Helldivers 2 just dropped a chunky balance patch that fixes heavy armour, adds meteor swarms, and deals a blow to eradication mission farmers

Helldivers 2 just had its first balance update. While mechs are still en-route, this payload is certainly nothing to sniff at—especially since it's still adding one major feature to the game: True to the game's Starship Troopers inspiration, meteors are now a major concern for the hardworking patriots of Super Earth. I'm sure nothing bad will happen to Buenos Aires, though.

"Many planets now have additional environmental challenges that will appear at random while you are deployed, from fire tornadoes to meteor showers and many more," the patch notes state. Helldivers 2 actually already had fire tornadoes in the planet of Hellmire—but as far as I can tell they were just background dressing. Until now, that is.

Eradicate missions—which were previously used as an XP, medals, and requisitions farm—have also had their duration doubled. "The time to complete the mission was previously shorter than intended and should now usually take twice as long to complete." This should ideally stop players from simply dipping in, knocking out some waves of bots or bugs, and dropping the rest of the operation to rinse and repeat—which could have an impact on the ongoing galactic war.

A swathe of adjustments has also hit some fan favourite guns—including the SG-225 Breaker, the RS-422 Railgun, and the Shield Generator Pack. Initially the patch notes didn't have specifics, but they've since been updated. Arrowhead Developer Alex Kravchenko also shared some more granular details via the game's official Discord.

There's also been a supply package of fixes to bugs and issues. Most notably, Arrowhead has "fixed armor rating values not reducing damage as intended". Previously, heavy armour wasn't doing much of anything to reduce damage, meaning all those stompy, Space Marine-adjacent suits were just sitting in my cargo hold collecting dust. I'm peachy keen to leverage their weight to stomp some bugs, now.

You can find the full list of patch notes below.

Minor Patch 01.000.100

Fresh new patch notes Helldivers!

Major Updates

• Planetary Hazards active
• Many planets now have additional environmental challenges that will appear at random while you are deployed, from fire tornadoes to meteor showers and many more.

Balancing

Eradicate Missions

• Eradicate missions now require more kills and enemies spawn more often. The time to complete the mission was previously shorter than intended and should now usually take twice as long to complete.

Primary, Secondary, & Support Weapons

• Breaker: Decreased magazine capacity from 16 to 13, increased recoil from 30 to 55
• Railgun: Decreased armor penetration, decreased damage against durable enemy parts
• Flamethrower: Increased damage per second by 50%
• Laser Cannon: Increased damage against durable enemy parts, increased armor penetration, improved ergonomics
• Punisher: Increased total ammo capacity from 40 to 60, increased stagger force, increased damage from 40 per bullet to 45 per bullet
• Breaker Spray & Pray: Increased armor penetration, increased fire rate from 300 to 330, increased number of pellets from 12 to 16 per shot, decreased magazine size from to 32 to 26

Stratagems

• Energy Shield Backpack: Increased delay before recharging.
• 380mm and 120mm Orbital Barrages: Increased duration of the bombardment, decreased spread.

Fixes

• Fixed armor rating values not reducing damage as intended.
• Fixed certain Bug Holes (including Stalker Nests) that were unnecessarily hard to destroy.
• Fixed anti-aliasing toggle not working on PS5.
• Balanced lighting across all planets to solve cases where the game was too dark.
• Improved flashlight efficacy.
• Increased visibility during “sand rain” weather on Erata Prime.
• Updated tutorial materials and lighting.
• Improved cases where some materials could look blurry if "Lighting" graphic setting was set to "Low".
• Fixed timing issues that could occur in the “Extract E-710” primary objective.
• Changed button interaction behavior for buttons in bunker POIs. Helldivers will now let go of the button after holding it for a few seconds.
• Fixed some cases of large assets floating if the ground beneath them was blown up.
• Helldivers standing next to ICBMs during launch will get properly toasty with a chance of not-so-spontaneous combustion.
• Fixed unthrowable snowballs after ragdolling.
• Fixed being able to use grenades after drowning.
• Camera no longer locked on the player's own corpse and blocking spectator mode.
• Helldivers now take damage from fire, gas etc. generated by other players.
• Armor no longer stretches when dismembered.

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 may crash after dropping several high power stratagems in succession.
• Picking up items from caches may cause characters to freeze in place for an extended period of time.
• Picking up items from bunkers and caches in quick succession may render one of the items unpickable.
• Players cannot unfriend other players befriended via friend code.
• Players may be unable to select loadout or return to ship when joining a multiplayer game session via PS5 Activity Card.
• Mission objective HUD displays different numbers for client and host during some missions.
• Default armor is always shown while viewing the warbond, regardless of the armor that player has equipped.
• Text chat box display is obstructed by the cinematic letterboxing during extraction.
• Some text in the HUD/UI is missing or not displaying correctly.
• Players may experience issues when many players attempt to login and/or play at the same time:
• Login rate limiting
• Players may become disconnected during play
• Various UI issues may appear when the game interacts with servers
• Some games may not be joinable by others for a short period of time