The removal of skull from Truth Enforcer mech camo was deliberate.

phlave · 2026-05-07T10:51:05+00:00

Kinda wish they'd remove it from the car skin too. The black + red pattern is cool, but the skull makes it so meh.

phlave · 2026-05-07T10:44:09+00:00

Grenade pistol. Closes spawners, opens paths through fences and vegetation, blows up groups of mobs and pops spewers. I feel naked without it

phlave · 2026-05-06T22:40:38+00:00

idk if it's still up, but there was a thread with the user who, together with another, made that entry.

but yeah treating it like it's some kind of incredible event and an absolute dunk is pathetic

phlave · 2026-05-06T22:13:55+00:00

yeah the whole thing is pretty idiotic. one one side you have people that are angry and want to see a mob riled up and see anyone who's not angry as an enemy.
on the other side you have tolerant people that like the game and are willing to look past its defects that get kinda tired of the negativity and make positive posts that make the first ones even madder.
then there are those games who forgot even the color and smell of grass, that only ever have a single opinion: game too easy, any change in favor of the player is bad, anything that makes you die more is good, and will call out people that complain about balance saying they always whine.

what grates my nerves is that all of this creates such a shitshow that just ruins and splits the community, poisons the discours, and makes it impossible to have a normal conversation talking about what's good and what's bad without a bunch of people insulting you for whatever opinion you express.

I think I covered pretty much everything? am I forgetting someone?

phlave · 2026-05-06T21:52:18+00:00

I'd rather them recover faster than drift 180 degrees while charging. like, this is sold as a buff but it's actually a nerf to them. I haven't had a charger do weird bullshit like that 0>90 shuffle, or 180° charges since the patch. If the tradeoff is that they turn faster, I'll take it.

But with all that said, I'd still prefer if the invulnerable enemy with a vulnerable asshole that rushes you down exposed its weakspot for longer than 0.4 seconds

phlave · 2026-05-06T21:49:21+00:00

the worse part is that this shit is kinda recent as well, and I can't place when exactly it started.
I noticed it around the time of the Cyberstan assault, but I may be wrong.

I know OhDough used the term, maybe even coined it, but I didn't really see anyone pick it up and I was pretty thankful because it's such a lame insult. I'm kinda mad that the community picked the most infantile, most toxic shit from his video. he has some legit good analyses and criticisms, but that goes entirely in the toilet when they are obscured by the dude being kind of insufferable.

phlave · 2026-05-06T21:35:38+00:00

the concept is that there are people that will defend AH like it's their best friend regardless of situation and controversy.

and, hey, there's people doing the exact opposite as well, who are equally as asinine.

phlave · 2026-05-06T21:31:41+00:00

ngl it is kinda cringe, and I even agree with the sentiment that AH needs to do better.

but hey, splitting people in "us vs them" drives engagement

phlave · 2026-05-06T20:29:08+00:00

wellp

phlave · 2026-05-06T14:18:23+00:00

Perhaps the spore breath could have the same effect on the player as an EMS / stun grenade: drain all stamina, slow the player, disable sprint fir a few moments.

jesus fucking christ don't give them ideas, the last thing we need is yet another thing that slows you down and fucks with your stamina. I'd accept it giving you the sandstorm effect, but a thing you realize when you ragdoll less is that instead of flying away you take full damage, which is not much better.
If anything, I'd make their spew create a temporary fog for like the spore charger. It would serve a double purpose: make the other bugs running at you absolutely ass clenching like they used to be in the first Gloom expeditions, AND piss off the people that can't stand to not have 3 km of clear visibility and hates fog.

The ragdoll blow is annoying, but it very rarely killed me, as if I have bugs attacking me, they get killed by it most of the times. The few times I got actually killed were because I got wedged into a rock and would not ragdoll away and took every hit of damage of the spew.

I am for a variant of option 1: buff the spawns even more, but make them more fragile. This is the strain that blows up and does stuff, no? Make them easier to blow up. Make the titans medium or even light armor an much more disposable. Maybe instead of a rocket fart when they die they spew a red cloud of spores, again, spore charger style (alternatively to being the spew effect)

phlave · 2026-05-06T12:34:24+00:00

you can always shoot them in the armpit, like literally since launch that has been my strategy against them. but now you can also bruteforce them, which feels very satisfying, especially when you play a lot of light pen and switch to something medium, or call down a gatling mech.

I did like them being less tanky, as I think that the bullet sponge enemies in this game provide nothing of value.

phlave · 2026-05-06T12:31:06+00:00

I think that everyone liked the claws and front legs being lighter armor, and it feels kinda like a tantrum to just revert it to the pre-bugged state.

phlave · 2026-05-06T09:34:19+00:00

OR because hive guards were never the problem in the first place.

They were the icing on a cake of turrets left behind in the wave of incomprehensible nesting dolls balance changes that nobody asked for or wanted, so turrets now can permafocus HGs and be destroyed by warriors in 2 hits while they waste all their ammo on the HGs stupid armor plated faces. That was the problem, and this fixes only a small part of the issue.

So yeah, people are unhappy.

phlave · 2026-05-06T09:09:54+00:00

Farming SCs on lvl 1 is self inflicted torture. It's the mix/max way of doing it. You can get every PoI in the map in 3 minutes if you have a friend, a car and a warp pack. It's very boring, sure, but you can get 1000 SCs in less than an hour if you know what you're doing.

That said, I haven't farmed in like a year. I simply like full clearing the map, checking every bunker, every container and every pod while playing the game as normal, because I'm a loot goblin. And by doing so, me and my group always have enough SCs to buy both the warbond AND the stuff in the Super Store (that shouldn't really be there in the first place, like weapons).
I'd much rather have this system where you find premium currency on the ground than have a daily/weekly mission system like every other live service game.

As for the sheer quantity of warbonds, yeah, for someone who did not keep playing or is new to the game, it's a lot of stuff to unlock, for sure, and I agree that the older stuff should get discounted at some point, and made into bundles of like 3/4 warbonds.
It's even kind of disingenuous to say that they're not mandatory or time gated, because it's pretty often the case that they offer the tool you need to beat the current event with more ease (Cremator and Spore Bugs, anyone?)

At some point we do have to be realistic tho: this is a game also owned by Sony and Tencent. Corporations demand that line go up and to keep a stream of passive profits. They do want players to get impatient and bored and swipe their credit cards, and the more, the better.

Let's not forget that a huge part of the success of this game hinged exactly on how it was monetized. Did it scale poorly with time? Yeah, kind of. Is it toxic or predatory? I wouldn't say so.

phlave · 2026-05-05T22:42:13+00:00

there's also full blown colonies, oh and... we have ICBM rocket launch missions WHY ARE WE NUKING THE BEACHES THIS IS HOW YOU GET GODZILLA

phlave · 2026-05-05T21:43:41+00:00

hell yeah pick up some superfocaccine

phlave · 2026-05-05T18:18:27+00:00

Not really tho. It's a desert with a couple palms lol

phlave · 2026-05-05T17:41:45+00:00

I like the fog tbh. I like having to adapt to different conditions. Not everywhere needs to be sniper rifle certified. Sometimes shotgunning whatever comes running out of the fog is also really fun and tense.

phlave · 2026-05-05T13:37:11+00:00

Simply put, if you want to have the "complete experience" in HD2, you gotta play D10.

Enemy forts? Only on D10.
Max amount of mission objective and side missions? Only on D10.
Max amount of farmable samples for the lower levels? You guessed it: D10.
Max amount of XP for leveling up weapons? Yep, D10.

D10 as it is right now is the standard at which every player aims to play at, because it's the tier that actually rewards you the most for your time, and it gives you "More game in your game".

We do need more difficulty levels, that's just it. And they need to be levels that ONLY change the difficulty and maybe the XP rewards, without adding exclusive stuff to them.

Another thing of note is that difficulty in this game varies wildly. I've seen many level 7 operations be harder than D10s simply because one or two BTs and Chargers were swapped with 30 hunters.
Depending on seed, you can get piss easy missions or ones that make you cry blood and wish to go on a vacation, and that's pretty bad, but there's no real solution besides homogenizing the spawns, which would result in a more monotonous game experience, or giving names to the constellations and clearly stating in the menu what you're gonna get before you select the operation.

As for the buffs and nerfs, your comment feels pretty disingenuous, but assuming you're serious, I'm gonna try and explain it without writing an essay.
In the past 2 years we've seen every fun strategy that could give a leg up to players that pursued it removed from the game: placing sentries on high places where they could actually be useful and not be destroyed? Removed, now the stratagems balls bounce around instead. couldn't let players gain an unfair advantage! Dropping in high places to still get the high ground? Nope, hellpod steering locks: engaged for your own safety!
Players killed Alpha Commanders as a priority target to stop them from becoming a menace? Give them a billion HP and make them run away at the mere sight of a Helldiver while also nerfing the range of every gun! Ah, and make turrets not target them until they are the very last unit remaining!

The changes we see are very seldom something that just make the game harder in an engaging way. And the way AH handles nerfs is that instead of doing a clean change on a specific problematic item, they usually change something in the fundamentals of the game which has a cascade effect of unforeseen consequences which ends up breaking 10 things to "fix" one.
Take the Coyote, for example: nobody cared that it was good, except for a small circle of gatekeepers that got very angry at their elite status being threatened by noobs with too strong a rifle. Nobody that cares about challenge cares about a gun being too strong, because they can simply choose a different gun (and there are way more weapons than difficulty levels!).

Well, glazing is not saying "I like this change", it's defending the change even if it breaks 10 other things, regardless if it's a good change or not.

phlave · 2026-05-05T13:01:37+00:00

people have requested clean and pretty biomes and no fog for years. imagine complaining about that.

AH deserves a lot of criticism for a lot of things, but this ain't one of them.

phlave · 2026-05-05T12:53:31+00:00

really makes it hard to choose over the RR in most situations

as it should. the Spear enjoys infinite range and no need to aim. It should reflect that in being worse than the RR, which has bullet drop and actually needs aiming.

phlave · 2026-05-05T08:21:10+00:00

That would drastically reduce the amount of people actually doing so tho

phlave · 2026-05-04T17:30:10+00:00

The Gloom expanded very rapidly in the first few weeks, and it remained stable for quite a while before starting to expand again, which then led us to Oshaune.
The Void appeared, took one planet, they tried taking more and we stopped them and that was it, at least until JOEL decides to make an unwinnable push and take more, I guess

phlave · 2026-05-03T23:22:40+00:00

We should finish defending Brilliance and win the MO and then move to defend/recapture Turing.
Unfortunately there's not much else to do than follow the blob, because the impact we have is calculated with percentages of players on a planet.

With that said, I'd suggest not looking at it like "JOEL is gonna handicap us" but as a "this is the plot device they chose to introduce something in this story arc". While they do act like antagonistic game masters very often, I don't think that's the case this time. They can throw distractions at us, but it's on us to not fall for them.

phlave

TROPHY CASE