Liberators still need buffing.

[RotGoblin]

All of them. Seriously.

They are still peashooters that run out of ammo before doing any meaningful damage.

[Balthazar the Magnificent Dog]

Originally posted by LoveTruffle:

Originally posted by Balthazar the Magnificent Dog:

If the concussive had explosive bullets like the dominator, doing 100% durable damage, it would be a hit.

This is the thing I would want to see changed with the Liberator Concussive. The stock Liberator and the Penetrator feel alright balance wise to me. They reward both skill shots and automatic fire on light targets or clusters of enemies. The only one I don't care for is the Carbine. I don't usually fight in close enough quarters to need that high of a rate of fire on a Liberator.

Carbine is good jungle planets where you dont have long lines of sight.

Also dont overlook tenderizer, you can adjust firerate up to 850, giving it double dps of the liberators.

[[IDN/IDR] Átlās]

only tenderizer needs buffing, i cannot find any situation that would really required that rifle.

[Enforcer]

Damage of the rifles should be significantly higher than the SMGs in exchange for being "less controllable".
SMG handling needs to improve in exchange.

[Doyle216]

It's not that they are bad weapons per se, it's just that the game starts to throw gross numbers of armored dudes at you past like diff 5 which of course they struggle with.

[N*rd]

Originally posted by Goblin:

All of them. Seriously.

They are still peashooters that run out of ammo before doing any meaningful damage.

All AR need a bigge Magazine - that would be a reasonable selling point

[RotGoblin]

Originally posted by N*rd:

Originally posted by Goblin:

All of them. Seriously.

They are still peashooters that run out of ammo before doing any meaningful damage.

All AR need a bigge Magazine - that would be a reasonable selling point

Fully agreed, more dakka would help.

[S R]

Originally posted by Goblin:

All of them. Seriously.

They are still peashooters that run out of ammo before doing any meaningful damage.

I think that's all the assault rifles really. Can be fun but at best they're... let's say viable.

[Vicpool]

The moment [difficulty] medium armor enemies begin to be nearly as common as baseline light armored ones, assault rifles drop off really hard. Of course you can still use them and complete missions, but you gotta sweat much more compared to other weapons. Vile Spewers (the green armored ones) are fuel for nightmares if you gotta deal with 5-6 at the same time. Of course in lower difficulties you can use support weapon/stratagems to deal with those, but when they are spawning as if they were the baseline unit of the terminids army, being there with an AR feels really punishing compared to other options.

I'd love them to buff both their damage and at least a bit of stopping power/staggering. They feel great to shoot, and to use in lower difficulties, but in difficulty 10 they are an obvious handicap option.

[Botji]

Originally posted by Vicpool:

The moment [difficulty] medium armor enemies begin to be nearly as common as baseline light armored ones, assault rifles drop off really hard. Of course you can still use them and complete missions, but you gotta sweat much more compared to other weapons. Vile Spewers (the green armored ones) are fuel for nightmares if you gotta deal with 5-6 at the same time. Of course in lower difficulties you can use support weapon/stratagems to deal with those, but when they are spawning as if they were the baseline unit of the terminids army, being there with an AR feels really punishing compared to other options.

I'd love them to buff both their damage and at least a bit of stopping power/staggering. They feel great to shoot, and to use in lower difficulties, but in difficulty 10 they are an obvious handicap option.

Lib-Pen only needs like 6 bullets to kill a armored Spewer, with... 45? bullets per reload that is technically 7.5 Spewers dead in VERY short time.

I think Alpha Commanders needs 9 bullets to the head but might be remembering wrong, somewhere around that at least which is not bad either.

Warriors too, 3 shots to the head and they pop meaning you could technically kill 15 Warriors/Hunters per reload with the Lib-Pen.



The actual problem with ARs is that they seem to be balanced around this theoretical damage and bullet efficiency but I doubt there is more than a single person that uses them like this, people grab a AR because they want to go BRRRRRRRT at the enemies.

The average "bullet waste/overkill" per enemy is probably like 200-300% because even if you stop shooting when you see a Warrior die, there are already enough bullets in the air to kill at least one, two or maybe three other Warriors depending on how fast the reaction to stop shooting was(even more wasted bullets if the person considers the Warrior dead when it stops moving).


And yeah it is somewhat easy to see that they are using this type of balancing if you look for it, JAR-5 has 15 bullets and can kill a Warrior/Hunter with a single shot = 15 kills
Slugger has 16 bullets and can kill a Warrior/Hunter with a single shot = 16 kills
Punisher ^
Crossbow if you get ~2-3 kills per bolt = 10-15 + the utility of closing bug holes and possibility of higher kill count
Purifier/Scorcher = ~15 kills depends on AoE etc.

A lot of weapons that are not specialized(like being only Light pen) falls into or around this point of theoretical 10-15 kills per reload. The only difference is how many bullets out of the total mag is being used but most/all of them will kill a Hunter/Warrior with 6-7% of its mag capacity(only things like Crossbow/Eruptor uses much more % per shot due to the AoE potential).



Its not that ARs are weak, especially the few with medium pen, its that they are balanced around "only using enough bullets to kill the target" to be as efficient or better than the current meta picks but due to their high RoF and "many bullets to get a kill" so any stray bullet into another hitbox makes it super easy to waste bullets compared to the slower RoF weapons.... like basically all the meta picks are, high damage, lower RoF because they are "ammo efficient", a JAR only fires so fast, you shoot them once then you pick another target or you double tap and pick another target.

ARs in general automatically "double-tripple-quadruple" tap enemies because we spray them with bullets until and after they die because that is how we want to use them. Lib-Pen would be a meta pick if people used it like a marksman rifle or something.

[Tahla]

ARs feel bad because there's currently no use case for them. Maybe the illuminate will change that since they have no armor and shields so rapid fire light pen weapons may be useful.

Bots are better off with medium pen or very accurate weapons, most ARs are not that. On top of that rocket striders have single handed made light pen weapons obsolete on the bot front along with gunships.

Bugs are badly designed in that you need to hit their weak spots to kill them in any meaningful time. ARs would feel much better if bugs had about the same TTK with body shots as with head shots, but they don't and rarely give you time to aim when they're at close to mid range, so you're better off with explosive weapons or stagger shotguns to keep them away.

TLDR, there are no enemies that would reward taking ARs in their current state. They either need higher pen, more stagger or more damage.

[Balthazar the Magnificent Dog]

There are more way to balance that just singe target damage.

In HD 1 each gun had damage balanced with a special effect, Patriot would shoot really fast, Justice had unstopable rounds that went though 10 targets and only stopped with heavy armor, and paragon had a slow effect.

When Polar Patriots promised Tenderizer I thought it would fire cryo bullets to slow the target, or freeze them in place, or degrade the armor, or something.

When I first saw Concussive I thougt it would be like CR-9 Supressor, like a really angry scorcher with a bayonet.

Bullets come in many kinds. lead, AP, explosive, dum dum, incendiary, poison, corrosive, homing beacons, auto tracking. etc.

There are more ways to make AR usefull than just shooting faster, I would make more bullets than guns.

https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/Helldivers_1:Weapons

[RotGoblin]

The Lib Penetrator seems okay if you take a supply pack.

But yeah, feels like they need more damage or extra mags.

[Mahjik]

Originally posted by Goblin:

But yeah, feels like they need more damage or extra mags.

That's what the Supply Backpack is for...

[Balthazar the Magnificent Dog]

Also check the comparison

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KVRB55s07fJjc6AlLBMRYpDlEC2eqWvUdiQvZ6teJqw/edit?gid=2088823024#gid=2088823024

[RandomDude64]

Originally posted by Masterofgaming22:

I think instead of just buffing the liberator, they should add a upgrade system so that way the liberator can stay how it is in the early levels, and get better as you progress through the game.

I don't know why you got that jester, weapon upgrades were a part of progression in the first game and weapon customisation at the least is planned for HD2