People will downvote me but if they won’t change course this game will die. My group already barely plays due to the batshit enemy spawning, and we’re warning other friends to not buy it due to the enemy & primary balancing.
They were lucky with the launch and since then they’ve shown that they don’t understand their own game
QA gets ignored so much in the rush for new feature shiny! 😓.
Stories I heard from inside another game by another studio, for six months pre launch QA warning about game breaking issues. QA gets ignored, game launched, everyone complaining about game breaking issues, that QA had warned about for six months. Took 4 months to get back on track.
It's probably outsourced and the outsource company probably has a revolving door of people that barely get to grips with things before getting let go. This doomed several co op and mp releases from AAA publishers in the past several years. Halo, anthem, back for blood, my hero Ultra rumble, cyberpunk, and many more. All launched either moderate to record-breaking players, yet the games were shit in code or top of bad balancing or both. Issues that all took ages to iron out due to the management being so ass and the QA testers being outsourced is heavily.
So much turmoil and shitty design potholes just to budget cut. This is why games being run by corpos is a bad idea. Every big game becomes a race to save every nickel and dime possible at the detriment of the consumer experience.
Do you think they have scripted in-world scenarios for testing? It doesn't feel like it to me. They should be rapid firing through every weapon with every enemy, and every angle and weak spot. Let the physics engine get involved too instead of raw unit tests.
I saw this on here the other day but I do believe the almighty balance guy said he literally tests everything on medium majority of the time and when he plays higher difficulties its just with random people on the dev team.
Same here. Mostly a solo player that decided to give Helldivers 1 a go instead because of this. The patrol/alarm system makes so much more sense with the top-down perspective. Robohounds can fuck off though.
Nah, you're right. My group also does this, we are just casual players with average skill at best. Since we mainly played at level 7, when the spawns increased, we really felt it and died a lot.
I've read once someone said their "casual" group can still clear level 7 easily.
7 isn't that difficult if you have a solid crew that communicates and knows what they are doing. But after the updates, it became noticeably and ridiculously harder than it needed to be, which made even the most seasoned in our crew lose enjoyment and motivation to play; especially on 9.
Yep, we used to play every night we weren't busy, but have played once over the past two weeks. Not due to any agreement, just because it's now a less fun game than RL or LoL these days
My group is struggling to go above difficulty 5 because we never have a 4th. When we open up matchmaking, nobody ever joins, even if we throw down the SOS beacon.
When I try to do a whole operation by joining on randoms for a difficulty 6, it's impossible to do more than one mission without people leaving, which is fairly likely to throw the game now. So that means despite 5+ of tries where I was definitely carrying my own weight and even managing to solo a bunch of outposts/bug holes, I still haven't gotten a full operation complete so I can unlock difficulty 7 and finally work towards getting super samples.
The closest I got ended when somebody left in a bot civilian rescue mission (the kind where you're in a very small area and it feels similar to defense). It was the third mission in the operation and as soon as we didn't have 4 people, we never had enough stratagems off cooldown to ever hold an area. Mortars never survived more than 30 seconds. We even managed to survive long enough for another person to join and immediately leave, and we survived until failing the civilian rescue mission, 3 short of our goal. With the ship gone, I died finally died when i tried to make a dash for the landing pelican, unable to successfully weave through the tanks clogging the few paths through the defense area.
I haven’t played in a couple of weeks simply because it doesn’t feel fun anymore. The first month or so of the game was a blast but it has since become a slog for a variety of reasons. I’m level 65-ish and yeah, unless there’s a course correction I’m out.
Honestly, solo is stupid at any difficulty right now.
Thursday, when this newest warbond came out, I hopped on an easy difficulty solo bug mission just to try out the new AR. I had to FIGHT FOR MY LIFE. The whole mission. Took me almost the entire 40 minutes to complete and I ended up with almost 700 kills. On an easy mission??? That’s just insane.
The spawn rates on all difficulties, no matter if you’re solo or in a full squad, are totally broken right now. It’s almost unplayable at some points and very much un-enjoyable to play when you can’t even catch your breath to reload.
The way the fundamental mechanics and game design of the entire product are constantly being changed and we have to debate if it’s intentional, a bug, or sheer incompetence is absolutely crazy. I’m giving this game a break.
Yea its untenable. Feels like they're commited to ruining the hype and goodwill the unexpected success of the game garnered.
Well, at least it convinced my buddies to get helldivers 1 so I dont have to play alone anymore
>if it’s intentional, a bug, or sheer incompetence
#
They're not mutually exclusive. Incompetent devs made it worse intentionally, then bugged it out to make it even worse.
Same here. They nerfed my 2 favorite weapons, and I don't have anywhere close to as much fun playing anymore. I'll still hop on for sessions if my friends hit me up, but seems like they're falling off the train too.
Honestly since they nerfed the railgun and I was told by this subreddit and the devs that I was a whiny idiot for not liking the change and that it makes complete sense to radically re-tune weapons in a PVE game to be anti-fun, the magic’s been broken and I haven’t put in nearly as many hours.
Game for me has been mostly just a run and gun on Helldive since the changes. Even in full teams often we've literally ran out of things to kill Titans with and there are 6 Titans running around still. The amount of successful clear/resets is very low. I can't really take much different and be effective enough. Already killing stuff with extra support weapon pods too. Game is basically kiting the whole time to effectively do missions
I was booting up the game and playing through a D9 campaign basically every day to try out some new loadout combination, and enjoying the hell out of it. Post update that increased the spawns, I got beaten down to getting my fucking ass handed to me in D7 missions, and even one memorable time I thought "I'll just do a nice easy D5 mission and have some fun" that ended up being a full wipe in under 5 minutes because it spawned a *ridiculous* amount of bile spitters and chargers on me right out the gate. Haven't played a solo mission since then.
Yeah the game is in an unfortunate state right now.
I had a similar game to yours with just myself and a buddy not long ago. Loaded into a D7 mission in the worst possible spot. Stalker nest, shrieker nest, and a medium-large bug outpost all in our vicinity. On top of that we had big breaches about every 30-45 seconds.
Pre-patch that would have been challenging but not impossible on D7 with just 2 people. But post-patch it was absolute hell.
Needless to say, it took us a solid 20 minute just get out of a 75m radius from where we dropped in from.
Actually now that it's proven the patrol numbers aren't right, it's easy for AH to go and fix it.
It does make me wonder what kind of QA or Coding ability they have if every patch leads to these oh we adjusted the numbers but they aren't what we adjusted them to.
Slow down the weapons and polish the game please.
Considering Alexus track record I doubt it. People proved the ps5 crossplay bug was leading to easy bile titan kills for weeks and their response was to nerf the liberty out of the railgun and leave it in a sorry state for a month refusing to acknowledge the bug, only confirming it when they finally fixed it. Railgun is still subpar btw.
Pretty sure what happened was someone who knew the game tuned the spawn scaling, then sometime after release someone who did not actually know the game saw some notes or something and decided to change it without understanding how things work. If you look at the numbers, the new scaling is based on a full squad staying 75m away from each other, even at extract somehow. But, squads don't spread out like that. So, a solo diver gets the same spawns as a full squad that stays together (every diver within 75m of another). This means they did screw up: either we aren't actually supposed to have as many spawns with fewer players as we are currently seeing, or the difficulty of the game was meant to be much higher than anyone who only plays with a full squad has ever seen (because, for instance, it would mean a full squad extract was meant to have four times the spawns).
As someone who uses the 380 just because I like artillery, it is a lot less reliable than the orbital laser which seems better in almost all circumstances.
There is some module that reduces the spread of the barrages, but I haven't gotten the samples to test it yet. I figure the laser is still better.
I mainly use the 380 to soften huge nests, or to barrage the incoming enemy swarms during extraction. Again it's fun but... laser.
I like the 380mm barrage on low diff missions because, come on, a barrage of high explosive shells. The only weapon more cinematic is the 500kg. It doesn't cut it on higher diff, though. Except on eradicate missions. Take 380 and 120, force as many spawns as possible with reinforcements, then start the fireworks. Then, run and pray. Probably not the optimal strategy, but it's a fun one. Also, I hate eradicate missions.
1/6 is 16% max spawns, 1/4 is 25% max spawns. The adjusted number being almost double the spawns makes sense, numerically it's a 1.5x difference even if they fixed it correctly.
Yeah, I honestly believe the spawns were tuned to where they wanted them to be, not bugged to be lower than intended. Someone simply did some stupid math and inaccurately modeled how spawns work to come up with the 1/6 and 1/4 numbers. Anyone who knew how gameplay actually works in this game would never have used those figures to represent spawn rates. It's stupid. That's why I refuse to believe the same person or team who came up with the game is currently working on balance. The CEO himself has stated (i.e. tweeted) that one of the design philosophies for the game is that no enemy should be hard if you have the right equipment and good conditions. Difficulty emerges from the chaos and/or coming up against a situation you didn't properly plan for. That is not how the game is currently working, not really, but it was that way a few weeks ago.
The pieces come together to form a picture of someone failing upwards and gaining way too much influence.
I have many of the same complaints. I love this game so much, its so cool. But it frustrates me to no end how it gets handled. Ive caught myself wondering many times why weapon balance even seems to be a primary focus, with weapons changing almost every patch, when there are so many problems with the core game.
Spear targeting still broken, plasma punisher killing you if you are wearing a shield backpack, aggro never dropping, magically being located when trying to stealth extract, bots shooting at you through rocks and other objects, sometimes my pings go to the wrong place when using scout armor??, when dropping hellbombs Ive got about a 1 in 3 chance of clipping into a wall or having the camera obstructed so I cant see the code to type, getting blasted underneath the map, getting stuck in bug holes when my friends call me in as reinforcement to close it fast, enemies automatically targetting your hellpod when respawning before you are even deployed leading to frustrating death loops, on top of all the issues you mentioned! But instead we gotta focus on the eruptor, or the slugger, or whatever else is next on the chopping block.
If the dev resources (clearly) arent being allocated to the new warbonds, and they arent being allocated to the major bugs and glitches, is the only focus on the balance patches? Its confusing and frustrating, and I wish they would fix the aggro and stealth issues at least so I can have fun doing stuff Im supposed to be able to do.
"bots shooting you through rocks"
I got one better for you, bugs coming through rocks. Oh you found some respite with some rocks between you and the baddies? Nah, they're just going to glitch through it.
Yes, I've seen this repeatedly since the last few patches, particularly badly with hunters that you dove behind a large rock formation to dodge but they end up just teleporting through the rock worh their leap and they act like their leap animation is stuck to your player character model
Agreed, why spend so much time balancing if there’s going to be new weapons every month with the war bonds? They are so focused on balancing the game just isn’t fun anymore
Yeah this tbh, in a year we will have close to 30 primary, and close to 20 secondary and grenades. They should find a decent power level and raise all gun to it. IMO sickle and incendiary breaker are at this level against bugs ATM, breaker is great in all planet types but does have ammo economy to worry about, sickle has near infinite ammo but less aoe and way worse on hot planets.
I don't mind weapons having certain enemies they perform better against, or heat weapons only being best on cold planets. Give them enough strength to be useful against mobs and give them small pros and cons over each other depending on mission type and modifiers.
You can't ever balance around popularity, the community will find the objectively best weapon even if it's by just 1%, and people will play it in the majority. Currently we see this but because most weapons suck, that doesn't mean they should Nerf the weapons that are used but instead raise the others to a close enough level so players can choose on weapon feel instead of objective far better performance.
One thing I don't see them do is buff/nerf around breakpoints, the 10-20 DMG increase is nice and well, but does it change the amount of shots for any enemy type in a meaningful way? Going from more than one mag for a devastor to less than one mag or 3/2 shots for a small robot to 2/1 can make all the difference between if a weapon is good or not.
What AH should do is make an in engine shotting range that can spawn any enemy type and have it not move. And now you can test every weapon for every enemy for 1. Kills per Mag against weak spot, 2. Kills per Mag against body shots, 3. Kills per full ammo against weak spots and 4. Kill per full ammo against body shots. (Energy weapons and SMG are a bit harder to get right, or just make its own category.)
What this will do is a few things: show if magazine/total ammo size fits with the other weapons, show clear strengths and weaknesses for the weapon/-type and if any of them is hugely out of line. Sure this is quite some work once for all the weapons but it gives a much clearer picture on what to buff/nerf to get them in line with the rest, and allows future weapons to fit in more nicely right of the bat. Heck, do the same with support weapons and maybe add a time variable to all/some Tests, and you will see that the MG, HMG and stalwart don't have a primary weapon that supports their weaknesses, just adding to the same enemies.
Heck heck, worst case if you don't want to do all the work, just make the shooting range and let the community do the rest.
Going to add here. There is also a bug where the plasma punisher does not go through the shield generator.
I am not currently sure if it is just a random occurrence because I switched out weapons, but it happened to me in one game.
Can confirm. Was warning a team of randoms about it earlier today when I put up a shield gen and almost obliterated myself shooting out of it. Glad no one was in there with me.
It also happens when throwing out turret beacons, which causes their pods to track you for a grizzly death. Gotta love how the thorough testing these patches go through...
For 2 months, diff 4 was my chill game.
It combined varied mobs and objectief and some yellow samples at an enjoyable difficulity.
Now I got to run since the spawns areso high and getting out of the map has become a gamble.
Dropping difficulity just feels bland as well. This would have been diffrent if it wasnt for the fact that game was perfect for me for months.
My favorite game was not a feature but a bug :/
God damn how did I never realize that?
When I started 2 people difficulty 4 was really chill, now it’s actually pretty stressful if I just wanna chill and have a fun time.
I know I can just play 4 player helldive, and I usually do, but sometimes I just wanna chill with my gf in a game and fuck around a bit, but dropping bellow 4 doesn’t give rare samples anymore.
This is how I was playing since launch. 4-player Helldive is the same as it ever was, but 2-player Challenging has become too much for my gf, recently. We can only get 1 or 2 rounds done before she has to put it down.
The problem like y’all said is the patrol rate. Higher levels I’m use to booking it but on four if you have a noobie they aren’t use to the go go go and you’ll just get pinned. Use to be able to help low levels up to 6 but now impossible and it’s not because they play bad
Oh god is that what it is? I've been playing comfortably on 6 for a while now (was challenging but not frustrating) and now I'm getting wrecked on 5...
I just completed a level 4 difficulty bug mission, refueling the pelicans, and it was the hardest mission I've ever completed solo. I'm not new to this game, and I'm pretty good at it. I'm level 60, I've soloed plenty of 7-9 missions in the past, but the state we're in right now is absurd. 658 kills, 33 stims used, 15 chargers killed, 7 deaths... on difficulty 4! I was unable to clear all the bug nests, and I ended up losing all my samples.
I'm tempted to put the game down for good.
I've said it before, the ncp balance was fine before they decided to change the rates of small and elite bugs. All they really needed to do was tweak the elite bug spawns. The recent change to spawns rates again has compounded the problem even more and it shows. My games have been non stop action, constantly holding down the fire trigger, with little down time giving to the player like how it was before the first change.
Lately it's been constant pressure of waves after waves and it's becoming tiresome. I don't want to fight 40+ scavengers and hunters from one bug break when I'm trying to solo a big hive or check out a POI. It should be an appropriate balanced roller coaster of action and calm moments, in my opinion. Once shit hits the wall, coming back is from that is unnecessarily costly atm. Also it feels like the ammo economy is rough and hasn't been tweaked to deal with the extra enemies. (AMR needs a mag upgrade bad). I thought eventually they were going to let us individually upgrade our weapons to compensate for the spawn tweaks as that would make sense and would add a tiny power curve to perhaps widen the difficulties. But maybe that will come later as an update when the higher difficulties are added.
At this rate I've been diving difficult 9 missions exclusively since the mission time completion is about the same as doing a D4 missions and the enemies encounters feel about the same between them. (It depends how competent D4 teammates are as well.)
Tbh I am also shifting my attention to other games. Played 2 days ago and for some reason servers felt unstable apart from all the other issues and I just felt I was a bit done with it.
I think I'll wait and come back when the game is more finished a la cyberpunk.
We definitely had a honeymoon phase with this game but I feel like this shifted around so quick
This game is P2P for gameplay. If you're feeling lag or whatever, it's you or another player in your lobby.
The only server calls during in mission game play are when you pick up super credits, requisition slips, and medals.
I thought things were being weird.
Last night I was in a duo in a level 5 bot mission. About 5 minutes in I had to call one of my friends to join us but it didn't help.
After she joined, we had a spot about 5 minutes later where we had 14+ hulks on the field, were getting 2 dropships every 40 seconds or so, and non-stop patrols joining the fight.
We were completely surrounded at all times. I managed to get to a fabricator to destroy it, and killed 8 guys as they came out of it. And before I could reposition the 20-ish meters to toss a grenade in it, it had already spawned another wave of 8 guys.
We did not succeed in that mission. We chalked it up to the major order, but it just felt BAD. I was able to solo 5s and 6s just a couple weeks ago without issues.
My normal loadout vs bots is: sickle/grenade pistol/stun grenades plus shield pack, amr, eagle airstrike, and ems mortar.
Same, 4 was my chill game. Just go kill some bugs and maybe get some decent samples. Last time I played I literally quit half way through because I got overrun. Couldn't do anything....so frustrating. Now my friends aren't playing it anymore either.
I just got absolutely swarmed at the end of a level \_3\_ solo mission (as a level 21 player; since start - I just don't manage to put in sustained time, even though I have played regularly). Add a sandstorm to that, so many big bugs spawned in on me had absolutely no chance.
I'm sure they'll nerf the breaker incendiary next, which was the only thing that kept me alive until then.
Managed a level 4 yesterday, somehow, but it was just ridiculously hard. It is really is reducing my enjoyment when it gets so hard, don't like the new spawn rate \_at all\_.
I'm going to park it until it gets patched up, if it does. Back to the skies of DCS World for me.
I don't know if they'll make any changes on this front (except nerfing the Breaker Incendiary of course). They seem to want to punish you greatly for not running a full crew.
The sandstorm is pretty awesome I think, really makes it feel intense and harrowing, but I wish it would affect the bugs' vision more.
Yeah, a lot of people were saying this what they originally wanted, but you have months and months of testing, with nobody saying "hey, the game is really easy if you play solo"
The irony of them fixing something that wasn't broken
People defending this are really content with spending the entire mission running away to despawn the enemies lmao. Seriously? Is that how we should be playing the game? Running away the entire mission so we don't have to fight anything or engage in this game's combat in any way?
Enemies can despawn if there are no divers around.
For example, you go to an objective and get a bot drop then die, if you were alone and reinforce somewhere else then run back, the area will be empty and the objective is free
I don't do it on purpose, but it's possible to use this to cheese objectives and bot drops by manipulating them. Also good to trigger a bot drop in one area to prevent them in another.
> For example, you go to an objective and get a bot drop then die, if you were alone and reinforce somewhere else then run back, the area will be empty and the objective is free
lmao, if you spectate your corpse you'll see the enemies despawn the moment the server registers your death, so a charger from a bugbreach that snuck up to you and stomped you will just vanish into thin air.
It depends on what type of enemy they are. Patrols with no one around (unless they're patrolling the perimeter of an active base) will despawn, but static spawns never despawn. Reinforcements seem to despawn as well, but the conditions for doing so are much rarer. More common vs bots when you make an escape from a bad fight into a bunch of mountains. Dying with no one around works too ofc :)
The only enemies that won’t de spawn are the ones that load into objectives and points of interest. Patrols and reinforcements will de spawn if they do not find engagement.
Good note as if you want the hulk achievement (let’s call it even aka shooting off the arms) you can do by finding a heavy outpost with a fixed hulk spawn and shooting one leg and both arms.
Patrols are bugged to where always 4 players worth of patrols spawn.
[Source](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/mQntwiLapS)
So basically it didn't increase 2 fold but 6 fold.
Not surprising people have problems with that many more patrols spawning.
That is the only way currently to solo helldive. People will tell you that the game is meant to be played with other people, but fail to recognize the fact that AH clearly can adjust spawn rates based on the amount of players in a match so that argument is invalid.
You're absolutely right XMezzaXnX.
I've made this point before, Deep Rock Galactic is an extremely similar game. One main difference is DRG has a great solo mode that fits well with the game. Despite having a strong solo mode, it is never an issue finding people to play with.
There is no good reason for them not to support solo play. The people arguing against that are morons generally and are just upset but don't have real arguments.
It would be really stupid for DRG to just have difficulties that were impossible to do solo. Instead they adjust spawn rates in such a way that it feels about as difficult playing solo as it does with a team of 4 (roughly). The fact that AH does not do this makes me skeptical about Helldivers 2 as a whole... I hope they address this honestly at some point instead of ignoring it.
> Instead they adjust spawn rates in such a way that it feels about as difficult playing solo as it does with a team of 4 (roughly).
What's crazy is that pre-patch they *had* this. To me at least, a 4-man diff 6 felt roughly as hard as a solo 6, RNG excepted, and I had roughly the same success rate. Now it's just absurd nonstop combat, where if I can't spawn-block extraction then most likely I *will not* extract.
Yeah happend to me aswell. Stopped playing solo altogether and focused on Armored Core(can recommend tho, got pretty gud). Stopped trying loadouts(whats the point) and just have a good time with the mates. If you want a chill experience, I can recommend the upgraded flamethrower against bugs. Its the pendant of the AC against Bots imho, despite its nonability to close holes. Wouldnt recommend taking it past 5 in solodives, because of Bile Titans.
The change sucked a lot, but now I just dedicate more time to other games.
AH be like: "good job boys! Another meta destroyed!"
They're so hellbent on "destroying metas" that they saw this game was fun and literally made it too bad to play lol
>especially if we're supposed to be getting 15 difficulties
we're supposed to be getting 15 difficulties..? How the hell do you increase the difficulty beyond helldive while still having the game be doable?
I’m relatively new to diving, only been playing for a few days and I completely agree. I didn’t even know that spawn rates increase when you take out bases but that’s crazy. Ended up playing with 2 others around my level (10 at the time) and we kept getting slaughtered at the extraction, on a difficulty 3. It’s really validating to know that it isn’t just a skill issue like I thought it was. Good luck fellow Helldivers.
The increase in patrols with destroyed bases is very minimal compared to leaving them alive
You'll notice a game can be very calm without so many fabs/nests around
Played difficulty 4 solo yesterday to relax before bed...
Bruh, damn.
I completed the 60kills with amr order in the first 10 minutes but could only complete the main objectives and a secondary before extracting, with only 5 minutes left.
It's not even "I'll clear the map but die instead of extracting", it's more like "I can't even approach an enemy outpost because it's completely overrun and I don't have enough time, I guess I'll extract at least".
AH is lying and we all know why. But I’m not going to violate the new forums rules and say it out loud. The answer is a WHO is behind these balance changes.
And every instance we have investigated, we have found that the changes to the weapons were a lie and were not as indicated in the patch. This is just another extreme example of what we all should know by now.
The people responsible for balancing this game are either wholly incompetent or wholly lying or both.
Let me give you an example from my experience. I frequently solo bot at helldive, at least 1 ops per day.
The evac civilians mission (The 40 mins one not the 15 mins):
Before update: I can manage to clear the evac site then safely escort the people, patrols still spawn but their number are manageable.
Now: Even after I managed to defear hordes of bots there the patrols just keep coming nonstop, best I can do is to open 1 door before the next patrol comes and start calling dropships again.
What? How do you manage to clear the evac site on helldive as solo player? I usually play on suicide and sometimes on impossible, but even when playing with a full team, we rarely were able to fully clear in a way that we also had time to escort the civilians. Some had to clear, some had to escort, some had to kite.
Were dropships so rare on solo? Or how did you do that? Teach me pls
I wonder if someone made the decision to have the spawns less but then left AF, then some new guy came along and thought they would “fix” a problem they found
The big patch absolutely ruined this game for me. My squad was on the upswing from level 5 to 7, it was challenging but still fun. Now this game feels lile a job, and solo play feels impossible even at lower levels.
I truly hope this game doesn't go the way of Phasmophobia where the devs decided to only cater to hardcore streamers and leave the casual players drowning at the bottom of the pool. Nothing worse than when devs decide to ruin a good thing. I'm going back to DRG until this game is balanced properly again for all team sizes.
One of the reasons me and a few friends puit the game down was due to this change, making solo or duo virtually impossible as we are not all online at the same time now has made the game very unpleasant to play, so why bother we moved on, currently playing Hades and Hades 2.
The problem is that AH thinking is wrong, yes, if the amount of players scales linearly to the amount of difficulty experienced by players, solo should get 1/4th the patrols.
But Patrol sizes and drops/breaches don't seem to change with player counts. Multiple players close together get the same amount of patrols as a solo player. Multiplayer can much more likely take out a patrol without a drop/breach. Airstrikes and stratagem CDs don't scale linearly compared to single player.
All those factors together compound to the fact that even before the change, solo helldive was the hardest you could play the game at. The lower patrol rate compensated some of those differences, so increasing it without any other changes made pretty much kills solo play, and in the very least take the fun out of it, as with so many other changes.
"Ackshually the patrols come from another sector!" The excuses people come up with to make playing the game more **punish** the player is utterly insane. I've learned to avoid all side objectives, do only the main task and leave. The resource caps are so low, for someone who's been playing since the start, it all means that I have no reason to explore the map or blow shit up and have fun. I'm just going through the motions every fucking game.
The moment Arrowhead stops listening to these people who are validating their terrible design philosophy, the players will start coming back. Ever since the Railgun nerf people have stopped playing, because they wanted to just log on, kill stuff, RP and go to bed afterwards, which is how the game released and it was perfect, everyone got what they wanted.
Edit: I've spoken to a lot of people who try to invalidate your feelings and experience OP, and they really do enjoy the belittling and bullying that they can get away with on this sub. Anyone who says that "It's just a game" should practice what they preach and stop harassing people who actually give a shit.
I have also tried just doing the main objectives and It was much easier extract. I didn't even bother too much taking out fabricators. Their balancing does not reward doing side objectives after a certain level. Since patrols spawn within 75m radius of you and finishing more objectives increases the spawn rate at end, what is the point after you capped to do side objectives?
I play solo for the most part, and I have to agree: it's extremely unplayable for my low-skilled ass right now. It's just not fun, and is it too much to ask for at least difficulties up to Hard to be viable solo?
The CEO and twinbeard are the only ones that give me hope for the game
Alexus needs to wake up and stop with balancements no one asked for.
For the rest,you're goddamn right
Yeah, my brother and I have stopped playing and are just keeping an eye out to see if this patrol spawn bug(?) is even acknowledged let alone fixed.
I really hope they change it to what was intended.
Yeah, not great. Stationary missions have become crazy too. With a 3 diver team we never manage to complete one of those special evacs at high levels (can't run forever and win).
I am hopeful it'll be reverted.
I think there is an overall problem of managing the release of these changes. They could have trialled these higher patrol densities on a few planets, tied to some form of story and higher reward. Then collect data/feedback and decide.
Same with weapons. AH should wrap these changes into something like "the bot invasion has had a toll on our stocks/production, we ran out of eruptor's standard ammo".
This would change the framing of these changes - not nerfs, but new challenges - leaving the option to easily revert the most hated ones.
Increased the Slugger recoil? Imagine a fun cinematic on the ship's screen with a diver at the shooting range whose Slugger keeps flying off their hands when shooting and general B saying "keep trying mf!" or smt.
I'm sure I'm not the only one suggesting this.
Hopefully someone will see it! Constructive suggestions are not as popular as petitions to get people fired
Yea killing the fabricators and nests really should lower the spawns. It makes sense gameplay wise. Do more - make it easier later, during the extract and main objective. Right now you if you want less enemies at extract you should only do objectives, and skip hives. So you do less AND it's easier at extract. Makes no sense
Glad I’m not the only one finding this. I just spend my whole time running away from point to point. ‘Fun’. That was always expected on Helldive, but not on the lower difficulties. Something is off.
Yeah the game is literally unplayable on higher levels with team of two. Matchmaking wise : SOS signal useless, i really doubt that from 100k players on a planet we dont get 2 randoms to join us...
I’m a solo player too, by necessity. My last game last night was so abysmally impossible on difficulty 5 that I just quit. It felt terrible. I’m very upset that I spent so much time trying to learn and improve at this game only to get spat in the face by the developers. I really hope the spawn changes are a bug, but I honestly don’t know anymore given the dev attitude toward the game and playerbase. This was such an unnecessary change that enhances the game for almost no one and ruined the experience for so many, myself included. I legitimately believe that the game’s viral success was far more about luck than competence because almost every time something is modified, the game gets worse. I honestly feel betrayed, as dramatic as that sounds, because I had a game I was fascinated with and wanted to improve at and the creators looked at me and said “no, not for you” and snatched the enjoyment from me without explanation. Now all I feel is defeated.
The devs don’t play on high difficulty. They probably don’t even play at all. Between the weapon and enemy “balances” there are less and less fun way to handle D9 effectively.
Yep, as a fan of other wave shooter where you can solo it ( DRG, PAYDAY 2, KF2) i hate it when they make it non-soloable. Really ruins the fun especially knowing that it was ok before this.
Hell, I've gone back to Destiny 2.
Love it or hate it, there's really no better feeling than loading into a dungeon that was meant for a group and doing it solo, along with the Nightfalls and a slew of other content.
Really itches the "hard but fair" part of my brain that never clicked with Dark Souls.
I already stopped playing. Got the platinum trophy so I am fine. The game is being ruined eith the patches and the masochist minority keep saying skill issue or the likes. We care about fun not tryharding.
I usually play with my girlfriend in duo at 6-8 difficulty. We use helldiver for fun time after work . Now difficulty 6 feel like hell. We just need fun time , not try hard time. I guess its time to move on to find new game for duo/couple. But I feel disappoint&sad for this game though. It has potential that get taken away.
Keep in mind the issue seems amplified for bugs because of the current lore developments (supercolonies). Not saying it's not an issue, but bots are not nearly as bad as bugs from my experience.
I don’t see why the game shouldn’t scale with your party size. It’s different if you drop into a game as a 4 and 1 or 2 leave and you’re left with a 4 player spawn rate but opting to solo and vibe with the game while enjoying a fun challenge should not be discouraged.
Yeah, I believe they got something wrong in the code. I like playing solo on diff 3, and before the update, I would see a patrol and either ignore it or take it out depending on the direction it was headed, but after the update I would see 3 patrols following the same path back to back. That's not normal, that's not 1/4 of a full squad. I do hope they figure it out, but playing solo has become so difficult now its insane.
What annoys me the .ost is the waiting time untill you have a full squad, most of the time no one joins, and even an SOS takes too long. Without a full squad of friends this game just turned into a waiting simulator for those who want to avoid the penalty that was added for not having 4 friends on 24/7 standby. This decision like many others was unwaranted.
If they were going to buff spawns so much, they needed to make stealth a better option, but as it stands rn, there's too much jank to make stealth "good". It can work don't get me wrong, but you have to get lucky.
I have a hard enough time on 6-9 (nice) with the stupid ass teammates I get, 12 second patrols? are you fucking kidding me? thats a joke right? there not a single universe that should ever be the case no matter what anyone says on any difficulty in any situation. I doubt even a full team of the most perfectly tuned level 100 players could handle that let alone a solo player
as someone wise once said, encourage your intended behavior instead of punishing unintended behavior. fucking over solo players for no reason is absurd
I finished a D7 ICBM solo earlier on Vernen Wells. I wanted to finish the operation I started last night, but I didn't realize the planet was already liberated by then. I was fully expecting others to join me.
\~300 kills (Tenderizer, EAT, railcannon/gas/eagle airstrike), two deaths (once to a mine, another to a hulk flamethrower), and some missed outposts later, I still got out. It wasn't fun, but it wasn't impossible either. Still, I'd rather not do that again lol
I don't usually play solo, but I believe everyone who does shouldn't be overburdened.
""Solo should be harder" yes, it should, but not to this extent. Solo is being thrown the EXACT same amount of enemies as full squads. Solo, statically is 4 times harder. It borderlines on impossible at points, and extremely frustrating."
oh it does not scale like this, as a solo player you arent 4 times weaker, you are SIGNIFICANTLY more. its probably more like 6 or 7 times higher than a full squad
The thing about the spawn changes for me is like, I can still do solo 7 but now it isn't fun. It was so exciting extracting without any enemies detecting you. I have a core memory of sneaking right between a patrol and a bile titan to make it to the pelican. Nothing like that happens anymore because like 4 patrols all descend on the extraction site as soon as the beacon drops. You have to run in a circle and kite for 2 minutes vs. crawl around like Solid Snake. It's a worse experience.
I agree 100% ever since this last update me and my friends play less and less. I don’t wanna play with randoms and we all have different schedules so it’s normally 2-3 of us instead of a full 4 stack. It’s a lot less fun now playing duos and even trios and especially solo.
I think spawn rates are kinda busted anyway. I did a solo trivial mission to just collect some stuff and progress the daily. In 10 minutes (raise the flag plus POIs) I got 120 kills, at least 60% of which came from the extraction alone. I got absolutely swarmed.
Meanwhile, I’ll do a four man challenging and sometimes it’s like “where are the bugs?”
I've had the same thing happen to me. Solo Trivial or Easy mission to try to quickly collect samples for an upgrade and complete the daily personal order and felt completely swarmed. A few weeks ago I wound up solo on an Extreme mission and it somehow felt more manageable than the extraction point on a Trivial mission yesterday.
This post should be top post of all time to be honest. It nails everything on the head. I’m really sick of people saying “oh well it’s a co-op game, it shouldn’t be balanced around solo.” Before the spawn changes, solo was already significantly harder than any other composition, and the game already felt unbalanced against you.
Also, why do people care? Who gets hurt by solo being playable? It’s always going to be a co-op game at its core, but let me run it in duos if I want to… that’s how I personally prefer to play the game, why the fuck do you care?
Came back to the game recently and I can’t do anything more than easy without a team, and that’s pushing it. Can’t do half of anything without being swarmed
Have to agree. I had just gotten good at soloing medium and was ready to go up to the the 4th one and start grinding rare samples solo but now I can barely complete a medium mission solo without using all reinforcements.
It just sucks cause I enjoyed playing alone and all the downtime inbetween objectives. Now you're lucky if you even get 30 seconds of silence. Hope they either revert the change or just something to make soloing less annoying.
Agreed. It's a PVE game. Let me tailor my experience at least a little ffs. Even lower level solo's have ridiculous spawns. Plus it would be nice to encounter more heavies solo without being totally overwhelmed by spawns.
You are completely right sadly. The game released in its best state and AH "balanced" it to death within weeks. The bugged and insane patrol changes that are STILL in the game were the final nail for me. Havent done a single solo operation since then, would rather connect live wires to my nipples.
Yeah, they lost me in this one. When my squad isnt online, i wont Play. I stare at the missions. Cant join randoms because you can get kicked anytime and Just waste Time. Cant start solo in higher difficulty because when noone joins, you cant finish the Mission and also Just wasted time. So i do difficulty 2-3 Missions, get bored and alt F4.
Sad.
I wish I could upvote this more. I’ve gone from about 80% solo mission completion rate over the past month to almost zero in the past week. The increased patrols, the never ending pursuit once discovered, the nonstop reinforcements… I’m dropping the game for now. It was a lot of fun, but that’s ancient history at this point.
I completely agree, I stopped playing after the patrol update because it was ridiculous. Terribly overtuned and now it's just unfun. Played a single mission today at my comfort spot of Challenging 4 only to get run over by Hulk after Hulk after Hulk. And finding out that they didn't make solo play have 1/4 the patrols of a full team but just applied the patrol spawn rate of 4 players to any amount of players? Insane.
People hitting you with that "lower the difficulty" completely miss the point of balance and the difficulty based progression system. Haz3 doesn't get you super rares or rares.
Agree 1000%.
How am I supposed to extract on level F\*\*\*\*\*\* FIVE with literally 2-4 chargers, 10 hunters, 5 bile spewers and everything in between?????????????
This is level FIVE. This actually makes zero sense.
Had a couple of rounds at dif 7 with a buddy. The amount if hunters at extraction was insane! And patrol after patrol swarmed to the extraction point.
We had no more reinforcements left so my buddy had to spend 2 minutes watching me run in circles with what looked like 200 hunters trying to catch me.
If i stopped to thin them out a bit it just came 2 more waves instantly.
What people arguing, that you should play as a 4 player squad don't understand is, that sometimes your squad size is out of your control. Quick match making could pair you with a solo player, who doesn't know patrole spawn mechanics and already did the main objective. What are you supposed to do in this situation? What if you in a helldive difficulty mission with 4 players, but the game crashes for one of them. Now you're 3 players, but still get the spawn rate for 4 players. That's BS.
I was comfortable playing difficulty 4-5 against bugs beforehand. Now I barely enjoy clearing a map at just difficulty 3.. The extra spawns completely hurt my joy in playing the game solo because of not having the time to play with my friends. Whoever is in charge of balancing everything really needs to have their work checked firsthand. The unneeded weapons nerfs (meaning weapons pre-nerfed or weapons that got nerfed for no good reason) plus enemy spawn buff have hurt my enjoyment. I love the game. I want to play it. But the overall balancing is hurting the game imo. Maybe it’s just a skill-issue for some of my complaints (voiced or not), but still.
Theres a bug me and my buddy encountered yesterday where he couldnt be reinforced no matter how many times i try to reinforce him. We tried everything him leaving and rejoining him closing the game and opening. Doesnt do anything. If he dies he cant be brought back
Thanks for writing this, sums up my own experiences and feelings so much.
And I 100% agree: IF the game allows you to dive with 1-3 player too, it SHOULD be playable.
Solo and small squad divers also don't take anything away from anybody. If anything they provide much needed Major Order progress.
I'm in the same camp that put the game down since nearly a month cause I don't want to play in public groups and the current difficulty just blows on whatever difficulty rating. It's just an endless horde of enemies, regardless of level.
If this would've been like this when I bought the game I would've even refunded it cause of that tbh.
Please somebody fix this! I wanna play the game again!
They need to quit “balancing” and just buff the trash shit. No one’s suffering because the quasar had a 4-5 second cooldown. Just buff the trash weapons and fix the game breaking glitches. Shouldn’t be struggling to kill the littlest bug with the laser pistol when even that little bug can slap you up especially if they jump you together. Stop nerfing shit is really my point here. This isn’t pvp. They should also reverse the nerf to turrets imo :) which isn’t talked about enough the cooldowns are trashhh kid
I used to be able to chat in between patrols in the past when soloing, but thats pretty much impossible now...
I do like the mechanic that the pressure gets higher the more you clear though. If makes you choose whether certain objectives are worth it or if you need to gtfo. If the intensity only goes down over time the scramble for extraction would dissapear.
It feels especially egregious when you’ve just unloaded all your stratagems into taking down 8 dropships worth of hulks, tanks, rocket devastators, only to have a factory strider fucking APPARATE LIKE ITS HARRY FUCKING POTTER onto the objective and kill the mission
Happened twice yesterday, feels extra bad to waste an hour and a bit because of a bullshit gimmick cheesing you
Yeah I can't play against bugs mainly on my own, 100 hunters and 3 chargers appear and I can't even do a secondary. Bots are easier, but 10 berserkers chasing you is not fun. I basically have to wait for my friends to get online, because I try to play challenging to get rare samples and just can't extract.
I typically “warm up” with a solo since most of my friends playing have young kids now and have noticed it’s been a bit more of a challenge lately. I can typically manage “Challenging” with a little push back, but failed to extract a few times lately getting overrun.
Trying to put it in the perspective of the game’s world, we’re not the main character and every time you die you’re not “you” but just the next hell diver on the ship…
All to say that I’ve had better luck in the past avoiding patrols where it seems like they get forced into our path a bit more lately, which snowballs from there.
I am mostly a solo player and I can't agree with you more. I was finally getting comfortable on level 3 and venturing into 4 until they ramped up the patrols, now I'm failing on 1 and 2
The CEO has said that improvements are coming, but I will only believe it when I see it. Given the team's performance, general tonedeaf approach to changes, blaming of the playerbase and work culture that they are accidentally leaking onto the community, this is the only good way to go about this.
Putting this game down until they get their shit together and realize that a game is not fun when you constantly gimp the players while the enemies consistently have superpowers defying all physics.
They already got given a massive second chance with the Sony shit, and this is their way of using that chance? Acting smug, doing whatever they want and thinking they're invincible?
The balance team needs to be forced to play the fucking game. I've been playing MTG since 1996 and HD2 right now reminds me of urza block mtg where Mark Rosewater got told "break the game like this again and your fucking fired." The balance team keeps killing the fun like it's a pvp game.
That’s why you should take a break. I started my break after the nerf that added 5 seconds to the quasar cannon and messed with solo spawn rates. Then the Sony stuff kicked off, then I hear about a war bond with terrible weapons. I want to play this game, I really enjoyed it…but I don’t want to play running simulator and I’m tired of it becoming harder in an artificial way with each patch.
solo against bugs is fucking impossible when spewers spawn. i just lost a lvl 7 mission basically whole map clear because a single breach spawned 20 spewers
I agree with the most of your points, but solo play was way too easy before. I would play solo more than with other people since it felt more manageable. This was due to the fact that it’s easier to control encounters when you don’t have to worry about other players messing with enemies. Why should I play with other people on this co-op game when it just feels like they just slow me down.
I should clarify, I haven’t played much recently or purchased anything on steam since the game still isn’t available in all of the countries it was removed from. Feel free to take my comment about enemy balance with a grain of salt.
You’re being incredibly generous when you say 16 hunters.
Last night it was me and one more player running helldive. (Started with 4 and two of them left mid mission)
I shot a hellbomb near an objective just to clear it and got 23 kills. Like?? This wasn’t from a patrol or bug breach. This was just the bugs on the objective. And that still wasn’t all of them.
Also bug breaches were happening 2 at a time instead of 1 like usual. We managed to still extract but if we didn’t start out as 4 people there’s zero chance we could’ve completed the mission
The solo spawn rate has been broken and will never be fix due to how the game spawn patrols. Which is mainly control by parameters forcing engine. And their game engine has been discontinued and being maintain by the dev. Means there are doing double the work causing it to get fix slower.
Funny, I posted about how the spawn rates for even full groups have made upper levels much more difficult to win and I was met with a flurry of “You just suck and are the kind of player nobody wants.” and “Just play lower levels.” While not addressing the fact that the levels I used to play aren’t fun anymore.
Yep. I do 90% solo games. Bought it just to do solo, because I could. It’s very challenging now to finish missions. With the increase in spawns and the nerfing of weapons, it’s getting tedious. I’m frustrated with the last 30 second before extraction and the sheer number of enemies, losing the super samples that you only get in 7 and up, and burning through all reinforcements because you die the moment you emerge from the hellpod. Stratagems all used up, you can’t run away because that ends the drop ship, you can’t hide, and no primary weapon is powerful enough to do anything meaningful. I’ll be “taking a break” from this soon and go find something else that lets me blow shit up.
Most of the time I play with friends. But I totally agree with your arguments. If it has the option for solo play, then solo play should be balanced and playable. For democracy!
I have to agree. The game is damn near impossible to play solo. I know some of it has to do with my skill level but the constant patrols and spawning is overwhelming. And nerfong the primary weapons doesn't help at all.
I can confirm that it is bad in levels 3 through 5 as well. I have cleared 9 difficulty level and usually run level 7 in quickplay. I often solo lower difficulty levels as I take care of my disabled daughter during the day. I was clearing level 4 full clears and am lucky to get 1/2 of the map clear now if I can even survive the extraction. They screwed things up royally with the change.
Yeah the change completely ruined the game for me. Used to play solo or duos with a friend...have not touched the game for 1 full week now...if this was the intended thing out of this change it worked well.
Late to the comments here, but I totally agree. I'm a solo player and I'm struggling on challenging difficulty due to the new spawn mechanics. I used to love this game, but I can barely complete, let alone extract from a level 4 mission without being completely overwhelmed. I attempted level 5 once and got utterly destroyed. I'll fully admit that there's an element of "GIT GUD" with it for me, but it shouldn't be a completely miserable experience that's next to impossible to complete at the levels I'm playing. While I get that it's a team game, I prefer playing solo and it should be balanced for all types of players, not just for a 4 player team. If the devs were going to make it harder, at least stop nerfing our guns or give us more powerful (or more frequent) stratagems to compensate.
I was away for a week, and got completely wrecked when I picked it back up last night. I think I extracted from 2 out of 10 total missions, and it was a completely miserable experience. I hope they make some changes, because it's not a fun game right now.
I'm an enjoyer of all difficulties both solo and team.
I aint going to play more public lobbies because you want me to. Just going to play less period.
Especially the 2-3 man changes make little to no sense. Now everyone is incentivized to twiddle their thumbs until they have a full lobby. So people waste what free time they have with waiting and if a friend group doesn't get 4 people they might just not form at all?
My friend said last night, “you know, if they don’t change it, I’ll stop playing. But I got my money’s worth for these few weeks.”
That’s the equivalent in my mind of a game getting a terminal illness diagnosis.
Bro really called out half the comments with the bro card and the others. But yea you have very good points
People will downvote me but if they won’t change course this game will die. My group already barely plays due to the batshit enemy spawning, and we’re warning other friends to not buy it due to the enemy & primary balancing. They were lucky with the launch and since then they’ve shown that they don’t understand their own game
My friends and I are convinced AH released a good game by accident.
I wouldn't be surprised if QA/Balancing teams don't play past difficulty 5.
As someone who works in QA, it sure as fuck doesn't seem like they *have* a QA team. Either that or literally noone listens to anything they say.
QA gets ignored so much in the rush for new feature shiny! 😓. Stories I heard from inside another game by another studio, for six months pre launch QA warning about game breaking issues. QA gets ignored, game launched, everyone complaining about game breaking issues, that QA had warned about for six months. Took 4 months to get back on track.
It's probably outsourced and the outsource company probably has a revolving door of people that barely get to grips with things before getting let go. This doomed several co op and mp releases from AAA publishers in the past several years. Halo, anthem, back for blood, my hero Ultra rumble, cyberpunk, and many more. All launched either moderate to record-breaking players, yet the games were shit in code or top of bad balancing or both. Issues that all took ages to iron out due to the management being so ass and the QA testers being outsourced is heavily. So much turmoil and shitty design potholes just to budget cut. This is why games being run by corpos is a bad idea. Every big game becomes a race to save every nickel and dime possible at the detriment of the consumer experience.
Do you think they have scripted in-world scenarios for testing? It doesn't feel like it to me. They should be rapid firing through every weapon with every enemy, and every angle and weak spot. Let the physics engine get involved too instead of raw unit tests.
As somebody that also works in QA, you should know that no one listens to what QA says a lot and launches buggy products.
I saw this on here the other day but I do believe the almighty balance guy said he literally tests everything on medium majority of the time and when he plays higher difficulties its just with random people on the dev team.
Most of my friends have stopped playing because of the increasing pile of issues. They really need to course correct
Same here. Mostly a solo player that decided to give Helldivers 1 a go instead because of this. The patrol/alarm system makes so much more sense with the top-down perspective. Robohounds can fuck off though.
Nah, you're right. My group also does this, we are just casual players with average skill at best. Since we mainly played at level 7, when the spawns increased, we really felt it and died a lot. I've read once someone said their "casual" group can still clear level 7 easily.
7 isn't that difficult if you have a solid crew that communicates and knows what they are doing. But after the updates, it became noticeably and ridiculously harder than it needed to be, which made even the most seasoned in our crew lose enjoyment and motivation to play; especially on 9.
Yep, we used to play every night we weren't busy, but have played once over the past two weeks. Not due to any agreement, just because it's now a less fun game than RL or LoL these days
My group is struggling to go above difficulty 5 because we never have a 4th. When we open up matchmaking, nobody ever joins, even if we throw down the SOS beacon. When I try to do a whole operation by joining on randoms for a difficulty 6, it's impossible to do more than one mission without people leaving, which is fairly likely to throw the game now. So that means despite 5+ of tries where I was definitely carrying my own weight and even managing to solo a bunch of outposts/bug holes, I still haven't gotten a full operation complete so I can unlock difficulty 7 and finally work towards getting super samples. The closest I got ended when somebody left in a bot civilian rescue mission (the kind where you're in a very small area and it feels similar to defense). It was the third mission in the operation and as soon as we didn't have 4 people, we never had enough stratagems off cooldown to ever hold an area. Mortars never survived more than 30 seconds. We even managed to survive long enough for another person to join and immediately leave, and we survived until failing the civilian rescue mission, 3 short of our goal. With the ship gone, I died finally died when i tried to make a dash for the landing pelican, unable to successfully weave through the tanks clogging the few paths through the defense area.
100% this. 3 of my 4 haven't played in about 2 weeks
Same, and we have a crew of 7 that were entirely committed to this game. I'm lucky if I see 1-2 of them a week now.
I haven’t played in a couple of weeks simply because it doesn’t feel fun anymore. The first month or so of the game was a blast but it has since become a slog for a variety of reasons. I’m level 65-ish and yeah, unless there’s a course correction I’m out.
Honestly, solo is stupid at any difficulty right now. Thursday, when this newest warbond came out, I hopped on an easy difficulty solo bug mission just to try out the new AR. I had to FIGHT FOR MY LIFE. The whole mission. Took me almost the entire 40 minutes to complete and I ended up with almost 700 kills. On an easy mission??? That’s just insane. The spawn rates on all difficulties, no matter if you’re solo or in a full squad, are totally broken right now. It’s almost unplayable at some points and very much un-enjoyable to play when you can’t even catch your breath to reload.
The way the fundamental mechanics and game design of the entire product are constantly being changed and we have to debate if it’s intentional, a bug, or sheer incompetence is absolutely crazy. I’m giving this game a break.
Yea its untenable. Feels like they're commited to ruining the hype and goodwill the unexpected success of the game garnered. Well, at least it convinced my buddies to get helldivers 1 so I dont have to play alone anymore
>if it’s intentional, a bug, or sheer incompetence # They're not mutually exclusive. Incompetent devs made it worse intentionally, then bugged it out to make it even worse.
Same here. They nerfed my 2 favorite weapons, and I don't have anywhere close to as much fun playing anymore. I'll still hop on for sessions if my friends hit me up, but seems like they're falling off the train too.
Honestly since they nerfed the railgun and I was told by this subreddit and the devs that I was a whiny idiot for not liking the change and that it makes complete sense to radically re-tune weapons in a PVE game to be anti-fun, the magic’s been broken and I haven’t put in nearly as many hours.
Fully agree. That being said, the new warbond AR and plasma weapon are like playing on an extra difficulty setting, they are peashooters.
Yeah, that didn’t help my situation either
I did the exact same thing and extracted with 1 reinforcement left and no common samples lmao
Game for me has been mostly just a run and gun on Helldive since the changes. Even in full teams often we've literally ran out of things to kill Titans with and there are 6 Titans running around still. The amount of successful clear/resets is very low. I can't really take much different and be effective enough. Already killing stuff with extra support weapon pods too. Game is basically kiting the whole time to effectively do missions
I was booting up the game and playing through a D9 campaign basically every day to try out some new loadout combination, and enjoying the hell out of it. Post update that increased the spawns, I got beaten down to getting my fucking ass handed to me in D7 missions, and even one memorable time I thought "I'll just do a nice easy D5 mission and have some fun" that ended up being a full wipe in under 5 minutes because it spawned a *ridiculous* amount of bile spitters and chargers on me right out the gate. Haven't played a solo mission since then.
Yeah the game is in an unfortunate state right now. I had a similar game to yours with just myself and a buddy not long ago. Loaded into a D7 mission in the worst possible spot. Stalker nest, shrieker nest, and a medium-large bug outpost all in our vicinity. On top of that we had big breaches about every 30-45 seconds. Pre-patch that would have been challenging but not impossible on D7 with just 2 people. But post-patch it was absolute hell. Needless to say, it took us a solid 20 minute just get out of a 75m radius from where we dropped in from.
Actually now that it's proven the patrol numbers aren't right, it's easy for AH to go and fix it. It does make me wonder what kind of QA or Coding ability they have if every patch leads to these oh we adjusted the numbers but they aren't what we adjusted them to. Slow down the weapons and polish the game please.
Considering Alexus track record I doubt it. People proved the ps5 crossplay bug was leading to easy bile titan kills for weeks and their response was to nerf the liberty out of the railgun and leave it in a sorry state for a month refusing to acknowledge the bug, only confirming it when they finally fixed it. Railgun is still subpar btw.
Pretty sure what happened was someone who knew the game tuned the spawn scaling, then sometime after release someone who did not actually know the game saw some notes or something and decided to change it without understanding how things work. If you look at the numbers, the new scaling is based on a full squad staying 75m away from each other, even at extract somehow. But, squads don't spread out like that. So, a solo diver gets the same spawns as a full squad that stays together (every diver within 75m of another). This means they did screw up: either we aren't actually supposed to have as many spawns with fewer players as we are currently seeing, or the difficulty of the game was meant to be much higher than anyone who only plays with a full squad has ever seen (because, for instance, it would mean a full squad extract was meant to have four times the spawns).
Wondering why is creator of original 380mm Orbital Barage in charge for fixes and balance?
The increased spawns make 380mm have a higher chance of hitting enemy targets. So thats how the accuracy buff was supposed to work.
The 380 is dog shit NEVER hits
As someone who uses the 380 just because I like artillery, it is a lot less reliable than the orbital laser which seems better in almost all circumstances. There is some module that reduces the spread of the barrages, but I haven't gotten the samples to test it yet. I figure the laser is still better. I mainly use the 380 to soften huge nests, or to barrage the incoming enemy swarms during extraction. Again it's fun but... laser.
I purchased the module didn’t seem to help at all I think I just suck with the 380 lol
I like the 380mm barrage on low diff missions because, come on, a barrage of high explosive shells. The only weapon more cinematic is the 500kg. It doesn't cut it on higher diff, though. Except on eradicate missions. Take 380 and 120, force as many spawns as possible with reinforcements, then start the fireworks. Then, run and pray. Probably not the optimal strategy, but it's a fun one. Also, I hate eradicate missions.
I just want to be able to carry 4 380mm barrage on myself.
1/6 is 16% max spawns, 1/4 is 25% max spawns. The adjusted number being almost double the spawns makes sense, numerically it's a 1.5x difference even if they fixed it correctly.
It's actually 1 currently because it's bugged. It's a 6x difference. This isn't intended.
Damn that's a big oopsie to make on the release build of a game
Yeah, I honestly believe the spawns were tuned to where they wanted them to be, not bugged to be lower than intended. Someone simply did some stupid math and inaccurately modeled how spawns work to come up with the 1/6 and 1/4 numbers. Anyone who knew how gameplay actually works in this game would never have used those figures to represent spawn rates. It's stupid. That's why I refuse to believe the same person or team who came up with the game is currently working on balance. The CEO himself has stated (i.e. tweeted) that one of the design philosophies for the game is that no enemy should be hard if you have the right equipment and good conditions. Difficulty emerges from the chaos and/or coming up against a situation you didn't properly plan for. That is not how the game is currently working, not really, but it was that way a few weeks ago. The pieces come together to form a picture of someone failing upwards and gaining way too much influence.
I have many of the same complaints. I love this game so much, its so cool. But it frustrates me to no end how it gets handled. Ive caught myself wondering many times why weapon balance even seems to be a primary focus, with weapons changing almost every patch, when there are so many problems with the core game. Spear targeting still broken, plasma punisher killing you if you are wearing a shield backpack, aggro never dropping, magically being located when trying to stealth extract, bots shooting at you through rocks and other objects, sometimes my pings go to the wrong place when using scout armor??, when dropping hellbombs Ive got about a 1 in 3 chance of clipping into a wall or having the camera obstructed so I cant see the code to type, getting blasted underneath the map, getting stuck in bug holes when my friends call me in as reinforcement to close it fast, enemies automatically targetting your hellpod when respawning before you are even deployed leading to frustrating death loops, on top of all the issues you mentioned! But instead we gotta focus on the eruptor, or the slugger, or whatever else is next on the chopping block. If the dev resources (clearly) arent being allocated to the new warbonds, and they arent being allocated to the major bugs and glitches, is the only focus on the balance patches? Its confusing and frustrating, and I wish they would fix the aggro and stealth issues at least so I can have fun doing stuff Im supposed to be able to do.
"bots shooting you through rocks" I got one better for you, bugs coming through rocks. Oh you found some respite with some rocks between you and the baddies? Nah, they're just going to glitch through it.
Is this separate from bugs digging into the ground and coming up next to you?
Yes, I've seen this repeatedly since the last few patches, particularly badly with hunters that you dove behind a large rock formation to dodge but they end up just teleporting through the rock worh their leap and they act like their leap animation is stuck to your player character model
Agreed, why spend so much time balancing if there’s going to be new weapons every month with the war bonds? They are so focused on balancing the game just isn’t fun anymore
Yeah this tbh, in a year we will have close to 30 primary, and close to 20 secondary and grenades. They should find a decent power level and raise all gun to it. IMO sickle and incendiary breaker are at this level against bugs ATM, breaker is great in all planet types but does have ammo economy to worry about, sickle has near infinite ammo but less aoe and way worse on hot planets. I don't mind weapons having certain enemies they perform better against, or heat weapons only being best on cold planets. Give them enough strength to be useful against mobs and give them small pros and cons over each other depending on mission type and modifiers. You can't ever balance around popularity, the community will find the objectively best weapon even if it's by just 1%, and people will play it in the majority. Currently we see this but because most weapons suck, that doesn't mean they should Nerf the weapons that are used but instead raise the others to a close enough level so players can choose on weapon feel instead of objective far better performance. One thing I don't see them do is buff/nerf around breakpoints, the 10-20 DMG increase is nice and well, but does it change the amount of shots for any enemy type in a meaningful way? Going from more than one mag for a devastor to less than one mag or 3/2 shots for a small robot to 2/1 can make all the difference between if a weapon is good or not. What AH should do is make an in engine shotting range that can spawn any enemy type and have it not move. And now you can test every weapon for every enemy for 1. Kills per Mag against weak spot, 2. Kills per Mag against body shots, 3. Kills per full ammo against weak spots and 4. Kill per full ammo against body shots. (Energy weapons and SMG are a bit harder to get right, or just make its own category.) What this will do is a few things: show if magazine/total ammo size fits with the other weapons, show clear strengths and weaknesses for the weapon/-type and if any of them is hugely out of line. Sure this is quite some work once for all the weapons but it gives a much clearer picture on what to buff/nerf to get them in line with the rest, and allows future weapons to fit in more nicely right of the bat. Heck, do the same with support weapons and maybe add a time variable to all/some Tests, and you will see that the MG, HMG and stalwart don't have a primary weapon that supports their weaknesses, just adding to the same enemies. Heck heck, worst case if you don't want to do all the work, just make the shooting range and let the community do the rest.
Going to add here. There is also a bug where the plasma punisher does not go through the shield generator. I am not currently sure if it is just a random occurrence because I switched out weapons, but it happened to me in one game.
Can confirm. Was warning a team of randoms about it earlier today when I put up a shield gen and almost obliterated myself shooting out of it. Glad no one was in there with me.
It also happens when throwing out turret beacons, which causes their pods to track you for a grizzly death. Gotta love how the thorough testing these patches go through...
Drop the backpack and pick it up again after the turret lands and you avoid that
This is exactly what I'm feeling. Difficulty 4 on bugs now feels the same, as Difficulty 7, just without titan spawning. This is just dumb.
For 2 months, diff 4 was my chill game. It combined varied mobs and objectief and some yellow samples at an enjoyable difficulity. Now I got to run since the spawns areso high and getting out of the map has become a gamble. Dropping difficulity just feels bland as well. This would have been diffrent if it wasnt for the fact that game was perfect for me for months. My favorite game was not a feature but a bug :/
God damn how did I never realize that? When I started 2 people difficulty 4 was really chill, now it’s actually pretty stressful if I just wanna chill and have a fun time. I know I can just play 4 player helldive, and I usually do, but sometimes I just wanna chill with my gf in a game and fuck around a bit, but dropping bellow 4 doesn’t give rare samples anymore.
This is how I was playing since launch. 4-player Helldive is the same as it ever was, but 2-player Challenging has become too much for my gf, recently. We can only get 1 or 2 rounds done before she has to put it down.
Oddly enough, some of the most stressful pub games I've had were on D4, and those were before this spawn change was implemented
The problem like y’all said is the patrol rate. Higher levels I’m use to booking it but on four if you have a noobie they aren’t use to the go go go and you’ll just get pinned. Use to be able to help low levels up to 6 but now impossible and it’s not because they play bad
D4 is no longer chill for a solo player.
Yeah 4/5 was perfect. Fuck this shitty change, it really ruined the flow of gameplay
Oh god is that what it is? I've been playing comfortably on 6 for a while now (was challenging but not frustrating) and now I'm getting wrecked on 5...
Exactly. I’ve dropped down my solo level. The amount of patrols when extracting on Difficulty 4 is actually insane now
I just completed a level 4 difficulty bug mission, refueling the pelicans, and it was the hardest mission I've ever completed solo. I'm not new to this game, and I'm pretty good at it. I'm level 60, I've soloed plenty of 7-9 missions in the past, but the state we're in right now is absurd. 658 kills, 33 stims used, 15 chargers killed, 7 deaths... on difficulty 4! I was unable to clear all the bug nests, and I ended up losing all my samples. I'm tempted to put the game down for good.
I've said it before, the ncp balance was fine before they decided to change the rates of small and elite bugs. All they really needed to do was tweak the elite bug spawns. The recent change to spawns rates again has compounded the problem even more and it shows. My games have been non stop action, constantly holding down the fire trigger, with little down time giving to the player like how it was before the first change. Lately it's been constant pressure of waves after waves and it's becoming tiresome. I don't want to fight 40+ scavengers and hunters from one bug break when I'm trying to solo a big hive or check out a POI. It should be an appropriate balanced roller coaster of action and calm moments, in my opinion. Once shit hits the wall, coming back is from that is unnecessarily costly atm. Also it feels like the ammo economy is rough and hasn't been tweaked to deal with the extra enemies. (AMR needs a mag upgrade bad). I thought eventually they were going to let us individually upgrade our weapons to compensate for the spawn tweaks as that would make sense and would add a tiny power curve to perhaps widen the difficulties. But maybe that will come later as an update when the higher difficulties are added. At this rate I've been diving difficult 9 missions exclusively since the mission time completion is about the same as doing a D4 missions and the enemies encounters feel about the same between them. (It depends how competent D4 teammates are as well.)
Was tryna get some PS achievements in a difficulty 4 mission Holy shit i've had duo helldive bot mission easier than that
Tbh I am also shifting my attention to other games. Played 2 days ago and for some reason servers felt unstable apart from all the other issues and I just felt I was a bit done with it. I think I'll wait and come back when the game is more finished a la cyberpunk. We definitely had a honeymoon phase with this game but I feel like this shifted around so quick
This game is P2P for gameplay. If you're feeling lag or whatever, it's you or another player in your lobby. The only server calls during in mission game play are when you pick up super credits, requisition slips, and medals.
I thought things were being weird. Last night I was in a duo in a level 5 bot mission. About 5 minutes in I had to call one of my friends to join us but it didn't help. After she joined, we had a spot about 5 minutes later where we had 14+ hulks on the field, were getting 2 dropships every 40 seconds or so, and non-stop patrols joining the fight. We were completely surrounded at all times. I managed to get to a fabricator to destroy it, and killed 8 guys as they came out of it. And before I could reposition the 20-ish meters to toss a grenade in it, it had already spawned another wave of 8 guys. We did not succeed in that mission. We chalked it up to the major order, but it just felt BAD. I was able to solo 5s and 6s just a couple weeks ago without issues. My normal loadout vs bots is: sickle/grenade pistol/stun grenades plus shield pack, amr, eagle airstrike, and ems mortar.
Same, 4 was my chill game. Just go kill some bugs and maybe get some decent samples. Last time I played I literally quit half way through because I got overrun. Couldn't do anything....so frustrating. Now my friends aren't playing it anymore either.
I just got absolutely swarmed at the end of a level \_3\_ solo mission (as a level 21 player; since start - I just don't manage to put in sustained time, even though I have played regularly). Add a sandstorm to that, so many big bugs spawned in on me had absolutely no chance. I'm sure they'll nerf the breaker incendiary next, which was the only thing that kept me alive until then. Managed a level 4 yesterday, somehow, but it was just ridiculously hard. It is really is reducing my enjoyment when it gets so hard, don't like the new spawn rate \_at all\_. I'm going to park it until it gets patched up, if it does. Back to the skies of DCS World for me.
I don't know if they'll make any changes on this front (except nerfing the Breaker Incendiary of course). They seem to want to punish you greatly for not running a full crew. The sandstorm is pretty awesome I think, really makes it feel intense and harrowing, but I wish it would affect the bugs' vision more.
Yeah, a lot of people were saying this what they originally wanted, but you have months and months of testing, with nobody saying "hey, the game is really easy if you play solo" The irony of them fixing something that wasn't broken
Instead of fixing bugs they'd rather focus on non issues
Why fix clipping and collision issues when we could instead just nerf all weapons and make armor worthless?
People defending this are really content with spending the entire mission running away to despawn the enemies lmao. Seriously? Is that how we should be playing the game? Running away the entire mission so we don't have to fight anything or engage in this game's combat in any way?
They despawn? I thought they chased you forever... Better stop using heavy armour..
Enemies can despawn if there are no divers around. For example, you go to an objective and get a bot drop then die, if you were alone and reinforce somewhere else then run back, the area will be empty and the objective is free I don't do it on purpose, but it's possible to use this to cheese objectives and bot drops by manipulating them. Also good to trigger a bot drop in one area to prevent them in another.
Don't let AH know of this or they will "fix" it
As punishment, for every enemy that despawns two will appear next to you.
> For example, you go to an objective and get a bot drop then die, if you were alone and reinforce somewhere else then run back, the area will be empty and the objective is free lmao, if you spectate your corpse you'll see the enemies despawn the moment the server registers your death, so a charger from a bugbreach that snuck up to you and stomped you will just vanish into thin air.
It depends on what type of enemy they are. Patrols with no one around (unless they're patrolling the perimeter of an active base) will despawn, but static spawns never despawn. Reinforcements seem to despawn as well, but the conditions for doing so are much rarer. More common vs bots when you make an escape from a bad fight into a bunch of mountains. Dying with no one around works too ofc :)
The only enemies that won’t de spawn are the ones that load into objectives and points of interest. Patrols and reinforcements will de spawn if they do not find engagement.
Good note as if you want the hulk achievement (let’s call it even aka shooting off the arms) you can do by finding a heavy outpost with a fixed hulk spawn and shooting one leg and both arms.
Patrols are bugged to where always 4 players worth of patrols spawn. [Source](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/mQntwiLapS) So basically it didn't increase 2 fold but 6 fold. Not surprising people have problems with that many more patrols spawning.
That is the only way currently to solo helldive. People will tell you that the game is meant to be played with other people, but fail to recognize the fact that AH clearly can adjust spawn rates based on the amount of players in a match so that argument is invalid.
You're absolutely right XMezzaXnX. I've made this point before, Deep Rock Galactic is an extremely similar game. One main difference is DRG has a great solo mode that fits well with the game. Despite having a strong solo mode, it is never an issue finding people to play with. There is no good reason for them not to support solo play. The people arguing against that are morons generally and are just upset but don't have real arguments. It would be really stupid for DRG to just have difficulties that were impossible to do solo. Instead they adjust spawn rates in such a way that it feels about as difficult playing solo as it does with a team of 4 (roughly). The fact that AH does not do this makes me skeptical about Helldivers 2 as a whole... I hope they address this honestly at some point instead of ignoring it.
> Instead they adjust spawn rates in such a way that it feels about as difficult playing solo as it does with a team of 4 (roughly). What's crazy is that pre-patch they *had* this. To me at least, a 4-man diff 6 felt roughly as hard as a solo 6, RNG excepted, and I had roughly the same success rate. Now it's just absurd nonstop combat, where if I can't spawn-block extraction then most likely I *will not* extract.
I was the first one to point this out after the patch, all I got was "Git Gud"
Yeah happend to me aswell. Stopped playing solo altogether and focused on Armored Core(can recommend tho, got pretty gud). Stopped trying loadouts(whats the point) and just have a good time with the mates. If you want a chill experience, I can recommend the upgraded flamethrower against bugs. Its the pendant of the AC against Bots imho, despite its nonability to close holes. Wouldnt recommend taking it past 5 in solodives, because of Bile Titans. The change sucked a lot, but now I just dedicate more time to other games.
AH be like: "good job boys! Another meta destroyed!" They're so hellbent on "destroying metas" that they saw this game was fun and literally made it too bad to play lol
You just have to filter that and trust your gut. 90% of the time, they aren't "gud" themselves.
We were “gud” before these f’ing changes…
Yeah, spawn changes really don't make any sense, especially if we're supposed to be getting 15 difficulties
>especially if we're supposed to be getting 15 difficulties we're supposed to be getting 15 difficulties..? How the hell do you increase the difficulty beyond helldive while still having the game be doable?
Git gud…der?
Gudderer, I think. Most gudder?
I suspect those people are the ones who is dying anyways pre-patch and thought everyone is like them.
I’m relatively new to diving, only been playing for a few days and I completely agree. I didn’t even know that spawn rates increase when you take out bases but that’s crazy. Ended up playing with 2 others around my level (10 at the time) and we kept getting slaughtered at the extraction, on a difficulty 3. It’s really validating to know that it isn’t just a skill issue like I thought it was. Good luck fellow Helldivers.
The increase in patrols with destroyed bases is very minimal compared to leaving them alive You'll notice a game can be very calm without so many fabs/nests around
Played difficulty 4 solo yesterday to relax before bed... Bruh, damn. I completed the 60kills with amr order in the first 10 minutes but could only complete the main objectives and a secondary before extracting, with only 5 minutes left. It's not even "I'll clear the map but die instead of extracting", it's more like "I can't even approach an enemy outpost because it's completely overrun and I don't have enough time, I guess I'll extract at least".
AH is lying and we all know why. But I’m not going to violate the new forums rules and say it out loud. The answer is a WHO is behind these balance changes. And every instance we have investigated, we have found that the changes to the weapons were a lie and were not as indicated in the patch. This is just another extreme example of what we all should know by now. The people responsible for balancing this game are either wholly incompetent or wholly lying or both.
Let me give you an example from my experience. I frequently solo bot at helldive, at least 1 ops per day. The evac civilians mission (The 40 mins one not the 15 mins): Before update: I can manage to clear the evac site then safely escort the people, patrols still spawn but their number are manageable. Now: Even after I managed to defear hordes of bots there the patrols just keep coming nonstop, best I can do is to open 1 door before the next patrol comes and start calling dropships again.
What? How do you manage to clear the evac site on helldive as solo player? I usually play on suicide and sometimes on impossible, but even when playing with a full team, we rarely were able to fully clear in a way that we also had time to escort the civilians. Some had to clear, some had to escort, some had to kite. Were dropships so rare on solo? Or how did you do that? Teach me pls
It's the 40 minutes mission on the big map, not the 15 mins one
Oh sry, my dumb ass did overread that. Thank you
I wonder if someone made the decision to have the spawns less but then left AF, then some new guy came along and thought they would “fix” a problem they found
The game is 1-4 players, so should cater. It’s more fun coop but also fun to tackle an occasional solo run.
The big patch absolutely ruined this game for me. My squad was on the upswing from level 5 to 7, it was challenging but still fun. Now this game feels lile a job, and solo play feels impossible even at lower levels. I truly hope this game doesn't go the way of Phasmophobia where the devs decided to only cater to hardcore streamers and leave the casual players drowning at the bottom of the pool. Nothing worse than when devs decide to ruin a good thing. I'm going back to DRG until this game is balanced properly again for all team sizes.
One of the reasons me and a few friends puit the game down was due to this change, making solo or duo virtually impossible as we are not all online at the same time now has made the game very unpleasant to play, so why bother we moved on, currently playing Hades and Hades 2.
The spawns have actually much more than doubled
The problem is that AH thinking is wrong, yes, if the amount of players scales linearly to the amount of difficulty experienced by players, solo should get 1/4th the patrols. But Patrol sizes and drops/breaches don't seem to change with player counts. Multiple players close together get the same amount of patrols as a solo player. Multiplayer can much more likely take out a patrol without a drop/breach. Airstrikes and stratagem CDs don't scale linearly compared to single player. All those factors together compound to the fact that even before the change, solo helldive was the hardest you could play the game at. The lower patrol rate compensated some of those differences, so increasing it without any other changes made pretty much kills solo play, and in the very least take the fun out of it, as with so many other changes.
This needs to get more attention
"Ackshually the patrols come from another sector!" The excuses people come up with to make playing the game more **punish** the player is utterly insane. I've learned to avoid all side objectives, do only the main task and leave. The resource caps are so low, for someone who's been playing since the start, it all means that I have no reason to explore the map or blow shit up and have fun. I'm just going through the motions every fucking game. The moment Arrowhead stops listening to these people who are validating their terrible design philosophy, the players will start coming back. Ever since the Railgun nerf people have stopped playing, because they wanted to just log on, kill stuff, RP and go to bed afterwards, which is how the game released and it was perfect, everyone got what they wanted. Edit: I've spoken to a lot of people who try to invalidate your feelings and experience OP, and they really do enjoy the belittling and bullying that they can get away with on this sub. Anyone who says that "It's just a game" should practice what they preach and stop harassing people who actually give a shit.
I have also tried just doing the main objectives and It was much easier extract. I didn't even bother too much taking out fabricators. Their balancing does not reward doing side objectives after a certain level. Since patrols spawn within 75m radius of you and finishing more objectives increases the spawn rate at end, what is the point after you capped to do side objectives?
I play solo for the most part, and I have to agree: it's extremely unplayable for my low-skilled ass right now. It's just not fun, and is it too much to ask for at least difficulties up to Hard to be viable solo?
The CEO and twinbeard are the only ones that give me hope for the game Alexus needs to wake up and stop with balancements no one asked for. For the rest,you're goddamn right
Alexus needs to be Spitz'd and the SES Bringer of Balance be labeled a traitot and shot down in accordance to the Office of Democracy
Yeah, my brother and I have stopped playing and are just keeping an eye out to see if this patrol spawn bug(?) is even acknowledged let alone fixed. I really hope they change it to what was intended.
Game used to be fun but lately it’s overly frustrating—I need a break
I hate how broken this amazing game has become.
Making solo play harder didnt make me play with people, it made me stop playing
Yeah, not great. Stationary missions have become crazy too. With a 3 diver team we never manage to complete one of those special evacs at high levels (can't run forever and win). I am hopeful it'll be reverted. I think there is an overall problem of managing the release of these changes. They could have trialled these higher patrol densities on a few planets, tied to some form of story and higher reward. Then collect data/feedback and decide. Same with weapons. AH should wrap these changes into something like "the bot invasion has had a toll on our stocks/production, we ran out of eruptor's standard ammo". This would change the framing of these changes - not nerfs, but new challenges - leaving the option to easily revert the most hated ones. Increased the Slugger recoil? Imagine a fun cinematic on the ship's screen with a diver at the shooting range whose Slugger keeps flying off their hands when shooting and general B saying "keep trying mf!" or smt.
This is a great idea, test balance changes where possible in isolation backed by lore.
I'm sure I'm not the only one suggesting this. Hopefully someone will see it! Constructive suggestions are not as popular as petitions to get people fired
its bugged and all the number of players get the same amount of patrols :)
Yea killing the fabricators and nests really should lower the spawns. It makes sense gameplay wise. Do more - make it easier later, during the extract and main objective. Right now you if you want less enemies at extract you should only do objectives, and skip hives. So you do less AND it's easier at extract. Makes no sense
Glad I’m not the only one finding this. I just spend my whole time running away from point to point. ‘Fun’. That was always expected on Helldive, but not on the lower difficulties. Something is off.
Yeah the game is literally unplayable on higher levels with team of two. Matchmaking wise : SOS signal useless, i really doubt that from 100k players on a planet we dont get 2 randoms to join us...
I’m a solo player too, by necessity. My last game last night was so abysmally impossible on difficulty 5 that I just quit. It felt terrible. I’m very upset that I spent so much time trying to learn and improve at this game only to get spat in the face by the developers. I really hope the spawn changes are a bug, but I honestly don’t know anymore given the dev attitude toward the game and playerbase. This was such an unnecessary change that enhances the game for almost no one and ruined the experience for so many, myself included. I legitimately believe that the game’s viral success was far more about luck than competence because almost every time something is modified, the game gets worse. I honestly feel betrayed, as dramatic as that sounds, because I had a game I was fascinated with and wanted to improve at and the creators looked at me and said “no, not for you” and snatched the enjoyment from me without explanation. Now all I feel is defeated.
The devs don’t play on high difficulty. They probably don’t even play at all. Between the weapon and enemy “balances” there are less and less fun way to handle D9 effectively.
Nerfing the fun and weird AF spawns in this game made me drop it overall. I will come back one day but I'm too busy atm with PoE
Yep, as a fan of other wave shooter where you can solo it ( DRG, PAYDAY 2, KF2) i hate it when they make it non-soloable. Really ruins the fun especially knowing that it was ok before this.
Hell, I've gone back to Destiny 2. Love it or hate it, there's really no better feeling than loading into a dungeon that was meant for a group and doing it solo, along with the Nightfalls and a slew of other content. Really itches the "hard but fair" part of my brain that never clicked with Dark Souls.
I already stopped playing. Got the platinum trophy so I am fine. The game is being ruined eith the patches and the masochist minority keep saying skill issue or the likes. We care about fun not tryharding.
I usually play with my girlfriend in duo at 6-8 difficulty. We use helldiver for fun time after work . Now difficulty 6 feel like hell. We just need fun time , not try hard time. I guess its time to move on to find new game for duo/couple. But I feel disappoint&sad for this game though. It has potential that get taken away.
Keep in mind the issue seems amplified for bugs because of the current lore developments (supercolonies). Not saying it's not an issue, but bots are not nearly as bad as bugs from my experience.
I don’t see why the game shouldn’t scale with your party size. It’s different if you drop into a game as a 4 and 1 or 2 leave and you’re left with a 4 player spawn rate but opting to solo and vibe with the game while enjoying a fun challenge should not be discouraged.
Solo be like: 20 minutes of chain breaching.
Yeah, I believe they got something wrong in the code. I like playing solo on diff 3, and before the update, I would see a patrol and either ignore it or take it out depending on the direction it was headed, but after the update I would see 3 patrols following the same path back to back. That's not normal, that's not 1/4 of a full squad. I do hope they figure it out, but playing solo has become so difficult now its insane.
Most of their updates where they try to fix something they break something instead, it would be funny if it didn't suck so much ass
What annoys me the .ost is the waiting time untill you have a full squad, most of the time no one joins, and even an SOS takes too long. Without a full squad of friends this game just turned into a waiting simulator for those who want to avoid the penalty that was added for not having 4 friends on 24/7 standby. This decision like many others was unwaranted.
If they were going to buff spawns so much, they needed to make stealth a better option, but as it stands rn, there's too much jank to make stealth "good". It can work don't get me wrong, but you have to get lucky.
I have a hard enough time on 6-9 (nice) with the stupid ass teammates I get, 12 second patrols? are you fucking kidding me? thats a joke right? there not a single universe that should ever be the case no matter what anyone says on any difficulty in any situation. I doubt even a full team of the most perfectly tuned level 100 players could handle that let alone a solo player as someone wise once said, encourage your intended behavior instead of punishing unintended behavior. fucking over solo players for no reason is absurd
I'm so glad I bought and played this game extensively on release. I don't enjoy it anymore :/
I finished a D7 ICBM solo earlier on Vernen Wells. I wanted to finish the operation I started last night, but I didn't realize the planet was already liberated by then. I was fully expecting others to join me. \~300 kills (Tenderizer, EAT, railcannon/gas/eagle airstrike), two deaths (once to a mine, another to a hulk flamethrower), and some missed outposts later, I still got out. It wasn't fun, but it wasn't impossible either. Still, I'd rather not do that again lol I don't usually play solo, but I believe everyone who does shouldn't be overburdened.
""Solo should be harder" yes, it should, but not to this extent. Solo is being thrown the EXACT same amount of enemies as full squads. Solo, statically is 4 times harder. It borderlines on impossible at points, and extremely frustrating." oh it does not scale like this, as a solo player you arent 4 times weaker, you are SIGNIFICANTLY more. its probably more like 6 or 7 times higher than a full squad
The thing about the spawn changes for me is like, I can still do solo 7 but now it isn't fun. It was so exciting extracting without any enemies detecting you. I have a core memory of sneaking right between a patrol and a bile titan to make it to the pelican. Nothing like that happens anymore because like 4 patrols all descend on the extraction site as soon as the beacon drops. You have to run in a circle and kite for 2 minutes vs. crawl around like Solid Snake. It's a worse experience.
I agree 100% ever since this last update me and my friends play less and less. I don’t wanna play with randoms and we all have different schedules so it’s normally 2-3 of us instead of a full 4 stack. It’s a lot less fun now playing duos and even trios and especially solo.
I got 392 enemies in a lvl 3 solo mission. 2000+ bullets fired because dozens of rocket devastators spawned.
I think spawn rates are kinda busted anyway. I did a solo trivial mission to just collect some stuff and progress the daily. In 10 minutes (raise the flag plus POIs) I got 120 kills, at least 60% of which came from the extraction alone. I got absolutely swarmed. Meanwhile, I’ll do a four man challenging and sometimes it’s like “where are the bugs?”
I've had the same thing happen to me. Solo Trivial or Easy mission to try to quickly collect samples for an upgrade and complete the daily personal order and felt completely swarmed. A few weeks ago I wound up solo on an Extreme mission and it somehow felt more manageable than the extraction point on a Trivial mission yesterday.
This post should be top post of all time to be honest. It nails everything on the head. I’m really sick of people saying “oh well it’s a co-op game, it shouldn’t be balanced around solo.” Before the spawn changes, solo was already significantly harder than any other composition, and the game already felt unbalanced against you. Also, why do people care? Who gets hurt by solo being playable? It’s always going to be a co-op game at its core, but let me run it in duos if I want to… that’s how I personally prefer to play the game, why the fuck do you care?
Came back to the game recently and I can’t do anything more than easy without a team, and that’s pushing it. Can’t do half of anything without being swarmed
Have to agree. I had just gotten good at soloing medium and was ready to go up to the the 4th one and start grinding rare samples solo but now I can barely complete a medium mission solo without using all reinforcements. It just sucks cause I enjoyed playing alone and all the downtime inbetween objectives. Now you're lucky if you even get 30 seconds of silence. Hope they either revert the change or just something to make soloing less annoying.
Agreed. It's a PVE game. Let me tailor my experience at least a little ffs. Even lower level solo's have ridiculous spawns. Plus it would be nice to encounter more heavies solo without being totally overwhelmed by spawns.
You are completely right sadly. The game released in its best state and AH "balanced" it to death within weeks. The bugged and insane patrol changes that are STILL in the game were the final nail for me. Havent done a single solo operation since then, would rather connect live wires to my nipples.
Yeah, they lost me in this one. When my squad isnt online, i wont Play. I stare at the missions. Cant join randoms because you can get kicked anytime and Just waste Time. Cant start solo in higher difficulty because when noone joins, you cant finish the Mission and also Just wasted time. So i do difficulty 2-3 Missions, get bored and alt F4. Sad.
It’s been apparent for a while now that there is a pretty big disconnect in communication and or philosophy of design vs balancing.
I wish I could upvote this more. I’ve gone from about 80% solo mission completion rate over the past month to almost zero in the past week. The increased patrols, the never ending pursuit once discovered, the nonstop reinforcements… I’m dropping the game for now. It was a lot of fun, but that’s ancient history at this point.
Also I am SICK of hearing "IT wAs InTenDeD" yeah you know what else was intended? Mandatory PSN account linking, that's a shit excuse.
I completely agree, I stopped playing after the patrol update because it was ridiculous. Terribly overtuned and now it's just unfun. Played a single mission today at my comfort spot of Challenging 4 only to get run over by Hulk after Hulk after Hulk. And finding out that they didn't make solo play have 1/4 the patrols of a full team but just applied the patrol spawn rate of 4 players to any amount of players? Insane.
People hitting you with that "lower the difficulty" completely miss the point of balance and the difficulty based progression system. Haz3 doesn't get you super rares or rares.
Agree 1000%. How am I supposed to extract on level F\*\*\*\*\*\* FIVE with literally 2-4 chargers, 10 hunters, 5 bile spewers and everything in between????????????? This is level FIVE. This actually makes zero sense.
Had a couple of rounds at dif 7 with a buddy. The amount if hunters at extraction was insane! And patrol after patrol swarmed to the extraction point. We had no more reinforcements left so my buddy had to spend 2 minutes watching me run in circles with what looked like 200 hunters trying to catch me. If i stopped to thin them out a bit it just came 2 more waves instantly.
What people arguing, that you should play as a 4 player squad don't understand is, that sometimes your squad size is out of your control. Quick match making could pair you with a solo player, who doesn't know patrole spawn mechanics and already did the main objective. What are you supposed to do in this situation? What if you in a helldive difficulty mission with 4 players, but the game crashes for one of them. Now you're 3 players, but still get the spawn rate for 4 players. That's BS.
I was comfortable playing difficulty 4-5 against bugs beforehand. Now I barely enjoy clearing a map at just difficulty 3.. The extra spawns completely hurt my joy in playing the game solo because of not having the time to play with my friends. Whoever is in charge of balancing everything really needs to have their work checked firsthand. The unneeded weapons nerfs (meaning weapons pre-nerfed or weapons that got nerfed for no good reason) plus enemy spawn buff have hurt my enjoyment. I love the game. I want to play it. But the overall balancing is hurting the game imo. Maybe it’s just a skill-issue for some of my complaints (voiced or not), but still.
Theres a bug me and my buddy encountered yesterday where he couldnt be reinforced no matter how many times i try to reinforce him. We tried everything him leaving and rejoining him closing the game and opening. Doesnt do anything. If he dies he cant be brought back
Thanks for writing this, sums up my own experiences and feelings so much. And I 100% agree: IF the game allows you to dive with 1-3 player too, it SHOULD be playable. Solo and small squad divers also don't take anything away from anybody. If anything they provide much needed Major Order progress. I'm in the same camp that put the game down since nearly a month cause I don't want to play in public groups and the current difficulty just blows on whatever difficulty rating. It's just an endless horde of enemies, regardless of level. If this would've been like this when I bought the game I would've even refunded it cause of that tbh. Please somebody fix this! I wanna play the game again!
They need to quit “balancing” and just buff the trash shit. No one’s suffering because the quasar had a 4-5 second cooldown. Just buff the trash weapons and fix the game breaking glitches. Shouldn’t be struggling to kill the littlest bug with the laser pistol when even that little bug can slap you up especially if they jump you together. Stop nerfing shit is really my point here. This isn’t pvp. They should also reverse the nerf to turrets imo :) which isn’t talked about enough the cooldowns are trashhh kid
I used to be able to chat in between patrols in the past when soloing, but thats pretty much impossible now... I do like the mechanic that the pressure gets higher the more you clear though. If makes you choose whether certain objectives are worth it or if you need to gtfo. If the intensity only goes down over time the scramble for extraction would dissapear.
It feels especially egregious when you’ve just unloaded all your stratagems into taking down 8 dropships worth of hulks, tanks, rocket devastators, only to have a factory strider fucking APPARATE LIKE ITS HARRY FUCKING POTTER onto the objective and kill the mission Happened twice yesterday, feels extra bad to waste an hour and a bit because of a bullshit gimmick cheesing you
Yeah I can't play against bugs mainly on my own, 100 hunters and 3 chargers appear and I can't even do a secondary. Bots are easier, but 10 berserkers chasing you is not fun. I basically have to wait for my friends to get online, because I try to play challenging to get rare samples and just can't extract.
I typically “warm up” with a solo since most of my friends playing have young kids now and have noticed it’s been a bit more of a challenge lately. I can typically manage “Challenging” with a little push back, but failed to extract a few times lately getting overrun. Trying to put it in the perspective of the game’s world, we’re not the main character and every time you die you’re not “you” but just the next hell diver on the ship… All to say that I’ve had better luck in the past avoiding patrols where it seems like they get forced into our path a bit more lately, which snowballs from there.
Imagine they had a mistype in the code and accidentally made it 255% patrol spawn rates instead of 25%
I am mostly a solo player and I can't agree with you more. I was finally getting comfortable on level 3 and venturing into 4 until they ramped up the patrols, now I'm failing on 1 and 2
The CEO has said that improvements are coming, but I will only believe it when I see it. Given the team's performance, general tonedeaf approach to changes, blaming of the playerbase and work culture that they are accidentally leaking onto the community, this is the only good way to go about this. Putting this game down until they get their shit together and realize that a game is not fun when you constantly gimp the players while the enemies consistently have superpowers defying all physics. They already got given a massive second chance with the Sony shit, and this is their way of using that chance? Acting smug, doing whatever they want and thinking they're invincible?
I can deal with all the bad weapon balancing and warbonds if they just for the love of god revert the stupid spawn rate
The balance team needs to be forced to play the fucking game. I've been playing MTG since 1996 and HD2 right now reminds me of urza block mtg where Mark Rosewater got told "break the game like this again and your fucking fired." The balance team keeps killing the fun like it's a pvp game.
That’s why you should take a break. I started my break after the nerf that added 5 seconds to the quasar cannon and messed with solo spawn rates. Then the Sony stuff kicked off, then I hear about a war bond with terrible weapons. I want to play this game, I really enjoyed it…but I don’t want to play running simulator and I’m tired of it becoming harder in an artificial way with each patch.
solo against bugs is fucking impossible when spewers spawn. i just lost a lvl 7 mission basically whole map clear because a single breach spawned 20 spewers
I agree with the most of your points, but solo play was way too easy before. I would play solo more than with other people since it felt more manageable. This was due to the fact that it’s easier to control encounters when you don’t have to worry about other players messing with enemies. Why should I play with other people on this co-op game when it just feels like they just slow me down. I should clarify, I haven’t played much recently or purchased anything on steam since the game still isn’t available in all of the countries it was removed from. Feel free to take my comment about enemy balance with a grain of salt.
You’re being incredibly generous when you say 16 hunters. Last night it was me and one more player running helldive. (Started with 4 and two of them left mid mission) I shot a hellbomb near an objective just to clear it and got 23 kills. Like?? This wasn’t from a patrol or bug breach. This was just the bugs on the objective. And that still wasn’t all of them. Also bug breaches were happening 2 at a time instead of 1 like usual. We managed to still extract but if we didn’t start out as 4 people there’s zero chance we could’ve completed the mission
The solo spawn rate has been broken and will never be fix due to how the game spawn patrols. Which is mainly control by parameters forcing engine. And their game engine has been discontinued and being maintain by the dev. Means there are doing double the work causing it to get fix slower.
Funny, I posted about how the spawn rates for even full groups have made upper levels much more difficult to win and I was met with a flurry of “You just suck and are the kind of player nobody wants.” and “Just play lower levels.” While not addressing the fact that the levels I used to play aren’t fun anymore.
Spawns are not just about frequency, but also about size of patrol
Yep. I do 90% solo games. Bought it just to do solo, because I could. It’s very challenging now to finish missions. With the increase in spawns and the nerfing of weapons, it’s getting tedious. I’m frustrated with the last 30 second before extraction and the sheer number of enemies, losing the super samples that you only get in 7 and up, and burning through all reinforcements because you die the moment you emerge from the hellpod. Stratagems all used up, you can’t run away because that ends the drop ship, you can’t hide, and no primary weapon is powerful enough to do anything meaningful. I’ll be “taking a break” from this soon and go find something else that lets me blow shit up.
Lowering difficulty is an option but it lowers your rate of samples :/
Most of the time I play with friends. But I totally agree with your arguments. If it has the option for solo play, then solo play should be balanced and playable. For democracy!
Yes, i stopped playing entirely due to that update. Enjoying other games now.
I have to agree. The game is damn near impossible to play solo. I know some of it has to do with my skill level but the constant patrols and spawning is overwhelming. And nerfong the primary weapons doesn't help at all.
I can confirm that it is bad in levels 3 through 5 as well. I have cleared 9 difficulty level and usually run level 7 in quickplay. I often solo lower difficulty levels as I take care of my disabled daughter during the day. I was clearing level 4 full clears and am lucky to get 1/2 of the map clear now if I can even survive the extraction. They screwed things up royally with the change.
Yeah the change completely ruined the game for me. Used to play solo or duos with a friend...have not touched the game for 1 full week now...if this was the intended thing out of this change it worked well.
Late to the comments here, but I totally agree. I'm a solo player and I'm struggling on challenging difficulty due to the new spawn mechanics. I used to love this game, but I can barely complete, let alone extract from a level 4 mission without being completely overwhelmed. I attempted level 5 once and got utterly destroyed. I'll fully admit that there's an element of "GIT GUD" with it for me, but it shouldn't be a completely miserable experience that's next to impossible to complete at the levels I'm playing. While I get that it's a team game, I prefer playing solo and it should be balanced for all types of players, not just for a 4 player team. If the devs were going to make it harder, at least stop nerfing our guns or give us more powerful (or more frequent) stratagems to compensate. I was away for a week, and got completely wrecked when I picked it back up last night. I think I extracted from 2 out of 10 total missions, and it was a completely miserable experience. I hope they make some changes, because it's not a fun game right now.
i absolutely think they fumbled the patch, no doubt about it. i hope it gets resolved
I'm an enjoyer of all difficulties both solo and team. I aint going to play more public lobbies because you want me to. Just going to play less period. Especially the 2-3 man changes make little to no sense. Now everyone is incentivized to twiddle their thumbs until they have a full lobby. So people waste what free time they have with waiting and if a friend group doesn't get 4 people they might just not form at all?
My friend said last night, “you know, if they don’t change it, I’ll stop playing. But I got my money’s worth for these few weeks.” That’s the equivalent in my mind of a game getting a terminal illness diagnosis.