• News

Helldivers 2 Patch 1.000.200 notes take aim at mission & weapon balancing

The Arc Thrower got its range reduced and takes a second to charge while the Anti-Material Rifle now packs more punch.

TJ Denzer

April 2, 2024 7:40 AM

Image via Arrowhead Game Studios

1

The latest update for Helldivers 2 has arrived, and this time Arrowhead Game Studios is working on a wealth of balances for the game. Missions, weapons, stratagems, armor, and more got adjustments in Patch 1.000.200, complete with buffs, nerfs, and just a bit of adjustment to keep the game fun and avoid being unfair. Want to see if your favorite loadout took a hit? Then read on below.

Helldivers 2 Patch 1.000.200 notes

Arrowhead Game Studios put out Helldivers 2 Patch 1.000.200 and its accompanying patch notes this week. Some of the biggest changes on the list include adjustments to the Arc Thrower. It gained stagger force, but at the cost of taking a second to charge for a shot and having its range considerably reduced. The Anti-Material Rifle, on the other hand, took a substantial buff with a 30 percent damage increase, no strings attached. Missions were also a focus with objectives like Retrieve Essential Personnel playing enemy spawn points further away so civilians won’t get mauled right out of the gate. These came in among a wealth of other balancing and adjustments big and small:

Overview

This update includes:

• Balance changes to missions, stratagems, weapons, enemies and Helldivers.
• General fixes and stability improvements.
• Increased Level Cap

Gameplay

Planetary Hazard additions

• Blizzards
• Sandstorms

Increased level cap

• Level cap has been increased from 50 to 150

Balancing

Missions

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.

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.

Operation Modifiers

• 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

Tutorial

• Invisible collision partially blocking the doorway leading to the launch pad in the Tutorial

Known Issues

• These are issues that were either introduced by this patch and are being worked on, or are from a previous version and have not yet been fixed.
• Game might crash when picking up a snowball or throwing back a grenade
• Various issues involving friend invites and cross-play
• Cross-platform friend invites might not show up in the Friend Requests tab.
• Players cannot unfriend other players befriended via friend code.
• Players cannot unblock players that were not in their Friends list beforehand.
• Players cannot befriend players with Steam names shorter than 3 characters
• Explosive weapon stats include only direct hit damage but not explosive damage.
• Explosions do not break your limbs (except for when you fly into a rock).
• Planet liberation reaches 100% at the end of every Defend mission.
• Drowning in deep water with a Vitality Booster equipped puts Helldiver in a broken state.
• Stratagem beam might attach itself to an enemy but it will deploy to its original location.
• Some player customizations (like title or body type) may reset after restarting the game.

That covers Helldivers 2 Patch 1.000.200. Be sure to follow our full Helldivers 2 coverage for previous updates, news, and guides.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.