The flamethrower in Helldivers 2 isn’t in the best spot, especially considering recent flame changes. And the latest patch came with a bug that unironically made it even less effective.
Helldivers 2 received a small patch 01.001.004 on Aug. 20 with several fixes, including fixes to ragdolling and a fix to where “flamethrower particles would ignore enemies.” Unfortunately, the last part caused an accidental stealth nerf to the FLAM-40 flamethrower, as it now may not deal damage to Charger’s tails at all.
As shared by many players over at the Helldivers 2 subreddit and Discord, the flamethrower is very inconsistent when it comes to dealing with Chargers’ tails, specifically. From brief testing, we noticed the flamethrower doesn’t always show hit marks when firing at a Charger’s tail, leading to multiple wasted fuel canisters. On the plus side, the flamethrower is still good, if not better, at clearing waves of smaller enemies after the patch.
Unlike the previous flamethrower nerf that angered the Helldivers 2 community, this seems to be an unintentional bug. Arrowhead Game Studios community manager Twinbeard wrote on Discord that there are no flamethrower nerfs the team knows of. Twinbeard also acknowledged there is something wrong with the flamethrower, and the team is investigating what happened.
In the meantime, avoid using flamethrowers against Chargers, or always have a backup weapon with enough ammo in case the flamethrower bugs out. Chargers are already annoying to deal with, and this bug, paired with the flame bouncing off the armor, doesn’t make helldiving any easier.
