Helldivers 2 received its first balance update today. While the newly released patch adds an exciting development in the form of planetary hazards, it also waters down some of the game’s best weapons and loadouts.
Arrowhead has announced that the new Helldivers 2 patch is currently out on PC and PS5. Apart from various bug fixes and resolving known issues, the patch changes three major things. First up are the new planetary hazards.
Helldivers 2 new patch includes planetary hazards. This adds a new level of environmental challenges on certain planets at random. Players will now face these hazardous conditions when deployed, such as meteor showers and fire tornedoes, to spice up the gameplay.
Secondly, the new Helldivers 2 patch has made major changes in the Eradicate Missions. After this patch, these missions will require the players to make more kills, with more enemies spawning. According to the developer, the time required to complete these missions was shorter than they had intended and after this new patch, it should take players twice as long to complete these missions.
Lastly, the new patch nerfs some of the best loadouts in the game. According to the game’s designer, Alex Kravchenko, the decision to do so has been made to balance out the guns and make sure that
Powerful weapons can’t be too versatile, and versatile weapons can’t be too powerful.
To implement this, the developer has analyzed the user data and feedback to isolate three items that violate this creed. So, it has decided to remedy the situation by giving them significant downsides to all three (Breaker, Railgun, and Shield Generator Backpack) to balance their power.
Helldivers 2 Patch 01.000.100 Full Notes
Major Updates
Planetary Hazards active
- Many planets now have additional environmental challenges that will appear at random while you are deployed, from fire tornadoes to meteor showers and many more.
Balancing
- Eradicate missions now require more kills and enemies spawn more often. The time to complete the mission was previously shorter than intended and should now usually take twice as long to complete.
Primary, Secondary, & Support Weapons
- Breaker: Decreased magazine capacity from 16 to 13, increased recoil from 30 to 55
- Railgun: Decreased armor penetration, decreased damage against durable enemy parts
- Flamethrower: Increased damage per second by 50%
- Laser Cannon: Increased damage against durable enemy parts, increased armor penetration, improved ergonomics
- Punisher: Increased total ammo capacity from 40 to 60, increased stagger force, increased damage from 40 per bullet to 45 per bullet
- Breaker Spray & Pray: Increased armor penetration, increased fire rate from 300 to 330, increased number of pellets from 12 to 16 per shot, decreased magazine size from to 32 to 26
Stratagems
- Energy Shield Backpack: Increased delay before recharging
- 380mm and 120mm Orbital Barrages: Increased duration of the bombardment, decreased spread
Fixes
- Fixed armor rating values not reducing damage as intended.
- Fixed certain Bug Holes (including Stalker Nests) that were unnecessarily hard to destroy.
- Fixed anti-aliasing toggle not working on PS5.
- Balanced lighting across all planets to solve cases where the game was too dark.
- Improved flashlight efficacy.
- Increased visibility during “sand rain” weather on Erata Prime.
- Updated tutorial materials and lighting.
- Improved cases where some materials could look blurry if the ‘Lighting’ graphic setting was set to “Low”.
- Fixed timing issues that could occur in the “Extract E-710” primary objective.
- Changed button interaction behavior for buttons in bunker POIs. Helldivers will now let go of the button after holding it for a few seconds.
- Fixed some cases of large assets floating if the ground beneath them was blown up.
- Helldivers standing next to ICBMs during launch will get properly toasty with a chance of not-so-spontaneous combustion.
- Fixed unthrowable snowballs after rag-dolling.
- Fixed being able to use grenades after drowning.
- The camera is no longer locked on the player’s corpse and blocking spectator mode.
- Helldivers now take damage from fire, gas, etc., generated by other players.
- Armor no longer stretches when dismembered.
Known Issues
These are issues that were either introduced by this patch and are being worked on, or are from a previous version and have not yet been fixed.
- The game may crash after dropping several high-power stratagems in succession.
- Picking up items from caches may cause characters to freeze in place for an extended period of time.
- Picking up items from bunkers and caches in quick succession may render one of the items unpickable.
- Players cannot unfriend other players befriended via friend code.
- Players may be unable to select loadout or return to ship when joining a multiplayer game session via PS5 Activity Card.
- Mission objective HUD displays different numbers for clients and hosts during some missions.
- Default armor is always shown while viewing the war bond, regardless of the armor that the player has equipped.
- Text chat box display is obstructed by the cinematic letterboxing during extraction.
- Some text in the HUD/UI is missing or not displaying correctly.
- Players may experience issues when many players attempt to log in and/ or play at the same time:
- Login rate limiting
- Players may become disconnected during play
- Various UI issues may appear when the game interacts with servers
- Some games may not be joinable by others for a short period of time
