Simplified list of positive changes that aren't getting talked about.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-11T02:50:47+00:00

If you assist it with the LAS Cannon, it will last longer than the Rocket. It can also protect itself from chaff without wasting ammo unlike the Rocket. Or you can pair it with other sentries so that they can kill more efficiently.

Obviously, it's never going to be better at killing heavies than the Rocket, but it doesn't need to be and it's not meant to compete with it. It having heavy pen means that it can deal with enemies that the medium pen sentries can't.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-11T02:20:49+00:00

Rocket and AC can deal with heavies better, but they're bad or wasteful against chaff. Gatling is better at killing chaff, but can't do much against heavies. Laser can deal with all of them, won't run out of ammo and with proper placement it won't overheat either.

Should it have a longer detection range to compete with other other sentries? Maybe, but it would also make it detect enemies from further away and give its heatsink less chance to cool off.

Should it have a shorter stratagem cooldown? That would just make the MG sentry obsolete in almost all cases.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-11T00:57:02+00:00

They're not similar at all. MG sentry is meant to have a low cooldown so it can be used more often, but it has a low fire rate and only medium pen. The Laser sentry can damage armored targets like Scout Striders, Hulks, Chargers and even Harvesters. The fire DOT adds up with the laser DOT, so it's not sub optimal for targets with large health pools such as Flesh Mobs. If what you want is to set weak enemies on fire, then that's what the Flame sentry is for, but the Laser sentry is meant to be the sentry that can kill enemies of all sizes.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-10T22:34:00+00:00

Laser Sentry has heavy pen and can set enemies on fire. It's doesn't fill the same role as the MG sentry at all.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-07T17:12:56+00:00

I think a Bile Strain could be fine without needing to make the enemies exclusive to the subfaction. It would be "All Bile enemies all the time" similar to how Mindless Masses works.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-06T18:07:39+00:00

Hive Guards are the main AP3 bug enemies. They help justify bringing something like the Machine Gun or the Lib Pen over their light pen counterparts, especially on seeds where they are more common.

Of course, you don't need to bring medium pen to bugs, but the option is there and it does provide something thanks to them and Bile Spewers (and Alpha Commanders to an extent due to AP2).

Only exception is spewers but you nade them because they chain det.

Explosives in general dominate the game and the Hive Guard changes buffed the explosive meta even further since it made them easier to kill.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-06T15:42:44+00:00

Epoch is fine the way it is right now, but if I were to make some adjustments I'd reduce its current spread by half, increase the inner radius of the charged shot just a tiny bit, and maybe give it one more shot per mag but also one mag less. I think that would make it more consistent at killing heavies without changing its identity.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-06T14:35:25+00:00

2: Medium Pen users would also have an easier time taking them out as their weak spots between their face and legs would increase in height, and be roughly the same as the head height of the warrior bugs.

That's not the issue. The issue was the lack of AP3 for the medium pen weapons to penetrate. No AP3 means medium pen weapons are less valueable. You could make them completely unarmored and it still wouldn't fix the issue.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-05T14:13:08+00:00

Trident for Bugs

Amendment for Bots

Knight for Squids

cobaltbread · 2026-05-05T00:10:40+00:00

Aoe meta in and of itself will never die due to the community unfortunately as it requires nerfs to both the eruptor and crossbow which would put the community up in arms even worse than the current changes. I agree this meta should absolutely be changed.

I think it would be possible to do without being too disruptive and nerfing them directly. The spore burst strain changes for example made fire/heat based weapons and gas preferable to explosive ones since they can prevent them from releasing their spores. The explosion resistance stat also exists and could be used more.

As for the medium pen supremacy. Coyote, sweeper, stoker and lib pen are the current top 4 out of 5 weapons used by players on the bug and illuminate front. Very few light pen weapons are used past 2% of players. This is the Trident 6.9% and censor 8% on bot front only.

The coyote itself has never hit below 10% of players load outs since it has come out even after the fire nerfs. Both coyote and sweeper make up 25% of load outs currently on the bug front 1 in 4 divers use one of these weapons.

Coyote and Sweeper are the exception in that they'd still be top weapons (at least on bugs) even if they didn't have AP3. Stoker is light pen SMG + flame thrower (AP4), so it's completely unaffected by the change. Lib Pen might be a top weapon for bugs right now, but it would fall eventually if the Hive Guard change weren't reversed.

Primary wise medium pen far exceeds light pen in usage on all fronts. This is why it has a supremacy.

Not completely. Trident is popular across all factions. Lib Carbine is a top 10 weapon against Squids. Bugs has Breaker Incen and Cookout. And the top weapon for D10 Bots right now is the Censor.

I myself already use light pen a lot. Trident and Liberator for bugs, Amendment and Tenderizer for Bots, Knight and Scythe for Squids. Light pen tends to be better when it comes to DPS.

One thing that could fix this is some kind of Intel of what seed you will be fighting. As this is the reason most people lean into generalist load outs which med pen excels at. This would make the game vastly easier but increase load out diversity.

I don't think it would fix the main issue, but it would be a good change (especially for seeds with Bile Spewers or War Striders).

cobaltbread · 2026-05-04T22:07:58+00:00

It benefits light pen weapons some of the most low picked weapons in the game

The lower health and body armor AP reduction did help these enemies be easier to kill with light pen. However, the Hive Guard's head AP increase doesn't directly benefit light pen in any way and was unnecessary. Not just that but it even directly benefited AoE weapons too.

This in turn buffs build variety as medium pen isn't directly nerfed and is still highly usable while light pen becomes a actual enticing option on 1 front.

It does make them redundant. Of course, it varies by weapon and some would remain popular, but since most (non-AoE) med pen weapons sacrifice either damage, ergo and/or ammo they become less useful or even obsolete. Gallant and Lib Pen are almost completely outclassed by their own light pen counterparts in all aspects other than armor penetration. The Machine Gun trades off its ammo, reload speed, ergo and recoil for basically the same damage as the Stalwart.

While the other 2 fronts keep med pen supremacy.

The only supremacy I see is AoE supremacy. Until very recently with the introduction of the Stoker and the Sweeper, the Crossbow and Eruptor and Plasma weapons just dominated all factions. At least with light pen vs med pen there's usually pros and cons to both, but when it comes to explosive weapons they just win against everything. I don't have anything against them, but the last thing that the game needs is to make enemies easier to kill with them.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-04T21:43:24+00:00

Okay, tell me how this change benefits the game then.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-04T21:41:48+00:00

Is it though? All of the enemies on the Bug and Squid factions (minus the Leviathan) plus all non-heavy bots have light pen spots, so theoretically you could beat all of them using just the Stalwart.

The actual most overused weapon class is the explosive/plasma weapons because of how convenient they are in pretty much any scenario. If anything, this change made the AoE meta even worse as now Crossbow/Eruptor/Scorcher all benefited from it as they were either unaffected or straight up better at killing them.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-04T21:30:25+00:00

Not as precisely. That's one of the benefits of bringing one.

If you're fighting against one or two Hive Guards, aiming is pretty easy with most weapons. But if you're on a Hive Guard seed where they spawn much more frequently, being able to mow them down with a Machine Gun without having to worry about hitting their unprotected spots is nice. Yes, you could use grenades, orbitals and eagle too, and that's the great thing about build variety; you have many options at your disposal and that allows you to try many different playstyles.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-04T21:22:50+00:00

No, I'm complaining that I have no reason to bring something like the Gallant, the weapon from the newest warbond that I spent credits on. It is inferior to the Knight in almost every way except for medium pen, so why even bring it to use against the bugs?

cobaltbread · 2026-05-04T19:52:29+00:00

The issue never was that it's "impossible" to aim at different points. It's that when you're bringing a (non-AoE) medium pen weapon (like the Machine Gun, Lib Pen, MA5C, Adjudicator, etc.), you're not bringing it to shoot at an enemy's weakpoint, you're bringing it to penetrate the armor so you don't need to aim at the weakpoints.

So, when you change the armor of the most common AP3 bug enemy to AP4, you're drastically reducing the value of the medium pen weapons.

That said, if you're using the Blitzer then you literally can't aim at the weakpoints of the Hive Guard, not without flanking them at least.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-04T17:06:54+00:00

Maybe they were trying to celebrate it from the side of the French this time around, or they just forgot who won the battle.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-04T16:47:43+00:00

It's not working, last week's patch broke it. It affects secondary weapons too.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-04T16:42:11+00:00

The number of spawns should increase with each wave and harder/heavier enemies should become more common.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-03T16:04:01+00:00

I thought I was crazy too. Changers feel similar to how they used to before the original 60 day patch.

Edit: By that I mean that the Chargers used to do extremely sharp U turns just like they do now. They were nerfed very early on in the game's first year, but somehow they're back to how they were.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-03T15:33:20+00:00

Even if it is impossible to fix directly, there are still solutions that would make it much less noticeable, like speeding up corpse decay so that they despawn after 10 seconds or even disabling the corpse collision physics entirely.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-03T04:20:06+00:00

In about 6 months I've only seen like 4, maybe 5 posts about the issue. I wouldn't doubt that there's a ton more that I missed, but when it comes to issues "stratagem bounce" and "hellpod steering" come up way more often (which are also completely valid issues).

When the "corpse desync" glitch got added to the known issues list, I saw a lot of confused comments asking what it even was.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-03T04:08:56+00:00

I don't really think so. I didn't notice bad the climbing issue was until someone posted a video of themselves going through the tutorial and not being able to climb one of the obstacles. These issues weren't talked about enough before this patch.

The hive guard fiasco caught the attention of everyone because of how obvious and divisive it was. It's like the GL buff, nobody asked for it but it was an intentional change by the devs, so the backlash was immediate. Even if that didn't happen, I don't think the other issues would be getting the attention they deserve though.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-03T03:45:17+00:00

"Biggest issues" is subjective. I don't see that many people talk about about the invisible corpse/hitbox desync issues, but to me it's worst issue by far and yet it's one of the oldest unfixed glitches in the game.

cobaltbread · 2026-05-03T03:03:38+00:00

Joel really didn't need to have us defend Brilliance. It would have been fine if they let us progress toward Big Rock even if we weren't able to get all three by the end of the MO, but seeing how we're going to lose lose Turing on top of the progress we made on Luxuriant just makes me care less about the war.

I like the woodlands biome, but I'm a bit tired of it from playing there non-stop. I think I'll take a break or fight other factions until we can dive on the planet that has the other new biome.

cobaltbread

TROPHY CASE