HELLDIVERS™ 2 News

Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead has revealed the next Warbond that'll be arriving in the game. It's called Chemical Agents, and will live up to that name by letting you douse enemies in horrible gas and unleash some similarly toxic odours on your teammates through a fart emote.

The news of this Warbond comes as studio is building to the deployment of Patch 01.001.007 on September 17, which thus far looks to be bringing a heap of buffs in an attempt to get the game's community back into their happy zone, following recent criticism over nerfs. Here's hoping the follow-up to the Freedom's Flame Warbond passes that same smell test.

As outlined in the PS blog post announcing it, Chemical Agents is set to drop on September 19, and offers a bunch of gear themed around the kind of stuff you might don if you were trying to rid the entire galaxy of bacteria using everything you keep in the cupboard under your kitchen sink.

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Helldivers, when you’re on the warfront, emptying magazines into hordes of Terminids, do you ever feel like you’re a space bug exterminator? I know I do and that’s why I’m really excited to tell you about our next Warbond*: Chemical Agents! This one has some seriously deadly toys.

The Helldivers are getting toxic.

I’ll start with everyone’s favorite part of a Warbond: the offensive gear. The first thing a Terminid exterminator needs is a good, high-pressure sprayer. The TX-41 Sterilizer is the tool of the trade, ready to spray down the threat with chemical gas.

A literal spray and pray with the TX-41 Sterilizer.

And in case the bugs got behind you, don’t worry–your gassy little pal the AX/TX-13 “Guard Dog” Dog Breath won’t let them get the drop on you before it hoses them down with its corrosive gas sprayer. If there’s still some standing after the stratagems are done, hit ‘em with the G-4 Gas grenade. Cover the whole area in a cloud of noxious fumes, Helldiver!

The AX/TX-13 “Guard Dog” Dog Breath gassed up and ready to go.

Adding stratagem variants to Warbonds is new with Chemical Agents, but our designers felt that since gas is a crowd control tool, it made more sense to release stratagems and let Helldivers choose the primary weapons they love the most. Not only that, but this is bringing some serious variety to Chemical Agents that we hope players will enjoy.

Breathe easy in the AF-02 Haz-Master armor.

Now let’s talk drip. The exterminators of Super Earth have access to some killer threads in Chemical Agents. Firstly, these armors have the Advanced Filtration passive, which gives the player resistance to the gas clouds they’ll be generating with their new toys, including the toxic cloud put off by the Orbital Gas Strike stratagem. The AF-50 Noxious Ranger is a lightweight armor, best paired with the Standard of Safe Distance cape. If you really want to go full on with your protective gear, you’ve got the medium AF-02 Haz-Master and the matching Patient Zero’s Remembrance cape. Each set also has a coordinating player card to match the capes.

The AF-50 Noxious Ranger can survive in the fumes.

Our players have been asking for more emotes, and the ones included with Chemical Agents are some of our best yet. Want to know how to tell a joke in Helldivers 2 with your microphone off? Use the co-emote “Natural Gas Extraction” of course. See if you can convince your whole squad to pull your finger. And once you all get back to your ship, they can express their disgust with the “Ew” victory pose.

I said pull my finger, Helldiver!

We’re adding another set of patterns for your Hellpods, Pelican-1, and exosuit in Mustard–not the kind that goes on a hot dog either–this is the deadly kind. If at any point your squad wanders into your toxic cloud, you can use the new utility P-11 Stim Pistol to give them a minor heal from a safe distance.

The friendliest of friendly fire: the P-11 Stim Pistol.

Finally, if you want to really lean into the role, Chemical Agents includes a new player title–Expert Exterminator. 

That’s everything, Helldivers. This could be a whole new theme for your squad as the galaxy’s elite peacekeepers and pest destroyers. Gas up for Chemical Agents, releasing September 19th! 

Helldivers 2's upcoming patch will be bringing with it some pretty beefy buffs to the RS-422 railgun, with Arrowhead having slid the weapon's damage numbers upwards in its efforts to deliver the kind of fun that the game's community has been asking for.

The studio is offering little snippets of the notes for Patch 01.001.007 at the moment, building on what it shared in last week's blog post and building up to the update dropping on September 17.

Following up on revealing its plans in terms of buffing flamethrowers yesterday, Arrowhead's latest revceal concerns the railgun, which was a very popular weapon, especially early on in the game's lifespan when it was being used to take down armoured foes before being hit with an unpopular nerf.

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Helldivers 2's community has been asking for buffs to flamethrowers rather than the kind of nerf that fire weapons got alongside the Escalation of Freedom update, and Arrowhead looks to be delivering just that, having now provided more info on just how it's gone about turning the in-game heat back up.

The studio gave us a brief glimpse into its plans for the update, now dubbed Patch 01.001.007, last week. "We are also working towards additional improvements for the flamethrower weapons," was all it wrote then, but here's some info on what exactly those improvements will look like.

"We've heard you loud and clear and Flamethrower damage is increased by 33%," Arrowhead wrote in the first of a string of posts providing more details about the patch in the run up to its arrival on September 17, "Flamer mechanics will be reverted to the state before the Escalation of Freedom update and flamebased weapons can now damage heavier enemies like Chargers, Bile Titans, Impalers and Hulks."

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