Is Helldive worth it? Helldivers 2 players debate best difficulty levels

Helldivers 2 is a difficult game—Hell Divers get splattered across a dozen planets in a million different ways on any difficulty level. But some players wonder what’s the best difficulty for new and old Divers alike, and the answer is surprising.

In a March 5 Reddit post, a Helldivers 2 player called u/OldSloppy asked about everyone’s preferred difficulty level. “I really suck, so I tend to enjoy 4-5, with the occasional 6+ if I’m feeling dangerous…,” they wrote. This would put their preferred difficulty at Extreme, just before they could obtain Super Samples.

This spawned an interesting debate. The top comment echoed a lot of Divers’ sentiments: “We play mostly 7 now, do not see a reason to go any higher and anything below 6 is too easy.” Several Hell Divers chimed in, writing that Suicide Mission—the first type where you can get Super Samples—is a great stopping point for many Divers.

Many point to the game-warping effects that occur on Impossible and Helldive as the reason for them not moving along: “Stratagem scatter and scramble can both FOOK OFF,” one player wrote, noting the time they tried to call down a Support Pack and ended up wiping their group. These modifiers, and many more similarly annoying ones, can only occur on Helldiver 2’s highest difficulties.

It took a while of scrolling through responses to find the first person to say Helldive was worth it, and for a simple reason: “Medals go brrrr.” With Helldive providing the highest multipliers for rewards and the highest number of base Warbond Medals, it was surprising to see how long it took for someone to respond with the highest difficulty in the game.

But even this comment thread wasn’t without its detractors: “[The Meta loadout is] all anyone bloody takes for Helldive. It gets boring,” one player wrote, who found the standard setup of Railgun and Shield Generator frustrating. It seemed obvious that even those who could handle Helldive despised the current balance of weapons and Stratagems they were asked to bring to each of the game’s hardest Missions. For some who have done Helldive missions, the options felt like you had to run Meta or be seen as an “idiot who is actively gimping the team.”

In general, the sentiment among Hell Divers seemed to fall around the seventh difficulty level or Suicide Mission—detracting newer Divers who don’t yet have the gear to handle those terrifying challenges. That difficulty mixes strong enemy populations with the freedom to run “non-meta” builds, like Jump Packs and Machine Guns. It is also where Divers can get Super Samples and enough Medals to make a dent in the huge Medal count you need to clear the current Warbonds.