Helldivers 2 developers casually revealed they're quadrupling Railgun's durability damage. CCO Pilestedt said kit like the Recoilless Rifle would become a "delete key", and I love the sound of that.

Helldivers 2 was criticized for a few things over its turbulent life. First, its heavily armored enemies are difficult to kill and take too long to kill. Second, whenever someone is having too much fun, it seems that the weapon in question gets nerfed.

Arrowhead Games' CCO, formerly CEO, Johan Pilestedt spoke on Discord about the design philosophy behind an upcoming patch for the horde-shooter. The patch is due to arrive September 17.

The update promises to fix several major bugs, including restoring the flamethrower's former glory. It will also aim to make Helldivers more 'hoo-rah', and less 'getting ragdolled' by a dozen charging because you had to die just after calling down the weapon that you needed to kill them'-rah. This is good because the latter option is a mouthful.

"The update we are launching is a much more holistic approach to realigning the gameplay," Pilestedt writes. "We realised that the reason so many of you were excited about some tools like the flamethrower, the railgun, and the Eruptor was because they dealt with heavily armored opponents much more effectively than we were supposed to.... The changes we needed were a little larger than just getting back the flamethrower to where it used to be; but also getting other weapons to the level where you (and me) felt they all should've started.

Pilestedt's Helldivers 2 explains that specialised tools, such as the Spear, are not only good at what they do but also necessary to do so. All other weapons, by comparison, are pea-shooters. Arrowhead's goal is to make weapons more effective in general while making specialised anti-tank weaponry like the Spear more effective against their intended enemies.

This was demonstrated today on Twitter. The railgun will get a major upgrade, quadruplingits "durable" overall damage, and a 150% boost in damage at full charge.

"There is still a chance to excel if you use the right tools like Spear and RL to defeat [Bile titans] -- but in theory, you could defeat [Bile titans] with a 4-stack of flamethrower-mad-men," Pilested wrote in a response to one player.

When a player asks the CCO how specialized weapons like the Recoilless Rifle would be handled in the new, more flexible world, he replies that they will be "basically [a] delete key." I like that.

If this patch delivers as promised, it appears that Arrowhead has addressed the majority of its players' continued frustrations regarding its balance updates. A shift away from conservative numbers-fiddling, and instead allowing their fun options to be fun and effective in dispensing freedom.