Demystifying Helldivers 2's Difficulty (Or Lack Thereof) [cc]

this game really isn't that hard after doing my best to uncover and explain how this game stealth mechanics work I wanted to do the same but with the different difficulty options there are similarly few dives into this online which is absolutely bizarre to me considering how popular this game is and how stats minded Gamers tend to be I have noticed people way overstating the difference between difficulties there's really not that much different between them at all which is inevitable when you have nine separate difficulties there's the boring changes about objectives and points of interest the objectives are self-explanatory enough that I'm not even going to mention them but you'll notice that the total samples and missions goes up as you increase in difficulty and this is because of the places of interest at the places of interest buildings get Cannon turrets erected over them friendship doors get a fence and most get a ton of Mines most importantly though they also get more samples at first I thought the increased samples in higher difficulty missions might be from a map size increase because more map would bean more places for the prefab pois to spawn but no the amount of samples that spawn in each POI change as you get higher it's not just more places of interest regardless of difficulty the main objective dict takes Map size and it's always the same I have these screenshots to prove this but this is really boring so I'm going to move on besides those relatively minor changes the only other thing that changes between difficulty is enemy variety and drop ship complements nearly all of the difficulty is in enemy count a difficulty one boss Devastator is the exact same as the eight level 9 Devastators deployed from a drop sh ship during a hell dive this is a bit of a mixed bag of a balancing decision because on one hand it is nice to know that an enemy is always going to be consistent when you see them and you don't have to run mental calculations about what difficulty you're on on the other hand the only real palpable meaningful difference between difficulties is what comes in as reinforcements difficulty seven and belows reinforcements are generally pretty trivial to deal with eights are Devastator hell and nine is literal hell where every flare calls in three or more drop ships with any enemy available to be dropped in right from the beginning of a mission other difficulties scale up the units that can be brought in as reinforcements over time but on Hell dive the first flare that goes up a minute after dropping can call in a factory Strider there's a couple problems with this being the only real difficulty change namely that it makes playing stealthy even more overpowered than it already is the only real thing that's changing between the difficulties is in the drop ships which are trivial to run away from I hinted at this last time but learning how to properly exploit the stealth mechanics trivializes the game to an insane degree relative to standard play this isn't anything that's surprising either really because a lot of the time balancing the game very clearly went into the combat side of things there are precisely zero stealth specific strategems or weapons and only one armor bonus revolving around the play style and considering it's a play style that involves ignoring the majority of what development time and balancing went into it's really no surprise that it's incredibly overpowered turns out that when you don't interact with half of the game it's easier the jumps between difficulty aren't a consist consistent linear line it's all over the place it's definitely not well balanced because the game has been universally unusable in my experience with a full group so much of the player's power budget is in their strategems and the more you have the better the more people you bring the objectively more powerful you are the amount of reinforces you get per person is also almost comedically high and I've never seen it even get remotely close to emptying on a full four-man Squad hell dive Mission I honestly don't know why solo players are punished with only four strategems and five reinforces it's objectively the hardest way to play and it's the only real way to feel at the differences between the difficulties because player weapons are frankly terrible with like two exceptions very quickly you'll learn how much you rely on strategems for combat and when you're alone you just don't get that many even playing with others won't save you though most objectives in this game are intentionally literal tedium which is fine when you're under stress but when all enemies only come from One Direction and you have to designate one bastard to be the Tardis button presser it is extremely boring another issue is that difficulty is inherently incredibly inconsistent because some genius decided that enemy damage in this game should be a big old Casino for some godforsaken reason enemies can headshot and random crit you as two separate mechanics as a player there is absolutely no way to know when this is going to happen or prevent it so often you live and die by a pull of the slot machine if they roll cherries you can just straight up tank a rocket to the face and the weakest armor in the game but if they roll sevens you explode uh pray for Cherries I guess added on to this stemming yourself makes you invincible for the duration of the effect assuming you don't get extremely unlucky this leads to incredibly unintuitive gameplay where you want to keep yourself at a sliver of health so you can activate your on demand invincibility when you get shot at because of how swingy the enemy damage is combined with low total player Health you need to do this literally every single time you get shot at or you risk instant death this is why damage sometimes instantly kills you and other times literally doesn't move your health bar there is also limb damage which feels like it was much more complicated at some point in development and then simplified to the point of irrelevance there very well might have been full DSX limb Health Management at some point but now you just stick a stem in your neck and you're you're fine if hellers managed to live for more than a few minutes they would probably go comos within hours I can also confirm with 100% certainty that having broken arms literally does nothing not not in a hyperbolic sense it literally does nothing it doesn't change your recoil or your accuracy in either first or third person and it doesn't change your throwing range what's ever it comes up so rarely that even if it did work across a 100 hours of gameplay this clip is the only example I have of me shooting someone with a broken arm as you're stiming yourself immediately when you take damage anyway good luck even having a broken limb in the first place without also being dead I have absolutely no [ __ ] clue why these choices were made and people are acting like solving this is a complex issue when it's just not remove enemies being able to randomly do three to six times more damage completely randomly and raise damage across the board so it's consistent and you're done also remove democracy protects embracing the casino damage with this truly nightmarishly designed passive should really not be in the game it's not like a dios with one or two Guaranteed Life saves instead you better roll sevens or you die I was very curious if stats like crit chance chain between difficulties but no most of my time playing has been on Hell dive and so I had a rough idea of how often crits happened there with it being the ninth difficulty my assumption was that the crit chance would start on 2% on trip R and then go up 1% per difficulty to reach 10% on Hell dive but no after getting shot at for an hour I'm fairly certain that the crit chance does not change between difficulties and probably sits around 10% globally I don't have the time nor patience to track the damage taken from a thousand hits at full health and all nine difficulties so I can't say for sure but I would guesstimate the crit chance to be somewhere in the realm of 5 to 10% if enemies get crits naturally I wondered if players do too and I can pretty conclusively say no I really thought player crits existed because some enemies went down a lot faster than others seemingly inexplicably but after standing around and shooting bots in the legs for 20 minutes I'm certain this isn't the case the inconsistent damage comes from damage regions rather than rare High moments incidentally while I was testing this I found that getting close to Lone Trooper Bots would consistently make them dream of world of peace and stop attacking and there was genuinely no way I could find to get them out of the state and it happened every time I did this fortunately it did help me with identifying damage regions which are bizarrely complicated in Hell divers too a bizarrely large amount of this game's difficulty is entirely in knowledge checks rather than mechanical knowledge that's normal and something as complex as kenhi but hord Shooters tend to be pretty straightforward it's not a guessing game where you're supposed to shoot the charger and Left 4 Dead a bile Titan is terrifying at first Until you realize that two quazars to the nose kills it instantly the factory Strider seems unkillable until you shoot it six times in the tummy and then it explodes usually this would be fine but knowing these things makes the game so much easier and it's not telegraphed whatsoever it's odd because some weak spots are very obvious while some aren't at all the Hulk's heat sink and bright red eye are very clearly where you're meant to shoot even if the hit box in the ladder is so small that it felt like a red herring at first but the fact that you can shoot off their limbs and this can be a far more consistent kill is communicated exclusively through an achievement and literally nothing else the factory Strider is honestly probably the worst example I had absolutely no idea what to shoot at when I first saw this thing it's pretty much all one flant color and apart from its eye it doesn't have any color on its weak points to draw your eye this community made infographic shows the actual weak points and you can pretty clearly see that none of these are marked there's no like yellow caution tape hinting that the underbelly is a weak spot or anything like that now I know better and I Rodeo them but it's still bizarre how much of this game's difficulty can be avoided with Niche trivia our Good Old Friends the drop ships show this too because they get called in once every 3 minutes on the dot all difficulties this is never told to you there is no timer on the screen or anything and you have to keep track of it yourself and if you do you can exploit the [ __ ] out of it I had comers recommend baiting drop ship spawns before going to a big location and yeah this is another way knowledge checks make the game infinitely easier if you don't stick around when the flare gets popped there's basically no chance that the reinforcements the drop ship brings in will be able to follow you given that you've got a good 20 or 30 second head start on them even if they did pretty much all of the enemies in this game are defeated by serpentining back and forth and Diving when you hear Rockets the localization confusion booster probably increases the time between drop ship spawns but I don't know I'm not paying $10 for that garbage even if it did given how the other boosters are balanced it's probably by some completely irrelevant number like an extra 7 Seconds between drops in general if you're with others play on Hell dive all the time there's not enough changes between difficulties to justify getting so many less rewards if you're on your own seven is pretty easy and on eight brings something that can deal with Devastators nine is hell as you don't have enough strategems to deal with all the heavy armor but it's most certainly doable it's just not very fun the last quite lazy addition to high difficulty is difficulty modifiers operations get more of these as you go up and they are universally kind of dull and the only one that was a significant shakeup was removed from the game this feature feels like something that wasn't finished as there are so few modifiers and one of them which is losing a whole strategy slot is so much worse for your power budget than all of the other modifiers combined interesting modifiers would be the ones that limit the strategy you can bring by either having strict limits stat changes to certain strategems or just cool down increases I'd also like to see modifiers like these missions have more of X enemy type or something like that instead of just 25% slower call- in time like who cares dark tide has this with its Mission modifiers and I would like to see the equivalent to a shock troop Gauntlet in Hell divers as for what strategems you do decide to bring in I suppose that brings us to load out there's been a lot of hubub over the balance team for this game recently and it's mainly because of like three changes being blown way out of proportion realistically the entire Arsenal is completely [ __ ] and there's probably no fixing it without a serious rework of the entire system hell diver's weapon diversity is non-existent weapons in the same category play basically identically to each other you've got assault rifle Assault Rifle assault rifle and assault rifle oh look they're adding another one aesthetically they don't look that different from each other and gameplay-wise they feel identical to wield due to a lack of statistical variety or distinct audio differences and there's always objectively a Best Choice The Liberator variants literally use the same shooting sound effect with extremely similar fire rates and the one that is notably different from the others feels like it shouldn't even be a liberator at all even the ones that do feel different like the breaker compared to the Sluggers don't feel special because almost every single Primary in this game is utter garbage if there were more generic Soldier Bots and higher difficulties they would feel way better but when almost every enemy is a Devastator enjoy shooting at their bizarrely minuscule head hit box with your glorified water gun your different primaries basically end up being like a big wide selection of different colored paper weights what makes this even more confusing is that impact grenades are so good they beat out all the other grenades so handily it's not even a contest and can instant kill like half a dozen Devastators at once meanwhile the adjudicator needs at least a full mag for one half of this problem is just the sheer quantity of Devastators they're giant bulky boring and tanky it's unfortunate that they're not supported by more grunt troops this is probably the single best chance they could make is increasing the amount of fodder enemies that there are I'm talking a big increase too like two or three times more random Soldier guys it would make weapons feel a lot less useless and help with the next problem while all the other primaries are awful meanwhile The scorcher Remains incredibly blatantly stronger than every other primary with no signs of that changing it can deal with things that no other primaries can in only a single magazine completely ignores armor and it one shots most enemies I do think that the explosive weapons do tend to play pretty uniquely but they're also kind of awful the Eruptor was okay but isn't very good anymore and the explosive crossbow is just bad none of the weapons really feel like they were designed to fit different play Styles a very classic example of weapons that were designed this way is ones which offer a simple tradeoff lower fire rate in exchange for higher damage hell divers has pretty much no significant always accessible examples of this there's no both action rifle to reward those who are comfortable with Landing precise shots there is a double barrel shotgun but it's exclusively an extremely rare World spawn to the point where I only have one clip of it and it takes up your support weapon slot the new rail gun on paper looks like a good alternative to the scorcher which it does look better stat-wise too but in reality the fire rate stat is just a lie and the weapon is objectively worse than the scorcher the one DMR that was different from all the others that did exist got turned into an assault rifle and the worst one available at that these kind of weapons a bolt-action sniper a sonoff shotgun an exclusively burst fire rifle are extremely basic weapon Concepts that don't exist and the roster we do have is pretty generic there aren't many creative or unique ones to make up for it the explosive weapons do show a bit of creativity especially the Eruptor pre Nerf but most are quite generic and uninteresting any creative weapons are saved for being support weapons which are either essentially main weapon Replacements or seldom used surprisingly weapons aren't even the largest issue with the loadout balance people can complain about the rebalance of weapons all they want but it doesn't change how much the game is balanced around strategems the 380 and Eagle air strike are so ridiculously broken good that objectively every single person should bring them if you want to play completely optimally the laser is a strong Contender for that too and it's not helped by being implemented extremely lazily with a Max of three uses slapped on because they couldn't bother to actually balance it this doesn't work at all because with a full Squad you can still bring 12 of these and most missions tend to be over by the time you've thrown all three uses in general this game is extremely balanced around Contracting looh heed Martin and playing with a full Squad makes this extremely apparent pretty much every problem is solved by calling in Uncle Sam and your Elite Squad of Hell divers are reduced to basically being Expendable drones that exist only to lay targets for Lady Liberty to dispense unto the right to vote I get the game being so heavily balanced around dumping the military industrial complex on people is kind of funny and fitting for the tone but it does blow for the game actually being enjoyable while I think the 380 and air strike are mandatory for everyone to play completely optimally they're not mandatory to win as I said this game isn't that hard but if you want to guarantee your chances of winning that is what you should bring I'm curious what people will swear the other two strategy slot should be I would personally probably say the 500 kgr in The Shield Pack but other people might think otherwise with how the game works right now I don't actually think this is fixable a strict limit of four strategy slots heavily discourages experimentation especially when they're all in the same playing field and there are too many strategems in the game which are clearly worse than others the 380 and like the the smoke strike take up the same amount of space in your load out and so is a very obvious answer every time making different strategems cost different strategy slots seems like a pretty natural solution and it can be contextualized as Beacon bandwidth or something ultimately it doesn't really matter because how strategies are currently implemented already makes no logical sense raise each player's bandwidth to around 8 or 10 and the cost of all strateg in the game can be balanced accordingly some of these cost changes can be Buffs too with some totally outclass ones like the jump pack and machine gun Sentry dropped to only costing one now as an aside I'm certain this comment will get some big jump pack fans to try to roast me but you guys really need to come back down to reality it's way worse than every other backpack there's no question about it I would rather be able to do the almost useless team reload than have this thing lowering the cost of some strategems gives the ones like Napal gas and smoke a reason to exist because they could cost a pittance relative to other more immediate problem solvers leaving slots open and having unspent bandwidth could also reduce the cooldown time of the strategies that you do select you can fully invest in a democracy deployer if you really like it now I'm not going to go over every single pokeball in the game to theorize their ideal costs but smoke should honestly probably be free and the 380 should be at least half of your total available slots either four or five maybe even more it's hard to overstate how overpowered that thing is even with this change most strategy could still do with a heavy nerfing although I'm sure the community would [ __ ] and piss and whine if Arrowhead did so the Eagles especially are egregious getting into call in two tactical nukes every 2 minutes you might not believe me on this point because the in-game kill counter is extremely misleading it takes less time to reset than it takes between 380 rounds to land so it can seem like you threw a 380 and it killed nothing but in reality each shot could have killed one or two and it just doesn't tell you as for a strategy that doesn't have this problem because it can't kill anything anyway smoke actually turns out to be half nonfunctional to no one's surprise I'm sure if enemies can see you before the smoke goes down they'll be able to shoot you with standard accuracy directly through the smoke anyway if the Bots are directly in the smoke though I've seen hulks give up on life and in general they tend to be very confused I still think it should probably be free because while I like the idea of smoke a lot its actual best use on the battlefield is to scare your friends when they see the giant red line and think you just dropped a barrage on them I know some people are big fans of the never Nerf only buff philosophy that OverWatch is most famous for popularizing I have a lot of experience with OverWatch and have played it since release I can extremely confidently say that OverWatch is one of the most consistently poorly balanced games I have ever played and the philosophy in a vacuum is just a horrible idea never nerfing anything is exactly how you get horrendous power creep which makes everything far worse for everyone because for enemies to pose any challenge when the players are broken they can only get stronger by relying on utter [ __ ] C XCOM 2 for the most egregious example of this ever I imagine this video came off as fairly negative so I think it's important to point out that I played a 100 hours of this game at time of writing I wouldn't have done that if the game was absolutely horrible it is very fun it's just also really flawed but most things are the core gameplay is still fun enough that I played it regardless of the poor performance the ungodly amount of bugs the Bizarro World stealth mechanics and this the sketchy balance I like this game a lot even if stealth is overpowered you know it's it's still fun and exciting to do every now and then even if the overreliance on strategems is exhausting after a while I have to admit that I still do like the pretty colors it's clearly not a finished game though between the bugs and the several mechanics straight up not functioning or breaking entirely this game was at best years away from being considered polished I doubt that will happen because because as it is with all life service games content must be pushed to keep people playing there is a lot in the works and pretty much everything planned for the next couple months has been leaked already I'm a bit scared to use any of that footage in case it gets taken down but it's not hard to find this video by venatrix pretty much has everything in it Link in description to give proper context just how much has been leaked the new Mech which released today at time of speaking was leaked over a month ago and not just like files I mean like game playay of it was leaked one of these leaks is being able to call in a squadron of AI controlled sea Troopers as rein enforcements knowing now that you'll be able to call in your very own Squad of lads this dispatched text makes a lot more sense I know they'll probably just be terrible but God I hope they're at least kind of acceptable AI teammates it sounds like fun to have some 20 Allied bodies on the field assuming everyone brings this and it works like conventional strums they could also set up on destroyed outposts and turn every Mission into a far cry Outpost takeover just just saying as for an update on the PSN thing people complained enough and got the email requirement removed but the game remains blocked in an assload of countries this is most likely valve and steam doing this not Sony the fact that Sony haven't commented on this yet is insane to me though there may be an NDA in play stopping them from talking about steam's back end now I highly highly highly doubt Sony are stupid enough to actually genuinely block access to all these countries completely of their own accord the game being restricted on Steam is almost certainly a valve employee deciding to Fan the Flames frankly while prematurely wiping their hands of any legal wrongdoing it is is completely insane that Sony would go through with their PSN requirement and not include a workaround for any unsupported countries but hey maybe they are that insane I guess time will tell thanks to my patrons em me especially like comment subscribe you know the drill and have a good night

Channel: Cassius

Views: 26,440

Keywords: helldivers 2 gameplay, helldivers 2 pc, helldivers stealth, helldivers 2 stealth, helldivers stealth build, helldivers 2 stealth build, helldivers solo stealth, helldivers 2 solo stealth, helldivers stealth guide, helldivers 2 tips, helldivers 2 guide, heldivers, heldivers 2, helldivers 2 stealth run, helldivers 2 solo, helfdivers, helldivers 2 difficulty, helldivers 2 helldive, helldive, helldivers 2 best difficulty, helldivers 2 difficulty 9, helldivers 2 difficulty explained

Id: KtghYzYoAuM

Length: 21min 13sec (1273 seconds)

Published: Thu May 30 2024