You're by far the best HD2 content creator out there. The quality of your videos and your reasoning is way above the other half baked, clickbait, yapping until 8 min mark, content creators Thank you for your hard work man.
I agree, 100%. I really enjoyed another creator but the more I watched them the more I realized they're just constantly spewing these hyperbolic, overly negative knee-jerk opinions based on a single mission or a single enemy matchup for a weapon. They've also had a history of this with basically every game they play, with drama following them everywhere not just with other creators but also developers. Not going to name anyone, but I'm sure y'all know who I'm talking about. Rykken seems like the perfect antithesis to that type of attitude
I love how basically every time the word "Stalker" appears in these videos it's followed by "(Bastard)". I love the new SMG just for the fact that it can stunlock Stalkers, it feels nice to give those sneaky buggers a taste of their own medicine.
That throwback to darktide gave me mental Dmg. How could they drop the ball so much on a great game like that? Also it's weird how AH CEO talks about how assault rifles are often shown as underpowered when in reality they are death spitting monsters when in his own game most of the assaults are just a joke.
You need to put it into context. The HP of a human is equal to that of a scavenger. Against human enemies, all assault rifles would 1-3 shit a person, depending on location and range. We're not fighting humans. We're fighting aliens and robots. Most of whom have at a few dozen to several times the HP of a human. Not to mention, most of them have separated HP pools for different limbs that can be severed without killing them. Something that can't happen for humans. The assault rifles aren't weak. The enemies are just strong.
"How could they drop the ball so much on a great game like that?" Because Fatshark management is a cargo cult. They copy elements from more successful games, but badly, because they don't understand how they work-never mind comprehending that they lack the necessary resources to make it work. This would be bad enough when it comes to gameplay elements, like a hive map that serves no functional purpose except to be worse than a server browser in every single way, but it's especially bad when they try to copy the cheap tricks that MMORPGs, Gacha games, etc. use to keep people grinding. Only it mostly doesn't keep people grinding, because Fatshark copied those systems badly, because they don't understand how they work. The reason Fatshark keep blindly trying to copy what works for other games is because they are institutionally incapable of learning from their own experience. Darktide repeated every mistake of Vermintide 2, only harder in some cases, because they just don't learn.
When I saw the title I thought you were going to be one of those guys whining about how assault rifles aren't as good at being marksman rifles as marksman rifles. Thank you for actually being a reasonable person with good ideas.
The only one i feel should be a hybrid of the two is the tenderizer, due to its description matching a modern .308 rifle like a G3 in bullpup kinda, and its reduced mag. Otherwise, yeah the ARs need more... "Oomph" to make them able to compare to the 2 most used gun classes, 65 damage smgs and breaker and variants. I shouldn't be getting outpaced with a 2 handed rifle by some guy with a one handed smg. Personal belief but i feel like it's justified.
I was thinking the same. Holy shit this video was really good. I couldnt quite put my finger on what it was the game is missing and this vid just made it clear as day
This video is a breath of fresh air around the balancing of the game. I’m not into click-baity videos like “the balancing is going to kill the game”. This video goes straight to the point and lay out what and why your balancing suggestions are meaningful. I hope the devs see this and take notes!
that title doesn't sound like clickbait to me. i know at least 4 people who haven't been playing the game because the balancing and no new fun tools is getting stale really fast. so, i imagine there are more than just us 4 who feel that way, ergo: not clickbait, but accurate.
@@FackeYu You guys have no idea what a dead game looks like. Besides, a lot of the people from Tik Tok are heading off cause their attention spans are too short to have one game hold them for more than a month.
One way to buff the tenderizer could be to make it able to strip light armor and dismember quickly. So if you’re shooting at a devastators hips the light armor is gone in 3-4 shots and afterwards you are doing full damage to that area. Or it could shoot off the Gun arm of the heavy devastators quickly. This way the gun makes a target more “tender”. Or you could take inspiration from the g11 (irl gun) with a burst that is fired off so quickly the shooter doesn’t feel recoil until after the burst. This would pay homage to its battle rifle looks.
Could also make it a medium armor penatrating weapon. Combined with the rest of the changes it would be a great "jam it in their face and mag dump" weapon...perfect for dealing with devastators without having to stop and aim thus keeping the whole fast paced stormtrooper vibe
@@AnonymousVenator could counter that issue by giving it a red dot sight....why do you need a long range scope on a CQC weapon ya know? Seriously tho main reason I suggested that was cause it's description mentions it being a larger caliber with more stopping power...could swap out the anti armor with a stagger chance I guess...but either way it should hit HARD to make up for it's smaller mag imo
Adjudicator or penetrator can be nice when you wanna go through medium bug armor. But the stopping power is just pathetic. Even the pistols have better dpm than the assault rifles.
Defender does get out ranged by ARs and doesn't have a scope, so there is that, at least. If you look at the ttks between Liberator and Defender, it isn't that different.
@@johnthetactician there's no real point in longer distance shooting with ARs though. If you want to actually have distance, the marksman rifles are going to be your choice, which are decent against bots. And against bugs, you don't really need that much distance in the first place
@GameFuMaster there is a point, it's for thinning swarms before they get close. If it's an unaggrod patrol, of course, it's smarter to not engage. If it's a PoI, light enemies can be eliminated from a distance before getting closer. Lights are also the ones that call breaches/drops, so there is another advantage to the range.
The CEO said that they wont increase the magsize of the liberator because it doesn't make senes since its modeled after a 45 round stanag magazine. however when i suggested the same ideas as in a mag count increase to the liberator i was met with hostility on the discord when i just tried to point out that instead of being "average" the liberator should be the most forgiving weapon as a starter
They could just change the model? Which would give an in lore reason too. "current magazine size is insufficent for combat encounters, we are now issuing 50 round drums"
I feel like they should do 60 round mags. They are literally the same design of the mag but slightly wider. It won't ruin the design and I think would look really nice.
@@missfire9480 The whole reason the breaker got mag size nerf: SE MOT Said that breakers often were found with still half full mags. so they cut the rounds from 16 to 13.
Refusing to buff because of this notion of "realism" is bogus when a tiny lunch box pack can refill multiple rockets, grenades, magazines, and stims at once. Even if you don't change the model, who really cares at the end of the day so long as the weapon is more fun to use? I hate it when realism is used as an excuse to not make the game better, while it's ignored when it's annoying or detrimental to players (like Rocket Devastators having unlimited ammo and no reloads) Decide if you want to stick to realism or not, cherry picking convenient excuses is just frustrating.
following you from darktide to now helldivers can definitely see the hardwork and growth! completely agree that the biggest point is "purpose" it doesn't have to be popular or super overpowered etc etc, it just needs to feel like it makes sense to someone, somewhere. Give us options that feel significant or at least fun to explore even if they're not "meta" keep up the good work and hope your words reach many ears!
Sounded like great suggestions, I've found most ARs to be rather lacking especially due to bad durable damage or no medium penetration. Of course it would really help if the devs didn't hide important numbers like durable damage. That is an essential stat.
I'd like to see how your balancing would go if they brought the game difficulty back to game release. Honestly Ive been hoping they move back to their stated idealized intentions. For us to be Paper soldiers, using Super badass rocks, to kill the universes most deadly scissors. Great to see your content here, ive been following you since DT. As a hardcore player of these types of games, I look forward to seeing your post regularly. Please kept up the great work. You are one of my core info sources for these types of games.
It'd be wild to see the Tenderizer do 90 damage. That revision overall does seem overkill, even if the ammo seemingly balances it out. One weapon concept I'd been thinking of for this game was the Triple Action Thunder (look it up for an image; I think the aesthetic would fit well). After the Verdict wasn't the hand cannon I'd hoped it'd be, this was what I latched onto. Basically a handheld AMR that's breech loaded, single round, so reload every shot. It even had a patented recoil reducing shock absorber. No matter what happens, firing a .50 BMG from a pistol one-handed is gonna kick like a mule.
People aren’t thinking of the Verdict properly imo. It’s described as a 14mm (.55 cal, the same caliber as a Boys AT rifle from WW2) which is bigger than a .50bmg but it can’t physically hold as much powder as a .50 bmg. Compare muzzle velocities and impact energy of a .50ae desert eagle to a .500s&w revolver and I’d wager it’s roughly similar to what the difference between the senator and the verdict are. The revolver will hit harder but the semiauto can hold more rounds and fire quicker. That’s the trade off between the two.
It wont, because that wont change most breakpoints on chaffs. The issue with ars is their inability to handle medium tier enemies in a timely manner. For bots it their tiny weak point, and bugs is the large health pool with armour.
Honestly the devs really need to reconsider their armor system because as it is Medium 1 is so niche that it's barely even an advantage as most enemies have Light 1 weak points making Light 2 superior to Medium 1 in most situations, or have Medium 2+ making it useless, or if they have a Medium 1 weak point, it's either quicker to maneuver around them (Hive Guard and Scout Strider) or their HP is so high you'll want to use a support weapon anyway (Gunship, Hulk, and Tank). I think the only real target you might want to take a Medium 1 Primary for is Bile Spewers, and that's solely because their Light 1 sides use durable damage, all while swarming in groups of 10 or more and more than likely mixed in with Chargers and Bile Titans. So, 1 enemy out of 33-ish is niche as fuck. I think what they should do first and foremost is reduce the number of armor degrees down from 11 to 7, that is instead of 0-10 as they currently have it, they have Light 1-2, Medium 1-2, Heavy 1-2, then Hell Bomb, which is how most people describe it anyway. Second, all weapons primary damage should only use Light 2, Medium 2, or Heavy 2, so there aren't any Medium weapons that can't penetrate all Medium armors to some degree. Additionally Light pen weapons should have at least 2x the ammo of Medium pen to make them universally more ammo efficient than Medium pen. Third, in opposition to common logic, obvious Weak Spots should be more heavily armored than the majority of the body to incentivize using higher pen weapons for better TTKs, while all enemies should have a rear or underside Weak Spot with at least Light 2 pen to allow all weapons to destroy every enemy somehow. Rough Examples: Raider, Body Light 1 HP 125, Heady Light 2 HP 50; Liberator STK 3-2 shots, Penetrator 3-2 shots, EAT 1-1 shots Devastator, Body Light 2 HP 250, Head Medium 1 HP 100; Liberator STK 9-X shots, Penetrator STK 6-3 shots, EAT STK 1-1 shots. Scout Strider, Pilot as Raider, Body Medium 1 HP 500, Legs Medium 2 HP 200; Liberator STK R-X-X shots, Penetrator STK R-12-9 shots, EAT STK R-2-1 shots. Hulk, Vent Light 2 HP 600, Body Medium 2 HP 750, Head Heavy 1 HP 300; Liberator STK 20-X-X shots, Penetrator STK 14-34-X shots, EAT STK 2-2-1 shots. Tank, Vent Light 2 HP 800, Body Heavy 1 HP 1000, Turret Heavy 2 HP 400; Liberator STK 27-X-X shots, Penetrator STK 18-X-X shots, EAT STK 2-3-2 shots.
Very well made video. Your ideas for all the guns sound very fun, and i didn't even know durable damage was a thing till now. Wish i could make you lead balancer.
More magazine size is the main change that needs to be made to assault rifles. Anything less than 50 rounds is borderline useless in this game when the sickle is almost an LMG
I think Durable Damage is the biggest issue against bots and the percentage across the board needs to be buffed in damage. A whole mag for one devestator shoulder cannon is insane.
I'm the biggest penetrator apologist in the galaxy. It's really good on bugs, it very efficiently deals Commanders and guards and spewers, has a ton of ammo, and is easy to use. The caveat is your must overrely on it's insane headshot multiplier and pure damage on critical weak points to overcome it's weak damage per shot. Most light armor weapons you need to target different spots on different enemies to efficiently dispatch them. The penetrator instead purely relies on headshots. Just pop a head and switch to a different target as they're in hard bleed out. On paper the gun is bad; but in practice it's refreshingly simply as long as you have the mechanical skill to back it up.
Adjudicator just feels better to use. It's dura dmg is less than Lib Pen, but it handles swarms much better while being 98% as good vs med armor mobs. It's just as good at 100+ meters as Lib Pen, but handles full auto in the face better and reloads on the run faster. Lib Pen just feels pointless.
@@Trooper10231 That's not necessarily true, you lose a ton of ammo efficiency as you end up significantly overkilling targets, it has less overall ammo, and exponentially more recoil leading to much worse sustained dps, which is the only reason you even pick an AR over a DMR. It's fine if you subjectively like the gun, but if you put the two weapons side by side they're not really all that different tier wise. Personally I hate the mag size and recoil. In practice it performs significantly worse into mixed crowds. You overkill small targets, when one round of which is worth far more than a round per mag of the penetrator comparing mag size, for a rather marginal gain on TTK for medium armored enemies. Not to mention that while medium armored enemies have bigger heads, the recoil further lowers your effective DPS against small body targets, especially hunters and stalkers.
I think an analogous game for this philosophy of side-grades is TF2, funnily enough. It’s a class-based game that demands a specific role be filled by each class, and so the sidegrades have wound up being “enablers,” in the sense that they strengthen certain elements of a class’s role, min-maxxing their “playstyle,”
The best way to go about balancing primaries is to think of alllll the different playstyles and “subclasses” that a player could pursue, and give them the tools to succeed in that niche IF they build into it. Examples could include an infantry bolt-action with med 2 pen and high durable damage but low mag size for a support-minded playstyle, or a beam weapon (like the medigun) with an overheat mechanic that heals teammates but does pisspoor damage to enemies.
LAS-77 Icarus A laser rifle that shoots bolts of light. The damage, recoil, and armor penetration are low but they all increase as the heat sink warms up. Don’t shine too brightly though or you’ll burnout and have to start from cold with a lengthy reload. The weapon is designed to be a daring front line weapon rewarding the player with brutal levels of stopping power as long they can maintain good resource management.
reminds me of one of the overclocks for the laser rifle in DRG, where it does a ton of extra damage but only while it is close to overheating. Can be brutal to learn, but super fun when mastered
Im curious what would be your thoughts on the current support weapon state. imo support weapons are mostly in a solid state vs automatons(some that should be good are real bad tho). but in a DISMAL state vs bugs. this being the fact that nearly every single support weapon can kill every single bot enemy in an efficient manner due to the weakpoint design vs bots. but bugs, chargers and bile titans do not have any meaningful weakpoints/the weakpoints they do have either have far too much hp(bile titan) or reduce damage by an insane amount(chargers). i believe obviously having anti tank still dealing with them quicker, and safer is of course important. but i believe AP4 weapons (AMR, Laser Cannon, HMG etc) should be able to kill chargers and bile titans in a reasonable time frame. Just to help with support weapon diversity. Since being shoehorned into the same support weapons or the same strategems if you dont have a support weapon that can deal with them just isnt fun. imo the easiest way to do this is to either add a weakpoint to the mouth of chargers just below their headplate, or lean into the whole "behind the leg" glitch and just make it a feature that the joints and backside of legs are lesser armored, maybe T3 or 4. instead of current 5. for bile titans its way easier. Currently you can technically kill them with AP4 by shooting underneath them on their rear sack(AFTER its been destroyed). The problem with is is the fact that it has an insane amount of HP. For example it takes over 2 minutes of continuous fire with the laser cannon to kill them. This was also back when you could still stun titans with stun grenades and EMS. so all theyd have to do is reduce the HP by a large margin for this part of bile titans and potentially also reduce the armor value from T4 to T3. I believe this would keep anti tank weapons valuable and still better/more safe because vs chargers, having to play bull tamer with them in the middle of a fight isnt exactly ideal or safe, vs just blowing up their head immediately and moving on. and bile titans, sitting directly underneath bile titans is not safe at all but would be practically required to kill them. It just opens up so much more variety which bugs desperately needs in my opinion.(half the game!)
Id love to see a SMG concepts video and if you make one I have a branching concept Id love for you to steal After careful consideration the super earth ministry of truth has determined that contact with automaton weaponry will not result in the contracting of communist ideas in the holder, therefore SEAF scientists have been approved to begin repurposing scrapped clankers into the weaponry of tomorrow. "We literally just pulled the arm off of a decommissioned heavy devastator and did one of two things to it:" Option 1: we did no modifications and made the first ever one handed support weapon. Not only that but it is the first ever support weapon that has a built in backpack so theres no team loading, not that you need it because this weapon is IDENTICAL to the heavy devastator's long range, low spread, no recoil SMG minigun. Heavy sway due to the large barrel and it is set to burst by default but you can turn it to unsafe mode for more sustained DPS, be warned that firing too long causes the battery backpack to explode. Despite the built in backpack it can still fit a slim ballistic shield but nothing else. Option 2: We sawed off the barrel of the gun, disconnected the backpack and moved the battery guts into the stock of the gun resulting in a near identical weapon but with a few small changes. The reflective barrel worked to reduce spread ever so slightly so use at long range is not recommended. Moving the hefty battery into the body of the gun counteracts the shorter barrel so its equally as tedious to maneuver, the real drawback comes from the extreme temperature caused by even a short burst of fire. Luckily the design allowed for an aggressive venting setup meaning that the gun will go from cool to blazing hot to cool all within a matter of seconds, trigger discipline is a MUST. One handed, energy, fast windup, no recoil, 2 extra replacement heat sinks, Light II penetrating, low to no stagger and medium low durability damage. Used with a ballistic shield to accurately pop devastator heads and hit other weak points but missing shots can be heavily punished.
Good effort but with SMG - 37 Defender having same armor pen as most rifles (at Light II) and superior dmg it just doesn't make sense. Liberator or most derivatives are just almost smgs that you have to hold with two hands. If whichever dev stupidly intends on hiding behind "rEaLiSm" as the vision of weapon design, then let's hold them to it. Rifle of any kind will always have a better penetration than a SMG, that's why and for many other reasons even special forces all over the world ditched smgs (save for specialty cases) in favor of carbine length rifles because of their overall increase in performance. Since nerfing a fine weapon as the Defender or any weapon for that matter is the last thing we want then all rifles should have minimum armor pen Med I. What would be left to do is fudge the durable damage to suit a rifles purpose: lower for Liberator as a general purpose light assault rifle with relatively short barrel and obviously higher for LPenetrator / Adjucator and so on. It would leave the Defender in a good spot dmg wise while having the additional utility of one handed use but not eclipsing any of the rifles. It would have been a lot easier if they didn't paint themselves into a corner with how armor pen is squished into basically 2 tiers for any normal weapons.
I'm impressed with these proposals, I think there's a lot of good thinking here. My only hangup is the proposed tenderizer changes; I feel it is risky to make such an overpowered weapon with its only weakness be the ammo economy. I'm afraid in such a case it would lead to players using the supply backpack 100% of the time, and hoarding all the ammo pickups for themselves, leaving none for their teammates. An idea I thought of that might work as well; give the Tenderizer that much power but also add an overheating mechanic that reduces the rate-of-fire when the gun is too hot. That way, the weapon remains powerful for clearing patrols and small groups, but in a prolonged engagement, the weapon doesn't have time to cool off and its performance degrades to a point where performance is actually less than the standard liberator. It wouldn't stop you from defending yourself, but it'd force you to disengage to get back the more potent fire-rate.
Cool ideas, but I also think that this game has a fundamental design problem in how weapons and enemies are designed, which should probably be addressed in order to make weapon balancing incentives more sensical going forward. Basically, when it comes to Armor Piercing in this game, it is universally the case that any primary/secondary weapon with above baseline armor piercing ability is also tuned to be a precision weapon (I.e. it has better sights, but also smaller magazines and lower fire rate, so you are incentivized to make precise shots). At the same time, the enemy design is completely inverted: They tend to have armor on parts which are easy to hit, and small critical hit spots are usually unarmored. So the main unique utility of accurate AP weapons is being able to hurt enemies without aiming precisely, whereas the required playstyle of non-piercing weapons is to take precise shots at the exposed areas. The enemy design incentivizes you to use weapons the complete opposite way from what they're designed to be good at, which is very counterintuitive.
I don't agree on most of your buff The Liberator would need to be upped in damage in my opinion and same for the mesely 45 of the lib pen which hold it back way too much overall. When you compare their dps to any shotgun, they are lacking way behind overall. Because, even with more Ammo, I can say safely that the Lib pen would heavely lack behind a Dominator for sure
You're incredibly talented and extremely articulate with your knowledge, explanation and line of thoughts. I really wish you'd be hired at Arrowhead as a weapons' balance lead...
I agree with the concept for sure. The devs seem too busy to make meanigful changes or something. I like your focus on part damage too. I think this is the key to making weapons and strategems feel good. Even if it dosent kill a weap/strat can find use by breaking parts or stripping armor. In my opinion the dev has had this strict view on balance since HD1 but the crowd wasnt as loud before. They liked keeping things on the edge of greatness.
Brimstone sounds stellar! I'd run that all day long. Great video, Ryken. I really liked your balance change suggestions to Blessings in Darktide, and I like this one, as well.
I'm not sure if I'm correct I'm this so feel free to argue with me. How do you balance primary weapons in a game with airstrikes, orbital strikes, support weapons, and sentries? A change in one requires balancing not only against primary weapons in their respective categories and then against the other primaries, balance needs to happen across the interlocking systems that interact with each other. Absent that analysis, I think conversations about buffs and nerfs are helpful to get the ball rolling but are incomplete.
I know it's not the topic of discussion but the Knight SMG needs double mag size to make it useful. Nobody ever talks about it so I will never stop, it needs to happen!
I followed your work on darktide and you are a rare content creator that take a scientific approach instead of spreading half wrong info. Always on point, thanks for yours video, keep up the good work
I had some people in the helldivers discord that the tenderizer is good. it is, in fact, still dogshit. took me 2 mags to the back of a devastator to kill it, goes though ammo insanely fast, and only gets 5 mags from resupply. I swear I spend more time reloading than shooting.
videos like this always surprise me because, if there is a team of experienced professionals, why cant they come up with ideas like this? Or do these ideas get suppressed by other views, it doesnt make any sense
I hate how most discussions about balancing is "make x stronger". Absolutely no consideration that the devs don't want any weapon to be a straight up upgrade and preferable to prior versions. Right now the pummeler is straight up better than the defender for a negligible damage difference. Every weapon requires some unique function, but not all primary weapons are going to excel in all situations which is why we have stratagem to compliment the loadout. We can't look at weapons purely in a vacuum.
the idea of turning the tenderizer into a scar h is very appealing to me. i would love higher recoil, beefier muzzle report, and higher damage. your balance for that particular weapon would satisfy me very much.
I'd love to see as sidegrades to the standard Liberator: *Liberator SSW* (Squad Support Weapon): A heavy-barreled full-auto-only Liberator with reduced ergonomics and reload speed in exchange for a double-capacity drum magazine and that "bipod" perk, allowing divers specializing in the machinegunner roles to still fill that role (albeit less effectively, MGs are generally better) if they lose their support weapon. Probably only has a red-dot to improve situational awareness and encourage long-range accuracy by volume-of-fire. *Liberator CE* (Close Encounters): A bog-standard Liberator with just a few little tweaks to make it a scrappy little trench-clearer. The fire-rate have been increased, and a extended piece of frame with a bayonet has been added to massively increase melee damage (especially while sprinting). However, reinforcing the weapon to be used intentionally as a bludgeon and spear meant removing the scope to only have sturdy iron sights, increased sway from the odd weight balance, and the boosted fire rate making recoil more noticeable. For more ideas, the Dagger needs a rework, and I'd love to fit it into a small family of energy sidearms. *Dagger* (Laser Pistol) - To be more in-line with the rest of the pistols as valid options to pull when you are caught empty and need a problem solved, the DPS would be brought up to match or even exceed the Sickle laser rifle. However, it overheats (and cools!) nearly twice as fast as its bigger brother, and only has one reserve heatsink similar to the laser cannon. This weapon is a strong sidearm choice if you can temper your fire-rate, but failing to do so will leave you without a secondary in very short order. *Shank* (Pulse Handcannon) - With medium penetration and even more damage than the Senator revolver, this energy big iron is held back by the standard energy-weapon charge-up and only about 8 shots of consecutive fire. Fires the same kind of projectile as the Sickle, but is basically semi-automatic and only has one reserve shot. *Katar* (Electroshock Gauntlet) - An unconventional weapon that fists over a helldivers fist and is "punched" toward an enemy when fired, this weapon includes both a melee pummeling surface and a small pop of electricity that can spread over a crowd to stagger and flinch them, or if in proper hitting range converge on a single point, resulting in a respectable burst of damage. It's heatsink can only stand two consecutive powered attacks without cooking, but it has a better-than-normal unpowered melee and three reserve heatsinks.
For your idea of a close quarters liberator, in the first game, there was a rifle called the patriot, that was exactly what you said. There are also some leaks that show the patriot, with the simple stats of a higher fire rate and more recoil.
My GAWD I would 100% finally have a desire to play again if they balanced the assault rifles like this! What a great way to balance them! Great logic! And the bonus idea were great! Each has a distinct purpose and function and feel. I always loved the FG-42 in WW2 style games, so would love to get something with that style and purpose!
what bugs me about this game is how both smg and assault rifle balancing is completely backwards, all smgs are slow firing and more potent than assault rifles when its supposed to be the other way around, assault rifles SHOULD be the jack of all trades (master of none) while the smgs should be the kings of close quarters and DMRs/sniper rifles should be long range kings, not the smgs being a direct upgrade from rifles
Yes!! I was thinking a lot about how I'd balance SMGs and Rifles. In real life, Rifles would make SMG obsolete in terms of power fire.. and yet... SMGs deal much more damage than Assault Rifles... ? _ ? I haven idea, but the thought isn't fully fleshed out - maybe for another video ;)
You're the only Helldivers 2 content creator I still watch. You put out INSANELY good content that's well thought and researched. All the other creators for the game, I'd rather be playing the game than watching them. You make me put the game away and think!!
I really like these balancing ideas. Thing is, not every weapon needs to be super extreme mega SSS-Tier or whatever. BUT! Every weapon should be fun to shoot and have a clear purpose and identity. It's all about having a huge pool of viable weapons and toys to choose from depending on the playstyle you like or the mood youre in. I really hope you make these balancing Ideas for the other weapon categories aswell! If AH ever decides to make some sort of community feedback/balancing council you defenitely belong there!
I really like your suggestions. Establishing a clear purpose for each gun also makes it easier to create weapons of other categories that perform a similar or parts of a job but with a twist, like if you want to make a "first shotgun" it would be fairly easy to balance that against the liberator but keeping in mind a higher damage fall-off with range. Another massively important change that needs to be made is to make weapon stats more visable, for example the durable damage stat is incredibly important to know about, not to mention really basic stuff like total ammo and ammo recovered.
I’d like for flame weapons to block enemy movement and stun temporarily, small and medium enemies should rear up when they hit flame and be stalled for a bit. Napalm strikes would create a wall of blocking flame. Incendiary grenades a small aoe block. And the flamer would stun lock enemies if you continue to spray them, or quick sprays would still hold them off and daze them. So flamers could actually hold and push at the frontline, instead of running backwards constantly. The fact people have to run a shield with the flamethrower, shows that people are compensating for the flame weapons not functioning properly. Flame weapons would great in the RTS game Starship Troopers Terran Command. Flame weapons suck so hard right now because they do not inhibit enemy movement
Eh, i dont see thrm needing any changes, nor can they be changed without edging out everything else. There is a fundamental disconnect from what the primary weapon roles are and what series newbies expect them to do. The primary is a small part of your loadout, and at higher difficulties is intended to give you breathing room and prevent alarms. The devs arent going to rework the fundamentals of the series - and the entirety of the weapon roster - when each AR already has a unique role that works quite well at all difficulties. I appreciate your commentary as always.
This is how I think ARs should be buffed to make them more on par with the Sickle, which is the ideal power level for weapons imo: - AR-23 Liberator: Damage increased from 60 to 70; spare magazine count increased from 7 to 10 - AR-23C Liberator Concussive: Damage increased from 65 to 100; stagger effect reworked to match that of the Pummeler - AR-23P Liberator Penetrator: Damage increased from 45 to 70; recoil decreased from 19 to 15, scope crosshair reworked - AR-61 Tenderizer: Damage increased from 60 to 80; fire rate decreased from 600 to 560 - BR-14 Adjudicator: Damage increased from 80 to 100; rate of fire decreased from 550 to 440; horizontal recoil reduced
It would be silly if AH only buffs the assault riffles because older warbonds like "Democratic Detonation" in particular the eruptor got TWO injust nerfs TWO making the weapon pretty much USELESS! It could one shot strider at front armor plate, Berserkers at the belly and Devestators at the crutch area which is deserved! Other primaries in the current day can destroy a whole small army incl Berserkers, Devestatotors Striders and other enemies lets say 5 Berserkers, 2 Devestators, 7 Troopers, 2 Striders, Shield berserker etc in the time span you HAD to RELOAD THREE times just to destroy ONLY ONE berserker with the Eruptor!!!!! That to me is extremely UNBALANCED! A "SLOW SLOW single shot bolt action gun" was always a HARD HITTER! They also need to look at older warbonds and buff weapons.
2:47 not to be a contrarian, but for some insane reason I see Breaker S&P in half the games I play (both bots and bugs, though mostly bugs, playing on 7 and 8). I am at a loss as to why, but people do use it. The only Sluggers, Punishers or Xbows I've ever seen have all come from me though.
@@rykenxiv I play in EU, though I do get a lot of Chinese players since I'm in eastern europe. It has genuinely driven me mental and I've just accepted that the S&P has seen a resurgence (maybe because regular Breaker has bad ammo econ on bugs?), until this video where I was reminded I'm not insane.
Breaker S&P: 192dmg x 26bullet x 8(+1)mag = 44'928 dmg vs no armor or 22'464 vs light armor lots of damage, big magazines, not bad bullet spread, available in free warbond
Looking at the way the Devs just changed the # of Magazines each weapon carries for weapons, they seem to be looking Real Life military load-outs. 1 in the weapon, and 6 mags on your vest is standard. AH also seems to be going with standard mag sizes 10, 15, 20, and 30, though the 45 of the Liberator is the outlier in this line of thought. I would like some love for the machine guns. The light MG should be fast firing, low damage light, armor pen similar to the US Military's M249 firing from 200 round mags, with 2-3 mags carried. The medium could be slower firing medium damage and medium-1 pen. Mag sizes should be similar but would be belts, 2-3 belts carried. The heavy would be the slowest firing, heavily damaging, and medium -2 pen. Belt feed by 100 round belts 3 - 4 belts carried (like the old M60 machine gun).
Yeah man, I like using the ARs, they're a nice breathe of fresh air and good for taking out bugs from a long distance, they bring a completely different way of doing combat. But speaking of SMGs... I brought one last night as of writing this, thinking I would need to carry an SSD for a long distance and I've realized they're actually useless! This is a rant about SMGs I know, but I love SMGs. The Smg, the first one is onehanded, but usually an SMG would outperform a AR in firerate to compensate for lesser damage. But the Liberator outperforms the SMG in every way. Hell, midway through the match I swapped my gun out for a SYTHE and it got more kills! The SMGs are completely unviable in difficulties 6 and above.
In regards to the Wolfebrand and Jackal, there already was a silenced assault rifle leaked that was a Liberator variant called the "AR-48 Truth Whisperer" and it has a built-in supressor, 55 damage, 30 round mag, 750 fire rate, and 30 recoil (numbers subject to change of course).
I will die on the hill that the AR-61 Tenderizer should be the same as the fully upgraded AR-20L 'Justice' from HD1, a higher caliber version of the liberator Med pen, over pen, 30round clip, And they can figure the trade off for the bayonet since Im not sure they can add that to HD2
Flashlits+laser sights! Plus optics. It would be nice to give players ability to switch some module parts, adding underbarrel gl launchers with limited amount of nades (or even excluding players nades in this case), underbarrel shotguns ect. And if we could load some specific ammo right in game, we could change weapon effect. Let's take a basic liberator as an example. First think - I'm 90% sure we could use suppressor there. Second - we could carry 6 mags loaded with based FMG, 2 mags with AP, another 2 mags loaded with HP, 1 mag with subsonics, etc. We could have incendiary or other stuff. That's just a proposition so I'm not thinking about details. Might be that would be a good idea to give players ability to manage their loadout. So if we load some specific rounds, weapons stats changes sometimes. AP rounds give massive amount or recoil, supsonics with suppressor has massive bullet drop off and can't penetrate anything, ect. Fire rate be also changed depending what round is loaded. And in this case liberator won't be ideal, it will stay basic weapon. Liberator Penetrator could be rebalanced to use higher caliber ap rounds, some explosive ammunition and other stuff. It's basic stopping power could be less coz higher penetration, fire rated could be slower, recoil could be higher, and reinforced barrel excluded silencers. Adjudicator could be an edge of combat rifle subclass with high caliber ammo usage, top damage, low fire rate, low ammo capacity, but it could have exclusive access to experimental ECM and he+incendiary rounds, for example, in addition to other types of ammo. But it's costumization capabilities would be very low. Tenderiser as a shock assault rifle could shine in other way having top fire rate closer to mp-98 knight, but with much less recoil. In addition burst mode could give even faster fire rate but with some delay between bursts. Assault rifles in general must be all-rounders mixing pros of other weapons, but in a somewhat weaker variant with some features. It won't fill specific role, but still would do the job. On the other hand it's a massive rework and I'm pretty sure it will lead other problems with balance. P.S. I rly think some stratagem weapons should be primary like Stalwart and Grenade Launcher, probably. Plus I don't understand reason why both diligence sniper rifles exists when we have AMR that is better in all ways, excluding it's not a primary weapon.
Saying my piece before I get too far into the video. The current removal of unique features and Standardisation is NOT the kind of balance that gamers enjoy. AR should be the “ideal middle ground” hard hitting but not too hard, accurate but not pinpoint every shot, rapid fire but not too fast, long range, but not too long (be it zoom, bullet velocity, bullet drop or the falloff so many other games force in that I generally don’t like). SMG can have damage but it should be mitigated by recoil or fire rate. General ranged capability should be decent but slower projectiles/more-drop than an AR, but as compensation more ammo in the mag and carried. DMR frankly are underperforming given their various ongoing downsides, the JAR invalidates them more than the slugger ever did. Double the damage, make them aim faster but ADS slower and make them reliably accurate plinkers not wildly bouncing low ammo disappointments. AoE weapons are in a state now. Undo ALL the nerfs, let puni-plas keep its projectile speed boost and make the Eruptor lean more into the long range GL aspect, and have the xbow properly split into 2-3 variants, explode after contact (basically a shaped charge), mostly explosion for add-clear and white phosphorus. The current xbow is somehow a DD weapon with low ammo and has the worst AoE out of all the explosive class now (less pen and less damage on that AoE). Shotguns are likely all over the place. The punisher shoots too slow, the sluggers been neutered, spray n pray lives up to its name and can’t hit anything, breakers okayish but the nerf was not needed, incen-breaker frankly speaking got a base damage boost for reasons unknown (then fire was bugmffes 3-4 times) and the double barrel is positively okayish, but should be a primary weapon not support.
Some things i would do, give the Concussive Liberator 80 damage (yeah, i don't agree with decreasing its damage, thats pointless to do, enemies already just soak up all the stagger and damage), +15 durable damage, 400 rpm, increase mag size to 35 and leave it in semi auto. As for the Penetrator give it 60 damage at least and +15 durable damage, we are still fire the same caliber round, except we don't fire standard FMJ, but AP rounds out of a longer barrel.
Whilst I like the thought put into each gun (especially with not over-buffing already good guns like the base Liberator), I disagree on the Adjudicator recoil reduction. I think its heavy recoil really feels powerful whilst not being unmanageable. The firerate should also remain unchanged - even at 500, it feels sluggish, but only to the point where each shot feels really heavy. Any more would make it just slow. It just needs a few more bullets per mag and the "Explosive" trait so it can break Bile Spewer guts, plus the ability to stagger on hit for medium enemies (Warriors, Devastators)
I would have personally chosen the Tenderizer to be our first fully dedicated burst fire AR. Give it a very high RPM within each burst, but a small delay between bursts. Slightly up the damage and keep it light armor pen. The “Stopping Power” referred to in its description could allude to staggering medium/small enemies if you land all 3 rounds of the burst on target. I would also give it the same scope as AMR because it most resembles the Halo 3 Battle Rifle scope. Of course give it a 36 round magazine as well.
Forget a balance for Assault rifles. How bout a standard? Every Assault rifle has to do a dps of 100. Medium Armor piercing is the exception dealing more then a hundred. How bout that?
I would rather have the Tenderizers Damage increased to 80 and Adjudicators damage increased to 100. The reason why i feel that way is that the Adjudicator is meant to be fired in Semi auto and only go full auto in vlose range spray. Like the FN Fal it is based on. Giving the Adjudicator 100 damage will allow it to kill small bots in one shot in the Chest, giving it a proper Battle Rifle role. The Tenderizer will then have a direct distinction from the Liberator/ Sickle. It will be a hard hitting, accurate, low recoil, low ammo Rifle.
I would personally put the Hurricane as a SMG because the reference you used reminds me of the MP40 and the high fire rate low damage makes me think of a PDW (Personal Defense Weapon) like the P90 which uses armor piercing pistol rounds. I also don't mind if they had sidegrades with the exact stats of another weapon if it has a different look. Kinda acting like skins for other games. THo I wouldn't do more than 1 a warbond.
There's also the problem with armor perks. All perks behave exactly the same no matter the armor type. The only benefit you have is either speed while running or more armor. I'll give an example of what I think armor types should do by using the Engineering kit as example. Light armor - +10% increased weapon stability while crouched or prone. + 10% increased throwing range. Medium armor - +5% increased weapon stability while crouched or prone. +5% increased throwing range. + 15% reduced flinching when shot. Heavy armor - +30% reduced flinching when shot. As you can see, this sets apart the armor sets a bit more, and the base perks will benefit more depending on your play style. The Engineering Kit will be greatly enhanced by what the base armor perks already has. In the case above, the light armor would gain an additional +10% weapon stability to account for the fact that he's not running around with bulky armor weighing him down. The light armor would benefit most for agility and speed. Allowing them to get into position and fire accurate shots very quickly. However, they have no benefit whatsoever if they get shot. They will stagger like normal. But the heavy armor can take hits and barely flinch. Allowing them to maintain a steady aim on target and keep firing. This makes them a true tank. Something like this is needed for armor sets because just the armor and speed difference do very little to distinguish the difference between all of them. Especially dealing with high damage enemies.
100 should be the base damage that all other weapons are scaled from, the starting liberator rifle should start at 100 damage and then all other weapons should scale from that base damage, so we have an easier time understanding damage values comparatively. If the base damage is 100, and you get a rifle or smg that does let's say 75 damage, that's a minus 1/4 damage reduction, which is an easy percent to understand, or if you get a rifle that does 150 damage that's a plus 1/2 damage addition. The current system is so minute and minor, there really isn't much functional difference between 60 and 65 damage, why even differentiate those two values when it's such a minor difference, and likely the two different weapons will perform almost exactly the same, aside from other factors like magazine capacity and recoil and such. Smg's and assault rifles feel way too similar because they effectively they are the same weapons at the moment, because making the smg's deal much less damage than the liberators' 60-ish would make them straight up unusable, and since the damage can't be nerfed without making the weapons actually useless, they also can't make them hold more ammo because then they would actually be just better. Marksman rifles also hardly feel different because the base damage on weapons is already so anemic that even doubling the amount of damage from the base liberator doesn't feel very powerful at all, and the slow fire rate without even medium penetration on average means they're just worse than the assault rifles and smg's without much of a niche to fit into. Imagine, most assault rifles dealing 100-125 damage, between 6-10 magazines, 25-50 round magazines. The damage buff alone would make them punchy, but then by making these weapons so strong you can take smg's and do this: Most smg's deal 50-80 damage, 40-60 rounds per magazine, 10-16 magazines, much higher fire rates than assault rifles, not as much penetration on average. Marksman rifles could be bumped up to 150-250 damage, between 15-30 rounds per magazine, slow fire rates, 6-10 magazines in total, should on average beat medium armor, perhaps even have body penetration so you can shoot through multiple enemies with one bullet. Shotguns are in a decent place right now I think, but I think adjusting them to better reflect a close range glass cannon-y playstyle wouldn't hurt. Energy weapons are sort of a... "fuck it we throwin' shit at the wall" category, take the sickle for example: it's effectively just an assault rifle, but dealing laser damage, effectively infinite ammo, slightly worse damage than other assault rifles, no stagger, almost no recoil, and takes a second to fire up. The plasma punisher is a mutation on a shotgun, and we can push this concept further with new or upcoming weapons. Weapons like the scythe and plasmas scorcher fit a niche for things only energy could do; effectively, energy weapons should be treated like a side grade to the ballistic weapons, not necessarily better or worse, but having trade offs to fill a particular niche a little more. Anyway, very wordy comment I know, will get lost in the sea, but I really think if they're gonna keep adding bigger and more powerful enemies, buffing all weapons based around a starting 100 damage base will be the only way to keep them from feeling even weaker than they do now, and help each category feel less same-y, while still allowing individual weapons in each class stand apart more.
Someone tag AH. This guy should be the balancing lead. Nothing here is bonkers, but it does allow for more "fun". I'd still be playing HD2 if someone on the team took fun factor into account when "balancing".
Hi Ryken, great video! Last week, I had access to the invaders spreadsheet and wanted to see if there was an equation / index that could predict when a weapon feels effective or fun to use, and settled on this: Firepower Index = (Burst DPS) x (Total Sustained Damage) x (Damage loss ratios [inaccuracy, lack of armor pen]) The underlying idea here is that although the game's underlying systems are extremely complicated, from a gameplay impact perspective, there are two standout considerations: (i) How much damage can this weapon dish out in a very short period of time (read: contexts where it is kill-or-be-killed) (ii) How much damage can this weapon dish out over a long period of time (read: contexts where you are facing a horde and need to be putting a sizeable dent in it each reload). Since both of these considerations use the same units -- damage -- you can then multiply the known values for (i) DPS, and (ii) mag dump damage with guesstimates for how much damage you lose from inaccuracy factors (spread, sway, recoil, bad ergonomics, bad sights, etc.) and from lack of adequate penetration against most targets. Once you multiply these 4 numbers, you get an index that reflects that weapon's ability to effectively place firepower on targets in the two most important contexts. Hence, the index's name: the firepower index. You can check out my spreadsheet here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZjWnmsM1hbwJu20xKyCFRWRNqNLuV6tsc3eCuh9eExA/edit?usp=sharing --- Going by these numbers, a weapon needs a Firepower Index of around 12-15 before the community enjoys it. Unfortunately, that means the ARs need *a lot* of help to bring them up to snuff. Give the spreadsheet a look and let me know what you think!
The adjudicator should’ve remained as a DMR, the lack of damage was felt by the adjudicator but all DMRs suffered from this. It felt like the adjudicator was swept under the rug and left as a hard hitting AR profile. The adjudicator could’ve been really unique as a proper battle rifle that CAN go full auto rather than should be full auto. It just needed more damage (possibly durable dam?) and a slightly relaxed recoil for semi auto firing
I really appreciate your focus on the "purpose" or fantasy of each gun and dialing its game feel and balance around that. Really hope AH shares that same view as they work on their rebalancing. Especially with the crossbow. No idea what they were trying to do with that weapon or its purpose. I'd LOVE to see an AK-47 style rifle in the game with mechanics similar to how they did it in L4D. Innacurate, recoil like a bucking bronco, but hits like a truck. Also it needs good meaty sound design to sound powerful when shooting. I was honestly hoping the Adjudicator would fit this role when it got rebalanced but it doesn't quite hit for me.
Yup, I pretty much agreed with the underlying philosophy behind what you're saying about assault rifles. I haven't used that entire class of weapons except for the sickle because they just don't have a defined role in their current iteration besides "general purpose gun", with some of them having medium penetration. Ever since they started changes weapons and "balancing" them, I've been saying that I just want a reason to use every single weapon. They don't all need to be good at everything, but each weapon we get should be good at *SOMETHING*. Some role or niche that at most, only competes with 1 or 2 similar weapons, but each of them having distinct differences between them, and varying stats over that group so that they each feel different to use, but are all useful for their intended niche. IMO, the best case of this is the AT weapons where the EAT, quasar, recoilless, and spear all have very distinct playstyles from each other, but all can be used for targets that require AT penetration. (please unnerf quasar, it didn't need the nerf, we just needed superior packaging methodology to not be bugged so that all the AT options are viable)
Your idea for the "Hurricane" is basically what I thought would be a fun direction to take the liberator penetrator. High rate of fire flechette weapon to use as a bullet hose. I think with the adjudicator added, the LibPen is sort of pointless in its current conceptualization. I really really like the place the Adjudicator is in, actually. I'd maybe give it a 30 round magazine, adjust the recoil a little, and it's perfect in the role of an automatic rifle (like the RPK, for example.) The armor penetration makes it ballistically feel like the MG43, but the relatively small magazine capacity gives you a fraction of the uptime, and makes reload management the trick to using the weapon efficiently. Though, I almost exclusively hip fire it, full auto. The way the recoil pattern works with the optic makes it extremely difficult to use in that application. Give it a try like that though. It's really fun, especially against bugs, and I think it falls in a very satisfying niche that would be bolstered by just a couple more rounds.
Remember that time the sickle came out and suddenly assault rifles were back? Yeah that feeling, we want more of that. It felt good to use. Currently there are exactly 2 assault rifles that I "enjoy" using and they are the sickle and the standard liberator. Every single other one has something "unique," sure, but said feature comes with too many drawbacks that I would rather use a more niche or unique weapon like the incredibly clunky but rewarding eruptor (well not any more, RIP) or the wonky but hard hitting dominator, or the now snappy and hard-hitting counter-sniper. There just isn't a good reason to use assault rifles currently, they are fun to spray but woefully ineffective where it counts. What we need is an explosive AR (since they made the explosive liberator into the concussive one... no I don't buy it was always supposed to be this way they called it explosive) that still only has light pen that is an absolute beast at popping squishy bug bits. No real AoE, think dominator explosions but with only light armor pen. Frankly something called the "tenderizer" should have this property. I do like the idea of more incendiary weapons. We have literally one when not counting grenades and the flame thrower. Less to do with assault rifle more to do with weapons in general (though it would likely be a good candidate for an AR, though an equally good option for a new SMG since we desperately need more one-handed options) I really like the idea of a mixed ammo weapon, a weapon that fires a series of shots with different properties. Something like concussive followed by an incendiary and ending with an explosive or higher armor pen round fired in three round burst with 1000+ fire rate on the burst so it comes out near simultaneously. It doesn't have to be powerful, it is meant to be a multi-tool. It would be a truly unique weapon and other more specialized ones would certainly be stronger but it could be a lot of _fun_ to use. That or the option to change ammo types, think like the lawgiver from Judge Dredd, but I think that same concept but not changing ammo (as I suggested) would be more interesting.
This is a fantastic overview of what the assault rifles could be. I don't agree with every change you suggest, but I think that the method ideals and goals layed out are solid. I don't think this addresses one of the issues I see a lot players reference, which is that Assault rifles feel like pea shooters. It doesn't feel like your shots are powerful at the highest difficulty levels. I think the biggest reason for this is damage breakpoints. A gun can deal 10 - 20 more damage without actually killing anything of importance any faster. This issue is exacerbated, I think, by how much easier the first 5 difficulty levels are. The Liberator pre-nerf is honestly more than enough for the first 5 difficulties. You only really start to feel pea shooter effect once medium and heavy armored enemies become more prolific. Medium Armor penetration is a requirement past difficulty level 6, either from your primary, or a support weapon. You can squeak by without it against bugs, but you really can't again bots thanks to Hulks, Tanks, Gunships and Factory Striders.
Personally, I think they should explore the role of weapons without "Light armour penetration". The only weapon to date without armour pen was the breaker spray and pray at launch, which was a bad joke. It was buffed by having less ammo, more DPS and the same armour pen as the stock breaker. This made it a tolerable weapon, but it meant it was literally just a reskinned, lighter version of the breaker instead of having a unique role. If there were some common-sense changes to armour (such as terminid eggs not having any, hive guards dying if you remove their legs) and if they removed the 0 and -1 armour pen angles on it, they could balance weapons like lighter shotguns and SMG's around being hyper-specialised horde clear tools (the same way medium armour pen weapons sacrifice performance against hordes for penetration) or specialised for certain targets (devastator heads or spewer butts). It would open up a lot more options for variety of weapons. AR's can be the choice for a "versatile" weapon, while taking something like the spray and pray would make you into the ultimate hunter/berserker killer at the cost of forcing you to go for the soft spots against enemies like devastators and brood commanders. Having weapons like the liberator, liberator concussive, tenderiser, defender, sickle and pummeller all fill basically the same role against the same enemies with clear better options will stagnate the options quickly
While I think your approach to this is reasonable, I think it will always be imperfect for a few reasons. I think what you do is important, but it's spending too much time looking at just numbers. 1 we don't know what the purpose of primary weapon is in the game, we've had some hints from the dev, but we're assuming that all primary weapons should be equally equivalent at all purposes which is not guaranteed to be the case. And it's fail to account for the interactions with support weapons and how they mutually influence each others. 2 Guessing a purpose for a weapon is very subjective and it's hard to see a purpose from any other perspective than a single player pov. To me weapons like the liberator concussive were trading effectiveness for yourself to enable more effectiveness for your teammates. How do you adequately factor that into a weapon when you're just looking at numbers. 3 It undervalues the feel of a weapon. Some weapons could just be less effective more wieldy versions of another weapon, and that's alright, someone will like it. But that's not quantifiable. 4 Coming up for purposes for weapons and agreeing on it is heavily skewed by the community hive mind bullying the discussion. It's hard to not say things like "when's the last time you've seen someone use xxx" we don't have the usage stats, and even then we wouldn't have the "effective" usage stats. For example I've been using the spray & pray since they've buffed it on occasion, it has a good purpose imo, but it's easy to listen to the community and think it doesn't. The community has a lot of inertia and hardly changes opinions about subtle changes or when things move within the "reasonable" margins. It only reacts quickly to flashy gimmick and overpowered stuff.
I don't know about a lot of you here but when I was a kid when you failed something a mission for example, you literally passed the contorller to the person next to you and watched with a mixed emotion of hoping they suceed and pull it off but also kinda wanting to get back on and be the "hero" yourself. Especially as the game ramped up and some missions became 20 attempt ordeals with older siblings being called in for reinforcements haha There was no moanign to eachother about the balance of the weapons 🤣 the disc was the disc, the console had power cords, tv lead and controller leads. It only exissted in your house on a cartridge or disc. You understood the game was hard and there was a satisfaction and honour in completing games for yourself and amongst your peers. Now in 2024 I'm playing helldivers and play mostly with randoms on levels 6-9 depending on if I want to help newer pmayers or really test myself. Other than level 9 i probably complete 9/10 missions? Mwybe even closer to 19/20. And all I sse everywhere is people moaning the game needs to be changed to make it easier on even the hardest diffculties. You chose the level! From one up, you can have upto 3 people helping you. You have orbitals, turrets, mechs, rocket launchers, mines, airstrikes, grenade launchers, rail guns, amr rifles, grenades, even grenade pistols, revolvers and uzis aswell. But you're really telling me the game is broken and wouldn't just simply "benefit" from a few marginal changes? Whole community seems entitled but I think its been turned that way by the perfect storm of over sucess with a massive scandal early on. It seems to me many just seem entitled and have no perseverence to over come the odds and see the satisfation in that. I guess when you give everyone a medal for over a decade from childhood. Everyone expects to win regardless of how much time and effort you put in to actually mastering the game. I dont struggle on this game and it can't just be me, people aren't in awe when we extract all 3 missions its GG and a dissappointment when we dont make it. Is the game really that hard? That broken?
I don't really see why I would choose much else when I look at the proposed Liberator Penetrator. Pretty sure that would kill a cannon tower to the heat sink rather quickly and it would be hitting way above its weight against Brood Commanders. It is medium armor pen that can take out a spewer sack in less than a magazine (around 25 bullets). On a positive note it might actually be good against gunships. I think it is too good with that combination of armor penetration, durable parts damage, and low recoil. Not a fan of liberator concussive changes. Would rather keep everything the same and instead bump the normal damage to around 90. A weapon that hits above its weight against no armor, which there is quite a bit around, but otherwise is relegated to support role. Not a fan of Adjudicator changes, but I can get behind a small durable parts damage increase and I wouldn't mind the MG-43 sharing in those changes. It really represents the idea of a battle rifle right now and historically battle rifles were not an all around fantastic idea. They are serviceable and have advantages, but they also have issues. Proposed Tenderizer seems way too one sided for a primary. Having almost zero sustain and bonkers DPS beyond just about any other weapon (on par with MG-43) just about forces it to be paired with an equipment stratagem to fix it or have it only be useful in very very limited scenarios.
I'm someone who's been using the Lib a lot since I started playing this week, and i've watched a lot of videos already to kind of figure out how to fight things and what weakspots are, cause i've been trying to get Ws with the rifle, along with the starting pistol and grenade. From what i've read, nemy health does not change between difficulties. Using the Liberator mostly, cause it was what I have. You can kill(respectively, lowballing a little if you miss some shots due to chaos): 5-8 warriors, 10 stalkers, 30 scavengers (some do not die in one shot/my aim bad), 2 or 3 brood commanders if you aim for the leg joins on the 'stomach', and it's 'knee' and all the limb that isn't connected right at the armored foreleg, that seems slightly tougher than the rest. It generally annihilates all bug legs and squishy bits. And heads, from a range where leaving them alive for a second doesn't matter much since they can't reach you, unless you don't want to abuse the bug breach. In bots, what i've mostly fought, it can bully devastators: Shooting off the arms of shield devs and sawing through the mid sections of normal and rocket ones as well as the same disarmament. If you can consistently hit the face or gut of devastators, and the stomachs of berserkers, they can go down in 3s/s per clip. Normal raiders get taken down by any shot to the stomach, center chest sub 50 meters, or head. It's surprisingly good for the bot "chaff", just, definitely not when they're already on you in numbers, even with the good firerate on it.
Hey Ryken! I have over 2500hrs of Darktide under my belt. Your vids are always spot on an very informative. I love them! And here in Helldivers 2 you just continue to have this great input. You should get a job in this industry honestly!
Bro, how it will destroy devastators "in a pinch"? Am i missing smth? If u have light armor pin, every single bullet will be just deflected by armor, unless u have perfect head aim. And if so, jar5 or diligence would do better just by oneshoting devastators. You need to also and Medium armor pin to this concept
IMO, taking the LibC RoF from 320 to 600 is exactly what the devs just did, only in the other direction. It is throwing the lever too hard. If you have a test server, you do this, note how the intentional gross-over-correction performs, dial that back to what you think will work and then test again (at least once) before rolling out to live.
If the Crossbow had 8rds and 120rpm fire rate, then that would be the only primary Id use. 😢 Too bad AH Fun-Killers were assigned to the balancing team.
This is balancing based on actual gameplay experience, the way it should be done. The devs' approach of "nerf whatever is used the most based on statistics" is lazy and inefficient. As for side-grades, they're basically inevitable if AH really intends to churn out these warbonds monthly, or even bi-monthly. There's no way that many unique weapons can be designed, especially not at this rate.
To think of it its kinda odd that baseline AR have lowest possible armor penetration value on par with shotguns and basic pistol. It would be very healthy for balance if devs shifted penetration value for all rifles 1 notch up so liberator would have t3 penetration and liberator penetrator would have t4 being able to deal full damage to devastators hull and 1/2 damage to hulk eye.
I don't know you guys but playing ogryn in darktide beats playing a normal helldiver UNLESS i build said helldiver like a tank and giving them some heavy weapons. But ogryn slaps spiky ones around and has club; soooo... In essence i found myself to go back to darktide and back to helldivers every now and then when i want to go in snowglobe planet.
You're by far the best HD2 content creator out there. The quality of your videos and your reasoning is way above the other half baked, clickbait, yapping until 8 min mark, content creators
Thank you for your hard work man.
Word! The journey was long and hard through the clickbait, tier list and scam news Videos, but finally found the best HD2 UA-camr :)
I agree, 100%. I really enjoyed another creator but the more I watched them the more I realized they're just constantly spewing these hyperbolic, overly negative knee-jerk opinions based on a single mission or a single enemy matchup for a weapon. They've also had a history of this with basically every game they play, with drama following them everywhere not just with other creators but also developers.
Not going to name anyone, but I'm sure y'all know who I'm talking about. Rykken seems like the perfect antithesis to that type of attitude
Agreed
I love how basically every time the word "Stalker" appears in these videos it's followed by "(Bastard)". I love the new SMG just for the fact that it can stunlock Stalkers, it feels nice to give those sneaky buggers a taste of their own medicine.
That Pummeler is so nice for Helldive difficulty bugs. Decent for bots too.
and that's what made it my choice of weapons against the bugs just for stalker stopping power that almost no other gun can do.
@@smileydude12better against bots tbh. They're much more dangerous. Stunning heavy/rocket devastators is huge. Same with hulks if you got a back shot
The current assault rifles should be renamed 'retreat riles' since that what you do majority of the time using them.
The good ol' kill a single medium sized enemy and run for your life rifle
I mean... if we're being fair that's in keeping with the whole _Starship Troopers_ aesthetic.
Small brained take. What do you expect when you're constantly fighting at least five enemies on your own.
You want each bullet to be one hit kills?
@@ShadowDaPk 👶🍼
French assault rifles 🤣
Democracy demands that the weapons that made it great, be made great again.
That throwback to darktide gave me mental Dmg. How could they drop the ball so much on a great game like that?
Also it's weird how AH CEO talks about how assault rifles are often shown as underpowered when in reality they are death spitting monsters when in his own game most of the assaults are just a joke.
I'm this exact conversation about how hard Fatshark dropped the ball on Darktide right now!
@@rykenxiv Yeah I got to that part after writing this comment 😂
You need to put it into context. The HP of a human is equal to that of a scavenger. Against human enemies, all assault rifles would 1-3 shit a person, depending on location and range.
We're not fighting humans. We're fighting aliens and robots. Most of whom have at a few dozen to several times the HP of a human. Not to mention, most of them have separated HP pools for different limbs that can be severed without killing them. Something that can't happen for humans.
The assault rifles aren't weak. The enemies are just strong.
The CEO said that in response to how weak they are in the game
He didn’t balance the game himself, he is correcting the problem
"How could they drop the ball so much on a great game like that?"
Because Fatshark management is a cargo cult. They copy elements from more successful games, but badly, because they don't understand how they work-never mind comprehending that they lack the necessary resources to make it work. This would be bad enough when it comes to gameplay elements, like a hive map that serves no functional purpose except to be worse than a server browser in every single way, but it's especially bad when they try to copy the cheap tricks that MMORPGs, Gacha games, etc. use to keep people grinding. Only it mostly doesn't keep people grinding, because Fatshark copied those systems badly, because they don't understand how they work.
The reason Fatshark keep blindly trying to copy what works for other games is because they are institutionally incapable of learning from their own experience. Darktide repeated every mistake of Vermintide 2, only harder in some cases, because they just don't learn.
Love the part where you gave out concepts and I love the whole theme of this video. Keep em coming Ryken !
Thank you! Glad you liked my ideas~ :)
When I saw the title I thought you were going to be one of those guys whining about how assault rifles aren't as good at being marksman rifles as marksman rifles. Thank you for actually being a reasonable person with good ideas.
The only one i feel should be a hybrid of the two is the tenderizer, due to its description matching a modern .308 rifle like a G3 in bullpup kinda, and its reduced mag. Otherwise, yeah the ARs need more... "Oomph" to make them able to compare to the 2 most used gun classes, 65 damage smgs and breaker and variants.
I shouldn't be getting outpaced with a 2 handed rifle by some guy with a one handed smg. Personal belief but i feel like it's justified.
Great video, arrowhead should hire you ❤
I was thinking the same. Holy shit this video was really good. I couldnt quite put my finger on what it was the game is missing and this vid just made it clear as day
I have a feeling he has a better job than they could offer 😂
This video is a breath of fresh air around the balancing of the game. I’m not into click-baity videos like “the balancing is going to kill the game”.
This video goes straight to the point and lay out what and why your balancing suggestions are meaningful. I hope the devs see this and take notes!
that title doesn't sound like clickbait to me. i know at least 4 people who haven't been playing the game because the balancing and no new fun tools is getting stale really fast. so, i imagine there are more than just us 4 who feel that way, ergo: not clickbait, but accurate.
But the balance philosophy they have will kill the game
Its not clickbait when its true and the balance guy has a history of ruining a game.
Yes! so many content creators just ride toxicity and negativity for views and it's making the game worse for everyone.
@@FackeYu You guys have no idea what a dead game looks like. Besides, a lot of the people from Tik Tok are heading off cause their attention spans are too short to have one game hold them for more than a month.
One way to buff the tenderizer could be to make it able to strip light armor and dismember quickly. So if you’re shooting at a devastators hips the light armor is gone in 3-4 shots and afterwards you are doing full damage to that area. Or it could shoot off the Gun arm of the heavy devastators quickly. This way the gun makes a target more “tender”.
Or you could take inspiration from the g11 (irl gun) with a burst that is fired off so quickly the shooter doesn’t feel recoil until after the burst. This would pay homage to its battle rifle looks.
Could also make it a medium armor penatrating weapon. Combined with the rest of the changes it would be a great "jam it in their face and mag dump" weapon...perfect for dealing with devastators without having to stop and aim thus keeping the whole fast paced stormtrooper vibe
@@Northraider123Would make it kinda op with it's recoil. It can already headshot Devastators from far away in full auto
@@AnonymousVenator could counter that issue by giving it a red dot sight....why do you need a long range scope on a CQC weapon ya know?
Seriously tho main reason I suggested that was cause it's description mentions it being a larger caliber with more stopping power...could swap out the anti armor with a stagger chance I guess...but either way it should hit HARD to make up for it's smaller mag imo
Also give it last round bolt hold open and a bolt release for the love of god.
I think Lasers should have that role, personally.
When the Defender (SMG) does more damage than all assault rifles, then something is wrong with the game
Adjudicator or penetrator can be nice when you wanna go through medium bug armor. But the stopping power is just pathetic.
Even the pistols have better dpm than the assault rifles.
Defender does get out ranged by ARs and doesn't have a scope, so there is that, at least. If you look at the ttks between Liberator and Defender, it isn't that different.
@@johnthetactician there's no real point in longer distance shooting with ARs though.
If you want to actually have distance, the marksman rifles are going to be your choice, which are decent against bots. And against bugs, you don't really need that much distance in the first place
@GameFuMaster there is a point, it's for thinning swarms before they get close. If it's an unaggrod patrol, of course, it's smarter to not engage. If it's a PoI, light enemies can be eliminated from a distance before getting closer. Lights are also the ones that call breaches/drops, so there is another advantage to the range.
@@johnthetactician you can do it without a scope lol. third person is good enough
The CEO said that they wont increase the magsize of the liberator because it doesn't make senes since its modeled after a 45 round stanag magazine. however when i suggested the same ideas as in a mag count increase to the liberator i was met with hostility on the discord when i just tried to point out that instead of being "average" the liberator should be the most forgiving weapon as a starter
They could just change the model?
Which would give an in lore reason too.
"current magazine size is insufficent for combat encounters, we are now issuing 50 round drums"
I feel like they should do 60 round mags. They are literally the same design of the mag but slightly wider. It won't ruin the design and I think would look really nice.
@@missfire9480 The whole reason the breaker got mag size nerf:
SE MOT Said that breakers often were found with still half full mags. so they cut the rounds from 16 to 13.
Refusing to buff because of this notion of "realism" is bogus when a tiny lunch box pack can refill multiple rockets, grenades, magazines, and stims at once. Even if you don't change the model, who really cares at the end of the day so long as the weapon is more fun to use?
I hate it when realism is used as an excuse to not make the game better, while it's ignored when it's annoying or detrimental to players (like Rocket Devastators having unlimited ammo and no reloads)
Decide if you want to stick to realism or not, cherry picking convenient excuses is just frustrating.
Time to share this around
Top notch work here. Someone should tweet this video at the devs or the CEO.
Do it bro!
Don't give me the responsibility.
They already know and are working on better balancing
following you from darktide to now helldivers can definitely see the hardwork and growth!
completely agree that the biggest point is "purpose" it doesn't have to be popular or super overpowered etc etc, it just needs to feel like it makes sense to someone, somewhere. Give us options that feel significant or at least fun to explore even if they're not "meta"
keep up the good work and hope your words reach many ears!
Sounded like great suggestions, I've found most ARs to be rather lacking especially due to bad durable damage or no medium penetration.
Of course it would really help if the devs didn't hide important numbers like durable damage. That is an essential stat.
I'd like to see how your balancing would go if they brought the game difficulty back to game release. Honestly Ive been hoping they move back to their stated idealized intentions. For us to be Paper soldiers, using Super badass rocks, to kill the universes most deadly scissors. Great to see your content here, ive been following you since DT. As a hardcore player of these types of games, I look forward to seeing your post regularly. Please kept up the great work. You are one of my core info sources for these types of games.
It'd be wild to see the Tenderizer do 90 damage. That revision overall does seem overkill, even if the ammo seemingly balances it out.
One weapon concept I'd been thinking of for this game was the Triple Action Thunder (look it up for an image; I think the aesthetic would fit well). After the Verdict wasn't the hand cannon I'd hoped it'd be, this was what I latched onto. Basically a handheld AMR that's breech loaded, single round, so reload every shot. It even had a patented recoil reducing shock absorber. No matter what happens, firing a .50 BMG from a pistol one-handed is gonna kick like a mule.
That sounds amazing to have! A breech loaded AMR would be great to have!
People aren’t thinking of the Verdict properly imo. It’s described as a 14mm (.55 cal, the same caliber as a Boys AT rifle from WW2) which is bigger than a .50bmg but it can’t physically hold as much powder as a .50 bmg. Compare muzzle velocities and impact energy of a .50ae desert eagle to a .500s&w revolver and I’d wager it’s roughly similar to what the difference between the senator and the verdict are. The revolver will hit harder but the semiauto can hold more rounds and fire quicker. That’s the trade off between the two.
It wont, because that wont change most breakpoints on chaffs. The issue with ars is their inability to handle medium tier enemies in a timely manner. For bots it their tiny weak point, and bugs is the large health pool with armour.
ive wanted a single shot per reload heavy armor penetrating primary or secondary weapon for a long time.
Honestly the devs really need to reconsider their armor system because as it is Medium 1 is so niche that it's barely even an advantage as most enemies have Light 1 weak points making Light 2 superior to Medium 1 in most situations, or have Medium 2+ making it useless, or if they have a Medium 1 weak point, it's either quicker to maneuver around them (Hive Guard and Scout Strider) or their HP is so high you'll want to use a support weapon anyway (Gunship, Hulk, and Tank). I think the only real target you might want to take a Medium 1 Primary for is Bile Spewers, and that's solely because their Light 1 sides use durable damage, all while swarming in groups of 10 or more and more than likely mixed in with Chargers and Bile Titans. So, 1 enemy out of 33-ish is niche as fuck.
I think what they should do first and foremost is reduce the number of armor degrees down from 11 to 7, that is instead of 0-10 as they currently have it, they have Light 1-2, Medium 1-2, Heavy 1-2, then Hell Bomb, which is how most people describe it anyway.
Second, all weapons primary damage should only use Light 2, Medium 2, or Heavy 2, so there aren't any Medium weapons that can't penetrate all Medium armors to some degree. Additionally Light pen weapons should have at least 2x the ammo of Medium pen to make them universally more ammo efficient than Medium pen.
Third, in opposition to common logic, obvious Weak Spots should be more heavily armored than the majority of the body to incentivize using higher pen weapons for better TTKs, while all enemies should have a rear or underside Weak Spot with at least Light 2 pen to allow all weapons to destroy every enemy somehow.
Rough Examples:
Raider, Body Light 1 HP 125, Heady Light 2 HP 50; Liberator STK 3-2 shots, Penetrator 3-2 shots, EAT 1-1 shots
Devastator, Body Light 2 HP 250, Head Medium 1 HP 100; Liberator STK 9-X shots, Penetrator STK 6-3 shots, EAT STK 1-1 shots.
Scout Strider, Pilot as Raider, Body Medium 1 HP 500, Legs Medium 2 HP 200; Liberator STK R-X-X shots, Penetrator STK R-12-9 shots, EAT STK R-2-1 shots.
Hulk, Vent Light 2 HP 600, Body Medium 2 HP 750, Head Heavy 1 HP 300; Liberator STK 20-X-X shots, Penetrator STK 14-34-X shots, EAT STK 2-2-1 shots.
Tank, Vent Light 2 HP 800, Body Heavy 1 HP 1000, Turret Heavy 2 HP 400; Liberator STK 27-X-X shots, Penetrator STK 18-X-X shots, EAT STK 2-3-2 shots.
The Dominator only received a slight nerf and continues to be the strongest allrounder primary. Imo at least.
Very well made video. Your ideas for all the guns sound very fun, and i didn't even know durable damage was a thing till now. Wish i could make you lead balancer.
More magazine size is the main change that needs to be made to assault rifles. Anything less than 50 rounds is borderline useless in this game when the sickle is almost an LMG
I've been trying to find a explanation for durable damage. You illustrated it perfectly. Thank you.
I think Durable Damage is the biggest issue against bots and the percentage across the board needs to be buffed in damage. A whole mag for one devestator shoulder cannon is insane.
I'm the biggest penetrator apologist in the galaxy.
It's really good on bugs, it very efficiently deals Commanders and guards and spewers, has a ton of ammo, and is easy to use.
The caveat is your must overrely on it's insane headshot multiplier and pure damage on critical weak points to overcome it's weak damage per shot.
Most light armor weapons you need to target different spots on different enemies to efficiently dispatch them. The penetrator instead purely relies on headshots. Just pop a head and switch to a different target as they're in hard bleed out. On paper the gun is bad; but in practice it's refreshingly simply as long as you have the mechanical skill to back it up.
Penetrator does not have a higher headshot multiplier, that is pure placebo.
@@TooFewSecretsagainst brood commander and nursing spewer heads it does, because they have AC 2 and make the light pen weapons do 50% damage.
Adjudicator just feels better to use. It's dura dmg is less than Lib Pen, but it handles swarms much better while being 98% as good vs med armor mobs. It's just as good at 100+ meters as Lib Pen, but handles full auto in the face better and reloads on the run faster.
Lib Pen just feels pointless.
@@Trooper10231 That's not necessarily true, you lose a ton of ammo efficiency as you end up significantly overkilling targets, it has less overall ammo, and exponentially more recoil leading to much worse sustained dps, which is the only reason you even pick an AR over a DMR.
It's fine if you subjectively like the gun, but if you put the two weapons side by side they're not really all that different tier wise.
Personally I hate the mag size and recoil. In practice it performs significantly worse into mixed crowds. You overkill small targets, when one round of which is worth far more than a round per mag of the penetrator comparing mag size, for a rather marginal gain on TTK for medium armored enemies. Not to mention that while medium armored enemies have bigger heads, the recoil further lowers your effective DPS against small body targets, especially hunters and stalkers.
@@TooFewSecrets Should have made it more clear I was talking about armored targets.
I think an analogous game for this philosophy of side-grades is TF2, funnily enough. It’s a class-based game that demands a specific role be filled by each class, and so the sidegrades have wound up being “enablers,” in the sense that they strengthen certain elements of a class’s role, min-maxxing their “playstyle,”
The best way to go about balancing primaries is to think of alllll the different playstyles and “subclasses” that a player could pursue, and give them the tools to succeed in that niche IF they build into it. Examples could include an infantry bolt-action with med 2 pen and high durable damage but low mag size for a support-minded playstyle, or a beam weapon (like the medigun) with an overheat mechanic that heals teammates but does pisspoor damage to enemies.
@@frogonsizeablelog HD1 had both of those, actually. Except I don't think the medigun damaged enemies at all. It just healed teammates and vehicles.
Please, most weapon in TF2 is either overpowered or useless
@@doomleikaare you high?
LAS-77 Icarus
A laser rifle that shoots bolts of light. The damage, recoil, and armor penetration are low but they all increase as the heat sink warms up. Don’t shine too brightly though or you’ll burnout and have to start from cold with a lengthy reload.
The weapon is designed to be a daring front line weapon rewarding the player with brutal levels of stopping power as long they can maintain good resource management.
reminds me of one of the overclocks for the laser rifle in DRG, where it does a ton of extra damage but only while it is close to overheating. Can be brutal to learn, but super fun when mastered
This would be a really fun addition, and fun additions are exactly what helldivers needs right now!
This comment should be pinned becuase that's a really fun weapon right there but I highly doubt they will ever make something like that
Woah, holy smokes, am I actually first this time?
lol, not quite
Im curious what would be your thoughts on the current support weapon state.
imo support weapons are mostly in a solid state vs automatons(some that should be good are real bad tho).
but in a DISMAL state vs bugs.
this being the fact that nearly every single support weapon can kill every single bot enemy in an efficient manner due to the weakpoint design vs bots.
but bugs, chargers and bile titans do not have any meaningful weakpoints/the weakpoints they do have either have far too much hp(bile titan) or reduce damage by an insane amount(chargers).
i believe obviously having anti tank still dealing with them quicker, and safer is of course important.
but i believe AP4 weapons (AMR, Laser Cannon, HMG etc) should be able to kill chargers and bile titans in a reasonable time frame. Just to help with support weapon diversity. Since being shoehorned into the same support weapons or the same strategems if you dont have a support weapon that can deal with them just isnt fun.
imo the easiest way to do this is to either add a weakpoint to the mouth of chargers just below their headplate, or lean into the whole "behind the leg" glitch and just make it a feature that the joints and backside of legs are lesser armored, maybe T3 or 4. instead of current 5.
for bile titans its way easier. Currently you can technically kill them with AP4 by shooting underneath them on their rear sack(AFTER its been destroyed). The problem with is is the fact that it has an insane amount of HP. For example it takes over 2 minutes of continuous fire with the laser cannon to kill them. This was also back when you could still stun titans with stun grenades and EMS.
so all theyd have to do is reduce the HP by a large margin for this part of bile titans and potentially also reduce the armor value from T4 to T3.
I believe this would keep anti tank weapons valuable and still better/more safe because vs chargers, having to play bull tamer with them in the middle of a fight isnt exactly ideal or safe, vs just blowing up their head immediately and moving on. and bile titans, sitting directly underneath bile titans is not safe at all but would be practically required to kill them.
It just opens up so much more variety which bugs desperately needs in my opinion.(half the game!)
Id love to see a SMG concepts video and if you make one I have a branching concept Id love for you to steal
After careful consideration the super earth ministry of truth has determined that contact with automaton weaponry will not result in the contracting of communist ideas in the holder, therefore SEAF scientists have been approved to begin repurposing scrapped clankers into the weaponry of tomorrow.
"We literally just pulled the arm off of a decommissioned heavy devastator and did one of two things to it:"
Option 1: we did no modifications and made the first ever one handed support weapon. Not only that but it is the first ever support weapon that has a built in backpack so theres no team loading, not that you need it because this weapon is IDENTICAL to the heavy devastator's long range, low spread, no recoil SMG minigun. Heavy sway due to the large barrel and it is set to burst by default but you can turn it to unsafe mode for more sustained DPS, be warned that firing too long causes the battery backpack to explode. Despite the built in backpack it can still fit a slim ballistic shield but nothing else.
Option 2: We sawed off the barrel of the gun, disconnected the backpack and moved the battery guts into the stock of the gun resulting in a near identical weapon but with a few small changes. The reflective barrel worked to reduce spread ever so slightly so use at long range is not recommended. Moving the hefty battery into the body of the gun counteracts the shorter barrel so its equally as tedious to maneuver, the real drawback comes from the extreme temperature caused by even a short burst of fire. Luckily the design allowed for an aggressive venting setup meaning that the gun will go from cool to blazing hot to cool all within a matter of seconds, trigger discipline is a MUST. One handed, energy, fast windup, no recoil, 2 extra replacement heat sinks, Light II penetrating, low to no stagger and medium low durability damage. Used with a ballistic shield to accurately pop devastator heads and hit other weak points but missing shots can be heavily punished.
Good effort but with SMG - 37 Defender having same armor pen as most rifles (at Light II) and superior dmg it just doesn't make sense. Liberator or most derivatives are just almost smgs that you have to hold with two hands.
If whichever dev stupidly intends on hiding behind "rEaLiSm" as the vision of weapon design, then let's hold them to it. Rifle of any kind will always have a better penetration than a SMG, that's why and for many other reasons even special forces all over the world ditched smgs (save for specialty cases) in favor of carbine length rifles because of their overall increase in performance.
Since nerfing a fine weapon as the Defender or any weapon for that matter is the last thing we want then all rifles should have minimum armor pen Med I. What would be left to do is fudge the durable damage to suit a rifles purpose: lower for Liberator as a general purpose light assault rifle with relatively short barrel and obviously higher for LPenetrator / Adjucator and so on.
It would leave the Defender in a good spot dmg wise while having the additional utility of one handed use but not eclipsing any of the rifles.
It would have been a lot easier if they didn't paint themselves into a corner with how armor pen is squished into basically 2 tiers for any normal weapons.
I'm impressed with these proposals, I think there's a lot of good thinking here. My only hangup is the proposed tenderizer changes; I feel it is risky to make such an overpowered weapon with its only weakness be the ammo economy. I'm afraid in such a case it would lead to players using the supply backpack 100% of the time, and hoarding all the ammo pickups for themselves, leaving none for their teammates.
An idea I thought of that might work as well; give the Tenderizer that much power but also add an overheating mechanic that reduces the rate-of-fire when the gun is too hot. That way, the weapon remains powerful for clearing patrols and small groups, but in a prolonged engagement, the weapon doesn't have time to cool off and its performance degrades to a point where performance is actually less than the standard liberator. It wouldn't stop you from defending yourself, but it'd force you to disengage to get back the more potent fire-rate.
Cool ideas, but I also think that this game has a fundamental design problem in how weapons and enemies are designed, which should probably be addressed in order to make weapon balancing incentives more sensical going forward.
Basically, when it comes to Armor Piercing in this game, it is universally the case that any primary/secondary weapon with above baseline armor piercing ability is also tuned to be a precision weapon (I.e. it has better sights, but also smaller magazines and lower fire rate, so you are incentivized to make precise shots). At the same time, the enemy design is completely inverted: They tend to have armor on parts which are easy to hit, and small critical hit spots are usually unarmored.
So the main unique utility of accurate AP weapons is being able to hurt enemies without aiming precisely, whereas the required playstyle of non-piercing weapons is to take precise shots at the exposed areas. The enemy design incentivizes you to use weapons the complete opposite way from what they're designed to be good at, which is very counterintuitive.
I don't agree on most of your buff
The Liberator would need to be upped in damage in my opinion and same for the mesely 45 of the lib pen which hold it back way too much overall. When you compare their dps to any shotgun, they are lacking way behind overall.
Because, even with more Ammo, I can say safely that the Lib pen would heavely lack behind a Dominator for sure
You're incredibly talented and extremely articulate with your knowledge, explanation and line of thoughts. I really wish you'd be hired at Arrowhead as a weapons' balance lead...
I agree with the concept for sure. The devs seem too busy to make meanigful changes or something. I like your focus on part damage too. I think this is the key to making weapons and strategems feel good. Even if it dosent kill a weap/strat can find use by breaking parts or stripping armor.
In my opinion the dev has had this strict view on balance since HD1 but the crowd wasnt as loud before. They liked keeping things on the edge of greatness.
Brimstone sounds stellar! I'd run that all day long. Great video, Ryken. I really liked your balance change suggestions to Blessings in Darktide, and I like this one, as well.
Hey! Glad you liked the idea! It was the one I had the most fun coming up with :)
I'm not sure if I'm correct I'm this so feel free to argue with me.
How do you balance primary weapons in a game with airstrikes, orbital strikes, support weapons, and sentries?
A change in one requires balancing not only against primary weapons in their respective categories and then against the other primaries, balance needs to happen across the interlocking systems that interact with each other.
Absent that analysis, I think conversations about buffs and nerfs are helpful to get the ball rolling but are incomplete.
I know it's not the topic of discussion but the Knight SMG needs double mag size to make it useful. Nobody ever talks about it so I will never stop, it needs to happen!
I followed your work on darktide and you are a rare content creator that take a scientific approach instead of spreading half wrong info. Always on point, thanks for yours video, keep up the good work
I had some people in the helldivers discord that the tenderizer is good.
it is, in fact, still dogshit. took me 2 mags to the back of a devastator to kill it, goes though ammo insanely fast, and only gets 5 mags from resupply. I swear I spend more time reloading than shooting.
I know you only mentioned it in passing, but the Knight is actually pretty fun on lower difficulties.
For as long as you have ammo, at least.
Thank you this is amazing you didn’t take the easy way out and just complain you made an argument backed it up and proposed solutions
videos like this always surprise me because, if there is a team of experienced professionals, why cant they come up with ideas like this? Or do these ideas get suppressed by other views, it doesnt make any sense
I hate how most discussions about balancing is "make x stronger".
Absolutely no consideration that the devs don't want any weapon to be a straight up upgrade and preferable to prior versions. Right now the pummeler is straight up better than the defender for a negligible damage difference.
Every weapon requires some unique function, but not all primary weapons are going to excel in all situations which is why we have stratagem to compliment the loadout.
We can't look at weapons purely in a vacuum.
Again rifles ain't never been great. They should make them more realistic they should do more damage than smg shots atleast.
As a game developer, I found this video quite interesting. Thank you!
I'm here after the massive patch comparing actual changes to the proposed ones 😂
the idea of turning the tenderizer into a scar h is very appealing to me. i would love higher recoil, beefier muzzle report, and higher damage. your balance for that particular weapon would satisfy me very much.
Now this was extremely well put together. I enjoyed the video! Would love to see a similar approach by arrowhead
I'd love to see as sidegrades to the standard Liberator:
*Liberator SSW* (Squad Support Weapon): A heavy-barreled full-auto-only Liberator with reduced ergonomics and reload speed in exchange for a double-capacity drum magazine and that "bipod" perk, allowing divers specializing in the machinegunner roles to still fill that role (albeit less effectively, MGs are generally better) if they lose their support weapon. Probably only has a red-dot to improve situational awareness and encourage long-range accuracy by volume-of-fire.
*Liberator CE* (Close Encounters): A bog-standard Liberator with just a few little tweaks to make it a scrappy little trench-clearer. The fire-rate have been increased, and a extended piece of frame with a bayonet has been added to massively increase melee damage (especially while sprinting). However, reinforcing the weapon to be used intentionally as a bludgeon and spear meant removing the scope to only have sturdy iron sights, increased sway from the odd weight balance, and the boosted fire rate making recoil more noticeable.
For more ideas, the Dagger needs a rework, and I'd love to fit it into a small family of energy sidearms.
*Dagger* (Laser Pistol) - To be more in-line with the rest of the pistols as valid options to pull when you are caught empty and need a problem solved, the DPS would be brought up to match or even exceed the Sickle laser rifle. However, it overheats (and cools!) nearly twice as fast as its bigger brother, and only has one reserve heatsink similar to the laser cannon. This weapon is a strong sidearm choice if you can temper your fire-rate, but failing to do so will leave you without a secondary in very short order.
*Shank* (Pulse Handcannon) - With medium penetration and even more damage than the Senator revolver, this energy big iron is held back by the standard energy-weapon charge-up and only about 8 shots of consecutive fire. Fires the same kind of projectile as the Sickle, but is basically semi-automatic and only has one reserve shot.
*Katar* (Electroshock Gauntlet) - An unconventional weapon that fists over a helldivers fist and is "punched" toward an enemy when fired, this weapon includes both a melee pummeling surface and a small pop of electricity that can spread over a crowd to stagger and flinch them, or if in proper hitting range converge on a single point, resulting in a respectable burst of damage. It's heatsink can only stand two consecutive powered attacks without cooking, but it has a better-than-normal unpowered melee and three reserve heatsinks.
For your idea of a close quarters liberator, in the first game, there was a rifle called the patriot, that was exactly what you said.
There are also some leaks that show the patriot, with the simple stats of a higher fire rate and more recoil.
My GAWD I would 100% finally have a desire to play again if they balanced the assault rifles like this! What a great way to balance them! Great logic! And the bonus idea were great! Each has a distinct purpose and function and feel. I always loved the FG-42 in WW2 style games, so would love to get something with that style and purpose!
what bugs me about this game is how both smg and assault rifle balancing is completely backwards, all smgs are slow firing and more potent than assault rifles when its supposed to be the other way around, assault rifles SHOULD be the jack of all trades (master of none) while the smgs should be the kings of close quarters and DMRs/sniper rifles should be long range kings, not the smgs being a direct upgrade from rifles
Yes!! I was thinking a lot about how I'd balance SMGs and Rifles. In real life, Rifles would make SMG obsolete in terms of power fire.. and yet... SMGs deal much more damage than Assault Rifles... ? _ ? I haven idea, but the thought isn't fully fleshed out - maybe for another video ;)
The liberator penetrator is one of my favorite guns, I feel like I cant go without medium armor pen now. Diligince CS is pretty good now too
You're the only Helldivers 2 content creator I still watch. You put out INSANELY good content that's well thought and researched. All the other creators for the game, I'd rather be playing the game than watching them. You make me put the game away and think!!
You'd probably like cashcrop too. He's right up there with Ryken
Very good, would love to try your weapons out.
This is the best video I've seen on this topic. Constructive, instead of simply juvenile whinging.
I really like these balancing ideas. Thing is, not every weapon needs to be super extreme mega SSS-Tier or whatever. BUT! Every weapon should be fun to shoot and have a clear purpose and identity. It's all about having a huge pool of viable weapons and toys to choose from depending on the playstyle you like or the mood youre in.
I really hope you make these balancing Ideas for the other weapon categories aswell!
If AH ever decides to make some sort of community feedback/balancing council you defenitely belong there!
I really like your suggestions. Establishing a clear purpose for each gun also makes it easier to create weapons of other categories that perform a similar or parts of a job but with a twist, like if you want to make a "first shotgun" it would be fairly easy to balance that against the liberator but keeping in mind a higher damage fall-off with range.
Another massively important change that needs to be made is to make weapon stats more visable, for example the durable damage stat is incredibly important to know about, not to mention really basic stuff like total ammo and ammo recovered.
Wish you were on the dev team.
Get this man a job at Arrowhead…and Fatshark…any game I enjoy 😅
I’d like for flame weapons to block enemy movement and stun temporarily, small and medium enemies should rear up when they hit flame and be stalled for a bit. Napalm strikes would create a wall of blocking flame. Incendiary grenades a small aoe block. And the flamer would stun lock enemies if you continue to spray them, or quick sprays would still hold them off and daze them. So flamers could actually hold and push at the frontline, instead of running backwards constantly. The fact people have to run a shield with the flamethrower, shows that people are compensating for the flame weapons not functioning properly. Flame weapons would great in the RTS game Starship Troopers Terran Command. Flame weapons suck so hard right now because they do not inhibit enemy movement
Eh, i dont see thrm needing any changes, nor can they be changed without edging out everything else.
There is a fundamental disconnect from what the primary weapon roles are and what series newbies expect them to do. The primary is a small part of your loadout, and at higher difficulties is intended to give you breathing room and prevent alarms.
The devs arent going to rework the fundamentals of the series - and the entirety of the weapon roster - when each AR already has a unique role that works quite well at all difficulties.
I appreciate your commentary as always.
Interestingly, Adjucator's model BR probably stands for Battle Rifle, which stands squarely between Assault Rifles (Carbines) and DMRs.
This is how I think ARs should be buffed to make them more on par with the Sickle, which is the ideal power level for weapons imo:
- AR-23 Liberator: Damage increased from 60 to 70; spare magazine count increased from 7 to 10
- AR-23C Liberator Concussive: Damage increased from 65 to 100; stagger effect reworked to match that of the Pummeler
- AR-23P Liberator Penetrator: Damage increased from 45 to 70; recoil decreased from 19 to 15, scope crosshair reworked
- AR-61 Tenderizer: Damage increased from 60 to 80; fire rate decreased from 600 to 560
- BR-14 Adjudicator: Damage increased from 80 to 100; rate of fire decreased from 550 to 440; horizontal recoil reduced
It would be silly if AH only buffs the assault riffles because older warbonds like "Democratic Detonation" in particular the eruptor got TWO injust nerfs TWO making the weapon pretty much USELESS! It could one shot strider at front armor plate, Berserkers at the belly and Devestators at the crutch area which is deserved! Other primaries in the current day can destroy a whole small army incl Berserkers, Devestatotors Striders and other enemies lets say 5 Berserkers, 2 Devestators, 7 Troopers, 2 Striders, Shield berserker etc in the time span you HAD to RELOAD THREE times just to destroy ONLY ONE berserker with the Eruptor!!!!! That to me is extremely UNBALANCED! A "SLOW SLOW single shot bolt action gun" was always a HARD HITTER! They also need to look at older warbonds and buff weapons.
2:47 not to be a contrarian, but for some insane reason I see Breaker S&P in half the games I play (both bots and bugs, though mostly bugs, playing on 7 and 8). I am at a loss as to why, but people do use it. The only Sluggers, Punishers or Xbows I've ever seen have all come from me though.
Interesting! I have not seen a single S&P in not just my games, but my friends games as well! (wonder if its a regional thing...?)
@@rykenxiv I play in EU, though I do get a lot of Chinese players since I'm in eastern europe. It has genuinely driven me mental and I've just accepted that the S&P has seen a resurgence (maybe because regular Breaker has bad ammo econ on bugs?), until this video where I was reminded I'm not insane.
Breaker S&P: 192dmg x 26bullet x 8(+1)mag = 44'928 dmg vs no armor or 22'464 vs light armor
lots of damage, big magazines, not bad bullet spread, available in free warbond
Looking at the way the Devs just changed the # of Magazines each weapon carries for weapons, they seem to be looking Real Life military load-outs. 1 in the weapon, and 6 mags on your vest is standard. AH also seems to be going with standard mag sizes 10, 15, 20, and 30, though the 45 of the Liberator is the outlier in this line of thought. I would like some love for the machine guns. The light MG should be fast firing, low damage light, armor pen similar to the US Military's M249 firing from 200 round mags, with 2-3 mags carried. The medium could be slower firing medium damage and medium-1 pen. Mag sizes should be similar but would be belts, 2-3 belts carried. The heavy would be the slowest firing, heavily damaging, and medium -2 pen. Belt feed by 100 round belts 3 - 4 belts carried (like the old M60 machine gun).
Yeah man, I like using the ARs, they're a nice breathe of fresh air and good for taking out bugs from a long distance, they bring a completely different way of doing combat. But speaking of SMGs... I brought one last night as of writing this, thinking I would need to carry an SSD for a long distance and I've realized they're actually useless! This is a rant about SMGs I know, but I love SMGs. The Smg, the first one is onehanded, but usually an SMG would outperform a AR in firerate to compensate for lesser damage. But the Liberator outperforms the SMG in every way. Hell, midway through the match I swapped my gun out for a SYTHE and it got more kills! The SMGs are completely unviable in difficulties 6 and above.
In regards to the Wolfebrand and Jackal, there already was a silenced assault rifle leaked that was a Liberator variant called the "AR-48 Truth Whisperer" and it has a built-in supressor, 55 damage, 30 round mag, 750 fire rate, and 30 recoil (numbers subject to change of course).
I will die on the hill that the AR-61 Tenderizer should be the same as the fully upgraded AR-20L 'Justice' from HD1, a higher caliber version of the liberator
Med pen, over pen, 30round clip,
And they can figure the trade off for the bayonet since Im not sure they can add that to HD2
Flashlits+laser sights! Plus optics. It would be nice to give players ability to switch some module parts, adding underbarrel gl launchers with limited amount of nades (or even excluding players nades in this case), underbarrel shotguns ect. And if we could load some specific ammo right in game, we could change weapon effect.
Let's take a basic liberator as an example. First think - I'm 90% sure we could use suppressor there. Second - we could carry 6 mags loaded with based FMG, 2 mags with AP, another 2 mags loaded with HP, 1 mag with subsonics, etc. We could have incendiary or other stuff. That's just a proposition so I'm not thinking about details. Might be that would be a good idea to give players ability to manage their loadout.
So if we load some specific rounds, weapons stats changes sometimes. AP rounds give massive amount or recoil, supsonics with suppressor has massive bullet drop off and can't penetrate anything, ect. Fire rate be also changed depending what round is loaded.
And in this case liberator won't be ideal, it will stay basic weapon. Liberator Penetrator could be rebalanced to use higher caliber ap rounds, some explosive ammunition and other stuff. It's basic stopping power could be less coz higher penetration, fire rated could be slower, recoil could be higher, and reinforced barrel excluded silencers.
Adjudicator could be an edge of combat rifle subclass with high caliber ammo usage, top damage, low fire rate, low ammo capacity, but it could have exclusive access to experimental ECM and he+incendiary rounds, for example, in addition to other types of ammo. But it's costumization capabilities would be very low.
Tenderiser as a shock assault rifle could shine in other way having top fire rate closer to mp-98 knight, but with much less recoil. In addition burst mode could give even faster fire rate but with some delay between bursts.
Assault rifles in general must be all-rounders mixing pros of other weapons, but in a somewhat weaker variant with some features. It won't fill specific role, but still would do the job.
On the other hand it's a massive rework and I'm pretty sure it will lead other problems with balance.
P.S. I rly think some stratagem weapons should be primary like Stalwart and Grenade Launcher, probably. Plus I don't understand reason why both diligence sniper rifles exists when we have AMR that is better in all ways, excluding it's not a primary weapon.
Saying my piece before I get too far into the video.
The current removal of unique features and Standardisation is NOT the kind of balance that gamers enjoy.
AR should be the “ideal middle ground” hard hitting but not too hard, accurate but not pinpoint every shot, rapid fire but not too fast, long range, but not too long (be it zoom, bullet velocity, bullet drop or the falloff so many other games force in that I generally don’t like).
SMG can have damage but it should be mitigated by recoil or fire rate. General ranged capability should be decent but slower projectiles/more-drop than an AR, but as compensation more ammo in the mag and carried.
DMR frankly are underperforming given their various ongoing downsides, the JAR invalidates them more than the slugger ever did. Double the damage, make them aim faster but ADS slower and make them reliably accurate plinkers not wildly bouncing low ammo disappointments.
AoE weapons are in a state now. Undo ALL the nerfs, let puni-plas keep its projectile speed boost and make the Eruptor lean more into the long range GL aspect, and have the xbow properly split into 2-3 variants, explode after contact (basically a shaped charge), mostly explosion for add-clear and white phosphorus. The current xbow is somehow a DD weapon with low ammo and has the worst AoE out of all the explosive class now (less pen and less damage on that AoE).
Shotguns are likely all over the place. The punisher shoots too slow, the sluggers been neutered, spray n pray lives up to its name and can’t hit anything, breakers okayish but the nerf was not needed, incen-breaker frankly speaking got a base damage boost for reasons unknown (then fire was bugmffes 3-4 times) and the double barrel is positively okayish, but should be a primary weapon not support.
Some things i would do, give the Concussive Liberator 80 damage (yeah, i don't agree with decreasing its damage, thats pointless to do, enemies already just soak up all the stagger and damage), +15 durable damage, 400 rpm, increase mag size to 35 and leave it in semi auto. As for the Penetrator give it 60 damage at least and +15 durable damage, we are still fire the same caliber round, except we don't fire standard FMJ, but AP rounds out of a longer barrel.
Whilst I like the thought put into each gun (especially with not over-buffing already good guns like the base Liberator), I disagree on the Adjudicator recoil reduction. I think its heavy recoil really feels powerful whilst not being unmanageable. The firerate should also remain unchanged - even at 500, it feels sluggish, but only to the point where each shot feels really heavy. Any more would make it just slow. It just needs a few more bullets per mag and the "Explosive" trait so it can break Bile Spewer guts, plus the ability to stagger on hit for medium enemies (Warriors, Devastators)
I would have personally chosen the Tenderizer to be our first fully dedicated burst fire AR. Give it a very high RPM within each burst, but a small delay between bursts. Slightly up the damage and keep it light armor pen. The “Stopping Power” referred to in its description could allude to staggering medium/small enemies if you land all 3 rounds of the burst on target. I would also give it the same scope as AMR because it most resembles the Halo 3 Battle Rifle scope. Of course give it a 36 round magazine as well.
Forget a balance for Assault rifles. How bout a standard? Every Assault rifle has to do a dps of 100. Medium Armor piercing is the exception dealing more then a hundred. How bout that?
I would rather have the Tenderizers Damage increased to 80 and Adjudicators damage increased to 100.
The reason why i feel that way is that the Adjudicator is meant to be fired in Semi auto and only go full auto in vlose range spray. Like the FN Fal it is based on. Giving the Adjudicator 100 damage will allow it to kill small bots in one shot in the Chest, giving it a proper Battle Rifle role.
The Tenderizer will then have a direct distinction from the Liberator/ Sickle. It will be a hard hitting, accurate, low recoil, low ammo Rifle.
I would personally put the Hurricane as a SMG because the reference you used reminds me of the MP40 and the high fire rate low damage makes me think of a PDW (Personal Defense Weapon) like the P90 which uses armor piercing pistol rounds.
I also don't mind if they had sidegrades with the exact stats of another weapon if it has a different look. Kinda acting like skins for other games. THo I wouldn't do more than 1 a warbond.
There's also the problem with armor perks. All perks behave exactly the same no matter the armor type. The only benefit you have is either speed while running or more armor. I'll give an example of what I think armor types should do by using the Engineering kit as example.
Light armor - +10% increased weapon stability while crouched or prone. + 10% increased throwing range.
Medium armor - +5% increased weapon stability while crouched or prone. +5% increased throwing range. + 15% reduced flinching when shot.
Heavy armor - +30% reduced flinching when shot.
As you can see, this sets apart the armor sets a bit more, and the base perks will benefit more depending on your play style. The Engineering Kit will be greatly enhanced by what the base armor perks already has. In the case above, the light armor would gain an additional +10% weapon stability to account for the fact that he's not running around with bulky armor weighing him down.
The light armor would benefit most for agility and speed. Allowing them to get into position and fire accurate shots very quickly. However, they have no benefit whatsoever if they get shot. They will stagger like normal. But the heavy armor can take hits and barely flinch. Allowing them to maintain a steady aim on target and keep firing. This makes them a true tank.
Something like this is needed for armor sets because just the armor and speed difference do very little to distinguish the difference between all of them. Especially dealing with high damage enemies.
100 should be the base damage that all other weapons are scaled from, the starting liberator rifle should start at 100 damage and then all other weapons should scale from that base damage, so we have an easier time understanding damage values comparatively. If the base damage is 100, and you get a rifle or smg that does let's say 75 damage, that's a minus 1/4 damage reduction, which is an easy percent to understand, or if you get a rifle that does 150 damage that's a plus 1/2 damage addition. The current system is so minute and minor, there really isn't much functional difference between 60 and 65 damage, why even differentiate those two values when it's such a minor difference, and likely the two different weapons will perform almost exactly the same, aside from other factors like magazine capacity and recoil and such.
Smg's and assault rifles feel way too similar because they effectively they are the same weapons at the moment, because making the smg's deal much less damage than the liberators' 60-ish would make them straight up unusable, and since the damage can't be nerfed without making the weapons actually useless, they also can't make them hold more ammo because then they would actually be just better. Marksman rifles also hardly feel different because the base damage on weapons is already so anemic that even doubling the amount of damage from the base liberator doesn't feel very powerful at all, and the slow fire rate without even medium penetration on average means they're just worse than the assault rifles and smg's without much of a niche to fit into.
Imagine, most assault rifles dealing 100-125 damage, between 6-10 magazines, 25-50 round magazines. The damage buff alone would make them punchy, but then by making these weapons so strong you can take smg's and do this:
Most smg's deal 50-80 damage, 40-60 rounds per magazine, 10-16 magazines, much higher fire rates than assault rifles, not as much penetration on average.
Marksman rifles could be bumped up to 150-250 damage, between 15-30 rounds per magazine, slow fire rates, 6-10 magazines in total, should on average beat medium armor, perhaps even have body penetration so you can shoot through multiple enemies with one bullet.
Shotguns are in a decent place right now I think, but I think adjusting them to better reflect a close range glass cannon-y playstyle wouldn't hurt.
Energy weapons are sort of a... "fuck it we throwin' shit at the wall" category, take the sickle for example: it's effectively just an assault rifle, but dealing laser damage, effectively infinite ammo, slightly worse damage than other assault rifles, no stagger, almost no recoil, and takes a second to fire up. The plasma punisher is a mutation on a shotgun, and we can push this concept further with new or upcoming weapons. Weapons like the scythe and plasmas scorcher fit a niche for things only energy could do; effectively, energy weapons should be treated like a side grade to the ballistic weapons, not necessarily better or worse, but having trade offs to fill a particular niche a little more.
Anyway, very wordy comment I know, will get lost in the sea, but I really think if they're gonna keep adding bigger and more powerful enemies, buffing all weapons based around a starting 100 damage base will be the only way to keep them from feeling even weaker than they do now, and help each category feel less same-y, while still allowing individual weapons in each class stand apart more.
Someone tag AH. This guy should be the balancing lead. Nothing here is bonkers, but it does allow for more "fun". I'd still be playing HD2 if someone on the team took fun factor into account when "balancing".
Hi Ryken, great video!
Last week, I had access to the invaders spreadsheet and wanted to see if there was an equation / index that could predict when a weapon feels effective or fun to use, and settled on this:
Firepower Index = (Burst DPS) x (Total Sustained Damage) x (Damage loss ratios [inaccuracy, lack of armor pen])
The underlying idea here is that although the game's underlying systems are extremely complicated, from a gameplay impact perspective, there are two standout considerations:
(i) How much damage can this weapon dish out in a very short period of time (read: contexts where it is kill-or-be-killed)
(ii) How much damage can this weapon dish out over a long period of time (read: contexts where you are facing a horde and need to be putting a sizeable dent in it each reload).
Since both of these considerations use the same units -- damage -- you can then multiply the known values for (i) DPS, and (ii) mag dump damage with guesstimates for how much damage you lose from inaccuracy factors (spread, sway, recoil, bad ergonomics, bad sights, etc.) and from lack of adequate penetration against most targets.
Once you multiply these 4 numbers, you get an index that reflects that weapon's ability to effectively place firepower on targets in the two most important contexts. Hence, the index's name: the firepower index.
You can check out my spreadsheet here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZjWnmsM1hbwJu20xKyCFRWRNqNLuV6tsc3eCuh9eExA/edit?usp=sharing
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Going by these numbers, a weapon needs a Firepower Index of around 12-15 before the community enjoys it. Unfortunately, that means the ARs need *a lot* of help to bring them up to snuff.
Give the spreadsheet a look and let me know what you think!
The adjudicator should’ve remained as a DMR, the lack of damage was felt by the adjudicator but all DMRs suffered from this. It felt like the adjudicator was swept under the rug and left as a hard hitting AR profile. The adjudicator could’ve been really unique as a proper battle rifle that CAN go full auto rather than should be full auto. It just needed more damage (possibly durable dam?) and a slightly relaxed recoil for semi auto firing
I really appreciate your focus on the "purpose" or fantasy of each gun and dialing its game feel and balance around that. Really hope AH shares that same view as they work on their rebalancing. Especially with the crossbow. No idea what they were trying to do with that weapon or its purpose.
I'd LOVE to see an AK-47 style rifle in the game with mechanics similar to how they did it in L4D. Innacurate, recoil like a bucking bronco, but hits like a truck. Also it needs good meaty sound design to sound powerful when shooting. I was honestly hoping the Adjudicator would fit this role when it got rebalanced but it doesn't quite hit for me.
Yup, I pretty much agreed with the underlying philosophy behind what you're saying about assault rifles. I haven't used that entire class of weapons except for the sickle because they just don't have a defined role in their current iteration besides "general purpose gun", with some of them having medium penetration.
Ever since they started changes weapons and "balancing" them, I've been saying that I just want a reason to use every single weapon. They don't all need to be good at everything, but each weapon we get should be good at *SOMETHING*. Some role or niche that at most, only competes with 1 or 2 similar weapons, but each of them having distinct differences between them, and varying stats over that group so that they each feel different to use, but are all useful for their intended niche. IMO, the best case of this is the AT weapons where the EAT, quasar, recoilless, and spear all have very distinct playstyles from each other, but all can be used for targets that require AT penetration. (please unnerf quasar, it didn't need the nerf, we just needed superior packaging methodology to not be bugged so that all the AT options are viable)
Your idea for the "Hurricane" is basically what I thought would be a fun direction to take the liberator penetrator. High rate of fire flechette weapon to use as a bullet hose. I think with the adjudicator added, the LibPen is sort of pointless in its current conceptualization. I really really like the place the Adjudicator is in, actually. I'd maybe give it a 30 round magazine, adjust the recoil a little, and it's perfect in the role of an automatic rifle (like the RPK, for example.) The armor penetration makes it ballistically feel like the MG43, but the relatively small magazine capacity gives you a fraction of the uptime, and makes reload management the trick to using the weapon efficiently. Though, I almost exclusively hip fire it, full auto. The way the recoil pattern works with the optic makes it extremely difficult to use in that application. Give it a try like that though. It's really fun, especially against bugs, and I think it falls in a very satisfying niche that would be bolstered by just a couple more rounds.
Remember that time the sickle came out and suddenly assault rifles were back? Yeah that feeling, we want more of that. It felt good to use. Currently there are exactly 2 assault rifles that I "enjoy" using and they are the sickle and the standard liberator. Every single other one has something "unique," sure, but said feature comes with too many drawbacks that I would rather use a more niche or unique weapon like the incredibly clunky but rewarding eruptor (well not any more, RIP) or the wonky but hard hitting dominator, or the now snappy and hard-hitting counter-sniper. There just isn't a good reason to use assault rifles currently, they are fun to spray but woefully ineffective where it counts.
What we need is an explosive AR (since they made the explosive liberator into the concussive one... no I don't buy it was always supposed to be this way they called it explosive) that still only has light pen that is an absolute beast at popping squishy bug bits. No real AoE, think dominator explosions but with only light armor pen. Frankly something called the "tenderizer" should have this property.
I do like the idea of more incendiary weapons. We have literally one when not counting grenades and the flame thrower. Less to do with assault rifle more to do with weapons in general (though it would likely be a good candidate for an AR, though an equally good option for a new SMG since we desperately need more one-handed options) I really like the idea of a mixed ammo weapon, a weapon that fires a series of shots with different properties. Something like concussive followed by an incendiary and ending with an explosive or higher armor pen round fired in three round burst with 1000+ fire rate on the burst so it comes out near simultaneously. It doesn't have to be powerful, it is meant to be a multi-tool. It would be a truly unique weapon and other more specialized ones would certainly be stronger but it could be a lot of _fun_ to use. That or the option to change ammo types, think like the lawgiver from Judge Dredd, but I think that same concept but not changing ammo (as I suggested) would be more interesting.
This is a fantastic overview of what the assault rifles could be. I don't agree with every change you suggest, but I think that the method ideals and goals layed out are solid.
I don't think this addresses one of the issues I see a lot players reference, which is that Assault rifles feel like pea shooters. It doesn't feel like your shots are powerful at the highest difficulty levels. I think the biggest reason for this is damage breakpoints. A gun can deal 10 - 20 more damage without actually killing anything of importance any faster. This issue is exacerbated, I think, by how much easier the first 5 difficulty levels are. The Liberator pre-nerf is honestly more than enough for the first 5 difficulties. You only really start to feel pea shooter effect once medium and heavy armored enemies become more prolific. Medium Armor penetration is a requirement past difficulty level 6, either from your primary, or a support weapon. You can squeak by without it against bugs, but you really can't again bots thanks to Hulks, Tanks, Gunships and Factory Striders.
Personally, I think they should explore the role of weapons without "Light armour penetration". The only weapon to date without armour pen was the breaker spray and pray at launch, which was a bad joke. It was buffed by having less ammo, more DPS and the same armour pen as the stock breaker. This made it a tolerable weapon, but it meant it was literally just a reskinned, lighter version of the breaker instead of having a unique role.
If there were some common-sense changes to armour (such as terminid eggs not having any, hive guards dying if you remove their legs) and if they removed the 0 and -1 armour pen angles on it, they could balance weapons like lighter shotguns and SMG's around being hyper-specialised horde clear tools (the same way medium armour pen weapons sacrifice performance against hordes for penetration) or specialised for certain targets (devastator heads or spewer butts). It would open up a lot more options for variety of weapons. AR's can be the choice for a "versatile" weapon, while taking something like the spray and pray would make you into the ultimate hunter/berserker killer at the cost of forcing you to go for the soft spots against enemies like devastators and brood commanders.
Having weapons like the liberator, liberator concussive, tenderiser, defender, sickle and pummeller all fill basically the same role against the same enemies with clear better options will stagnate the options quickly
While I think your approach to this is reasonable, I think it will always be imperfect for a few reasons. I think what you do is important, but it's spending too much time looking at just numbers.
1 we don't know what the purpose of primary weapon is in the game, we've had some hints from the dev, but we're assuming that all primary weapons should be equally equivalent at all purposes which is not guaranteed to be the case. And it's fail to account for the interactions with support weapons and how they mutually influence each others.
2 Guessing a purpose for a weapon is very subjective and it's hard to see a purpose from any other perspective than a single player pov. To me weapons like the liberator concussive were trading effectiveness for yourself to enable more effectiveness for your teammates. How do you adequately factor that into a weapon when you're just looking at numbers.
3 It undervalues the feel of a weapon. Some weapons could just be less effective more wieldy versions of another weapon, and that's alright, someone will like it. But that's not quantifiable.
4 Coming up for purposes for weapons and agreeing on it is heavily skewed by the community hive mind bullying the discussion. It's hard to not say things like "when's the last time you've seen someone use xxx" we don't have the usage stats, and even then we wouldn't have the "effective" usage stats. For example I've been using the spray & pray since they've buffed it on occasion, it has a good purpose imo, but it's easy to listen to the community and think it doesn't. The community has a lot of inertia and hardly changes opinions about subtle changes or when things move within the "reasonable" margins. It only reacts quickly to flashy gimmick and overpowered stuff.
I don't know about a lot of you here but when I was a kid when you failed something a mission for example, you literally passed the contorller to the person next to you and watched with a mixed emotion of hoping they suceed and pull it off but also kinda wanting to get back on and be the "hero" yourself. Especially as the game ramped up and some missions became 20 attempt ordeals with older siblings being called in for reinforcements haha
There was no moanign to eachother about the balance of the weapons 🤣 the disc was the disc, the console had power cords, tv lead and controller leads. It only exissted in your house on a cartridge or disc.
You understood the game was hard and there was a satisfaction and honour in completing games for yourself and amongst your peers.
Now in 2024 I'm playing helldivers and play mostly with randoms on levels 6-9 depending on if I want to help newer pmayers or really test myself. Other than level 9 i probably complete 9/10 missions? Mwybe even closer to 19/20. And all I sse everywhere is people moaning the game needs to be changed to make it easier on even the hardest diffculties.
You chose the level!
From one up, you can have upto 3 people helping you.
You have orbitals, turrets, mechs, rocket launchers, mines, airstrikes, grenade launchers, rail guns, amr rifles, grenades, even grenade pistols, revolvers and uzis aswell.
But you're really telling me the game is broken and wouldn't just simply "benefit" from a few marginal changes?
Whole community seems entitled but I think its been turned that way by the perfect storm of over sucess with a massive scandal early on.
It seems to me many just seem entitled and have no perseverence to over come the odds and see the satisfation in that.
I guess when you give everyone a medal for over a decade from childhood. Everyone expects to win regardless of how much time and effort you put in to actually mastering the game.
I dont struggle on this game and it can't just be me, people aren't in awe when we extract all 3 missions its GG and a dissappointment when we dont make it. Is the game really that hard? That broken?
I don't really see why I would choose much else when I look at the proposed Liberator Penetrator. Pretty sure that would kill a cannon tower to the heat sink rather quickly and it would be hitting way above its weight against Brood Commanders. It is medium armor pen that can take out a spewer sack in less than a magazine (around 25 bullets). On a positive note it might actually be good against gunships. I think it is too good with that combination of armor penetration, durable parts damage, and low recoil.
Not a fan of liberator concussive changes. Would rather keep everything the same and instead bump the normal damage to around 90. A weapon that hits above its weight against no armor, which there is quite a bit around, but otherwise is relegated to support role.
Not a fan of Adjudicator changes, but I can get behind a small durable parts damage increase and I wouldn't mind the MG-43 sharing in those changes. It really represents the idea of a battle rifle right now and historically battle rifles were not an all around fantastic idea. They are serviceable and have advantages, but they also have issues.
Proposed Tenderizer seems way too one sided for a primary. Having almost zero sustain and bonkers DPS beyond just about any other weapon (on par with MG-43) just about forces it to be paired with an equipment stratagem to fix it or have it only be useful in very very limited scenarios.
I'm someone who's been using the Lib a lot since I started playing this week, and i've watched a lot of videos already to kind of figure out how to fight things and what weakspots are, cause i've been trying to get Ws with the rifle, along with the starting pistol and grenade.
From what i've read, nemy health does not change between difficulties.
Using the Liberator mostly, cause it was what I have.
You can kill(respectively, lowballing a little if you miss some shots due to chaos): 5-8 warriors, 10 stalkers, 30 scavengers (some do not die in one shot/my aim bad), 2 or 3 brood commanders if you aim for the leg joins on the 'stomach', and it's 'knee' and all the limb that isn't connected right at the armored foreleg, that seems slightly tougher than the rest. It generally annihilates all bug legs and squishy bits. And heads, from a range where leaving them alive for a second doesn't matter much since they can't reach you, unless you don't want to abuse the bug breach.
In bots, what i've mostly fought, it can bully devastators: Shooting off the arms of shield devs and sawing through the mid sections of normal and rocket ones as well as the same disarmament. If you can consistently hit the face or gut of devastators, and the stomachs of berserkers, they can go down in 3s/s per clip.
Normal raiders get taken down by any shot to the stomach, center chest sub 50 meters, or head. It's surprisingly good for the bot "chaff", just, definitely not when they're already on you in numbers, even with the good firerate on it.
Hey Ryken! I have over 2500hrs of Darktide under my belt. Your vids are always spot on an very informative. I love them! And here in Helldivers 2 you just continue to have this great input. You should get a job in this industry honestly!
Bro, how it will destroy devastators "in a pinch"? Am i missing smth? If u have light armor pin, every single bullet will be just deflected by armor, unless u have perfect head aim. And if so, jar5 or diligence would do better just by oneshoting devastators. You need to also and Medium armor pin to this concept
IMO, taking the LibC RoF from 320 to 600 is exactly what the devs just did, only in the other direction. It is throwing the lever too hard. If you have a test server, you do this, note how the intentional gross-over-correction performs, dial that back to what you think will work and then test again (at least once) before rolling out to live.
If the Crossbow had 8rds and 120rpm fire rate, then that would be the only primary Id use. 😢 Too bad AH Fun-Killers were assigned to the balancing team.
This is balancing based on actual gameplay experience, the way it should be done. The devs' approach of "nerf whatever is used the most based on statistics" is lazy and inefficient.
As for side-grades, they're basically inevitable if AH really intends to churn out these warbonds monthly, or even bi-monthly. There's no way that many unique weapons can be designed, especially not at this rate.
To think of it its kinda odd that baseline AR have lowest possible armor penetration value on par with shotguns and basic pistol. It would be very healthy for balance if devs shifted penetration value for all rifles 1 notch up so liberator would have t3 penetration and liberator penetrator would have t4 being able to deal full damage to devastators hull and 1/2 damage to hulk eye.
I don't know you guys but playing ogryn in darktide beats playing a normal helldiver UNLESS i build said helldiver like a tank and giving them some heavy weapons.
But ogryn slaps spiky ones around and has club; soooo...
In essence i found myself to go back to darktide and back to helldivers every now and then when i want to go in snowglobe planet.