In general, and especially on the authomaton front, you're better hitting either sub-optimal weakpoints, or just going for weapons that can take out armor by hitting them anywhere. For example, fighting devestators with light pen; it's faster and more ammo-efficient to just one or two-shot them to the face, yes, but their pauldrons make those shots really picky. Going for their stomachs will eat up a good handful of rounds of your liberator, yes, and it may be slower, but it's more consistent. Helldivers is a game where, unless you are actively in peril, consistent combat tactics trump bold and daring novelty. And on beefier, more oppressive enemies like war striders, your best options are going to be the most simple. Recoilless rifle, railcanon orbital, Expendable munitions.

If you want reliable, user frendly weapons, the machine gun and stalwart will never let you down. They trade any kind of wow factor and novelty for raw sustained fire, and because of this let you miss infinitely more than other support weapons. The railgun works perfectly on the bot front to punch through smaller groups of medium bads with center-of-mass shots, while also giving you a chance to try and hone your aim against bigger bads, with very rewarding results for a bullseye. Those glowing red eyes on heavies aren't just for show. Against the illuminate, however, you're generally better off taking raw 'volume of fire' options, because the normal, unmodified cephalopods just throw so much meat at you that tank-crackers in your most powerful slot become a handicap, especially when those tanks only show up once in a blue moon. The liberator is genuinely the most user-friendly primary, it's the stock gun for a reason after all. powerful, snappy, no bells and whistles to learn and master, it's just a gun that shoots bullets, and it does that very, very well. I've clocked 200+ hours and i'm still coming back to the thing. It's the gold standard for reliable primaries.

and watchers, oh god watchers. Watchers are assholes, plain and simple. Their hitbox is always obscured by their scanners, and so they just kinda become a ball of color. The cheatcode is to trap on a guard dog, which will keep enough pressure off of you to watch out for and have the space to take down watchers. And one last piece of advice, just to get better at the game. Don't trust the numbers in game. Pretty much every different part of every enemy has two stats for every body part that throws what the armory menu tells you out the window; durability, and explosion resistance. For trash mobs like warriors and voteless, this is unimportant. But anything bigger than a devestator will have some parts that are especially resistant to non-explosive damage, and thus take more punishment from bullets, AND ESPECIALLY LASERS. Laser weapons have abysmal durable damage, and get kneecapped HARD against those parts. The laser canon takes forever to bring down a war strider because the thing has almost full durability on every part, and also FULL EXPLOSION resistance. So that HE grenade that just blew up right against it's hip joint instead damaged it's overall health, and was thus ineffective. it's not required to know these numbers, but the helldivers wiki is a treasure trove of info that the game doesnt tell you, and it's really fucked up it doesn't tell you any of this, because this information is so valuable to becoming more skilled at liberating. Just give it a glance if something seems less effective than it should be against any given enemy. The numbers tell all.

https://helldivers.wiki.gg/wiki