Nerfing guns that are mid at best is an interesting balancing philosophy.

"Instead of making all weapons equally alright/good with strengths and weaknesses, let's make them all equally shit !" Interesting philosophy for a coop game.

"Warbond weapons need to be strong" The laser pistol would beg to differ.

You know AH balance team is wack when the last crossbow and eruptor nerfs were advertised as buffs

If the developers want us to use our strategems against bigger enemies, then they need to greatly reduce the cool down. Most of these items are on a 2-4 minute cooldown, some are much longer. And then, there are levels in which the weather stops you from using stratagems. There are modifiers that take away one strategem slot. there are modifiers that make orbital strikes far less accurate, and modifiers that increase the cooldown and the call in time. This makes the game objectively less fun.

Why are they acting like they are making an e-sports game. Just let all the guns be nuts and fire the balance devs.

I'm REALLY struggling to understand AH balance team, first they introduce this wild ass ricochet mechanics and to counteract that effect on Eruptor they change how Eruptor was envisioned to work? The fuck are they snorting over there?

Alexus has absolutely no idea what he's doing or what the community is screaming for. ArrowHead need to sort out their balancing problems before it kills the entire game.

"rely on support and stratagems for heavies" yeah I'll get right on that after the entire team has used their entire repertoire and 3 more bile titans decide to spawn with an escort of 12 spewers, 4 chargers, and the endless flood of chaff. When I dive with randoms and they end up ragequitting on 7+ because their weapons are all shit i don't exactly feel like I'm having fun

Just hopped on to try the Eruptor is awful. Shooting medium armor and not killing any of them when it killed multiple before. What's the point of extremely slow firing low ammo and mag size when it cannot kill anything but small enemies with one hit?

If they want primaries to be for chaff and support weapons and stratagems to be for heavies then it is very contradictory that there exists support weapons and stratagems that do nothing to heavies. You wouldn’t use the Stalwart to kill a Charger and you literally can’t use it to kill a Bile Titan. The Airburst Rocket Launcher is made for chaff clearing not killing heavies. The Eagle strafing run and Orbital Airburst Strike does nothing to heavies. The Eagle Napalm Strike is specifically for burning bug chaff to death. When are we supposed to not bring heavy killing stratagems and support weapons to play these chaf killing ones when they don’t give us any primary weapon choices?

I don’t think they need to be as ruthless as they are with nerfs because: 1. It’s a pve game 2. They are and will be introducing new and harder enemies which helps to counter metas and power creep

Them saying detonating the shot under the enemy is an exploit it really puts it into perspective how twisted their view of the game is, and sure it's viable, but so is playing the game with my feet, but that doesn't make it fun.

Alexus has a track record of screwing up whatever he works on. He was the most hated dev in hello neighbour 2 community. And honestly i have no idea how he got into lead balance designer role without any experience in this game genre.

The HD2 balance team is so weird about finding players coming up with cool and interesting strategies and calling them “exploits” or “brainless”, like with the eruptor shot or the rail gun charger leg from launch. Then weeks later they say “here, we killed a viable way deal with this problem, have an even more odd or brain dead way to deal with it (like the change to make rockets one shot charger heads)

I look back at HD1, and as much as I love 2, it's INSANE how much more appropriate to the task at hand EVERYTHING felt back then. There's no way you would spend 30-90 seconds running around trying to get a single elite mob off your ass in HD1, even before you purchased the DLC kit. Where did the team that came up with such an exquisite toolset go?!

These arrowhead people just can’t help but put their foot in their mouth every time they turnaround Devs:put in a explosive shell high caliber rifle Players:uses weapon as such Devs: your exploiting REEEE

Sick of the nerfs, and the game still crashes, just had one.

The whole balancing philosophy with primary weapons being intended for normal enemies while stratagems are for large enemies works great as long as you're fighting the bots. Since the frequency of those enemies fits the cooldown of the stratagems. But when you're fighting bugs, you might see 3 charges on every nest you clear. Or multiple bile titans. You simply can't use your stratagems often enough to deal with all these threats.

It really does feel like the balance team either don't play their own game (or play at a low difficulty level), and just nerf things by looking at numbers on a screen. Primaries are supposed to be just for chaff but that's the problem: even against chaff a lot of these Primaries are either mid/inefficient or straight-up garbage, and it's made worse with the significant reduction of the ammo economy across the board. Medium armour enemies in particular have been an issue for a while in terms of how many rounds they can soak, with something like the Adjudicator (which is supposed to be good vs. those enemies) requiring a whole magazine dump into a Brood Commander just to tickle it. Weapons like the old Breaker Spray & Pray and the current Liberator Concussive are so bad that they shouldn't even be in the game, they're a waste of time and pixels. We won the war against Sony but I think we're losing a lot of the fun in the game with these last couple of patches IMHO. Some of the spawn rates for the bugs also need to be looked at again. The Hunter spam is often times oppressive with their dumb headshot mechanics and combined with the mediocre primaries, the increased patrol rates in general, and the still questionable armour balance...I find fighting the bugs supremely unfun right now, and the game crashes don't help either for that matter. I think I preferred it when there were 10+ Bile Titans and Chargers spawning in on a 7+. At least that was cinematic AF, even if the squad did wipe. Now we just get death by a thousand leaps from overgrown fleas.

Bile spewers are medium enemies, Eruptor could 1 shot them when aimed at right spot, right now you sometimes need full mag and they're still walking, that's worse damage than Liberator on the most tanky part of the bug.

Because the idiot responsible for balancing the game is the kind of dev that looks at spreadsheets instead of playing the game. So he gets confused by all the numbers instead of understanding why players gravitate towards certain weapons or how to use them.

Here’s a thought. Make guns good enough that you can successfully complete the missions with just your weapons. And support weapon are used for “support”. Pretty much the balance of the game makes the support weapons the true primaries.

"Instead of making all weapons equally alright/good with strengths and weaknesses, let's make them all equally shit This philosophy is actully too common in game industry. This same mindset is in PoE and many other games. And it is sign that data is prime source of inforamtion for devs, not the community

if that dev thinks eruptor has been buffed, he hasn't tried using it. it used to oneshot fodder infantry in a large area, and now it takes multiple shots, its a massive nerf.

hold on, why the FUCK are we supposed to play the way the devs want us to play? mind you, the devs who don't even play enough to know if, for example, a fix they implemented actually fixed anything? calling features they don't like exploits? what is this? as expected, changing my review back to negative until this stops

I think that Arrowhead should "roleplay" weapon tweaks. Instead of describing these things as patches, they can describe these as changes to production, experimental designs, cost-cutting measures by Super Earth, etc. These things happen in real life when new weapons are introduced to the battlefield. Yes, it would be the same thing, but it would be a fun way of framing these tweaks, and be a cheeky way of "explaining" missteps.

Restricting primary's to chaff kills only makes no sense when you consider sniper riles or high damage slow fire rate weapons. Also if they are going to be for chaff they should actually be decent.. most cant hold up

love how the devs and community managers keep acting like victims for receiving feedback. they're absolutely shit at interacting with the fans and i bet they dont even play test the weapon changes

Why do we jump to "endlessly" buffing weapons? The whole point of buffs is to get weapons to a point where they can statistically and practically perform well. What's happening is that they're balancing the fun out of the game's arsenal. The Eruptor being able to clear large areas of enemies and close factory/ bug holes was bc it has the lowest fire rate in the game and you'd need to supplement it w/ a support weapon or teammate. Now it's a worse Scorcher that can close spaweners. The slugger had no use case over the Scorcher outside of halting the chainsaw devastator squads until they were dead. It already took 5-8 shots at a walker's leg joint to down rather than the Scorcher's 1-2 at the body The Scythe still does less than 1/2 of the Sickle's damage w/ the same exact uptime. It seems liker they have no idea what the practical breakpoints are & are stuck balancing for either perfect accuracy or pre-spawn increase difficulties.

I now remember why I quit playing warfare, division 2, red dead online, and few other games like this. Devs constantly messing with things people like for "reasons" that make sense to them.

I fail to understand where the eruptor is supposed to fit in now. There's better options for pretty much every scenario

6:25 I'm still waiting for him to do his job tbh. Cause at 7+ I use like 4 weapons and the rest can go kick rocks. I'm not sacrificing my primary for something that struggles to kill at minimum 8 bugs or bots before a reload.

WHY DO THEY KEEP NERFING CROSSBOWS??? No one even plays with that weapon.

The issue is starting to be how they can make new weapons distinct without making them overpowered or underpowered. Personally I think its absurd to tell people to rely on stratagems, IE support weapons, when they have a nearly 6 minute+ cooldown with the exception of the EATs. I certainly don't want primaries capable of dealing with heavy units in seconds, but you have to be able to do *something.* Oftentimes stratagems capable of dealing with heavies quickly and effectively are on a long cooldown. So its up to your support weapons. What happens if you die? You're crippled and basically just running away while you wait for an orbital to come off CD, *OR* you've gotta do some desperate play to get your support weapon back, OR you have to wait for its absurdly long cooldown. And meanwhile, the game KEEPS SPAWNING HEAVIES. Objectives that need you to stay put for a few minutes can death spiral VERY quickly. Thank god the 'skill issue' gang isn't here right now because that doesn't help anything.

The eruptor nerf doesnt seem intentional. The explosive weapons category right now clear all medium sized enemies and having the eruptor also dig into heavy size mobs made the stalwart and machine gun entirely viable. It was beautiful because you would still need some really big stratagems to the heaviest enemies. As a solo diver the ability to be a hybrid build with options keeps the game fun for me

If "making the game more fun" is his job, then hes not doing too well. They could have just made the players imune to Eruptor shrapnel. Gun stays fun. No one dies.

If the chargers where dying to the shrapnel from the Eruptor then buff the charges armor under its belly instead of nerfing a clearly fun weapon? Also then why the magazine nerf? what did that have to do with the chargers? Just makes no sense, It feels like their lying.

I think that problem with balancing could be partially resolved if player knew what enemies will be on planet, like "planet is highly infested with bile bugs" "high amount of chargers were detected in this area" or "local mutation has caused higher spawn rates of hunters" so that weapons that are niche could be used when needed

If they want us to use the stratagems more, they need to look at the stratagems, not the primaries. For example, Railcannon Strike needs a massive cooldown reduction. Like 50%.

can we stop nerfing weapons that arent even problematic? Like there are so many weapons that feel like shit to use, or there are other weapons that fulfill the role but in a much better way (in a non OP way)

They got to be careful not to detect and destroy fun... You hit the nail on the head regarding too much reliance on data to balance

It's takes TWO ENTIRE ORBITAL LASERS to kill a single Bile Titan. They cool down like once maybe twice a round. How TF am I supposed to use that more?

Did you see that thing about the lead weapon balancer being the guy that ruined Hello Neighbor 2?

Just fire the balancing department at this point, one of the best game on a while with one of the worst balancing team

Stratagem cooldowns are too long for it to be reliably used against heavy enemy spawns in higher difficulties. Not to mention several different debuffs that can affect them completely out of player control. Am I supposed to wait 3 - 4 minutes every time to kill a group of chargers?

I fought like 30 fricking bile titans today and bro, not even a 500kg one shot them when it landed under them.

I feel that overall there is general feeling that weapon balance is not going into a good direction. Also why should the community continue to get excited about new war bonds, to only have Arrowhead to tweak (downwardly tune) weapons a few weeks later. It has happened with every war bond to date and with no end in sight. Also there is some concern they are balancing the game against flawed data (PS5 bug, host lobby bug, DoT bug, weight sole play over group play etc).

Can we get a higher cap on resources? I no longer bother with Orders since I have maxed Medals and Samples. Waiting on the new Warbond to spend them and farm medals....and then I have no purpose anymore.

I cannot understand what in the blue hell these people are thinking with all these nerfs. Particularly the ones that nerf magazine size or the total number of magazines you can carry with a weapon. I'm starting to feel they don't play their game and instead are doing spreadsheet-based nerfs, basically if players use too much of any weapon then nerf it. The Eruptor is SINGLE SHOT, takes a LONG time to reload after EVERY SHOT and if you shoot stuff that's next to you, you take damage as well. So WHY would you reduce the number of mags it has, it's not like you can spray and pray with it anyway. This type of nerfs just causes more instances where you literally run out of bullets and then can only run away and wait to be able to call a resupply. That is NOT fun gameplay. 13:32 100% BULLSHIT. They nerfed shield and railgun JUST TO STOP PEOPLE USING THEM. They literally went "you're not having fun the right way" and destroy a whole loadout. You know why it was bullshit? Because then, after they introduced MORE POWERFUL armor penetrating weapons (e.g. Quasar cannon, etc.) they REBUFFED the shield and REVERSED the railgun nerf by adding back its armor penetration. So there was NOTHING WRONG with the weapon or the shield, they just did it to screw over people who were using that combination. This is the primary reason my review of Helldivers has been negative for a long time now, way before the recent Sony scandal and will continue to remain that way. I used to play way more but every time I find some setup I enjoy it gets nerfed so the game just doesn't feel fun for me anymore. It's not just me, I used to have 5-6 friends I constantly played with and now none of them are playing anymore.

GIVE me my Eruptor back! the nerf was uncalled for. It was a skill based weapon that now has no real use case other than you can shoot bug holes and fabricators with it.... very lame.

Honestly Arrowhead should push out in universe reasons for balance changes... If Major Brass came on the TV and told us that in an effort to win the war faster Super Earth has discovered a way to make ammunition for the Eruptur much cheaper and quicker, and are now manufacturing it on a new planet... where the factor just happens to make smaller clips and less explody shells... that would be f***ing hilarious... like if all "nerfs" were explained away as finding better ways to make the weapons... that would fit the universe so well.

What's crazy is if the direction or "vision" of the game is primarys are pretty much just not useful and they want you to focus on using stratagems, and no new armor passives have come out. So, warbonds are useless and more so pointless?

In my opinion, the recent change to the Eruptor to compensate for the lose of the shrapnel is a bit too much of a negative. Its slow rate of fire and total ammo capacity make it a worse version of the Plasma punisher. To make the weapons feel a bit more balanced, the Eruptor should have a bigger AOE with less damage drop off, keep the rate of fire, but what is killing the damage for certain targets is the drop off. That way it can excel at range and damage where the punisher can excel at faster rate of fire and more ammo

If the rest of the devs have this ass backwards approach to balance they may as well never release a new Warbond ever again. Whose going to be putting down money for things at inevitably get “BaLanCeD” into trash. When the community at large tells you that something feels bad, and you still choose to argue that it’s actually “viable” it’s like seeing writing on the wall, but choosing not to read it…

I remember when Jar 5 had 300 damage, that -25 damage nerf I could really feel that. hive tyrant and brood commander seem to take more hits to kill. And hunter survive more 1 shots than when it was 300 damage, surviving 1 shot...why is it necessary for hunters to survive more 1 shots? Its not like the jar 5 have much ammo for it either, with all the sway, reloads. I just dont understand.

All this dedication to realistic guns and they ignore the historical weakness of the glacis plate of a tank. Our top-attack option is roulette on whether it locks and too slow to be viable above 7, especially when large enemies can just slide around to protect the glowing spots faster than you can sprint.

I killed myself maybe twice with the shrapnel effect. These excuses are pathetic and make no sense considering this problem wouldn't have even happened had they left the gun alone. Sure it was powerful but it was keeping your players playing. How is that a bad thing? And forcing players to use strats vs medium adds? Do you want to play the game for me or should I?

I personally stopped playing it about 3 weeks ago now, and a big part on why I stopped is the constant of fixings things that ain't broke. Being derailed by sum dev sitting behind a deck nerfing everything trying to prolong the game.

Magazine size was not reduced on the Eruptor, it's always been 6 shots. It was reduced from 12 mags down to 6. The shrapnel was not changed originally, it was the ricochet update that made the shrapnel fire back at you, resulting in your death. If the reversed the ricochet changes, which weren't needed in the first place? The shrapnel wouldn't kill you, Eruptor wouldn't be broken. I've been using the Eruptor since the warbond was released, being extremely effective on everything bug, even decent on titans if your support/strats were on cool down.

Calling the old skillshot tech on the Eruptor an "exploit" seems like...a bit of horrible strong wording lol. I think that's simply just not what that word means. I'd unironically prefer power creep over what we have now, people say "oh they don't nerf everything, look at this 20 buffs they did for all these weapons!!!!" then the buffs are just very slight damage increases to weapons that end up still being useless trash because they NEED waaaay more than that. Bonus point: If they want us to use supports and stratagems to deal with heavy units, make the Stalwart and Machine Gun primary weapons already, seriously.

Went from 1 shot Brood Commander to 2-3 shots… The Eruptor is broken.

In my tests de eruptor went from one shoting medium enemies (all except chargers and titans, spewers take 2 to the body) with a shot to the head along with smaller enemies in range, to taking 3 head shots to take down a hive guard (armored head bug) without killing the smaller bugs around. Basically, you still need to rack each shot for a second, before firing the next one, but you can't take down medium enemies effectively and the smaller ones also take 1 shot each, and since you don't deal good aoe anymore, you are better off not using it there. Tl;dr: It now sucks to kill individual things because each shot takes too long to load, amd can't do crowd control, because it's explosion is too weak

1. 40 direct damage isn't a good trade off for 100 area damage when the gun is a bolt action with a very slow rate of fire 2. Alexus was the lead designer for Hello Neighbor 2 and he was responsible for cutting a lot of gameplay features enjoyed by fans of the first game.

My Eruptor... It was horrible at close range - ultra low turning speed, slow AF reload, but I could one-shot ATSTs, bigger bugs and units below hulk. Oh, and btw when they are gonna fix the always scoping issue?

What they need to do is change philosophies because even if another weapon gets like a 5-10% buff, thats going to create a new meta anyway. All these nerfs make getting the warbond pointless cause they're gonna get nerfed in 2-3 weeks anyway. If this was COD, then I'd agree, nerf and buff as much as you can, but since we're working as a team here, we need more bullets and firepower to bring more freedom! (Stratagems need a buff too! More powerful bombs= more democracy spreaded)

I do not care what weapons the devs want us to use! WTF is that all about? Let us use what we want, when we want.

The bigger problem is: on higher levels the amount of medium and large enemies is so high that using stratagems doesn't always work. If you miss one stratagems or it doesn't kill e.x. a titan it's pretty much death. The constant slow of smaller enemies makes it also very hard to evade and breaking fights is near impossible as well without using stratagems you need to kill on objectives on later levels. I don't see how this helps balancing the game tbh. Take turret stratagems for example, they die so far even if you throw them at max range since you get swarmed from all sides that the chance is pretty much 50/50 if you call it down. I don't know maybe give it a small shield in the first 19 seconds or something. Like this, strategic or tactical planning is not possible.

Crashes got crazy, just started happening to me yesterday. 3 games in a row crashed for seemingly no reason mid match...

People arnt gonna buy these bonds if your gonna nerf shit I'm not I'll wait 2 weeks

"Players were using an exploit where they were having fun with their primary weapons. Yes, that's an edge case. No, I didn't consider it. Weapon effectiveness has been nerfed. I still strongly believe that primary weapons benefit from being mostly useless more consistently. So, it's only a net minus if you're having fun, otherwise it's perfect."

The CB-9 change was actually more of a buff than a nerf; it's now easier to one-shot headshot devastators at 40-60m thanks to the better arc from the faster velocity, while the increased stagger keeps them at bay if you do miss the headshot, and though the amount of clips was reduced, the ammo economy overall is now much better. Eravin actually finds it to be one of the best primary options now, right alongside the DCS and Scorcher.

The real reason is to trick players with useful weapons everytime a new warbond is out tricking them to buy it and then nerf it after a month and before a new warbond comes out creating this if I don't get it now it'll get nerfed later mentality. And I was banned for saying this in the Helldivers 2 discord.

I've been using Erruptor almost exclusively on Helldive, and never even tried to kill chargers with it. I don't think it suppose to kill them in one-two shots. The main "tech" of the Erruptor is that it is the only primary that can reliably close bug holes and fabricators! But not being to one-shot mid enemies sucks, and they need to buff it's bullet damage.

To be honest, how many times were you killed by the shrapnel? An unnecessary complaint basically nerfed the gun again.

The game vision is to really capture a real military experience. So they make you ill-equipped for any situation, and despise the people in control for constantly screwing you over.

Noticed lastnight that if you stamp on a charger while in a mech, you get sound effects and hit markers asnif you're being shot at by something?

Then why even give us snipers and even bolt action snipers as primaries and strategems like strafing runs, mashine gun barrage, cluster bombs and so on for stratagems. Also, that's how shrapnel works.

Why even bother with the new warbond, any 'good' weapons won't last. Its all just cosmetics, hell we're lucky theyre not nerfing those too

Just to recap. Eruptor got half its mags removed, its damage falloff on the explosion increased, then they took away the shrapnel pieces and gave us a flat 40 damage increase (=1 shrapnel piece) but didnt realize the falloff on the explosion was going to still be awful. It reloads slow, has a tiny magazine size, and its "still viable"? Give us SOMETHING here.

My baby the Eruptor has been getting put through it bro. Slugger Plasma has been my new favorite

The bigger problem is not being able to be reinforced, despite having full lives, ran into the glitch after the update

Bro they added a deflect on self feature upon shooting at heavy armor which NOBODY asked for. THEN they noticed the eruptor mechanic messed with their "new feature" which again nobody needed. And THEN they changed the shrapnel mechanic on the eruptor making it shit. So basically the player lost another tool cause someone added a stupid ass mechanic in the game and they can't pull it back immediately after they put it in.

Community "The gun now feels like trash. We think it's this change" Arrowhead- "It wasn't that. it was this." Community: "Okay... the gun still feels like trash now." Arrowhead: "..." I get it. Game making is hard, but this is a bit ridiculous. All the fun weapons are getting nerfed into the ground or are useless. What's the point of buying a new warbond knowing that all the weapons are going to be trash at launch of feel like trash after they nerf it.

Not the Eruptor, no fun at all to use it. Takes 3-5 shots just to kill a god damn Hive Guard

It sounds to me like some of the nerfs to guns like the Eruptor may still not be a fully intentional nerf. One thing I’ll never understand in shooter gaming that are PvE, is why development studios always seem to naturally feel a need to nerf things. Balance in any shooter is good, but especially in PvE. I think most gamers would agree that if a gun or overall weapon balance is to lean one way or the other we would all prefer it leans more overpowered in favor of the player. Sure it can make the game too easy for a time but that’s usually more fun than things feeling too hard or having too many weapons that feel ineffective.

You can buff weapons without buffing just damage (stagger, mag size, fire rate, penetration through small enemies, dot effects etc.) Players are looking to have fun these effects and techs are fun to master. Then we get new stuff that we'll also want to master. The devs are making it hard to like certain weapons in fear of it getting nerfed directly or indirectly.

Weapons are not the only thing that suffer from balance issues. A majority of the stratagems like the turrets for example are practically unusable on higher levels due to various factors (for turrets it is because they have a long cooldown and can very easily be taken out by enemies without doing anything). Another factor is the balance between various player numbers in a mission, where lower player counts in missions lead to drastically increased difficulty after the last major balance update which increased patrols by 50% for solo players for example.

what did they do to the rail gun again? it was buffed like days ago and now its nerfed again or i am lost?

Primary weapons being only for chaffe sounds like bs to me. Why would they ever bother with any of them having medium pen or any effect like explosive or fire?

The Eruptor worked JUST fine before the ricochet mechanic was introduced. The ricochet mechanic seems to be programming that directs rounds towards players if the rounds hit heavy armor. This would make sense that this broke the Eruptor because if it's a percentage based program, a significant number of projectiles would be directed towards friendlies. They need to dump the ricochet mechanic, it's dumb and doesn't make sense that the rounds comes back with enough force to penetrate armor after colliding and spending energy on a target. It is _not_ realistic, just another way to add RNG death to the game.

The Eruptor was the weapon that got me to change and try new loadouts because how applicable it was.

This guy obiously never finished a game in dif 9. The eruptor was quite nice to kill spewers and brood commanders while the rest of the team was dealing with the chaff. Now it does not do anything and he is like "Its gud weapon". Getting 3 rounds from the breaker mag is 1 thing, making a weapon bad is another. And let's be real here. The eruptor sharpnel was killing you or your teammates... Okay. Eagles, orbitals, flamethrowers and a lot of other stuff was, is and will kill you probably at greater rates than the dreadful sharpnel -.-

These nerfs are not good for AI bugs and bots. They would be better for team death match or something. The balancing is trash. Not to mention the randomness at times when you have bile titans all spawning multiple times at once then the rest of the bug team are after you and nothing in your arsenal is good enough anymore. Or on cooldown. If we have a long wait time then the massive AI should have a delay until our strats are back.

It's ironic that their concept has been "primaries are for fodder hordes and supports and stratagems are for heavies." AND YET! The change they made to the Eruptor has made it more viable against heavies and practically ineffective against fodder hordes. I think they're trying to sort things way too cleanly and it's hurting the game. Their idea is "Primaries for fodder and mediums, stratagems and Supports for mediums and heavies." with the reality being that primaries clear fodder and struggle with mediums and stratagems and supports clear mediums and only a handful of them actually can handle heavies in an efficient manner. They need to stretch that ideal further. It should be Primaries can kill anything, but you're going to be spending way too much time trying to deal with a heavy with your primary and support and stratagems can kill anything, but their best platform is heavy clearing, some clearing out a lot more than others clearing out 1 really REALLY good. Yes, the game is supposed to be difficult, but it's also supposed to be fun. Sitting on Hellmire waiting for the fire tornadoes to stop for 10 minutes while patrol after patrol after patrol keeps running up to harass me and burn to death isn't fun. Having to sit and wait for an Ion Storm to pass to address a charger is not fun. Having to wait until a jammer is dealt with to deal with a hulk parade is not fun. Those make the game difficult, not fun. Having ways to either deal with the threat or give a better chance of survival during these mandatory arbitrarily enforced times of not playing the game while playing the game would be a lot more fun. You only have so many grenades to get you out of jail if they're even the kind that can do so. Yes, there is skill involved, but making the game unplayable because you want to try out a new gun that literally is so inept at being a weapon that it struggles against basic fodder is an open admission that you're adding s*it content to this game to fluff the warbonds.

Oh, look! The tesla tower's arc oneshots your teammates! We need to nerf its damage by 80% ASAP!

Whenever I see people echoing the "only buff, never nerf" mindset I just look at what happened to Borderlands 3. The community flipped out about some small nerfs early on and the devs way overcorrected by only buffing everything into the stratosphere for the rest of the game's lifetime, which ended up ruinning the fun of starting a new playthrough because every piece of trash that dropped was able to one shot damn near everything in the game. They even went so far as to constantly give global droprate buffs to the point where endgame drops were popping out of literal piles of shit to where a player would exit the tutorial with seven copies of the only guns they'll ever need for the rest of a playthrough.

The railgun/backpack early meta was mostly because at the time 90 percent of the weapons just didn't work properly. Had the game launched with all of the weapons working properly I don't think the railgun meta would have gotten as popular as it did.

What the community wants is a fun-to-use variety of weapons that does not feel weak or underwhelming. Ultimately we players FEEL instead of calculating things from the ground up. It would be nice if I could see players getting into missions with a wide variety of primary and secondary and choice of strategems. Which, to be honest, the current state of the game is doing mid and approaching a bad direction (By the dev team hitting the top pick weapon instead of seeing what's wrong with the other weapon). Weapons need not be OP, as long as the player feels good and live the fantasy of playing it. I give a good example: Earth Defense Force, lots of the weapons there are actually not the best (Some are even meme), but many of them feels good to use, and are contributing to the fight the player is experiencing.

I'm surprised the eruptor could one shot the charger. Granted I mostly used it for bots and shooting at the feet of a few basic bots was a good way to clear a few close around it. I understand the devs wanting a variety of primaries being used, but with only so many medium armor penetrating choices and hard hitting guns to use, some primaries need to be great/ amazing for the harder difficulties. Looking forward to seeing if the next warbonds sub machine gun will be a good or better option with the ballistic shield or not.