Please, please don’t use the Punisher Plasma with your shield in Helldivers 2 right now

Following yesterday’s Helldivers 2 update, players have discovered a rather annoying new feature that causes you to die to your own shots if you use the Punisher Plasma while your shield backpack is active.

Helldivers 2 Update 01.000.300 brought with it a slew of weapon and balance changes, including one to ricochet that’s killed more than a few Helldivers in the last 24 hours. However, one change that’s not mentioned—which leads me to believe it could be unintentional—is to the Punisher Plasma, which will now rebound off of the inside of a shield backpack’s shield when it’s active, causing what you might expect as a result: hot death.

PSA: Put your shield backpacks down if you’re using the Punisher Plasma in Helldivers 2

It’s hard to say exactly which change to the Punisher Plasma might have caused this alteration in its behavior. Players on the Helldivers 2 subreddit suspect, as I do, that the implementation of ricochet has something to do with it. Below are the listed changes from yesterday’s patch notes specifically for the weapon.

• SG-8P Punisher Plasma
  • Decreased maximum mags from 12 to 8
  • Increased amount of magazines received from resupply from 6 to 8
  • Increased projectile speed, but will still keep a similar range
  • Decreased damage falloff on the explosion
  • Now placed in the energy weapons category

As you can see, it’s all pretty standard stuff except for the last point. When the Cutting Edge Warbond was initially released, the weapon was a shotgun. All shotguns now have a chance for their slugs to ricochet off of Automaton armor and other surfaces, harming any nearby Helldivers. However, the Punisher Plasma is now an energy weapon, which could be why its blasts ricochet off of shields.

Another theory is that the blast is detonating based on proximity to the shield itself. This is what the rounds from the Airburst Rocket Launcher were doing prior to the update, so it’s a decent guess. At the time of writing, though, this weapon will still kill the Helldiver using it if they have an active shield backpack on.

Given how many players are dying to their own ricocheting bullets, and the fact that developer Arrowhead Game Studios would have tested that before pushing the update live, this Punisher Plasma behavior could be completely intentional. The combination of a mobile shield with a laser weapon is pretty powerful, after all. Even if it isn’t, this feature is going to force players to switch up their Stratagems so they can fire away at enemies without risk of face-melting.