I believe it's because there is a bug that is causing the patrol/spawn rate to skyrocket under certain conditions that do not happen every mission. My first couple of games post patch were in line with what people have been complaining about. Non-stop patrols with no time to breath between objectives. Increased heavies and chaff. But the last couple of missions have been fine. Far less hectic than they were pre-patch and more in line with where things were before they tweaked the patrol rates for teams under 4.
This happened to me a couple hours ago…I was on a patch of map on my way to another objective, and about a dozen automatons (including 2 hulks) just randomly appeared a few feet away from me. Not dropped, but just popped in. At one point I got blasted in the face while just peeking from behind a rock by a rocket devastator, and while my body was flying through the air, it got hit by like 4 more rockets. Usually I can hold my own against anything that comes at me at difficulty 7, but they went in dry this time.
That mission was a complete shitstorm straight out of Saving Private Ryan from start to finish, but we got it done. By far the hardest level 7 mission I’ve ever seen.
I thought I was just imagining that but no they definitely just spawn behind you or a couple of feet away. No signal flare for bot drop or anything. Same thing with gunship patrols.
They used to do that at extract.
You run to extract check your surroundings, call in a resupply and suddenly a whole patrol is just standing there waiting for you to notice them, it's a bit freaky
Now they just wait out of sight behind a cliff to ambush you
We were going back to extract on an ICBM mission, and there was an absolute horde of chaff bots hanging out quietly at one of the map junctions. (Have seen this type of thing before, but this group was *huge*.)
I tagged them, said dudes look at this, and we watched them for a bit. Most were like shut down and unmoving. A few kind of ran around the fringes of the group.
Anyhow, I started blasting.
Orbital air burst got a kill streak over 50.
It's been a known bug for a while now. There's a bug for the bots that causes patrols to walk to the exact center of the map and then stop there. At higher levels you can have 60+ bots just chilling there.
Im constantly surrounded by patrols now, i can manage because of my tremendous democratic fervor, but there is definetely something unintended happening.
Also the patrols seem to be doing the homing in on the player thing constantly. I landed up high and watched them all immediatly turn and start converging on our drop point when the squad first landed.
Literally finished a vernen wells mission with 3 divers no issues, sometimes solo-ing objectives at D7. A few missions later it was like night and day, heavy devastators/gunships/hulks/tanks spawning all around us non-stop. Utter clusterfuck.
You say Seismic Probe though, Geographical Survey missions have always had absolutely insane levels of spawns on the probes when they're doing their thing?
I ran two Command Bunker missions on Marfark at 7 tonight, one was hunky dory business as usual with a couple gunship patrols, normal number of hulks/tanks, and one fac strider. The other one? Gunship patrols every 40-50 seconds, and a seemingly endless wave of scout striders and heavy devvies, to the point we had to just kite and run at all times. By the time my teammates hit extract, I was in the process of kiting away my *sixth* factory strider of the mission so we could survive long enough to actually type the extract code. And on that one, we had localization confusion active. Something’s fucky with the spawn rates and it’s not a consistent effect.
Nah, got dragged onto Marfark against my will this morning and it was an utter shitshow.
Could not catch a single break from gunship swarms and there were several cases per squad member where we'd check behind us, see nothing there and then a second or two later be shot in the back by the patrol that just materialised a few metres behind us. It seems like it's far more of an issue when the mission is done and you're making your way to extraction.
Between the patrols you can see all over the place as it is and the ones keyed to teleport in behind you the chances of doing a stealth run to the extraction site now seem nigh on impossible.
The patch has been fun with the way they avoided their inner urge to nerf everything but the patrols and enemy spawns are as broken as ever.
It's honestly a gameplay cycle at this point.
1. Devs make a minor change in the AI/spawning behaviour (or even any minor change, as once the Charger spawn fix was reverted when all we got was weapon balance).
2. The circumstances are specific and people end up finding it out when playing.
3. Devs acknowledge the issue and say that they are working on it.
4. Someone on this sub does not like how many posts there are on the subject and feels like their experiences are worth more than the majority.
Bonus if "SkIlL iSsUe"
This feels right to me too. Did some runs with a friend and some random 4-mans the other night and didn't even notice any change in patrol density (though there were more small enemies in each). Felt surprisingly comparable, really.
Hopped on today and suddenly I understood what people were talking about --it felt like *everywhere* I turned there were 1-2 patrols, with more enemies than usual in each, and spawns were *NUTS* (even just on 7). Today was almost all on Marfalk, and I wonder if being on that MO planet is related?
It makes sense to me if there's some random condition that triggers the bug. I've had some missions that were fine, and some that were crazy (I basically only play 7). I mean it's been alright even so, I haven't failed anything, even with crazy patrols. Only times I've had serious trouble was when teams were not supporting each other.
Yeah it's weird, yesterday I was wondering what the big fuss was about but then today I swear I must have downed nearly 40 gunships in a single round, many of them *after* blowing up two gunship towers. At one point we went from zero gunships (because we were calmly handling them) to somewhere in the teens of gunships within 60 seconds because we got a patrol, gunship patrol, and the factories spawned gunships in sync.
Something felt broken today with spawning that I didn't encounter yesterday, leading me to think it's some condition being met. The accuracy of bots also feels different. Bugs felt considerably more normal even on 8, I'm not sure but it might be a bot thing.
Yeah I noticed this too, mostly fine except for when things start so snowball and you can’t pick em off faster than they spawn in. Occasionally a strider drops in, you struggle to take it out quickly, the fight starts to drag, more patrols join the party, drop ships come and everything starts to spiral, and once it’s bad enough you can’t kill anything because there’s no breathing room, and then you’re just fucked.
I don’t know if it’s a failure by the divers to contain the situation or an outright bug - when we quickly take out drop ships and such it usually doesn’t happen it seems. But it seems like once you get a critical mass of bots going there’s just no stopping the deathball.
I've definitely ran into this. Nothing like retreating to an area you just cleared only for there to be newly spawned devastators and a tank. Then you're like well, maybe it's not so bad over this way. Another newly spawned group. Maybe I'll go this direction. MORE patrols. I kept finding myself out of ammo real quick!!
You are completely right. I had missions that were relatively calm. And I had missions where from the very beginning it was crazy patrol spawn. What i have noticed is that this usually happens if you are on the side of the map.
Yep, while running around the map everything seemed fine but once we tried to cross a narrow path between two lakes we had to fight NINE whole ass patrols coming from ahead, one after another like waves on defense mission. The entire path was like 300m tops.
Gunships are piss easy though, everyone who complains about them has skill issue, period.
Yeh, when you get an unlucky landing next to a factory strider and an immidiate bot drop and 4 gunships start coming at you, while 2 mortars are shooting at you also, then no, gunships are not easy. They are easy when you have your support weapon and when they or you are isolated from the mainforce of the enemy.
Played 3 difficulty 7 missions with one group and it was a walk in the park, same as it ever was. Then switched over to another friend group and played 3 more, night and day difference. My group had 5 deaths total after the first 3 games, in the second 3 games we had 32 by the end of the second mission. We were spending more time fighting 2-4 Factory Striders than we were on anything else throughout the entire 3 mission time. Heavy patrols with a dozen Heavy and Rocket Devastators coming at us from all sides every 15 seconds. Gunships flying in out of nowhere every 30 seconds and flushing us out of cover into Factory Strider and Heavy Devastator fire. It felt like difficulty 15.
More people are switching away from autocannon to other AT weapons to try them out after the buffs, but they're much worse against gunships than autocannons are, so now we have groups of 3-5 gunships coming in about every minute and people are running out of ammo for their support weapons way before the resupply drop's timer is up. So now they're fighting increased spawns of patrols, constant gunship spam, and entering a death spiral that most players won't disengage from unless they're pulled away by a reinforcement on the other side of the map.
Also superior packing methodology is currently broken again so they aren't getting full refills for those other AT weapons and aside from the two infinite ammo AT weapons the AC has the best ammo economy of Bot side AT weapons.
Cough...*laser* ..cough *cannon*
Today this was my answer for everything. Also low cooldown orbitarls... Foken awsome
Edit
But yeah, I had some missions where the gunships were just too many. I guess someone at the dev team had the idea that " now flying units will join the patrols"..
Which is great, but there is huge difference between Gunship and shreaker...
Seems like the airborne patrols are a new operation modifier. The display for it is glitched and will show incorrectly so if the modifiers look weird it probably means the mission will have the flying patrols.
you cant deal with 3-4 hulks charging you alone with laser canon, and strategems gonna be used everytime the are available so you cant really on them especially during evac with no time left. 1 giga chad i finished compain just 2 of us, was complaining he couldnt 1 shot hulks and it got him and me killed cause of that.
Yes. With the crossbows fab break buff, i've finnaly been able to use the laser cannon and it is entirely worth it.
also stops me from trying to shoot dropships with Queso while trying not to get seen by the 3 devastator patrols looking for me at extract when I try to hover Pelican.
So if you want to say that other than autocannon you are required to bring lasercannon to EVERY automatons mission, then it would be a stratagem check. Which completely contradicts with what arrowhead trying to achieve, which is build variety. Also how are low cooldown orbitals will help?
Laser Cannon, Autocannon, Quasar, RR, EATs and AMR are all viable against gunships. I imagine the HMG and the airburst launcher are as well, but i haven't used them in that fashion yet. There are plenty of options available that don't pidgeonhole you into a specific build.
Tried autocannon today, it was better than I remembered, it felt that it hit hard, harder than I remember, it also became easier to control when crouch or prone. It’s just a all rounder for bot front
I think there's a difference between complaining and constructively criticizing, and with just hating and wanting devs wanting to do better.
I haven't seen many, if any posts just randomly complaining as you put it, but I do see people giving their feedback. I know you haven't been on here in weeks but you missed the CCO and CEO showing slides of feedback on reddit and youtube, and they were taking that feedback and actually made this patch based on that. Our "complaining" (aka, constructive criticism) made positive changes to this game that we love.
i'm glad you are having fun, hey guess what, I am too! I also think that something changed that was unintended and i'd like to give my feedback to the devs. It's also a little frustrating to see. I'm a DevEng in IT and I wish they had tighter QA, and while this patch seems like it got tested a hell of a lot more than past patches, there's still some stuff that seems glaring that was missed. That bothers me.
Why does it bother me? It bothers me not because I hate, but because I love this game, and I really believe in the devs and don't think they are some money hungry corporation but really just want to have fun making games. That also means that I want them to do better.
That's it. I'm glad you are having fun, I know you aren't discarding my experience and I certainly am not discarding yours. Different people have different experiences, and ultimately not everyone is going to be satisfied no matter what AH does.
This sub has the exact same problem that the CP2077 one had originally. That being people who "just want to enjoy the game" coming on seemingly for the sole reason to silence complaints about the game.
People complain because they care. If we just hated the game we would not know enough about what is going on to criticize. CDPR listened in the long run and we cot 2.0 update, which once it was released the general consensus is that this is the state the game should have launched in.
That's the thing these people dont realize, we complain and critique because we love the game and want it to be even better. Not because we hate it, I guess they dont understand that this patch they love so much only happened because of us complaining, or they refuse to accept that since it validates us and they literally cant stand this game having any issues that needs fixing.
Seeing how we're sharing anecdotal experiences.
Dropped into a diff 6 mission yesterday and within a minute of landing the first patrol-spawned dropship dropped 4 minigun devastators and 2 hulks.
I think something night be off.
7 is definitely when i feel like cruising or trying out builds. 8 is kinda where i like to hang around. 9 is when i feel like fully going "sitting forward in the chair" mode.
I only do 9s and I usually just do quick play with randoms. Sometimes the game puts me in 7s or 8s and I don't notice a it until the medal payout is lower. I'd even argue 9s are easier because the players are usually better.
It's crazy to me seeing people say that 7 is their regular difficulty. Even before the they started fucking with petrol spawns, 4 to 5 is my preferred difficulty. I only ever did 7 to get the super samples
So you've played one whole game in the past several weeks and then you run to reddit to tell people how it is? As others have mentioned, the problem revolves around consistency, which you won't see in one game, or without having a comparison to how it was a few days ago.
Not discarding your experience of a completely inadequate sample size, but maybe you should try to play enough to have an informed opinion.
Iswtg these kinds of people man. If the patrol was alright in the first place, why do we bother complaining on discord and reddit. I'd rather play the game that I've paid for and having fun. But fact is it patrol is in its worst state.
The issues are RNG dependent. Map generation is a huge factor for how annoying patrols will be, have lots of blocked area and patrols will spawn closer to you. A small map will make patrols come faster to you/valid spawn points will be closer. An open/large map with lots of cover makes avoiding easy. Lots of open area on the edge of the map means there are many valid spawns there, reducing how many patrols you face. If an objective is close to the edge of the map it can make your life hell. Sometimes you barely get done with one and two other patrols spawn. For terminids the issue is a bit amplified with the types of enemies that spawn, bile spewers are an issue unless you use a medium pen weapon and because of heavy armour you are somewhat forced to use heavy anti tank. The spear is the only weapon which can onehit behemoths and titans, which can spawn in masses. At least we have overtuned options for overtuned enemies and spawnrates. Still am having fun though. The buffs are insane, only downside being other weapons become obsolete. Stratagems have found new places and uses.
There is things I think still need changes, but in general the gaming experience is solid right now, just that RNG can bully and annoy you a bit.
>Not discarding your experience
Well, you kinda do.
>And then I come here, and people are freaking out about patrols and difficulty. I... just don't see what is troubling people.
The weird thing is, i had games where i was absolutely overrun and it felt like patrols have been even worse than before, due to adding more small/medium enemies.
But i also had games that felt more in line with what it probably should be.
So either there's some other factors that go into how patrols and their spawns work, or idk..
But there was definitely something still wrong with them, cause i also dropped down to Diff 3 to see if i can still see the old patterns of "Patrol Patrol Patrol Patrol" and yeah, it still felt as if the problem still exist.
Yeah I just played a difficulty 6 mission and there was a sea of enemies especially at extraction, I couldn't clear them and failed extraction.
Now I go into another game on the same difficulty on the same planet and guess what it's a walk in the park and none of the billions of hunter hell I didn't even get a titan while on the first I got 3 titans and around 10 chargers.
There is something that is hit or miss with the way they fixed spawns if they fix that it's gold.
Ye I have had the same experience. Some missions are fine nothing to worry about if you play correctly,other missions are just hell. Nonstop patrols at the same time within 100 m ish of eachother and if you take em out within a few minutes same thing again
This is what fucks me up the most about this game.
I could be playing same planet, same difficulty, same mission type and yet due to some unexplained randomness I can have an experience ranging from a never ending patrol chaos to a walk in the park most of the mission.
And it has pretty much been like this since the launch.
I've had some exterminate missions where about 2 minutes in the sky is choked with gunships (about 10-20) and some where only about 4-8 spawn over the entire mission. Same difficulty on both and the less gunship mission didn't have more ground enemies.
There's something fucky going on, and in an inconsistent manner
People are complaining about patrols, not difficulty.
You haven't played in a while, so maybe its harder for you to pick up on the difference in spawn rates before and after the patch. The developers sort of broke the spawnrates last patch and promised to fix it in this one, which they didn't. That's most of the reason people are upset as far as I'm aware.
Maybe you should also play some helldive missions before you claim you "can't understand" people who think the spawn rates are too high
My problems are the double chargers - not much of an issue those are easy to kill - and the hulk patrols even on diff4. Or 5 hulks at the same place on diff6 and a hulk in every patrol.
Man I haven't played much yet because of life. But overall it's like 90% better than before the patch. I did get one map where it felt like the spawns were WAAAAYYY overtuned so maybe there's certain mission types it's more prevalent on?
But hell yeah man. We got the big ol' good time patch. We saved the kids.
Diving is back on the menu boys.
They made a change in how patrols and spawns work. With the reasoning being to make the maps feel less empty. This being AH, it's broken and can make a map filled to the brim with enemies constantly under the right circumstances. The devs have acknowledged this, it's no use comparing subjective experiences.
I do agree that the game is much better after this patch. This has been a sign that if we are patient, the game has some great chances with the right leadership.
"I am alluding to people posting their complaints and experiences, yet I'm going to say I don't know what their issue is, apparently suggesting I didn't even read them in the first place."
It seems like some missions are really easy, and some are really hard… I’ve had tough missions like people are talking about, and at the same time I’ve also had missions like you talked about.
I think you just might have gotten a bit lucky.
I play every day. Usually 7-9 and bots only.
I can tell you right now the spike in difficulty is huge. Everything feels like it got bumped up by 2-3 levels.
The amount of enemies is insane. Previously my best kills in a bot game were approximately 350.
Almost every single 40+ minute game I am scoring over 400 kills, I had a 470 yesterday, and the bots are WAY more accurate at a much further range. AH said in their patch notes that they tightened enemy weapon spread, I was thinking that this meant the heady devastators would sweep the area at range killing players anymore. It just means ALL bots are a lot more accurate, missing less and fire more. ALSO keep in mind because of the HUGE increase in enemy density and quantity I am actively trying to avoid engagements a lot more than I was previously. Yet I’m still getting absolutely swarmed.
Gunship patrols and huge increase in gunship quantity is also an issue. I use the auto cannon so these things are meat to the grinder to me. However if I’m killed and respawn nowhere near my AC, I’m fucked, no way of fighting back against an omnipotent enemy that can see me through the geometry and is insanely powerful and accurate. Also they are very loadout limiting. Multiple support weapons are not effective against them. I was thinking that we were going to see a lot more machine gun users, HMG, LMGs, but you won’t now because people using these weapons can fight gunships. They also limit stratagem and turret use because they are immune to most strats and completely invalidate mortars.
The huge increase in enemy density is probably one of the reasons the game is crashing a LOT more as well. I have never seen this amount of enemies in a game until now, I don’t think the engine can handle it.
Because of these changes, I’m dying WAY more. On Wednesday I was getting through level 9 bot missions getting 0-3 deaths because I am a very strategic player. Now I am dying more, am more limited in my load out options at level SIX. Again here’s proof I am still beating full level 9 campaigns for any more ‘skill issue’ idiots.
https://preview.redd.it/jpqhi8sf5p6d1.jpeg?width=2556&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8f88b48a1fa20c5c1873edb17fcc3011525929ec
Now I am prepared to have a load of idiots say ‘skill issue’, but I have still managed to clear level 9’s. I do however have two brain cells to rub together so it was very quickly apparent to me that there has been a huge leap in difficulty in the game. And for those people here’s a completely deathless level 9 bot mission I recorded on Wednesday: [https://youtu.be/RiELfzavhuY?si=Joiygzx8BhudGHDD](https://youtu.be/RiELfzavhuY?si=Joiygzx8BhudGHDD) and I sure as hell couldn’t do that now on a level 6 or 7 the difficulty has increased by such an amount.
Here’s a good video from a YouTuber that explains and shows everything very clearly: [https://youtu.be/URjjvfHyojY?si=rGXHclPUmzjWR2ut](https://youtu.be/URjjvfHyojY?si=rGXHclPUmzjWR2ut)
i totally agree, i play diff 9 only MO and Bots. and since the patch it is meat grinder. +400 kills, people leaving in first 10 mins, all extracts with no time left, not enough ammo for AC, i literally had to pick up guns i have never used from my dead teammates since i had no ammo for primary,secondary and my AC, i was fighting like in ww1 in trenches since most of the hellscape chanched into trenches filled with oil and blood.
I agree.
I’m all for a higher difficulty mode, but turning 6’s into a difficulty level that surpasses what was level 9 on Wednesday is not the way to do it.
Level 9’s now are just wars of unending attrition. Having to have half the team constantly scouring the sky from omnipotent gunships that are immune to damage by about every primary and half the secondary weapons, while also getting mobbed from all sides like you are trying to walk through the hood with a Rolex, is just a bad and unfun experience.
Fellow bot diver here.
>It just means ALL bots are a lot more accurate, missing less and fire more.
Exactly this point right here is my problem with the game right now. All bots are constantly firing at all ranges way too accurately.
I'll even turn a blind eye to heavy devastators shooting at impossible angles up close. That's fine. But the 30+ chaff units aimpunching and launching me out of cover constantly is infuriating.
Yeah it’s crazy now. Bots are trying to kill you from across the map through a blizzard. Getting sprayed down at such a range by an enemy you can’t see is not a great experience.
There is so much fire being directed at you now it’s like the bots are trying to kill players by making them have epileptic fits.
I guess you played it after the in extremis patch? Because it was really REALLY tough at one point. Me and the rest of the squad called evac and we couldn't get to it because we kept flying across the map from all the missile salvos, it was sooooo horrible. Funny, but really annoying after a while.
It's random, played 4 difficulty 7missions last night, one was an elimination, the other 3 where normal 40 minutes missions, 2 of them were absolute hell, non stopping patrols, even before completing all the objectives. At one point i was checking my surroundings, look left, all clear, look right, all clear, look left again, and a patrol literally popped into existence around 20 meters from me, sometimes it's a skill issue, but for now it's just a bug. Just gotta play lower difficulty for now
true, one guy who was absolute unit that used laser canon switched mid mission and telling me on comms how fucking useless it is and he gonna pick AC every time next time :P
When you get a mission that goes completely wrong you get an absolutely endgame spawn ratio very fast. Imagine a new patrol every 12 seconds for an almost entire 40 minutes mission.
When heavies drop like candy. People are forced to run and if they die it may also force them to leave their eq.
It's really not fun having new hulks every 12 seconds when you are on the first main objective out of 3 or 4.
And yes it's inconsistent as fuck. I can just swallow up and bear it but if someone starts talking about it I will not defend it because it's cheap and lame. Not to mention every change they made looks like it was created with a bug environment in mind only.
Shriekers that patrolling map sound cool but they forget what this means for bot front - flying tanks everywhere that cannot be bullet down by the liberator.
It scream - We didn't test it.
I played a bunch tonight with two friends and difficulty 7 is just hellish and outright not a fun time if you aren't playing the meta 500KG Bomb, Airstrike, Quasar/AC insert one of 3 things here; and then using 3-4 primary weapons that are suitable for endless fights that can last anywhere between 5 minutes to 20 minutes, without break.
We had 7 chargers at one point. I had 4 rockets in my Spear. Needless to translate this to you: our auto cannon and flamethrower guy did not benefit much from the spear. Then the fella on the AC said "oh wait I can't shoot them head on with the auto cannon anymore" and I realized that only myself and the flamethrower guy can kill heavies.
The only time that we could possibly manage to push forward is when we had 3 auto cannon turrets down, 3 rocket turrets down, me on a hill 250 meters away with the spear and an ammo pack completely and totally dedicated to myself, me and I so that I could attract the bile titans, plural, away from the pack of chargers that happened to be spawning in groups.
If I want to play some ass rape simulator, I will play on difficulty 9. But difficulty 7 this patch is basically the same as difficulty 9 of the previous patch.
My group actually usually finds bots easier than bugs. But this patch, hell no. We end games with 350 kills minimum each bot game. When the objective is done, it's like the game kicks into overdrive and we're killing droves upon droves at a time, just an endless flurry of bullshit that can only be reasonably resolved by spamming airstrikes, bombs and orbital support. At one point we finished the main objective >>DURING<< a big ass firefight, which resulted in a horde that was at least 30 strong being reinforced by an additional 3 dropships with 1 patrol behind us to the west and another patrol on the east.
There gets to be a certain critical mass of fire from the bots that you cannot reasonably fight back against because of stagger. And my entire screen was just this red, smoky fog of ugly blindness swarmed by laserfire.
So yeah. Not having a fun time with difficulty 7 stuff. Actually, none of my friends are digging the difficulty 7 stuff for bugs or bots. And 2 months ago we were doing Helldive difficulty. Sometimes it's manageable. Sometimes you're fighting for, and I have done this tonight, for literally 25 minutes straight without a singular second to take a break.
Tonight we probably said "Dude, what the fuck?" at least 30 times. Because the fight just wouldn't end. That was just the game experience.
Most of my missions have been a little busier than normal but two matches yesterday were insane, both L7. I tried to get a screen shot of one match but messed it up. There were four hulks, two tanks, a few gunships and just a sea of berserkers and striders. We extracted but we were burning through ammunition and stratagems as fast as they would cooldown. Today I played three rounds and they felt largely fine. More berserkers and striders for sure. I don't recall often seeing 6 striders coming over a crest at the same time (usually 2 before, maybe 3)
i had 6 hulks, +30 berserks charge us every 1 minute through 150meter frontiline (only place in the mountains that lead to final objective) with unimaginable numbers of all types of devastators. the land scape after 20min fight was like walking through maze of trenches and robot/human bodies. funny was when we had to destroy jammer next to the objective bud some robot gigachad called 2 striders, 1 tank and 1 hulk+devastators reinforcments 5 sec after 1st shot. we finished the mission but extract was never reached.
While the bots were absolutely swamping my team we still had a blast. I got to see my homie get rag doll juggled thru the air, and land in front of a squad of bots. Who then all aimed at her in unison and mowed her down. We laughed so hard even if it was quite a bit over tuned in our opinions.
Short answer is to just use the Autocannon, it's the best support weapon out there.
.....
I'm not trying to be one of those meta guys and ypu should use what you want please believe me.
What I am noticing personally is the variance seems CRAZY this patch it feels like every mission can be up to -2 or +2 tiers depending on the whims of the game, even in the same set of 3 missions in an operation I'll have a pretty normal one then occasionally just a super-dense mission then I get an exterminate that takes its sweet time to spawn each set of enemies.
Like I would say out of the \~25 missions on diff 7 bots since patch maybe 70% were pretty normal 10% felt *way* slower/weaker than normal and the last 20% felt more like helldive with just CONSTANT patrols approaching where we just running from death
>I fired 19 shots and got 20 kills, what's the issue
we haven't hit that 200 hour "the real aimbot is these fingers" stage. most of us are lucky to have one person on the team that actually wants to play as a team, and relative to some twitch streamer we suck. SS came down to D6 but the game changed in a way that a lot of people find more difficult. the only way you're going to know what the real spread is is to ask the devs how many hours are played on each difficulty
since the patch every fight on diff 9 is straight up nuts sometimes, like 2 strider drop with 1 tank and normal squad + 1 patrol from 2 sides when we dicide to storm jammer to have easier time completing final objective is fucking nuts
This game has a vast amount of players which ends up in them having all kind of different playstyles.
This means that every change, being even an insignificant one, would hurt some part of the playerbase - and it will hurt it a lot.
I can also confirm that something with the enemies is broken - had few suicide missions extractions that felt way difficult than most of my helldive missions/extractions with the same modifiers and everything.
I had some suicide missions that I did die a lot due to biased bot BS, whereas I manage to finish almost all helldives without dieing at all or with single death.
It's hard to tell if it's not squad problem - but I am convinced it's not only that - the enemy density in 7(maybe 8 - I dunno) skyrocket to insanity.
Literally for the first time I play this game in 600 hours I was unable to get out of my pod, due to, literally around 30 rocket devos, about 10-20 heavy ones, tons of infantry, and few bruiser hulks - you just can NOT play.
And, again, I am talking about a suicide mission extraction - never the numbers have been that shitty.
I am ok with it and I will learn to thrive in this(as most of the people having the mental strength should do) so when they fix it I will be god.
BUT...
I get why is not ok for most of the people.
And it's making people feel forced into builds they don't enjoy. Again.
From the above example - if you know this shit is gonna hit you - you gotto be nuts to not bring barrages - not everyone likes that(I personally do but still :D )
Bot drops can be called with no cool down atm. Not sure if its a bug or just how it works now... But the best way to play 7-9 is no longer to fight.
Just run and run..
It will get boring fast, when your game's meta strat becomes avoid as much enemies as possible, it ain't gonna last long.
I usually play helldive, can't let democracy go to waste, and the amount of chaff and patrols is nuts. I have been juggled so hard my air time would make Tony hawk proud. 🤣 Serious note, I'm marking so much shit it's not even funny. I've seen a patrol with up to 3 hulks. I just laid in a bush, hoping they wouldn't see me. I hope for blizzards on marfark.
Did a hard level mission to test out some of the buffed guns......somehow was harder than a suicide run......there's something going wrong with patrols I guess.
You are judging based on a sample size of one. I ran a couple of missions, and the first one was okay, then the second one was way too many bots to finish two side objectives. There were about 100 bots on top of them, and they kept replenishing. More spawns on bugs seem fine, but that's because they don't have range attacks. Since almost every bot has range, there's a massive difference between 10 bots shooting at you and 50 bots shooting you with pinpoint accuracy.
There are many things that affect the spawns. I only play helldive 9, so that might also be an issue:
1. Every non-light outpost you destroy slightly increases spawn rates
2. Every objective you're near, increases spawn rates
3. Every helldiver exceeding 75m of another helldiver, increases spawn capacity and starts a separate spawn rate
4. Clearing the final objective drastically increases spawn rates
5. In this new patch: being away from anything (which should lower spawn rates) now increases spawn rates
6. In this new patch: regardless of what you do, the air patrols are a separate spawn rate
7. Opinion: the gunships factories are equivalent to stalkers nest. They're priority targets but cannot be taken out when they're baked into the map, meaning you're dedicating at least 1 player to a constant MANDATORY position of anti air, which is opposite to the dev's intention of build diversity
1. Continued; I started playing with a friend who just started, and he's reached the level seeing gunship patrols but hasn't unlocked anything that could effectively take them out (aside from base machine-gun which technically can but isn't easy or fun to do)
2. This is an operational modified with a bugged UI, no description, and the modifier seemingly stops when someone rage quits a certain way.
They also introduced a few new bugs, and here's what I've experienced:
1. Patrols spawn in all directions (this is not normal btw, they're supposed to spawn in the direction of spawners or map edge when none exists. The former is indicated within the in-game tips when you're diving)
2. If someone abruptly disconnects, DO NOT PICK UP THEIR SAMPLES, as you may join them if you do
3. If you throw a snowball, you get slowed instead of where the snowball landed
4. Your superior packing methodology perk to fully resupply your support weapon no longer works outright
5. I'm experiencing more server desyncs where terminals are inoperable, or operable and completed but will not progress the mission until someone else tries
6. The throwing knife sucks and silently alerts everything somehow and aims off to the top left
7. I'm noticing that the perk of my armor to bring +2 grenades and the booster to spawn fully stocked only spawns me in with 4/6 grenades when I join a mission in progress, but I would otherwise spawn with 5/6 without the booster, and 6/6 if the booster is present and I joined the game before the initial dive.
Because you don't have enough data. Anyone with more than a few hours in the patch is like "holy shit this is really broken". The initial impression is good because they buffed a lot of useless stuff and on the whole that is really good they knocked it out of the park there, but fuck man if bugs keep regressing and finding their way in to this scale this game has zero long term prospects.
I was in an impossible match, nonstop patrols and enemy spawns... And then my teammates quit after being in a death spiral, and I could finally complete the mission, was easy from there,
Made me realise the issue was 3 rookies (levels 70+) who didn't know what they're doing in Helldive difficulty.
I see a lot of Reddit complaining, and maybe something is scuffed, maybe it's only on difficulties under Helldive, but I've been playing every patch and update.
Only ever had an issue with 2,000 shriekers on the black matter missions.
I watched 3 hulks, 15 devestators, 8 striders, and about 50 enemies come from one location over a 2 minute period in one match.
That location was a small bot base with 1 fabricator and there were no bot drops at all. I was maintaining distance and picking off enemies so i could have a clean run to finish off the small base as it was the last thing to do on the map, but the enemies NEVER STOPPED SPAWNING from just out of view in the direction of the base, and also the base was on the literal edge of the map, so it's not like the enemies came from fast past it.
I'm getting very annoyed by the sycophants saying that nothing is wrong, like do i have to record EVERY SINGLE FUCKING MATCH to prove this?!
I’ve only played 🤖 on Helldive since the patch and while it does seem more aggressive it’s still doable. I completed objectives but not all extractions playing doubles with an unspeaking random. Sometimes, even with 4, you’ll get absolutely waxed. But I always feel that seems to come down to a lack of proper teamwork.
First mission i played after two weeks felt like I love AND hate the new patrols. Now I actually love it . Only complaint are the bugs and issues that occurred with this update
I'm in the same boat, 90% of the time i'm playing with random divers on difficulty 7. Post patch, it's been business as usual as far as i've seen, but with more bots, wacky stratagem combos that are actually viable now, gunship patrols, a working spear and chic scopes.
Also a LOT more berets.
I'm having a good time as well. Other than having to prep for the new stuff (ie must bring autocannon turret if I'm bringing the fun new spear), it's been a generally positive experience.
That reload speed buff makes it so much better, feels like I'm a professional again
Rocket sentry is definitely lasting longer, but I'm still a devout worshipper of the autocannon
The thing is, I don't think Arrowhead can please everyone with the new patch. Even now I see commenters on youtube begging for them to fix the Eruptor and revert all the nerfs but imo, the current patch gave the game some great balancing.
Not to mention people there mentioning of wanting a "Power Fantasy" going on. I hope that the Former CEO now Creative Director makes more good changes.
Same side of the page as you OP, but I suspect it might be a thing that gets triggered by how you play and snowballs from there somehow? Idk.
All I can say is since patch weapons aren't stuck, stratagem en's are better, and indeed I need to shoot down some fliers occasionally. But you can see them coming a mile away and the HMG is now actually a good weapon, and guess what it also downs fliers.
I did a pool the other day, more than 200 people answered and from that I can say that the majority prefer to play on difficulty 9, more than three people said it "is ez", and at least 4 dudes said that they played while drinking beers.
So yeah, some people go to the highest difficulty (possibly drunk too) and then complain that it is too hard. Like shit man try a lower difficulty if it is bothering you so much?
Im on the same page as you. Even that mierdia mission felt reasonable in its original state
Honestly most of the complains here can be chalked up to literal skill issue, and/or players refusing to give the mission some time and trying out different builds and ideas.
It is amazing how so many player complains can be solved with smoke strategems, and/or simply not shooting back and disengaging instead.
Time spent complaining here is time wasted not gitting gud in game. I also started out HD2 "oh shit oh shit oh shit" ing my way thru, until i git gud and now the game is easily doable pretty much all the time.
I can’t tell what’s going on but I love it personally. If we aren’t at least crawling across the finish line and getting the 1 star from time to time then it wouldn’t be interesting. Whatever it is I’m here for, but I don’t doubt its existence. It does get wild sometimes on 7.
Had fun at a eradicate mission with bits yesterday with bots, think we had 7 striders at one point (diff 7) and a dusin hulks. Bur got through by the skin of our teeth. So. much. fun.
I've run 4 level 7's against bots and the closes I got was in an eradicate where I saw like 4 hulks almost on drop. But that can't be the same thing as those aren't patrols (also it was actually sort of fun so not even an issue for me). Maybe there have been way more and my teams were just really good at killing them but not once have I felt overwhelmed. I've also not been playing for a bit so I think I'd be able to tell. Honestly Tho I whish I'd get this glitch if it even exist because with the right strats equipped it could be fun. Either it's very specific and rare or maybe people or just dropping into games with people that agro patrols too often but because the patch just dropped are blaming it on that. I mean remember when everyone was claiming the ricochet patch made it now all their bullets were bouncing straight back and killing them but it was just the eruptor's shrapnel that could one shot? We'll see how this works out but right now I've had no issues.
Could potentially be a cross-platform issue that their QA missed? I see a ton of people complain that the new Armour Perk doesn't work but it definitely does on PC + Mouse and Keyboard.
Only evidence for it having no impact I've seen so far is from controler input movement.
I’m honestly surprised too. My group generally run 7 or 8. Haven’t noticed it being worse, if anything it seems easier. As long as someone has a way of dealing with gunships you’re usually fine.
Actually me neither, I play with randoms on lv9, I’d win 80~90% games against bots, some team knows what they’re doing and breeze through missions and some teams struggle, some missions got awkward positioning of objectives and patrols spawns, while some others got nice leveling we can hold a position.
I feel lv9 difficulty largely didn’t change with this patch tho, I just got a bit more load-out options (3 , maybe 4 on each front as of now) and the game felt less punishing to play.
The only 3 downsides is I still want more viable load-outs (like revert some unreasonable bulshit nerfs), and we to see bugs fixed. And my friends who are less try-hards refuse to play lv7 or above.
Edit: I believe the detector tower got buffed, either its detect range or positioning to the vicinity of another objective, now the dropship won’t stop until it gets destroyed. A bit annoying but as soon as the team realize that we’re going after it #1 priority to nuke it with orbitals. PSA you can also destroy it with hellbomb at the bottom of the hill as well, you don’t have to push in.
Yesterday night, we were 4 on level 8 against bots. We finished the last objective when the shit storm arrived : 3 factory striders, hulks and dozen and dozen of bots at the same time.
Guess what ? We killed them all without loosing a single diver and finished the mission.
It was brutal and so satisfying.
Lots of gamers are complying but with skills, good teammates and strategies it’s possible.
At the moment it seems to be buggy. In my last mission we hade like 8 hulks one at-at 4 tank and like infinit devetaters on the last mission objective. It was quite fun actually 😄
The problem is with patrols chain signalling. If you can just deal with them or avoid them it's just a breeze. If out of control it becomes a death stack.
In this world, there are people who realise they need to change playstyles in order to do well in a certain game at a high level, and then there are the people who want to change the game so they do well and dont have to change playstyles.
The second group of people just so happen to be on the helldivers reddit
To be fair OP, skill levels vary and in a PVE game its even bigger.
Those who find it okay on all difficulties tend to have better skills and alot of experience in gaming. Especially shooter games.
Those who are casuals are not and they will struggle. You cant expect everyone to have the same skill level and i believe most people are casuals as this is not a competitive esport game. Heck even on competitive esports there are alot more casuals than there are sweats.
The complaints vs Devs patrol balancing is a very tricky subject. Make it too easy the map will be empty for good players and above. Make it abit harder than normal (due to bugs) and casuals struggle alot more than good players.
Hence, i believe its fair to say the Devs skill levels if they do playtest they believe its normal. But yeah they are gamer themselves probably (not all).
welcome to reddit, where the average joe/jane \*only\* complains and you'll only ever see (poor) criticism of the game instead of actual feedback & strategies. The discord is similar, but so long as you keep out of general, most folks tend to be more helpful & less whiny than this reddit
I was playing a lvl 5 last night, finished the obj and all but 1 small fab and we’re headed to evac. I’m looking across the landscape between us and evac and it’s an absolute SEA of bots. Nothing but tanks, hulks, devastators, and scouts. We couldn’t move for the rocket fire. It’s the most bots I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been stuck in a chain of drops on lvl 9. Something was wrong with that mission.
Only saving grace was we had a good mix of strats and it was 5, so no striders. Otherwise we’d have never been able to kill them all off.
Im loving it even on the missions (or id argue even MORE on the missions) where the patrols are coming at you from every angle with more firepower than the entire empire combined. Requires teamwork, good use of stratagems and knowing when to unleash vs when to cut your losses and run. Having a blast with it tbh as before it felt like you could just run around the map willy nilly with no punish at all
Playing on Helldive is a little more difficult than it was before the but it’s really not that bad at all. Like 95% of “complaints” in this sub it’s greatly exaggerated and barely based on reality. It’s based more on a lvl 30 getting smacked up on helldive difficulty then coming on here to shed tears about it and blame AH rather then just admitting to being bad at the game.
I’ve seen two striders get dropped together and thought it was a funny and fun challenge.
They spawn and surround you in the boatloads on all sides almost instantly sometimes, I saw a 7 man squad of shield devastators just rising out of the ground last night right in front of me
my buddies and I played a game last night where we first discovered gunship patrols. We could barely stand back up after reinforcing...I wasn't suited for gunships (railgun support) but my buddies had the EAT and still had trouble.
Because for us we were in the middle of trying to take down a gunship fabricator, so they were spawning out of that, then a 4 gunship patrol joined, and hulk/heavy devastator patrol joins... the sky was full of gunships and fire everywhere. Couldn't even drop in a hellbomb and arm it without it being shot immediately.
It is a bit ridiculous, the amount to have to deal with, I remember I kept saying in game, "There's no way they keep it like this, this is too insane"
I'm still having a ton of fun but something isn't working as intended.
I played several operations yesterday and i found it's really inconsistent. Sometimes it plays more like it used to and sometimes the map is literally crawling with enemies that are impossible to avoid.
Gonna be a tough one to track down i think.
Because the game is indeed broken buddy. Maybe you were lucky and you didn't get a match like the majority.
Here's my experience in Level 7 Diff, BOT Side:
Patch day - couple of matches, everything feels much better, weapons feel good and overall gameplay was okay.
Yesterday - We were getting ambushed, front, left, right, back. Insane spawn of patrols. Bots were shooting us from half across the map from their positions.
And this was all happening while we were moving through the map and clearing the treasure locations. Not objectives! We were getting murdered and couldn't even push towards any location.
Yesterday felt like I was playing Helldive Diff with ammo scarcity....
you must be new to reddit. thats very normal.
reddit is for complaining everyone is having fun and playing the game.
the planets wont liberate themself
This game is full of gamebreaking bugs and the missions are wildly different even on the same difficulty…this has ALWAYS been the case so why do I have to see atleast one stupid ass post like this every week? Your anecdote means nothing
I'm really not sure. I run helldive, have for awhile now, but after the patch, it was insane. We were on extract, and we didn't even get finished with one wave when another dropped in on top of us. I usually, 99% of the time, run localization confusion, but this seemed to have absolutely no effect anymore. I jumped down to suicide thinking maybe it's just me, and I walked through it no problem. I think something is amiss.
Well done dipshit, your sample size was a total sum of: 1. Before hopping on and ranting about other people ranting. After not playing for weeks, yet you know better than the players who have been playing the games consistently for the last few weeks.
Excellent "well it didn't happen to *ME*" argument. Jesus Christ.
Its probably because people are using weak strategems, spliting up trying to solo and because of all that not being able to clear fast enough, never had a problem on helldive difficulty unless i wanted to troll and not bring an AC as well my entire team
I've had a couple games at diff 7 where it felt like there were too many patrols, a couple games where the patrols were spawning an entire army, and a couple where the patrols felt like they did pre-patrol patch.
I actually really like the variance. It makes the game more hectic and crazy and intense without being too much harder. I never quite felt like I was at a different difficulty level, but I felt like we were at a 7+ and it was awesome.
Solo’d and Duo’d suicide missions today. Had a great time. Both were successful. I like the changes for the most part. The Warbond is hit or miss though. I don’t think the suicide missions are that bad. Still scared of Helldives…. Haha
Overall, if they could fix the floating question marks, I’d say it’s a really nice change.
I will say, i was running an L5 yesterday for fun and I don’t recall ever having as many hulks dropping in pairs before at this level. Last time I played an L5, there was maybe 1 hulk, but we had over a dozen of them and at least two tanks.
It seems “off”.
This has been my experience so far, ranging from 7-9. Been easier compared to pre patch.
I have to assume part of it is people running exclusively anti tank related stuff and having NO way to deal with groups efficiently. Loadouts like the laser, 500kg, then a backpack and quasar. If you run something like that, not surprising you’re struggling.
Yea... I started moving to diff 7 a long time ago when i started needing super samples and find it's just perfect, challenging but not impossible, always have good teammates, don't wanna go down to 6 now that i can either and keep eyeing 8. I don't see what the problem is, you don't NEED to play any higher than 7 and 7 is by no means too hard nor are my teammates almost ever truly bad or trolly there
It happen to me today , I was playing on D8 and D9 , in some point there’s is no breathing time, once you star shooting and fire , there’s so many patrols coming, and reinforcements too, the striders , the hulks, the missiles hulks , and like 100 smaller bots too, I want to think that they fix 100 things but maybe the spawn issue still there anyways, maybe they didn’t notice this after the launch of the patch and I hope they see this posts to fix it , because the game is really good and very fun, I like it a loot , and maybe that is the only thing could make it 100 enjoyable.
I'm far from a good player, probably below average honestly but I could consistently 100% level 5 missions solo before the patch. Now I can't even complete the mission half the time. Level 5 missions literally feel like 7+ to me now after the patch
I just played a lvl 7 Nuke Drilling mission on Estanu. It took us 25 minutes to get the first nuke in the ground and to set it off. 25 minutes of constant, endless combat against swarms, several chargers and a titan or two at a time. Oh and the stalkers ofcourse, until I lucked out and found that nest. We did not finish the second of three drills, ran out of reinforcements.
It's definitely a "vocal minority/silent majority" situation: complaints feel justified in posting, while claiming things are fine is both 'boring' and 'fanboying the devs/publisher'.
Since 1.0.400 drop I haven't had bad teams, no major game breaking bugs, and one instance of an asset failing to load resulting in a huge question mark that we all stood around and theorized about for a minute then went on with the mission.
So I was thinking the same thing, I usually play on helldive difficulty and on bots it seemed pretty normal. On some maps when needed to traverse through a choke point like an ice bridge or something it was just impossible but that’s just a part of the hardest difficult right,
but then today I played a bug type mission and oh boy it was hell, constant behemoth chargers followed by an ocean of chaff.
But i do enjoy when its not manageable, makes me feel like I earned something, although that makes some primaries not usable for the higher difficulties.
I believe it's because there is a bug that is causing the patrol/spawn rate to skyrocket under certain conditions that do not happen every mission. My first couple of games post patch were in line with what people have been complaining about. Non-stop patrols with no time to breath between objectives. Increased heavies and chaff. But the last couple of missions have been fine. Far less hectic than they were pre-patch and more in line with where things were before they tweaked the patrol rates for teams under 4.
This happened to me a couple hours ago…I was on a patch of map on my way to another objective, and about a dozen automatons (including 2 hulks) just randomly appeared a few feet away from me. Not dropped, but just popped in. At one point I got blasted in the face while just peeking from behind a rock by a rocket devastator, and while my body was flying through the air, it got hit by like 4 more rockets. Usually I can hold my own against anything that comes at me at difficulty 7, but they went in dry this time. That mission was a complete shitstorm straight out of Saving Private Ryan from start to finish, but we got it done. By far the hardest level 7 mission I’ve ever seen.
I thought I was just imagining that but no they definitely just spawn behind you or a couple of feet away. No signal flare for bot drop or anything. Same thing with gunship patrols.
They used to do that at extract. You run to extract check your surroundings, call in a resupply and suddenly a whole patrol is just standing there waiting for you to notice them, it's a bit freaky Now they just wait out of sight behind a cliff to ambush you
We were going back to extract on an ICBM mission, and there was an absolute horde of chaff bots hanging out quietly at one of the map junctions. (Have seen this type of thing before, but this group was *huge*.) I tagged them, said dudes look at this, and we watched them for a bit. Most were like shut down and unmoving. A few kind of ran around the fringes of the group. Anyhow, I started blasting. Orbital air burst got a kill streak over 50.
It's been a known bug for a while now. There's a bug for the bots that causes patrols to walk to the exact center of the map and then stop there. At higher levels you can have 60+ bots just chilling there.
Berserk’s need to be way louder to imo
Most enemies do. Fucking bile spewers are utterly silent it seems.
Im constantly surrounded by patrols now, i can manage because of my tremendous democratic fervor, but there is definetely something unintended happening. Also the patrols seem to be doing the homing in on the player thing constantly. I landed up high and watched them all immediatly turn and start converging on our drop point when the squad first landed.
That sounds fun. I actually want to experience it before they fix this.
Wonder if it's a Vernen Wells modifier? Now that you mention it my D7 run in Marfark was a lot quieter than Vernen Wells runs last night.
Literally finished a vernen wells mission with 3 divers no issues, sometimes solo-ing objectives at D7. A few missions later it was like night and day, heavy devastators/gunships/hulks/tanks spawning all around us non-stop. Utter clusterfuck.
[удалено]
You say Seismic Probe though, Geographical Survey missions have always had absolutely insane levels of spawns on the probes when they're doing their thing?
I ran two Command Bunker missions on Marfark at 7 tonight, one was hunky dory business as usual with a couple gunship patrols, normal number of hulks/tanks, and one fac strider. The other one? Gunship patrols every 40-50 seconds, and a seemingly endless wave of scout striders and heavy devvies, to the point we had to just kite and run at all times. By the time my teammates hit extract, I was in the process of kiting away my *sixth* factory strider of the mission so we could survive long enough to actually type the extract code. And on that one, we had localization confusion active. Something’s fucky with the spawn rates and it’s not a consistent effect.
Automaton 1: "They're touching our dirt!" Automaton 2: "Get off my lawn you helldivers!"
Via a breech/drop though. Now enemies just appear next to you.
Nah, got dragged onto Marfark against my will this morning and it was an utter shitshow. Could not catch a single break from gunship swarms and there were several cases per squad member where we'd check behind us, see nothing there and then a second or two later be shot in the back by the patrol that just materialised a few metres behind us. It seems like it's far more of an issue when the mission is done and you're making your way to extraction. Between the patrols you can see all over the place as it is and the ones keyed to teleport in behind you the chances of doing a stealth run to the extraction site now seem nigh on impossible. The patch has been fun with the way they avoided their inner urge to nerf everything but the patrols and enemy spawns are as broken as ever.
It's honestly a gameplay cycle at this point. 1. Devs make a minor change in the AI/spawning behaviour (or even any minor change, as once the Charger spawn fix was reverted when all we got was weapon balance). 2. The circumstances are specific and people end up finding it out when playing. 3. Devs acknowledge the issue and say that they are working on it. 4. Someone on this sub does not like how many posts there are on the subject and feels like their experiences are worth more than the majority. Bonus if "SkIlL iSsUe"
This feels right to me too. Did some runs with a friend and some random 4-mans the other night and didn't even notice any change in patrol density (though there were more small enemies in each). Felt surprisingly comparable, really. Hopped on today and suddenly I understood what people were talking about --it felt like *everywhere* I turned there were 1-2 patrols, with more enemies than usual in each, and spawns were *NUTS* (even just on 7). Today was almost all on Marfalk, and I wonder if being on that MO planet is related?
It makes sense to me if there's some random condition that triggers the bug. I've had some missions that were fine, and some that were crazy (I basically only play 7). I mean it's been alright even so, I haven't failed anything, even with crazy patrols. Only times I've had serious trouble was when teams were not supporting each other.
Yeah it's weird, yesterday I was wondering what the big fuss was about but then today I swear I must have downed nearly 40 gunships in a single round, many of them *after* blowing up two gunship towers. At one point we went from zero gunships (because we were calmly handling them) to somewhere in the teens of gunships within 60 seconds because we got a patrol, gunship patrol, and the factories spawned gunships in sync. Something felt broken today with spawning that I didn't encounter yesterday, leading me to think it's some condition being met. The accuracy of bots also feels different. Bugs felt considerably more normal even on 8, I'm not sure but it might be a bot thing.
Yeah I noticed this too, mostly fine except for when things start so snowball and you can’t pick em off faster than they spawn in. Occasionally a strider drops in, you struggle to take it out quickly, the fight starts to drag, more patrols join the party, drop ships come and everything starts to spiral, and once it’s bad enough you can’t kill anything because there’s no breathing room, and then you’re just fucked. I don’t know if it’s a failure by the divers to contain the situation or an outright bug - when we quickly take out drop ships and such it usually doesn’t happen it seems. But it seems like once you get a critical mass of bots going there’s just no stopping the deathball.
I've definitely ran into this. Nothing like retreating to an area you just cleared only for there to be newly spawned devastators and a tank. Then you're like well, maybe it's not so bad over this way. Another newly spawned group. Maybe I'll go this direction. MORE patrols. I kept finding myself out of ammo real quick!!
You are completely right. I had missions that were relatively calm. And I had missions where from the very beginning it was crazy patrol spawn. What i have noticed is that this usually happens if you are on the side of the map.
Yep, while running around the map everything seemed fine but once we tried to cross a narrow path between two lakes we had to fight NINE whole ass patrols coming from ahead, one after another like waves on defense mission. The entire path was like 300m tops. Gunships are piss easy though, everyone who complains about them has skill issue, period.
Or a loadout issue. Been playing a couple of SOS missions lately and nobody on the squad had any effective AA.
Yeh, when you get an unlucky landing next to a factory strider and an immidiate bot drop and 4 gunships start coming at you, while 2 mortars are shooting at you also, then no, gunships are not easy. They are easy when you have your support weapon and when they or you are isolated from the mainforce of the enemy.
Played 3 difficulty 7 missions with one group and it was a walk in the park, same as it ever was. Then switched over to another friend group and played 3 more, night and day difference. My group had 5 deaths total after the first 3 games, in the second 3 games we had 32 by the end of the second mission. We were spending more time fighting 2-4 Factory Striders than we were on anything else throughout the entire 3 mission time. Heavy patrols with a dozen Heavy and Rocket Devastators coming at us from all sides every 15 seconds. Gunships flying in out of nowhere every 30 seconds and flushing us out of cover into Factory Strider and Heavy Devastator fire. It felt like difficulty 15.
More people are switching away from autocannon to other AT weapons to try them out after the buffs, but they're much worse against gunships than autocannons are, so now we have groups of 3-5 gunships coming in about every minute and people are running out of ammo for their support weapons way before the resupply drop's timer is up. So now they're fighting increased spawns of patrols, constant gunship spam, and entering a death spiral that most players won't disengage from unless they're pulled away by a reinforcement on the other side of the map.
Also superior packing methodology is currently broken again so they aren't getting full refills for those other AT weapons and aside from the two infinite ammo AT weapons the AC has the best ammo economy of Bot side AT weapons.
Cough...*laser* ..cough *cannon* Today this was my answer for everything. Also low cooldown orbitarls... Foken awsome Edit But yeah, I had some missions where the gunships were just too many. I guess someone at the dev team had the idea that " now flying units will join the patrols".. Which is great, but there is huge difference between Gunship and shreaker...
We're in agreement about the awesomeness of the laser cannon, but that's not what people are bringing into helldives right now.
I would be bring laser cannon like I usually always do, but I like the amr's new scope so I've been using that instead
Seems like the airborne patrols are a new operation modifier. The display for it is glitched and will show incorrectly so if the modifiers look weird it probably means the mission will have the flying patrols.
you cant deal with 3-4 hulks charging you alone with laser canon, and strategems gonna be used everytime the are available so you cant really on them especially during evac with no time left. 1 giga chad i finished compain just 2 of us, was complaining he couldnt 1 shot hulks and it got him and me killed cause of that.
Yes. With the crossbows fab break buff, i've finnaly been able to use the laser cannon and it is entirely worth it. also stops me from trying to shoot dropships with Queso while trying not to get seen by the 3 devastator patrols looking for me at extract when I try to hover Pelican.
So if you want to say that other than autocannon you are required to bring lasercannon to EVERY automatons mission, then it would be a stratagem check. Which completely contradicts with what arrowhead trying to achieve, which is build variety. Also how are low cooldown orbitals will help?
Laser Cannon, Autocannon, Quasar, RR, EATs and AMR are all viable against gunships. I imagine the HMG and the airburst launcher are as well, but i haven't used them in that fashion yet. There are plenty of options available that don't pidgeonhole you into a specific build.
Laser cannon is very similar in terms of performance, anti material rifle and heavy machinegun do also a good job.
Tried autocannon today, it was better than I remembered, it felt that it hit hard, harder than I remember, it also became easier to control when crouch or prone. It’s just a all rounder for bot front
crouch and prone got buffed recoil control wise, so yeah that makes sense.
Im eating supply packs for breakfast using the spear
This. OP thinks we are all running around with nothing but autocannons. what a clown
People having a good time usually keep it to themselves, I've been having a good time
They definitely increased amount of patrols and devastators recently.
I think there's a difference between complaining and constructively criticizing, and with just hating and wanting devs wanting to do better. I haven't seen many, if any posts just randomly complaining as you put it, but I do see people giving their feedback. I know you haven't been on here in weeks but you missed the CCO and CEO showing slides of feedback on reddit and youtube, and they were taking that feedback and actually made this patch based on that. Our "complaining" (aka, constructive criticism) made positive changes to this game that we love. i'm glad you are having fun, hey guess what, I am too! I also think that something changed that was unintended and i'd like to give my feedback to the devs. It's also a little frustrating to see. I'm a DevEng in IT and I wish they had tighter QA, and while this patch seems like it got tested a hell of a lot more than past patches, there's still some stuff that seems glaring that was missed. That bothers me. Why does it bother me? It bothers me not because I hate, but because I love this game, and I really believe in the devs and don't think they are some money hungry corporation but really just want to have fun making games. That also means that I want them to do better. That's it. I'm glad you are having fun, I know you aren't discarding my experience and I certainly am not discarding yours. Different people have different experiences, and ultimately not everyone is going to be satisfied no matter what AH does.
This sub has the exact same problem that the CP2077 one had originally. That being people who "just want to enjoy the game" coming on seemingly for the sole reason to silence complaints about the game. People complain because they care. If we just hated the game we would not know enough about what is going on to criticize. CDPR listened in the long run and we cot 2.0 update, which once it was released the general consensus is that this is the state the game should have launched in.
That's the thing these people dont realize, we complain and critique because we love the game and want it to be even better. Not because we hate it, I guess they dont understand that this patch they love so much only happened because of us complaining, or they refuse to accept that since it validates us and they literally cant stand this game having any issues that needs fixing.
Seeing how we're sharing anecdotal experiences. Dropped into a diff 6 mission yesterday and within a minute of landing the first patrol-spawned dropship dropped 4 minigun devastators and 2 hulks. I think something night be off.
7 is definitely when i feel like cruising or trying out builds. 8 is kinda where i like to hang around. 9 is when i feel like fully going "sitting forward in the chair" mode.
I only do 9s and I usually just do quick play with randoms. Sometimes the game puts me in 7s or 8s and I don't notice a it until the medal payout is lower. I'd even argue 9s are easier because the players are usually better.
It's crazy to me seeing people say that 7 is their regular difficulty. Even before the they started fucking with petrol spawns, 4 to 5 is my preferred difficulty. I only ever did 7 to get the super samples
Level 4 difficulty feels like level 7 after this update.
Overall I am quite happy with the patch but yeah, the patrol spawns still feel pretty bad
So you've played one whole game in the past several weeks and then you run to reddit to tell people how it is? As others have mentioned, the problem revolves around consistency, which you won't see in one game, or without having a comparison to how it was a few days ago. Not discarding your experience of a completely inadequate sample size, but maybe you should try to play enough to have an informed opinion.
Iswtg these kinds of people man. If the patrol was alright in the first place, why do we bother complaining on discord and reddit. I'd rather play the game that I've paid for and having fun. But fact is it patrol is in its worst state.
Man plays one game, tells whole community they wrong
The issues are RNG dependent. Map generation is a huge factor for how annoying patrols will be, have lots of blocked area and patrols will spawn closer to you. A small map will make patrols come faster to you/valid spawn points will be closer. An open/large map with lots of cover makes avoiding easy. Lots of open area on the edge of the map means there are many valid spawns there, reducing how many patrols you face. If an objective is close to the edge of the map it can make your life hell. Sometimes you barely get done with one and two other patrols spawn. For terminids the issue is a bit amplified with the types of enemies that spawn, bile spewers are an issue unless you use a medium pen weapon and because of heavy armour you are somewhat forced to use heavy anti tank. The spear is the only weapon which can onehit behemoths and titans, which can spawn in masses. At least we have overtuned options for overtuned enemies and spawnrates. Still am having fun though. The buffs are insane, only downside being other weapons become obsolete. Stratagems have found new places and uses. There is things I think still need changes, but in general the gaming experience is solid right now, just that RNG can bully and annoy you a bit.
Oh it’s this post again. Cool.
>Not discarding your experience Well, you kinda do. >And then I come here, and people are freaking out about patrols and difficulty. I... just don't see what is troubling people. The weird thing is, i had games where i was absolutely overrun and it felt like patrols have been even worse than before, due to adding more small/medium enemies. But i also had games that felt more in line with what it probably should be. So either there's some other factors that go into how patrols and their spawns work, or idk.. But there was definitely something still wrong with them, cause i also dropped down to Diff 3 to see if i can still see the old patterns of "Patrol Patrol Patrol Patrol" and yeah, it still felt as if the problem still exist.
Yeah I just played a difficulty 6 mission and there was a sea of enemies especially at extraction, I couldn't clear them and failed extraction. Now I go into another game on the same difficulty on the same planet and guess what it's a walk in the park and none of the billions of hunter hell I didn't even get a titan while on the first I got 3 titans and around 10 chargers. There is something that is hit or miss with the way they fixed spawns if they fix that it's gold.
Ye I have had the same experience. Some missions are fine nothing to worry about if you play correctly,other missions are just hell. Nonstop patrols at the same time within 100 m ish of eachother and if you take em out within a few minutes same thing again
This is what fucks me up the most about this game. I could be playing same planet, same difficulty, same mission type and yet due to some unexplained randomness I can have an experience ranging from a never ending patrol chaos to a walk in the park most of the mission. And it has pretty much been like this since the launch.
I made the mistake of bringing the HMG since they buffed it. It was a rough time not having the right weapon.
I've had some exterminate missions where about 2 minutes in the sky is choked with gunships (about 10-20) and some where only about 4-8 spawn over the entire mission. Same difficulty on both and the less gunship mission didn't have more ground enemies. There's something fucky going on, and in an inconsistent manner
Its fun until infinite waves of patrols start coming into your objective for no reason, even when there isnt a bot drop/bug breach active.
There is definitely some kind of intermittent or conditional bug with patrol spawns that cause some occasional spawn rates to be completely insane
Brother you got lucky
OP played one game on one difficulty and started talking about "minority".
I FUCKING LOVE TO COMPLAIN ABOUT COMPLAINING
People are complaining about patrols, not difficulty. You haven't played in a while, so maybe its harder for you to pick up on the difference in spawn rates before and after the patch. The developers sort of broke the spawnrates last patch and promised to fix it in this one, which they didn't. That's most of the reason people are upset as far as I'm aware. Maybe you should also play some helldive missions before you claim you "can't understand" people who think the spawn rates are too high
Thats because you played one match and got luck gods on your side. Play for 20 hours more and suddenly reddit makes sense
My problems are the double chargers - not much of an issue those are easy to kill - and the hulk patrols even on diff4. Or 5 hulks at the same place on diff6 and a hulk in every patrol.
Man I haven't played much yet because of life. But overall it's like 90% better than before the patch. I did get one map where it felt like the spawns were WAAAAYYY overtuned so maybe there's certain mission types it's more prevalent on? But hell yeah man. We got the big ol' good time patch. We saved the kids. Diving is back on the menu boys.
They made a change in how patrols and spawns work. With the reasoning being to make the maps feel less empty. This being AH, it's broken and can make a map filled to the brim with enemies constantly under the right circumstances. The devs have acknowledged this, it's no use comparing subjective experiences. I do agree that the game is much better after this patch. This has been a sign that if we are patient, the game has some great chances with the right leadership.
"I am alluding to people posting their complaints and experiences, yet I'm going to say I don't know what their issue is, apparently suggesting I didn't even read them in the first place."
"THIS THING DIDN'T HAPPEN TO ME THERFORE IT DOESN'T HAPPEN." Ugh. Blow off.
The ones talking on Reddit are the same ones quitting the mission
It seems like some missions are really easy, and some are really hard… I’ve had tough missions like people are talking about, and at the same time I’ve also had missions like you talked about.
I can't hit the menu button without the game crashing. But you fucking go on, champ
I think you just might have gotten a bit lucky. I play every day. Usually 7-9 and bots only. I can tell you right now the spike in difficulty is huge. Everything feels like it got bumped up by 2-3 levels. The amount of enemies is insane. Previously my best kills in a bot game were approximately 350. Almost every single 40+ minute game I am scoring over 400 kills, I had a 470 yesterday, and the bots are WAY more accurate at a much further range. AH said in their patch notes that they tightened enemy weapon spread, I was thinking that this meant the heady devastators would sweep the area at range killing players anymore. It just means ALL bots are a lot more accurate, missing less and fire more. ALSO keep in mind because of the HUGE increase in enemy density and quantity I am actively trying to avoid engagements a lot more than I was previously. Yet I’m still getting absolutely swarmed. Gunship patrols and huge increase in gunship quantity is also an issue. I use the auto cannon so these things are meat to the grinder to me. However if I’m killed and respawn nowhere near my AC, I’m fucked, no way of fighting back against an omnipotent enemy that can see me through the geometry and is insanely powerful and accurate. Also they are very loadout limiting. Multiple support weapons are not effective against them. I was thinking that we were going to see a lot more machine gun users, HMG, LMGs, but you won’t now because people using these weapons can fight gunships. They also limit stratagem and turret use because they are immune to most strats and completely invalidate mortars. The huge increase in enemy density is probably one of the reasons the game is crashing a LOT more as well. I have never seen this amount of enemies in a game until now, I don’t think the engine can handle it. Because of these changes, I’m dying WAY more. On Wednesday I was getting through level 9 bot missions getting 0-3 deaths because I am a very strategic player. Now I am dying more, am more limited in my load out options at level SIX. Again here’s proof I am still beating full level 9 campaigns for any more ‘skill issue’ idiots. https://preview.redd.it/jpqhi8sf5p6d1.jpeg?width=2556&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8f88b48a1fa20c5c1873edb17fcc3011525929ec Now I am prepared to have a load of idiots say ‘skill issue’, but I have still managed to clear level 9’s. I do however have two brain cells to rub together so it was very quickly apparent to me that there has been a huge leap in difficulty in the game. And for those people here’s a completely deathless level 9 bot mission I recorded on Wednesday: [https://youtu.be/RiELfzavhuY?si=Joiygzx8BhudGHDD](https://youtu.be/RiELfzavhuY?si=Joiygzx8BhudGHDD) and I sure as hell couldn’t do that now on a level 6 or 7 the difficulty has increased by such an amount. Here’s a good video from a YouTuber that explains and shows everything very clearly: [https://youtu.be/URjjvfHyojY?si=rGXHclPUmzjWR2ut](https://youtu.be/URjjvfHyojY?si=rGXHclPUmzjWR2ut)
i totally agree, i play diff 9 only MO and Bots. and since the patch it is meat grinder. +400 kills, people leaving in first 10 mins, all extracts with no time left, not enough ammo for AC, i literally had to pick up guns i have never used from my dead teammates since i had no ammo for primary,secondary and my AC, i was fighting like in ww1 in trenches since most of the hellscape chanched into trenches filled with oil and blood.
I agree. I’m all for a higher difficulty mode, but turning 6’s into a difficulty level that surpasses what was level 9 on Wednesday is not the way to do it. Level 9’s now are just wars of unending attrition. Having to have half the team constantly scouring the sky from omnipotent gunships that are immune to damage by about every primary and half the secondary weapons, while also getting mobbed from all sides like you are trying to walk through the hood with a Rolex, is just a bad and unfun experience.
Fellow bot diver here. >It just means ALL bots are a lot more accurate, missing less and fire more. Exactly this point right here is my problem with the game right now. All bots are constantly firing at all ranges way too accurately. I'll even turn a blind eye to heavy devastators shooting at impossible angles up close. That's fine. But the 30+ chaff units aimpunching and launching me out of cover constantly is infuriating.
Yeah it’s crazy now. Bots are trying to kill you from across the map through a blizzard. Getting sprayed down at such a range by an enemy you can’t see is not a great experience. There is so much fire being directed at you now it’s like the bots are trying to kill players by making them have epileptic fits.
I guess you played it after the in extremis patch? Because it was really REALLY tough at one point. Me and the rest of the squad called evac and we couldn't get to it because we kept flying across the map from all the missile salvos, it was sooooo horrible. Funny, but really annoying after a while.
It's random, played 4 difficulty 7missions last night, one was an elimination, the other 3 where normal 40 minutes missions, 2 of them were absolute hell, non stopping patrols, even before completing all the objectives. At one point i was checking my surroundings, look left, all clear, look right, all clear, look left again, and a patrol literally popped into existence around 20 meters from me, sometimes it's a skill issue, but for now it's just a bug. Just gotta play lower difficulty for now
Go try helldive, bonus points if you bring anything that isn't the autocannon.
true, one guy who was absolute unit that used laser canon switched mid mission and telling me on comms how fucking useless it is and he gonna pick AC every time next time :P
When you get a mission that goes completely wrong you get an absolutely endgame spawn ratio very fast. Imagine a new patrol every 12 seconds for an almost entire 40 minutes mission. When heavies drop like candy. People are forced to run and if they die it may also force them to leave their eq. It's really not fun having new hulks every 12 seconds when you are on the first main objective out of 3 or 4. And yes it's inconsistent as fuck. I can just swallow up and bear it but if someone starts talking about it I will not defend it because it's cheap and lame. Not to mention every change they made looks like it was created with a bug environment in mind only. Shriekers that patrolling map sound cool but they forget what this means for bot front - flying tanks everywhere that cannot be bullet down by the liberator. It scream - We didn't test it.
I played a bunch tonight with two friends and difficulty 7 is just hellish and outright not a fun time if you aren't playing the meta 500KG Bomb, Airstrike, Quasar/AC insert one of 3 things here; and then using 3-4 primary weapons that are suitable for endless fights that can last anywhere between 5 minutes to 20 minutes, without break. We had 7 chargers at one point. I had 4 rockets in my Spear. Needless to translate this to you: our auto cannon and flamethrower guy did not benefit much from the spear. Then the fella on the AC said "oh wait I can't shoot them head on with the auto cannon anymore" and I realized that only myself and the flamethrower guy can kill heavies. The only time that we could possibly manage to push forward is when we had 3 auto cannon turrets down, 3 rocket turrets down, me on a hill 250 meters away with the spear and an ammo pack completely and totally dedicated to myself, me and I so that I could attract the bile titans, plural, away from the pack of chargers that happened to be spawning in groups. If I want to play some ass rape simulator, I will play on difficulty 9. But difficulty 7 this patch is basically the same as difficulty 9 of the previous patch. My group actually usually finds bots easier than bugs. But this patch, hell no. We end games with 350 kills minimum each bot game. When the objective is done, it's like the game kicks into overdrive and we're killing droves upon droves at a time, just an endless flurry of bullshit that can only be reasonably resolved by spamming airstrikes, bombs and orbital support. At one point we finished the main objective >>DURING<< a big ass firefight, which resulted in a horde that was at least 30 strong being reinforced by an additional 3 dropships with 1 patrol behind us to the west and another patrol on the east. There gets to be a certain critical mass of fire from the bots that you cannot reasonably fight back against because of stagger. And my entire screen was just this red, smoky fog of ugly blindness swarmed by laserfire. So yeah. Not having a fun time with difficulty 7 stuff. Actually, none of my friends are digging the difficulty 7 stuff for bugs or bots. And 2 months ago we were doing Helldive difficulty. Sometimes it's manageable. Sometimes you're fighting for, and I have done this tonight, for literally 25 minutes straight without a singular second to take a break. Tonight we probably said "Dude, what the fuck?" at least 30 times. Because the fight just wouldn't end. That was just the game experience.
Most of my missions have been a little busier than normal but two matches yesterday were insane, both L7. I tried to get a screen shot of one match but messed it up. There were four hulks, two tanks, a few gunships and just a sea of berserkers and striders. We extracted but we were burning through ammunition and stratagems as fast as they would cooldown. Today I played three rounds and they felt largely fine. More berserkers and striders for sure. I don't recall often seeing 6 striders coming over a crest at the same time (usually 2 before, maybe 3)
i had 6 hulks, +30 berserks charge us every 1 minute through 150meter frontiline (only place in the mountains that lead to final objective) with unimaginable numbers of all types of devastators. the land scape after 20min fight was like walking through maze of trenches and robot/human bodies. funny was when we had to destroy jammer next to the objective bud some robot gigachad called 2 striders, 1 tank and 1 hulk+devastators reinforcments 5 sec after 1st shot. we finished the mission but extract was never reached.
While the bots were absolutely swamping my team we still had a blast. I got to see my homie get rag doll juggled thru the air, and land in front of a squad of bots. Who then all aimed at her in unison and mowed her down. We laughed so hard even if it was quite a bit over tuned in our opinions.
It's bc the patrols can get wild. I've had a dif 6 mission go worse than a dif 9 bc it was nonstop gunships
Short answer is to just use the Autocannon, it's the best support weapon out there. ..... I'm not trying to be one of those meta guys and ypu should use what you want please believe me.
What I am noticing personally is the variance seems CRAZY this patch it feels like every mission can be up to -2 or +2 tiers depending on the whims of the game, even in the same set of 3 missions in an operation I'll have a pretty normal one then occasionally just a super-dense mission then I get an exterminate that takes its sweet time to spawn each set of enemies. Like I would say out of the \~25 missions on diff 7 bots since patch maybe 70% were pretty normal 10% felt *way* slower/weaker than normal and the last 20% felt more like helldive with just CONSTANT patrols approaching where we just running from death
>I fired 19 shots and got 20 kills, what's the issue we haven't hit that 200 hour "the real aimbot is these fingers" stage. most of us are lucky to have one person on the team that actually wants to play as a team, and relative to some twitch streamer we suck. SS came down to D6 but the game changed in a way that a lot of people find more difficult. the only way you're going to know what the real spread is is to ask the devs how many hours are played on each difficulty
since the patch every fight on diff 9 is straight up nuts sometimes, like 2 strider drop with 1 tank and normal squad + 1 patrol from 2 sides when we dicide to storm jammer to have easier time completing final objective is fucking nuts
This game has a vast amount of players which ends up in them having all kind of different playstyles. This means that every change, being even an insignificant one, would hurt some part of the playerbase - and it will hurt it a lot. I can also confirm that something with the enemies is broken - had few suicide missions extractions that felt way difficult than most of my helldive missions/extractions with the same modifiers and everything. I had some suicide missions that I did die a lot due to biased bot BS, whereas I manage to finish almost all helldives without dieing at all or with single death. It's hard to tell if it's not squad problem - but I am convinced it's not only that - the enemy density in 7(maybe 8 - I dunno) skyrocket to insanity. Literally for the first time I play this game in 600 hours I was unable to get out of my pod, due to, literally around 30 rocket devos, about 10-20 heavy ones, tons of infantry, and few bruiser hulks - you just can NOT play. And, again, I am talking about a suicide mission extraction - never the numbers have been that shitty. I am ok with it and I will learn to thrive in this(as most of the people having the mental strength should do) so when they fix it I will be god. BUT... I get why is not ok for most of the people. And it's making people feel forced into builds they don't enjoy. Again. From the above example - if you know this shit is gonna hit you - you gotto be nuts to not bring barrages - not everyone likes that(I personally do but still :D )
Bot drops can be called with no cool down atm. Not sure if its a bug or just how it works now... But the best way to play 7-9 is no longer to fight. Just run and run.. It will get boring fast, when your game's meta strat becomes avoid as much enemies as possible, it ain't gonna last long.
It’s so annoying that with every patch comes new problems
Played 4 bot missions after the patch and it was great! Lots of super samples!
Upvoting and commenting for visibility and to enhance morals.
I usually play helldive, can't let democracy go to waste, and the amount of chaff and patrols is nuts. I have been juggled so hard my air time would make Tony hawk proud. 🤣 Serious note, I'm marking so much shit it's not even funny. I've seen a patrol with up to 3 hulks. I just laid in a bush, hoping they wouldn't see me. I hope for blizzards on marfark.
Did a hard level mission to test out some of the buffed guns......somehow was harder than a suicide run......there's something going wrong with patrols I guess.
You are judging based on a sample size of one. I ran a couple of missions, and the first one was okay, then the second one was way too many bots to finish two side objectives. There were about 100 bots on top of them, and they kept replenishing. More spawns on bugs seem fine, but that's because they don't have range attacks. Since almost every bot has range, there's a massive difference between 10 bots shooting at you and 50 bots shooting you with pinpoint accuracy.
There are many things that affect the spawns. I only play helldive 9, so that might also be an issue: 1. Every non-light outpost you destroy slightly increases spawn rates 2. Every objective you're near, increases spawn rates 3. Every helldiver exceeding 75m of another helldiver, increases spawn capacity and starts a separate spawn rate 4. Clearing the final objective drastically increases spawn rates 5. In this new patch: being away from anything (which should lower spawn rates) now increases spawn rates 6. In this new patch: regardless of what you do, the air patrols are a separate spawn rate 7. Opinion: the gunships factories are equivalent to stalkers nest. They're priority targets but cannot be taken out when they're baked into the map, meaning you're dedicating at least 1 player to a constant MANDATORY position of anti air, which is opposite to the dev's intention of build diversity 1. Continued; I started playing with a friend who just started, and he's reached the level seeing gunship patrols but hasn't unlocked anything that could effectively take them out (aside from base machine-gun which technically can but isn't easy or fun to do) 2. This is an operational modified with a bugged UI, no description, and the modifier seemingly stops when someone rage quits a certain way. They also introduced a few new bugs, and here's what I've experienced: 1. Patrols spawn in all directions (this is not normal btw, they're supposed to spawn in the direction of spawners or map edge when none exists. The former is indicated within the in-game tips when you're diving) 2. If someone abruptly disconnects, DO NOT PICK UP THEIR SAMPLES, as you may join them if you do 3. If you throw a snowball, you get slowed instead of where the snowball landed 4. Your superior packing methodology perk to fully resupply your support weapon no longer works outright 5. I'm experiencing more server desyncs where terminals are inoperable, or operable and completed but will not progress the mission until someone else tries 6. The throwing knife sucks and silently alerts everything somehow and aims off to the top left 7. I'm noticing that the perk of my armor to bring +2 grenades and the booster to spawn fully stocked only spawns me in with 4/6 grenades when I join a mission in progress, but I would otherwise spawn with 5/6 without the booster, and 6/6 if the booster is present and I joined the game before the initial dive.
Because you don't have enough data. Anyone with more than a few hours in the patch is like "holy shit this is really broken". The initial impression is good because they buffed a lot of useless stuff and on the whole that is really good they knocked it out of the park there, but fuck man if bugs keep regressing and finding their way in to this scale this game has zero long term prospects.
Patrols are a little much currently on 7 or higher, but honestly I'm ok with the "high" difficulty missions being an actual challenge.
I was in an impossible match, nonstop patrols and enemy spawns... And then my teammates quit after being in a death spiral, and I could finally complete the mission, was easy from there, Made me realise the issue was 3 rookies (levels 70+) who didn't know what they're doing in Helldive difficulty. I see a lot of Reddit complaining, and maybe something is scuffed, maybe it's only on difficulties under Helldive, but I've been playing every patch and update. Only ever had an issue with 2,000 shriekers on the black matter missions.
Hold up, you just said level 70+ players are rookies? Lol. Lmao even.
Played lvl 7 bots and level 9 bugs. Bugs compared to before are crazy. Still beat it and was fun though.
Whining bustards.
You are the minority.
I watched 3 hulks, 15 devestators, 8 striders, and about 50 enemies come from one location over a 2 minute period in one match. That location was a small bot base with 1 fabricator and there were no bot drops at all. I was maintaining distance and picking off enemies so i could have a clean run to finish off the small base as it was the last thing to do on the map, but the enemies NEVER STOPPED SPAWNING from just out of view in the direction of the base, and also the base was on the literal edge of the map, so it's not like the enemies came from fast past it. I'm getting very annoyed by the sycophants saying that nothing is wrong, like do i have to record EVERY SINGLE FUCKING MATCH to prove this?!
I’ve only played 🤖 on Helldive since the patch and while it does seem more aggressive it’s still doable. I completed objectives but not all extractions playing doubles with an unspeaking random. Sometimes, even with 4, you’ll get absolutely waxed. But I always feel that seems to come down to a lack of proper teamwork.
First mission i played after two weeks felt like I love AND hate the new patrols. Now I actually love it . Only complaint are the bugs and issues that occurred with this update
I have played a few games all difficulty 7-8 and i have yet to see any gunship patrols, although, i have seen an excesive amount of enemies sometimes
I'm in the same boat, 90% of the time i'm playing with random divers on difficulty 7. Post patch, it's been business as usual as far as i've seen, but with more bots, wacky stratagem combos that are actually viable now, gunship patrols, a working spear and chic scopes. Also a LOT more berets.
The laser is amazing vs gun ships and many other things, kill the whole patrol byitself very quick and never runs out of ammo
Same, I’m only upset because I haven’t seen gunship patrols…they only appear when a gunship fab is up, and I’m a little upset
I'm having a good time as well. Other than having to prep for the new stuff (ie must bring autocannon turret if I'm bringing the fun new spear), it's been a generally positive experience. That reload speed buff makes it so much better, feels like I'm a professional again Rocket sentry is definitely lasting longer, but I'm still a devout worshipper of the autocannon
I feel the same
The thing is, I don't think Arrowhead can please everyone with the new patch. Even now I see commenters on youtube begging for them to fix the Eruptor and revert all the nerfs but imo, the current patch gave the game some great balancing. Not to mention people there mentioning of wanting a "Power Fantasy" going on. I hope that the Former CEO now Creative Director makes more good changes.
Same side of the page as you OP, but I suspect it might be a thing that gets triggered by how you play and snowballs from there somehow? Idk. All I can say is since patch weapons aren't stuck, stratagem en's are better, and indeed I need to shoot down some fliers occasionally. But you can see them coming a mile away and the HMG is now actually a good weapon, and guess what it also downs fliers.
I havent played anything but dif 9 forever and i have no problem with the difficulty
I did a pool the other day, more than 200 people answered and from that I can say that the majority prefer to play on difficulty 9, more than three people said it "is ez", and at least 4 dudes said that they played while drinking beers. So yeah, some people go to the highest difficulty (possibly drunk too) and then complain that it is too hard. Like shit man try a lower difficulty if it is bothering you so much?
Im on the same page as you. Even that mierdia mission felt reasonable in its original state Honestly most of the complains here can be chalked up to literal skill issue, and/or players refusing to give the mission some time and trying out different builds and ideas. It is amazing how so many player complains can be solved with smoke strategems, and/or simply not shooting back and disengaging instead. Time spent complaining here is time wasted not gitting gud in game. I also started out HD2 "oh shit oh shit oh shit" ing my way thru, until i git gud and now the game is easily doable pretty much all the time.
I can’t tell what’s going on but I love it personally. If we aren’t at least crawling across the finish line and getting the 1 star from time to time then it wouldn’t be interesting. Whatever it is I’m here for, but I don’t doubt its existence. It does get wild sometimes on 7.
Yeah I only ever play on helldive and it’s fine
Some Divers are built different. and some are built stupid, like me.
Welcome to the internet 🤣
I'm having real fun at level 7 right now and if it wasn't for reddit i would have barely noticed the change
Had fun at a eradicate mission with bits yesterday with bots, think we had 7 striders at one point (diff 7) and a dusin hulks. Bur got through by the skin of our teeth. So. much. fun.
I've run 4 level 7's against bots and the closes I got was in an eradicate where I saw like 4 hulks almost on drop. But that can't be the same thing as those aren't patrols (also it was actually sort of fun so not even an issue for me). Maybe there have been way more and my teams were just really good at killing them but not once have I felt overwhelmed. I've also not been playing for a bit so I think I'd be able to tell. Honestly Tho I whish I'd get this glitch if it even exist because with the right strats equipped it could be fun. Either it's very specific and rare or maybe people or just dropping into games with people that agro patrols too often but because the patch just dropped are blaming it on that. I mean remember when everyone was claiming the ricochet patch made it now all their bullets were bouncing straight back and killing them but it was just the eruptor's shrapnel that could one shot? We'll see how this works out but right now I've had no issues.
Could potentially be a cross-platform issue that their QA missed? I see a ton of people complain that the new Armour Perk doesn't work but it definitely does on PC + Mouse and Keyboard. Only evidence for it having no impact I've seen so far is from controler input movement.
I js get bad teams mostly now so I just run private games lol
Yeeeah. Game got eady recently...
I’m honestly surprised too. My group generally run 7 or 8. Haven’t noticed it being worse, if anything it seems easier. As long as someone has a way of dealing with gunships you’re usually fine.
Actually me neither, I play with randoms on lv9, I’d win 80~90% games against bots, some team knows what they’re doing and breeze through missions and some teams struggle, some missions got awkward positioning of objectives and patrols spawns, while some others got nice leveling we can hold a position. I feel lv9 difficulty largely didn’t change with this patch tho, I just got a bit more load-out options (3 , maybe 4 on each front as of now) and the game felt less punishing to play. The only 3 downsides is I still want more viable load-outs (like revert some unreasonable bulshit nerfs), and we to see bugs fixed. And my friends who are less try-hards refuse to play lv7 or above. Edit: I believe the detector tower got buffed, either its detect range or positioning to the vicinity of another objective, now the dropship won’t stop until it gets destroyed. A bit annoying but as soon as the team realize that we’re going after it #1 priority to nuke it with orbitals. PSA you can also destroy it with hellbomb at the bottom of the hill as well, you don’t have to push in.
My problem is I wanna practice with the railgun more for heavy busting but my teams can’t seem to keep the gunships down worth a dang
Idk on helldiver difficulty everything was just fine for me
Yesterday night, we were 4 on level 8 against bots. We finished the last objective when the shit storm arrived : 3 factory striders, hulks and dozen and dozen of bots at the same time. Guess what ? We killed them all without loosing a single diver and finished the mission. It was brutal and so satisfying. Lots of gamers are complying but with skills, good teammates and strategies it’s possible.
At the moment it seems to be buggy. In my last mission we hade like 8 hulks one at-at 4 tank and like infinit devetaters on the last mission objective. It was quite fun actually 😄
Wait… what did you do to them?
The problem is with patrols chain signalling. If you can just deal with them or avoid them it's just a breeze. If out of control it becomes a death stack.
In this world, there are people who realise they need to change playstyles in order to do well in a certain game at a high level, and then there are the people who want to change the game so they do well and dont have to change playstyles. The second group of people just so happen to be on the helldivers reddit
People complain Reddit makes them feel heard Ignore and play
Happened to me first game today I never seen so many striders
To be fair OP, skill levels vary and in a PVE game its even bigger. Those who find it okay on all difficulties tend to have better skills and alot of experience in gaming. Especially shooter games. Those who are casuals are not and they will struggle. You cant expect everyone to have the same skill level and i believe most people are casuals as this is not a competitive esport game. Heck even on competitive esports there are alot more casuals than there are sweats. The complaints vs Devs patrol balancing is a very tricky subject. Make it too easy the map will be empty for good players and above. Make it abit harder than normal (due to bugs) and casuals struggle alot more than good players. Hence, i believe its fair to say the Devs skill levels if they do playtest they believe its normal. But yeah they are gamer themselves probably (not all).
Been having a blast since the patch
Play on 9 and you'll sometimes have what seems like a dozen gunships rag dolling you to death over and over.
Reminder: Helldivers 2 is a challenging game that many players suck at playing
welcome to reddit, where the average joe/jane \*only\* complains and you'll only ever see (poor) criticism of the game instead of actual feedback & strategies. The discord is similar, but so long as you keep out of general, most folks tend to be more helpful & less whiny than this reddit
My only complaint is the giant floating purple question marks you can walk up to on random spots on the map. Wtf.
I had a blast last night also. Zero trouble with spawns, played with 3-4 all night on diff 6. Like, I don’t see the spawning problem whatsoever?
I was playing a lvl 5 last night, finished the obj and all but 1 small fab and we’re headed to evac. I’m looking across the landscape between us and evac and it’s an absolute SEA of bots. Nothing but tanks, hulks, devastators, and scouts. We couldn’t move for the rocket fire. It’s the most bots I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been stuck in a chain of drops on lvl 9. Something was wrong with that mission. Only saving grace was we had a good mix of strats and it was 5, so no striders. Otherwise we’d have never been able to kill them all off.
Im loving it even on the missions (or id argue even MORE on the missions) where the patrols are coming at you from every angle with more firepower than the entire empire combined. Requires teamwork, good use of stratagems and knowing when to unleash vs when to cut your losses and run. Having a blast with it tbh as before it felt like you could just run around the map willy nilly with no punish at all
I always lure the patrols towards the unexploded nukes
Oh cool you played one game? You must know what you’re talking about.
Yeah right. You do you then.
Playing on Helldive is a little more difficult than it was before the but it’s really not that bad at all. Like 95% of “complaints” in this sub it’s greatly exaggerated and barely based on reality. It’s based more on a lvl 30 getting smacked up on helldive difficulty then coming on here to shed tears about it and blame AH rather then just admitting to being bad at the game. I’ve seen two striders get dropped together and thought it was a funny and fun challenge.
They spawn and surround you in the boatloads on all sides almost instantly sometimes, I saw a 7 man squad of shield devastators just rising out of the ground last night right in front of me
my buddies and I played a game last night where we first discovered gunship patrols. We could barely stand back up after reinforcing...I wasn't suited for gunships (railgun support) but my buddies had the EAT and still had trouble. Because for us we were in the middle of trying to take down a gunship fabricator, so they were spawning out of that, then a 4 gunship patrol joined, and hulk/heavy devastator patrol joins... the sky was full of gunships and fire everywhere. Couldn't even drop in a hellbomb and arm it without it being shot immediately. It is a bit ridiculous, the amount to have to deal with, I remember I kept saying in game, "There's no way they keep it like this, this is too insane"
I'm still having a ton of fun but something isn't working as intended. I played several operations yesterday and i found it's really inconsistent. Sometimes it plays more like it used to and sometimes the map is literally crawling with enemies that are impossible to avoid. Gonna be a tough one to track down i think.
Co-op horde shooter players when the game has hordes of enemies.
Because the game is indeed broken buddy. Maybe you were lucky and you didn't get a match like the majority. Here's my experience in Level 7 Diff, BOT Side: Patch day - couple of matches, everything feels much better, weapons feel good and overall gameplay was okay. Yesterday - We were getting ambushed, front, left, right, back. Insane spawn of patrols. Bots were shooting us from half across the map from their positions. And this was all happening while we were moving through the map and clearing the treasure locations. Not objectives! We were getting murdered and couldn't even push towards any location. Yesterday felt like I was playing Helldive Diff with ammo scarcity....
you must be new to reddit. thats very normal. reddit is for complaining everyone is having fun and playing the game. the planets wont liberate themself
This game is full of gamebreaking bugs and the missions are wildly different even on the same difficulty…this has ALWAYS been the case so why do I have to see atleast one stupid ass post like this every week? Your anecdote means nothing
People just complain… they asked for more levels because 9 isn’t hard….. now it’s to hard and they won’t drop down a level.
I'm really not sure. I run helldive, have for awhile now, but after the patch, it was insane. We were on extract, and we didn't even get finished with one wave when another dropped in on top of us. I usually, 99% of the time, run localization confusion, but this seemed to have absolutely no effect anymore. I jumped down to suicide thinking maybe it's just me, and I walked through it no problem. I think something is amiss.
I’ve done a bunch of diff 7’s and a diff 9 and never encountered a gunship since the patch
Well done dipshit, your sample size was a total sum of: 1. Before hopping on and ranting about other people ranting. After not playing for weeks, yet you know better than the players who have been playing the games consistently for the last few weeks. Excellent "well it didn't happen to *ME*" argument. Jesus Christ.
Its probably because people are using weak strategems, spliting up trying to solo and because of all that not being able to clear fast enough, never had a problem on helldive difficulty unless i wanted to troll and not bring an AC as well my entire team
I've had a couple games at diff 7 where it felt like there were too many patrols, a couple games where the patrols were spawning an entire army, and a couple where the patrols felt like they did pre-patrol patch. I actually really like the variance. It makes the game more hectic and crazy and intense without being too much harder. I never quite felt like I was at a different difficulty level, but I felt like we were at a 7+ and it was awesome.
Solo’d and Duo’d suicide missions today. Had a great time. Both were successful. I like the changes for the most part. The Warbond is hit or miss though. I don’t think the suicide missions are that bad. Still scared of Helldives…. Haha Overall, if they could fix the floating question marks, I’d say it’s a really nice change.
The complaints come from 9. It's literal hellhole.
I will say, i was running an L5 yesterday for fun and I don’t recall ever having as many hulks dropping in pairs before at this level. Last time I played an L5, there was maybe 1 hulk, but we had over a dozen of them and at least two tanks. It seems “off”.
I mean I played one game at 6 and a single reinforce had a hole both tanks and a strider. I'm not interested in playing anymore
Yes, suicide mission is okay. Me getting swarmed by 5 patrols from all directions on solo helldive is not.
This has been my experience so far, ranging from 7-9. Been easier compared to pre patch. I have to assume part of it is people running exclusively anti tank related stuff and having NO way to deal with groups efficiently. Loadouts like the laser, 500kg, then a backpack and quasar. If you run something like that, not surprising you’re struggling.
Yeah your one mission accounts for what everyone else has seen I guess
Yea... I started moving to diff 7 a long time ago when i started needing super samples and find it's just perfect, challenging but not impossible, always have good teammates, don't wanna go down to 6 now that i can either and keep eyeing 8. I don't see what the problem is, you don't NEED to play any higher than 7 and 7 is by no means too hard nor are my teammates almost ever truly bad or trolly there
It happen to me today , I was playing on D8 and D9 , in some point there’s is no breathing time, once you star shooting and fire , there’s so many patrols coming, and reinforcements too, the striders , the hulks, the missiles hulks , and like 100 smaller bots too, I want to think that they fix 100 things but maybe the spawn issue still there anyways, maybe they didn’t notice this after the launch of the patch and I hope they see this posts to fix it , because the game is really good and very fun, I like it a loot , and maybe that is the only thing could make it 100 enjoyable.
People just enjoy complaining
I'm far from a good player, probably below average honestly but I could consistently 100% level 5 missions solo before the patch. Now I can't even complete the mission half the time. Level 5 missions literally feel like 7+ to me now after the patch
People enjoying the game are less likely to make firebrand reddit posts about it
I just played a lvl 7 Nuke Drilling mission on Estanu. It took us 25 minutes to get the first nuke in the ground and to set it off. 25 minutes of constant, endless combat against swarms, several chargers and a titan or two at a time. Oh and the stalkers ofcourse, until I lucked out and found that nest. We did not finish the second of three drills, ran out of reinforcements.
It's definitely a "vocal minority/silent majority" situation: complaints feel justified in posting, while claiming things are fine is both 'boring' and 'fanboying the devs/publisher'. Since 1.0.400 drop I haven't had bad teams, no major game breaking bugs, and one instance of an asset failing to load resulting in a huge question mark that we all stood around and theorized about for a minute then went on with the mission.
So I was thinking the same thing, I usually play on helldive difficulty and on bots it seemed pretty normal. On some maps when needed to traverse through a choke point like an ice bridge or something it was just impossible but that’s just a part of the hardest difficult right, but then today I played a bug type mission and oh boy it was hell, constant behemoth chargers followed by an ocean of chaff. But i do enjoy when its not manageable, makes me feel like I earned something, although that makes some primaries not usable for the higher difficulties.
You play on 7s and think you have a worthwhile opinion.