Helldivers 2 Support Continues in the Latest Warbond Drop, Out Next Week

I am generally not a stealth player (quite the opposite) but I have snuck into a few bases to detonate a backpack nuke so I’m open to a stealth warbond.

Silenced sniper and assault rifles are well and good but the firearm that jumps out at me is the re-educator (a pistol that fires chemical darts that induce a brief bout of delirium, the same way poison gas does). The explosives also look fun, especially the remotely detonated C4 charges.

How is the balance for the game these days? I played in the first six weeks but dropped off with all the chopping and changing.

The Censor sounds pretty interesting (and probably a bit more viable as a suppressed with how detection works in the game - one shot one kill should be much more effective than automatics) and the pistol offering a single target gas effect could have an interesting niche in open-sidearm loadouts - at least if it can reliably prick medium enemies, fleshmobs etc at a reasonable range. Will be interesting to see where the damage and Armor Pen falls on the C4 pack - if it can deal with most heavies with a single satchel (and only takes up the backpack slot) it could make for an interesting swap for Thermites, Dynamite or even the Ultimatum as a close-range Anti-Tank option.

A bit of a novelty/aesthetic warbond for most people, definitely (and even for stealth players, arguably the plasma weapons are still the best option as they're naturally silent to fire with loud impact explosions that can distract) but hey - I like novelty warbonds if the kit looks nice or offers something different.

Stealth is broken in the game has been since they bugged it up in a patch they've even admitted it is. On PC I've been playing the lite version that's 23GB compared to 144Gb and it pays just the same if not better, but they still need to fix stuff

@MrPeanutbutterz It's pretty solid. The ups and downs with the game these days are more centered around performance isdues or bugs that inevitably sneak in with the updates, but the weapon balancing is much less aggressive than the first year - where they tended to nerf the meta weapons hard before, they focus entirely on improving underperforming weapons now to bring them up to par. As such the changes end up feeling much less... aggressive? than before, and generally make the game more fun to drop back into to test out new things that you might have overlooked before. The weapon customisation that they added a year ago is also pretty fun to play around with, even though some weapons benefit from it much more than others in the current state.

There's also a lot of variety now in the Warbonds to accommodate for all sorts of different playstyles (although I do wish they'd offer more free stratagems outside of them, those seem to have dropped off entirely at this point.)

Not sure what you mean by balance but Helldivers 2 caters to the power fantasy crowd more than it did in its first several months (there are a lot of ridiculously powerful weapons like backpack nukes, recoilless rifles and rifles that fire rounds that explode in shrapnel).

However enemies have also gotten bigger and more numerous. The toughest enemy is hands down the Hive Lord, a train sized burrowing worm covered in heavy armor that is very deadly and hard to kill. It can be killed but it survives stuff that annihilates everything else in the game.

None of the current missions is all that tough for solid teams who stay mostly on mission but periodically there are time limited crazy hard ones that pop up like invasion repulsion (illuminate ships land randomly all over that map and start churning out enemies and teams lost if 12 ships landed at once and won if they took out 50) and platinum extraction (landing in the middle of a giant enemy base and trying to transport a bunch of platinum bars to a container for extraction while the bots threw everything at you).

@crossbit Thanks for the detailed answer, much appreciated.

That method of balancing sounds far more palatable to me and exactly what I was hoping for. I remember finally unlocking some weapon (genuinely over a year since I last booted it) and then the patch the day later nerfed in, which was a bridge too far for me.

Sounds like it might be worth dipping in for a look again (sure I still have it installed anyways).

The Redacted Regiment warbond hit today. I haven’t unlocked the explosives yet but the stealth armor and the silenced weapons work well (enemies not staring at you as you take somebody down tend to miss you).

There are new (thus far robot specific) commando missions which give you extremely limited air support and thereby encourage you to play stealthy. Unusually for H2 there are cells of dormant soldiers implanted in the ground scattered around the map. You need to activate each cell to make their contained reinforcements (a couple soldiers) available. Once a soldier dies and a reinforcement order is put in someone in the activated cells is randomly defrosted.

The missions are challenging tough but doable even for randoms (which is how I play multiplayer most of the time and how I played this morning). There were a few rage quitters but most people got the hang of things (stay moving, strike bases hard but judiciously, try to avoid getting into it with patrols) pretty quickly.

Another warbond has been unveiled. It’s named Siege Breakers and seems to be the opposite of Redacted in that it focuses on heavy armor, a new stationary bubble shield, a sledgehammer with an explosive head (looks hilariously badass), and a multibarrel laser gun whose beams are so powerful they powerful they slice through normal robots. Last but not least is what looks to be the most powerful Expendable Anti-Tank missile (nuclear warhead, single shot) in the game.

https://youtu.be/z2q23CtnqUA