They do that to keep people chasing the new primaries from the war bonds.

The cycle is pretty obvious at this point: warbond comes out, weapon is god, weapon gets nerfed, repeat.

People mistaken fun and trivializing.

The game is balanced around being difficult, so that you need your team and stratagems (weapons included) to beat it.

When you get a new overpowered weapon, it feels great because the game is so hard/tedious otherwise. But it is actually an overpowered weapon.

Agreed, but at the same time if feels wrong intuitively for that to do more damage than a direct hit. Feel like there should be a system to let the round actually penetrate a small bit before the shrapnel goes off if you hit the target in a weak spot.

Micro transactions? You mean the super credits you can fairly easily farm without paying a penny of real money extra?

Doesn't seem very "locked" to me...

I fucking hate the "meta" era of online gaming we are in. Everything has to be meta. "You shouldn't use that gun, it deals 0.3 DMG less than the others", "that armor is bad since patch 27383727 3 minutes ago", "how dare you play this champion that has a 2% lower win-rate".

Fuck off, meta is something that became relevant for pro gaming. I don't give a shit about the meta, this is bronze, it literally doesn't matter at the skill level 99% of players are at. People just want to have something to blame when they lose: "of course you won, that weapon is OP/imba/busted".

And it's making its way into pve/coop too now. Every time I launch a new online game I have to learn what people want me to play so that I don't get yelled at. How about you just let me play? So what if my build is not optimal?

I think gaming has made amazing strides, but along the way some people forgot that the main goal is to have fun.

You are describing balance, actually. If all weapons are viable and you're not punished for using one instead of another, it means that they each have their niche or they're balanced well. And the balancing target is the enemy.

It's easier to balance in a pve game because the AI behave predictably and have known stats. Tweaking AI and enemies is a good tool for pve balance, but only as it can allow some mechanics to be viable. Tweaking enemies will do nothing to balance weapons between themselves.

There is another balancing bullet too : making the game so easy that the relative power of weapons between themselves doesn't matter. But it cannot work with HD2 because the game is supposed to be hard.

Every time people are freaked out about a weapon being unusable and trash, i continue using them and i would never know if people weren't crying about it. The only thing i immediately realised was the senator buff. I only play on helldivers difficulty

You're not even wrong tho. It is a co-op game. There's no need for "balance". All they need is to have a reason to consider bringing something other than a single standard loadout.

At the end of the day, the type of player who cares will find the single mathematically best loadout and will just use that, even if they nerf everything into the ground.

What they should focus on is making sure all loadouts have their uses. And perhaps work on matchmaking so the kind of person who plays with randoms won't get kicked from games for not using The Meta; ideally by matching those non-meta-kickers together so the normal people can have fun.

The game already works like this. Automatons and terminids behave extremely differently, and push for very different weapons. And in each faction some enemies will be more easily dealt with with specific weapons.

Two infamous examples are the berzerker bot and the stalker bug. Control weapons (weapons with high stagger) trivialise them. But most people don't use these weapons, and thus those enemies are among the most hated ones by the community.