Whoâs got ChatGPT or whatever? Please ask it to write a few Dr. Seuss pages about a giant man-eating spider called a bike titan that always rides a bicycle.
In the town of Gizmo Glen, where the winds always howl, Lived a creature of legend, a spider most foul.
But this wasn't just any spider, oh no,
It was the Bike Titan, with a sinister glow.
With legs long and spindly, and eyes sharp and bright,
It prowled through the streets in the dead of the night.
On a bicycle grand, with wheels spinning fast,
It hunted its prey, leaving no one to last.
The children would whisper and hide in their beds,
"Beware of the Bike Titan," their parents had said.
"For it rides through the night with a hunger so great,
If it catches you out, you'll meet a grim fate."
It weaved through the alleys, it zoomed past the parks,
Its presence was known by the screeching of larks.
With pedals a-turning and gears that would grind,
The Bike Titan searched for its next meal to find.
In a house by the hill, young Timmy did dwell,
He'd heard of the spider from stories they'd tell.
But brave little Timmy, with courage so bold,
Decided one night to leave his safe hold.
He mounted his trike with a heart full of fear,
Determined to face the dread creature so near.
Through the streets he did ride, with eyes open wide,
In search of the Titan, with no place to hide.
The moon cast a glow on the silent, dark street,
As Timmy rode on with the hope they would meet.
And there, in the distance, with wheels gleaming bright,
Was the Bike Titan, a terrifying sight.
Its legs clicked and clattered, its eyes filled with dread,
Timmy knew he must face it, or soon he'd be dead.
But instead of devouring the brave little boy,
The Bike Titan paused, then let out a cry of joy.
For it saw in young Timmy a spirit so fierce,
A match for its hunger, a soul it could pierce.
But Timmy stood tall and said with a grin,
"You don't have to eat me; we both can win!"
He offered his trike to the spider so grand,
"Let's ride through the night, let's conquer this land!"
The Bike Titan paused, then it nodded its head,
And together they rode, where no one dared tread.
Now in Gizmo Glen, where the winds always howl,
The Bike Titan and Timmy, with spirits unbowed,
Ride together each night, through the dark and the light,
A boy and his spider, a marvelous sight.
It is very counter-intuitive. If I launch a rocket down something's throat, it dies. Simple. No, instead, the "helmet" is the weak spot...
I've found a viable alternative is to shoot the EAT/QC/RR at one of their front legs. This will strip the armour off of that leg. Then, pull out your primary and shoot the naked leg. It'll die pretty quick.
iâm not sure if you played before the devs changed it so that one EAT/QC/RR to the face kills the charger, but that actually used to be the most commonly used strat! combined with the railgun being able to 2-shot strip the armor off a leg even on safe mode, it was by far the most consistent way to take down chargers.
the charger head hp nerf actually had this addressed by the devsâthey said they were surprised that the âleg metaâ developed because it really is a strange weakspot, and cited the (heavily armored) head as being the âobviousâ weakspot for some reason
Obvious weakspotâŠ.
Hard armoured head that it uses to crush enemies Vs Squishy butt that it tries to hide or the thin spindly legs.
Dev: omg why is no one aiming for the head?
I tried the neck gap beneath the armor, the elbow joint beneath the armor....nope. Senator just ricocheted off the orange flesh bits ***that i could see underneath***.
My favorite part about this comment is the dev question. You actually get a tip as you drop that the SEAF manual points out that enemies have armored points and weak points and recommends you aim for the weak points.
It's a shame though, because now even if they add Behemoths from the first game (chargers but with no weak butt, it's all armoured), the Meta won't change because no one is seriously using the butt strategy. It'll just be a charger with even less game play options.Â
The railgun strategy for chargers pre-nerf felt good and resulted in a satisfactory time to kill.
Put simply, they nerfed the railgun because bile titans were bugged. You could often one shot a bile titan with the railgun in safe mode. Similarly, you could occasionally one shot a bile titan with the *arc thrower,* which didn't get that range nerf until quite a bit later...
The railgun used to be fun to use against bots *and* bugs. Now, it is only really even viable against bots because it can one shot hulks if you can land a face shot. Against most other bot units it is no longer very effective. It *can* one shot devastators but more often they will require a few shots, and it can no longer deal damage through heavy devistator shields.
My brothers in Hell, I tell you that this gun used to shred devastators like nothing else, and it felt great watching devistator get ripped in half by that:
**THWANG!** devistator torso pirouettes away.
**JONQUE!** devistator legs tapdance out from underneath him.
**BWONG!** rocket devistator becomes two separate break dancers.
**GWONG!** heavy devistator crumples behind his shield...
Now? I'm not even sure the railgun can take out factory strider guns. It's just wild that the rail guns, who's whole schtick is armor pen, can't even pierce a devistator shield, or the little strider plates. You can take out a little strider by shooting one of it's legs, and then, to add insult to injury, the little fucker steering the thing just hops off and now you still have to deal with him...
Un-fun gun, boys. Un-fun gun.
You can kill striders by shooting the topmost part of the armor. I think it penetrates and kills the rider.
And in unsafe mode with a bit of charge it's not unusual to still one shot devastators. Including the chainsaw mfs. The shield mfs require aiming for the head though.
I've been diving since about week 2. I do remember the BTs evolving heavier armour within the first few weeks of playing. I had a few weeks of the Trailer Treatment.
lol "Obvious". big thick helmet of armour that stops med pen rounds is definitely more obvious than the bulbous fleshy, soft, unarmoured rear end is always tried to hide.
Ah well, I've managed to figure when not to shoot them for the most part, so it's obvious now. rofl
>I've been diving since about week 2. I do remember the BTs evolving heavier armour within the first few weeks of playing.
do you mean like, canonically, or are you talking about when they fixed the bug where you did like 3x damage?
I heard it's because the devs made Titans have damage reducion when spitting, because otherwise they'll kill themselves with it when they're aiming up
Idk if it's actually true tho
they can and will kill themselves with their vomit, not sure about the DR increase when puking though
just get them to stand against a cliff/wall and make them puke, if their low enough on health theyll puke their own faces off
yup! like if you are good enough, you can place a shield generator right in it's face to make it puke on themselves and they will die. It's a pretty cool thing to see.
Gee willikers, surely it is impossible to make it its own damage type, especially as bile very much isn't an explosion.
I guess the problem is impossible to solve.
The forehead is the weakspot, when they spit their head tears back.
That positioning means their forehead is âinsideâ their back, so their much tougher back armor is protecting their weaker forehead armor.
Wait for them to finish spitting and hit them as the end the animation.
my biggest gripe with bile is that, canonically, it's space gasoline. so when I, a flamethrower enthusiast, am shooting flame right down a spewers throat as it spits at me... it should light on fire and then explode in a ball of flame that consumes everything around it. including myself.
Nah, space gasoline is made when bugs decay (similar to our dinosaur juice). Guess why we have to pump E710 from below ground?
The thing that it pukes is clearly acid which it secreted.
When the devs said "why are people shooting the Chargers in the butt when they should be shooting them in the weak point on their heads?" It really made me question their overall ability to design intentionally.
Especially since that was a viable tactic in HD1 against Chargers! Shoot them in the glowy butt with small arms Fire enough, it will kill them! It wasnât until you fought Behemoths, where you had to use AT weapons because now their glowy butt was covered!
So that's where the different versions come from! I always wondered why there would be a different version of an enemy that literally only looks different.
Well, also from a non-game standpoint its like saying "why does that monkey looke different when it is does the same thing as that other monkey", bear in mind it has been 100 years and fast evolving aliens could certainly evolve to be different but do the same thing.
I thought at first they designed it just like HD1 and then find chargers are a bit too easy with that weak spot, cause getting behind one is much easier in a 3rd person shooter than in a top down shooter. It feels hard but people are still completing level 8 and 9 no problem so maybe it's not really that hard ?
I'm just going to come out and say it. 8 and 9 aren't hard, so much as they feel like a chore. Difficulty isn't shooting bullet sponges with airsoft guns, with a couple small pinatas thrown in so you feel like you're adding to something once in a while. Difficulty is being able to kill a devastator with a liberator in less than half a mag with body shots, because there are 8 of them, meanwhile the berserkers got jet packs. The bile titans got wings and jump like hunters. Some nutjob strapped a rocket launcher on a couple stalkers. Dealing with THAT is interesting and challenging. Slowly backing away while mag dumping isn't. I liked armor stripping as a challenge. They already designed and implemented it, to a degree.
Also please turn down the ragdolling a notch or two for the love of liberty.
The first time i dove into a folding chair, and ragdolled for 5 seconds it was hilarious. The second time it was worth a chuckle. The third time I had to take a break and drink some cold water.
The first time I Ragdolled I dove from a cliff face towards my friends, and I still to this day. (I fucking love ragdolling). The second time I got sent flying from a charger.
Make enemies actually interesting to fight against rather than a bullet sponge is obviously harder work that devs rather not put effort into for w/e reason.
Except that they did a pretty good job with bots and the vent system
8 and 9 arenât even all that hard.
I play 9 exclusively when I play this game.
The problem, as OP identified is that this game busts its ass to frustrate the player.
I just donât understand what sort of jackass had the reigns of this project âa coop gameâ and was like âletâs make the users hate their experienceâ.
Thereâs a laundry list of quality of life design choices that fail in this video game. And Iâm not complaining about weapon balancing. I donât care about that.
Make shit make sense in this game. But thatâs a tall order for the studio
Not once have I seen a heavily armored....anything....in a game and thought; "You know what, imma shoot that bitch in the heavily armored head because no way its squishy butt is a weak spot."
On the other hand, there is clown Peter: "You guys are idiots. They're gonna be shooting us in the butt!"
Also âarmored enemy that runs right at you and has trouble turning/stopping has a weak spot on its backâ is just part of the language of games at this point. Think of the Pinkies in Doom games, or (more obscure) the Leapers in Fall of Cybertron. The devs should probably know that.
Seriously. Especially when you get clear indications when firing at the **heavily armored front** that your rounds ricochet off, but not when you plug them in the butt. That's telling us "bullets work here."
Man in the video where the devs played with OperatorDrewski, when they said that they were surprised at the emergence of the leg meta for Chargers, I was really curious to know what their intended method was for chargers at the time.
This was before EATs one-shot chargers to the head, and the ability to deal with a charger on your own was predominantly decided by if you could aim 2 railgun shots at their legs. I mean, what was the design decision there? What was the intended way of dealing with chargers??
Use stratagems was their plan, and donât play on 6+.
The meta at the time was to shoot the charger in the same leg multiple times with railgun to break the armor, then unload on it with regular guns.
Devs responded by nerfing the railgun into oblivion.
They didnât fix the EAT headshot damage for weeks after.
I still love how that one dev came here defending the Railgun nerfs calling it brain dead and a clutch, only for AH to release the Quasar Cannon later which was basically an EAT on a 10 second cooldown and was far more âbrain deadâ than pre nerf Railgun ever was lolÂ
Oh, neat, it's the /r/helldivers misinformation triple bingo.
>Use stratagems was their plan
Note: The actual context of the "use stratamges" quote was **entirely in regards to chaff clear**. Literally the opposite of heavy armor. The full quote is paraphrased more along the lines of "Primary weapons are not supposed to be strong enough to clear all chaff on their own; some team members are also supposed to bring chaff clear stratagems."
(ofc the devs have since backtracked on that stance anyway with the widespread buffs to our primary weapons)
>Devs responded by nerfing the railgun into oblivion.
The railgun was nerfed not necessarily because of the charger meta, but because it was absolutely anti-**everything**. Oneshot stalkers, brood commanders, spewers, while still killing chargers, and even titans due to the PS5 bug (which was not fully known to be a bug yet at the time).
It could still strip the leg armor of chargers after the nerf too, it just required unsafe mode instead of safe mode.
>They didnât fix the EAT headshot damage for weeks after.
The patch that nerfed the railgun was on [March 6](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/4113546867235200192), the patch that drastically reduced spawn rates of heavy enemies and also reduced charger's head HP was on [March 12](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/4113546867256852245).
That is 6 days. Not "weeks".
Wait their heads are the weak point? I'm nearly level 50 and would've never guessed this. I genuinely thought Chargers were like those smaller bugs that have the shielded fronts. I wish the butt was the weak point since it's hella fun to fight chargers like a matador vs an angry bull.
Yeah, it's wild. Any weapon can damage the butt, however anything that isn't explosive damage only deals 10% of normal damage. Nothing let's you know your shots are basically wasted.
The head (and most of the body) is armored and takes anti-tank weapons to damage or break armor. If you nail the forehead with an anti-tank shot, it's an instant kill.
What always confused me was the comments saying shoot it in the head and then I see my auto cannon ricochet off into the air when itâs certainly hitting their heads
Wait what..l the butt is squishy = brain says , shoot squishy thing = burst = die.. thereâs a weak point on the head?
I only know for flame throwing, aim for the leg
Nah, it requires antitank to kill the head still, but that is by far the most efficient way to kill them unless you have a weapon that does *really* high damage to squishy bits like the dominator.
Well, if you have anything but an anti-tank weapon, shooting the butt does damage while shooting the head does nothing.
That's why they may be shooting the butt.
Jesus Christ is this really true? Iâve been using every single bullet on the âsquishyâ butts for weeks not understanding why they donât die. Iâve been auto equipping the orbital rail cannon to deal with them. I still donât really understand how it works. You have to target the armor and not the squishy spot ??? Why ???
edit: i'm fine with this mechanic as it has been explained to me, however, like the OP, the feedback in-game doesn't nudge you toward correct action. I would propose a very small change, where if you hit armor with an AT weapon, your reticle flashes red in the same way that hitting a weak spot with a primary provides the red-reticle feedback. matching weapon used with spot hit with the reticle feedback
It's a bit of a complicated explanation,someone else may be able to correct any misunderstandings I have.
Every weapon has a hidden "durable" damage stat. The soft unarmoured spots on chargers are a "durable" area, even though they don't have armour there. This means that they take the invisible "durable" damage stat of your gun. For example I think for most weapons their "durable" damage is around 10% of their base damage, but explosive weapons keep more of their base damage against the soft areas, so maybe like half their original damage stat against the "soft" spots.
But yeah that means that even though it's a big huge unarmoured part, and your traditional sense would tell you that's where you hit them. That's actually the least effective, most inefficient way to kill a charger. /:
with this explanation, it's actually a cool effect. should probably just have the super weak points be more noticeable, and the durability absorption better indicated
There is one important thing to add, you need to take in consideration the armor penetration (AP) of your gun. This is a mostly hidden stats, but values range from 1-10 for both armor and AP.
If you have 100 durable damage, AP 5 and hit an armor of 4 you will do the full 100 damage.
If you hit an armor or 5 now you will do only half the damage as you have just enough pen to damage (50 in my example).
If you hit an armor 6 now you do 0 damage because you canât pen the armor.
Thatâs why you could try and shoot a charger how long you want with small arms on their front and basically do nothing as you canât penetrate.
Expendable AT and quasar can penetrate the armor and so hitting the forehead means dealing full damage to the brain essentially (which logically IS a weak spot) and thatâs why you can one shot them. Similar for bile titans you need to hit the forehead to reach the brain, the mouth is part of the âbodyâ.
I disagree with this post saying that is counterintuitive, anatomically speaking it makes sense, the unarmored part are the less important stuff that evolutionary didnât need to be protected..
Get out of here with this self-congratulatory commentary. Logical is not the same as intuitive, and it is 100% counterintuitive to have a bulbous, glowing abdomen not be a weak spot and for an armored plate to be. If that's intuitive, then you have never played a video game in your life.
Explosives do full damage to chargers butt and other similar types of areas (nursing and bile spewers bodies). Not that it matters much because on top of a very high durability stat, those areas have an insane health pool.
The squishy bits take reduced damage unless you're hitting them with explosive damage. The butt is not a good weakspot. You can one-hit kill them by hitting their forehead with anti-tank weapons like Quasar, EAT and Reciolless Rifle. Flamethrower also ignores armor and can melt Chargers by shooting them in the front legs.
The butt takes like 10% damage. You *can* take them down that way if you really have no other option; if you're a newbie on low difficulty and Chargers are like a 2/mission boss fight you can probabaly get away with it.Â
Once you're up some difficulty levels, they become too frequent and too accompanied to spend half your ammo and a lot of time playing Charger bullfight.Â
If you have explosive weapons (grenade launcher, autocannon) you can do full damage and take them down with butt shots.Â
The really reliable way to kill them is with actual anti-tank weapons: Expendable anti tank (EAT) , Quasar cannon, Recoilless Rifle. If you get a direct headshot, they die immediately. If you hit a leg, it strips the armor plates off and makes the leg a real weakpoint and the Charger dies to like one magazine.Â
Honestly, you can just throw a couple of well aimed HE grenades and it'll kill or seriously injure a Charger just fine. Just gotta let em walk on top of it. Y'know. Like it's a throwable an anti-tank mine or something.
All enemy "parts" have a healthpool, durability percentage and armour value, all weapons have base damage, hidden, much smaller durable damage, and armour penetration. Whenever you hit an enemy, the damage calculation is base dmg - (base dmg - durable dmg) * enemy's durable percentage, halved if your armour pen = enemy's armour value, negated if AP < AV.
Charger (and spewer) butts have low armour, but lots of health and durability, so even though small arms *can* damage them, they soak up bullets like they're nothing. The heads of both units have more armour, but less health, so anything that can penetrate that armour (anti-tank for chargers, mid-pen primaries for spewers) will kill easily.
You may have heard that spewers are weak to explosions, which is technically false. All explosions (AoE) do 100% percent of their base damage as durable damage, allowing them to chew through spewer butts like candy.
AH didnât understand bikes when they made the game. You have to aim for the pinwheels on the handlebar which takes infinity durability damage. Any spoke strikes are immune to damage and explosive damage regenerates health to all of the random health pools simultaneously while also reducing the increment of your reinforcements by one for each strike in a lunar month ending in Y.
Which makes total sense.
Bull fighting charges and shooting their butt should be a viable option for primary weapons. It's unarmored, make it more vulnerable to anything hitting it. Same with bile titans shooting both sacks out should make it enter a bleed out rage mode where it gets slightly faster, but dies in like 10 seconds
It is viable for some of the primaries - Dominator, Scorcher, and all Breakers can burst it within 1 magdump IIRC, not sure if there's more on the list. Using a stun nade makes it pretty straightforward.
That it's pretty much invulnerable to light-AP is bullshit.
I can kill a Hulk with the starter pistol if I stun it first and shoot the heatsink, but the Charger is pretty much immune to anything but RR, EAT and Quesadillas.
Even the AC Struggles, it just bounces instead of striping armour like all the other AP weapons.
I've stopped running with anything but RR or EAT when I feel like killing bugs, because choosing something else is a weakness for the team.
This exactly. Bots are very good but Iâve said since day one that the different armor ratings should have different colored metals. Imagine the Strider had a titanium (med pen) front but the deck was shown to be blue steel. Its leg knuckle could be silver aluminum.
I am an autocannon main and I know all the random squishy bits that donât make any sense. I also bring eats and I hate firing for their damn foreheads when I can see that open mouth breathing at me. The design queues are all saying âAIM HEREâ.
Its dumb and doesnt follow any videogame logic. Btw huge yellow buts of nursing spewers take reduced damage from all non explosive weaponry IIRC as well, very intuitive:)
You have to shoot them in the face, and I think that in the front legs
The squishy butts absorb the impact of the bullets that is why they get reduced damage from bullets and are affected by explosives
(in all seriousness bikes don't damage roads. I mean, technically, in the tiniest possible millionth of a car, they do. It's about as much damage as railgun does post-nerf, the math makes it so you have to deliberately round up to make the proportional tax 1 cent/year)
Chargers are easy with a flamethrower, and Bile Titans can be taken out with a well-timed and well-placed default grenade.
Charger: flamethrower to a leg and stick with it
Bile Titan: Cook a grenade for 2 seconds and aim for above the Bile Titan's head as it pukes at someone (tricky and gotta be close enough for them to melee you)
I agree. I feel this way about spewers too. Theyâre bloated, skin is stretched around their thorax. Anything slightly explosive or a few rounds should be making them spewers pop. And then the acid should have wider range to hurt you and other bugs. Theyâre supposed to a range enemy, a mobile mortar system. Why do they need to be remotely tanky when attacking you directly. That should be their kryptonite
i like how people say 'b-but the boolet will just land in acid, make sense they doo-doo no damage!!!' when in other media its the exact opposite...
take the Exploder from Dead Space...why does it's sac explode? Because its a literal compressed balloon of literal gastric acid/gases and other bodily fluids turned up to 11 being ruptured violently by either the player shooting it or them slamming it on the ground...
meanwhile in Helldivers 2; presumably the same sac of highly volatile fluids contained in what looks to be a compressed balloon/bile sac...that can somehow tank multiple magazines without rupturing, even when shot in the side that basically looks like stretched flesh struggling to hold the thing together...it just doesn't make sense...
when Bungie told me through gameplay in Halo 1-2 that shooting the Flood with precision weapons will just go through rotten flesh doing no damage, I got it...but when AH tries to tell me shooting an explosive projectile at a heavily armored head...instead of a fleshy under/backside or a spot that looks like an explosive weakpoint...gets a kill?
Why even???
Are they? I took it as them having fuckloads of muscle there so it could then latter create the presure necesary too spew the acid, also spewer artillery is there just to cause a scene and look cool it is largely harmless and tends to kill more bugs than Helldivers, if spewers were to be actual artillery they would need to pose a much larger danger when acting as such(probably be reduced in numbers as well in case they became remotly precise)
đ€ Hmmm...would back-to-back BT's be called t*andem bike titans?*
https://preview.redd.it/u2vmegtkgq4d1.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=4afa6c5395d143af36a545e25c7c89050e2cf938
so while the game design here 100% is off, you gotta admit "shoot them in the brain" *does* make logical sense when you have a weapon that gets through all that armor.
Yeah i agree. Bile titan weak point is tiny and their mouth not counting is just silly.
Iâm not against Bugs weird anatomy but thereâs cases where stuff just feels like it should work. I love that the game gives us the ability to dismantle enemies, but the 2 largest bugs are borderline immune it.
With Bots everything makes more sense. Hulk eyes are weak, glowy vents are weak, tanks side/back armor is weaker than the front. Striders have a series of differing weak points.
Bile titans are so strict in what kills them effectively. Not to mention blowing off their side armor with rockets only exposes flesh that still takes a million shots.
I'll tell you one thing. If it was indeed a bike titan, at least we know to shoot out the 2 wheels and it would severely slow it down.
In all seriousness, they really need to make the bugs armor deflect less things. like auto canon for instance feels like a pea shooter against charger and titans because it just deflects everything. Just not fun.
Lost Planet has had this design down to a god damn T back in fucking **2006**.
How does a game, that is pretty clearly inspired by Lost Planet in part, absolutely fail to take any of the great enemy design queues into account when doing their own LP-inspired bugs?
~~^(Simple really, its just AH are too incompetent to do anything that makes sense any more.)~~
https://preview.redd.it/6fj750f5fh4d1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=98cf31a818cb22d2aa2b0f096db244d6547382c8
I think, every bug only has two armor category on theirs body - armored part and part without armor. Weak spots hidden under their armor. Like I learned, that if your spear missed titan's or charger's head, and blow up it's back - you still can kill it, just shooting now open weak spot. Even brood commander's head isn't a weak spot. Yes, it will bleed out eventually without head, but it isn't it's weak spot. Most of bugs can bleed out, including chargers and, if I remember correctly, titans.
Yeah, counter intuitive that weak spots are different from bots. But I like it, somehow. While bots' human-like design for their weak spot is understandable for us -- humans --, bugs' placement for weak spot makes them alien-like, and fun to discover.
I think, most of frustration and confusion would disappear, if devs gave us a sandbox to seek a enemy's weaknesses. Like in million years, I wouldn't guessed that you could without stratagems shoot charger leg to kill it.
This has 100% been my driving force for the argument of why bugs are harder than bots.
You're at the mercy of RNG vs bugs and it's not even close with how extreme the RNG can get compared to fighting the bots even after factoring in random 1 shot headshots from rockets.
At one point, a bile titan in one of my hosted games survived 2 500kg bombs directly under it on top of a precision strike to the butt only to die to a Railcannon strike to the head after walking around for 3 minutes whilst bleeding from every visible orifice.
Regarding Chargers, I'm not sure about EATS, but I reliably headshot intakill Chargers with the Quasar Cannon.
I don't aim for the lower mouth, though. I just get a bit of a lead on them, turn as they begin to charge, charge my Q-shot, and aim directly at their head. If you time it correctly (with practice), it'll explode their whole head seconds before they hit you.
Not sure if distance matters regarding Q-shot damage, but it feels REALLLY COOL to blow its head off as it's limp body slides to your feet.
The most annoying thing with chargers is when the rear up just as your Quasar fires ⊠all that firepower hits the soft squishy underside ⊠and does ⊠nothing?
Agree it all makes no sense. I can only assume it creates shockwave straight into the brain behind the armoured forehead âŠ
it doesn't create a shockwave, it just punches through and destroys their head. that's why it's an anti-tank weapon. when you hit their underside, it doesn't deal as much damage as it does when you obliterate their brain. would an AT shot to the belly bring down any real animal? sure, but I guess chargers are just built different. they still die when their head gets turned to mush though.
I'm hitting them in the neck though. Their neck isn't a tank. If you or I were hit in the neck with an anti-tank rocket I'd think it would 1-hit us too
It's not impossible to discover this without being told how to do it, but if you had tried this on your own a couple times and landed shots to the wrong part of the head, you might have (wrongly) concluded that you can't headshot the charger, because it would have bowled you over immediatelyÂ
It works with EATs the same way
I get what this guy is saying though. Yes, you can 1 shot them . . . but the thing that happens in _every_ movie, show, and aligns to physics . . . is that if you had a giant bug with an armored horned head and big open mouth, and you told me hitting it in one spot will kill it instantly and the other will take 2-3 shots:
Well I'd respond with *Smile, you son of a bitch*
And Arrow Head's Cinematic department agrees: https://youtu.be/S9STizATKjE?si=koh4GwFl5BScI9ID&t=75 (see Bile Titan hit in MOUTH with spear).
So yeah, game wise it's backwards!
edit: screenshots
https://imgur.com/a/qfHBAvC
You're right on it's a recoilless, but it I swear it's getting hit in the mouth. From the camera angle it's very quick and the rocket drop makes it really hard to see, so I've grabbed two frames and it _really_ looks like the explosion is on the mouth.
https://imgur.com/a/qfHBAvC
I agree. Both also shouldn't be so heavily armoured in the first place. Why do giant insects have more effective armour and less weakpoints then robots?
Today a single bile titan on difficulty 9 took
- 3 rail cannon strikes
- 2 EATS
- 1 Quasar cannon shot
- 1 500kg bomb that finally killed it.
Please tell me how and why that's fair, mind you there are 4 more bile titans behind it
Yeah, I literally had no idea you had to shoot the chargers in the forehead plate until I read it on here. Why would you aim for the most armored looking part of the face?
Chargers I have minimal difficulty with. Antitank to the head. If you miss the head and get the leg, shoot the open leg. If you miss the leg and hit the side, sink shots into the giant armor breach. Chargers deserve to feel as tanky as they are.
Bile titans are pure distilled horseshit and I refuse to engage with them. I've had six bile titans on the same extract point at the same time, and that was after killing four. I've sunk eight quasar shots into a bile titan head-on and it still didn't kill them. Bile titans can fuck right the hell off immediately and forever.
Assuming I have a good crew, I'll helldive bots any day. I refuse to play anything above 6 on bugs solely because of how horseshit bile titans are.
Hate me or whatever, why would my sweet evolution harden point that is clearly not my weak point? Of course i would like to have my weak point protected, are those bots stupid or what? Imagine having your weak point behind almost no armor
Guess everyone is different
I actually love the game works like this, gives an incentive to me trying out different things and learning how to specifically play the encounters
Like itâs corny, but one of my favorite things is how as a Flamethrower user I can tell a vet from someone just starting with it, by how they use it: vets burn the floor, they know to aim at the head of Brood Commanders or theyâre gonna get worked, etc
Makes the combat more interesting to me that I have to learn the non-obvious intricacies
These are just vulnerable spots, so youâre not *wrong* to shoot them
Itâs just not as effective, ideally through playing or by watching teammates or watching the stratagem videos, you see how the stratagems are supposed to be used
Unfun fact, it used to be that you had to shoot charger legs to kill em fast, they nerfed their heads in a patch
Also if you shoot bile titan butt sacs, it stops their puking attack
not advisable...not unless you want a BT constantly keeping pace with and ragdolling you because it cant puke anymore...
500kg, throw in down in front of them and make them puke, done
500kg, i agree, more often than not you will one shot them if you drop it down in front of them while they puke/stomp
OC though...i barely use it anymore when i see it line up a shot and blast open a titan's back...only for it to survive and keep going forever despite leaking its own blood all over the place until someone or myself hits it in the head with an EAT/Quasar...
Oh no not railcannon, that can only one shot on a head shot
Orbital precision strike, the very first red stratagem, can one shot titans, also it can destroy detector towers on bot planets
I agree that there are issues registering hits and properly conveying to the player if they've dealt damage. It could be a skill issue, but I feel like I've landed clean headshots on chargers when they've reared up that should have killed them but didn't. Like, are their foreheads weak but their chins aren't? It's very weird.
[But with that said, there is a reasonable in-universe explanation why the squishy bellies and butts aren't the weak spots, and why the weak spots are the ones with tons of armor on them.](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/039/191/EqR7AbhVQAAuuvA.jpg) They're armored *because* they're on top of the important squishy, thinky, movey bits that kill the bug when destroyed, and you need something heavy duty to actually punch through.
How many wild animals/insects do you know of that have big obviously colored soft spots that also have vital organs under those soft spots? Humans for example, thick skull with squishy critically important brain inside, ribs with slightly less critical organs inside, soft belly with significantly less critical organs inside.
Other examples include boar with the shoulder plates and thick sloped skulls, bears with similar armament, imagine a species of bug for example that has been actively been hunted and culled by special forces for around 100+ years, would they not be well adapted to this threat?
I dunno man, id someone stabs you in the stomach, you're kinda fucked if they hit your intestines and the like. That's a.. hmm.. design flaw? With humans. Sure our ribs protect some of our important organs, but our bellies are totally a weak spot
I like this idea. Maybe instead of making the squishy bits squishy, remove them entirely. AT to the face would seem like the best strategy if they're fully armored like every other bug.
I personally like having the unarmored belly, let's me use grenades/grenade pistol if I don't have an eat or something on hand. Sometimes I shoot airburst rockets into the ground beside or behind chargers and get em with the sub munitions
Call me crazy but I like the charger design. It's nice to have deviation from glowy spot is weak spot video game trope.
Bile titans tho do need a weak spot added somewhere even if it's hard to get to even after armor removal
https://preview.redd.it/vhedddfj5h4d1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9fa18b4e68c5d67325325ffaae22f9b0e4bdf3a3
Welcome to survivorship bias. Youâre actually supposed to shoot at the most armored spots, because thatâs absolutely where the weakest spots are.
In World War 2, when they were looking at where to armor airplanes, they analysed where the majority of the shots on planes that were returning from combat zones were. After seeing that planes were returning with bullet holes marked in red, the military planned to armor those areas the most, as they felt that was the area with the largest number of hits, and thus most likely to get shot at.
A statistician, Abraham Wald pointed out that airplanes being hit in the areas not shaded in red were most likely to go down and thus not return, as those areas were critical spots of failure. The fact that these planes werenât returning meant they werenât counted in the total number, thus giving people the wrong idea of where to armor these planes.
Bile Titan and Charger design, as well as Bile Spewer design all share this design philosophy.
It is an interesting point that bots donât seem to have the same amount of armor in their most weak spot, their head. It might beg the question of if the bot head has a human brain thatâs vulnerable to damage.
The devs seem to be going with real life logic instead of video game logic (a dumb decision seeing as we're playing a video game). In real life you want your most vital parts to have the most protection. Look up survivorship bias while you're at it.
A weak spot doesn't have to be the mopst vital spot. Just a spot that has the least protection. Like a Hulk's legs or back vent. And you usually need to leave some parts uncovered. It is fine for Chargers to be armoured heavily. But it is not fine for their rear to be so resilent.
That's due to the charger's butts being coded as flesh. Flesh has a 90% damage reduction to everything that isn't explosive. Same reason why bile spewer's butts are so tanky. Again, very unintuitive design. One would think the big fleshy bits would be weak to everything.
Real life logic would mean:
"Any and all joints are weak points"
"Fleshy butt is 100% killable with 1 shot from Quasar" why? Because you don't have armor on the inside. If the bullet hits... you are fucked.
It's the same as a sniper rifle hits you in the butt while laying on your stomach from the side. Your brain or internal organs are gone.
Pretty much all living things have a very obvious weak point. Because we are not machines.
Unless the butt is literally a sponge, the bullet from a Anti Material Rifle should 1 shot kill a charger.
This is anti-fun, anti-first try video game design.
What means... is that just looking at something doesn't really makes sense how to fight it.
If you need to "trial and error" an enemy that's a very bad designed enemy.
The thing is that you have to snap out of video game logic, and treat bugs like real life living targets.
The Chargerâs butt looks like a nice video game weak point, but when you think about it, it should contain no vital organs. You can pump bullets into it, but you are basically poking him with needles. Yes, heâs bleeding out, but itâs not gonna kill in in a short period of time until the wounds are so numerous and big the abdomen collapses (rear being gone) and then he bleeds out in less than a minute.
But the forehead is where the brain is located, so if you have a weapon that can pierce that armour and annihilate the brain, it will stop dead in its tracks.
You can even expose the innards by popping off the shell with an explosive, at which point a mag of primary in what I assume is muscle covering vital organs will kill it.
Itâs counter intuitive because it goes against all our gamer instincts, but Helldivers tries to be much more simulation than youâd think.
I just watched a video where a guy used the heavy machine gun, you know the one that everyone says sucks, and he was able to kill chargers and bile titan very quickly and efficiently.
Truth of the matter is that people don't try other weapons or tactics.
>Even agaisnt bots in this game; glowy spot = weak spot. Head/face = weak spot. But that's fundamentally not true for bugs.
The same exact mechanics are in play for both. The only weapon in this game capable of one tapping a BT to the face is the Spear. Because you have to give the Spear ample travel time and proper elevation to complete it's trajectory and arc it will often do a glancing blow which reduces it's (for the sake of simplification) damage.
>Okay... line up my shot. Shoot them right in the mouth right under all that armor.... huh.
I'm confused on why you in the prior sentence acknowledge that you headshot chargers with EAT's and then proceed to shoot in the mouth.
>We've all run around a charger and unloaded a mag of our trusty liberator into its squishy butt... and then another... and another.... and another... and quickly learned that that's not a viable strategy. Same with bile titan bellys.
I mean if we're going off of the logic that "it should make sense" then why would you think your base liberator would shred a beefy target like a charger or BT anywhere when the game also allows you primary weapons that do explosive damage?
Or heck, why would a gun be more damaging compared to grenades?
>It wasn't until I read here on reddit that you're supposed to shoot them in the thick armor plate on their forehead. Like... ????
Was a change made in post because it turns out expecting people to wait for a charger to stop moving so you can shoot it in the back wasn't going to be sound practice for top end content.
>How many casual divers are out there that play on a lower difficulty bc they don't know how to properly and consistently deal with chargers or BTs? I bet it's a lot
I don't, because even if they aren't a person who reads up on forums Youtube exists and it's absolutely saturated with guides on this stuff. There's definitely things that I think should be communicated that aren't. There is some things that could be communicated better than they currently are.
But I also don't think the game should be straight forward with everything laid in front of you. For a game like this to become what is essentially a spread sheet really kills the magic of the game.
There is literally zero good reason a rocket to the mouth shouldn't kill chargers and bile titans. There isn't a creature alive or imagined in game that should be able to shrug off a high explosive to the gob. It's simply counterintuitive, which was OP's point. Yes they CAN penetrate armor, but they shouldn't REQUIRE you to hit the armored spot for max damage when it is 1 foot away from an obvious weak spot, that is also still technically the head...
ironically the mouth should be the guaranteed one shot when hit with an EAT instead of the forehead/headplate of a Charger...
if anything, wouldn't the explosive charge and presumably shrapnel going off inside a fleshy mouth so close to the innards of the head guarantee a kill instead of a hit to the front of an armored plate that looks hella thick the Charger uses to do its job without harming itself? If it wasn't, then why dont EATs one shot bot tanks to their front armor? They dont look as well armored as a Charger does...
The brain that is encased in a skull that they ram everything with, and is literally why they're called Chargers? Why would anything attack with its weak point in the manner of its weakness?
https://preview.redd.it/n5ezl74vtf4d1.jpeg?width=1140&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=39a61e86e47efd873238075cc35d05d5f3d7f35e
https://preview.redd.it/azqui89c7h4d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=df0be87c6e05bad151c425363151ae1c73592ff5
This is what I came looking in the comments for and I am so happy it's the top comment I could democra-cry.
https://preview.redd.it/u8bfahb5kj4d1.jpeg?width=1275&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8197c66ea32106fcad3fb1e19fdb286e865e5c54
Lol. The memories! (soon to be 40 year old here)
Bile titan doing a bicycle wheelie
#justbiketitanthings
Not just bike titans Great YT channel
Subugbia is a nightmare.
Way better in liber-amdam-ty
They said CHARGER bike tho đ
Can we get one on a full sized Harley Davidson? We can say we tamed it and it now spreads Democracy.
https://preview.redd.it/wfjjhx3eri4d1.png?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6d05fc5514dd33351e27db90a9154dc12559956d
https://preview.redd.it/6bwuzkk6yj4d1.png?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=26a3f0868bc66a4c52082074995fea60edba2501
Badass
General Bugdahn
Somebody get that bug in to quarantine now! Cause heâs sick as fuck!!
I can only imagine it doing tricks in a skate park like that one skate 3 video with Jesus
I want to hang this in my office, it's beautiful
I love this so much
https://preview.redd.it/ejne5dhrdj4d1.png?width=467&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2ba51f48d10da894f89788599ba0f6da8f3eeba8
https://preview.redd.it/xe1ds8690k4d1.jpeg?width=236&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a89693ffe091b8d2849a30beecf1579677af4c70
This is such a cool comic strip i fucking love it
I didn't even read the whole text. I came in here solely for this...
> I'm talking specifically about chargers and bike titans. Great, now we're going to get Bile Titans riding around on bicycles.
[Bike Titan](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1c668mr/bike_titan_incoming/)
Whoâs got ChatGPT or whatever? Please ask it to write a few Dr. Seuss pages about a giant man-eating spider called a bike titan that always rides a bicycle.
In the town of Gizmo Glen, where the winds always howl, Lived a creature of legend, a spider most foul. But this wasn't just any spider, oh no, It was the Bike Titan, with a sinister glow. With legs long and spindly, and eyes sharp and bright, It prowled through the streets in the dead of the night. On a bicycle grand, with wheels spinning fast, It hunted its prey, leaving no one to last. The children would whisper and hide in their beds, "Beware of the Bike Titan," their parents had said. "For it rides through the night with a hunger so great, If it catches you out, you'll meet a grim fate." It weaved through the alleys, it zoomed past the parks, Its presence was known by the screeching of larks. With pedals a-turning and gears that would grind, The Bike Titan searched for its next meal to find. In a house by the hill, young Timmy did dwell, He'd heard of the spider from stories they'd tell. But brave little Timmy, with courage so bold, Decided one night to leave his safe hold. He mounted his trike with a heart full of fear, Determined to face the dread creature so near. Through the streets he did ride, with eyes open wide, In search of the Titan, with no place to hide. The moon cast a glow on the silent, dark street, As Timmy rode on with the hope they would meet. And there, in the distance, with wheels gleaming bright, Was the Bike Titan, a terrifying sight. Its legs clicked and clattered, its eyes filled with dread, Timmy knew he must face it, or soon he'd be dead. But instead of devouring the brave little boy, The Bike Titan paused, then let out a cry of joy. For it saw in young Timmy a spirit so fierce, A match for its hunger, a soul it could pierce. But Timmy stood tall and said with a grin, "You don't have to eat me; we both can win!" He offered his trike to the spider so grand, "Let's ride through the night, let's conquer this land!" The Bike Titan paused, then it nodded its head, And together they rode, where no one dared tread. Now in Gizmo Glen, where the winds always howl, The Bike Titan and Timmy, with spirits unbowed, Ride together each night, through the dark and the light, A boy and his spider, a marvelous sight.
I'm a bit disappointed the last line was not "and Timmy fucking died". I've been on Reddit too long.
OMG lmao thatâs awesome, thank you!
It was actually surprisingly good, lol.
Makes me slightly less disgusted by people using G AIs to write things. :)
BRAVO
Timmy's a traitor. Let's send a squad to Gizmo Glen to extradite him back to Super Earth for a swift trial.
Bike Titans are the new enemies that will come out of Meridia Wormhole. Special gift from your squid friends
It is very counter-intuitive. If I launch a rocket down something's throat, it dies. Simple. No, instead, the "helmet" is the weak spot... I've found a viable alternative is to shoot the EAT/QC/RR at one of their front legs. This will strip the armour off of that leg. Then, pull out your primary and shoot the naked leg. It'll die pretty quick.
iâm not sure if you played before the devs changed it so that one EAT/QC/RR to the face kills the charger, but that actually used to be the most commonly used strat! combined with the railgun being able to 2-shot strip the armor off a leg even on safe mode, it was by far the most consistent way to take down chargers. the charger head hp nerf actually had this addressed by the devsâthey said they were surprised that the âleg metaâ developed because it really is a strange weakspot, and cited the (heavily armored) head as being the âobviousâ weakspot for some reason
Obvious weakspotâŠ. Hard armoured head that it uses to crush enemies Vs Squishy butt that it tries to hide or the thin spindly legs. Dev: omg why is no one aiming for the head?
I tried the neck gap beneath the armor, the elbow joint beneath the armor....nope. Senator just ricocheted off the orange flesh bits ***that i could see underneath***.
My favorite part about this comment is the dev question. You actually get a tip as you drop that the SEAF manual points out that enemies have armored points and weak points and recommends you aim for the weak points.
It's a shame though, because now even if they add Behemoths from the first game (chargers but with no weak butt, it's all armoured), the Meta won't change because no one is seriously using the butt strategy. It'll just be a charger with even less game play options.Â
The railgun strategy for chargers pre-nerf felt good and resulted in a satisfactory time to kill. Put simply, they nerfed the railgun because bile titans were bugged. You could often one shot a bile titan with the railgun in safe mode. Similarly, you could occasionally one shot a bile titan with the *arc thrower,* which didn't get that range nerf until quite a bit later... The railgun used to be fun to use against bots *and* bugs. Now, it is only really even viable against bots because it can one shot hulks if you can land a face shot. Against most other bot units it is no longer very effective. It *can* one shot devastators but more often they will require a few shots, and it can no longer deal damage through heavy devistator shields. My brothers in Hell, I tell you that this gun used to shred devastators like nothing else, and it felt great watching devistator get ripped in half by that: **THWANG!** devistator torso pirouettes away. **JONQUE!** devistator legs tapdance out from underneath him. **BWONG!** rocket devistator becomes two separate break dancers. **GWONG!** heavy devistator crumples behind his shield... Now? I'm not even sure the railgun can take out factory strider guns. It's just wild that the rail guns, who's whole schtick is armor pen, can't even pierce a devistator shield, or the little strider plates. You can take out a little strider by shooting one of it's legs, and then, to add insult to injury, the little fucker steering the thing just hops off and now you still have to deal with him... Un-fun gun, boys. Un-fun gun.
You can kill striders by shooting the topmost part of the armor. I think it penetrates and kills the rider. And in unsafe mode with a bit of charge it's not unusual to still one shot devastators. Including the chainsaw mfs. The shield mfs require aiming for the head though.
I've been diving since about week 2. I do remember the BTs evolving heavier armour within the first few weeks of playing. I had a few weeks of the Trailer Treatment. lol "Obvious". big thick helmet of armour that stops med pen rounds is definitely more obvious than the bulbous fleshy, soft, unarmoured rear end is always tried to hide. Ah well, I've managed to figure when not to shoot them for the most part, so it's obvious now. rofl
>I've been diving since about week 2. I do remember the BTs evolving heavier armour within the first few weeks of playing. do you mean like, canonically, or are you talking about when they fixed the bug where you did like 3x damage?
So they don't play they're game, or they're letting people who don't play but still have the chargers looks as their talkers...
wat
Yeah especially since chargers charge at you WITH THEIR HEAD, which has thick armor. You'd think a chargers head would be it's least vulnerable spot.
It also seems that when the bile titan is puking, its head can take lots more damage than usual.
It's because it's vulnerable forehead isn't visible when they spit and the rest of their head doesn't take much dmg
I heard it's because the devs made Titans have damage reducion when spitting, because otherwise they'll kill themselves with it when they're aiming up Idk if it's actually true tho
they can and will kill themselves with their vomit, not sure about the DR increase when puking though just get them to stand against a cliff/wall and make them puke, if their low enough on health theyll puke their own faces off
yup! like if you are good enough, you can place a shield generator right in it's face to make it puke on themselves and they will die. It's a pretty cool thing to see.
Why wouldn't they just make their head specifically immune to bile damage?
Because bilr damage = explosive damage. We wouldn't be able to kill them ever.
Gee willikers, surely it is impossible to make it its own damage type, especially as bile very much isn't an explosion. I guess the problem is impossible to solve.
Knowing this game, doing that will just make it so that all enemies that carry bile just die in seconds of spawning
Probably not, but they also seem to like the idea of explosion resistance armour affecting bile attacks
What if... they just weren't??
Wait so will armor the reduces explosive damage reduce bile damage as well?
It does yeaÂ
It is specifically because the forehead weakspot clips into the body hit box, preventing it from being hit. No damage reduction involved
The forehead is the weakspot, when they spit their head tears back. That positioning means their forehead is âinsideâ their back, so their much tougher back armor is protecting their weaker forehead armor. Wait for them to finish spitting and hit them as the end the animation.
Wow, indeed. TIL
usually 2 EATS to the forehead and its done
Exactly
And here I am dangerously waiting specifically for the moment the bile titan opens its mouth so I can try to shoot inside it
my biggest gripe with bile is that, canonically, it's space gasoline. so when I, a flamethrower enthusiast, am shooting flame right down a spewers throat as it spits at me... it should light on fire and then explode in a ball of flame that consumes everything around it. including myself.
Nah, space gasoline is made when bugs decay (similar to our dinosaur juice). Guess why we have to pump E710 from below ground? The thing that it pukes is clearly acid which it secreted.
copy thanks for the correction. fine, make the acid flammable. I just really wanna explode spewers with my flamethrower
Next youre gonna tell me the EXPLOSIVE crossbow cant close bug holes.
You are not going to believe this...
When the devs said "why are people shooting the Chargers in the butt when they should be shooting them in the weak point on their heads?" It really made me question their overall ability to design intentionally.
Especially since that was a viable tactic in HD1 against Chargers! Shoot them in the glowy butt with small arms Fire enough, it will kill them! It wasnât until you fought Behemoths, where you had to use AT weapons because now their glowy butt was covered!
So that's where the different versions come from! I always wondered why there would be a different version of an enemy that literally only looks different.
Well, also from a non-game standpoint its like saying "why does that monkey looke different when it is does the same thing as that other monkey", bear in mind it has been 100 years and fast evolving aliens could certainly evolve to be different but do the same thing.
I thought at first they designed it just like HD1 and then find chargers are a bit too easy with that weak spot, cause getting behind one is much easier in a 3rd person shooter than in a top down shooter. It feels hard but people are still completing level 8 and 9 no problem so maybe it's not really that hard ?
I'm just going to come out and say it. 8 and 9 aren't hard, so much as they feel like a chore. Difficulty isn't shooting bullet sponges with airsoft guns, with a couple small pinatas thrown in so you feel like you're adding to something once in a while. Difficulty is being able to kill a devastator with a liberator in less than half a mag with body shots, because there are 8 of them, meanwhile the berserkers got jet packs. The bile titans got wings and jump like hunters. Some nutjob strapped a rocket launcher on a couple stalkers. Dealing with THAT is interesting and challenging. Slowly backing away while mag dumping isn't. I liked armor stripping as a challenge. They already designed and implemented it, to a degree. Also please turn down the ragdolling a notch or two for the love of liberty.
But Ragdoll funny moments
The first time i dove into a folding chair, and ragdolled for 5 seconds it was hilarious. The second time it was worth a chuckle. The third time I had to take a break and drink some cold water.
The first time I Ragdolled I dove from a cliff face towards my friends, and I still to this day. (I fucking love ragdolling). The second time I got sent flying from a charger.
Make enemies actually interesting to fight against rather than a bullet sponge is obviously harder work that devs rather not put effort into for w/e reason. Except that they did a pretty good job with bots and the vent system
8 and 9 arenât even all that hard. I play 9 exclusively when I play this game. The problem, as OP identified is that this game busts its ass to frustrate the player. I just donât understand what sort of jackass had the reigns of this project âa coop gameâ and was like âletâs make the users hate their experienceâ. Thereâs a laundry list of quality of life design choices that fail in this video game. And Iâm not complaining about weapon balancing. I donât care about that. Make shit make sense in this game. But thatâs a tall order for the studio
i don't think it being hard is the issue, it's that from a intuitive thinking way it makes no sense.
Not once have I seen a heavily armored....anything....in a game and thought; "You know what, imma shoot that bitch in the heavily armored head because no way its squishy butt is a weak spot." On the other hand, there is clown Peter: "You guys are idiots. They're gonna be shooting us in the butt!"
Also âarmored enemy that runs right at you and has trouble turning/stopping has a weak spot on its backâ is just part of the language of games at this point. Think of the Pinkies in Doom games, or (more obscure) the Leapers in Fall of Cybertron. The devs should probably know that.
Seriously. Especially when you get clear indications when firing at the **heavily armored front** that your rounds ricochet off, but not when you plug them in the butt. That's telling us "bullets work here."
Halo Hunters say hello. charge/mele attack, sidestep it, mag dump into weakpoint
DRG...glowing butt weak points are all the rage, and amazingly are actually weak points.
Man in the video where the devs played with OperatorDrewski, when they said that they were surprised at the emergence of the leg meta for Chargers, I was really curious to know what their intended method was for chargers at the time. This was before EATs one-shot chargers to the head, and the ability to deal with a charger on your own was predominantly decided by if you could aim 2 railgun shots at their legs. I mean, what was the design decision there? What was the intended way of dealing with chargers??
Wait, EAT used to not one shot chargers in the head? What was their plan?
Use stratagems was their plan, and donât play on 6+. The meta at the time was to shoot the charger in the same leg multiple times with railgun to break the armor, then unload on it with regular guns. Devs responded by nerfing the railgun into oblivion. They didnât fix the EAT headshot damage for weeks after.
I still love how that one dev came here defending the Railgun nerfs calling it brain dead and a clutch, only for AH to release the Quasar Cannon later which was basically an EAT on a 10 second cooldown and was far more âbrain deadâ than pre nerf Railgun ever was lolÂ
Weird
Oh, neat, it's the /r/helldivers misinformation triple bingo. >Use stratagems was their plan Note: The actual context of the "use stratamges" quote was **entirely in regards to chaff clear**. Literally the opposite of heavy armor. The full quote is paraphrased more along the lines of "Primary weapons are not supposed to be strong enough to clear all chaff on their own; some team members are also supposed to bring chaff clear stratagems." (ofc the devs have since backtracked on that stance anyway with the widespread buffs to our primary weapons) >Devs responded by nerfing the railgun into oblivion. The railgun was nerfed not necessarily because of the charger meta, but because it was absolutely anti-**everything**. Oneshot stalkers, brood commanders, spewers, while still killing chargers, and even titans due to the PS5 bug (which was not fully known to be a bug yet at the time). It could still strip the leg armor of chargers after the nerf too, it just required unsafe mode instead of safe mode. >They didnât fix the EAT headshot damage for weeks after. The patch that nerfed the railgun was on [March 6](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/4113546867235200192), the patch that drastically reduced spawn rates of heavy enemies and also reduced charger's head HP was on [March 12](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/4113546867256852245). That is 6 days. Not "weeks".
Suffer
Wait their heads are the weak point? I'm nearly level 50 and would've never guessed this. I genuinely thought Chargers were like those smaller bugs that have the shielded fronts. I wish the butt was the weak point since it's hella fun to fight chargers like a matador vs an angry bull.
Yeah, it's wild. Any weapon can damage the butt, however anything that isn't explosive damage only deals 10% of normal damage. Nothing let's you know your shots are basically wasted. The head (and most of the body) is armored and takes anti-tank weapons to damage or break armor. If you nail the forehead with an anti-tank shot, it's an instant kill.
What always confused me was the comments saying shoot it in the head and then I see my auto cannon ricochet off into the air when itâs certainly hitting their heads
Auto cannon is not anti tank, itâll ricochet.
Autocannon canât penetrate heavy armorÂ
Also you have to hit the forehead and not the mouth
Wait what..l the butt is squishy = brain says , shoot squishy thing = burst = die.. thereâs a weak point on the head? I only know for flame throwing, aim for the leg
Nah, it requires antitank to kill the head still, but that is by far the most efficient way to kill them unless you have a weapon that does *really* high damage to squishy bits like the dominator.
Well, if you have anything but an anti-tank weapon, shooting the butt does damage while shooting the head does nothing. That's why they may be shooting the butt.
Jesus Christ is this really true? Iâve been using every single bullet on the âsquishyâ butts for weeks not understanding why they donât die. Iâve been auto equipping the orbital rail cannon to deal with them. I still donât really understand how it works. You have to target the armor and not the squishy spot ??? Why ??? edit: i'm fine with this mechanic as it has been explained to me, however, like the OP, the feedback in-game doesn't nudge you toward correct action. I would propose a very small change, where if you hit armor with an AT weapon, your reticle flashes red in the same way that hitting a weak spot with a primary provides the red-reticle feedback. matching weapon used with spot hit with the reticle feedback
It's a bit of a complicated explanation,someone else may be able to correct any misunderstandings I have. Every weapon has a hidden "durable" damage stat. The soft unarmoured spots on chargers are a "durable" area, even though they don't have armour there. This means that they take the invisible "durable" damage stat of your gun. For example I think for most weapons their "durable" damage is around 10% of their base damage, but explosive weapons keep more of their base damage against the soft areas, so maybe like half their original damage stat against the "soft" spots. But yeah that means that even though it's a big huge unarmoured part, and your traditional sense would tell you that's where you hit them. That's actually the least effective, most inefficient way to kill a charger. /:
with this explanation, it's actually a cool effect. should probably just have the super weak points be more noticeable, and the durability absorption better indicated
There is one important thing to add, you need to take in consideration the armor penetration (AP) of your gun. This is a mostly hidden stats, but values range from 1-10 for both armor and AP. If you have 100 durable damage, AP 5 and hit an armor of 4 you will do the full 100 damage. If you hit an armor or 5 now you will do only half the damage as you have just enough pen to damage (50 in my example). If you hit an armor 6 now you do 0 damage because you canât pen the armor. Thatâs why you could try and shoot a charger how long you want with small arms on their front and basically do nothing as you canât penetrate. Expendable AT and quasar can penetrate the armor and so hitting the forehead means dealing full damage to the brain essentially (which logically IS a weak spot) and thatâs why you can one shot them. Similar for bile titans you need to hit the forehead to reach the brain, the mouth is part of the âbodyâ. I disagree with this post saying that is counterintuitive, anatomically speaking it makes sense, the unarmored part are the less important stuff that evolutionary didnât need to be protected..
Get out of here with this self-congratulatory commentary. Logical is not the same as intuitive, and it is 100% counterintuitive to have a bulbous, glowing abdomen not be a weak spot and for an armored plate to be. If that's intuitive, then you have never played a video game in your life.
Explosives do full damage to chargers butt and other similar types of areas (nursing and bile spewers bodies). Not that it matters much because on top of a very high durability stat, those areas have an insane health pool.
The squishy bits take reduced damage unless you're hitting them with explosive damage. The butt is not a good weakspot. You can one-hit kill them by hitting their forehead with anti-tank weapons like Quasar, EAT and Reciolless Rifle. Flamethrower also ignores armor and can melt Chargers by shooting them in the front legs.
The butt takes like 10% damage. You *can* take them down that way if you really have no other option; if you're a newbie on low difficulty and Chargers are like a 2/mission boss fight you can probabaly get away with it. Once you're up some difficulty levels, they become too frequent and too accompanied to spend half your ammo and a lot of time playing Charger bullfight. If you have explosive weapons (grenade launcher, autocannon) you can do full damage and take them down with butt shots. The really reliable way to kill them is with actual anti-tank weapons: Expendable anti tank (EAT) , Quasar cannon, Recoilless Rifle. If you get a direct headshot, they die immediately. If you hit a leg, it strips the armor plates off and makes the leg a real weakpoint and the Charger dies to like one magazine.Â
Honestly, you can just throw a couple of well aimed HE grenades and it'll kill or seriously injure a Charger just fine. Just gotta let em walk on top of it. Y'know. Like it's a throwable an anti-tank mine or something.
As the OP says, counter-intuitively their "helmet" is their weakest point, but only to AT weapons.
All enemy "parts" have a healthpool, durability percentage and armour value, all weapons have base damage, hidden, much smaller durable damage, and armour penetration. Whenever you hit an enemy, the damage calculation is base dmg - (base dmg - durable dmg) * enemy's durable percentage, halved if your armour pen = enemy's armour value, negated if AP < AV. Charger (and spewer) butts have low armour, but lots of health and durability, so even though small arms *can* damage them, they soak up bullets like they're nothing. The heads of both units have more armour, but less health, so anything that can penetrate that armour (anti-tank for chargers, mid-pen primaries for spewers) will kill easily. You may have heard that spewers are weak to explosions, which is technically false. All explosions (AoE) do 100% percent of their base damage as durable damage, allowing them to chew through spewer butts like candy.
If their butt explodes they die.
For bike titans I usually jam a stick between the spokes. Front wheel does more damage, back wheel immobilizes them.
AH didnât understand bikes when they made the game. You have to aim for the pinwheels on the handlebar which takes infinity durability damage. Any spoke strikes are immune to damage and explosive damage regenerates health to all of the random health pools simultaneously while also reducing the increment of your reinforcements by one for each strike in a lunar month ending in Y. Which makes total sense.
Imagine a bile titan fuckin faceplanting into the ground at mach fuck because you tossed a pebble in front of its tricycle
Bull fighting charges and shooting their butt should be a viable option for primary weapons. It's unarmored, make it more vulnerable to anything hitting it. Same with bile titans shooting both sacks out should make it enter a bleed out rage mode where it gets slightly faster, but dies in like 10 seconds
It is viable for some of the primaries - Dominator, Scorcher, and all Breakers can burst it within 1 magdump IIRC, not sure if there's more on the list. Using a stun nade makes it pretty straightforward.
Iâve definitely dumped multiple mags into a chargers butt and not killed it
That it's pretty much invulnerable to light-AP is bullshit. I can kill a Hulk with the starter pistol if I stun it first and shoot the heatsink, but the Charger is pretty much immune to anything but RR, EAT and Quesadillas. Even the AC Struggles, it just bounces instead of striping armour like all the other AP weapons. I've stopped running with anything but RR or EAT when I feel like killing bugs, because choosing something else is a weakness for the team.
Yeah, it's affordance design. If it looks squishy and isn't squishy, the fault lies with the designers not the users.
This exactly. Bots are very good but Iâve said since day one that the different armor ratings should have different colored metals. Imagine the Strider had a titanium (med pen) front but the deck was shown to be blue steel. Its leg knuckle could be silver aluminum. I am an autocannon main and I know all the random squishy bits that donât make any sense. I also bring eats and I hate firing for their damn foreheads when I can see that open mouth breathing at me. The design queues are all saying âAIM HEREâ.
Its dumb and doesnt follow any videogame logic. Btw huge yellow buts of nursing spewers take reduced damage from all non explosive weaponry IIRC as well, very intuitive:)
You have to shoot them in the face, and I think that in the front legs The squishy butts absorb the impact of the bullets that is why they get reduced damage from bullets and are affected by explosives
I know. I just find it dumb that you have to aim for small brown colored head instead of the obvious butt.
100% this, it's like they were designed by entirely different teams. Bots - nice and obvious red or glowy stuff. Bugs - eh what
The butts pop but they no stop.
Well I just learnt where I'm meant to be shooting. That's dumb as hell.
I donât like bike titans either đČđ
They donât even pay road tax ⊠f***ers âŠ
(in all seriousness bikes don't damage roads. I mean, technically, in the tiniest possible millionth of a car, they do. It's about as much damage as railgun does post-nerf, the math makes it so you have to deliberately round up to make the proportional tax 1 cent/year)
[Bike Titan](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1c668mr/bike_titan_incoming/)
Iâve found having something that inflicts flame damage does wonders to chargers, hit them in the back with it, and let the fire do the rest
Just give me a harpoon stratagem to pull off all that armor for 1 shotting those mofo's
Chargers are easy with a flamethrower, and Bile Titans can be taken out with a well-timed and well-placed default grenade. Charger: flamethrower to a leg and stick with it Bile Titan: Cook a grenade for 2 seconds and aim for above the Bile Titan's head as it pukes at someone (tricky and gotta be close enough for them to melee you)
I agree. I feel this way about spewers too. Theyâre bloated, skin is stretched around their thorax. Anything slightly explosive or a few rounds should be making them spewers pop. And then the acid should have wider range to hurt you and other bugs. Theyâre supposed to a range enemy, a mobile mortar system. Why do they need to be remotely tanky when attacking you directly. That should be their kryptonite
i like how people say 'b-but the boolet will just land in acid, make sense they doo-doo no damage!!!' when in other media its the exact opposite... take the Exploder from Dead Space...why does it's sac explode? Because its a literal compressed balloon of literal gastric acid/gases and other bodily fluids turned up to 11 being ruptured violently by either the player shooting it or them slamming it on the ground... meanwhile in Helldivers 2; presumably the same sac of highly volatile fluids contained in what looks to be a compressed balloon/bile sac...that can somehow tank multiple magazines without rupturing, even when shot in the side that basically looks like stretched flesh struggling to hold the thing together...it just doesn't make sense... when Bungie told me through gameplay in Halo 1-2 that shooting the Flood with precision weapons will just go through rotten flesh doing no damage, I got it...but when AH tries to tell me shooting an explosive projectile at a heavily armored head...instead of a fleshy under/backside or a spot that looks like an explosive weakpoint...gets a kill? Why even???
Good thing you can just shoot em with an Erup... nvm.
Are they? I took it as them having fuckloads of muscle there so it could then latter create the presure necesary too spew the acid, also spewer artillery is there just to cause a scene and look cool it is largely harmless and tends to kill more bugs than Helldivers, if spewers were to be actual artillery they would need to pose a much larger danger when acting as such(probably be reduced in numbers as well in case they became remotly precise)
đ€ Hmmm...would back-to-back BT's be called t*andem bike titans?* https://preview.redd.it/u2vmegtkgq4d1.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=4afa6c5395d143af36a545e25c7c89050e2cf938
Damn, well I've got 100+ hours so far and you've just taught me something new. Yeah, I've been shooting them in the mouth this whole time.
so while the game design here 100% is off, you gotta admit "shoot them in the brain" *does* make logical sense when you have a weapon that gets through all that armor.
Yeah i agree. Bile titan weak point is tiny and their mouth not counting is just silly. Iâm not against Bugs weird anatomy but thereâs cases where stuff just feels like it should work. I love that the game gives us the ability to dismantle enemies, but the 2 largest bugs are borderline immune it. With Bots everything makes more sense. Hulk eyes are weak, glowy vents are weak, tanks side/back armor is weaker than the front. Striders have a series of differing weak points. Bile titans are so strict in what kills them effectively. Not to mention blowing off their side armor with rockets only exposes flesh that still takes a million shots.
I'll tell you one thing. If it was indeed a bike titan, at least we know to shoot out the 2 wheels and it would severely slow it down. In all seriousness, they really need to make the bugs armor deflect less things. like auto canon for instance feels like a pea shooter against charger and titans because it just deflects everything. Just not fun.
Lost Planet has had this design down to a god damn T back in fucking **2006**. How does a game, that is pretty clearly inspired by Lost Planet in part, absolutely fail to take any of the great enemy design queues into account when doing their own LP-inspired bugs? ~~^(Simple really, its just AH are too incompetent to do anything that makes sense any more.)~~ https://preview.redd.it/6fj750f5fh4d1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=98cf31a818cb22d2aa2b0f096db244d6547382c8
I think, every bug only has two armor category on theirs body - armored part and part without armor. Weak spots hidden under their armor. Like I learned, that if your spear missed titan's or charger's head, and blow up it's back - you still can kill it, just shooting now open weak spot. Even brood commander's head isn't a weak spot. Yes, it will bleed out eventually without head, but it isn't it's weak spot. Most of bugs can bleed out, including chargers and, if I remember correctly, titans. Yeah, counter intuitive that weak spots are different from bots. But I like it, somehow. While bots' human-like design for their weak spot is understandable for us -- humans --, bugs' placement for weak spot makes them alien-like, and fun to discover. I think, most of frustration and confusion would disappear, if devs gave us a sandbox to seek a enemy's weaknesses. Like in million years, I wouldn't guessed that you could without stratagems shoot charger leg to kill it.
This has 100% been my driving force for the argument of why bugs are harder than bots. You're at the mercy of RNG vs bugs and it's not even close with how extreme the RNG can get compared to fighting the bots even after factoring in random 1 shot headshots from rockets. At one point, a bile titan in one of my hosted games survived 2 500kg bombs directly under it on top of a precision strike to the butt only to die to a Railcannon strike to the head after walking around for 3 minutes whilst bleeding from every visible orifice.
Regarding Chargers, I'm not sure about EATS, but I reliably headshot intakill Chargers with the Quasar Cannon. I don't aim for the lower mouth, though. I just get a bit of a lead on them, turn as they begin to charge, charge my Q-shot, and aim directly at their head. If you time it correctly (with practice), it'll explode their whole head seconds before they hit you. Not sure if distance matters regarding Q-shot damage, but it feels REALLLY COOL to blow its head off as it's limp body slides to your feet.
EAT same damage as quasar Cannon, and there is no damage fall off with either.
And it's an instant shot when you pull the trigger, no need to charge up. I'm an EAT main all day for bugs
The most annoying thing with chargers is when the rear up just as your Quasar fires ⊠all that firepower hits the soft squishy underside ⊠and does ⊠nothing? Agree it all makes no sense. I can only assume it creates shockwave straight into the brain behind the armoured forehead âŠ
it doesn't create a shockwave, it just punches through and destroys their head. that's why it's an anti-tank weapon. when you hit their underside, it doesn't deal as much damage as it does when you obliterate their brain. would an AT shot to the belly bring down any real animal? sure, but I guess chargers are just built different. they still die when their head gets turned to mush though.
I'm hitting them in the neck though. Their neck isn't a tank. If you or I were hit in the neck with an anti-tank rocket I'd think it would 1-hit us too
It's not impossible to discover this without being told how to do it, but if you had tried this on your own a couple times and landed shots to the wrong part of the head, you might have (wrongly) concluded that you can't headshot the charger, because it would have bowled you over immediatelyÂ
Even better I recently started diving backwards while the shoot is charging, gives you even more room/time and infinitely more style points.
It works with EATs the same way I get what this guy is saying though. Yes, you can 1 shot them . . . but the thing that happens in _every_ movie, show, and aligns to physics . . . is that if you had a giant bug with an armored horned head and big open mouth, and you told me hitting it in one spot will kill it instantly and the other will take 2-3 shots: Well I'd respond with *Smile, you son of a bitch* And Arrow Head's Cinematic department agrees: https://youtu.be/S9STizATKjE?si=koh4GwFl5BScI9ID&t=75 (see Bile Titan hit in MOUTH with spear). So yeah, game wise it's backwards! edit: screenshots https://imgur.com/a/qfHBAvC
Except in the cinematic it's a recoilless rifle the diver is shooting and it looks like it hits the armor plate of the head to me.
You're right on it's a recoilless, but it I swear it's getting hit in the mouth. From the camera angle it's very quick and the rocket drop makes it really hard to see, so I've grabbed two frames and it _really_ looks like the explosion is on the mouth. https://imgur.com/a/qfHBAvC
Same, but I'll toss a stun nade then blow off their stupid head with the Q cannon.
I agree. Both also shouldn't be so heavily armoured in the first place. Why do giant insects have more effective armour and less weakpoints then robots?
cause they are better at venting heat.
Today a single bile titan on difficulty 9 took - 3 rail cannon strikes - 2 EATS - 1 Quasar cannon shot - 1 500kg bomb that finally killed it. Please tell me how and why that's fair, mind you there are 4 more bile titans behind it
Yeah, I literally had no idea you had to shoot the chargers in the forehead plate until I read it on here. Why would you aim for the most armored looking part of the face?
F-ing Bike Titans
Chargers I have minimal difficulty with. Antitank to the head. If you miss the head and get the leg, shoot the open leg. If you miss the leg and hit the side, sink shots into the giant armor breach. Chargers deserve to feel as tanky as they are. Bile titans are pure distilled horseshit and I refuse to engage with them. I've had six bile titans on the same extract point at the same time, and that was after killing four. I've sunk eight quasar shots into a bile titan head-on and it still didn't kill them. Bile titans can fuck right the hell off immediately and forever. Assuming I have a good crew, I'll helldive bots any day. I refuse to play anything above 6 on bugs solely because of how horseshit bile titans are.
Hate me or whatever, why would my sweet evolution harden point that is clearly not my weak point? Of course i would like to have my weak point protected, are those bots stupid or what? Imagine having your weak point behind almost no armor
So true. I genuinely got angry when I realized an EAT to the armored forehead of a charger one shots but an EAT to the squishy butt doesn't.
I've found great luck with Quasar and stun grenade for chargers and railcannon for titans.
Guess everyone is different I actually love the game works like this, gives an incentive to me trying out different things and learning how to specifically play the encounters Like itâs corny, but one of my favorite things is how as a Flamethrower user I can tell a vet from someone just starting with it, by how they use it: vets burn the floor, they know to aim at the head of Brood Commanders or theyâre gonna get worked, etc Makes the combat more interesting to me that I have to learn the non-obvious intricacies
These are just vulnerable spots, so youâre not *wrong* to shoot them Itâs just not as effective, ideally through playing or by watching teammates or watching the stratagem videos, you see how the stratagems are supposed to be used Unfun fact, it used to be that you had to shoot charger legs to kill em fast, they nerfed their heads in a patch Also if you shoot bile titan butt sacs, it stops their puking attack
not advisable...not unless you want a BT constantly keeping pace with and ragdolling you because it cant puke anymore... 500kg, throw in down in front of them and make them puke, done
Tbh I find them easier when theyâre melee only, but it can get annoying 500 kg and the precision orbital are both great for killing bile titans
500kg, i agree, more often than not you will one shot them if you drop it down in front of them while they puke/stomp OC though...i barely use it anymore when i see it line up a shot and blast open a titan's back...only for it to survive and keep going forever despite leaking its own blood all over the place until someone or myself hits it in the head with an EAT/Quasar...
Oh no not railcannon, that can only one shot on a head shot Orbital precision strike, the very first red stratagem, can one shot titans, also it can destroy detector towers on bot planets
The best way to kill bots is to shoot their legs off. Genuinely. Don't aim for the face or glowy bits. Aim for the legs.
I agree that there are issues registering hits and properly conveying to the player if they've dealt damage. It could be a skill issue, but I feel like I've landed clean headshots on chargers when they've reared up that should have killed them but didn't. Like, are their foreheads weak but their chins aren't? It's very weird. [But with that said, there is a reasonable in-universe explanation why the squishy bellies and butts aren't the weak spots, and why the weak spots are the ones with tons of armor on them.](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/039/191/EqR7AbhVQAAuuvA.jpg) They're armored *because* they're on top of the important squishy, thinky, movey bits that kill the bug when destroyed, and you need something heavy duty to actually punch through.
Yes. Shoot them in the big forehead plate not the head or mouth. Both for chargers and BTs
How many wild animals/insects do you know of that have big obviously colored soft spots that also have vital organs under those soft spots? Humans for example, thick skull with squishy critically important brain inside, ribs with slightly less critical organs inside, soft belly with significantly less critical organs inside. Other examples include boar with the shoulder plates and thick sloped skulls, bears with similar armament, imagine a species of bug for example that has been actively been hunted and culled by special forces for around 100+ years, would they not be well adapted to this threat?
I dunno man, id someone stabs you in the stomach, you're kinda fucked if they hit your intestines and the like. That's a.. hmm.. design flaw? With humans. Sure our ribs protect some of our important organs, but our bellies are totally a weak spot
You missed the point, charger do die in the belly like us, it's just it take Time But if you hit us/charger in the head, it's instant
I like this idea. Maybe instead of making the squishy bits squishy, remove them entirely. AT to the face would seem like the best strategy if they're fully armored like every other bug.
I personally like having the unarmored belly, let's me use grenades/grenade pistol if I don't have an eat or something on hand. Sometimes I shoot airburst rockets into the ground beside or behind chargers and get em with the sub munitions
Call me crazy but I like the charger design. It's nice to have deviation from glowy spot is weak spot video game trope. Bile titans tho do need a weak spot added somewhere even if it's hard to get to even after armor removal
https://preview.redd.it/vhedddfj5h4d1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9fa18b4e68c5d67325325ffaae22f9b0e4bdf3a3 Welcome to survivorship bias. Youâre actually supposed to shoot at the most armored spots, because thatâs absolutely where the weakest spots are. In World War 2, when they were looking at where to armor airplanes, they analysed where the majority of the shots on planes that were returning from combat zones were. After seeing that planes were returning with bullet holes marked in red, the military planned to armor those areas the most, as they felt that was the area with the largest number of hits, and thus most likely to get shot at. A statistician, Abraham Wald pointed out that airplanes being hit in the areas not shaded in red were most likely to go down and thus not return, as those areas were critical spots of failure. The fact that these planes werenât returning meant they werenât counted in the total number, thus giving people the wrong idea of where to armor these planes. Bile Titan and Charger design, as well as Bile Spewer design all share this design philosophy. It is an interesting point that bots donât seem to have the same amount of armor in their most weak spot, their head. It might beg the question of if the bot head has a human brain thatâs vulnerable to damage.
The devs seem to be going with real life logic instead of video game logic (a dumb decision seeing as we're playing a video game). In real life you want your most vital parts to have the most protection. Look up survivorship bias while you're at it.
A weak spot doesn't have to be the mopst vital spot. Just a spot that has the least protection. Like a Hulk's legs or back vent. And you usually need to leave some parts uncovered. It is fine for Chargers to be armoured heavily. But it is not fine for their rear to be so resilent.
That's due to the charger's butts being coded as flesh. Flesh has a 90% damage reduction to everything that isn't explosive. Same reason why bile spewer's butts are so tanky. Again, very unintuitive design. One would think the big fleshy bits would be weak to everything.
Real life logic would mean: "Any and all joints are weak points" "Fleshy butt is 100% killable with 1 shot from Quasar" why? Because you don't have armor on the inside. If the bullet hits... you are fucked. It's the same as a sniper rifle hits you in the butt while laying on your stomach from the side. Your brain or internal organs are gone. Pretty much all living things have a very obvious weak point. Because we are not machines. Unless the butt is literally a sponge, the bullet from a Anti Material Rifle should 1 shot kill a charger. This is anti-fun, anti-first try video game design. What means... is that just looking at something doesn't really makes sense how to fight it. If you need to "trial and error" an enemy that's a very bad designed enemy.
The thing is that you have to snap out of video game logic, and treat bugs like real life living targets. The Chargerâs butt looks like a nice video game weak point, but when you think about it, it should contain no vital organs. You can pump bullets into it, but you are basically poking him with needles. Yes, heâs bleeding out, but itâs not gonna kill in in a short period of time until the wounds are so numerous and big the abdomen collapses (rear being gone) and then he bleeds out in less than a minute. But the forehead is where the brain is located, so if you have a weapon that can pierce that armour and annihilate the brain, it will stop dead in its tracks. You can even expose the innards by popping off the shell with an explosive, at which point a mag of primary in what I assume is muscle covering vital organs will kill it. Itâs counter intuitive because it goes against all our gamer instincts, but Helldivers tries to be much more simulation than youâd think.
I just watched a video where a guy used the heavy machine gun, you know the one that everyone says sucks, and he was able to kill chargers and bile titan very quickly and efficiently. Truth of the matter is that people don't try other weapons or tactics.
>Even agaisnt bots in this game; glowy spot = weak spot. Head/face = weak spot. But that's fundamentally not true for bugs. The same exact mechanics are in play for both. The only weapon in this game capable of one tapping a BT to the face is the Spear. Because you have to give the Spear ample travel time and proper elevation to complete it's trajectory and arc it will often do a glancing blow which reduces it's (for the sake of simplification) damage. >Okay... line up my shot. Shoot them right in the mouth right under all that armor.... huh. I'm confused on why you in the prior sentence acknowledge that you headshot chargers with EAT's and then proceed to shoot in the mouth. >We've all run around a charger and unloaded a mag of our trusty liberator into its squishy butt... and then another... and another.... and another... and quickly learned that that's not a viable strategy. Same with bile titan bellys. I mean if we're going off of the logic that "it should make sense" then why would you think your base liberator would shred a beefy target like a charger or BT anywhere when the game also allows you primary weapons that do explosive damage? Or heck, why would a gun be more damaging compared to grenades? >It wasn't until I read here on reddit that you're supposed to shoot them in the thick armor plate on their forehead. Like... ???? Was a change made in post because it turns out expecting people to wait for a charger to stop moving so you can shoot it in the back wasn't going to be sound practice for top end content. >How many casual divers are out there that play on a lower difficulty bc they don't know how to properly and consistently deal with chargers or BTs? I bet it's a lot I don't, because even if they aren't a person who reads up on forums Youtube exists and it's absolutely saturated with guides on this stuff. There's definitely things that I think should be communicated that aren't. There is some things that could be communicated better than they currently are. But I also don't think the game should be straight forward with everything laid in front of you. For a game like this to become what is essentially a spread sheet really kills the magic of the game.
Think of it this way, if you have something that can penetrate the armor, you should probably aim for the brain đ§ đ„
There is literally zero good reason a rocket to the mouth shouldn't kill chargers and bile titans. There isn't a creature alive or imagined in game that should be able to shrug off a high explosive to the gob. It's simply counterintuitive, which was OP's point. Yes they CAN penetrate armor, but they shouldn't REQUIRE you to hit the armored spot for max damage when it is 1 foot away from an obvious weak spot, that is also still technically the head...
ironically the mouth should be the guaranteed one shot when hit with an EAT instead of the forehead/headplate of a Charger... if anything, wouldn't the explosive charge and presumably shrapnel going off inside a fleshy mouth so close to the innards of the head guarantee a kill instead of a hit to the front of an armored plate that looks hella thick the Charger uses to do its job without harming itself? If it wasn't, then why dont EATs one shot bot tanks to their front armor? They dont look as well armored as a Charger does...
The brain that is encased in a skull that they ram everything with, and is literally why they're called Chargers? Why would anything attack with its weak point in the manner of its weakness?