So the Fleshmob was designed bad on purpose

[Malidictus]

https://youtu.be/3pPGgHieWok?si=Dnra1L2fx9vb0hHG&t=194

The quote in question starts at 3:13, but here's what was said that I'm referring to in case you don't feel like watching the full video:

It's much faster than it looks, it's much more dangerous than it looks. Just count on throwing a lot of resources on it. [...] But that doesn't mean there's not gonna' be another one. There's gonna' be plenty of these.

This isn't me speculating or drawing inferences. It's not me fighting the enemy wrong or bringing the wrong weapons. This is the design goal behind the entire concept of the Fleshmob, spelled out in plain text: to be a resource sink.

Now, this could be my bias against the Illiminate's whole design talking, but... that'd describing an intentionally badly-designed enemy. The Fleshmob can't have weak points, because that would reduce its effective health and so reduce the resource cost in taking it down. It can't be slowed or staggered, because then players would be more easily able to evade them and thus avoid spending the resources. What, then is the point of discussing good balance or compelling gameplay in relation to an enemy that's intentionally designed to have neither?

I used to joke about Arrowhead's designiners building obvious weknesses into their enemies, then going back and removing all of them through mechanics. I'm not so sure it's a joke any more. In order to make the Fleshmob a proper ammo sink, all clever or creative ways of killing it had to be preemptively shut down, until we're left with the most basic, simplistic approach of "bring more DPS, bring more ammo".

And yes, I'm fully expecting the boilerplate "skill issue" responses. That's effectively a given on this forum. But consider this, before making that argument: Even if I were a god among men, able to take the Fleshmob down without ever being in danger or ever slowing down - would that change anything about its intended design? Would it make it less of a sandbag on legs, less of a DPS check? Being able to overcome bad design doesn't make that design any less bad. It just means we've found workarounds so we don't have to deal with it.

This has now become a pattern with Arrowhead. They design their enemies as hard gear checks first and foremost. If they have any more complex mechanics, it's entirely incidental and usually not terribly relevant to their intended design. After all, when the playerbase collectively discovered the unintended "Charger leg meta", Arrowhead's solution was to... remove it. Bump up leg armour and force players into shooting the Charger in the head - as it was apparently intended to be fought.

It genuinely feels like enemies in this game are all intended to be as boring as possible to fight. Any fun or creative ways of taking them down are unintended, and often rectified. Arrowhead rolled that back partially against Bug and Bot heavies, only to reintroduce it with the Illuminate all over again. This feels like Groundhog Day, and I don't like that feeling.

[Erratic Pulse]

lowkey whenever i see one of them i just ignore them and run past
its a waste of time to even bother with them since theres probably 3 more charging at you once its dead

[Khloros]

So here is my take on fleshmobs. I dont think they are actually an issue, i think the problem people have with them, stems from the fact we dont have the full illuminate roster yet.

Right now like 4 or 5 of them spawning all at once, suck, but i think thats because thats all that can spawn vs down the road we might only get like 1 or 2 and then the rest of those slots are filled with other elites.

[Strobe]

Publicado originalmente por Kibou:

lol, flying overseers are still the most dangerous illuminate enemy by far, with the crescent ones in second place now. git gud

Elevated still piss me off so damn much. I'm convinced they tuned up how fast firing and accurate they are. Bane of my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ existence.

[Random Person]

Publicado originalmente por Malidictus:

Publicado originalmente por Asgard Thor:

Here's a little secret I use: I don't kill them all the time.

Right, but that brings us back to the "running away meta" from Launch. How do you kill strong enemies? You don't! Just run away until they despawn. It works, but is oppressively boring in actual practice. This was my primary, overriding criticism of the original Helldivers, as well. Combat - the most compelling and often only selling point to this game - is a failure state. You get in combat if you fail to avoid combat, in which case it's your punishment. Much better to run away and hide

Arrowhead's 60-day patch was a compromise in this regard, redesigning both enemies and weapons in order to allow us to hold our ground. Now it feels like the people responsible for that patch are gone, and the original Launch team are back in command, because they're busy repeating practically all the mistakes of 2024. The Fleshmob isn't the only (or, really, worst) examples. It's just the one example we got official confirmation on. People's absolute worst, most critical read of the thing is how Arrowhead intended it to work.

Publicado originalmente por Random Person:

You can make enemies a challenge in far more effective way than just making them tanky.

Pretty much this, yes. A sandbag with a gun is "challenging" in the same sense, but equally uncompelling to actually fight. Magdumping into bullet sponges is what got The Division critically panned when it came out, and for much the same reason. It's the sort of mechanic you might find in an Tab-target MMO. In an action game like this, the result is tedious and unrewarding.

In fact, Division 2 is a great example of doing "tough" enemies right. Most enemies sport destructible weak points which trigger a variety of interesting effects, from forcing them to swap weapons to removing abilities, to causing explosions which hurt other enemies, to my favourite - shooting the belt on a heavy gunner's belt-fed machinegun forcing him to reload. That game has its own host of issues, but enemy design ain't one of 'em.

By contrast, Helldivers 2's Illiminate are simplistic, oppressive and overall not that much fun to fight. They chase the player and spam damage. The best way to deal with them is to spam damage back at them.

I have to disagree with your take on Helldivers 1's approach to combat. Yes it is designed to be a punishment for allowing a patrol to spot you and call for reinforcements, but with how hard the game tries to force combat on the higher difficulties, its very clear you're fully intended to make this mistake routinely and engage in combat.

All Helldivers 1 really just asks the player think about the terms of engagement. You are meant to fight, you just need to pick your battles based on what you think your team can handle, and if winning the fight is worthwhile for the mission. I actually think this improves the fights themselves, since it adds more meaning to them, and also adds a sense of urgency that simply wouldn't exist if you never had to consider the possibility of if you never had to consider the possibility of retreat.

That being said, thats a bit off topic, though entirely. I must say I think what makes HD1 different HD2 in how this dynamic works is how both games approach difficulty in combat. HD1 was simply much better designed in this regard. Enemies had well telegraphed attacks that behaved consistently and could easily be avoided on their own if you were vigilant and knew what you were doing, but were also very punishing to get hit by, so you could hold pretty much as long as you could keep up with avoiding their attacks and killing them well enough.

HD2 by contrast has a lot more randomness in its mechanics, enemies with random spread on their attacks, locational damage being applied to the player, and rag-dolling, so rather than feeling like a test of skill to face the horde, it just feel like their trying to bog you down in a fight until you get unlucky and die to something random. Of course this is all easily worked around by just not engaging with the horde at all, but thats not exactly fun, so your next best option is to simply kill as fast as possible to mitigate the length of time in which something can go wrong.

While HD1 and HD2 go for similar ideas in regards to having the player think about the terms of engagement, HD2 kinda falls flat in the execution, at least in my opinion, due to the game pretty much exclusively taking the low hanging fruit when it comes to the pursuit of difficulty, rather than actually trying to provide a challenge in an interesting way.

Now as far as the fleshmob itself, which is the original topic of conversation, the issue with that is there simply little depth with combating it. You run to the side when it charges, and shoot it until dies. That is pretty much it. Explosive weapons get some extra depth with them due to the potential of hitting multiple body parts at once to stack damage, but for most weapons its really just a matter of magdumping them. Its not exactly interesting to switch your machine gun to max RPM and hold LMB until your enemy dies. I wouldn't even say their bloated health pool really even makes them a threat, they're so easy to dodge that once you spot them the outcome of the fight is basically set in stone, and the presence of other Illuminate units doesn't really change much because they also stuggle the player. From my experience the only time a fleshmob can really kill you is if you either get ragdolled into one, or you grow complacent, get tunnel visioned, and one manages to sneak up on you and kill you. In other words, its only the rare one that you don't shoot at that manages to kill you. You cut their health in half and it would make little difference in terms of their impact on the gameplay besides maybe players wasting a bit less time and making them dodge to the side a bit less. Its not even that its good at wasting ammo either, players have more than enough supplies available to deal with them. They just don't improve the game meaningful way, and feel under developed more than anything.

[Spartykins]

Publicado originalmente por Kaine:

All these tears remind me of the way chargers were-A real challenge.

AT into followup shots on exposed leg flesh wasn't really challenging

just meant it was a good idea to bring disposable launchers with you

[Cola Bear]

Treason Detected: All Statements have been recorded and will be reviewed once the invasion is put down. Traitors will then be put down.

Charges and Allegations of Treason will be dismissed- AS LONG AS YOU FIGHT DON'T MAKE ME SHOOT YOU!

SUPER EARTH NEEDS COMMITMENT, NOT LAMENTATIONS OF A TREASONOUS SCUM.

FIGHT OR BE SHOT.

FIGHT OR BE SHOT.

SUPER EARTH WILL NOT FALL.

[[Asgard] Thor]

Publicado originalmente por Malidictus:

Publicado originalmente por Asgard Thor:

Here's a little secret I use: I don't kill them all the time.

Right, but that brings us back to the "running away meta" from Launch. How do you kill strong enemies? You don't! Just run away until they despawn. It works, but is oppressively boring in actual practice. This was my primary, overriding criticism of the original Helldivers, as well. Combat - the most compelling and often only selling point to this game - is a failure state. You get in combat if you fail to avoid combat, in which case it's your punishment. Much better to run away and hide

Arrowhead's 60-day patch was a compromise in this regard, redesigning both enemies and weapons in order to allow us to hold our ground. Now it feels like the people responsible for that patch are gone, and the original Launch team are back in command, because they're busy repeating practically all the mistakes of 2024. The Fleshmob isn't the only (or, really, worst) examples. It's just the one example we got official confirmation on. People's absolute worst, most critical read of the thing is how Arrowhead intended it to work.

Too many tourists want to go on safari and kill every single enemy and then also complain killing every single enemy is too hard to do. This seems to be a self-inflicted problem and I really don't know if any answer will satisfy you.

[Gamer0001]

they have weak spots the heads shot them and they die fast

[DeMasked]

The main weakness is that it's aggro is super low. You don't have to waste time or resources on killing everything in sight, that will only bog you down.

[Rilgar55]

Heavy machine gun melts them, wasp melts them, autocannon flak melts them, gatling sentry + some support fire from you melts them. I really dont get why people hate them so much, yeah they are tanky but can be dodged, dond deal that much damage unless you get downed just at their feet, and (at least on difficult 8) they spawn in pretty manageable numbers

[CadiMossy]

Skill issues, get good.

[Sayo]

Yeah this is why helldivers is overall a boring game. The only thing to really work to is new weapons and perks but the best strat is to engage the enemy as little as possible. It's boring.

[Japa Amazônico]

Adhering to the design philosophy of being a resource sink, i would add not a weak point but a crippling mechanic. Shoot it enough time in the stubby legs and it will become crippled, it would not be able to charge, only walk....

Would it trivialize the enemy ?
- Probably
Do i think it needs to change ?
- Nope

I personally like the way it is, its not particularly hard to avoid and while tanky, its not too hard to kill ( couple shots and a thermite grenade works like a charm )

[PapaSloppy]

I hit it with a laser cannon until it almost overheats then a few shots from my arc blitzer and its dead, no resources wasted.

[Bloodnut]

Publicado originalmente por CadiMossy:

Brah stop crying, you are just trash, and don't want to learn the game. Shoot the damn faces on it those are the weak spots. They have no armor. Thermite nades. Eagle strafing run one taps it.Eagle cluster bombs and Airburst rocket launcher. Let it charge you like a charger and shoot more faces after you dodge it. Flamethrowers. Machine gun turrent. All effective.

Yep, you're right we're totally trash, and don't want to learn the game.
Now that we agree on that, you can go find a different post to troll.