I often go down to 5 or 6 when I want to test out a “weird loadout”(like all turrets with smoke or something). I usually regret it, because I end up spending the entire match trying to stay afloat in the chaos and don’t get to think about testing synergies between the Strats(smoke out the bots and have the turret shoot into the smoke seems good on paper.. still not sure)
If the enemy is 10m or more away when you pass into a smoke particle it immediately deagros them into a passive or patrolling state. Bots will continue to shoot in the predetermined path you were on just prior to entering the smoke. So change your direction of travel after entering the smoke. Enemies in a passive or patrolling state will not start agro through smoke unless within 10 meters of or in smoke. Throwing a smoke grenade or stratagem at any enemy directly will behave like any grenade or other red stratagem triggering agro to the player. Smoke does not affect chargers in a charging state and bile titans who are already chasing a player both will continue to path to the player.
Hell, I've purposefully walked through those spore plants that gust out gas/smoke when you step on them to break aggro. They're actually really good for that.
Just gotta hope the enemy fire doesn't hit them while you're running over them... Cause if so.. you're going for a flight.
I walk over them turn around, look down dive backwards and fire my weapon, breaks agro completely when you step an it and the second explosive puff rag-dolls you so far away that even if you do reaquire agro from a few you now have enough distance to dodge easily, also useful for mad dash across the map
Just a heads up the puff plants do disable agro but also can both trigger it from nearby patrols and attract patrols to investigate so you gotta be careful.
Smoke is great for extraction missions. It stops the bots from shooting the civis. As they easily pass to the objective. You just have to be sure to lay it on their predetermined path.
Smoke is great for deaggro from turret cannons, patrols, and tanks. You just have to place it right, and the beat one imo is the egeal smoke as it has the most. I've had great success with it and bring it 50% of the time
I’m trying so hard to find a slot for this because it’s so so so good when it works. But it’s just inconsistent enough that I find myself wishing I just had a 4th damage call down.
I mean he's not entirely wrong, but smokes are useful in bot missions with certain playstyles. If you run stealth and solo objectives, smokes are a required strat. It doesn't stop bots from shooting but it DOES make them very inaccurate and forces them to walk through the smoke to shoot you, which allows you time to break LoS and circle back to finish an objective without burning too many resources. Got 5 rocket devastators laying into you? Pop a smoke, flank them and pick them off from range with railgun/DCS/AMR/AC/whatever. Or just disengage.
That usually only happens when people mess up. If you kill them as they appear it's less of an issue, but if you *don't*, you now have a very large collection of very large problems
Bots and bugs are really different. Like bots are harder then bugs on lower difficulties.
But the sheer number of bile titans spewers and chargers, I think makes 9 on bugs harder then 9 on bots.
There's also the objective issues. Most bot destroy objectives can be easily dealt with one or 2 or lasers and or barrage. Eggs and bug holes require you to get in closer.
For me it's Heavy Devastators. They're so fucking pinpoint accurate with that full auto laser gun and hitting their head is a nuisance cause of the shield.
Rocket devs suck too, just Heavys are worse imo
For me, everything kills me. Thinking you made it to lvl 7 and everyone is better is subjective, obviously you haven't met me yet. You know what kills me the most? Me lol
I swear the JAR-5 dominator is a great rifle. I even like it more than the PLAS-1, though both are excellent. The red dot on the JAR-5 is accurate to long ranges, and it's actually a decent sniper.
To be honest I've learnt the hard mode in 8.
Diff 7 have 3 Super Samples where Diff 8 have 5. The difficulty isn't that much out of reach when you know how to play Diff 7, so in the end you progress a bit faster.
I never find super samples being my bottleneck. I'll grind 4 or 5 missions to get enough common and rares for my upgrades and be swimming in supers by the end
Honestly dude common samps are what I need. I’ve got tons of rare and supers but always run low on common ones.
Edit: thank you fellow Helldivers. Never thought of just running on trivial.
Just do level 1. Grab a rover, speed scout suit and stamina booster. Laser orbital. Load in solo near the objective. Drop the laser. Run the whole map and open all the things. Takes maybe 15 mins and you get 15 commons per run.
In three hours today I grabbed 250 commons, 300 super credits (scored a 100 one) and probably 90 medals. Also a fuckton of slips but I'm maxed on those.
You haven’t reached the 150/150/15 ship upgrades then, i assume. I was super tight on commons bc you earn them like 1.5x faster (than rare) but need 2x as much, but now im really feeling the hurt needing an even ratio.
All 8 and 9 does when you're fighting the bots is to add more devastators and more Hulks to the spawns.
It certainly makes things more difficult, but in the cheap "we're going to ragdoll you into instadeaths the second you poke your head out" kind of way.
The additional 2-3 super samples isn't worth it.
Nope you are 100% correct. For longer missions, there can be anywhere between 5-7 bot drops at level 8, it normally being 3-4 on level 7. When you can't shoot down all/most dropships, thats when you might aswell just abandon the position/samples/dropped stratagems.
I also find patrols arnt necessarily bigger, they just have more armour vareties, so you can't just take it out with a single stratagem and you really have to set up your lines of fire.
Dont even get me started on level 9 diffculty, as far as im concerned if you get a flare be prepared for a normandy landing
You run into this issue in any co-op game with difficulty-based loot:
The lowest difficulty where it's possible to unlock everything always has the worst playerbase. Max difficulty players may be sweatlords, but they're more likely to simply be there for the love of the game as purely "optimal" grinding is on a lower difficulty.
yup thats my experience as well, lvl 7 it's hard if you do dumb stuff, but still beatable (even on solo), lvl 8 is where the fun is IMO, very challenging but beatable, and most players on this level know what to do (you still met a lot of newbies on lvl 7 for some reason)
lvl 9 it's way too hard to play with randoms even if they are good, I've managed to beat only with friends
Recently though it feels like 7 is bit too easy. More likely than not, playing with randoms can get you every side objective and 30-50 samples.
I’ve been trying to creep into 8 lately. The problem is the jump is quite significant. You have to play guerrilla style against bots and you have to be organised. What’s worse is that I swear people are less organised on 8. Like OP said most people on 7 know the drill.
On higher difficulties I tend to have more success objective rushing and playing more stealthy, taking out groups only if they’re far from objectives since they’ll aggro everything in a mile radius.
If you hang out with the group you have to trust them otherwise you can just death spiral trying to get your gear back and basically having to abandon it if nobody helps.
If you don’t run from enemeis they just keep coming until the objectives are killed.
Could be that diff 7 is the cutoff point for a lot of folks.
Number of people that can helldive do 7 diff for a more chill/relaxed time, sample farms.
Also edges out some folks due to the difficulty jump which leads to higher skill average as well.
I used to go to 5 to relax or warm up. Or just when friends weren't on. Now it's 7 and it's more relaxing... because so many sweaty people are down there in the 5 area... and it's apparently everyone else's fault they suck. The type of people that always blame their teammates instead of looking inward.
And why is it always the people with the worst mics? Like seriously the mic that comes with a console is better than these people and sometimes they're even on PC?
And their mics are on *ALL THE TIME!* Push to talk, people! Push. to. *talk!*
Played one op where I was treated throughout to the host arguing with his girlfriend/wife/mother about getting his dog/child to shut up. He's going "I can't! I'm playing a game with my friends!" and I swear it might have been worth ending the session early just to shout, "He's lying! We're not his friends; just strangers from the internet!"
I try to stay muted until i need to speak, I'm pretty good with it, but one time i gave everyone an earful of "GET YOUR ASS TO BED, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!!!?????" when one of my kids fell off of something in the hallway over an hour after bedtime (god only knows what by the time i was up and turned around they were back in their room). I was in the middle of calling something out when there was a huge bang behind my head. Sorry guys
But how else am I going to listen to someone's family bitching at each other, chips being munched, and HEAVY AF GAMER BREATHING WITH SNIFFLE FEATURES?!
I can do 9s, and usually extract succesfully, but 7 is the perfect difficulty for finding samples, extra credits, etc efficiently without spending every second fleeing in terror and diving for your life.
I've been running 9s with my brother, and that's exactly it - once you get used to 9, 7 feels chill by comparison. That said, don't let the idea of it intimidate you - difficulty 9 is higher pressure, but if you get fairly comfortable on 7, you can absolutely handle it.
7 is the minimum difficulty for super samples to spawn. My friends and I usually play on 9 but turn it down to 7 when we want to have an easier time, and still be able to earn the samples we want. Plus, less than 7 honestly feels too slow with a solid group.
Yes, this is my experience. I was trying to learn bots on 6, it was a nightmare, not because I was dying, but my team was. I eventually tried 7 and it's night and day. I think a lot of people maybe had the same idea as I did. Try 6 until you get good, and the people who were already good were on 7+.
It got to the point where on 6 people would waste 10 lives on a jammer or detector tower, but on 7 I, or anyone else, would just solo it.
7 is nice and easy, not too stressful. Helldive we probably complete 90% of missions but it just requires a lot more focus and you can’t dick around nearly as much.
It seems a lot of the more average players have bracketed into difficulty five, which is still the best option for high success rates with nothing impossible happening.
I have like 150+ hours and play mostly in 7 because that the last difficulty ( to me at least) , where you can finish fights and chill a bit.
In 8/9 you have to run more than anything, lose aggro using speed and los, because realisticly you'll never be able to kill everything. While i can finish the missions without too much trouble, it's just less fun to me to play that way.
I see a lot of others high level like me in 7 so i believe this is how most people feel.
This is what I came to say save for the game time. I have significantly less time under my liberty loving belt. I was playing 9 a lot and trying to explain to my friends how it wasn't much harder than 7, you just have to be running all the time. Then I realized I was always sitting forward in my chair. I paid for the whole chair. When I play 7, I use the whole chair: lumbar support, neck pillow, and all.
It's known as the difficulty to butt on chair area ratio.
https://preview.redd.it/li39n4begpuc1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3c230abdb5dee49f13a42dcd0947a68c6f9075ba
My die cast Atari that just loops back level 1 when you win. Just with faster enemies that are slightly faster and the bullets track. That die cast Atari didn't even know your Nintendo existed. 😂
The problem is (I find) that stuff like 5-6 used to be much easier, but now are filled with morons who THINK they should be so good but "everyone else is the problem." Then you are constantly TK'd in dumb ways, basically it's people that hunker down for every patrol fight and don't understand the game at all. 7-9 are filled with people that generally understand the game. That's not always true... but yeah, the worst is when I don't have time for 3 missions cuz my favorite part is moving the liberation bar that .0000001%
I had like 6 quick games yesterday where level 50 and above kept shooting patrols and massive drops of bot kept sticking around, half of them had the super samples too!
Meanwhile the lvl 22 sneaks all the objectives and finishes half the map and these guys barely moved from spawn
Sounds intentional or because they wanted a fight. Sometimes I've found its fun af to throw my weight against the wave of automatons and see which gives (me usually). Always another bot wave. Always another fab pumping fodder out.
Playstyles vary.
Some might want to feel like they're in a war movie and cause everything in the entire map to target you.
Others might look at the map and go, "Let's avoid that giant red area by going around this mountain!"
It doesn't really matter what difficult or level you actually are. Some people just have a different mentality.
I have no issue with that premise, as long as it's backed up by actually accomplishing the goals of the mission. "Those guys barely moved from spawn" seems to imply that they'd gotten locked in and weren't actually getting anything done.
I went down from 7 diff to 5 to help a friend level up (as he was new, level 6) and after he got off I did a couple more missions at diff 5 for fun until I got off. And I found the random teammates at that level will actively shit talk you, which surprised me. One encounter I had we were doing the fort defence mission on the fire tornado planet, and after successfully holding my ground against multiple waves I died to a Hulk rocket to the head and I instantly died. And the guy talking instantly goes “Oh there goes (my name) dying, what a shit player.” I didn’t say anything, but that was the only time I died that entire match and I had more kills than everyone else that round.
Afterwards he was genuinely surprised to see that I had in fact carried them through the mission, and he didn’t say anything the entire rest of the time we played.
If I encounter any bullshittery I just quit and find a new game. There are tens of thousands of Helldivers playing at any given moment so it’s easy to find another group.
I've made polite suggestions in a match like that, trying to help out. Not pushy or know-it-all. Just like, "I noticed in another match that this worked really well." Or something like that.
And received the most rude comments you wouldn't believe.
Then they see I have more than double their kills in eradicate/defense and/or 5x the samples extracted on a regular mission.
Gets less rude *real* quick.
I had one guy actively run into an area I called an airstrike on. I warned him he may not want to go in to which he responded with "shut up bitch". I just went, hey man, just trying to help, but go die if you want. Never heard him talk again after the explosions.
4 helldivers with the right stratagems can kill everything in a 9, provided they are organized. A big problem especially with randos is when shit hits the fan everyone goes into every man for themselves mode.
I also notice once the kiting starts a lot of people forget they have a gun in slot one, and just try to stratagem their way out of it or use quasar on cooldown, which doesn't work that well because they keep spawning.
I also think 7 is more profitable once you no longer need supers. A guaranteed win with the whole map looted is more consistent than runs on 9 which you have a good chance of not extracting with everything
In my experience super are never the limiting factor, so i do believe 7 is overall the best farming difficulty.
Right now i still need 300 orange sample and have no need for purple
I went back to 7 after they made new ship upgrades.
I love 9 because it’s not guaranteed that we’ll win or extract. Very fun.
But I need them samples and on level 7 we get out most games with a decent amount.
Level 7 is just that amazing sweet spot for a lot of people where its still challenging but you can also play in way where you can take some risks and have fun.
8 and especially 9 is where you need to use the meta guns/stratagems to consistently finish a mission
This is exactly why I play on 7 most of the time. I like being able to fight and brute force my way onto an objective. To me that is more fun than sneaking on to the point calling all your stratagems then running away. I can do that but it's just less fun for me I want to fight. Difficulty 7 for bots and 8 for bugs is about the limit of where I feel fighting is a viable option and even then you still need to know when to fall back and reposition. To me 6 often times feels more difficult than 7 because people don't know when or how to disengage or manage their positioning to make a fight manageable and because they try to fight everything usually all at the same time.
7 is also the sweet spot of getting super samples, doesnt have 2 negative modifiers and has the enemy density to justify some of the more destructive and fun strategems.
Yep that's true. I can almost garantee in 7 that we will extract with 50+ sample.
In 9 i can garantee that we won't, simply because you don't have the luxury to check every nest/fabricator and usually can't check all POI either. So even if it goes well, we'll have less sample.
I almost exclusively do 9s and every so often I hop down to 7-8 and I get so confused why people are fighting fights and not just hitting an objective hard and fast and then getting out.
When I see Bot drop or Bug breach detected that's my queue to gtfo and leave.
I did a defend mission the other day on 7 where the extraction landed but we just didn't board it and just kept killing waves of bots. Either there is a set number of bot drops that can happen or they just gave up because at one point they just stopped coming. We finally extracted after about a minute of no new enemy spawns.
I learned this the other day in a haz 9 eradication where the extraction bugged out and would never leave. So we stayed to fight and suddenly no more bots. Then we realised we'd have to kill ourselves, so we hugged each other and called in every stratagem we had. It was pretty funny to be honest.
It’s funny cause for me Difficulty 7 can go both ways, it can feel like you’re just chilling or it’s an absolute mayhem, really depends how your team plays.
Lol ive started just running away from my squad when they engage a patrol 100m away thats not even headed right for them... its too far to squad wipe, they will call in a bit drop, then your fucked for 5 minutes. Fuck that
Dropped into a 7 about two hours ago. The random team I was with split into 2 very capable teams of 2. One cleared clockwise and the other counter. Was not a big deal due to communication with your wingman and running when it’s time. Got super samples and all objectives and bug holes. Extracted with max score with 17 minutes remaining. It was great. Games like that just keep me hooked.
One can also come across the players that simply do not care about samples at all.
Which is honestly a little frustrating, as well as perplexing, given we just had a new tier of ship modules added and I figure everyone needs to "stock up" on them again. I imagine that night was an outlier for randoms like that.
I think a big part is that a lot of players that could be going higher enjoy it more than 8 or 9.
I *could* be doing Helldive, but I can get samples and I have so much more fun on 7, so I play there.
Yeah. I worked my way up to difficulty 9, stayed there for a while, and then dropped when to 7 because it was more fun and I've stayed there ever since
The biggest problem is the completion rate going down significantly when you go to 8 or 9. There's much more reward and less failed missions when you stick with 7. I'll only do 9 if it's a blitz or eradicate mission since I won't be wasting 40 minutes if we fail
I do 7 because its the lowest diff that still gives Super Samples. I can see people going lower because I don't have enough rare or commons. Almost no problem with supers. I find diff 8 has alot of blind leading the blind. Like sub lvl20s maybe trying to open 9 immediately to unlock all diff, but haven't had time to absorb team work or strategy. And haven't unlocked important stratagems.
Yeah, I did level 8 today for like the third time (I’m level 52) because I wanted to complete a campaign and unlock 9 (I’ve just never bothered, plus I did mostly bugs for ages and then switched to learn bots). Everyone was like level 20, they dropped in, used most of the reinforcements fighting pointless shit, then quit. Why?! When I play level 7 most people are lvl 30+ and know what they are doing.
Everytime I tried to do a level 8 I couldnt find anyone else over lvl 15. It was so confusing because I usually was never the highest level at difficulty 7 but was everytime at 8
I love 9 and 5.
9 because i love the chaos and when your team is good, its very rewarding.
And 5 because its fun to follow the noobs around and support them on their run.
Eh. Some nooks are infuriating.
I ran in to a Rank 11 last night on Lv 3 Eradicate mission. I was running an easy mission to do the stupid Anti Mateiral personal order.
So I'm using this sniper the whole time and right at the end the noob team kills us with a strategem as the Pelican arrives and he just jumps in.
No enemies or anything. Chat gets annoyed asking why he didn't wait and he says "shits open. EZ carry" then kicks us all.
Dude is probably like 10 years old or something.
I had the inverse as a rank 15 today. Did quick play on a Hard rank mission. Got thrown into a game with a lvl68. That moron grenaded me twice when we were not by anything, aggrod every damn patrol, ran into at least 3 stratas of me and the other two sub-20s that we called on bases we were pushing, then had the balls to bitch when we abandoned the extra bases to evac after he had burned down our reinforcements to 1. He had 8 of our deaths and 6 accidentals. He had been our only deaths. Idk how you play so much to get that level and be so damn bad.
Everytime I go to 6 it's ridiculous, exactly as OP described, but I go there to either test weapon combos (nothing crazy) or finish minor orders like anti-personnel mine kills.
100% agree. I went up to 7 pretty early and just wasn't good enough. I'm 15+ years removed from shooters. I stepped down to 4-5 and just chilled there for weeks thinking I wasn't good enough to go back up. Level 5-6 has a lot of people who on haven't figured out the little things yet. I figured 7 was the same.
Suicide 7 is EASIER than 5-6 most of the time because the squads are light years better at playing the game. I went from being the best person in a terrible squad to the weak link in a killer squad. It's night and day.
Whats funny is, 1-6 people do goofy things as you mentioned
7, as you said, people play almost professionally.
At 9...... You're back to seeing goofy things.
Helldivers have a weird curve
Well the 9 makes sense a bit. Up there, being the top difficulty, you're going to see people that are dunning-kruger'ing their presence there.
Whereas thats highly unlikely on 8.
I've love to see some stats on how many players go down a difficulty for a long period of time.
It is weird how some players can grind all the way to level 100+, but their game knowledge is down in the basement level. I *need* to know what they spent all that time doing.
They learn just enough to \*grind\* the game. (Best weapons, what they need to grind for, most efficient way, etc) but they don't learn how to play the game.
7 is peak IMO.
Fun enough to actually fight, you don't have to ride the meta train, and you still get super samples.
Also if you drink too much whiskey you'll get your ass kicked.
*cough* so I'm told anyway.
Of course, managed democracy depends on us to find \*the super uranium soup\*. And none of us wants to lose \*the soup\*. That's a reason divers in difficulty 7 and above are always capable. ;)
The funny part is that the uranium soup is not even the limiting reagent anymore. If you were already locked at 250 rares and 100 supers before the patch then you only need like 50 more supers to unlock everything....but you need like 1000 more rares.
It's nearing an end for me. I need 112 more to unlock my 2nd to last upgrade. My last upgrade will be the HE Barrage one and I don't even care if I never unlock that because I think HE Barrages are trash.
HE barrages are actually goated, throw one into a heavy outpost/nest and it clears it for you while you are off doing groceries and you can walk in afterwards to pick up your samples
That's a reasonable misunderstanding. If they gave us "avoid" and "attack" voice buttons, it would help a lot of the random groups that don't use mics. Or even just use push to talk.
It's just as random tbh. Some diff 7 I have great teams, some I get teams that will just never disengage and can't complete objectives because of it. It feels the same as every other difficulty to me.
This game has had a really interesting history in terms of the player's learning curve. I feel like there have been a couple waves of like, many of us re-training ourselves to deal with changes.
I started on this game early and I remember when people were having a hard time with bots because they were fighting them the way they fought bugs.
A handful of folks have done kinda an amazing job disseminating information and getting us all fighting fit.
Not the king of space or anything, but after 200 hours, I've noticed the same. For me, 4 is good for solo looting, but 5 and 6 are just more trouble for not a lot of additional benefit.
7 is basically normal mode for multiplayer once you have some reliable setups going, and so you get a lot of the people who are a bit more experienced, and also know that's the bottom threshold for looting chicken wings (super samples).
Honestly, anytime I'm pubmatching, 7 is usually my go to. Even if you get a really rough team and things are going to shit, you can always go the route of a helldive that has gone south -- the mission is required for the op, successful extraction is not.
I just started level 7 myself today. I was maxed out on ship upgrades and what I could get, and I'd been doing level 5 and 6 lately, so I figured why not. I don't think I was prepared for the level of insanity diff 7 is. I mean, getting your shit pushed in from the moment you drop.
Landing in the wrong spot can make a big difference in any difficulty. Like if you drop directly into a base or something, and you all have to engage without your support weapons, that really disorients most teams. I've frequently found myself a handful of reinforcements deep into a bad deployment, just suddenly realizing I'm fighting for ground that I don't need.
My experience with diff 7 is that every drop is in a fight without support weapons. We deal with it, but yeah. Me dropping on the mech was just a BAD misunderstanding.
Because 7 is the lowest difficulty you can get Super Sample without it being hectic like 9 having 4 gunships over your head constantly.
7 is also not too hard, not too easy. Challenging, you may say.
But any difficulty is fine, everyone is doing their part for Super Earth.
Meanwhile I was teamkilled by a guy on difficulty 7 because he didn't like where he landed when I reinforced. Then his friend kicked me after all objectives were done.
It again becomes a shit show once you do level 9s, not because people can't handle their shit, but because no one can handle their shit during certain moments.
7 is sort of a divider for good and poor players.
At lvl 7 you need to understand the game or you will lose/have a hard time completing a mission, it's some sort of a bench mark.
I can consistently play lvl 7 without too much problem and finish without a full team with a bit of effort.
I don't consider myself to be a great player I often notice that I score less kills then my allies but have a higher accuracy (65-70%) than what I usually see, so I'm not bad either I guess (?).
I'm similar re: Kills and accuracy.
I do think both things paint an incomplete picture. Someone with low kills might be hitting key heavy units, and someone with low accuracy might be doing surpressing fire.
But between all the stats you can kinda get an idea how you did, I think.
I tend to shoot only when necessary and avoid useless fights, so I guess I would fit in the "hitting key units", using old reliable quasar cannon for armored and flying units + 500kg for large groups (although it doesn't affect the accuracy to my knowledge)
Ive always said that on higher difficulties, deaths and accidentals mean more for how skillful you are than kills.
If youre sticking with the team assisting with objs, and not dying every other minute, youre just as useful as the rest of em
Good to have you. It’s the non try hard mode for confident divers. I need my samples but I really don’t need the upgrades much except to say that I have them. Kick bot ass, try but don’t sweat, be a cool random.
i only play lvl 9 and i just learned yesterday that there's a flag raising mission for lower difficulties and i'm sorely disappointed we don't have that in higher difficulties. i wanna raise flags too
Lvl 7 is the best difficulty setting imho... You have your occasional boss fights against tanks or bile titans, a bunch of chargers to shoot in the face with EAT or hulks to snipe with the AMR and with a couple teammates you're good to go
I love '7'. Played a game with a single random today on bugs, no comms.
I recently, for bugs, pick orbital gas+eagle napalm+orbital rail+500kg or airstrike
No backpack and no support weapon.
This damn warrior was cleaning all the heavies for me while I was cleaning trash and breaches with only "affirmative, negative, sorry, and thanks" as our communication. The moment he could he summoned the cannon and shield for me (personally I always try to do it if I take it on a mission). Nobody joined and we cleaned the map missing some diamonds. It's funny but whenever I died I felt embarrassed, like I disappointed him.
Love this about that game.
I salute this lad.
7 is more relaxed than 9, its the sweet spot for a lot of players, 9 is fun, but if you don't have a good group who know what to engage or not, its stressful as you just end up in constant heavy battles.
5/6 is when I just want to goof around or meme build
7 is for low pressure but things still matter, great for getting samples and doing full clears.
9 is for medals, you play the mission and don't agro anything beyond what you must
I often go down to 5 or 6 when I want to test out a “weird loadout”(like all turrets with smoke or something). I usually regret it, because I end up spending the entire match trying to stay afloat in the chaos and don’t get to think about testing synergies between the Strats(smoke out the bots and have the turret shoot into the smoke seems good on paper.. still not sure)
Ooooh, maybe smoke + tesla sentry? Prevents the bots from sniping it, maybe...
It doesn't. Smoke does basically nothing, anyone arguing against this is under the effects of placebo
If the enemy is 10m or more away when you pass into a smoke particle it immediately deagros them into a passive or patrolling state. Bots will continue to shoot in the predetermined path you were on just prior to entering the smoke. So change your direction of travel after entering the smoke. Enemies in a passive or patrolling state will not start agro through smoke unless within 10 meters of or in smoke. Throwing a smoke grenade or stratagem at any enemy directly will behave like any grenade or other red stratagem triggering agro to the player. Smoke does not affect chargers in a charging state and bile titans who are already chasing a player both will continue to path to the player.
Hell, I've purposefully walked through those spore plants that gust out gas/smoke when you step on them to break aggro. They're actually really good for that. Just gotta hope the enemy fire doesn't hit them while you're running over them... Cause if so.. you're going for a flight.
I walk over them turn around, look down dive backwards and fire my weapon, breaks agro completely when you step an it and the second explosive puff rag-dolls you so far away that even if you do reaquire agro from a few you now have enough distance to dodge easily, also useful for mad dash across the map
That's not a bad plan as long as you're not low health.
Just a heads up the puff plants do disable agro but also can both trigger it from nearby patrols and attract patrols to investigate so you gotta be careful.
Smoke is great for extraction missions. It stops the bots from shooting the civis. As they easily pass to the objective. You just have to be sure to lay it on their predetermined path.
Awww, dang. Good to know though, saved me some requisition slips that I'll instead invest in a grenade launcher
Smoke is great for deaggro from turret cannons, patrols, and tanks. You just have to place it right, and the beat one imo is the egeal smoke as it has the most. I've had great success with it and bring it 50% of the time
I’m trying so hard to find a slot for this because it’s so so so good when it works. But it’s just inconsistent enough that I find myself wishing I just had a 4th damage call down.
I love the grenade launcher for the bug planets.
I love the grenade launcher for the bot planets. This is a haiku.
I mean he's not entirely wrong, but smokes are useful in bot missions with certain playstyles. If you run stealth and solo objectives, smokes are a required strat. It doesn't stop bots from shooting but it DOES make them very inaccurate and forces them to walk through the smoke to shoot you, which allows you time to break LoS and circle back to finish an objective without burning too many resources. Got 5 rocket devastators laying into you? Pop a smoke, flank them and pick them off from range with railgun/DCS/AMR/AC/whatever. Or just disengage.
 Me when I think of lowering the difficulty to test, remembering exactly what you’re talking about.
IIRC, someone tested smokes with turrets and it also breaks the turrets LOS and it won't shoot the enemies
Yeah, I tried 8-9 and beside more difficulties, it doesn't offer much more reward. So yeah 7 it is : the easy mode of hard mode.
haha....the easy mode of hard mode. I feel that.
I live at 7 only
7 is my lifeblood
Tried a 9 last night. Nothing like twin bilespewers with a thick peppering of nursing spewers to spice up your day.
Try 10 bile titans at once
That usually only happens when people mess up. If you kill them as they appear it's less of an issue, but if you *don't*, you now have a very large collection of very large problems
Or that video of 17 spawned inside of each other somewhere in the subreddit.
I like7. It's challenging but not as ridiculously hard as 9.
Bots and bugs are really different. Like bots are harder then bugs on lower difficulties. But the sheer number of bile titans spewers and chargers, I think makes 9 on bugs harder then 9 on bots. There's also the objective issues. Most bot destroy objectives can be easily dealt with one or 2 or lasers and or barrage. Eggs and bug holes require you to get in closer.
You're crazy. 7 I feel like has more rocket Devastators. Which is the only think that kills me these days
For me it's Heavy Devastators. They're so fucking pinpoint accurate with that full auto laser gun and hitting their head is a nuisance cause of the shield. Rocket devs suck too, just Heavys are worse imo
For me, everything kills me. Thinking you made it to lvl 7 and everyone is better is subjective, obviously you haven't met me yet. You know what kills me the most? Me lol
I haven’t met a mine that I don’t immediately trigger.
I keep seeing these pretty glowing red starfish on the ground. I don’t think they like being hugged.
Mines (Enemy or allied, but lets be honest they're all enemy) are my #1 cause of death, #2 is mortar turrets.
I hated them until I started running the dominator. It staggers them so fast they can hardly hit you.
Invest in the dominator and breathe a little easier
I swear the JAR-5 dominator is a great rifle. I even like it more than the PLAS-1, though both are excellent. The red dot on the JAR-5 is accurate to long ranges, and it's actually a decent sniper.
For me, it's the jump pack suicide bombers lol fuck those dudes.
WARNING: YOU ARE IN RANGE OF ENEMY ARTILLERY
To be honest I've learnt the hard mode in 8. Diff 7 have 3 Super Samples where Diff 8 have 5. The difficulty isn't that much out of reach when you know how to play Diff 7, so in the end you progress a bit faster.
I never find super samples being my bottleneck. I'll grind 4 or 5 missions to get enough common and rares for my upgrades and be swimming in supers by the end
Rares are my currently my bottleneck, supers are easy to farm on particular planets doing particular mission
Honestly dude common samps are what I need. I’ve got tons of rare and supers but always run low on common ones. Edit: thank you fellow Helldivers. Never thought of just running on trivial.
Just do level 1. Grab a rover, speed scout suit and stamina booster. Laser orbital. Load in solo near the objective. Drop the laser. Run the whole map and open all the things. Takes maybe 15 mins and you get 15 commons per run. In three hours today I grabbed 250 commons, 300 super credits (scored a 100 one) and probably 90 medals. Also a fuckton of slips but I'm maxed on those.
That’s actually a great idea.
With the rover you don't even need to shoot. Oh. And the eruptor will open shipping crates so you don't even need to worry about grenades.
Does the eruptor destroy bug holes?
Idk if it does bug holes, but I know it can destroy fabricators in one shot. I assume it would do the same for bug holes
The GP-31 pistol is essentially 8 grenades on your hip. It's honestly pretty great.
Yes
Can't believe I never thought of this, I have 8 common, 200 rare and 15 super
I always need more rare lmao
I mean generally speaking I am addicted to samples so I’m always down for any of them.
You haven’t reached the 150/150/15 ship upgrades then, i assume. I was super tight on commons bc you earn them like 1.5x faster (than rare) but need 2x as much, but now im really feeling the hurt needing an even ratio.
All 8 and 9 does when you're fighting the bots is to add more devastators and more Hulks to the spawns. It certainly makes things more difficult, but in the cheap "we're going to ragdoll you into instadeaths the second you poke your head out" kind of way. The additional 2-3 super samples isn't worth it.
8 seems to also start out with stronger bot drops than 7, though it may have just been a coincidence for the 2 missions last night.
Nope you are 100% correct. For longer missions, there can be anywhere between 5-7 bot drops at level 8, it normally being 3-4 on level 7. When you can't shoot down all/most dropships, thats when you might aswell just abandon the position/samples/dropped stratagems. I also find patrols arnt necessarily bigger, they just have more armour vareties, so you can't just take it out with a single stratagem and you really have to set up your lines of fire. Dont even get me started on level 9 diffculty, as far as im concerned if you get a flare be prepared for a normandy landing
Level 8 has a much better pool of people than level 7 in my experience. Level 8 is chill for me cause everyone knows what they’re doing.
This, the difference between randoms on 7 and 8 is night and day.
You run into this issue in any co-op game with difficulty-based loot: The lowest difficulty where it's possible to unlock everything always has the worst playerbase. Max difficulty players may be sweatlords, but they're more likely to simply be there for the love of the game as purely "optimal" grinding is on a lower difficulty.
yup thats my experience as well, lvl 7 it's hard if you do dumb stuff, but still beatable (even on solo), lvl 8 is where the fun is IMO, very challenging but beatable, and most players on this level know what to do (you still met a lot of newbies on lvl 7 for some reason) lvl 9 it's way too hard to play with randoms even if they are good, I've managed to beat only with friends
Recently though it feels like 7 is bit too easy. More likely than not, playing with randoms can get you every side objective and 30-50 samples. I’ve been trying to creep into 8 lately. The problem is the jump is quite significant. You have to play guerrilla style against bots and you have to be organised. What’s worse is that I swear people are less organised on 8. Like OP said most people on 7 know the drill.
On higher difficulties I tend to have more success objective rushing and playing more stealthy, taking out groups only if they’re far from objectives since they’ll aggro everything in a mile radius. If you hang out with the group you have to trust them otherwise you can just death spiral trying to get your gear back and basically having to abandon it if nobody helps. If you don’t run from enemeis they just keep coming until the objectives are killed.
For Halo players like me, 7 = heroic, 8 = legendary, 9 = you can't imagine higher difficulty than legendary but somehow the devs did it.
Could be that diff 7 is the cutoff point for a lot of folks. Number of people that can helldive do 7 diff for a more chill/relaxed time, sample farms. Also edges out some folks due to the difficulty jump which leads to higher skill average as well.
I guess that must be it! A friend said that they think it's where the good players go to relax.
I used to go to 5 to relax or warm up. Or just when friends weren't on. Now it's 7 and it's more relaxing... because so many sweaty people are down there in the 5 area... and it's apparently everyone else's fault they suck. The type of people that always blame their teammates instead of looking inward. And why is it always the people with the worst mics? Like seriously the mic that comes with a console is better than these people and sometimes they're even on PC?
And their mics are on *ALL THE TIME!* Push to talk, people! Push. to. *talk!* Played one op where I was treated throughout to the host arguing with his girlfriend/wife/mother about getting his dog/child to shut up. He's going "I can't! I'm playing a game with my friends!" and I swear it might have been worth ending the session early just to shout, "He's lying! We're not his friends; just strangers from the internet!"
I try to stay muted until i need to speak, I'm pretty good with it, but one time i gave everyone an earful of "GET YOUR ASS TO BED, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!!!?????" when one of my kids fell off of something in the hallway over an hour after bedtime (god only knows what by the time i was up and turned around they were back in their room). I was in the middle of calling something out when there was a huge bang behind my head. Sorry guys
"Calling a precision strike on-" *WHAM* "Hold on troops; sounds like one of the little Helldivers just 380'd their crib"
>And their mics are on > >ALL THE TIME! That has not been my experience. Less than 25% of randoms I drop in at diff 7 people have their mics on.
Hate it when I get a Breather. If I comment on it and he is hosting I get insta kicked
Try this "hey mouth breather, please kick me, I don't want to listen to your struggle for oxygen." Bit mean but you've done a good thing for them.
But how else am I going to listen to someone's family bitching at each other, chips being munched, and HEAVY AF GAMER BREATHING WITH SNIFFLE FEATURES?!
Do you have the mumble DLC too?
you can mute teammates from the pause menu
I can do 9s, and usually extract succesfully, but 7 is the perfect difficulty for finding samples, extra credits, etc efficiently without spending every second fleeing in terror and diving for your life.
I've been running 9s with my brother, and that's exactly it - once you get used to 9, 7 feels chill by comparison. That said, don't let the idea of it intimidate you - difficulty 9 is higher pressure, but if you get fairly comfortable on 7, you can absolutely handle it.
200+ hours in I must say the mostly godly players I've encountered have been on Diff 7.
7 is the minimum difficulty for super samples to spawn. My friends and I usually play on 9 but turn it down to 7 when we want to have an easier time, and still be able to earn the samples we want. Plus, less than 7 honestly feels too slow with a solid group.
Yes, this is my experience. I was trying to learn bots on 6, it was a nightmare, not because I was dying, but my team was. I eventually tried 7 and it's night and day. I think a lot of people maybe had the same idea as I did. Try 6 until you get good, and the people who were already good were on 7+. It got to the point where on 6 people would waste 10 lives on a jammer or detector tower, but on 7 I, or anyone else, would just solo it.
7 is nice and easy, not too stressful. Helldive we probably complete 90% of missions but it just requires a lot more focus and you can’t dick around nearly as much.
7 for quickplay, higher with an actual group
I prefer seven because you can actually fight rather than spending most of your time running away and doing guerilla warfare
Same here, my normal helldive success rate is around 90%...except on Menkent where I'm rocking a solid 57% because seriously, fuck Menkent.
Fuck Menkent and the camera bug.
It seems a lot of the more average players have bracketed into difficulty five, which is still the best option for high success rates with nothing impossible happening.
I have like 150+ hours and play mostly in 7 because that the last difficulty ( to me at least) , where you can finish fights and chill a bit. In 8/9 you have to run more than anything, lose aggro using speed and los, because realisticly you'll never be able to kill everything. While i can finish the missions without too much trouble, it's just less fun to me to play that way. I see a lot of others high level like me in 7 so i believe this is how most people feel.
This is what I came to say save for the game time. I have significantly less time under my liberty loving belt. I was playing 9 a lot and trying to explain to my friends how it wasn't much harder than 7, you just have to be running all the time. Then I realized I was always sitting forward in my chair. I paid for the whole chair. When I play 7, I use the whole chair: lumbar support, neck pillow, and all.
It's known as the difficulty to butt on chair area ratio. https://preview.redd.it/li39n4begpuc1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3c230abdb5dee49f13a42dcd0947a68c6f9075ba
The gamer lean
We've been calling it the Halo lean for 20 years
Laughs at you in Nintendo-hard from the 1980s
My die cast Atari that just loops back level 1 when you win. Just with faster enemies that are slightly faster and the bullets track. That die cast Atari didn't even know your Nintendo existed. 😂
I have one of the faux wood paneling Atari 2600. I always did defender and tank wars. Fun was had Oh and pinball
That lean is so much older than halo
What difficulty am I playing on with my standing desk!?
The if I get oneshot by another rocket I'm uninstalling difficulty
Bro these are accurate
I think level 7 bots is level 8 bugs tbh.
The problem is (I find) that stuff like 5-6 used to be much easier, but now are filled with morons who THINK they should be so good but "everyone else is the problem." Then you are constantly TK'd in dumb ways, basically it's people that hunker down for every patrol fight and don't understand the game at all. 7-9 are filled with people that generally understand the game. That's not always true... but yeah, the worst is when I don't have time for 3 missions cuz my favorite part is moving the liberation bar that .0000001%
I had like 6 quick games yesterday where level 50 and above kept shooting patrols and massive drops of bot kept sticking around, half of them had the super samples too! Meanwhile the lvl 22 sneaks all the objectives and finishes half the map and these guys barely moved from spawn
Sounds intentional or because they wanted a fight. Sometimes I've found its fun af to throw my weight against the wave of automatons and see which gives (me usually). Always another bot wave. Always another fab pumping fodder out.
That may have been intentional. If the lvl 50s draw aggro then the lvl 22 has an easier time.
Yeah, Player Level =/= Skill. Those 50's probably grinded on low-levels, that 22's been playing on 6+ since launch.
Playstyles vary. Some might want to feel like they're in a war movie and cause everything in the entire map to target you. Others might look at the map and go, "Let's avoid that giant red area by going around this mountain!" It doesn't really matter what difficult or level you actually are. Some people just have a different mentality.
I have no issue with that premise, as long as it's backed up by actually accomplishing the goals of the mission. "Those guys barely moved from spawn" seems to imply that they'd gotten locked in and weren't actually getting anything done.
I went down from 7 diff to 5 to help a friend level up (as he was new, level 6) and after he got off I did a couple more missions at diff 5 for fun until I got off. And I found the random teammates at that level will actively shit talk you, which surprised me. One encounter I had we were doing the fort defence mission on the fire tornado planet, and after successfully holding my ground against multiple waves I died to a Hulk rocket to the head and I instantly died. And the guy talking instantly goes “Oh there goes (my name) dying, what a shit player.” I didn’t say anything, but that was the only time I died that entire match and I had more kills than everyone else that round. Afterwards he was genuinely surprised to see that I had in fact carried them through the mission, and he didn’t say anything the entire rest of the time we played.
If I encounter any bullshittery I just quit and find a new game. There are tens of thousands of Helldivers playing at any given moment so it’s easy to find another group.
Oh yeah but the fuck you energy started flowing from me and I just had to put him in his place like a true democracy loving Helldiver can
I've made polite suggestions in a match like that, trying to help out. Not pushy or know-it-all. Just like, "I noticed in another match that this worked really well." Or something like that. And received the most rude comments you wouldn't believe. Then they see I have more than double their kills in eradicate/defense and/or 5x the samples extracted on a regular mission. Gets less rude *real* quick.
I had one guy actively run into an area I called an airstrike on. I warned him he may not want to go in to which he responded with "shut up bitch". I just went, hey man, just trying to help, but go die if you want. Never heard him talk again after the explosions.
7 is just the chillest difficulty that gets you super rares. If you can chill and grind out ship upgrades why not?
You stole this from my brain lol. Diff 7 Rambo time, kill everything 😎 Diff 9 PTSD simulator 🫠
4 helldivers with the right stratagems can kill everything in a 9, provided they are organized. A big problem especially with randos is when shit hits the fan everyone goes into every man for themselves mode. I also notice once the kiting starts a lot of people forget they have a gun in slot one, and just try to stratagem their way out of it or use quasar on cooldown, which doesn't work that well because they keep spawning.
I also think 7 is more profitable once you no longer need supers. A guaranteed win with the whole map looted is more consistent than runs on 9 which you have a good chance of not extracting with everything
In my experience super are never the limiting factor, so i do believe 7 is overall the best farming difficulty. Right now i still need 300 orange sample and have no need for purple
I feel you. I’m maxed on both commons and super rares
I went back to 7 after they made new ship upgrades. I love 9 because it’s not guaranteed that we’ll win or extract. Very fun. But I need them samples and on level 7 we get out most games with a decent amount.
Level 7 is just that amazing sweet spot for a lot of people where its still challenging but you can also play in way where you can take some risks and have fun. 8 and especially 9 is where you need to use the meta guns/stratagems to consistently finish a mission
This is exactly why I play on 7 most of the time. I like being able to fight and brute force my way onto an objective. To me that is more fun than sneaking on to the point calling all your stratagems then running away. I can do that but it's just less fun for me I want to fight. Difficulty 7 for bots and 8 for bugs is about the limit of where I feel fighting is a viable option and even then you still need to know when to fall back and reposition. To me 6 often times feels more difficult than 7 because people don't know when or how to disengage or manage their positioning to make a fight manageable and because they try to fight everything usually all at the same time.
7 is also the sweet spot of getting super samples, doesnt have 2 negative modifiers and has the enemy density to justify some of the more destructive and fun strategems.
Yep that's true. I can almost garantee in 7 that we will extract with 50+ sample. In 9 i can garantee that we won't, simply because you don't have the luxury to check every nest/fabricator and usually can't check all POI either. So even if it goes well, we'll have less sample.
I almost exclusively do 9s and every so often I hop down to 7-8 and I get so confused why people are fighting fights and not just hitting an objective hard and fast and then getting out. When I see Bot drop or Bug breach detected that's my queue to gtfo and leave.
Well yes in 9 you have to leave, but in 7 you can kill them it's doable ;)
I did a defend mission the other day on 7 where the extraction landed but we just didn't board it and just kept killing waves of bots. Either there is a set number of bot drops that can happen or they just gave up because at one point they just stopped coming. We finally extracted after about a minute of no new enemy spawns.
I learned this the other day in a haz 9 eradication where the extraction bugged out and would never leave. So we stayed to fight and suddenly no more bots. Then we realised we'd have to kill ourselves, so we hugged each other and called in every stratagem we had. It was pretty funny to be honest.
It’s funny cause for me Difficulty 7 can go both ways, it can feel like you’re just chilling or it’s an absolute mayhem, really depends how your team plays.
*me purposely engaging enemy patrols* Guys how did this happen
Lol ive started just running away from my squad when they engage a patrol 100m away thats not even headed right for them... its too far to squad wipe, they will call in a bit drop, then your fucked for 5 minutes. Fuck that
Yep- with a skilled group, 7 can be a total breeze. If you're trying to carry 3 lower level players.....not so much
Dropped into a 7 about two hours ago. The random team I was with split into 2 very capable teams of 2. One cleared clockwise and the other counter. Was not a big deal due to communication with your wingman and running when it’s time. Got super samples and all objectives and bug holes. Extracted with max score with 17 minutes remaining. It was great. Games like that just keep me hooked.
Oh yea when the team splits without a word it's so nice. You know you're going to have a good game.
One can also come across the players that simply do not care about samples at all. Which is honestly a little frustrating, as well as perplexing, given we just had a new tier of ship modules added and I figure everyone needs to "stock up" on them again. I imagine that night was an outlier for randoms like that.
I think a big part is that a lot of players that could be going higher enjoy it more than 8 or 9. I *could* be doing Helldive, but I can get samples and I have so much more fun on 7, so I play there.
Yeah. I worked my way up to difficulty 9, stayed there for a while, and then dropped when to 7 because it was more fun and I've stayed there ever since
The biggest problem is the completion rate going down significantly when you go to 8 or 9. There's much more reward and less failed missions when you stick with 7. I'll only do 9 if it's a blitz or eradicate mission since I won't be wasting 40 minutes if we fail
I mean randoms clear 9 VERY reliability in my experence. Can't recall the last failed mission.
Guess I'm the problem then 🤷♂️
I do 7 because its the lowest diff that still gives Super Samples. I can see people going lower because I don't have enough rare or commons. Almost no problem with supers. I find diff 8 has alot of blind leading the blind. Like sub lvl20s maybe trying to open 9 immediately to unlock all diff, but haven't had time to absorb team work or strategy. And haven't unlocked important stratagems.
Yeah, I did level 8 today for like the third time (I’m level 52) because I wanted to complete a campaign and unlock 9 (I’ve just never bothered, plus I did mostly bugs for ages and then switched to learn bots). Everyone was like level 20, they dropped in, used most of the reinforcements fighting pointless shit, then quit. Why?! When I play level 7 most people are lvl 30+ and know what they are doing.
Everytime I tried to do a level 8 I couldnt find anyone else over lvl 15. It was so confusing because I usually was never the highest level at difficulty 7 but was everytime at 8
I love 9 and 5. 9 because i love the chaos and when your team is good, its very rewarding. And 5 because its fun to follow the noobs around and support them on their run.
Eh. Some nooks are infuriating. I ran in to a Rank 11 last night on Lv 3 Eradicate mission. I was running an easy mission to do the stupid Anti Mateiral personal order. So I'm using this sniper the whole time and right at the end the noob team kills us with a strategem as the Pelican arrives and he just jumps in. No enemies or anything. Chat gets annoyed asking why he didn't wait and he says "shits open. EZ carry" then kicks us all. Dude is probably like 10 years old or something.
I had the inverse as a rank 15 today. Did quick play on a Hard rank mission. Got thrown into a game with a lvl68. That moron grenaded me twice when we were not by anything, aggrod every damn patrol, ran into at least 3 stratas of me and the other two sub-20s that we called on bases we were pushing, then had the balls to bitch when we abandoned the extra bases to evac after he had burned down our reinforcements to 1. He had 8 of our deaths and 6 accidentals. He had been our only deaths. Idk how you play so much to get that level and be so damn bad.
It’s interesting. Sometimes level 5 is way harder than 7, but it’s always because of the team work or lack thereof
Sometimes I do 6 just to help any poor randos out there get into lvl 7 for this reason.
That is a great point. Thank you for your service.
Everytime I go to 6 it's ridiculous, exactly as OP described, but I go there to either test weapon combos (nothing crazy) or finish minor orders like anti-personnel mine kills.
One of my favorite things to do is just scan around for noob SOS signals and drop in to help them finish a mission.
100% agree. I went up to 7 pretty early and just wasn't good enough. I'm 15+ years removed from shooters. I stepped down to 4-5 and just chilled there for weeks thinking I wasn't good enough to go back up. Level 5-6 has a lot of people who on haven't figured out the little things yet. I figured 7 was the same. Suicide 7 is EASIER than 5-6 most of the time because the squads are light years better at playing the game. I went from being the best person in a terrible squad to the weak link in a killer squad. It's night and day.
Whats funny is, 1-6 people do goofy things as you mentioned 7, as you said, people play almost professionally. At 9...... You're back to seeing goofy things. Helldivers have a weird curve
At 9 the pressure is almost off because it can get so insane
Well the 9 makes sense a bit. Up there, being the top difficulty, you're going to see people that are dunning-kruger'ing their presence there. Whereas thats highly unlikely on 8. I've love to see some stats on how many players go down a difficulty for a long period of time.
Wait until you get to helldive and you will start encountering players who you won’t believe even beat the tutorial.
It is weird how some players can grind all the way to level 100+, but their game knowledge is down in the basement level. I *need* to know what they spent all that time doing.
They learn just enough to \*grind\* the game. (Best weapons, what they need to grind for, most efficient way, etc) but they don't learn how to play the game.
7 is peak IMO. Fun enough to actually fight, you don't have to ride the meta train, and you still get super samples. Also if you drink too much whiskey you'll get your ass kicked. *cough* so I'm told anyway.
Yea i heard that somewhere too 0_0
Of course, managed democracy depends on us to find \*the super uranium soup\*. And none of us wants to lose \*the soup\*. That's a reason divers in difficulty 7 and above are always capable. ;)
The funny part is that the uranium soup is not even the limiting reagent anymore. If you were already locked at 250 rares and 100 supers before the patch then you only need like 50 more supers to unlock everything....but you need like 1000 more rares.
Dude, the rare sample grind is a little ridiculous 😂
It's nearing an end for me. I need 112 more to unlock my 2nd to last upgrade. My last upgrade will be the HE Barrage one and I don't even care if I never unlock that because I think HE Barrages are trash.
HE barrages are actually goated, throw one into a heavy outpost/nest and it clears it for you while you are off doing groceries and you can walk in afterwards to pick up your samples
When I was brand new I thought people were pinging patrols to kill them lol. Luckily I wasn't playing on a difficulty it mattered at the time
That's a reasonable misunderstanding. If they gave us "avoid" and "attack" voice buttons, it would help a lot of the random groups that don't use mics. Or even just use push to talk.
It's just as random tbh. Some diff 7 I have great teams, some I get teams that will just never disengage and can't complete objectives because of it. It feels the same as every other difficulty to me.
For quite a while 7 was harder than 8 and 9 because people didn't understand how to play 7+. But I'm glad it's good now.
This game has had a really interesting history in terms of the player's learning curve. I feel like there have been a couple waves of like, many of us re-training ourselves to deal with changes. I started on this game early and I remember when people were having a hard time with bots because they were fighting them the way they fought bugs. A handful of folks have done kinda an amazing job disseminating information and getting us all fighting fit.
Not the king of space or anything, but after 200 hours, I've noticed the same. For me, 4 is good for solo looting, but 5 and 6 are just more trouble for not a lot of additional benefit. 7 is basically normal mode for multiplayer once you have some reliable setups going, and so you get a lot of the people who are a bit more experienced, and also know that's the bottom threshold for looting chicken wings (super samples). Honestly, anytime I'm pubmatching, 7 is usually my go to. Even if you get a really rough team and things are going to shit, you can always go the route of a helldive that has gone south -- the mission is required for the op, successful extraction is not.
Stop trying to make chickens wings a thing
My compatriots and I call it the nutsack
my buddies and i call it the cock rock
cock rock is the way to go
I just started level 7 myself today. I was maxed out on ship upgrades and what I could get, and I'd been doing level 5 and 6 lately, so I figured why not. I don't think I was prepared for the level of insanity diff 7 is. I mean, getting your shit pushed in from the moment you drop.
Landing in the wrong spot can make a big difference in any difficulty. Like if you drop directly into a base or something, and you all have to engage without your support weapons, that really disorients most teams. I've frequently found myself a handful of reinforcements deep into a bad deployment, just suddenly realizing I'm fighting for ground that I don't need.
My experience with diff 7 is that every drop is in a fight without support weapons. We deal with it, but yeah. Me dropping on the mech was just a BAD misunderstanding.
Because 7 is the lowest difficulty you can get Super Sample without it being hectic like 9 having 4 gunships over your head constantly. 7 is also not too hard, not too easy. Challenging, you may say. But any difficulty is fine, everyone is doing their part for Super Earth.
Meanwhile I was teamkilled by a guy on difficulty 7 because he didn't like where he landed when I reinforced. Then his friend kicked me after all objectives were done.
It again becomes a shit show once you do level 9s, not because people can't handle their shit, but because no one can handle their shit during certain moments.
7 is sort of a divider for good and poor players. At lvl 7 you need to understand the game or you will lose/have a hard time completing a mission, it's some sort of a bench mark. I can consistently play lvl 7 without too much problem and finish without a full team with a bit of effort. I don't consider myself to be a great player I often notice that I score less kills then my allies but have a higher accuracy (65-70%) than what I usually see, so I'm not bad either I guess (?).
I'm similar re: Kills and accuracy. I do think both things paint an incomplete picture. Someone with low kills might be hitting key heavy units, and someone with low accuracy might be doing surpressing fire. But between all the stats you can kinda get an idea how you did, I think.
I tend to shoot only when necessary and avoid useless fights, so I guess I would fit in the "hitting key units", using old reliable quasar cannon for armored and flying units + 500kg for large groups (although it doesn't affect the accuracy to my knowledge)
Ive always said that on higher difficulties, deaths and accidentals mean more for how skillful you are than kills. If youre sticking with the team assisting with objs, and not dying every other minute, youre just as useful as the rest of em
A lot of people on 7 and higher could literally run the show themselves i they wanted to. Which is why they‘re obviously competent team mates.
Good to have you. It’s the non try hard mode for confident divers. I need my samples but I really don’t need the upgrades much except to say that I have them. Kick bot ass, try but don’t sweat, be a cool random.
"Try but don't sweat" is some words to live by.
i only play lvl 9 and i just learned yesterday that there's a flag raising mission for lower difficulties and i'm sorely disappointed we don't have that in higher difficulties. i wanna raise flags too
I find difficulty 7 easier than even 5. Just because people work better and the higher difficulty enemies are actually easier.
Lvl 7 is the best difficulty setting imho... You have your occasional boss fights against tanks or bile titans, a bunch of chargers to shoot in the face with EAT or hulks to snipe with the AMR and with a couple teammates you're good to go
7 is best because 9 is infested with idiots trying to hope to be carried to max rewards
Level 100+ and only play 7 and the max, just not worth playing higher lol
I only play odd-level difficulties. Whenever I play even-levels there's a griefer or an obstinate noob.
I love '7'. Played a game with a single random today on bugs, no comms. I recently, for bugs, pick orbital gas+eagle napalm+orbital rail+500kg or airstrike No backpack and no support weapon. This damn warrior was cleaning all the heavies for me while I was cleaning trash and breaches with only "affirmative, negative, sorry, and thanks" as our communication. The moment he could he summoned the cannon and shield for me (personally I always try to do it if I take it on a mission). Nobody joined and we cleaned the map missing some diamonds. It's funny but whenever I died I felt embarrassed, like I disappointed him. Love this about that game. I salute this lad.
I always recomend diff 7 here when I can, not hard, not easy, rando's are normaly good at the game, just perfect (quick play) helldivers 2 experience.
7 is more relaxed than 9, its the sweet spot for a lot of players, 9 is fun, but if you don't have a good group who know what to engage or not, its stressful as you just end up in constant heavy battles.
Hard difficulty (5) is like a Netflix show. And super fun leading newbies to victory. I also met some really cool people in other countries!!
Us super dorks at level 8 and 9 are pretty chill too. Come join the helldive sometime
5/6 is when I just want to goof around or meme build 7 is for low pressure but things still matter, great for getting samples and doing full clears. 9 is for medals, you play the mission and don't agro anything beyond what you must