Most modern online games are released far from perfect, not just when it comes to bugs and glitches but also when it comes to balancing, especially when it comes to titles such as Helldivers 2. In its most recent wave of patches, that being patch 01.000.300, there have been several changes to many of the game’s weapons, which has led to several heated discussions within the Helldivers 2 community.
One of the more notable changes is the change made to the community favorite, Quasar Cannon, which many players have said Arrowhead Studios “nerfed”. Much of player’s concerns were addressed on the official Helldivers 2 Discord and Subreddit, which has proved that not only has Quasar Cannon not been nerfed instead the patch actually buffed several of the game’s weapons including The Adjudicator, Punisher Plasma, Counter Sniper, as well as the Guard Dog and the Railgun. These are just some of the guns that received a boost – but the patch covers plenty more.
https://twitter.com/helldivers2/status/1784872521772175413
However, gun nerfs are not the only topic that has caused discussion within the Helldivers 2 community. Along with the buffs and boosts to several weapons, Arrowhead also revealed that when there are less than four players, there will be an increase in patrol spawning. However, there will be no changes to four-player missions. This new decision means that if players are playing in teams of three or less, they will have a much more difficult experience, with solo players experiencing the most challenge.
This decision has notably caused a stir for players, but Arrowhead Studios released a statement from the game’s design director saying “we unintendedly had non-linear scaling of the patrol spawns so they didn’t spawn as often as they should have when less than four players,” Broström said – “the intention is that one player has 1/4th of the patrols compared to four players, but it used to be that they had 1/6th.” He continued with the following statement:
“Scaling of patrol spawns was exponential before, and that felt good on four player lobbies but a bit too empty when playing with fewer players, especially when playing solo. So now we made the scaling of patrols to be linear, which means if you play solo you will get 25% of the patrols compared to a four-player lobby instead of having about 17% of the patrols. There is still a cap of patrols that can spawn at the same time so during situations when we spawn a lot of patrols, such as extractions, even solo players won’t notice the difference. The change is made to make the world feel less empty for one and two-player lobbies, especially on high difficulty missions which was also slightly too easy for solo players compared to our intentions.”
With the changes made in the patch now clarified, players can rest assured that shift in difficulty wasn’t that their favorite weapon’s got nerfed but instead the game got a significant change in difficulty scaling. Understandably these changes will take awhile to get used to and there’s now telling if these changes will remain or will Arrowhead Studios have to go back to the drawing board (and actually nerf the Quasar Cannon).
