Summary

• Nerfed weapons in Helldivers 2 have upset the community, making some guns useless and unbalanced.
• Arrowhead Game Studios acknowledged the issue and promised to improve weapon balancing for player fun.
• Despite declining player counts, fixing balancing issues and prioritizing fun could bring back fans.

all-things-fire-themed Warbond, Freedom's Flame.

The community was understandably quite upset at the alteration, which made an already underpowered weapon that much worse. While the majority of other changes have been favorably received and have even led to Helldivers 2 being one of the best co-op shooters, this has seemingly turned some of the game's community against it and even prompted a response from Arrowhead Game Studios' new CEO Shams Jorjani. However, while the flamethrower nerfs have tipped some of the community over the edge, it's only the start of Helldivers 2's issues.

Helldivers 2's Best Weapons Have Been Nerfed Repeatedly

Helldivers 2 Fans Lash Out Against Underpowered Weapons

Since its launch, Helldivers 2 has had a balancing issue. With so many weapons available to players, it has been almost impossible to make them all viable without inherently breaking the overall game flow. This problem has been a frustrating aspect of the game, but one that has simply sat at the back of player's minds while they blast Terminids and Automatons alike.

However, the recent Escalation of Freedom update, which has brought some of the biggest changes to Helldivers 2 since launch, has fundamentally changed this. The general discourse online has centered around how only three or four of Helldivers 2's guns are actually usable, while the rest remain useless. The Railgun, for example, once nerfed, no longer felt as effective, making it a worthless weapon.

Each weapon in Helldivers 2 goes through frequent nerfs and buffs across its lifetime to ensure that the game remains somewhat balanced, often in favor of the Terminids and Automatons. Helldivers 2 simply wouldn't be that much fun if every gun felt like the BFG from DOOM, tearing through enemies like they were nothing. However, Helldivers 2 isn't much fun if every gun feels like a peashooter barely capable of denting an Automaton's armor.

Helldivers 2's Weapon Balancing Favors Realism Over Fun

Helldivers 2 Isn't Living Up To Its Promised Power Fantasy

One of the reasons Helldivers 2 received glowing reviews in early 2024 was because it fulfilled the power fantasy so many players had been looking for. Players would drop into a battlefield swarmed by hundreds of bugs or robots and blast them away with powerful guns while desperately scrambling to complete an objective. The back of the game's physical box even s the ability to "Spread democracy with overpowered weapons."

However, this is no longer the case, as Helldivers 2 feels like an unbalanced experience, one that constantly prioritizes realism over fun. Where players could once melt a Charger with a couple of bursts from a flamethrower, now it feels like tossing matches at it and hoping for the best. It seems like Arrowhead Game Studios, or at least its new CEO Shams Jorjani, is aware of the problem, as Jorjani posted in the game's Discord (screenshot via Helldivers Alerts on X, formerly Twitter) an apology, stating the following:

"We still need to improve a lot in understanding what players want and marry that to the development process. We want every release to be a step in the right direction. Constant improvement. I don't think we feel this was that. So we need to do better."

The issue with Helldivers 2 isn't so much that the flamethrower is underpowered or even that it has been nerfed twice in a row despite players calling for it to be buffed. Rather, most of Helldivers 2's weapons feel underpowered, and the list of usable weapons grows smaller and smaller. The grave of fun weapons in Helldivers 2 is so deep at this point that it seems hard to imagine digging out of it any time soon.

Helldivers 2 Needs To Fix Its Balancing Issues Quickly

Arrowhead Game Studios' Response Is A Step In The Right Direction

It's no secret that Helldivers 2's player count has been on the decline for a short while now. Its all-time peak player count on Steam was 458,709, and that was six months ago, with its peak player count in the last 30 days hitting just 62,819, according to SteamDB. For Helldivers 2 to ever reclaim its original player count, or even close to it, it needs to fix some of its biggest issues, namely its balance.

However, as Jorjani stated in his Discord post, these updates take a considerable amount of time. So, it is unlikely that players will feel the full potential of every Helldivers 2 weapon for a while. Nevertheless, while it's unlikely Helldivers 2 will ever truly be balanced, prioritizing player fun and the original promised power fantasy will go a long way toward bringing players back and continuing to introduce new fans to the blood-soaked co-op experience.

Sources: Helldivers Alerts/X, SteamDB