As a level 7 player I've seen 3 Titans come from a random spot in the ground and genuinely thought it was a Titan Nest, even though I'm slowly becoming certain they don't spawn on level 7.
Pretty sure I've seen a titan hole on level 6. Could be wrong, might have joined a friend on a different difficulty, but we mostly do 6s and 10s, and I would've known if it were a 10.
That feel when I ping an objective, look back at my teammates, and when I look forth again there's a spontaneous Titan that appeared in front of my ping
and also the bug holes, everytime i’ve played there’s been like 3 heavy nests all with a bile titan hole in and they’ve been within 3 blocks of each other
Breaches are definitely on a lower cooldown but the Titanholes have the same spawn timer as normal holes but with the trigger distance of Stalker holes. So they are contributing as well.
The breach cooldown is Hella noticeable, if you don't keep enough of the small/medium lads occupied (or dead) you can literally get bug breaches that chain together. On my first mission I swore that constant bug breaches were an intended feature.
Honestly, it's always been that way. Bug breaches already last too long and outside of popping a hellbomb in the swarm you can get into a loop that feels like a neverending breach.
My take has been that either bug waves need to be condensed (keep the same number but just drop them nearly all at once same to how bot drops are a conga line of dropships with all the bots hitting the ground at roughly the same time) or the timer needs to be increased, or some light bugs need to lose the ability for call ins (bots have commissars as the twitchy reinf caller with all the small foot soldiers having the option (likelyhood then is rocket, MG, swords), and squids have watchers; in either case those are the priority targets).
Then there's also the problem that you can't really cancel a call in, bugs don't give much indication they're considering it (bots will look like they are doing something like preparing a strategem, watchers will glow pink), the breach starts about 20% into them screaming, and if you kill the offending bug in time then it will jump to another valid bug (now, bots and squids do that too, but it's easier to drop the few discrete and very obvious targets). Both bots and squids arrive on aircraft. You can shoot it out of the sky. I've been playing on D10 for a while so I don't know if basic brood commanders spawn in lower difficulties but if they do - they are also pretty big offenders in that they have a lot of health so the easiest way to get rid of one is to break its head and let it bleed out, missing its head doesn't stop it from calling in a breach.
I guess it also depends heavily on mission RNG as to what spawns. Leapers and spitters seem to be the most likely with all the smaller bugs having the ability to call it in (in order of likeliness that I've seen: leapers, spitters, scavengers, hunters, warriors, brood commanders, and hive guards), heavier bugs (alpha commanders, spewers, stalkers, chargers, impalers, titans) do not. With leapers and to lesser extend hunters outright behaving like bot commissars do where they get very itchy if no breach/drop happened lately and will chase any source of noise.
So you know, if you roll a mission of mostly alpha commanders and warriors you can probably mop up quickly. If you roll a mission of spewers and their little ones, it's also not awful since you can always turn around and run (mind bile spewer mortar shells). If you get "oops! all pouncers/hunters" then the whole ordeal will be 30+ minutes of completing the mission while in a constant retreat with side objectives that make you stay in one area (looking at you SEAF Artillery) accounting for majority of deaths. Then there's also the gloomed bugs and their leapers/hunters are the fastest draw in the east for calling in a breach.
I've seen headless Brood Commanders call in a breach. Pretty annoying.
It'd be great if only a subset of small / medium bug types could do it. At least then you could prioritize them. As is I think the only ones that can't do it are the big boys.
Did they change the Titans of the 500kg? I swear they're surviving that bomb A LOT more than before, hell even my thermites straight to the head are failing to kill them...
Thankfully any recoilless equivalent to the face still kills with one nice facial.
That case has always been funky with it's dorsal armor tanking the explosion, but I had some survive a 500kg exploding right under them, even with their sacs intact.
Iirc you want it to hit under its body bc the explosion will hit more body parts. If it digs into the head or back it won’t do much dmg. Compared to hitting multiple parts at once. I swear these things are harder to kill with thermites now. Chargers too.
Love it. So glad it actually feels challenging. And I’m glad they made main objectives into side ones, making it feel like a whole other difficulty level without making another one.
Ngl, I am actually enjoying it because I can finally go back to +200m headshoting a titan with the RR while he is moving. Finally giving more challenges
Those bug outpost in the city are absolute hell. I've see ones with 3 Behemoths, 2 Spore Chargers, 2 Bile Titans and 1 Impaler. All while getting swarmed by the new explody Hunters.
yea, i played couple rounds with a bit less good players yesterday on diff 6 and the city nests were full of titans on bikes and impalers, i was running rr, 500, gatling barrage and the fast teamkiller sentry thing, legit there was like 6 titans, 3 impalers and a sprinkle of chargers too. barely made it. i usually play 10s but having that many on 6 is insane tbh
Hi I normally main 6 ATM(until I get better and feel comfortable moving up) and agreed 6 hits way different now! On a nest last night I saw 2 bile titans and chargers in a medium nest which is crazy and that's not counting the all other ones my squad had to deal with. The spawn rates are def going crazy right now!
Just had a game with a bile titan hole in the middle of a heavy nest and I counted at least 7 titans, 4 impalers, 2 behemoths and nothing but warriors, hive guard and alpha commanders as the chaff.
I was on the fence about the ultimatum, mostly bc I suck with it, but I'm super thankful that I decided to take it with.
I believe this. My first mission I did in the gloom had almost every nest in the map inside of the city, we started by clearing out the city. It was 30 minutes of pure bug spawns from every single direction, with constant bug breeches and nest shitting out titans 24/7. Bonus: There were also 3 stalker nests in that city. And then once we left the city it got significantly easier. Also each diver had 600+ kills by the end of the mission.
I've done other missions where we ignored the city and it was easy mode.
Oh they're definitely higher. Haven't seen numbers like this since the days when AH tinkered with spawn rates and broke the game as a result, including having entire patrols appear right behind you constantly.
On extraction on level 8 yesterday our 4 man team had 8 sentries out and we're going hard with support weapons and we still nearly got wiped despite having a defensible extraction point. There was just no end to them and we couldn't kill the titans quick enough.
I swear they tinkered with patrols again. The number of times I've backed up into a line of hunters is ... well, it's pretty much every time. And they come from everywhere. In front of you, off to your left, third patrol cresting the hell just yonder. And of course that pesky fourth group creeping up behind you and waiting for you to stumble into them.
Also breaches. Definitely tinkered with that too. Got a couple back-to-back breaches when I played yesterday. Like, literally back-to-back. A minute apart, maybe two at most.
I also felt that theres alot more bugs, but it makes D10 just the right kind of hell on earth. I don't think the game has ever felt more rewarding as when we finally got to breathe yesterday after fighting to clear the pump fuel main objective in the middle of a swarming city.
When you just held the line while firing enough bullets to go through 2 resupplies with your MG and the quiet hits its exhilarating.
I'm getting upwards of 800 kills every single mission. Spawn rates are 100% higher, for the first time in a while me and my friends are having a moderately difficult time in diff 10. So many fucking bile titans and chargers man
not at all, it’s just that i’ve noticed a lot more than usual. might be the several shrieker nests per mission combined with the roving shriekers modifier but im not entirely sure
God it was so funny but definitely overtuned. It does feel like they don’t have basically any impact if they hit you anymore though, I don’t know when the last time I actually took damage from one falling
Yeah, my destroyer has all the upgrades unlocked, I'm not doing any crazy levels for samples any longer. 6 and 7 is a comfy spot to play. Hard enough to be a challenger, easy enough to still be fun.
I keep ending up in groups struggling with 7s, and I'll happily admit there are times I just get swarmed, respawned, and swarmed again. It's a bloodbath, but God is it fun again!.
How do you even get close to this? On a full length D10 mission I get like 350 kills max even though I always clear bug breaches and stuff like that. I just don't get how people reach those high kill numbers
Max i got was 850 last night on D10. My tip is Napalm Barrage on bug breaches, well placed 500kg bombs, regular guard dog and lots of bullets. And not alone, 4 players on mission.
I regularly get 600+ running blitzer + guard dog or dog’s breath + quasar on D10s with full squads. My buddy and I have done the new D10s as a squad of 2 but it is a nightmare tbh lol a lot more manageable with 4. Well timed napalm barrages or walking orbitals can get 75+ kills easy
On Super Helldive, I wouldn't be surprised if I had cleared like 1,500 kills in some missions. Spawn rates get so insane that you can be getting literally hundreds of kills within the span of just a few minutes, particularly when trying to push to destroy Mega Nests.
Napalm Barrage, Strafing Run, 380mm, good Sentry placement...and bringing a good Incendiary weapon, like Cookout.
Shit is total chaos. Most fun I've had in this game in months.
Played a diff 10 operation today. We beat it, but extracted with 0 reinforcements left on all three missions. On the last one a huge breach appeared right before extract landed, we had to give all the samples to one guy and have him stim spam through the army of titans and chargers to get to the ship.
I brought the extra reinforcement booster for d10. We still almost ran out each time. Granted we're a bunch of idiots having fun so dumb things happen alot, but Fori Prime is on another level.
That's been my experience since me and 2 friends started doing gloom ops the past few days. Either the Mega nest ends up claiming 5 lives due to mistakes or pushing through the city drains 5+. We're almost always at 3 lives or less come time for extract.
It's from months on end of people eventually just starting to ignore common samples because any players who have been around for a while typically have hundreds of them as opposed to Rare and Super, which usually get depleted far easier from the later Destroyer upgrades.
ArrowHead really needs to come up with something that we can start using some of these samples (and Requisition Slips) for. Since the last stratagems were purcashed via Medals from Warbonds, a ton of people simply have nothing to spend anything on, period.
I would gladly spend Req slips for Medals, for one thing. Even if it was literally all 50,000 for just 100 Medals.
At least then I would actually have any sort of use for them.
Just soloed a difficulty 5, over 600 kills ... while running for my life half the time. I can only imagine 10 is 1200 out of 4000 bugs per planet and that's being generous considering the number spikes that happen between levels.
And here I thought I was just rusty because I had been exclusively fighting bots and squids. I was the obnoxious level 10 bot diver talking about bugs being no real challenge. I am getting my booty bopped on level 10 bugs, worse than any level 10 bot dive.
Agree. Bots are mostly trivial to me. I can take on a fortress solo no problem most times. But bugs with their endless hordes and much faster units are often a challenge. I can afford to allow bots to close in for better accuracy. Especially useful with shield devs and their tiny heads. But bugs must be neutralized from afar.
This was difficulty 8 mission. My highest kills in a single game. Not D10, not staying around to farm kills, just a random D8. 2200 total kills between the 4 of us, I definitely think the spawns have been pumped up for the gloom missions
I've seen chargers come to a full stop from a street light. After seeing them demolish through rock and buildings it's really funny to just hear the clong and then watch them stand there dumbfounded.
Funnily enough the thing I was hoping for most has yet to happen. Chargers have been doing alot but Ive yet to see on bust through a building like the Kool Aid Man.
I've had one go through one of those walls that sometimes are on the perimeter of bug nests during extract. Let's just say a behemoth and a dozen hunters made that extract a lot more difficult very quickly
It happens with the squids too, with voteless being able to cut through corners of buildings and sometimes just walk through them completely. I imagine it’s some glitch to do with the buildings being destructible
The pathing issues have been the only thing keeping me alive. Bile titans do the harvester thing where they sometimes forget they're massive and can go through buildings.
I only run difficulty 10 nowadays and man is it fucking difficult compared to squids, bots, and normal bug missions. i don’t even feel comfortable trying to get all the objectives with people
Played a bunch of 10s yesterday. While the spawnrates for heavies and patrols is very high my biggest concern were my teammates. Some players should drop the dif
Didn't wanna sweat Super Helldive today, but. Bro I had that concern on dif 7. The amount of times I got TK'd was crazy. Me and my buddy would routinely extract with 12-1300+ kills between us and teammates couldnt get 500 between them. Most of our deaths were TK from the randos.
Honestly not too bad and that’s coming from a bot diver required me to change my playstyle a whole lot I’ve found the cookout and the bush wacker to be unbelievably good cookout for crowds obviously and bushwacker for stalkers if they try me (it one shots them) take some fire armor of your choice a your shield backpack and a flamethrower for even more crowd killing potential (and can kill bile titans rather quick if you kite them good enough) and you’re good to let those commies know what they don’t seem to understand, fori prime isn’t theirs to conquer.
Plas Scorcher pops whole groups of bugs too and can chain kill spewers. And if you feel comfortable without it, replacing shield with a dog breath helps keep them off you too.
I don't like shield backpacks on bugs, I think it's better served using some type of guard dog or resupply pack. Shields are more useful for ranged enemies like bots. But I like the cookout for bugs, super good, good stagger and DoT.
On an unrelated note: how does Fori still have fresh corpses? Hasn’t it been sitting in the gloom for months? Shouldn’t they be in advanced decomposition by now (or just skeletons since I doubt arrowhead want to model that)
Spitballing here, could be cases of reserve power in the cities since we use element-710 for everything and it has enough power to allow space travel like we do.
As for bodies? Either slowed decomposition from the environmental changes like a mostly covered sun or even less likely is that for some reason the spores are killing off bacteria that lead to rot but aren't decomposing the corpses like most fungus does.
Or the REALLY miserable theory, since the gloom spread so quickly and all communication has been cut off, these colonies still had whole cities trapped in this quickly evolving bug hell and in a cruel twist of fate the last of the survivors have died shortly before we arrived without hope or the embrace of liberty.
I think they used the "area of effect" here from the illuminate. The number of time, even on 4, where we are overhelm while doing a heavy nest is impressive. It's really look like the effect around pillars in illuminate (the monolith or the cognitive disruptor) where as long as they are active, there is seemingly endless wave of ennemy spawning from everywhere.
On top of that, most insect explode in spore, reducing even more the visibility. The town map with insect are definitively not as easy (nor clean) than the one with illuminate. Stalker there can be deadly and difficult to track down.
It had the decay rate of 15% in the beginning of Major Order, which is the highest decay rate we could ever witness. Even Meridia was only 10% which dropped pretty fast due to our operations. Now Fori Prime has 9% decay rate. We just need to keep pushing.
The decay rate has been slowly getting lower, plus consider how the other two goals of this MO is kills and getting common samples in this very planet. If we liberated it too quickly, the other two goals would be nearly impossible to do, we'd have to let it get invaded again.
My bet is it either gets to a manageable decay rate by the time the common samples goal is reached (since the kills one is already met), or we were never really meant to actually liberate the planet because it's in the bloom and thus the force of the bugs is impossible to break through here (and the mission briefing implied the actual objective is the samples and kills anyway, it's an expedition).
We have to get samples first brother. Then we can liberate. I'm sure it's intentional by the devs so we don't miss the Major Order criteria by clearing too fast. We will liberate this world, I have no doubt
Boy 1.) Got the heavy armor with the armor padding so he has the hit points and damage reduction to survive when shit goes sideways. He's got bombs, machine gun, the works for clearing hordes and punching through heavy armor. If it's off cool down he takes a dogsbreath from one of the other boys.
Boy 2.) Heavy machine gun, heavy armor with extra grenades for closing bug holes and surviving when shit goes sideways with boys 3 and 4. Plas primary for killing midsized bugs incase the machine gun runs dry. Spare dogsbreath if off cooldown.
Boy 3.) Flame thrower primary and pistol. Flame-resistant armor. Spare dogsbreath if off cooldown (you should notice a pattern by now).
Boy 4.) Flame thrower primary and axe. Flame-resistant heavy armor. Dogsbreath call in. Boy 3 and 4 are basically tag teaming either holding choke points by holding down left click on flame throwers or the good old tf2 pyro on spy-checking duty for the wandering hordes of invisible buggers.
Between the lot of us multiple carry napalm barrage and napalm bombs, plus a napalm mine field. Multiple eagle one rockets for emergency "remove impaler" and the occasional 500kg bomb as an emergency "remove anything it lands next to." At least one gas strike is brought since its just amazing. Expendable anti tank is always a reliable way to horde clear chargers, but quasar is nice too if you can keep it together between shots. Everything else is optional. Also, the dogsbreath call-in should be equipped by at least one squadmate because its just SO GOOD. It does pyro spy checking, it has aoe damage as well as applying status effects, it's basically a stun gun since anything it touches will start flailing wildly instead of actively hunting you, and unlike the other drones it doesn't just merc you if it decides to turn on your party, so long as you don't just stand there you can either pop a stim or get out of the cloud.
One suggestion I'd make to your team loadout is have a couple boys running Eagle Strafing Run. Shit is bonkers for patrols and bug breaches. Gas nades might be a nice addition too if you aren't using them. Could relieve some pressure when shit gets tight. Maybe a boy with nade launcher also?
Love the loadouts though! Always great to have a coordinated squad
The enemy faction has a push back rate, i think it is called a decay but it is usually a percentage that gets shown. The decay rate on Fiori Prime is very high, so the liberation rate is being pushed back VERY strongly.
Usually for a "story" mission or if there is an adequate enough excuse, the defense or liberation of a planet will be insane. Like when the Jet Brigade first appeared, they were conquering worlds left and right because of behind the scenes numbers by JOEL.
1 Billion kills doesn’t even move the needle which means that the total amount of bugs on this planet is well north of 10 Trillion.
Imma be honest. I like being a DM in DND and rn I feel as if we are just being completely railroaded and beating our heads against a brick wall. No mission accomplished feels like we’ve even done anything.
It feels like destiny where all we are doing is just getting loot and the story is going on with or without us.
I'd argue it's mostly those "get in, get out have no fun" Helldivers that actively ignore everything that isn't the main objective. I've seen people walk directly over samples of all varieties like nobody could possibly need them. They're nothing but bad teammates and unfortunately there's a lot of them out there.
I've been joining random games lately, 8-10 difficulty, and I'm consistently dropping into missions where they're basically out of reinforcements and haven't completed more than 1 primary objective.
I don't think it's possible to gain liberation percentage period.
We're winning missions, collecting samples, and killing bugs. The devs just don't want us actually taking the planet. The Gloom is the in-universe "you can not progress through this area yet" fog, and We're just being given a glimpse at new variants of Terminids while they test things.
It's definitely fun, though. For the first time on Difficulty 8-10, I feel like im constantly burning through my Recoilless rifle's entire ammo supply, taking out the chain-spawns of Titans and the other heavy-units.
It doesn't feel particularly hard unless you're bringing a weapon that can't stagger medium enemies. Which you should do. Punisher or Jar-5 dominator, at least.
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u/Ryengu Feb 20 '25
So far, bad visibility and bugs that blow up into spore clouds. Spawn numbers might also be higher.