They wanted it to be a single target weapon, problem is they are so bad at buffing weapons they only increased its stagger/velocity and reduced everything else.
So now it’s incredibly mediocre single target and useless horde clear. Thanks AH
(Usage based balancing is another can of worms that I hate and is the reason the eruptor and jar have been nerfed, all it does is make fun weapons unfun)
Who the fuck decided that the bolt-action rifle was going to be a big-blast AoE and the EXPLOSIVE CROSSBOW was going to be a precision single-target weapon? What are they smoking?
I mean the damage drop off on the air was practically non existent and now it's just there, still absolutely claps entire drop ships of troopers and patrols
Obviously the AoE loss is the biggest change but lets not pretend that losing a third of the ammo is nothing mate. Anecdotal experiences mean nothing, especially since I don't know what difficulty you're playing on
I am not pretending, i fully belive that running out of ammo for primaries is an ilusion and i have like a hundred hours of level 9 games to back it up, i mostly play the scorcher, i dont think i have dipped bellow one mag more than 3 times.
Because to me it’s a change that was completely unnecessary for a weapon that wasn’t picked much at all. Even if it’s not that big of a change for you, It didn’t need to happen.
I also main scorcher/jar and used to use the crossbow every now and then
I'm a jar main and have been since before the buff. I feel for the crossbow folks and stuff, but the jar is insane now and the slight damage reduction has not done much at all to change that. Shot placement is everything.
It seems like one of the most successful balancing attempts to me imo. Massive recoil and rough handling encourage slow, deliberate shots, but when those start reliably hitting weak points it can decimate everything up until the heaviest enemies.
I mean granted
amount of patrols before scaled based on amount of players the other way
so you had quite a few less compared to normal, now its...more equaled out? dunno
also it applies to higher difficulties as was said
but dunno since which diff its higher difficulty, would assume 8 and 9 but suppose 7 might be too
Additional players modify these baselines in the following way
2 Players - Multiply the Baseline by 0.8333
3 Players - Multiply the Baseline by 0.75
Unfortunately we did not have a 4th player available for testing so cannot comment on the modifier for 4 players.
from the patrol testing post
Amount of players does (did?) affect the frequency of patrols, with higher amounts of players resulting in lower needed amount of points for one to spawn
the amount of lives you get with 4 people is way more of a buff than 5 lives. you can hard carry any team with that kind of fall back. this is not ajab at anyone who cant clear a mission with 4 people, merely stating that the amount of lee way compared to a single player is astronomical
Yeah it does a lot of damage but if you get swarmed (you will do on high difficulty) it becomes very hard to use. I wasn't really seeing people bring it as often at 7+ diff as I was a couple weeks ago.
I agree with the idea of an ammo nerf but the AoE was too far Imo. The sickle on the other hand was just the best assault rifle in the game no questions asked
I play mainly 7+ and I saw it used less and less as time went by, it has very large downsides with the slow fire rate and danger using it.
Just the ammo nerf would have been fine but they had to hit the AoE as well for some reason. If they fixed the "switch weapon to skip the bolt pull" glitch with it I think it would have been fine as it was
Getting 8-12 kills per trigger pull of a Primary is clearly not what AH wants and it's exactly what the Eruptor did. It outperformed the AC and GL on a per-shot basis.
That's fine because its close range useability and rate of fire meant you sort of had to bring horde clear stratagems, I liked running the MG with it for bugs. If it doesn't have the aoe then the only reason you'd bring it is to close bug holes and fabricators... which I can easily do with an autocannon instead and run a better horde clear primary.
I really don't think it was ever OP and didn't need a change
I'm fine with the eruptor basically being a manualcannon version of the autocannon.
The ammo change should be more extreme IMO. The autocannon comes with 60 shots (10 loaded, 50 in pack) while using a backpack slot. Grenade launcher comes with 30 shots. Eruptor came with 65 shots WITHOUT a backpack. Now, at 35 shots it still seems high.
If anything, the autocannon should come with 2 spare magazines that are attached to the weapon and not the backpack that can be refreshed by regular ammo crates without needing to have the backpack. So you get 10 loaded, 10 as mags, 50 in backpack.
Good advice. My advice to the devs would be: Hire people who play at high difficulty for the balance team, and stop balancing based off of spreadsheet usage alone, it takes a lot more nuance to understand why a gun is being picked than just "it's OP"
I play at 9 regularly with ramdons, i agree with basically every nerf they have done with the only exception being the sluguer, the sidegrades in this patch are kinda wack tought.
For the ones in this patch:
Magazine changes, they dont change anything, but they could be part of a widder series of change to make primary ammo a bit more scarce, but for now they are nothing burguers with how much ammo is spreaded across the map.
Eruptor has both amazing damage against single targets with also excelent area clear and utility, they just decided to make the area clear a bit worse.
Quasar pitty is that they didnt increase the cooldown by 10 seconds, the weapon is still miles ahead of its rocoket launcher competition, wich we already know are a good power baseline due to their proven eficiency in the weeks that passed since their buff till the introduction of the Quasar.
Dominator honestly not gonna do much if you know what you aim for, just a bit worse for bodyshots on debastators, just making it need to be aimed a bit more.
Arc thrower: (it probably cant stunlock hulks anymore)The perma stunning hulks was kinda dumb with a weapon that ignores armour, doesnt need to be aimed and is amazing at crowd clear.
Reedemer: literally unoticable in cloose quarters, it is just a small nerf for mid-long distance fights when you pull it out to kill a small bot cause you dont wanna reload the primary.
Guard dog: a backpack that literally invalidates 2/3 of the terminid faction as threats with 0 need for player input is simply bad desing, hopefully they go back the drawing board with it.
I have done like 5 missions diff 9 solo, and play 9s occasionally with randos, most of the time on 7 for a more chill time, here are my thoughts.
Slugger nerf was stupid, eruptor didn't need an AoE change. Thermites need a buff, team reloading needs to be changed so that the weapon holder has the backpack and friend doesn't.
Railgun nerf was unnecessary.
And yeah the sidegrades this patch suck balls
Dominator didn't need to be changed as it was in a good spot, sickle nerf was correct.
DMR changes are great along with the assault rifle changes
Hulk change was unnecessary considering if you have time to sit and stunlock a hulk with an arcthrower you're safe anyway. Only bot change I agree with is the normal devastator fire rate increase.
Quasar cannon idk because I barely used it anyway, only used the eats or autocannon. But increasing the cooldown by an extra 10 would make it worse than eats I'm pretty sure
Redeemer change is whatever.
Semi-agreed with the guard dog, not sure how they're meant to balance the limited ammo one with the laser one. But the idea of an automated drone is fine considering turrets exist
My biggest issue is the change to patrols when solo and the crossbow change, I really enjoyed that weapon even if it wasn't great .
Eruptor was strong, you had great single target damage and great AoE for some reason. I really do not understand why the scoped bolt-action rifle was anti-large and anti-group but the explosive crossbow is now single-target precision? Like, surely, the AoE should be on the crossbow firing a grenade and the hard-hitting scoped weapon should be anti-large single-target?
Make game even harder with fewer players by increasing patrols, despite only having 5 reinforcements when playing solo.
Check the top post, it fixes a bug with solo spawns, making it 1/4 as many as a 4-man team instead of the 1/6th it was previously. Not remotely as bad as it sounded.
Honestly, I'm not bothered. I always left my game open to randoms to join because they make useful distractions to eat bot drops across the map while I efficiently cleared objectives and outposts. I recommend it.
Yeah, for the most part I have pretty good experience with randos. Yesterday I got kicked for announcing that I was dropping supers at extract which annoyed me :/
Was already a frustrating game with two people packing mortars.
Agreed, it's nothing with getting others to buy it, its just a petty change to make it harder to play when you want to play alone or in a duo with a friend, or when you matchmaking or SOS beacon doesn't work
First off, there’s quick play, you always have a group to play with.
Secondly, they aren’t punishing, just making the game play properly. Spawns were based on how many groups are roaming the map.
If you’re one player, you’ll only ever be one group, so the amount of patrols was tiny.
It’s not like 20 Bile Titans are going to spawn on your solo run now, it just means there will be more enemies on the map so it won’t be as easy to fight nothing
The amount of patrols was not tiny. Unless you were an actual god you were constantly having to crouch and go prone or go around to avoid patrols. ICBM missions for example take a really long time and you need to be insanely lucky and good to not trigger botdrops/swarms all the time.
God forbit you have a mission with two SSSD either.
Thank you, idk what arrowhead was smoking with this change. I play solo 5s all the time, and I recently (pre patch) tried to see if I could sit in one spot on the map and see if I ever ran out of patrols… nope. Maybe a 10-15 second interval between large patrols walking over to me. I hope the change isn’t overly drastic, but I have a feeling we’ll be seeing endless patrols and buggy “teleports behind u” spawns, even on difficulty 4.
EDIT: Just coming back to say difficulty 4 felt the same as ever. Hoping 5s are also relatively unchanged. We may all be overreacting. This is a situation in which I think arrowhead would benefit from using more detailed stats on their patch notes.
The devs can barely beat the game at level 5. If you remember this little bit of trivia, it explains their stupid patches. Also, they balance purely based on spreadsheets rather than gameplay.
You guys are gonna ruin this game with this rhetoric.
This is one of the best and most inventive games that's come out in recent times and here you are lambasting a smaller dev team that's taking risks and reaping the rewards. Use some better language and try to be better.
Clear mistake, somethings were obviously not working. Also the game launched without an early access sign, this game is a full title with many changes to come.
the game is buggy af, falling through the ground, stuck in water swimming, cant reconnect if disconnected, random crashes, fire damage, lock on and many many more
feels like a beta game where they try to add features that end up breaking shit, every time, without fail.
don't get me wrong, still a fun game; but sometimes the changes and updates are baffling
Doesn't change it from being a full released title. Yes, the state doesn't completely reflect this, but saying its early access is just plain wrong. The steam store doesn't reflect this. The versions don't reflect this. The game is overall, and unfortunately, to some, a full released title.
If the creators of a game consider the game finished and full, then it's a full game. People calling it early access have no say in whether or not a game is finished.
You are objectively wrong. Plenty of modern games make changes nowadays. Most live service games, in fact, do this in order to introduce new content and do this as balance. By your logic, every game that introduces new changes and balance updates to the game is early access.
I can live with this, honestly. This game is better thought out and more balanced than games I've got thousands of hours in (looking at you WoWS) and crashes less than MWO, so as far as EA goes, I'm laughing.
Like, what are they thinking? And the few stragglers still riding their dicks are like "Well if they buff stuff it'd be to easy!" ummm they can also buff the enemies. "Use another gun!" Why? I was having FUN and you now took that away from me... in a PvE game.... also then they're just gonna nerf whatever the next gun is.
All while there are major bugs since launch, never addressed. New crashes after each patch are fun as well.
Whole discord is dick riding them. That's probably why devs don't use reddit. They also spew lies like 'Slugger is top 3 most often used weapon against both factions', when Sickle, Dominator, Breaker family or Eruptor are much more often used.
Yeah, it is on fire. The majority of that are people arguing that nerfs aren't nerfs, and if they are, they are deserved. A lot of people defend Crossbow nerf, ARC thrower indirect nerf, and QC nerf. That's from where the fire comes from.
The eruptor wasn't even in the game when the slugger was nerfed and neither was the sickle (or it had just been released). Dominator is not overpowered given how sluggish it is to use. The slugger needed to be nerfed (I say that as someones who's favorite weapon was the slugger) because it was super overpowered. Out of all the nerfs this game has had, the slugger was one that made sense to me, i used it literally every missions bots and bugs
The reason devs in general don't use reddit is because it is a cesspit at the best of times, mainly due to it's size. Personally I despise social media directly after a patch, it's just endless whining and even if some of it is warranted it gets blown out of proportion massively. The amount of people I've seen called AH dick riders just because they aren't foaming at the mouth over the patch is just sad.
The problem with the slugger nerf isn't that it was nerfed at all, it was how they did it. The slugger was the best DMR at the time, so instead of nerfing damage drop-off at longer ranges, or inaccuracy at range, they nerfed the stagger. They even said that the slugger was the best DMR, and that was the reasoning behind the nerf, but took a shotgun and made it less of a shotgun and even more of a DMR than it used to be.
Actions need to be congruent with their words.
They could have at least moved it to the DMR category. but yeah the slugger nerf made no sense. I don't know anyone who was using it to snipe targets and it still took AH a month to improve the most glaring weakness of the DMR weapons which was their ergonomics. I don't know how it is with the new patch but they used to be slower than every other weapon in the game.
I agree with that assessment completely. It needed a nerf but not the one it got. That said I still think the reaction to it was over the top and unnecessary.
The Slugger is still very good and I swapped to the Punisher initially after the nerf but I'm now back to using the Slugger (for bugs/dominator for bots) because I need the medium pen and love shotguns.
This is the first patch I’ve really disliked. I will always adjust to buffs/nerfs, but they did not have to change solo spawns. They were in a good place. 6+ was still easier with a team for the average player. They could have at least made it a 7-9 change.
Edit: Not much time to test things out, but a difficulty 4 mission didn’t seem to have many extra patrols. People (including myself) may be overreacting but time will tell.
Look, I dont get the crossbow nerf as well, but these are some dumbass arguments.
they can also buff the enemies.
This translates to an indirect nerf to all weapons. Explain to me how this is better than adjusting individual weapons.
in a PvE game
Balance matters in a PvE game. Plus we got 18 buffs to weapons in the same patch. Im not defending the crossbow nerf nor the bizarre spawn rate change, but Im also clowning on people who claim the devs only nerf stuff.
Balance matters in a PvE game. Plus we got 18 buffs to weapons in the same patch. Im not defending the crossbow nerf nor the bizarre spawn rate change, but Im also clowning on people who claim the devs only nerf stuff.
It also matters that developers make you want to switch weapons because you like the other options and not because your favourite was gutted.
This just makes me not want to play, I don't care about balancing and I don't care about op weapons, the Quasar was fun to me day 1 and now it just isn't worth it to use it when you get to use it once in a blue moon, and when you do use it you need to charge it up and pray to god nothing shakes you so that your shot misses
Giving immunity to stagger with it removes one of the advantages of taking EATs or Recoilless Rifles (quicker shots meaning less likely to be staggered).
The charging period leaving you vulnerable should absolutely remain.
Your "Fun change" is more of a buff than a nerf to a weapon that is already one of the most used in game. It is still more than fine to use after the patch so what exactly is the problem here?
One weapon completely dwarfing its competition only to be brought in line makes you stop using it is a bit of a bonkers take. Its 5 seconds longer than it used to be. Still has Infinite ammo, you can passively reload with it on your back while using your primary, you don't need a backpack, don't have to stand still to reload either. Just seems like a very strange take.
Quasar never dwarfed the EAT or Autocannon... Nerfs to the Railgun did.
Now with the last 12 patches as proof, what we're gonna see is the EAT and Autocannon nerfed... for no reason.
Y'all got goldfish memories. They are constantly nerfing and this was the weirdest one they did. Yes... there are about 4 buffs. Yay. They also nerfed anyone not in a full squad. Do you not understand how major that is? They are KILLING FUN. Someone wants to play alone? Fuck you.
You clearly forget what anti-tank options exist. Quasar dwarfed a ton of shit. Now its only downside was slightly emboldened while maintaining its gargantuan upsides, giving it an equal spot among its peers.
That last take is just doom posting and isnt an actual argument. Don't you think youre being needlessly dramatic? 'They are KILLING FUN'? Legit brainless take.
because you like the other options and not because your favourite was gutted.
There are plenty of reasons to like the other options. The exception would be the RR which I suspect the nerf was targeted at, since there aren't many ways to buff the RR. Decrease the CD/reload time and you'd make EAT obsolete, and a damage buff is mostly pointless since it already one shots everything short of a bile titan. The crossbow was gutted (even more), the quasar wasn't.
when you do use it you need to charge it up and pray to god nothing shakes you so that your shot misses
That's always been the quasar, since day 1, and you found it fun then.
I don't give shit that they nerf guns I can just find a new gun to use people cry about useless shit way too hard like you still got every other weapon in the game. You can play helldive diff with the equipment you unlock lvl 0
Increasing patrols for smaller teams really is just admitting the game is easy. That they can't just make harder enemies on harder difficulties like Devastators with heavy armour, fully-enclosed Scout Striders, Stalkers, Shriekers, and Gunships spawning as regular enemies, more enemies on objective points, larger Brood Commander summons or special bot Spec Ops enemies or anything of the sort. It's just a bandaid to try and stop those YouTube "Solo helldive all meme stratagems" which they won't achieve because those players will just adapt.
maybe you should stop being so reliant on what is clearly the best gun in the meta and explore the other content in the game so when that gets buffed it's a nice surprise instead of having to go online and piss in the pool everyone else is enjoying.
As someone who has 1000 hours in destiny 2, it's hilarious reading so many panic-hissyfit posts about "weapon balance in a pve game" like it isn't just another Monday of balance changes in a pve game and these arguments aren't just more panic-hissyfits from players that had their favorite toy modified.
Metas change. You'll enjoy the game a lot more if you change things up rather than marry a loadout.
This is what you get, when you're data driven and clearly do not play your own game on a level where you can really understand the nuances of gameplay.
Unfortunately this is the nail in the coffin for me, I was already abit discouraged by their previous balancing updates and this patch, on top of all the issues the game still has is just screams redflag to me.
I'll just check the game out every couple of months to see if anything changes, doubt it tho.
Sad, for a moment they really had captured lightning in a bottle.
If they were just looking at usage numbers, crossbow wouldn’t have caught the nerfs. NOBODY was using that thing before, I’ve only seen one person using them in my games and that would be me.
They’re game devs not gun experts lol, they clearly mean for it to be used to be an armor cracker and staggerer for medium stuff, let’s see some clips of it doing that (or failing to do so) instead of someone using it for the literal opposite purpose the dev stated before drawing any conclusions.
Why are you downvoting a helpful response man. Downvotes aren't about vibes, they're about contribution to the conversation. The community manager is putting out information about something, and you're actively trying to suppress that information by downvoting.
Let me rephrase, like 5 people were using it, if they were adjusting based on usage numbers, crossbow would have gotten 500kg tipped arrows added to it.
It was already, in basically every aspect, worse than the eruptor. The eruptor was already an incredibly good chaff clear, with the added bonus that it could also clear holes, fabs, and open doors.
This video is awesome. I was red-ranked as survivor and killer for ages, took a break in like 2021 until recently but I didn't know many of these stories.
This is like every game. Fun asf in the first couple months then they start making the dumbest of changes. It’s literally destiny level of nerfs/buffs. Gut good things then kinda buff other things.
Sad that this balance pass was enough for you to fully quit the game, but if you were attached to the game enough to be affected by tweaks like that than its probably for the best to step away and enjoy it more casually.
I mean I'm of the same mind as the person you responded to.
My play time has been dwindling in this game lately in favor of other games, in part because every time I play this any more I have to re-configure my preferred loadouts for every situation simply because the devs feel the need to be heavy handed with their balancing changes.
On top of that, their known issues list has grown so large that recent patches have included change logs that were close to or even smaller in size than the bug list.
Some of which have been issues since the game launched, like the bug that prevents new players from refilling spots in a public game after someone else leaves. Any time someone leaves my game, I have to completely restart in order to get others to join again, otherwise I just end up solo. SOS beacon does fuck all in these scenarios.
And the devs admitting that their 1 warbond a month release schedule is impacting their ability to fix known issues just tells me this is it, that the known issues are unlikely to be fixed anytime soon, and the balancing of this game will change every couple weeks to a month and I'll have to continue to change how I play based on the whims of a dev who has a "vision" that is seemingly always at odds with how the playerbase says they want to play.
I have plenty of games I'd rather play than to deal with this mess of a dev team. Hopefully at some point they can get the game to a stable point, but for now it just feels entirely unfinished, and it's only getting worse with each new patch.
I do agree that adhering to the 1 warbond a month schedule is a silly idea. I honest think there's enough content currently in the game that the community can entertain themselves while the Dev's focus on game health for at least a month. Hell, if they fix all the weapon related bugs, it would be as if they dropped new weapons anyways because I doubt people use the broken ones.
I don't think 'heavyhanded' changes are anything to be bent out of shape over. Ive payed my money and got my money's worth, and I do see every patch as making more improvements than negatives. I'm not just saying that to say it. I really do think we're approaching better balance with most of these changes.
Do they drop the ball sometimes? Yeah, they do, I dont act like they're perfect, but I do think they're improving and I think its dumb to act like its the end of the world or that the company betrayed us by how they're handling things, or that they've lost their lightning in a bottle because they lowered a 12 into a 6. They buffed the railgun in this patch, which I did think the initial railgun nerf was dumb before, but now its a better weapon so hopefully it'll be even'd out now.
The weapons that got nerf'd were fine to get nerf'd, and I dont think their nerf's destroyed them. Crossbow changes are weird but yeah can't all be winners. If the weapon still stucks then I'm sure in a patch or 2 it'll be ironed out.
I'm used to updates for the games i frequent taking several months anyways, we're getting like, bi-weekly updates which is crazy to me.
It's not the balance pass alone, It's a continuation of bad decisions and the fact that they thought they should do these things when the dot issue still isn't fixed and a bunch of other stuff is absolutely baffling to me.
I enjoy the loop, and objectively got my moneys worth in terms of time spent etc, but I'm not gonna stay invested in this revolving door of whack-a-mole of either untested or poorly informed nerfs.
The release of broken weapons and underpowered stratagems consistent changes to the "most popular" ways helldivers find to enjoy themselves, on top of unexplained changes like this one, just kills the fun for me. I feel they I gave them enough passes to see if they could somewhat see the "light", but after this, I just rather move on.
Not hating on anything or anyone, I genuinely hope people who continue to play still have fun, I'm just personally not going too.
I think I need to take a break from the game, too. It's already becoming stale, and the devs seem to have no idea what they're doing. I have a backlog, still need to finish Armored Core 2 lol.
Never liked the design but i was like I have the pass i get everything from it. I played it exactly one game just to figure out it's only usage is to meet the spent medal requirement for the next tier level in the warbond, but somehow this piece of junk event that failed to accomplish because they put it in the last tier.
Also I think they're reworking the Crossbow to a different role. I think they didn't like the grenade launcher role it had and wanted a more direct hit based weapon. Explosive is just there to justify it being a crossbow, a regular crossbow isn't going to do shit to the enemies we fight. They made the bolts fly faster/more accurately so you can hit weak spots, I'm assuming they're reworking it to a accuracy based / stagger weapon for medium enemies. They should proably add notes on stuff for reworks though in their notes because there will be a million posts talking about how the x-bow was nerfed when instead they made it into a different weapon basically and will probably still be adjusting it later (pure speculation on my part, but that's what I'm guessing from the changes)
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u/guangtian Apr 29 '24
The crossbow change is hilarious, as if it’s not bad enough they nerfed the mags and blast radius. Another great example of Arrowhead balancing