As another Malevelon Creek campaign begins, Helldivers 2's latest patch makes some big balancing tweaks, adds in blizzards and sandstorms

Life truly never stands still in Helldivers 2. Following some frantic Easter major order executions, the community is now facing the latest in a seemingly unending string of battles for Malevelon Creek, though a fresh patch should add some fresh surprises into the Galactic War mix.

Following the addition of some new guns to the game’s arsenal late last week, not long after Arrowhead barred players from getting into snowball fights (that’s still ongoing for now, as you’ll find out if you read on), there’ve been a couple of new major orders folks have been digging into. Given how hard they’re going, odds are this patch’s bug fixes and additions will largely be good news to the soldiers of Super Earth.

If you check out the notes for patch 01.000.200, one set of new additions will likely jump off the page straight away. Yup, there are two new planetary hazards to add to your list of scary things to avoid - blizzards and sandstorms. Cue endless jokes about Darude and Diablo 4, probably.

Aside from that, there’ve been a bunch of balancing tweaks made to missions, with those that involve retrieving essential personnel and destroying command bunkers being the targets. The former have had their enemy spawn points moved “further away from the objective to give players a fairer chance of defending the location”, while the latter has had “more objective locations” added to it in order to make it a bit tougher.

Meanwhile a huge range of weapons - from Arc Throwers to Sluggers - have been buffed or nerfed, with those changes coming alongside some similar balancing tweaks to the damage inflicted by enemies like Chargers and Shriekers in certain scenarios. Hopefully, this revamp of the status quo, which also comes with a change that makes the patriot exosuit’s rockets only penetrate armour when you score a direct hit and a buff to heavier Helldiver armours, won’t prove as controversial as previous ones have.

While there are also plenty of the usual bug fixes, the issue of crashes occurring when snowballs are thrown is sadly still a thing for now, though Arrowhead does re-affirm that it’s still working on this in the patch notes.

So, bear that in mind if you’re planning to join the just over 30,000 players currently fighting to retake Malevelon Creek for the second time in about two days, because this war definitely isn’t getting a bit confusing at times.