How to increase mission difficulty in Helldivers 2

Changing difficulties in Helldiver 2 should be easily done by a switch. But for some reason, you must play in a certain way to unlock the higher levels. Reading this guide could be worth your time because it’ll save you a lot of it. To find out how to increase the mission difficulty in Helldivers 2, we got the answer.

Helldivers 2: How to increase mission difficulty

Going up a level in the game by playing Helldivers 2 for a while. To advance, you have to beat a mission in any operation at the difficulty you’re playing on. If the difficulty level is Trivial which is the easiest stage and you beat it, the Easy difficulty unlocks. Then by beating a mission on the Easy difficulty, you’ll unlock the Medium difficulty. But you can still go back to all the levels and set it to any of the difficulties you’ve unlocked. I felt I needed more practice, so I dropped back down to Medium in some cases. This just gives you options and freedom in you how play. 

All difficulty levels – explained

There are a total of nine levels you can go through. All will change how the matches run in Helldivers 2. The higher you go, the more rewards there are to earn. 

• Trivial: This stage has mostly primary objectives and grunt-level enemy patrols. You won’t be collecting much as there are only common samples found here.

• Easy: Now you get the chance to liberate Light Outposts and get Allied Tactical Objectives which yield more badges and samples. Like Trival, you can only find common samples within this difficulty.

• Medium: You’ll be fighting more armored enemies with more objectives that are controlled by the enemy. This is also the last stage where you can find only common samples.

• Challenging: Heavily armored enemies seem to appear in abundance now, there’s also more of their outposts to be liberated. Rare samples will start to appear on top of the common ones.

• Hard: More mission objectives are added and larger enemies like the Hulks become the threat. The samples found here are common and rare. 

• Extreme: The number of massive and armored enemies increases tenfold. I wouldn’t recommend running this alone. You can attempt a solo session, but you might not get very far. As with the Hard and Challenging, common and rare samples are only available in this difficulty. 

• Suicide Mission: Even more objectives drop with a larger presence of Massive enemies. Heavily armored enemies feel like they replace the grunts how many there are now. On top of that, you’ll start collecting Super Rare samples when you’re on Suicide Mission. 

• Impossible: The number of all enemy types has jumped up. You will be engaging mostly with larger and special enemy types. To make matters worse, you’ll need to do more main objectives to extract. You’ll find a lot of Super Rare samples, so the trade-off can be worth it. 

• Helldive: Take everything mentioned in the last three stages, and turn it up to 100. Everything is increased to its limit. More Massive enemies and more objectives become the norm. This is a difficulty level you must prepare your whole squad for because it will test you. These four difficulties are the only ones to offer Super Rare samples, so farming may be done. 

Before you Helldive

Each of the aforementioned difficulties does change gameplay quite a bit. But from Trival to Hard, it becomes a steady climb in terms of how tough the missions can be. On the other hand, in Extreme to Helldive, you’ll notice things change almost immediately. The worst part, there’s less time and more objectives. So your team will need to keep on moving as they go through the match. Even if you have a good build, you’ll still need to rely on your squadmates to help you out. 

On the flip side, the rewards are plentiful. You can get more badges and more samples if you play through the last four difficulties. However, make sure you understand Helldivers 2 before even attempting the Extreme level. 

Yes, Helldivers 2 gets tougher and more demanding as you go. These Stratagems might make even the hardest difficulty in the game easier to go down. 

Helldivers 2 is avaible now via Steam and PS5.