Helldivers 2’s hardest difficulties are now even harder because Super Earth’s best soldiers are also insane

Published:

3 February 2026

Last Updated: 3 February 2026

By:

If you thought that Helldivers 2 wasn’t difficult enough, Arrowhead Game Studios has you covered. As players now charge towards New Cyberstan, the Automaton Homeworld, in Patch 6.0.0, the game’s hardest difficulties have been made even harder.

Following feedback from the game’s most dedicated players, Arrowhead has decided to ramp up the challenge with an increase of “intensity” for the game’s highest difficulty levels.

Announced in a recent video, Arrowhead confirmed that they have “made changes across all factions to increase the intensity on high difficulties”, referring to levels 9 and 10. However, right now, players should notice the biggest jump in difficulty on the Automaton front.

“The biggest change should be noticed on the Automaton front while Terminids and the Illuminate are less affected,” the team explained. With that said, the other two factions should also ramp up in intensity as the Into the Unjust campaign continues forth.

Additionally, enemies are now smarter overall. In the past, enemies have actually been consistently inaccurate in their shots as “calculations were not always updated when there were many enemies trying to aim”. Now, calculations are always being updated – without a drop in performance – so they are much deadlier than before. Again, this fix mostly changes Automaton behaviour, but other ranged enemies should benefit as well.

Alongside the change in overall difficulty for higher-tier players, Arrowhead has also given players a 50% buff to base melee damage across all weapons, although armour passives that increase melee have been nerfed. Arrowhead has done this to make sure that any “armour passive that increases melee damage [is] less mandatory”, but the overall damage of melee is improved across the board.

All in all, it seems like a great change for Helldivers 2 as many fans have complained about the lack of higher difficulties in the game. If your most dedicated soldiers want the harder difficulties to be even harder, you ramp that challenge up for the little psychopaths.

Helldivers 2 is now in a great place. While the game did have a rough spot last year, Arrowhead has jumped into 2026 with a clear goal of expanding the game with new features, weapons, and more bombastic campaigns.

About The Author

Lewis White

Lewis White is a veteran games journalist with over a decade in the field. Starting with beloved Xbox website ICXM/XboxMAD, Lewis became the Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser before becoming the Editor in Chief of StealthOptional and Gfinityesports. Lewis later jumped to By Gamers For Gamers where he jumped to become EIC of VideoGamer and the host of the New VideoGamer Podcast prior to the website’s acquisition.

Over the years, Lewis has also seen long-form investigative pieces published in outlets such as Eurogamer, PCGamesN, Wireframe, Retro Gamer, Nintendo Life, and EDGE. Now, as the Editor in Chief of FRVR Blog, Lewis strives to bring the same level of quality journalism with interview-led content to the site in both written and audio form with the FRVR Podcast.

With a First Degree BA Hons in Games Journalism and Public Relations, Lewis has been a stable part of the British games press for over a decade, and has frequently displayed his love of Halo, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and other games pretty much everywhere he’s worked. And FRVR is no different.

See author's posts