Arrowhead earned my trust back with Servants of Freedom then prompted lost that trust a week later.
( Warning! )
The post below is lengthy and will involve a lot of reading. Go to another post if that doesn’t interest you.
About 6 months ago (August 2024), I put in a lot of effort to try to provide the best feedback I could to Arrowhead in hopes of helping save the game. All my friends had stopped playing and many had just outright deleted the game. They had done this because Arrowhead had displayed a clear pattern of nerfing weapons and buffing enemies. This slowly but surely made fighting literally any faction utterly painful and tedious to the point the game was no longer fun. As a result, the player count on Steam had dropped to an average of around 30k players daily. That number was falling with every passing week, eventually getting to below 25k players before the first buff patch was released along with the 60-day plan. The game was dying, and it was entirely the fault of the pro-nerf part of the community and Arrowhead itself for listening to them.
The 60-day plan was a promise to bring Helldivers 2 gameplay back to the point of being fun. Arrowhead accomplished this by nerfing enemies and buffing Helldiver gear. They did exactly what the majority of their playerbase asked for. The result of this was the game going from 30k players to 150k players on Steam alone in the span of a week. The game was back, but the community was rightly wary of Arrowhead’s balancing philosophy going forward.
Arrowhead has always had a tendency to introduce so-called “stealth nerfs” and “stealth buffs” to the game with their balance patches. Post-October 15th, 2024, the vast majority of these stealth changes have been nerfs. Below are some examples of these:
1. Vitality Booster Effectiveness – Decreased from 20% damage reduction to 10% damage reduction. (This in spite of the fact that Helldiver durability was already nerfed badly during the 60-day plan “buffdate.”)
Widespread reports of decreases in weapon armor penetration.
Plasma Weapons having a notably decreased damage output.
HMG damage being nerfed.
SMG-32 from Truth Enforcers having bloom to decrease its accuracy.
I could go on, but you get the point. Stealth nerfs are what kept me from fully putting my trust back in the hands of Arrowhead. Even when the Illuminate released, I still kept my cynical view of them. I, and indeed many of my friends, held the belief they would go back to nerfing things into the ground given enough time. I held out hope even when a few of my friends continued to boycott the game in protest from prior to the 60-day plan.
The tide began to turn for me when Arrowhead decided to implement the Siege Ready armor trait in its unintended state. Meaning Siege Ready armor added extra ammo to all weapons on the person of the Helldiver wearing it. This gave me hope. Servants of Freedom, however, finally allowed me to trust Arrowhead again. I talked my old regiment members into coming back to the game, got them to buy warbonds, bought warbonds myself—all was back to the golden days again…
Servants of Freedom was a beacon of hope standing resolute against the stormy tide of stealth nerfs and previous fun nerfing philosophies that ruined the game. If Arrowhead was so committed to fun that they put in a secondary weapon capable of 1-tapping objectives, then surely they had changed, right? Finally, they were committed to fun in such a way that I could put my trust, and therefore my money, into Helldivers 2. It only took a single week for them to ruin the trust they only just earned back from me.
PATCH 01.002.103: A betrayal.
Arrowhead once again bent the knee to the ever-wailing minority of players that demand constant nerfs. They nerfed not only the weapon that I had just paid money for, but they nerfed the armor from the previous warbond I also paid money for. And now I have to ask myself, why do I keep paying them money at all if they are just going to slap me in the face in answer to my patronage? Why did I go through the trouble of convincing my friends to redownload the game they had been boycotting due to nerfs, only for them to get the same treatment a week into it? How many times are you going to slap us, your customers, in the face?
I can promise you this: I won’t be asking my friends to come back to your game ever again. Even if I continue to play it, I am not going to be wasting their time any further. You’ve already backstepped from your 60-day plan promises. You’ve lost my trust again, and this time it probably isn’t coming back at all.
To give you an idea of how badly this was taken by my regiment, here’s the immediate reaction to seeing the patch notes posted in Discord:
This sentiment runs deep across all 6 Regiment discords I am in. No one likes this shit. It’s another betrayal from Arrowhead, stabbing their customers in the back in favor of the smallest minority in their community.
In my opinion, Arrowhead needs to figure out their priorities, and there is one fantastic way to do that. Make like the Lord of the Fallen devs and poll your entire player base in-game on their feelings on balance and specifically nerfs. I think you will have a very clear picture of just who precisely you need to be catering your game towards once you do such a survey. (It's almost like having in-game polls would have prevented this and other backlashes. Like I've been saying since pre-buff patch days.)
So, what exactly were the nerfs that upset everyone so badly? Let’s take a look…
#1 The LAS-17 Double-Edge Sickle
The LAS-17 Double-Edge Sickle was meant to start with light armor penetration and build up to medium as more heat built up, but it launched with medium armor penetration right away, even with zero heat.
OLD
- 0-25% heat: AP3 55 damage – Deals 0 damage/second to players
- 26-90% heat: AP3 55 damage – Deals 10 damage/second to players
- +91% heat: AP3 55 damage – Deals 50 damage/second to players + fire status effect
NEW
- 0-25% heat: AP2 55 damage – Deals 0 damage/second to players
- 26-50% heat: AP3 55 damage – Deals 10 damage/second to players
- 51-90% heat: AP3 70 damage – Deals 20 damage/second to players
- +91% heat: AP4 70 damage – Deals 50 damage/second to players + fire status effect (This almost instant kills you even wearing heavy fire-proof armor with Vitality Booster on.)
Magazines (No one ever reloads this anyway, so this effectively is pointless and feels designed to make you think it is a buff.)
- Starting magazines increased from 1 to 2
- Spare magazines increased from 2 to 3
This, of all the nerfs from the recent patch, was the most reasonable. That said, everyone I play with utterly loved this gun as it was, medium armor pen from the start. This one weapon even had my regiment members excited to fight bugs. Which, pretty much all of us hate doing because they feel the most unfair currently. The fact that this gun was so good, albeit glitched or not, gave them hope that fun could once again exist in Helldivers 2. Much like Siege Ready armor from Urban Legends, it may have been a wise idea to keep the released state of the gun. If this was the only nerf they rolled out, then I wouldn’t have even complained. Sadly, this wasn’t the only nerf they rolled out as you will soon see.
#2 The GP-31 Ultimatum
Also gained extra ammo from the previously-a-bug-but-now-a-feature Siege Ready armor passive, and we feel that this specific combination is too strong.
We’re huge fans of big booms booming big (to quote our fabulous Design Director), so we didn’t want to make the weapon less satisfying to use – we still want it to bring democratic tears to your eyes every time you use it, like it does for us. However, we will be addressing how easy it is to access extra ammunition for it, ensuring it requires a bit more effort to use it to the full effect.
We have seen a lot of mixed player feedback for this weapon and how certain players feel it trivializes some of the harder content, while others feel it plays just fine and is a great addition to the game. We have carefully opted for an approach where we’d like to reduce the ease of access to additional ammunition while maintaining the weapon’s core identity as a powerhouse. This means players will need to put in more effort and strategy to maximize its effectiveness at the cost of some armor and booster synergy for this specific weapon.
We will continue to monitor these changes, so please keep providing us more feedback!
The GP-31 Ultimatum is no longer influenced by the Hellpod Optimization Booster or the Siege Ready armor passive.
This is where the outrage primarily comes from. The entire point of this gun was its absurdity factor. It’s a secondary capable of destroying anything in the game provided you can hit it dead on. They didn’t change that about it. All they did was make it more tedious to use. Just like all they did to the Breaker Incendiary was make it more tedious to use. Just like all they did to the normal Breaker was make it more tedious to use. This is, yet again, the same design philosophy that nearly destroyed the game being used in exactly the same way in 2025. Arrowhead has seemingly learned nothing from their past mistakes. (That or Pilestedt is the only one who has even the vaguest idea of what fun is.)
What’s worse is that this isn’t even just a nerf on the Ultimatum. It’s a nerf on Siege Ready and Hellpod Space Optimization. Mind you, Hellpod Space Optimization is a booster so roundly used that I never see it not taken on a mission in a full lobby. (This is a hint that its effects should be made standard without the use of a booster at all.) Nerfing Siege Ready armor for this weapon in specific is setting the precedent that it can be done to anything in future. Effectively, nerfing the previously released warbond armor from here on. Who is to say that they don’t take issue with the extra ammo Siege Ready gives to MGs, Grenade Launchers, or whatever else they release in future? Why? Because the gun explicitly designed to be OP is too OP. Again, Arrowhead is displaying a clear and concise inability to understand the aspects of Helldivers 2 that the majority of their players find fun and engaging. They have once again nerfed fun and replaced it with tedium for the sake of the pro-nerf minority.
An ill omen for balance updates to come.
The fact that Arrowhead has blatantly displayed their willingness to nerf the fun out of the game for exactly the same reasons they did previously, resulting in the game dying, is an ill omen. If Arrowhead is willing to behave in the same manner that led to the assured downfall of Helldivers had they continued, it is unacceptable. It is the duty of the playerbase to speak to Arrowhead loudly on every front, declaring our opposition to this design philosophy. (For the second time.)
I myself have chosen to do this by changing my positive review, which I changed from a negative after the 60-day patch, back to a negative. I am not saying you should do this, but I am saying that’s my way of showing my disapproval. (That and writing all this.) Come hell or high water, my review will remain negative until the Ultimatum has been completely reverted to its release state. I am tired of having to argue against Arrowhead’s anti-fun balancing philosophy. I am tired of trying to run PR for Arrowhead to bring back people to the game, only for Arrowhead to stab us in the back.
In conclusion, I’m tired of being tired. Arrowhead, fix this mess immediately before you once again find yourself traveling down the road of a dying game where everyone is miserable and adversarial toward your studio because of it.
TL;DR:
After Arrowhead's "Servants of Freedom" update brought me back to Helldivers 2 with renewed trust, they completely shattered it just a week later with PATCH 01.002.103.Nerfs to specifically GP-31 Ultimatum and its ammo economy in relation to passives/boosters undermined everything that had brought the game back. Despite being promised fun and balance, Arrowhead reverted to their old, anti-fun nerfing habits, resulting in frustration across the player base. This betrayal has led me to change my review back to negative, and I'm no longer encouraging friends to return to the game. Arrowhead needs to stop nerfing the fun out of the game or risk repeating their past mistakes.