New Helldivers 2 Patch Brings the Fire, Nerfs Escort Missions

A sweeping list of changes hit the Galactic Warfront today, and they’re more notable than usual. Most importantly: the level cap is going up, escort mission difficulty is going down, and fire got a lot more deadly. Here’s all the information on the newest Helldivers 2 patch notes.

Helldivers 2 Patch 1.000.102 Weapon Changes

The Dominator saw big buffs today, while the Slugger had quite a few nerfs. Tooltips reflecting a weapon’s armor penetration capability seem to be more accurate, and on that note, the Anti-Materiel Rifle and Counter Sniper saw buffs to damage and armor penetration, respectively. Full notes below:

• 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.

In a similar vein, the Patriot Exosuit will now “only penetrate armor on a direct hit.”

Helldivers 2 Patch 1.000.102 Patch Notes

Other changes entail a nerf to the difficulty of the infamous “Retrieve Essential Personnel” mission type, a whopping 50% boost to all Fire damage, and halved durations of mission modifiers that increase Stratagem call-in and cooldown times. Oh, they also added Blizzards and Sandstorms, just in case you felt like you could see things a little too well. Full notes below:

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.

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

These are pretty substantial changes, on the whole. Notably, armor looks to have received another buff, which should help ease the downsides of being slowed down so much by Heavy Armor. Bug puke should probably stop one-shotting players, as well.

After playing with some friends last night and having a great time until the exact moment we were tasked with an Escort Personnel mission, I’m very excited to try out the changes to this incredibly oppressive mission type. I, at one point, counted no less than six active Hulk units on our location as we scrambled to spam the buttons that sent the citizens of Super Earth to their doom.