Huge Helldivers 2 patch finally arrives, with a barrage of weapon balancing tweaks and an entire separate post to help explain them

The huge Helldivers 2 patch that folks have been waiting for for a good liitle while now has just dropped and, well, it's just as hefty as Arrowhead had been teasing. Seriously, there are more weapon balancing tweaks than you can comprehend, and an entire separate post dedicated to help you understand why certain changes have been made.

That's in addition to the new mechanics that the developer had teased earlier this week having been added to the game. You certainly can't complain that Arrowhead isn't putting in plenty of effort to give folks what they want as it settles into its new approach to updates.

You can check out the entire list of changes in the patch notes as per usual, but this time there's also a separate post authored by Arrowhead chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt that goes into more detail on the balancing changes the studio's made.

"With these balance changes we wanted to buff up some of the weaker stratagems to make them more viable and add more opportunity for variety in loadouts," he writes, "We also changed a few to make them more consistent, but the goal was to keep a similar or higher power level. We are looking into the stratagems more to see if there are any other stratagems that might need some buffs or changes to make them more viable."

Some of the weapons on the list that seem to have recieved the most in-depth revamps are the A/MLS-4X Rocket Sentry, the MG-206 Heavy Machine Gun - which Pilestedt identifies as having "failed to deliver on the fantasy of a Heavy Machine Gun when it was released" - and the R-36 Eruptor, which has had its damage per explosion upped in an attempt to further compensate for the removal of its shrapnel-flinging ability a little whole ago.

Alongside enacting all of that balancing, Arrowhead has introduced a bunch of long-requested stuff, including visible Galactic War supply lines and attacks origin points, invite-only lobby creation, and a retuning of heavy enemy and patrol spawning rates. When it comes to the latter, you should see "at least 30% less" heavily armoured foes during higher difficulty bug breaches, with smaller enemies filling in the space. Patrol spawning is largely "back to how it worked before patch 01.000.300".

Oh, and some planets will now be a bit less foggy. Plus, that spear accuracy fix folks have wanted for ages is here, though it will need further tweaking before it can target Automaton spawners again.

So, there you go. If you're planning on reading through all of the changes, I recommend making a cup of tea and setting aside a good couple of hours.