"Hazard 5A" sounds about right going forwards, if 5+ is too nebulous

I’d love “enemy variety” and “swarm frequency” multipliers for haz 5+ Also just give us the ability to stack them all up to ridiculous levels. Make it like the pact of punishment in hades where you can mix and match difficulty modifiers anywhere from mild kick to literal hell

Your yapping is peak content please continue

Interesting stuff. I guess GSG should've worked with the modded difficulties community to make haz5+ more fun. It would also be nice if you went over all weapons and overclocks some time later like you did over a year ago

Bro is the mayor of Yappsville and we are the citizens 🗣️

omg even the huulis are buffed by aggressive 2 look at him ZOOM!

As a casual that is jumping from haz 5 to 6x2 from time to time haz5+ feels easier than 6x2 in majority of missions. The spawn rates of high priority targets and big targets of haz6 is still more, and they are the main pain tbh. Like, it doesn't matter if 50 or 60 grunts are running at me if I can kill them with 1 breach cutter blast regardless. But for example if there is more purple spiders that are coming at me from different angles the difficulty increase is more noticeable. But in missions where close combat is almost inevitable indeed haz5+ is harder. In 6x2 you can afford to dash through a wave of bugs to reposition, take cheap damage etc. In 5+ you literally have to play for no hit challenge cuz the second 1 or 2 bugs hits you you are essentially dead. Like Waste said it is not very fun, and I agree

i could see haz5+ with only "aggressive enemies" and "more enemies" be simplified to "more & aggressive enemies" or MAE2

Idk about lots of nitra... Each time I had enough only for 1-2 pods (and I had to actively seek out lootbugs). And it just added even more back tracking, it was fresh in the beginning, but quickly became annoying

I agree with u on the player vulnerability thing. The way I view Health in DRG, it's like a resource that I can spend to actually make my fighting plans work. I often find myself near-death because of this, but it just feels right and feels good to do so, u know 😂 Really gets my blood pumping, dancing through swarms and still live through it to take a resupply.

while I disagree with you on some things regarding build restriction, pretty much my thoughts exactly on the more lethal changes. Last night I played a haz5 2-0-2-2 and it was alright, but more of a pain. No one really had damage. Naturally, players over time will figure out effective ways to combat such difficulty, but I'm also curious about whether or not those additions adequately show up in the server search. Two people in the lobby had no idea I even activated 3 of the 4 modifiers. I know it shows next to the mission difficulty, with icons and the I or II. But I feel people are too conditioned not to see.. who knows, maybe it's just a player and time thing. That said, after that mission, I played around with haz 2-2-2-0, and that seemed more fun to me, than 2-0-2-2. I do agree that 2-2-2-2 would just be unfun. It's why spreadsheets and theory just fail. You just increase number and that means more difficult/fun right? Nope. I'm curious if I can play around with 2-1-2-1 or even a 2-1-2-2, but that'll be for another day. Not a fan of the naming schemes mostly though. Talking about haz5a, makes me thinks there's a tougher (or easier?) haz5b.. is there a haz5s tier? Who knows! I do enjoy the 2-2-2-2 scheme, reflects weapon builds. 32132

Ayyyy season 5 Waste baby! Awesome to see you back, and hyped to see more of whatever you’ll be cooking!

I came to the same conclusions about haz5+max but by playing it a bunch instead. I noticed the most effective strategies were to move together and always bunker right before a swarm, and that player vulnerability is by far the most difficult and unfun of the 4 modifiers, and removing it or even ticking it down to 1 instead of 2 DRASTICALLY changes the overall difficulty of the whole mission top to bottom start to finish. DRG has good balance in that when you get hit by something, it's meant to be a reminder you need to pay attention to something that you weren't focusing on. Could be a septic spreader's mortar wad, could be a spitballer in the dark across the cavern, could be a swarmer that crept up behind you, etc etc. All of these things are still designed in a way where the first hit is meant to be a reminder that springs you into a specific response. Even if you're at low health and that hit actually downs you, technically you're STILL being reminded to pay attention to something that you weren't (your health), so even then it does its job ...but with player vulnerability haz5+ mod, that reminder is no longer a reminder, but instead a blunt penalty for not *predicting* the incoming damage and flawlessly evading it. Punishing a player for not being able to predict that a specific enemy in a specific spot on a huge map of randomly spawning enemies was going to attack them right at a specific moment is VERY unfun, but were the hit to just dink you to keep you on your toes or jumpstart your situational awareness like it normally does, then all it really does is forcibly boost your engagement with your surroundings. This, I'm confident, is exactly why it works so well the way it is on haz 5 and below; it's enjoyable to get hit by something that surprises you and forces you to adjust strategy on the fly, but it's so extremely frustrating and unenjoyable to be downed by that same something you simply neglected to clairvoyantly anticipate.

as a haz 5 pub player, 100% agree. absolutely love the more bugs modifier, and would even like to see more tiers for it. as a certified driller main, massive swarms of grunts are infinitely satisfying to burn, freeze & melt in acid lol. also a fan of the aggressive enemies, is a good stepup in difficulty when it comes to kiting and what not bc in haz 5 as you said you can literally just jump through waves and they barely touch you if you're doing it right. however. dwarf vulnerability is the bane of my existance and just makes the game frustrating, and i was unsure abt the tankier enemies modifier but was leaning towards not liking it. but when you described it as "reducing build variety" yeah that solidifies it as really not good lol. like i love in DRG how there aren't really "bad" builds, like basically all weapons & OCs work as long as you're not contradicting your upgrades and what not. it's just that at higher hazards like 6+, it becomes clear that certains builds are definitely better and others just can't compete. and the tankier enemies just fully goes against that, a lot of things are just so hard to use there cannot wait to get my hands on the driller & gunner OCs, they look so damn fun. oh and yeah, love this video style. very interesting to hear your expanded thoughts and reasons on things

i didn't expect it to be a replacement for modded difficulties, i enjoy that they have modifiers rather than forcing any one particular difficulty standard. that being said i think a good way forward would be to add more modifiers (more waves, more elite spawns, harsher player scaling) that can increase or add to haz 5 stats to meet player expectations. i dont like the idea of 5A being the definitive experience and believe we have modifiers to let us decide what is the most fun, so i hope players choose what they want most and dont brute force the fun out of 5+ by running exclusively 5A.

I don't find the unfun difficulty options too bad since you can just not put them on. More Enemies and Aggressive Enemies both feel really good on II, and tough I gives a big stat bump to larger targets w/out touching common scaling. Skipping one or both levels of player vuln and only taking one level of toughness makes for a very enjoyable experience that wasn't otherwise available in vanilla.

Completely agree on the haz 5 modifiers. I love more enemies, and aggressive enemies is nice too when I'm up for a challenge. I most likely will never again click enemy health and player vulnerability. One funny quirk of the system is that I always put 0 or 2 for the levels, I just don't really see the use case for only one level of modifier. If you are at haz5 looking for more challenge, you are totally ready for just going +2 on your favorite modifier.

I think Haz 5 2222 should be "Haz 5 Max" personally. They really should've made swarm delay a modifier instead of player vulnerability. Also just feel like pointing out: Cluster bomblets do something around 40 on direct hits. So the per-shot damage is almost identical to Salvo's (though getting perfect hits is harder), with like 4x the effective ammo (~40 salvos vs ~160 cluster rockets), probably 3x the effective DPS, and actual effectiveness at range. And Salvo isn't even that bad to begin with. Very balanced overclock.

I like the format a lot. I LOVE how you define your fun and context before giving what I feel is really constructive feedback. You made a point to highlight some of GSG's reasons to focus on designing for casual players before comparing the new content to modded games. Why should GSG spend resources on a market which is: 1) way smaller than I think you think (only an extremely slim margin of players install mods, let alone feel 6x2 is chill; and more importantly 2) a market whose needs are already perfectly well served by mods! If I were gsg I'd def take your feedback into strong consideration. I'd like to see less nitra received per pickaxe strike, smaller nitra patches, or fewer patches, or any combo of the three. The buffs to ammo count would inherently make guns weaker from swapping. That alone gives the players agency in choosing the problem they'll have to deal with.

looking forward to your vid on the new OC's!

I agree that the buffed health and damage is annoying and a cheap way to increase difficulty, reminds me of terraria as the increased damage and stuff in master mode is annoying but the new biss phases where cool.

rambling is peak content please continue!

How close to 6x2 can you get with the 5+ difficulty modifiers? Is there some level of fine-tuning that recreates the experience? If not, how close does it get?

My biggest problem with tougher enemies is break points on weaker enemies like as you said makes some weapons useless like imo a better way to approach it would be make big bugs like praetorians stronger but like 5% to 10% as to not make them bullet sponges but still more hard

ELECTRO MINELETS!! HYPE YES THANK YOU 🙏🙏🙏 Loved the takes, and the video style! Would love to hear more stuff in this format!! As a very minor nitpick, maybe a bit of a positive spin at the end would've been a nicer spot to end it? Leaving it with the jetty boots discussion kinda felt a bit of a sour spot to end on--BUT I LIKED THE VIDEO A LOT AND REALLY AM EXCITED TO SEE MORE FROM YOU

4:30 don't forget Left for Dead 2 :P

great video, I agree that player vulnerability is kinda dumb, it's not enjoyable to just instantly die to certain projectiles that are sometimes almost undodgeable. Also yeah, it rewards bunker playstyles which are honestly the most boring strat hands-down. I think a good change would be making player vulnerability only make you take more damage from certain enemies instead of all of them, for example it feels fine on grunts and makes them a more dangerous threat when comboed with the aggressive enemies modifier.

Honestly your takes on haz 5+ are how im feeling too. I've just been sticking to more and aggressive enemies for the most part. Deep scan is pretty fun mission too. The drillevator still has the cinematic magic so I'll see if I start to hate it or not later on. From someone who doesn't play modded drg outside of 10+ dwarfs messing around, Haz 5+ doesn't feel that much harder, just more annoying with dwarf vulnerability and durability. It just messes too much with my mental numbers which is too much permanent damage I cannot afford to take. I do like the new secondaries we can get both on regular missions and DDs too. Having a small refinery without the defense phase of it feels fast and nice alongside finding 2 crystals. They shake up the DDs more which thank god, DDs really needed new content after the drought of S3-4. The new warnings help it out a bit too. I am curious to hear your opinion on the OCs because they're definitely very unique compared to what we have now. I'm running builds like burning nightmare sludge pump and taking repellant off of platform guns suddenly.

I wish drillevator was way bigger, so it actually feels like a massive lift arena section (halo the first game that comes to my mind)with no resupplies . Rn it's just an overglorified dorreta section, kinda lame and sad.

Correction: The crystals you are scanning are called resonance crystals, they are not valuable or precious, they only serve the purpose of letting mission control triangulate the final destination; the morkite geode.

Great vid love to see you back! Really want to here what you think of the oc’s

DRG is such a game that i can't play a video or music on the backgroud because it requires so much attention. I find it really interesting.

new best overclock in the game? but electro minelets has been ingame since overclocks were added, no?? Please clarify

I am really happy that they added the difficulty modifiers (i like the agressive bugs and more bugs only really. Maybe 1 tick into tougher enemies but thats it). This is because i like to play with other people or randoms so having a 6x2 lobby is impossible for me, so i do like how there is a lite version of 6x2 (that i wish i could try) that i can play with my friends potentially and with randoms

wtf waste is alive?

haz5 + max is easier than 6x2 i havent cleared 6x2 solo lmao already did it with haz5+ even more since its a new patch and you see a lot of greenbeards joining sidenote: if you still hate how good jetty boots are, just think of it as you getting lucky in a roguelike run, we already have randomly generated cave and random-ish enemies, and the roguelike game theyre now making was supposed to be just a patch to drg so mebe ppl should really start adding that genre to drg lmao

The best thing they did with the hazard 5+ mechanic is being able to choose what you want to increase as a modifier. L will probably increase the amount of enemies and aggressiveness, games that just increase damage you take and health for difficult usually create bland or unhealthy gameplay. Another thing to add is imo hazard 5 + will be a big thing for console, since in pc we can just mode to what we want anyway. Even them some players just despise moding so the option being right there is good for the game. L would suggest you and the modding community gives feedback for more options in how we increase difficulty instead of just diminishing its value. More settings for haz5+ is the way to go. This season is incredible, although we can sure make hazard 5+ better 😅.

I come from game with very hardcore friendly fire and its super cool coz u need to focus and think more befor shooting, but im not sure in drg, threre a lot of AoE weapons

I haven’t played haz 5 plus but I feel like I would agree with you, considering how little fun shield disruption is. Dwarve vulnerability should be replaced with like swarm intensity

Great video tho the resonance crystals aren't called geodes, geode is the main objective

based on this video i think we should buff cluster missiles

I enjoyed this video format. Thanks for sharing

I think if its Haz5+ with just 1111 then just one +, if its is Haz5 with 2222 then it should be Haz5++

DRG has an excellent learning curve. The speed at which you unlock new tools and learn how to use them against tougher bugs while learning faster ways to complete objectives navigate caves etc is excellent. The difficulty curve being lackluster always felt to me like it did the game a disservice. I'm still continuing to improve at this game with well over three hundred hours, but the bugs have been the same since hour 30. I understand that many players will never reach haz 5, and that many more will simply be content playing on easier difficulties and relaxing with their friends. The game has plenty to offer these players, but it also has plenty more to offer those willing to take the plunge, and I've always been of the opinion that all of the depth the developers have poured into this game is severely underappreciated when the max difficulty your average player has access to requires them to use only a fraction of it. With that being said, I highly doubt any more difficulties will be added past this point, and while I appreciate the sentiment I really do wish they had gone further if only to push more players towards the modded community.

Hard agree on the friendly fire encouraging toxicity. I've had multiple games where players will kill their teammates before they leave the mission and also just randomly. This one time a gunner host would constantly intentionally shoot at his teammates and it ended up with him killing all of us, going afk and then failing the mission because he took too much damage through the drop pod resistance. I was banned from his lobby and I'm only upset about it because I never got the chance to block him on Steam. I am 50/50 on removing friendly fire because in my 750 hours of game time, this has only ever happened to me 4 times, but it is significant enough that I would say removing it is warranted. A nice middle ground could be keeping the feedback and voicelines from the friendly fire but remove the damage wholesale. It would keep the personality but remove the frustration.

They "fixed" the bomblet trigger delay on the most recent patch right? I understand that it's a pretty powerful OC but still can't but to feel as if I had been robbed of great power.

yapping is the way to go tbh, very good for second monitor enter entertaining

I'm getting quite a few crashes but I don't want to disable all of my mods. Is there any information that can be gleamed from the crashlogs like payday 2 crash logs?

Hey how do you unlocked the cluster missiles for the Missile-launcher? I don't know how but i don't get any more weapon OC on the forge neither on machine events. It seems like they aren't in my game or something.

Haz 4 casual reporting!! Love your videos

Pfffft uve got clusters it doesnt count im only half joking, but im very aware you specifically could do this without it also, ive started hugging the wall on my way up the big hole, and then tapping c to start bringing molly up before the pod lands, makes it take a slightly less painful amount of time.

Nice video style, wasn't bored at all.

I'll definitely be playing with just more enemies and aggressive enemies. Like you said the other 2 are just not fun

hello i would like a yappucino (nice video)

I agree with most of the points Tried the new difficulties, the faster and more enemies are the fun ones, the other ones I just don't really touch. I like the breakpoints and such where they are. Can't really comment on the drillevator thing for solos, but it's a fun, if not too challenging, ride down. More cinematic than anything, but still neat. Sometimes a little cramped feeling with four people running around. Overall, season 5 looking good. There's not anything that's... ANNOYING to fight against like rockpox was. getting ganked by several stalkers at once is an experience, and while there are definitely some, let's say, not so powerful overclocks in the mix, the majority of them are a lot of fun to play with, even if not super strong.

I thought this video format was good, I think the "rambling" works as you are going through a list of bullet points.

Good video, i like separate commentary over gameplay. When it comes to hazard 5+ I joined a 5+ 2222 lobby yesterday, spawned next to 2 spitballers wirh no cover, froze a spitballer with cryo cannon, dumped 2 subata magazines into it and it still fucking lived. And then i proceeded to die a single spitballer shot. Insta left that shit. I'm definitely not picking stronger enemies ever. That modifier is just gatekeeping 90% of the weapons and overclocks in the game. Fuck that. Also not picking player vulnerability I think, but maybe later down the line I'll pick it just to artificially boost the difficulty. That said, lethal enemies and more enemies are amazing imo. I'm not a fan of modded difficulties mostly because not many people join those games. So having an official difficulty that's comparable to the modded one is very nice. That's honestly the biggest thing for me in the season 5. Well that and old seasons since I didn't play them and I want something to grind for.

Opinions on the Core Stone events?

hi waste; has anything developed regarding the mod hub / unified ui situation, and does unified ui work in S5?

cluster feels good but I'm usually still rocking neurotoxin rounds

I hope they work on the vunurabliliry part, or let u choose

So this cluster missiles overclock sounds like it has just stolen the niche that frag missiles has. PB Missiles are still gonna be good because of their ability to shred bosses.

The goat is back

Hey do you recommend buying helldivers 2 if played exclusively solo? I dont think many people play it where I live and I dont have friends to convince to play with me

How did you get the old damage indicator for your shield back? I find the new one too distracting and limiting on visibility

What do you think about the cluster charges after the nerfs?

Hey, i’m newish to DRG and i’m wondering if there is a website or a chat where good players like you speak about builds and loudouts that fit the meta.

looks like you have mods installed, are you still using unified UI, or have you gone back to mod hub? or rather, what can I use to even run mods without crashing in s5 😅

Just came out of a struggle os 2 hours with a friend with the New Haz 5 2222. And yeah, its not that fun. We had to change our build to a really meta build, and we were still getting killed vem after playing perfect. One time we were perfect, and them a shellback spawned and hitted us. And boom, I died and my friend got tô low health and a grunt finished us off. That happened um seconds and we had everything under control before that heppened

I enjoyed this style of video. i too felt like the new mission type was cool but not really super amazing, i think it has potential to be better. im interested to hear what you say about the overclocks. also what graphics card do you have you're using the lowest settings ive seen + upscaling

21:54 I had a nemesis and bulk spawn in the drillevator section, and while theire not fast enough to get the the drillevator I shit myself

Could you put the cluster charges build in the description?

Also it's not that Hard to get New hazard 5+ I once saw a scout who didn't have a single promotion which lead to expcted outcome

It feels kinda hard to keep watching because your constructive criticism doesn't match up with how I feel about the game, but I would say you do have some good points. I think ghost ship games could improve hazard 5+, but the point of hazard 5+ is for people to choose how they want to make things harder, so it doesn't really bother me that much that some of the options aren't as good as others. I get a lot of my enjoyment from just shooting the guns, so I don't mind some of the slower sections of the game, though I am not a very big fan of the caretaker mission.

Haz 5a as a long time 1300 hour greybeard, is legitimately so unfun. Some mission types literally i dont even think are possible to win solo or almost impossible. Build diversity is basically non-existent and boils down to "which set up do you want to use to cheese the bugs" and using anything else is an immediate L. Get too close to the edge of your shield? Instant death. Big culprits are tough enemies and especially player vulnerability. And for such an insane spike in difficulty, you get less of a bonus than just cleaning up 1 or 2 contagion spikes. Legitimately not well thought out at all.

I personally think that enemy toughness has some potential to be interesting for shaking up the breakpoint meta/make other weapons more viable like Ai Stability Engine but for that to happen they probably need to reduce the multiplier

My favorite part is when you stopped being nice and snapped

erm, waiter! more yapping please!

Hello, just curious how you can do the fast movement on the zip lines. I have tried jumping on and off, but I cannot seem to go as fast as you in the video.

all that algorithm stuff

I haven’t played since last year, is this new difficulty like the last mission on an elite deep dive? Also, what kind of state is the game in? I’m thinking of purchasing on steam but am kind of hoping for a sale.

5+8 i call it

Man I thought you were ganna love this update😭

I like your commentary videos so make more please

PLayer vulrnability is for people who do no-hit speedruns. It's optional for a reason.

I do agree with some of your points I also disagree with some of the other points.

So does this mean you'll Verm more?

Love the video type

Hey waste I was wondering if you could show ur graphic settings and what you have them set to

keep yapping

u r the best

Hello, what is your favorite mission type?

holy shiz waste alive

They just nerfed the oc rip 😭

Rock and stone

Young Margaret Walker Christopher Miller Jeffrey

i like hazard 5EX for 5+'s name

I liked this video

I allways accidently reload with this OC. Minelayer is still 10times better

I like the video type