Helldivers 2 Chemical Agents Warbond brings positive toxicity next week

Developer Arrowhead Game Studios has announced a new Warbond for Helldivers 2 that launches on September 19, 2024. This one is called Chemical Agents, and it brings something to the game that it’s been missing since it was first released: chemical warfare.

Helldivers 2‘s Chemical Agents Warbond introduces more cosmetics for your Hellpod, Guard Dog, and Exosuits. There are also two new Stratagems, both of which spray chemicals at enemies to kill them with damage over time, resulting in the worst kind of deaths imaginable. What might be my favorite thing from this Warbond is the new armor sets, both of which look like the kinds of hazmat suits you’d see in a horror sci-fi movie.

Toxic Helldivers

The items that I suspect most players will be excited about are the new Stratagems in the Chemical Agents Warbond. The first is the TX-41 Sterilizer, a chemical gas sprayer that’ll deal damage over time. The AX/TX-13 “Guard Dog” Dog Breath does the same thing automatically while following you around and watching you mow down enemies with your primary and secondary weapons.

The G-4 Gas Grenade creates a gas cloud that does the same type of damage, though I’d expect the initial explosion to deal some additional damage too. As I mentioned, it’s the two new armor sets that I think are the stars of this Warbond.

Each one comes with the Advanced Filtration passive. This blocks most of the incoming damage from the toxic gas clouds you’ll be creating with all the new Stratagems, including the Orbital Gas Strike Stratagem, which sounds like a sci-fi dirty bomb.

In addition to some vibrant new cosmetics, there’s also the P-11 Stim Pistol, which will help you provide a small healing buff to other Helldivers. It won’t save you from a horde of Automatons, but it’ll stop someone dying from a sudden rocket attack.

As with every new Warbond, Chemical Agents has a new Title to earn. This time around, it’s Expert Exterminator, which feels like the perfect Title to be rocking when you drop onto a bug world to wipe out a few billion Terminids for oil to power Super Earth’s Superdestroyers.

This Warbond comes at an interesting time for Helldivers 2 because fans eagerly await the 60-day update that should buff every weapon that’s been steadily nerfed over the last couple of months. However, the update could be a double-edged sword with nerfs that ruin some other element we’re not yet aware of.

Arrowhead Game Studios has a lot of work to do to regain the player base’s trust. Warbonds are great because they give us more fun tools to play around with, but we need the fundamentals of Helldivers 2 to feel good again if the game is going to pull back the members of its community that it’s lost.