Helldivers 2‘s April 29 updatemay have nerfed some things, but it also made DMRs relevant, massively improved the hand cannon’s usability, and delivered a slew of other goodies. It didn’t take long, however, for players to figure out that the “fix” for the game’s ricochets is a tad problematic.
As the excitement overall the balancing changesdied down, players realized that ricochets may have become exceedingly dangerous with the new update. On the biggestHelldivers 2subreddit, there’sa multitudeofhighly upvotedthreads discussing the issues with the new ricochet system and even posting footage of explosive rounds reflecting directly off of enemy armor and back into the person firing them.
As per Arrowhead’s owndescription of the ricochet rework, here’s what was done to the feature with update 01.000.300: “Shots that ricochet from heavy armored enemies will now properly hit the Helldiver who fired them. Trigger discipline is highly recommended,” said the patch notes.
Helldivers 2’s new ricochet system is just the old one, but fixed
Given how the patch notes are worded, and the videos posted by the players experiencing issues, it’s easy to conclude that the current intention is for reflected rounds to basically ricochet back directly into the Helldiver firing them, and that was the community’s working theory for a little while. This, however, was explained by Redditor zenbast not too long after the misinformation first began to spread:
Basically, the issue is trifold:
This combined into a perfect storm of people misunderstanding the developers’ intentions and conflating the fixed ricochets with sudden deaths from a variety of other sources. Up to the April 29 update, the players’ own ricochets couldneverkill them, and would instead just pass through them. That specific behavior – which is an obvious bug – is what was fixed in the new update, and the patch notes’ wording didn’t adequately clarify what was happening in the backend.
In summary, then, there’s no real need to worry about ricocheted rounds if you didn’t worry about them up until now. Similarly, there is a real need to worry about using high-explosive weaponry in close-quarters combat, as this should be obviously avoided at all costs. Doubly so if you’re happy using the admittedly phenomenal Eruptor rifle, which not only explodes but also showers the nearby area in hot shrapnel.
