Helldivers 2 players aren't happy about the game's first balance patch—here's why

Helldivers 2 had its first balance patch yesterday and—as one might expect—it's not gone down splendidly.

In case you're unfamiliar, one of the best higher-difficulty weapons received significant nerfs due to its overuse. According to Arrowhead, the railgun was meant to be an «anti-tank sniper rifle» rather than the best-in-slot support weapon it very much became. Previously, this thing was capable of capping chargers and bile titans with a few well-placed rounds.

It can still take out heavily-armoured opponents, it just requires a little more skill—the 'unsafe' mode has a chance of blowing you up if you hold fire for too long, but it also increases its armour-piercing qualities. Limb damage has also been reduced, so you need to aim for headshots.

As designer Alex Kravchenko noted when the patch dropped: «Sure, you will have your own favourite [gun], but it should come from your personal preference, not from the universally-agreed knowledge of which gun is the strongest.» It's not like the patch was nerfs all the way down, either. The flamethrower is actually good now—and it's even able to deal with chargers, albeit a smidge slower than those halcyon railgun days. Regardless, players (at least the vocal ones) are, well, a bit upset.

This has been made a little worse by several prickly comments made by various Arrowhead devs over on the Discord that I'm not going to share here—partially because I don't think pointing fingers is productive. 

Is it the best (or most professional) move to stoke the flames? No, of course not. But I want to underscore that most of these screenshots are taken out of context, divorced from the inflammatory messages surrounding them. 

Ideally everyone would keep a cool head, but the server has over 100,000 members at the time of counting. If even a fraction of those people were yelling at me in real-time, I might get a little snippy too—as would anybody. Moving on.

I've felt the sweet kiss of the Railgun—but I'm still climbing the