Helldivers 2 update buffs a ton of stratagems and weapons
Arrowhead Game Studios issued a major update for its smash Starship Troopers simulator Helldivers 2 on Thursday, featuring sweeping balance changes, a more informative Galactic War map, and the addition of invite-only lobbies.
Patch 01.000.400 begins a change of pace at Arrowhead, which said earlier in the week that it planned to slow down the rate at which it updated the game, delivering bigger, higher-quality patches less frequently.
It’s certainly a substantial update. There are some new features, but the headline for Helldivers 2 players is probably the huge set of balance changes that (mostly) buff stratagems and weapons across the game, with the goal of increasing viability and loadout variety.
In a very detailed blog post, Arrowhead’s chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt — evidently making good use of the time he freed up by resigning as the studio’s CEO — laid out the thinking behind the balance changes, going into some detail on each one.
“With these balance changes we wanted to buff up some of the weaker stratagems to make them more viable and add more opportunity for variety in loadouts,” Pilestedt said, adding that there were few nerfs in the patch. “We also changed a few to make them more consistent, but the goal was to keep a similar or higher power level. We are looking into the stratagems more to see if there are any other stratagems that might need some buffs or changes to make them more viable.”
Some examples: Several of the game’s sentry stratagems have been made more effective (and durable), the HMG emplacement and minefields have been buffed, and Orbital strikes are now more readily available and flexible in their use to make them competitive against Eagle stratagems. On the weapons side, at least eight of the game’s firearms are buffed — including the grenade launcher, HMG, explosive crossbow, Adjudicator, and Tenderizer — and changes have been made to how Helldivers 2 handles recoil and rifle damage to durable body parts.
Away from balance
Read more on polygon.com
