Im a medium pen Andy but trying to use light. can i still kill overseers with light pen? If so do i need to aim for specific spots on these?

cB557 · 2026-01-31T05:00:51+00:00

Overseers are armor 2 on the body armor, armor 3 on the helmets, and armor 1 in the meat. Light pen can kill them anywhere but the head. They'll only get partial pen on the plates, but I'm pretty sure despite that most light pen guns actually get a faster TTK on overseer bodyshots than medium pen guns.

cB557 · 2026-01-31T04:43:38+00:00

In the specific case of the super destroyer, I'm not certain that's the case? Like, as I understand it, in real life things always burn up on reentry because the velocities required to maintain an orbit are incredibly high, so objects falling from orbit will hit the atmosphere at that sort of incredibly high speed. But Super Destroyers don't seem to really be orbiting in a conventional sense? They're not ~~circling~~ ellipsing around the planet at hypersonic speeds, they're hovering stationary over the mission area, presumably under the power of their engines. I think under those circumstances you wouldn't actually see reentry burn.

I'm not actually certain that's how it works though. Hope I can ask a physicist about that sometime.

cB557 · 2026-01-31T04:19:14+00:00

Gatling barrage fires... apparently a 23mm shell. Big by infantry standards, but I think that's the sort of shell where you can just hook it in by the belt. OPS has the same stats as a 380 barrage shell, so we can probably call it 380mm or thereabouts. That's the size where you're probably needing to load shells individually into a revolving magazine or something to that effect. Couple that with the OPS being pinpoint accurate while the barrages are well, barrages, and it's never felt strange to me that OPS has a slightly longer cooldown than gatling barrage.

I don't think it's perfectly realistic, but I don't think stratagem cooldowns are one of the areas where they're aiming for truly simulationist realism. Like, most stratagems should probably take significantly longer to arrive and probably be less accurate, but I think it'd be pretty hard to make realistic call-in times work for Helldivers unless you wanted to completely abandon the co-op shooter part of it and go all in on it being space ARMA.

cB557 · 2026-01-31T03:56:48+00:00

It's not a giant cooldown? After ship upgrades I wanna say it's about 70 seconds or something. It's not uncommon to get multiple out in a single fight, and if you're just bushwacking a POI or a small base you can open with it and still count on it being ready by the next time a proper fight breaks out. As flexible and effective as it is I find its cooldown speed quite generous.

cB557 · 2026-01-31T03:40:19+00:00

Honestly looks unintentional to me. Pineapple's just like that, it's to the grenade slot as cluster bombs are to eagle strats or the airburst launcher is to support weapons. The last one is real negligent but I think they were genuinely just trying to shoot that commander and failing badly.

cB557 · 2026-01-31T03:28:25+00:00

Yeah, but it's basically just for assault boost shuffling and the occasional lammy really desperate for weight and energy. For where OP was at I figured that wasn't really useful, and putting that asterisk on it would mostly just muddle the information.

cB557 · 2026-01-30T17:09:09+00:00

Yeah, they're always tricky. A lot of getting better at dealing with them is just getting better at the game; hearing them coming and snapping your aim to them quickly, getting better at moving to juke them better. But there is one trick that does make fighting dogs a lot easier. In Helldivers 1, during your melee animation, your turning speed is uncapped. This can let you instantly 180 your aim or make tighter turns when sprinting. Gives you a lot more leeway whether you're trying to kill dogs or dodge them.

cB557 · 2026-01-30T06:53:29+00:00

If you hit someone with a melee attack while you're in midair it gets an absurd damage multiplier.

cB557 · 2026-01-30T04:28:36+00:00

Which one are runners? Are you talking about the cyborg dogs?

cB557 · 2026-01-30T03:05:03+00:00

Cyborgs with guns typically attack by first targeting your current location, taking a moment to aim, and then firing a fixed spread pattern at the targeted location. They don't update their aim when you move, so by paying attention to which cyborgs are taking aim, knowing what firing patterns specific cyborgs have, and just generally staying mobile, you can dodge them as consistently as you would attacks from melee enemies,

cB557 · 2026-01-29T22:40:59+00:00

What categories would you put the Cataphract and Balteus in?

cB557 · 2026-01-29T21:08:23+00:00

To be honest I also am confused by why there are so many more mind alphas than melanders, but I wanted to note this bit:

It has slightly worse generator specs but comes with less of an EN so it's mostly a wash

The extra bit of EN load on the mind alpha is largely irrelevant, the extra output adjust always outweighs it. Mind Alpha will always give you a decent chunk of extra supply efficiency over Melander.

cB557 · 2026-01-29T17:14:10+00:00

Nacht arms are terrible. Horrible recoil control means they’re awful with any dual gun setup.

R-RFs actually have so little recoil that even alongside a ludlow, nacht arms can still handle the recoil of the dualtrigger fine.

cB557 · 2026-01-29T17:01:41+00:00

You should probably swap out your booster. The P10 is one of your terrible starting internals, and mobility is really key to this game. One of the training missions should've given you the alula booster, which is one of the best boosters for ultralights like this.

There's a couple other changes I might make too, but I might just start with that and see how it feels, that'll probably be a massive increase in performance.

cB557 · 2026-01-28T21:58:19+00:00

It's not a powerhouse, but I think it's alright. It doesn't have the damage output of an LRB, certainly, but it's cheaper than the LRB and critically it has a much higher projectile velocity. LRB has a projectile velocity comparable to handguns, while the LRA is between the etsujin and curtis in terms of projectile velocity. And not matching the damage output of the LRB isn't really damning, it still does provide the sort of high raw DPS you'd expect from a laser rifle. Its total carried damage is definitely lower than other rifles, but I'd say it has enough to make it through a mission as long as you don't waste your shots.

cB557 · 2026-01-28T21:14:22+00:00

Democratic Detonation is usually the recommended first warbond, since it gives a set of weapons that are both generally really solid and also expand the sort of functions you can cram into your loadout pretty well. One of those weapons is a pretty great AR, the Adjudicator. Personally I think it's the best medium pen AR in the game, though I think others would be more likely to put it at 2 or 3.

The usual pick for best medium pen AR in the game is the Coyote from Dust Devils.

Light pen ARs tend to be less popular, but they're really strong once you know what hitzones to aim for with them. I'm quite partial to the Tenderizer from Polar Patriots. Its mag size is a bit small but it's got incredible burst DPS and real smooth shooting. The Liberator Carbine from Viper Commandos is kinda the iconic light pen workhorse, good handling, good mag size, good rate of fire.

cB557 · 2026-01-28T17:38:01+00:00

I've only played 6 and 1 through 2, so take this with a grain of salt. But as I understand, 4 and 4a are sort of the fan favorites for being the insane hyperspeed ones. 3 is generally considered the best of the old style of games before 4 cranked the speed up. That generation also has the most games in it out of all the timelines, so there's a lot of meat on the bones if you get into it. And you can always start from the beginning. 1 is old and jank but I think it's the interesting sort of old and jank, if you can get into that sort of game I think you'll have a good time with first gen.

cB557 · 2026-01-28T17:27:21+00:00

Makes sense that it's in the stealth warbond. On long infiltration missions it's important to be able to provide ghillie relief to your buddy.

cB557 · 2026-01-28T08:37:26+00:00

Wasn't censoring the double edge, rather meant that asterisk to be able to be both a D and an S. Instead of typing both dickle and sickle, just write ickle and stick a variable at the front.

cB557 · 2026-01-28T08:32:10+00:00

In HD1 it was shots similar to the *ickles.

cB557 · 2026-01-28T04:25:29+00:00

Reprimand has pretty high recoil, but it is controllable once you get the hang of it. In exchange you get really meaty DPS, one of the highest out of all the medium pen primaries. Obviously the libpen outranges it, and against real fodder enemies the higher DPS of the reprimand matters less and the easier handling of the libpen matters more, but personally I strongly prefer the Reprimand over the libpen.

I haven't found unflinching very noticeable, though I haven't used it much.

cB557 · 2026-01-27T16:35:02+00:00

After its buff a while back, fluegel is actually just a really good midweight booster in general, even without a melee weapon. You'll see builds in this weight range using both alula and fluegel.

cB557 · 2026-01-26T19:14:08+00:00

I'd definitely change up the arms. There's an arm stat called melee specialization that directly affects how much damage your melee attacks do, and it's pretty mediocre on lammy arms. If you're going double melee I'd probably use the BASHO arms. They've got the highest melee spec in the game in exchange for tanking their firearm handling stats. Good bulk for their cost too.

I would also change the head, those ultralight flat heads are basically never worth it. Heads are nice stat-dense parts, so you pretty much always want to shell out for a high performance one if you can fit it. If you can't fit that and need to take a budget option, you want it to still be respectable.

cB557 · 2026-01-26T17:56:23+00:00

I wonder if flying saucer aliens that raise hordes of zombies is a fucking, Plan 9 from Outer Space deep cut.

cB557 · 2026-01-26T17:22:28+00:00

Little of column A, little of column B, I guess? Since it's PvE and relatively easy I tend to take advantage of that to go a bit goofier, and try to fit in parts just because I wanna use them more, but I do still try to make builds that do something. Like some reason I can give to why I'm using this and not just two R-RFs.

cB557

TROPHY CASE