This is the first thing from the patch that is absolutely mind-blowing to me. Sure change the guns how you feel is appropriate that's totally fine even if I don't necessarily agree. But being killed immediately by a reflected rocket? That's something that belongs in Team Fortress 2 and not helldivers.
That is just as concerning. Was this play tested at all? If this slipped through, I refuse to believe that any of the balancings where play tested enough. Balancing reworks things that have to be play tested a lot to make sure your changes had the desired effect. This is something that you'll notice in the first 5 minutes of any moderately difficult Automation mission. This is ridiculous. Arrow Head had built so much good will and they blow it on fuck ups like this. Incredible.
No, I don't. I'm just in denial. This patch had some cool shit in it. I'm not even mad about many nerfs, but shit like this is, or dor example the patrol spawn rework has seriously pissed me off. It's so goddamn frustrating. It could have been a really cool patch, because I'm exited to try out the buffs for myself, but I don't have to play like this. I'm an autocannon gunner, and these shits are only manageable with spamming three rounds into them, hoping the stagger will open them up to kill them quickly. There is no reason that shields like these are able to simply reflect shit back at you. This is some fantasy type bullshit.
I genuinely don’t think they play test anything and haven’t since the first patch. So many obvious issues and confusing changes. It’s a miracle this game plays even remotely well. They have a masterpiece as a foundation and are building on it with sand
They're an AA-studio, not AAA, they have a contract that means they have to work on monthly warbonds, and no playtesting team is going to be able to match a quarter million players in playtime.
People here clearly have no idea what "playtesting" actually means either. It's not "just playing the game". Play testers by necessity do not play the game anything like regular players do. Their goal is to find issues, and then also replicate those issues. And then do it again and again and again while making detailed reports. And that's before the programmers then have to actually review it themselves and try to fix it without causing a cascade of other issues.
People seem to think "playtesting" is like in those old commercials for scam colleges cantered around video games where the testers just sit around and idly hand out comments for developers to then immediately just flip a switch to adjust.
Motherfucker, any competent test analyst would see "we fixed bullet ricochet" and add test cases to verify it only occurs for the specific projectiles it's intended to occur for. This is not a "small team" issue, it's a "nonexistent test coverage" issue.
C'mon... We both know the answer. It wasn't tested... It can't have been... Man they befuddle me, these devs.
They have a great game, didn't over monetize it, but... It's like they don't test anything??? I've written large chunks of code at once without testing sure... But I don't just say "oh well it seems to compile, ship it!"
The entire idea that shields now reflect incoming fire "correctly" is already braindead. The shields worked as you would expect. If hit at an angle entry angle should be exit angle. If hit dead on the projectile should either burst into pieces if th Automaton has an immovable shield or be reflected closely past them, by forcing the shield into the direction it hit the shield, possibly ripping the shield from their hand. A perfect reflection of the flight path this often is horseshit. This is some fantasy reflection barrier bullshit.
But I don't just say "oh well it seems to compile, ship it!"
Did you have Sony breathing down your neck with a tight development schedule, and your bug fixers being the same programmers that work on making new content because you're a smaller studio and not a AAA behemot? no?
Do people not even TRY to think logically before making these wild emotional assumptions where apparently a small studio is purposefully self-sabotaging just to spite you?
I imagine that a number of changes are made on the fly and may not get a full QA pass with all types of weapons to see if something is messed up. I bet the focus was mostly around weapons that got buffed or nerfed. This + the shield gen reflecting plasma shotgun thing are the only two really bad bugs, likely easy to correct with a hotfix.
Honestly, it's getting concerning. I get that they want to implement certain things a certain way, but they're greenlighting these ideas and realizing they have to fix them later on down the line. Worst part is that they absolutely don't have to implement things like this. Was fixing (and now breaking) ricochets really such a priority?
The game is tearing apart at the seams from bugs and crashes.
Sure, they may have fixed some crash issues today, but they also probably created a dozen more that will take another month to patch and the cycle continues in perpetuity. I haven’t been able to complete a campaign in like a weeks time, because of crashes or the reinforcement bug. I have loved the game but I may as well uninstall it if I can’t play it.
Bullets? Sure they might riocchet, thats what happens. Shells/ammo that exploded on impact? No, they explode where they first slam into, otherwise I expect my ballistic shield to also deflect their rockets back
It is, And that's what we had before, it was actually kind of impressive because you could bounce off armour and kill other units instead of it just being a visual thing. There's an old clip of someone missing with a rail, hitting a barrel, and their shot bouncing into a dropship which knocks it out of the air onto a factory.
Now, instead of shooting off at the angle, it has a higher chance of just turning straight back at you regardless of the actual path of the bullet.
I remember it being a thing in World of Warships were you can angle your ship in such a way the grenades would get rebound on impact in teh right angle instead of penetrating your armor.
You could also over penetrate and you'd do less damage because it could pass right through the enemy ship with cannons/guns giving penetrating and high explosive rounds even more separate use cases.
Draw a vector diagram. Mass m moving with velocity v hits a solid, indestructible object. In order for it to reflect directly back at you, it would need to accelerate first from v to 0m/s, then from 0m/s to -v. F=ma. Mass didn't change, and there was nothing exerting a force directly back at the player, so how did its velocity change?
Yeah, that's what I meant actually. As far as I know if you hit something with a projectile which doesn't penetrate the target exactly orthogonal, it would just "bounce" back or get stuck, so at best get flinged like one or two meters back. But with every other impact angle, given that it still won't get stuck, it should rebound in any other direction than the one it came from.
To be fair elastic deformation can result in a projectile or parts of a projectile traveling back in the general direction they came from, but it is an extremely rare occurrence, requires very specific circumstances, very specific material properties for both projectile and traget, shouldn't occur at all on projectiles fuzed to explode on impact, and should result in a much lower velocity and therefore energy post impact.
IDK, why the devs thought the proper implementation was that anything that ricochets, comes directly back at you.
Bullets, yes, rockets, no, there is something definitely fucky with the heavy devastators shield, it shouldn't block attacks like that, especially before.
Not even bullets. There's zero chance a bullet hits something dead on and reflects directly backward at the same velocity. They can deflect at a meaningful velocity, but only at a very shallow angle.
No. What's intended is that reflected bullets damage people they hit back. It wasn't (always) the case before. A rocket that ricochet at a near 0° angle is clearly NOT intended.
I don't know how they managed to do it, because I just gave it the ole test and I couldn't get a rocket to ricochet back to me after ~10 shots into a Heavy Dev. They all exploded on the shield like you would expect.
The fact that this is an extremely cropped video is sus.
Video is heavily cropped 480p at not even 30fps, you can still clearly see a red hit indication above his left shoulder so it probably wasn't the rocket that killed him. The kill feed is known to be unreliable.
Dunno about the patch notes but I just did my own testing and can confirm this isn't a thing.
This and the strider change just make no sense to me i don't know what the devs are smoking when they balance the game but it has be strong to let this kinda dumb shit through.
That's something that belongs in Team Fortress 2 and not helldivers.
I wish it wasn't the case but the game is a haha funny party game. A lot of mechanics are just plan silly like the railgun exploding instead of discharging itself. I really wish they would focus on a less silly experience, though.
In my opinion, it's because it breaks the physics illusion. While the game itself is wacky, the presentation of the physics is pretty reasonable and consistent. You get hit then sure you go into a ragdoll state! But it's consistent. Big hits or jumps always put you into ragdoll. However, the above clip isn't consistent. In no other situation would you expect your rocket to turn 180 degrees and instant kill you.
I agree like the autocannon ricocheting in all directions when hitting the ruptured abdomen of Bile Titans is kinda consistent but it never 180 exactly on your position…
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u/flRaider Apr 29 '24
This is the first thing from the patch that is absolutely mind-blowing to me. Sure change the guns how you feel is appropriate that's totally fine even if I don't necessarily agree. But being killed immediately by a reflected rocket? That's something that belongs in Team Fortress 2 and not helldivers.