The NERF issue is a perspective thing

[Asbel]

So i paused playing cuz the nerfs did hit me hard, but its actually not that bad of a deal, but why are ppl so down hard whining about it? The reason is simple to understand but not easy to realize. First of all its not an skill issue. ;)

The actual problem is that the majority of Game Devs does not know how to actually nerf stuff. Its a deep rooted psychological fear to lose power or influnce over something and with the nerfs this fear is triggered. Its common and normal. Nothing to be ashamed about. But nerfing stuff is necessary for a game to balance itself. Its unavoidable. But how can we now nerf or balance without triggering the fear of losing power? Well there are actually a couple of ways to do that.

1. Nerf in phases (if you nerf the weapons over time with small adjustments, it wont have a huge impact, cuz ppl will get used to it over time.)
2. Reward the player for not using the OP stuff (Making objectives or mission modifiers that bans the use of certain items but gives rewards in the end, will condition the player)
3. Just buff the enemies (this is by far the most simple method, if you just buff the enemies the fear will not be triggered instead the player will either feel ecnouraged or a little bit frustrated but it wont have an impact like the actual ongoing discussion)

Helldivers has a lot of potential to "hide" nerfs through missions and modifiers, And they easly can ecnoruage the player to use more balanced strategems and weapons. But in the end they didnt do anything like that. Maybe its becaus they dont know or they are working to much and cant bother with this stuff. I mean we cant expect them to tip toe around the feelings of every player, that would be some rainbow stuff aint it? ;)

[Aldain]

I think the real perspective issue is that the Railgun was giving both the players and developers a false perspective of how many armored foes they should need to kill/spawn at any given moment.

They correctly realized the Railgun was a problem, but falsely assumed that the enemies were in tune with everything other than the Railgun, which is why they've mentioned they're reviewing the spawn rates/durability of heavy units.

[Estellese]

No those three examples still piss off the playerbase just as much. When you play games for long enough, you start to see that no matter what you do there will always be a small section of the playerbase who will scream, cry and throw a fit if they can't have the game exactly their way. (Which, more often than not, means an extremely easy game that tells them it is hard.)

Originally posted by Aldain:

I think the real perspective issue is that the Railgun was giving both the players and developers a false perspective of how many armored foes they should need to kill/spawn at any given moment.

They correctly realized the Railgun was a problem, but falsely assumed that the enemies were in tune with everything other than the Railgun, which is why they've mentioned they're reviewing the spawn rates/durability of heavy units.

I think the heavies problem is just a problem for bugs IMO. I don't have this issue with bots.

Because bot heavies can be taken out pretty quickly. But chargers and titans can not.

[Aldain]

Originally posted by Estellese:

I think the heavies problem is just a problem for bugs IMO. I don't have this issue with bots.

Because bot heavies can be taken out pretty quickly. But chargers and titans can not.

I pretty much agree, though I've seen a few instances with the Bots spawning a questionable amount of tanks/hulks out of nowhere at times and that can feel excessive it has nothing on the bug spam.

But Chargers in particular are WAY too durable to spawn in packs of 3 or more imo, and far more difficult to deal with since they well...charge at you constantly and can sometimes turn on a dime for no reason.

[Heartbreak One]

Originally posted by Estellese:

I think the heavies problem is just a problem for bugs IMO. I don't have this issue with bots.

Because bot heavies can be taken out pretty quickly. But chargers and titans can not.

I'm with you on that - at low difficulties, I'd say bugs is easier than bots, but right around the middle bugs easily overtakes.

I can handle diff 8 on Bots with pubs, and it's rarely a problem (few lairy moments here and there, but whatever), but bugs at diff 8 is a whole different story.

The other thing is I find it much easier to disengage with bots - so long as you can find some cover, you can generally escape. You've only really got to worry about berserkers or the jetpack guys. Good luck running from a charger unless you can find some terrain to confuse them (I have also seen the bug out and just go idle, but that's not consistent). Not to mention titans - even when de-biled - are a big attention sink to kite, and throw in hunters or either bile variant and it turns into a mess quick.

[Grimsdottir]

I also suspect its partly the communities fault.

I've seen people 'misuse' the arc thrower for example. Rather than letting it rip on massive hoards or kite them into an easy kill lane. I've seen people use it on small groups, like 1 to 4 enemies. Ones you could honestly use a pistol on well before the arc thrower.

So I kinda just blindly chalk people's complaints into what I've personally seen.

[Forblaze]

Originally posted by Estellese:

When you play games for long enough, you start to see that no matter what you do there will always be a small section of the playerbase who will scream, cry and throw a fit if they can't have the game exactly their way. (Which, more often than not, means an extremely easy game that tells them it is hard.)

The last bit is really key. People get their identities wrapped up in this idea of being good at video games and become hostile when reality clashes against it.

[Kaine]

Originally posted by Asbel:

But nerfing stuff is necessary for a game to balance itself.

Is it? What is the purpose of a game? The purpose is to entertain. Now when an entire community is praising the fun they are having and the challenges. Where a game feels like utter carnage for both you and the enemy....maybe just maybe you already hit the right balance.

Why mess with it at all? When the community says-Thankyou so much we are having awesome fun and everyone is buying the game-Why make a change that leads to everyone saying-Not so much fun anymore....

I just completed a Helldive difficulty mission but it wasnt fun. The reason it wasnt fun was because the tactics are to kite and hide and air strike your objectives. You dont have the firepower to take on the horde- Not because you run out of ammunition but because you have time limited and restricted solutions to problems (armour) that comes in multitudes.

You use your limited options and then run until you get your timers off cool down. Not fun.

I want the carnage battles back please.

[★ Dr. Danger!]

Yeah I dunno, I went from regularly solo clearing maps on Suicidal, evac with 40ish samples.
Today, I am struggling to complete a single mission solo on level 4 to either bugs or bots...
Wasn't just a nerf, but a buff to enemies too, and there is nothing subtle about it.
If it's to balance us getting pilotable mech bots... just remove the mech bots please, no thank you.

[Aldain]

Originally posted by Kaine:

Originally posted by Asbel:

But nerfing stuff is necessary for a game to balance itself.

Is it?

YES.

Otherwise you get power creep that causes everything to have to constantly be an upward "Stronger Enemies>Stronger Players>Stronger Enemies" loop until the entire game devolves into nonsense specifically designed solely for whatever the apex of the power creep is.

Imagine if they left the Railgun as it was and every new enemy had to be heavily armored to not instantly explode from the damn Railgun, and the new gear they introduce would have to be as good as the Railgun otherwise who the *$&# would use it?

You can't balance a pair of scales by adding asynchronous weight to both sides, you only break the scales. Or to put it even more simply, you can only add so much air to a balloon before it bursts.

[Hobbes]

Keep in mind the different variables the devs may want to take into account.

You say: Buff the enemies
This also impact all the other difficulty levels and impacts players not yet level 20 that do not have access to the railgun. It will fix one thing and break 3 others.

Others have said: Don't nerf the railgun, buff all the weapons
This impacts all difficulties, easy becomes trivial, trival becomes Super trivial (melee only anyone?)

Balancing tends to happen in steps, the easiest step 1, with the least amount of impact on the playerbase not on Helldive difficulty or those who haven't unlocked the railgun yet is to adjust the railgun.

They have clearly reviewed the impact, hence now a dev post on them reviewing armour values in general (and possibly spawn rates)

I do understand, we all want to play NOW, but for game balance as a whole it's probably better if they make small incremental adjustments to get to where THEY want the game to be.

And yes, it sucks if they tweaked one thing and it doesn't have the intended end outcome, but the only thing to do is give it some time.

The violent and toxic reactions to this process are just as harmful for the game as an unbalanced or unfun game is.

Since vocal people on game forums seem to have no chill whatsoever it becomes this cascade of anger and frustration which doesn't help anyone.

I hope the devs will continue to review the impact of changes they make and adjust accordingly to get the best possible compromise between their vision of the game without completely ignoring player feedback.

Player feedback can't be the only or primary feedback to take into account because who do you listen to?

Player 1. - I want this game to be a wish-fulfilling chuck norris simulator with powerful guns
Player 2. - I want this game to be so hard that I start rethinking all my life's choices
Player 3. - I would like this to be an open world looter shooter where killing enemies give XP
Player 4. - Groups are annoying, the game should allow me to play Helldive on Solo difficulty, please balance around that.

They're all players, who do you listen to?

Some players are more vocal, it doesn't make them the majority so that's not always something to go by.

The devs vision for the intended game experience should be leading I think.

And based on what's happened in the past few days I think they have taken some feedback into account but I'm happy they stuck with their guns initially as we can't know what kind of game they want to make (to an extent)

Looking at their previous games gives an indication of what we can expect but with Helldivers 2 being such an influencer hit it brings a lot of players that do not know the history and perhaps are expecting something much more mainstream and vanilla.

Watch some Helldivers 1 gameplay and see if that gives you an idea of what they are going for. In many ways the main difference between 1 and 2 is just camera perspective.

I hope enough people can muster the patience to let the devs work on it a bit more before they jump to conclusions. And if you have the maturity levels of a spoiled child and have to rage and throw your toys out of the pram the second things don't go your way, you probably will not be missed.

[Bunkerotter]

Originally posted by Grimsdottir:

I also suspect its partly the communities fault.

I've seen people 'misuse' the arc thrower for example. Rather than letting it rip on massive hoards or kite them into an easy kill lane. I've seen people use it on small groups, like 1 to 4 enemies. Ones you could honestly use a pistol on well before the arc thrower.

So I kinda just blindly chalk people's complaints into what I've personally seen.

Hm...
I kinda have to object here.
Why shouldn't I use the arc thrower on single enemies or small groups? Why should I waste ammo if I have a Weapon who doesn't require ammo?
EDIT: Also, the arc thrower seems to be less loud and does potentially not alert other nearby enemies.

[G-Yuki]

With the amount of heavy armored enemies that spawned, the pre-nerf rail gun was a complete necessity simply due to the heavy volume of chargers, bile titans, Hulks and tanks the game will throw at you in higher difficulties especially during extraction. If they were gonna nerf the only reliable weapon against a mass number of armored foes, they also needed to tone down the spawns with it. Not after.

[Frankie]

I think the equipment nerfs were ok. Railgun and Breaker are still good. The only problem is that they did not buff other weapons to meet the quality of those, I guess this will happen over many months unfortunately. On the other hand I agree with Dr. Danger in that it would be nice to get some samples here and there in solo. I do think that a lot of solo mission are being played, I would really like to see some stats on that.

[CloversDrop]

Nerfing meta weapons isn't about balance, it's about creating a shortage of viable/powerful weapons, where the shortage is then satisfied with 'paid for content', usually less than a month after the nerf patch.

Diablo 4's first nerf patch hit the meta builds for each class hard, the power shortage was then replaced with stuff you'd get in the season 2 content, which came out 2-3 weeks after the nerf patch.

Diablo 4 developers even did Q&A streams to discuss why the nerf was so important and talked about long term balance and health of the game, it's all ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
It was about you buying season 2 so you could get the season 2 items that would put your build back into the meta levels of damage.


If you wanted to truly balance a game, you'd balance all the weapons/stuff/equipment around the current meta.

For example, you'd say... why are people using the railgun to kill heavies instead of the spear.
Spear has a lock on bug, so we'll fix that and change the time to lock on to the same time it takes to charge the railgun.
Spear has limited ammo, lets increase the ammo, so you hold 20 rockets.
Spear needs you to be stationary for to long to reload, ok lets change that so you can reload on the move and make it so it takes roughly the same amount of time as the railgun.
Then you'd fine tune the spears stats so it's more unique, maybe make it take a little longer to reload, but does more damage, or maybe less ammo for more damage, etc...
etc etc etc with the other heavy armour support stuff.

same goes for primary and strategems etc.

Breaker is meta to buff all the primarys so they're similar in damage, recoil, ammo firerate etc, etc. then tune them according to the gun.

Maybe breaker incendiary should have slightly less ammo but does slightly more damage taking into account the fire effect.

smgs maybe higher rate of fire, less damage, more ammo

etc etc with the other primarys

[Dezzmont]

Originally posted by Kaine:

Is it?.

Yes.

Games are interesting, and there is a reason we call the mechanics in them systems, because they are an interplay of different elements. Some of these are 'bounded,' meaning you can't realistically nerf or buff them past a certain point, while others are arbitrary.

For example, you can't realistically nerf or buff movement too much because the game becomes incoherent if you are moving so fast you can't process anything, even if the enemies can 'keep up,' or so slow that you take 5 hours to complete a mission, even if it takes 2 minutes for an enemy to reach you from its spawn to compensate.

This is important in regards to the railgun and shield because they interact with two major bounded mechanics. The railgun interacts with armor, which you can't really buff every single support weapon to handle without breaking the core design of the game, and the shield interacts with slows, which are a whole THING in coop shooter design and are vitally important to get juuuust right (which Helldivers arguably does, if anything its a bit too generous with how empowered your movement is).

You can't buff say... the grenade launcher to be a reasonable comparison to the railgun without making it silly and ruining the game. If you make it pierce armor it just makes armor a non-mechanic. If you make it so good vs non-armored targets that it allows you to run almost no anti-armor besides one dedicated player taking it, then the game becomes trivial at all times. There is just no realistic way to buff it without the game becoming completely silly.

Likewise, you can't realistically buff the Jump Pack in any dimension besides cooldown, which is a fine enough buff, but has an upper limit as if the cooldown is too low you again just trivialize the game because movement and positioning (which is what 90% of the game is at its core) becomes braindead.

So even though damage and health is relatively arbitrary (They still are bounded, but are a lot less bounded than mobility or the armor counter system) and you can buff it almost as much as you want, these tools just aren't fitting in well with the rest of the system. Rather than trying to adjust literally every part of the game design to avoid lowering some numbers, they... lowered some numbers, which is the sane thing to do.

As has been noted, the railgun especially shows a problem with other design elements when nerfed (The shield wasn't even the best backpack, it was the easiest to use backpack and allowed you to survive most situations despite making really big misplays) because armor is a bit overtuned right now in regards to how common it is on bugs, which is a side effect of going to 3D and allowing squads to disperse, which requires a LOT more enemies to populate the map, which is a problem with high mobility enemies like Chargers.

In HD1 it was fine to require strategems or specialized AT weaponry to kill things like them, and otherwise have every other weapon be ineffective or mostly ineffective, because you always had 16 stratagems available on your location at any given time and you needed to worry about a lot less crap. Now everything is way more busy and your more likely to see more than 2 chargers at once, so even though they are easy to avoid, they are unpleasant because you get stuck playing matador with them and can't dial in a strategem safely because you also are constantly getting swarmed by little guys due to your formation getting disrupted in a way it never could in HD1.

But you don't fix that by letting the Railgun just dunk on everything. You fix that by lowering charger spawn rates and MAYBE making some intermediate level between 'does not affect enemy' and 'destroys their armor utterly.'