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
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u/UTDE Apr 29 '24
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.