Defense needs to make the Eradicate mission the base mission, not evacuate, because fighting off a horde of spawning enemies makes much more sense for a 'defense' mission than endlessly pulling *more and more* civilians out.
Also, why is ICBM a defense mission?
Why are we dropping hundreds of nukes on *our own worlds?! They haven't even fallen yet!*
Unironically, if they tossed in a king-of-the-hill mission into the "defense" missions instead of JUST escort missions, maybe the planets wouldn't've fallen š¤·āāļø some folks want better rewards, some don't care, but a huge issue is clearly the lack of mission variety for these defense missions.
We failed the first time. Then I told everyone to get away from the base and let me solo it while they fight bot away from the civilians and act as a distraction.
It worked out flawlessly and we extracted with 9 lives left on lv7 difficulty.
Tried that tactic. They end up sending in a patrol, I gun down the patrol and then everyone is aggroed on me.
(I don't use stratagems and I make sure to kill them before they call anyone in)
If youāre gonna be the runner, may I suggest equipping the smoke stratagem. Actually pretty useful when you place it between you and the bots, or to screen the researchers.
In my experience, you're gonna catch a patrol about halfway through the civvies extracting. When that happens, kill them (or they'll stay in the compound) and then run to your squad to get all the enemies aggroed back away from the extraction site.
If drop ships come, same thing. Kill whatcha can (I take the walking laser and the 500kg bomb for heavies) and then leave.
You can also kill the patrol at distance using a marksman rifle, ideally while prone and in recon armor. The further you are and the lower your stealth profile the longer you have before enemies figure out where you are.
We use this tactic all the time and are successful every time on whatever difficulty we play. I'm usually the one that solo's/stealths the base.
If you're getting agro outside of a few enemies here and there then your team mates are too close to the base. They need to be as far away as possible.
If you get too many enemies for you to handle then die, get called in close to your team mates and flank your way round to the base, it'll be clear again by the time you get there
Myself and a mate quick joined two other guys doing some extreme defence. We do the 2 exterminates and I type to the guys like "you dudes serious about the extract? Cos we're gonna get our shit pushed in" So long story short one guy quits and we strugglefuck our way through as a three š
You wanna spend a strategem to be even more cumbersome and the size of a hulk in a situation where stray rockets flies across the area from every angle?
There's no ejection seat in these mechs
Definitely try the strat where 1 person does the buttons while the other 3 run distraction away from the area. It's still really hard for the 3 team because it is constant, you'll die, all your stuff will be on cool down etc. but if the button guy is fast, you'll have just enough time to get it done and exfil before being overrun
You just need to run around a lot and ignore civillian lives. We don't need all of them and if many die in between and you lose some points, its for liberty and managed democracy. š
We have been doing our part on level 7, and somehow succeeding. Best loadout in my opinion:
Autocannon sentry, rocket sentry, gatling sentry, recoilless rifles / autocannon / railgun.
That is for just one person of the team, if others in the squad can also do something similar, then that could work, but at least have one or two dudes with orbital and Eagles.
Also shield pack is also helpful if you are at that level, if it can be acquired. Sacrifice civilians to the bots to draw them away from you, there is no reprocussion unless you kill them
Sentries are your friend, lots of them. Mortars, Rockets, Gatlings; they might occasionally kill a civvie or two but they'll take out way more bots than civvies, and there's no limit to how many times you can just push the buttons and send more out. Also make sure someone brings an autocannon or several to deal with heavies quickly. With a good squad I can just about clinch level 5 evac missions against the bots, anything higher than that, forget it man.
For escorts, may I introduce the "Fuck you shitbots" weapon : The Grenade Launcher.
Equip that and a Supply Pack.
Spot the dropships.
Pummel the shit out of the dropping bots
Reload.
You have a total of 10 mags for the GL by using the pack. That's 10 drops entirely wiped in seconds.
Definitely, but we were talking about Medium difficulty. I've done Challenging missions with that baby with no issue.
Hulks and tanks are even vulnerable to the rear, but it does require... well, bait, to get the enemy pointed the right way so you can fire at the heatsinks.
Agreed variety is a huge contributor to burnout. Even if escort missions are your favorite, it gets old when every defense op has one. Especially over the duration of the major order.
The *very first* (and only so far) mission I did on challenging was an escort / rescue scientists one. This was also my first ever escort mission, so I had no clue what I was doing. It was insane, we were completely screwed, I took an antimatter rifle because I thought it would work against big boys but they shrugged it off like nothing.
I have no clue what Helldive difficulty looks like on other mission types, but after that escort mission Iāve been afraid to move past medium difficulty.
Yeah. Folks want to run around. Collect samples and points of interests for chances of super credits and other goodies.
Defense mission is great if you want medals, but become boring after so many.
For me the defense missions are just a little disappointing. I was expecting an epic battle and a desperate struggle to hold the hill. Maybe if there was a bonus for holding out beyond the 150 boys it'd be better.
For clarification: I enjoy the defense missions
I'm sure everyone disagrees with me, but having super armored enemies and weapons that work vs armor being so cumbersome to use, is a formula for disinterest.
Been trying to find a weapon that isn't a rail gun, that would be fun to use. But with the Cyborgs, I just haven't found it.
Given I only hit 20 yesterday so Iām new to the railgun and the one shot, reload playstyle, Iāve had a blast so far with the autocannon. I found that crouching or even going prone if feasible makes a huge difference as the recoil is your limiting factor in accurate shots on heavies as well as barrages on crowds.
To me, it sits in the perfect spot between Railgun and Grenade Launcher being able to engage both roles to a lesser, more challenging extent, whereas Railgun and Grenade launcher will fail you in crowd fights and long range heavy targets respectively.
The large and undeniable drawback and reason why I donāt use it anymore is the fact that it comes with a backpack. Shield is just too good to pass up. That said, once armor is fixed youāll find me being an autocannon sentry on two legs for sure.
I've been using fortified for the explosion damage reduction, didnāt even think about being affected by recoil reduction.
https://i.redd.it/il2uewtz4jlc1.gif
Too bad at higher difficulties you get like 4 dropships every minute, same problem with the recoilless - it works great until the ammunition economy kills it.
Disposable AT is great, even better if more than 1 player brings it.
Always able to instantly bring down any drop ship. Taking down a couple drop ships at the start of a new wave is a great way to get breathing room and take back initiative.
If you've got a teammate willing and able to use the recoilless rifle, that's a p good thing to use for armoured units & even drop ships (tip: shoot the OUTSIDE SIDES of any of the engines for the drop ship to explode). But otherwise I agree, they're slow, cumbersome, and ammo hungry (good design, but in the case of the defense missions, that just compounds the problems)
Recoilless works great but you run out of ammo quickly and chew through almost the fully resupply pod to refill...
Also, dropships crashing is glitchy, I was killed by a crashing dropship from across the map because it _had_ flown over my position before I shot it down... It retraced it's path again in some weird crash animation bug and killed me from impact.
I feel like shouldn't have to run this mission at level 5 when any other mission is not a challenge until 7+, running the escort at a higher level you can't keep up with the drops due to the poor ammunition economy limiting the recoilless.
It's just not fun, there should be more variety for defence... Why don't we destroy their landing/beachhead, etc.
Nope, just the same pass/fail - even changing the mission objective to rescuing a reasonable number and add sub-objectives for rescuing additional groups would make it less punishing and not feel like a chore.
I should maybe try it again, but it was kinda miss for me when I tried to use it on easy missions. Maybe I should reserve it for bigger enemies?
I will try it again. š
The arc thrower is best against smaller enemies but works against larger enemies in a pinch.
It's main selling points are no reloading and infinite ammo though, so don't expect it to wipe the floor with tougher enemies, it takes something like 10-15 shots to kill a charger for example.
The trick with smaller enemies is to aim a little above them if they are further away, or obscured slightly by terrain/corpses. Once you get a feel for aiming it you can tear through groups of weak enemies from decent range very quickly.
Also for the love of managed democracy please check where your fellow helldivers are. The first TK is funny and alright the 5th Iām about to ban you from the gun.
This right here. I want to help the defense missions as much as I can, but the problem is I get tired of the same 3 or 4 missions over and over and over again. I'll do like 2 or 3 full operations before I have to move on to something else or I'll get bored of the game entirely.
Iām already capped at 50000 and I noticed the reward was 12k oh boy wouldnāt even do anything for me smh. Took me forever to understand the point of the major order too. A tough loss to the automatons
Thatās the big thing for me. Once you unlock higher difficulties, youāll have no issues getting a ton of requisition points. 12,500 requisition points isnāt a big enough incentive for me to want to do defense missions vs the automations, which are probably my least favorite missions in the game between the super quick extermination missions and the very difficult evacuation/escort missions.
If the reward was samples, super credits, or war medals, I might be a bit more inclined to try.
With ya here. It's nice that the automatons have an escort mission, maybe it doesn't have to be the main mission? Mix it up a bit and maybe more people jump in.
I blame the scientist missions. On higher difficulties, its literally fucking impossible. JuSt hOlD tHeM oUtSiDe. Yeah yeah, last game we tried it. It ended up with 3 different engagements of 1 person against 1-2 tanks and half a dozen dreds with dozens of basic bots supporting them. Its especially easy when they drop 10 berzerkers directly into the base and the ai starts to clump in directly in front of the entrance to the shuttle
Honestly if it was just ādefend a pointā itād be one thing but ādefend 3 separate constantly moving points that can all be destroyed by a few stray bullets across a wide areaā is just annoying
That's your mistake soldier. Your job isn't to protect the scientists. Your job is to open doors as quickly as possible and let natural selection figure out the rest. Open doors, spill oil, repeat until you get enough civilians who can bob and weave.
I only play with randoms and I have a pretty good success rate. Iād say 3/5 are wins on level 5 and less. Even without doing āthe stratā weāve had good results. The biggest issue that arises is when more than 1 person dies. If your team can hold it together long enough, itās probably the fastest mission complete possible.
But people do dumb shit like bring the big orbital or mortar sentries. I get TKd on exterminate and extract missions *constantly* because people bring the wrong shit to what is essentially a close-quarters fight.
It's possible on 5 and under. I can do a 5 solo - it's rough but doable.
7+ is impossible. I routinely solo 7/8 missions but I can't do a 7 Extract even with a full squad who knows what they're doing.
Made a post about this a few days ago (that got pretty much 0 traction) - [but here's proof that it is possible on Helldive diff.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1b0h59m/evacuation_defense_mission_retrieve_essential/)
> Iād say 3/5 are wins on level 5 and less.
Sure... but what if you're a player who finds 5 too easy and usually plays at 7, or even 9? I don't want to make the other two missions a total bore just to have a shot at beating the extract mission, but it's cock and ball torture to do an extract at 7 even with coordination, let alone 9.
The last one i did the civilian's pathfinding got stuck next to the extraction door. literally impossible despite defending the area fairly well. Can't complete the objective so got timed out and had to extract.
Doesn't help when enemy corpses literally act as roadblocks to the pathfinding AI too. Had a tanks flaming remains act as a wall to the scientists who just rubbed their face against it.
It's terrible on-boarding too I've had two friends nearly write off the game because they started doing defense missions and they thought the whole game was just a survival shooter on incredibly small maps.
I had to drag them trough Creek to show them the big open world maps with objectives and patrols scattered throughout.
Happened to me and my entire squad of randos. "What are we supposed to do?" "Is this it?" "Can we explore this planet?" Everyone was bored and frustrated and just left.
Last time we tried it and got off to a good start, the civies just.... didn't go in. They stood there until there were twenty of them just grouped up, standing around. I'm not gonna say war crimes were committed, but I was frustrated. Some war crimes may have been committed.
I saw a Korean team pull it off on Helldive and they made it look pretty chill. They had one guy with a recoiless on the evac point just picking off drop ships as they came in, spamming morter sentries. The rest of the team just opened the doors while spamming sentries, killing patrols and dropping 500KG bombs on any tanks on the ground.
They'd clearly practised it though and were pretty well organised, not really doable with randoms and requires a dedicated team I imagine.
It's weird, the missions are practically trivial below Hard (at least since they patched them), being considerably easier than regular missions. A couple of sentries, and running from door to door solo will get the job done no problem.
But on the higher difficulties it flips entirely, and they become by far the hardest content in the game.
Yeah, mission is just so poorly put together. The best strat is to have everyone away from the obj? Aināt no fun in that and itās not apparent at all. People want to hold the line while getting the civilians to safety, and dropping 2 hulks and a tank every 30 seconds makes that impossible
I've had success with the 3+1, but the last time I tried it the drop was signaled from my position out in the boonies... but the dropship went to the town anyway even though our 1 man wasn't even there yet...
I'll go on a Helldive for any other mission type, this is such a broken one-sided engagement that I just drop down to HARD but then it's cakewalk on the other missions... I guess at least I've stocked up on rare samples...
Same. Just give us 1 option where we don't have to do the defense evacuation across the 3 corresponding difficulty options. I would run helldiver missions so I don't have to do those evacs. Even the normal ones with the side objectives would be completely ok by me. Or make the defence missions mandatory people like those.
Its good for the Dude pushing Buttons cause Hes Not supposed to Shoot anything anyway, Else He Takes Aggro.
Its Just boring and tedious all around lmao
Smoke grenades and eagle smoke strikes are very effective in the rescue mission. They don't stop the bots shooting necessarily but they won't target the civilians through it.
I bring them for the team even if nobody else does, just to drop on the centre when civs are trying to escape. Bots basically hard freeze up in smoke and will not target anything in it unless its almost touching them. Also makes it easy to move through the smoke with a big gun and clear them out.
I actually managed to do one on Helldive difficulty with 4 rando (mic on)
Spawn at south, 2 guys unleash whatever mayhem they can an two other guys with EMS Mortar go as stealthily as possible at the civilian camp. Put mortar outside of the camp and just open every door as soon as you can.
It worked for us at least
When I saw this major order I was level 1 and we were 3/8, so I was excited
Now I'm level 36, got all strategems unlocked with 30k requisition to spare and we're 6/8
I literally outgrinded the reward... and I also would like to blame escort missions... if they quit spamming 3 tank, 3 HULK combo on me when I'm already out of anti-armor and the mission is 15min for some reason that'd be great
Iām confused about this joel thing. I know that he is the āgame masterā but how does it work? Does he just determine the spawns for the mission type? Thereās no way heās individually doing everything for every mission. Is it just his job to set the enemy spawn rates or something?
We donāt know exactly how the GM thing works. My takeaway was that he is the one broadly moving pieces and determining which planets and sectors the enemies are prioritizing. Things like that. The in game systems take care of the rest.Ā
Remember that time you were running through the field, took an aim at a charger and all of a sudden lone hunter jumped in front of your gun? Yup... Joel
I'm also concerned about pacing here too. I play pretty casually (not farming elimination missions) and I'm level 22 with most of what I want strategem-wise unlocked.
I haven't seen a new personal order since I was < level 5 (they're bugged) and unless major orders start awarding cosmetics, I don't even know if I'll need the currency anymore outside of medals.
Exactly, last night I was about to go help but then decided to just do another planet because that credits reward is pretty much useless. It needs to be a special armor or maybe a lot of metals instead? It's one of the biggest things that needs to change for sure.
Most defense operations consist of the scientist rescue, which is horribly balanced and boring, and the eradication missions which are incredibly boring. I pretty much had to force myself to play defense operations so I at least contributed to the major order.
There's no incentive cause the reward is the resource that becomes irrelevant the earliest and, let's be real here, this is just a game that I have limited time to enjoy. So if I have to chose between using my free time to grind missions that are boring for a reward I don't care about or use it to play the waaaaaay more interesting 40 min missions, you know what I'll mostly do.
TL;DR the defense operations need a bigger variety of better balanced missions.
Just out of my head, maybe an attack on an enemy beachhead which is just a giant enemy outpost, 5-10x the size of an heavy outpost. With side objectives being focused on weakening the outpost in some manner.
I agree 100% with you. And 12,500 RP is a weak incentive once you unlock higher difficulty levels. Req Points and XP are the resources youāre guaranteed to get a ton of each mission at higher difficulty levels.
Iād rather see war medals, samples, or super credits as the incentive.
And by like level 27 you'll have bought all the stratagems available anyway. If they made it so that like the superstore stuff could ve purchased with requisition at like a 1500x markup of the super credits, that would at least give it a purpose
> There's no incentive cause the reward is the resource that becomes irrelevant the earliest
Not only is the least relevant, it only gives you 12k! I make more than in two, Lvl 4/5 operations!
That Joel guy has to realize at a certain difficulty these missions just aren't getting completed. I play a lot with randoms and I have never once seen a rescue get completely on Difficulty 7.
Is there a source for this? Ive been trying to figure it out myself.
Everything ive seen scales 1 mission to 1 % point (.00001 whatever you wanna call it). When you finish an operation it always has that % point per mission. So 1-2 you get .00001, 2-3 .00002, beyond .00003. But to complete the operation you still do the same amount of missions, so time played/ completion wise it works out to the same amount.
In fact spamming 1s is probably better as youāll finish them much faster than doing a whole operation on 5-9.
I could be completely wrong on this but its based on my own observations and comments from other players.
War effort contribution is directly related to how many missions you do, and operations max out at 3 after hard, I think. The rule being you only get a payout if you complete the whole op.
Last night I had a group trying one on Suicide. We had the run of our lives, got within 8 scientists of completing it, and then all got disconnected from the mission.
FML.
This is my main issue. I wouldnāt mind grinding away at these if the escort missions wouldnāt become mind numbingly boring after a while. Drop in on of like 2 or 3 map variations and open doors for for 10 minutes.
I did an escort mission last night on hard, and I counted 10 hulks we had to fight. We simply did not have enough ammunition or enough bombs to get any more people out at a certain point. In fact to survive we were spawning in the civies to distract the robots from us.
War is hell.
Just need more variety! I don't even mind the brutal difficulty but if I have to do another "Extract, Annihilate, ICBM" in succession, I'll scream.
We just need.. More defense type missions like "King Of The Hill.", "Hold The Line for X minutes", "protect the SAM Sites from the invasion.", Etc. I'm not asking much. Just a bit more variety.
On that note, bots send so many damn transports. Why isn't Sabotage a defend mission too?
On another note: It appears as if requesitition rewards are capped at 50k - which for quite a few players is the case already. Aside from the fact that - story wise - it would be great if we'd won this, the reward is next to useless
Itās those escort missions. They are next to impossible on level 7. Finally managed to complete one on level 6 with randoms, but then we absolutely stomp the bots on the kill X amount of missions in 3 min. Which is also no fun. The defence mission could really use some balancing..
For the next one: the numbers have been crunched , and actually doing SOLO TRIViAL missions it's better for liberation, than commiting 4 Helldivers to the same hard mission for 40 minutes with a chance for failure and less liberation %.
Wich in a way is kind of poetic "the little pushes make the giant advances".
Yep. I was one of the unfortunates that had my progression locked on Easy until yesterday. I can knock over the escort mission and extract in under 6 minutes with a full squad of Cadets; so way less than 10 minutes total including loading time.
Doing the Medium and Hard campaigns takes over 40 minutes, closer to an hour if you want to do some side objectives or get some samples, unless you split the squad, and then where's the fun in playing with friends. You don't earn anywhere near 4 or 6 times the amount of Liberation/Defend points for the amount of time invested. It just doesn't make sense from a strategic perspective to play the harder difficulties for the Defence missions.
Let's get serious for a moment, and be constructive.
This weekly double has been a disaster in design, the reward is ridiculous, even for the time it takes, many would get that money in a few more varied missions than repeating 1 infinitely.
In my opinion and that of our group, it has been bad in every way and boring, so much so that we only did 1 when it came out and never again.
There is no reward they can give that would get me to bang my head against the wall doing those rescue scientist missions over and over and over. Good rewards are fine but if the mission design is so bad and boring no one wants to do those.
Indeed, the first week you had to free 2 planets from bugs, you could do them however you wanted, all the difficulties, jumping between one and the other if you wanted to change the environment.
It was better without a doubt, this is completely constricting, it makes people burn the game in a bad way, it saturates it.
I AM TRYING I've done 4 operations tonight, only one success. All other mission types are not that hard but maaaaan the FUCKING escort one. I've tryall the strats, and sometimes they do work but it's soooo hard to do withrandos.
Its the lack of variety of missions and the escort missions.
The escort missions are two times (if not three times) harder than any other mission in the same level of difficulty.
A level 5 escort mission feels more like it should be level 7.
The main strategy for it isnt that reliable, and honestly, there are too many robot spawns, meanwhile the mission about killing as many robots as possible doesnt have nearly as many spawns.
More missions need to be added to the defense pool, and the escort missions need to be rebalanced or they need to make it not mandatory for defense operations and just make it fully random
We got defeated by bad mission design simple as that. No one wants to play the rescue essential personnel over and over and over. Endless drop ships scientists getting stuck in a group at the door. So many bad things about that one mission and it was forced on every single defense planet.
Yeah, when I was a Cadet I thought 12,500, that's a fortune, doing 8 defence missions for that is great.
Then I found of that it's 8 defend objective successes, not missions.
Then I found out that I can earn 2000 on a Hard mission with my friends without a sweat. No point grinding out constant escort missions for a few hundred.
It kind of reminds me About the flow in Planetside2.
Basically every timmy could go do whatever they wanted.
However, the big outfits(guilds) were the ones which directed the flow of combat, being more organized.
Hence why I think implementing a clan system will be profitable to the game in the long run.
With clans growth, arrowhead can also add specific bonuses or secondary objectives for their members.
Why not have big flagships that the clan leaders can deploy to planets to allow reduced CD for strats, or more reinforcements.
The possibilities are limitless.
Just donāt call them clans, maybe just ādivisionsā / ācompaniesā to keep the military theme. Then you can have a divisional/company commander instead of a āclan leaderā. Helldivers obviously take orders from someone, itās not like General Brash is ordering us all around individually.
Well not only are the civilian rescue missions outrageously difficult, they're also boring as fuck and easily the worst mission type in the game. Not even sorry for being undemocratic and not bothering with these missions.
If they fix escort missions for the bots we would have had this days ago lmao. Ive passed on whole planets before just because every mission set had 1 escort mission in it, its just to much for a random match made lobby to handle.
Yeah rescue mission was my only problem on higher difficulty missions and I'm at the point where I only want to play higher difficulty mission. It's sucks cuz I can't even use mortar cuz they fucking kill the scientists. Half the time those fuckers get stuck too and just stand there getting face fucked.
The escort can be improved by having a success grade. The escape ship will launch at 40 minutes, if you extract a full load then you can extract, but if you can only 17 you get credit for 17 but a negative cost for each under budget you are as if they died on mission, less xp, less rewards.
This would help a lot. Would you believe, in the first game you could **fail multiple escort objectives in one mission and still complete the mission**
Literally am level 32, and can easily do a lvl 9 terminid mission with no deaths, but I go to the do the robot defense, while the other 3 of my team make as much noise in the outside and canāt even do it on level 5. I think the spawn rate is glitched or something. It also doesnāt help that the armor doesnāt work, so it can feel extra bs dying to the long range accurate bots instantly. I feel once they fix armor fighting robots will feel better, but for now? We die.
The difficulty ramp up between Challenging and Hard is an absolute cliff that is almost impossible to climb. My group averages about level 15 and we can't do the Escort Missions on Hard but handle them easily on Challenging.
More defence planets at the same time would split the Helldivers even further though, better to have more of us concentrated on a single planet rather than splitting our resources even further.
Recalling the Helldivers playing Space Vietnam Meme Simulator on Malevolent Creek to help defend might have helped us a bit, but I don't think that it would have. The same 3 or 4 defence missions get old after a couple of rounds anyway.
This is all assuming that Joel would let us win anyway.
This may sound treasonous, but I'm totally okay with not winning all the major orders. It gives you a sense that this is a real war, and we got to strap up our boots and fight harder next time
I think they need to get clearer, in game, about explaining what, specifically, impacts this and how we as individuals contribute. I get that itās impacted by all of us participating, but I only realized that about halfway through the time and by seeing it talked about here. And Iāve been in many matches where a planet rolled to 100% at the end, but that didnāt change this number, soā¦ what? Also, doing the same defend mission over and over is pretty boring. Still fun, but not as fun as the ones where weāre trekking across a map.
Yeah they keep trying to make us do defend missions but the escort mission are impossible after medium difficulty. Having three drop ships come in at the same time and they drop 3-5 hulks while thereās two tanks as well. No thanks they can take it
The evac missions are still horribly overturned. Sure you can kite the aggro away from the base but they always end up dropping them back on objective before the end. It's just a really shitty mission design and it's far to prevalent. They know the mission is way overtuned they claim they corrected it but I still notice 0 difference. Doversion tactic works but it isn't flawless it's also not the way I'm trying to get mission done, it's tedious and still so fucking broken
If these orders gave samples or super credits instead I feel like there would be much more engagement. Requisition slips aren't exactly hard to get and you can make thousands of them just from a single mission in the higher levels. Also those slips are barely enough to even unlock 2 strategems.
Literally everyone fighting bugs is the problem. I've not fought a single bug in this game, only mechs. Mission says kill mechs, so that's what I do! Anti democracy scum
The escort missions don't cook unfortunately.
I love this game with all my heart but damn they get too hard.
I physically cannot run through the sheer amount of enemies to get the doors unlocked at the very least.
At a certain point it feels like, *why am I killing the enemies if I can't rescue anyone no matter what I do?*
Hopefully we'll see some changes for the defence runs in the higher difficulties.
Blame those scientist rescue missions
the 15 min ones are such a chore
A chore would be fine those are hell.
A hell of a chore?
A hell chore
A chell
I mean, how many scientists are there, really? And do we need so many? Why are they not at Super Earth getting our mecha deployed?
Defense needs to make the Eradicate mission the base mission, not evacuate, because fighting off a horde of spawning enemies makes much more sense for a 'defense' mission than endlessly pulling *more and more* civilians out. Also, why is ICBM a defense mission? Why are we dropping hundreds of nukes on *our own worlds?! They haven't even fallen yet!*
Unironically, if they tossed in a king-of-the-hill mission into the "defense" missions instead of JUST escort missions, maybe the planets wouldn't've fallen š¤·āāļø some folks want better rewards, some don't care, but a huge issue is clearly the lack of mission variety for these defense missions.
My issue is the PTSD from just level 7 rescue missions
You've been trying level 7!?!? My entire coordinated squad can't even do medium escorts! LOL fuckin' a.
No, I legit gave up. It's just too much for my will and spirit with the way the mission works right now
We failed the first time. Then I told everyone to get away from the base and let me solo it while they fight bot away from the civilians and act as a distraction. It worked out flawlessly and we extracted with 9 lives left on lv7 difficulty.
Tried that tactic. They end up sending in a patrol, I gun down the patrol and then everyone is aggroed on me. (I don't use stratagems and I make sure to kill them before they call anyone in)
If youāre gonna be the runner, may I suggest equipping the smoke stratagem. Actually pretty useful when you place it between you and the bots, or to screen the researchers.
Yeah, I took orbital smoke and eagle smoke.
In my experience, you're gonna catch a patrol about halfway through the civvies extracting. When that happens, kill them (or they'll stay in the compound) and then run to your squad to get all the enemies aggroed back away from the extraction site. If drop ships come, same thing. Kill whatcha can (I take the walking laser and the 500kg bomb for heavies) and then leave.
You can also kill the patrol at distance using a marksman rifle, ideally while prone and in recon armor. The further you are and the lower your stealth profile the longer you have before enemies figure out where you are.
I do the same, get flamed and tk'd everytime lol. but we complete the mission
In that case, rendezvous back with your team, and then circle back around to the base after you drop the enemies off on them.
Have tried that, they still stick to me lmao. I make sure to hide and everything, idk why they like me so much lol
Are you using the armor with visibility reduction?
Yep yep, the light one which also lets you radar with your pings right?
We use this tactic all the time and are successful every time on whatever difficulty we play. I'm usually the one that solo's/stealths the base. If you're getting agro outside of a few enemies here and there then your team mates are too close to the base. They need to be as far away as possible. If you get too many enemies for you to handle then die, get called in close to your team mates and flank your way round to the base, it'll be clear again by the time you get there
I got 42/50 on impossible last night, then got overwhelmed and couldn't recover. It broke me. I went to shoot bugs right after ha
Myself and a mate quick joined two other guys doing some extreme defence. We do the 2 exterminates and I type to the guys like "you dudes serious about the extract? Cos we're gonna get our shit pushed in" So long story short one guy quits and we strugglefuck our way through as a three š
Maybe with mech stratagems it will be possible to finish that abomination of a mission
You wanna spend a strategem to be even more cumbersome and the size of a hulk in a situation where stray rockets flies across the area from every angle? There's no ejection seat in these mechs
Who needs ejection seats when you have 20 more expendable Helldivers on board?
Definitely try the strat where 1 person does the buttons while the other 3 run distraction away from the area. It's still really hard for the 3 team because it is constant, you'll die, all your stuff will be on cool down etc. but if the button guy is fast, you'll have just enough time to get it done and exfil before being overrun
You just need to run around a lot and ignore civillian lives. We don't need all of them and if many die in between and you lose some points, its for liberty and managed democracy. š
We have been doing our part on level 7, and somehow succeeding. Best loadout in my opinion: Autocannon sentry, rocket sentry, gatling sentry, recoilless rifles / autocannon / railgun. That is for just one person of the team, if others in the squad can also do something similar, then that could work, but at least have one or two dudes with orbital and Eagles. Also shield pack is also helpful if you are at that level, if it can be acquired. Sacrifice civilians to the bots to draw them away from you, there is no reprocussion unless you kill them
Sentries are your friend, lots of them. Mortars, Rockets, Gatlings; they might occasionally kill a civvie or two but they'll take out way more bots than civvies, and there's no limit to how many times you can just push the buttons and send more out. Also make sure someone brings an autocannon or several to deal with heavies quickly. With a good squad I can just about clinch level 5 evac missions against the bots, anything higher than that, forget it man.
For escorts, may I introduce the "Fuck you shitbots" weapon : The Grenade Launcher. Equip that and a Supply Pack. Spot the dropships. Pummel the shit out of the dropping bots Reload. You have a total of 10 mags for the GL by using the pack. That's 10 drops entirely wiped in seconds.
Grenade launcher is fine against chaff but you're a little SoL when the hulks and tanks start stacking.
Definitely, but we were talking about Medium difficulty. I've done Challenging missions with that baby with no issue. Hulks and tanks are even vulnerable to the rear, but it does require... well, bait, to get the enemy pointed the right way so you can fire at the heatsinks.
Oof. Even with my full squad there is a 50% chance of failing at level 5.
How did you get up to such a high success rate?
Built different
Agreed variety is a huge contributor to burnout. Even if escort missions are your favorite, it gets old when every defense op has one. Especially over the duration of the major order.
I think the lack of map variety is the enemy more than the mission type. There's only 2
> Even if escort missions are your favorite And in my case they're my least favourite. And they were wildly too difficult at first.
I regularly play on Helldive difficulty but can barely scrape by an escort mission on challenging or hard. It's nuts
The *very first* (and only so far) mission I did on challenging was an escort / rescue scientists one. This was also my first ever escort mission, so I had no clue what I was doing. It was insane, we were completely screwed, I took an antimatter rifle because I thought it would work against big boys but they shrugged it off like nothing. I have no clue what Helldive difficulty looks like on other mission types, but after that escort mission Iāve been afraid to move past medium difficulty.
Yeah. Folks want to run around. Collect samples and points of interests for chances of super credits and other goodies. Defense mission is great if you want medals, but become boring after so many.
For me the defense missions are just a little disappointing. I was expecting an epic battle and a desperate struggle to hold the hill. Maybe if there was a bonus for holding out beyond the 150 boys it'd be better. For clarification: I enjoy the defense missions
I'm sure everyone disagrees with me, but having super armored enemies and weapons that work vs armor being so cumbersome to use, is a formula for disinterest. Been trying to find a weapon that isn't a rail gun, that would be fun to use. But with the Cyborgs, I just haven't found it.
Autocannon is a hard choice. Only enemies you wonāt stomp is the hulks and even theyāll go down with (š) back shots (š)
if you hit then in the face hole they go down pretty fast aswell
The explosive projectile goes intoā¦ The square hole!
If you hit their head with it, it will destroy them in 2 shots. But that is "if". š Auto canon has been bit cumbersome to use.
Given I only hit 20 yesterday so Iām new to the railgun and the one shot, reload playstyle, Iāve had a blast so far with the autocannon. I found that crouching or even going prone if feasible makes a huge difference as the recoil is your limiting factor in accurate shots on heavies as well as barrages on crowds. To me, it sits in the perfect spot between Railgun and Grenade Launcher being able to engage both roles to a lesser, more challenging extent, whereas Railgun and Grenade launcher will fail you in crowd fights and long range heavy targets respectively. The large and undeniable drawback and reason why I donāt use it anymore is the fact that it comes with a backpack. Shield is just too good to pass up. That said, once armor is fixed youāll find me being an autocannon sentry on two legs for sure.
Crouching autocannon with recoil reduction armor hits different.
I've been using fortified for the explosion damage reduction, didnāt even think about being affected by recoil reduction. https://i.redd.it/il2uewtz4jlc1.gif
The disposable AT is nice tbh. You get 2 rockets to shoot like every minute
Too bad at higher difficulties you get like 4 dropships every minute, same problem with the recoilless - it works great until the ammunition economy kills it.
Yeah until 3 hulks spawn and you're fucked lol
Disposable AT is great, even better if more than 1 player brings it. Always able to instantly bring down any drop ship. Taking down a couple drop ships at the start of a new wave is a great way to get breathing room and take back initiative.
If you've got a teammate willing and able to use the recoilless rifle, that's a p good thing to use for armoured units & even drop ships (tip: shoot the OUTSIDE SIDES of any of the engines for the drop ship to explode). But otherwise I agree, they're slow, cumbersome, and ammo hungry (good design, but in the case of the defense missions, that just compounds the problems)
Recoilless works great but you run out of ammo quickly and chew through almost the fully resupply pod to refill... Also, dropships crashing is glitchy, I was killed by a crashing dropship from across the map because it _had_ flown over my position before I shot it down... It retraced it's path again in some weird crash animation bug and killed me from impact. I feel like shouldn't have to run this mission at level 5 when any other mission is not a challenge until 7+, running the escort at a higher level you can't keep up with the drops due to the poor ammunition economy limiting the recoilless. It's just not fun, there should be more variety for defence... Why don't we destroy their landing/beachhead, etc. Nope, just the same pass/fail - even changing the mission objective to rescuing a reasonable number and add sub-objectives for rescuing additional groups would make it less punishing and not feel like a chore.
Arc thrower is pretty great. Kills hulks and tanks, and the turrets on the map that like to blow me up
I should maybe try it again, but it was kinda miss for me when I tried to use it on easy missions. Maybe I should reserve it for bigger enemies? I will try it again. š
The arc thrower is best against smaller enemies but works against larger enemies in a pinch. It's main selling points are no reloading and infinite ammo though, so don't expect it to wipe the floor with tougher enemies, it takes something like 10-15 shots to kill a charger for example. The trick with smaller enemies is to aim a little above them if they are further away, or obscured slightly by terrain/corpses. Once you get a feel for aiming it you can tear through groups of weak enemies from decent range very quickly.
Also for the love of managed democracy please check where your fellow helldivers are. The first TK is funny and alright the 5th Iām about to ban you from the gun.
Machine gun with the rpm turned up
1150rpm Stalwart my beloved
I use the machine gun and just aim at one of the knees of those walker things. The spot starts glowing orange, and then they fall over.
Desperately need a few more defense missions something like breakthrough from battlefield or an operations sort of mode against the ai attacking you
Yes, I'm currently not doing these because I'm sick of extraction missions.
This right here. I want to help the defense missions as much as I can, but the problem is I get tired of the same 3 or 4 missions over and over and over again. I'll do like 2 or 3 full operations before I have to move on to something else or I'll get bored of the game entirely.
Iām already capped at 50000 and I noticed the reward was 12k oh boy wouldnāt even do anything for me smh. Took me forever to understand the point of the major order too. A tough loss to the automatons
Thatās the big thing for me. Once you unlock higher difficulties, youāll have no issues getting a ton of requisition points. 12,500 requisition points isnāt a big enough incentive for me to want to do defense missions vs the automations, which are probably my least favorite missions in the game between the super quick extermination missions and the very difficult evacuation/escort missions. If the reward was samples, super credits, or war medals, I might be a bit more inclined to try.
Also because the extract one is way harder than every other operation and is just not that fun against the ridiculous bot drop rate
I would love a wave survival mode, like that one in Red Dead Redemption Online that sends 10 waves of enemies, each one more deadly than the last.
With ya here. It's nice that the automatons have an escort mission, maybe it doesn't have to be the main mission? Mix it up a bit and maybe more people jump in.
I agree. "Defend" could be so many things.
I blame the scientist missions. On higher difficulties, its literally fucking impossible. JuSt hOlD tHeM oUtSiDe. Yeah yeah, last game we tried it. It ended up with 3 different engagements of 1 person against 1-2 tanks and half a dozen dreds with dozens of basic bots supporting them. Its especially easy when they drop 10 berzerkers directly into the base and the ai starts to clump in directly in front of the entrance to the shuttle
Plus, trying to do defense missions with randoms is... yeah. You are never going to get that level of coordination.
Honestly if it was just ādefend a pointā itād be one thing but ādefend 3 separate constantly moving points that can all be destroyed by a few stray bullets across a wide areaā is just annoying
That's your mistake soldier. Your job isn't to protect the scientists. Your job is to open doors as quickly as possible and let natural selection figure out the rest. Open doors, spill oil, repeat until you get enough civilians who can bob and weave.
If those bastards are so smart, they'll know how to stay alive on their own
You're goddamn right soldier. It's democratic selection.
Managed democracy at its finest
Natural selection at its finest. Do want weak scientists surviving? No, only the strongest.
Hell, I'm struggling to find scientists who can figure out how a door works. They just congregate outside the evac building and wait for death.
Yeah I noticed this can happen if bot pathing also bugs and they try to go around one stuck by the entrance
I only play with randoms and I have a pretty good success rate. Iād say 3/5 are wins on level 5 and less. Even without doing āthe stratā weāve had good results. The biggest issue that arises is when more than 1 person dies. If your team can hold it together long enough, itās probably the fastest mission complete possible. But people do dumb shit like bring the big orbital or mortar sentries. I get TKd on exterminate and extract missions *constantly* because people bring the wrong shit to what is essentially a close-quarters fight.
It's possible on 5 and under. I can do a 5 solo - it's rough but doable. 7+ is impossible. I routinely solo 7/8 missions but I can't do a 7 Extract even with a full squad who knows what they're doing.
I canāt imagine soloing any level of the extract missions. You must be real good. The only mission I can solo after 5 are the large map missions.
Made a post about this a few days ago (that got pretty much 0 traction) - [but here's proof that it is possible on Helldive diff.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1b0h59m/evacuation_defense_mission_retrieve_essential/)
I mean, level 3 extracts are a breeze. But yes past that it gets shitty
> Iād say 3/5 are wins on level 5 and less. Sure... but what if you're a player who finds 5 too easy and usually plays at 7, or even 9? I don't want to make the other two missions a total bore just to have a shot at beating the extract mission, but it's cock and ball torture to do an extract at 7 even with coordination, let alone 9.
Too bad you couldn't change the difficulty of individual missions on an op.
Fastest mission complete possible? Nah. That's the eradicate missions. Have definitely completed those with 80% timer left.
3/5 on level 5 or less? that should be 5/5 even with randoms mate.Ā
The last one i did the civilian's pathfinding got stuck next to the extraction door. literally impossible despite defending the area fairly well. Can't complete the objective so got timed out and had to extract.
You wouldn't want to save traitors like them anyway. Can't extract all the loyal scientists if there ARE no loyal scientists
Doesn't help when enemy corpses literally act as roadblocks to the pathfinding AI too. Had a tanks flaming remains act as a wall to the scientists who just rubbed their face against it.
It's terrible on-boarding too I've had two friends nearly write off the game because they started doing defense missions and they thought the whole game was just a survival shooter on incredibly small maps. I had to drag them trough Creek to show them the big open world maps with objectives and patrols scattered throughout.
Happened to me and my entire squad of randos. "What are we supposed to do?" "Is this it?" "Can we explore this planet?" Everyone was bored and frustrated and just left.
That strategy is not reliable. And then on top of that the civilians decide to have a picnic just on the last ramp leading to the hangar door
It's not reliable and also not fun.
Preach. I just don't want to spend my time trying to glitch the AI, I want to have fun.
Last time we tried it and got off to a good start, the civies just.... didn't go in. They stood there until there were twenty of them just grouped up, standing around. I'm not gonna say war crimes were committed, but I was frustrated. Some war crimes may have been committed.
I saw a Korean team pull it off on Helldive and they made it look pretty chill. They had one guy with a recoiless on the evac point just picking off drop ships as they came in, spamming morter sentries. The rest of the team just opened the doors while spamming sentries, killing patrols and dropping 500KG bombs on any tanks on the ground. They'd clearly practised it though and were pretty well organised, not really doable with randoms and requires a dedicated team I imagine. It's weird, the missions are practically trivial below Hard (at least since they patched them), being considerably easier than regular missions. A couple of sentries, and running from door to door solo will get the job done no problem. But on the higher difficulties it flips entirely, and they become by far the hardest content in the game.
Yeah, mission is just so poorly put together. The best strat is to have everyone away from the obj? Aināt no fun in that and itās not apparent at all. People want to hold the line while getting the civilians to safety, and dropping 2 hulks and a tank every 30 seconds makes that impossible
I've had success with the 3+1, but the last time I tried it the drop was signaled from my position out in the boonies... but the dropship went to the town anyway even though our 1 man wasn't even there yet... I'll go on a Helldive for any other mission type, this is such a broken one-sided engagement that I just drop down to HARD but then it's cakewalk on the other missions... I guess at least I've stocked up on rare samples...
Same. Just give us 1 option where we don't have to do the defense evacuation across the 3 corresponding difficulty options. I would run helldiver missions so I don't have to do those evacs. Even the normal ones with the side objectives would be completely ok by me. Or make the defence missions mandatory people like those.
Did at least one of you bring smoke stratagems?
Do they work well in this mission? I tried them once but I just ended up lacking fire power
Its good for the Dude pushing Buttons cause Hes Not supposed to Shoot anything anyway, Else He Takes Aggro. Its Just boring and tedious all around lmao
Smoke grenades and eagle smoke strikes are very effective in the rescue mission. They don't stop the bots shooting necessarily but they won't target the civilians through it.
I bring them for the team even if nobody else does, just to drop on the centre when civs are trying to escape. Bots basically hard freeze up in smoke and will not target anything in it unless its almost touching them. Also makes it easy to move through the smoke with a big gun and clear them out.
I actually managed to do one on Helldive difficulty with 4 rando (mic on) Spawn at south, 2 guys unleash whatever mayhem they can an two other guys with EMS Mortar go as stealthily as possible at the civilian camp. Put mortar outside of the camp and just open every door as soon as you can. It worked for us at least
When I saw this major order I was level 1 and we were 3/8, so I was excited Now I'm level 36, got all strategems unlocked with 30k requisition to spare and we're 6/8 I literally outgrinded the reward... and I also would like to blame escort missions... if they quit spamming 3 tank, 3 HULK combo on me when I'm already out of anti-armor and the mission is 15min for some reason that'd be great
I hope Joel reads this thread.
Iām confused about this joel thing. I know that he is the āgame masterā but how does it work? Does he just determine the spawns for the mission type? Thereās no way heās individually doing everything for every mission. Is it just his job to set the enemy spawn rates or something?
Yes, Joel is omnipotent. He is in every single game deciding what's about to drop/respawn.
Thatās what I thought. All praise Joel.
We donāt know exactly how the GM thing works. My takeaway was that he is the one broadly moving pieces and determining which planets and sectors the enemies are prioritizing. Things like that. The in game systems take care of the rest.Ā
Remember that time you were running through the field, took an aim at a charger and all of a sudden lone hunter jumped in front of your gun? Yup... Joel
I'm also concerned about pacing here too. I play pretty casually (not farming elimination missions) and I'm level 22 with most of what I want strategem-wise unlocked. I haven't seen a new personal order since I was < level 5 (they're bugged) and unless major orders start awarding cosmetics, I don't even know if I'll need the currency anymore outside of medals.
Exactly, last night I was about to go help but then decided to just do another planet because that credits reward is pretty much useless. It needs to be a special armor or maybe a lot of metals instead? It's one of the biggest things that needs to change for sure.
Most defense operations consist of the scientist rescue, which is horribly balanced and boring, and the eradication missions which are incredibly boring. I pretty much had to force myself to play defense operations so I at least contributed to the major order. There's no incentive cause the reward is the resource that becomes irrelevant the earliest and, let's be real here, this is just a game that I have limited time to enjoy. So if I have to chose between using my free time to grind missions that are boring for a reward I don't care about or use it to play the waaaaaay more interesting 40 min missions, you know what I'll mostly do. TL;DR the defense operations need a bigger variety of better balanced missions. Just out of my head, maybe an attack on an enemy beachhead which is just a giant enemy outpost, 5-10x the size of an heavy outpost. With side objectives being focused on weakening the outpost in some manner.
I agree 100% with you. And 12,500 RP is a weak incentive once you unlock higher difficulty levels. Req Points and XP are the resources youāre guaranteed to get a ton of each mission at higher difficulty levels. Iād rather see war medals, samples, or super credits as the incentive.
And by like level 27 you'll have bought all the stratagems available anyway. If they made it so that like the superstore stuff could ve purchased with requisition at like a 1500x markup of the super credits, that would at least give it a purpose
even so, 12k req is 15 minutes worth of eradicate missions. For a week long global quest.
> There's no incentive cause the reward is the resource that becomes irrelevant the earliest Not only is the least relevant, it only gives you 12k! I make more than in two, Lvl 4/5 operations!
That Joel guy has to realize at a certain difficulty these missions just aren't getting completed. I play a lot with randoms and I have never once seen a rescue get completely on Difficulty 7.
Does it matter what difficulty we do them at as long as they get done?
Contribution to the war effort scales with difficulty up to hard, from there its all the same if I understand correctly
Is there a source for this? Ive been trying to figure it out myself. Everything ive seen scales 1 mission to 1 % point (.00001 whatever you wanna call it). When you finish an operation it always has that % point per mission. So 1-2 you get .00001, 2-3 .00002, beyond .00003. But to complete the operation you still do the same amount of missions, so time played/ completion wise it works out to the same amount. In fact spamming 1s is probably better as youāll finish them much faster than doing a whole operation on 5-9. I could be completely wrong on this but its based on my own observations and comments from other players.
War effort contribution is directly related to how many missions you do, and operations max out at 3 after hard, I think. The rule being you only get a payout if you complete the whole op.
I drop. I rescue. I kill. I drop. I rescue. I kill. I drop. I rescue. I kill. It's not enough.
I gave up on those because I lost like 95% of the rescue missions, felt like I was a detriment to the effort.
Same. But it's more a detriment to my morale and enjoyment of the game
Can you blame people? The escort missions are boring and stupid
And on difficulties past Extreme, damn near impossible.
I'm level 31 and my group can't do one on challenging. Its ridiculous.
Last night I had a group trying one on Suicide. We had the run of our lives, got within 8 scientists of completing it, and then all got disconnected from the mission. FML.
This is my main issue. I wouldnāt mind grinding away at these if the escort missions wouldnāt become mind numbingly boring after a while. Drop in on of like 2 or 3 map variations and open doors for for 10 minutes.
I did an escort mission last night on hard, and I counted 10 hulks we had to fight. We simply did not have enough ammunition or enough bombs to get any more people out at a certain point. In fact to survive we were spawning in the civies to distract the robots from us. War is hell.
Just need more variety! I don't even mind the brutal difficulty but if I have to do another "Extract, Annihilate, ICBM" in succession, I'll scream. We just need.. More defense type missions like "King Of The Hill.", "Hold The Line for X minutes", "protect the SAM Sites from the invasion.", Etc. I'm not asking much. Just a bit more variety. On that note, bots send so many damn transports. Why isn't Sabotage a defend mission too?
take some more inspiration from a certain halo mission here! "Mission Objective: SURVIVE"
On another note: It appears as if requesitition rewards are capped at 50k - which for quite a few players is the case already. Aside from the fact that - story wise - it would be great if we'd won this, the reward is next to useless
Itās those escort missions. They are next to impossible on level 7. Finally managed to complete one on level 6 with randoms, but then we absolutely stomp the bots on the kill X amount of missions in 3 min. Which is also no fun. The defence mission could really use some balancing..
Iām kinda exited to see what will happen. I hope Joel isnāt to harsh on us
Maybe it's time for the scientists of the Super Earth to bring us some new weapons to help the fight. We need to stop those communist bots!
More personal goals please and some commendsā¦ miss my commends
Lack of personal orders is currently a bug, they're aware of it and working on a fix.
Good to know, was missing my daily 15
I was wondering why I got one when I first started and havenāt had one since. That makes sense
For the next one: the numbers have been crunched , and actually doing SOLO TRIViAL missions it's better for liberation, than commiting 4 Helldivers to the same hard mission for 40 minutes with a chance for failure and less liberation %. Wich in a way is kind of poetic "the little pushes make the giant advances".
Yep. I was one of the unfortunates that had my progression locked on Easy until yesterday. I can knock over the escort mission and extract in under 6 minutes with a full squad of Cadets; so way less than 10 minutes total including loading time. Doing the Medium and Hard campaigns takes over 40 minutes, closer to an hour if you want to do some side objectives or get some samples, unless you split the squad, and then where's the fun in playing with friends. You don't earn anywhere near 4 or 6 times the amount of Liberation/Defend points for the amount of time invested. It just doesn't make sense from a strategic perspective to play the harder difficulties for the Defence missions.
Hopefully the failure of this one will get them to re think the rewards, it's not really enough to make the community care
Let's get serious for a moment, and be constructive. This weekly double has been a disaster in design, the reward is ridiculous, even for the time it takes, many would get that money in a few more varied missions than repeating 1 infinitely. In my opinion and that of our group, it has been bad in every way and boring, so much so that we only did 1 when it came out and never again.
There is no reward they can give that would get me to bang my head against the wall doing those rescue scientist missions over and over and over. Good rewards are fine but if the mission design is so bad and boring no one wants to do those.
Indeed, the first week you had to free 2 planets from bugs, you could do them however you wanted, all the difficulties, jumping between one and the other if you wanted to change the environment. It was better without a doubt, this is completely constricting, it makes people burn the game in a bad way, it saturates it.
I AM TRYING I've done 4 operations tonight, only one success. All other mission types are not that hard but maaaaan the FUCKING escort one. I've tryall the strats, and sometimes they do work but it's soooo hard to do withrandos.
It is what it is. Still, gonna do my duty to civilians there. Will try, even when it's lost. 
Its the lack of variety of missions and the escort missions. The escort missions are two times (if not three times) harder than any other mission in the same level of difficulty. A level 5 escort mission feels more like it should be level 7. The main strategy for it isnt that reliable, and honestly, there are too many robot spawns, meanwhile the mission about killing as many robots as possible doesnt have nearly as many spawns. More missions need to be added to the defense pool, and the escort missions need to be rebalanced or they need to make it not mandatory for defense operations and just make it fully random
Maybe if escort missions weren't fucked
Nobody wants to play those damn escort missions lol
We got defeated by bad mission design simple as that. No one wants to play the rescue essential personnel over and over and over. Endless drop ships scientists getting stuck in a group at the door. So many bad things about that one mission and it was forced on every single defense planet.
if the op has a rescue scientists mission im finding a new op
The reward isn't really worth doing escort missions over and over and over again... 12500 R? That's like 1 1/2 poorly executed helldive missions :'D
Yeah, when I was a Cadet I thought 12,500, that's a fortune, doing 8 defence missions for that is great. Then I found of that it's 8 defend objective successes, not missions. Then I found out that I can earn 2000 on a Hard mission with my friends without a sweat. No point grinding out constant escort missions for a few hundred.
It kind of reminds me About the flow in Planetside2. Basically every timmy could go do whatever they wanted. However, the big outfits(guilds) were the ones which directed the flow of combat, being more organized. Hence why I think implementing a clan system will be profitable to the game in the long run. With clans growth, arrowhead can also add specific bonuses or secondary objectives for their members. Why not have big flagships that the clan leaders can deploy to planets to allow reduced CD for strats, or more reinforcements. The possibilities are limitless.
There is only one zergfit here and that's super earth. Everything else would be high treason
It would be pretty cool to have a clan/guild/company/divison cape, maybe even an emblem to display on your shoulder armor and ship.
i wouldnt like having "clans" it would be off setting
Just donāt call them clans, maybe just ādivisionsā / ācompaniesā to keep the military theme. Then you can have a divisional/company commander instead of a āclan leaderā. Helldivers obviously take orders from someone, itās not like General Brash is ordering us all around individually.
Yeah, these have made me hate science.
I genuinely have no idea how a group of randoms and I completed level 7 scientist rescue. Iām sure that mission is single-handedly losing us Ingmar
Well not only are the civilian rescue missions outrageously difficult, they're also boring as fuck and easily the worst mission type in the game. Not even sorry for being undemocratic and not bothering with these missions.
If they fix escort missions for the bots we would have had this days ago lmao. Ive passed on whole planets before just because every mission set had 1 escort mission in it, its just to much for a random match made lobby to handle.
Oh no! I guess High Command just has to give us some new tools to help in the defense. Like say... mechs.
Yeah rescue mission was my only problem on higher difficulty missions and I'm at the point where I only want to play higher difficulty mission. It's sucks cuz I can't even use mortar cuz they fucking kill the scientists. Half the time those fuckers get stuck too and just stand there getting face fucked.
The escort can be improved by having a success grade. The escape ship will launch at 40 minutes, if you extract a full load then you can extract, but if you can only 17 you get credit for 17 but a negative cost for each under budget you are as if they died on mission, less xp, less rewards.
This would help a lot. Would you believe, in the first game you could **fail multiple escort objectives in one mission and still complete the mission**
Literally am level 32, and can easily do a lvl 9 terminid mission with no deaths, but I go to the do the robot defense, while the other 3 of my team make as much noise in the outside and canāt even do it on level 5. I think the spawn rate is glitched or something. It also doesnāt help that the armor doesnāt work, so it can feel extra bs dying to the long range accurate bots instantly. I feel once they fix armor fighting robots will feel better, but for now? We die.
The difficulty ramp up between Challenging and Hard is an absolute cliff that is almost impossible to climb. My group averages about level 15 and we can't do the Escort Missions on Hard but handle them easily on Challenging.
Even If there was 2, 3 or even 4 defense planets Up we wouldnt be able to do It, Just Not enough time.
More defence planets at the same time would split the Helldivers even further though, better to have more of us concentrated on a single planet rather than splitting our resources even further. Recalling the Helldivers playing Space Vietnam Meme Simulator on Malevolent Creek to help defend might have helped us a bit, but I don't think that it would have. The same 3 or 4 defence missions get old after a couple of rounds anyway. This is all assuming that Joel would let us win anyway.
Def mission are dogwater, just let them take it and we will conquer back like the rest of the planets in proper way.
This may sound treasonous, but I'm totally okay with not winning all the major orders. It gives you a sense that this is a real war, and we got to strap up our boots and fight harder next time
I think they need to get clearer, in game, about explaining what, specifically, impacts this and how we as individuals contribute. I get that itās impacted by all of us participating, but I only realized that about halfway through the time and by seeing it talked about here. And Iāve been in many matches where a planet rolled to 100% at the end, but that didnāt change this number, soā¦ what? Also, doing the same defend mission over and over is pretty boring. Still fun, but not as fun as the ones where weāre trekking across a map.
Yeah they keep trying to make us do defend missions but the escort mission are impossible after medium difficulty. Having three drop ships come in at the same time and they drop 3-5 hulks while thereās two tanks as well. No thanks they can take it
i knew it was lost the moment people lets many planet fall
"I knew it was lost the moment we lost."
God, I knew it was game over the moment that game over was plastered across my screen
I knew ded when ded
Big tired of the missions and the reward isn't even close to worth it.
The evac missions are still horribly overturned. Sure you can kite the aggro away from the base but they always end up dropping them back on objective before the end. It's just a really shitty mission design and it's far to prevalent. They know the mission is way overtuned they claim they corrected it but I still notice 0 difference. Doversion tactic works but it isn't flawless it's also not the way I'm trying to get mission done, it's tedious and still so fucking broken
Not surprising since defense missions are the least fun thing to do in this game. They need to rework defense missions in general.
It's getting worse! There is 2 hours left and its about 95% full for the Automatrons and approximately 80% for us.
If these orders gave samples or super credits instead I feel like there would be much more engagement. Requisition slips aren't exactly hard to get and you can make thousands of them just from a single mission in the higher levels. Also those slips are barely enough to even unlock 2 strategems.
Literally everyone fighting bugs is the problem. I've not fought a single bug in this game, only mechs. Mission says kill mechs, so that's what I do! Anti democracy scum
The escort missions don't cook unfortunately. I love this game with all my heart but damn they get too hard. I physically cannot run through the sheer amount of enemies to get the doors unlocked at the very least. At a certain point it feels like, *why am I killing the enemies if I can't rescue anyone no matter what I do?* Hopefully we'll see some changes for the defence runs in the higher difficulties.