[Update]: Helldivers 2's September 17th update is coming with an armor rework, more effective heavy weapons and plenty of buffs!

If you haven't been paying attention, Helldivers 2 has had a bit of a fall from grace over the past few months. Despite starting off with an extremely enthusiastic playerbase, the endless bugs, crashes, nerfs and underpowered Warbond weapons have eroded all of the good will and created a rather adversarial relationship between the players and developers, so much so that Helldivers 2 now sits at a Mostly Negative rating on Steam!

In an effort to mend this divide, as well as bring Helldivers 2 back to its glory days, Arrowhead Game Studios have now announced that they are reevaluating their design choices, as well as working on rebalancing the entire game. The goal, as you might imagine, is to increase the amount of viable weapons and stratagems, while simultaneously reducing the amount of annoyance certain enemies can produce.

The details are still few and far between, but the Creative Director Pilestedt recently held a Q&A that clarified at least a couple of things. Here's a brief rundown of what I feel are the important bits:

• Ragdolling will be reduced considerably as Automaton rockets will not only have a much smaller splash radius, but Rocket Devastators will no longer have infinite ammo!

• Chargers will lose their preferential status and finally become vulnerable to more than just the heaviest anti-tank weapons. If you shoot its exposed butt, it will fall over even to primary weapons.

• Weapons like the Autocannon and Anti-Materiel Rifle will become more viable against bugs, even the heaviest ones.

• Bile Titan heads will now be properly vulnerable and won't just randomly shrug off damage, while the soft underbelly will be succeptible to even small arms fire.

• Mechs will also be getting some buffs, though that will have to wait for the next big update as there are far more pressing matters at the moment.

• The 500kg bomb, which has a notoriously small blast radius, will be getting some buffs to help with its consistency.

Personally, I'm really hoping the flamethrower gets reworked as well because the one we have right now is not only remarkably weak, but just looks absolutely terrible after the recent round of changes. I have no idea what Arrowhead were thinking when they decided it even needed a rework, but this is definitely not 'it'!

Whatever the future may bring, I'll make sure to let you know once Arrowhead finally spills the beans and reveals what exactly is coming with the update. Until then, I think Space Marine 2 will be a pretty good distraction!