Unpopular opinion : the balance patch dumbed down the game too much

Helldivers is a prime example on what happens when you let the loud minority control the development of a game.

There are hundreds of horde shooter games, what made helldivers stand out was that it was a hybrid between a tactical shooter where you had to plan out load outs and work together (example GTFO, mgsv) and a classic horde shooter like left 4 dead.

To beat the higher difficulty at launch you had to look at the map and balance the squads loadout to deal with the different enemies, example we usually ran the machine gun for the small bugs and a combination of the auto cannon and rail gun for the chargers.

To kill a charger back then : have the rail gunner remove the armor and have the machine gunner finish it. While the rest of the squad defends There was no way for a single person to deal with several enemy types. And if you didn't do it timely, on the higher difficulties you would get swarmed and die

To kill a charger now : throw a sticky grenade or shoot it with any gun until it dies (fast)

Even the strongest enemies like the titan usually die from a single 500kg bomb which is on under a 2m cd, per person.

Instead of being disposable soldiers as intended we are now one man armies, with a heavy machinegun and a 500kg bomb you are able to handle every single enemy, and when in a squad even on difficulty 10 the enemies now die before being able to be a threat.

We used to struggle with difficulty 7, and victory felt earned now even on difficulty 10 with Randoms, each match is a steamroll where you just mindlessly runs between missions and shoot stuff . When each enemy is easy, the only way to increase difficulty is to increase amount of enemies and I'm pretty sure we are already at the limit due to performance and this is why 9 and 10 is almost identical.

And last awful change : getting ragdolled, killed by physics or random shit outside your control like a ricochet headshot is hilarious and been a thing of these games since magicka 1, these moments keep getting nerfed because "Sweats" (in a pve game) keep complaining over it when it's these moments that makes helldivers stand out

I really don't understand why people called for balance changes because a game is too hard when there's literally 9 difficulty settings

I miss launch helldivers Rant over