Helldivers 2 - Hell is more diverse than ever as PlayStation's demographics continue to grow and change.

So it turns out you can take the hit from the 500K bomb at close range with the shield pack.....and even protect another helldiver if you do the hug emote

Direct link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=el1gPuXVM4s
Assuming the devs don't patch this out, the only flaw with this strategy is that the bomb's direct impact can fizzle the shields out right before detonation, so know where the bomb is falling at all times.
 
I'm not sure if that's any worse than a dozen puke bugs and 8 chargers chasing my ass across hell and half of Georgia for 2 to 3 stamina bars back-to-back.
I love 7 and above missions where the game just decides to spawn packs of 10 armored brap bugs in a pile, 250 meters out in the fog, behind a mountain, and every one of their fart artillery shells instakills you if it lands within 10 meters.

Hopefully shit like that or randomly getting RPG'd by a bot from 300 meters out will become less annoying when our armor actually starts working.
 
So it turns out you can take the hit from the 500K bomb at close range with the shield pack.....and even protect another helldiver if you do the hug emote

I'm fairly certain being able to protect another Diver is unintended behavior, but I love that Arrowhead has just shrugged and left it in.
 
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I realized why I'm enjoying this game so much now. Player movement was directly copied from Metal Gear Solid 5, one of the best third-person shooters of all time (in my opinion). I don't even care if it's a 1-to-1 copy, I want more games to copy MGSV. Its gameplay has not been matched up until this point.
 
Looks like Joel went to bed and we're gonna clear 2 alerts within a day.

edit: Yep, second planet of the 2 planet order got liberated in under two hours, so quick the timer on the order screen can't even keep up.
The fact we cleared a 'nid related standing order in under a day. Yet, we have failed every bot standing order as far as I can tell.

Ah well, free war bond medals are free war bond medals
 
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So it turns out you can take the hit from the 500K bomb at close range with the shield pack.....and even protect another helldiver if you do the hug emote

Direct link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=el1gPuXVM4s
OIP.jpg

Remember how I said I love the dev cause they actually give a shit about their game? It turns on on snow planets in deep enough snow you can make snowballs.

Direct link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=I3ik6yIhR9M
Snowalls are an effective tool in warfare for distracting or pulling aggro and possibly stunning weaker enemies, not sure if the devs coded that in tho.
 
What's amazing to me, playing it is that here's a smaller budget title running on an engine that stopped updating over half a decade ago and it looks about as good as most intense 4K photorealistic AAA releases that have had tons of money spent on said photorealism - and it runs smoother. Having strong consistent art direction and knowledge of the game engine (even an “outdated” abandonware engine!) is all it takes to make a AA title look better than most of these overhyped AAAAAAA games that have had massive portions of the budget dumped into the graphics. We don't need games with tons of money blown on making the graphics even more photorealistic to the point where it's ridiculous, studios just need to make games with the same visual fidelity as something that came out around ten years ago. Stop tightening up the graphics, we don't need them any tighter.

 
I realized why I'm enjoying this game so much now. Player movement was directly copied from Metal Gear Solid 5, one of the best third-person shooters of all time (in my opinion). I don't even care if it's a 1-to-1 copy, I want more games to copy MGSV. Its gameplay has not been matched up until this point.
I thought the same thing. I played a solo mission yesterday being as stealthy as possible and it feels like the same game at certain points, especially when crawling around an objective and dodging patrols that investigate when you activate a terminal. The stealth is surprisingly intuitive and reliable, you can get right up beside enemies when prone and they won't see you. I'm going to guess they have something like a 50 degree cone of vision which can't see you from more than 4 metres away if you're prone, seriously they're almost blind to crawling divers. The challenge is avoiding getting surrounded, or blindsided by a random patrol.
 
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Helldivers 2 is the fastest Steam Refund I ever placed. Literally doesn't even work on High-End Radeon GPUs. Seemingly nobody with an RX 7900XTX, or any similar flavors of the upper 7000 series can run this game. The PS5 runs on a Radeon GPU. I don't know how Playstation Studios reconciles this.

Sure would like to play the game. The bit I managed to get in before it crashed my entire system back to POST was fun.

Apparently I need to turn GI and Antialiasing off to get it to run. Fuck that. I didn't buy a sledgehammer GPU to not run at max settings. Do better Soyny.
 
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The fact we cleared a 'nid related standing order in under a day. Yet, we have failed every bot standing order as far as I can tell.
We've only had one Major Order against the Automatons, it was the defense campaign. We failed for a variety of reasons, but in short—It wasn't fun or rewarding to contribute, the reward wasn't worth it, and players quickly lost interest because of that.

Here's a more detailed breakdown of the Defense Campaign's foundational issues if you're interested:
Time Gates: The objectives had a 48 hour countdown. We needed to fill the bar up before the Automaton bar filled up. This timegated race concept is fine in theory, but it quickly grows to be an issue due to the following.

Mission Type: Every operation on defense campaign planets included civilian evacuation. It's not a great mission type as is. But guaranteeing at least 1 mission will involve it quickly turned people off from touching it. Higher difficulties sometimes involved 2, with one being a variant of it.

Difficulty Issues: Aforementioned mission type had a bug for a few days into the order where the resistance mounted against you would be higher than that of the difficulty you had selected. If you felt you could confidently do challenging, you were going to get a far more difficult experience.

Reward: 12,500 requisition slips iirc. Our first major order gave us 10,000. Not bad if given at or a few days after launch. But the time gates guaranteed it'd be at least 16 days after the first major order ended. Problem here is that people were quickly making that much from missions alone. Then if by some chance you reached at least level 20 and also bought all the stratagems you could, this reward had little value to you. It had even less if you hit the current cap of 50,000 req slips.

So ultimately, each objective was a 48 hour race to fill up a bar, that could only be contributed to by playing a mission type nobody was really enjoying, and had been bugged for an early portion of the order, all for a reward that may or may not even be worth it by this point. Very quickly players decided they just didn't want to do this. I'd say it's part of why Malevelon Creek became such a meme. "Space Vietnam" is just one sector over, and it was relevant since it was against the Automatons.

We cleared the recent Terminid order very quickly, and are on track to clear the current Terminid order because players can actively contribute and in a variety of ways. But even the current order highlights that Time Gates with some contexts are just a bit silly. We currently have both planets liberated and are now just sitting around on our hands just going after whatever planets are close to liberation.

Foundationally it just wasn't a good order. Here's hoping they learned from that one and be thankful it was early on in the lifespan of the game.
 
What are the best stratagems to unlock first? The EATS rocket seems pretty good and the light machine gun seems shitty.
 
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What are the best stratagems to unlock first? The EATS rocket seems pretty good and the light machine gun seems shitty.
Here's a list. Kept it to level 10 and below. Mainly highlighted the stratagems that will give you the most bang for your buck. Listed it by type and level they unlock. No real suggested order of acquisition outside of this. I'd just suggest grabbing what looks fun to you or what you find yourself using a lot, or needing more.

The only stratagems I'd actively advise against are the Orbital 120mm & 380mm HE barrages. The cone of fire is extremely wide and you'll not find many great use cases for it.
Weapons:
Expendable Anti-Tank ( lvl 3 )—Fantastic low cool down counter to a lot of armored enemies.
Recoilless Rifle ( lvl 5 )—Like the EAT but has more of a punch. Don't need to keep calling it down. Quicker rate of fire with a buddy.
Autocannon ( lvl 10 )—Like the recoilless but non-explosive. Just a big gun. Quicker reload with a buddy.

Orbital:
Orbital Airburst Strike ( lvl 5 )—Just good in general against large groups. Sometimes you just need that raw damage against a lot of enemies in one area.

Hangar:
Eagle Airstrike—This will be your bread and butter for many missions. Big damage. Quick call-in. Only drawback is that once you exhaust them, Eagle needs to rearm. Otherwise effectively infinite use.
Eagle 110mm Rocket Pods ( lvl 10 )—Great damage output and call in time. Similar drawback to the above.

Bridge:
Orbital EMS Strike ( lvl 5 )—Creates a field where enemies are temporarily stunned. Good for breathing room.
HMG Emplacement ( lvl 10 )—Very good for mowing down enemies. But you need to utilize it with effective choke points or buddies covering you.
Shield Generator Relay ( lvl 10 )—Primarily for use against Automatons. Enemy fire can't come in, but your fire can go out. It's good for having a quick breather and just cover all around. But it's main benefit is giving you a moment to do threat assessment, and possibly take them out from the safety of the shield.

Engineering Bay:
Grenade Launcher ( lvl 5 )—Good in general. But makes quick work of nests and fabricators.
Guard Dog Rover ( lvl 10 )—The laser one. Unlimited ammo. Sometimes goes back to your backpack. Great for light cover fire, or helping you to take things down. If you need to runaway it often covers your tail and helps take things out that are chasing you. Can friendly fire you if you're not careful.

Robotics Workshop:
Gatling Sentry ( lvl 5 )—Ignore the MG sentry. This is just an across the board superior option.
Mortar Sentry ( lvl 8 )—Fantastic option all around. Just don't let the enemies get close otherwise you're getting mortared too.
 
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Hello, I haven't engaged much with this thread because I've been busy playing Helldivers 2. Steam says I've put 40 hours into it.

In other news. The mechs have been leaked, bros.
I definitely like how they look. It reminds me of late 90's to early 2000's sci-fi. I imagine they'll be out pretty soon.
 
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The devs (apparently) have been dropping mechs into random mission as a form of marketing but there is supposedly a mod to unlock them. I wouldn't risk it through.

I do wonder if we get like 90% close to liberating the Creek they are gonna drop the third faction on us.
 
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I'm growing to love the Laser Gun. Not affected by gravity and no damage falloff, plus the infinite ammo if you manage the heatsink efficiently. You can knock out spore spewers and insect eggs from halfway across the map in safety. The damage just needs to be tweaked a little and you got a perfect support weapon.
 
God my first satly bitch that quit after getting caught on a cluster bomb fly by on a bug mission level 7. Got hit, mumbled something on his ps4 mic and was gone. We ended up finishing the mission with a ton of samples ( all the super samples) and hit all the extra objectives.

This is helldivers.....I'd be shocked if a mission didn't have any friendly fire.
 
I'm growing to love the Laser Gun.
Do you mean the laser rifle, or the stratagem laser cannon? I've tried the laser rifle, and it's damage felt way too low to actually be useful.
God my first satly bitch that quit after getting caught on a cluster bomb fly by on a bug mission level 7. Got hit, mumbled something on his ps4 mic and was gone. We ended up finishing the mission with a ton of samples ( all the super samples) and hit all the extra objectives.

This is helldivers.....I'd be shocked if a mission didn't have any friendly fire.
This is how the game is, the amount of times I or a teammate has called in a stratagem only to kill everybody is too high to count. So long as reinforcements aren't depleted, that's just a free ammo refill.
 
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