Helldivers 2 update 1.000.400 patch notes: Major balance changes, invite-only lobbies, and more

The highly anticipated major update 1.000.400 for Helldivers 2 is here, bringing a metric ton of balance changes to the third-person co-op shooter.

An upgrade to the galactic map has been made as well: It now depicts additional information like the attack vectors of invading forces, enabling the community to stop an offensive by mounting a direct counterattack against the source planet. Supply Lines, which have been part of the game from the start, but hadn’t been shown on the map to avoid clutter, are also being displayed now.

Helldivers can also choose their comrades for the next jump onto the battlefield by using the new invite-only lobbies introduced with this update.

You can find the full Helldivers 2 update 1.000.400 patch notes including explanations for the changes by Arrowhead CCO Johan Pilestedt below.

Goal with stratagem balance changes this patch:

“With these balance changes we wanted to buff up some of the weaker stratagems to make them more viable and add more possibility for variety in the loadouts. 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. We also want to be better at explaining what our goals are with the changes, please see the linked blog post for more information.”

A/MLS-4X Rocket Sentry:

“The old intent was to saturate an area with rockets, but it made it too inconsistent against medium and larger enemies. We want to make it more consistent against medium and larger enemies and give it a better ammo economy to separate it from the autocannon sentry that has a higher damage output, but can waste ammo by shooting targets that are already dead.”

A/MG-43 Machine gun sentry:

“The Machine Gun Sentry felt like a worse version of the Gatling sentry and we wanted it to have a different place in the tool box. We lowered the cooldown to make it more available and more useful when changing position often.”

A/MG-43 Machine gun Sentry, A/G-16 Gatling Sentry, A/MLS-4X Rocket Sentry, A/AC-8 Autocannon Sentry, A/M-12 Mortar Sentry, A/M-23 EMS Mortar Sentry:

“The sentry turrets in the game were a little too easily killed by the bullets flying in a chaotic situation. We have increased the durability* factor of the turrets to make them more resistant to small arms fire.”

E/MG-101 HMG Emplacement:

“The HMG Emplacement is intended to be a way of defending a fixed position but due to its immobility and the drawback that presents, the slow rotation speed was a bit too much of an additional drawback. Therefore we have increased the rotation speed significantly.”

MD-6 Anti-Personnel Minefield:

MD-I4 Incendiary Mines:

“The minefields are supposed to be a strong but volatile way of blocking off certain approaches for a limited time. They are currently not very good at filling this role and we will be looking more at them in the future. For now we are increasing their damage to at least improve their effectiveness against targets that trigger them.”

Orbital Gatling:

“The Orbital Gatling Barrage was not effective at dealing with any specific targets. We want it to be better at saturating the target area and also be able to do damage against heavy armored units. It is still not very likely to outright kill heavily armored targets but should be able to soften them up a bit. We also lowered the cooldown to make it more available and to make it more competitive in comparison to Eagle stratagems.”

Orbital Precision Strike:

“The Orbital Precision Strike’s original intent was to be used against spawners and fixed positions. However this hasn’t stopped the community from using it against pretty much everything. Therefore we want to make it a little easier to use against moving targets by lowering the call in time. We also lowered the cooldown to make it more available and to make it more competitive in comparison to Eagle stratagems.”

Orbital Airburst Strike:

“The Orbital Airburst Strike’s original intent was to block an area for a short duration and kill most non-heavy armored enemies in the area. It was underperforming compared to other anti-chaff options and had a very low rate of use. To make it a more attractive option we lowered the cooldown which should also make it more competitive in comparison to Eagle stratagems.”

Eagle 110MM Rocket Pods:

While these changes may look like a straight up nerf, that is not the intention. Please see the blogpost for more information.

“The Eagle Rocket Pods were very inconsistent in dealing with its main targets, heavily armored enemies. The changes we are making aim to make it more consistent at dealing with these targets, but it will still not be a surefire way of outright killing them. It should however always soften up a target in some way. We are interested in hearing feedback on how this feels now and are open to tweaking them further.”

Eagle Strafing Run:

“The Eagle Strafing Run is supposed to be a tool to effectively deal with small groups of medium armored enemies. To that end we have increased its armor penetration to be able to reliably penetrate medium armored targets and soften up heavily armored enemies. We expect to have to tweak this further in the future. As with the Eagle Rocket Pods, we are very interested in your feedback.”

GL-21 Grenade Launcher:

“The Grenade Launcher is intended to be good at softening up hordes of enemies and provide utility for destroying spawners. While it is still good at destroying spawners the explosion was a little too weak to reliably damage medium enemies. The change in its explosion damage should put it in a better place when it comes to dealing with hordes, and more effective against some medium armored enemies.”

MG-206 Heavy Machine Gun:

“The HMG failed to deliver on the fantasy of a Heavy Machine Gun when it was released. It had a weak round with low damage and impact, while the fire rate was up in levels more likely seen on smaller MGs. The HMGs intent is to be a great option at dealing with medium armored enemies and should chew them up easily, similar to the HMG emplacement. We are lowering the rate of fire further to resemble the fire rate seen in contemporary weapons of similar type, and increasing the damage and stagger so that each hit is significant. This should also make the available ammo last longer.”

MG-43 Machine Gun:

“The intent of the Machine Gun was that it should be a great crowd clear weapon with the ability to tackle medium armored enemies. The drawbacks of the machine gun are that you have to sit still while reloading and this made it hard to compete with the Stalwarts mobility. Therefore we want to lean into its strengths and reduce its drawbacks slightly to improve the value proposition of the weapon. To that end we are lowering the reload time, and giving it an additional magazine. It is also receiving a buff to damage described below.”

MG-43 Machine Gun, A/MG-43 Machine gun Sentry, A/G-16 Gatling Sentry and EXO-45 Patriot Exosuits Gatling:

“The family of machine gun stratagems that used the 8mm rifle round were underperforming slightly and we have therefore increased the damage slightly.”

AR-23 Liberator, M-105 Stalwart and AX/AR-23 “Guard Dog”:

AR-23C Liberator Concussive:

BR-14 Adjudicator:

“The Adjudicator, with relatively few rounds in each magazine combined with a wild recoil, left players no room for error, which didn’t feel good for an assault rifle type weapon. The increased magazine capacity should make the weapon more forgiving of mistakes and encourage a more aggressive playstyle. Remember, short controlled bursts!”

AR-61 Tenderizer:

“The Tenderizer was released in a non-representative state as it used the incorrect stats, didn't have its own niche and felt like a worse Liberator. We're restoring justice and bringing it back to its intended design, which is a very precise assault rifle that rewards high accuracy play by having a heavy hitting round that doesn’t penetrate medium armor. “

PLAS-101 Purifier:

“The original idea behind the Purifier was to create a Scorcher variant with a charge up mechanic. Unfortunately, since the projectile didn't have enough armor penetration against medium-armored enemies, even a direct hit didn't deal enough damage to justify its long charge-up time. By increasing the armor penetration of the projectile and reducing the damage falloff of the explosion we hope to make it an exotic option that is viable in capable hands.”

CB-9 Explosive Crossbow:

“Similarly to the Purifier, the crossbow's bolt didn't always deal its full damage due to the explosion having lower armor penetration than the projectile. Making both the projectile and the explosion penetrate medium armor should make the crossbow more consistent against medium-sized targets and increase its AoE viability.”

R-36 Eruptor:

“In one of the previous patches we removed the shrapnel from the explosion as it made Eruptor's ability to spike damage too much for a primary weapon (and for a support weapon even, its theoretical max was over 9000!) and introduced some unexpected interactions. We acknowledge that the Eruptor lost a good portion of its capabilities and the additional damage boost didn't make up for the loss of shrapnel. Adding back shrapnel is quite tricky because of the low visibility of shrapnel, which sometimes created situations where you or your fellow helldivers died with very little feedback of what killed you. To compensate for that, we're giving the Eruptor 150 more damage per explosion to make it more consistent without introducing new edge-cases. The intent is that this change will make the Eruptor viable both against medium armored targets and groups of cannon fodder enemies.”

R-63 Diligence:

“Small arms fire in the game does less damage to durable* body parts, however many small arms were doing the same damage (percentage wise) not representing the larger impact a rifle type round would have compared to other types. Therefore, rifle type bullets are now slightly more effective against durable* body parts. In general, the higher your caliber of weapon the better the effect is against durable body parts. Explosions also have very high effectiveness against durable body parts as shockwaves ripple through whatever you are hitting. Some weapons are more effective than others or have special exceptions, though this should follow the same logic as above.”

* Some enemies have durable body parts that receive only a portion of base damage from projectiles

Other:

“The intention of our recoil modifiers is to reward usage of different stances in relation to different weapon types. They are also there to highlight that constantly moving around isn't doing your accuracy any favors. We made some changes to the recoil stance modifiers to make them more consistent and also reward being prone more.”

Removed operation modifier AA-Defenses: Reducing the stratagem slots by 1:

Disabled the Retrieve Essential Personnel defend event mission for the time being:

Super Samples:

Social:

Armors:

Spike Plant:

Fire Tornados:

*Fire tornados being more random should result in more variance in situations players find themselves in. Tornados are significantly less likely to pile up and overlap on extraction points or objectives, and will generally be a bit easier to deal with.

Tremors:

*These changes should result in more situations where enemies away from the player get stunned, as well as reducing how consistently the player has a tremor occur next to them.

Ion Storms:

Visibility:

A lot of planets have had their fog amounts tweaked to be a bit less harsh and dense, to provide less fatigue from constantly fighting on planets with bad visibility. We still intend there to be foggy planets with worse visibility, but the balance was a bit off.

Unexploded Hellbomb:

Vegetation:

Acid Effect:

Armored enemy balance:

Patrols:

Stunning:

Bile Spewer and Nursing Spewer:

Bile Titan:

Charger Behemoth:

Chargers:

Hulk Scorcher:

Automaton Tanks:

Introducing Supply Lines & Origin of Attacks:

Supply lines were previously not shown on the Galactic War map to reduce clutter and improve readability. However based on the feedback from our community we have made an implementation showing them on the map. This solution tries to maintain the general readability while still exposing the system to players in game.

You will now also be able to see which planet an attack is originating from, potentially allowing for the community to stop the attack at its source. We have also updated visuals in the sector and planet info pop-ups.

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.

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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