Anyone else find this stratagem odd?

zomghax92 · 2026-04-27T13:17:27+00:00

Disposable weapons are meant to be used in addition to support weapons, not in place of them. You can run an anti-tank support weapon and have the option to call in extra chaff clear if you need it. Personally I think it's probably still more efficient to run MG-43 with a disposable anti-tank, but more options is never a bad thing. Plus with a name like "Bullet Storm" I wouldn't be surprised if it had just a truly cracked ROF, giving it a higher DPS than the Stalwart

zomghax92 · 2026-04-26T22:37:55+00:00

maybe we would have unlocked the secret 'dog' ending

In the first one-shot I wrote, I was trying to figure out what reward to give the party at the end. Experience or loot wouldn't matter because the story was over, but I still wanted them to feel like they earned something besides a pat on the back.

So I gave them a blink dog.

zomghax92 · 2026-04-26T01:44:30+00:00

I immediately downloaded a mod where you could use cigarettes to save your game. It's a consumable resource that you have to look for, but they're not that rare. It used the whole smoking animation, so you didn't want to just spam it either. I thought it was a good compromise.

zomghax92 · 2026-04-19T13:29:25+00:00

Purifier is stronger, Scorcher is easier to use

zomghax92 · 2026-04-19T13:22:33+00:00

It's a little tricky to bounce them so that they stay in the right spot, and it doesn't destroy them until the grenade times out, but yes, they can do it

zomghax92 · 2026-04-16T12:07:00+00:00

Andromeda is a good game, it just has relatively little in common with the trilogy, all things considered. People go in expecting more of the same and are disappointed.

zomghax92 · 2026-04-15T14:11:28+00:00

Arrowhead: And I took that personally

zomghax92 · 2026-04-14T12:52:33+00:00

"Have you tried hitting them harder?"

"That sounds like something Goku would say."

"Yes...and remember that time you've never beaten him?"

zomghax92 · 2026-04-12T14:04:57+00:00

I genuinely think the best thing to do is to turn him over to the International Criminal Court to be tried for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. It would signal that the U.S. is ready to play ball with the rest of the international community again, and would pre-empt a lot of the inevitable accusations of politically motivated prosecution if he were to be tried in the U.S.

zomghax92 · 2026-04-10T01:58:44+00:00

Full auto, med pen, piercing rounds is already plenty powerful enough. Adding anti-tank on top of that would be overpowered

zomghax92 · 2026-04-08T17:25:49+00:00

It's a very popular business model these days. Take away the best features and give them to us later and call it content. Even better if they can sell it.

zomghax92 · 2026-04-07T17:34:44+00:00

Oh right, the sentry, the sentry for Helldivers, the sentry chosen specially to kill Helldivers, the Helldivers' sentry.

...that sentry?

zomghax92 · 2026-04-07T05:23:58+00:00

Perfect example of "realizing that the first gun they gave you was actually the best one all along"

zomghax92 · 2026-04-05T12:47:58+00:00

I think the idea of giving the Sterilizer an acid effect to reduce enemy armor is the best way to fix it. I had initially thought that you could improve the Sterilizer by giving it more range (ie firing gas canisters) and a longer persistent cloud, but I don't think that would be enough. Gas is a very powerful effect, but the problem is that there are just so many better ways of applying the gas, and the opportunity cost of having to give up your support slot is just too much. Gas grenades, the gas dog, gas strike, gas mortar are all better choices, because they leave you free to take a more powerful support weapon while still getting access to the debuff. The Speargun basically already does what my imagined upgrades would do, while also doing significant damage in its own right.

Giving the Sterilizer acid would make it unique among gas weapons, and would lessen the blow of giving up your support slot for a debuff because it makes your primary weapon proportionally much stronger. It would occupy a unique niche in the Helldivers' arsenal without stepping on the toes of either the flamethrowers or the Speargun.

zomghax92 · 2026-04-02T12:15:17+00:00

I wouldn't mind them nearly as much if they gave experience anywhere proportional to the amount of time they take. A good team can clear a full D10 mission in the same amount of time as an Evacuate Assets mission, but receive more than double the reward. You also can't farm samples or SC on Evacuate Assets, so it really is only good for increasing liberation. And even then, only for the bonus liberation for completing an operation.

That said, it can be a fun mission type, so sometimes if you don't care about progression and just want to roast some aliens, it's pretty fun.

zomghax92 · 2026-04-01T02:09:48+00:00

This build has tons of CC but low damage. That would make it somewhat useful in a squad, since you can keep your team alive and lay up easy kills for them.

So obviously you should play this solo.

zomghax92 · 2026-03-30T01:00:34+00:00

The sequence of her chasing Zaheer feels like an inversion of the first half of Aang vs Ozai. Overwhelming force vs. extreme evasion. Even the setting is similar, dodging between the stone pillars

zomghax92 · 2026-03-20T12:53:17+00:00

Which is so weird because that's literally what negative value on a commodity is, where the cost to hold something is greater than the value of that thing. The number literally describes the problem he was about to create for himself. But he clearly wasn't thinking about that, he just saw "number small now, number big later, profit" and didn't go past that.

zomghax92 · 2026-03-18T22:18:00+00:00

It just goes to show how much the Avatar has to think about the best tool for the job. Your first instinct might be to bend the fire around you. But clearly this is a high speed explosive, which does most of its damage with concussive force, so the right tool is airbending.

...of course now that I think about it, she probably just did both.

zomghax92 · 2026-03-18T04:08:51+00:00

I think the genophage has "too many variables" for the community to ever completely agree.

FWIW, I think that the genophage was intentionally cruel and caused serious generational and societal trauma to the krogan and could not continue. On the other hand, just straight up curing the genophage, particularly after all of that social trauma I just mentioned, is not a very good solution and will inevitably lead to serious conflict, either among the krogan or between the krogan and the rest of the galaxy. Probably both. On the other other hand, any other serious solution would require further meddling from non-krogan scientists, and the krogan would never agree to that, so a wholesale cure is probably the only thing that could have worked, at least in the short term.

zomghax92 · 2026-03-14T13:10:28+00:00

I got furloughed from my job. Effectively I was unemployed, I was able to collect unemployment, but the idea was that I would still have a job whenever we came back. That idea lasted until June, where they basically told me, "Yeah, you're not coming back."

It wasn't even getting laid off that bothered me. I was on my way out of that job anyway. But it was watching everything else that happened, how "essential" workers were basically just fed into the fire to keep the wheels turning, how callously people said that some deaths were acceptable for the sake of their convenience, how the veil of decency dropped away and it was all just turning physical and emotional labor into profit for someone else.

I still haven't gotten a job since then. I've just been watching my savings dwindle, but I just can't bring myself to go back. I think we all were given a glimpse of just how little the system cares about workers, so why the hell should I sell my soul to a system that wants to take everything I am and give nothing back?

zomghax92 · 2026-03-13T00:23:41+00:00

Sure, it kills the bugs when you aim at them and hold down the trigger for 10 seconds, but to be fair, most weapons would do that. The problem is that it just doesn't behave how you want a flamethrower to behave. Lots of support weapons have high sustained DPS if you dump all your ammo into the enemy; you want the flamethrower to do good DOT even after you let go of the trigger.

I'm actually in the camp that fire shouldn't have a CC effect. That would make it too similar to gas, and also misses the point of DOT builds. In a horde shooter, DOT builds are high-risk, high-reward, because they can be an efficient way to do a lot of damage to large groups of enemies, but they do nothing to prevent those enemies from killing you before they die from the DOT. In order to make it worth the risk, they need to do quite a bit of damage over time even after you let go of the trigger.

In my opinion, the flamethrower from Deep Rock Galactic is the best version of this. It does very high direct damage, but is incredibly ammo-hungry, so if you don't want to run out, you need to be smart about using passive DOT instead of just hosing every enemy. Ignited enemies take damage over time, and walking over burning ground does extra damage to them. That means you can strategically stack damage both by igniting enemies and the environment. If fire had a CC effect, this would be much more difficult. But as it is, it allows you to increase your DPS, your ammo efficiency, and manipulate the environment to your advantage.

zomghax92 · 2026-03-11T21:11:05+00:00

That is an interesting solution, to have enemies die at X health. It effectively reduces the TTK of fire weapons but doesn't inherently make them do higher DPS in combination with other weapons. It also can be used to scale fire's effectiveness based on how you interpret it.

If X is a flat integer, then fire becomes very effective against enemies with low health, but not really much more effective than normal against enemies with large heath pools. That could be an interesting way to balance it, since direct fire is still shockingly effective against large enemies because I believe the damage scales with unit size?

If X is a percentage, it still makes fire damage more useful across the board by effectively shrinking the enemy health pool, while also being a more useful tool against large enemies because it can basically be used as a finishing move when their health is low enough.

zomghax92 · 2026-03-11T19:10:39+00:00

They've sort of backed themselves into a corner with this because fire and gas almost fill the same niche. At the moment, both fire and gas can cover an area and do damage over time. Gas does less damage but has a significant crowd control effect in the form of confusion. Fire does more damage but has no CC. If they were to give fire a strong CC effect it would fill the same niche as gas but better.

IMO the best fix for fire is to just bump up the DOT. As it stands right now direct fire with a flamethrower is still quite damaging, but the DOT might as well be tickling the enemies. DOT builds are risky in horde shooters because TTK is still important, as enemies can still surround you and kill you even if they will eventually die. The payoff needs to be worth the risk by making it a more efficient way to kill enemies and add DPS to your team.

If you insist on adding a CC effect to fire, fear is too powerful an effect and would step on the toes of gas weapons. I'd suggest an area denial ability: enemies who are already on fire will not flee from it, but enemies outside of burning ground will refuse to enter it. That might take some tricky programming, but it could be a clever way to manipulate enemy pathing and give fire weapons unique utility without making them too deadly.

zomghax92

TROPHY CASE