Helldivers 2’s first big balance patch is here, but players aren’t happy

After weeks of technical difficulties and bug-stomping, the Helldivers 2 developer finally unleashed a balance adjustment patch. Perhaps expectedly, the community proceeded to light themselves on fire, complaining about the “nerf-first” mindset the dev seemed to take while making the game more difficult.

A big win seemed to be coming for Arrowhead Studios when it released Patch 01.000.100, intended to be the first balance patch for Helldivers 2. The dev nerfed the dominant meta strategy of the SG-225 Breaker, Railgun, and Shield Generator Pack. On the flip side, it made buffs to other shotguns—alongside lesser-used support weapons and orbitals—while adjusting the difficulty of planetary hazards and the Extermination mission type.

The community took this quite hard. The official post about Arrowhead Studios’ thought process quickly filled with comments deriding the dev for its lack of focus on Armor and the Stratagem cooldown increases on high difficulties. Alongside players asking for additional buffs for weapons like the Scythe and Liberator, this post seemed to add fuel to players’ animosity.

Community posts didn’t fair much better. One player posted an image of a new Extermination Mission on Suicide Mission difficulty, showcasing a group of Chargers and Bile Titans spawning simultaneously. The following comment thread made jokes about how the developer wants you to “use what you like” in a game where high-armor and high-power enemies spawn in droves.

And yet another post went into detail about the current difficulty of effectively clearing enemies on Impossible and Helldive Missions. “There is NOTHING in the game to reliably deal with this,” the player explained, insisting that a nerf-first mindset is going to make the game less “fun, skillful, or engaging”—especially during the crowded extraction sections of Difficulty Eight and Nine Missions.

Unfortunately, select Arrowhead Studios devs aren’t handling the situation with grace. Several Reddit posts caught dev comments saying they were “feeding the rage for [their] own entertainment here” and making vague threats about lessening “dev interaction” on their Discord. This dev commentary was received as expected, with most players thinking these types of posts are “bizarre and upsetting” from a dev team many expected much from.

That said, the Helldivers Reddit and Discord were not all doom-and-gloom following the balance patches. Several Divers noted the Breaker and Railgun were not nerfed that hard, with one post saying the backlash was “just sad” and the nerfs were simply not worth all of this hatred. Another post mentioned the worst part of this discourse wasn’t the nerfs or lack of buffs. But, instead, how it split the united community Helldivers 2 used to cultivate—between the “get guud vs the this patch sucks” camps.

We can only cross our fingers and hope Super Earth survives this civil war before it consumes the game for weeks to come.