Whether you’re being swarmed by flesh-rending bugs or knee-deep in murderous chrome within the hell that is Robot Vietnam, it’s certainly fair to say that Helldivers 2 can become overwhelming pretty quickly. Luckily for you, we’ve got no less than twenty stellar tips that will help to keep both you and your teammates alive as you bravely soar across the galaxy, spreading democracy to those who are starved of it the most.
1. Resources Are Shared – There’s No Need To Kill Your Teammates For Them
There’s no reason to kill your teammates for collecting samples, war bonds or any other resource. None at all. The reason for this is that every resource which is collected is pooled and then dispensed to every member of the team after the mission. So again, don’t kill your teammates just to get resources because, well, Helldivers 2 just doesn’t vibe that way and you shouldn’t either.
2. Share And Share Alike Your Stratagems
Stratagems are for everybody. This means that if you happen to have a support weapon stratagem on cooldown that you don’t need and notice that one of your buddies is bereft of such an armament, feel free to call it down and make their day. Sharing is caring, after all.
3. Pinging Supplies And Enemies Helps Everyone
It’s always good to have more than one set of eyes in just about anything in life and that notion proves to be especially true in Helldivers 2. So if you happen to spot some supplies or a patrol of enemies that your mates may have missed, do them a solid and give those things a good pinging. Extra sight helps the fight. Or something.
4. Communicate To Your Teammates Every Time You Deploy A Stratagem
When you’re casually about to drop an Orbital 380MM HE Barrage, you might want to inform your friends that exploding, hot death will be raining from the skies in the near term, lest you spend the next few minutes or so frantically fighting enemies as you scramble to bring your newly ruined comrades back from the dead. It’s just good manners.
5. Use Your Mission Time To Do As Much As Possible
Though you can pretty much make a beeline toward the main mission objective from the get-go, complete it and then leave whatever dustbowl you happen to be on, that would be a waste. This is because on just about every world there’s a veritable bounty of secondary objectives, resources to collect and additional missions to complete that can all help to bolster your loadout for future missions.
6. Always Bring A MG-43 Machine Gun (And Don’t Be Afraid To Refresh It)
Pretty much the first thing you should do after making landfall (other than checking your immediate vicinity for hostiles, of course) is to ensure that you’ve not only selected the MG-43 Machine Gun support stratagem but also that you summon it ASAP. Why? Well, because the MG-43 Machine Gun is an extremely powerful, high capacity, fully automatic chunk of sexy bang bang that tears apart Terminids and Automatons with equal ease.
7. Protect Your Teammates From Yourself
When you’re trying to fight off an invading horde of Terminids or Automations, the last thing you need is to be shot in the back by your ‘mates’. So, be the change you want to be in the world and make sure that you’re sparing a thought for your fellow Helldivers who might be criss-crossing in front of your line of fire.
8. If You’re Playing Solo Make Sure To Bring A Guard Dog
By the time you hit level 10 make sure that you’ve saved up enough credits to purchase the AX/LAS-5 “Guard Dog” Rover defence stratagem. This is because when twinned with either the Gatling or Machine Gun Sentry defensive stratagem, you end up with a solution that provides a solo player with sufficient support to not only take the fight to the much more numerous enemy forces but also provide something of a buffer to aid in escaping when things get too sticky.
9. Always Aim For The Weak Spot
The bigger Terminid and Automaton units, such as the Chargers and Devastators for example, have weak spots (denoted by exposed glowing flesh for the former and creepy red lights for the latter), that when focus-fired on can be taken down much quicker than just blindly shooting at any other part of their anatomy. Make sure to call these weak spots out to your teammates too – they’ll thank you for it.
10. Understand How To Fortify An Evacuation Zone
When you trigger the evacuation sequence you have two minutes to stay alive before salvation lands and whisks you to safety. However, it turns out that two minutes is a long time – especially on the higher difficulty levels – and so to make sure everyone gets home in one piece, be sure to proactively fortify your location with mines (don’t forget to let your teammates know where they are!), turrets and other such defensive stratagems.
11. Be Quick In Reinforcing Your Teammates
It’s generally good practice to reinforce your teammates as soon as you see one of them fall bravely in battle because not only does it get them back into the game sooner, but it also increases your chances of survival too.
12. Remaining Ammo Is Discarded When Reloading So Be Careful
While it can be a horrible habit to instinctively reload after just a few shots thanks to the conditioning of other shooters, you really shouldn’t be doing that in Helldivers 2, not least because each time you reload any remaining ammo is discarded.
13. Don’t Be Afraid To Dive Into Prone When The Going Gets Tough
When there’s enemy fire everywhere and heavily-armoured foes are charging your position, one of the most useful things you can do is to put some distance between yourself and all that grief by performing a diving leap backwards into a prone position. Not only does this provide some initial relief from incoming damage for a couple of precious seconds, especially if you happen to dive behind some cover, but it also provides enough time to reload your weapon or top up your health with a stim to get you back into the fight.
14. Make Sure To Tweak Your Loadouts Depending On Your Enemy
Terminids and Automatons are two very different enemies so it stands to reason that your loadouts should be as varied as your opposition. For the fleshy Terminids, you’ll want to prioritise incendiary and explosive weapons, while for the mechanical Automatons EMP and laser-focused armaments are much better suited to the task. Put simply, double-check your loadout before you hop into your hellpods, as it can make all the difference on the battlefield.
15. Synergise Your Stratagem Loadouts And Hellpod Boosters With Your Teammates
With four Helldivers in a single group there will likely be significant overlap in the stratagems and Hellpod boosters that each player has at their disposal. So it stands to reason that to become the most agile and comprehensively capable fighting unit out there, everybody brings a unique set of stratagems and Hellpod boosters to the dance so that the group is then versatile enough to respond to any threat.
16. Don’t Fight Every Enemy Patrol
There’s no need to fight every enemy patrol that you see – in fact, I would actively advise against it because very often such battles end up with the enemies calling reinforcements to these skirmishes, thus dragging out the whole affair even longer and sapping precious mission time into the bargain. Only fight when it becomes unavoidable.
17. Aim Area Of Effect Stratagems At Areas Rather Than Individual Enemies
Offensive area-of-effect stratagems such as the Orbital Walking Barrage and Orbital Gatling Barrage have been engineered to deal a substantial amount of damage to a large area. As a result, it makes sense to deploy these stratagems in a location rather than tagging an enemy directly – not least because if you happen to tag a particularly agile enemy (such as a leaping Terminid, for example), your stratagem can be hilariously returned to its sender, wiping out your entire group in the process. Fun but also not fun.
18. Change Your Stance (And Perspective) To Improve Your Accuracy
Like just about any other shooter out there, you can improve your accuracy in Helldivers 2 by either crouching or lying prone. However, while Helldivers 2 is primarily a third-person affair, you can also snap into a first-person, scoped perspective which makes landing precise shots on medium to long-distance baddies a lot easier than it otherwise would be.
19. Running And Gunning Can Save You In A Pinch
One overlooked aspect of Helldivers 2 third-person shooter gameplay is that you can actively run and gun should you so choose. While I wouldn’t recommend it as an attacking strategy, running backwards and gunning can prove very useful in thinning an encroaching horde and provide some time to take a breather and assess your next move.
20. Completing Major And Personal Orders Is A Great Way To Earn Extra Medals
Before you launch off to spread democracy you might want to take a look at the existing major and personal orders that are active. While the major orders tend to concern liberating a particular planet and take much longer to achieve, personal orders are instead much more digestible bite-sized objectives, such as completing a certain number of secondary objectives, killing a set number of specific enemies and so on which reward handfuls of additional medals for doing stuff that you would probably be doing anyway.
