Democracy knows no bounds, join the fight against tyranny!

Join us! It's a great value for money game.

The starter gear is actually pretty good, you will be able to contribute right away and handle everything on lower difficulties. You unlock the more specialized weapons over time but I used the starter guns and stratagems until level 15 with no issue and was always filling a role on my teams.

You have to unlock the higher difficulties by completing groups of missions at your highest option, so you will not be outclassed by any difficulty level at the start. A low level player in a high level lobby just means they've succeeded on several missions before, so it is not a negative for the team.

I do know trolling on the trivial difficulty became a thing, but it's much rarer than high level players joining to chill out and share equipment with newbies. If you're being trolled (and it is rare), just leave, they can't follow you or find you again.

If you do buy the game some tips:

• there are multiple currencies, they are not a pay to win obfuscation mechanic, so don't worry about that. They let you upgrade different things at the same time.
• Samples help you unlock upgrades to your ship, they are always shared, not everyone understands this, so at low levels sometimes people steal them, it means nothing for the team.
• All rewards are shared equally by your team, always
• medals help you with your Warbond (like a battle pass, they appear in the acquisitions tab), they do not expire or go away, and only the premium ones can be purchased. You can unlock the premium Warbond by saving your Super Credits, you don't have to buy them, you aren't behind for not having them.
• warbonds are how you unlock armor and primary weapons, but most importantly Boosters, which are team buffs you equip.
• Requisition is used to unlock new stratagems, there are no best stratagems, they're all useful depending on play style. The only broadly one considered better than another is the laser guard dog vs the liberator one.
• you can find samples, super credits, and medals in mission by investigating points of interest, so exploring is the path to upgrades
• teamkilling happens, just use the emote wheel to apologize and move on, nobody cares or tries for revenge unless you're especually eggregious.

Not at all. Level doesn’t matter too much, some losers only care about meta builds but fuck em.

Although it’s best enjoyed with friends.

Progression is capped, and pretty fast. And as others said it doesn't matter much (or at all, under difficulty 6).

Get in the hellpod, cadet

I restarted 2 weeks ago because cross progression isn't a thing yet (bought a new toy). Last night I played alongside level 5 players which is quite new still.

Mission difficulty is easy to manage and change between. There are always high level players joining easier missions for a break too.

If you're ever in doubt as to what you should do, dive and dive again. And again. And again!

This game is very accessible at all levels, get in there, Helldiver!

Sorry for hijacking your post. But is this game a worldwide co-op or something? It sounds interesting but I haven’t made the plunge yet

Nah nah, you get split up by difficulty. At first you only have access to level 1 difficulty, and you gain difficulty level access by accomplishing missions in each level (up to 9). Chances are, you'll be playing with fellow rookies until about 5 or 6. By the time you've hit difficulty 5 you'll have a full arsenal of very competent gear, helped very much by the fact that some of your starting gear is actually still very viable mid/late game.

I run difficulty 6 and 7 pretty exclusively and here is how I host. I will bring any level character on any mission, there are two caveats. If you burn like 7 lives in 5 mins I'm going to kick you because you aren't ready and you need to learn more, the other is if you are stopping and fighting everything on difficulty 7, just move on. Even in the latter circumstance you would have to do that for a very long period of time like 20% or 30% of the mission time. Honestly a level 7 character already has enough stratagems to run lvl 7 blitz, they just don't have the experience probably. Just know difficultly 1-6 and 7-9 are extremely different types of gameplay and pay attention to what others are doing and you'll be fine!

My sibling in democracy, everybody is welcome to fight the terror threatening our way of life.

If you are unsure, just say so in chat and stick with your squad. Everything will be alright.

✊

Just play! I'm only level 32 and a random level 9 joined my game. It's fun!

tldr: jump in, there are some tryhards but lower difficulty is way more fun

While spreading democracy it's more about the "how you spread it" more than "what you are using for it". You can have all the freedom you can have and still fail to deliver it because of wrong timing and so on. I'm still using the SG-8 Punisher (first weapon to receive from page 1 of the first warbond) despite being level 30ish. Know your enemies and their lies und you will be able to spread democracy and freedom even further down their throats.

You do a really easy mission then it unlocks easy missions, do an easy and you unlock medium missions. Don't move up, my buddy and I kept unlocking the difficulties until we just got to missions that were impossible for us to beat with our current skill level. If you do the easiest ones until you're really good at them, then move on to easy until those are very easy for you. Then you will do better and you'll be with other people with the skill level equal to your own.

People will be playing the game for years. It came out less than six months ago. It's not too late.

We're still accepting green beards at DRG too.

Helldiver go brrrrrrr fredom brrrrr

I regularly team up with both level 5s and Level 40-50 players on Difficulty 4/9, which is usually a cakewalk if you have level 20 items unlocked.

You go at your own pace and can pick what mission difficulty you want to be on.

You'll unlock better items which are helpful (like the Guard dog everyone loves but hates getting accidentally hit by) but to do the hardest difficulties you need a coordinated team no matter what level you are.

You can set how hard you want things to be and just set it to where it feels fun for your level.

I would put it this way. If you're the type of player who wants to unlock everything then you might be a bit late. But if you just want to have fun you can start at any time.

When it comes to unlocking everything most of the game is unlocked relatively quickly. Stratagems unlock pretty fast (I'd say maybe 30 hours to unlock all the stratagems, which is not a lot of time and most of them you might not even use) and have the biggest impact on your gameplay experience) followed by ship upgrades that also go relatively quick (maybe 60 hours if you don't shy away from difficulty 7) that just improve the stratagems.

But the thing that takes a lot of time are warbonds. Warbonds are essentially like battle passes except they don't expire. There are some useful things there, like weapons, grenades and armors, but they're mostly to give a bit more flavor to your gameplay and hardly a necessity. Those also take a lot medals to unlock everything. There's the free warbond that takes about 2k medals to unlock everything, but we also have 2 paid warbonds that each take ~600 medals to unlock everything and there's supposedly another one coming in 2 weeks which means we're soon talking about needing 4k medals to unlock everything. I have 120 hours in game and I have not unlocked everything in the warbonds. I imagine if you're going to start now and you want to absolutely unlock everything then you're going to need to grind something like 1k medals per month to catch up in 6 months.

Overall I'd say that the progression is logarithmic. You make the most progress at the start and then as time goes on your progression eventually tapers off into just farming medals and unlocking bonds.

I drag friends into helldive missions where they are level 1, and while it is chaotic and victory is not assured, so long as they have good aim they can figure out the rest in the field.

The initial stages and first levels were arguably even better than playing with full knowledge of all mechanics. Sure you get kicked once in a while by elitists but man, that initial chaos is really something.

Just play. Level is just a way to unlock equipment anyway. If you unlock stratagems, play them for a couple rounds and then you're leveled up anyway and can switch to the next after unlock.

Doesn't really matter, just go in and spread democracy! Do your part!

Thanks for all the replies folks, Ive got a big couple of weeks but then I'll be picking it up.

It may have seemed like a dumb question (kind of felt like one) but being a dad and working and all I didnt want to drop the cash on a game only to spend whole evenings waiting for low level groups to play or getting repeatedly kicked for being a noob.

after unlocking everything ive foud myself using the starting weapons the most.

until the slugger nerf i was all EAT, Stalwart, and Slugger.

I wish I could start over.