In the past year, the updates for Helldivers 2 have brought more weapon buffs, more new enemies, and better new content. Meanwhile, our FatShark development team only keeps nerfing one skill while refusing to fully buff underused skills. Since the talent tree update, the veteran’s stealth skill and the executioner skill have never received any meaningful buffs. However, skills like War Cry, Zealot’s Prayer, and the Psyker’s bubble shield have been nerfed again and again. In contrast, in the other game, explosive weapons are still powerful — Arrowhead has never nerfed them. The weapons from the new warbond are strong, and recently they haven’t hesitated to buff core mechanics of weapons, such as fire and gas. But FatShark only keeps nerfing players, reducing build diversity, and giving buffs that never hit the mark (plasma guns and bolters make all other ranged weapons irrelevant). And the most common suggestions on the forums are to delete weapons and delete talents. It seems there’s a reason why our FatShark game’s player count can’t compete with the other game.
This is called lying
Exec’s stance has received multiple buffs that’d made it more relevant and it is quite competitive with VoC at present. Especially its recent buff - the one that gives toughness% regeneration, reinforces Vet’s role as a elite/special/shooter killer.
Infiltrate is still bad, but to make it less sour an ability choice, it at least has had one of its tax nodes integrated into base ability (damage% for X seconds during & on leaving stealth); and the effect itself was buffed (its duration on exiting stealth went from 5s to 8s, IIRC).
And they’re still competitive, and people still run them. They’d been changed for all good reasons of encouraging people to try different things - what gives?
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I will skip the section re: what Arrowhead does, since I don’t play HD2, and I don’t see how that correlates to what FS is doing and how the game is doing player count - I will revisit the last bit in the last paragraph of my reply.
I don’t see how that applies to other “unpopular” weapons that are ran competitively, selectively by certain classes:
- Helbros (Vet),
- Heavy laspistols (all; but mostly Psyker),
- Bolt pistols (basically all),
- Combat shotgun (Arbites),
- Needle pistol (Scum),
- Shredder AP (mostly Scum and Zealot)
It seems you were implying the perspective of what weapons Veteran is typically using, in which case there are at least 3 other good weapons (Helbro, Las pistol, Bolt pistol) that can be ran instead of Plasma and Boltgun, and each of them will be slightly better at certain specialized things than the former two.
There are other reasons for the player count being low, which are disconnected from how the game is doing balance-wise, like HD2 being a shooter game mainly, and that typically attracts more people in the gaming culture than games that involve melee combat, like Darktide, and that by itself is a substantial factor.
There also isn’t that much stuff to do in-game if you’re not interested in self-improvement activities - FS games have never really had a lot of content in them and hardly if ever maintained a big playerbase. People play the content and experience it, get bored and move onto the next thing - DT suffers from that, because it does not have a dev cycle that would flood the playerbase with new content on the regular.
Buffing exclusively isn’t balancing the game any more than nerving exclusively is.
Buffing everything up to the level of the over performers would lead to the enemy being too weak in comparison, and then themselves needing a buff too.
The weapons you mentioned still struggle to compete with the plasma gun. The plasma gun has high penetration, high damage, and a large magazine — the only concern is overheating. But it takes eight shots for the plasma gun to overheat, and the damage from those eight shots already outclasses the ranged weapons you listed as examples. After this update, the veteran’s Executioner and stealth skills have been buffed, but the most used skill for the veteran is still War Cry. Is this what the forums call ‘good balance’
I don’t oppose nerfing a single skill, but as part of balancing, the other two skills need to be buffed enough to give players a reason to choose them. We all know the middle skill is strong — it compensates for the veteran’s lack of emergency survivability while also providing some team utility. But what about the other two? Executioner mode can’t handle the massive hordes in Havoc. Stealth can only be used for sneaking through and has almost no damage output. In the end, if you bring Executioner or Stealth into a public Havoc squad, you simply can’t keep up.
I think regardless of what we’re typing about - be it ranged weapons or skills - what matters more is that people will always gravitate towards playstyle that requires them to put in the least effort for the maximum output. This does not mean other options are weak, but they comparatively require more effort for similar or subpar result, and even then they find niches specific to them:
- Helbros have insane uptime and are the best sniping weapons in the game - for any relevant targets but bosses and even then they can chunk monsters if you have good aiming reflexes - and shooting comfort-wise they are excellent, but you have to have space to use them,
- Laspistols have similar supremacy in shooting uptime but they also feature things like Burn DoT via Infernus (realistic application of it anyway), good hipfire accuracy, really good weakspot/crit mods and Ghost for safety v ranged fire, and very good mobility,
- Bolt pistol has Lethal Proximity blessing, which is the only universal means of making certain explosions in the game bigger, since it works even if the weapon isn’t actively used (relevant for basically all explosion-based blitzes); and remains an average sniping weapon otherwise,
- Shredder AP has an insane Maniac armor damage profile (relevant v Flamers, Trapper and Dreg ragers) and allows you to easily burst a bunch of such enemies with little to no regard for accuracy, while being relatively efficient.
There’s no amount of balancing that will bring other weapons to the balance level that’s swivels on the notion of <max output & min input> - people will just move onto the next thing that happens to be outperforming other options, be it achieved through deduction via experimentation or informed media posts.
I do not expect every lobby to have 3 flavours of Veteran, all with different ability and blitz every lobby, because that’s not realistic with how people play the game. I expect people that have enough knowledge and applied skill expression to use “weaker” options to good use, regardless of who they are playing with, and I think that’s a healthy mindset to have if we really are striving for improving the state of balance.
And no, buffing Scrier’s Gaze (Psyker) yet again, to chase your idea, is not the way to do it.
I’m just gonna go off the top of my head what I can remember it’s received since patch 13.
- Ability to cooldown while active.
- One of its sub nodes built in (I think killing highlighted enemy for reset was originally a sub node).
- Duration buff to “Bigger they are” sub node.
- The ability to swap to melee without cancelling the effect.
- A very strong toughness regen effect that can be boosted with Tunnel Vision up to a very substantial 16% toughness per second.
I’m probably missing something here but saying these are not meaningful buffs and Exe isn’t a huge amount stronger than it was upon the release of the talent trees feels like it has to either be incredible ignorance or straight up trolling.
On the other hand, Fatshark somehow managed to make input and hit registration the worst it’s ever been so there’s that
Quite the feat especially considering how bad it already was
and boy am I glad I dont have to deal with these slacker console hippies that run on spring break iq level and “harhar” humor.
one game is made heavily with the console trough in mind while the other was at least in its inception a precise fps made with pc and mechanical skills in mind.
that the disneyland option attracts more “crowd” isn’t surprising, neither a sign of the actual quality of its players.
yes, darktide has its own “doofy” categorie and always will have, but those longterm players that mastered the game?
I take the presence of 2k of em any time of the year over the faceless masses that get a sunburn on their dingdongs while drinking from a bucket 
I have never understood why people think infiltrate is bad tbh it’s better than shroudfield imo.
I view Infiltrate as bad mainly due to bias against invisibility as a feature that FS has decided to reuse in Darktide - I dislike its merit by its very existence.
But I may have overstated what I wrote - it’s an OK ability, just somewhat limited by what it can do (when does a 30% damage increase matter?), but, it’s good for completing objectives solo and if you have people you can rely on, the TDR or aggro reduction nodes give Veteran some extra safety to worry less about something immediately in their face. And naturally it requires effort from the player’s end to get good value out of, unlike VoC.
Shroudfield has all that and it allows Zealot to one-shot Captains with certain weapons - so at least it has that going for it.
Fair enough
so if one game comes in with weak weapons and another comes in with strong weapons we have to pay no attention to this because you have to “Only buff” TM no matter how much more work it is on the route to balance or how much it breaks the game and disregard if it actually does work it its still a relative nerf because… why exactly?
Look FS are slow to respond the PS was utterly broken for what a whole year? theres certainly room to improve!
however i asked google helldivers 2 biggest weapon nerfs?
and it came back with pages of apparently controversial weapon nerfs so you do appear to be mistaken.
I believe the Forum should execute a TCD protocol to fix the spam and chatgpt posting issues.
Helldivers 2 is literally the root cause of the never nerf movement, and other developers are still overcompensating afraid of a similar public backlash.
HD2 is doing better because they turned the game into a hello kitty farming simulator, with about as much challenging content as warframe has to offer.
If dumbing the game down to mobile gacha levels of simplicity is the entry fee, I’ll take struggling over any given day.
Terrible comparison.
kek
So that’s why is the Exe stance power sword Veteran one of the most miserable (and also most reliable source of bots) and saddest sights in Auric/ML…its because of the competitiveness 
I follow some of the development there (hd2), and it couldn’t be more controversial than it is rn.
There is open communication tho, which is something it definitely has over DT/FS, even if it is biased open communication…
Neighbor grass is greener and all that.
It has a purpose and realistic applications in gameplay, be it Auric or Havoc - what else would it need to be?
There’s no way it’s 2026 and people still have this mentality of both “If a build can’t do X thing but do the rest very good, IT’S BAD AND NEED BUFFS!!!” as well as “You can’t play off meta in public Havoc”
Man I literally play Combat Axe FoTF Zealot in Havoc 40 and he does good
Do I need to make a stupid chud video about me using Exec stance in Havoc as proof of it being good?