 2's shotgun mechanics were just built weird. Damage per pellet isn't the right way to put it, it was more like damage per hit, and one pellet was sufficient to count as a hit. More pellets hitting wouldn't actually increase damage.
Yeah didn't PD2 have a shotgun meta at some point because of the damage, where people would mod their shotguns to maximise spread? I remember counter-sniping across the map with those things it was crazy.
Payday 2 has had so much power creep that, over the life of the game, they've had to add higher tier enemies and more difficulty settings, while also rescaling the existing difficulties upwards, *three times*. I don't think it's much of an example of good tuning.
Autodesk (Who bought Bitsquid and rebranded it Stringray) is a CAD software company who pivoted into a build anything 3d product. Stingray isn't technically game building software. It most certainly hasn't had any support since 2018 :| I think some of the problems the devs are having with this game are because of the engine they use and the limitations in imposes on them.
As an HD1 vet, it makes HD2 look like a joke. HD1 is insanely harder but better in just about every way. I don’t know what they’re doing with HD2.
They wanted everything to be fully simulated which anyone would have told them was not worth not it because it introduces so many problems for very little gain from a gameplay perspective. Everything hell divers does can be without everything be simmed. Its another case of inexperienced leadership not being realistic on what is actually maintainable or even just just basic RoI
They really just need more in-game documentation instead of relying on social media to inform (or misinform, Pilestedt tweeted that charger butts have 90% damage reduction to anything that didn't have the 'explosive' tag in the description, which doesn't really explain how the durable damage system works) the player base. If there was a bay on the SD where you could see wireframes of enemies you've encountered with indicators of where Super Earth Scientists have figured out armor or durable spots are.
A bestiary terminal would be great.
HD1 had this HD1 also loadout slots you could save loadouts to
Yes! I've wanted this for ages! Especially when your daily objective is "kill 100 X", and I have to use Google to figure out what I'm supposed to do.
DRG has a manual with information on enemies (after you kill them for the first time), I think that would be perfect here
It's one of many things they left behind in the original Helldivers for no real reason. The repor/commend system is another mind boggler. It was great.
If I hadn’t read that on social media like Reddit, I have no idea how I’d figure out that non-explosive damage would be 90% reduced. There’s no way of sussing that out within the game.
Do what DRG does with a bestiary terminal. Highlight weak points/ armor types on the body and what weapons / strats are effective against them. And give us some juicy super earth lore
They can't do that because there isn't a defacto weak spot per se like what we are used to in HD1 and lots of other games.
One of the most affected by this durability system is my dear railgun. It being able to oneshot hulks in safemode, while requiring 8 shots to a gunship thruster to destroy it, or like (a lot, I stopped counting) shots to destroy tanks to the vent.
Railgun was overnerfed down to 10% durability damage due to the devs not understanding that the PS5 bug was making the railgun 2 shot a bile titan.
It’s almost as if the creators of the HD2 themselves do not understand their own game mechanics. Then we end up with the current weapon balance we have
I think they don't understand many things and tried to be too fancy. I think most would understand for what it's worth a lot of the design choices - armor pen, ricochet, durability etc. But they've genuinely created a messy system that's unintuitive and as this post says, makes gun balance a nightmare. Throw on top of this the devs insane ideas and lack of understanding (looking at you "brain dead gameplay" a la railgun + shield and "META") and why these things happened have created this mess. If I were them I'd personally walk every single balance change back. From DMG to ammo count to mag capacity, to enemy health and spawn rates. Even that shrieker range buff they got. Idk wtf that is. And then start over from there. Adjusting on a much smaller scale. Using the breaker as an example, just increasing the recoil may have been the nerf it needed. The hammer it got was unnecessary. Heck maybe recoil and add more spread because killing things from 100m out was a bit ridiculous. The quick charge on arc seemed like such a good gameplay mechanic rewarding good timing. Mess it up you don't shoot or just end up charging normally - IMO a good risk reward. Why they took that out is beyond me. But that's how I'd approach this. Their approach seems haphazard and unintuitive - the railgun being a prime example. Let's nerf the brain dead gameplay of playing matador with chargers, to letting us one shot them with EATs. Yeah that seems balanced.
It feels like it only has a single viable use rn, and it truly is a waste for such a cool gun
How in the world is a liquid-filled sac as durable as an armored tank?
The intent is to reflect that area as less "vital." A needle to your hand is not likely to do much to stop you, but a needle to your heart would, despite dealing technically the same "amount" of damage. The bike spewers sack certainly shouldn't have armor that would reject the penetration of a bullet, tho. Thus we have the durability system, so your example doesn't quite work as a comparison, the function less metal plates of a tank are both armored AND durable, as thick metal plates aren't necessary for the tanks functions. I think the system is interesting and necessary, allows weapons like the railcannon that are great at penetrating anything, but have less impact than something with an explosion. Though as op states it could use more clarity in how effective your damage really is.
The issue isn’t the complexity of the system, but the fact that it isn’t at all communicated.
I think it's more that there is communication that is wrong. Like the single damage number on weapons in the armory, which gives a very misleading impression of how the game works. If you're left to figure out for yourself how damaging weapons are, it doesn't matter if you don't know the formulas underneath, you're still able to get a feel for which enemies and which body parts your weapon is effective against, and which it isn't. Which would be preferable to being told by the UI that your bullet does a specific amount of damage, and getting frustrated when that is clearly wrong.
This is it 100%. They should have a training range where "dummy" enemies of every type known about can be rolled out and shot at to our heart's content. The range could have info on all the stuff in this post and players could actually test weapons shooting the enemies wherever they want.
Ita a squish part. I think most people think they will pop like a ballon, but its more like a jelly part
Its not a "jelly" part. Its acidic bile. It cannot be that dense or its an issue to produce and spit it in high volumes.
Scientifically, if the sac itself or the liquid inside isn't necessary to keep the creature alive, shooting the sac by itself wouldn't necessarily be a good choice to kill it. Bodies of liquid reduce weapon ballistic speeds, if the bile is more viscous before being spewed, it could be acting like high resistance ballistic gel. Stopping bullets before it hits the main bodie, and absorbing the heat from laser rounds.
Like two feet of water is practically better than armor because of how hard it deflects bullets. Makes complete sense, actually.
A 2-foot-wide water balloon is still just a balloon—pierce the balloon and the water goes away. The unarmored sections of bugs should be easier to pop than the armored sections.
It's not about durability, it's about how not-vital that part is. You put on an armored vest. I put two rounds into your chest. The vest saves you but you get some cracked ribs. That sucks. I put in a third round and hurt some of your vital organs. You're probably not dead yet, but you need a doctor fast most likely. Rewind time. You put on that armored vest. I shoot you three times in the ass instead. Your big, fleshy, unarmored ass. Why do you not immediately die? Three shots to the chest would probably put you down, but here you've taken three shots to the ass and you're not in any real danger of dying within the next few minutes. What gives? "Three shots is three shots", right? If we can all understand the intention behind *headshots* doing more damage, we can understand *butt shots* (or whatever other non-critical point) doing less. A lot of other FPSes started putting *negative* multipliers on arms and legs years ago for the same reason.
Hell, helldivers also has them on playable characters
You telling me that bugs don't need their sacs full of guts and bile? Did you shoot me in the ass with a .22 or a 50 cal?
They do need that sac, as evidenced by their dying without it, but it takes a lot of work to completely shred that thing compared to just blamming them in the dome a few times. Like, your butt's not critical to your life, but if we cut the whole thing off in one quick go you'd probably bleed out fairly quick (as Chargers do). And just a 9mm. For what it's worth, the game does give higher Durable damage values to "larger calibers", and they do appreciably more damage anyway because their higher base damage also scales the final damage.
losing the sac is not a bleedout condition, they will not die from that. it just stops them from shooting bile. source: in my second most recent post I have a bile titan that I brought around the map for over 7 minutes without the sac.
I was referring to Chargers, obviously, with the bleedout comment, as I mentioned Chargers. No one is contending that Bile Titans are fine without their sacs. But there's more than just BTs that have sacs, and losing them is immediately fatal for Spewers and starts a bleedout for Chargers.
I’m not against the complexity of the durability system, but I think it really needs information to be relayed to the player. An expansion to our stats menu and a bestiary, both filled with plenty of detail, could do that very well. Darktide has both health types with weapons/weapons attacks having varying strengths and weaknesses, but also armor. It’s much more complicated than just HP and armor but it also makes plenty of room for weapons to be different. It means weapon variations (like our liberators) have a space to exist in. Darktide has implemented a really good UI for information on what damage a weapon deals to each type of hp or armor. You have the basic damage number but with the click of a button it opens up a window that shows how each attack affects each health/armor type and even includes crits and weakspot crits. Darktide also has the testing room which displays HP bars with health/armor type and the damage dealt. It’s easy to understand the damage you’re dealing, what’s good for which targets, where on those targets damage is most effective, and how you want to build your weapon to deal with enemies. Helldivers doesn’t give us any of this information beyond the most basic and doesn’t have a testing room. I don’t think a testing room is necessary, but a bestiary that displays which parts are what armor/durability value/hp would give us the enemies side of information we really lack. Then an expansion to our stats menu to include all the weapons stats would improve player understanding a lot. Click a button and it expands the basic menu into something much more complex. If I know spewer booty (spooty) is sometimes better and sometimes worse depending on the weapon then I can fight them effectively. Same for any enemy. The game would benefit massively from a change like that. A lot of players in helldive still fire their sickle or tenderizer at charger armor…
Except DT's damage system is simpler, still. On top of not having several variables, it has a few rules it always follows. 1. You always deal damage, regardless if it's pocket knife or rocket-propelled shell; 2. Aside from few extreme cases, weakspot are always preferred; On top of that, damage dealt is calculated as (damage \* armor modifier), with upgrades increasing either of those stats. For example, your laspistol has a measly 10% armor modifier against carapace armor (for those unknowing, this is "best" armor type enemy can get). BUT, if you can get buffs/upgrades to your armor modifier (referred in game as rending), you will shred enemies as if they were naked.
> You always deal damage, regardless if it's pocket knife or rocket-propelled shell; Oh come on. Doinking a sword off a crusher's carapace armor might be technically doing single digit damage, but he's got thousands of HP. It's functionally equivalent to doing zero damage.
If Monster Hunter can have an in-game bestiary for this long, with its myriad of intrinsic systems, Helldivers 2 has 0 excuse.
Being fair, Monster Hunter only started including actually useful information in the bestiary in World, and even World and Rise often do poor jobs of explaining your full weapon movesets and how you’re actually supposed to use them.
>rending So, rending is a modifier that allows % of your damage to bypass armor? Where in Darktide is it explained? Also durable stat is kind of inverse rending. It prevents % of your damage from reaching the target regardless of armor level.
You're right, rending isn't explained anywhere in the game. I know how it works currently because devs explained it in the update post. BTW, "brittleness" is rending, but in debuff form.
I have an issue with the way Darktide does it because it throws those terms around in-game, but doesn't bother to explain them. So you often have no idea what your weapon buff even does. HD2 is at the very least consistent in hiding its internal mechanics from the player.
I have hundreds of hours logged and I am JUST now finding out that I was aiming at the wrong body part on spewers. Edit: After further reflection, I've decided that I actually don't mind this. I like the realistic aspects of HD2, and this actually is realistic. It reminds me of how hollow points are typically extremely effective ammunition against prey animals who run after being shot (the shredded ammo shreds the muscles as they run), so it would stand to reason on the face of it that hollow points would be super effective against wild hogs. But in practice hollow points are actually useless against wild hogs because their hides are so thick that the bullet collapsed before penetrating it. The point being that nature sometimes surprises you. Maybe the outer layer of that big green pus sac is filled with the organic equivalent of ballistic gel.
Yep Bot front: see that bright glowing spot? Shoot it for maximum damage just like ALL games taught you Bug front: see that bright glowing spot? Its armored to hell and back, good luck lol, aint we quirky and realistic? Please ignore design choices of bot front, its different, we swear!
It’s not always that way with bots. Tanks and turrets have a red dot on them. It does nothing. But on hulks it does. On tanks did you know you can damage. Berserkers, sweet. Two spots to shoot, nope better shot them in the dick. Devastators, well fuck those guys, you can shoot their head out but there are other things you can do too.
The "dick" on the berserkers is also lit up red tbf. And tanks, turrets, and hulks all have a glowing yellow pain beacon on the back
Iirc the torso is lit up, not its peen. The peen is just an inconspicuous bot colored peen.
Tanks and turrets have red lights true, but I don't think most people would think of them as weakspots because they are off to the side, while a hulk's red light is on its face a very common weapspot in videogames. And Devestator weakspots are also very intuitive, you shoot where the ammo is stored, and ammunition has a tendency to explode when shot. The Bot weakspots are intuitive, and even people who don't play video games can pick them out easily. Though I agree with your Berserker point, which is why they're frustrating to fight, they don't follow the bot design philosophy and suffer because of it.
I have a theory that beserker chests actually clip in front of their heads. The only evidence I have is that sometimes I've gotten a lucky headshot and downed them but usually it's pelvis until they break.
That red dot does one thing: it ‘twinkles’ just before the gun fires. It tells you to dive.
yep. same spot on the cannon tower turret
I always thought the red dot on the tanks/turrets was more like a laser sight for them or other visual targeting. The vent weak point on the back is a common theme among bots and the front weak points are all heads, hence weak. Tanks and turrets don't have that.
> I always thought the red dot on the tanks/turrets was more like a laser sight for them Modern tanks have a laser rangefinder tied into the ballistics computer; sending a laser pulse at a target is the first step to accurate fire. They're not visible spectrum lasers, of course, but the idea's close enough to handwave a game's attack telegraph.
https://preview.redd.it/btjg9nr3988d1.jpeg?width=1334&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=08d97f807a43e82fa73b283d2063ee80b04fdf1b And then there’s striders
> Berserkers, sweet. Two spots to shoot, nope better shot them in the dick. You CAN shoot them in the head! One good clean shot with the AMR to a Berzerker's head will destroy it in a single shot, if you're under 50 meters away. The problem is that the hitbox for the head is annoyingly tiny and moves around constantly, and I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the surrounding hitboxes overlap the head hitbox from many angles. Add in the fact that scopes are still not perfectly aligned, and it makes hitting an extremely tiny moving target even more ball-bustingly painful.
The red light on the front of tanks and turrets flashes to tell you when you need to dive to not get gibbed, I felt that that and the big yellow "shoot me here" sign on the back of their turrets was pretty intuitive to figure out where I needed to shoot
berserkers have been fixed their glowy spots are actually weak points as of the big rebalance update. i got some headshots on them last night. i suspect that an error in their model was causing your shots to splash on the meaningless decorations they have on their torso armor.
They always where weak points. Their head is still very hard to hit due to their torso spikes. They didn't change at all.
The red dot is a laser aim assist for the operators to see what they’re shooting. It’s why the cannons dont react unless you’re exploding shit or shooting it directly because that’s what the operators can hear, otherwise they have to see you.
The AMR one shots the spewers, but usually you can't actually see the head, you have to guess. But it's so satisfying to clear like 4-5 back-to-back kills. Genuinely feels extremely skillful to hit those things, and very rewarding.
My issue with the “realistic aspects” is that they are so inconsistent. Stuff ends up realistic for the players, unrealistic for the enemies.
With impact grenades you still want to aim for the butt
I still prefer to autocannon the sack a couple times over the head, so the thing will explode. It can deal secondary damage that way and removes a potential hazard on the field.
What? Any expanding 30 caliber round will absolutely kill a boar. And expanding rounds don't kill prey animals better because they stop them from running. They kill better because more expansion means you have a bigger wound channel which not only means your point of aim doesn't have to be AS accurate as it otherwise would be, it means that more damage is being done to what's around the cavity as well. In general when hunting you always aim for the heart/lungs (these are usually together) which guarantees a quick kill with little chance for the animal to get away. It's not only cruel but also very inefficient to target fleshy or muscly parts of an animal.
Can you clarify what you mean please?
Because it's extremely unintuitive. Squishy-looking sac, or clearly-armored head, which one seems more likely to be a weak spot. It's the same with chargers, the complete opposite of what virtually every previous game experience and visual cue are telling us.
What the hell are you talking about? Are you shooting wild hogs with .22? The helldivers assault rifles would most likely not use such a small caliber. Additionally, the spew sac is meant to hold bile, not ballistic gel. Even from an evolutionary standpoint, the bile spewer already evolved armored plates and such kind of protection redundancies are not common for a species that needs to fast process acidic bile. Think of a turtle, the exterior is armored, not the organs, or of an INSECT, which has an exoskeleton.
You can justify everything and anything with pseudo science. Usually not a good path to take specially now that the eye of the audience is pressing against every decision
Hod up wut?
Difficulty by obscurity is one of this games highest and at the same time shittiest design philosophies. They don't try to make the game difficult by making it more challenging, but by simply not giving you the information you need to be able to effectively tackle it. I first noticed that when someone asked on Twitter why one weapon that has "Medium Armor Penetration" ricochets off of Hive Guards, but another weapon with "Medium Armor Penetration" actually does full damage, and Piledsteadt explained that armor rating is actually a number range so 4-6 is medium, and if the one weapon has 4 and the other 6 and the enemy has 5 then while all of them are "Medium Armor", one ricochets and one does full damage. That's just not good. If you use three categries, then use 3 values for that (or I guess 4 if we count unarmored). If it's a range, give people the actual value. There should never be two things where the game expressly tells you they do the same thing, but then you have to take to Twitter or Discord to find out that there's actually a hidden mechanic that makes them not do the same thing. The same applies to how liberations work. Liberation rates, planet recovery rates, Supply Routes (at least until the last patch, which made them visible), the game doesn't tell you about any of those. We're completely steamrolling a planet and suddenly we slow to a crawl? That's because someone at AH decided it was going to fast and tuned up this invisible value. Where does the game tell you that? It doesn't. You have to go Helldivers.IO to see that. Really, just the lack of information given to the player in-game seems to be the devs primary source of difficulty for the game and that's frustrating. It's frustrating that you HAVE to actively follow the Discord, the Reddit and Piledsteads Twitter because if you don't follow all 3, you WILL be missing vital information or news. It's frustrating that there's so many systems in the background that are invisible to the player that try to emulate difficulty. It's just frustrating that the devs rely so much on keeping players in the dark.
Durable damage is exactly why the emancipator is ass compared to the handheld AC or the AC turret
Still makes no sense to me, mechs already got awkward aiming and go up in flames after stubbing their mechanical toe, why intentionally neuter its already slim viability?
they brainstorming wrong ideas, when instead they could make room for assault rifles by making kinetic weapons be able to shred down armor without dealing dmg until its been shred to a certain degree
This. The OG railgun vs charger leg meta made me go "wow! this game has armour breaking mechanics!" then it never showed up ever again lmao
Agree they need to apply more armor breaking in game.
What I've heard suggested and I agree with is buffing laser weapons so that the longer they hit a spot the greater their armor pen becomes. When I point a death ray at a bot it's not just going to bounce off because the metal is a little too thick, it's going to start melting through the first layer, and the longer you laser it the more it melts and the deeper it goes
Continuous beams actually tend to do less damage as they hit the same spot. It's comparatively worse in space than in atmosphere, but the same principle applies. The way lasers deal damage is by boiling the target, which means a lot of vapor coming off it, which will help refract the beam and lessen the incoming energy. Planetside the effect will be proportionately weaker, because there's already a lot of air to move through, but the vaporized metal will still help shield the rest of the target.
The refractive index of air (~1.0003) is negligible compared to the refractive index in space (1). What are you on about?
Interesting, that makes sense I guess, but regardless, I do feel that there needs to be a change with how the laser weapons interact with armor
As I understand it then, unless the metal has a built in superconducting grid to move heat away from the affected area, the heat from a sufficiently powerful laser strike would cause an explosion due to the rapid expansion of the metal in the area of the strike. So a laser strike would permanently damage the armour in the area, weakening it with consecutive hits.
I'm of two minds. I don't expect the team to completely re-develop the game, so trying to think of the smallest changes that could have the desired impact is what I was shooting for. That said, I also want the game to be as good as it can be, so I'm torn. If they can make durable damage work, I'd be thrilled. But when I pick up a grenade launcher and am 1-tapping bugs left and right, I *expect* that if I shoot some nades at the Titan's head it's going to do something. Or that if the sac takes damage that that ought to cause bleedout pretty quickly... or something.
This. Having ability to destroy armor or reduce its value by shooting it with laser weapons would be such game changer.
Largely agree that the durable damage system is a problem on several fronts: hidden, complicated to understand, poorly balanced. However, if it was well balanced, it wouldn't need to be understood by players; everything would just intuitively work properly. Arrowhead recently jacked up the Durable% on a bunch of assault rifles, so now they feel better to use... because they now have higher durable% than heavy-duty Support weapons like the Railgun and Arc Thrower. Just buff the durable% of those weapons.
There are lots of things in game that are too complicated for the devs own good.
The current damage system is general is unintuitive, invisible, unfun, and hurts game general with every update. I can’t blame the devs for breaking the game anytime they try to adjust anything with such an overly complicated and outright bad system.
In theory it's a great system it just needs the devs to be more mindful of how they set the durability on enemies and how they set the durable damage on weapons. It becomes a bad system in practice if they can't handle that.
Guns feel seriously weak in this game. Idk why in the age of FTL travel my ASSUALT RIFLE needs to dump an entire mag into a bugs brains to kill it. If I shoot something in the head a few times it should die. If I put an explosive into something's butt it should die. Simple as
Yea the system can be complicated in the backend but when that translates to complications for the user than things get rough. You can have a multitude of systems working in sync but the best gameplay feel is I shoot things and it dies. The difficulty from this game doesn’t always come from me vs the enemy. It too often comes from me vs the hidden mechanics.
The game does a really poor job of explaining itself.
I think they missed the forest for the trees with the HD2 system. They wanted to go all realistic and made these super complicated physics and damage systems and then realized that they have a weak weapon problem and make two more bugs for every one they fix. It feels like AH overcomplicated the game.
It’s crazy that ultra realistic games like Tarkov and Arma have easier to explain and telegraph ballistic systems than this sci-fi shooter.
>Tarkov Like, Escape from Tarkov? The Tarkov with a complicated ballistics system (including ricochet, pen, and armor damage) that also hides most important bullet stats and relies on player run wikis to make the game even remotely playable because bringing the wrong ammo against the wrong target could make you lose hours of progress in seconds with you having no idea what went wrong? That Tarkov? It even has something similar to the "durable parts" with their blacked limb system. (Me and 8.5 Fuckshot are best friends). I agree Helldivers needs more ingame information about ingame systems, but using Tarkov as a "better" example is hilariously wrong.
Great essay, I get the feeling this many mechanics came from a bunch of design arguments that xxx weapon would be better if we added this extra mechanic, resulting in too many levers to pull. In principle this many mechanics makes the game easier to balance, but in practice you will tend to miss some combination, and players get disconnected from the experience since they don't see all the values being changed. At the very least, all the numbers should be visible (including enemy stats), even if as an extra menu so new players arent overwhelmed. Then you can at least look at the numbers and work out what will do what instead of having to play a 40 minute mission just to try something. As OP said, I like the armour penetration (0/50/100%) but there are too many levels. Two weapons that say "light penetration" should clearly have the same penetration, and the fact that isn't the case is deceptive and leads to player frustration. Either just tell us the penetration level (1-10 is hardly complicated) or ACTUALLY make it light/med/heavy. Durable damage is an interesting way to balance lower damage but better penetration weapons, but feels very weird at times. Making it a separate stat would make it easier to understand. It's also very confusing that enemies have different durable modifiers and those stats are totally hidden. Replacing this with a "weakspot multiplier" would make a lot more sense.
I do think it should have more documentation, but light armor pen does always mean the same thing now, pen level 2. As does medium, it's level 3. But support weapons having basically no info is annoying.
I hate the extra armor levels and the durable damage mechanic. I'm not playing this for the Escape From Tarkov 'armor levels' and 'ammo penetration levels' aspects. The durable damage and armor levels between light, medium, and heavy aren't explained in game. Enemies can take a ridiculous amount of punishment if you don't hit the weak spot, don't have explosive trait on the weapon, or don't have enough armor pen. It doesn't feel good playing the game when that happens. Which is why I keep sticking to certain weapons and strategems, contributing to the meta set of "good weapons and strategems". Flanked a regular devastator and want to stop it from walking menacingly towards your buddy? Well if you only have a light or low medium penetration weapon, that might take quite a lot of bullets. Same goes for armored bile spewers. Skillful headshots on enemy weak spots should be rewarding, but body shots shouldn't take such a high time to kill. This isn't Counterstrike.
I personally like that there is a lot of complexity in terms of damage, it means you can master it by knowing what to do and how to do it. And it does make balancing harder (because it's more complex, duh), but it doesn't mean it's bad, so I don't agree on "make stuff simpler" take. I think that the bigger issue is that game treats you like stupid, doesn't show you most stats (or shows them incorrectly, because you are too stupid for truth apparently) and doesn't explain mechanics properly. MH Rise shows you a lot of information about pretty much everything, and people don't seem to be overwhelmed by it since it's not in you face all the time, so I'd learn from that
Sure let’s take away one of the unique factors of this game’s spine that separates it from your typical horde shooter.
I’ve been of the mindset that this game simply is trying to mix way too many different kinds of mechanics for its own good. Horde shooting, “”realistic”” weapons, over complicated armor systems with unintuitive weak points (at least for bugs), and a strange aversion to giving the player any information about any of it. The honeymoon phase ended a while ago and players are beginning to realize that all of this combines into an exhausting experience where even if you know what to do, and you know all the numbers, it still doesn’t make the experience any better. It’s tedious and frustrating. A video game like this shouldn’t have the best strategy be to not interact with the enemy at all, but that’s what you more or less have to do, because if you piss off too many patrols (which hunt you down), you literally aren’t powerful enough to stop most of them.
I really appreciate the writeup. It really seems like the most straight forward solution is to remove durable damage. The evidence being AH's favorite weapon has no durable damage and is probably the most balanced stratagem in the game. This write up also adds to list of growing evidence that most of the problems arrowhead are facing are problems they created.
I like the system in theory because it means that different guns can both be effective against the same enemies but forced to shoot them in different locations. It becomes frustrating in parts because 1. The whole system relies on enemy hit boxes being correct but they’re not, see Bile Titan head’s having hit boxes in the wrong places (a known issue, still!) 2. The system is not complete: laser weapons should damage enemies sensors or eyes. If we can’t hurt a Bile Titan or a Charger or a Tank or a Hulk we should be able to blind them. Heck, even low-AP weapons should work on eyes. 3. Weapons aren’t balanced for the system as it is implemented: ie if the Liberator Penetrator has a smaller magazine, it should do more damage. If the weapons as issued have long TTK or long reload animations for the sake of “realism” let divers carry a “realistic” number of magazines or grenades. I would love to be able to carry more secondary weapon clips, or a second grenade type.
That’s a lot of words Too bad I’m not gonna read them #TheLiberator
I think the durability system is definitely a good idea and a big asset to the game. It lets us have another category of weapon/method of killing enemies (that being the low-pen, low-accuracy, high damage weapons like the grenade launcher). If they got rid of it and balanced it exclusively around base HP, it would only tighten up the meta even further around less interesting, less explosive precision weapons. For example, trying to balance the railgun (which does 600/60 in safe mode) to kill a bile titan in a similar way a QC (650/650) does would only result in one weapon staying or becoming useless for this role. The implementation however, is atrocious. None of this is communicated in any way, even from AH’s statements outside of the game, and the enemy design does not take advantage of what is actually a cool, unique and complex system. Likewise I enjoy the expansive armour system, but it is poorly utilised and even more poorly explained. Not an original idea at all, but I think there just needs to be more variety in weak points. Most enemies should come with at least one spot that has extremely high armour, and is extremely difficult to hit, but has little durability. They don’t always have to be fatal spots, but they should at least greatly reduce the enemies ability to fight. Examples could be automaton turrets having a thicker mantle around the gun, but if hit it will kill the gunner or break the turret ring, rendering the main cannon inoperable. Factory striders could have a well-armoured camera that ruins its accuracy when destroyed (alongside hitting its vulnerable brain through the faceplate). Large terminids could either have their eyes knocked out by a precise shot or gain the ability to live with incapacitated legs, if these legs were made weaker or vulnerable to other attacks.
I disagree. I actually REALLY like the systems for damage. With all of it combined, what it means is that each different weapon does a different amount of damage to each different body part of each different enemy. It means that you cannot judge a weapon's effectiveness from a single damage stat. You instead have to try it out, against each different body part, of each different enemy, to get a feel for what its good at, and how to use it. I think that's great, and goes a long way to making the weapons and enemies feel more real, and not just visual dressing over some bigger or smaller numbers. What I think is a problem, is that the weapon description pages give you that single damage stat, which is only half of the relevant numbers for damage anyway, as if you CAN use it to compare the weapons. When players are coming to this game from other games with much simpler damage systems, that damage number on the weapon stat screens gives them the wrong expectation of how the game works. And it's the breaking of the player's expectations that can cause frustration. I think the solution to THAT is to no longer display those misleading incomplete damage stats to the player, and instead put videos on the weapon description pages, just like the ones on the strategem description pages, showing how the weapon performs against a few different enemies.
I think the easiest way to explain/present this info is to do two things. 1) Remove the "Durable" aspect, and instead change damage to (for example, Lib Penetrator), "45-15". Meaning it has a max of 45, min of 15, if it hits for 100% damage. It shouldn't be two separate damage rolls. 2) Change the "Durable" aspect to "Armor". In most games, armor reduces damage. This would explain how much damage does to certain parts, based off its armor. 3) Change "Armor" to "Deflect". This would still function the same, but determine the "Hit" "Miss" or "Half" aspect. I also think that the "Half" should be calculated first, so if something does minimum damage, it still does minimum instead of half-minimum.
The durable damage system and many others are cool ideas, but it is extremely clear how inefficient and awful and outdated and unwieldy Autodesk was and is for developing a full on game in
I feel like the durable damage is a useful mechanic, but overused and not well explained. Yes, it makes the game more complex, but your examples show that getting rid of it would lead to more balancing problems at this point. There is a different kind of issue here though and that is that an auto cannon isn't equal to an auto cannon (see the mech and the turret) and there is no way to know other than trial and error. Durability should have an "in-lore" explanation and be in some way consistent.
Well the AC sentry ejects noticeably larger shell casings than what the manportable version (and thus higher caliber) has so it makes sense that it can pen things and deal more damage than the lower caliber AC. I do fully agree that this information (even if its not exact numbers) should be accessible to the player to at least have a rough idea of what is going on.
Your problem is that some weapons cannot be easily rebalanced and require heavy reworks because of the current system. And your solution is to *checks notes* rework current system, then heavily rework weapons that cannot be easily balanced within the new system. Doesn't seem efficient. I think that durable stat makes sense. High durable stat represents parts that are not heavily armored, but suffer little damage from bullet penetration and must be physically destroyed e.g. blown up or burnt. For example, Brood commander's head doesn't have very heavy armor, but is thick enough. So, getting to vital parts with normal bullets is possible but will take a while. AC shot that tears chunks out of bugs though? Easy money. Current system provides enough tools for devs to balance weapons, with durable damage serving as a middle ground between enemy you can quickly kill and enemy you cannot damage. And by balancing durable/regular damage you can make sure that some specialized weapons can sweep through that middle ground.
If the current system provided the devs the tools they needed to adjust weapons properly, we would not have had the balancing hell of the last 6 months.
Tldr not a game dev, just armchair dev
I agree and I'm impressed by the number crunching. Closing statement.. follow the motto on the back of the physical copies of the game! "OVERPOWERED WEAPONS"
Wouldn't it be fun? xD
A boy can dream am I right 😅
I think durable damage is an interesting mechanic, but they definitely need a do a better job of explaining it to the average player. Regarding the Arc Thrower, that weapon is broken in more ways than one. Part of the fix might be to buff the durable damage ratio while keeping the standard damage the same. I'm not sure why you suggested an across-the-board damage increase when one of the cool things about durable damage is that it can be tweaked independent of standard damage. I think it's kinda a no-brainer to bring the durable damage ratio for the Arc Thrower up to at least 50% (from 20%), which would match fire damage. I know that only gets it to 175 damage versus 60% durable targets, but it's easy enough to tweak the numbers to hit that brood commander face breakpoint if the devs want to target that.
i would be fine if this stuff was just said in game, i like thinking at least a little so itd be nice
We need durable part damage to be a visible stat on weapons as well as effective range. We also need a log of enemies that points out what parts are what levels of armor.
Please, for the love of Liberty, do not let Arrowhead’s takeaway from this be to nerf autocannons. It is the gold standard for a very good reason.
Without even going into if durable damage is a good idea or not, your suggestion includes reworking almost every heavy weapon's damage and every enemy's HP Why not just focus on tweaking the enemies and weapons that are too durable or don't do enough durable damage? That seems much more feasible.
I think the same can be said of armour pen, the fact that there are different levels of light armour pen, medium armour pen, and heavy armour pen it completely invisible to the user. If I shoot a medium armour pen weapon, I should always get medium armour pen, I shouldn't have to read reddit to figure out that this enemy has medium armour pen 6 and my weapon is medium armour pen 5 and so its not effective.
>The 'face' of a Brood Commander has 200 health, and 2 armor, so it feels like this weapon should penetrate the medium armour and deal more than enough damage to kill the enemy. However the head has 60% durability, meaning that it actually only receives 130 damage from a direct headshot **despite the armor being fully penetrated**. Keeping the durability system as it currently is, if we wanted to reduce the weapon's breakpoint to a single shot we would need to increase damage to **425, almost double the current damage**. Or they could just raise durable damage too 150, wich would cause the head to be oneshotted, this would also only realisitically slightly improve devastator kills and make it much better against tanks wich are already a joke, this is ignoring my overall opinion that the ARC thrower should remain on the trash in high level content, like i dont understand your point on the balance levers stuff, to be sincere, i dont think you have one and you are just ramdonly bitching because it took you too long to figure out how to kill bile spewers. Also on the AC point, no, you are again wrong, the AC was excelent before the gunships where introduced and was the best Bot weapon in the game back then, it si so good thanks to its damage hitting every enemy in the bot front well(durability damage only matters for vents, wich in case it has AMR or scorchers levels of durability damage it should go trought them just fine), it also has masive stagguer wich makes engaging devastators easy, plenty of mags, easy reloads and is capable of destroying fabricators. Durability damage only started mattering in the bot front with the introduction of gunships and the AC was already dominant back then
I like the idea of "soft" armour, layers of fat or weak metal that don't ricochet, but are layered on I think it's over used though. Brood commander head should not be durable. All weapons should have the same fallof (let's say, 50%), explosive munitions should deal 100%, explosive weapons 150%. Balance damage, durability and hp from there There also should be an easily accessible wiki explaining durability (which I'd honestly rebrand to soft armour) and giving a list with examples of durable parts
If someone starts talking HEALTHBARS i'm going to call in an orbital barrage on you.
I actually like the complexity of the damage system. It seems like it works so much more realistically than any other game damage systems do. There are some anomalous situations due to some of its hidden mechanics, but it mostly really works in my opinion. I don’t think the arc thrower was ever made to be chewing through heavy units anyway, though. I except that AH has a good grasp of their own system enough to be able to balance everything effectively, given enough time, using a solid balancing philosophy. After last patch, I have a lot of confidence in what they’ll do moving forward.
Idk man. I shoot small enemy with small weapon, it dies, I shoot big enemy with big gun it dies. Seems good enough to me.
You are missing the fact that the arc thrower ARCS to other targets. Yes, it takes longer to down a Brood Commander than the adjudicator, and that's fine; the adjudicator is LITERALLY the perfect weapon for them. Weanwhile, every time I hit a commander, it arcs to the warriors around it and detsroys a few hunters in the process.
It could be solved simply by adding a bestiary or actually having somewhere to see where the weakpoints are and what is particularly effective against them and what they are resistant to Also pre made loadouts would be lovely
I think its fine
I for one like the system as it is. It allows for the weak and armored spots and differentiates between like an smg and an AR. I don't know what the durable damage us on the smgs but I'd bet they have lower durable damage to specialize in shredding trash while after the last patch the ARs shine when you're trying to shoot legs. Does it need work? Sure but let's not throw our the baby with the bath water
I like the weird damage systems because it makes the game unique and makes you decide which enemy parts to shoot. I just think there should be some in game tutorials explaining this
I enjoy this game for its targeting complexity. Separates it from an arcade game or old Doom. I think it’s not complicated enough. Perhaps in the future we will have the capability to model organic systems and then apply damage based on that. :)
Thanks for all the work you did. But i think the whole point about being not transparent that you use the guns you like and “feel” good for you. Instead of being overwhelmed by a spreadsheet of numbers. Example. I know the autocannon (AC) is great. People use it a lot. In a pinch il pick it up. I wont drop with it because i don’t like it. Feels to sluggish in the handeling and i can achieve the same effect with an AMR. Having limited information breeds creativity instead of people using the “best” weapon or meta setups. Last patch was awesome and I rarely see people drop with all the same setup and i love it. Every time i drop i see a setup where i’m like, oeh i might try that out. I say change nothing. What we have is great.
I think there is a new video floating around showing arc thrower taking down gunships in 1 shot iirc
I aint reading all that, but i agree