You can just change sides to shoot accurately while arrowhead fixes this, i made a video demonstrating it: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/isinkqyQldanqZc.html

4:30 "I acknowledge the council has made a decision, given how its a stupid ass decision I've chosen to ignore it"

The mech is so underpowered it makes me worry for future vehicles as well. I also think their should be a "SEAF depot" garage type secondary objective that we can activate and rearm vehicles at.

The fixing of the EXO-45 really is a great first example of the devs breaking something to fix it. The shrapnel delete on the eruptor is the latest.

Devs got so obsessed with “balance” they forgot about the game being fun.

The mechs are supposed to be overpowered anyways. You trade a whole strategem for just 2 sections of being powerful with a long cooldown between. It doesn’t matter if it’s really strong cause regardless it’s not gonna carry you through for very long on higher difficulties.

The CEO stepped down to focus on balance, because the first game had way better balance than the 2nd game does at this point.

Alexus: "I've taken note of the communities complaints, and have thus reduced the EXO-PATRIOTS effective HP and ammo by 50% and now gets knocked over when hit by a charger or rocket"

the fact you have to empty the whole rocket pod to kill 1 bile titan is instanity

Every gun feels like I'm slapping a sibling with a pool noodle.

I don't think i've seen a single patriot suit since week 1 of its release

It’s true that every time you find something fun they nerf it.

I’m not playing helldivers 2 until Alexus is gone at this point

BTW you seem to have missed it in testing, the rocket pod also basically cant aim downwards anymore. If your target is any more than like a 1 degree decline from you, you cant hit it. The pod seems to have like -1 or -2 degrees of depression on it when before, if your minigun could aim at it, your rocket pod could too. (Visually it doesnt even make sense for it not to either.) Another nerf that came with their half assed fix for the self killing bug. To my memory though it still can aim up as much as it could pre-nerf. Though i dont remember because after they did the change i dont touch the damn thing anymore if you can understand.

devs ALSO killed the down-angle on the mech cso it can barely aim the rockets down 5-10 degrees now where before it could land a hit almost anywhere you aimed it. Once again, fun/utility/uniqueness was removed and all we have is statements of "this is fine".

I love this game but for the love of god they need to have a talk with their balancing team.

The whole thing with the mech rockets being able to destroy itself is such a brain-dead simple fix that it blows my mind that it was ever an issue. The source of the rocket should not be able to collide with its own projectile, _obviously_ . Insane...

I swear for my life I've never seen another shooter has this crazy amount of reticle issues

10 minute cooldown on something that can be destroyed or use all ammo within 2 minutes is bullshit

Great game, but the devs struck gold without the infrastructure to take advantage of it, and Sony had no interest in supporting them.

the main reason why people avoid the exo suit is that you have to sacrifice a lot to use it - while you are in the suit, you cant use strategems, call reinforcements in the heat of battle, it has a very long cool down and can only be used for a few battles and not to mention, your mobility is kinda dumpstered. Earlier, the sacrifice was worth it because the firepower it gave was great. Now you are abjectly worse when you are in the mech rather than outside where you can use your strategems.

Helldivers 2's development has been a bit frustrating after that first month or two of hype. New content is mostly in new war bonds, which contain weapons that either aren't good, or contain weapons that are good, then get nerfed. It's to the point that their CEO has stepped down to take a more direct role in the game's development. I think the combat against enemies should be reexamined. At the start, everything was novel and shiny, obviously, that honeymoon period. But now we know everything. Enemies are no longer scary, but annoying as hell. Notable examples are rocket devastators, charger spam, bile spitters getting tankier and buffed, and berserker bots being tanky as hell for being how common they are.

Not sure if this is because of the "on direct-hit" change, though I'm inclineed to believe that it is, but the mechs are absolutely awful against bile titans now. Its actually laughable how many rockets it takes to kill one. Before, you could kill a BT with two rockets to their head. Now it takes as many as seven. I use the mechs almost exclusively for the fifteen minute horde clear missions, and even under those optimal conditions, the mech underperforms against everything beyond chaff. The craziest thing is that everyone loved the mechs. Nobody thought they were overpowered because they lack tankiness. They were perfectly balanced by their limited uses and steep recharge time. I guess the devs thought it was too fun.

They neutered the railgun too. The devs’ idea of “balance” seems to be to make all the players’ weapons shit and the enemies overpowered, and there’s a reason for this. The guy in charge of game balance, a former Hello Neighbor dev, only plays level 5 missions. They don’t play on the highest difficulties, and have no idea how the game works on those difficulties.

I have heard that if you hit the "swap shoulders" button (which I forgot even existed) it switches which of the Mech's weapon are in line with the reticle, and that sorta makes a ton of sense.

"Instead of balancing everything to have pros and cons, we at ArrowHead Studios have decided to make everything shit" -the devs, probably

"I think the devs should fix what's already there BEFORE they add anything else." Well said Ratatoskr. Most of the playerbase feels the same way. Noone is here clamoring and dying for new weapons every month. We need what we have fixed already.

4:18 Ratatoskr on the outside: look how smoothly and straight my rockets go. Look how they hit the target I intend for them to hit. Ratatoskr on the inside: look how the massacred my boy

A lot of the perceived changes to the exo suit are actually changes that were made that are completely unrelated to the mech suit and then "unintentionally omitted from the patch notes." The undisclosed changes were aimed at changing the "unchanged leg meta" involving the indirect gutting received by the railgun and encompass a multi angled buff to enemy armor's ability to resist armor penetration. Thank alexus for being a dishonest and inept balance director because he is 100% responsible for every helldivers displeasure, always and without exception.

Balance across the board is so bad the CEO had to step down so he can steer helldivers back to a fun state. The game has been no fun for a while

My assumption is they just moved the spawn point but didn't change the rocket behavior or trajectory hence the reticle not being lined up since it's still based on the old positioning. Ideally they could keep the same relative behavior as before but spawn the rocket/activate collision a few frames later once it's already past the point where it'd blow you up unintentionally. Hell I'm not much of a programmer and there's prolly a dozen things they can do but I get the feeling they get 0 time for testing so all they can do is "yeah that's prolly fine" changes

Arrowhead is turning into fatshark

They should just have two aiming circles on screen, one for the rockets and one for the machine gun. This aiming discrepency is probably just because they just moved the origin point of the rockets to the left so it doesn't hit the mech when turning, but also forgot to do anything about the aim reticule.

It should have been obvious from the beginning when they nerfed the railgun...

I am hoping pilstedt being in the chief dev seat will bring significant change. I think LOTS of things can be fixed by the devs just PUTTING THINGS BACK THE WAY THEY WERE. This is a scenarios of overbalancing in a PVE game. Just keep broken weapons and focus on making more difficult and varying mission content instead

I recently noticed some Reddit posts explaining a workaround for the first half: if you swap shoulders on the camera, the rocket aiming is drastically improved. I assume it's rude to post links in your comments; searching for mech shoulder rocket Reddit should work, for example. Sad a workaround is necessary, but I'll happily take it for now. (Loved your channel even before the name drop. 👍)

Wow, you succinctly put my opinions on the mech into a easy to watch video. Thank you and I'll relay this to a few of my fellow helldivers. Lets make the mech great again.

In the last 30 hours of my gameplay, I didn’t see a single player use the mech. That tells me the “balance philosophy” is working as intended.

THANK YOU! Jesus I thought I was the only one thinking about this, I swear I have seen absolutely no one talk about this. The mech was so fun and good against bugs, I always used it and now I haven't used it since that update. Hopefully they take a look at this issue...some day.

I feel like I can hear him massage his temple and tilt his head in frustration throughout the video. Devs actually managed to get to him

Hopefully Pilestedt actually recognizes where the balancing problems come from and fixes them since he's now more involved with development after he stepped down

The last issue is that you can't aim the rockets down as far as you can the gattling anymore. For whatever reason the rocket pod that could "look down" about 45° before now stops around 15°-20°. Which is enough to often entirely make the rocket pod useless, esp if you fight on a hill.

The new mech at the very least shouldnt have the accuracy problem of the first one because the auto cannons are in similar positions as the mini gun

Devs: We want progression to be by the choices made by the players. Devs: We felt the need to nerf every weapon and buff all the enemys.

You have touched upon a problem that the community has been grinded down by for a while now. The double problem of rushing to get new content out and problematic balance ethos the devs have. Luckily Pilestedt has noted the players dissatisfaction and is going to address it himself, whether or not it will be too late to safe the deindling player base, who knows.

I bet theyve purposely made the autocannon exosuit have rediculously bad accuracy.

I somehow managed to hit myself with a mech rocket even with the "fixes" so it doesn't even do what it is supposed to. Granted it only happened once because i just gave up on the mech after struggling with it after the fixes on that mission.

Excellent analysis. This explains why it is rare to see them now.

That's arrowhead for you, they managed to lose 70% of their player base in 2 weeks due to poor balancing, the balancing department is clearly unfamiliar with the concept of fun.

Who cares if everything is too strong, it’s not like it’s pvp or a competitive game it’s us vs the computer

😂 just me and 2 ass bots, nice to be early

The devs have made so many mind-blowing balance decisions in the past 2 months, I really wish they would sit down and do an interview explaining where they're coming from. That and they aren't accounting for losing over 70% (on Steam from peak) of their player base when it comes to Major Orders. The only thing I can think of is that the player base is having too easy a time and beating whatever internal metrics they had for success rates in missions, especially the high difficulty missions, and they are willing to sacrifice fun to match those expectations

The rockets do need a fix, but mechs also need 2 crosshairs. Their weapons shoot from different sides of the body so they have different starting points and different trajectories, one crosshair doesn't represent both sides adequately. Side note: they should put the rockets on an arm like the machine gun so it has a full range of motion. That is one of the primary limiting factors.

Agreed on all points. The Mech is such an expensive stratagem and already just disintegrates unnaturally fast in a lot of situations. The number of times I've lost a mech I just called in because a rocket dev spotted me from 200 yards away and blitzed me is ridiculous. I called one in the other night and as soon as I jumped in I got surrounded by chainsaw bots coming around a rock and died before I even had time to take control of it. The fact they reduced the armor at one point AND ruined the ability to aim with the rocket launcher is absurd. Here's hoping mechs get addressed in the big rebalance they're supposedly working on.

Ah finally Ratatoskr experiences the last few "balance" patches welcome to current HD2 where anything fun is gutted because the devs ego trip over meta

Asking the team in charge of balancing about logic is like asking Bethesda about making a good game. They wouldn’t know.

Quality channel. Quality content. TY. You know gaming and how gamers feel. At least how this 40yrold does.

I dunno, i think mechs would be a bit out of place in Elden Ring in the first place, so maybe From Software should simply not add them in the DLC 🤔

Don’t worry, they nerfed the Autocannon suit before it even released. I just don’t understand how the same rockets or the same AP Autocannon shells can do vastly different damage between weapons. It’s the same munition.

Thank you for this video! I 100% agree with you and it feels so bad, the Mech was my favorite Stratagem by far!

What they should have done is make it so when one does fire a rocket from the exosuit, it either 1) makes it straight up not damages the exosuit, just make it immune to its own rockets or 2) Let the be a half second delay for when the rocket can actually damages anything, thus again solving the issue of blowing your self up (make it phase through make during that half second aswell)

Rockets shoot perfectly, switch shoulders, "You're wrong and your intensions are stupid."

I remember people used to call the complains of the railgun nerf "just bitching" cuz at the time there was not much balance to do, but yeah this was always the issue. It's seems the philosophy of helldivers balance consists of "let's make it as shitty and unreliable as possible to roleplay how inneficient humans are in the lore"

I think the aiming "bug" might be related to the distance to the target. Maybe adding a second marker for close distance would help in that regard.

Tried out emancipator. For the time it took to come in and the fact we struggled on a single planet to get it, it’s a huge letdown. Cannons are a tiny bit better then the autocannon gun to be able to shoot chargers and heavy armor head on but takes around 10+ shots to down them. Only upside is it’s free to use atm but will be ignored by today

It's worth mentioning to assist until fixed, switch camera shoulder when firing rockets to fire accurately.

I too love walking into bushes and pebbles and suddenly blow up!

The CEO is taking care of all that which is why he handed the reigns to a trusted individual to become the new ceo

BTW Mechwarrior Online a game from 2013 had this solved years ago. weapon projectiles and beams come from where the weapons are mounted with zero issue.

“Put it back the way it was” seems to be the fix for most of the things in game 😂.

It’s almost like a rocket pod doesn’t go straight

Nailed it. The mech really does feel useless now.

As someone who often uses the Mech on bugs, this video hit the nail on the head. I have many hours piloting the X- 45 but it definitly doesnt feel like it could support the team like it use too.

The devs genuinely don’t seem to understand shooters. The reticle being off on the AMR still to this day is ridiculous. It’s a sniper FFS and they don’t want to even hot fix it. And the recent nerf to the dominator’s handling makes the gun handle worse than the Auto Cannon. It is sad that there is so much potential with this game and yet they focus on this stuff.

The fact they have difficulties that go above level 9 "Helldive" upto level 15 "Inner circle of hell" is what makes these nerfs dumb as f*ck, aint no way anybody gonna survive the difficulties they haven't added yet lol

so it begins, every actively updating game will always come to these kind of stuff

The game should be getting better and not be getting worse from here on out if you missed the recent arrowhead news about the CEO becoming the chief creative officer so we can start getting changes we actually want and choosing someone else to become CEO while keeping a high position in the company as a chairman

Your crosshair is aligned with the mini gun arm, but if you hit the switch shoulder button it aligns with the rocket arm instead

I’m a huge fan of being able to pilot mechs in games so when the major order came to unlock the exo suit I was pumped. Then I get in the thing and it has the durability and health of wet toilet paper. That more then anything deflated my sense of fun with the game and I haven’t touched it in several months.

Actually it is interesting how the devs do the balancing. They always "balance" (means nerf everything) which is used much more than other weapons or stratagems. But the exosuit was never popular. People tried it when it got released and realised that the max 2 useage per mission is way too limiting with the limited ammo and nobody picked it up ever again. And they still nerfed a not at all used stratagem. WTF

If they do revert the mech despite the bug where it kills you, then they should also revert the eruptor

Only way to fix the rocket offset for now is to switch the camera POV to the other side. But then the machine gun does converge on target. You would assume that it wouldn’t be too hard to have weapons that converge on a target at least at a set distance.

You could literally fix it with in-universe lore by mounting the rocket launcher slightly forward on the body so that it clears the body when firing but still has a direct line to the point you aimed at. Say in game “due to reports from Helldivers, we have adjusted the positioning of the Patriot Exosuit’s rocket armament to reduce the chance of hitting yourself while turning”

My problem is that the mech dies without warning. I have no way of knowing if I'm one hit from death or at full HP. If it is dying, I die instantly also, because I've got no chance to bail. It needs a small grace period between shutting down due to damage and actually exploding.

the devs like a certain level of realism for the weapons and handling that stems from their military experience. In most games the projectiles essentially follow a path from the camera/center of player to the reticle on screen, but none of the weapons in helldivers 2 work this way. ALL weapons experience some small discrepancy because the projectiles originate from the barrel of the weapon and not the center of the player model. This is most noticeable while using high zoom scopes and shooting at something much closer. This is why the devs feel the mech is working as intended and if you fire at far away targets (which is difficult due to the top speed of the rocket and how it accelerates) the rocket will hit much closer to the reticle. If the target is far away enough the reticle will feel that same as on release but that is still much easier said than done. I agree the mechs used to feel much better, but they arent necessarily bad now, they are just more difficult to use. Id imagine its very very difficult for players using controllers but hitting those rockets is doable with mouse and keyboard.

i knew something was weird with the aiming but i thought they just requiered more precission since the direct hit nerf and assumed previously i was missing a lot and the game was now less lenient when missing rockets, but no, they are actually extremely hard to aim for no reason

Sad part is, its not just the mech, its most of the weapons in the game that people considered either "meta" or "fun" if either of these words or similar words were used to describe a weapon, as well as people using that weapon often, the devs would nerf the piss out of them. Between the Sony stupidity and the monstrously unfun "balance" patches, I've put the game down until something, anything, changes for the better at least with the gameplay mechanics. They keep promising to fix the balance patches, but I've yet to see an update state "hey we rolled back the balance changes" or "we've buffed the weapons we nerfed previously" or anything indicating something of that nature as of yet.

Thank you! I had exactly the same sentiment about the patriot exosuit, let's hope more notice and this make its way to the devs, hopefully with the former CEO with a more in-hands positions the fix will happen down the line

It is understandable that the rocket is aimed at a set distance and so the closer it is the more on the left it is, but there should be a visual hint to help you manage that. An option could be to have a perspective line for the rocket, or a second floating crosshair. This would be far more interesting than make the rocket magically adjust to the distance of the target in the crosshair of your machine gun which is the opposite side of the mech.

i could swear they nerfed the movement on the mech but that might just be me

I agree with your points. Reason I’m not playing is because they nerfed all of the primaries I actually liked. As for the rocket trajectory, as minor correction, they are not veering to the left, rather the rockets are firing forward, but with a leftward offset. The offset being the distance between the rocket launcher and the center reticle. All of the guns have this offset problems because all of the sights are parallel to the barrels. The guns are usable because the offset between the sights and barrels is very small. On the exosuit, the offset is huge, and makes it difficult to compensate for, especially on moving targets. Possible solutions: -your solution, revert the change -add smart aiming that takes range into account and angles the shot so that the rocket will intercept the reticle vector at the targets range (complicated, probably won’t happen, but would be the ideal solution) -add a laser pointer on the rocket launcher so you can see where it’s pointing (simple fix that doesn’t revert the change)

I remember one of the developers on discord saying that they were going to add a separate reticle for the rockets

Its pretty disappointing that they haven't come up with a way to fix this properly. I'm an indie game developer and I can offer a few options for how this can be easily fixed: Opt. A) Make it so hitbox of rockets fired from the mech do not interact with the hitbox of the mech at all. This involves checking the owner of the mech and the owner of the rocket on the frame when the collision happens and then simply allowing the rocket to pass through the mech without exploding if the owners match. Opt. B) Allow us to use the button that switches the side of character that your camera is on. It already exists on foot, enable it while in the mech. Opt. C) Make it so left click fires the chaingun, and when right click is held, the cursor aligns itself with the rocket weapon and left clicking will then fire a rocket. Opt. D) Centralize the camera above the mech. Opt. E) Give the mech a first person view. Opt. F) Return to monkey

I got the mech late so never used before nerf. I thought my aim was crap but I agree this changes it's effectiveness. Never see anyone using mech anymore and it's a shame.

Man this is where all the babies hang out.

The rockets also have a crappy pitch down limitation to just a few degrees below horizontal, making it very hard to hit nests. The first version didnt have this problem, it was added with the rocket self destruction "fix".

if u switch shoulders in exo suit it makes aiming easier especially for rockets

They also reduced the armor breaking ability. So it takes way more missiles just to kill a charger, and even more for a Bile titan.

The mechs have several small issues that compound to make them really unfun to use. The main problem is the camera being positioned way off to the side. This is what caused the rocket to hit the mech sometimes. The minigun never had any problems, because its nearly in-line with the crosshair. But the rocket launcher is so far away at the side of the screen that the rockets have to leave the tube at an angle to hit where you're aiming. This isn't too bad when you're aiming really far away, because the angle is still nearly straight. But the closer the target is, the more extreme the angle has to be. And if you aim at a target that is too close, the rockets have to fire at such a wide angle that they hit the nose of the mech, and blow it up. The way they "fixed" this is by simply limiting how wide an angle that the rockets can fire at. So if you aim close, or fire while turning, the rockets will still fire nearly straight our of the tubes. Which means, thanks to the crosshair being so far away from the actual weapon, the rockets will now only hit where you are aiming when the mech is pointing straight, and your target is extremely far away. Which is why it feels like they always hit way off to the left. Instead, the actual fix would have been to move the camera so its centered above the mech, instead of off to either side. This would make it so that both weapons are much closer to where the crosshair points, so they wouldn't have to fire at crazy angles to actually do what you want them to. There also needs to be another floating crosshair for the rocket launcher. The circle only shows where the minigun is going to hit, but the rockets get nothing. And since the launcher is so far away from the minigun, it needs its own indicator to show where the rockets are going to end up. This would also help stop players from accidentally hitting anything they're standing too close too, since the rocket indicator would land on that object, instead of on whatever the crosshair was pointing at. The controls of the mechs really need to be rebindable as well. I have use bound to F, which is also hard bound the stomp function on mechs. So every time I stomp, I get out. And every time I get out, my mech tries to kill me. All vehicle functions either need to be linked to their on foot counterparts. So the mech stomp would be whatever your melee binding is, instead of always being locked to F. Or, they need to make all vehicle functions rebindable in the menu as well. If they fix all these things, I might actually use mechs again. If they don't, they're just going to remain a completely useless disappointment.

I am still waiting on that patrol rate revert.