Helldivers 2has made a huge splash in the 2024 live service landscape. Delivering fun, fast-paced action with explosions as far as the eye can see, there’s a lot to love in Helldivers 2 (assuming you’re able to make it through the server queue unscathed). There are so many awesome weapons and stratagems to use in this game, and each one brings something unique to the battlefield. They’re not all created equally, though.
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Stratagems? More like comedy gems!
As the game continues to balloon in popularity and divers continue to climb the difficulty ranks, a clearer picture of the state of stratagem and weapon balancing is coming into focus — and we need buffs! Some weapons, like the Flamethrower, feel like trap-choices, and when it takes your hard-earned resources to unlock a new stratagem/weapon to try out, it can be a big bummer to make the wrong choice. This divide grows more dramatic once you climb into the highest difficulty tier, where you start to see everyone using pretty much the same weapons and stratagems.
Nerfing weapons in a PvE game feels just anti-fun, especially when they aren’t trivializing any content.
This is expected in this kind of online game, where you begin to see a meta begin to emerge in those higher, more grueling difficulties, and it makes sense that not every weapon or stratagem is meant to be viable in the upper echelon of Extreme, Suicide Mission, and Impossibledifficulty settings. But when you start to see every Helldiver running around with the same primary weapon (SG-225 Breaker shotgun), the same secondary weapon (P-19 Redeemer), and the same few stratagems (Shield Generator Pack, Railgun, Mortar Sentry, and Orbital Laser), a bit of staleness can slowly creep into your experience mission to mission.
The answer, however, isn’t to nerf these admittedly excellent weapons and stratagems. They work exactly how they should — they feel good to use, look awesome, and you’ll still get torn apart by Terminids or blown apart by Automatons if you aren’t being too careful. Nerfing weapons in a PvE game feels just anti-fun, especially when they aren’t trivializing any content.
Bring On The Boom
The answer is obviously and unequivocally to start buffing other weapons and stratagems to give viable alternatives that feel just as good as the current meta loadout.
And this doesn’t just apply to high-level play. Even at lower difficulties like Trivial or Easy, there are plenty underwhelming stratagems and weapons. The Flamethrower was one of my first unlocks because raining hellfire down on swarms of bugs seems like a sound strategy, and yet it feels so underwhelming to the point where I regretted the purchase after trying it out for a handful of missions. It needs more than a damage tweak, it needs a bit of a rework — make it shoot out a real stream of flame (give it some range), and let the flames cling to surfaces, creating some lingering flames that the enemies won’t just stomp through with nary a twitch.
The Flamethrower doesn’t need to be as powerful as the Railgun in Unsafe Mode or anything, but it should be better atsomethingthan the Railgun. Sure, the Flamethrower can put a stop to some of the small bugs, but so can my default Assault Rifle. The first Helldivers did a phenomenal job at balancing out the weapons. Not every weapon had the same effectiveness for every mission type, but every weapon excelled at something. We need an equivalent balancing act here.
We want bigger explosions, not smaller ones!
Now, don’t take this as me just complaining into the void. Helldivers 2 just dropped, and it’s an incredible game (I just reviewed it and gave it a 9.1for just how awesome it is). So much of the game nails the space marine experience, and even the undertuned weapons are still a blast to play with — as long as you don’t blindly take them into the higher difficulties. I have full confidence that the developers over at Arrowhead are working on weapon and stratagem balancing as we speak. They’ve been incredibly communicative about their server capacity issues due to the unprecedented success of this game.
Until the server issues are resolved, I don’t expect weapon balancing to be a high priority. But I’ve been seeing more and more calls from some voices in the community calling for nerfs to some of the highest performing weapons and stratagems in the game, and there needs to be more voices cautioning against that. There’s no need for nerfs in a PvE game like this. Power up the weaker loadouts, don’t make everything underwhelming.. We want bigger explosions, not smaller ones!
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