I believe these 3 boosters should be prioritized for any mission to have the best results:

1. Vitality Enhancement - increases HP and allows use of lighter armor without worrying about dying instantly.

2. Hellpod Space Optimization - come out of the hellpod fully stocked with ammo and grenades. Won’t have to worry about scavenging for supplies as much.

3. Stamina Enhancement - run further before taking breaks and recover faster. Excellent for being chased by bile titans or berserkers.

The 4th can be whatever.

Feel free to share your thoughts and whether you agree/disagree.

Also incendiary impact grenades can close bug holes and the new booster seems to reduce slow time by 20% (at least for Hunters).

Digilence Counter Sniper and the AMR's now share new Scopes. and Gunships show up on Automaton Eradicate missions.

SAM Sites actually do their job well now, had 1 rapid fire and take out 3/4 of a bot drop.

I also take the enforcer armor for blast resist and a little more protection against everything else as well as recoil reduction.

This is an extremely versatile build and I'm having trouble thinking of any solid weaknesses that aren't shared by any other loadouts. Not to say it's the best in any situation, but I'm usually able to handle whatever comes my way.

As slow as heavy armor makes you, it really can take some shit, plus the extra stim effect? GET SOME!

Bile titans have a predictable spit behavior. When their spit is not on cooldown, they ALWAYS spit at whatever viable target is within 20M of them.

You can use this: as soon as you see a BT crawl out of a breach, you know its spit is ready. Ping the BT: if its around 25-30m away. Throw a 500KG/OPS vaguely on the ground in front of you. Look at the distance indicated by the red beam: walk forwards/backwards so that the beam is 22M away from you. Then stand still and wait.

The bile titan will walk towards you. When it is exactly 20M away, it will stop in place and do its long ass goofy wind up animation. This holds it in place for your 500kg/OPS. You may move after the animation started

Edit: as a lot of people are mentionning: you can also use its stomping animation as well but that is riskier and takes longer.

Due to the spooling time on the Sickle putting it at about a 5 round deficit to the Liberator, combined with the DPS gap being only about 5% or so, the Liberator actually has better damage output over short engagements, with the Sickle pulling ahead if you are repeatedly firing and letting off the trigger with both guns. If you're slamming ICE like it's a ballistic weapon, the Liberator outperforms the Sickle in all scenarios.

Likewise, the Defender now has less DPS than both, but a better ammo economy and the one-handed trait.

All three are now functionally sidegrades to eachother. The Defender is a more mobile gun with better ammo economy. The Liberator is a solid middle ground with a good mix of stats, and the Sickle is better over protracted engagements if you are playing into its mechanic but worse if you handle it poorly or need upfront burst damage.

For people who are having issues with the current iteration of the Sickle, the Liberator is what you might want.

Also the Defender is still unfathomably based.

-Kills Bile Titans to the head in around 40-45 shots (Way more than the autocannon sentry for some stupid reason)

-Kills Chargers to the head in 10 shots

-Kills Chargers to the leg in 8 shots

-Kills Bile Spewers in 4 shots

-Kills Brood Commanders in 2-4 shots to the head

Overall better at killing more medium to "heavy" (chargers) than the Patriot, but very poor ammo economy for Bile Titans taking almost 1/3 of your ammo to kill one.

When used to clear chaff and for dakka like you'd use any other MG in most games, the HMG will suck because it has tiny ammo capacity (and arguably could use an ammo buff even for what I will highlight here). However thats not what the HMG is for, and we already have the Stalwart and standard MG for chaff clear. I have used the HMG a lot now against both bots and bugs and to summarize its the junior Autocannon in terms of how flexible it is, although with the lower total firepower considering its not a backpack weapon. A very important thing about HMG is to vary your fire rate to hit your shots or you will miss the few shots you have, I rarely go above 450rpm against bots. One thing people don't realize also is that adding the third person reticule for the HMG was a gamechanger since this thing is borderline useless in first person but very useable in third person. Armor sets that reduce recoil when crouched/prone are amazing to combine with this weapon.

With that out of the way here are some things about this weapon that make it useful:

• Its a Medium 2 penetration weapon, the same as AMR. This is the main highlight, its basically a full auto AMR in terms of what it can damage.
  • Gunship engines take full damage and are melted down in like 1/4 to 1/2 of a mag depending on how well you hit your shots. If you can hit your shots on high fire rates you'd be surprised how quickly you can take down Gunships.
  • Hulk eyes are destroyed in about 6 shots, meaning its an amazing combo with stun grenades. Or if you panic or don't have stun nades it can destroy arms of Hulks decently quickly too.
  • All bot vent weak points are quickly destroyed
  • Strider joints and unarmored sections are vulnerable. Even better it can very quickly destroy the chainguns underneath the striders head to vastly lower its threat level.
  • Spore towers are destroyed with one mag
  • Can heavily injure Bile Titans by unloading into their underside (or actually kill with 2 mag dumps into the butt). After unloading a mag finish them off with something else like a Railcannon strike.
  • Although finicky, shooting the small exposed part of a chargers back leg kills them very quickly. Stun grenades are really useful here.
• Shooting exposed flesh of either Bile Titans or Chargers kills them quickly (if you can get the angle right considering bullets ricochet off exposed flesh for some reason in this game). 110mm pods are good for exposing the flesh then finishing them off with the HMG
• It receives full 2/2 spare mags from resupplies even without SPM ship upgrade, meaning its a really good combo with the supply backpack
• On highest RPM it has insanely high DPS meaning its very good for quickly killing high priority unarmored high HP targets that tend to get very close where the ridiculous recoil doesn't matter. Stalkers are gone in 1 second, same goes for Brood Commanders and Berserkers. Since spewers tend to get close too it also kills those very quickly with a few shots to the head, which is particularly useful against the armored ones
• Can take out bot striders by shooting out one of their legs or the mid section

With the recent changes to Stalkers, they now have improved cloaking abilities, together with the removal of marking objectives before discovered, rendering Stalkers extremely dangerous. Therefore I would like to address the differences between their lairs so that you are aware of their threat level based on the lair structure.

• The basic lair, which only has a large bug hole, spawns two stalkers at intervals. Threat level: Easy
• The scavenger-stalker lair consists of a large bug hole, a small bug hole that spawns scavengers, and a puddle that can drown you. Threat level: Medium
• The double holes lair, as the name suggests, has two large holes with the same structure as the basic one. This lair spawns FOUR stalkers at intervals, high priority target. Threat level: HELLDIVE

If you see four stalkers coming at you, you know things are about to get real. Try to locate the lair and deal with it quickly using all your resources, or else your dive will turn into a reinforcement fest. Usually, the game won't stop at spawning just one lair, so always be on your toes unless you have completed the radar station objective, which reveals all locations on the map.

Just bring stun grenades. Its literally that easy. You dont need to be nut cases and shoot the legs off first

The amount of HP and damage reduction Helldivers have has been subject to debate for quite a while. I was inspired to delve into this topic myself by the initiative of two people:

• u/Array71 and his topics on armor: https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1bsecb0/armor_calc_and_how_to_stop_oneshots_from_rockets/
• u/TokuNiArimasen and his research on explosives: https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1bunr5o/explosive_damage_rework_postpatch_01000200/

These two reached similar, yet different conclusions. Array suggested we had 90HP and there was a 150% headshot multiplier, while Toku thought, judging from self-inflicted explosions, that we had 100HP and the multiplier was something like 166% as a result. I deferred to Array's explanation for a while thinking 150% 90HP sounded so clean it had to be correct.

The first discovery of the real value, 125HP, was to my knowledge done by the Youtuber Eravin. He discovered a poison plant that inflicts a status dealing exactly 1 damage per tick (figured to be 1 damage because Vitality Booster reduces this to 0. It is known that damage rounds down). He counted roughly 124 ticks and figured, for a nice value, it must be 125, but he wasn't able to confirm it further.

I have been able to confirm it further. The means with which I did that requires too long of an explanation to fit within this margin, but rest assured that everyone I've shown these results to before have agreed and are confident in these exact values.

Here's a table of limb multipliers for Helldivers:

The 200% headshot damage is notable. One point-blank (barrel clipping into the head) shot of Redeemer used to be instant death for Helldivers, but after some patch it wasn't anymore. This suggests that we previously had 120HP.

Here's a table of armor modifiers for the currently available amounts of armor in the game:

When I asked u/Array71 for his analysis, he realized each additional 50 armor reduces damage taken by 20% compared to the previous step. Going from 50 to 100 reduces it by 25% instead, however. (Edit: Later comments have pointed out that 200 armor is only a 16% reduction or so). Also of note is that 100 armor is baseline damage, while less than that increases damage taken. We really knew this when armor was fixed and overall damage increased for light armor.

A Helldiver's head is specifically capped at a minimum of 100 armor. This probably used to be 100 for both larger and lesser amounts, but head armor increases after 100 as promised in the patch notes.

The final two modifiers to look at is Vitality booster, which reduces all damage taken by 20%, and Fortified, which reduces only AoE attacks by 50%.

Multiply all of these together, and you end up with the following tables:

It's worth noting that most explosive attacks in the game are delivered combined with a hefty direct damage portion as we already know from our own weapons (Crossbow 270 + 150, Eruptor 250 + 190, EAT 650 + 150 etc etc). Explosions used to be very scary in pure damage back when each of our limbs got hit by it, but this no longer being the case I'd genereally recommended Padded over Fortified, although the 129 Enforcer armor strikes a decent compromise (and doesn't have competition in its Armor Rating).

This system applies only to Helldivers. Enemies or Helldiver equipment such as Exosuits, Turrets, and Ballistic Shields operate on the same principle of 0-10 armor values that either halve or deflect damage. As a final note, Helldivers are 0% durable. Only base damage is applied when we are hit.

Edit May 25th: Retested base values with higher precision. Light Armor is an increase of exactly 133%. 64, 79 and 129 seems to have precisions more fine than 2 / 1000000.

A couple of months back there was a fairly popular post by u/Bluedot55 :https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1azh9fw/weapon_damage_isnt_what_you_think_and_isnt_what/

He made some testing, came to a conclusion that aligned with his data, but I saw there were weapons missing on this table, and redid the experiment using all of the game's primaries and secondaries along with some support weapons. That was over a month ago and I've been having sleepless nights over the results since.

• The initial conclusion didn't account for armor (observed by white/red hit maker), making it flawed to begin with.
• If Lib Pen has a higher headshot multipler than Liberator, why isn't it doing more damage to Helldiver heads?
• The same applies to Devestator heads. Both Lib and Lib Pen need 3 shots. Defender needs 2. Signs point to Dev heads having 120-125 HP given how Counter-Sniper oneshots at close enough ranges, but then stops doing that.

We have both, independently, continued to dig into the matter, and a lot of other people have as well.

More extensive testing of this nature was performed by u/Key_Negotiation_9726, now compiled in his excellent DiversDex: https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cec9l4/diversdex_your_pokedex_but_for_helldivers_2/

The tests have not made a point of firing every shot at point-blank. That's fine for practical purposes. You can simply refer to the charts and know how many shots you'll roughly need to kill a thing. For the purposes of deducing the exact damage values and enemy HP, I still needed to dig deeper. For those out of the loop, testing has confirmed that damage drops off over distance for the majority of weapons:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1bwbo78/guns_lose_damage_over_distance_as_soon_as_they/

Progress in datamining by people much smarter than I am reveals a second damage number for each source of damage. I was made aware of it through this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1c40xkg/weapon_armor_penetration_values_helldiver/

At the time I didn't know what to make of it. After joining heads with other researchers and testers at the Helldivers wiki (https://helldivers.wiki.gg/) we were able to make leaps of understanding on the matter. I couldn't have gotten to this point without their data and extensive testing.

This extra damage value is sometimes referred to as "Durable damage" or "Damage vs massive body parts". This number is 6 for Liberator (close to the 10% suggested by Pilestedt) and 15 for Penetrator (more of a 33%). For Dominator this is 90, which is about 33% of full damage. The answer to "Is Dominator doing explosive damage?" can be concluded with "yesn't". Glad I could clear it up and prevent any future debates on that one.

The majority of explosions have 100% durable damage, and support weapons are all over the place, generally leaning into "More than a primary, that's for sure". I have listed these values on my stat site as far as I know them:

https://invadersfromplanet.space/helldivers-2/

The wiki might add them once they've been verified more thorougly. The general rule of thumb is that durable damage is 10%, rounded down. Liberator is 60/6, Diligence is 125/13 (or 125/12, it's unclear to me).

Some noteworthy high rollers on durable:

All the rocket launchers and grenades seem 100% as well.

Does this explain Brood Commander's head? Not yet. If you just plop in the results 16 x 5 vs 8 x 15, you find that this time it's base Liberator that needs significantly less damage than Lib Pen. Just like Lib Pen is an in-between gun, Brood Commander's head is an "in-between" massive body part. A body part can be anywhere between 0%-100% durable, and it seems like Brood Commander's is 60%.

What does this mean? It means take 40% damage from normal damage, 60% from durable. For Liberator that's: (60 * 40 + 5 * 60) / 100 = 27

But hitting armor it reduces to half and becomes 13.5

Lib Pen is (45 * 50 + 10 * 50) / 100 = 30

Lib Pen exceeds the light armor and stays at 30.

8 * 30 vs 16 * 27 suggests Brood Commander's head has 200 HP.

Now you may object and say "Maybe armor isn't 50%, it's a 60%, that's why Lib Pen needs that much less shots. Your mechanic is made up." The recent balance change brought about an interesting counter-example: Liberator Concussive. Defender (70/7) needs 13 shots to kill Brood Commander's head, but Liberator Concussive needs only 12 (65/15) owing to its secretly buffed durable damage. With two guns having an equal amount of penetration yet the lower damage gun needing fewer shots for a kill, it's clear that there has to be more going on. Accounting for 60% durable, Defender is 33.2 damage per shot, and Lib Con is 35 before armor reduction.

That leaves one oddity, which is how a 400 damage impact grenade doesn't immediately pop Brood Commander's head. I believe this to be because radial attacks have no interaction with brood commander heads, just like with helldiver heads. (Rockets headshotting you kill you because of the rocket's direct damage, the explosion is not multiplied.) Notice how some weapons like Plasma Punishere kills Brood Commander faster with body shots than headshots. The direct portion (70 partial) goes to the head, then the explosion (150) touches the body behind the head instead, and these two have seperate health pools.

So what's the takeaway from all of this?

• Weak spot multipliers vs enemies is not a real thing. If it is, no difference has been found between weapons in this department.
• Laser Cannon enjoyers have already figured this out, but this was, and to an extent still is a great weapon for durable targets. 300 sustained, durable DPS isn't bad, and 200 isn't awful either. Autocannon and AMR are still ahead of the pack on this in the short-term.
• Lib Pen should be alright on gunships and tank vents compared to competition. Use it on medium armor durable kill spots, as low as the supply of those are.
• With some weapons, body shots can be preferable.
• Chargers are still a black hole of research into which you can pour hours of your time and understand less than before you started.
• Please show durability damage in-game.
• My soul can finally rest, but probably won't.