Helldivers 2 is the only game that can release content at the pace that it does, and yet with every update feel like there's half the weapons to use from when we started.

Thanks for the feedback, Dominator damage reduced to 175 and breaker incindeary now overheats after 5 shots. We hope this makes the community undestand our balance philosophy

10:41 When you're a bot and all of a sudden you hear "Warning you are within range of enemy artillery" 💀

its crazy to me that they havent buffed the warbond weapons, the guy in charge of balancing said in the discord before the warbond dropped that all weapons are s teir, there are no bad weapons

not only do they nerf primaries into the ground they buff the enemies at the same time.

I loved Eruptor when it came out and now i feel like - "look what they did to my boy"

Arrowhead furiously taking notes on what the next nerf will be 📝

Eruptor charger one-shots obviously were not intentional, however, shooting under the butt is just what you do if you want to damage chargers with that type of a weapon, regardless or not if it may one shot or not. En exploit is a case where a player performs some unusual behavior to purposefully trigger, but shooting enemies in a way to damage their weakspots is expected standard gameplay and the sum of it all is a dev fuckup, not an exploit.

Ok so my understanding is... Any gun above C tier requires to be nerfed in the eyes of the balance team.

The Tenderizer sounds stronger than it actually hits

The scorcher wasn’t stealth nerfed, the walker striders got buffed, everything’s worse against them now.

Here at Arrowhead we understand you feel that some guns are underwhelming to use. That is why today we have nerfed any guns that felt whelming. Thank you for understanding our balancing philosophy...

When the blitzer got buffed, people were saying it was amazing against bugs. Its fun until corpses started building up. It becomes so horribly inconsistent the moment a freaking wilber's body is around you. I have had multiple times that i was point blank to a bug and fired the gun, and it would do no damage. It's just infuriating

Firing Alexus would buff Helldivers 2.

You can see in the tier list the work the balance team is doing to "make sure we are having fun". Lots of weapons were good at some point, but were nerfed into the ground for committing the crime of being ok. Funniest thing to me is that the only two good weapons are the jar, that they gave it a token nerf (???). And the breaker incendiary, which is also only good because fire got buffed like 3 times in a row, because the devs didnt know about the DOT bug for months. That gun is so nerfed Im not playing the game anymore, just waiting for the CEO patch

Yeah I wish more of the primaries were actually viable, I usually end up using my support as a primary instead lol.

There are 2 things infinite in this world: The number of Zubats in caves The amount of times someone can come up with a "Helldivers 2 weapon tier list."

people never mention how when you overheat the sickle (and other laser guns MINUS the lascannon) the heatsink auto ejects (a reloading step skipped) and inserting a spare is leagues faster than waiting for it to cool. and now you have 99 more shots to shoot much sooner. you'll resupply

Every single gun should be able to one shot bodyshot scavengers.

The issue is they are balancing around the support weapon imo. They want the tension of you having to get your equipment back when you die so they don't want you to have a primary that is too reliable. Unfortunately they also made Anti-tank weapons practically mandatory and limit stratagem usage against bots so of course people are going to try to use the few effective primaries.

People give the Punisher Plasma a lot of flak, but it for me it is the Slugger replacement. You can get decent range on it, it staggers, and it can blast lower mobs

What they've done to the Eruptor is unforgivable. It was in the perfect spot. Making stalwart and other support weapons viable again

Placing JAR is S maybe only by its strength ceiling. This gun is extremely hard to use. P.S. Tried it for a dozen games -- this thing is kinda cool. Nice stagger. Nice damage. Awesome max ttk. Amazing min ttk. Reload is kinda slow but whatever.

Helldivers 2 is in dire need of a LARGE buff patch. There’s far too many sub-par weapons. Enemy headshot accuracy needs to be tweaked as well.

they did give the dominator a huge buff, 200 to 300 damage (which got reduced to 275 later) and a lot more stagger. it was awesome, i wish they buffed other weapons like this too. i think all ARs (except sickle) could straight up use a 50% damage buff. all of them should be able to 2 shot devastator heads and mow through hordes of bugs. sickle is fine since it already has the benefit of puking so many bullets. diligence should get it's damaged bumped up to 150 to 1 shot devastator heads + 25 mag capacity and diligence sniper should get like 200-250 damage to be able to compete with dominator better imo (especially against bugs) or they could just nerf dominator and call it a day :(

🤣 I gotta say watching you speedrun the assault rifles had me dying. Can't think of another content creator who says hello-welcome, these are bad all in one breath sent me

Got it. Don’t nerf weapons. Hunters now move at X2 speed and chargers can now one shot with any attack

Shit gun. (Arrowhead is listening).

The two S tiers are the only guns I use. Can’t wait for their nerfs.

Waiting for thickfila to come in here and yap about how every gun is s tier

Helldivers 2 be like "here's a new warbond, 2 weapons are unusable and 1 will be nerfed next patch"

The Devs need to stop trying to optimise weapon stats and just make them all fun to use. Every update it feels like the effective weapon selection is worse. Helldivers 1 had amazing primaries, they should look to the past for inspiration instead of trying to fight meta players.

After watching your breakdown of incendiary breaker for bugs, it changed my life. It feels like it should be the gold standard for crowd control primary weapons. The new defender SMG with concussive is cute, but this thing SHREDS buggos. Also i HATE that the primary lasers are so skinny. Im literally pissing on terminids, I need FAT BEAM Thx dough hope the great "Rebalancing" comes soon🙏

Took a break from the game for the last month, crazy to see how the meta changed. They really massacred so many guns.

I think scorcher is A, but other than that I mostly agree. The fact that there aren't at least 4 or 5 more A tier weapons really shows how horrible the weapon balance in this game currently is.

2:26 I main the Diligence Counter, I play mostly on Haz 7 / 8, against the Bots. It is fantastic, in Solo you can get overwhelmed if you have poor map control or dig in for too long, but I can kill almost everything at distance before I really engage the objective. I combine it with the Spear, and it fits really well. If you have other players, they mostly go for a more CQB Loadout which gives us a good Synergy, I am able to cover them as they approach objectives. Sure it is not the Meta, but the Meta is boring anyway.

I think one part of the reason one can place two weapons in S and most in C is less of their weapon performance but how the game design of larger "medium" and "medium large" enemies are balanced around being meant to be handled with support weapons, but then those medium larges can be oppressively common on higher difficulties and tough constellations. A regular Liberator, which I personally think is fine, will deal with fodder bots and bugs more or less as expected, but then a medium enemy appears and they become a massive ammo sink whether you're throwing DPS into a meat shield or hunting for a lucky headshot. That big gulf is meant to get you to use a support weapon but those primaries in S can handle the situation better than any others without sacrificing too much. The fact that we only have 4 stratagem slots does constrain our options a lot too.

I wouldn't say the pummeler has "concussive" because it is not the stagger effect that weapons like concussive liberator has. Instead, Pummeler has EMS stun 0.5 sec which is superior to stagger. Compared to something like the Jar5 that has a lot of stagger and the damage you have an easier time keeping shots on target because that stagger animation really throws the enemy around. But the Jar5 hits like a truck. Pummeler feels like a team support gun at times letting you mini stun enemies.

scorcher not on A is a travesty, its still the best at dispatching walkers, and even tanks/other enemies with vents

Dominator and the pre-gutted Eruptor are, in my opinion, what should be the gold standard for weapon balance. Very strong primaries that are useful in a variety of situations, but with heavy downsides. Slow fire rate, low ammo, worse handling, self damage. There's smarter ways to keep weapons in check than "they do no damage now just rely on your teammates more lol."

Plasma punisher works fine when paired with an all-purpose support weapon like laser cannon or autocannon though, since those already deals with most bot scenarios regardless.

Gonna have to disagree with you on the Scorcher. Considering the Dominator's poor performance against Scout Striders, and the fact that the Scorcher can kill them in 4 shots (TTK of about a second), makes it better than the Jar5 in my opinion. Can the Dominator kill Scout Striders? If you dump a whole mag into them sometimes. I'll take consistently killing Scout Striders over the stagger offered by the Jar every single day. Plus the low sound profile makes it that much better to solo with. Also, I don't think LARPing means what you think it means. I'm pretty sure its the exact opposite of what you think it means.

i appreciate the one-handed trait on SMGs not necessarily for the shields but for being able to hipfire accurately while jogging away from enemies on my way to the objective. i also like Eravin's guide on using assault rifles. Aim for the limb or medium weakpoints instead of the head to get more consistent performance against 1 HP section compared to spreading damage between 2+ different HP sections. Also, correction for 1:39, Devastator heads have 130 HP not 125 HP.

I think you should take another look at the plasma punisher mate. When you are experienced with it hitting guys at 75+ meters is no problem. Can completely stun lock devastators and kills them in a few shots, stun locks groups of beserkers killing them as well. It’s a great gun.

sickle is S tier for me. I bring it on solo helldives and it's wonderful. truly what an AR should be in this game, massive mag that can shred any light or medium enemy.

Sick-lé rant: I loved the sickle when it came out as it was something different and viable. I now always choose it on frosted planets just to mix things up. What you said about the sickle should be featured in all weapons.."Fun...To...Use!!" even if it's not S-tier. A true and factual tier list I can completely agree with!

I dont understand why SMGs have such a slow fire rate and so little recoil. SMGs feels like ARs more than ARs.

Great video, appreciate the effort you put into this! I would agree with the Sickle call out there.

Slugger w/ stun was my baby. That thing was glued to my hands. Can't believe they made me replace it with the Jar.

Every time I'm trying to find an alternative to my beloved dominator, i end up with a "I could've been performing much better" feeling

I really enjoyed the Eruptor on release, and I didn't even know about the charger exploit. Since the nerfs I feel like I can't justify using anything but the sickle

IMO plasma punisher is the best gun for bots . You can kill factory striders and clear a bot drop if you get under it right before it drops

I agreed with maybe 95% of your placements. Even the remaining 5%, I only disagreed by maybe one tier difference. But the thing that stands out the most to me is the gap between the two s-tier weapons and everything else starting in B-tier because it really does speak volumes towards their insane balance philosophy. The two s-tier weapons seem unintentionally strong and will soon be nerfed because Arrowhead clearly wants all their primary weapons to be dogshit as a means toward artificially inflating difficulty in the most frustrating way possible for players. I would actually make the argument that the top weapons need to be a-tier, and everything else starts in C-tier instead, because in other games 'S-tier' weapons almost almost broken. Making the game so easy the devs HAVE to nerf them or the game experience is negatively impacted for all. Nether the JAR or incen breaker feel like that. They just feel 'really good' compared to otherwise terrible weapons. I can't call either of these weapons overpowered though. That's the worst indictment of all against the balance devs, that the vast majority of weapons in a game feel 'Below Average' in terms of performance. I never thought I'd fondly lament the past when greedy publishers in other games would release overpowered weapons in the latest DLC to drive sales up, but here we are. Starved for decent weapons.

Been rocking the jar 5 since launch (got tired of shotgun meta) and I even liked it then. It wasn't "good" but I enjoyed it, then that buff hit and its just an absolute joy to use.

I’d put the penetrator at the Davy jones locker tier. It’s so little damage that against most medium armor enemies you can’t kill anything by mag dumping into the armored areas anyway

Pretty on point. Only a couple things I'd contest: - I don't think the Liberator and the Liberator Penetrator deserve to be in the same tier. The base Lib is at least good at getting rid of light enemies ammo-efficiently at all ranges, whereas the Penetrator is a straight-up "noob trap" weapon (It sacrifices a bit of everything for the benefit of medium pen, but with the nerfed mag size _and_ damage it doesn't have the means to leverage that medium penetration ability, so it's a straight downgrade in practice) - The Knight is actually more like a Stalwart that's permanently stuck at max fire rate, with 1/5 the magazine capacity and worse recoil. It deals some pretty considerable burst and could actually be a viable weapon, if not for the pathetic ammo pool, and for the fact that the one-handed SMG features on it are incompatible with the most productive way of actually leveraging the fire rate/burst damage (firing from crouch/prone). - The Liberator Concussive is actually usable against bugs, but it still feels so boring that I'm not even going to bother making a case for it.

I think one easy thing they could do with the adjudicator, take the damage to somewhere in 100-ish, maybe even 120-ish, but return to pre-buff recoil. Make it feel like an actual battle rifle. Uncontrollable but full power cartridge. So you have to use armors with reduce recoil at crouch/prone to make it controllable but if you habit yourself around its recoil, you get a powerful full auto rifle.

Once you get into higher difficulties we definitely feel more funneled into a meta. Theres barely any variety in what we can choose to bring. Bring anything outside of the very small meta pond and its basically a death sentence.

Absolutely down for some V Rising videos. Started playing it myself partially off of your recommendation, and it KICKS ASS.

About Scorcher and those small walkers - as far as I remember there was a change that it is now "harder" to penetrate that front plate, and it allows less damage to go through (as far as understand - for all weapons, not specifically scorcher) So Scorcher is (or at least should be) as it always was, it just the specific enemy was changed

One thing I enjoy running, while it's definitely not extremely good, is diligence + AMR (and supply pack) against bots I run the diligence because it's able to take out all of the small bots really quickly with the high fire rate and low recoil, as well as not having to worry about ammo too much so you can spam the hell out of it. Then, I use AMR for pretty much everything else, because the diligence is practically useless for everything else. It's a fun loadout, not exactly great, but very fun.

I love these satirical tier lists. I can't believe they keep this pay to win stuff with poor old weapons like the dominator and breaker incendiary languishing while the new hot warbond has such monsters as the purifier. And this is just primaries. Won't they ever nerf the railgun or finally do something to bring the spear down into line? Everyone loves their homage to the famous javelin, but please let us choose to try out a weapon like the laser or autocannon without obliterating our chances at any real difficulty tier.

The "b" weapons feel like im playing "fair" , the Fire breaker feels like I'm more effective than the machine guns sometimes (on bugs)

Thank you for the feedback. Jar 5 dominator will have a 50% chance of detaching one of your limbs on every shot. Please use strategems.

Do away with individual weapons having a set armor pen level. Make different ammo types instead. Hollow points, ball ammo, AP ammo, incindieray ammo etc etc. Attach the armor pen levels to the ammo types ans adjust the damage accordingly to balamce them. It would greatly increase build diversity 😊

putting liberator into f tier right off the back makes me almost feel like this is a meme of a video tbh. Idk how you could even consider the liberator to be anywhere near a weapon like concussive or penetrator for instance. How does the gun have low ammo count when its able to dispatch anything under a devs within a few shots, and even enemies like devs can be downed rapidly with stomach shots. I know some people dont like assault rifles, and I do think several of them need buffs for sure, but Im beginning to think that a lot of people just dont know what they are doing at times.

People seem to frequently make these tier lists for weapons based on how they perform in solo situations. Which I always feel is a weird choice because the game almost requires you to play in groups of 2-4 where you can build your load out around the team. Breaker Incendiary clears swarms of bugs but struggles a fair bit if no one has something that can deal with medium armour. Meaning people need to bring impact nades, which means no concussive for larger stuff like a charger. It doesn’t need to be an S tier weapon so long as it compliments the rest of the teams load out especially at higher difficulties.

Get ready for Arrowhead to nerf everything above A tier after they find out about this video

S tier vid as usual bro im on board with everything you said 👍 assault rifes are ass period

I really hope they start putting in some primaries that kill big things, so we have more reason to use the LMG stratagems.

how were those berserkers doing no damage to you? is there some subtle left right movement going on? When those things hit they chuck half my life but they were barely touching you. Can someone explain the technique or wth is going on there at 3:36

I was so excited to unlock the Slugger last week only put it back on the shelf after using it against bots and bugs 😭

I don't have the 1st premium warbond yet as I spent my SC on 2nd and 3rd but I already trust 100% what you said about those weapons. Everything else you've said about every single weapon I used was extremely on point down to how it feels to fight different enemies with it and why. Extremely well researched and informed video, you clearly know what you're doing and being honest about your thoughts and experiences with your game. More games need youtubers like you and more games' developers need to listen to youtubers like you, expecially Helldivers 2.

The thing is with the eruptor you could close bug outposts and blow up fabricators and had decent AOE with shrapnel. But now with no shrapnel and you can't as easily close bug outposts I'd say it's down from A tier to C.

One thing I realized, the CEO once tweeted that they wouldn’t buff magazine size because they would need to fully remodel the weapon for “realism”. Fair enough, but they also had no problem nerfing the breaker’s magazine back when it was the only good primary. I really hope AH will start making better balance decisions, instead of making shortsighted nerfs to everything remotely useful

Getting real pissed that every good gun gets nerfed to basically useless after 2 weeks. You get used to them then it’s trash

This game has the barebones structure for lots of features that it just straight up doesn't have. people said it released feature complete, but it was more like it worked occasionally at launch and this was just an extended technical beta for the months after. None of the weapons have a clear identity of what they were built to counter, not even the good ones because there is little to compare the good weapons to and their only plus is that they just don't suck to use which imo is a very bad plus for a weapon. if each class of weapons had a bonus for using them ie like marksman weapons like dmrs got a huge damage buff for headshots and weak points and the stats that made sense then it'd give a good reason to use them vs right now where there's no reason to use an smg unless it's niche or low level because the shotguns exist or using the dmr when the amr and jar5 exist and the same goes for orbital stratagems vs eagle stratagems. And these are just problems with weapon selection. don't question why the enemy summons reinforcements immediately if they hear a twig snap when reinforcements are typically called in when your current force is close to depletion, or why the "ranged" bots don't use cover and need to close in like a mindless swarm of terminds to melee you with their fist when they literally have miniguns on their arms that can tap you from hundreds of meters away or how they just know where you are like a crappy version of the xenomorph ai from alien isolation. now granted yes if i had to recode a whole enemy ai to take advantage of their strengths it would be a pain just as revaluating all the useless weapons would be but it needs to be done. unfortunately, at the same time by the time they work out the problems and get the game going in a "fun" state most of everyone can agree on it'll be either too little to late or the game will just be barely surviving in maintenance. i love this game but god damn(sorry for the rant lol)

A KZfaqr by the name of Eravin did a video breaking down how damage works that explains some of the issues Dough is listing for example the why the diligence does not one shot devastators is probably due to the fact that every gun has falloff damage that is rounded down by at least one and because the rifle does exactly the damage on base as the devastator head it may be 1 damage short to kill it. Do note in this example durable is ignored as well as AP as the Diligence does have the requirements to beat it without damage being negated and the Devastator head having 0% durable. For anyone keen for a decent breakdown of damage calcs go check Eravin out.

Slugger is a great choice if you can use it skillfully. It can one tap devistaters and berserkers with a headshot just like the jar but with much better handling, target swapping and acquisition. It has better accuracy and ammo economy than the jar. I would only favor the jar in close quarters against multiple berserkers for the stagger and rate of fire.

I just call the 2 legged walkers, chicken walkers.

I pretty much only casually play solo at lower levels right now, just grab whatever I want and hike around looking for super credits in some vague hope that a warbond with interesting shit comes around. Still in disbelief at the lack of thematic armor perks in the warbonds.

There's a lot of cool tech you can do with the Pummeler's stunlock. Like if you drop a precsion strike on a charger but don't have stun grenades you can just keep blasting it's butt to keep it in place.

The dev said they don't want any metas, but they themselves have created metas for us

The dominator is a bolter from 40k. Had the whole team rocking it and it was basically that scene from the Astartes video where they show up in the ship and just start tearing ass. We walked into a boy base and every time a trigger was pulled something died. When they big boys came out they were just shredded with concentrated fire

"cookin with crisco" subbed immediately

Oh hell yeah, I was waiting for you to do something like this considering that the weapons are so mixed when it comes to usefulness. (just started watching the vid but I'm sure it'll be great:)

FYI I'm THE ArrowHead developer in charge of weapons balancing! so thanks for the info!!! My priority right now is to nerf the shit out of the Jar5-Dominator and the breaker Incendiary, I'm going to make them at least C tier because those weapons are too "overpowered", then i will work my way to remove all the weapons in your B Tier so we can really get a weapon balance utopia! Ty Dough!

id like to add that in co-op situations, having a party member with the pummeler is a godsend at times. the stagger can flinch a lot of enemies out of attacks, even stalkers, and ive genuinely saved lives before by shooting an enemy out of an attack that had an ally pinned down (spewers mostly). I feel it deserves an honorable mention for its sheer supportive power.

Smh. Plasma Punisher should at least be A tier. Its really good against bots. I can stagger almost anything with it.

I have not seen anyone argue Eruptor was meant to one shot chargers. Pretty much everyone would have been fine fixing that, it was removing the ability to one-shot hive commanders, stalkers, and bile spewers that really hurt.

Dude, you just revealed two whole weapons to the devs that are actually fun and effective. What are you thinking? Now we'll have nothing! lol

I think what happened to scorcher is explosive damage used to essentially ignore medium armor. Now it seems reduced by it. I'm not sure scorcher is a medium pen weapon anymore, but the explosion still does damage.

It might be different running solo vs running in a group, but I love running the punisher at higher difficulties in a group. The ability to stagger a bunch of bots with one shot and to be able to top off single shots is huge for allowing a 2nd player to mop things up. It also can kill if things get closer then comfortable. Only downside is that the range isn't great, but frankly everyone else is running longer range weapons so having someone CC/cleanup close is good. Not a fan of the Jar, because of how low the ammo count is, along with it's atrocious handling. It was the primary I was the most excited for too, because only heretics are not excited for a Bolter analog. But it just doesn't do enough. Ya, you can unload a clip into a factory strider's belly, but why do that when we have support weapons that can take them out easier without having us have to scramble for ammo afterwards? But I understand your arguments. Might not agree with them but I see the logic behind them.

I'm definitely enjoying using the Pummeler SMG against bots. It's really fun to use and the ballistic shield is nuts in terms of protection. Well placed shots can take out Devastators quickly, and it shuts down Breserkers as long as there is a single round in the mag. Pair it with the grenade pistol for plugging fabricators or to get around walkers and the AMR for a high damage punch before you run in for the mooks.

Punisher against bugs can be great if you're trying to keep moving, it lets you spray over your shoulder while running at nearly full speed. The ability to stagger bugs also really limits their ability to hurt you. It creates a safe buffer zone. Which can also be really helpful if you have incendiary impact grenades, as you can keep them in the flames longer. It also buys time for a teammate's Incendiary Breaker DoT to kill things. I consider it more of a crowd control weapon than anything, something the Defender lacks.

You said something that is so true. I have being watching some youtubers streaming HD2. And man, IMO, they choose C tier or worst tier weapons just to become more challenging. Yesterday I was watching Thiccfila testing support weapons. He is a very good player. But for the time I watched he was using Purifier, Adjudicator, Plasma Punisher. Every good player with a 4 man squad can use any weapon and complete everything. But, like you well said, most weapons are just bad to use. After 300+ hours playing this game, it is natural that the challenge becomes complete helldive with shity weapons as a challenge, but it is necessary to admit that they are weak weapons to the viewers.

Erupter killing chargers in one shot wasn't an exploit. It was RNG. I liked the rng of it. Felt like any one shot could take out an entire patrol, or medium enemy, and yet more often than not it couldn't. And it's fine because of the overwhelming damage from shrapnel. Otherwise no, they killed it by getting rid of the shrapnel. It was reasonable before. Lacking in fire rate maybe. But it was a primary. I would switch it to the AMR's place and put the AMR in primary weapons halving the rate of fire before calling the shrapnel mechanics an exploit

To defend the punisher plasma c status. It’s a very effective stun tool. If you’re pulling a sentry build, use the plasma to stun targets that are closing in. It’s niche but effective. “Just gots to get gud”

If a dev sees this video and thinks “We need to nerf fire breaker and dominator” Instead of “We need to buff a lot of weapons so they are like the fire breaker and dominator” Games chalked, they keep nerfing everything people find fun and want to use

Pretty weird tierlist overall. - having an entire tier empty - having guns on S because they are good at one of two factions, disregarding that they might suck at the other faction, making them an A weapon at best. S should be for "awesome at both factions" - saying "usefulness = tier" and having eruptor at the lowest possible tier despite the fact it can close holes / destroy factories But whatever, your list, your rules