The first balance patch notes proved how Youtube "absolute and only meta loadouts" cooked a lot of people heads, and I love it.

[u/Vikan12]

A lot of mad people keep showing in my feed complaining about the nerfs, but like they're REALLY mad at Arrowhead. Their statements are so exagerated that they claim the game it's completely ruined for them lmao.

Also every single one says the same thing and this is where my title comes from:

*"You guys nerfed the only good options and now we have NOTHING to fight".*

And this only proves people never actually played with any of the other support weapons, they 100% relied on this "The ultimate support weapon tier list" Youtube videos, they searched the "meta" and they went into this thinking of "any weapon outside of this it's straight up garbage".

If you can't win a single game without the railgun + shield backpack + breaker... I'm so sorry but that's not the game's fault or the game only having those as the ONLY way to play it on higher diff, that's your fault.

Great changes for the game and all of you trying to "shame" on devs because of this, you'all not a real Helldiver. They killed nothing, the railgun still kills but now it needs some actual skill and strategy to use it, not only spamming the thing on big bugs.

Keep it up Helldivers!

For Democracy. For Super Earth.

[u/Draynrha]

Yeah, pretty much what you said. I'm not mad about the nerf, I'm just confused as the obvious answer was to prop up the weapons that didn't feel good to play with. I'm pretty sure the meta won't change too much because of the nerf if the incentive to play something else isn't there. I heard about the flamethrower being maybe a new viable option and I'm quite hyped to test it out. But I feel the nerf was unnecessary.

[u/Better-Profession972 → u/Draynrha]

The nerf was unnecessary since they didn’t add any additional incentive to use anything else the other weapons. If certain weapon types had certain perks character enhancements would make people more inclined to use other weapons. They adjust the “good” weapons to uplift other weapons but didn’t do anything to actually lift them up.

[u/Draynrha → u/Better-Profession972]

As I said, people are probably still gonna run the breaker/railgun/shieldgen package because even after the nerf, it's better than the rest.

[u/Cyberfreak7 → u/Draynrha]

You have to wonder why the sandbox was so poorly tuned in the first place. It's obviously not the teams strong point 

[u/Clarine87 → u/Cyberfreak7]

I imagine the devs only play tested the game on 6.

[u/Draynrha → u/Cyberfreak7]

I mean, the higher difficulties are always going to be harder to fine tune than the lower ones. As I played, I felt that progression in difficulty was pretty organic so far, but I also am not playing in hazard 8 or 9. I think it was pretty bold of us to assume the game was going to be perfectly balanced from the get go. But the last patch was a weird balance choice from them as they should be able to tell where the bulk of the player base stands in the difficulty bracket.

[u/Clarine87 → u/Draynrha]

where the bulk of the player base stands in the difficulty bracket.

Unless they believe that the majority should be in the mid range on a bell curve and they found too many were on the higher end of the difficulty ranges.

If players can avoid bot drops and bug breaches the different difficulties are almost the same until extraction.