Helldivers 2's huge latest patch tweaks 24 weapons and stratagems - and lets you spread democracy at higher difficulties

It's been a bit of a longer wait between Helldivers 2 patches than we've previously been used to lately, with the last one have dropped back on April 16 to fix some misbhaving passives. That's just changed though, with a big new update dropping - and casually making balancing changes to 24 different weapons and stratagems.

Yup, while folks are just finishing up battling to secure themselves a new rocket launcher in the game's latest Major Order, a lot of the other stuff in their arsenals has just been re-jigged. The good news for those who're worried about the community's capacity to keep on recording impressive victories is that a fair amount of this update's gun tweaks do look to be on the buff side of the coin.

If you take a gander at the notes for Patch 01.000.300, you'll be greeted by a huge list of changes to primary, secondary & support weapons. Some of these, such as the Exploding Crossbow and BR-14 Adjudicator, have undergone pretty substantial reworks, while others have only been tweaked in a couple of ways.

Outside of changes to the amounts of mags you can carry for specific guns, a lot of the changes made seem designed to make the certain weapons more effective, either by directly buffing damage, or boosting properties like fire rate and armour penetration. On the nerf side of things, the likes of the Quasar Cannon - which has had its recharge time increased by five seconds - and the Dominator (damage decreased from 300 to 275) have been hit.

Beyond this, the patch includes a number of balancing changes to some stratagems, certain types of enemies and enemy patrol spawning for parties of less than four players, as well as reducing burning damage by 15% and ensuring that "armours with [an] armour rating above 100 now also reduce damage on headshots". Those who're really into demcratic roleplaying have gotten a number of treats too, with the main one being that "the Spread Democracy mission, otherwise known as 'raise the flag', can now be enjoyed on higher difficulties".

Finally, I have to note some slightly amusing changes arriving alongside highly requested features like the ability to disable auto-vaulting. For instance, "when readying up, Helldivers now salute to ensure maximum democratic readiness" and "victory poses will now only play for the extracted".

Yup, we really needed those. There's more in the huge patch besides all of that, so be sure to comb through the full notes yourself if you fancy it.