Helldivers!
Johan Pilestedt here, now in the Chief Creative Officer position at Arrowhead. First, I want to thank you, the community, for clearly voicing your opinions and concerns for the balance and fun of the game. With that, we have gone over a lot of the Weapon and Stratagem balance in our latest patch (01.000.400), and we wanted to share with you a little more information on the decisions we made.
With these balance changes we wanted to buff up some of the weaker stratagems to make them more viable and add more opportunity for variety in loadouts. We also changed a few to make them more consistent, but the goal was to keep a similar or higher power level.
We are looking into the stratagems more to see if there are any other stratagems that might need some buffs or changes to make them more viable. We also want to explain why we are making the changes we do, so that you can follow our thinking.
A/MLS-4X Rocket Sentry:
The old intent was to saturate an area with rockets, but it made it too inconsistent against medium and larger enemies.
We want to make it more consistent against medium and larger enemies and give it a better ammo economy to separate it from the autocannon sentry that has a higher damage output, but can waste ammo by shooting targets that are already dead.
A/MG-43 Machine gun sentry:
The Machine Gun Sentry felt like a worse version of the Gatling sentry and we wanted it to have a different place in the tool box.
We lowered the cooldown to make it more available and more useful when changing position often.
A/MG-43 Machine gun Sentry, A/G-16 Gatling Sentry, A/MLS-4X Rocket Sentry, A/AC-8 Autocannon Sentry, A/M-12 Mortar Sentry, A/M-23 EMS Mortar Sentry:
The sentry turrets in the game were a little too easily killed by the bullets flying in a chaotic situation.
We have increased the durability* factor of the turrets to make them more resistant to small arms fire.
E/MG-101 HMG Emplacement:
The HMG Emplacement is intended to be a way of defending a fixed position but due to its immobility and the drawback that presents, the slow rotation speed was a bit too much of an additional drawback.
Therefore we have increased the rotation speed significantly.
MD-6 Anti-Personnel Minefield & MD-I4 Incendiary Mines:
The minefields are supposed to be a strong but volatile way of blocking off certain approaches for a limited time. They are currently not very good at filling this role and we will be looking more at them in the future.
For now we are increasing their damage to at least improve their effectiveness against targets that trigger them.
Orbital Gatling:
The Orbital Gatling Barrage was not effective at dealing with any specific targets. We want it to be better at saturating the target area and also be able to do damage against heavy armored units.
It is still not very likely to outright kill heavily armored targets but should be able to soften them up a bit. We also lowered the cooldown to make it more available and to make it more competitive in comparison to Eagle stratagems.
Orbital Precision Strike:
The Orbital Precision Strikes original intent was to be used against spawners and fixed positions. However this hasn’t stopped the community from using it against pretty much everything.
Therefore we want to make it a little easier to use against moving targets by lowering the call in time. We also lowered the cooldown to make it more available and to make it more competitive in comparison to Eagle stratagems.
Orbital Airburst Strike:
The Orbital Airburst original intent was to block an area for a short duration and kill most non-heavy armored enemies in the area. It was underperforming compared to other anti-chaff options and had a very low rate of use.
To make it a more attractive option we lowered the cooldown which should also make it more competitive in comparison to Eagle stratagems.
Eagle 110mm Rocket Pods:
The Eagle Rocket Pods were very inconsistent in dealing with its main targets, heavily armored enemies.
The changes we are making aim to make it more consistent at dealing with these targets, but it will still not be a surefire way of outright killing them. It should however always soften up a target in some way.
We are interested in hearing feedback on how this feels now and are open to tweaking them further.
Eagle Strafing Run:
The Eagle Strafing Run is supposed to be a tool to effectively deal with small groups of medium armored enemies.
To that end we have increased its armor penetration to be able to reliably penetrate medium armored targets and soften up heavily armored enemies.
We expect to have to tweak this further in the future. As with the Eagle Rocket Pods, we are very interested in your feedback.
GL-21 Grenade Launcher:
The Grenade Launcher is intended to be good at softening up hordes of enemies and provide utility for destroying spawners. While it is still good at destroying spawners the explosion was a little too weak to reliably damage medium enemies.
The change in its explosion damage should put it in a better place when it comes to dealing with hordes, and more effective against some medium armored enemies.
MG-206 Heavy Machine Gun:
The HMG failed to deliver on the fantasy of a Heavy Machine Gun when it was released. It had a weak round with low damage and impact, while the fire rate was up in levels more likely seen on smaller MGs. The HMGs intent is to be a great option at dealing with medium armored enemies and should chew them up easily, similar to the HMG emplacement.
We are lowering the rate of fire further to resemble the fire rate seen in contemporary weapons of similar type, and increasing the damage and stagger so that each hit is significant. This should also make the available ammo last longer.
MG-43 Machine Gun:
The intent of the Machine Gun was that it should be a great crowd clear weapon with the ability to tackle medium armored enemies. The drawbacks of the machine gun are that you have to sit still while reloading and this made it hard to compete with the Stalwarts mobility.
Therefore we want to lean into its strengths and reduce its drawbacks slightly to improve the value proposition of the weapon. To that end we are lowering the reload time, and giving it an additional magazine. It is also receiving a buff to damage described below.
MG-43 Machine Gun, A/MG-43 Machine gun Sentry, A/G-16 Gatling Sentry, EXO-45 Patriot Exosuits Gatling:
The family of machine gun stratagems that used the 8mm rifle round were underperforming slightly and we have therefore increased the damage slightly.
Durable damage for rifle calibers
Small arms fire in the game does less damage to durable* body parts, however many small arms were doing the same damage (percentage wise) not representing the larger impact a rifle type round would have compared to other types. Therefore, rifle type bullets are now slightly more effective against durable* body parts.
These changes affect:
- AR-23 Liberator
- M-105 Stalwart
- AX/AR-23 “Guard dog”
- AR-23C Liberator Concussive
- R-63 Diligence
- BR-14 Adjudicator
- AR-61 Tenderizer
- MG-43 Machine Gun
- A/MG-43 Machine gun Sentry
- A/G-16 Gatling Sentry
- EXO-45 Patriot Exosuit's Gatling
*Durable body parts are in general body parts that have a high amount of mass with non vital organs, or a lot of empty space. The idea is to simulate that a single bullet has a high chance of not dealing significant damage.
In general, the higher your caliber of weapon the better the effect is against durable body parts. Explosions also have very high effectiveness against durable body parts as shockwaves ripple through whatever you are hitting. Some weapons are more effective than others or have special exceptions, though this should follow the same logic as above.
BR-14 Adjudicator:
The Adjudicator, with relatively few rounds in each magazine combined with a wild recoil, left players no room for error, which didn’t feel good for an assault rifle type weapon.
The increased magazine capacity should make the weapon more forgiving of mistakes and encourage a more aggressive playstyle. Remember, short controlled bursts!
AR-61 Tenderizer:
The Tenderizer was released in a non-representative state as it used the incorrect stats, didn't have its own niche and felt like a worse Liberator.
We're restoring justice and bringing it back to its intended design, which is a very precise assault rifle that rewards high accuracy play by having a heavy hitting round that doesn’t penetrate medium armor.
PLAS-101 Purifier:
The original idea behind the Purifier was to create a Scorcher variant with a charge up mechanic. Unfortunately, since the projectile didn't have enough armor penetration against medium-armored enemies, even a direct hit didn't deal enough damage to justify its long charge-up time.
By increasing the armor penetration of the projectile and reducing the damage falloff of the explosion we hope to make it an exotic option that is viable in capable hands.
CB-9 Explosive Crossbow:
Similarly to the Purifier, the crossbow's bolt didn't always deal its full damage due to the explosion having lower armor penetration than the projectile.
Making both the projectile and the explosion penetrate medium armor should make the crossbow more consistent against medium-sized targets and increase its AoE viability.
R-36 Eruptor:
In one of the previous patches we removed the shrapnel from the explosion as it made Eruptor's ability to spike damage too much for a primary weapon (and for a support weapon even, its theoretical max was over 9000!) and introduced some unexpected interactions. We acknowledge that the Eruptor lost a good portion of its capabilities and the additional damage boost didn't make up for the loss of shrapnel.
Adding back shrapnel is quite tricky because of the low visibility of shrapnel, which sometimes created situations where you or your fellow helldivers died with very little feedback of what killed you.
To compensate for that, we're giving the Eruptor 150 more damage per explosion to make it more consistent without introducing new edge-cases. The intent is that this change will make the Eruptor viable both against medium armored targets and groups of cannon fodder enemies.
Other
Updated Recoil stance modifiers
The intention of our recoil modifiers is to reward usage of different stances in relation to different weapon types. They are also there to highlight that constantly moving around isn't doing your accuracy any favors.
We made some changes to the recoil stance modifiers to make them more consistent and also reward being prone more. The percentages below show how much of the weapons recoil was applied in different scenarios and the new values:
- Thirdperson
- Stand:
- Stationary : 100% -> No change
- Moving: 150% -> No change
- Crouch
- Stationary: 50% -> 60%
- Moving: 125% -> 100%
- Prone
- Scoped
- Stand:
- Stationary : 100% -> 90%
- Moving: 100% -> 110%
- Crouch
- Stationary: 75% -> 60%
- Moving: 125% -> 90%
- Prone
Hopefully this gives you a little more insight on how we think and why we have made the changes we did. I want to end this by saying that we are not done, we will continue to refine and improve the play experience to keep the game fresh! On behalf of the team, we appreciate your feedback and hope that you'll have an exciting time checking these adjustments out.
Happy Helldiving!
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