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.
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.
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
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