Helldivers 2’s Big New Patch Introduces Wave of updates, and a Big Improvement to the Galactic Map – IGN

Helldivers 2’s highly anticipated 01.000.4000 patch is finally here, bringing with it a mass of gameplay tweaks, balance updates, and fixes to the popular co-operative shooter, along with invite-only lobby creation, and a big change to the galactic map.

Today’s update seed the introduction of a number of buffs for the game’s weaker stratagems in an attempt to increase their viability, including the Orbital Gatling Cannon, which is now capable of softening up heavily armored targets. Others were tweaked to make their performance more consistent, such as the Eagle 110mm rocket pod stratagem.

The update also makes the supply lines that connect worlds visible on the galactic map, allowing players to see where an invading faction is launching an attack from. Super Samples have also been made available during ‘extreme’ difficulty 6 missions, which will give players who are uncomfortable playing at higher difficulties the opportunity to upgrade ship modules using the resource.

Extreme weather events have also been adjusted on some planets, making fog less dense, and the paths of fire tornados more random, which will hopefully prevent them from transforming extraction points into a burning hellscape. Artificial lighting surrounding human outposts has also been adjusted to make it less distracting to the player, who also now has the option of hiding in large patches of vegetation to make themselves less visible to enemy patrols. On that note, patrol spawning has been rolled back to how it worked prior to patch 01.000.300 following feedback from the community.

Invite only lobbies have also been introduced, alongside a slew of fixes that address UI issues, crashes, and gameplay bugs, including one that allowed players to throw an infinite number of grenades by pressing the quick grenade button after closing the stratagem select menu. The devs have also remedied a bug that allowed the shuttle to take damage during extraction at the end of a game.

Arrowhead’s mysterious game master – known only as Joel – recently handed down a new major order to Helldivers 2 players on the behalf of Super Earth that came with a serious moral dilemma. Players have been given the choice of saving the world of Marfark, which would unlock the MD-17 Anti-Tank stratagem, or of protecting the planet Vernen Wells, which would net them zero stratagems but would ensure the safety of the digital civilian survivors that are trapped inside a childrens hospital. With two days left to go, it would seem that the overwhelming majority of players have opted to save the children, with Vernen Wells currently sitting on a 41 percent liberation rating, relative to Marfark’s 0.14 percent.

This week has also seen the release of the new jungle-themed Viper Commandos premium warbond, which adds new armor and weapons to Helldivers 2, while also introducing the first cosmetic skins that can be used to customise hellpods, exosuits, and extraction shuttles. Arrowhead recently announced that it had chosen to “focus on quality over quantity” when it comes to upcoming warbonds, opting to slow its release cadence in order to ensure more time to polish designs prior to release.

Check out the patch notes below for a full list of all the changes introduced in the new update.

Helldivers 2 update 01.000.400 patch notes in full:

Overview

For this patch, some of the major areas of interest are

• Visible Supply Lines & Attack Origins in the Galactic War.
• Stratagem, weapon, planet, and enemy balancing updates.
• Various crash fixes, stability improvements, and other updates.
• Invite-only lobby creation.
  The right most option in the Lobby settings. Currently only localized in English. Additional languages coming in the next patch

Balancing

Goal with stratagem balance changes this patch:

With these balance changes we wanted to buff up some of the weaker stratagems to make them more viable and add more possibility for variety in the loadouts. 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. We also want to be better at explaining what our goals are with the changes, please see the linked blog post for more information.

A/MLS-4X Rocket Sentry

• Decreased spread
• Prioritize larger targets
• Increased target distance from 75 to 100m
• Decreased Rockets per salvo 2 to 1 (to get a better ammo economy)
• Increased explosion radius from 1m to 4m
• Decreased explosion armor penetration (Explosion can no longer damage heavy armored enemies. The projectile still has enough AP to damage heavily armored targets.)
• Increased projectile damage from 200 to 300

A/MG-43 Machine gun sentry

• Reduced cooldown from 180 sec to 120 sec.

A/MG-43 Machine gun Sentry, A/G-16 Gatling Sentry, A/MLS-4X Rocket Sentry, A/AC-8 Autocannon Sentry, A/M-12 Mortar Sentry, A/M-23 EMS Mortar Sentry:

• Increased durability* from 0% to 80%

E/MG-101 HMG Emplacement

• Increased rotation speed by 100%

MD-6 Anti-Personnel Minefield

• Increased explosion damage from 250 to 350

MD-I4 Incendiary Mines

• Increased explosion damage from 150 to 210

Orbital Gatling

• Increased fire rate by 25%
• Increased rounds per salvo from 30 to 60
• Increased armor penetration (Can damage heavy armored enemies)
• Decreased cooldown from 80 sec to 70 sec

Orbital Precision strike

• Decreased cooldown from 100 sec to 90 sec
• Decreased Spawn/Call-in time from 4 sec to 2 sec

Orbital Airburst Strike

• Decreased cooldown from 120 sec to 100 sec

Eagle 110MM Rocket Pods

While these changes may look like a straight up nerf, that is not the intention. Please see the blogpost for more information.

• Improved targeting
• Increased projectile armor penetration (now does 100% damage to heavily armored enemies instead of 50%)
• Decreased projectile damage 600 to 250 (to compensate for the improved targeting and the extra damage from the increased armor penetration.)
• Decreased explosion armor penetration (explosion can no longer damage heavily armored enemies)

Eagle Strafing Run

• Increased uses from 3 to 4
• Increased armor penetration, can now damage heavily armored enemies.

GL-21 Grenade Launcher

• Increased explosion damage by from 350 to 400

MG-206 Heavy Machine Gun

• Increased projectile damage from 100 to 150
• Increased projectile damage against durable* body parts from 23% to 33%
• Decreased fire rate from 450/750/900 to 450/600/750
• Decreased reload time from 7 to 5.5 sec
• Increased stagger strength

MG-43 Machine Gun

• Decreased reload time from 4 to 3.5 seconds
• Increased max amount of Magazines from 3 to 4

MG-43 Machine Gun, A/MG-43 Machine gun Sentry, A/G-16 Gatling Sentry and EXO-45 Patriot Exosuits Gatling

• Increased projectile damage from 80 to 90
• Increased projectile damage against durable* body parts from 7.5% to 25%

AR-23 Liberator, M-105 Stalwart and AX/AR-23 “Guard dog”

• Increased projectile damage against durable* body parts from 10% to 23%

AR-23C Liberator Concussive

• Increased projectile damage against durable* body parts from 23% to 35%

BR-14 Adjudicator

• Increased magazine capacity from 25 to 30
• Increased projectile damage against durable* body parts from 10% to 20%

AR-61 Tenderizer

• Increased projectile damage from 60 to 95
• Increased projectile damage against durable* body parts from 10% to 17%
• Decreased ammo capacity from 35 to 30
• Decreased number of magazines from 10 to 8
• Increased stagger strength

PLAS-101 Purifier

• Increased projectile armor penetration to be the same as the explosion
• Decreased explosion damage falloff

CB-9 Explosive Crossbow

• Increased explosion armor penetration to be the same as the projectile
• Increased demolition strength (Can destroy Bug holes and Bot Fabricator buildings)
• Added medium penetration tag

R-36 Eruptor

• Increased total damage from 420 to 570 damage per shot

R-63 Diligence

• Increased projectile damage against durable* body parts from 10% to 25%

* Some enemies have durable body parts that receive only a portion of base damage from projectiles

Other

• Updated Recoil stance modifiers: We made changes to the recoil stance modifiers to make them more consistent and also reward being prone more. Almost all of them will improve the recoil and only a two have been made worse (and only by 10%).

See the blogpost for a more detailed description.

Gameplay

General

Removed operation modifier AA-Defenses: Reducing the stratagem slots by 1

• We want to look over the operation modifiers in the future. Right now there are too few of them which become repetitive and the ones we have do not create variety or promote different playstyles. For now, we removed this one because it only encourages the players to bring the best stratagems and does not promote variety

Disabled the Retrieve Essential Personnel defend event mission for the time being

• This is to give the mission the proper attention and care that it deserves as it is now deemed not fun enough or performing as we want it to.

Super Samples

• Super samples now spawn on difficulty 6. The reason for this change is that we feel that their existence only on difficulty 7+ forced some players to play the game on a harder difficulty than they wanted to comfortably play on. We do however still want a gating of them but a less punishing one.

• The SEAF Artillery stratagem is no longer blocked by stratagem jammers or Ion Storms, and is available after the mission timer ends and the destroyer leaves close orbit.

• Enemies in melee range of the gates in the Evacuate High-Value Assets mission will now attack it more consistently.

• Added the ability to chat from in-game menus and mission loading screen.

• Updated some first person crosshairs to improve readability.

Social

• Invite-Only lobbies are now supported

Armors

• New armor passive Peak Physique (+50% melee damage, +30% weapon ergonomics)

Planets & Hazards

Spike Plant

• The spike plant that appears on certain planets has been reworked.
• No longer causes bleed or stamina drain if hit by the plant explosion or spikes.
• Now “pops” three times sending spikes everywhere, dealing increased damage.

Fire Tornados

• Fire tornados have had their behavior changed, they should no longer feel like they actively respond to player movement, and should move more randomly.
• While a fire tornado storm takes place, enemy vision is reduced. Player vision is unaffected.

*Fire tornados being more random should result in more variance in situations players find themselves in. Tornados are significantly less likely to pile up and overlap on extraction points or objectives, and will generally be a bit easier to deal with.

Tremors

• Tremors have had their spawning tweaked to be slightly more random.
• Tremors have had their epicenter size and effect range increased.

*These changes should result in more situations where enemies away from the player get stunned, as well as reducing how consistently the player has a tremor occur next to them.

Ion Storms

• Added additional VFX for Ion Storms.

Visibility

A lot of planets have had their fog amounts tweaked to be a bit less harsh and dense, to provide less fatigue from constantly fighting on planets with bad visibility. We still intend there to be foggy planets with worse visibility, but the balance was a bit off.

• Desert planets such as Erata Prime, Chort Bay, Hellmire, and similar.
• Highlands planets such as Varylia 5, Matar Bay, Oshaune, and similar.
• Artificial light sources have had their intensity rebalanced and reduced across the board to fix situations of lights completely blinding the player.

Unexploded Hellbomb

• The unexploded malfunctioning hellbombs that can sometimes be found on planets will now explode immediately if hit with strong explosions or heavy weaponry. They will still have the same delay if hit by small arms fire or weaker attacks.

Vegetation

• Vegetation that’s large enough to slow the player now has an extra function. When inside the vegetation helldivers will be harder to detect, reducing their detection range by enemies. This effect stacks with other detection reducing effects such as nighttime, being crouched or prone, or things such as the scout armor passive.

Enemies

Acid Effect

• The acid effect applied by hunters, bug mines, etc. now allows you to sprint while under the effect and slows you by 30% instead of 50%. Duration has been increased from 3 to 4 seconds. These changes are intended to make it less punishing for players to be slowed while fighting the Terminids, This allows us to use it in more places without making the experience very punishing, for example the Bile Spewers.

Armored enemy balance

• We have toned down the amount of heavily armored enemies like Bile Titans, Chargers on higher difficulties and instead spawn more hordes of smaller enemies, the difference should be quite noticeable and the amount should be at least 30% less than before during bug breaches. We have also toned down slightly how many Hulks that spawn for the Automatons. Our intent is to ease up on the demand of anti-tank weapons and by having more of the other enemies give a better incentive for the group to bring stratagems and weapons that take care of hordes.

Patrols

• Patrol spawning is now back to how it worked before patch 01.000.300 with some slight tweaks so that the levels are less empty if you are far away from important locations with enemy presence.

Stunning

• Medium and large sized enemies now don’t get stunned as easily. This will not affect the stratagems that stun, and will mostly just affect how easily the Pummeler can stun larger enemies

Terminids

Bile Spewer and Nursing Spewer

• Spewers will now get slowed if they lose their legs.
• Spewer puke now applies the acid effect.
• Spewer puke now can only damage helldivers up to 4 times per second and the helldiver cannot take damage multiple times from the same projectile. This should reduce instances where you are instantly killed by it.

Bile Titan

• The Bile Titan’s head is slightly less durable against weaker anti-tank weapons. It’s not a large change, and will mostly matter for weapons like the railgun.
• The Bile Titan’s puke can now only damage the helldiver 4 times per second and the helldiver cannot take damage multiple times from the same projectile. The damage is still very deadly so running through their puke is not recommended. Their puke now also has a bigger spread.

Charger Behemoth

• The Charger Behemoth is now joining the battle on higher difficulties, it can now also take more damage than before. This enables us to spawn fewer chargers but still retain the difficulty.

Chargers

• Will now only show bleedout effects from the body if the bleedout state has started. It can still show bleedout effects from the mouth without having started the bleedout state.

Automatons

Hulk Scorcher

• The Hulk’s flamethrower now does less damage and cannot damage helldivers more than 4 times per second. In addition, the helldiver cannot be damaged multiple times by the same flame projectile. This should reduce instances where you are instantly killed by it.

Automaton Tanks

• The Tank armor value on the front has been lowered to be the same as the non-vent sections on the rear of the tank. The intent was initially that it was supposed to be more armored in the front, but the visual language did not show that.
• The vents on the back of the Tanks turret still has the same armor value as before, but will check for explosion directions correctly now.

• The damage of exploding automaton jump packs has been decreased by 50%, it will still set you on fire though.

Galactic War

Introducing Supply Lines & Origin of Attacks

Supply lines were previously not shown on the Galactic War map to reduce clutter and improve readability. However based on the feedback from our community we have made an implementation showing them on the map. This solution tries to maintain the general readability while still exposing the system to players in game.

You will now also be able to see which planet an attack is originating from, potentially allowing for the community to stop the attack at its source. We have also updated visuals in the sector and planet info pop-ups.

Fixes

• The FAF-14 Spear targeting has been reworked and should now function much better. However it has lost the ability to target Automaton Spawners, this is not intended and will be fixed in the future.

Intense Heat and Extreme Cold environmental modifiers will now affect the Quasar Cannon’s reload speed and will show correctly in the HUD.

• Reload speed on Cold planets -2.5 sec
• Reload speed on Hot planets +2.5 sec
• The radar pulse that detects enemies on the mini-map is now visible.
• Most of Automatons weapons have now gotten tighter limits to how much the projectile they shoot can deviate from its weapons muzzle angle. What this means is that situations where devastators shoot sideways and similar should be fixed.
• The weapons of the Exosuits are now allowed small adjustments in the angle they fire their projectiles versus their muzzle angle. This should make their weapons more accurate.
• Ballistic shield now collides with grenades.
• The unblock button should no longer disappear from the social menu.
• Blocked players can no longer join the blockers lobby through recent players.
• Fixed a bug where enemies killed, missions played, and missions completed stats would not be properly displayed in armory.
• Fixed issue where the player can throw an unlimited amount of grenades by pressing the “Quick grenade” button right after closing the Stratagem menu.
• Helldiver now also switches to the last active weapon when out of grenades, fixing the issue where they would be holding a stratagem ball without the stratagem menu being open.
• Fixed some text overlap in various locations.
• The burning effect applied to the player when a combat walker dies is now a normal burn. The intent is that you should be able to escape it alive. But you will be on fire so hit the ground!
• The extraction shuttle can no longer take damage preventing extraction. New high grade materials directly from Super Earth R&D have been utilized.
• On PC you can now navigate the super credits menu with “WASD” keys
• Fixed an issue where sample count in missions were incorrectly displayed
• Levels no longer generate with blocked areas preventing player progression.
• Your Ships bridge is no longer cast in perpetual shadow.
• Reduced situations where blue stratagems would bounce when placed next to the detector tower.
• The warbond menu now displays correct emote & victory poses in the thumbnail.
• War Medals cap is now displayed in the UI.
• Fixed a bug where the Helldivers armor could appear invisible for other players.
• Refined player reporting UI.
• Fixed issue where Helldivers could be launched into the air if close to a Bile Titan or Factory Strider corpse.
• Fix for Factory Strider sometimes spawned an extra model after being destroyed.
• Reduced situations where helldivers could spontaneously die while walking into seemingly walkable valleys on some planets.
• Fixed rare issue on arctic planets where players could spontaneously die close to large bodies of water.
• Fixed Pelican-1 sometimes leaving immediately after any player gets onboard.
• Fixed bug where helldiver could get stuck in grenade idle state after throwing grenades
• Fix Superior Packing Methodology not working for other peers.
• Recent Players list will now include hot-joining players.
• Relaxed disconnection policy for PC users.
• Fixed an issue where previous sessions’ player names might not be saved correctly when restarting.
• Defend event attack origin now visualized when hovering the planet with the defend event or the attack origin planet.
• Implemented outlines for previously poorly readable texts.

Crash Fixes

• General crash fixes.
• Fix for a crash that could occur when applying wounds to multiple enemies.
• PlayStation Only: Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause a crash when switching between Quality and Performance mode.
• Fix for a crash when a player leaves after all their railguns have exploded.
• Fix for crash that could occur when rejoining a previous session
• Fix for crash that occurred when trying to throw a snowball in ADS mode
• Fix for potential crash when loadout is aborted during hotjoin.
• Fix for rare crash linked to leaving a session while aiming a weapon.

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.

• Sending friend requests via friend code in game currently does not work.
• Players may be unable to be joined or invited to the game.
• Players added to the ‘Recent Players’ list will appear in the middle of the list.
• Players may experience delays in Medals and Super Credits payouts.
• Spear targeting is unable to target Automaton Spawners.
• Enemies that bleed out do not progress Personal Orders and Eradicate missions.
• Arc weapons sometimes behave inconsistently and sometimes misfire.
• Most weapons shoot below the crosshair when aiming down the sights.
• Plasma Punisher is unable to shoot out of the shield generators.
• Stratagem beam might attach itself to an enemy but it will deploy to its original location.
• Helldiver may be unable to stand up from crouching when surrounded by enemies.
• “Hand Carts” ship module does not reduce Shield Generator Pack’s cooldown.
• Bile Titan sometimes does not take damage to the head.
• Charger’s butt does not take damage from explosions.
• Players may become stuck in the Loadout when joining a game in progress.
• Reinforcement may not be available for players who join a game in progress.
• Planet liberation reaches 100% at the end of every Defend mission.
• “Raise Flag of Super Earth” objective does not show a progress bar.
• Mission count in the Career tab is being reset to zero after every game restart.
• Some weapons’ descriptions are out-of-date and don’t reflect their current design.
• BR-14 Adjudicator has incorrect recoil values

Anthony is a freelance contributor covering science and video gaming news for IGN. He has over eight years experience of covering breaking developments in multiple scientific fields and absolutely no time for your shenanigans. Follow him on Twitter @BeardConGamer