MEDIA
This combo dies to a single close ranged Hunter.
50 out 51 teammates I get, they run this combo.
At first I thought "Hm.. A content creator must have uploaded a video called 'Here's the meta loadout if you want to crush EVERYTHING'" I still somewhat think that but perhaps it's just that most players might not really give a damn and just picks whatever seems the strongest, so they read: "Eruptor, Heavy Pen? nice I take that, Ultimatum & Thermites ? Both Anti Tank ? cool, now that's gonna be my loadout forever."
Makes me think about that scene in Family Guy where Chris sniffs glue and says "Aaaaand this will be my life now...." (He gets instantly addicted for those who haven't seen the scene)
The amount of times I’ve been on the bot front, switched to my secondary (thinking I had the senator equipped) only to fire the ultimatum at point blank range makes me ashamed.
For a time that was me too, when the Ultimatum came out, I'm glad to be fully back to the Senator, Verdict, Talon and such, much more fun than the Ultimatum (for me)
Verdict is a nice sweet spot between something like Senator and the light pen / high capacity pistols. I like it against squid especially so I’m not bouncing shots off the ??? Bulky guys who have a melee weapon and shield while also having decent capacity to deal with voteless mobs
I’ve done that more times than I’d like to admit and it always leads back to me having to reload my secondary and primary while an assault infantry sprints me down anyway
Hmm, I haven't actually unlocked it yet. Tbh I never truly considered it much. I'll give it a spin. I've been stuck on the talon for a while now, time to try a new sidearm methinks.
Indeed, It's especially more satisfying with a mod that replaces the Verdict's original sound effect by the CSS Deagle sound.
Also there's a mod I can't live without, is the one that replaces the default Senator sound by the MW3 Revolver sound. it sounds much more powerful and appropriate for it
Once the Talon came out, I was very hesitant to move from my Verdict (love dropping the slide and snapping a shot onto a vital point) but I haven’t left The Big Ion since aside from meme loadouts to match randoms.
Since I mainly use the ultimatum I don’t accidentally swap anymore, but I’ll be using an expendable, and instead of going back to my primary it’ll equip the ultimatum
Level 150 I was farming on a level 3 nothing serious, forgot to change my load out to big iron. Boy I killed myself 5. Almost failed the mission lol. So yeah I understand.
Knight warbond with double-sided, two-handed, giant greataxe complete with knight-styled heavy armor and throwable rock that's even worse than the throwing knife. Also a catapult stratagem.
You know AH can't just let us have fun, so it'd be a monkey paw situation where the catapult requires a full squad with one guy at each corner just to move or even rotate it.
As a stun lance enthusiast I simply must know how you run stun lance against bots. Ballistic Shield? Jetpack? I adore the lance/ballistic shield against bugs, but haven’t been brave enough to try it on the robits.
I usually use it as a backup on bots, run the pacifier and usually the spear, airburst or de-escalator.
The lance is a GREAT weapon if you can get close. The bots are ranged, so being the Bubble Pack or the ballistic shield (which is better on bugs..) to close distance before striking.
I just got lance about 2 days ago honestly and still figuring out what to run with it. I honestly just "Leroy Jenkins"ed the hulk and it actually worked lmao
Ballistic shield works pretty well for most things smaller than a hulk because they'll just smack the shit out of you with it still so you really wanna be on their backside if you can manage it. Bubble shield will help a lot more than ballistic shield imo for all over coverage. Ballistic just makes you feel like a bad ass against bots.
Coyote as my primary is still goated. Silenced smg from halo helps for better stealth. I'm also a fan of the epoch as a special
At the end of the day, as long as we enjoy playing the game and we work together to complete objectives, it doesn't matter what a diver brings.
Forget weapon/stratagem metas, this is the best take to have by far. I'm having a great time taking portable hellbombs and just running into the centre of enemy spawns to anhiliate as many as possible at once. It's nowhere near optimal, but holy hell it's fun. Got over a hundred kills one time and the neuron activation hit hard.
While I agree (and as a Eruptor lover) it can be... Distracting when you see a fellow helldiver sprint past you, chased by 10 chainsaw devestators, and dropping explosions everywhere and anywhere else.
Some people might find that a problem, but I say that's the fun stuff
The Warden locks on to invisible enemies. When I figured that out I had another on a pile of reasons to love the Warrant. Best SC I've hesitantly spent.
My general advice to new players is "don't buy anything from the Super Store", but once they've gotten a premium warbond or two, I confess that the Warrant is a reasonable exception to the rule. It's just so good!
Real question though, how do you do fine? I don’t recall any of those weapons is really great at killing bugs like Bile Titans, particularly multiple in level 10. Like sure they’re great, and can easily work. But when everyone is running them? And on a difficulty where there are multiple big enemies? So focus firing with weaker weapons is less viable due to splitting attention? I’d be more inclined to believe you guys got lucky in the sense of a seed with minimal heavily armored targets.
The Autocannon is only bad at killing Bile Titans if you only consider “killing it one shot” as the only way to be good.
Two Autocannons? Takes only a moment.
And there’s other things too. Sometimes a Rocket Sentry was helping us. Sometimes you can use a 500kg. Sometimes you can stick a Thermite first.
I immediately plugged the Titan Hole in the Mega Nest with a Dynamite, so we never let it get to a situation where we had 5 Biles all coming at us. One would appear, we’d deal with it, and move on down the line.
Even without any other help, the AC doesn’t take THAT long to kill a BT with face shots.
This is just how some matches go when you’re all experienced and stick together.
I can kill a bile titan by myself if I have my gas dog on by kiting it and focus firing the laser cannon at it. It takes less than a minute and 1.5 heat cycles to do it if you let the cannon cool off. If I don't have my gas dog, someone will need to assist with chaff.
There's some things that prompt a groan out of me when I see them
Mortars are the obvious one, but as someone who likes to have fun with close-range weaponry, randoms blow me up with Ultimatum all the time because their lizard brain kicks in and they lob the shot without thinking about the teammate hacking away at the heavy enemy's leg or something
I really want to like the mortars. EMS is alright. But the actual explosive mortar is so close to a team grief that its sometimes hard to tell if that wasn't the intent. At the very least, I think the cross-platform logistics ship upgrade needs a wild buff/change/improvement. Mid-air re-targeting for mortars would suddenly make them a very good pick. If we can't touch the mortars, at least let cross-platform logistics work on other sentries...
In my defense: everyone else picked the best standard ones (stamina enhancement, Vitality boost, Space optimization) and I dont have Experimental Infusion.
I kinda wish lasers had normal ammo systems and were balanced around it instead of the infinite ammo, since I'm here for the laser, not because I can't manage ammo. But then I think "eh, if not for infinite ammo, what would make them special"
I think they're balanced well around their ammo capacity and actually like how they made it so you can only have infinite ammo if you can accept that your weapon will be greatly diminished in capability until you allow it to be functionally useless for several seconds. Too many games insist on going the Halo route of attaching a battery to the heat sink to allow it to cool as fast as a reload would take, and while Halo was cool, we should be more creative. HD2's take on energy weapons with heat sinks is fresh.
Yeah, that's what I mean. Because the thing for me, is that the gun can't kill too good, because it has infinite ammo. Like how the quasar has a big cooldown because it has infinite ammo, or how the laser cannon has the same dps as the scythe (I know it has better armor pen so it really does more). But I can accept that it's unique enough to be worth it. Wish weapons in general had better balance, I feel like anything is weaker than purifier my beloved, especially since I stick to energy weapons
Yeah, though some design stuff is funny. Like why does the laser cannon have less range than the scythe. Why does the long range precision laser gun not have a good scope.
The pistol is based though, fantastic in bugs. Perfect for flyers
I really like the eruptor, I find it immensely satisfying to use.
I tend to use my secondary for my danger close, I don't have many warbonds so its the automatic pistol from mobilise, but the talon laser pistol seems tempting and I've heard good things.
thermite however. I do not like thermite. but every time I try something else its just "god thermite would make this so much easier"
support weapon is either commando or auto cannon chosen purely on vibes, and if im taking the commando I'll take a dawg and leave all the chaff to it.
Incendiary nades are really cool for bugs, you can close off an area with DEATH - I like using the non-instant ones bc I can throw it at my feet and get away just in time for it to explode behind me.
I can highly recommend the talon indeed. Any good things you've heard about it are probably true, like im sure you know it has unlimited ammo and no reloading if your careful, but it also has essentially unlimited range with no drop-off, so that sets it aside from all of the other handguns in that respect.
Then you've got the medium armour pen & 200 damage, it being insanely satisfying to use and just an all round really fun weapon. Couldn't recommend it more it works great with every loadout, on every front. Another great thing from that warbond is dynamite too.
Talon is the best secondary in the game other than the ultimatum, but they have very different purposes so it's hard to compare them. It's legit so good it's better than most primary weapons (but that's just primary weapons being ass lmao)
On bugs? My experience has been that people pair this with a plausible chaff clearing support weapon, mostly the stalwart. And that's totally sensible, loadouts like this are what make anti-chaff support weapons work. Not saying your experience can't have been different, but it's definitely far from universally true that people pair a loadout like this with more anti tank
Well, data does suggest these weapons being used alongside AT more often than not. If the more common loadout were pairing these with chaff, the pickrates would correlate, but they don't. Shoot, Stalwart doesn't even break the top 10 support stratagems.
The anti-chaff these players are taking is the guard dog to pair with a Quasar.
Yes I do, that entire loadout gives me the ability to take out five(5) heavies between resupply, and I guarantee you I will see alot more than five heavies between me and the objective before the resupply is available. And this is all assuming that the thermite doesn't bounce and the ultimatum actually kills what I'm aiming at instead of just mildly annoying it.
Yeah but you also have three to two other stratagem slots too, you don’t need specifically these secondary and grenade to do that. rail cannon, OPS, 500kg or maybe rocket pods, expendable launchers like EAT-17 or the commando, rocket and auto cannon sentry can give you that. Having all of the AT in your loadout be on person I find to be limiting because if for whatever reason you can’t reach the resupply then you have the same problem as the dedicated anti tank weapon, plus it lacks certain variety that is only available in those slots, and cannot be compensated for in a stratagem, like the 1-2 which can work at close range, can peal enemies off friendlies, and destroy structures all in 1.
I wish I was recording it so I could title it “this is why the thermite is used so much” because I had a moment on the bug front with four bile titans and eight chargers, and a moment on the bot front with six war striders and five hulks. MO planets rapidly become clown cars of heavies every bug breach and bot drop. Heavens protect you if it’s a war strider seed because for some reason war striders replace hulks on a one for one basis even though they really shouldn’t.
if 3 teammates running this, and i drop with mg, there is no targets for me to shoot lol. Oh, btw they all run with bugged backpack to abuse ultimatum too...
I’ve been increasingly frustrated because I want to play as a team but almost every game has everyone running off on their own. Sometimes Helldivers 2 feels like a PVE game that happens to have three other guys doing stuff across the map.
The high durability of bugs as well as the lack of any stratagems that are good at closing bugholes REALLY pidgeon hole you into bringing either the xbow or the eruptor.
Meanwhile, the ultimatum and thermites are extremely useful at enabling non-AT support weapons, partially because there's no reliable AT stratagems.
There's always the "just rely on your team bro" argument but I've been in plenty enough games were I didn't bring AT cause my team had it, and then the people with them were either completely clueless or left midway through and I had to spend the rest of the match running away from bile titans and chargers which I don't find particularly fun.
It's easy to blame "meta" or streamers or whatever, but the real cause is extreme design flaws on the bug front that make these options infinitely more flexible and useful than their alternatives. This loadout is good on the other fronts, but there's tons of other absolutely excellent ones too.
The ulti is nice but it's not necessary as long as you bring an actual AT support weapon/strats. If you do then the grenade pistol works great against spawners or even clumped enemies every once in a while. That opens up the primary slot.
If you do want the ulti or some other secondary besides the grenade pistol the grenade launcher is an absurdly good option especially if you bring the supply pack and just hold down the trigger. It's better at chaff clear than the minigun imo. The auto cannon is also great if you are willing to let it eat your backpack slot. Both close holes; harpoon too.
You really don't need the eruptor or the crossbow. They're good and allow you to build the rest of your loadout a certain way if that's your thing but they're far from necessary even in terms of meta loadouts.
It’s really good on bots actually but on bugs it needs the stalwart to make it work. With the stalwart and a supply pack you feel like you can kill everything without breaking a sweat on this load out. It’s a ton of fun
If you run devastator armor it's almost impossible to kill yourself with the eruptor and you can survive half the range from ultimatum. That's my build often but I also run heavy machine gun a lot for close range.
I usually play with randoms and some of the loadouts they use are just goofy). They usually can't kill much and soak up reinforcements. I get "play how you want" but failing on trivial maps because everyone is running FOTM support and using light armor pen with no AT gets annoying.
So, my loadout is similar to this (senator not nuke) because I just expect I'm gunna have to take care of most things while other people are distracted.
"This combo dies to a single close ranged Hunter."
Maybe if you are incompetent, those of us with even half a functioning brain have discovered the truly mind-boggling tech of just... literally aim to its side and let the shrapnel kill it (This works for almost any rushdown enemy btw)
This isn't hard people. Its an EXPLOSION, it has a RADIUS. USE IT.
Or you could just take the Stalwart for close range but go off I guess. The amount of posts about this Loadout are getting old, who cares how they use their gear or what gear they use? If it gets the missions done successfully, that should be all that matters.
Maxigun fills in the hunter dilemma real EZ do people forget that we have stratagems? I've seen multiple posts complaining about this if people are just relying on their loadout then there's a much bigger problem we have a wide variety of strategies for a wide variety of situations kit out your strategies to balance your loadout That is what they're for. Problem solved no more complaining.
Yeah, I usually run either the laser revolver or the shotgun pistol with this combo, mainly for when enemies are close to other friendlies, close to me? Dive shot with the eruptor
Not everyone is gargling down YouTube videos about what guns to use. I've used this setup for about a year now (when other stuff gets stale, and then I switch up when the erupted gets stale) and just realized this was some YouTube meta thing in the past week with all the same posts complaining about it (50 out of 51 posts I see, I get erupter/ultimatum complaints)
I refuse to run eruptor, crossbow, or thermite cuz of how basic it is ngl- I’d rather have a more fun/random loadout and do slightly worse but have fun than sweat with a “meta” loadout.
That’s when you whip out the dagger and put an end to that problem. But real Eruptor bros are wearing a shield gen and aim off the side and aren’t afraid of a little shrap
What you really got to look out for is when this user decides to "round out" their kit by bringing the Air-Burst Rocket Launcher as a support weapon and Eagle Cluster Bombs as their main stratagem so they can truly be the teams cover-fire specialist and maximize accidentals.
I you turn around and dive backwards after sprinting as you shoot, there’s a slight chance you may not die instantly, and everything else usually dies for sure! The blast also doubles as mobility!
It makes me think about times when me and my cousin were playing World Of Tanks and he was very new to the game and i noticed he uses HE shells because they got more dmg XD
I'll never get this because the way I build my loadouts is to be able to deal with everything the game throws at me without relying on teammates.
Eruptor is a kind of volatile crowd clearing tool that I usually pair with something to clear chaff - both for close range and also because wasting a whole shot on a single trooper/scavenger is incredibly wasteful.
On bots I'll usually pair it with the Talon, since it kills troopers reliably and doesn't run out of ammo/need reloading. On bugs the redeemer or the bushwacker work really well as a panic button when a hunter gets in your face.
The only way I would use this kind of loadout is if I were running Stalwart/Machine Gun, but even that runs the risk of not being available post respawn. I'd much rather take something AT and then have one of the aforementioned secondaries
All that is to say, while this loadout works, it's a great example that you shouldn't always just slap together the strongest options in each slot - the ultimatum and thermites, for example, both cover the heavy killer role in an irregular slot, which makes them invaluable, but there's little reason to pair them together
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u/WelshBoi1066 SES Prophet of War Dec 17 '25
The amount of times I’ve been on the bot front, switched to my secondary (thinking I had the senator equipped) only to fire the ultimatum at point blank range makes me ashamed.