Helldivers 2's 7.1.0 update changes how enemies treat empty vehicles, repairs several career-stat categories and gives the Stratagem Hero cabinet its own local competition.
According to Arrowhead's official patch notes, enemies will no longer target unoccupied vehicles. That addresses a frustrating situation in which players could leave a vehicle to handle an objective and return to find enemies destroying the unattended machine.
The update also fixes career tracking for kills made with mines, vehicles, drones and backpacks. Those eliminations should now contribute to the relevant lifetime statistics rather than disappearing from the record. Stratagem Hero, the shipboard input-sequence minigame, gains Destroyer-based leaderboards, letting players compare scores within the same ship context.
Other fixes target mission flow. Players should no longer remain stuck in a state where they cannot be reinforced after a squadmate throws a reinforcement stratagem or the entire squad dies. Arrowhead also says enemy spawns are distributed more evenly among separated players and adjusts the time between waves to reduce downtime.
The release combines fixes, balance changes and items drawn from community feedback. As with any large live-service patch, the notes describe intended behavior; players may still encounter edge cases that require follow-up fixes.
