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Helldivers 2 gets its first rebalance patch (www.destructoid.com)

submitted 8 months ago by Goronmon@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

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[-] Graphy@lemmy.world 37 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Always pretty lame to see weapon nerfs in pvm games since I couldn’t care less what someone’s abusing to hit their endgame quicker.

I don’t play with randoms so for me the fun of stonger gear is that I can fill the rest of my gear with joke gear. Sometimes my group will rock all mines and mortar sentry to try and blow each other up.

Edit: the railgun did need a nerf tho I mainly mean like the other smaller weapon changes.

[-] Marsupial@quokk.au 32 points 8 months ago

Im fine with it, it means the game is more balanced overall and other builds become equally viable. At the end of the day it gives more choices for players.

[-] Arrixas@lemmy.world 19 points 8 months ago

The railgun was kinda gross with how much ammo it had and how easily it could deal with chargers in safe mode

[-] Tedrow@lemmy.world 10 points 8 months ago

Yup, just switch to unsafe mode. It's still great.

[-] Graphy@lemmy.world 7 points 8 months ago

always fine with balancing things but this just feels like the usual trend all games have these days where they’ll nerf first then a month from now have a list of buffs.

I could see the urgency of nerfing the railgun because I imagine every little gremlin is abusing it rn. It’s always the small nerfs like -3 rounds in the breaker that I roll my eyes at and wished they’d just wait until they roll out the buffs to do those.

I’m not going to see any gameplay changes while I’m running from 2 bile titans plus horde and my breaker plunks 3 less times.

[-] Tedrow@lemmy.world 17 points 8 months ago

I don't see them rolling out major buffs. They are being very careful to avoid power creep. All the people that want Helldives to be a walk in the park are playing the wrong game. Also they can just lower the difficulty and be fine.

[-] Graphy@lemmy.world 8 points 8 months ago

Twenty bucks there’s gonna be a big ol post that gets a lot of attention for adding +1 round to ten different guns a month from now.

I’m not sure where you’re getting the “blank wants blank to be blanker” vibes from but you go off.

I personally love the difficulty and to me this is just Nazi Zombies in a reskin. Where the harder difficulties are higher waves… so you’ve gotta run a train, your guns are really only for panic situations, and sometimes the train catches up to you before you grab your packed gun, so you lose it.

[-] Tedrow@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago

That's wasn't directed at you directly, that's why I said lots of people and not you. I've just seen a lot of people complaining about it.

I generally agree with your take. I just don't think they will do a significant buff to anything they debuffed any time soon. I think they are trying to push the players to be more versatile.

[-] Asafum@feddit.nl 7 points 8 months ago

You can't just lower the difficulty and progress though, mats are difficulty gated and with how absolutely gross and ridiculous the player base got (5 missions in a row getting kicked right at extraction) I only solo. :(

[-] Zahille7@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago

I haven't played the game but damn, that's shitty.

[-] jballs@sh.itjust.works 6 points 8 months ago

They also nearly doubled the recoil of the breaker. That's a huge deal.

[-] Blaidd@lemm.ee 3 points 8 months ago

Nope, not a huge deal at all. Still don't feel any recoil when using the breaker.

[-] Graphy@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Eh, I rarely shoot anything with my breaker besides dumping into a stalker/solo in the way stranglers. On harder difficulties it’s just not worth trying to accurately hit any weak spots on like chargers or anything else that would require precise aiming.

[-] asymmetric@lemmy.ca 30 points 8 months ago

Is there a name for the phenomenon when a company or group has access to all of the metrics for a product or good then makes foolish decisions using that information?

Right now Arrowhead can deflect all criticism of their actions by saying "we made this decision based on the numbers" while ignoring the fact that metrics aren't magic numbers blindly meant to be followed, you are supposed to use them to discover underlying reasons for why those numbers exist in the first place.

This patch is a big L for me and a bad omen for what is to come of this game if the devs are making their decisions like this.

[-] Carighan@lemmy.world 23 points 8 months ago

Why? The changes seem pretty sensible in regards to what was clearly above and below the power curve?

[-] killabeezio@lemm.ee 10 points 8 months ago

Hard agree. Played a 7 today and it felt really bad. Without balancing other weapons to make them viable, they just nerfed the only gun that can do shit.

I love the autocannon gun, but it's useless against bugs and only good against automatons.

I'll be sitting this patch out. It just wasn't fun to play with these changes.

[-] MufinMcFlufin@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I don't know if there's a term for that, but imo Rocket League had the same thing going for years. The game used to always queue a team based on the MMR of the highest ranked team member. People complained they couldn't play the game with their super low level friends in competitive play, so they changed it so it would average the rank between team members.

The reason I always hated this change was because an average bronze player can barely compete with an average silver player, and etc through the ranks. If you play in 2v2, then you can have a bronze and gold player against two silvers and the game thinks it's a fair fight. In reality, the gold player is likely going to run circles around both of the silvers while the bronze player barely needs to do anything except try and interfere with the silver team's defence for it to be no competition at all. I can only imagine the problem would have been even worse in 3v3 matches.

At least before when everyone queued by the highest ranked member's MMR, then you had to be selective about who you brought with to make sure they can carry their weight. After the change, they streamlined the smurfing and boosting problems the game already has.

Tried bringing it up in community discussions but the whole community (especially at the time) wanted to do nothing but circle jerk Psyonix's dicks with that same argument: "well Psyonix has the data and you don't, so how do you know this is a problem? They have the data and they made the change so clearly it must not be a problem"

[-] CluckN@lemmy.world 24 points 8 months ago

Oof those extermination missions were always a fun end-cap after doing 30+ minute intense missions. Shame to see them extended.

[-] jballs@sh.itjust.works 10 points 8 months ago

Yeah, if they were concerned about people spamming those and nothing else, then I wish they'd balance the rewards / mission effort, rather than just extending the mission time.

[-] bitwaba@lemmy.world 5 points 8 months ago

Who gives a shit about people spamming then? They only drop common samples so at best all anyone can get from spamming them is xp, credits, warbonds, and the first tier of ship module upgrades if they grind them.

There's no value in XP after 20, no value in credits past your first ~50k when you have all the strategems you're interested in, warbonds are nice but mostly useless except for the boosters and breaker (which just got nerfed), and the first tier ship modules are just quality of life improvements which everyone should be able to get easily anyways after 20 hrs of play.

[-] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 6 points 8 months ago

Because people spamming those missions aren’t completing operations, which means they don’t contribute to major orders at all, and lower the medal output rate.

[-] Sylvartas@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago

Also IIRC they even contribute to making these major orders harder, because cancelling an operation counts as failing it

[-] bitwaba@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

Then fix the issue with the medal output rate

[-] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

There’s no issue to fix?

[-] CH3DD4R_G0BL1N@sh.itjust.works 13 points 8 months ago

Not gonna lie, I’m a little concerned after this patch. I don’t think it’s entirely unfair to make comparisons to the first game seeing as it’s a sequel (up to you to agree/disagree). But with this patch especially, the philosophy differences between the two are becoming more apparent.

In 1, there was almost no primary that was useless altogether. Certainly no support or AT that was useless. And even at the high levels the armor spam wasn’t as ridiculous and we had more reliable tools to deal with it.

If they want things to be harder, why did they change the reinforce system to be objectively easier? That system change is my single biggest 1>2 gripe.

This after seeing one of the devs back this balance patch by constantly (and imo not so professionally, but I’m a boomer like that I guess) on Discord chide people not happy about the changes to “just go play an idle game” if they want an easy power fantasy cake walk.

Like I said, major concerns for me. The response to this will tell the tale. I never could get into DRG primarily because they seemed to prioritize difficulty balancing way over having fun in combat. Same thing with Deadlink which should have been a fave of mine. I really hope to not see HD2 go that route when I’ve touted HD1 as one of my faves and a contender for best coop game of all time for years now.

[-] Sylvartas@lemmy.world 6 points 8 months ago

And even at the high levels the armor spam wasn’t as ridiculous and we had more reliable tools to deal with it.

We have very different memories of this game. I remember the tanks spam at higher levels was even more egregious than in HD2. However I do agree that the anti amor options were basically all better. Especially in the stratagems department