Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2Wj-qnkN1k
And yeah, I did notice the Commando's missiles do follow some sort of logic as to where they'll land. They don't seem to land on top of my cursor, though. I haven't experimented TOO much, but they seem to drop "below" my cursor by a fair distance, though their drop location is still predictable.
The long and short of it, if I understand this correctly, is the distance from which I fire is what determines whether I score a kill or a bounce, with shots from the front requiring me to be closer than shots from the back. Cool, thank you! I wonder if there's a wiki which can give me damage and armour values, because the in-game stats aren't very precise.
Yeah, like in the case of a Warlord[helldivers.gamepedia.com], you'll do more damage if you hit him right in the sternum with an EAT-17[helldivers.gamepedia.com] as opposed to just winging him. This applies to other enemies too.
I also don't play with a keyboard or mouse, so I couldn't tell you where the cursor lines up or anything like that; I play with a controller.
The missiles sort of have a will of their own, in a manner of speaking, and you work with them. To use the words of Iroh from The Last Airbender when he's teaching Zuko how to wield lightning, "You do not command it, you are simply its humble guide." Same kinda applies here. You have to learn to position yourself so that the missile's most convenient target just so happens to be the target you want to hit.
For example, if there's a group of Butchers[helldivers.gamepedia.com] and there's a Warlord all the way in the back that you want to hit, you can angle away from the group so the missiles have to curve back in to hit something—making the Warlord their only option.
Yep, pretty much. From the front is easy; for everything else, however, that's where all that practice comes in. It'll definitely take some time getting used to all the different angles and distances to approach it from.
Happy to help. :)
You may already be aware, but when using most weapons, like say the RL-112[helldivers.gamepedia.com] to blast an IFV for example, hitting it dead on from the front or side will have a greater impact than hitting it at a 45° angle. This applies to any enemy, but is crucial when it comes to IFVs.
Something you may not know is that your vehicles also follows this structure, and you can use it to your advantage. For example, if you're driving an HAV[helldivers.gamepedia.com] and are being shot at by an IFV, you can tilt your vehicle slightly to deflect and take significantly less damage from the blasts.
IFVs do have one difference, and that is that the back doors are its weakest point. You'll kill it in one hit with from an EAT-17 or RL-112 with an otherwise "bad" angle if you hit the back doors.
With all of that being said, the Commando doesn't follow those rules, so knowing values won't help you there (I don't think they're available anywhere either). It always needs to hit the back half of an IFV, and you'll always need two missile hits in solo play (the first will cripple, the second will kill). When playing online (multiplayer), net code gets involved and that's how come sometimes you can kill IFVs with one missile. I suppose you could think of it as a glitch of sorts.
If you want to see some gameplay of it, I have quite a few videos where I use it. I'll leave a few here in case you're ever interested. I definitely have more if you want to find them, but here's three of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SH6xNp5Ufo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeYYedO9Eh4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bnu7PziJ70
The only logic to mastering the Commando's correct sweetspots from my experince is to simply spend about... 500ish hours with it I guess?...
Yeah, I have noticed shots straight up bouncing (and flying past my team-mates' heads) in some cases, but I'm not entirely sure how the system works. I suspect there's at least a simplified system for measuring angle of impact, but I'm not sure how that corresponds to different enemy types.
The game keeps telling me to aim for the centre of enemies, so I have to assume that most infantry have a circular (well, cyllindrical) hitbox with no bias towards any orientation. The easiest way to get a penetrating hit against a curved surface is to shoot it straight down the diameter, which is always in the "middle" on a circle from any perspective. Cyborg hulks throw a monkey wrench in this since they have that shield, but I suspect the shield is modelled as a simple 2D shape with different armour values, either impenetrable or requiring very high penetration values. That checks out.
Vehicles is where I start to be confused, and why I bring up Company of Heroes. The vehicles in that game have a hit box split in half. Any shots which land on the front half are counted as having hit the "front armour" regardless of angle, any shots hitting the back half register as "rear armour hits" with a little in-game pop-up. It seems to me like IFVs at least, possibly other vehicles that I haven't seen before (and probably player vehicles as well) have this to a certain extent. Hitting the front half of a vehicle with the Commando is ineffective, but hitting the rear half is effective regardless of impact angle.
Now, my suspicion here - and this is purely suspicion - is that this only applies to AoE (explosives). The Commando is not a projectile weapon like the Recoilless Rifle, in the sense that it doesn't calculate impact angle at all. Rather, it works like the Mortar and the various artillery Strategems. That is to say, it uses a different system for armour penetration, making use of a different set of hitboxes entirely.
What I don't know is how armour penetration is handled for vehicles vs. conventional AP weapons - Recoilless Rifle, AT Walker, AT Turret, etc. What I feel is safe to assume is that the IFV has a rectangular hit box, with different sides of it given different armour values and damage (along with penetration) is calculated between shot trajectory and the orientation of the surface impaced. Given various tips I've seen in the game, I would suspect that the front, sides and rear surfaces are given different armour values, with the toughest being at the front. As a result, a Commando shot from the "side" is just as bad as one from the front and rear if it lands on the fromt half of the vehicle.
Most of the above is something of an educated guess based on first hand experience and inductive reasoning. There aren't a lot of "good" ways to handle armour penetration in video games, especially 2.5D ones with planar aiming. Unless the developers went out of their way to code something stupid (which I assume they didn't), it's likely going to be some flavour of simple trigonometry between vectors and shapes, and that just seems like the simplest way to handle it.
There's also the question of whether there's only one type of "armour" responsible for both penetration and damage reduction, or if there are two separate stats. I'm willing to assume there's one, however, for the following reason: Weapon damage drops as my aim drifts from a target's middle, eventually turning into riccochets. This tells me that there is no "penetration" stat, just a damage resistance stat. Once damage falls below a certain threshold (likely 0), a hit turns into a bounce. How armour piercing is handled I can only speculate, but I'd assume by modifying the direct damage shots do to targers in some fashion, obviously bounded by the weapon's max damage. Buffing weapon damage against armour targets but capping it at max damage would be a cheap way to ensure that penetrating weapons' damage doesn't start falling off until a particular angle of offset.
I'm straying into complete guesswork here, though. To sum up, my suspicion is that angle of impact only matters for direct fire weapons, and a different system is used for indirect fire weapons.
I'm going to need more experience with it before I can speak with any confidence, but... It seems like when targeting nothing, the Commando missiles will drop "below" my mouse cursor, as though my cursor were elevated at significant distance. They definitely don't drop where I aim them, but I believe the offset is predictable. Considering their tracing works off of where they would have landed had no targets existed, that's worth knowing.
Right, armour angling. This does support my suspicion that vehicles use a rectangular hitbox where most everything else uses a spherical one. The question is how armour is distributed across the box. Do they have different armour values for front/sides/rear or do they only have front and rear armour. Considering the game's tips told me that tanks are more vulnerable from the side than from the front, I'm willing to assume they have separate side armour. Now the only question is what their armour values are.
The reason I ask is an effect that World of Tanks would call "sidescraping" - exposing only the highly-angled side of your vehicle to enemy fire. It works in World of Tanks because side armour is relatively tough even in comparison to frontal armour, making it impenetrable even at flat angles. It DOESN'T work in Armoured Warfare, however, because side armour is MASSIVELY thinner than frontal armour and can be shot through even at shallow angles. In a lot of cases, it's not worth angling your frontal armour for the extra toughness if that exposes your side armour. Then again, I doubt the AI in Helldivers is smart enough to target anything more than centre-mass of your vehicle, so that may be a moot point.
In either case, thank you kindly for the help and the conversation. Game mechanics are something of a hobby of mine, and Helldivers seems to have both pretty clever and VERY badly-communicated mechanics. It makes the game interesting to play but frustrating to try and "understand."
I read the whole thing. It was very interesting, but I have to say, your guess is as good as mine on a lot of that, if not better. I'm just very acquainted with the feel of the game as a whole, especially the Commando specifically, and have a lot of hours in both; but as far as solid numbers and all that, yeah that beats me.
You're right about the Commando and the angle. It doesn't care about that, but it does still care about hitting center or not (e.g. the "hitting sternum vs getting winged" example). you can easily end up spending a missile or two more than necessary if the first ones didn't connect well enough.
Another thing, Commando doesn't care about your cursor beyond the fact of which of the 360 degrees you're facing. As far as distance is concerned, the cursor isn't going to persuade anything. I'll even be happy to be proven wrong on that, but I can say that with almost absolute certainty. Besides, the Commando was made long before the game even came to PC and it wouldn't make much sense to change that.
In general, "tanks" as well as "anti-tank" have always been a strange subjects in this game. For example, Warlords are not tanks. They're just heavily armored, and all it takes to damage them is any single attack strong enough to get through its armor. All sniper rifles, P-2 'Gunslinger', and grenades can all damage Warlords. So can Heavy Strafing Run and I think even some fire (I know Warlords can be set on fire, but as far as fire doing damage I only think it's the case). IFVs are different. They're tanks as much as anything could be a "tank" in this game. You either bring anti-tank or they're not going down.
Oddly enough, even the SeigeMech is not really a "tank". Grenades and Rail Gun can both damage it. Granted, the damage is so minute that you won't even see the health bar move for quite a while, but if you ever get its health down so much that there's literally no health left in its bar but it's still alive, you can finish it off with Rail Gun shots or grenade blasts. So it would seem that while it does have armor, it also just has a lot of health.
IFVs and perhaps all vehicles do seem to have rectangle hitboxes though, and they can give you annoying results sometimes when you get "ran over" by a corner when you know you cleared the model.
Oh, you're welcome, and thank you as well. I enjoyed this. I don't think I can be of much more help though. You seem to be going a bit beyond my knowledge. haha
While there isn't a very extensive write-up on armour mechanics, it does seem like I was right to some extent. Weapon damage falls as the impact angle against the target grows shallower, but the dropoff is additive, rather than multiplicative. I figured armour would resist damage by a percentage, whereas instead it just subtracts from the damage of the weapon on impact. In other words, the armour damage subtraction scales with impact angle by some formula we don't know. I couldn't really make a reasonable guess as to what that might be, but I'd guess it's a weighted sine function.
Very little in the game appears to have meaningful amounts of armour. Edge cases aside (like shooting a closed Obelisk or shooting a Hulk in the back), it's really just three big bugs (Impaler, Tank, Behemoth) and the two big vehicles (IFV and Siege Mech). Of those, the IFV has the most armour at 2000-2250, the bugs all have 1000-1500 and the Siege Mech actually has 170-1500. That last one is weird, because it looks like you can penetrate it with fairly light AP, but only if you hit it dead-centre. With the massive range between minimum and maximum armour, protection would increase drastically for shots even a little off-centre. I guess it's done this way to accommodate very precise sniping and beam weapons? I don't know.
We don't know weapon damage numbers, but in the guide above darisnova did a lot of manual testing. He lists a Liberator as taking 4 shots to kill a Hunter. As the Hunter has 400 health, no constitution and no armour, that would but the Liberator at 100 damage. He also lists 6 shots to kill a Stalker, which has 50 health, 450 constitution and 0-60 armour. What that means is he should have been able to kill it in 5 PERFECT hits with 0 degree deflection. Even a MINOR deviation of any kind would drop the damage dealth a hair under the 500 necessary, requiring a sixth shot. As darisnova's tests were practical, it's safe to assume the precision needed to pull of 5 shots was simply not possible.
The long and short of it is the numbers seem to work out, and this makes me happy. I'd love to see this Wiki page updated with more info, though, because this is fascinating.
I think that can be chalked up to damage dropoff with distance. It's a semi-safe guess to assume that Helldivers has either linear or quadratic dropoff of damage based on the distance between the centre of an explosion and the impacted target. It could be using something a lot simpler like what Overwatch does (that is, have a series of discrete damage valies set for different minimum ranges with no interpolation between them), so I can't really be sure. Point is, though, that I'd assume the number of Commando shots needed to kill an IFV with damaging impacts depends on how close they actually land to the vehicle's hitbox or the centre thereof. That much makes sense to me.
Good point. The video you linked me to did mention that, but I guess I forgot. The Console (and I presume PC with a controller) versions of the game don't HAVE a cursor to begin with, near as I can tell - only direction. It's why the game puts so much emphasis on having a laser sight when I'm perfectly capable of aiming with precising by just putting my reticle over the enemy. It wouldn't surprise me, then, if the unguided commando completely disrespected my cursor and respected only my character's direction - as you point out. I guess it uses a different mechanic to what's used for throwables and indirect fire weapons, as the thing is meant to home rather than be aimed.
That's definitely worth pointing out again, thank you.
I have a sneaking suspicion there's no such thing as "Armour-Piercing" and "Anti-Tank" weapons. Rather, there are weapons which exceed certain armour-negation thresholds. The Wiki article I got linked to mentions that the "Armour-Piercing" stat causes weapons which have it to ignore 15 armour. That would be enough to roughly halve the armour damage reduction for most "lighter" units, though how much that helps is debatable. It might reduce your shots-to-kill with lighter weapons by 1, as with the Junter example above, but the difference won't be significant. It doesn't seem like it'll have much of an impact on heavier units as thoe have over 100 armour in a lot of cases. I would personally have expected AP weapons to negate up to 100 armour, which would negate the effects of armour on most units at most angles of impact, up to proper "heavy" and "armoured" units.
Without any idea of how much damage actual anti-tank weapons do, however, I don't have a guess as to what the "Anti-Tank" stat does, though. Considering the Commando can splatter most units I've fired it at in one hit, it has to deal well over 500 damage, but it would also have to deal less than 1000 or else it would be able to penetrate the back of an IFV, which we know it can't... I think? Can it do that without the AP upgrade? That also brings up the question of how indrect fire weapons and explosives deal with armour. Since they don't impact the target directly in most cases and fall down at awkward angles, no angle-of-impact calculation can be done. At that point, does armour resist at its smallest or largest amount? Or does it scale based on distance somehow?
Without more stats, I can't really speculate here, but my guess is the AP and AT upgrades simply negate some armour on hit. They don't have special flags of their own. There's nothing about the IFV which makes it a "tank" other than just having a really high armour stat.
Eh, I don't know if I'm going beyond your knowledge. Most of what I'm doing here is fairly baseless speculation from past experience with other games and just stuff which is easy to model mathematically :) I know this sort of stuff isn't necessary to know in order to play the game, but it does help to understand what's going on under the hood. Sometimes, things just have a weird implementation which seems badly unintuitive at first, but is perfectly logical once you know what's actually going on. The Commando is just such an example.
Oh yeah, they're still working on it. That's not my area, but I'm one of the guys that works on the wiki and happen to know the others (I also know darisnova). So yeah, I can tell you Sieyl (the guy finding those values for the wiki) is definitely a very reliable source. He pretty much knows this game inside and out from a technical/science standpoint. They've been hard at it the last few days, including yesterday, so there could be more updates in the near future (don't take that to the bank though--I don't want to speak for anyone). Honestly, you might make a good addition as a contributor if you're interested.
Well, I know I already touched on this a little bit already, but at least in the case of IFVs, they always take 2 shots to kill in solo play, no matter what, regardless of proximity. No more, no less (assuming we're not talking about non-damaging shots, like if you hit the front). The only way it's done in 1 shot is online where shots are sometimes doubled, but every weapon does this online, not just Commando. Commando and the sniper rifles might be the easiest to notice though.
Brood Commanders and Hulks might be good to test on though.
Haha, yeah I've thought of that; I just don't know how one could go about testing it.
I can't remember if you already said this or not, but maybe there's two layers of armor: "regular armor" and "tank armor" and things that are "anti-tank" just straight up bypass the "tank" level armor and just go in and deal with the health and "regular armor". Then enemies like Butchers just have "regular armor" no layer of "tank armor".
Even Butchers confuse me too. For a long time I used to think that Butchers had no armor--just a lot of health and could soak up a lot of hits. Until one day I read the in-game encyclopedia and noticed they're listed as having "heavy" armor (or "high"? I don't remember the word choice). So I guess Ninja is relatively good against them?
As far as Commando being able to damage an IFV without the AP upgrade, it's been quite a while since I played with an un-upgraded Commando, but I don't think so.
I have no solid evidence to back this up, but just going off of my "feel" for the game, I say with a fair degree of confidence that damage doesn't fall off with distance. Definitely not Commando, but I don't think it does with the RL-112 or primaries either. At least not in any meaningful way. I don't remember any situations where the enemy was far away and my aim was spot on but the damage dealt seemed less than if it were point blank or something.
This all sounds like stuff Sieyl would know and has probably talked about before at some point. I bet he'd have some good input if he doesn't already just straight up know the answer.
I doubt those folks could use my help. My professional background is in applied mathematics and programming so I'm not COMPLETELY talking out of my ass, but I don't think there's anything I can do to help with data gathering. I'm sure they have far smarter folks, possibly with access to internal settings :)
I stand corrected. It's entirely possible the developers might not have bothered with damage dropoff for AoE at all, in which case any explosives would do full damage to all enemies in the target areal. Honestly, in a game this hectic with controls this imprecise, that's probably the right call, assuming my guess is right. Interesting. The Commando's hard to test with anyway, since it's so difficult to aim with any amount of precision, but grenades and such might be testable.
That still leaves a few questions, though. How do explosives determine which part of a vehicle got "hit?" On direct impact that's easy, but what about when dealing splash damage? If a mortar round fell near the side of an IFV, did it hit the front or the rear? Could be based on distance, but again - distance from what? There's no point of impact against the vehicle, so what do you run range calculations against? Hitbox centre? Nearest impact?
Additionally, how is "armour penetration" handled? Say an AoE hit an IFV. By how much is the AoE damage reduced? Maximum armour? Minimum armour? Some armour value in-between? If the game doesn't do radial damage falloff, I doubt this choice is going to depend on distance from the target, but I don't really have a guess beyond that.
Hell, I don't even know if the Commando follows the same mechanics as the Mortar and the various Airstrikes, or if it has an exotic mechanic of its own :)
My initial guess was that "Armour" and "Tank" were simply flags on either an entire unit or at least the "armoured" part of its hitbox. Because of how simple the controls are, I originally assumed that the underlying mechanics would be equally as simple. From what I've seen on the Wiki, however - particularly the explanation about AP and the armour numbers - I'm inclined to think otherwise. I simply see nothing in the numbers to suggest that AP and AT are unique mechanics of their own. It seems to me like the only "tanks" in the game simply have abnormally high armour values.
Based on the armour values and AP description in the Wiki, I'm inclined to believe the developers went with a more flexible system of playing around with armour numbers and simply "labelling" certain ranges as AP or AT. Seems to me like "lightly" armoured enemies have minimum armour in the 15-25 range. If the AP stat reduces effective armour by 15, that would produce the "more damage" the game claims it to, while doing very little to more armoured enemies whose minimum armour is closer to 1000. You need either anti-tank weapons which reduce effective armour or just REALLY powerful weapons to hurt those. Among those enemies, the IFV stands apart as having double that amount.
This is actually a pretty precarious way to balance your game, since it doesn't leave you a lot of wiggle room for weapon damage and enemy health. You can't set weapon damage too high or they'll start penetrating armour when you didn't mean them to. Consequently, you can't set enemy health too high else they become annoying bullet sponges. Now, the game doesn't really have a very strong RPG element and its critters don't really scale, so it should be possible to pick the correct ratios and just lock down the numbers. It's still an interesting approach that I'd love to know more about though.
Systems design challenges like these are always fun to dig into. The ways in which individual developers choose to solve common problems can often be as exciting as the game itself.
Judging by the Wiki, you were right in your original assertion. They have tons and tons of HP - more than anything else short of bosses and three times that of the IFV, with comparatively very little armour. They have 25 armour, which is high enough to mess with low-damage automatic weapons, but low enough that AP and just high-damage weapons shouldn't be affected much. Butchers also have the same min and max armour, meaning it shouldn't matter what angle you hit them at.
See, this sort of thing is why I want to know the underlying mechanics. Is this enemy I'm fighting meant to be heavily armoured and merit armour-penetrating weapons, or am I better off grabbing high-DPS weapons, instead? What's the design meant to emulate? I've not fought Butchers yet, but seeing their character model leads me to suspect they were intended to be unarmoured bags of health - "fat zombies," essentially. If the game claims that they have "High" armour, this tells me that the in-game tags are written by hand and decided by lore, rather than derived from the underlying systems. They're there to give players a basic idea of what to expect, rather than communicating to players how the game works.
I'm inclined to accept this on faith. Considering that even WITH the Antit Tank trait, the Commando can only damage the IFV's rear armour (meaning its damage + armour negation is between 1000 and 2000, roughly), I'm willing to accept that it's unable to damage the IFV in particular. That's a bit of an edge case, though, as nothing else in the game has even remotely that much armour outside of deliberate "don't shoot this" items like a Hulk's shield or an Obelisk's shell.
Let me give you a roundabout example. The MMO City of Heroes had a "Controller" class who got "pets." These pets were initially temporary, lasting for only a few minutes. A later change in development made them "permanent," but they weren't actually permanent. Instead, they got given a duration of 99 999 seconds, which comes up to about 27 hours. If you happened to stay logged in for 28 hours and never changed instances, your pets would still despawn, but that wasn't very likely to happen.
I wouldn't, therefore, be surprised to know that for instance the Recoilless Rifle's final upgrade - the one which guarantees a penetration regardless of angle - gave it something like 9999 or Integer.MAX_VALUE armour strength reduction, or something deliberately too high to ever matter, but high enough to be more than any armour value likely to pop up in the game.
Assuming the Commando isn't able to penetrate the IFV's back without the upgrade, is able to penetrate the IFV's back with the upgrade but is never able to penetrate the front actually gives us a ballpark guess of how hard it hits and what "Anti-Tank" does. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on that page for more info, though :)
---
Completely sideways of the mechanics discussion, I finally found an excuse for why I keep using the Commando. A friend of mine's been pressing me for a reason as to why I don't just use the Recoilless rifle, because that's a lot more powerful and reliable. My answer is simply "ammo." The Recoilless rifle is pretty much only ever worth using against IFVs, Tanks, Impalers and maybe some of the rarer units that I've not seen yet. It only has 6 shots and a very slow reload, after all. Because a fully upgraded Commando has about 8 shots, I'm able to use it against smaller enemies without worrying about wasting my ammo or having to reload.
After doing a MASSIVELY harrowing mission where we were constantly harrassed by Hulks we couldn't kill, I finally understood that THAT is what the Commando's really good at. It CAN bust tanks, sure, but it's mostly useful at killing units too big to bother firing my machinegun at but too small to bother firing a Recoilless Rifle at. Thanks to your advise on using the thing, I'm finally starting to appreicate having it :)
I did read it all, but unfortunately, I don't think I have a lot worthwhile to add since I actually don't know the answers to a lot of those things. It'd be total conjecture for me. haha
Glad you're getting into the Commando though. It's really an awesome weapon.
discord.gg/HELLDIVERS
The main contributors to the Helldivers Wiki are gathered on the official Discord server for the game.
If you have even the slightest hint of being interested in collecting data and/or contributing in any sort of capacity then your efforts would go highly appreciated.
And even if you're not interested at all, maybe you'd like to join our little community anyway. :-)
On a different note, can anyone share the average shots to kill each different tank unit with an upgraded commando? This would be very useful information when deciding if I should take the commando over the recoilless rifle.
I don't have a precise number, but "A LOT" for any of the Bug tanks. The Provided your shots land well, I recall having to lob at least 4 missiles per Impaler/Tank, 6 or more for the Behemoth. An upgraded Commando has I believe 8 rockets in the magazine, so it's really only worth taking if your accuracy with it is spotless. Mine clearly isn't, so I've swapped over to the Rumbler mortar against the bugs. That still takes multiple salvos to kill a Behemoth, but the tocix damage slows it down and sets it up for the follow-up shot quite easily.
The Rumbler obviously doesn't work on the IFV as it has no armour negation, so a Recoilless Rifle or an EAT-17 is recommended for those. I have, to be honest, sort of phased out the Commando out of my loadouts since making this thread. If the weapon gave me some control over distance I might reconsider, but as it stands it's just TOO situational with how precise my distance from the enemy has to be.
Incidentally, I've been seeing precise damage values listed for enemies on the wiki. Do we know if the same is likely to happen with firearms, as well? Being able to compare the strength of my guns and their mitigation mechanics vs. the health of enemies and their defences would be VERY helpful in informing my decisions.
I'm not sure, but I can say there is an ongoing effort to improve the wiki. Some folks on the official helldivers discord server are spearheading this effort so if you head over and ask they may have the answer.
http://discord.gg/HELLDIVERS