Helldivers 2 update introduces meteor showers and fire tornadoes

A new patch for Helldivers 2 has been released on all platforms, and although it's classified as a "minor update," it introduces a new element that will affect your operations in a big way: planetary hazards.

As described on the official patch notes, planets will now have environmental challenges that will appear at random. These challenges are essentially natural disasters such as fire tornadoes and meteor showers. The post only specifies those two examples, but the game will feature more than that.

With this added difficulty, players must be more cautious when deploying on a planet to complete their mission.

This is certainly a surprise addition to the game, as previous leaks didn't mention any of it. Most of the community is patiently waiting for the arrival of mechs, which were leaked and then confirmed by an official post.

On top of that, the update brings a few balancing adjustments, nerfing some fan-favorite weapons like the Railgun. Here's the rest of the patch notes:

Balancing

Eradicate Missions

• Eradicate missions now require more kills and enemies spawn more often. The time to complete the mission was previously shorter than intended and should now usually take twice as long to complete.

Primary, Secondary, & Support Weapons

• Breaker: Decreased magazine capacity from 16 to 13, increased recoil from 30 to 55
• Railgun - Decreased armor penetration in Safe Mode, decreased damage against durable enemy parts
• Flamethrower: Increased damage per second by 50%
• Laser Cannon: Increased damage against durable enemy parts, increased armor penetration, improved ergonomics
• Punisher: Increased total ammo capacity from 40 to 60, increased stagger force, increased damage from 40 per bullet to 45 per bullet
• Breaker Spray & Pray: Increased armor penetration, increased fire rate from 300 to 330, increased number of pellets from 12 to 16 per shot, decreased magazine size from to 32 to 26

Stratagems

• Energy Shield Backpack: Increased delay before recharging
• 380mm and 120mm Orbital Barrages: Increased duration of the bombardment, decreased spread

Fixes

• Fixed armor rating values not reducing damage as intended.
• Fixed certain Bug Holes (including Stalker Nests) that were unnecessarily hard to destroy.
• Fixed anti-aliasing toggle not working on PS5.
• Balanced lighting across all planets to solve cases where the game was too dark.
• Improved flashlight efficacy.
• Increased visibility during “sand rain” weather on Erata Prime.
• Updated tutorial materials and lighting.
• Improved cases where some materials could look blurry if "Lighting" graphic setting was set to "Low".
• Fixed timing issues that could occur in the “Extract E-710” primary objective.
• Changed button interaction behavior for buttons in bunker POIs. Helldivers will now let go of the button after holding it for a few seconds.
• Fixed some cases of large assets floating if the ground beneath them was blown up.
• Helldivers standing next to ICBMs during launch will get properly toasty with a chance of not-so-spontaneous combustion.
• Fixed unthrowable snowballs after ragdolling.
• Fixed being able to use grenades after drowning.
• Camera no longer locked on the player's own corpse and blocking spectator mode.
• Helldivers now take damage from fire, gas etc. generated by other players.
• Armor no longer stretches when dismembered.

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 may crash after dropping several high power stratagems in succession.
• Picking up items from caches may cause characters to freeze in place for an extended period of time.
• Picking up items from bunkers and caches in quick succession may render one of the items unpickable.
• Players cannot unfriend other players befriended via friend code.
• Players may be unable to select loadout or return to ship when joining a multiplayer game session via PS5 Activity Card.
• Mission objective HUD displays different numbers for client and host during some missions.
• Default armor is always shown while viewing the warbond, regardless of the armor that player has equipped.
• Text chat box display is obstructed by the cinematic letterboxing during extraction.
• Some text in the HUD/UI is missing or not displaying correctly.
• Players may experience issues when many players attempt to login and/or play at the same time:
• Login rate limiting
• Players may become disconnected during play
• Various UI issues may appear when the game interacts with servers
• Some games may not be joinable by others for a short period of time

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