The massive Helldivers 2 patch is finally here, with a barrage of weapon balance adjustments and an entirely separate article to help explain them.

The huge Helldivers 2 patch that people have been waiting for for quite a while has just been released and, well, it's just as heavy as Arrowhead teased. Seriously, there are more weapon balance adjustments than you can imagine, and an entirely separate article is dedicated to helping you understand why certain changes have been made.

This is in addition to the new mechanics that the developer had announced earlier this week after being added to the game. You certainly can't complain that Arrowhead isn't putting much effort into giving people what they want. then want him to settle into his new approach to updates.

You can check out the full list of changes in the patch notes as usual, but this time there's also a separate article written by Arrowhead Creative Director Johan Pilestedt that goes into more detail about balancing changes made by the studio.

“With these balance changes, we wanted to improve some of the weaker stratagems to make them more viable and add more opportunity for variety in loadouts,” he writes. “We also tweaked a few to make them more consistent, but the goal was to keep a similar or higher power level. We are studying the stratagems further to see if there are other stratagems that might need improvement or modifications to make them more viable.

Some of the weapons on the list that appear to have received the most extensive redesigns are the A/MLS-4X Rocket Sentry, the MG-206 heavy machine gun – which Pilestedt identifies as having “failed to realize the fantasy of a Heavy Machine Gun upon release” – and the R-36 Eruptor, which had its explosion damage increased in an attempt to further compensate for the removal of its ability to throw shrapnel a little earlier.

In addition to implementing all this balancing, Arrowhead introduced a number of long-requested things, including visible Galactic War supply lines and attack origin points, the creation of invite-only lobbies, and a readjusted the spawn rates of heavy enemies and patrols. Regarding the latter, you should see “at least 30% fewer heavily armored enemies” during higher difficulty bug breaches, with smaller enemies filling the space. The appearance of patrols is largely “back to how it worked before patch 01.000.300.”

Oh, and some planets will now be a little less foggy. Plus, that spear accuracy fix that people have wanted for ages is here, although it will need further polishing before we can target Automaton spawners again.

So this is it. If you plan to read all the changes, I recommend making a cup of tea and setting aside a few hours.