Helldivers 2 has a whole range of weapons and war strategies to offer, but if you ask any real-life Super Earth patriot what their favorite gear is, they'll probably come up with the same names. The SG-225 Breaker, the Orbital Laser, the Railgun – with a few scattered honorable mentions for wartime strategies like the autocannon.
At least from my own experience, I can say with certainty that the railgun Is Kind of broken – in a funny way, my God. There's something satisfying about locking a charger on your knuckles or bombarding a Gall Titan from a safe distance. However, it puts you in a corner if you want to win.
Luckily, Arrowhead will be making some changes. As discovered by Player radarWhen asked by a fan about a possible balance patch, community manager Baskinator responded with a simple: “We're working on it for an update, yes.”
As for the details, lead game designer Alex Kravchenko was kind enough to chat with players about weapon tweaks on the game's Discord channel The Armory, a platform dedicated to chatter about gear – and in general, Arrowhead is against it Weapons with power out of control.
“Keep overpowered weapons in the game without fixing them.” does Kravchenko writes: “It's a balancing act – although it is a balancing act – in a separate message they write that when Arrowhead weakens a weapon, “even though the numbers show that this is now the case, it becomes more balanced… people go along with it still be dissatisfied with the changes (rightly so). Because they had found the most versatile tool, loved it, mastered it, and it was taken away from them.”
Still, Kravchenko assures players that “the changes are definitely coming, we just didn't want to rush it… the power of some weapons is VERY different from what is generally believed.”
This is reflected in comments from Arrowhead Games CEO Johan Pilestedt on Twitter, who criticized the community-favorite Breaker shotgun as actually not being all that great. “You would be surprised to know that the crusher does get more kills. However, it is not over-represented in missions that end in success.”
Kravchenko also commented on the contents of the patch on Discord earlier this week. “The first balance patch is mostly simple stat changes so as not to destabilize the codebase.” The numbers are being reshuffled, but it makes sense that Arrowhead wouldn't turn the knobs too quickly, especially given the server situation right now just got it under control.
