Helldivers 2: it is very important to return every hug

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Helldivers 2: it is very important to return every hug

Join The Helldivers!
	Freedom!
	Democracy!
	Liber-tea!
	Call for reinforcements!

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

How is it this low!? Myself and a buddy were chain-clearing the extract then defend mission pairs last night as just the two of us without any issues at all. Granted we were only playing on Medium, but we're also like level 5 because we both just picked up the game. Not using the 4x stratagem exploit or anything, just each taking a side of the map and keeping the spawns cleared + spamming the extract buttons when they reset. The crazy spawnrate is fun as hell and the missions themselves go extremely fast and give good rewards, gonna miss the event when it's over.

Fun game, getting more friends hooked on it.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2024 18:34

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 10, 2024 06:56

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Unless I am missing something that should be obvious, the support weapons stratagems (machine gun, laser cannon, railgun, etc) don't show the actual weapon stats anywhere?

I can see if a primary or secondary weapon is light or medium armor pen or per shot reload and the damage/magsize/etc, but I can't see the same stats for support weapons anywhere that I've found yet. It's irritating.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2024 19:35

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

I wish you could save "loadouts" of stratagems and boosters to have a one-click apply on the mission-readyup screen. Saving 10-15s of clicking each time adds up.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2024 21:31

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

DarkDobe posted:

The other is the unskippable post-game stats.

Giving struggling ancient console hardware the opportunity to unload assets and swap cached memory takes time.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2024 22:27

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Well that's some bullshit. Was in and playing perfectly fine, then restarted to try and get our 4th in because they couldn't join and now "servers at capacity" for the last 20 minutes.

How are server problems after the first weekend of a launch still a thing?

# ¿ Feb 17, 2024 02:46

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Chain-running the "kill x robots and extract" missions on the highest difficulty you can handle (we're on suicide with a 2 man group now) results in an absurdly fast leveling speed. It's ~850 exp and ~3k requisitions per run on suicide. Literally takes longer for the deployment, extraction, and postgame stats than the mission itself.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2024 21:19

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Nice thing about sample collection is that if you have a full 4-man team, 2 can just run around the whole map hitting every POI while the other 2 do the objectives and extract. You don't have to physically get in the shuttle to take samples with you, you just can't die while carrying them. This also means if the extraction zone is a utter clusterfuck you can just stay away and the only thing the team/you "lose" is a small exp/req bonus.

Wish it was easier to find rare/super rare samples though, the sheer quantities you need for later levels of upgrades are kind of nuts.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2024 05:31

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Game needs way more secondary weapons. Your choices are effectively:
- a weak normal pistol
- a much better smg
- an okay handcannon that takes years to reload (only available if you ground out or bought the premium bond)

...and all of them have extremely limited ammo pools. Give me more interesting and viable secondaries so I don't have to always bring the most optimal primary or die horribly. Hell, I'd even be okay with the current options if they had, like, double the available ammo so I could actually use the drat things for more than a single surprise patrol.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2024 17:43

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Sounds like it's about time to break out the old "move around and chat a random word or two every few minutes" AHK script. Have been just logging in at the end of lunch and leaving it tabbed out so I can actually play the drat game after work, but if their short-term bandaid is autokick instead of spinning up more/better servers, everything is fair game.

Perestroika posted:

Has anybody found a real niche for heat damage yet? I want to like the laser weapons, but goddamn so far they just seem plain inferior to just about any other option in the respective slot, theoretically infinite ammo really isn't that much of an advantage in practice.

I am generally happy to have the laser drone and scythe on missions that double the calldown timer, scramble calldowns, or block calldowns altogether. In the last case I think it may have been a secondary objective structure, but regardless it was a pain in the rear end to get resupplied which meant no ammo use = good even i hte damage output was lower.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2024 00:23

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Man the longer missions on the next-to-last difficulty get ridiculously intense in a heartbeat, especially since my ship is limping around with only the first set of upgrades across the board. I can't wait to see what the final difficulty does to spawnrates. Sample acquisition rate is suffering.

Dandywalken posted:

Buff flamethrower! Give it some sort of stun/constant interrupt vs bugs, Arrowcowards

Each tic of being set on fire or taking damage from fire should be filling a stagger bar.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2024 15:26

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

A friend pointed out that different helmets do actually have different stats despite not showing those on the helmet itself. For example:

It's not a huge difference, but it does make me wonder what else isn't displaying correctly.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2024 00:58

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

jokes posted:

So what do the marker scans do?

Diephoon posted:

It's radar, but around your map ping instead of your character. Sometimes I will place markers on the map ahead of where I'm going to see where enemies are. Sometimes I will go off and solo for a bit, but I will drop pings around where my team is fighting so they can get the benefit of radar pointing out enemies for them.

It also seems to get full bonuses from both the ship-upgrade "radar range" and the "radar range" booster. It's great. Easily my favotire armor passive. Generally ping whatever the main objective is and we can see every enemy for miles around it.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2024 01:32

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Arc has surprisingly decent range and perfect initial shot accuracy as far as I can tell, but the arcing part is really inconsistent and obviously it can also TK. That said, it was 2-shotting rocket devastators with headshots on suicidal and seemed to sometimes damage the bots inside walkers so...

I imagine it would be substantially less useful on bug missions.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2024 19:48

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Well obviously the patchnotes were indicating that they made the mission easier for the automatons because too many helldivers were succeeding and we're supposed to lose, or something.

My group has been pretty consistently clearing those missions on suicidal, and I can't say as I've noticed a difference since the patch.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2024 21:07

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

They claim to have plans to add more factions and mission types and stratagems and weapons and pages in the warbond store on a pretty aggressive schedule (monthly), so the endgame loop is "play on the hardest difficulty you can and have fun with friends while slowly progressing the always expanding unlock list".

# ¿ Feb 21, 2024 22:28

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

The main character is the ship.

You name the ship, not your (first) helldiver. Helldivers are nothing but meat drones the ship sends out to advance its mission of dispensing FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY. All of the upgrades you buy are for the ship or things the ship does. All the calldowns are either fired directly from the ship, or from the parasite craft hosted by the ship. All the warbond equipment you unlock is stored in the ship so it can be bolted onto freshly unthawed helldivers.

What I'm trying to say is that we need more customization options for the ship. Color channels, camo patterns, random trophies bolted onto the hull, counters for mission difficulty/count breakpoints, etc. Warframe this poo poo up to 11/10.

# ¿ Feb 22, 2024 19:17

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

drrockso20 posted:

To a degree I agree but there's a point where it is just too much, at the very least it should impact the enemy's ability to see and detect you just as much as it does you

I have seen multiple instances of bot patrols walking right by me not even 5 meters away in double-reduced-visibility missions. Bugs are more hit or miss, whch makes sense.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2024 03:41

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Pharmaskittle posted:

The sighting range doesn't seem to actually change what your scope looks like, at least not on the dmr I usually run

The scope overlay itself doesn't change, but scoped-in FOV/zoom does. Try switching between 50m and 200m with the AMR to clearly see the difference.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2024 20:32

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

To be fair, the extracts (kill 150/whatever) take all of 2-3 minutes even at the highest difficulty, and are by far the fastest and easiest way to farm Medals and Req and XP. So it makes perfect sense for people to smash their faces against that for a handful of hours to hit level 20 so every stratagem and a decent chunk of their warbonds can be unlocked to achieve loadout flexibility.

At least you'll only ever get common samples on those missions no matter the difficulty, so eventually even the farmers will have to branch out and start playing "normal" missions to finish upgrading their SD.

Now the ones who keep farming nothing but extracts after level 20 without understanding why it was a good idea for a little while but not forever, are also the type who makes noise on social media about no content and dead game and will jump to their next FOTM soon enough. I blame content creators for this mindset, mostly. It's their job so of course they're gonna minmax and chase efficiency, which skews the impression of the game for those watching.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2024 21:41

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

All the big AOE / explosive orbital strikes suck hard compared to precision orbitals and Eagle strikes, which is unfortunate because they all look pretty cool. They need to massively increase the damage-zone or something because even tossing the 380HE in the literal center of a large hive seems to do gently caress all except occasionally kill a few things on the periphery, and the whole squad well outside of the hive as a bonus.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2024 19:21

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

The only change railgun """needs""" from a balance standpoint is adding a backpack to power it. They can upgrade the scope at the same time since consuming the backpack slot is a relatively large nerf.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2024 21:15

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Phenotype posted:

The Steam version wouldn't let me play until I went through Captcha Hell to link it to my Playstation account!

A common misconception that I'm sure Sony would like more people to fall victim to. You can just skip all that account linking bullshit and still play without any issues on PC. Does seem odd that progression isn't carried over if you have linked accounts though - tried a support ticket?

# ¿ Feb 28, 2024 01:03

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

ShootaBoy posted:

What's the secret technique to actually play the game? All I can get are 'unable to connect to lobby' errors.

Set your game mode to public if it's not already, click on a mission node that doesn't have a player counter already, then pop an SOS beacon as soon as you spawn.
If you mean initial login fails, try joining on a random friend or group member who's already ingame, even if you immediately leave their session.

Sindai posted:

What's the best weapon for dealing with berserker packs? It's so much easier dealing with 1 hulk than 4-6 berserkers.

Slugger or one of the airstrike stratagems. Slugger can easily keep a full pack staggered until they're all dead. If a semi-auto version of the slugger with magazine reload instead of per-shot eventually comes out, it'll be the best primary weapon in the game no-contest.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2024 07:44

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Arrath posted:

I want to love grenade launchers, I really do. But there is something about them that turns me from average shooter into trick shot champion, except the trick is the ability to thread the needle between the hit boxes of the enemy legs so the grenade explodes harmlessly somewhere well behind the target.

IMO if you're gonna rock the 'nader you need to run it with the ammo support backpack, which unfortunately prevents you from using the shield or jetpack. But I like running 'nader on bug missions and making it my personal duty to close every single filthy undemocratic bug hole on the entire map. I also run slugger most of the time even on bug missions, so the ammo backpack does double duty.

AC is another viable option for bugs but I'm quite a bit worse at not blowing myself up with that somehow.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2024 18:31

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Stalwart on the highest RPM setting is something special. Honestly they should just reduce the RPM and magsize (or count) and make it a primary weapon instead of support.

Visible "weakspots" like charger abdomens should be actually-weak to everything instead of being a big fat phoney bullet trap of bullshit. Then they can give explosives innate armor destruction so they still have a niche and every metaslave doesn't feel the need to always railgun for optimal gameplay.

Waiting for armor with "extra mags" trait to come out, until then I'm glued to "scout". Being able to freely disengage from almost anything is just too good, and the radar on pings is legitimately great help for teammates while I'm on the other side of the map getting samples and clearing secondary objectives.

Play posted:

(regarding smoke)

I wish it was more useful, or at least covered a wider area. It seems to disperse very quickly too, I tried to use it as a way to get bots to completely lose you and that can happen, but more likely they'll just keep moving forward, come out of the smoke and kill you.

I've abandoned it as the coward's way. All my stratagems revolve around killing enemies, and my democracy officer strongly approves

You haven't lived if you've never dumped smoke on a large outpost/nest and crawled your way to an objective inside it then either hellbombed it and ran like crazy, or escaped without getting spotted or alarming anything even once. Granted that doesn't always work but it's an adrenaline rush when it does. Stealth is viable and smoke helps with stealth (more so against bots).

BeAuMaN posted:

My point is: For all the handwringing that was caused because of Arrowhead's choice of anti-cheat... it didn't matter in the end anyway because people circumvented it anyway?

Every anticheat always gets circumvented eventually. The main goal is just making it "more difficult" for joe casual to fire up a generic cheat program and break the game for whoever he randomly joins, at least during the initial popularity surge of a new game release.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2024 21:14

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

jokes posted:

Speaking of, I hope they make the jump pack have a higher jump

Jetpack needs to store like 20 seconds of thrust, then have a long recharge after its all used, like ~5 minutes. It's not comfy to use as-is.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2024 23:45

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Depends on the faction, really. For bugs you definitely want plenty of close range swarm clearing capability, but for bots medium to long range is generally preferable. That said, I'm not a fan of the "marksman" type primary weapons (give me an AMR or AC any day) aside from the slugger, which still works perfectly fine at close ranges.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2024 22:34

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Even with that mode change, if you start sprinting with the map already open, it will close the map. However you can just re-open the map and continue to sprint without issue.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2024 04:46

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Hold "x" to drop your backpack, quick! Love that last second attempt to dive away.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2024 02:04

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Every mission debuff needs to force-spawn a tertiary objective after the mission starts (so you can't land on top of it) which when you liberate with extreme prejudice clears the debuff. Instead of just being "gently caress you" turn it into a more forgiving "gently caress you if you're too lazy to run across the map".

# ¿ Mar 5, 2024 21:33

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Space zombies are gonna be the last faction after alien jedi. Think about it - zombies can't even vote, and that's the most un-democratic thing possible.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2024 05:01

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Silver and Gold 3 are both great.

Mech is fun, more so against bugs.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2024 20:23

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

I've got the stratagem menu on "hold" instead of "toggle" so switching to arrows would still result in stopped movement. It adds excitement to have to stop moving to punch in keys in a panic to call in support/reinforcements anyway.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2024 19:50

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Running the +radar ship upgrade and the +radar hexagon-whatever equipment buff and light armor with the scout trait (map pings function as radar origination points), I have seen patrols spawn offscreen/out of sight range and beeline toward a red beam stratagem before. I've also seen existing patrols do greater-than-90-degree pivots toward red beam calldowns even when they're beyond what should be reasonable aggro range.

It feels like patrols have a much higher detection range and prioritization/aggro on calldowns than stationary/POI enemies do. POI enemies will pretty much just sit there unless you drop something directly in their LOS or close by.

Tom Tucker posted:

Mortar sentries are absolute killing machines. Drop one down and you can almost guarantee 50-75% of combat effectiveness will be gone.

We have normal and EMS mortars, but where are the napalm mortars!?

# ¿ Mar 12, 2024 22:23

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Flamethrower drone and/or flamethrower turret is also acceptable. What I'm trying to say is that there's a ~~criminal~~ freedom-hating lack of ways to apply the cleansing flames of democracy to anything and everything around us, and that's just no good.

Third World Reagan posted:

You are getting a drone that has a loud speaker on it, that is it

It will just let you know how great super earth is

I would gladly burn a backpack slot on a boombox that just blasts the SEA on repeat, like the drone on flag-raising missions. Especially if it had an xbox-huge aggro range. Fear not, for the glorious sound of freedom rings loud and true!

sushibandit fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Mar 12, 2024

# ¿ Mar 12, 2024 22:50

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Mode 7 posted:

HELLDIVERS 2 THREAD GANG TAGS

If you want this gangtag:

Notes/Rules:

1) Quote this post within the next 24 hours or so, cutoff time will be 14/03/24 9am UTC (you can of course buy the gang tag for yourself at any point, this is just for the freebies)

2) If you already have the max amount of gang tags (3) please tell me which one to remove to make room in your quote post.

3) Desire for this gang tag was way higher than I expected. If your only post in this thread is asking for the gang tag I am probably not going to queue one for free, apologies. I queue these up but admins still have to sign off on em and we're apparently discouraged from handing them out like candy

It's beautiful. Tag me please!

# ¿ Mar 13, 2024 13:58

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Secondary weapons (or at least the machine pistol) need about double their current ammo pool. As often as you end up needing to use them if you have a slow-firing/single target primary, their pool gets burned through absurdly fast.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2024 16:41

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Helldivers 2 - Liber-tea Isn't Free

Dead Like Rev posted:

Yelling into the void trying to explain the difference between clip and mag is only going to lead to madness.

Nobody ever claimed that doing the right thing would be easy.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2024 19:41

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Rocket bots should all be grenade bots instead. Imagine the panic when a flurry of grenades from a devastator flies through the air and drops all around you beeping for a couple of seconds before exploding, as opposed to the "welp guess I just died" instagib that rockets tend to do if you're not glued to the shield pack.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2024 18:32

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 10, 2024 06:56

sushibandit: Feb 12, 2009

Gorelab posted:

Something like that or they need a more noticeable tell so even if you die you have a better idea of where the heck it was.

A laser sight on rocket bots that lights you up for a second so you notice before they fire would also work yeah. The only real danger from rockets is if you don't notice them / they shoot you from behind.

theysayheygreg posted:

look posters complain about regular mortars and not seeing them before you get gibbed so yes we should definitely add more death from the sky mechanics

A giant glowing "this is death" ball slowly flying through the air is much more noticeable than nearly invisible nearly vertical mortar sentry trails. Think the Wraith's main gun from Halo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS11s0t-MlI&t=8s

BitBasher posted:

Armor with the 50% reduced explosion damage trait works too. Even the light at or can tank a rocket and be ragdolled and left with 20% life or so.

Unfortunately that would require either giving up +2 grenades and better crouching accuracy (on medium/heavy) or better stealth and infinite radar (on light) which are pretty much welded to my helldiver at this point.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2024 18:47

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Helldivers 2: it is very important to return every hug

«‹›2 »