Helldivers 2’s New Heavy Machinegun is Good for One Thing

Yesterday, Helldivers 2 received two new weapons. One of them is an incredible, powerful, versatile laser rocket launcher, and the other one is the MG-101 Heavy Machine Gun. Here’s what the New Heavy Machinegun is good for in Helldivers 2.

What’s the Heavy Machinegun (MG-101) Good for Helldiver’s 2? – Answered

The Heavy Machinegun is.. strange. It doesn’t have that much ammo, at just 75 rounds a magazine, and it kicks like a horse. It’s nearly impossible to keep the reticle on target, and there’s no third-person aiming option, so you’re stuck aiming down sights and wrestling the thing anytime you fire more than a single round. The RPM can be changed from “slow and inaccurate” to “very fast, and also inaccurate.” The MG-101 is not very good at clearing chaff, and it can’t penetrate heavy armor with any kind of reliability. So, if you do decide to take it out into the field to fight the Automatons this weekend, I’m here to tell you that there is precisely one enemy type it excels at killing: Devastators.

MG-101 – What’s the Use Case in Helldivers 2?

The best thing to use the Heavy Machinegun (MG-101) on in Helldivers 2 is the Devastators. Devastators are those big, but not Hulk-size big Automaton units. You may be familiar with the absolute bastard of a unit known as the Rocket Devastator, which is capable of wiping a team from across the map with pinpoint precision and 100% lethality. Some of them carry big shields, some don’t. The point is, they’re big, they’re slow, and they’re just armored enough to put the MG-101 to good use.

If it wasn’t clear, I don’t particularly care for the new Heavy Machine Gun. I quite like the regular Machine Gun and even the Liberator (its more lightweight counterpart). But the Heavy just doesn’t seem to fill a particularly useful niche beyond, like I mentioned, killing very specifically sized and specifically armored foes like Devastators (and maybe Hive Guards, if we’re looking at Terminids).

But even still, as mentioned before, Rocket Devastators are a big enough threat on their own that bringing along a weapon like the MG-101 just to deal with them is worthwhile. This way you can also keep an open backpack slot, in case you want to be the ammo mule while everyone else is busy blowing things up with weapons that actually hit things, like the EAT-17. Or check out the new laser rocket launcher that also made its debut with the MG-101