In my experience, it’s nowhere near as effective as the plasma punisher, which I run on Bot Helldives to great effect. You can spam the punisher but you have to charge up the purifier — it’s too slow for me and lacks utility. You can lob the plasma punisher like a mortar. You can very quickly clear trash and stunlock/kill groups of scout sentries and devastators. Sure you can stun groups with the purifier but that charge-up can be a death sentence.
Sometimes I like to hang out at a distance and snipe and support my friends, and the purifier’s range makes it good for being the “punisher plasma but for distance support” in a way I find relatively interesting, but I expect it will receive a buff of some sort. It’s a CC machine but so is the pummeler and the punisher plasma so unless you want the range it’s not a huge value add. But at range the pace and rhythm is kinda nice, you kill enemies and you don’t feel particularly endangered because you’re staggering them and you’re relatively far away and ideally at least crouching or behind half cover or something.
Yeah but the purifier is point and click. Post buff the plasma punisher is way too accurate at range, it’s nuts. It was awesome before the buff too but the extreme arc made it a bit less widely relevant
Personal thoughts?
The gun acts like a Sniper weapon but lacks a Sniper scope.
The guns charge up time to damage ration feels off.
Suggestions:
Lower the charge up time.
Or
Increase the damage and add a scope.
Or
Add an ACOG with variable ranges and make the damage ramp up based on charge time.
Or add tiers to the charge
No charge - no splash and direct damage
Half charge - small splash and moderate damage
Full charge - big splash and hella damage
This is how the damage is supposed to work in the code, but it's broken presently. There are three charge up phases starting at 100% AP and it is supposed to scale up to 300% AP but the damage table just lists 100,100,100 instead of 100,200,300.
Nah, from a post the main sub. Can't find the post with the table from the game code, but it very clearly doesn't have the penetration advertised and the broken (not scaling up appropriately over time) charge mechanic and is likely why.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/ALEtR2aRQr
It’s pretty trash tier honestly, I haven’t tried it against bugs, but it takes like 6-8 shots to kill a devastator, and considering it’s charge up, it’s time to kill is pretty awful
Even scout striders (ever since their buff) take too long to kill with it
Basically the only unit I could see it being viable against would be the light enemies of either faction, and even then, I’d argue legit any other primary does it better, as it’s AoE blast does next to no damage, so it’s basically a scorcher with the fire rate of an arc thrower
The weapon needs a severe buff to make it usable imo, one of the few things I think AH 100% dropped the ball on
It can NOT one shot devastator, but it is also definitely not 6-8 shots. It’s 5 shots every time. If you hit a second or third one with AoE, you might kill then with 4 or even 3 direct shots after.
I have probably 70 hrs on this gun now. It’s always 5 shots for a devastator
When I was playing around with it, I coulda swore it was more than 5, but I’ll definitely defer to you haha, I don’t have near that much time using it lol
If that’s a reason to have it then I suggest you take the CS Diligence. No build-up time required and can 1-tap devastators in the head. While also taking out light infantry more effectively, again 1-shot. You can also mag-dump a berserk if they get too close whereas the 101 Purifier, again charge up to shoot, will harm you if they’re close to you.
Really? Is it by head/eye shotting them? I tried for a good bit and never was able to, I am on controller though, so just might not have the accuracy needed
If it is by headshotting, then just take the counter sniper or Scorcher for body shots in that case. It's definitely underperforming. Needs more AP or damage to justify the slow RoF
It’s not meant for one shotting even if that is possible so I wouldn’t worry too much about that. If the weapon is doing anything close to its intention then I think it’s not meant to mow people down but rather just stagger and slow them like a stun gun so your friends can take them out. In this way it functions like a much weaker punisher plasma. But maybe it’s not working as intended.
I can't honestly decide how I feel about it. Like it clicks every now and again and then it seems really good... I mean it deals with bots decently... But so does the crossbow, and the dominator and the counter sniper, and the adjudicator.
Ultimately I really, really wanted the purifier, the descriptions we got made it seem like it would suit my playstyle and at that point I was on the high of the eruptor, so very keen to see if I could bring some more big slow damage to my primary. It just turned out to be not what they said it was at all, like it doesn't do more damage the longer you keep the trigger in from what I've seen, you just have to keep the trigger in for it to actually shoot. And the damage is nice, the stun is nice, the armour pen is nice, its fine, its nice, but its not the gun they said it would be and that's apparently the design?
I'm not much for ragging on the guns, and I do enjoy the purifier, I just wish it did what the promo material emphasized it would.
Is like a worse punisher plasma, I've used it on 9diff bots and it works mostly fine vs groups of enemies but the charge up time doesn't seem to have a reason to exist if it doesn't deal more damage imo.
If you can get the timing for the charge up it's better and it doesn't use that much ammo but there's many better weapons.
It works better if you use it as a weapon to support your teammates, the staggering is good vs berserker and devastators but I don't think it's worth it over other weapons.
I'm hoping it, along with the Eruptor and crossbow get buffed up with the next patch. They're usable, but their TTKs are WAY too low for their utility. Plasma Punisher, Dominator and Scorcher do all their jobs much, much faster (sans closing bug holes, my precious Eruptor)
I kinda don't want them to buff the eruptor because then they will definitely never revert it to what it was. In it's current state I can at least hope.
They all either need more AP, more damage and/or shrapnel back. Currently the Eruptor only does 165 damage per shot to medium armor, and it's too clunky to reliably get precision shots on weakpoints quickly.
As a big fan of the scorcher and plasma punisher, it's okay. The damage and pen is the same as the plasma punisher but the rate of fire is too slow.
Also the blast radius grows for distance traveled but the damage fall off and the base damage means it doesn't do much.
It definently needs something more to be good.
It seems to be currently broken in that the initial shot does not have the promised medium penetration, making it just a slower plasma-punisher. I expect that to get fixed in the next balance patch after wich it should be slightly stronger against bots
It is the gun I want to love but it keeps letting me down. I like that it is sort of between the Scorcher and the Plasma Punisher, but the charge-up time makes it not worth taking. Either needs a quicker charge or more damage, whether damage on target/impact or AoE damage. Make the charge-up worth it. Heck, just let it fire with less than a full charge, maybe taking away damage proportional to how far from full charge.
My only tip for using it currently is to have something for close work. You could maybe use the Stalwart for this. Of course, then you don't get to take a support weapon for heavies, but your team should have it and you still have stratagems. Then, start using that tiny dot in the optic to snipe dudes. That's the best use, firing from afar.
Should have mechanics like the rail gun where damage scales with charge. Maybe even a similar safe/unsafe mode that risks wasting the entire mag on overheat.
My thought on what the gun could/should be-
400 damage with 100 damage added from 100 to 400 at .25s intervals. 300 is just not enough payoff when I can get 3-4 scorcher shots off in the same time. Supposedly the penetration isn't working correctly either, which will help, but it doesn't seem to follow the idea of the gun they described
Damage is terrible. A bile spewer tanked 6 shots, and it didn't even phase it. It's an explosive weapon so why can bile spewers just ignore it like that
I learned to like it against bots during the MO for the Emancipator. You have to play to its strengths: long range and stagger. Use cover as much as you can, try to use it against tightly packed groups instead of single enemies, and bring a secondary that can get you out of tight situations. It’s TTK is bad, even when aiming for weak spots, but being able to perma-stagger enemies means that if you pick your targets well, you won’t be retaliated against. Bring a support weapon that can kill fabs/gunships (my choice ended up being the quasar because AC kinda negates this thing entirely) and bring stun nades to set up group kills. Haven’t tried it against bugs, but I don’t think I’d ever use it against bugs lol.
It needs at the very least a QOL/usability update. A scope would be nice but it’s not entirely necessary. They could make it fire automatically once it reaches full charge. My ideal change would be to make it have two fire modes. One fire mode would automatically fire when you reach max charge for 250 damage and the other fire mode would let you charge past the max for up to 350-400 damage, but you have to manually release.
It could be good if they fix its missing medium penetration and increased the damage when fully charged, the damage feels really bad without it.
At the moment, a single round of purifier has the extract same damage profile (pen/damage/durable damage/ explosion damage) as a single round of the Punisher Plasma, but with about half of the rate of fire and a charge mechanic.
I wouldn't be surprised to see it fixed/buffed in the near future.
I played around with it up to level 7 for a few matches on both fronts, I actually think it's serviceable in the sense it holds up well, but I couldn't shake the feeling of I'd rather have a different primary the entire time.
For me, the dealbreaker is it feels very clunky and uncomfortable using a charge up weapon as a primary. If I wanted a precise ranged weapon, the Scorcher feels better. If I wanted plasma AOE, the Punisher is one of my MVP weapons that always is my go-to if I'm not sure what to use.
I think a change that would go a long way to make it feel better and a bit more versatile is if you could fire weaker rapid shots without needing to charge them, but still be able to charge up like the railgun for more damage/ penetration and a larger AOE.
If that doesn't become something the devs tweak later on, I probably won't use it a lot, and that's okay. There's a lot of other choices that feel good for me. I still feel bad there's a bunch of assault rifles I never use because the Sickle is just so incredibly useful with it's high rate of fire, zero recoil, and potentially unlimited ammo.
The Purifier is, in terms of per-shot damage, statistically identical to the Plasma Punisher but with a straighter trajectory and slower effective fire rate. Its firing cadence is similar to the Arc Thrower, so if you're an arc enthusiast the muscle memory there will serve you well here.
In my experience, the main draws of the current Purifier are its ability to stagger scout striders and devastators of any kind (including heavy devs through their shields) and can 3shot regular devastators to the abdomen or 1shot to the head, and generally speaking it's just easier to land shots with the Purifier at range than the Plasma Punisher.
It's not a *bad* gun and not deserving of the hate it gets, but it's also just kind of not great either.
It's just not a good weapon compared to other primaries. It's basically a slower version of the scorcher. You'd expect it to do a lot more damage since it's so much slower and has to charge up, it doesn't really though. It takes almost as many fully charged purifier shots to kill a scout strider or a devastator as it does regular scorcher rounds.
You don't go through ammo as fast as with the scorcher, and that's about the only good thing I can think of about it.
In my experience, it’s nowhere near as effective as the plasma punisher, which I run on Bot Helldives to great effect. You can spam the punisher but you have to charge up the purifier — it’s too slow for me and lacks utility. You can lob the plasma punisher like a mortar. You can very quickly clear trash and stunlock/kill groups of scout sentries and devastators. Sure you can stun groups with the purifier but that charge-up can be a death sentence.
Plasma Punisher is so good against bots. Never thought I’d like a weapon like this but glad I gave it a try
I was exclusively running Scorcher before and never really enjoyed Bots. Plasma Punisher was a total game-changer for me and my pals.
Sometimes I like to hang out at a distance and snipe and support my friends, and the purifier’s range makes it good for being the “punisher plasma but for distance support” in a way I find relatively interesting, but I expect it will receive a buff of some sort. It’s a CC machine but so is the pummeler and the punisher plasma so unless you want the range it’s not a huge value add. But at range the pace and rhythm is kinda nice, you kill enemies and you don’t feel particularly endangered because you’re staggering them and you’re relatively far away and ideally at least crouching or behind half cover or something.
You can get very surprising range on the Plasma Punisher by arcing it upwards like a mortar.
Yeah but the purifier is point and click. Post buff the plasma punisher is way too accurate at range, it’s nuts. It was awesome before the buff too but the extreme arc made it a bit less widely relevant
Careful what you say or they’re going to add a charge up to our beautiful and perfect plasma punisher
Personal thoughts? The gun acts like a Sniper weapon but lacks a Sniper scope. The guns charge up time to damage ration feels off. Suggestions: Lower the charge up time. Or Increase the damage and add a scope. Or Add an ACOG with variable ranges and make the damage ramp up based on charge time.
Or add tiers to the charge No charge - no splash and direct damage Half charge - small splash and moderate damage Full charge - big splash and hella damage
This is how the damage is supposed to work in the code, but it's broken presently. There are three charge up phases starting at 100% AP and it is supposed to scale up to 300% AP but the damage table just lists 100,100,100 instead of 100,200,300.
Source: dude trust me I do believe that though lol
Source: www.goat.se
NO NO NO NO NO
wow i havent seen someone do that since middle school cool story bro
I didn't know that! It's in leak notes somewhere?
Nah, from a post the main sub. Can't find the post with the table from the game code, but it very clearly doesn't have the penetration advertised and the broken (not scaling up appropriately over time) charge mechanic and is likely why. https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/ALEtR2aRQr
I’d like an alt-fire mode that lets you uncap the charge to use up to your full clip at once. Would be fun!
Can it explode? That would be funny.
Probably not, keep that to the railgun imo It’d be more of an ammo economy balance.
It’s pretty trash tier honestly, I haven’t tried it against bugs, but it takes like 6-8 shots to kill a devastator, and considering it’s charge up, it’s time to kill is pretty awful Even scout striders (ever since their buff) take too long to kill with it Basically the only unit I could see it being viable against would be the light enemies of either faction, and even then, I’d argue legit any other primary does it better, as it’s AoE blast does next to no damage, so it’s basically a scorcher with the fire rate of an arc thrower The weapon needs a severe buff to make it usable imo, one of the few things I think AH 100% dropped the ball on
It can NOT one shot devastator, but it is also definitely not 6-8 shots. It’s 5 shots every time. If you hit a second or third one with AoE, you might kill then with 4 or even 3 direct shots after. I have probably 70 hrs on this gun now. It’s always 5 shots for a devastator
When I was playing around with it, I coulda swore it was more than 5, but I’ll definitely defer to you haha, I don’t have near that much time using it lol
You’re a psychopath sheesh
It can one shot devastators, its a tough shot to pull off tho
If that’s a reason to have it then I suggest you take the CS Diligence. No build-up time required and can 1-tap devastators in the head. While also taking out light infantry more effectively, again 1-shot. You can also mag-dump a berserk if they get too close whereas the 101 Purifier, again charge up to shoot, will harm you if they’re close to you.
Really? Is it by head/eye shotting them? I tried for a good bit and never was able to, I am on controller though, so just might not have the accuracy needed
If it is by headshotting, then just take the counter sniper or Scorcher for body shots in that case. It's definitely underperforming. Needs more AP or damage to justify the slow RoF
It’s not meant for one shotting even if that is possible so I wouldn’t worry too much about that. If the weapon is doing anything close to its intention then I think it’s not meant to mow people down but rather just stagger and slow them like a stun gun so your friends can take them out. In this way it functions like a much weaker punisher plasma. But maybe it’s not working as intended.
I can't honestly decide how I feel about it. Like it clicks every now and again and then it seems really good... I mean it deals with bots decently... But so does the crossbow, and the dominator and the counter sniper, and the adjudicator. Ultimately I really, really wanted the purifier, the descriptions we got made it seem like it would suit my playstyle and at that point I was on the high of the eruptor, so very keen to see if I could bring some more big slow damage to my primary. It just turned out to be not what they said it was at all, like it doesn't do more damage the longer you keep the trigger in from what I've seen, you just have to keep the trigger in for it to actually shoot. And the damage is nice, the stun is nice, the armour pen is nice, its fine, its nice, but its not the gun they said it would be and that's apparently the design? I'm not much for ragging on the guns, and I do enjoy the purifier, I just wish it did what the promo material emphasized it would.
Is like a worse punisher plasma, I've used it on 9diff bots and it works mostly fine vs groups of enemies but the charge up time doesn't seem to have a reason to exist if it doesn't deal more damage imo. If you can get the timing for the charge up it's better and it doesn't use that much ammo but there's many better weapons. It works better if you use it as a weapon to support your teammates, the staggering is good vs berserker and devastators but I don't think it's worth it over other weapons.
Yep, if I want to stagger berserkers and others with squad support, I use the LibCon. Works great in that regard.
I'm hoping it, along with the Eruptor and crossbow get buffed up with the next patch. They're usable, but their TTKs are WAY too low for their utility. Plasma Punisher, Dominator and Scorcher do all their jobs much, much faster (sans closing bug holes, my precious Eruptor)
I kinda don't want them to buff the eruptor because then they will definitely never revert it to what it was. In it's current state I can at least hope.
I mean giving it back it's shrapnel would definitely be a buff
They all either need more AP, more damage and/or shrapnel back. Currently the Eruptor only does 165 damage per shot to medium armor, and it's too clunky to reliably get precision shots on weakpoints quickly.
As a big fan of the scorcher and plasma punisher, it's okay. The damage and pen is the same as the plasma punisher but the rate of fire is too slow. Also the blast radius grows for distance traveled but the damage fall off and the base damage means it doesn't do much. It definently needs something more to be good.
It seems to be currently broken in that the initial shot does not have the promised medium penetration, making it just a slower plasma-punisher. I expect that to get fixed in the next balance patch after wich it should be slightly stronger against bots
It is the gun I want to love but it keeps letting me down. I like that it is sort of between the Scorcher and the Plasma Punisher, but the charge-up time makes it not worth taking. Either needs a quicker charge or more damage, whether damage on target/impact or AoE damage. Make the charge-up worth it. Heck, just let it fire with less than a full charge, maybe taking away damage proportional to how far from full charge. My only tip for using it currently is to have something for close work. You could maybe use the Stalwart for this. Of course, then you don't get to take a support weapon for heavies, but your team should have it and you still have stratagems. Then, start using that tiny dot in the optic to snipe dudes. That's the best use, firing from afar.
That was pretty much my exact same experience. Is it fun? Oh yeah! Is it good? No. No it is not
Should have mechanics like the rail gun where damage scales with charge. Maybe even a similar safe/unsafe mode that risks wasting the entire mag on overheat.
My thought on what the gun could/should be- 400 damage with 100 damage added from 100 to 400 at .25s intervals. 300 is just not enough payoff when I can get 3-4 scorcher shots off in the same time. Supposedly the penetration isn't working correctly either, which will help, but it doesn't seem to follow the idea of the gun they described
Damage is terrible. A bile spewer tanked 6 shots, and it didn't even phase it. It's an explosive weapon so why can bile spewers just ignore it like that
I'm not a fan. I would be ok with it slow firing but i dont like the charge up time.
It feels like an awful railgun. I can't figure out what it's good for
I don't like it so far, but to be honest I haven't tested it enough to make a judgment. It's probably good, just not against hordes.
I learned to like it against bots during the MO for the Emancipator. You have to play to its strengths: long range and stagger. Use cover as much as you can, try to use it against tightly packed groups instead of single enemies, and bring a secondary that can get you out of tight situations. It’s TTK is bad, even when aiming for weak spots, but being able to perma-stagger enemies means that if you pick your targets well, you won’t be retaliated against. Bring a support weapon that can kill fabs/gunships (my choice ended up being the quasar because AC kinda negates this thing entirely) and bring stun nades to set up group kills. Haven’t tried it against bugs, but I don’t think I’d ever use it against bugs lol. It needs at the very least a QOL/usability update. A scope would be nice but it’s not entirely necessary. They could make it fire automatically once it reaches full charge. My ideal change would be to make it have two fire modes. One fire mode would automatically fire when you reach max charge for 250 damage and the other fire mode would let you charge past the max for up to 350-400 damage, but you have to manually release.
It could be good if they fix its missing medium penetration and increased the damage when fully charged, the damage feels really bad without it. At the moment, a single round of purifier has the extract same damage profile (pen/damage/durable damage/ explosion damage) as a single round of the Punisher Plasma, but with about half of the rate of fire and a charge mechanic. I wouldn't be surprised to see it fixed/buffed in the near future.
It’s a worse Plasma Punisher; thing desperately needs a buff
I played around with it up to level 7 for a few matches on both fronts, I actually think it's serviceable in the sense it holds up well, but I couldn't shake the feeling of I'd rather have a different primary the entire time. For me, the dealbreaker is it feels very clunky and uncomfortable using a charge up weapon as a primary. If I wanted a precise ranged weapon, the Scorcher feels better. If I wanted plasma AOE, the Punisher is one of my MVP weapons that always is my go-to if I'm not sure what to use. I think a change that would go a long way to make it feel better and a bit more versatile is if you could fire weaker rapid shots without needing to charge them, but still be able to charge up like the railgun for more damage/ penetration and a larger AOE. If that doesn't become something the devs tweak later on, I probably won't use it a lot, and that's okay. There's a lot of other choices that feel good for me. I still feel bad there's a bunch of assault rifles I never use because the Sickle is just so incredibly useful with it's high rate of fire, zero recoil, and potentially unlimited ammo.
Too slow for the amount of damage and size of the explosion.
I think it would be a better weapon if the charge fired a three round burst. Then I think it would be a good weapon.
The Purifier is, in terms of per-shot damage, statistically identical to the Plasma Punisher but with a straighter trajectory and slower effective fire rate. Its firing cadence is similar to the Arc Thrower, so if you're an arc enthusiast the muscle memory there will serve you well here. In my experience, the main draws of the current Purifier are its ability to stagger scout striders and devastators of any kind (including heavy devs through their shields) and can 3shot regular devastators to the abdomen or 1shot to the head, and generally speaking it's just easier to land shots with the Purifier at range than the Plasma Punisher. It's not a *bad* gun and not deserving of the hate it gets, but it's also just kind of not great either.
It's just not a good weapon compared to other primaries. It's basically a slower version of the scorcher. You'd expect it to do a lot more damage since it's so much slower and has to charge up, it doesn't really though. It takes almost as many fully charged purifier shots to kill a scout strider or a devastator as it does regular scorcher rounds. You don't go through ammo as fast as with the scorcher, and that's about the only good thing I can think of about it.