The reason the railgun was popular was because it was the only effective way to deal with chargers. To nerf that and leave other AT weapons / charger health and armor untouched is really fucking stupid.
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Hard agree.
Arrowhead published a blog post where they went into detail about their design philosophy: https://www.arrowheadgamestudios.com/2024/03/balancing-the-firepower-in-helldivers-2/
I did not like the subtle arrogance behind their rationale here for the changes.
Subtle arrogance? It seems like a completely reasonable and well thought out post. People read way too much into normal posts.
It feels like the game balance team hasn't played the game on the higher difficulties. If your primary weapon isn't supposed to be able to deal with tanks, then your strategems are your only option. But nerfing the railgun without giving us other alternatives makes killing massive amounts of tanks impossible. I doubt the buffs to the flamethrower and laser cannon are going to be enough.
Meh, I disagree. With the "meta" loadout of breaker, shield, and railgun, even helldiver difficulty can be relatively easy as long as you can avoid getting surrounded. If the goal is to always feel like you need to work together and barely make it out alive, these changes make sense. I personally prefer that there isn't one correct way to play the higher difficulties.
I personally prefer that there isn't one correct way to play the higher difficulties.
I agree that there should be many viable ways to at higher difficulties. I just think that nerfing the only way that seems to work without providing alternatives doesn't seem like the way to go about making that happen.
I don't think it's arrogant, I think it's actually really interesting how they talk about the "fantasy" of the game. I get not everyone plays the game for the same reason, but I understand the devs' vision of the game really being about the feel of being a hero against the odds, not having the most effecient loadout or unlocking everything as fast as possible.
The chargers work pretty well with a shot from the recoilless rifle in one of the front legs followed by a magazine of the primary gun in the now exposed leg.
HMG + recoilless also works pretty well, rocket in leg and 1-2 seconds with the HMG and he's gone.
Only downside is the reload time so if you have 2 or more chargers somebody has to kite them while you reload.
Aside from the HMG and recoilless both being support weapons, it’s not really feasible to use the recoilless if there are multiple of them, not to mention ammo concerns
But the HMG is not a support weapon and the railgun is? I don't quite get the point.
We can take down 4 chargers at the same time with this strategy with 2 people with recoilless. More than that and the orbital laser or railcannon have to come out.
Oh I thought you meant the machine gun as in the support weapon machine gun, my bad. Forgot about the emplacement one
Seems like the laser cannon is supposed to sort of fill some of that gap.
I played a few games after the patch and I came to a similar opinion. I don't think the railgun was the real issue. The chargers were the issue and people were using the railgun because it was by far the best option against chargers.
I don't think the railgun needed such a nerf. I think the flamer buff and breaker nerf together would've brought railgun numbers down, because flamer is now crazy good against chargers while also being good against patrols. At least you would've had to choose between the range of the railgun or the crowd control of the flamer. Now I'm just going to be using the flamer, which creates the same issue as before just with a different gun.
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.
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.
The railgun was kinda gross with how much ammo it had and how easily it could deal with chargers in safe mode
Yup, just switch to unsafe mode. It's still great.
Nah, it takes ~4 unsafe shots to strip a charger leg now, so a little over twice as long.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :(
Odd energy.
They also nearly doubled the recoil of the breaker. That's a huge deal.
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.
Oof those extermination missions were always a fun end-cap after doing 30+ minute intense missions. Shame to see them extended.
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.
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.
Why? The changes seem pretty sensible in regards to what was clearly above and below the power curve?
For the railgun specifically, it was about the only actually effective way to deal with the multiple chargers the game likes to throw at you constantly. Now you’re pretty much fucked.
Should have brought other options up. Shifted the curve right rather then left.
Yeah I just made a similar comment. At the higher levels, you have more tank enemies than are practical to deal with using orbitals and airstrikes alone. The railgun was the only thing feasible to deal with wave after wave of tanks. Taking that away without giving alternatives is a major blow to level 7 and above.
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.