Helldivers 2 Freedom's Flame Warbond
Screenshot by Destructoid

Best weapons and items to get first in the Helldivers 2 Freedom’s Flame Warbond

It's cookout season.

The Freedom’s Flame Warbond is out now in Helldivers 2, but what are the best things to get? Is this worth it? We’ll go over the highlights of this Warbond to determine if it’s worth the Super Credits or not.

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Best weapons and items to get in the Helldivers 2 Freedom’s Flame Warbond

If you do decide to drop 1,000 Super Credits on the Freedom’s Flame Warbond, the only things really worth getting your hands on are the SG-451 Cookout shotgun and the body armor sets.

Helldivers 2 SG-451 Cookout
Screenshot by Destructoid

SG-451 Cookout

To start off, the star of the show is the SG-451. It’s the new incendiary shotgun that surprisingly packs a punch and has good staggering potential. It functions just like the SG-8S Slugger and the SG-8 Punisher in that it has a round-based reload. Each bullet has to be reloaded one by one.

The incendiary bullets will also deal a good amount of DoT (Damage over Time) to affected enemies, resulting in more damage than what’s displayed in the stats. It’s good for what it is, but the main draw to it is that it has more utility.

Since it’s a round-based reload gun, you can stop reloading after putting in a shell or two to keep firing. There’s also a trick you can do after reloading each shell where you fire right after, so there’s little downtime between shots. This also avoids waiting for an entire clip to return to full.

This may not be on par with the stopping power that the Incendiary Breaker does, but what the Cookout can do is stagger medium-sized enemies like Stalkers and Brood Commanders. Other than that, the only other stars of the Warbond are the new armor sets.

Helldivers 2 Freedom's Flame new armor
Screenshot by Destructoid

I-09 Heatseeker and I-102 Draconaught

The new armor sets included in this Warbond reduce fire damage taken by 75%, mostly to mitigate your own self-damage from an incendiary grenade or an accidental flamethrower shot to the feet. 

They’re fine for what they do, but they aren’t as effective as the armor sets in the Cutting Edge Warbond are. Those mitigate 95% arc damage. Though fire damage is a lot more common from the weapons we have so far in the game, Hulk flamethrowers, or planetary effects like fire tornadoes, the 75% is still worth it for very specific scenarios.

Is the Freedom’s Flame Warbond worth it?

Unless you have all other Warbonds purchased, you’re just sitting on over 1,000 Super Credits, or want new cosmetics, the Freedom’s Flame Warbond isn’t really worth it. 

With the recent nerfs to incendiary weapons, it’s hard to recommend something that will only be really useful on the first page. Everything else doesn’t get the job done after difficulty 7.

The new Booster is too niche to really get anything done and the majority of the weapons are already nerfed because of the Escalation of Freedom patch. Just hang on until there’s enough community backlash for Arrowhead to hopefully revert these nerfs or find a good middle ground in terms of balance.


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Author
Image of Elliott Gatica
Elliott Gatica
Contributing Writer - Elliott has been writing about video games since he was in high school. Carrying that momentum forward, he has now appeared in outlets such as App Trigger, Attack of the Fanboy, and now Destructoid. He focuses heavily on Warframe, but he is also an avid fan of fighting games and shooters. When he isn't here, he's probably getting salty in Mortal Kombat 1 or climbing the competitive ranks with his friends on Overwatch 2.
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