The first balance patch of Helldivers 2 went down a touch poorly with players, which kicked off some prickly arguments on the official Discord between players and devs. As my fellow staff writer Morgan Park rightfully pointed out yesterday, I do think everyone needs to chill out a bit—even if there are some wrinkles to iron.
In case you're new to the hell(dive) of difficulties seven to nine, let me lay out the issue: Higher-difficulty missions against bugs set you against two major headaches, the bile titan and the charger—both of which have heavy armour which cause most conventional weapons to simply bounce off their exoskeletons.
The Railgun, a stupendously effective anti-armour weapon, received some heavy nerfs. This has quickly led to players (who had previously been managing the local bug population just fine) suddenly getting curb stomped and slathered in acid by the hive's finest. Naturally, the Automatons have their fair share of hard-to-deal-with tanks, too.
- Defending a kinda wimpy Killzone crossover gun, Helldivers 2's Johan Pilestedt says the game's past balance woes were due to weapons being 'seen as game objects' and that 'balance doesn't matter'
- Helldivers 2's latest warbond adds a stratagem I've craved since the galactic war started, a portable hellbomb
As for the precise issue, the debuffed Railgun no longer has those armour-piercing qualities, and its damage to limbs has been reduced. It regains its armour-piercing if you use its "unsafe mode", but even then it's still nowhere near the meta-defining destroyer it once was—and you've got to be more accurate with it, still.
Since the waves of enemies just keep coming, the compounding effect of that has resulted in some truly hilarious screenshots. Welcome to the titan rave.
Can a dev tell me what stratagem I should've brought for this situation? from r/Helldivers
While funny in isolation, it should be noted that divers respawn without their support weapons—so even if you're trying to make something like the Recoilless Rifle work, getting back to it without dying involves a lot of running serpentine. It's to the point where some players are just running into the map's edge and triggering the fleet's anti-traitor cannons. A tear-jerking sacrifice for democracy, even if their names will have to be stricken out of the record.
That'll change soon, though. As spotted by GamesRadar, a recent message by Arrowhead's associate community manager on the game's Discord is promising an end to charger woes.
"I wanted to take a moment this afternoon to let you all know that we've heard your concerns over the last few days regarding enemy spawns, enemy armour, and the ability to kill these enemies … I can confirm that we're currently looking at changes to the spawn rates and health pools of heavy enemies, and will be attempting to spread them out more to prevent large spikes of tougher mobs appearing at the same time, as well as making them a bit easier to bring down. This change should go out in a future hotfix—no date as of yet."
The message also mentions that "the EAT-17 and Recoilless Rifle no longer suffer from a 50% damage decrease when hitting an armored enemy at a 'glance angle' that deflects the shot … combined with the upcoming adjustment to health and spawn rates, this should make the larger enemies a bit less common, instead spawning more 'chaff' enemies to support them, and should allow players to bring these enemies down with a single well-placed shot."
In case you're unfamiliar with those weapons, the EAT-17 Anti-Tank and the Recoilless Rifle are both rocket launcher stratagems—one of them drops two disposable RPGs, the other requires a backpack. While both are far slower than the Railgun of old, this at least means there'll be ways to deal with these heavily-armoured chumps.
