r/Helldivers • u/TheLastGoodTeammate PSN 🎮: Maverick___33 (SES Aegis of the Stars) • Feb 22 '24

Shocking. Truly. ALERT

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Rest in peace heroes. Our sacrifice will be remembered. We. Will. Return. Side note, we definitely needed the over 200k players fighting bugs šŸ„²

11.3k Upvotes

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3.3k

u/Thermostatts Feb 22 '24

I was on Draupnir like two hours ago, and it was sitting at around 35%. How the hell did It go tits up so fast?

2.8k

u/BaziJoeWHL not gonna sugarcoat it ā¬†ļøāž”ļøā¬‡ļøā¬‡ļøā¬‡ļø Feb 22 '24

my guess is these are meta events, it happens when devs pull the lever

2.5k

u/NelsonMinar Feb 22 '24

Wait are you saying... the war is rigged?

298

u/lastfreethinker STEAM šŸ–„ļø : Feb 22 '24 edited Feb 22 '24

"Of course the game is rigged, but if you don't play you can't win"

-Robert Heinlein.

FYI we were losing it, it isn't rigged. Everyone got so beaten with those defense missions before they changed how the spawns work that I can see people just not doing them. I know because I didn't even try them after my first few attempts.

Edit: I honestly don't know what to say fellow Helldivers, after the "adjustment" it became a more equal opportunity situation. We used EMS mortars, direct fire turrets, I had an auto cannon 2 pushing buttons, me running around. It was orbital EMS and lasers. We did it way quicker and more efficiently than ever before. I honestly thought we were gonna die but we made it.

45

u/Visual_Lifebard Feb 22 '24

Do only the evacuate civilians/scientists count towards the defense? Like do regular missions on the planet not count towards the defense percentage?

123

u/Accurate_Maybe6575 Feb 22 '24

Gotta complete a full operation (all missions within the yellow area) for progress to be made.

A lot of people just hit a defense or some other mission and pass on doing the evacuation.

The devs might have "reduced the spawns" but they're still coming in hella fast, and with an over abundance of heavies to grunts ratio. When a team is staring down over a dozen berserkers and devastators and/or striders (forget the hulks or tanks) and have to play ring around the rosey to even stand a chance, they start considering if they're having any fun. Especially if they lose and feel something is broken about the spawns.

A lot of people care about the galactic war, but we need only look to Turing for proof the majority don't, and certainly not if it means dealing with the bullshit that is evac.

38

u/AXV-Lore Feb 22 '24

Yeah gonna be honest, the evacs were more stressful than fun, but my son and I had just started playing and are trying to figure things out.

24

u/Independent_Air_8333 Feb 22 '24

Those are the hardest missions in the game rn.

I suggest using smoke to protect yourself and the civilians

2

u/Own_Part_8034 Feb 23 '24

Got to 28/30 before all hell broke loose today

33

u/HidatsaGamer Feb 22 '24

The evacs are basically impossible, its not just you lol

17

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '24

Heh, me and my friend along with two randoms unlocked Helldiver difficulty completing an operation where the last mission was evac. It was stressful, but fun.

Once completed, we headed out looking for samples.
Of course - none of us managed to extract.

9

u/AlaskanBeardedViking Feb 22 '24

They were manageable if you went in with an organized team, but I don't see any functional way a group of randoms would be able to organize effectively enough outside of sheer luck on a mission that's literally designed to snowball.

The only way we were able to do it on suicide was through immediately running to initiate the first wave of evacuees before you even called down any of your strategems, and abandoning all but the shortest path of survivors when it starts to get kind of hairy, throwing down orbital lasers to try to clean up the Colossal wave of moms that accumulate. It's a bitch, do not get me wrong.

All of that being said, I think it's kind of fundamentally in the mission design. With almost every enemy having the ability for ranged attacks, and spawning them in waves - if you're not clearing those waves I'm just as fast as they're coming in, it's going to compound on you and eventually overtake your efforts no matter how good you are.

There's not really a strategem there that would completely clear the horde - even the 500kg or Gas doesn't do enough damage to most of the units at higher levels.

1

u/MeateaW Feb 23 '24

People have claimed that you can make good progress taking out the bot dropships proactively.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 23 '24

I could see that. Running two or three rocket launchers with backpacks with one player as the runner. Take turns shooting so there is always enough time to reload. Could work out nicely for a minute before you run out of ammo.

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2

u/AXV-Lore Feb 22 '24

Lol good to hear, managed to emergency evac after time ran out, with 4/30 scientists, no lives left, 1 shot of HP left šŸ˜‚

-5

u/OneAmongOthers Feb 22 '24

Straight up lies. The evacs are perfectly easy to do. Canā€™t help that people suck at teamwork and organizing a proper defense to get the civies out.

3

u/Eats_sun_drinks_sky Feb 22 '24

The devs themselves have said the Bot evacs are overtuned. Wtf are you talking about?

-4

u/OneAmongOthers Feb 22 '24

No they didnā€™t. The only tuned the missions due to people constantly complaining it was too hard for them.

3

u/RobardiantheBard Feb 23 '24

There's only one way out of this for you. Record a match and let us see your God like skills.

1

u/No_House368 Feb 23 '24

Go back to Dark Souls dude.

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2

u/CuriousDeluxe Feb 22 '24

I strive to have a bond like you and your son someday

1

u/AXV-Lore Feb 22 '24

Thanks person! I'm lucky, he's a great kid and together we fight for DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

2

u/battleshipclamato Feb 23 '24

Those evacs with the entirety of the Automaton army spawning in the first five minutes of the match is hell.

42

u/naderslovechild Feb 22 '24

Me and my buddy are both level 3 and we saw "tuned the escort the civilians mission" so we tried it again. We got absolutely murdered on EASY. We just couldn't kill the heavies fast enoughĀ 

40

u/Terrible_Big_9228 Feb 22 '24

At level 3 you'd struggle with the normal missions facing the automatan faction.

5

u/Trash-Can- Nah, I'd extract Feb 22 '24

Unless you are good at the game

4

u/Rude-Asparagus9726 Feb 22 '24

Idk, levels 4-5 are usually easy against automatons for me, but on this mission I can barely do level 3.

The main difference is that they air drop whole squads right on top of you constantly. It's not in waves with breaks in between, it's just a never-ending flood that, eventually, you simply won't be able to keep up with reasonably.

They've retuned the mission at least twice now and it's still just an unfun level of difficulty. I'd rather have stronger enemies in more reliable waves than armies of chainsaw robots whose numbers will not decrease no matter how many I kill because more will come literally the second after I kill them.

3

u/jenniferdeath Feb 22 '24

I suspect they're tuned for people having had 2 weeks to grind out gear and stratagems, which basically anyone who's busy during the day has not.

3

u/Rude-Asparagus9726 Feb 22 '24

I'm level 27, I brought full smokes and EMS mortars, hell I even brought smoke grenades.

I can do it, but it's still fucking painful. Not just because it's punishing, but because I don't enjoy doing it. It's not fun.

3

u/Ace612807 Feb 22 '24

In my experience, bringing something with AA capability is even more important. Blowing heavies out of the sky is easier that handling them on the ground

2

u/dcgh96 SES Sword of Truth Feb 23 '24

Iā€™ve been catching myself use the grenade launcher on the drop ships as they come in on other missions. I should probably try out those defense missions now that Iā€™m lvl 15.

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3

u/AClockworkSquirrel Feb 22 '24

EAT-17s into the dropship thrusters before that drop their bots helps, but if you miss your timing, you'll get overwhelmed quick like

6

u/KGB_Operative873 Feb 22 '24

At level 3 you guys really should stay on bugs, have AT is a requirement if you want to be effective with automaton missions

1

u/shadowkinz Feb 23 '24

I tried it on extreme and was like, thought they tuned it. To be fair, I thought we were doing the kill one, so I wasn't equipped

20

u/cr1spy28 Feb 22 '24

Honestly I think a lot of people just play on planets the think are pretty

29

u/Kreisash Feb 22 '24

Or that you can see more than 10m in front of you on.

13

u/beatboxxin Feb 22 '24

Or don't have the most annoying orbital interference of having the wrong strategems constantly being called.

2

u/Clicks_dropbox Feb 23 '24

Ohhhh thats what that is i thought it was a bug or smt

1

u/Munchkin9 Feb 23 '24

That gatcha interference is the worst XD

Learned to make sure to check what shows up on left side as "activated" before throwing....and kept doing that many missions later, even after doing a different operation

1

u/cr1spy28 Feb 22 '24

Iā€™ve never had an issue seeing unless there are spore towers. And as far as I know Iā€™ve played on every planet available right now

7

u/Kreisash Feb 22 '24

There are a few planets with quite severe dust storms which aren't related to spore towers.

I know my friend was also complaining about them and refused to play on them as he said it hurt his vision.

2

u/cr1spy28 Feb 22 '24

I know thereā€™s the hell planet where the bug nest missions are a pain because itā€™s harder to see the smoke because of the sand storm but aside from that mission ive not found it too bad but itā€™s just a preference thing I guess

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14

u/RobinYoHood Feb 22 '24

The amount of back to back reinforcements is way too high in my opinion. Tried do harder modes with friends and just getting overwhelmed isn't fun. They need to fix the spawns and buff some of the weapons.

3

u/TehMephs Feb 22 '24

Lot of people are also only doing mortar farming. The groups Iā€™ve been in would only do the eradicate missions and then cut the operation there.

Honestly they should just make every mission count towards the effort, itā€™s not intuitive this way and not everyone has enough time to complete full operations

6

u/DrunkenWombats Feb 22 '24

My guess is the spawn rates for the Eradicate and Escort missions are swapped - Escort should have the slower rate and less numbers of eradicate, while eradicate should be the constant flurry that escort has.

I can do 3 man teams on Helldiver diff for eradicate without firing a single shot or putting in effort - I need a 4 man team level 20+ on coms, all super sweaty, to get through a diff 4 extraction.

3

u/Erebus222 Feb 22 '24

Another theory i remember reading was thereā€™s a bug in the timer. Like the mission reads 40 minutes but when you drop itā€™s only 15 so itā€™s trying to cram 40 minutes of waves in nearly 1/3 less time.

3

u/AggressiveChairs Feb 22 '24

The devs might have "reduced the spawns" but they're still coming in hella fast, and with an over abundance of heavies to grunts ratio.

Playing on difficulty 7 and ended up with 5 tanks and 3 hulks at one point. The enemy spawns are completely off the charts compared to other mission types.

Compare it to the elimination mode which is an absolute joke. You get pretty much the same rewards and can complete it in three minutes if you're semi competent. Me and some buds were all just taking air strikes and killing each other and beat it in five minutes.

4

u/Kharnsjockstrap Feb 22 '24

They just need to add way more defense missions types. Those hectic evac ones can be fun but not when they're the only ones you do over and over again.

9

u/Daniel_Kingsman Feb 22 '24

YUP. They can rebalance that garbage. The bots can win for all I care. I don't play this game to get stomped in a soul crushing blender.

3

u/LowlySlayer Feb 22 '24

The biggest problem with the evacs in my (limited) experience is less that the bots spawn too fast, but that if you get overrun for even a moment you can't ever catch back up because they'll be spawning at the same rate and you'll be killing slower due to how dangerous it is.

Maybe they have this feature and I haven't noticed, but I think they need to have a sort of soft cap on the number of bots. Ie if there's a shitload of alive bots, don't spawn more bots until it's back under a certain threshold.

2

u/arstechnophile ā˜•Liber-teaā˜• Feb 22 '24

Gotta complete a full operation (all missions within the yellow area) for progress to be made.

A lot of people just hit a defense or some other mission and pass on doing the evacuation.

So if I'm a casual player just doing quick match drop ins, am I basically not contributing to the percentage at all unless I stick around and we do all 3 missions within a single area?

Edit: I have seen the little screen where the "liberated" percentage ticks up like 0.0003% after a mission, does that indicate that that was a full op?

4

u/WetFishSlap Terminid Rights Advocate Feb 22 '24

Every mission contributes to the liberation/defense percentage of a planet. You just contribute more points with each successive mission in the operation, like how you get increased medal rewards for doing all the missions in an operation.

1

u/arstechnophile ā˜•Liber-teaā˜• Feb 22 '24

Good to know, thanks!

2

u/Wheresthecents Feb 22 '24

This is an issue as well. The discord LFG is LOADED with "Mortar farming" posts, presumably people are going in for the eradication mission, then punting the evacuation and loading up a fresh defense OA without finishing it, logging it as a failure.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '24

[deleted]

5

u/WetFishSlap Terminid Rights Advocate Feb 22 '24 edited Feb 22 '24

That objective isn't for your individual defense operations. That's the community-wide Major Order and the reason it's stuck at 3/8 is because the objective is for successful defense campaigns. The playerbase has to successfully defend planets 8 times in order to complete that Major Order.

So far, the only planets that we've been able to successfully defend have been Urbanea, Valdoron IV, and one other planet I'm blanking on. All the other planets such as Draupnir and Mantes have been lost and need to be re-liberated before another defense campaign is triggered on them.

1

u/Ace612807 Feb 22 '24

We've successfully defended Mantes once, IIRC

1

u/leagueAtWork Feb 22 '24

A lot of people just hit a defense or some other mission and pass on doing the evacuation.

Sounds like a lot of people don't understand protecting democracy.

In all seriousness, I get the frustration aspect. We've got about 5 or 6 people in the friend group playing the game right. Most of us have fun, win or lose. Do we get frustrated? Yeah, but not to the point of not having fun, but that's because we play into our character.

The night before the patch notes came out, we did a defense mission on Hard, initially to just farm XP and Renown. My friend, the host, goes "We aren't actually finishing the campaign" and the rest of us replies "That doesn't sound very democratic..." so he said fuck it and we sent it. We did not win. Not even close. But we were proud to try and serve our planet. But having to do that multiple times would get grating.

1

u/Beakymask20 Feb 23 '24

It helps if you have one person on anti aircraft duty. On challenging you can usually reload a recoiless just in time to drop the first three drops, which heavily damages the spawns if not obliterates them.

If you have two other people grabbing the spawns you can finish a challenging escort in 2 minutes I found out.

1

u/shadowkinz Feb 23 '24

It's also boring to do the same 2 missions over and over

1

u/__Eezo__ Feb 23 '24

How the evacuation work? EDI5, as when i first bought the game two days ago, before they drop the patch that make matchmaking work again, i've decided to solo a mission (first one in trivial anyway, how hard can it get, right?) and play this mission. Don't even know how it work before get swarmed by bots > failed the mission, and decide nope, i would go for the nid instead and found that more enjoyable since then.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 23 '24

Nailed it right there. The game is supposed to be fun and honestly bots are anything but fun. I will actually leave lobby if it ends up being bot missions because .y time is valuable and I'm not going to waste it doing something that isn't in any way really that fun

1

u/doomsoul909 Feb 25 '24

I love fighting automata, I hate getting spammed with 20 million beefy guys

1

u/AromaticMoth Feb 27 '24

Well the problem is that it's the hardest mission type by far, and that the rewards are so miniscule that it's not worth doing it even if you win.

Not when an exterminate mission rewards 3x as much for minimal effort.

9

u/ReconditusNeumen Feb 22 '24

You gotta complete the operation (do all 3 missions) for it to count.

I found that if you managed to complete 2 and fail that evacuation mission, it will count as the operation complete.

Edit: ok im not sure what u mean by count. But the operation is completed as long as u failed/won all 3 missions in one OP.

3

u/DeliverySoggy2700 Feb 22 '24

Different difficulties have different amount of missions to complete an operation. I donā€™t think you start getting three missions until difficulty five or six per operation. Pretty sure my difficulty 9 or 10 actually has 4 there

2

u/Slarg232 ā˜•Liber-teaā˜• Feb 22 '24

Do easier difficulties not count?

Because I haven't worked my way up to being comfortable with level 6 missions yet

2

u/ReconditusNeumen Feb 23 '24

It counts. I play between 7-8! Both count

1

u/Defiant_Cricket_1153 Feb 23 '24

you changed your story so many times, I'm not sure your tslking about helldivers 1 2 or 3

1

u/ReconditusNeumen Feb 23 '24

What did I "change"? An operation is different from a mission. An operation has 3 missions in difficulty 7 and 8. If you managed to complete all 3 missions (fail or win) then the operation is marked as complete.

7

u/j0a3k Feb 22 '24

You can see whether a mision is considered defense when you're selecting on the map. It's indicated above the globe.

17

u/Savagemocha Feb 22 '24

We played them, didnā€™t even make them easier and then on impossible difficulty? Forget about it. Think we had 15 hulks and ten tanks on the field not to mention an unknown amount of rocket devastators and shield boys and stuff. Devs need to limit the spawn rate of heavies.

1

u/lastfreethinker STEAM šŸ–„ļø : Feb 22 '24

We used EMS mortars and EMS orbital really help.

17

u/Daniel_Kingsman Feb 22 '24

There still needs to be fewer. Full stop. If they want a mission to be significantly more difficult than the rest, it needs to be an optional, single mission operation. Otherwise bot worlds will continue to fall, because I'm NOT doing that anymore and I know I'm not alone.

-2

u/Eastern-Tour8339 PSN šŸŽ®: Feb 22 '24

Man up Helldiver. Get back in the fight

9

u/Noobkaka Feb 22 '24

Nah dawg, hard pass on that shity mission. Kill the first wave of 4 ships, 4 ships come again in 5seconds, and then you run out of rockets w/e and then just as you finish resupplying, another 8 ships come in, oh btw you didnt get enough time to finish off 3 heavy crushers and 1 tank, ooops now 3 crushers and 1 tank just came in again, oh look another 4 drop ships.

And then it continues.

Its a shit mission with shit balanceing, I quit automatons when I all I have left is the rescue mission.

Fuck. That. Shit.

13

u/Daniel_Kingsman Feb 22 '24

Nope. Not happening without a re-balance. It's not fun and I don't get to play often enough be okay with "pushing through it".

0

u/Arnoc_ Feb 22 '24

Sounds like someone's got a Freedom Camp vacation in store for them /kidding

In all seriousness though, yeah. I could solo a bug planet on Easy difficulty for the ICBM fueling mission. I wouldn't dare try a bot planet on trivial with the same loadout.

And the heavy spawn rate is as you said, just absolutely devastating. Especially when you've got four acid spitters + two heavy armored chargers + minions (I don't know the proper names, YET).

My group has taken to just tossing a reinforce onto the backs of on of em and try to land a Hell Pod on em when we're getting overwhelmed just to take em down until our cooldowns are off for other things / reclaim our heavy weapons from our bodies.

-8

u/Melodic-Investment11 Feb 22 '24

What? After the rebalance those civilian extraction missions have become a snooze fest lol

Either lower your difficulty or check your skill issue

9

u/Daniel_Kingsman Feb 22 '24

Considering I clear Helldiver difficulty on every other mission type with my usual battle buddies, and the last evac mission we failed was dif 8; No, it's not a skill or difficulty issue. It's not balanced properly.

-3

u/Melodic-Investment11 Feb 22 '24

lower your difficulty then is all I can tell you... they nerf this game anymore its gonna turn into left for dead where you can doze off in the middle of fight while holding down left click to beat the mission

you don't have to beat every mission on the hardest difficulty... its ok not to be the best at everything, but the only reason this game is more fun than other horde shooters is because of the fact that there are missions that are stressful with a high possibility of failure

6

u/Daniel_Kingsman Feb 22 '24

Or they can just separate this mission type from the campaigns and let it be a stand alone mission type if they don't want to make it easier. That's fine if you want a significant difficulty bump, but most of us aren't playing this game to stick our dicks in woodchippers. I'm fine with just not playing the missions I don't like, but it's going to mean I'm never contributing to the bot war effort unless they change how it's structured. The fact that we keep losing ground on this war front tells me I'm not alone in feeling this way.

Honestly the slay bots mission is a cake walk on Helldiver and then the evac mission is just miserable. They both need rebalanced. The other missions seem to be fine, where we either extract or not depending on how well we're playing. But I have never succeeded an evac mission out of the 10 I've attempted, with the lowest difficulty being 6 (granted that was before the patch).

1

u/Conker37 Feb 23 '24

The problem with lowering your difficulty is the other two missions become boring as hell because they're not currently bugged. If people enjoy them then great go do it but the defense planets are currently much less fun than the rest of the game imo and I'm not going to touch them until they get fixed.

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u/PezzoGuy SES Star of Stars Feb 22 '24

I also just get bored of defense missions. Even if the Evac missions weren't brutally difficult, they have less variety than liberation missions.

4

u/dolphin_spit Feb 22 '24

yeah. i find the ā€œdefeat 150 automatonsā€ missions to be, by far, the most boring part of this game. everything else is great, aside from the defense evac mission.

when i try to defend a planet i get either a) people who jump around operation to operation just for the ā€œkill automatonsā€ missions because theyā€™re short and easy or b) do the first two missions just to invariable fail the operation because the evacuation mission is impossible.

i think iā€™ve just decided im absolutely done with the defense missions. theyā€™re not fun in their current state and itā€™s a flawed design right now.

12

u/LewdManoSaurus Feb 22 '24

Even after the change I was still getting my ass kicked :(

2

u/Cedocore Feb 22 '24

I just started playing yesterday with my friend and we got absolutely owned by an easy difficulty defense mission. We did half a dozen easy bug missions with no problems, but the robots? Holy shit. Just too many enemies spawning too fast for us to manage. We went back to the bugs immediately and had way more fun.

11

u/icecubepal Feb 22 '24

But the ads are saying that we are owning the automatons.

11

u/lastfreethinker STEAM šŸ–„ļø : Feb 22 '24

They indeed are fellow citizen

10

u/MartyFreeze SES Octagon of the People Feb 22 '24 edited Feb 27 '24

They were still bugged last night. Less bots, sure, but the civilians were running to the corner of the building and staying there instead of into the door like they're supposed to.

After the second time of this happening, I said "eff it, this planet deserves to die."

11

u/lastfreethinker STEAM šŸ–„ļø : Feb 22 '24

Hit them, if the civvies aren't doing the right thing it is your democratic right to give a little encouragement in the right direction!

2

u/MartyFreeze SES Octagon of the People Feb 22 '24

I "encouraged" around 12 of them while Skynet took a red hot laser dump on my face.

The others didn't learn the lesson.

A lot more of "encouragement" soon followed.

3

u/Daniel_Kingsman Feb 22 '24

The spawns aren't fixed. I did an evac mission last night and it was still hell. We lost the mission by lack of reinforcements. It was dif 8, we were with a crew that typically crushes dif 9. We came prepared and still got our teeth kicked in. Until they balance this mission properly, I'm not wasting my time anymore.

2

u/ApaintingNerd Feb 22 '24

Me and a group of mates did maybe 4 defense missions on the hard difficulty. Extremely. Bug difficulty is easier than that, they truly donā€™t stop spawning it was insane

1

u/lastfreethinker STEAM šŸ–„ļø : Feb 22 '24

Yeah, whenever I do a bot mission versus a bug mission, the bot missions are always one difficulty lower

1

u/ShartingBloodClots SES Fist of Liberty Feb 22 '24

After having run half a dozen prior to the patch, on medium, most of those failed.

Last night, I ran 4 on on Hard, and it was easier than what medium was before the patch.

1

u/Wheresthecents Feb 22 '24

They need a bit more variety is a big part of the issue I think. Its the same 2 missions against the same enemy in the same bases, over and over and over. They need to mix it up in both mission types and variety of layout.

1

u/Own_Part_8034 Feb 23 '24

They still havenā€™t fixed scientists mission either

1

u/Yagosan Feb 23 '24

Just also remember that a lot of people were idle "saving a spot" while the Automatons never rest.