After getting giddy-upped in major fashion, Helldivers 2’s Bile Titan-slaying six-shooter has now sent the community through every stage of the buff reaction Kübler-Ross model

Helldivers 2’s latest update, Patch 01.001.104, brought with it a lot of tweaks to weapons, but few have seen more chatter this week than the buff to the P-4 Senator, a double-action revolver – after being supercharged – has turned a lot of Super Earthers into would-be John Waynes.

As part of the patch, the gun had its armor penetration increased from 3 to 4, projectile damage increased from 175 to 200 and projectile durable damage increased from 35 to 70. The result? Well, being able to use it to blast away Bile Titans in just a few shots, take out some hulks too while you’re at it, and a cascade of memes about it being high noon across the galaxy.

That was just stage one, though. Over the past couple of days, Helldivers 2’s subreddit has seen players go through several other steps of what I’m dubbing the buff reaction Kübler-Ross model, or the four stages of griefing .

Stage two kicked off not long after that flurry of initial praise, with a couple of folks starting to think ‘well, hold your horses now, maybe these changes have made the Senator a bit too overpowered’. “I love the feeling you get when you see a bile titan appear, it’s that moment of ‘HOLY S**T WHAT DO WE DO, WHAT CAN WE THROW AT THIS MONSTER??!!’, one wrote, “But now with it being some revolver shots away from dead I just don’t feel that same dread and awe when seeing a bile titan. It’s too fragile.”

Following on from that, stage three was the Reddit equivalent of Twitter’s ‘retweet to dunk on a thing you think is dumb’ phenomenon (which, to be fair, routinely produces some very funny posts), with posts telling those few who’d suggested that the gun might be too OP that they were, in fact, very wrong, thank you very much.

“It’s not broken imo, I honestly think it’s fine,” argued one of these folks, “Using it vs [armour penetration four] enemies (besides hulks) is a pipedream due to the damage not being high enough. It just helps it do more damage at its intended role of medium clear, with some anti heavy utility.” They then went through a number of other sidearms, outlining their thoughts that each of them still had reasons you’d go for them over the Senator in certain scenarios.

Stage four – or four and five depending on how you want to categorise things – follows on from that last point. Should this change to the Senator mean anyuthing in terms of changes to other weapons and strategems going forward? Some folks thought yes, arguing that primary weapons like the Slugger and Dominator should perhaps have their armour pententation upped to match it.

Others, seemigly with a lot more support, argued that no, Arrowhead should not do that. “Making any primary weapon [except for the flamethrowers and Constitution] have AP4 would outclass every other primary weapon,” one wrote, “it would shut down certain loadouts because “why take x weapon when you have y weapon that can do AT”, hell it would even outshine some support weapons which should really never happen.”

The endgame of this back-and-forth, at least for now, seems to be some folks concluding that the only primary weapons that should potentially be given level four AP are the Eruptor or maybe “something like a precise bolt-action sniper”.

And, while all of that’s been going on, it looks like the divers have still managed to come out on top in the Major order that’s just finished. Nice.