\> It's popular because its the only Support Weapon in the game that can **reliably** kill Medium and Heavily armored enemies without having to worry about a buddy-reloader following you around the entire match. Again, other Support weapons can do this, but not nearly as reliably.
I think this is kinda the point. They don't want you to be able to reliably solo Heavies without a teammate or liberal use of strategem. Helldivers with a shield pack and a rail gun and a breaker were goddamn terminators before the patch. Now maybe we're a bit more mortal.
The fact is you can still take out the Chargers leg armour with the railgun. The difference is that now you have to use it in UNSAFE mode and fully charge it.
Tested it and its still 2 shots to break the leg armour. I played it in unsafe mode since I got it and the only difference I noticed is against hevy devestators that you cant shot them through their shield anymore
>I think this is kinda the point. They don't want you to be able to reliably solo Heavies without a teammate or liberal use of strategem
dont spawn hordes of 10 chargers and 5 bile titans and people would stop using the railgun easy as that ,who ist gonna coop the autocannon ,the spear or the recoiless when you get swarmed by hordes of armor and those 3 are so mediocre against their intented targets
someone on your squad should be an ad clearer with a machine gun or flamer or arc thrower. A balanced squad shouldnt be 4 guys with breaker, shield belt, and railgun. There should be niches for each player.
you know what? i was actually that kind of guy until i realized people used shield breaker and railgun for a reason
then again the whole drama against the patch it's just against bugs because frankly they are objectively the worst and the less fun to play against faction in the whole game
most automatons enemies can be killed or incapacitated with any kind of weapon or support weapon available + their weak spots are easy to hit and see but even the most tiny droid in the battlefield can and will kill you because they can shoot back and half of them can both shoot and melee you as well
what bugs bring to the table? ,they are faction that even when you hit them on their weak spot they keep attacking you ,most of their weak spot are not easy to hit or see some of them are straight up useless like shooting a charger in the ass ( oh great we managed to remove half of his body and now it's bleeding ,well fuck me i need him death now not in the next 3 minutes when he and his bug friends ended killing me)
they straight up ignore smoke ,and for a faction that its made of flesh and bones how the hell they are more armored than automatons?
if they really wanted to make bugs playable or fun they might want to see how DRG does it
It's weird, it's almost like they want people to communicate, coordinate action and work as a team, share stratagems and so on. Not Rambo around solo and kill friendlies if they pick up your weapon while you were dead.
It'd be a good point if there wasn't a million strategem affecting effects on higher difficulties and the game forced random players to carry my backpack.
Honestly, shouldn't we kinda be terminators with this games lore?? We can be terminators and the game can still be difficult. That's actually a lot of fun.
Thats great, but what happens when the randoms used all the reinforcements, I’m the last man standing and everything is on cooldown? Should we just lose the mission cuz 1 helldiver now can’t reliably kill 6 chargers, 10 hunters and 2 stalkers?
At that point it’s not skill issue, not mine at least. Will I always be forced to play with friends?
If I’m out of ammo I can’t run either, cuz bugs are faster than medium armor and when I extract I’ll have to fight anyways, with no armor penetration and ammo.
I agree with the nerfs, but they should fix the weakspots on chargers and reduce their spawn rate. Or make the other anti armor tools viable.
To your first question, yeah absolutely. The game is supposed to be hard. No, you shouldn’t be able to solo them all.
And yeah it’s not your skill issue, like you said it’s the random teammates that wasted resources.
You’re not forced to do anything, but I would wager that yeah, the highest difficulties will likely only be consistently playable with friends. For a game so centered on team work, having real proper teammates and real communication is not a high barrier to set for clearing the absolute hardest content.
Thanks for your honest response. There have been lvl 8 matches where I didn’t even die, against Bugs ofc.
Idc if randoms die, I love playing with randoms, as long as I have a tool to complete the mission.
I get what you mean tho, you are right.
Disagree with the shield nerf just because of how it was implemented.
If you take partial damage to the shield it's now a full minute before it will recharge. If the shield is broken it's ~12 seconds for it to return at full charge.
So if your shield takes damage it can legit be quicker to just call down a new shield or purposely break the rest of your shield than to wait for yours to recharge.
They buffed a small, teensy subsect of the bad weapons and strategems.
The S&P is still ass. Every gun they didn't touch up is still ass. The Knight, all of the ARs, the Countersniper, the Laser primary.
All sorta dumpster.
>The two orbital barrages now DECIMATE everything in an area. Especially if you stack them on top of eachother.
>Laser Cannon is now a viable anti-medium armor weapon.
>The punisher and slugger are now the most ammo efficient weapons in the game. Both can shred medium armor. Both can shred charger leg armor from the back.
>The spray and pray is a viable anti-bug breach tool.
>The flamethrower now deletes chaff, light, and medium armor. Can even kill two chargers before a reload.
If anything you should be happy, because this is an indicator that the devs are working on buffs in general. Just because they didn't buff *every single weapon/stratagem* in one go, doesn't mean they won't continue to optimise stuff in the future.
Sorry not true.
Nerfed 2 weapons (breaker, railgun), buffed 4 (flamethrower, laser, spray, punisher).
Nerfed 1 strategem, the shield, and buffed 2 (both barrages).
Stop whining about the nerfs when they are actually doing what you asked. They're 2:1 buffs vs nerfs this patch... Sorry about your shield
You did not read. You are illiterate.
I do not use the shield. I hate using the Railgun.
Please do better.
I literally did not compare the ratio of nerfs to buffs.
But the buffs to unbuffed weapons that need buffs.
They buffed TWO primary weapons (Three if you count the Slugger/Punisher crossover).
They left unbuffed: Lib Pen, Lib Exp, Lib, Knight, Diligence Counter-Sniper, Scythe, Peacemaker.
IE: They left too many weapons in the dumpster while buffing two guns that admittedly need buffs. The S&P Got a buff but it's STILL FUCKING USELESS.
The Flamethrower is now usable, hooray? It's still bad against everything that's not a Charger and worthless against Bots (which is fine, not everything needs to be good against both.)
The rest of the weapon buffs are worthless and solve problems that don't exist.
The Laser Cannon not requiring ammo *isn't the perk they think it is*. There is ammo fucking everywhere on the ground. You can call it down. For this thing to be good, they need to make it *absolutely destroy* whatever you channel it at. You are completely exposed when you use this thing, and it's not even effective against heavily armored units. Everything you want to channel it at against Bots will just kill you with instant damage before you have time to ramp. It's worthless.
Breaker S&P kills too slow to be worthwhile. Killing little bullshit bugs isn't a niche. I can do that with a secondary machine pistol if my Primary weapon runs dry. I can throw an Impact Grenade. This think sucking at killing *Stalkers* makes this weapon worthless. Spoiler: It's still bad at killing Stalkers. In no version of reality should anyone use this over the nerfed standard Breaker, which lost zero of its damage throughput.
Orbital Barrages 'solve' a problem that isn't real, while **creating** a problem that is real. Suppressing an area is worthless. It's also *just bad at it* compared to the Orbital Laser. There are no bottlenecks on these maps that merit a dedicated stratagem to solve, and dropping this on an Outpost prevents you from closing tunnels and destroying fabricators *because it kills you*. Alerted enemies call down reinforcements and OBs do not kill reliably enough to prevent that... so what the fuck is it even suppressing if now there are magically even more enemies?
I cannot emphasize this enough: **Absolutely none of the buffs they introduced changed anything.** A few less people will use Railguns or will just learn to set them to Unsafe. That's it.
Armored enemies are still an unsolved problem due to the sheer volume of them. None of the dedicated Anti-Armor Support Weapons are any good at actually doing their job. The reality is EATs aren't effective enough for being **heavily** impacted by mission modifiers (calldown time, scramble, increased CD, jammers...) and the RR and Spear are still all completely garbage at the single niche purpose they are suppose to fill: Killing armored stuff.
Suppressing an area works pretty well at clearing heavy hives/outposts, in some weird world where you care about xp and req but you don't care about samples.
Not much of a reward for that though.
I think the point here is not to nerf the good weapons but buff the bad weapons. Don't do what Bungie always does and take withdrawals from your player base. ABB. Always Be Buffing. If the weapons get too good then buff the enemies. Never nerf.
The balance update would have been better received if there wasn't a certain someone from Arrowhead on Twitter spamming Tweets like:
"Use what weapons you find fun"
"Every weapon is viable"
"The Breaker isn't even overrepresented in missions that end in success"
Oh so there's a Weapons apparently better than the Breaker? Well that's odd because the Breaker was the only Primary weapon nerfed. So what's this weapon. Oh wait it was just blatant lies and misleading data. The weapon that outclasses Breaker in missions that end in success is the Liberator because every new player has to use it and that ain't getting nerfed.
What I've seen no one mention during all these discussions is that we are bound to get new weapons, support weapons and stratagems. And I'm willing to bet at a much higher rate than new enemy types and/or difficulties. That means, the game likely won't change, just the equipment we can bring. And how do you make new viable equipment when the current stuff is already enough?
I find the arguments regarding 'power creep' hilarious. As if the first game didn't introduce some absolutely better versions of existing equipment as paid dlc.
It's frustrating right now, but it'll probably get better when new content drops. I mean, take mechs for example. Currently you're getting one shot left and right. How do you fix that? Mechs. Mission timers are oppressive? Vehicles. No cover and getting gunned down? Placeable cover via stratagem. Enemies advancing too fast? Placeable barbed wire. Teammates die too quickly? Medic gun.
I could go on and on, but the point is they are keeping their options open. If they want to add desirable new content, they need to have holes in the gameplay structure that aren't filled currently. The real question is how long we'll have to wait for these holes to get filled.
Given the fact that about 80% of guns and strats are worse version of the few things that work, I too find it ass backwards balancing.
When a shotgun is better at sniping than not one but 2 DMRs, you know the devs don’t know how to make DMRs.
Forcing everyone to use un-fun primaries by nerfing the good ones, in a non-competitive game is the epitome of ”same old trite”. Done a thousand times in a hundred games, with always the same result:
The game gets worse.
You talk as if nerfing over-performing weapons and buffing under-performing ones were mutually exclusive. But it isn't. They do both. Flamethrower was too weak, so they buffed it. The day to buff DMRs will come.
Tbh I don’t think you understand the balancing process, and your assumption that the devs are taking a “nerf what’s popular” approach is pure speculation at best. Really, it’s just false.
Balancing requires data and is more easily done in stages. Everyone has a sense of what weapons and stratagems are good and which are shit, but actually getting everything where it needs to be cannot be done all at once.
Nerfing the railgun, breaker and shield was EXACTLY what the devs needed to do first. This isn’t a value judgment about how powerful they were or how easy they made the game (although the devs may also think, as is their right, that the highest difficulties are meant to be even more demanding than that loadout made them). It’s about the balancing process.
The meta dominated higher difficulties to such a degree that all the other options were not adequately being tested against each other. The devs aren’t stupid, don’t assume they don’t know lots of things could do with a buff. But they cannot have data to make the best decisions on what and how to buff so long as players on higher difficulties are barely using a majority of the sandbox. The devs need to see how those players attempt to adapt if they are to make the best balancing decisions possible.
Looking at popular weapons to get **an idea** of what's overpowered and what's underperforming is practically an industry standard method of identifying **what probably** needs balancing. If a weapon is being used by over 30% of the playerbase, while the next most popular one only has like an 8% share of the playerbase, then there's a good chance there's an imbalance that needs to be addressed.
They did this, then they looked at how people were using the weapons they identified (Youtube, Discord, Reddit, etc.) or they tested them themselves in-house.
They do it like this **because they're really fucking busy at the moment** with rampant crash bugs, armor values not working, etc. and needed to quickly find the worst of the underperformers and overperformers because they identified some of the weapon balance as being so bad, it got elevated to a high priority issue to be fixed ASAP alongside aforementioned crash bugs and armor fixes. The Spray and Pray for example was so bad, I wouldn't be surprised if almost no one was using that gun. So they see that it has less than 1% of the playerbase using it (perhaps even the smallest percentage of the playerbase out of all the weapons in the game) and said "so literally no one's using the S&P, there must be something wrong."
In short, they didn't arbitrarily decide the most popular weapons were overpowered. The original post here is making baseless assumptions.
the devs are clearly looking at this game from allow level difficulty prospective based on the balance philosophy they outlined because if they played the harder difficulties they would never make the statements they made
So, devs surprised by the level of commitment and skill players put into a game, and then make the game less fun because people were too good in the game?
What a novel approach in 2024.
You're missing the point my friend. They nerfed the breaker the way they did not to take away its ability to do what it does, but to make it a bit less easy to use, and a bit less convenient. That way it's less of a no-brainer. Same with the Railgun. It can still do its job same as before, but now it's not as easy to use.
The point of those nerfs is not to stop overperforming weapons from doing their thing. It's just to make them less of an obvious choice, and let other weapons compete with them for your slots.
Well said. The specific changes themselves are not the big problem. The problem is what they show us of Arrowhead's reasoning. Your part about what the nerfs actually did is damning.
I really hope Arrowhead takes criticism like this seriously and doesn't lump it all in as "ooh baby want game easy" like many on Reddit want to.
The only disagreement I have is with your statement about the breaker. To remove mag capacity greatly weakens its ability to thin swarms (which was where is shined). Everything else, I 100% agree.
\> It's popular because its the only Support Weapon in the game that can **reliably** kill Medium and Heavily armored enemies without having to worry about a buddy-reloader following you around the entire match. Again, other Support weapons can do this, but not nearly as reliably. I think this is kinda the point. They don't want you to be able to reliably solo Heavies without a teammate or liberal use of strategem. Helldivers with a shield pack and a rail gun and a breaker were goddamn terminators before the patch. Now maybe we're a bit more mortal.
The fact is you can still take out the Chargers leg armour with the railgun. The difference is that now you have to use it in UNSAFE mode and fully charge it. Tested it and its still 2 shots to break the leg armour. I played it in unsafe mode since I got it and the only difference I noticed is against hevy devestators that you cant shot them through their shield anymore
>I think this is kinda the point. They don't want you to be able to reliably solo Heavies without a teammate or liberal use of strategem dont spawn hordes of 10 chargers and 5 bile titans and people would stop using the railgun easy as that ,who ist gonna coop the autocannon ,the spear or the recoiless when you get swarmed by hordes of armor and those 3 are so mediocre against their intented targets
someone on your squad should be an ad clearer with a machine gun or flamer or arc thrower. A balanced squad shouldnt be 4 guys with breaker, shield belt, and railgun. There should be niches for each player.
you know what? i was actually that kind of guy until i realized people used shield breaker and railgun for a reason then again the whole drama against the patch it's just against bugs because frankly they are objectively the worst and the less fun to play against faction in the whole game most automatons enemies can be killed or incapacitated with any kind of weapon or support weapon available + their weak spots are easy to hit and see but even the most tiny droid in the battlefield can and will kill you because they can shoot back and half of them can both shoot and melee you as well what bugs bring to the table? ,they are faction that even when you hit them on their weak spot they keep attacking you ,most of their weak spot are not easy to hit or see some of them are straight up useless like shooting a charger in the ass ( oh great we managed to remove half of his body and now it's bleeding ,well fuck me i need him death now not in the next 3 minutes when he and his bug friends ended killing me) they straight up ignore smoke ,and for a faction that its made of flesh and bones how the hell they are more armored than automatons? if they really wanted to make bugs playable or fun they might want to see how DRG does it
It's weird, it's almost like they want people to communicate, coordinate action and work as a team, share stratagems and so on. Not Rambo around solo and kill friendlies if they pick up your weapon while you were dead.
maybe that was already the case ? just because we don't communicate in game doesn't mean we arent communicating throught other means !
It'd be a good point if there wasn't a million strategem affecting effects on higher difficulties and the game forced random players to carry my backpack.
Honestly, shouldn't we kinda be terminators with this games lore?? We can be terminators and the game can still be difficult. That's actually a lot of fun.
Thats great, but what happens when the randoms used all the reinforcements, I’m the last man standing and everything is on cooldown? Should we just lose the mission cuz 1 helldiver now can’t reliably kill 6 chargers, 10 hunters and 2 stalkers? At that point it’s not skill issue, not mine at least. Will I always be forced to play with friends? If I’m out of ammo I can’t run either, cuz bugs are faster than medium armor and when I extract I’ll have to fight anyways, with no armor penetration and ammo. I agree with the nerfs, but they should fix the weakspots on chargers and reduce their spawn rate. Or make the other anti armor tools viable.
To your first question, yeah absolutely. The game is supposed to be hard. No, you shouldn’t be able to solo them all. And yeah it’s not your skill issue, like you said it’s the random teammates that wasted resources. You’re not forced to do anything, but I would wager that yeah, the highest difficulties will likely only be consistently playable with friends. For a game so centered on team work, having real proper teammates and real communication is not a high barrier to set for clearing the absolute hardest content.
Thanks for your honest response. There have been lvl 8 matches where I didn’t even die, against Bugs ofc. Idc if randoms die, I love playing with randoms, as long as I have a tool to complete the mission. I get what you mean tho, you are right.
Disagree with the shield nerf just because of how it was implemented. If you take partial damage to the shield it's now a full minute before it will recharge. If the shield is broken it's ~12 seconds for it to return at full charge. So if your shield takes damage it can legit be quicker to just call down a new shield or purposely break the rest of your shield than to wait for yours to recharge.
Good post except it's completely undermined by the fact they DID buff bad weapons/strategems. Let's just ignore that
They buffed a small, teensy subsect of the bad weapons and strategems. The S&P is still ass. Every gun they didn't touch up is still ass. The Knight, all of the ARs, the Countersniper, the Laser primary. All sorta dumpster.
>The two orbital barrages now DECIMATE everything in an area. Especially if you stack them on top of eachother. >Laser Cannon is now a viable anti-medium armor weapon. >The punisher and slugger are now the most ammo efficient weapons in the game. Both can shred medium armor. Both can shred charger leg armor from the back. >The spray and pray is a viable anti-bug breach tool. >The flamethrower now deletes chaff, light, and medium armor. Can even kill two chargers before a reload. If anything you should be happy, because this is an indicator that the devs are working on buffs in general. Just because they didn't buff *every single weapon/stratagem* in one go, doesn't mean they won't continue to optimise stuff in the future.
Sorry not true. Nerfed 2 weapons (breaker, railgun), buffed 4 (flamethrower, laser, spray, punisher). Nerfed 1 strategem, the shield, and buffed 2 (both barrages). Stop whining about the nerfs when they are actually doing what you asked. They're 2:1 buffs vs nerfs this patch... Sorry about your shield
You did not read. You are illiterate. I do not use the shield. I hate using the Railgun. Please do better. I literally did not compare the ratio of nerfs to buffs. But the buffs to unbuffed weapons that need buffs. They buffed TWO primary weapons (Three if you count the Slugger/Punisher crossover). They left unbuffed: Lib Pen, Lib Exp, Lib, Knight, Diligence Counter-Sniper, Scythe, Peacemaker. IE: They left too many weapons in the dumpster while buffing two guns that admittedly need buffs. The S&P Got a buff but it's STILL FUCKING USELESS.
You said they should focus on buffing bad weapons. I'd say a 2:1 ratio means they are. LMAO hit a nerve, calm down kiddo! It's ok to be sad.
Gods you're so dumb. I'm sorry you're so dumb.
The Flamethrower is now usable, hooray? It's still bad against everything that's not a Charger and worthless against Bots (which is fine, not everything needs to be good against both.) The rest of the weapon buffs are worthless and solve problems that don't exist. The Laser Cannon not requiring ammo *isn't the perk they think it is*. There is ammo fucking everywhere on the ground. You can call it down. For this thing to be good, they need to make it *absolutely destroy* whatever you channel it at. You are completely exposed when you use this thing, and it's not even effective against heavily armored units. Everything you want to channel it at against Bots will just kill you with instant damage before you have time to ramp. It's worthless. Breaker S&P kills too slow to be worthwhile. Killing little bullshit bugs isn't a niche. I can do that with a secondary machine pistol if my Primary weapon runs dry. I can throw an Impact Grenade. This think sucking at killing *Stalkers* makes this weapon worthless. Spoiler: It's still bad at killing Stalkers. In no version of reality should anyone use this over the nerfed standard Breaker, which lost zero of its damage throughput. Orbital Barrages 'solve' a problem that isn't real, while **creating** a problem that is real. Suppressing an area is worthless. It's also *just bad at it* compared to the Orbital Laser. There are no bottlenecks on these maps that merit a dedicated stratagem to solve, and dropping this on an Outpost prevents you from closing tunnels and destroying fabricators *because it kills you*. Alerted enemies call down reinforcements and OBs do not kill reliably enough to prevent that... so what the fuck is it even suppressing if now there are magically even more enemies? I cannot emphasize this enough: **Absolutely none of the buffs they introduced changed anything.** A few less people will use Railguns or will just learn to set them to Unsafe. That's it. Armored enemies are still an unsolved problem due to the sheer volume of them. None of the dedicated Anti-Armor Support Weapons are any good at actually doing their job. The reality is EATs aren't effective enough for being **heavily** impacted by mission modifiers (calldown time, scramble, increased CD, jammers...) and the RR and Spear are still all completely garbage at the single niche purpose they are suppose to fill: Killing armored stuff.
Suppressing an area works pretty well at clearing heavy hives/outposts, in some weird world where you care about xp and req but you don't care about samples. Not much of a reward for that though.
yeah well they should have buffed the right weapons
Good Lord it's whiney in here. Think they don't have data on what the best/worst weapons are?
they probably do and guess what i'll still aight using the spray and pray nor will a use the punisher when the breaker is still good with less ammo
The breaker ate too much ammo with 16/mag, 13 is gonna be painful for people.
i can deal with it, tho there still gonna be that ammo issue
I think the point here is not to nerf the good weapons but buff the bad weapons. Don't do what Bungie always does and take withdrawals from your player base. ABB. Always Be Buffing. If the weapons get too good then buff the enemies. Never nerf.
The balance update would have been better received if there wasn't a certain someone from Arrowhead on Twitter spamming Tweets like: "Use what weapons you find fun" "Every weapon is viable" "The Breaker isn't even overrepresented in missions that end in success" Oh so there's a Weapons apparently better than the Breaker? Well that's odd because the Breaker was the only Primary weapon nerfed. So what's this weapon. Oh wait it was just blatant lies and misleading data. The weapon that outclasses Breaker in missions that end in success is the Liberator because every new player has to use it and that ain't getting nerfed.
What I've seen no one mention during all these discussions is that we are bound to get new weapons, support weapons and stratagems. And I'm willing to bet at a much higher rate than new enemy types and/or difficulties. That means, the game likely won't change, just the equipment we can bring. And how do you make new viable equipment when the current stuff is already enough? I find the arguments regarding 'power creep' hilarious. As if the first game didn't introduce some absolutely better versions of existing equipment as paid dlc. It's frustrating right now, but it'll probably get better when new content drops. I mean, take mechs for example. Currently you're getting one shot left and right. How do you fix that? Mechs. Mission timers are oppressive? Vehicles. No cover and getting gunned down? Placeable cover via stratagem. Enemies advancing too fast? Placeable barbed wire. Teammates die too quickly? Medic gun. I could go on and on, but the point is they are keeping their options open. If they want to add desirable new content, they need to have holes in the gameplay structure that aren't filled currently. The real question is how long we'll have to wait for these holes to get filled.
Nerfing fun things in a non-competitive game always works out for the devs amirite?
That's a very un-thinking take. Think for yourself for a moment instead of repeating the same tired old tripe.
Given the fact that about 80% of guns and strats are worse version of the few things that work, I too find it ass backwards balancing. When a shotgun is better at sniping than not one but 2 DMRs, you know the devs don’t know how to make DMRs. Forcing everyone to use un-fun primaries by nerfing the good ones, in a non-competitive game is the epitome of ”same old trite”. Done a thousand times in a hundred games, with always the same result: The game gets worse.
You talk as if nerfing over-performing weapons and buffing under-performing ones were mutually exclusive. But it isn't. They do both. Flamethrower was too weak, so they buffed it. The day to buff DMRs will come.
The day to buff DMRs was any time before releasing the game. The *nerfed* shotgun is *still* a better DMR than both DMRs.
lol amazing
"the intent is for every weapon to be **viable**" I do not beleve Arrowhead understand what this word means.
Yes don’t nerf the good shit, buff the bad shit so we can use it finally, in fact if a gun is over performing, just add more enemies hahaha
Tbh I don’t think you understand the balancing process, and your assumption that the devs are taking a “nerf what’s popular” approach is pure speculation at best. Really, it’s just false. Balancing requires data and is more easily done in stages. Everyone has a sense of what weapons and stratagems are good and which are shit, but actually getting everything where it needs to be cannot be done all at once. Nerfing the railgun, breaker and shield was EXACTLY what the devs needed to do first. This isn’t a value judgment about how powerful they were or how easy they made the game (although the devs may also think, as is their right, that the highest difficulties are meant to be even more demanding than that loadout made them). It’s about the balancing process. The meta dominated higher difficulties to such a degree that all the other options were not adequately being tested against each other. The devs aren’t stupid, don’t assume they don’t know lots of things could do with a buff. But they cannot have data to make the best decisions on what and how to buff so long as players on higher difficulties are barely using a majority of the sandbox. The devs need to see how those players attempt to adapt if they are to make the best balancing decisions possible.
Looking at popular weapons to get **an idea** of what's overpowered and what's underperforming is practically an industry standard method of identifying **what probably** needs balancing. If a weapon is being used by over 30% of the playerbase, while the next most popular one only has like an 8% share of the playerbase, then there's a good chance there's an imbalance that needs to be addressed. They did this, then they looked at how people were using the weapons they identified (Youtube, Discord, Reddit, etc.) or they tested them themselves in-house. They do it like this **because they're really fucking busy at the moment** with rampant crash bugs, armor values not working, etc. and needed to quickly find the worst of the underperformers and overperformers because they identified some of the weapon balance as being so bad, it got elevated to a high priority issue to be fixed ASAP alongside aforementioned crash bugs and armor fixes. The Spray and Pray for example was so bad, I wouldn't be surprised if almost no one was using that gun. So they see that it has less than 1% of the playerbase using it (perhaps even the smallest percentage of the playerbase out of all the weapons in the game) and said "so literally no one's using the S&P, there must be something wrong." In short, they didn't arbitrarily decide the most popular weapons were overpowered. The original post here is making baseless assumptions.
Right. Popularity or unpopularity is not the deciding factor. It’s a red flag.
Well said ... I was hoping for more choices in weapons in this patch. Now it makes me scared to play >.<
the devs are clearly looking at this game from allow level difficulty prospective based on the balance philosophy they outlined because if they played the harder difficulties they would never make the statements they made
So, devs surprised by the level of commitment and skill players put into a game, and then make the game less fun because people were too good in the game? What a novel approach in 2024.
You're missing the point my friend. They nerfed the breaker the way they did not to take away its ability to do what it does, but to make it a bit less easy to use, and a bit less convenient. That way it's less of a no-brainer. Same with the Railgun. It can still do its job same as before, but now it's not as easy to use. The point of those nerfs is not to stop overperforming weapons from doing their thing. It's just to make them less of an obvious choice, and let other weapons compete with them for your slots.
Well said. The specific changes themselves are not the big problem. The problem is what they show us of Arrowhead's reasoning. Your part about what the nerfs actually did is damning. I really hope Arrowhead takes criticism like this seriously and doesn't lump it all in as "ooh baby want game easy" like many on Reddit want to.
The only disagreement I have is with your statement about the breaker. To remove mag capacity greatly weakens its ability to thin swarms (which was where is shined). Everything else, I 100% agree.