Helldivers 2: New update increases level limit, brings new extreme weather and much more

The latest update for Helldivers 2 brings numerous changes. We have the highlights and of course the patch notes for you

A new patch for Helldivers 2 has been live for both PC and PlayStation 5 for a few hours now. It is the second major update with game adjustments, but there are also one or two new features.

Helldivers 2: What’s in the update

Here are the highlights of patch 01.000.200:

• Increased level limit: The maximum level has been increased from 50 to 150.
• New extreme weather: You may encounter blizzards and sandstorms.
• Improved armor: Medium armor reduces damage by an additional 5 percent and heavy armor by 10 percent 
• In the missions to rescue essential personnel the enemies now spawn a little further away. There are also fewer civilians to rescue on higher difficulty levels.
• In the missions to destroy command bunkers, there are now more target objects on the map. The mission can occur from operations of difficulty level 5.
• The effect of Operations modifiers on cooldowns has been halved.

Helldivers 2: Patch notes for patch 01.000.200

Gameplay

Additions to the planetary danger

• Blizzards
• Sandstorms

Increased level cap

• The level cap has been increased from 50 to 150

Balancing

Missions

Retrieve important personnel

• Enemy spawn points have been moved further away from the objective to give players a better chance of defending the location.
• On higher difficulty levels, fewer civilians are required to complete the mission.

Destroy command bunker

• Now there are more target locations, the mission was previously too easy compared to other missions.
• It can now appear in missions from difficulty level 5.

Operation modifiers

• The negative effect of operation modifiers that increase the cooldown time of strategists or the enlistment time has been mitigated.

Primary, secondary & support weapons

• Bow Thrower: Fixed inconsistencies when charging; it now always takes 1s to charge a shot.
• Bow Thrower: Distance reduced from 50m to 35m.
• Bow Thrower: Stagger power increased.
• Watchdog: Now restores full ammo from supply crates.
• Anti-Materiel Rifle: Damage increased by 30%.
• Breaker Incendiary: Damage per bullet increased from 15 to 20.
• Fire damage per tick increased by 50% (from all sources).
• Liberator Penetrator: now has a full auto mode.
• Dominator: Damage increased from 200 to 300.
• Dominator: Stagger increased.
• Diligence Counter Sniper: Armor penetration increased from light to medium.
• Slinger: Reduced stagger.
• Slinger: Damage reduced from 280 to 250.
• Slinger: reduced destructive power.
• Slinger: Fixed armor penetration tag in menu.
• Slugger, Liberator Concussive, Senator: Wrong armor penetration tags in the menu fixed.
• Recoilless Rifle: The number of rockets that can be recovered from supply crates has been increased from 2 to 3.
• Spear: The number of rockets that can be recovered from the supply crates has been increased from 1 to 2.
• Heavy Machine Gun: The highest rate of fire has been reduced from 1200 rpm to a moderate 950 rpm.

Stratagems

• Patriot Exosuit: Missiles now only penetrate armor on direct hit.

Enemies

• Balancing adjustments were made to
• Charger’s normal melee attack now deals less damage against exosuits.
• Gall Spitters and Care Spitters do less damage with their vomit.
• The Bile Titan can no longer be stunned.
• Shriekers no longer create Bug Breaches.
• Shriekers that hit you while dead now deal significantly less damage.

Helldiver

Balancing adjustments were made to

• Heavy and medium armor protects better and you now take about 10% less damage than before when wearing heavy armor and about 5% less when wearing medium armor. Fortified command and light armor remain unchanged.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where save settings for PS5 were reset when the game was restarted, causing things like loadout and hint settings to be reset.
• Enemies now correctly target exosuits. Previously, many enemies would ignore exosuits if there was a Helldiver on foot that they could target.
• Fixed exosuits being able to fire their weapons while opening the minimap.
• The Helldiver and Exosuit both had a bug that caused them to sometimes take blast damage multiple times, making things like automaton missiles too lethal, this is now fixed.
• Automaton enemy constellations that preferred to spawn more of certain Devastator types were not working and now work as they should. This means that sometimes when playing against the Automatons, you will encounter more Devastators instead of other enemy types.

We have improved the system that prevents the Hellpod from controlling near large or important objects.

• We have resolved issues where the effective area around objects was much larger than intended.
• We have reduced the number of objects that prevent hellpod control.
• Note: This system is intended to prevent softlocks where players can fall on key interaction points or unintended locations. We will continue to monitor the health of the system after the update to see if additional optimizations are needed.
• Fixed cases where the ground under some objects could bomb, causing them to float.

Changes to the ballistic shields

• The collision mesh has been slightly enlarged to improve forgiveness
• Changed shield poses so that less of the hell diver is visible
• Fixed a bug where parts of the Helldiver became vulnerable when using the shield in first person

Tutorial

• Invisible collision partially blocks the passage to the launch pad in the tutorial

For example, the bow thrower and the anti-matter rifle were given a buff. In return, the mechs had to put up with a small nerf. With the new level cap, veterans also have a new goal to aim for. What do you particularly like about the patch? What should the developers address in the next update? Let us know in the comments.