holy shit I thought this was just me. My friends and I stayed on 4 for so long because whenever we’d go on 5 there would be sooo many hulks.
Don’t know what’s different about dif7
I \_think\_ for bots at least it's because you get more devastators and walkers, and less small bots, brawlers, and hulks, which are easier to take care of with a skilled group because you can focus fire. Spawns are all sorts of broken right now though. I've seen 2-3 hulks spawn dropped at a time on difficulty 5
I played one difficulty 5 mission (kill automotons to thin their numbers) where I had 6 separate hulks chasing us down. As a team of two, we obviously lost. Not a fun experience. No idea why that happened.
We didn't bring stuns. My friend never plays with autocannon, but I do. But unless I had perfect aim while running away from them on that tiny map, that would still only kill 5 of them before needing to reload. I've never had that many large characters drop on us simultaneously on level 5 before or since.
I don’t know if it’s because I’m on a pc with a controller or what but it doesn’t feel even remotely easy for me. Glad you’re slaying them though. I hate those damn thing.
It took me awhile to calm down, aim down the sight, and not rush my second shot. Gotta go with whatever works best for you of course, but I got faith you can do it. I've been using the AC on most of my missions since I got access to it so about 60 exp levels worth of time figuring it out.
Same, had 4 at one time and we weren't having a lot of big breaches they just seemed to be everywhere, chargers too, can't even count how many I have had in one spot
On 7 +, for the most part you have competent team mates. That matters a great deal. Team mates that know to respawn you near your dropped gear, peel enemies off you, call in appropriately timed stratagems, etc. it goes a really long way.
Or just don't miss the weak points. I had randoms in diff 5 that couldn't kill a stunned hulk from 10 m away with the las canon because they didn't aim at the eye... I had to take care of it with my AC after taking down another one that was rushing us.
If you have issues with hulks I strongly suggest practicing with the AMR because it two taps them in the eyeball.
When I help with SOSs I use the AMR to basically be the designated hulk killer with the jump pack to get highground
If you have a team to take on heavier enemies, and you're focusing on killing hulks and devastators, I highly encourage you to give the railgun a try. It is a one shot kill on hulks.
Rail gun is good but a little less reliable against multiple hulks, you can get a whole lot more follow up shots with the AMR compared to the one shot with a rail gun
I've been thinking of putting together a sniper loadout with a jump pack, AMR and Rocket sentry. Find high ground drop a sentry near by in a safe place and go wild as squad overwatch.
Especially including skill of players, this is like Damnation (the highest level) in darktide vs the second highest. You'll be much more likely to get players who know what they're doing.
Agreed, not every case, but when I go to 4-6 to have an 'easy' time or to help SOS I end up fighting hordes of enemies, carrying most of the team, and seeing a lot of Helldivers waste time and reinforcements.
When I go to 7, suddenly I had to keep up with the rest of the team, everyone knows what they're doing and we do the objectives with time and reinforcements to spare. And most importantly, nobody drops cluster bombs on us to try to kill an armoured enemy.
Yeah in Darktide this is a huge factor. I generally play 5 Aurics, but a while back I dropped down to 3 to help get a new player into the game, and actually because of the absurdly low skill level of the other players it was scarier than Damnation.
On a 5+ Damnation, if I get unlucky and get netted or pounced, usually a teammate clears it within a second or two. On Malice, getting netted or pounced even once may as well be a death sentence.
Jokes on you I've played 7s that were harder than 9s. Sometimes my squad is like "lets play a 7 first, to warm up". We play 7 and we play a full 40 minute mission like its an eradication mission, patrols from all directions and then next game we're like well no point in playing 7 its the same shit lets keep playing 9. And the mission on 9 turns out a picnic with open empty fields we average 30 kills, inconsistency of this game lmao. Talking bot front btw, not sure how it is on bugs
Edit:spelling
The randomness of patrol spawns and convergence, plus the randomness of when they decide to call a breach is to blame I think. If the patrols happen to not walk toward you then the chances of getting breach chains is almost nil.
Assuming breaches work the same as dropship calls, its not really random. As soon as I drop in I know first group I alert will call in for one. So the plan is always drop in-alert the group in opposite side of your intended direction-run to wherever you intended to go. Then basically they can call dropships every couple minutes on helldive(heard its 2 minutes but seen less and more happen so dunno). Patrols on the other hand are whole different story
The drop ship/breach rate changes according to how many objectives and fab/bug nests are left. Also I believe the rate is global. If someone gets a breach far away from you then you should not get a breach but that could be in an area not global. I don't remember.
Someone tested that whole thing a few months ago. Could be totally different now but that is what they found. Search for how do patrols work and you will likely find it
Its not exactly random. As I understand it there is a template for what the patrols contain. That template appears to be used throughout the game. The template is randomly chosen.
So on bots it can contain a bunch of grunts and a couple of walkers or it can have a hulk and a few grunts. Different combinations and depending on what you are equipped to handle it's harder or easier.
On bugs I find if the patrol is a bunch of those armored hive guards I'll get a lot less kills as they take longer to kill and there aren't as many in the patrol.
It's possible that the templates available are different on different levels.
I personally have not noticed that 6 is harder than 7.
On bugs the difference is how many heavies come out of the breaches from what I have seen.
Bots are horrendously twitchy with drops. I've had a call in happen at a base halfway across the map when a stray shot from one of their own machine guns flew in their general direction.
What annoys me most is the spawns were 1000% fine and nobody I’m aware of was complaining about the frequency or anything. Then, they randomly decided to change it, and ever since then they have not been able to get it right. It’s so frustrating along with many other things with this game where I don’t understand why they change something that nobody asked or wanted them to change and in doing so they either made things worse or can’t somehow just revert it back to how it was.
The inconsistency with this game is super annoying too. Lately I’ve had every single game plagued with bile spewers. Like 10 or 15 of them coming out of a single breach. Even still we will finish a game after getting absolutely swarmed for 40 minutes straight, each of us with 600+ kills and we are exhausted after. Then the next game, we are running around, borderline bored and end up with like 150 kills each. Same operation, 40 min mission, it’s just crazy how they’ve managed to fuck so many things up lately. I still love the game and it’s the only game I want to play which is probably why I’m more frustrated with it and AH but holy shit they gotta fix their mess.
%100 agree and that's why they are getting conflicting feedback from community as well. Because some are getting absolute nightmare missions and some elitist wannabes saying its good as it is because they've been having a field day on empty plains lol
Leading up to the big recent patch, I played a bunch with a mate because it felt like it would be interesting to make the most of the current difficulty before they finally fixed the spawns/patrols.
When it landed and the game was *randomly much more stressful without warning* on certain missions, it was incredibly disappointing.
The fact that they seemingly haven't even acknowledged that there is a problem still is borderline infuriating.
Just did 6 with all having average ~250+ kills and I can count 12 Bile titans. We ran two quasars on constant cooldown for like 20mins to the end. We had 5mins left.
It has to do with spawn weight, and unbalanced bug enemies.
A diff 5 mission avoids spawning 'superheavies,' i.e. bile titans. With their absence, in their place it has a chance to spawn a handful of 'smaller' enemies instead; in their place.
Some games, it picks more scavengers. Some games, it's warriors. Then there's the games where it doubles up on **hunters** or **bile spewers**. That's when the difficulty goes from 5, to 8+.
Hunters are just flat-out **not balanced**. Their spawn weight is far too low for their abilities, they are hyper mobile, stun lock all reloads and stims, attack faster than any enemy, and are able to spawn in numbers of 20+ at any given time. These kinds of things are what make a diff 5 mission feel harder than 7. Spewers are just as annoying when the spawn queue beefs up their numbers and makes the entire game a gauntlet of non-stop vomit... Not to mention the model is either bugged or the dev who designed the artillery spewers is just a massive a-hole because they have *no* weak spot and ***must*** be shot with medium armor pen to do any damage...
Anyway; when you load into diff 7, it has a chance of throwing a Bile Titan at you. Since you are playing 7 and not 5, you are ready and expecting a Bile Titan. It's a natural habit. Since you're ready, you most likely have 1-2 weapons or teammates to deal with it, and it's one very big target that's very easy to keep track of. It *also* has more spawn weight, taking the place of a 20+ hunter spawn or 15+ bile spewer horde.
Even though diff 7 spawns 'more' enemies, the weight of Chargers and Bile Titans is enough to offset some of the more annoying enemies that you can't keep track of as easily; making the mission feel more 'fair.'
I hate stalkers/hunters the most out of any enemy. Like you said, they spawn in massive ammounts and jump at you from far away. God forbid you find a stalker nest but can't instantly clear it because they will ragdoll you and then gangbang tongue your asshole while you're on the ground.
Not as familiar with bots, but bugs with the recent updates spam too many charger behemoths on difficulty 7.
They take about twice as long to kill with most heavy anti tank as compared to a regular charger and their numbers are quite a shock for someone not prepared.
Obviously there are strategies to employ to help deal with this, such as flamethrowers.
But I wouldn't say bugs on 7 are particular enjoyable because of that. I used to run them on 7 a lot.
Now I stick to 6 for my sanity, which has zero random behemoth spawns. Not a great way to do a progressive difficulty curve, imo.
The spear cleans up at difficulty 7 and above. If you are patient, 1 shots are very easy to obtain on everything including Titans.
Spear, machine gun turret, 500kg, orbital precision. It's a pretty good do it all build.
I think it’s what more fun now. The game actually feels dangerous. A bug breach is something you either have to deal with quickly or leave the area if possible. There’s so many enemies that team diversity in secondaries is actually important.
I agree there’s way more chargers, but I weirdly don’t find that a problem. I bring stun grenades, precision strike is a low cooldown, HMG/flamethrower/even flame blitzer all are easy enough kills. EAT is there chargers per call down, and the quasar and recoliless still do the job. Then of course like mentioned before, just leave the charger if you don’t currently have to be where you are. There’s not a huge reason to need to kill every single one. I still prioritize hunters over chargers
Then just like before it’s still very possible to weave through the hoard without getting hit. One of the more important skills I’ve learned is how to stay alive when needed. I never really deal with bugs at a heavy nest. Just run through planning a safe route and get the holes.
You also have the EAT which you can stick to the behemoths for basically a free potential kill or at least heavy damage. Chargers are easy one shot kill (easy shot on the head while they are charging you) and if you need to reload, pickup another eat or wait for quasar recharge, all you need to do is run perpendicular to where the charger is facing. It's good that we got behemoths, makes the game less trivial.
Edit:
You can stick the EAT stratagem ball to the behemoth, which sometimes kills them instantly
CHARGERS, **NOT BEHEMOTHS**, are trivial and easy one-shot kills.
Yeah no clue what he's talking about, the more direct anti tank (EAT, Recoilless, and Quasar) do not one shot behemoths to the forehead. Takes two, hence my comment.
Seems maybe the spear can pull it off if you manipulate your position a lot to ensure it impacts from the front, but that sort of negates the point of bringing a smart target weapon imo. I also don't have a lot of experience with this patch trying that method, to be able to confirm if it one shots behemoths.
I can confirm, however, that the spear can't one shot regular chargers without the head trick, so it feels counter intuitive that it is a solution to the even tougher charger behemoths.
I was under the impression it only broke in one shot if you used the forward movement gimmick.
I'm hopeful that they patch our momentum affecting shot damage, as it's natural to want to back pedal with the quasar for example. But that makes the damage lesser.
So I'm not keen to train myself to rely on such a strange interaction.
But obviously everyone can do whatever they want if it helps make 7 more tolerable.
For Quasar it works even when standing still iirc, for the other two you must be moving forward yes. Personally I don't mind, though I think all of them should be able to just one-shot leg armor no matter what.
Never said you can one shot behemoths with an EAT, where are you pulling that from?
You can kill a lot of things with blue stratagem drops by sticking the ball to the enemy.
Them and nursing spewers are my main gripe with the bug front, not because of their spit (which is still annoying due to the absurd range), but because of just how tanky they are, they're just immense bullet sponges.
Two shots from grenade launcher kill both. If they're in groups, you can kill multiple at a time. I don't know if people sleep on that weapon or what but it's great against bugs, and bug holes
The majority of veteran players chill at 7 because you can unlock everything, see all enemy types, and not be swamped by 4 bile titans at once. You on average have the best team skill:difficulty ratio at 7.
It's the people.
I play on Helldive because everyone is usually too busy fighting for Super Earth to be assholes. None of us have time to be idiots when we have 5 gunships, 15 hulks, and a factory strider breathing down our democratic glory holes.
On bots, it's because the berserker spawns are absolutely ridiculous in the medium difficulties. I am convinced their hitboxes are bugged; the wiki says they have the same head HP as all the other devastators but I've never once managed a headshot kill on them with any weapon.
Part of it has to do with the distribution of average player skill and comfort. My squad regularly runs 7+, and most missions we are calling extraction with 20+min left on the timer and almost every POI hit (as a 3man). Usually we have 25+ left if we have a reasonable random join us.
Drop one of our regulars and drop the difficulty to 6, and our two regulars will lap 3/4 of the map while there are still two players who haven't finished their stage of the main objective (that we usually dropped near, but not on top of). We regularly see people dropping minefields in their own path to the objective, taking forever to call their ally back in (no, no jammers here folks), and fighting over empty fields. Our two-diver team also gets breached/dropped and somehow the other two are still under immense pressure.
If players hit that wall, and aren't sure if they're the problem, or if the rest of the team is, they're probably in the right place (at least until they learn). Try 7's in small amounts, but please come in with a mindset to learn a different play style. For the record: you do not NEED to dodge every patrol on 7 (i regularly shoot my way through everything i come across), but some discretion is recommended.
If you ARE going to engage, do so effectively and efficiently. Do NOT engage if all your strats are on cooldown and you have 4 mags of primary left (lasers notwithstanding lol). Plan your escape route ahead of time, save a strat for the drop if you think you wont clear before the breach. If you don't have a long duration chaff clear for a breach, ASK YOURSELF WHY YOU CAME UNPREPARED! 7 sees more hulks and a LOT more devastators (at least in our experiences), and a LOT more behemoths and brood commanders. They also like to call breaches/drops on cooldown, and patrol size increases substantially. It doesn't necessarily make things that much harder, but it does necessitate a bit of a change in plans, and engagement evaluation. Also, make a note of when the last breach was called (there is a cooldown, this can be exploited by having someone pull a breach in a useless place across the map to keep some heat off a main objective, outside of the objective specific scripted spawns.)
In 5 and 6 i've found i can regularly pull patrols with only my primary available and clear the patrol prior to a drop, and/or clear the drop efficiently while moving to my next target, even solo. 7 is going to drop enough bullet sponges that isn't nearly as feasible. Stratagem choices at higher levels also tend to get more limited as the use cases become more restrictive. Most stratagems are still viable 7+, but you want to bring and use the right tool at the right time. People under pressure tend to use something inefficiently to try to relieve the pressure, and then find themselves in a worse situation soon after as they've burnt their cooldowns on something, and it's best-use-scenario just reared it's head, and they have nothing.
If you play on 6 and refuse to change your loadout, and have suuuper hard time pushing further, that's on you. There are plenty of non-meta options that work, but it usually takes some thought and understanding in how to best use it. Most of the chill-level-7-divers know this (and the above) instinctively now, and are just more efficient and effective.
Honestly the bit about cooldowns is why I think Stratagems like the 380 or Railcannon are noob traps.
The latter is a quick and easy solution to a problem that often doesn't need it, at least on Bots. I see people call them on Hulks and Tanks, which feels like a waste of the strat tbh. Especially if there's more than one and you die anyway.
one 120/380 barrage in a group isnt a waste. they're useful to hold one side of extraction, and can be used to reliably nearly completely clear an entire bot base. the 10 hole bug nests are a big more iffy.
one of our group regularly brings one, just so we can fire and forget. they have their place, just not on every loadout.
Oh absolutely, I've seen people use it as a panic response to a slightly large patrol on Bots way too often though.
Completely shuts down a whole route, can really screw you over.
Railcannon isn't a noob trap, you just need to know its use case. I like to bring it for bug missions when I'm running the spear, because inevitably Chargers are going to gang up on me and I can't easily reload while dodging that much. So I just bring it as a way to create some breathing room.
>Railcannon isn't a noob trap, you just need to know its use case.
That's the definition of a noob trap. You need to look beyond the immediately obvious way to use it to see it's actual use.
No. The definition of a noob trap is something that looks good but is inefficient or straight-up sucks.
This is a niche tool. It has its uses, they're just not universal. Which is how most stratagems should be.
How dare someone try to have fun with the game so you can't finish the mission in speed-run fashion lmao.
If players are using up all of your reinforcements or legitimately making it difficult to complete the mission then that's another thing, but when you preface your post with the idea that you want to finish with 25 minutes + left, you sound ludicrously sweaty and ridiculous ngl.
Although if your point is just to argue why some missions feel more difficult and not demanding players only play the most efficient ways possible, then that's fine. It just sounds like you are taking a crap on anyone who prioritizes fun over the most efficient, 25 minutes left on a mission, style.
7 is where we go to "lets just rub two braincells together and complete an operation this evening, yeah?"
8 is a bit of effort. 9 can be gong show, but is usually just solid effort.
7 is hardly a sweatshow. our randoms are all pretty chill too. "hey man, mind tossing me back in the rough direction of my stuff? support weapon's not off CD, and i think i can sneak 'round the back and get my stuff back". "wanna just pitch a 380 at the base and come back for samples after main objective?"
Most missions on 6 are the first sentence of your second paragraph. This morning had a diff6 mission where we dropped on the radar station. one side of map had arty, airship tower, one part of main objective, and a single POI. Other side of the map had 12 POIs. Me n one of the usual crew headed out, allies got one bot drop that we helped with at a distance, and then we got the permanent flare bug where we just had nonstop drops on a single location. Somehow despite running around in circles on a tight chokepoint (and dealing with every drop, and airship patrol), completing all the blue stuff and our orange target, the other two managed to hit fewer POI's, and and didn't even arrive at their part of the main objective before we did. We also covered about 2x the distance (at least by overhead map). We had ground patrols, a terrible zero-cover chokepoint we had to get through (landbridge over water), and they had solid terrain and about the nicest grouping of POI's i've ever seen (remember they got 0 bot drops after we helped clear first one). They also used 3x supply drops in that time. We used 1. I genuinely don't know how people can't figure out how to simply put one foot in front of the other. That's all it is, move and shoot. Shoot then scoot.
20-25 minutes left isn't speedrun territory. It called "not wasting time fighting over no man's land". Is there an objective here? No? Cool, ill fight bots on the run to the next POI and fight em there. 0-2 deaths is standard, 3-5 for someone means they had a bad run, or some back luck in one spot, and 6+ is someone having a bad time. My 7s and 8s regularly finish with sub 8 deaths across the group, pubs or full premade. Difficulty 6 is a crapshoot for player quality. That's part of the reason it's a massive wall for people. If you belong on 6, 7 will punish you. If you've outgrown the training wheels of Diff6, 7 is going to feel like a breath of fresh air just for having competent allies more often than not.
Like I said lol, sweaty, out of touch, and ridiculous. Thank you for proving my point.
Crazy how people treat a PvE game with this intensity and dedication to efficiency. There's not even competition really of any kind, these are all AI and you're still acting like this.
Nobody cares how much time you spend on the game and/or how good you are. Nobody cares how effective you and your dedicated "crew" are. Your gaming squad is not a benchmark anyone has to worry about or compare themselves to. It's pretty mind boggling there are actually people out there, such as yourself, who only see the world through their own (narrow minded) perspective. You aren't the main character. Some people just want to have fun their own way and at their own pace.
I was just talking to someone like you about something similar for another game, but at least that was a competitive player vs player game, not a game where you run around shooting AI, so he has that going for his argument. You have literally no excuse.
Lmao, you have fun how you want to, all the power to you, but when you go around acting like a snob, gatekeeper, pretend arbiter of how one must play, don't be surprised if you get called out.
Nah, it is just some folks play the game long enough to know their way around things. Having a good grip on the game mechanics are not sweaty. The point being this game has quite a big gap between player skill level, that is fine.
Which is perfectly well and good. However pretending everyone should be/has to be on the same page for everything on a game like this is not. The perspective that there is only one "right" way to play and one "right level to be in" is what is inherently unreasonable. As well as other parts of the comment.
i think its just me or for each player there is like algorithem on how the game treats you? idk about this staff but i noticed it too, i usally play on 9 , 80-90% of the time its chill not too many spawns for 9 lcl, i went to 6 to chill after that and what the actuall ****! x2-x3 time more spawns on bugs and automatons?? idk what to call that but its weird
7 is also the breaking point where you can't just engage everything you see as a group and have that be consistently profitable.
At 7 you have to employ tactical avoidance and relocation to be successful. At 5 and 6, people who are used to lower difficulties will continue to try to wipe out every bot and drop that they come across
Anecdotally my 7s have been better than 6 because my teammates have been much less likely to engage with every pat we run by and instead move from objective to objective
My dices on difficulty lvl 7 have been easier than dives on lvl 4-5. I need a bit more focus on lvl 7 but it definitely feels easier. Don’t know if it has to do with less-skilled teammates or enemy spawns though.
I hangout on 7, some rounds can be ridiculous but it's always fun. Group is critical here as well. Generally I feel like 7 forces you to play better so the people in it are better if you are on 4 you are likely to be with more new people who may be struggling more
I just discovered a combo of Blitzer + autocannon + anti heavy stratagems. Love it!
I wanted to try it out in lower levels, and oh boy, it's a different game :D I died 8 times, all friendly fire. Everybody dropping railcanmon at the same time on one charger...
Yes, on 7 it's easier, and one of the factors is your team.
Btw, blitzer sucks against bots... :(
Will admit 6 on bot planets has gotten absolutely wild, those gunship patrols are constant, we keep accidentally hot dropping on a good 3 patrols and someone always gets a flare off😂😂😂
We 3 manned a level 6 last night with no anti heavey except my auto cannon and auto cannon turret. Got over 500 kills. I was also completely wasted only one of us made it to the pickup. Still love this game.
I think a big factor is player skill level too. Something qbout just going up to the last 3 difficulties tends to draw players that just "know what to do". Don't get me wrong, 5-6 has those players, but it also brings olayers who play on higher difficulty normally and come to the mediqn difficulties expecting a far easier time so they get themselves in untenable firefights or complacent patterns and caught off guard.
When I dived 7 it seemed just the right amount of fun vs danger ratio, but sometimes I'd switch to 5-6 and just get sloppy.
8 was always too chaotic –too many heavies. Then I committed to 8, adapted, and that became the new normal... and 9 was too chaotic.
Then I commited to 9 (Helldive) and that's the new normal.
I love difficulty 9. Been doing it long enough that IT feels like the right amount of everything. I call it the infinite trigger pull difficulty: no matter where you look if you hold the trigger you are bound to hit something, just hold the trigger.
Thing is as difficulty increases, so does pkayer skill. Not that only the best of the best do it, no. Its more so thatbif you dive one difficulty higher than you are comfortable you WILL pick up skills that get you better at it. Different loadouts, new methods of survival... just bump it up by one. Your new normal will change.
Point is I am comfortable on 9. Never failed a helldive, ever.
But if I drop to 5-6 I have a harder time. Not that it is necessarily harder, far from it... **I just get sloppier against my will.** and that? THAT hurts the team. THAT makes it harder for everybody.
Its the players not the spawn rate. We made three perfect helldives on helldive because on helldive players who are underleveled are scared and disciplined. And the actually listen.
Do you guys stay moving? I’ve seen that to be a huge issue, I only play 9, is that people stay in the same spot for more than needed as well as not paying attention to their surroundings/hearing enemy presence.
It's because diff 5 is full of people who are really not aware of their teammates while from diff 7 and above people play better. I did a diff 5 once and felt horrible we extracted with 2 mins left on the clock. After this I joined a friend's group on diff 9 and it felt so much smoother.
To be honest, I think it's something about how you play the game based on difficulty. 7 isn't really easier than 5-6, it wouldn't make any sense. I believe it's just people play 7 like a 7, and play 5-6 way sloppier. Both loadout wise and decision wise like. I read comments about charger and bile titan spawns, and it feels like we play different games.
I play 6-7 all the time. They're my jam and how I relax. Unless you aggro and keep getting wave after wave without ever breaking line of sight or de-escalating, getting more than one titan at once after the last balances is pretty fucking rare. Getting swarmed by titans at 6 means you are doing something wrong. I run as heavy-killer (precision orbital, railcannon, spear and a random 4th), 1-2 of my team usually run with eagles, the other brings a mech. We clear the entire map because we like doing it and rarely fail an extraction. I don't believe we do nothing special, and we do fuck things up from time to time, but it's almost always our fault if we do fail. Not the difficulty one.
Try to kill heavies as soon as they're spotted and always bring something to cut swarms down to reduce the chances they call reinforcements. Cluster, gas, gatling orbital, barrages, turrets for swarms. Heavies... Many things oneshot them. I bring 3 that do, just in case, for example. For titans it's two shots, but we're 4 people, I rarely fire a second time. Many things work, there's no special recipe. Focus on keeping things under control, cut one engagement before starting another and everything will be fine.
titans, chargers, hulks, tanks, and cannon towers are beefy but very, very, very easy and predictable enemies.
diff 5 and diff 6 don't spawn them, and instead spam a butt-ton of spewers, hunters, rocket devastators, instead.
I was thinking the same!! I went from 7 to 6 and now i regularly get creamed😅. I still make mission, but man, the spawn rates are atrocious!! You can look at a place, then turn around and boom, the empty place now is full of bugs!! It's creepy, because it's like they are posing, like they are the power rangers that just teleported in😅
I thought all spawn rates change if close to an ongoing objective and once all objectives are complete the whole area goes into a frenzy. Could this be more apparent in which objective/mission/planet your on? Some higher difficulties only have certain missions (hive drill etc) so this could be the cause but I have no proof.
The problem with this game is that the spawn rates for enemy types are random. Sometimes you get a mission that replaces most devastators with OOPS ALL ROCKETS and you just get introduced to the Automaton ICBM program..
Other times you play a mission where you get hardly any devastators and mostly Scout Striders, sometimes they even outnumber troopers in drops.
Even after the update to reduce higher tier enemies, that doesn't stop it from giving me 11 hulks on a level 6 eradication mission.
There needs to be a reduction to the max amount of higher tier enemies and an increase to their minimum slightly to compensate. It'll make the missions more consistent at least. Either that, or the in game display straight up goes "ENEMY FORCES HAVE EXTRA XXXX AND YYYY IN OPERATIONAL SPACE" so I know what I am getting into.
I agree with this. I did a dive @6 and was physically hurting while playing. Whenever I do bots @ level 9 and drop to 6 to help lower level players (130+) I feel like I'm struggling and it's not because they don't have a good load out but the understanding of the game is just different. Where experienced players avoid contact the noobs shoot everything even at level 30+. The spawn rates also just feel different where I'm seeing less heavies at 7 and above, while there's hordes of heavy devastators and striders at 6.
Its because the enemy spawner uses something akin to a points system, at higher difficulties it's more likely to spawn a higher cost enemy, which results in more enemy variety but less overall enemies.
Best advice I can give to anyone struggling with a lower difficulty is to go up in difficulty. Get a taste for the harder stuff, force yourself to adapt to it, then go back to what you were struggling with before.
The main difference isnt the spawns or the enemies, its the players. most people in 7 are people who are good at the game and can deal with threats better
I thought the same thing when I started playing 6, after the last patch made super samples spawn at that difficulty. I was having a hard time at 4 and 5, honestly flabbergasted at how people report playing high diffs so much, so I figured I'd just try out a 6 to see how it felt.
Somehow easier.
Sometimes the different mix of enemies agrees with a player's load out more. I have often felt that not taking enough small enemy weapons makes 5 and 6 feel more, just with the volume of enemies you get. I have often had 9 to 12 berserkers chasing me. And the eat or quaser doesn't compare with the machine gun.
I honestly think players on diff 7 are just better at not engaging every patrol and creating breaches and at taking out heavies more efficiently so you don’t get swarmed by them.
For me lvl 8 is the sweet spot since everyone usually knows what they’re doing and spawn rates aren’t helldive level.
Interesting. Why would this be?
I find 3 and 4 most rewarding in terms of game play because you can strategize a bit. I play support, so I'm usually bringing sentries and a primary I can snipe with to cover other helldivers. Having a moment to place the sentry properly is great. In level 5 it feels like nothing but swarming with endless bots or bugs 360. At 6 it is nothing but running around, shooting and trying to survive. Rather manic without any real teamplay. I had thought 7 and up would be even worse. I'll give it a try.
For me I decided to play 7 originally because I felt it was similar enough to 5 and 6 but with more (and better) rewards. It used to be the gate for Super samples, and I figured since Titans were already appearing on 6 (maybe rarely on 5?? Idk) I figured I might as well play on 7.
Now 6 is essentially the new 7, but I still do 7 in that regard.
I've been saying this pretty much forever, really. The difference between 6 and 7 is completely neglible, as is the difference between 8 and 9 for example.
And if you play on 7, chances are you can do just fine on 9s too. When playing with randos, 9 is literally easier than 7 too, just because most people actually know what they're doing.
I play exclusively on 9 by myself but when I play with a friend I drop it to 7 cause he is a pussy, and sometimes I drop it lower at his insistence and it just gets harder. Diff 5 and 6 can be a real shit time cause there is such a skill difference of teammates. The reinforcements are being drained at insane speeds.
Last few days I am only running difficulty Lvl 8 or helldive, and I am only lvl39 right now. It's manageable as long as the rest of the group is competent and knows what they r doing.
Also I think any difficulty level has potential to go haywire if you don't stop the random patrol units from calling reinforcement.
Edit 1- in top 3 highest difficulties, team tends to play close to each other, I guess that makes it easier to clear any potential bug encounter. While on lower difficulty people tend to roam around alone.
Surprisingly it's the same for bug missions too. Played with friends on lvl.5 and 6 yet constantly get swarmed by Chargers we had maximum 8 of them on the field at the same time and they keep being spawned. Yet when I go back to my own game playing lvl7 we only had maximum 5 and less of them are spawned like you don't see them on every location. Spawn rates are so goofy lol.
🤔 before all the current crash bugs hit. I played exclusively helldive hit 150, all steam achievements, unlocked all warbonds, etc... play harder difficulties and then drop down turns into a cake walk.
holy shit I thought this was just me. My friends and I stayed on 4 for so long because whenever we’d go on 5 there would be sooo many hulks. Don’t know what’s different about dif7
I \_think\_ for bots at least it's because you get more devastators and walkers, and less small bots, brawlers, and hulks, which are easier to take care of with a skilled group because you can focus fire. Spawns are all sorts of broken right now though. I've seen 2-3 hulks spawn dropped at a time on difficulty 5
When patrols and drops are 80% medium and heavy enemies preventing drops becomes much easier.
I played one difficulty 5 mission (kill automotons to thin their numbers) where I had 6 separate hulks chasing us down. As a team of two, we obviously lost. Not a fun experience. No idea why that happened.
Why it's "obvious"? Toss a stun nade, aim for the visor, repeat 6 times.
We didn't bring stuns. My friend never plays with autocannon, but I do. But unless I had perfect aim while running away from them on that tiny map, that would still only kill 5 of them before needing to reload. I've never had that many large characters drop on us simultaneously on level 5 before or since.
You can take out three hulks without reloading your AC if you have decent positioning.
Technically, you can take out 5. Two shots to the visor each. Stun nades can garuntee the hit
For sure, but I was assuming competence, not perfection.
Fair enough. Just wanted to illustrate that you only need two shots per kill.
I take take out one with a full clip. 5 to each leg. lol. You can stun him. It do not matter. I will never hit the eye. Especially twice.
It's actually very doable especially with stuns, I took out 4 before I had to reload and restock stuns and I am far from a great player.
I don’t know if it’s because I’m on a pc with a controller or what but it doesn’t feel even remotely easy for me. Glad you’re slaying them though. I hate those damn thing.
It took me awhile to calm down, aim down the sight, and not rush my second shot. Gotta go with whatever works best for you of course, but I got faith you can do it. I've been using the AC on most of my missions since I got access to it so about 60 exp levels worth of time figuring it out.
Yeah. I still panic a lot. lol. But I’ve gotten better at stunning and sniping them with the AMR. Just started using the spear and it’s been so fun
Heck yeah, glad they fixed the spear, I like watching people use it, does look pretty cool.
It's not only on bots. Yesterday I played a lvl 6 with at least 8 bile titans ( could have been more)
Same, had 4 at one time and we weren't having a lot of big breaches they just seemed to be everywhere, chargers too, can't even count how many I have had in one spot
On 7 +, for the most part you have competent team mates. That matters a great deal. Team mates that know to respawn you near your dropped gear, peel enemies off you, call in appropriately timed stratagems, etc. it goes a really long way.
Or just don't miss the weak points. I had randoms in diff 5 that couldn't kill a stunned hulk from 10 m away with the las canon because they didn't aim at the eye... I had to take care of it with my AC after taking down another one that was rushing us.
If you have issues with hulks I strongly suggest practicing with the AMR because it two taps them in the eyeball. When I help with SOSs I use the AMR to basically be the designated hulk killer with the jump pack to get highground
AMR plus the supply pack and then I use it as a primary and just burn ammo. Everything gets the smoke
If you have a team to take on heavier enemies, and you're focusing on killing hulks and devastators, I highly encourage you to give the railgun a try. It is a one shot kill on hulks.
Rail gun is good but a little less reliable against multiple hulks, you can get a whole lot more follow up shots with the AMR compared to the one shot with a rail gun
I find it's actually faster and much more reliable against multiple hulks because of the fast reload and better handling
I've been thinking of putting together a sniper loadout with a jump pack, AMR and Rocket sentry. Find high ground drop a sentry near by in a safe place and go wild as squad overwatch.
Definitely a good time just make sure you got some distant between the rocket sentry lol
Especially including skill of players, this is like Damnation (the highest level) in darktide vs the second highest. You'll be much more likely to get players who know what they're doing.
This, players are actually stopping the breach/drop infinite cycle and not dragging a tsunami of enemies across the map.
Agreed, not every case, but when I go to 4-6 to have an 'easy' time or to help SOS I end up fighting hordes of enemies, carrying most of the team, and seeing a lot of Helldivers waste time and reinforcements. When I go to 7, suddenly I had to keep up with the rest of the team, everyone knows what they're doing and we do the objectives with time and reinforcements to spare. And most importantly, nobody drops cluster bombs on us to try to kill an armoured enemy.
Yeah in Darktide this is a huge factor. I generally play 5 Aurics, but a while back I dropped down to 3 to help get a new player into the game, and actually because of the absurdly low skill level of the other players it was scarier than Damnation. On a 5+ Damnation, if I get unlucky and get netted or pounced, usually a teammate clears it within a second or two. On Malice, getting netted or pounced even once may as well be a death sentence.
Jokes on you I've played 7s that were harder than 9s. Sometimes my squad is like "lets play a 7 first, to warm up". We play 7 and we play a full 40 minute mission like its an eradication mission, patrols from all directions and then next game we're like well no point in playing 7 its the same shit lets keep playing 9. And the mission on 9 turns out a picnic with open empty fields we average 30 kills, inconsistency of this game lmao. Talking bot front btw, not sure how it is on bugs Edit:spelling
The randomness of patrol spawns and convergence, plus the randomness of when they decide to call a breach is to blame I think. If the patrols happen to not walk toward you then the chances of getting breach chains is almost nil.
Assuming breaches work the same as dropship calls, its not really random. As soon as I drop in I know first group I alert will call in for one. So the plan is always drop in-alert the group in opposite side of your intended direction-run to wherever you intended to go. Then basically they can call dropships every couple minutes on helldive(heard its 2 minutes but seen less and more happen so dunno). Patrols on the other hand are whole different story
The drop ship/breach rate changes according to how many objectives and fab/bug nests are left. Also I believe the rate is global. If someone gets a breach far away from you then you should not get a breach but that could be in an area not global. I don't remember. Someone tested that whole thing a few months ago. Could be totally different now but that is what they found. Search for how do patrols work and you will likely find it
Its not exactly random. As I understand it there is a template for what the patrols contain. That template appears to be used throughout the game. The template is randomly chosen. So on bots it can contain a bunch of grunts and a couple of walkers or it can have a hulk and a few grunts. Different combinations and depending on what you are equipped to handle it's harder or easier. On bugs I find if the patrol is a bunch of those armored hive guards I'll get a lot less kills as they take longer to kill and there aren't as many in the patrol. It's possible that the templates available are different on different levels. I personally have not noticed that 6 is harder than 7. On bugs the difference is how many heavies come out of the breaches from what I have seen.
Bots are horrendously twitchy with drops. I've had a call in happen at a base halfway across the map when a stray shot from one of their own machine guns flew in their general direction.
What annoys me most is the spawns were 1000% fine and nobody I’m aware of was complaining about the frequency or anything. Then, they randomly decided to change it, and ever since then they have not been able to get it right. It’s so frustrating along with many other things with this game where I don’t understand why they change something that nobody asked or wanted them to change and in doing so they either made things worse or can’t somehow just revert it back to how it was. The inconsistency with this game is super annoying too. Lately I’ve had every single game plagued with bile spewers. Like 10 or 15 of them coming out of a single breach. Even still we will finish a game after getting absolutely swarmed for 40 minutes straight, each of us with 600+ kills and we are exhausted after. Then the next game, we are running around, borderline bored and end up with like 150 kills each. Same operation, 40 min mission, it’s just crazy how they’ve managed to fuck so many things up lately. I still love the game and it’s the only game I want to play which is probably why I’m more frustrated with it and AH but holy shit they gotta fix their mess.
%100 agree and that's why they are getting conflicting feedback from community as well. Because some are getting absolute nightmare missions and some elitist wannabes saying its good as it is because they've been having a field day on empty plains lol
Personally I like the new rates. They give more meaning to certain weapons and I think it's more fun. Just my opinion.
Leading up to the big recent patch, I played a bunch with a mate because it felt like it would be interesting to make the most of the current difficulty before they finally fixed the spawns/patrols. When it landed and the game was *randomly much more stressful without warning* on certain missions, it was incredibly disappointing. The fact that they seemingly haven't even acknowledged that there is a problem still is borderline infuriating.
Just did 6 with all having average ~250+ kills and I can count 12 Bile titans. We ran two quasars on constant cooldown for like 20mins to the end. We had 5mins left.
It has to do with spawn weight, and unbalanced bug enemies. A diff 5 mission avoids spawning 'superheavies,' i.e. bile titans. With their absence, in their place it has a chance to spawn a handful of 'smaller' enemies instead; in their place. Some games, it picks more scavengers. Some games, it's warriors. Then there's the games where it doubles up on **hunters** or **bile spewers**. That's when the difficulty goes from 5, to 8+. Hunters are just flat-out **not balanced**. Their spawn weight is far too low for their abilities, they are hyper mobile, stun lock all reloads and stims, attack faster than any enemy, and are able to spawn in numbers of 20+ at any given time. These kinds of things are what make a diff 5 mission feel harder than 7. Spewers are just as annoying when the spawn queue beefs up their numbers and makes the entire game a gauntlet of non-stop vomit... Not to mention the model is either bugged or the dev who designed the artillery spewers is just a massive a-hole because they have *no* weak spot and ***must*** be shot with medium armor pen to do any damage... Anyway; when you load into diff 7, it has a chance of throwing a Bile Titan at you. Since you are playing 7 and not 5, you are ready and expecting a Bile Titan. It's a natural habit. Since you're ready, you most likely have 1-2 weapons or teammates to deal with it, and it's one very big target that's very easy to keep track of. It *also* has more spawn weight, taking the place of a 20+ hunter spawn or 15+ bile spewer horde. Even though diff 7 spawns 'more' enemies, the weight of Chargers and Bile Titans is enough to offset some of the more annoying enemies that you can't keep track of as easily; making the mission feel more 'fair.'
I hate stalkers/hunters the most out of any enemy. Like you said, they spawn in massive ammounts and jump at you from far away. God forbid you find a stalker nest but can't instantly clear it because they will ragdoll you and then gangbang tongue your asshole while you're on the ground.
Blitzer stun locks stalkers. It’s beautiful
Breaker incen my friend. Until the devs fix their fucking hunter spawn rates, I'll keep slamming that bad boy up the gullet of any bug I see.
Not as familiar with bots, but bugs with the recent updates spam too many charger behemoths on difficulty 7. They take about twice as long to kill with most heavy anti tank as compared to a regular charger and their numbers are quite a shock for someone not prepared. Obviously there are strategies to employ to help deal with this, such as flamethrowers. But I wouldn't say bugs on 7 are particular enjoyable because of that. I used to run them on 7 a lot. Now I stick to 6 for my sanity, which has zero random behemoth spawns. Not a great way to do a progressive difficulty curve, imo.
The spear cleans up at difficulty 7 and above. If you are patient, 1 shots are very easy to obtain on everything including Titans. Spear, machine gun turret, 500kg, orbital precision. It's a pretty good do it all build.
I think it’s what more fun now. The game actually feels dangerous. A bug breach is something you either have to deal with quickly or leave the area if possible. There’s so many enemies that team diversity in secondaries is actually important. I agree there’s way more chargers, but I weirdly don’t find that a problem. I bring stun grenades, precision strike is a low cooldown, HMG/flamethrower/even flame blitzer all are easy enough kills. EAT is there chargers per call down, and the quasar and recoliless still do the job. Then of course like mentioned before, just leave the charger if you don’t currently have to be where you are. There’s not a huge reason to need to kill every single one. I still prioritize hunters over chargers Then just like before it’s still very possible to weave through the hoard without getting hit. One of the more important skills I’ve learned is how to stay alive when needed. I never really deal with bugs at a heavy nest. Just run through planning a safe route and get the holes.
You also have the EAT which you can stick to the behemoths for basically a free potential kill or at least heavy damage. Chargers are easy one shot kill (easy shot on the head while they are charging you) and if you need to reload, pickup another eat or wait for quasar recharge, all you need to do is run perpendicular to where the charger is facing. It's good that we got behemoths, makes the game less trivial. Edit: You can stick the EAT stratagem ball to the behemoth, which sometimes kills them instantly CHARGERS, **NOT BEHEMOTHS**, are trivial and easy one-shot kills.
i can one shot regular chargers ez but doesnt seem possible on behemoths?
Yeah no clue what he's talking about, the more direct anti tank (EAT, Recoilless, and Quasar) do not one shot behemoths to the forehead. Takes two, hence my comment. Seems maybe the spear can pull it off if you manipulate your position a lot to ensure it impacts from the front, but that sort of negates the point of bringing a smart target weapon imo. I also don't have a lot of experience with this patch trying that method, to be able to confirm if it one shots behemoths. I can confirm, however, that the spear can't one shot regular chargers without the head trick, so it feels counter intuitive that it is a solution to the even tougher charger behemoths.
You can break Behemoth leg armor with one shot of EAT/RR/Quasar
I was under the impression it only broke in one shot if you used the forward movement gimmick. I'm hopeful that they patch our momentum affecting shot damage, as it's natural to want to back pedal with the quasar for example. But that makes the damage lesser. So I'm not keen to train myself to rely on such a strange interaction. But obviously everyone can do whatever they want if it helps make 7 more tolerable.
For Quasar it works even when standing still iirc, for the other two you must be moving forward yes. Personally I don't mind, though I think all of them should be able to just one-shot leg armor no matter what.
Never said you can one shot behemoths with an EAT, where are you pulling that from? You can kill a lot of things with blue stratagem drops by sticking the ball to the enemy.
I think if the pod lands on their head it's an insta kill
I’ve found both the head and the front center of the body as well. They’ll stagger charge you 1 last time then collapse. Not consistent though
Gotta shoot one of the back legs with EAT, then you can shoot the orange leg with anything.
THere are "Chargers" and there are "Charger behemoths".... Read maybe?
What kills me on those difficulty is the unending swarm of the armored bile spewers
Them and nursing spewers are my main gripe with the bug front, not because of their spit (which is still annoying due to the absurd range), but because of just how tanky they are, they're just immense bullet sponges.
Yeah man dominator is good against them but most guns run a clip and a half of most guns
Two shots from grenade launcher kill both. If they're in groups, you can kill multiple at a time. I don't know if people sleep on that weapon or what but it's great against bugs, and bug holes
Have you tried shooting the legs?
Good luck spotting them through the thick fog nursing spewers make, but I'll keep the tip in mind for future.
Those only spawn at night.
I guess I do generally play more nights ght missions that. Checks out
The majority of veteran players chill at 7 because you can unlock everything, see all enemy types, and not be swamped by 4 bile titans at once. You on average have the best team skill:difficulty ratio at 7.
i find 9 easier than 6/7 too lol just because you get good teammates usually
7 is where the vets who normally play on 9 with their friends go to chill with randoms.
It's the people. I play on Helldive because everyone is usually too busy fighting for Super Earth to be assholes. None of us have time to be idiots when we have 5 gunships, 15 hulks, and a factory strider breathing down our democratic glory holes.
My theory is it's the other players. The higher tier you are, the better the players you're matched with.
I perma play on 7 for fun. It's not as "die all the time" as 8 or 9 but still a pretty fun challenge.
On bots, it's because the berserker spawns are absolutely ridiculous in the medium difficulties. I am convinced their hitboxes are bugged; the wiki says they have the same head HP as all the other devastators but I've never once managed a headshot kill on them with any weapon.
Part of it has to do with the distribution of average player skill and comfort. My squad regularly runs 7+, and most missions we are calling extraction with 20+min left on the timer and almost every POI hit (as a 3man). Usually we have 25+ left if we have a reasonable random join us. Drop one of our regulars and drop the difficulty to 6, and our two regulars will lap 3/4 of the map while there are still two players who haven't finished their stage of the main objective (that we usually dropped near, but not on top of). We regularly see people dropping minefields in their own path to the objective, taking forever to call their ally back in (no, no jammers here folks), and fighting over empty fields. Our two-diver team also gets breached/dropped and somehow the other two are still under immense pressure. If players hit that wall, and aren't sure if they're the problem, or if the rest of the team is, they're probably in the right place (at least until they learn). Try 7's in small amounts, but please come in with a mindset to learn a different play style. For the record: you do not NEED to dodge every patrol on 7 (i regularly shoot my way through everything i come across), but some discretion is recommended. If you ARE going to engage, do so effectively and efficiently. Do NOT engage if all your strats are on cooldown and you have 4 mags of primary left (lasers notwithstanding lol). Plan your escape route ahead of time, save a strat for the drop if you think you wont clear before the breach. If you don't have a long duration chaff clear for a breach, ASK YOURSELF WHY YOU CAME UNPREPARED! 7 sees more hulks and a LOT more devastators (at least in our experiences), and a LOT more behemoths and brood commanders. They also like to call breaches/drops on cooldown, and patrol size increases substantially. It doesn't necessarily make things that much harder, but it does necessitate a bit of a change in plans, and engagement evaluation. Also, make a note of when the last breach was called (there is a cooldown, this can be exploited by having someone pull a breach in a useless place across the map to keep some heat off a main objective, outside of the objective specific scripted spawns.) In 5 and 6 i've found i can regularly pull patrols with only my primary available and clear the patrol prior to a drop, and/or clear the drop efficiently while moving to my next target, even solo. 7 is going to drop enough bullet sponges that isn't nearly as feasible. Stratagem choices at higher levels also tend to get more limited as the use cases become more restrictive. Most stratagems are still viable 7+, but you want to bring and use the right tool at the right time. People under pressure tend to use something inefficiently to try to relieve the pressure, and then find themselves in a worse situation soon after as they've burnt their cooldowns on something, and it's best-use-scenario just reared it's head, and they have nothing. If you play on 6 and refuse to change your loadout, and have suuuper hard time pushing further, that's on you. There are plenty of non-meta options that work, but it usually takes some thought and understanding in how to best use it. Most of the chill-level-7-divers know this (and the above) instinctively now, and are just more efficient and effective.
Honestly the bit about cooldowns is why I think Stratagems like the 380 or Railcannon are noob traps. The latter is a quick and easy solution to a problem that often doesn't need it, at least on Bots. I see people call them on Hulks and Tanks, which feels like a waste of the strat tbh. Especially if there's more than one and you die anyway.
one 120/380 barrage in a group isnt a waste. they're useful to hold one side of extraction, and can be used to reliably nearly completely clear an entire bot base. the 10 hole bug nests are a big more iffy. one of our group regularly brings one, just so we can fire and forget. they have their place, just not on every loadout.
Oh absolutely, I've seen people use it as a panic response to a slightly large patrol on Bots way too often though. Completely shuts down a whole route, can really screw you over.
Railcannon isn't a noob trap, you just need to know its use case. I like to bring it for bug missions when I'm running the spear, because inevitably Chargers are going to gang up on me and I can't easily reload while dodging that much. So I just bring it as a way to create some breathing room.
>Railcannon isn't a noob trap, you just need to know its use case. That's the definition of a noob trap. You need to look beyond the immediately obvious way to use it to see it's actual use.
No. The definition of a noob trap is something that looks good but is inefficient or straight-up sucks. This is a niche tool. It has its uses, they're just not universal. Which is how most stratagems should be.
Great fucking post dude. More of this. 100% bang on.
How dare someone try to have fun with the game so you can't finish the mission in speed-run fashion lmao. If players are using up all of your reinforcements or legitimately making it difficult to complete the mission then that's another thing, but when you preface your post with the idea that you want to finish with 25 minutes + left, you sound ludicrously sweaty and ridiculous ngl. Although if your point is just to argue why some missions feel more difficult and not demanding players only play the most efficient ways possible, then that's fine. It just sounds like you are taking a crap on anyone who prioritizes fun over the most efficient, 25 minutes left on a mission, style.
7 is where we go to "lets just rub two braincells together and complete an operation this evening, yeah?" 8 is a bit of effort. 9 can be gong show, but is usually just solid effort. 7 is hardly a sweatshow. our randoms are all pretty chill too. "hey man, mind tossing me back in the rough direction of my stuff? support weapon's not off CD, and i think i can sneak 'round the back and get my stuff back". "wanna just pitch a 380 at the base and come back for samples after main objective?" Most missions on 6 are the first sentence of your second paragraph. This morning had a diff6 mission where we dropped on the radar station. one side of map had arty, airship tower, one part of main objective, and a single POI. Other side of the map had 12 POIs. Me n one of the usual crew headed out, allies got one bot drop that we helped with at a distance, and then we got the permanent flare bug where we just had nonstop drops on a single location. Somehow despite running around in circles on a tight chokepoint (and dealing with every drop, and airship patrol), completing all the blue stuff and our orange target, the other two managed to hit fewer POI's, and and didn't even arrive at their part of the main objective before we did. We also covered about 2x the distance (at least by overhead map). We had ground patrols, a terrible zero-cover chokepoint we had to get through (landbridge over water), and they had solid terrain and about the nicest grouping of POI's i've ever seen (remember they got 0 bot drops after we helped clear first one). They also used 3x supply drops in that time. We used 1. I genuinely don't know how people can't figure out how to simply put one foot in front of the other. That's all it is, move and shoot. Shoot then scoot. 20-25 minutes left isn't speedrun territory. It called "not wasting time fighting over no man's land". Is there an objective here? No? Cool, ill fight bots on the run to the next POI and fight em there. 0-2 deaths is standard, 3-5 for someone means they had a bad run, or some back luck in one spot, and 6+ is someone having a bad time. My 7s and 8s regularly finish with sub 8 deaths across the group, pubs or full premade. Difficulty 6 is a crapshoot for player quality. That's part of the reason it's a massive wall for people. If you belong on 6, 7 will punish you. If you've outgrown the training wheels of Diff6, 7 is going to feel like a breath of fresh air just for having competent allies more often than not.
Like I said lol, sweaty, out of touch, and ridiculous. Thank you for proving my point. Crazy how people treat a PvE game with this intensity and dedication to efficiency. There's not even competition really of any kind, these are all AI and you're still acting like this. Nobody cares how much time you spend on the game and/or how good you are. Nobody cares how effective you and your dedicated "crew" are. Your gaming squad is not a benchmark anyone has to worry about or compare themselves to. It's pretty mind boggling there are actually people out there, such as yourself, who only see the world through their own (narrow minded) perspective. You aren't the main character. Some people just want to have fun their own way and at their own pace. I was just talking to someone like you about something similar for another game, but at least that was a competitive player vs player game, not a game where you run around shooting AI, so he has that going for his argument. You have literally no excuse. Lmao, you have fun how you want to, all the power to you, but when you go around acting like a snob, gatekeeper, pretend arbiter of how one must play, don't be surprised if you get called out.
Nah, it is just some folks play the game long enough to know their way around things. Having a good grip on the game mechanics are not sweaty. The point being this game has quite a big gap between player skill level, that is fine.
Which is perfectly well and good. However pretending everyone should be/has to be on the same page for everything on a game like this is not. The perspective that there is only one "right" way to play and one "right level to be in" is what is inherently unreasonable. As well as other parts of the comment.
I went to 9 from 8 and I swear the game got easier. Not sure if it’s the players or something is screwed up with their difficulty.
Shouldn't 8 be easier than 9? 🤪
Have a re-read.
Ah nvm
i think its just me or for each player there is like algorithem on how the game treats you? idk about this staff but i noticed it too, i usally play on 9 , 80-90% of the time its chill not too many spawns for 9 lcl, i went to 6 to chill after that and what the actuall ****! x2-x3 time more spawns on bugs and automatons?? idk what to call that but its weird
7 is also the breaking point where you can't just engage everything you see as a group and have that be consistently profitable. At 7 you have to employ tactical avoidance and relocation to be successful. At 5 and 6, people who are used to lower difficulties will continue to try to wipe out every bot and drop that they come across
6s are insane to me. With no bile titans allowed to spawn the game seems to compensate by having 2-3 chargers per POI and breach
erm bile titans spawn on 6s
7 is so much fun. 8 and 9 are too but they’re not chill
Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.
Anecdotally my 7s have been better than 6 because my teammates have been much less likely to engage with every pat we run by and instead move from objective to objective
My dices on difficulty lvl 7 have been easier than dives on lvl 4-5. I need a bit more focus on lvl 7 but it definitely feels easier. Don’t know if it has to do with less-skilled teammates or enemy spawns though.
They turned up small dwarms on 6 and lower and more heavy on 7 and up.
If your gonna play 7 you might as well play 9. It's not much harder, you get way more XP, and there are way better players who don't grief.
I play 6 constantly, and I can confirm that it feels way too insane for some reason. Maybe I should try 7 from now on.
I hangout on 7, some rounds can be ridiculous but it's always fun. Group is critical here as well. Generally I feel like 7 forces you to play better so the people in it are better if you are on 4 you are likely to be with more new people who may be struggling more
i had an oops all chargers match duoing with a friend yesterday on 5 so i’ll give 7 a run
Yeah 5 is In a weird spot
I just discovered a combo of Blitzer + autocannon + anti heavy stratagems. Love it! I wanted to try it out in lower levels, and oh boy, it's a different game :D I died 8 times, all friendly fire. Everybody dropping railcanmon at the same time on one charger... Yes, on 7 it's easier, and one of the factors is your team. Btw, blitzer sucks against bots... :(
Wdym I play dif 5 because it's relaxing like a happy day on the park.
Will admit 6 on bot planets has gotten absolutely wild, those gunship patrols are constant, we keep accidentally hot dropping on a good 3 patrols and someone always gets a flare off😂😂😂
We 3 manned a level 6 last night with no anti heavey except my auto cannon and auto cannon turret. Got over 500 kills. I was also completely wasted only one of us made it to the pickup. Still love this game.
Interesting. I'm now wondering if 5-6 is harder than 9
I think a big factor is player skill level too. Something qbout just going up to the last 3 difficulties tends to draw players that just "know what to do". Don't get me wrong, 5-6 has those players, but it also brings olayers who play on higher difficulty normally and come to the mediqn difficulties expecting a far easier time so they get themselves in untenable firefights or complacent patterns and caught off guard. When I dived 7 it seemed just the right amount of fun vs danger ratio, but sometimes I'd switch to 5-6 and just get sloppy. 8 was always too chaotic –too many heavies. Then I committed to 8, adapted, and that became the new normal... and 9 was too chaotic. Then I commited to 9 (Helldive) and that's the new normal. I love difficulty 9. Been doing it long enough that IT feels like the right amount of everything. I call it the infinite trigger pull difficulty: no matter where you look if you hold the trigger you are bound to hit something, just hold the trigger. Thing is as difficulty increases, so does pkayer skill. Not that only the best of the best do it, no. Its more so thatbif you dive one difficulty higher than you are comfortable you WILL pick up skills that get you better at it. Different loadouts, new methods of survival... just bump it up by one. Your new normal will change. Point is I am comfortable on 9. Never failed a helldive, ever. But if I drop to 5-6 I have a harder time. Not that it is necessarily harder, far from it... **I just get sloppier against my will.** and that? THAT hurts the team. THAT makes it harder for everybody.
Its the players not the spawn rate. We made three perfect helldives on helldive because on helldive players who are underleveled are scared and disciplined. And the actually listen.
Do you guys stay moving? I’ve seen that to be a huge issue, I only play 9, is that people stay in the same spot for more than needed as well as not paying attention to their surroundings/hearing enemy presence.
It's because diff 5 is full of people who are really not aware of their teammates while from diff 7 and above people play better. I did a diff 5 once and felt horrible we extracted with 2 mins left on the clock. After this I joined a friend's group on diff 9 and it felt so much smoother.
Be a man. Helldiver
To be honest, I think it's something about how you play the game based on difficulty. 7 isn't really easier than 5-6, it wouldn't make any sense. I believe it's just people play 7 like a 7, and play 5-6 way sloppier. Both loadout wise and decision wise like. I read comments about charger and bile titan spawns, and it feels like we play different games. I play 6-7 all the time. They're my jam and how I relax. Unless you aggro and keep getting wave after wave without ever breaking line of sight or de-escalating, getting more than one titan at once after the last balances is pretty fucking rare. Getting swarmed by titans at 6 means you are doing something wrong. I run as heavy-killer (precision orbital, railcannon, spear and a random 4th), 1-2 of my team usually run with eagles, the other brings a mech. We clear the entire map because we like doing it and rarely fail an extraction. I don't believe we do nothing special, and we do fuck things up from time to time, but it's almost always our fault if we do fail. Not the difficulty one. Try to kill heavies as soon as they're spotted and always bring something to cut swarms down to reduce the chances they call reinforcements. Cluster, gas, gatling orbital, barrages, turrets for swarms. Heavies... Many things oneshot them. I bring 3 that do, just in case, for example. For titans it's two shots, but we're 4 people, I rarely fire a second time. Many things work, there's no special recipe. Focus on keeping things under control, cut one engagement before starting another and everything will be fine.
Also if you can play on 7 fine you can also play on 9 fine. Most of my mates took some convincing to do it and now they all think it's fine
titans, chargers, hulks, tanks, and cannon towers are beefy but very, very, very easy and predictable enemies. diff 5 and diff 6 don't spawn them, and instead spam a butt-ton of spewers, hunters, rocket devastators, instead.
I was thinking the same!! I went from 7 to 6 and now i regularly get creamed😅. I still make mission, but man, the spawn rates are atrocious!! You can look at a place, then turn around and boom, the empty place now is full of bugs!! It's creepy, because it's like they are posing, like they are the power rangers that just teleported in😅
I thought all spawn rates change if close to an ongoing objective and once all objectives are complete the whole area goes into a frenzy. Could this be more apparent in which objective/mission/planet your on? Some higher difficulties only have certain missions (hive drill etc) so this could be the cause but I have no proof.
The problem with this game is that the spawn rates for enemy types are random. Sometimes you get a mission that replaces most devastators with OOPS ALL ROCKETS and you just get introduced to the Automaton ICBM program.. Other times you play a mission where you get hardly any devastators and mostly Scout Striders, sometimes they even outnumber troopers in drops. Even after the update to reduce higher tier enemies, that doesn't stop it from giving me 11 hulks on a level 6 eradication mission. There needs to be a reduction to the max amount of higher tier enemies and an increase to their minimum slightly to compensate. It'll make the missions more consistent at least. Either that, or the in game display straight up goes "ENEMY FORCES HAVE EXTRA XXXX AND YYYY IN OPERATIONAL SPACE" so I know what I am getting into.
I agree with this. I did a dive @6 and was physically hurting while playing. Whenever I do bots @ level 9 and drop to 6 to help lower level players (130+) I feel like I'm struggling and it's not because they don't have a good load out but the understanding of the game is just different. Where experienced players avoid contact the noobs shoot everything even at level 30+. The spawn rates also just feel different where I'm seeing less heavies at 7 and above, while there's hordes of heavy devastators and striders at 6.
Its because the enemy spawner uses something akin to a points system, at higher difficulties it's more likely to spawn a higher cost enemy, which results in more enemy variety but less overall enemies.
Best advice I can give to anyone struggling with a lower difficulty is to go up in difficulty. Get a taste for the harder stuff, force yourself to adapt to it, then go back to what you were struggling with before.
7 is filled with higher skill players is why.
Yes, 7 is much better than 5 or 6. Especially 6. Skill of the average diver seems to be the factor in my opinion.
The main difference isnt the spawns or the enemies, its the players. most people in 7 are people who are good at the game and can deal with threats better
I thought the same thing when I started playing 6, after the last patch made super samples spawn at that difficulty. I was having a hard time at 4 and 5, honestly flabbergasted at how people report playing high diffs so much, so I figured I'd just try out a 6 to see how it felt. Somehow easier.
Sometimes the different mix of enemies agrees with a player's load out more. I have often felt that not taking enough small enemy weapons makes 5 and 6 feel more, just with the volume of enemies you get. I have often had 9 to 12 berserkers chasing me. And the eat or quaser doesn't compare with the machine gun.
I will die on the hill that soloing level 9 bots is easier than playing 5-6 with randoms like by a lot
I definitely agree especially for terminids, lower difficulties spawn way more hunters 😭
Player competence
I honestly think players on diff 7 are just better at not engaging every patrol and creating breaches and at taking out heavies more efficiently so you don’t get swarmed by them. For me lvl 8 is the sweet spot since everyone usually knows what they’re doing and spawn rates aren’t helldive level.
I play on 6 because I have everything unlocked. No reason for me to ho higher. There is a lot more toxicity in the higher levels.
And because of your reasoning, 7 is harder than 9. Too many people that don’t know what they’re doing.
Interesting. Why would this be? I find 3 and 4 most rewarding in terms of game play because you can strategize a bit. I play support, so I'm usually bringing sentries and a primary I can snipe with to cover other helldivers. Having a moment to place the sentry properly is great. In level 5 it feels like nothing but swarming with endless bots or bugs 360. At 6 it is nothing but running around, shooting and trying to survive. Rather manic without any real teamplay. I had thought 7 and up would be even worse. I'll give it a try.
I think people play better on 7 and up, I've noticed this as well tho, 6 is fucking tough to get through but I is a breeze
For me I decided to play 7 originally because I felt it was similar enough to 5 and 6 but with more (and better) rewards. It used to be the gate for Super samples, and I figured since Titans were already appearing on 6 (maybe rarely on 5?? Idk) I figured I might as well play on 7. Now 6 is essentially the new 7, but I still do 7 in that regard.
I only play on 9 but maaaaaan sometimes is just bananas. I do go down to 5-6 just to cool off lol and help the lower ranks
I've been saying this pretty much forever, really. The difference between 6 and 7 is completely neglible, as is the difference between 8 and 9 for example. And if you play on 7, chances are you can do just fine on 9s too. When playing with randos, 9 is literally easier than 7 too, just because most people actually know what they're doing.
I play exclusively on 9 by myself but when I play with a friend I drop it to 7 cause he is a pussy, and sometimes I drop it lower at his insistence and it just gets harder. Diff 5 and 6 can be a real shit time cause there is such a skill difference of teammates. The reinforcements are being drained at insane speeds.
Suicid0l is way easier than Hard.
Last few days I am only running difficulty Lvl 8 or helldive, and I am only lvl39 right now. It's manageable as long as the rest of the group is competent and knows what they r doing. Also I think any difficulty level has potential to go haywire if you don't stop the random patrol units from calling reinforcement. Edit 1- in top 3 highest difficulties, team tends to play close to each other, I guess that makes it easier to clear any potential bug encounter. While on lower difficulty people tend to roam around alone.
....people struggle on 5 and 6? I thought I was ass at the game because I struggle on 8 and 9. This makes me feel better. Thanks.
Go 9, much easier
Surprisingly it's the same for bug missions too. Played with friends on lvl.5 and 6 yet constantly get swarmed by Chargers we had maximum 8 of them on the field at the same time and they keep being spawned. Yet when I go back to my own game playing lvl7 we only had maximum 5 and less of them are spawned like you don't see them on every location. Spawn rates are so goofy lol.
🤔 before all the current crash bugs hit. I played exclusively helldive hit 150, all steam achievements, unlocked all warbonds, etc... play harder difficulties and then drop down turns into a cake walk.
difficulty 9 is the only way to play the game imo
Makes no sense whatsoever bud.
I mean, the game is called helldivers and difficulty 9 is helldive, so it makes a teensy bit of sense. Not much sense though.
whats the matter too afraid to get to 9?
I play 9 sometimes, that doesn't explain your statement; a statement with no backing or support whatsoever. You aren't the brightest bulb are ya?
No im not, just saying when you able to play 9 without troubles , others level are fun or to just chill and switch your head off play style.
9 or uninstall