A fresh Helldivers 2 patch dropped today, and it’s a big one. While the weapon changes will always draw the most attention, changes to Patrol spawning have left many in the community wondering what the hell is going on. From the patch:
“Patrol spawning has been increased when there are fewer than four players. The fewer the players the bigger the change. For 4 player missions there will be no change compared to before. The biggest noticeable change will be for solo players at higher difficulties.”
On first read, the changes don’t make much sense. But Helldivers 2’s community manager reached out to specific developers at Arrowhead to explain the changes. The quick answer? Missions were easier with fewer players because the patrol spawns didn’t match up correctly.
“Scaling of patrol spawns was exponential before, and that felt good on four player lobbies, but a bit too empty when playing with fewer players, especially when playing solo.
Now we’ve made the scaling of patrols to be linear, which means that if you play solo you will get 25 % of the patrols compared to a four player lobby, instead of having about 17 % of the patrols.
There is still a cap on patrols that may spawn at the same time, so during situations when we spawn a lot of patrols (such as extractions) even solo players won’t notice the difference.
The change is made to make the world feel less empty for one and two player lobbies, especially on high difficulty missions – which was also slightly too easy for solo players compared to our intentions.”
Ok, that makes more sense. I wondered why they were making it more difficult for fewer players for seemingly no reason. Instead, it was a bug with spawn rates that is being fixed. The folks at Arrowhead could have saved themselves a community uproar if they explained that better in the patch notes. Or just wrote, “fixed patrol spawning.” Instead, the patch notes read like smaller squads are being punished.
Still, if you’re running less than four players – you’re going to feel this change today.
Despite Helldivers 2 being one of the smoothest co-op games to play with random folks, plenty of players still enjoy going solo. Some of the most popular guides on Steam focus on solo play.
Today’s patch is packed with changes to most of the game’s weapons. Some of the biggest at first glance are the nerf to the Quasar Cannon. Its recharge time is now increased by five seconds. The Railgun got some love today with increased armor penetration in both fire modes. Check out the full patch notes to see if your favorite loadout got better or worse today.