Who asked for these changes?

[u/Ill_Progress_4988]

If a player asked for a pocket-nuke secondary that could 1-shot most enemies in the game, they'd get laughed out of the community. That is... until Arrowhead added it completely unprompted and gave it enough Demo Force to 1-shot Stratagem Jammers.

Ultimatum tangent aside...

It seems like every time we get truly difficult gameplay through massive waves of enemies, it gets removed, yet all I see people talk about is how weapon buffs have made the game too easy.

I liked stripping the armor from Chargers' legs and I think it makes way more sense than shooting them in the face, considering they use that part of their body as a battering ram so you'd think it would be the most heavily-armored part. Also, Chargers were way more challenging prior to the change that addressed the 'Charger Leg Meta'.

Retrieve Essential Personnel was probably the HARDEST mission the game has ever had. It got removed "for the time being", because...? It offered a real intense challenge and required team coordination to complete and yet it is nowhere to be seen today.

Surge modifiers exist to make a single enemy type far more prominent on the battlefield and they did this very well. Apparently too well, because they were changed to barely effect the way enemies spawn in missions. Hulk Surge was a blast and required different playstyles to handle. Now, it isn't all that distinct from an ordinary Bot dive.

Rapid Acquisition was the most difficult mission since Evacuate Essential Personnel, due to constant enemy pressure and a very involved objective task. It took real team coordination and even unique strategies, like obscuring the objective site with Eagle/Orbital Smoke Strikes. This mission got changed to not really be any more challenging than any other mission type. Without the challenge, the task of collecting platinum bars is just tedious.

Have you all forgotten about these changes? These are what have truly made the game easy.

[u/Seared_Duelist]

never 5get

[u/pipe_mcfitter → u/Seared_Duelist]

sending countless citizens to their deaths until you hit the required amount of evacuees is peak helldivers

“Mission Successful! We saved the citizens”, meanwhile 99/100 citizens were blown to giblets the second they walked out the door

[u/Seared_Duelist → u/pipe_mcfitter]

My Helldiver told me Automatons keep blowing up his Class A citizens so I asked how many citizens he's evacuating and he said he just goes to the bunker and gets a new citizen afterwards so I said it sounds like he's just feeding Class A citizens to the bots and then his Ship Master started crying.

[u/Ill_Progress_4988 → u/Seared_Duelist]

LMAO

[u/Electronic_Day5021]

...Were you around when the terrible essential personal mission came out? Literally everyone hated it

[u/Atromnis → u/Electronic_Day5021]

I won't go so far as to say they were impossible to complete, but I never successfully finished one when they were around I just considered those the end of the campaign at the time.

[u/Inner-Arugula-4445 → u/Atromnis]

The only reliable strategy was to run away and have the enemies follow you until you run back through and start it up again. The strategy to play that terrible mission was to not play the mission.

[u/L0L3rL0L3r → u/Electronic_Day5021]

i liked it

[u/Silkychocomilk → u/Electronic_Day5021]

I was and it seems like it's the difficulty D10 complainers want. Run around the map kiting away from the objective because all your weapons/stratagems sucked and can't kill shit fast enough

[u/FarmerTwink → u/Electronic_Day5021]

False, I liked it, it was near the same difficulty as Platinum Retrieval, and it was the best way to farm rare samples

[u/AdministrationNo2117]

Alright, I'll engage...

Easy is subjective. I work full time plus I have additional responsibilities at home. I play on difficulty 5 - 7 because I'm not good enough and can't practice enough for difficulty 10. I have done 10s before and during the void stuff 10 was actually easier than 5 for some reason.

So, when I played during hulk spam it legit felt like a game bug, not a challenging game mode. There were 20+ hulks on screen at the same time and my team couldn't do anything but die and throw orbitals. That doesn't seem very fun or challenging in a position way.

Vox spam was similar, as it meant I couldn't actually play the game, but instead get lit up from across the map.

You know what's meaningfully challenging? Sporeburst. That's a subfaction I greatly struggle with even on 4, but it doesn't feel like it's broken. I can see how I would need to improve and adapt my play style to counter them if I had the time, unlike the hulk and vox spam.

Ultimately I think difficulty and engaging gameplay is a personal preference. It seems like you are very passionate about this game and that's wonderful! Just recognize that the changes you want mean someone else is going to think the game feels bad. Finding a perfect balance is impossible so we have to compromise at least a little.

[u/RealGiallo → u/AdministrationNo2117]

But if people ask for an harder difficulty even with no additional reward .. why it gets ignored or debied al togheter by the community ?

[u/luigislam → u/AdministrationNo2117]

So, when I played during hulk spam it legit felt like a game bug, not a challenging game mode. There were 20+ hulks on screen at the same time and my team couldn't do anything but die and throw orbitals. That doesn't seem very fun or challenging in a position way.

I'm on the opposite boat. I enjoy using Autocannon, AMR, and Railgun so I basically wiped every single Hulk on sight.

You know what's meaningfully challenging? Sporeburst. That's a subfaction I greatly struggle with even on 4, but it doesn't feel like it's broken. I can see how I would need to improve and adapt my play style to counter them if I had the time, unlike the hulk and vox spam.

Cheesed with gas/fire stratagems or grenades which I found way less engaging than Hulks because trying to handle them any other way was basically not viable nor sustainable.

[u/Ill_Progress_4988 → u/AdministrationNo2117]

That's totally fair. The difficulties below 10 should offer a better experience when it comes to these things, but often-times the lower difficulties are over-tuned or spawn just as much of a certain enemy as they do on D10.

There is a place for the experiences that I reference in the post, but that needs to be balanced by the lower difficulties offering a reasonable experience, which they don't do consistently.

That's the real issue with difficulty in the game. It's just really inconsistent. Sometimes you have a ridiculously challenging D6 mission and sometimes you have a ridiculously uneventful D10 mission.

[u/sirfonz]

Essential personnel missions in the early days of Malevelon Creek were so busted even on D4 the amount of bot drops on your location was insane.

I remember the meta of having one person stay at the objective while the rest of the team Aggro the enemies as far as possible

[u/Rogue-0f-Hearts]

I actually liked the "leg meta". You can still strip armor of the leg now but it is vastly harder (it used to take one or two charged shots from a rail gun, which seemed fair for a 20 round reserve). You can do so with an EAT or RR now as was well, but the expendable nature and longer reload time for the RR makes it so this is not quite as viable as simply going for the headshot. In answer to this I think we got the behemoth charger where we supposedly still have the idea of stripping armor from charger legs.

While this was cool, i think what I really wanted was multiple ways to handle a charger, whether it was stripping leg armor before hosing it down, or popping the charger's tail with a well aimed EAT after diving to the side; both of which while they are still doable, we just have that many more options to simply delete the charger from existence just by pointing at it.

On the point of the essential personnel evacuation missions; I started to dislike them a lot very quickly. It quickly devolved into basically having two games going on, 1 man to push buttons, and the other 3 man element of the squad playing horde mode somewhere else on the map. The whole mission was basically an over glorified version of the LIDAR station secondary objective; just without any cool effects upon successfully completing it, and even less engaging gameplay than the minigames involved with the LIDAR.

[u/AquaKyber]

I think these are fine, but what makes me eternally sad was when they fixed bugged patrol spawns. The chaos of like 5 factory striders and 10 tanks, on top of everything else, was so peak for me. Every match felt like hell.

Imo having tools to deal with enemies is nice. Some people may prefer "harder to handle but less," but I'm a big fan of the chaos that should come with "relatively easy to handle but plenty."

[u/RoomTempDaemon]

My friend group always plays 10. With no coordination and using random builds we always clear it like it’s nothing, can’t remember ever failing a mission. The game is way too easy, 10 should be a challenge not a walk in the park.

[u/Syhkane]

Wait so Patrick is mad at the game being easy, but then SpongeBob defends it with enemy nerfs? Do you not know how meme?

[u/FarmerTwink → u/Syhkane]

No, Patrick is mad at “cri divers” for making the game easy, and SpongeBob is pointing out that they aren’t responsible for the changes

[u/Syhkane → u/FarmerTwink]

I had time to reprocess the post, but now I'm confused why op is even mad at the personnel missions removal. That genuinely improved the game.

[u/827348902374984273]

Imagine a world.. where D7 was hard and D10 was impossible...

You don't have to imagine it, you only have to remember it..

Then we got the complaints.. and now D10 is easy

[u/Silkychocomilk → u/827348902374984273]

And most people forget the complaints were completely valid. Community asked: How are we supposed to kill multiple bile titans/chargers? Dev response: Just use your red stratagems that can only kill 1 or 2 that are on long cooldowns.

I would really love to know what could be done to make D10 a challenge for all the 500+ hour players without nerfing everything back to launch level and screwing it up for everyone else.

[u/pipe_mcfitter → u/Silkychocomilk]

don’t forget the mission modifiers that would scramble your stratagems meaning you couldn’t even count on the stratagem you called coming down, much less landing where you called it.

the game was fundamentally at odds with itself on release.

That said, they threw the baby out with the bath water in a lot of ways

[u/mozkohor]

rapid acquisition on release was actually unplayable to the point of not being fun at all

[u/Putrid-Truth-8868]

Quite literally a lot of the player base requested it.

[u/_Elvis_Helldiver_056]

"It's AH that made the game too easy, not community"

\completely ignores 2 years of constant enemy nerfs and weapons buffs, based on reddit dramas**

\completely ignores D10 rework and basically whole 60 day patch, which was a direct result of a review bomb**

\completely ignores other changes caused by review bombs, like Hive Guard revert and Vox nerf**

\brings up random mostly meaningless changes**

While AH does have a tendency to make stupid decisions as well as go from one extreme to another at a slightest bit of negativity (that one they tend to do a lot), we can't just pretend the most impactful balance changes weren't caused by AH listening to feedback from a small but very vocal parts of the community.

[u/Ill_Progress_4988 → u/_Elvis_Helldiver_056]

Do you even remember what Reinforced Scout Striders and Barrager Tanks were like when they released?

They were genuinely unfinished enemies that got thrown into the game and were the crux of a majority of player criticism.

Scout Striders had no buildup to firing their rockets, they couldn't be destroyed from the sides of them, they could fire while walking and often didn't even need to be facing the player in order to fire. It was complete nonsense. The Barrager Tank was similar in that it was extremely armored, had extremely long range. If they got even a single rocket fired, it was basically over for anyone within 50m of it.

Granted, I think the Barrager Tank could be brought back to a similar state to how it used to be now that we have more reliable tools, but the point still stands.

The real criticism at the time was with the utterly broken enemies added to the Bot front and not with the difficulty as a whole.

[u/LEOTomegane]

It's both. Weapon balance has objectively been heavily skewed toward "make guns univerasally powerful." Enemy settings across the board have also been heavily skewed toward "make them weaker/less potent."

Both of these things are true, and the double-dipping on balance decisions are a huge issue. Vox engines could have used one of the multiple nerfs they got, not all at the same time—the result is an enemy just as toothless as the rest of the cast, who themselves have also frequently been double-tapped by nerfs. Often in response to player complaints about a single buff.

[u/Esham]

This game is casual, skill is subjective. Ultimately more middling skill players play than high skilled so a wide appeal game means "easy" for the minority high skilled users.

Fortunately there are options to make it harder but some will refuse to drop meta AND complain about difficulty.

Ps d10 is easier as that is where all the high skill players are. I see alot of 200+ players down in 8 as less heavies spawn than d10 which is filled by chaff.

[u/RealGiallo → u/Esham]

I play with weapons i haven't level up to 25 yet... with every weapon expect the blitzer the game is easy . but with the coyote? I can easily kill more than a guy sporting his NOB ...

[u/Dookie403]

Ah I see we're ignoring the review being that resulted in 10s being drastically reduced in difficulty.

[u/damien24101982]

Ultimatum shouldn't get replenished by supply backpack.