Helldivers 2: Escalation of Freedom angers players with new nerfs, and more are on the way

Helldivers 2 is in for it again, it seems. The game’s new Escalation of Freedom update has only just come out, and the players have already figured out that it’s loaded with a few non-insignificant nerfs to flame-based weapons, such as the incendiary Breaker shotgun and the flamethrower, among others.

More specifically, the community feels that the Escalation of Freedom update has essentially reneged the developer Arrowhead Games’ prior promise to more mindfully balance weapons. The flamethrower, for one, can no longer effectively take down armored enemies (like the infamously annoying Charger), and the incendiary Breaker has lost two full magazines’ worth of spare ammo in an attempt to make it a less popular choice on Terminid missions.

The Helldivers 2 community is not happy with the current direction of the game

The fact that the Helldivers 2 community feels unheard yet again is particularly problematic for two reasons. Firstly, this isn’t Arrowhead Games’ first problematic balancing rodeo, and the company specifically promised to be more measured in how it approaches balancing in the future. Secondly, the Freedom’s Flame Warbond is due to launch very, very soon, and two of its weapons – primary and secondary flamethrower armaments – have essentially been pre-nerfed just to be safe.

The biggest Helldivers 2 subreddit isn’t in full meltdown mode over these changes just yet, but it’s not too far from it either, as threads bemoaning the new batch of nerfs keep popping up left and right, overtaking any other discussion that might be happening in the wake of the new content update. To their credit, Arrowhead devs have been trying to explain why some of the most popular weapons have been nerfed as much as they have without ample buffs showing up elsewhere, but it may ring hollow in the wider context of the game’s meta.

According to one of the developers working at Arrowhead, the specific reasoning for the incendiary Breaker shotgun’s nerf was that it was extremely popular in Terminid missions. This rhymes with Arrowhead’s reasoning for nerfing the Railgun from months ago, and suggests that the most popular outliers will always, inevitably, get brought down a couple of pegs to weaken them.

In the interim, Arrowhead also attempted to further explain the reasoning behind the nerfs in a dedicated Steam blog post, as shown below. Whether that’s a valid enough explanation or not is up to everyone to decide for themselves, but the really notable bit is that the quad-barreled Commando rocket launcher is clearly the next weapon on the nerf docket: “The ability of Commando’s missiles to destroy Automaton fabricator buildings from any angle was unintended behavior,” it says. “We do plan on fixing this but have decided to take some time to think this through and not make any rash decisions on how best to rebalance this weapon.”

For what it’s worth, I – being a die-hard solo Helldiver – feel like the game is in a reasonably good state at lower difficulties when playing alone. Then again, I’m obviously not interacting with the game’s brand-spanking-new Super Helldive (T10) difficulty, and the horrific Impaler Terminids. Considering the uproar that’s on show on the game’s biggest subreddit right now, though, many players do not share my newfound interest in the game, and this is something Arrowhead Games is going to have to contend with as time goes on. Whether the former CEO’s promises have been broken or not might even be irrelevant, as the community feels like they’ve been broken, and I don’t need to explain why this is a bad look.