How are people surviving higher difficulty levels?

[Andi5000]

So me and my friends have been playing on several evenings over the last two weeks. We are between level 11 and 20. So far we have not managed to get past difficulty level 4.
There are just waves after waves after waves of enemies, never ending spawns, many big enemies with heavy armor, extrem AI aggression, especially after the last update, we very rarely make it to the extraction with more than a handful of respawns left. More often than not we just TPKd.

We are in our 30s and even 50s, we all have plenty experience in many other shooters from Battlefield to Warzone to Apex etc. for over 12 years, mind you, we're no complete morons - however, this game just completely anihilates us. Controls are sluggish, switching from granades to guns isn't snappy, reloads don't trigger (because weapon switching didn't happen), calling strategems accidentally turns into granades, etc. all of this on top of enemy clusterfkcs, which make it impossible to play tactically ...

Not being able to make it beyond level 4, I am completely confused how everybody on Youtube and in the forums dicussed playing and managing level 7 and higher. I mean - how on earth?!? How did they get there? What are we missing?

Or is there some hidden experience/difficulty/grinding curve which means you need to farm points on levels 3-5 endlessly until you can finally unlock those weapons which then make higher levels even possible at all? Is it simply a matter of "once you have spent 500 hours and spent 150.000 medals, you get the tools you need?"

Can someone enlighten me what's going on here? Apart from getgud, than you.

[CookingMaMa]

Dont shot everything. Enemies will call reinforcement as well
Only shot when enemies spotted u.

[AC_R4VN]

I feel like not enough people crawl around on their gut. Just crawling around and surveying the area before running around, checking the radar for red blips. I've snuck into enemy bases unseen without the reduced enemy sight bonus even on higher difficulties crawling around, finding a way to get to objectives, watching patrols go by and marking them so people can see them, and getting in close to enemy forts to blow them up. Does it work all the time? No, but I've had enough success with it to acknowledge and promote it - sometimes it's almost like Skyrim level 100 Sneak with a nat 20 thrown in, other times I get myself surrounded because I sneaked into the perfect position for every patrol to surround me to obliterate me into fossil fuel.

Trust your gut, use your gut.

[Krome Skulz]

The hardest difficulty I've completed solo is challenging but that is because every challenging bug map I tried had the very stupid arena type map that is small and has a crap ton of bugs you have to kill and I get annoyed with it so haven't moved up to hard yet due to that annoying map being linked to any other challenging map I've tried and not completing it.

You may know this stuff or not.

First, your levels don't mean you get more powerful like in an MMO it means you get access to more Strategems and weapons/armor which can make you better equipped for higher difficulties. Starter Strats normally don't work as well on higher difficulty like turrets for instance.

Also, from what I understand, the faster you get in and out and do the objectives the less enemies you'll face. Run there and get out. If you are farming Super Credits and Medals I'd say do it on a lower difficulty like easy or trivial because you can destroy enemies than and still explore.

Going prone and not moving, as long as bugs haven't seen or heard you works pretty well. I had 3-4 patrols, one after the other, walk within 2 meters of me and not even notice me while prone. Automatons it doesn't seem to work for me but maybe because I am still farming and I take my Guard Dog with me so it is floating while I'm prone. I'll have to test that out.

Enemies go by sound and sight and I heard a Dev. say bugs can kind of smell you too. Not sure if that is true, especially since the 3-4 Pats that passed by me without even knowing I was there, but they said bugs don't fly and we now have flying bugs. -_-

Also, they said if you call in anything right after landing on a planet there is a better chance for a patrol to come to you due to landing making noise and than your call-ins making more or something to that affect.

[Anzuvere]

Genuine answer here, a lot of it comes down between a simple trifecta of difficulty selection, damage system and unlocks. For level 10-20 I think 4-6 is fine as a difficulty. The game does seem to want things to feel really challenging early on and then as you unlock more stratagems and weapons it becomes significantly easier on that 1/3rd of the trifecta.

Something else to consider are the damage types, for example bringing a cluster bomb eagle against automatons will be super great but against bugs it's generally just decent. Vice versa the napalm strike can sometimes do wonders against bugs but is pretty ineffective against automatons. The same logic applies to weapons with things like the side arm SMG vs the Revolver, naturally the one with more stopping power punctures armour a little better where the other can handle the smaller bugs extremely well.

Lastly something I personally see a lot of people make or break difficulty 7 and 8 runs at is the tempo of their mission. It's really easy to get caught up trying to clear out a hoard of enemies and spend 10 minutes fighting and fighting and fighting only to keep running into more patrols, more back-up, more re-spawns and consequently feel completely overwhelmed. It's actually completely fine and, in my opinion at least, encouraged to keep moving on with a respectful mind of specific scenarios. You can for example drag a charger around behind you for a good long while before it catches up to you in medium or light armour and then take a 90 degree or 180 degree turn around it to make it stop in place and turn on a dime - throwing it off it's pursuit for a while, while you keep running to the next major objective. I probably don't recommend using stealth as the system is a little wonky (with the visibility reduction armours) but that's also an option for small player groups. And as a pro tip: Smoke is completely broken against automatons. The smoke eagle can be called in three times every 15 seconds or so and covers a large area in smoke reducing their ability to actively pursue you. If you're actively moving along things like tanks and devastators won't keep track of you, only the little guys.

TL;DR Keep your chin up. You're likely doing better than it feels right now and things will get easier with time and organisation.

[Duncan Slamwell, B-Ball Attorney]

Just Walk Out
You can leave!!!
tanks
bile titans
orbital barrage
too many robots
crushers if your quick
team mates

IF IT SUCKS... HIT DA BRICKS!!
real hell divers flee

[Andi5000]

Originalmente postado por Feathers McGraw:

Change your keybinds mate. They are clunky otherwise, set stratagem binds to arrow keys and have ctrl as a press and not hold and you can run and strata without stopping. Besides that dive often, make sure you have ammo, and co-ordinate your ordinance.

We're playing on PS5, maybe this is also a factor. There are no hotkeys for the strategems for instance. You need to keep a button pressed on the controller and then simultaneously enter the sequence with the direction keys. If you screw up the sequence, the last button you pressed my have changed your weapon to the grenades and thinking it worked out, you then throw a grenade instead of the strategem. Another example: When I have thrown a grenade and suddenly a bug appears in front of me, I quickly press triangle to switch to my primary weapon and immediately start firing. This works in all other games; here, it takes a second or so for the character to change from grenade to the rife, so by the time I start shooting, I still have the grenades equipped. So I keep throwing grenades accidentally in close-quarters situations (which is the worst). The same is true with reloading: sometimes pressing the reload button does not register. I have to explicitly stand still, press it again, wait 500ms and then the animation will trigger. For being so chaotic and fast paced, the controls seem to be laggy.

Sure, this is something to recognize and learn and get better at, still, this is making it really annoying on top of overwhelming.

[Munglord]

We're not. Me and the lads are all over lvl 20 and its just mayhem until we run out of reinforcements. Maybe we'll clear the objective, maybe we won't. Its just chaos and most of the time I'm having fun while crying at the same time.

[Bear your Bears]

Personally I feel the game falls apart at level 4 and up. It requires you to have anti-horde builds, but then also requires you to have anti-tank capabilities in your build. The end result is you can do neither well and we get to the second part that makes this game feel bad.

The squad. My experience is that most players are just smoothbrain monkeys in helldiver suits. I just gave up on three of the new bug spray missions...

One a guy brought mortar, which not only TKs very efficiently when against bugs, it also sits there and peppers the tower, resetting it.
One a guy kept straffing the tower with his LMG, resetting it.
Last one a guy carpet bombed the tower, resetting it.

I'm honestly impressed these people can even get this game installed and join a mission with their complete lack of brain function. This extends to every mission type. The amount of people that don't understand you should nuke a patrol as fast as possible and instead just let them live and call reinforcements has given me brain damage.

Not to mention the elitists on forums that think everything is fine when all they do is play hyper meta and farm medals with no concern with ACTUALLY playing the game.

[Gin]

Just pick counters for the heavies, and have some way to deal with smaller ads then run, you might die, but doesn't matter in the long term. In the end, the only point of extraction is for samples, if no samples, there's little benefit.

My basic go-to stratagems are:
Orbital Railcannon for heavies
Gatling sentry for ads, EMS mortal for defense missions + Gatling
Support weapon: EAT/RR/Spear/AutoCannon, depends on how I feel. Grenade Launcher for Blitz
Eagle Airstrike for helping with clearing holes or ads. Cluster for ads and egg mission. 500kg sometimes, Bombardment Orbital sometimes for clearing nests/objectives

I mostly go light armor to run quicker, I have the extra nades on my armor to clear holes. Most times I run impact nades, but I sometimes go for incendiary cause it's fun. But impact is just better for eggs and to clear groups of small ads

For guns I run the Knight(?) SMG, that smaller one, for when I want to clear small ads myself. It does a decent job.
Slugger or whatever the shotgun is called from the basic warbond down the line, it's pretty cool to clear the medium size stuff. The push back is also nice.

And other than that, just run and be aware of your surroundings. You can dodge enemies, no need to fight everything. If you're into killing a lot of bugs, you can always do that after completing the main objectives.

Also, if you run out of stratagems or stuff to kill heavies, there's always the option to die and reinforce on top of them. Desperate measures.

[Hobbes]

Originalmente postado por Munglord:

Its just chaos and most of the time I'm having fun while crying at the same time.

That's the spirit!!!

[...]

Idk about you guys but they've definitely buffed enemy damage. A hunter pretty much 2 shots me with med armour and this never happened before the recent update. 3 chargers at once on level 4. This is getting beyond ridiculous. I could barely solo lvl 6 and now I can barely do some lvl 4 missions

[Lightravenn]

Originalmente postado por Gin:

Just pick counters for the heavies, and have some way to deal with smaller ads then run, you might die, but doesn't matter in the long term. In the end, the only point of extraction is for samples, if no samples, there's little benefit.

My basic go-to stratagems are:
Orbital Railcannon for heavies
Gatling sentry for ads, EMS mortal for defense missions + Gatling
Support weapon: EAT/RR/Spear/AutoCannon, depends on how I feel. Grenade Launcher for Blitz
Eagle Airstrike for helping with clearing holes or ads. Cluster for ads and egg mission. 500kg sometimes, Bombardment Orbital sometimes for clearing nests/objectives

I mostly go light armor to run quicker, I have the extra nades on my armor to clear holes. Most times I run impact nades, but I sometimes go for incendiary cause it's fun. But impact is just better for eggs and to clear groups of small ads

For guns I run the Knight(?) SMG, that smaller one, for when I want to clear small ads myself. It does a decent job.
Slugger or whatever the shotgun is called from the basic warbond down the line, it's pretty cool to clear the medium size stuff. The push back is also nice.

And other than that, just run and be aware of your surroundings. You can dodge enemies, no need to fight everything. If you're into killing a lot of bugs, you can always do that after completing the main objectives.

Also, if you run out of stratagems or stuff to kill heavies, there's always the option to die and reinforce on top of them. Desperate measures.

Yes, extraction only is worth if your team managed to claim samples.. if not then leaving the planet alive is not important. Primary objective and secondaries are the important stuff.

[Andi5000]

Just to add to this in case anybody is still reading this:

I just played in a group of 4 players, one of level 50, the others were levels 20, 16 and 15. Together we managed difficulty level 7 without too much frustration. Challenging, yes, as it should be, overwhelming and also crazy to some extent, but in no way was this comparable with the frustration we noobs had at difficulties 4 and 5.
We may have played better, communicated better, and we had 2 players who knew what they were doing (and the level 50 player carrying the team obviously) yes. But still, I felt that at difficulty level 7 the endless hordes were much more suitable and manageable for whatever reason and it all made much more sense.

So; not all is bad. And the tips in this thread here helped a lot, thanks everyone.

[Anarchy]

Jump pack.

[retroquark]

Originalmente postado por Andi5000:

But still, I felt that at difficulty level 7 the endless hordes were much more suitable and manageable for whatever reason and it all made much more sense.

The thing is that the game turns into a wavy mess because of lag very quickly. If you play private games with local friends (and you're lucky with how the psn-service is ticking through, the nprotect routines don't block anything) you get a fairly decent update frequency for how the spawns respond to you, and how they choose paths.

I.e., they feel predictable and menacing, they have purpose, on the one hand. But on the other, when you dodge or move away from a charger, and things like that, you don't get sideswiped a second off, your placement stratagems don't tick in with a pause, the strategem sticks to the chargers, the weak points actually get hit on every shot -- things like that.

So everything is tighter for the whole team.

When the stars don't align, basically, and all of that doesn't happen, you'll be on the other end of the scale: most shots either miss, or they hit away from where you were aiming (so you miss critical spots). Or you are shooting the same bug past what's necessary (the team wastes extremely precious ammo). And the spawns are late on your screen, compared to what they are actually doing. A charger is maybe in a charge, but on your screen, you only see it sort of floating towards you in a circle before somehow swiping you. It will never do that in a single-player game, or in a local game.

Same thing that happens with the hunters, that people hate so much. They have a single-hit attack that you probably actually will see very clearly. But because of these out of sync events towards the host, you're running into all kinds of issues when they get too close. On a single-player game you might have seen it in time and fired enough shots. In this out of sync game, you might see it early and shoot a good clip at it. But if there's no "contest" involved with the server at that point, you are just getting stealth-swiped from the server's point of view.

This can of course also work to your advantage: if you spot, from the server point of view, mobs before they spot you - now you have all kinds of bonus-damage going on, that then looks like - from the server and the client closer to the server - as if it happens instantly.

This is also what is happening when you are playing with randoms. Either they are far off from you and the server, and call down stratagems and various single-shot smacks, that will always be enough to either disable or kill the larger mobs. Area effect strafes as well will of course do the same thing, mowing down full spawns long before the server notices that player.

Or they are close to the server, and you are not, where they then have proper updates and are playing well - when what you see on the other end is basically that you're always late, and that mobs practically explode the moment you point your gun at it.

This issue is something that has followed all of Sony's games since about 2009, when they enforced the same standard that all the other publishers had already chosen: to treat lag and syncs towards the servers not as a technical issue, but as a support-issue only.

This is what has EA support recommend you to connect to servers on the opposite end of the planet, for example. Because they know from a gameplay point of view that playing with severe lag will make most players have an advantage over local players. So they know for a fact that people who complain about lag from really laggy players coming in a zapping them before they can do anything (from the server, what happens is that the laggy player is given a second or so to shoot the other player before they even appear). And that's then what they started recommending people to do. If you complain about lag - just become laggy yourself!

Is this an issue in a pve game that is actually pretty slow paced? Well, if you have 200ms pings (which is generally achievable across half the globe in any direction - this still splits the player base, but it won't stop anyone from actually playing the game, unless they literally live on the Moon, or play through satellite internet -- which happens, trust me.. specially on console. Anyone with extremely bad mobile or wifi will also of course struggle) -- what this means from the server to the client is that all updates will, in ideal circumstances, take 400ms. This is the objectively shortest time it takes from something to be updated on the server from all clients without any overhead. Very nice trickery has been developed to make this faster, and to allow cluster updates to propagate indirectly with hybrid servers. And this works, given that the shooter is fairly slow-paced.

What happens if you increase this ping to not just 500ms, but to a variable 5-900ms? Well, now you have 2 second update syncs happening constantly. Which means that all your stratagems are out of place (or that you need to predict, with variable outcomes, where you should be placing it ahead of the mobs). And that you need to basically be aware of how these pauses are happening between the clients to be able to compensate for it.

I don't mind telling you that I had a huge fight with a Sony person over how they killed off M.A.G. in exactly this way. Their fairly famous community manager person didn't see it as an issue. The publisher contacts from Sony who worked at Zipper at the time didn't see it. And that game ended up being a meta-competition where teams would either consciously exploit the lag, or else just end up playing into how the lag pauses work.

To the point where anyone who are just interested in an immersive game will be sort of left with this quizzical look on their face, before quitting altogether.

Helldivers 2 is such a good game, and allows local teams to play with an ok sync, that I think it might survive a little bit. But playing with randoms is going to be mired in the meta-game. Which is what the community managers are already tweaking the game for - which you see with the nerfs. It's not because the guns are too powerful, it's because the sync-advantage allows the close-to-server players to clear the map before the other players even get there.

And that's the beginning of the end for the game, basically.