Helldivers 2 players hate the new ricochet, but the problem isn’t what it first seems

Helldivers 2‘s April 29 update may have nerfed some things, but it also made DMRs relevant, massively improved the hand cannon’s usability, and delivered a slew of other goodies. It didn’t take long, however, for players to figure out that the “fix” for the game’s ricochets is a tad problematic.

As the excitement over all the balancing changes died down, players realized that ricochets may have become exceedingly dangerous with the new update. On the biggest Helldivers 2 subreddit, there’s a multitude of highly upvoted threads discussing the issues with the new ricochet system and even posting footage of explosive rounds reflecting directly off of enemy armor and back into the person firing them.

As per Arrowhead’s own description of the ricochet rework, here’s what was done to the feature with update 01.000.300: “Shots that ricochet from heavy armored enemies will now properly hit the Helldiver who fired them. Trigger discipline is highly recommended,” said the patch notes.

Helldivers 2’s new ricochet system is just the old one, but fixed

Given how the patch notes are worded, and the videos posted by the players experiencing issues, it’s easy to conclude that the current intention is for reflected rounds to basically ricochet back directly into the Helldiver firing them, and that was the community’s working theory for a little while. This, however, was explained by Redditor zenbast not too long after the misinformation first began to spread:

Basically, the issue is trifold:

• Arrowhead’s patch notes weren’t explicit enough in what, exactly, was being done to the ricochet system
• Some people experiencing “ricochet” deaths were actually being gunned down or blown to bits by other weapons firing nearby or at them
• Others were using the Eruptor rifle and getting killed by their own shrapnel

This combined into a perfect storm of people misunderstanding the developers’ intentions and conflating the fixed ricochets with sudden deaths from a variety of other sources. Up to the April 29 update, the players’ own ricochets could never kill them, and would instead just pass through them. That specific behavior – which is an obvious bug – is what was fixed in the new update, and the patch notes’ wording didn’t adequately clarify what was happening in the backend.

In summary, then, there’s no real need to worry about ricocheted rounds if you didn’t worry about them up until now. Similarly, there is a real need to worry about using high-explosive weaponry in close-quarters combat, as this should be obviously avoided at all costs. Doubly so if you’re happy using the admittedly phenomenal Eruptor rifle, which not only explodes but also showers the nearby area in hot shrapnel.