If you’ve played Helldivers 2 for any length of time, you’ll know that friendly fire can be as lethal as enemy attacks. This is the nature of Arrowhead’s unpredictable and often hilarious action game; you never know where the next explosion is coming from, and death is never far away.
But what causes the most number of friendly fire incidents? It’s something I’ve wondered about as a fan of Helldivers 2, as someone who’s laughed down my mic at my teammates as I’ve inadvertently blown them up or shredded them to pieces with a turret. Ah, the turrets! More of a menace than a help, some would say.
Arrowhead has now provided some answers via an infographic that reveals all sorts of stats for Helldivers 2’s second year of service. We see that the Terminids are the most-killed enemy faction, which makes a lot of sense to me given there are a lot more of them, typically, and, well, they’re just the most fun enemy to face.
Things get a little more interesting when it comes to the most-deployed stratagems. The top three are no surprise (of course Reinforce is top, you use it to bring squadmates back in). The 500KG Bomb being second doesn’t surprise me either, given its eternal usefulness. Resupply makes a lot of sense in third.
But it’s the friendly fire list that has my attention. Top of the tree is the Eagle Strafing Run, which is by quite some distance the biggest offender of friendly fire incidents, and ahead of the battlefield nuisance that is the Hellbomb. I wouldn’t have thought the Eagle Strafing Run would have caused so much chaos! What I think is happening here is that Arrowhead is counting the DSS Eagle Storm, which triggers periodic, automatic Eagle Strafing Runs during missions. Players often bemoan the DSS for causing accidental friendly fire, and some actively avoid playing with it available.
“The DSS Eagle Storm is an active detriment to our operations on Cyberstan,” reads one recent reddit thread, posted amid the community push against the Cyborg homeworld.
“I just finished a D10 campaign with my fireteam where all four of us either died to an errant Eagle Strafing Run or the game crashed because of an Eagle Strike. I feel like instead of random map wide strike we should be given a low/zero cooldown Eagle Strafing stratagem. The reinforcement budget spent fixing Eagle-1’s mistakes is (in my opinion) egregious and totally fixable.”
“Yeah, those DSS Eagle pilots really need to work on their coordination,” added another.
Meanwhile, I am not surprised to see the Guard Dog on the list, though. Damn that thing! And the less said about mines, the better.
Lots to chew on, then, as fans and Arrowhead itself ponder the future of Helldivers 2, which is still going strong over two years since its launch. Check out IGN’s recent interview with game director Mikael Eriksson for more on what to expect.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
