Ah well. After an initial wave of hype when it first became operational the other day, Helldivers 2’s Democracy Space Station has already found its way into the bad books of some divers. How? Well, the biggest issue looks to be its orbital barrages causing as many problems for the divers as they do the enemy.
If you’re out of the loop, the DSS has had pretty high expectations to live up to, given it’s the new Galactic War feature players just spent a month and a bit fighting to construct via their Major Orders, expending lots of virtual blood, sweat, and tears in the process.
Sadly, as players have gone about using it to help them defend the likes of Mastia and Gallivare from the Jet Brigade and close out the current MO, they’ve found that at least one of the things the DSS can do is arguably more of a hindrance than a boon.
Basically, one of its abilities right out of the gate is the orbital barrage which, as you’d expect, unleashes a barrage of ordinance from far above the targeted planet, blowing up whichever enemies are being battled on the surface in order to help out players. Well, that’s in theory at least, as in practice, folks have found the barrage to be unleashing seemingly random explosive fire that’s hitting divers and making them ragdoll or straight-up die as often as it is bots or bugs.
“I was standing five meters away from my teammate reloading my HMG when I got domed by the barrage, they were the only other person on my team, I’ve had 2 missions now fail because the barrage kept killing us,” a player with the handle itsyoboi33 wrote in one of a number of Helldivers 2 subreddit threads on the subject, “The barrage doesn’t even seem to do anything, I’ve seen a SINGLE patrol get killed by the barrage and thats it, no fabricators, no tanks, no striders, just one patrol as we were leaving an objective.”
“First mission with it we lost probably 10 reinforcements from the DSS,” another user, Genghis_Sean_Reigns, described in another thread, “It killed maybe like two robots. It aims at us when the closest robot is 120 meters away.”
Meanwhile, user AMillionBears had a go at summing up the whole thing: “The DSS concept is great, the execution is poor. The problem is that they removed player control. That’s not fun. The orbital bombardment killed me twice in five minutes.
“Instead of an orbital bombardment with no player control, why not reduce all orbital cooldowns by 50% when the DSS is nearby? Or give each orbital one more use? Or make each orbital last 50% longer? I want a DSS Orbital Laser that burns for 60 seconds,” they countinued, adding: “Or, when the DSS is deployed, have it give us bonus random stratagems that we can use. Anything would be better than this team-killing monstrosity.”
Have you been blasted to bits by the DSS’s orbital barrage yet, or have you had an alright time finding ways to avoid getting caught in the crossfire between it and the bots? Let us know below!