Thanks for the feedback, Dominator damage reduced to 175 and breaker incindeary now overheats after 5 shots. We hope this makes the community undestand our balance philosophy
"The incendiary breaker now overheats after 5 shots, and will explode and set you on fire akin to the unsafe railgun when fully charged, we hope you continue to enjoy helldivers 2"
Due to a bug with the exploding breaker incendiary buff causing nearby team mates to take more burn damage than intended, we have disabled fire damage on the weapon but gave it a further buff to have one additional pellet per shot at the cost of taking 10m falloff damage. We hope this reflects our balance philosophy of turning useful weapons into wet noodles.
Helldivers 2 is the only game that can release content at the pace that it does, and yet with every update feel like there's half the weapons to use from when we started.
Yeah, so right now they are releasing 0 weapons and items for 2 weeks now, and I don't see they are going to in the weeks to come. Too fast, too "balanced". So they are taking the SLOW approach now. Which is good. But you don't get to see content coming out like nuts anymore.
Everything is supposed to be balanced so if something is too powerful or overused it has to be nerfed since there's many different guns. That's just basic design unfortunately. There's different weapons for different people
@@fuzzyotterpaws4395 Yeah except it's flawed because they don't know why other people are picking the guns that are actually good compared to the mediocre to god awful guns.
@@GooiYingChyi what are you on about? They never released any weapons outside of warbonds, and those are once a month. They did drop a few strateagems, but those were, and still are, mostly ok, aside a few bugs. Imo they should stop pushing out a warbond every month and instead focus on making warbonds good.
its crazy to me that they havent buffed the warbond weapons, the guy in charge of balancing said in the discord before the warbond dropped that all weapons are s teir, there are no bad weapons
The guy in charge of balancing has a track record of ruining games with the decisions they make. Their terrible design philosophy has obviously carried over into this game (different game) and players are noticing it more so now. I typically don't advocate for removing someone from a team, but this person needs to be replaced.
Lol you dont have to hide his name. That loser "Alexus" has ruined games into the ground before. They seriously need to fire his ass before this game is ran into the ground by his "balancing"
Used to be way better with the old plasma punisher, that gun had a more suitable arc for actually aiming and landing those long range mortar shots. (I still think the projectile trajectory change was an overall nerf to effectiveness even if it did improve base usability...)
@@sinteleonWeird, even if I liked the Punisher Plasma before the recent change and I saw its potential, I feel that the arc trajectory made it so bad and didn't allow to use it on a reliable. I understand the benefits of the more pronounced arc, but in the 90% of the cases it lacked a better trajectory to shoot directly where you wanted to shoot without having to look at the sky. One cool middle ground would be to add a fire selector to be able to choose between current trajectory and old trajectory
They don't buff enemies' stats directly, lol. It's indirect like the general fire damage buff for everything that can deal fire damage in the game or increased enemy spawning. And not every primary weapon was nerfed. A lot of buffs were given last Major patch.
@@Brother_O4TSThose buffs did not make any meaningful changes to the weapons that suck 😂 assault rifles got a 10 damage buff, yet they are still terrible and unusable against both enemy factions. The marksman rifles are still mid at best. The shotguns are mostly garbage with the incendiary breaker being the exception. The SMGs are mid. Most weapons are bad or mid, and that can’t be good for most player’s enjoyment of the game.
They both directly increased hulk stagger resistance and strider explosive resistance, as well as making shriekers and gunships faster and able to spawn from longer ranges. They definitely do directly buff enemies.
@@crackededge9351 the ARs can deal with all fodder enemies and medium armored enemies (especially when hitting weak spots, like Devastator heads) just fine. All the shotguns are still good, even the Slugger. I would like AH to make them better but in their current states, they're still serviceable. If you can't see that, that's a skill issue 🤷
Eruptor charger one-shots obviously were not intentional, however, shooting under the butt is just what you do if you want to damage chargers with that type of a weapon, regardless or not if it may one shot or not. En exploit is a case where a player performs some unusual behavior to purposefully trigger, but shooting enemies in a way to damage their weakspots is expected standard gameplay and the sum of it all is a dev fuckup, not an exploit.
Honestly the idea that you could get a lucky one shot against one of the 3+ chargers bearing down on you doesn't seem like such an egregious exploit that they had to nerf the entire weapon as a result. I definitely agree it was just an occasional happy accident from using the weapon as intended, if you actually tried to constantly fish for charger kills that way I just don't see it being consistent.
Regardless, it's something that the devs fixed for good reason. No one's getting banned for using it the way it was previously. (the question isn't whether it should be fixed, but how it should be fixed)
@@sinteleon removing the charger onetap wasnt even the intended outcome of the change. The intent was to keep the weapon sameish while removing teamkilling. Alexus is just so out of touch that he had no clue shrapnel was the main damage source, he didnt even know it could oneshot chargers until afterwards. He chalked it up to players only being upset because they cant oneshot chargers anymore now and said its gonna stay this way because he considers using the shrapnel to your advantage as an exploit. Charger onetaps really werent that big of a deal and if they really have a problem for it they should fix that one aspect specifically without touching other breakpoints. If they cant do that as they demonstrated, then just leave the weapon alone period.
@@sinteleon true but please refer back to the part where i adressed that, if it really is an issue, then fix only the issue. if you cant manage that. leave it alone. i couldnt care less about it not oneshotting chargers, 2-3 shots should be fine considering if you magdump other weapons into a charger ass you use similar amounts of ammo. what i do care about is that the weapon is fundamentally ruined now and people defend it by saying it should have never oneshot chargers... cool fix the charger oneshot an were good then.
For a while I was strictly an automata player because I just didn't find bugs as fun to fight. Then after I finally found a build i really enjoyed (eruptor + quasar + rover drone) they nerfed EVERY part of that build. Obviously it didn't make every part of it unusable, but just the fact that every piece ended up weaker was pretty tilting.
@@ZephyrKitten742 Mine was almost the same. Eruptor, Redeemer, Stun, Shield BP, Quasar, 500kg and cluster. It was awesome vs bugs. The Eruptor was the glue of the build.
It felt amazing to 1 shot bile spewers in their ass. No precisions required, just hit the big yellow balloon. The "it definitely did not make shrapnel unrealistically dangerous patch" kinda ruined the gun for me, then they just took it out back and shot it a week later.
@@GooiYingChyi What is funny is that the two weapon in S tier received buffs. Dominator does 37.5% more damage than it did at release and has a lot more stagger. And the incendiary breaker got a 33% pellet damage increase. Nobody every remembers the buffs, they just become the new base line and get forgotten.
Here at Arrowhead we understand you feel that some guns are underwhelming to use. That is why today we have nerfed any guns that felt whelming. Thank you for understanding our balancing philosophy...
When the blitzer got buffed, people were saying it was amazing against bugs. Its fun until corpses started building up. It becomes so horribly inconsistent the moment a freaking wilber's body is around you. I have had multiple times that i was point blank to a bug and fired the gun, and it would do no damage. It's just infuriating
I think they should change the way arc projectiles work. Just make it a damage cone that when it hits an enemy it arcs to another beside or behind it. Might be more difficult than what I’m saying. But arc damage and electricity in general in this game is very frustrating.
@@yourstrulli9089 I don't know what demonic code they have for arc projectiles but it 100% needs to change its so bad. I feel like it should be 10 or so ray casts that when hit a enemy they arc to another, a little like what you said.
From my extensive testing with arc weapons, I think the arc thrower probably shoots a cylinder with a certain number of enemies in it getting hit. The problem is that anything that isn't a live enemy will stop the arc completely. The Blitzer is extremely wierd because it seems to work depending on your field of vision. It actually performs significantly worse when you aim it. The area of effect becomes narrower and the arcs hit terrain more often.
@@endhunter569No, they said it didn't release how they wanted and they probably designed it before liberator buffs. Just give it time for the next patch
@@fuzzyotterpaws4395 go watch the trailer for polar patriots and tell me the tenderizer is anything like they said it was. A patch doesn’t mean they didn’t lie to us
@Robert399 I think it needs an ammo economy buff as well as a slight increase in damage by like 5 or 10 as well as a durable damage increase. It's armour penetration is fine as is.
You can see in the tier list the work the balance team is doing to "make sure we are having fun". Lots of weapons were good at some point, but were nerfed into the ground for committing the crime of being ok. Funniest thing to me is that the only two good weapons are the jar, that they gave it a token nerf (???). And the breaker incendiary, which is also only good because fire got buffed like 3 times in a row, because the devs didnt know about the DOT bug for months. That gun is so nerfed Im not playing the game anymore, just waiting for the CEO patch
Same, also remove orbital scatter since that is so horrible it diminishes all of my fun since i love orbitals, so for that to say nah no fun today is so stupid.
people never mention how when you overheat the sickle (and other laser guns MINUS the lascannon) the heatsink auto ejects (a reloading step skipped) and inserting a spare is leagues faster than waiting for it to cool. and now you have 99 more shots to shoot much sooner. you'll resupply
There are 2 things infinite in this world: The number of Zubats in caves The amount of times someone can come up with a "Helldivers 2 weapon tier list."
Only thing missing from these vids' title is the patch number. They can pump them out all they like if they would clearly label what version they are talking about.
The issue is they are balancing around the support weapon imo. They want the tension of you having to get your equipment back when you die so they don't want you to have a primary that is too reliable. Unfortunately they also made Anti-tank weapons practically mandatory and limit stratagem usage against bots so of course people are going to try to use the few effective primaries.
Yeah that seems to be the case. Tbh I kinda get what the devs are saying but they are just doing a terrible job at balancing at the moment. I found that using primaries for the small guys is the best use. Imo I just don’t get why you would use a primary to kill a devastator when almost every support weapon can do it with half the effort. It still doesn’t change the fact that primaries feel awful right now tho
Yeah that's great but then when you can't get your equipment back, you're done. The game is over. The other day I got mobbed by bots and three Hulks were camping my corpse. I've got stun grenades, the sickle, no medium armor pen never mind heavy, and fifteen minutes left on the cooldown for my support weapon, because a map modifier doubles the cooldown time. Fantastic. This is what fun looks like.
@@stronensycharte64 because it would outright replace 80% of the other primaries adjustable rof, same bullet as the liberator, reload on the move and 100 round mag
People give the Punisher Plasma a lot of flak, but it for me it is the Slugger replacement. You can get decent range on it, it staggers, and it can blast lower mobs
For me the PP strikes a good balance between fun and effectiveness. It reloads fast and if you're unlucky enough to run into a patrol of like 20+ troopers (which I usually am) firing a few shots and blasting them all is so much fun. It can also take out striders in two shots, and for primaries I want them to be effective at killing at least one of the medium mobs effectively.
Plasma Punisher is S tier against bots and C against bugs. IDK what he's smoking but any group light and medium close together gets destroyed or stun-locked, especially Shield devastators.
I think a lot of why he doesn’t like it is his solo playstyle. If you aren’t placing your shots to keep the group together, then it can feel so slow to kill some of the medium enemies. Still one of my favorite weapons in a squad. Sending rounds over a teammate’s head and stunning a group of berserkers to keep them from getting run down is so satisfying.
its saved me so many times in situations where I can just arc the shot over a rock and stay in cover, instead of sticking my head up and getting hit by a million rockets
Agreed. It’s now the “best” AoE weapon including vs the scorcher at times. scorcher got the pinpoint and focussed AoE for closer kills, puni-plas brings in AoE stagger and more AoE distance n damage. All 3 othe AoE weapons have major issues. Eruptor has AoE drop-off and a unusual ammo/RoF/handling. Now is somehow the Direct Damage weapon with a light-pen AoE (that got its range nerfed) and also terrible ammo economy because it’s a poor man’s JAR (1/3 the ammo, way slower projectile, some damage traded in for basically useless AoE and the ability to self-delete at remarkable ranges). Purifier is a scorcher with +50 damage (presumably AoE but the data isn’t being updated in the wiki) but with 1/3 the RoF and some med-pen DD on a gun with no meaningful scope.
they did give the dominator a huge buff, 200 to 300 damage (which got reduced to 275 later) and a lot more stagger. it was awesome, i wish they buffed other weapons like this too. i think all ARs (except sickle) could straight up use a 50% damage buff. all of them should be able to 2 shot devastator heads and mow through hordes of bugs. sickle is fine since it already has the benefit of puking so many bullets. diligence should get it's damaged bumped up to 150 to 1 shot devastator heads + 25 mag capacity and diligence sniper should get like 200-250 damage to be able to compete with dominator better imo (especially against bugs) or they could just nerf dominator and call it a day :(
If they nerf the Domjnator instead of fixing other weapons we will have all the proof we need that the “balance leader” only wants to nerf weapons and refuses to make any meaningful buffs.
Completely Agree. Honestly, the Liberator should be made A tier weapon at least, it should be good in every scenario but no the best, providing new players a reliable and strong weapon but reason to explore other weapons. Taking from TF2's original game design, the standard weapons like the AR should be best all-rounders but be worse than other weapons in their niche. At the moment they are just garbage. Liberator's damage should be increased to 90-100 and its armor pen to 2.5(eg A chance to pen higher armor) Lib Concussive's damage should be increased to 110 and its rpm to 480-560 and its armor pen to 2.5 OR make it explosive again with more damage and pen Lib Penetrator's damage should be increased to 85-95 Tenderizer's damage should be increased to 100-110 and its armor pen to 2.5 Adjudicator's damage should be increased to 120-140 and more accurate/stable but keep recoil Diligence's damage should be increase to 175-200 and its armor pen to 2.5 Counter Sniper's damage should be increase to 225-250
Placing JAR is S maybe only by its strength ceiling. This gun is extremely hard to use. P.S. Tried it for a dozen games -- this thing is kinda cool. Nice stagger. Nice damage. Awesome max ttk. Amazing min ttk. Reload is kinda slow but whatever.
It has to be. Best marksmanship weapon in the range that matters (medium), it has slow bullets but 0 damage drop, and your not reliant on headshots to do damage. One of the best suppressive fire primary, the best in term of damage. Great to get out of melee range pinches where handling doesn't matter as much, with stagger, raw damage, and RoF
It is, but once you get used to it, it's probably the best primary in the game. I even use it against bugs, since it can handle Bile Spewers and is exceptional against mediums (Even if it comes at the cost of being annoying to use against hunters).
Yup. I main it, and have tens of hours at lvl 9 at this point, and it's by no means a "pick it up and feel powerful" weapon, which is what S-tier should be. The fact is the avg HD2 player doesn't have years of FPS experience, doesn't know what "feathering shots", "tapfiring", or "pop shotting" means, likes guns with good ADS over good theoretical TTK, and cares more about ADS and spray TTK than precision shot placement. Plasma punisher, Sickle, and Scorcher are going to do wayyyy more for them. Some of these claims in the responses are such cap. Best marksmanship weapon, no damage drop off, doesn't need headshots for quick TTK, all cap. I'd love to see them playing on 9 just spraying and praying and having no concern on ammo. The bullet for sure drops off starting at 40m - I know because I'll use it for long range engagement when I bring AC, Spear, or laser cannon on bots. Landing headshots on back to back enemies is a rough time unless you're really used to the gun. Just look at all the solo helldivers on YT bringing AMR as their supply weapon and basically using it as their main until they have to bring out their primary, and bring scorcher instead. There's a reason for that. I know OhDough loves JAR, and I do too, but to pretend it doesn't have significant drawbacks to offset its strengths is cap, and the fact is most HD2 players are going to have a bad time if they just look at this tier list and try it out.
@@Pr0m3th310us Again, the sickle has way higher fire rate than every other weapon outside of the MG line of support weapons, with way more ammo per mag than every other weapon except for stalwart. All that, and it has infinite ammo.
@@sinteleon "Every single gun should be able to one shot bodyshot scavengers, except the sickle, that one should take 2-3 because sinteleon thinks it has too high a fire rate" Happy?
I think scorcher is A, but other than that I mostly agree. The fact that there aren't at least 4 or 5 more A tier weapons really shows how horrible the weapon balance in this game currently is.
I could just say things should be different but if you actually want to do research on good primaries check out different players' Diff 9 solo uploads and see the variety of weaponry used. I know it's popular to shit on AH for weapon balance right now (and I disagree they should even be weapon balancing 3 months into the game), but pretending there's only 2 good primary weapons is...cap.
@thepromman I agree with what you're getting at, but at the same time, it comes down to skill as well. Most content creators playing on helldive are skilled players. They could probably make a wet noodle look viable. I think that anything B tier and higher is probably viable for most average players... it's just not as fun as it could be. Idk about you, but fun is my first priority when I play. Getting home after a long day of work only to play AH's fantasy of being expendable and powerless isn't super appealing to most people. Definitely a fine line that they've crossed recently.
The Devs need to stop trying to optimise weapon stats and just make them all fun to use. Every update it feels like the effective weapon selection is worse. Helldivers 1 had amazing primaries, they should look to the past for inspiration instead of trying to fight meta players.
After the railgun update everything went downhills, not because of the railgun, but because they did so many changes to the game that is unrecognizable now to day 1
I think one part of the reason one can place two weapons in S and most in C is less of their weapon performance but how the game design of larger "medium" and "medium large" enemies are balanced around being meant to be handled with support weapons, but then those medium larges can be oppressively common on higher difficulties and tough constellations. A regular Liberator, which I personally think is fine, will deal with fodder bots and bugs more or less as expected, but then a medium enemy appears and they become a massive ammo sink whether you're throwing DPS into a meat shield or hunting for a lucky headshot. That big gulf is meant to get you to use a support weapon but those primaries in S can handle the situation better than any others without sacrificing too much. The fact that we only have 4 stratagem slots does constrain our options a lot too.
Yup. Dumping almost a liberator mag killing a brood commander. Meanwhile there's two more and three hive guards right in front of you. And all three brood commanders callin extra warriors around them. Its no wonder people think primaries are undercooked.
Dominator and the pre-gutted Eruptor are, in my opinion, what should be the gold standard for weapon balance. Very strong primaries that are useful in a variety of situations, but with heavy downsides. Slow fire rate, low ammo, worse handling, self damage. There's smarter ways to keep weapons in check than "they do no damage now just rely on your teammates more lol."
It was so fun when the eruptor was good, bringing the eruptor enabled me to bring support weapons like the stalwart, now I haven't touched the stalwart since the nerf, very sad balance team lmao
@@stronensycharte64 I used to run MGs with both the Slugger and Eruptor but that's a big fat F. MGs desperately need more specialized weapons like the those to have a place in the game since, honestly, even if MGs were good, they'd still be irrelevant. They're just glorified primaries. Something like the Eruptor which was better suited for big mobs gave a weapon like the Stalwart a chance to shine since it covers such a big weakness of the weapon.
The problem with the Eruptor was that all the downsides you listed are immediately rendered moot by just taking a Stalwart. Now you have all the power of the Eruptor and a de facto primary weapon that’s basically an AR that holds 100 rounds
@riskyflash6812 Actually there's no problem there because that's a perfectly normal way to build your character. You cover your weaknesses. Eruptor + Stalwart still isn't even that good because it has a glaring weakness to tanks. Stalwart is only barely good enough to kill the small mobs and the Eruptor (minus one-shotting Chargers which it shouldn't have been able to do) is way too slow to reasonably deal with tanks. How would this even be a problem in a PvE game?
I felt like the Eruptor was perfect aside from the over abundance of ammo. The way they have ammo now seems fine except they gutted the shrapnel of the gun so it feels shit to use now.
People seem to frequently make these tier lists for weapons based on how they perform in solo situations. Which I always feel is a weird choice because the game almost requires you to play in groups of 2-4 where you can build your load out around the team. Breaker Incendiary clears swarms of bugs but struggles a fair bit if no one has something that can deal with medium armour. Meaning people need to bring impact nades, which means no concussive for larger stuff like a charger. It doesn’t need to be an S tier weapon so long as it compliments the rest of the teams load out especially at higher difficulties.
After watching your breakdown of incendiary breaker for bugs, it changed my life. It feels like it should be the gold standard for crowd control primary weapons. The new defender SMG with concussive is cute, but this thing SHREDS buggos. Also i HATE that the primary lasers are so skinny. Im literally pissing on terminids, I need FAT BEAM Thx dough hope the great "Rebalancing" comes soon🙏
Thanks for advocating for better marksman rifles. I thought I would LOVE these guns, but they ended up absolute C-F tier, which is correct. I wish they have a Marksman that had the base damage of Jar 5, and make Jar 5 explosive penetrate the toughest armor (like Red visor). That would do justice.
i appreciate the one-handed trait on SMGs not necessarily for the shields but for being able to hipfire accurately while jogging away from enemies on my way to the objective. i also like Eravin's guide on using assault rifles. Aim for the limb or medium weakpoints instead of the head to get more consistent performance against 1 HP section compared to spreading damage between 2+ different HP sections. Also, correction for 1:39, Devastator heads have 130 HP not 125 HP.
I wouldn't say the pummeler has "concussive" because it is not the stagger effect that weapons like concussive liberator has. Instead, Pummeler has EMS stun 0.5 sec which is superior to stagger. Compared to something like the Jar5 that has a lot of stagger and the damage you have an easier time keeping shots on target because that stagger animation really throws the enemy around. But the Jar5 hits like a truck. Pummeler feels like a team support gun at times letting you mini stun enemies.
I think you should take another look at the plasma punisher mate. When you are experienced with it hitting guys at 75+ meters is no problem. Can completely stun lock devastators and kills them in a few shots, stun locks groups of beserkers killing them as well. It’s a great gun.
sickle is S tier for me. I bring it on solo helldives and it's wonderful. truly what an AR should be in this game, massive mag that can shred any light or medium enemy.
@@Bopiz787 Agreed, if you were going through 6 mags before finding ammo at a PoI or restocking from a resupply, that's a skill issue. Reducing 6 to 3 is imo the funniest non-nerf nerf I've seen in a balancing changelog.
I’d put the penetrator at the Davy jones locker tier. It’s so little damage that against most medium armor enemies you can’t kill anything by mag dumping into the armored areas anyway
The Plasma Punisher would be a D-tier weapon without its ability to stun enemies. With the Stun it barely makes it into B tier imo. It still needs more buffs to be viable against Bugs at level 9. There’s no reason the PP should take 4 shots to destroy a Bile Spewer.
@@crackededge9351 Agreed, but with the stunlock I kind of like it, because it allows it to deal with all bot enemies medium and below somewhat reasonably (even if it's annoying against devastator). I think it works with AMR and Laser Cannon Dominator, on the other hand, feels terrible to use against small bots, and against strider, even if it's great against devastators and berserker. It's a good match for the autocannon EDIT: since I forgot to mention, I played up to level 7, mostly solo. So take what I say with the right pinch of salt.
I used the eruptor a couple times back when it wasn't 100% shit. It was the only reason you could bring LMG stratagems without shooting yourself in the foot.
Once you get into higher difficulties we definitely feel more funneled into a meta. Theres barely any variety in what we can choose to bring. Bring anything outside of the very small meta pond and its basically a death sentence.
I have not seen anyone argue Eruptor was meant to one shot chargers. Pretty much everyone would have been fine fixing that, it was removing the ability to one-shot hive commanders, stalkers, and bile spewers that really hurt.
One thing I enjoy running, while it's definitely not extremely good, is diligence + AMR (and supply pack) against bots I run the diligence because it's able to take out all of the small bots really quickly with the high fire rate and low recoil, as well as not having to worry about ammo too much so you can spam the hell out of it. Then, I use AMR for pretty much everything else, because the diligence is practically useless for everything else. It's a fun loadout, not exactly great, but very fun.
It's valid, but I feel like if you're exclusively using your primary for getting rid of small enemies, you might as well use the Liberator. The scope is mostly similar, and if you tap fire it's still accurate at range, but it can also seamlessly transition to mowing down groups in full-auto when you need to.
A RUclipsr by the name of Eravin did a video breaking down how damage works that explains some of the issues Dough is listing for example the why the diligence does not one shot devastators is probably due to the fact that every gun has falloff damage that is rounded down by at least one and because the rifle does exactly the damage on base as the devastator head it may be 1 damage short to kill it. Do note in this example durable is ignored as well as AP as the Diligence does have the requirements to beat it without damage being negated and the Devastator head having 0% durable. For anyone keen for a decent breakdown of damage calcs go check Eravin out.
Gonna have to disagree with you on the Scorcher. Considering the Dominator's poor performance against Scout Striders, and the fact that the Scorcher can kill them in 4 shots (TTK of about a second), makes it better than the Jar5 in my opinion. Can the Dominator kill Scout Striders? If you dump a whole mag into them sometimes. I'll take consistently killing Scout Striders over the stagger offered by the Jar every single day. Plus the low sound profile makes it that much better to solo with. Also, I don't think LARPing means what you think it means. I'm pretty sure its the exact opposite of what you think it means.
I love these satirical tier lists. I can't believe they keep this pay to win stuff with poor old weapons like the dominator and breaker incendiary languishing while the new hot warbond has such monsters as the purifier. And this is just primaries. Won't they ever nerf the railgun or finally do something to bring the spear down into line? Everyone loves their homage to the famous javelin, but please let us choose to try out a weapon like the laser or autocannon without obliterating our chances at any real difficulty tier.
I really enjoyed the Eruptor on release, and I didn't even know about the charger exploit. Since the nerfs I feel like I can't justify using anything but the sickle
I think one easy thing they could do with the adjudicator, take the damage to somewhere in 100-ish, maybe even 120-ish, but return to pre-buff recoil. Make it feel like an actual battle rifle. Uncontrollable but full power cartridge. So you have to use armors with reduce recoil at crouch/prone to make it controllable but if you habit yourself around its recoil, you get a powerful full auto rifle.
The plasma punisher has ONE mission where i say its SS+ Alpha tier: Fortress defense. You always have the high ground, enemies are always super clumped up. Drop ships hover right above you for the plasma balls to murder all the guys before they even get a chance. Bug breaches are right in your face yet you're super safe to bombard them from above. Also, the Arc-12 Blitzer deserves S-tier. I used to hate it. i called the buff "not enough, still crap". But then i tested it, and it is now the only bug weapon i'll ever use. Yes, sometimes there's a little wilbur in the middle of a huge pile of bug bodies where i have to whip out my secondary redeemer and kill it. But that huge pile of corpses were all made with my trusty arc-12 blitzer, when all other weapons would've overheated, needed a reload, ran out of ammo, didn't deal enough damage, yadda yadda. NO OTHER weapon in this game can singlehandedly stop any size of bug waves running at you like the arc-12 blitzer. incendiary breaker only gets close. No other weapon can oneshot a brood commanders head off and then stop the headless body runnign at you right there. While simulatenously aoe-murder all his friends around him. I was the guy that got told "if you can't use the arc-12 blitzer, L2P, skill issue" when i complained about the arcs getting grounded by little rocks and dead bodies. i learned to play with it. it is god tier. If you can't handle it, learn 2 play, skill issue 😆
Taking the laser doggo is a good way of removing that lone Wilbur too (as well as hunters etc and cutting the legs off fellow helldivers... wait) But yeah, I've been loving the Blitzer too (I only unlocked it a couple of days before the buff and was enjoying it then). The amount of times you're late into a mission, running for the LZ, surrounded by bodies and not having to worry about ammo. It's wonderful I've rarely been bothered by the aiming issues either. Sure, there's times it'll hit dead bodies or rocks etc, but you can usually reposition or re-target, punch the bug in front of you etc. I often lob an impact grenade and move away
Yea, that's also how I feel about the game. You need weapons to kill certain enemies quick, some weapons do that well, most don't. So in the end you pretty much always equip the same 2-3 weapons, because the others just don't do it.
To defend the punisher plasma c status. It’s a very effective stun tool. If you’re pulling a sentry build, use the plasma to stun targets that are closing in. It’s niche but effective. “Just gots to get gud”
putting liberator into f tier right off the back makes me almost feel like this is a meme of a video tbh. Idk how you could even consider the liberator to be anywhere near a weapon like concussive or penetrator for instance. How does the gun have low ammo count when its able to dispatch anything under a devs within a few shots, and even enemies like devs can be downed rapidly with stomach shots. I know some people dont like assault rifles, and I do think several of them need buffs for sure, but Im beginning to think that a lot of people just dont know what they are doing at times.
The Liberator is a great gun in the right context and loadout. It's super effective against chaff enemies, especially Automatons. It can mow down groups of 10+ with a single mag. It has a zoom scope and can do this at medium-long ranges too. This also means fewer drop ships being called in. I routinely get the most kills in difficulty 7 and 8 random squads running the AMR and Liberator against Automatons. AMR for almost all enemies above chaff troopers, Liberator for the little guys.
When you go to helldive yea its good against hunters and wilbers and warriors, but against brood commanders, the 20 bile spewers and stalkers it will be useless outright, and against bots requiring to maintain aim against devastators is death sentence unless you have shield or stun grenades.
FYI I'm THE ArrowHead developer in charge of weapons balancing! so thanks for the info!!! My priority right now is to nerf the shit out of the Jar5-Dominator and the breaker Incendiary, I'm going to make them at least C tier because those weapons are too "overpowered", then i will work my way to remove all the weapons in your B Tier so we can really get a weapon balance utopia! Ty Dough!
I had a passionate dislike for the Eruptor the moment I got my hands on it. But even after everything, now I’m a fan, because I can use it to destroy fabricators with much more ease and consistency than the grenade pistol, so it’s awesome for my stealth builds. And being able to stun devastators at long ranges makes it good for supporting my allies. It’s like the AMR and the Autocannon were merged by some Chinese manufacturer, but it hits all the right notes for me. Bring the redeemer and laser cannon to gain back your overall lethality and versatility.
I unlocked both breaker and slugger right before their nerfs. Nothing feels worse than a weapon you were hyped to use get neutered before you get to truly have fun with it.
It was such a perfect weapon before. I managed to use it for a few weeks before it was nerfed. It did great damage and the stagger was a staple of the weapon, it was fantastic against medium enemies but it was balanced because it couldn’t handle swarms of small bugs or bots. When they reduced the damage and gave the stagger from the slugger to the punisher (which makes NO fucking sense why a hail of small pellets would hit harder than a huge solid lump of lead), they removed any reason to use the weapon anymore.
id like to add that in co-op situations, having a party member with the pummeler is a godsend at times. the stagger can flinch a lot of enemies out of attacks, even stalkers, and ive genuinely saved lives before by shooting an enemy out of an attack that had an ally pinned down (spewers mostly). I feel it deserves an honorable mention for its sheer supportive power.
I pretty much only casually play solo at lower levels right now, just grab whatever I want and hike around looking for super credits in some vague hope that a warbond with interesting shit comes around. Still in disbelief at the lack of thematic armor perks in the warbonds.
@@OhDough Their argument about why they won't add transmogs because they want an armor's appearance to reflect what it did, only to follow by releasing an arctic warfare themed pack that included a snow colored armor that was just a servo boosted armor without the robot arm that made those armors easily recognizable made my brain hurt.
The thing is with the eruptor you could close bug outposts and blow up fabricators and had decent AOE with shrapnel. But now with no shrapnel and you can't as easily close bug outposts I'd say it's down from A tier to C.
I think the only weapons that got buffed from irrelevancy to relevancy are: Flamethrower, Dominator, Laser Cannon, Counter-Sniper (Maybe). Meanwhile: Ruined the railgun. Ruined the Eruptor. Kinda sorta ruined the Quasar. Ruined an already mediocre crossbow. Ruined the breaker. Ruined the slugger. So more weapons have been killed than saved. There's the AMR as well I guess but 1. it was already decent, not irrelevant and 2. we'd still be at a deficit. If I'm forgetting weapons on either side, let me know.
This game has the barebones structure for lots of features that it just straight up doesn't have. people said it released feature complete, but it was more like it worked occasionally at launch and this was just an extended technical beta for the months after. None of the weapons have a clear identity of what they were built to counter, not even the good ones because there is little to compare the good weapons to and their only plus is that they just don't suck to use which imo is a very bad plus for a weapon. if each class of weapons had a bonus for using them ie like marksman weapons like dmrs got a huge damage buff for headshots and weak points and the stats that made sense then it'd give a good reason to use them vs right now where there's no reason to use an smg unless it's niche or low level because the shotguns exist or using the dmr when the amr and jar5 exist and the same goes for orbital stratagems vs eagle stratagems. And these are just problems with weapon selection. don't question why the enemy summons reinforcements immediately if they hear a twig snap when reinforcements are typically called in when your current force is close to depletion, or why the "ranged" bots don't use cover and need to close in like a mindless swarm of terminds to melee you with their fist when they literally have miniguns on their arms that can tap you from hundreds of meters away or how they just know where you are like a crappy version of the xenomorph ai from alien isolation. now granted yes if i had to recode a whole enemy ai to take advantage of their strengths it would be a pain just as revaluating all the useless weapons would be but it needs to be done. unfortunately, at the same time by the time they work out the problems and get the game going in a "fun" state most of everyone can agree on it'll be either too little to late or the game will just be barely surviving in maintenance. i love this game but god damn(sorry for the rant lol)
Pretty on point. Only a couple things I'd contest: - I don't think the Liberator and the Liberator Penetrator deserve to be in the same tier. The base Lib is at least good at getting rid of light enemies ammo-efficiently at all ranges, whereas the Penetrator is a straight-up "noob trap" weapon (It sacrifices a bit of everything for the benefit of medium pen, but with the nerfed mag size _and_ damage it doesn't have the means to leverage that medium penetration ability, so it's a straight downgrade in practice) - The Knight is actually more like a Stalwart that's permanently stuck at max fire rate, with 1/5 the magazine capacity and worse recoil. It deals some pretty considerable burst and could actually be a viable weapon, if not for the pathetic ammo pool, and for the fact that the one-handed SMG features on it are incompatible with the most productive way of actually leveraging the fire rate/burst damage (firing from crouch/prone). - The Liberator Concussive is actually usable against bugs, but it still feels so boring that I'm not even going to bother making a case for it.
Erupter killing chargers in one shot wasn't an exploit. It was RNG. I liked the rng of it. Felt like any one shot could take out an entire patrol, or medium enemy, and yet more often than not it couldn't. And it's fine because of the overwhelming damage from shrapnel. Otherwise no, they killed it by getting rid of the shrapnel. It was reasonable before. Lacking in fire rate maybe. But it was a primary. I would switch it to the AMR's place and put the AMR in primary weapons halving the rate of fire before calling the shrapnel mechanics an exploit
I enjoyed how the Eruptor felt. Not so much with the one shotting chargers, but it felt good. Right now, it just feels too weak considering the capacity and rate of fire.
I’ll admit I still run the Eruptor with a flamethrower build against bugs. Mostly for closing holes and killing spewers at a distance so I don’t have to do avoid acid spray while laying down a wall of flaming democracy.
For my playstyle you can take my plasma punisher out of my cold dead hands which doesn't even happen that often. It's really good against the bots in my opinion despite the devastator lack of effectiveness as it can stagger in an area which is great when you have three heavy devs coming at you that sort of thing.
Yeah I didn't get it either. Against automatons after rate of fire buff it feels good. 2 shots and staggers striders. One shots chaff and will kill devastators in 2 to 4 shots while staggering them.
@@GS-ng3ec Same problem as with normal punisher- it kills stuff too slow. On lower diff its alright since there are less enemies and bot drops are less frequent but higher you goes more you wish for something with better TTK.
Going ham and mag dumping the Incendiary Breaker into a swarm of bugs, quick reloading, and being ready to pick off any stragglers that survive the inferno sure does feel good. Hope it doesn't get nerfed to hell.
AoE and hard stun of the Plasma Punisher makes up for the slower medium TTK in my opinion. You can stun-lock a large group and take out a large patrol in a single mag if you juggle it right.
Punisher against bugs can be great if you're trying to keep moving, it lets you spray over your shoulder while running at nearly full speed. The ability to stagger bugs also really limits their ability to hurt you. It creates a safe buffer zone. Which can also be really helpful if you have incendiary impact grenades, as you can keep them in the flames longer. It also buys time for a teammate's Incendiary Breaker DoT to kill things. I consider it more of a crowd control weapon than anything, something the Defender lacks.
The ability of the Plasma Punisher to stagger with AoE is its best feature for crowd control. Particularly if you're working in a group, you can take the heat off your buddies by stopping two heavy devastators in their tracks at the same time by arcing your shots correctly. Also the PP's ability to WRECK Striders and drive Berzerkers back is invaluable. I've been loving this "n00b t00b" of a gun, it made automaton missions fun again.
It might be different running solo vs running in a group, but I love running the punisher at higher difficulties in a group. The ability to stagger a bunch of bots with one shot and to be able to top off single shots is huge for allowing a 2nd player to mop things up. It also can kill if things get closer then comfortable. Only downside is that the range isn't great, but frankly everyone else is running longer range weapons so having someone CC/cleanup close is good. Not a fan of the Jar, because of how low the ammo count is, along with it's atrocious handling. It was the primary I was the most excited for too, because only heretics are not excited for a Bolter analog. But it just doesn't do enough. Ya, you can unload a clip into a factory strider's belly, but why do that when we have support weapons that can take them out easier without having us have to scramble for ammo afterwards? But I understand your arguments. Might not agree with them but I see the logic behind them.
The Jar takes out enemies in far less shots than just about everything else, the handling isn't terrible and the ammo isn't either. I'd rather hit an enemy once and be done with it than having to dump half a mag into one but you do you...
@@Mox3712 And I'd rather keep 3-4 locked down instead of having to try to get around them because they're chasing someone else. Too many times of not having the headshot because of a poor angle and/or an unlucky flinch for the Jar to be useful to me at any range. The handling and ammo _are_ terrible on the Jar compared to the punisher.
The plasma punisher is not a solo weapon, but with a group of as small as even 2 people, its ability to lock several bots down is more valuable than most weapons. Bots already take time to kill unlike bugs, so having a guy that can stunlock a whole patrol while the rest of the time take them apart is a massive game changer. Against bugs you dont need defense, just high DPS and kill power. But on Bots you need a defense plan, most people take the shield pack or the balistic shield. But also a CC guy does wonders. dont underestimate this gun just because it lacks instant kill power. Bring it with your squad and you will notice people are MUCH safer.
With marksman rifles it would be interesting to strip amour. Idk if that would work but interesting. It would give them a ability that would help support and it would promote good aim for those players that like that
If a dev sees this video and thinks “We need to nerf fire breaker and dominator” Instead of “We need to buff a lot of weapons so they are like the fire breaker and dominator” Games chalked, they keep nerfing everything people find fun and want to use
Pummeler has amazing combo potential! Especially against bugs. It can stun lock a charger long enough for your precision strike or resupply to actually hit it. It can also save you big-time vs stalkers. You can kill one by mag dumping it, or keep 2-3 stunned long enough to make an escape. It pairs really nicely with the jetpack for this.
I personnally would put Punisher in B or A tier against bugs. It's a good weapon to defend yourself but most importantly it has enough stagger to push back Stalkers while damaging them. You can potentially one shot them as well which is pretty nice. Plasma Punisher is for me B tier against bot. It does lack damage on body shot but I feel like if you miss the headshot and land a body shot, the stagger leave them vulnerable long enough to follow up with a headshot and just kill them. It also has good utility in the break eggs mission but that's about it on bug side.
I have no clue why the SMGs do more damage per bullet than the assault rifles, and then the tenderizer does the same as the liberator despite being described as 'high caliber.' We could of had the halo 3 BR as the tenderizer, instead we got a fucking massage gun
About Scorcher and those small walkers - as far as I remember there was a change that it is now "harder" to penetrate that front plate, and it allows less damage to go through (as far as understand - for all weapons, not specifically scorcher) So Scorcher is (or at least should be) as it always was, it just the specific enemy was changed
Respectfully, the assault rifles are pretty decent and I would personally put the liberator and variants in C tier. The standard liberator clears small and medium enemies and rewards accuracy while also having enough ammo to full auto when needed. I guess I prefer guns that I can shoot more while thinking about ammo less. Great video, interesting takes. I would like to see you do a challenge of starter armor, lib, peacemaker, OPS, Eagle air, Machine Gun, EAT-17. Go back to the beginning and see how far you've come!
Slugger is a great choice if you can use it skillfully. It can one tap devistaters and berserkers with a headshot just like the jar but with much better handling, target swapping and acquisition. It has better accuracy and ammo economy than the jar. I would only favor the jar in close quarters against multiple berserkers for the stagger and rate of fire.
eruptor closes bug holes at any range. that's the only reason I use it, specifically when my "primary" is something like the flamethrower. it kills spewers inconsistently too I guess
Going to have to disagree on the scorcher, its my go to for bugs, cause it can kill chargers while the breaker incendiary cant, additionally i use it to shoot out the belly of biles, then able to take em out with an eagle airstrike. I dont even use support weapons with it, instead I opt for 2 orbitals and 2 eagles
I imagine the purifier is so bad because they were testing the weapon when they had old explosion damage (explosion damage worked on limbs/heads) and it was probably okay, but now no matter where you hit an enemy, the eplosion damage from the weapon is only going to damage their main body rather than their weaker parts, which is why the scorcher is also worse now. They did a bandaid fix to stop people getting one shot by rocket devastators without buffing the weapons indirectly nerfed. Its also why the eruptor is so bad now, because the explosion damage wasnt doing anything, it was all the shrapnel. All they need to do is revert the change for enemies but keep helldivers more immune to explosion damage or reduce the rocket spam by bots.
Thanks for the feedback, Dominator damage reduced to 175 and breaker incindeary now overheats after 5 shots. We hope this makes the community undestand our balance philosophy
breaker incendiary has a 75% chance to light you on fire when shooting
@@OhDough And explode if you stay on fire for more then half a second
"The incendiary breaker now overheats after 5 shots, and will explode and set you on fire akin to the unsafe railgun when fully charged, we hope you continue to enjoy helldivers 2"
And you carry less ammo
Due to a bug with the exploding breaker incendiary buff causing nearby team mates to take more burn damage than intended, we have disabled fire damage on the weapon but gave it a further buff to have one additional pellet per shot at the cost of taking 10m falloff damage. We hope this reflects our balance philosophy of turning useful weapons into wet noodles.
Helldivers 2 is the only game that can release content at the pace that it does, and yet with every update feel like there's half the weapons to use from when we started.
This hurts, but yeah :/
Yeah, so right now they are releasing 0 weapons and items for 2 weeks now, and I don't see they are going to in the weeks to come. Too fast, too "balanced". So they are taking the SLOW approach now. Which is good. But you don't get to see content coming out like nuts anymore.
Everything is supposed to be balanced so if something is too powerful or overused it has to be nerfed since there's many different guns. That's just basic design unfortunately. There's different weapons for different people
@@fuzzyotterpaws4395 Yeah except it's flawed because they don't know why other people are picking the guns that are actually good compared to the mediocre to god awful guns.
@@GooiYingChyi what are you on about? They never released any weapons outside of warbonds, and those are once a month. They did drop a few strateagems, but those were, and still are, mostly ok, aside a few bugs. Imo they should stop pushing out a warbond every month and instead focus on making warbonds good.
its crazy to me that they havent buffed the warbond weapons, the guy in charge of balancing said in the discord before the warbond dropped that all weapons are s teir, there are no bad weapons
The guy in charge of balancing has a track record of ruining games with the decisions they make. Their terrible design philosophy has obviously carried over into this game (different game) and players are noticing it more so now. I typically don't advocate for removing someone from a team, but this person needs to be replaced.
I mean , "suck" starts with S too .
Yes they are scamming their players
He's a goddam troll who must be on some revenge campaign from being bullied when he was kid or something
Lol you dont have to hide his name. That loser "Alexus" has ruined games into the ground before. They seriously need to fire his ass before this game is ran into the ground by his "balancing"
10:41 When you're a bot and all of a sudden you hear "Warning you are within range of enemy artillery" 💀
Used to be way better with the old plasma punisher, that gun had a more suitable arc for actually aiming and landing those long range mortar shots. (I still think the projectile trajectory change was an overall nerf to effectiveness even if it did improve base usability...)
@@sinteleonWeird, even if I liked the Punisher Plasma before the recent change and I saw its potential, I feel that the arc trajectory made it so bad and didn't allow to use it on a reliable. I understand the benefits of the more pronounced arc, but in the 90% of the cases it lacked a better trajectory to shoot directly where you wanted to shoot without having to look at the sky.
One cool middle ground would be to add a fire selector to be able to choose between current trajectory and old trajectory
not only do they nerf primaries into the ground they buff the enemies at the same time.
They don't buff enemies' stats directly, lol. It's indirect like the general fire damage buff for everything that can deal fire damage in the game or increased enemy spawning. And not every primary weapon was nerfed. A lot of buffs were given last Major patch.
@@Brother_O4TSDid they not just buff hulks with reduced stagger last patch?
@@Brother_O4TSThose buffs did not make any meaningful changes to the weapons that suck 😂 assault rifles got a 10 damage buff, yet they are still terrible and unusable against both enemy factions. The marksman rifles are still mid at best. The shotguns are mostly garbage with the incendiary breaker being the exception. The SMGs are mid. Most weapons are bad or mid, and that can’t be good for most player’s enjoyment of the game.
They both directly increased hulk stagger resistance and strider explosive resistance, as well as making shriekers and gunships faster and able to spawn from longer ranges. They definitely do directly buff enemies.
@@crackededge9351 the ARs can deal with all fodder enemies and medium armored enemies (especially when hitting weak spots, like Devastator heads) just fine. All the shotguns are still good, even the Slugger. I would like AH to make them better but in their current states, they're still serviceable. If you can't see that, that's a skill issue 🤷
Eruptor charger one-shots obviously were not intentional, however, shooting under the butt is just what you do if you want to damage chargers with that type of a weapon, regardless or not if it may one shot or not. En exploit is a case where a player performs some unusual behavior to purposefully trigger, but shooting enemies in a way to damage their weakspots is expected standard gameplay and the sum of it all is a dev fuckup, not an exploit.
Honestly the idea that you could get a lucky one shot against one of the 3+ chargers bearing down on you doesn't seem like such an egregious exploit that they had to nerf the entire weapon as a result. I definitely agree it was just an occasional happy accident from using the weapon as intended, if you actually tried to constantly fish for charger kills that way I just don't see it being consistent.
Regardless, it's something that the devs fixed for good reason. No one's getting banned for using it the way it was previously. (the question isn't whether it should be fixed, but how it should be fixed)
@@sinteleon removing the charger onetap wasnt even the intended outcome of the change. The intent was to keep the weapon sameish while removing teamkilling. Alexus is just so out of touch that he had no clue shrapnel was the main damage source, he didnt even know it could oneshot chargers until afterwards. He chalked it up to players only being upset because they cant oneshot chargers anymore now and said its gonna stay this way because he considers using the shrapnel to your advantage as an exploit. Charger onetaps really werent that big of a deal and if they really have a problem for it they should fix that one aspect specifically without touching other breakpoints. If they cant do that as they demonstrated, then just leave the weapon alone period.
@@theboomshroom1865 Just because something was changed for the wrong reason doesn't mean it isn't deserved.
@@sinteleon true but please refer back to the part where i adressed that, if it really is an issue, then fix only the issue. if you cant manage that. leave it alone. i couldnt care less about it not oneshotting chargers, 2-3 shots should be fine considering if you magdump other weapons into a charger ass you use similar amounts of ammo. what i do care about is that the weapon is fundamentally ruined now and people defend it by saying it should have never oneshot chargers... cool fix the charger oneshot an were good then.
I loved Eruptor when it came out and now i feel like - "look what they did to my boy"
It was my favorite weapon. Rewarded precision and smart choices. Now it is simply a worse Dominator in all aspects.
For a while I was strictly an automata player because I just didn't find bugs as fun to fight. Then after I finally found a build i really enjoyed (eruptor + quasar + rover drone) they nerfed EVERY part of that build. Obviously it didn't make every part of it unusable, but just the fact that every piece ended up weaker was pretty tilting.
@@ZephyrKitten742 Mine was almost the same. Eruptor, Redeemer, Stun, Shield BP, Quasar, 500kg and cluster. It was awesome vs bugs. The Eruptor was the glue of the build.
It felt amazing to 1 shot bile spewers in their ass. No precisions required, just hit the big yellow balloon. The "it definitely did not make shrapnel unrealistically dangerous patch" kinda ruined the gun for me, then they just took it out back and shot it a week later.
i know right they murder him my baby.
Arrowhead furiously taking notes on what the next nerf will be 📝
"Write that down, WRITE THAT DOWN!!!"
No need. Nerf everything is their philosophy.
@@GooiYingChyi Are they former CCP staff? EVE Online was always getting nerfed when I played it. It was infuriating.
@@GooiYingChyi What is funny is that the two weapon in S tier received buffs. Dominator does 37.5% more damage than it did at release and has a lot more stagger. And the incendiary breaker got a 33% pellet damage increase. Nobody every remembers the buffs, they just become the new base line and get forgotten.
@@benmiles00 No, they are not that smart.
Here at Arrowhead we understand you feel that some guns are underwhelming to use. That is why today we have nerfed any guns that felt whelming. Thank you for understanding our balancing philosophy...
Firing Alexus would buff Helldivers 2.
⏫️ this! She's a hatin' @ss hoʻé
He should be fired. Into the sun in a hellpod.
The real tier list is about how to make a dev studio S tier.
When the blitzer got buffed, people were saying it was amazing against bugs. Its fun until corpses started building up. It becomes so horribly inconsistent the moment a freaking wilber's body is around you. I have had multiple times that i was point blank to a bug and fired the gun, and it would do no damage. It's just infuriating
I think they should change the way arc projectiles work. Just make it a damage cone that when it hits an enemy it arcs to another beside or behind it. Might be more difficult than what I’m saying. But arc damage and electricity in general in this game is very frustrating.
@@yourstrulli9089 I don't know what demonic code they have for arc projectiles but it 100% needs to change its so bad. I feel like it should be 10 or so ray casts that when hit a enemy they arc to another, a little like what you said.
Doesn't cut it. Simple as.
From my extensive testing with arc weapons, I think the arc thrower probably shoots a cylinder with a certain number of enemies in it getting hit. The problem is that anything that isn't a live enemy will stop the arc completely. The Blitzer is extremely wierd because it seems to work depending on your field of vision. It actually performs significantly worse when you aim it. The area of effect becomes narrower and the arcs hit terrain more often.
The arc thrower is infinitely better than the blitzer, i very much enjoy the thrower and can't stand the blitzer.
The Tenderizer sounds stronger than it actually hits
They entirely falsely advertised it
Which sucks cause in terms of design and sound it is awesome
@@endhunter569No, they said it didn't release how they wanted and they probably designed it before liberator buffs. Just give it time for the next patch
@@fuzzyotterpaws4395 go watch the trailer for polar patriots and tell me the tenderizer is anything like they said it was. A patch doesn’t mean they didn’t lie to us
@@fuzzyotterpaws4395 But how hard is it to perform the most basic level of testing before releasing new weapons?
Ok so my understanding is... Any gun above C tier requires to be nerfed in the eyes of the balance team.
Pretty much. They don't want any gun to be obviously better than the Liberator (which I get in a "we're not pay 2 win" way)
@Robert399 this would be fine if the liberator was an effective and fun gun to use. Spoiler alert: its not, it's kinda ass.
@@mack-attack-420 Agreed. It should be a viable weapon but it shouldn't be holding back everything else.
@Robert399 I think it needs an ammo economy buff as well as a slight increase in damage by like 5 or 10 as well as a durable damage increase. It's armour penetration is fine as is.
You can see in the tier list the work the balance team is doing to "make sure we are having fun".
Lots of weapons were good at some point, but were nerfed into the ground for committing the crime of being ok.
Funniest thing to me is that the only two good weapons are the jar, that they gave it a token nerf (???). And the breaker incendiary, which is also only good because fire got buffed like 3 times in a row, because the devs didnt know about the DOT bug for months. That gun is so nerfed
Im not playing the game anymore, just waiting for the CEO patch
Same, also remove orbital scatter since that is so horrible it diminishes all of my fun since i love orbitals, so for that to say nah no fun today is so stupid.
people never mention how when you overheat the sickle (and other laser guns MINUS the lascannon) the heatsink auto ejects (a reloading step skipped) and inserting a spare is leagues faster than waiting for it to cool. and now you have 99 more shots to shoot much sooner. you'll resupply
There are 2 things infinite in this world:
The number of Zubats in caves
The amount of times someone can come up with a "Helldivers 2 weapon tier list."
Devs giving unlimited content for creators.
Only thing missing from these vids' title is the patch number. They can pump them out all they like if they would clearly label what version they are talking about.
The issue is they are balancing around the support weapon imo. They want the tension of you having to get your equipment back when you die so they don't want you to have a primary that is too reliable. Unfortunately they also made Anti-tank weapons practically mandatory and limit stratagem usage against bots so of course people are going to try to use the few effective primaries.
Yeah that seems to be the case. Tbh I kinda get what the devs are saying but they are just doing a terrible job at balancing at the moment. I found that using primaries for the small guys is the best use. Imo I just don’t get why you would use a primary to kill a devastator when almost every support weapon can do it with half the effort. It still doesn’t change the fact that primaries feel awful right now tho
Why is the stalwart a support weapon then? The only reason to bring it was when the eruptor was good lol
Yeah that's great but then when you can't get your equipment back, you're done. The game is over. The other day I got mobbed by bots and three Hulks were camping my corpse. I've got stun grenades, the sickle, no medium armor pen never mind heavy, and fifteen minutes left on the cooldown for my support weapon, because a map modifier doubles the cooldown time. Fantastic. This is what fun looks like.
@@stronensycharte64 because it would outright replace 80% of the other primaries
adjustable rof, same bullet as the liberator, reload on the move and 100 round mag
@@stronensycharte64 Stalwart is supposed to be a primary weapon. Someone probably made a mistake on the product team.
Thank you for the feedback. Jar 5 dominator will have a 50% chance of detaching one of your limbs on every shot. Please use strategems.
Helldivers 2 is in dire need of a LARGE buff patch. There’s far too many sub-par weapons. Enemy headshot accuracy needs to be tweaked as well.
People give the Punisher Plasma a lot of flak, but it for me it is the Slugger replacement. You can get decent range on it, it staggers, and it can blast lower mobs
For me the PP strikes a good balance between fun and effectiveness. It reloads fast and if you're unlucky enough to run into a patrol of like 20+ troopers (which I usually am) firing a few shots and blasting them all is so much fun. It can also take out striders in two shots, and for primaries I want them to be effective at killing at least one of the medium mobs effectively.
Plasma Punisher is S tier against bots and C against bugs. IDK what he's smoking but any group light and medium close together gets destroyed or stun-locked, especially Shield devastators.
I think a lot of why he doesn’t like it is his solo playstyle. If you aren’t placing your shots to keep the group together, then it can feel so slow to kill some of the medium enemies. Still one of my favorite weapons in a squad. Sending rounds over a teammate’s head and stunning a group of berserkers to keep them from getting run down is so satisfying.
its saved me so many times in situations where I can just arc the shot over a rock and stay in cover, instead of sticking my head up and getting hit by a million rockets
Agreed. It’s now the “best” AoE weapon including vs the scorcher at times.
scorcher got the pinpoint and focussed AoE for closer kills, puni-plas brings in AoE stagger and more AoE distance n damage.
All 3 othe AoE weapons have major issues. Eruptor has AoE drop-off and a unusual ammo/RoF/handling. Now is somehow the Direct Damage weapon with a light-pen AoE (that got its range nerfed) and also terrible ammo economy because it’s a poor man’s JAR (1/3 the ammo, way slower projectile, some damage traded in for basically useless AoE and the ability to self-delete at remarkable ranges). Purifier is a scorcher with +50 damage (presumably AoE but the data isn’t being updated in the wiki) but with 1/3 the RoF and some med-pen DD on a gun with no meaningful scope.
they did give the dominator a huge buff, 200 to 300 damage (which got reduced to 275 later) and a lot more stagger. it was awesome, i wish they buffed other weapons like this too. i think all ARs (except sickle) could straight up use a 50% damage buff. all of them should be able to 2 shot devastator heads and mow through hordes of bugs. sickle is fine since it already has the benefit of puking so many bullets. diligence should get it's damaged bumped up to 150 to 1 shot devastator heads + 25 mag capacity and diligence sniper should get like 200-250 damage to be able to compete with dominator better imo (especially against bugs)
or they could just nerf dominator and call it a day :(
If they nerf the Domjnator instead of fixing other weapons we will have all the proof we need that the “balance leader” only wants to nerf weapons and refuses to make any meaningful buffs.
I will quit the game if they nerf the dominator again without significantly buffing other weapons 😭😭😭
Diligence needs medium armor pen more than it needs damage. Though damage on top would be welcome with open arms.
Completely Agree. Honestly, the Liberator should be made A tier weapon at least, it should be good in every scenario but no the best, providing new players a reliable and strong weapon but reason to explore other weapons.
Taking from TF2's original game design, the standard weapons like the AR should be best all-rounders but be worse than other weapons in their niche. At the moment they are just garbage.
Liberator's damage should be increased to 90-100 and its armor pen to 2.5(eg A chance to pen higher armor)
Lib Concussive's damage should be increased to 110 and its rpm to 480-560 and its armor pen to 2.5 OR make it explosive again with more damage and pen
Lib Penetrator's damage should be increased to 85-95
Tenderizer's damage should be increased to 100-110 and its armor pen to 2.5
Adjudicator's damage should be increased to 120-140 and more accurate/stable but keep recoil
Diligence's damage should be increase to 175-200 and its armor pen to 2.5
Counter Sniper's damage should be increase to 225-250
I tried the JAR before and it didn't feel great when I used it. After this I may try it again. I just couldn't get into it before
Placing JAR is S maybe only by its strength ceiling. This gun is extremely hard to use.
P.S. Tried it for a dozen games -- this thing is kinda cool. Nice stagger. Nice damage. Awesome max ttk. Amazing min ttk. Reload is kinda slow but whatever.
It has to be. Best marksmanship weapon in the range that matters (medium), it has slow bullets but 0 damage drop, and your not reliant on headshots to do damage.
One of the best suppressive fire primary, the best in term of damage.
Great to get out of melee range pinches where handling doesn't matter as much, with stagger, raw damage, and RoF
It sways too much i dont like it
All I do is one tap bot heads with it, idk what you're talking about. You can even mag dump into chainsaw guys accurately
It is, but once you get used to it, it's probably the best primary in the game.
I even use it against bugs, since it can handle Bile Spewers and is exceptional against mediums (Even if it comes at the cost of being annoying to use against hunters).
Yup. I main it, and have tens of hours at lvl 9 at this point, and it's by no means a "pick it up and feel powerful" weapon, which is what S-tier should be. The fact is the avg HD2 player doesn't have years of FPS experience, doesn't know what "feathering shots", "tapfiring", or "pop shotting" means, likes guns with good ADS over good theoretical TTK, and cares more about ADS and spray TTK than precision shot placement. Plasma punisher, Sickle, and Scorcher are going to do wayyyy more for them.
Some of these claims in the responses are such cap. Best marksmanship weapon, no damage drop off, doesn't need headshots for quick TTK, all cap. I'd love to see them playing on 9 just spraying and praying and having no concern on ammo. The bullet for sure drops off starting at 40m - I know because I'll use it for long range engagement when I bring AC, Spear, or laser cannon on bots. Landing headshots on back to back enemies is a rough time unless you're really used to the gun.
Just look at all the solo helldivers on YT bringing AMR as their supply weapon and basically using it as their main until they have to bring out their primary, and bring scorcher instead. There's a reason for that. I know OhDough loves JAR, and I do too, but to pretend it doesn't have significant drawbacks to offset its strengths is cap, and the fact is most HD2 players are going to have a bad time if they just look at this tier list and try it out.
Every single gun should be able to one shot bodyshot scavengers.
Disagree with sickle because of it's extreme ammo capacity and fire rate, also what counts as a 1-shot for laser weapons?
@@sinteleonAgreed
@@sinteleonthere's no reason for the lowest tier enemy should take more than one shot from anything
@@Pr0m3th310us Again, the sickle has way higher fire rate than every other weapon outside of the MG line of support weapons, with way more ammo per mag than every other weapon except for stalwart. All that, and it has infinite ammo.
@@sinteleon "Every single gun should be able to one shot bodyshot scavengers, except the sickle, that one should take 2-3 because sinteleon thinks it has too high a fire rate"
Happy?
I think scorcher is A, but other than that I mostly agree. The fact that there aren't at least 4 or 5 more A tier weapons really shows how horrible the weapon balance in this game currently is.
Slugger w/ stun was my baby. That thing was glued to my hands. Can't believe they made me replace it with the Jar.
I really don't see why they both don't have it...
The two S tiers are the only guns I use. Can’t wait for their nerfs.
Took a break from the game for the last month, crazy to see how the meta changed. They really massacred so many guns.
I could just say things should be different but if you actually want to do research on good primaries check out different players' Diff 9 solo uploads and see the variety of weaponry used.
I know it's popular to shit on AH for weapon balance right now (and I disagree they should even be weapon balancing 3 months into the game), but pretending there's only 2 good primary weapons is...cap.
@thepromman I agree with what you're getting at, but at the same time, it comes down to skill as well. Most content creators playing on helldive are skilled players. They could probably make a wet noodle look viable.
I think that anything B tier and higher is probably viable for most average players... it's just not as fun as it could be.
Idk about you, but fun is my first priority when I play. Getting home after a long day of work only to play AH's fantasy of being expendable and powerless isn't super appealing to most people.
Definitely a fine line that they've crossed recently.
The Devs need to stop trying to optimise weapon stats and just make them all fun to use. Every update it feels like the effective weapon selection is worse. Helldivers 1 had amazing primaries, they should look to the past for inspiration instead of trying to fight meta players.
After the railgun update everything went downhills, not because of the railgun, but because they did so many changes to the game that is unrecognizable now to day 1
I think one part of the reason one can place two weapons in S and most in C is less of their weapon performance but how the game design of larger "medium" and "medium large" enemies are balanced around being meant to be handled with support weapons, but then those medium larges can be oppressively common on higher difficulties and tough constellations. A regular Liberator, which I personally think is fine, will deal with fodder bots and bugs more or less as expected, but then a medium enemy appears and they become a massive ammo sink whether you're throwing DPS into a meat shield or hunting for a lucky headshot. That big gulf is meant to get you to use a support weapon but those primaries in S can handle the situation better than any others without sacrificing too much. The fact that we only have 4 stratagem slots does constrain our options a lot too.
Yup. Dumping almost a liberator mag killing a brood commander. Meanwhile there's two more and three hive guards right in front of you.
And all three brood commanders callin extra warriors around them. Its no wonder people think primaries are undercooked.
Dominator and the pre-gutted Eruptor are, in my opinion, what should be the gold standard for weapon balance. Very strong primaries that are useful in a variety of situations, but with heavy downsides. Slow fire rate, low ammo, worse handling, self damage. There's smarter ways to keep weapons in check than "they do no damage now just rely on your teammates more lol."
It was so fun when the eruptor was good, bringing the eruptor enabled me to bring support weapons like the stalwart, now I haven't touched the stalwart since the nerf, very sad balance team lmao
@@stronensycharte64 I used to run MGs with both the Slugger and Eruptor but that's a big fat F. MGs desperately need more specialized weapons like the those to have a place in the game since, honestly, even if MGs were good, they'd still be irrelevant. They're just glorified primaries. Something like the Eruptor which was better suited for big mobs gave a weapon like the Stalwart a chance to shine since it covers such a big weakness of the weapon.
The problem with the Eruptor was that all the downsides you listed are immediately rendered moot by just taking a Stalwart. Now you have all the power of the Eruptor and a de facto primary weapon that’s basically an AR that holds 100 rounds
@riskyflash6812 Actually there's no problem there because that's a perfectly normal way to build your character. You cover your weaknesses. Eruptor + Stalwart still isn't even that good because it has a glaring weakness to tanks. Stalwart is only barely good enough to kill the small mobs and the Eruptor (minus one-shotting Chargers which it shouldn't have been able to do) is way too slow to reasonably deal with tanks. How would this even be a problem in a PvE game?
I felt like the Eruptor was perfect aside from the over abundance of ammo. The way they have ammo now seems fine except they gutted the shrapnel of the gun so it feels shit to use now.
People seem to frequently make these tier lists for weapons based on how they perform in solo situations.
Which I always feel is a weird choice because the game almost requires you to play in groups of 2-4 where you can build your load out around the team.
Breaker Incendiary clears swarms of bugs but struggles a fair bit if no one has something that can deal with medium armour.
Meaning people need to bring impact nades, which means no concussive for larger stuff like a charger.
It doesn’t need to be an S tier weapon so long as it compliments the rest of the teams load out especially at higher difficulties.
Waiting for thickfila to come in here and yap about how every gun is s tier
He did a tier list like a month ago, about half the guns he said were trash or average lol
LOL he do enjoy using Poopfier 😂
After watching your breakdown of incendiary breaker for bugs, it changed my life. It feels like it should be the gold standard for crowd control primary weapons. The new defender SMG with concussive is cute, but this thing SHREDS buggos.
Also i HATE that the primary lasers are so skinny. Im literally pissing on terminids, I need FAT BEAM
Thx dough hope the great "Rebalancing" comes soon🙏
Yeah Scythe is a joke. Probably better than a water gun, that I can attest to.
Thanks for advocating for better marksman rifles. I thought I would LOVE these guns, but they ended up absolute C-F tier, which is correct. I wish they have a Marksman that had the base damage of Jar 5, and make Jar 5 explosive penetrate the toughest armor (like Red visor). That would do justice.
i appreciate the one-handed trait on SMGs not necessarily for the shields but for being able to hipfire accurately while jogging away from enemies on my way to the objective.
i also like Eravin's guide on using assault rifles. Aim for the limb or medium weakpoints instead of the head to get more consistent performance against 1 HP section compared to spreading damage between 2+ different HP sections.
Also, correction for 1:39, Devastator heads have 130 HP not 125 HP.
I wouldn't say the pummeler has "concussive" because it is not the stagger effect that weapons like concussive liberator has.
Instead, Pummeler has EMS stun 0.5 sec which is superior to stagger.
Compared to something like the Jar5 that has a lot of stagger and the damage you have an easier time keeping shots on target because that stagger animation really throws the enemy around. But the Jar5 hits like a truck.
Pummeler feels like a team support gun at times letting you mini stun enemies.
Pummeler is about the only consistentachine gun right now
I think you should take another look at the plasma punisher mate. When you are experienced with it hitting guys at 75+ meters is no problem. Can completely stun lock devastators and kills them in a few shots, stun locks groups of beserkers killing them as well. It’s a great gun.
You need to lay off the copium pal
I dont understand why SMGs have such a slow fire rate and so little recoil. SMGs feels like ARs more than ARs.
sickle is S tier for me. I bring it on solo helldives and it's wonderful. truly what an AR should be in this game, massive mag that can shred any light or medium enemy.
if they left the x6 mags that came with it should atleast be a
@@Jdp313 the mag change really didn't do anything to the gun if you use it correctly
@@Bopiz787 Agreed, if you were going through 6 mags before finding ammo at a PoI or restocking from a resupply, that's a skill issue. Reducing 6 to 3 is imo the funniest non-nerf nerf I've seen in a balancing changelog.
Not effective against medium enemies no, bt light enemies are no issues yes.
I used to love it on bugs but stalkers ruined it to me. It just cant handle stalkers at all one of the worst weapon against them.
I’d put the penetrator at the Davy jones locker tier. It’s so little damage that against most medium armor enemies you can’t kill anything by mag dumping into the armored areas anyway
IMO plasma punisher is the best gun for bots . You can kill factory striders and clear a bot drop if you get under it right before it drops
Plasma Punisher is only a B tier weapon because of its stun lock effect. Without it it’s a D tier weapon because of its poor damage stat.
The Plasma Punisher would be a D-tier weapon without its ability to stun enemies. With the Stun it barely makes it into B tier imo. It still needs more buffs to be viable against Bugs at level 9. There’s no reason the PP should take 4 shots to destroy a Bile Spewer.
@@crackededge9351 Agreed, but with the stunlock I kind of like it, because it allows it to deal with all bot enemies medium and below somewhat reasonably (even if it's annoying against devastator). I think it works with AMR and Laser Cannon
Dominator, on the other hand, feels terrible to use against small bots, and against strider, even if it's great against devastators and berserker. It's a good match for the autocannon
EDIT: since I forgot to mention, I played up to level 7, mostly solo. So take what I say with the right pinch of salt.
I don’t really play bugs much so I wouldn’t know how it’s over there
@@crackededge9351 You are extremely uneducated. It is MINIMUM A tier.
I used the eruptor a couple times back when it wasn't 100% shit. It was the only reason you could bring LMG stratagems without shooting yourself in the foot.
Once you get into higher difficulties we definitely feel more funneled into a meta. Theres barely any variety in what we can choose to bring.
Bring anything outside of the very small meta pond and its basically a death sentence.
I have not seen anyone argue Eruptor was meant to one shot chargers. Pretty much everyone would have been fine fixing that, it was removing the ability to one-shot hive commanders, stalkers, and bile spewers that really hurt.
One thing I enjoy running, while it's definitely not extremely good, is diligence + AMR (and supply pack) against bots
I run the diligence because it's able to take out all of the small bots really quickly with the high fire rate and low recoil, as well as not having to worry about ammo too much so you can spam the hell out of it.
Then, I use AMR for pretty much everything else, because the diligence is practically useless for everything else.
It's a fun loadout, not exactly great, but very fun.
I love running the AMR and the Liberator on Automatons for the same reason.
It's valid, but I feel like if you're exclusively using your primary for getting rid of small enemies, you might as well use the Liberator. The scope is mostly similar, and if you tap fire it's still accurate at range, but it can also seamlessly transition to mowing down groups in full-auto when you need to.
The new pistol one-taps small bots. Its not bad.
I really hope they start putting in some primaries that kill big things, so we have more reason to use the LMG stratagems.
A RUclipsr by the name of Eravin did a video breaking down how damage works that explains some of the issues Dough is listing for example the why the diligence does not one shot devastators is probably due to the fact that every gun has falloff damage that is rounded down by at least one and because the rifle does exactly the damage on base as the devastator head it may be 1 damage short to kill it. Do note in this example durable is ignored as well as AP as the Diligence does have the requirements to beat it without damage being negated and the Devastator head having 0% durable.
For anyone keen for a decent breakdown of damage calcs go check Eravin out.
i dont think they ever intended the diligence to oneshot them, hence they placed this directly on the breakpoint
@user-ve3fz3bm7z 100% agree otherwise what would be the point of the Diligence Counter Sniper, starter vs upgraded variant.
Gonna have to disagree with you on the Scorcher. Considering the Dominator's poor performance against Scout Striders, and the fact that the Scorcher can kill them in 4 shots (TTK of about a second), makes it better than the Jar5 in my opinion. Can the Dominator kill Scout Striders? If you dump a whole mag into them sometimes. I'll take consistently killing Scout Striders over the stagger offered by the Jar every single day. Plus the low sound profile makes it that much better to solo with. Also, I don't think LARPing means what you think it means. I'm pretty sure its the exact opposite of what you think it means.
Its about 3-4 shots to the crotch with dominator to kill scout strider.
The "b" weapons feel like im playing "fair" , the Fire breaker feels like I'm more effective than the machine guns sometimes (on bugs)
I love these satirical tier lists. I can't believe they keep this pay to win stuff with poor old weapons like the dominator and breaker incendiary languishing while the new hot warbond has such monsters as the purifier. And this is just primaries. Won't they ever nerf the railgun or finally do something to bring the spear down into line? Everyone loves their homage to the famous javelin, but please let us choose to try out a weapon like the laser or autocannon without obliterating our chances at any real difficulty tier.
what do you mean the autocannon is really good?
@@YABOYthechickenskewer yur smokin crack gun is trash lmao
(arrowhead is listening)
I really enjoyed the Eruptor on release, and I didn't even know about the charger exploit. Since the nerfs I feel like I can't justify using anything but the sickle
I think one easy thing they could do with the adjudicator, take the damage to somewhere in 100-ish, maybe even 120-ish, but return to pre-buff recoil. Make it feel like an actual battle rifle. Uncontrollable but full power cartridge. So you have to use armors with reduce recoil at crouch/prone to make it controllable but if you habit yourself around its recoil, you get a powerful full auto rifle.
The plasma punisher has ONE mission where i say its SS+ Alpha tier: Fortress defense.
You always have the high ground, enemies are always super clumped up. Drop ships hover right above you for the plasma balls to murder all the guys before they even get a chance. Bug breaches are right in your face yet you're super safe to bombard them from above.
Also, the Arc-12 Blitzer deserves S-tier. I used to hate it. i called the buff "not enough, still crap". But then i tested it, and it is now the only bug weapon i'll ever use. Yes, sometimes there's a little wilbur in the middle of a huge pile of bug bodies where i have to whip out my secondary redeemer and kill it. But that huge pile of corpses were all made with my trusty arc-12 blitzer, when all other weapons would've overheated, needed a reload, ran out of ammo, didn't deal enough damage, yadda yadda.
NO OTHER weapon in this game can singlehandedly stop any size of bug waves running at you like the arc-12 blitzer. incendiary breaker only gets close. No other weapon can oneshot a brood commanders head off and then stop the headless body runnign at you right there. While simulatenously aoe-murder all his friends around him.
I was the guy that got told "if you can't use the arc-12 blitzer, L2P, skill issue" when i complained about the arcs getting grounded by little rocks and dead bodies. i learned to play with it. it is god tier. If you can't handle it, learn 2 play, skill issue 😆
Taking the laser doggo is a good way of removing that lone Wilbur too (as well as hunters etc and cutting the legs off fellow helldivers... wait)
But yeah, I've been loving the Blitzer too (I only unlocked it a couple of days before the buff and was enjoying it then). The amount of times you're late into a mission, running for the LZ, surrounded by bodies and not having to worry about ammo. It's wonderful
I've rarely been bothered by the aiming issues either. Sure, there's times it'll hit dead bodies or rocks etc, but you can usually reposition or re-target, punch the bug in front of you etc. I often lob an impact grenade and move away
Get ready for Arrowhead to nerf everything above A tier after they find out about this video
Yea, that's also how I feel about the game. You need weapons to kill certain enemies quick, some weapons do that well, most don't. So in the end you pretty much always equip the same 2-3 weapons, because the others just don't do it.
To defend the punisher plasma c status. It’s a very effective stun tool. If you’re pulling a sentry build, use the plasma to stun targets that are closing in. It’s niche but effective. “Just gots to get gud”
putting liberator into f tier right off the back makes me almost feel like this is a meme of a video tbh.
Idk how you could even consider the liberator to be anywhere near a weapon like concussive or penetrator for instance. How does the gun have low ammo count when its able to dispatch anything under a devs within a few shots, and even enemies like devs can be downed rapidly with stomach shots.
I know some people dont like assault rifles, and I do think several of them need buffs for sure, but Im beginning to think that a lot of people just dont know what they are doing at times.
Fr, and putting the *scythe* of all things above that and in C tier is just wrong. Deserves to be much lower
The Liberator is a great gun in the right context and loadout. It's super effective against chaff enemies, especially Automatons. It can mow down groups of 10+ with a single mag. It has a zoom scope and can do this at medium-long ranges too. This also means fewer drop ships being called in. I routinely get the most kills in difficulty 7 and 8 random squads running the AMR and Liberator against Automatons. AMR for almost all enemies above chaff troopers, Liberator for the little guys.
45 damage and medium armor pen, limited magazine size (at least the dominator has the damage to compensate for that) I’ll rather keep my dominator
@@thatoneguy1741 I'm talking about the liberator not the penetrator. I specifically even said how the penetrator sucks even
When you go to helldive yea its good against hunters and wilbers and warriors, but against brood commanders, the 20 bile spewers and stalkers it will be useless outright, and against bots requiring to maintain aim against devastators is death sentence unless you have shield or stun grenades.
The dev said they don't want any metas, but they themselves have created metas for us
FYI I'm THE ArrowHead developer in charge of weapons balancing! so thanks for the info!!! My priority right now is to nerf the shit out of the Jar5-Dominator and the breaker Incendiary, I'm going to make them at least C tier because those weapons are too "overpowered", then i will work my way to remove all the weapons in your B Tier so we can really get a weapon balance utopia! Ty Dough!
I had a passionate dislike for the Eruptor the moment I got my hands on it.
But even after everything, now I’m a fan, because I can use it to destroy fabricators with much more ease and consistency than the grenade pistol, so it’s awesome for my stealth builds. And being able to stun devastators at long ranges makes it good for supporting my allies. It’s like the AMR and the Autocannon were merged by some Chinese manufacturer, but it hits all the right notes for me. Bring the redeemer and laser cannon to gain back your overall lethality and versatility.
I was so excited to unlock the Slugger last week only put it back on the shelf after using it against bots and bugs 😭
It's so bad. I've tried to make it work but it is just awful.
Same, looked forward to using it but just couldn't make it work.
I unlocked both breaker and slugger right before their nerfs. Nothing feels worse than a weapon you were hyped to use get neutered before you get to truly have fun with it.
It was such a perfect weapon before. I managed to use it for a few weeks before it was nerfed. It did great damage and the stagger was a staple of the weapon, it was fantastic against medium enemies but it was balanced because it couldn’t handle swarms of small bugs or bots. When they reduced the damage and gave the stagger from the slugger to the punisher (which makes NO fucking sense why a hail of small pellets would hit harder than a huge solid lump of lead), they removed any reason to use the weapon anymore.
I unlocked the slugger, went to bed because work the next day, and woke up to it being nerfed lol. Never actually got to use it when it was good.
The walkie guys got buffed so that they’re more resistant to explosive damage. That’s why the scorcher doesn’t 2 shot them.
id like to add that in co-op situations, having a party member with the pummeler is a godsend at times. the stagger can flinch a lot of enemies out of attacks, even stalkers, and ive genuinely saved lives before by shooting an enemy out of an attack that had an ally pinned down (spewers mostly). I feel it deserves an honorable mention for its sheer supportive power.
Also out of all the automatic guns it has very good firepower, not good compared to shotguns, but better than the other options.
The fix nobody is saying, make the break action shotgun a primary weapon
S tier vid as usual bro im on board with everything you said 👍 assault rifes are ass period
plasma punisher *can* be A tier, but you have to bring a supply pack so you can spam it at everything because you'll run out of ammo otherwise.
Yup, it actually was in a pretty nice place before the last "balance" patch with 12 total mags, but then they reduced it to 8 🤦♂️
I just call the 2 legged walkers, chicken walkers.
I'd love a 6+ armor pen primary weapon
I pretty much only casually play solo at lower levels right now, just grab whatever I want and hike around looking for super credits in some vague hope that a warbond with interesting shit comes around. Still in disbelief at the lack of thematic armor perks in the warbonds.
I'm shocked at how they're slacking with the cosmetics TBH. It almost seems intentional which is weird
@OhDough they worked on the game for 7 years and yet they're just like "I dunno! Stuff like that is just too hard 🤷"
@@OhDough Their argument about why they won't add transmogs because they want an armor's appearance to reflect what it did, only to follow by releasing an arctic warfare themed pack that included a snow colored armor that was just a servo boosted armor without the robot arm that made those armors easily recognizable made my brain hurt.
@@ZephyrKitten742Seems lazy and uninspired...
@@nicholasgutierrez4563 probably cause the devs at Arrowhead are lazy and uninspired
The thing is with the eruptor you could close bug outposts and blow up fabricators and had decent AOE with shrapnel. But now with no shrapnel and you can't as easily close bug outposts I'd say it's down from A tier to C.
Completely agree with buffing trash instead of nerfing the goodies 💯
I think the only weapons that got buffed from irrelevancy to relevancy are:
Flamethrower, Dominator, Laser Cannon, Counter-Sniper (Maybe).
Meanwhile:
Ruined the railgun. Ruined the Eruptor. Kinda sorta ruined the Quasar. Ruined an already mediocre crossbow. Ruined the breaker. Ruined the slugger.
So more weapons have been killed than saved. There's the AMR as well I guess but 1. it was already decent, not irrelevant and 2. we'd still be at a deficit.
If I'm forgetting weapons on either side, let me know.
This game has the barebones structure for lots of features that it just straight up doesn't have. people said it released feature complete, but it was more like it worked occasionally at launch and this was just an extended technical beta for the months after.
None of the weapons have a clear identity of what they were built to counter, not even the good ones because there is little to compare the good weapons to and their only plus is that they just don't suck to use which imo is a very bad plus for a weapon. if each class of weapons had a bonus for using them ie like marksman weapons like dmrs got a huge damage buff for headshots and weak points and the stats that made sense then it'd give a good reason to use them vs right now where there's no reason to use an smg unless it's niche or low level because the shotguns exist or using the dmr when the amr and jar5 exist and the same goes for orbital stratagems vs eagle stratagems.
And these are just problems with weapon selection. don't question why the enemy summons reinforcements immediately if they hear a twig snap when reinforcements are typically called in when your current force is close to depletion, or why the "ranged" bots don't use cover and need to close in like a mindless swarm of terminds to melee you with their fist when they literally have miniguns on their arms that can tap you from hundreds of meters away or how they just know where you are like a crappy version of the xenomorph ai from alien isolation.
now granted yes if i had to recode a whole enemy ai to take advantage of their strengths it would be a pain just as revaluating all the useless weapons would be but it needs to be done. unfortunately, at the same time by the time they work out the problems and get the game going in a "fun" state most of everyone can agree on it'll be either too little to late or the game will just be barely surviving in maintenance.
i love this game but god damn(sorry for the rant lol)
Pretty on point. Only a couple things I'd contest:
- I don't think the Liberator and the Liberator Penetrator deserve to be in the same tier. The base Lib is at least good at getting rid of light enemies ammo-efficiently at all ranges, whereas the Penetrator is a straight-up "noob trap" weapon (It sacrifices a bit of everything for the benefit of medium pen, but with the nerfed mag size _and_ damage it doesn't have the means to leverage that medium penetration ability, so it's a straight downgrade in practice)
- The Knight is actually more like a Stalwart that's permanently stuck at max fire rate, with 1/5 the magazine capacity and worse recoil. It deals some pretty considerable burst and could actually be a viable weapon, if not for the pathetic ammo pool, and for the fact that the one-handed SMG features on it are incompatible with the most productive way of actually leveraging the fire rate/burst damage (firing from crouch/prone).
- The Liberator Concussive is actually usable against bugs, but it still feels so boring that I'm not even going to bother making a case for it.
Erupter killing chargers in one shot wasn't an exploit. It was RNG. I liked the rng of it. Felt like any one shot could take out an entire patrol, or medium enemy, and yet more often than not it couldn't. And it's fine because of the overwhelming damage from shrapnel. Otherwise no, they killed it by getting rid of the shrapnel. It was reasonable before. Lacking in fire rate maybe. But it was a primary. I would switch it to the AMR's place and put the AMR in primary weapons halving the rate of fire before calling the shrapnel mechanics an exploit
I enjoyed how the Eruptor felt. Not so much with the one shotting chargers, but it felt good.
Right now, it just feels too weak considering the capacity and rate of fire.
I’ll admit I still run the Eruptor with a flamethrower build against bugs. Mostly for closing holes and killing spewers at a distance so I don’t have to do avoid acid spray while laying down a wall of flaming democracy.
For my playstyle you can take my plasma punisher out of my cold dead hands which doesn't even happen that often. It's really good against the bots in my opinion despite the devastator lack of effectiveness as it can stagger in an area which is great when you have three heavy devs coming at you that sort of thing.
Putting PP in anything other than S tier is a sin
Yeah I didn't get it either. Against automatons after rate of fire buff it feels good. 2 shots and staggers striders. One shots chaff and will kill devastators in 2 to 4 shots while staggering them.
@@GS-ng3ecHell its even A tier against bugs once you get used to playing around that splash radius
Plus being able to lob the shots over cover
@@GS-ng3ec Same problem as with normal punisher- it kills stuff too slow. On lower diff its alright since there are less enemies and bot drops are less frequent but higher you goes more you wish for something with better TTK.
Going ham and mag dumping the Incendiary Breaker into a swarm of bugs, quick reloading, and being ready to pick off any stragglers that survive the inferno sure does feel good. Hope it doesn't get nerfed to hell.
AoE and hard stun of the Plasma Punisher makes up for the slower medium TTK in my opinion. You can stun-lock a large group and take out a large patrol in a single mag if you juggle it right.
Punisher against bugs can be great if you're trying to keep moving, it lets you spray over your shoulder while running at nearly full speed. The ability to stagger bugs also really limits their ability to hurt you. It creates a safe buffer zone. Which can also be really helpful if you have incendiary impact grenades, as you can keep them in the flames longer. It also buys time for a teammate's Incendiary Breaker DoT to kill things. I consider it more of a crowd control weapon than anything, something the Defender lacks.
The ability of the Plasma Punisher to stagger with AoE is its best feature for crowd control. Particularly if you're working in a group, you can take the heat off your buddies by stopping two heavy devastators in their tracks at the same time by arcing your shots correctly. Also the PP's ability to WRECK Striders and drive Berzerkers back is invaluable. I've been loving this "n00b t00b" of a gun, it made automaton missions fun again.
It might be different running solo vs running in a group, but I love running the punisher at higher difficulties in a group.
The ability to stagger a bunch of bots with one shot and to be able to top off single shots is huge for allowing a 2nd player to mop things up. It also can kill if things get closer then comfortable. Only downside is that the range isn't great, but frankly everyone else is running longer range weapons so having someone CC/cleanup close is good.
Not a fan of the Jar, because of how low the ammo count is, along with it's atrocious handling. It was the primary I was the most excited for too, because only heretics are not excited for a Bolter analog. But it just doesn't do enough. Ya, you can unload a clip into a factory strider's belly, but why do that when we have support weapons that can take them out easier without having us have to scramble for ammo afterwards?
But I understand your arguments. Might not agree with them but I see the logic behind them.
The Jar takes out enemies in far less shots than just about everything else, the handling isn't terrible and the ammo isn't either. I'd rather hit an enemy once and be done with it than having to dump half a mag into one but you do you...
@@Mox3712 And I'd rather keep 3-4 locked down instead of having to try to get around them because they're chasing someone else. Too many times of not having the headshot because of a poor angle and/or an unlucky flinch for the Jar to be useful to me at any range.
The handling and ammo _are_ terrible on the Jar compared to the punisher.
The plasma punisher is not a solo weapon, but with a group of as small as even 2 people, its ability to lock several bots down is more valuable than most weapons.
Bots already take time to kill unlike bugs, so having a guy that can stunlock a whole patrol while the rest of the time take them apart is a massive game changer.
Against bugs you dont need defense, just high DPS and kill power. But on Bots you need a defense plan, most people take the shield pack or the balistic shield. But also a CC guy does wonders. dont underestimate this gun just because it lacks instant kill power. Bring it with your squad and you will notice people are MUCH safer.
With marksman rifles it would be interesting to strip amour. Idk if that would work but interesting. It would give them a ability that would help support and it would promote good aim for those players that like that
If a dev sees this video and thinks
“We need to nerf fire breaker and dominator”
Instead of
“We need to buff a lot of weapons so they are like the fire breaker and dominator”
Games chalked, they keep nerfing everything people find fun and want to use
Pummeler has amazing combo potential! Especially against bugs. It can stun lock a charger long enough for your precision strike or resupply to actually hit it. It can also save you big-time vs stalkers. You can kill one by mag dumping it, or keep 2-3 stunned long enough to make an escape. It pairs really nicely with the jetpack for this.
Love the new haircut brah
preciate it
I personnally would put Punisher in B or A tier against bugs. It's a good weapon to defend yourself but most importantly it has enough stagger to push back Stalkers while damaging them. You can potentially one shot them as well which is pretty nice. Plasma Punisher is for me B tier against bot. It does lack damage on body shot but I feel like if you miss the headshot and land a body shot, the stagger leave them vulnerable long enough to follow up with a headshot and just kill them. It also has good utility in the break eggs mission but that's about it on bug side.
Punisher is s tier for bugs
I have no clue why the SMGs do more damage per bullet than the assault rifles, and then the tenderizer does the same as the liberator despite being described as 'high caliber.'
We could of had the halo 3 BR as the tenderizer, instead we got a fucking massage gun
About Scorcher and those small walkers - as far as I remember there was a change that it is now "harder" to penetrate that front plate, and it allows less damage to go through (as far as understand - for all weapons, not specifically scorcher)
So Scorcher is (or at least should be) as it always was, it just the specific enemy was changed
Respectfully, the assault rifles are pretty decent and I would personally put the liberator and variants in C tier.
The standard liberator clears small and medium enemies and rewards accuracy while also having enough ammo to full auto when needed.
I guess I prefer guns that I can shoot more while thinking about ammo less.
Great video, interesting takes. I would like to see you do a challenge of starter armor, lib, peacemaker, OPS, Eagle air, Machine Gun, EAT-17. Go back to the beginning and see how far you've come!
This must be a troll list to have spray and pray above breaker
Slugger is a great choice if you can use it skillfully. It can one tap devistaters and berserkers with a headshot just like the jar but with much better handling, target swapping and acquisition. It has better accuracy and ammo economy than the jar. I would only favor the jar in close quarters against multiple berserkers for the stagger and rate of fire.
eruptor closes bug holes at any range. that's the only reason I use it, specifically when my "primary" is something like the flamethrower. it kills spewers inconsistently too I guess
Absolutely down for some V Rising videos. Started playing it myself partially off of your recommendation, and it KICKS ASS.
Gayest "Tier List"
the friends and family check list came back
my condolences
😂@@OhDough
Mmm... Colors
Going to have to disagree on the scorcher, its my go to for bugs, cause it can kill chargers while the breaker incendiary cant, additionally i use it to shoot out the belly of biles, then able to take em out with an eagle airstrike. I dont even use support weapons with it, instead I opt for 2 orbitals and 2 eagles
I imagine the purifier is so bad because they were testing the weapon when they had old explosion damage (explosion damage worked on limbs/heads) and it was probably okay, but now no matter where you hit an enemy, the eplosion damage from the weapon is only going to damage their main body rather than their weaker parts, which is why the scorcher is also worse now. They did a bandaid fix to stop people getting one shot by rocket devastators without buffing the weapons indirectly nerfed. Its also why the eruptor is so bad now, because the explosion damage wasnt doing anything, it was all the shrapnel. All they need to do is revert the change for enemies but keep helldivers more immune to explosion damage or reduce the rocket spam by bots.
Dude, you just revealed two whole weapons to the devs that are actually fun and effective. What are you thinking? Now we'll have nothing! lol