u/TaterToTwastaken

To those uninformed,
Helldivers has a unique mechanic known by many as constellations. These essentially dictate what can and cannot spawn in a mission, and sometimes are the only way that you can encounter specific enemies.

Great examples of this that you are definitely familiar with are the bile spewer constellation and warstrider constellation.
With the former being the only way that bile spewers, bile spitters, and bile warriors will ever spawn.

The main intention of this mechanic is to diversify the game and offer you different threats each mission so you never get too bored of your opponents. And in that regard, constellations do their job pretty well.

But why does this feature suck?

Well there is the obvious reason being that you cannot effectively tailor your loadout to counter specific enemies when you have absolutely no idea what you will be up against.
But there is also a more pressing concern that I have in regard to overall game difficulty.

Some constellations are just straight up easier than others.

There are constellations that utterly REFUSE to spawn high tier enemies, there are constellations that spawn nothing BUT high tier enemies, and there is the perfect middle ground which feels oh so sweet whenever you get it.

This ends up throwing the games difficulty curve all over the place in many cases. Certain constellations can make a dif 6 mission feel like dif 10, or vice versa, which, at least in my opinion, kinda blows.

When the core difficulty in a game is not so much determined by what the player actually has selected, but rather by a seemingly random system instead, it doesn't feel good.

Inconsistency sucks. We need less of it.

Maybe constellations could be tied to difficulties? With the harder ones (like warstriders) being present only on 9 or 10, while easier ones like hunter constellations or tank constellations could be reserved for easier difficulties? Idk man.

TL;DR

I just don't like the randomness in this game.
I want my silly little max difficulty to always feel like its supposed to.

Images are taken from the steam and playstation store pages respectively

The developers have said in the past that subfactions, as a concept, were made primarily as a way to make the game harder by introducing new mechanics or gimmicks to enemies.

However,
The new spore burst bugs have actually suggested that this isn't entirely all that is changing within subfactions behind the scenes.

Heavy units clearly are spawning more often and in larger numbers than normal, and as some other players have noticed, more enemy patrols spawn overall throughout the mission, meaning that you will almost always end up fighting larger amounts of enemies, more frequently.

This creates a pretty large disconnect between main factions and their alternates, where in some cases default enemy factions are a total joke by comparison, not because of the new gimmicks or new mechanics, but because significantly more enemies are spawning.

Genuine game difficulty should not be locked behind specific planets!

We have a difficulty selector with 10 whole options, please, arrowhead, use it.
"Fighting against impossible odds" is literally a major selling point of this game, so we shouldn't only be able to experience it on specific planets.

Subfactions shouldn't be the only way that players who crave challenge can actually get it.