Helldivers 2 weekend patch made defence missions easier, but Suicide, Impossible and Helldive a lot harder

Helldivers 2 just can’t stop growing, and developer Arrowhead Game Studios continues to work diligently in the background to keep up. Part of that work goes to addressing the most common concerns, and it usually takes the form of patches.

The game received several of them already, with the most recent dropping on Saturday, just as Helldivers 2 doubled its all-time concurrent record on Steam - which lead to Arrowhead temporarily capping player totals.

Patch 01.000.009 is technically the game’s first balance patch, but it’s also full of fixes to a few of the stability and connection problems that have cropped up since launch. The balance tweaks mainly concern mission difficulty, which includes defence missions.

This is, in part, a response to player complaints about the difficulty of defence missions, which popped up when Automatons became the new major threat following the weekly reset. Players expressed frustration that the difficulty spike between standard missions and defence missions is even more pronounced when playing against the Automaton faction, which is typically faster and more aggressive compared to the bugs.

Though the defence event has been made a little easier, Suicide, Impossible and Helldive difficulties are now harder, as Arrowhead noted they were “too easy.” Eradicate mission difficulty has also been upped, though that came with a time extension to 15 minutes.

The patch includes yet more backend fixes to improve lobby sorting, and increase the likelihood of players connecting to lobbies through matchmaking. On the bug fixes front, 01.000.009 resolved a number of crashes that could occur during extraction (rough!), when joining a mission, when identical particle effects play at the same time, when accepting invites - and the strangest one, when firing the SMG-37 Defender in ADS mode.

Read on below for the full change log, and be sure to hit up our incredibly useful and insightful Helldivers 2 tips. We guarantee you didn’t know about a lot of them.

Stability/Crashes

• Fixed a crash during extraction cutscene relating to text to speech.
• Fixed a crash happening during extraction in search and destroy missions after consecutive multiplayer missions.
• Fixed a crash when getting disconnected during the joining cutscene.
• Fixed a crash while shooting from the 'SMG-37 Defender' in ADS mode.
• Fixed a crash that rarely occurs relating to surface data for footstep effects.
• Fixed a rare crash relating to identical particle effects playing.
• Fixed a crash that could occur in relation to accepting an invite.

Matchmaking

• Fixed an issue that caused us to send invalid data to multiplayer services.
• Improved lobby sorting to increase chance of connectivity.

Balance and Other Fixes

• Defend event difficulty has been reduced.
• Fix for Suicide, Impossible and Helldive missions being too easy.
• Eradicate mission difficulty Increased.
• Eradicate mission timer has been increased to 15 minutes.
• Updated Mission End screen to display Experience and Requisition multiplier.
• Issue where multiple of the same stratagems could be brought to a mission has been resolved.