Honestly, I feel like that's actually a good thing. The premium warbonds should focus on fun new toys, but nothing that you need to have in order to have fun and succeed at missions.
CountVon
joined 1 year ago
I'm really looking forward to trying the grenade pistol as part of my loadout vs. bots. Stun grenades make it easier to line up headshots but you can't use them to destroy factories. I'm hoping the grenade pistol can be used to close that gap.
Guy Gavriel Kay. First book published in 1984, part of a trilogy that was Tolkien-esque, quite decent, but not exactly ground-breaking. He's since gone on to something a little more unique, which he describes as "historical fiction with a quarter-turn to the fantastic." Impeccably researched but set an alternate world that's a close but not exact mirror of our own. This allows him to take a few small liberties with historical accuracy in service of telling a better story. Personally I think he really hit his stride in 1995 with The Lions of Al-Rassan, and almost everything he's written since then has been exceptional.
I think the shield emplacement is much better than just OK vs. bots. We've started taking one or two shield emplacements on bot missions, usually on difficulty 7 or 8. Opening a fight with a shield emplacement gives you a safe zone where you can charge Quasars or line up Slugger headshots on Devastators. It makes dealing with Rocket Devastators in particular a lot easier and safer. With its 90-second cooldown, it's usually up in time for the next fight.
The Slugger staggers all the bugs that can call in a bug breach, and stagger cancels the call-in even if the target survives the shot. The stagger lasts long enough that you can chain-stun mid-size, dangerous enemies like Devastators or Brood Commanders. You can even stagger-juggle two or even three such targets if your aim is good. The crowd control power of the Slugger is why it's my go-to primary.
I am 100% a Quasar enjoyer, personally I like the cadence of it. You pull it out behind cover, let it spin up, shoulder-peek and delete something, then put it away for 10-15 seconds and it's ready to go all over again. No backpack slot, no ammo concerns, no reload animation, no waiting for a call-in to deal with a heavy. The Quasar projectile has no projectile drop either, making it hands-down the best weapon in the game to snipe bot dropships or distant objectives. I'd be reluctant to "waste" an EAT or RR shot on a Devastator, but the Quasar's infinite ammo means I'll happily zap one on that 15-second cadence if there's nothing bigger to shoot at.
One piece of advice for using the Quasar: don't use Aim-Down-Sights. I use ADS with most guns in this game, but not the Quasar. If you've only used it first-person then you might not realize that the third-person reticle for the Quasar gives way more information. The reticle spins and slowly turns from a square into a circle when it's about to fire, making it easier to time your shot when shoulder-peeking. The reticle turns red while it's on cooldown, white when it's good to go again. The ADS view gives you none of this information visually.
My group runs 8s if we feel like pushing ourselves, 7s if we want a less frantic pace. At those difficulties there are a lot of heavies to deal with, and the Quasar feels like the most flexible tool for dealing with them. The RR can shoot faster with a team reload, but that requires coordination that can be hard to manage under pressure. The EAT can give you two quick shots per call-in, but then you're left with a minute-long dry spell before the destroyer can give you any more rocket goodness.
The Autocannon will tend to struggle against Tanks and Hulks. That said, if you enjoy the AC then go with what you like! One of the regulars in my group usually brings an AC, and I'm happy to have them there because it can deal with other targets for which the Quasar isn't suited. Against bots the AC shreds walkers, against bugs it pops spewers, and against both its splash damage will clear chafe packs quickly. I wouldn't want a full team of ACs on a 7 or 8, but one or two are always welcome in the mix.
Haven't tried the HMG yet personally, but all of my group that gave it a spin tonight said it's junk. Recoil is wild, mag is small for a high-RoF weapon, and it doesn't one-shot chafe. We don't see description tags for support weapons, but if we did I bet the HMG would have the "Medium Armor Penetration" label. All the med pen weapons kinda suck, and I'd put the HMG in the same category. The armor pen gives them better effect on certain targets (like the HMG can chew through the front shield of a walker) but you give up a bunch of damage on lighter armored targets. It drops the damage per round below breakpoints for a lot of targets, and the targets it does work on can be better dealt with in other ways. I'm sure you could make the HMG work in some really narrow situations, e.g. Fortified armor, fully prone, and enemies funneled into a chokepoint. But outside that really narrow scope? Yuck.
The Quasar on the other hand is S-tier IMO, especially vs. bots. It is dead easy to keep the aimpoint on a bot dropship engine while the laser spools up. We ran a bunch of Quasars in our group tonight and I've never seen so much dropship carnage. The Quasar doesn't take up a backpack slot, so you can run Personal Shield to save yourself some chip damage. If you've got multiple Quasars in the group and you're on comms, you can time two Quasar shots to a turret's weakpoint to take it out before it starts rotating toward you. It recharges while it's on your back so you can displace, shoot your primary, chuck a grenade, whatever. For my money it's better than the RR, because you don't need to rely on a team reload or root yourself for 5 seconds for a solo reload, and it's better than the EAT because the Quasar is ready to go when you need it, no need to wait for call-in. The spin-up time is a downside, but you can spool up the shot in cover and shoulder-peak just before it goes off. Heat can also be a downside, hot planets will increase the cooldown to the point where the RR or EAT might be better. But on temperate planets it's great, and on cold planets it'll be downright ridiculous.
Yeah, looks like you're correct, I got baited by the description. Did some testing with a friend, had him shoot me in the leg with a secondary with and without Servo-Assisted armor. No visible difference in the amount of damage taken, but Servo-Assisted prevented a leg injury below 50%. Will repeat the test tomorrow with the B-08 Light Gunner armor (light armor with Extra Padding modifier, 100 armor rating instead of 50) to see if that mitigates any amount of damage.
I wanna say it’s called the Legionnaire Armor in the store sometimes?
Yep, SC-37 Legionnaire. That's the one I run, since armor seems to do so little. Might be an argument for medium or heavy armor vs. bots, but I value the mobility and stam regen of light armor too much to switch.
I’ll have to give stun grenades a shot. I typically use the impact grenades on bots since they insta kill walkers and help a ton if you’re getting swarmed by a pack of the chainsaw arms dudes.
I run the Slugger as primary, partly because it helps me survive either of those in a pinch. For chainsaw bot packs of three or less you can give each a stagger in turn to prevent them from closing with you. As long as you start before they're on top of you and don't miss, they'll be dead before they reach you. Versus walkers you can shoot the hip joint to stagger them, and they don't shoot while staggered. Four or five shots destroys the leg. Not a very ammo-efficient way to kill a walker, but a pretty safe method if none of my teammates has an angle on them.
The Slugger also one-shots all chafe bots, is surprisingly accurate at range and can one-shot devastators if you hit 'em in the face. Tough to do at range though as you have to account for bullet drop.
Slugger stagger is also excellent vs. bugs, the stagger can interrupt bug breach call-ins even if the shot doesn't kill the bug. It's been my go-to primary for all situations since the Breaker nerf.
In addition to a personal shield, try running armor with the Servo-Assisted modifier. The extra 50% limb health seems to help with all the ranged chip damage that inevitably comes with fighting bots. The longer throw range can take some getting used to though.
Stun grenades are also really, really good vs. bots. You can stun Hulks, which makes it a lot easier to snipe the Hulk's face. Stunning walkers causes them to lean forward, making it possible to pick off the driver using your primary weapon without needing to flank the walker. The big downside is that you can't frag bot factories with stun grenades, so you'll need to rely on Eagles and/or teammates to do that.
Stun grenades + AMR is a great combo too. Two AMR shots to the face kills a Hulk, and shots are pretty easy to hit when the Hulk is stunned. For rocket devastators, one or two AMR shots will blow up the rocket pods (hitting either shoulder pod will destroy both). The pods are a much easier target than the face, and rocket devastators without rockets aren't very threatening.
If you're experiencing frequent crashes on PC, try deleting your shader cache and relaunching the game. On Windows the shader cache file is %appdata%\Arrowhead\Helldivers2\shader_cache\pipeline_library.cache. You'll notice some stuttering after the shader cache is deleted, particularly during the hellpod drop scene. That's shaders recompiling in the background, it should stop after a few games. I had one CTD when the Arc weapon bug was first introduced, deleted my shader cache file and have had zero CTDs across many games since then.
Edit: This is with an RTX 3080 and Ryzen 7 5700X on a B450 mobo, with Nvidia v551.86 drivers installed. YMMV depending on your rig.
If you're experiencing frequent crashes on PS5... Condolences, I guess? 🤷♂️
It's a fair criticism, persistent crashes can definitely suck the fun out of a game. I'm experiencing more crashes now than I was a month ago, which is not the direction things should be going. While I'm pleased with the pace of content releases, I'd really like to see better stability in what they're releasing. The most recent one I've seen is a really common crash during the extraction animation. This one was hitting my usual group at the end of roughly half our games last. It was happening so frequently that it really makes me wonder how such a bug makes it into a release.
I will mention two troubleshooting steps that have seemed to help me. If you're on PC, try these to see if it improves your experience any:
%appdata%\Arrowhead\Helldivers2\shader_cache\pipeline_library.cache. This change has appeared to have a very positive impact for me in a few instances. You will likely notice more stuttering after clearing the cache as shaders are compiled in the background, but it should stabilize after a few minutes.After experiencing several crashes yesterday, I went through both troubleshooting steps last night and had no crashes across several missions tonight. Can't guarantee it'll help in your case, but it's worth a shot.
And that's not to say it really absolves Arrowhead of a responsibility to fix these particular problems. The fact that file verification and shader cache flush seem to resolve so many of my crashes indicates that they have serious problems they need to solve related to client patching and shader management.