Stress Testing Helldivers 2's HORRIBLE New Meta

Helldivers 2's new update completely changed the endgame meta. Today we review all the changes to weapons, stratagems and mission types in this gameplay test.

-=Follow me on=-

[NeeL-ZzZz]

What i dont like is the fact that patrols can spawn literally on top of player now.

With a literal visual pop in and you are surrounded in a field that was empty a second ago

[kaiserkhan]

Fun Fact: The Spear can now be resupplied with regular ammo drops on the map. This was previously not the case, the Spear would only be restocked with the resupply node. Thinking that this could of been a bug and thus wasnt reported as a major change.

[Prolink]

What I found out was that the flamethrower ignores armor, but you still have to aim for the weak point. You can kill Chargers without even having to dive once at times, as long as it’s constant jet to the leg.

[natesiress]

Honestly, if they would just make it so any teammate can come up to you while you have a backpack loaded weapon and team-reload, things would be so much better. The recoilless is really nice against chargers, for the first charger you see. Then you have to wait 3-5 business days for it to reload, in place, while you get plowed down by bugs. If my teammates could come up and reload for me without them having to sacrifice their backpack slot for me to use the weapon, it would massively incentivize teamplay and make every backpack weapon infinitely more viable.

[bluehotboomer]

Strongest strategem is to call in a dead diver and have them land on something

[stovetopicus]

"We want players to use their strategems more", then proceeds to put 100% calldown time debuff on all planets in 7-9 difficulties.

[chitin]

As a OG breaker user in helldivers 1, I was actually surprised how effective the breaker was in HD2. The nerf is pretty mild and makes sense. The railgun nerfs seem a little too much for me, maybe something in between would have been good.

[some_rndm_guy]

They probably accidentally applied the higher spawn rates for defense missions to all missions.

[BelialSux]

i’ve come to realize the most reliable stratagem weapon we have at our disposal now is the Arc Thrower since it has no ammo counter, ignores Hulk and Charger armor, and can efficiently kill hordes of enemies while killing a larger enemy.

[Karphagen]

How do we take care of 5+ Chargers on Helldive? Simply, we use the "Old man in Winter" strategy. We designate a sacrificial lamb to aggro all the chargers, pull them to the edge of the map, and die there :D

[milomateer]

My biggest gripe with the game rn is how useless guns are and how you need to rely on stratagems, which is fine, but with 30 chargers and 10 bile titans and probably you having only 2 offensive stratagems to use, you are always out of resources to deal with the enemies. Your only option is to run away until your stratagems cooldown, but then there are factors increasing stratagem cooldown, call down time, scrambling them, and restricting one slot! Devs say to rely on stratagems but we can’t even do that!

[SeaGLGaming]

I think Arrowhead accidently broke the difficulties. We had a newer player join so we dropped from difficulty 7 to 4, and we immediately got wiped on an extraction mission. Three Chargers were out in the field as soon as we landed. Four more spawned on the 100 meter journey to the site. There was never less than four running around inside the site. We had no shot at the extraction and only rescued 6. We ran out of ammo, stratagems, and everything we had to take care of heavy armor. Two of us extracted but only because we had to resort to glitching on top of buildings and rocks and trying to aggro as many as possible and hope someone could run around and release the civis. We failed of course. We then tried a bot mission. It was chaos but we managed to complete the mission, still on 4, but then as we got to extraction, three tanks and four hulks dropped in. Two survived and had to flee the site when one got hit by a meteor the fourth time. We were out of reinforce so we had to wait. I get called in when the other gets killed. I ran away and survived to reinforce again, and then he gets immediately killed by a meteor. I call someone else in and we made our way back to extraction by looping around half the map to draw the enemies out. We then start the call again when 6 drop ships come in, land right on top of the site, and drop three tanks, a hulk, and 10 walkers. And that's on top of all the tanks and hulks that were still chasing us.

The difficulties and spawn rates are definitely broke. What use to take lots of teamwork on difficulty 7 is now required on even the lowest difficulty. Hell, we dropped it down to 4 due to how insane the spawns were, and we still had four bile titans immediately spawn in right at the start of a defense mission. After we wasted all our anti heavy supplies and stratagems, we immediately were swarmed with several Chargers.

So on top of the best support weapon getting nerfed into oblivion, all the difficulties have been raised, either intentionally or unintentionally. So now you're just screwed no matter what. It takes extreme luck and glitches now to survive. We're not the best Helldiver squad, but we communicate well and strategize. We're never running mindlessly around and overwhelming ourselves. We're pinging, setting up parameters, planning retreats, avoiding patrols or taking them out quickly and efficiently to avoid reinforcements, planning use of support weapons etc, and we still get completely overwhelmed on ever low tier difficulties right now.

You said it best, current meta since the update is just to just keep running away and hoping the enemies will stop spawning and use stratagems to cove retreat. You can no longer stand and fight and try to set up a front. It's fight, get overwhelmed, and runaway until stratagems and resupplies cooldown. The game has to be hard, especially on higher difficulties. Previously, it felt like some missions on higher difficulties would be extremely hard and intense but others could be easy just depending on the location. Now it's just constant bullshit go. Hopefully a hot patch in the coming days can fix this because we had a friend playing for the first time almost completely give up because she felt she was useless and didn't stand a chance.

[Arenesz]

As a Helldiver one veteran i was suprised since start that we had the weapons so effective, because high level weaponry is not in the game yet at all. difficulty seven and above usually needed havy laser weponry liek laser shotguns or mechanized infantry in the form of mech walkers. I think they just simply balancing the hoards in preparation of these weapins release.

[Pink-Kiwi]

Autocannon and arc thrower mains virtually unphased by the whole change.

[thereprehensible]

I do kinda agree that the whole _"You're meant to use stratagems instead of guns"_ thing was... A bad take.
Especially since those tend to have long cooldowns, leaving you with one use of each either every other fight or after several. Spawn loops alongside lacking the ability to output damage, or crack armor, is a pain. Everybody needs at least 1-2 anti-armor options or the team is screwed.

Which means that at best, you get one anti-nasty hard-hitting ability per fight... Which becomes a problem when/if multiple big bads spawn at once.
Which happens a LOT in higher difficulties. With anti-armor being the focus, it can also be rather difficult to hold back hordes... Since nobody can really be dedicated to such when guns are being outright made ineffective and ammunition sparse enough that those nerf-guns can't be utilized consistently either.

In terms of balance, this means you simply cannot _fight_ in some cases. You're gonna have to simply keep running and popping stratagems as you flee.
We need at least one or two moar stratagem slots, IMO... Or severely reduced base cooldowns. Alternatively, we need our guns to get buffed, flat out; with ammo reserves deep enough to use them fairly often and damage great enough to function when using an anti-armor weapon that takes both the special weapon and backpack slot.

[ryanhartmanisgreat]

We are in a terrible spot where all the good gear was nerfed, nothing was really buffed enough to make a big difference, and all these new mechs and powerful stuff haven't dropped yet.

[mikeh]

a buff/fix that wasn't mentioned in the patch notes: Spear now locks on faster and more reliably, it also resupplies rockets from standard ammo boxes. I was smacking heavies left and right last night with it.

[JSON_bourne]

Can we put some sort of delay on when they start to call in the bug breach? Even like half a second. Feels bad when I kill the bug calling the bug breach almost instantly but it still calls in the bug breach

EDIT: Changed bug hole to bug breach. Also on the low vis missions done even try to avoid bug breach lol

[JohnnyRico]

When the entire higher difficulty meta hinges on a single gun and then you nerf that gun, it's gonna be a problem. I think it's great they buffed the flamethrower and I feel the regular breaker is still really good. They also buffed the spear by letting you replace ammo more easily, but I really think they could've given some modest buffs to some other weapons to help deal with Bile Titans and Hulks. I usually use the autocannon on bots and the stalwart on bugs, so buffing the flamethrower has actually made it easier for me to solo chargers.

[HuskySansVergogne]

Tried the Laser Canon against bugs, I found it to be super trash, like before the patch.
Tried against Automatons, it's night and day.
You can deal with every unit with it.
Killed multiples Hulk by aiming at the head and if you're able to shoot at the back it will get the job done in 2-3 seconds, same for the Tanks.
Very versatile agaisnt Automatons and very ammo efficient.
You should use it from a distance, covering your allies.