Arrowhead Game Studios has released a new Helldivers 2 patch, which makes significant balance changes and adds two new planetary hazards.
Version 01.000.200 is now live and, as Arrowhead puts it in the Steam patch notes, is a "slightly bigger update for you all to assist in the liberation efforts of our galaxy," and comes with two new surprise features.
First is the increased level cap, which has been raised from 50 to 150, since some players have already maxed it out, so it's a welcome adjustment that will allow players to level up further as they continue to fight for freedom and democracy across the galaxy.
Second, is the addition of two new Planetary Hazards: blizzards and sandstorms. Planetary Hazards were introduced in version 01.000.100 last month and are essentially environmental dangers that can occur at any point on any planet while players fight off the Automatons and Terminids.
The patch also aims to address balance changes to a range of features across the board, like Stategems and weapons. One notable change is for the 'Retrieve Essential Personnel' missions, which have been tweaked, moving the enemy spawn points further away from the objective so players have a fairer chance of defending the location and now there are fewer civilians required to complete the mission on higher difficulties.
In terms of enemies, the Bile Titan can no longer be stunned, Shriekers can't create bug breaches anymore, and the Bile Spewer and Nursing Spewer enemies do less damage with their projectile vomit (yuck), among other tweaks.
The lengthy patch notes can be read in full below, which also highlight known issues, including a bug affecting cross-play and friend invites not appearing in the friend tab.
Helldivers 2 version 01.000.200 patch notes:
Gameplay
Planetary Hazard additions
- Blizzards
- Sandstorms
Increased level cap
- Level cap has been increased from 50 to 150
Balancing
Missions
Retrieve Essential Personnel
- Moved the enemy spawn points further away from the objective to give players a fairer chance of defending the location.
- There are fewer civilians required to complete the mission on higher difficulties.
Destroy Command Bunkers
- Now has more objective locations, the mission was too easy before compared to other missions.
- It can now appear in operations from difficulty 5.
Operation Modifiers
- Halved the negative effect of operation modifiers that increase stratagem cooldowns or call in times.
Primary, Secondary, & Support Weapons
- Arc Thrower: fixed charging inconsistencies; it will now always take 1s to charge a shot.
- Arc Thrower: reduced distance from 50m to 35m.
- Arc Thrower: increased stagger force.
- Guard Dog: now restores full ammo from supply boxes.
- Anti-Materiel Rifle: damage increased by 30%.
- Breaker Incendiary: damage per bullet increased from 15 per bullet to 20 per bullet.
- Fire damage per tick increased by 50% (from all sources).
- Liberator Penetrator: now has a full auto mode.
- Dominator: increased damage from 200 to 300.
- Dominator: increased stagger.
- Diligence Counter Sniper: increased armor penetration from light to medium.
- Slugger: reduced stagger.
- Slugger: reduced damage from 280 to 250.
- Slugger: reduced demolition force.
- Slugger: fixed armor penetration tag in the menu.
- Slugger, Liberator Concussive, Senator: fixed incorrect armor penetration tags in the menu.
- Recoilless Rifle: increased the number of rockets you restore from supply boxes from 2 to 3.
- Spear: increased the number of missiles you restore from supply boxes from 1 to 2.
- Heavy Machine Gun: the highest fire rate mode reduced from 1200 rpm to a more moderate 950.
Stratagems
- Patriot Exosuit: rockets will now penetrate armor only on direct hit.
Enemies
- Balancing adjustments have been made to
- Chargers normal melee attack now does less damage against Exosuits.
- Bile Spewer and Nursing Spewer do less damage with their puke.
- The Bile Titan can no longer be stunned.
- Shriekers no longer create bug breaches.
- Shriekers hitting you while they are dead now does significantly less damage.
Helldiver
Balancing adjustments have been made to:
- Heavy and medium armor protects better and you now take about 10% less damage than before while wearing heavy and about 5% less when wearing medium armor. Fortified commando and light armor is unchanged.
Fixes
- Fixed issue where save settings for PS5 would be reset when the game is rebooted, causing things such as loadout and hint settings to reset.
- Enemies now properly target Exosuits. Previously, many enemies effectively ignored Exosuits if a helldiver on foot was available for them to target.
- Fixed Exosuits being able to fire their weapons while opening the minimap.
- The Helldiver and the Exosuit both had a bug that made them sometimes take explosion damage multiple times making things like automaton rockets be too deadly, this is now fixed.
- Automaton enemy constellations that preferred to spawn more of certain Devastators types did not work and are now functioning as they should. This means that sometimes when playing against the Automatons you will face more Devastators instead of other enemy types.
We have improved the system that prevents hellpod steering close to large or important objects.
- We have solved issues where the effective area around objects was a lot larger than intended.
- We have reduced the number of objects that prevent hellpod steering.
- Note: This system is intended to prevent softlocks where players can drop on important interaction points, or drop into unintended places. We will continue to monitor the state of the system after the update to see if additional tweaks are necessary.
- Fixed cases where the ground under some assets could be bombed causing them to float.
Ballistic Shield changes
- Collision mesh has been slightly increased in size for more forgiveness
- Changed shield poses so that less of the helldiver is exposed
- Addressed bug where parts of the helldiver would become vulnerable while using the shield in first person
Tutorial
- Invisible collision partially blocking the doorway leading to the launch pad in the Tutorial
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.
- Game might crash when picking up a snowball or throwing back a grenade
Various issues involving friend invites and cross-play
- Cross-platform friend invites might not show up in the Friend Requests tab.
- Players cannot unfriend other players befriended via friend code.
- Players cannot unblock players that were not in their Friends list beforehand.
- Players cannot befriend players with Steam names shorter than 3 characters
- Explosive weapon stats include only direct hit damage but not explosive damage.
- Explosions do not break your limbs (except for when you fly into a rock).
- Planet liberation reaches 100% at the end of every Defend mission.
- Drowning in deep water with a Vitality Booster equipped puts Helldiver in a broken state.
- Stratagem beam might attach itself to an enemy but it will deploy to its original location.
- Some player customizations (like title or body type) may reset after restarting the game.
