Helldivers 2 Dev Tracker

Easier than if they'd been used to it for 6 months. But yeah, we're not surprised that there are strong emotions, but people will adapt quickly. I will say that these changes should have less of an impact on the difficulty than I'd like. The primaries aren't really that much of a variable on the top difficulties, but the changes to the railgun and shield backpack will hopefully bring some more thinking back into the game.

That is definately a valid concern. We don't want to make changes to everything all at once, since it becomes hard to tell what effect an individual change has. There will be more changes, but it really comes down to what behavior we see from players. We're not balancing a high-stakes e-sport, so we're not really worried about an unfair advantage, we just want to encourage more varied playstyles.

The armors where bugged, yeah, but only in that it was defaulting to 100. So you might not see as big of a change as you'd think :P

The composer was Wilbert Roget, II. He doesn't work at Arrowhead, but he did an amazing job, I agree!
http://www.rogetmusic.com/...

Not exactly, it's more balanced around the mid range. With the higher difficulties being cranked up to where we think it should be slightly ridiculous.

Thank you, we do like that it works as well as it does. We want to work more into that too, yes, I think it should be a viable playstyle. But at the end of the day, it will have to end in a massive firefight, how else will the enemies of Super Earth learn the taste of Democracy?

If we've done our jobs right, all weapons should be equally good now, or atleast be closer on the power scale than before.

Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Hang in there!

We're not expecting to strike the perfect balance, this is going to be an ongoing process. We do want you to have fun, we just don't want one thing to be vastly overrepresented. I look forward to seeing what the new meta turns into, I'm happy as long as the players are being challenged.
My biggest problem was with the shield backpack and the railgun safe-mode, because they are so good compared to the brain power it takes to use them.

We'll be rolling it out on PS5 once we verify that this patch isn't breaking anything. We can't roll back updates on PS5 easily, so we're trying to be safe and checking how everything holds up on PC first.

The defender is pretty good, you're right. But we don't think it's too good, so we let that one be.

"A game for everyone, is a game for no one."

Sorry to hear that, but if you came to helldiver for a power-trip you came to the wrong place. It's a meat grinder. It doesn't matter if you're level 1 or 50, you should struggle on the higher difficulties.

Yes I am, you are free to disagree. You shouldn't even clear helldives at all if you're leaning on the primaries rather than your team and your stratagems.

Difficulty is indeed fine. You can absolutely kill bugs and blow sh*t up with the stuff we have on offer. Try the changes out and see what you think.
If it's just stomping you want I suggest dropping down a difficulty or two if it the higher difficulties are too hard.
Our vision is that you can only clear the highest difficulty with a perfectly coordinated team that all have a specialization that synergizes with the others in the group. We might not be quite there yet, but that's what we're aiming for.

A quick comment on why we decided to nerf rather than buff:
We're balancing a PvE game, that means we're balancing your power level vs. the difficulty of the game, not versus other players.

That means that if we bring all weapons up, we would also need to bring the enemies up proportionally to reach our target difficulty. We like what we see with the other weapons, so it made the most sense to bring the stronger stuff down a bit and the weaker stuff up.

On a personal note; I was horrified to see that people where crushing the harder difficulty only a couple of weeks after release. This is supposed to be a hard game, I want you to earn your success.

Good luck!

EDIT: Typo

No, whatever those folks are using isn't the finished version. We want you to play the one that is done, and not before we drop it. Should go without saying.

No dev would do that.

EDIT: To be clear; I'm talking about leaks in general. I'm not gonna comment on anything specific you might've seen. If we want to give you a sneak peek it'll be obvious that it's from us.

It wasn't a dev. It takes a certain kind of idiot to just go showing another colleague's work before it is ready, and we don't hire idiots.

EDIT: I'm not gonna comment on any video you might've seen in particular, but the idea that someone on my dev team would just hop online and start showing off stuff for cheap clout makes me feel sick. So drop that line of reasoning.

I agree with you, the weapons aren't upgrades to one another. We're looking into a lot of things right now and are focusing in some areas so we don't change things too much across the board. If we did, it could be hard to figure out what change caused what effect.

The thing about the Redeemer and Peacemaker is that even a small damage buff to the Peacemaker wouldn't really close the distance between the two in terms of raw potential damage, so to make them balanced we'd have to look at more than just small tweaks. And since the sidearms aren't exactly the most hard working parts of your kit, we might just leave them be for now, even if that means one is better. But we're looking into it.