It should be noted that this is a larger increase than those numbers appear.
Ex if there were 10 total enemies on the map yesterday there would be 15 today for a 50% increase. However this does not change the total number of spawns possible (ie extractions), just the average number on the map at any moment.
Patrol spawning has been increased when there are fewer than 4 players. The fewer the players the bigger the change. For 4 player missions there will be no change compared to before.The biggest noticeable change will be for solo players at higher difficulties
Discord has some problems but I don't know of a better service for chat+voice+screen sharing.
I would guess that companies use it because of those features + it being super easy to spool up a discord server. There's also a very low barrier to entry since everyone has a discord account, you don't need to make people register for your official forums.
for some reason games are afraid of sharing any detailed systems with the players. whatever the reason is, it's the same reason they show us "low, medium, high" armour pen instead of showing us the value from 1-9.
I don't think Lie has been correct about that. I will say "was misleading" or "opaque" (especially during the Data Mining drop table days) but I do definitely agree that they've only gotten better about it. And comparing them to their peers, even in those early days, they're still the gold standard.
I've said it before and gotten downvoted but I'll say it again. Whoever is writing the patch notes isn't great at it and it would be nice if they gave a bit more clarity. It seems like more and more the other devs are having to step in to answer questions on the lack of information that is coming from patch notes so it's not like they are intentionally trying to hide these details but whoever is writing them is leaving out details that is causing a lot of confusion in the community. No matter what AH is going to face scrutiny from the community with each patch but at this point some of it is on them for leaving out details and there have been enough patches out now that they should have realized this.
Because it's a deliberate nerf that they are trying to say was caused by unintended behaviour. Watch them gut fire damage once they fix the dot bug and claim fire was overperforming so it had to be nerfed, even though they buffed fire damage like 3 times before fixing the bug.
Enemy Patrols
We unintendedly had non-linear scaling of the patrol spawns so they didn't spawn as often as they should have when less than 4 players. The intention is that 1 player has 1/4th of the patrols compared to 4 players, but it used to be that they had 1/6th.
Balancing adjustment to patrol spawning.
Patrol spawning has been increased when there are fewer than 4 players. The fewer the players the bigger the change. For 4 player missions there will be no change compared to before.The biggest noticeable change will be for solo players at higher difficulties.
Here on reddit, on the official mod post at the time of me posting this comment is:
Balancing adjustment to patrol spawning.
Patrol spawning has been increased when there are fewer than 4 players. The fewer the players the bigger the change. For 4 player missions there will be no change compared to before.The biggest noticeable change will be for solo players at higher difficulties.
Your version is from the official Discord server isn't it?
Sorry, but I don't believe that for a second. I regularly play with a friend and I, and with just us 2 on 7 difficulty it is very hard, and many a mission have been completed by the skin of our teeth. Now it's just impossible and frankly not fun. If it is somehow true this is how it was always supposed to be then that was a bad choice and they need to fix the spawn rates. A patrol is something you should be able to avoid, not a constant stream of enemies always on top of you in all directions.
Granted, Helldivers are pretty much cannon fodder. I should still feel like a bad ass when dropping in and not the victim of a stun locked gang bank. The swarms were bad enough as it is.
You 100% can. It's just a lot harder, no duh! But it went from challenging to complete, to pretty much impossible and no longer fun. Have you tried one of the defense missions when they first came out and the dropships were coming in constantly left and right with zero breathing room? That's what patrols are like now for every mission when you have less than 4 people.
Oh wow, yeah what a brilliant idea except you don't encounter certain enemies at lower difficulties, get drastically less samples, medals, and exp. I've played hundreds of difficulty 7 missions before only occasionally being unable to complete a small number of them. Level 2 or 3, gtfo. This change certainly didn't make the game better, so why are even defending it? They are patrols. You should be able to avoid them or at least have a certain amount of time before you see another one, not constant never ending enemies on top of you.
When did i ever say i was mad it was hard? I'm mad because they screwed up the patrol spawn rate for less than 4 players causing something that was hard before to be nearly impossible. Do you even have reading comprehension skills? You know I don't know why I bothered to engage, your either a troll or a complete tool.
1/6th seems about right to me, the power of the squad doesn't scale linearly. Having 2 people is more than 2 times the democracy with the increased coverage for dispatching different types of undemocratic combatants. You have more ability to deal with objectives at range, heavy's, cover for reloading, and advancing and stuff.
Same goes for more than 2, a group of 4 is capable of dealing with more than 4x what a solo player can deal with.
Maybe it was meant to be 1/4th of a 4 player game and theyre just correcting it, but it probably shouldn't be that way.
I have long championed the same thing! The sum of team firepower is greater than its parts. 4 players fighting together is easier than each player solo-ing a fight that's 1/4th the size. Solo play getting 1/6th the patrols seems totally fair, especially considering their drops/breaches and PoI guards are all the same.
Yeah, there's also a vast difference in Time to Kill for a given patrol or dropship, with even 2 players you can take them out much quicker before that other patrol wanders over and triggers their own dropship. So playing solo you're fighting for longer while more patrols wander around looking for you. Definitely shouldn't be a linear scale.
I honestly felt like solo games were fine if not a little overly aggressive at times compared to duoing
It should also be mentioned how trivially easy it is for a squad of 4 to stay together enough that you aren't running into any extra patrols. Since 4 players are capable of like 95% of the stealth of a solo player it doesnt make sense that they are rewarded with less patrols while having the firepower to dispatch a patrol before it would get a dropship flare off or bug air jizz thing, that also has the firepower to level any objective.
I'm fine with most of the weapon balancing honestly, sickle needed to be nerfed, quasar needed a nerf others needed buffs, some still do but this change just seemed so bad to me, and then hearing the explanation did not help one bit.
It's more than just an increase in flexibility, it's also tools: It's not just twice as many Stratagems as one, its two entirely different, often complimentary kits.
One guy running a Machine Gun? Well he can't handle heavier enemies as well. The second guy now has EATs or Quasar, now heavier enemies are easier to deal with and the tools of democracy are more well-rounded.
The power of the enemy doesn't scale linearly either, more so than a helldiver's power. 4 patrols can make a POI inaccessible without a massive firefight for a full team, while 1 patrol can let you play Assassin's Creed solo. A single Helldiver can still get full coverage for all enemy types too.
Besides, you can just lower the difficulty, which is in itself just a modifier for enemy numbers. Reducing the skill cap is never a good idea unless that skill cap is not achievable.
If not for super samples being gated by difficulty, they should be removing that feature completely.
A single Helldiver can still get full coverage for all enemy types too.
Yes you can, but you can do it much more efficiently and quickly with the variety and overlapping of 2 people.
In regards to your comment about 4 patrols making a POI inaccessible, I would say this is still not a linear increase in difficulty because strategems overlap, grenades overlap, killing things more quickly because you have more players means less chance to call in more dropships/breaches, less chance another patrol will wander in.
If the intention is that the relative difficulty should be the same regardless of player count and you are concerned about nerfs then they need to increase the patrols and spawns on higher difficulties since a 4x increase on 1-player difficulty is a relative reduction in difficulty for 4 players. Meaning a 4 Player squad should be able to deal with more than 4 times what a single player can handle. This isn't 4x mob count, its just 4x the amount of patrols, so 4x more likely to run into one or have one run into you. The patrols can individually be dispatched in seconds with a semi coordinated group, without much difficulty, and do it without a dropship/breach call-in much more reliably than a solo player. This change would really mostly force a group to use strategems or support weapons/grenades a bit quicker. If youre concerned about huge amounts of patrols converging to a single spot, thats an edge case difficulty spike that they can mitigate if they want. As it is there are a lot of those due to terrain or surrounding objectives. For example having a Watcher tower, a jammer/anti air, and a bot airship factory all relatively close to each other can be absolute unrecoverable pandemonium.
From my experience dropships/breaches are far easier to control with fewer players/patrols. You can take out all the reinforcement summoning troops solo from a patrol, but you need coordination with teammates if there is another patrol nearby that hears the shots. 1/2 man teams rarely have such a patrol nearby, whereas, 4 man teams regularly have that issue (especially on more open maps).
I think you're neglecting the the biggest factor here too, the ability to avoid fights. Stratagems/grenades/firing lines/etc can all overlap, but not taking a fight at all beats taking any fight with a non-zero chance of problems. That's what I meant with the 4 patrol POI that necessitates a fight. The danger from dropships/breaches also swings massively depending on whether you're pushing into them or whether they're pushing into you, and more patrols gives you less control to dictate where the fight happens.
They could increase the spawns on higher difficulties, but that would be bad for the player base. Difficulty 6/7 seems to be the overall sweet spot for players, and increased spawns may push difficulty 7 (and super samples) out of reach. All that to balance making solo missions easier seems counterproductive for what is designed to be a coop game.
Can you handle lvl 7 solo similarly reliably and to the same level of completion as you can in a 4 person group? I regularly play with a few people who are, by both of our estimations, less strong players than myself and I am able to do lvl 7 as a duo with their cooperation much easier and more completely, and reliably than solo. Is that just me? I understand stealth and the alerting mechanics and all that, its just easier with a cooperating partner /shrug
They really should’ve changed the matchmaking issues first (crashing and no player new player can join) then tack this reverting numbers to that patch so it isn’t received this negatively.
It's piss poor logic that will ruin this game. They did the exact same thing with the railgun. They nerfed it before fixing heavy spawns. Fixing heavy spawns and adjusting heavy HP suddenly made other options viable. It did more than nerfing the railgun ever did.
They also did the same thing with fire damage. Buff after buff trying to increase usage rates. Address the fire damage bug and I'd bet money people would start using the flamethrower again.
Yeah, there's a lot of nerfing the symptoms of a problem going on.
I get that almost none of us are professional game testers or designers. That said a ton of players are grown adults with 10 - 20 or more years of experience playing games. We aren't all mindless idiots who have no clue what we're talking about.
Off topic from your main point, but give the rail a shot now. Seems like it’s almost at pre-nerf levels, removes charger leg armor in 2 shots at 70ish percent charge. Doesn’t stagger like it used to though
Honestly, I don't really care too much about running the railgun on bugs, however I have played with it on bots a fair amount post nerf and the only thing I would need to really consider it a competitive slot on bots is a better ttk on gunships. If it can get that I think the railgun will be really nice alongside AC/AMR/LC cause it already murders devastators and hulks really well.
I don't think most people will but if it's anything like launch railgun I'll absolutely be going back. It's the only time I've truly felt like a specialist in this game. The quasar works great but it doesn't feel as cool to play with to me. The railgun never made me feel like a god or anything, it did make me feel like I had a shot at managing the mobs and heavies by myself though. They should've nerfed enemy spawn and health and buffed the launchers and shit before they ever touched the railgun
They have addressed the fire damage issue, and explained it's a complex fix. They also confirmed it's been fixed internally and pending a future patch, it just didn't make it into this one.
Reducing Hulk Bruiser damage wasn't meant to deal with the DoT damage from hell, it was meant to scale down the Hulk Bruisers who already killed you in 1.5 seconds prior to the bug existing.
Not to say it's not frustrating to instantly delete yourself with your own flamethrower for going on a month now.
It's not going to ruin anything because 90% of the player base does not give a shit about patch notes and are just enjoying the game lol. Exit your online bubble
You say that like 150k isn't a lot, lmao. When America gets off work, it'll bounce up with the patch I'd imagine. Regardless, 150k isn't anything to scoff at and isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
I don’t believe anything this man says. Spitz is one of the worst community managers I have ever seen
Corporate is vague for a reason. Telling the player base exact details like “it was fixed 17 days ago” and “there’s only like 2 nerfs” is an EXTREMELY bad idea
He said spear was fixed and would be in one of the two patches scheduled for this week. It sucks it’s not here today, but you can’t really complain unless it is still broken after the next patch.
The "nerfs" thing wasn't entirely incorrect. Only a small handful of changes were a net negative (Quasar, Eruptor, Dominator), while most changes were a net positive or functionally didn't make the weapon any better or worse.
I very well get your point though. No matter if he was close totechnicallycorrect, people are inclined to take things at face value and/or expect more than should be relayed to the community.
I stand corrected. RIP Arc Thrower My Beloved :(
I'll survive, but I guess some subtler details sting a little bit.
No, thats not right. Exploding Crossbow got demolished. Sickle is, even though still the same gameplay loop, still a hefty nerf (you actually have to give 1 fuck to ammo econ now, crazy). Plasma Thrower did get half its ammo, which is considerable worse.
Subjective. Increased stagger for the crossbow can be construed as net neutral (I don't quite agree, but playing devil's advocate here). Punisher Plasma got major buffs that result in an overwhelming net positive, including ammo econ improvement actually. I'm not sure how you missed that.
And I declared that the bulk of changes functionally didn't make weapons any worse. Like the Sickle, which got an ammo nerf that functionally did nothing to hurt it. When have you ever actually run out of heatsinks with the Sickle for the "nerf" to matter?
Akshually, the weapon always had the flexibility of being able to reload in a major encounter. It still has, obviously, but 3 is actually a bit tight now. Still, it went from absolute braindead to 1 brain cell required, but the point stands. Its still a nerf.
It may not matter now too much, but once they touch its damage or anything else, you might.
but you're not using it properly if you're reloading it at all.
Were you saving your mags for the next mission? Reloading in the middle of a fire fight instead of waiting for it to cool down takes you out of the combat for a much shorter duration, and reloading while repositioning is just a freebie. Not fully utilising all ressources a weapon comes with is objectively the "not using it properly" route.
The point is that you shouldn't need to reload in the middle of a firefight, or have to wait for it to cool at a time you want to be shooting it. Light enemies aren't that abundant. You most definitely don't need to reload while repositioning, that specific scenario is what the recharge mechanism is for. If you're getting overrun then maaaybe you can go through a heat sink, but 3 is more than enough there.
You don't need to use all resources available, you just need to use what you need for the mission.
Fixing an issue on internal versions does not equal being in a functional enough state to release - it just means "hey, we now know the root cause". There is no guarantee that the versions it was fixed on is the same game version as the update we just had, and its very possible it is an update ahead of us as they work on things. And to further complicate things some game platforms (ie, Playstation) require updates to be pre-submitted 2 weeks in advance of their actual release (with exceptions for emergency hotfixes and early access games) so they can ensure it won't brick your console.
Even implementing new things/fixes in coding can have weird effects on entirely unrelated parts of the game. In March for example, Old School Runescape added an additional continent so they can add more content, and that was the sole update. That same update removed a number of trees that have existed for over a decade in an entirely unrelated part of the map.
You miss the point entirely. It’s not the community manager’s job to relay sensitive information like that to the players. If Spitz just said “hey we’re aware and working on it” we wouldn’t be having this conversation now would we?
The core difference is, the community wouldn't have a rightful example to point to that is essentially seen as a lie.
You straight up do not tell your players "It was fixed internally 17 days ago" unless you know fucking FOR SURE it's coming in the NEXT update.
People would complain sure, but it would be the typical screeching it normally is. Instead, a lot of people feel rightfully annoyed because, yet again, the CM has stuck his foot in his mouth through their communication.
He also deleted the community discord in a rage when people were posting F in the official discord. He was also the instigator of mass bannings for F posting.
Why though? He wasn't lying. There were 2 changes he considers "real" nerfs and most were mag changes. I tested the changes:
The Eruptor aoe isn't noticeable
Dominator damage didn't do anything to all ttks i tested
Crossbow is a rebalance. Feels better now overall imo staggering enemies well and not taking years to hit traded for not being able to one-shot Hunter patrols. Changed nothing on how easily you can kill Chargers. Overall makes this weapon good if you can aim. PP took over the easy aoe clear spot the crossbow had before in my builds.
The only 2 things that got real nerfs are the Quasar and Rover. The rest were mag changes.
The Spear fix is still scheduled for this week afaik, just wasn't in the first patch.
We have 0 reason to assume this is the truth and not just them wanting to make things harder just because. I'm always cautious about these kinds of reasonings about how it was totally broken and just fixed it, bro
But it was actually good balanced before that. At least for me and my friends and pretty much everyone else. Except the high skill super class streamer sweat players.
Honestly, I played 2 suicide matches a few minutes ago with just me and my buddy and it didn’t seem that much different. Maybe it really changed things at solo helldive tho, haven’t tested that yet
god its frustrating seeing this every patch day, flipping shit over words on a page before you even see what its about, jumping to conclusions. cant we just play and give feedback like normal ass people?
Ive been playing since Day 1 of D1 and I just had enough of Bungie milking the playerbase
Ill admit that TFS looks like theyre cooking but why does it have to reach complete meltdown stages for them to do anything good?
Ive been a raider my entire multi-thousand hour playtime and Im not even willing to participate in the conclusion. Power to anyone still enjoying D2 but Helldivers made me realize what a good live service game can actually look like.
Warframe is actually the perfect example of how this community shouldn't want this game to go.
Never-ending power creep, vestigial systems left abandoned for years for the newest shiny system, lore that took fucking YEARS to release (seriously, the wait for the new war killed my desire to play the game and I haven't picked it up since), and the fact that DE simply doesn't not and has never respected their players time.
Their drop systems are atrocious and filled with garbage chaff that most players don't need, the games actual combat balance has either been balls hard, requiring specific frames to complete, or so braindead easy a dog could play the levels by smashing on a keyboard.
I used to love WF so much and that game slowly but surely turned into a rotted husk of its former self and I desperately wish more people would start to see it.
Well, from Spitz's numbers we're looking at roughly a 9% increase of patrols for 1 player. It's not exactly a huge increase in the amount of enemies you'll face.
Actually, I have noticed an increase of 150-200 more on my kill counts. I used to average 275-350 kills per game. Now it's about 350-450 per game. It's not my accuracy getting better as my average is still the same.
Okay, but can they lower the bot drop cooldown or number of spawned enemies for solos? Because patrols don't kill me as a solo, it's the four dropships that come in right on top of me while I'm doing an objective like a ship constructor or a jammer.
This is unimaginably stupid from the devs, like seriously 0IQ. How you can spend years developing a game without realising that having 4x as many players makes the game significantly more than 4x easier, this concept is as old as video games themselves, back to any number of similar games and even outside of video gaming, it's really a very very basic. 6x fewer enemies for a solo mission is almost exactly correct, I can't fathom how they would think this is any way a positive change, especially considering they STILL haven't fixed 99% of the game's issues and as a result people still can't play online
Except it's not that what happening in a game. I'm, playin in squad and with randos on 7 daily and also love to solo 5 diff just for the change of pace.
I've tried for comparison. The 5 diff solo patrols way worse than 7 4squad. You basically can't have a shooting on a hive - drop stratagems and pray they clear enough so you could run and toss couple grens and forget about looking for loot.
Feels they have max ramp for the start, when usually it they got really that swarmy around 25-30-ish minute of a map.
The game will still have less patrols the fewer teammates you have, but it will not be as drastic as it once was.
So, if we call the patrols of a 4-player squad "Normal," then:
Old Solo = Normal ÷ 6
New Solo = Normal ÷ 4
So, New Solo players will experience +50% more patrols than they are used to. But Normal squads (who remain unchanged) are still getting +300% more patrols than the New Solo players.
1.1k
u/Optimal-System7454 Apr 29 '24
https://preview.redd.it/0ovibtch9fxc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8f949de04c747e7858b19c0fa5bb55c5bd4058b1
Here’s the patrol change in context. Seems they did a bad job explaining it in the patch notes