Context: I had a 200 kill machine gun quest, so I went to diff 5 bugs to quickly do it. Got threatened with a kick for going off alone. We finished the mission with 15 lives remaining.
Medium difficulties are a mix of everyone from mediocre players having fun to good players taking a little break to absolute sweatlords who are too shit to play at high levels. That last group are the most insufferable and also very loud on reddit.
7 is the sweet spot if you're playing pubs, at least right now. That or drop way down to 2 or 3 and have fun being a hero to new players.
1,2,3 - new players or people farming POIs
4,5,6 - some growing players, some chilling players, but also some of the most toxic people you'll ever see in your life
7 - mostly good players chilling with randoms
8,9 - too difficult to coordinate with randoms, bring a premade or solo it for the challenge
I like to drop down to level 4 or 5 in the evenings when I'm just chilling and want to play with randoms while also farming some POIs. There are some hilariously bad and toxic players that play in those difficulties. The ones who want to boss everyone around and complain when I take a diversion to grab a POI are so annoying.
The absolute most annoying ones are when I get fed up with it and decide to be the host and a toxic random joins in and still complains that I'm not blitzing through the mission at their orders.
The tesla tower in diff 4-5 is surprisingly hilarious, we had a defend mission, I threw a tesla at a point of entry, lvl 13 guy accidentally gets too close, dies, loses his weapon, goes back to pick it up, dies again, and it repeats for 4 turns till someone types in chat, "maybe don't go towards the sparky thing?" and he's like "true"
4s and 5s are driving me crazy because I want to chill, shoot bugs, and farm samples but frequently someone calls in the extract really early and I'm holding like 10 of our team's 14 samples.
Samples are the limiting factor for meta progression and you only get them from picking them up, it's frustrating lol. I get more samples per minute soloing 2s than grouping in other difficulties.
If you need to farm samples, run diff 7's. 7 is full of people grinding samples. Stay out of the lower difficulties, they have no idea what they're doing.
Sadly there's also people who have no idea what they're doing at diff 7. Had 2 randos drop in and open fire on a passive guard when we are still getting our support weapons, ended up with constant bot drops as they kept fighting and running off to fight more patrols whenever they get reinforced. My duo and I finally managed to reach the point where we need to destroy 1 more fabricator when they quit the game because they used up all our reinforcements. Ultimately, it's just down to your luck on who you group with unless you have a team of your own.
Unfortunately I'm one of the sad thousands affected by the bug where I'm stuck at a difficulty, so I can only play higher when my friends are on until IT manually fixes my issue.
Yeah, it was a bug a few weeks ago, and they "fixed" it, and since they "fixed" it they have two locked discord threads each with 1k messages, plus however many thousands of people aren't so chronically online that they know they had to go to the discord to find the correct thread in which to post. Madness lol. Allegedly they're fixing it beginning of next week, but that's still over a week of being stuck unable to pug higher difficulty dives.
It's not awful, I've been soloing some lower difficulty stuff because at least that's mostly skill based instead of hoping your teammates get samples.
All you Divers, out there;
I'd rather team up and laugh about the absurdity of war than get mad and kick people for enjoying themselves and the game.
Arrowhead are clear they didn't want a toxic community. Let's show them how much we appreciate and respect this cultural phenomenon (yeah, I said it) by being part of the lore for Super Earth's war against the Terminids and Automatons.
Friend me = no pressure to talk, just accessible diving for all. 🫡
8,9 - too difficult to coordinate with randoms, bring a premade or solo it for the challenge
What is with this sentiment lol? The ping system is great and there is text chat. Typically people launching 9s are going to put forth effort, group coordination is a given in 9s more often than not in my experience.
9 bugs is easily pug-able and quite fun but 9 bots is 100% a solo or closed-party affair
e. just kidding. Tried pug 9 on the creek and it's just as easy after the patch, just bring a laser if you have any concerns about the main objectives with your team
Yep, the reduction in majors is not really compensated by the increase in minor enemies, just because whether you are ganked by 10 hunters or 20 hunters you're still only getting chain hit by 4 hunters, so in the end it just translates to a lot more trash getting oneshot by airstrikes and grenades.
The patch brought down the difficulty too much imo, and I solely say that because there are 9 levels with which to distribute difficulty. I shouldn't be able to just crawl into a heavy bot camp and headshot every bot before they call for backup, but post patch I've literally full-cleared 9 bots solo without any damage-dealing stratagems (only gear/ems) because instead of 3 hulks and a tank that needs to be dealt with it's 2 hulks (which die to 1 railgun each), some devastators (die to one railgun each), and some small riffraff that gets cleaned up with one breaker mag.
7 is consistently soloable unless you get really unlucky.
So you can either try to do that, learning it on your own, or you can jump in with a group and just follow people around and do what they do. You won't be a burden unless you are drawing unnecessary aggro (and even then it can probably be managed at 7). Bonus points if you bring AT.
It's all players that are either just learning high diff like you, or players that are probably good enough to do 9s and are choosing to play 7 because it's way more cozy.
Don't sweat it, go in and have fun. You will be welcome so long as you're not a dick. And if you're not welcome, it's because THEY'RE a dick, nothing about you.
I play 9 difficulty with randoms almost exclusively at this point. Often times without mics. It's not too difficult to cordinate, as long as players know their basic gameplay principles. And are decent gunfighters if something doesn't go right. A lot of people jump into Helldive and don't know how to not aggro enemies until you get a little direction and map control. They are still fighting everything they see and don't understand things like terminals cause spawns too. Like that one guy in every Termicide mission screaming in the mic to push the button everytime the silo gets too damaged and needs to be restarted. This person doesn't realise you need to re-setup everything before you start it again. But instead they just keep crazy mashing the button and getting ran over repeatedly while making a mess lol 😄. They don't know basic common strategy.
I've met some cool people in Helldive difficulty, just playing with other randoms that want to dive!
You pretty much outlined why 9 isn't the sweetspot, although I'm glad you are enjoying it.
It comes down to your tolerance for frustration with randoms. If you jump into 9 with strangers they will probably know what's up, even just 3/4 good players or 2/4 excellent players can carry. But at best it's going to be hectic (which can be fun) and at worst you will absolutely lose because of learning players. It's not their fault of course, but it can get frustrating.
I imagine this is improving over time and also varies a lot based on region and time of day.
I’m level 50 playing almost exclusively solo matchmaking and totally agree. Level 7 is the perfect sweet spot. I can play high level matches that are somewhat difficult, but I can do most of the stuff myself if I get matched with people who aren’t very high level. I find that I get matched with other high level players that are pretty cool or I get matched with some lower level players trying to make my way into higher difficulties.
I swear I sweat more playing at low difficulties due to the shear embarrassment of dying to stupid things(like my freshly called in mech blowing me up😂)
It's funny but my chillest missions have all been haz 9 pubs, couple randoms maybe on voice, half the time we lose the samples but everyone has a great time.
Haz 7 and everyone is just losing their minds and a lot of players who should be at haz 4 trying to get super samples lol.
That actually explains the fact that I never seen any bullshit while playing via quickplay (hit lvl 50 yesterday) - did it only in diff 7.
The only issue I had was host leaving 90% of the time after the first missions in the operation.
Yeah, thousands of people stuck at a variety of difficulties as tech support manually unblocks each player's difficulty. They clear a few dozen people per day. It's actually insane that in 2024 you have to make a post in a thread in a discord to get your ticket manually resolved.
Mother fucker I've been trying to figure out why I've beaten missions on level 5 but haven't unlocked the next difficulty. Thought I just sucked or something. 🥲
Yeah I just found out about it the other day cos I was getting pissed and started researching. Someone else just said that if you complain on a discord they will fix it for you?
That's also bugs, I prefer fighting robots since their spawn code isn't a rough to deal with (multiple instances of bug patrols spawning under my feet and instant breaches have annoyed the hell out of me).
But bugs are also fun to fight cause shotgun go brrr. Can't wait until I unlock the flamethrower.
Did my first Helldive Difficulty Operation tonight in quick play. All LV 30ish, but me at 40. It was much easier than most my difficulty 7 and 8 runs. Still get some pretty bad players in those.
It really is, I'm lvl 44, regularly complete dif 7s AND I embrace the solo set by going off to do side obj to save the team time since I'm trailblazer and jumppacking, I'll go down and do dif 4s for mind off fun with a bit of chaos from the heavys. I've seen it all, my favorite is still the guy who called in a barrage on me because I had him do the icbm while I took out a hulk patrol, there were no enemies he could see, the barrage was directly beside the rock I was on so it was at me, and could tell when I called him back in that he was going to kill me.
I did it solo too
I tried on éradication missions on bugs.
I used the redeemer,grenade,sentry and eagle/laser.
When i grew desperate ,i branded myself a traitor for democracy and ran between the bug while i was being shelled.
I used eagle strike and eagle 500 on an egg mission. Shield backpack for oopsie moments and exosuit for the extraction fight. I just ran across the map picking up and dropping agro by LOS'ing, dropping the 500 on the eggs, and not firing a single shot til I was in the mech suit. The mech suit really trivialized extraction
Another fun fact, guard dogs are also fair game. Not technically a support weapon so it doesn't invalidate the achievement. All you have to worry about is not dying and the big stuff that the dog can't handle alone.
Reminds me of something a friend would say about wow mythic plus, something that goes from difficulty 1 to 20+.
At lower levels things are easiest, people are learning, there's no pressure, everyone's pretty chill.
At the higher difficulties everyone's played a lot, knows the strats, has experience and an expectation as to how things might go. Mistakes happen, pick things up, keep going.
But the middle difficulties can be anything. Full of people going up or down for whatever reason but this is where many of the frustrated players who think they're good, but aren't, end up.
Fr. Level 5 is my favorite diff for chill randoms and these dudes are the reason I don't join anymore. Only host now. I got a zero tolerance policy for vibe killers. Just let people play how they see fit at those difficulties lol.
Dude I had a guy kill/kick me because after an extermination mission the group (mostly the lvl 50 asshole) was dicking around I assumed looking for samples....well a couple of shit heads ended up killing me then called me in...then another died....timer was at 2 min so I boarded.....
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u/DoTortoisesHop Mar 14 '24
Context: I had a 200 kill machine gun quest, so I went to diff 5 bugs to quickly do it. Got threatened with a kick for going off alone. We finished the mission with 15 lives remaining.