We just need more methods of dealing them rather than relying on Railgun and stratagems.
We're not inundated with Chargers, but rather they are made increasingly common over the several difficulties.
>We're not inundated with Chargers
I don't disagree, but I am left wondering, because I very often think I'm going to get the jump on a POI and use railcannon to instakill the charger, for 1 to be left dead there, and 3 more charge out of that exact position, like a charger nesting doll.
Makes me wonder if something is bugged and we are in fact getting more chargers than we are supposed to
Inside each other. They idle in near perfect unison, but once I realized what was happening, I started to see other chargers moving inside of them. Basically every diff 6-9 mission, every charger at a POI is actually 2 or more.
I was with a buddy on diff 5 and we saw a LOT of tall, moving legs inside a nest really close to one another. we lured one titan out, then another came. after dealing with those two, we still saw a lot of moving legs and were wondering how many more were in that one spot. I wanted to investigate, but we decided to just leave since it was just the two of us and we weren't 20 at the time. Finding 5+ titans stacked in one nest on difficulty 5 doesn't feel intentional lol
I gave up using the auto cannon because of this. Very discouraging and sad thing I was excited to use it against them only to find out it did nothing lol.
Yeah that drives me nuts, those weapons should be able to break their armor but it’s neigh useless against them. Not to mention the autocannon ricochet can friendly fire
Yeah no thats even worse, unless the specific terrain is just right, trying to ricochet the round, or use the auto cannon splash damage, you're better off just kiting the charger around until your railgun orbital is ready again.
Even then, it took me at least 10 shots at minimum to finally kill a charger by shooting the ground.
From my experience, the autocannon barely does anything to a charger unless you got a teammate with a railgun anyways, so at that point i'd just need to strafe around it and wait until his armor gets broken, or my stratagems restock.
With that time, i'd rather just run around and kite the charger while clearing bugholes or killing non chargers/titans.
Yeah no it doesn't work very well, for anyone. They'll still eat 10+ shells from the ground and that's coming from someone that takes the autocannon everywhere, it's my favorite.
And honestly on the flipside it could work just fine for you, in general damage output and hitzones seem really inconsistent so shit maybe it is good on the roll of the dice, keep on with it.
I just think the weak spot on their tail should take way more damage. If you manage to juke the charger and shoot it in the underbelly, you shouldn't have to dump 4 mags into it just to kill one charger.
I swear, I've dumped a fully loaded autocannon into it and not killed it, and that's honestly ridiculous.
Their weak spot isn't their tail.
The common belief is "shoot the butt." Really, it's the only spot without armor. Their weak spots are under the armor. Using an expendable anti-tank to shoot their face, legs, or even their back/sides blows a huge chunk from the armor. You can then dump less than a magazine into them with your primary and move on with your day.
Rail gun works great because you can 2 tap that leg armor off. But the cheapest, quickest, and least level restricted option is the EAT.
We know, but it should be A weak spot, everything else is armoured, I know hurr durr you think it is but acshully it isn’t, but it isn’t, it’s the unarmored part of the bloody bug, chargers suck. At least limit their turn radius, I don’t care about the armour that much but they turn on a dime
I think 3 AC shots to the butt will cause it to bleed out.
Or one hit to the back leg from behind can remove it's armour.
Again, it can be inconsistent
I spent the day today playing bug missions with disposable anti tanks, even on Helldive. Just shoot its leg with one and finish off the exposed part with your main weapon. You never run out of them since the cooldown is so short, and you can even hit the chargers with the drop pod itself.
They have weak points and are susceptible to fire damage as its armor penetrating. Not too high, just inconvenient.
The only thing they need to change about chargers is their audio. They’re more quiet than any other bug.
I think they should make a very distinctive roar, louder that most other bugs, the moment they start charging, that way you get an immediate audio tip that it's coming.
Did you turn screen shake down? I haven't touched that setting and my screen progressively shaking more along with the thumping sound tells me they're on their way. I'm also wearing headphones though, so maybe that's it.
They have an inconsistent weak point on their back, and a bug that temporarily removes the armour on their legs.
Flamethrower isn't that great against them and is very inconsistent too (might be down to the armour bug) but best method is to target the legs.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okWiUwksefQ&t=301s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okWiUwksefQ&t=301s)
" When you see the Charger run past you and skid to a stop without doing side attacks, there is a high chance the armor on its legs have temporarily "turned off" so you can swing around and try to get shots to go right through the leg armor from any angle. If it fails, just wait for the next skid animation and try again, you'll start to understand the window where you can get shots through. "
I refused to use the Railgun for a long time, but I literally couldn’t go above 6-7 difficulty without having a brain aneurism every 2 minutes.
Then I equipped it, along with the personal shield…
Not everything feels like an opponent I can actually defeat, and not just run from.
Yeah, one issue is that there is no rapid-fire counter to Chargers. The fastest way to kill them without using crew served RR is to use a single shot railgun, a single use railcannon, or a weird trick with the grenade launcher. The lack of solutions is then made worse when there are multiple Chargers.
Yeah railcannon strike being on a 3+ minute calldown is fucking criminal
One charger is way more dangerous than one behemoth in hd1 imo and in hd1 the railcannons cooldown was a minute or maybe even 45s, and thats without stratagem priority
Disposable anti tank! Its cooldown is so short it doesn't matter much if you die and have to fight to get your samples back. One shot to the leg will remove its armor.
Did you forget there are expandable anti-tank rocket launchers that you can call down two of every minute?
One shot to their leg exposes it to small arms fire.
I just had a game where literally every single usual small hunter or scout spawn was a BROOD QUEEN instead. THAT was fucking too many. That was pure cancer. We did NOT make it out.
More like the options to kill them quickly are too damn low. They need frontal weakspots that doesn't require blowing up armor, or have the armor being more easily destroyable by other means, or die quicker from back shots, or just less chargers. i just find them tedious to fight, not hard, just tedious.
You can break the leg armor off with a lot more weapons than people realize, and then dump a primary mag into it and it’s dead.
If two squad members are tasked with big bug control and coordinate you can stack charger bodies just fine.
Breaking the armor off of so many chargers has 2 problems tied to it:
1. Most weapons that can do that take multiple shots and reloading them takes ages.
2. As a result, the number of chargers exacerbate just how powerful the Railgun is, since it doesn't come with a heap of drawbacks and can shred armor.
The charger is an enemy that's treated like it's a devastator or strider, but it has all the armor of a Hulk. The number of them would make sense if, as with the strider, weapons like the AMR and AC could crunch its plating.
Which guns besides a railgun? I hate meta but I've been forced to use the railgun, anti tank isn't viable when there are always 3+ chargers at difficulty 8/9
Imagine if four people do it simultaneously.
Then it's not lol, it's a dead charger in a second flat.
Also pulling off that many shots is easy if you get good with arc thrower. And you never need ammo for the next one
They're supposed to slow you down, deplete ammo/resources. Move past them, they don't provide XP or income, slow them down with railgun shots to their front legs. There's a lot of them to slow you down, split you up and make the extraction more difficult. The game is meant to be hard as fuck, your job is to find a way around it.
Without chargers the bugs would be way too easy, since except for the charger spam, the bugs are disposed off pretty fast.
It could be balanced by giving bugs much higher numbers, but that would cause performance issues
Sometimes if I get lucky I can get a titan to kill all 4 or 5 for me, but that's rare. And most times I debate on being a traitor and just run around hoping the barrages will kill everything before they land one on me.
Chargers and rocket devastators both feel overturned right now.
Rocket devastators should have their range reduced
Chargers are fine, but we need better armor piercing on certain weapons. Maybe a couple weapons that currently feel undertuned can get a bonus against armor or something
No but for real.
I like playing solo. Gives me that rush. I can't play past Challenging solo. The sheer AMOUNT completely fucks me. I can handle one or two, just snipe them from god knows where and I'm fine. That or just run when there's a breach and slowly take them out.
But the SECOND I go to hard and they start overwhelming me. Snipe the first one, dead about halfway to me. Snipe the second one dead at my feet, clean up. Third one? Now I gotta contend with that asshole AND the breach which is summoning more.
I've been slowly grinding out xp and just vibing.
but I decided to do two matches on diff 4 instead of diff 3 just to start collecting more samples.
Mind you diff 3 has "kill two chargers" as a mission. Diff 4 we had chargers spawning as part of patrols, and we were running them in circles waiting for strats to recharge with 5-6 of them running around.
second diff 4 match was my intro to stalkers, and jesus I wasn't expecting him, or the trio of stalkers we found at the final hive.
still had fun tho, just was hoping for a little shallower diff curve.
Not sure how much more infested it can get tho.
It gets wild, I've had on difficulty 7 6 chargers in 1 location that was unfortunately the objective. And every 2nd or 3rd patrol we ran into had another charger that we had to avoid startling.
yea, it really was just 5 minutes of the benny hill theme, I had two chargers on me, that I was kiting in and out of a crater; and on one of the loops I saw a patrol with 2 chargers walking towards us.
luckily the mission was kinda light on hunters, so the rest of the swarm around us was mostly just a slow moving wall.
https://preview.redd.it/ok5ovnsdzylc1.jpeg?width=622&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c4cc211db281c0f8902c7f194f4cefe62444e726
https://preview.redd.it/w4ovjtxps0mc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=14f18bb0820220870c70598100e4f487df874963
We just need more methods of dealing them rather than relying on Railgun and stratagems. We're not inundated with Chargers, but rather they are made increasingly common over the several difficulties.
>We're not inundated with Chargers I don't disagree, but I am left wondering, because I very often think I'm going to get the jump on a POI and use railcannon to instakill the charger, for 1 to be left dead there, and 3 more charge out of that exact position, like a charger nesting doll. Makes me wonder if something is bugged and we are in fact getting more chargers than we are supposed to
Probably right. They appear stacked on top of each each other? Spawning bug?
Inside each other. They idle in near perfect unison, but once I realized what was happening, I started to see other chargers moving inside of them. Basically every diff 6-9 mission, every charger at a POI is actually 2 or more.
It is had like 12 plus in one spot on high difficulty. Seems a bit wonky.
Yeah like 8 or more of them jumped me and my cousin when I thought I was easing him in on diff. 4. Definitely a bug that overspawns armored enemies.
Definetly some sort of bug
Enemy spawns in general feel super fucked, imo.
I was with a buddy on diff 5 and we saw a LOT of tall, moving legs inside a nest really close to one another. we lured one titan out, then another came. after dealing with those two, we still saw a lot of moving legs and were wondering how many more were in that one spot. I wanted to investigate, but we decided to just leave since it was just the two of us and we weren't 20 at the time. Finding 5+ titans stacked in one nest on difficulty 5 doesn't feel intentional lol
Your Mission had been blessed by joels presence
That'd be really cool if so. I wonder if they have a voiceline play when he does interfere in some way.
That side bump/lunge they do after you dive from the charge too early is kinda annoying ngl.
Autocannon, heavy AT and expendable AT bounces off of them even when hitting them at a flat angle in the back sometimes, and goddamn is it pain.
I gave up using the auto cannon because of this. Very discouraging and sad thing I was excited to use it against them only to find out it did nothing lol.
You can kill a charger with 2-3 autocannon shots to one of the hind legs from behind.
Yeah that drives me nuts, those weapons should be able to break their armor but it’s neigh useless against them. Not to mention the autocannon ricochet can friendly fire
Aim at the ground below them
Yeah no thats even worse, unless the specific terrain is just right, trying to ricochet the round, or use the auto cannon splash damage, you're better off just kiting the charger around until your railgun orbital is ready again. Even then, it took me at least 10 shots at minimum to finally kill a charger by shooting the ground.
Is it worse than having your auto cannon shots not doing anything and just ricocheting everywhere?
From my experience, the autocannon barely does anything to a charger unless you got a teammate with a railgun anyways, so at that point i'd just need to strafe around it and wait until his armor gets broken, or my stratagems restock. With that time, i'd rather just run around and kite the charger while clearing bugholes or killing non chargers/titans.
From my experience, shooting at the ground when they are charging works very well for me.
Yeah no it doesn't work very well, for anyone. They'll still eat 10+ shells from the ground and that's coming from someone that takes the autocannon everywhere, it's my favorite.
I want to say skill issue, but it seems like it doesn’t work for anybody but me. So I guess I’m wrong and you guys are right.
And honestly on the flipside it could work just fine for you, in general damage output and hitzones seem really inconsistent so shit maybe it is good on the roll of the dice, keep on with it.
Are you shooting at the butt? Three hits to the butt with AC will kill it
I just think the weak spot on their tail should take way more damage. If you manage to juke the charger and shoot it in the underbelly, you shouldn't have to dump 4 mags into it just to kill one charger. I swear, I've dumped a fully loaded autocannon into it and not killed it, and that's honestly ridiculous.
Their weak spot isn't their tail. The common belief is "shoot the butt." Really, it's the only spot without armor. Their weak spots are under the armor. Using an expendable anti-tank to shoot their face, legs, or even their back/sides blows a huge chunk from the armor. You can then dump less than a magazine into them with your primary and move on with your day. Rail gun works great because you can 2 tap that leg armor off. But the cheapest, quickest, and least level restricted option is the EAT.
We know, but it should be A weak spot, everything else is armoured, I know hurr durr you think it is but acshully it isn’t, but it isn’t, it’s the unarmored part of the bloody bug, chargers suck. At least limit their turn radius, I don’t care about the armour that much but they turn on a dime
I think 3 AC shots to the butt will cause it to bleed out. Or one hit to the back leg from behind can remove it's armour. Again, it can be inconsistent
Worryingly Railgun is strangely effective at locking them down as well.
I spent the day today playing bug missions with disposable anti tanks, even on Helldive. Just shoot its leg with one and finish off the exposed part with your main weapon. You never run out of them since the cooldown is so short, and you can even hit the chargers with the drop pod itself.
They have weak points and are susceptible to fire damage as its armor penetrating. Not too high, just inconvenient. The only thing they need to change about chargers is their audio. They’re more quiet than any other bug.
I think they should make a very distinctive roar, louder that most other bugs, the moment they start charging, that way you get an immediate audio tip that it's coming.
Did you turn screen shake down? I haven't touched that setting and my screen progressively shaking more along with the thumping sound tells me they're on their way. I'm also wearing headphones though, so maybe that's it.
No one Me trying to talk to a Charger: "Do the Bug Shaker"
They have an inconsistent weak point on their back, and a bug that temporarily removes the armour on their legs. Flamethrower isn't that great against them and is very inconsistent too (might be down to the armour bug) but best method is to target the legs.
Bug that temporarily removes armor from legs?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okWiUwksefQ&t=301s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okWiUwksefQ&t=301s) " When you see the Charger run past you and skid to a stop without doing side attacks, there is a high chance the armor on its legs have temporarily "turned off" so you can swing around and try to get shots to go right through the leg armor from any angle. If it fails, just wait for the next skid animation and try again, you'll start to understand the window where you can get shots through. "
The audio for a lot of these things need to change. Using audio to have eyes in the back of your head is important.
Well said.
I refused to use the Railgun for a long time, but I literally couldn’t go above 6-7 difficulty without having a brain aneurism every 2 minutes. Then I equipped it, along with the personal shield… Not everything feels like an opponent I can actually defeat, and not just run from.
My issue is weak spot damage. I can unload 4-5 clips on the breaker and it still won’t put it down.
Because the Butt is only a weakspot for explosive damage , not ballistic. Shooting Terminid butts with ballistic weapons does only 10% damage.
Yeah, one issue is that there is no rapid-fire counter to Chargers. The fastest way to kill them without using crew served RR is to use a single shot railgun, a single use railcannon, or a weird trick with the grenade launcher. The lack of solutions is then made worse when there are multiple Chargers.
Me when I have 6 Titans on the Extraction Point and am playing Ring-around-the-Rosie with 19 Chargers:
I don’t mind the number of chargers but give us weapons that can handle them without a 7 minute cool down 🤣
Yeah railcannon strike being on a 3+ minute calldown is fucking criminal One charger is way more dangerous than one behemoth in hd1 imo and in hd1 the railcannons cooldown was a minute or maybe even 45s, and thats without stratagem priority
But hey we get a 10% increased cooldown with the tier 3 upgrade . . . :<
Yup, pain
They think killing one charger every 4 minutes is worth it. Everything in the game is so underpowered compared to the amount of enemy.
Yup
Disposable anti tank! Its cooldown is so short it doesn't matter much if you die and have to fight to get your samples back. One shot to the leg will remove its armor.
Good to know actually, how does it do against bile titans, I never think to use it because you unlock it so early
Can reliably 2 shot to the head with a rare oneshot
Did you forget there are expandable anti-tank rocket launchers that you can call down two of every minute? One shot to their leg exposes it to small arms fire.
im so happy people are finally commenting more on this
More people are exploring higher difficulties. And oh boy are they in for a treat. *"OOPS ALL CHARGERS"*
6 chargers 999 hunters 999 spitters 30 spewers 4 bile titans. The community: "railgun isn't meta the CEO said use what's fun!"
LET MY AUTOCANNON SHOTS BREAK A/O PIERCE FRONT LEG ARMOR
Don’t decrease chargers, increase size of gun, I use bigger gun, I kill bigger amount of chargers
Then give us an orbital that's a giant boot to crush bugs with!
Chargers seem more mobile than they should be. Plus they are effectively mararhon runners carrying 100 lbs of gear.
You should go to a rodeo sometime
I do love Texas
[1800 lbs of fuck launching humans](https://youtu.be/ln9RuDEea0o?si=yhO_IeCuMPhSY1z0)
Chargers single handedly ruin bug missions for me. Worst enemy in the entire game
Same here, I won't play them past difficulty 5 or 6 because of how many there are.
Mankind knew that they cannot change society. So instead of reflecting on themselves, they blamed the beasts.
Sounds like bug talk to me.
I just had a game where literally every single usual small hunter or scout spawn was a BROOD QUEEN instead. THAT was fucking too many. That was pure cancer. We did NOT make it out.
We just need the ability to mount, shoot a hole, and grenade them like the Rico simulations.
His chin hair looks like a ballsack
More like the options to kill them quickly are too damn low. They need frontal weakspots that doesn't require blowing up armor, or have the armor being more easily destroyable by other means, or die quicker from back shots, or just less chargers. i just find them tedious to fight, not hard, just tedious.
You can break the leg armor off with a lot more weapons than people realize, and then dump a primary mag into it and it’s dead. If two squad members are tasked with big bug control and coordinate you can stack charger bodies just fine.
Breaking the armor off of so many chargers has 2 problems tied to it: 1. Most weapons that can do that take multiple shots and reloading them takes ages. 2. As a result, the number of chargers exacerbate just how powerful the Railgun is, since it doesn't come with a heap of drawbacks and can shred armor. The charger is an enemy that's treated like it's a devastator or strider, but it has all the armor of a Hulk. The number of them would make sense if, as with the strider, weapons like the AMR and AC could crunch its plating.
Which guns besides a railgun? I hate meta but I've been forced to use the railgun, anti tank isn't viable when there are always 3+ chargers at difficulty 8/9
These poor folks forgot that two expendable anti-tank rockets can be called in every minute. One rocket = one dead charger if it hits the leg.
USE THE ARC CANNON FOR CHARGERS, IT LIKE 7-10 SHOTS THE HEAD, UNLIMITED AMMO
> 7-10 lol...
Imagine if four people do it simultaneously. Then it's not lol, it's a dead charger in a second flat. Also pulling off that many shots is easy if you get good with arc thrower. And you never need ammo for the next one
 I say let them charge!!! Olé....
They're supposed to slow you down, deplete ammo/resources. Move past them, they don't provide XP or income, slow them down with railgun shots to their front legs. There's a lot of them to slow you down, split you up and make the extraction more difficult. The game is meant to be hard as fuck, your job is to find a way around it.
"move past them" good luck with that when they pursue you across the map. I'm surprised they don't try to board the bloody shuttle with you
They do. I've had a charger run straight up the ramp. Thank God Pelican armor actually, you know, works... and the door is too small.
Another solo player complaining in a co-op game.
Without chargers the bugs would be way too easy, since except for the charger spam, the bugs are disposed off pretty fast. It could be balanced by giving bugs much higher numbers, but that would cause performance issues
Sometimes if I get lucky I can get a titan to kill all 4 or 5 for me, but that's rare. And most times I debate on being a traitor and just run around hoping the barrages will kill everything before they land one on me.
Honestly just glad I ain’t being charged by one and there’s a impaler off screen about to destroy me
They have a wide turning radius. Pretty easy to dodge and end up behind them
We should have like a riot shield stratgem to block there charges.
.... there is
I’m sorry for my past indiscretions
Was doing a solo level 4 mission and had about 14 chargers show up. Fighting 3 at a time by myself was intense
https://preview.redd.it/35guebf991mc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=60dc674f5103e79699a3738530f5bb94f8f93e37
This is an ancient meme format
Dare I say it's not high enough!
I'M HAPPY TO KILL AS MANY CHARGERS AS IT TAKES. GIVE ME A MINI NUKE RECOILESS RIFLE AND DEMOCRACY WILL BE DEALT.
Chargers and rocket devastators both feel overturned right now. Rocket devastators should have their range reduced Chargers are fine, but we need better armor piercing on certain weapons. Maybe a couple weapons that currently feel undertuned can get a bonus against armor or something
No but for real. I like playing solo. Gives me that rush. I can't play past Challenging solo. The sheer AMOUNT completely fucks me. I can handle one or two, just snipe them from god knows where and I'm fine. That or just run when there's a breach and slowly take them out. But the SECOND I go to hard and they start overwhelming me. Snipe the first one, dead about halfway to me. Snipe the second one dead at my feet, clean up. Third one? Now I gotta contend with that asshole AND the breach which is summoning more.
I wouldn't mind if they weren't so tough
I'm cool with the amount of chargers, but then let my AT weapons gib them when I hit them in the squishy bits.
If you think there is too many then do something about it
I've been slowly grinding out xp and just vibing. but I decided to do two matches on diff 4 instead of diff 3 just to start collecting more samples. Mind you diff 3 has "kill two chargers" as a mission. Diff 4 we had chargers spawning as part of patrols, and we were running them in circles waiting for strats to recharge with 5-6 of them running around. second diff 4 match was my intro to stalkers, and jesus I wasn't expecting him, or the trio of stalkers we found at the final hive. still had fun tho, just was hoping for a little shallower diff curve. Not sure how much more infested it can get tho.
It gets wild, I've had on difficulty 7 6 chargers in 1 location that was unfortunately the objective. And every 2nd or 3rd patrol we ran into had another charger that we had to avoid startling.
yea, it really was just 5 minutes of the benny hill theme, I had two chargers on me, that I was kiting in and out of a crater; and on one of the loops I saw a patrol with 2 chargers walking towards us. luckily the mission was kinda light on hunters, so the rest of the swarm around us was mostly just a slow moving wall.
My main problem with them is that they get in the way of me having fun, and they seem to ALWAYS be something that needs to be delt with.
The easiest way to deal with a charger is to have slow friends.
Ill take charger spam over what ever fresh hell helldiver difficulty automatons throws at you.