Helldivers 2 update 01.000.200 patch notes: Easier Defense missions, new balance pass on weapons

Arrowhead / Sony

The Helldivers are riding high at the moment – April 1, 2024, saw the long-awaited liberation of Malevelon Creek from the Automaton yoke and now developer Arrowhead has delivered a large update for Helldivers 2, re-balancing several aspects of the phenomenal co-op shooter.

Retrieve Essential Personnel, a Defense mission, has been made a little easier by moving the spawn points of enemies further away from the objective, giving Helldivers more time to prepare their fortifications. On higher difficulties, you’ll also be required to rescue fewer civilians to win. Another mission receiving changes is Destroy Command Bunkers, which has been made a bit more difficult due to the addition of more target locations.

In terms of new content, two Planetary Hazards have been added – Blizzards and Sandstorms.

When it comes to weapon adjustments, the Anti-Material Rifle, Breaker Incendiary, Dominator, Diligence Counter Sniper, and Recoilless Rifle have all received various buffs to increase their effectiveness in combat.

Enemies are affected by balance changes as well: Chargers will deal less damage to Exosuits using their regular melee attacks, while Bile Spewers and Nursing Spewers do less damage with their acidic puke. On the flipside stands a buff to Bile Titans – they can no longer be stunned.

Check below for the full Helldivers 2 update 01.000.200 patch notes.

Helldivers 2 update 01.000.200 patch notes

Gameplay

Planetary Hazard additions

• Blizzards
• Sandstorms

Balancing

Mission: 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.

Mission: 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.
• 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.