Major Helldivers 2 patch increases "intensity" of the highest difficulties, buffs all melee weapons, makes enemies better at aiming, and so much more

A major new patch for Helldivers 2 is live now, bringing a whole bunch of balance changes, a new tank vehicle, tweaks to enemies, increased challenge on its highest difficulties, and more. Oh, and also the bots have officially stolen Super Earth's planet-destroying space laser schematics, so, uh, that's concerning.

Outlined in the latest patch notes, Helldivers 2's new update is adding the Bastion Tank to "roll over entrenched enemies" – it'll be available in-game later today alongside the new Siegebreakers Warbond.

For any veteran players who've been craving more of a challenge, this patch has a change for you. "Made changes across all factions to increase the intensity on high difficulties, the biggest change should be noticed on the Automaton front while Terminids and the Illuminate are less affected," the notes read. Specifically, this should affect difficulties nine and 10.

Balance changes are the real headliner of the patch, though, with loads of tweaks to both weapons and enemies. For a start, all melee weapons have been given a blanket buff, with base melee attacks being given a 50% increase in damage. While Arrowhead has "decreased the modifiers on the armor passives that increase melee damage," the "total damage with the melee armor passive will be higher or the same as before" – the idea is to "make the Armor passive that increases melee damage less mandatory but still be useful to make melee weapons more effective."

Elsewhere, the sway modifier for SMG and Pistol weapons has been reduced – changed "to be the same as most other weapons – as Arrowhead explains: "The intent is that the increased drag of SMG and Pistol which make it a close combat weapon and less effective at range is the main characteristic of these weapons."

As for enemy changes, some have been adjusted to increase their effectiveness against certain Helldiver vehicles with large amounts of health. "Things like attacks from Bile Titans, Chargers, Crescent Overseers, Overseers, Rocket firing Automatons, Hulk melee attacks, mortars, acid etc have gotten values adjusted. Some of the adjustments only affect certain targets (ie the Bastion). Other adjustments also affect the FRV and Exosuits," the patch notes explain.

Along with those changes, enemies have also gotten better at actually aiming their attacks. Arrowhead notes that the "calculations were not always updated when there were many enemies trying to aim, making Automatons on higher difficulties a bit bad at aiming. They should now attempt to update the aim better considering the data they have before they get another proper aim update. This means that Automatons will aim better even when there are a lot of them without any further cost to performance."

Plenty of bugs have also been fixed, and Arrowhead has added a new "hang detection" feature to stop players from getting stuck in a freeze. Essentially, if your game freezes for more than 20 seconds, Helldivers 2 will now purposely crash itself, which will also help prevent issues going forward, as it creates "a file called a 'crash dump' which contains important debugging information for our programmers to diagnose and fix the root cause of the hang." Players who experience a freeze are advised to wait "at least 40 seconds before restarting your PC to allow the hang detector to do its job."

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