Helldivers 2 Update 01.000.200 Patch Notes and Details – huge level cap increase, Helldivers get tougher

Much like butter, democracy is not going to spread itself. If you have been diving into Helldivers 2 and want to keep up to date with recent patch notes, then we’re dropping the details in from orbit right now.

Helldivers 2 Update 01.000.200 Patch Notes

A new update, around the 1.5G mark on PC (sorry PlayStation folks, I’m not sure how big it is for you), has brought some changes to Helldivers 2. This comes after one hell of a weekend, during which we spent a lot of time going toe to toe with the bots and finally, after weeks of brutal fighting, took Malevelon Creek. Now that this harrowing section of the war is over, it is time to roll on to our next challenge, which will be how to stop seeing glowing red eyes every time I try to sleep.

The good news is that this update solves a couple of problems that Bugdivers have been dealing with, mainly the incredibly damaging puke attacks from Bile Spewers and Nursing Spewers. These guys could take you out with ease, but the damage has been dialed back a little. This comes on top of improved medium and heavy armor performance, so we should be in a good position for our next push against those pesky Terminids.

Of major interest, the level cap has now been pushed from 50 to 150. I don’t know what new ranks come with that yet, as I am busy typing this article instead of getting stuck into the war with my battle brothers and sisters like I should be. This is a big one for folks who just like to watch the numbers go up. A couple of missions have seen some minor tweaks, such as the Retrieve Essential Personnel mission. It seems lots of folks may have been struggling to extract the citizens, although I suspect this may be down to enthusiastically embracing freedom via firepower, as firepower doesn’t always discriminate between friend and foe.

My favorite change is that any operation modifier that has a negative effect on stratagem cooldowns or call-in time has been halved. This is good news, as the Stratagems are a core part of the gameplay loop, and having to sit around and wait for them doesn’t always feel very good. Keep us well armed, well fed, and bristling with Stratagems, and Helldivers will keep fighting forever. You can find the complete patch notes below.

Update Overview

This update includes:
-Balance changes to missions, stratagems, weapons, enemies, and Helldivers.
-General fixes and stability improvements.
– Increased Level Cap

Gameplay

Planetary Hazard additions

• Blizzards
• Sandstorms

Increased level cap

• Level cap has been increased from 50 to 150

Balancing

Missions

Retrieve Essential Personnel

• Moved the enemy spawn points further away from the objective to give players a fairer chance of defending the location.
• There are fewer civilians required to complete the mission on higher difficulties.

Destroy Command Bunkers

• Now has more objective locations, the mission was too easy before compared to other missions.
• It can now appear in operations from difficulty 5.

Operation Modifiers

• Halved the negative effect of operation modifiers that increase stratagem cooldowns or call in times.

Primary, Secondary, & Support Weapons

• Arc Thrower: fixed charging inconsistencies; it will now always take 1s to charge a shot.
• Arc Thrower: reduced distance from 50m to 35m.
• Arc Thrower: increased stagger force.
• Guard Dog: now restores full ammo from supply boxes.
• Anti-Materiel Rifle: damage increased by 30%.
• Breaker Incendiary: damage per bullet increased from 15 per bullet to 20 per bullet.
• Fire damage per tick increased by 50% (from all sources).
• Liberator Penetrator: now has a full auto mode.
• Dominator: increased damage from 200 to 300.
• Dominator: increased stagger.
• Diligence Counter Sniper: increased armor penetration from light to medium.
• Slugger: reduced stagger.
• Slugger: reduced damage from 280 to 250.
• Slugger: reduced demolition force.
• Slugger: fixed armor penetration tag in the menu.
• Slugger, Liberator Concussive, Senator: fixed incorrect armor penetration tags in the menu.
• Recoilless Rifle: increased the number of rockets you restore from supply boxes from 2 to 3.
• Spear: increased the number of missiles you restore from supply boxes from 1 to 2.
• Heavy Machine Gun: the highest fire rate mode reduced from 1200 rpm to a more moderate 950.

Stratagems

• Patriot Exosuit: rockets will now penetrate armor only on direct hit.

Enemies

Balancing adjustments have been made to:

• Chargers normal melee attack now does less damage against Exosuits.
• Bile Spewer and Nursing Spewer do less damage with their puke.
• The Bile Titan can no longer be stunned.
• Shriekers no longer create bug breaches.
• Shriekers hitting you while they are dead now does significantly less damage.

Helldiver

Balancing adjustments have been made to

• Heavy and medium armor protects better and you now take about 10% less damage than before while wearing heavy and about 5% less when wearing medium armor. Fortified commando and light armor is unchanged.

Fixes

• Fixed issue where save settings for PS5 would be reset when the game is rebooted, causing things such as loadout and hint settings to reset.
• Enemies now properly target Exosuits. Previously, many enemies effectively ignored Exosuits if a helldiver on foot was available for them to target.
• Fixed Exosuits being able to fire their weapons while opening the minimap.
• The Helldiver and the Exosuit both had a bug that made them sometimes take explosion damage multiple times making things like automaton rockets be too deadly, this is now fixed.
• Automaton enemy constellations that preferred to spawn more of certain Devastators types did not work and are now functioning as they should. This means that sometimes when playing against the Automatons you will face more Devastators instead of other enemy types.

We have improved the system that prevents hellpod steering close to large or important objects.

• We have solved issues where the effective area around objects was a lot larger than intended.
• We have reduced the number of objects that prevent hellpod steering.
• Note: This system is intended to prevent softlocks where players can drop on important interaction points, or drop into unintended places. We will continue to monitor the state of the system after the update to see if additional tweaks are necessary.

• Fixed cases where the ground under some assets could be bombed causing them to float.

Ballistic Shield changes

• Collision mesh has been slightly increased in size for more forgiveness
• Changed shield poses so that less of the helldiver is exposed
• Addressed bug where parts of the helldiver would become vulnerable while using the shield in first person

Known Issues

These are issues that were either introduced by this patch and are being worked on, or are from a previous version and have not yet been fixed.

• Game might crash when picking up a snowball or throwing back a grenade

Various issues involving friend invites and cross-play

• Cross-platform friend invites might not show up in the Friend Requests tab.
• Players cannot unfriend other players befriended via friend code.
• Players cannot unblock players that were not in their Friends list beforehand.
• Players cannot befriend players with Steam names shorter than 3 characters

• Explosive weapon stats include only direct hit damage but not explosive damage.
• Explosions do not break your limbs (except for when you fly into a rock).
• Planet liberation reaches 100% at the end of every Defend mission.
• Drowning in deep water with a Vitality Booster equipped puts Helldiver in a broken state.
• Stratagem beam might attach itself to an enemy but it will deploy to its original location.
• Some player customizations (like title or body type) may reset after restarting the game.