Boosters and You: Guide to the Best Boosters

Boosters are essentially perks from Helldivers 1; packages that enhance your ability's as well as your teams.

You unlock these in the Warbonds, and they get progressively more expensive as you go down the warbonds pass.

As such, it isn't often clear what they do and what exact benefit they bring to the team, as well as what you should be bringing; this guide hopes to remedy that.

Perks are Now Boosters

If you're a veteran Helldiver, you likely remember the perks from HD1. The staples like Cardio Accelerator, All Terrain Boots, Stratagem Priority, etc.

In the last game, there were essentially only a handful of good perks to choose, and they only benefited yourself.

In Helldivers 2, that is changed. Perks are now Boosters, and they help your ENTIRE team. So when selecting a booster, think about the difficulty, terrain, biome, faction, and mission you are going to be doing.

Disclaimer: WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.

The following is my opinion after 100 hours and several dozens of helldives, both public and private lobbies, solo and with other players.

Just because your team does not equip your preferred booster, that does NOT mean you get the right to flame them. This is a cooperative game where you FIGHT and DIE together. Yes, your choices dictate how your match will go, but it does NOT mean you get to flame someone because they didn't take the booster you wanted.

My suggestion? Kindly ask if they have X booster and if such, ask if they'll equip it. At lower difficulties, booster choices, while they do impact the mission, aren't the BIGGEST deal, as it is your personal decisions in the actual dive that matter. At high difficulties, yes, certain boosters are preferred over others, and some choices will dictate whether you succeed or not.

At the end of the day, this is a game, these are my personal opinions and we're all here to have fun!

Available Boosters

VITALITY ENHANCEMENT

 ALLOWS ALL HELLDIVERS TO RESIST INJURY.
UNLOCKED ON PAGE 4 OF HELLDIVERS MOBILIZE WARBOND 

This booster is duel purpose: it grants helldivers 30% more health as well as increase your resistant to limb injuries.

What does this mean though? Having an injured arm impacts your aiming and shooting (from what I've and others have gathered, it doesn't seem to do anything?), an injured leg means you can't run or sprint and you hobble along, and an injured chest will result in you bleeding out slowly, eventually keeling over dead.

Without this booster, you will sustain an injury to one or both legs after 2 falls from a decently high height. With this booster, it bumps up to 3. Without this booster, a single shot from pretty much any gun will destroy your limb, injuring it. With this booster, you can shrug off a round or so before you get injured. Interestingly, the "Servo-Assisted" trait on some armors (increases limb health by 50%) is pretty much the same as what this booster does, but the effects DO NOT STACK.

30% more health and being much less likely to break your entire body is great; its the difference between getting one shotted, and hobbling away with a sliver of health. The limb break resistance is just the cherry on top.

STAMINA ENHANCEMENT

 INCREASES ALL HELLDIVERS' STAMINA CAPACITY AND RECOVERY
UNLOCKED ON PAGE 7 OF HELLDIVERS MOBILIZE WARBOND 

This booster increases both your stamina capacity, as well as your recovery when you are not sprinting/diving, etc. This is roughly a 30% boost in stamina capacity, as well as a stamina recovery speed increase of upwards 66% depending on armor. I feel it necessary to say: this is HUGE and you'd be remiss to ignore this booster.

This is extremely useful as getting to and from your objectives on the large maps that Helldivers 2 offers is important. This is in my opinion useful with every type of armor, but doubly so if you choose to run Heavy armor as you have less stamina and a slower recharge time.

MUSCLE ENHANCEMENT

 ALLOWS HELLDIVERS TO TRAVERSE DIFFICULTY TERRAIN WITH EASE
UNLOCKED ON PAGE 9 OF HELLDIVERS MOBILIZE WARBOND 

If you played Helldivers 1, you probably remember the All-Terrain Boots perk that was locked behind the Terrain Specialist Pack for 2.99 USD, and how it was essentially mandatory for the snowy and forest/swamp biome missions. I won't say that's the case here (although I was itching for my boots when I was deployed on Heeth launch week) but these do fulfill the same niche that the boots did in HD1.

Not mandatory on every planet as the biome and terrain is what dictates the need for them, but general rule of thumb is if a planet has: snow, sand, mud, swamps, waste high water you have to cross, OR Planetary Effects like blizzards or rainstorms (ie: mud), it might be a good idea to take it.

UAV RECON BOOSTER

 INCREASES ALL HELLDIVERS' EFFECTIVE RADAR RANGE
UNLOCKED ON PAGE 6 OF HELLDIVERS MOBILIZE WARBOND 

The UAV Recon Booster, as the name suggests, boosts the maximum range of your portable radar.

• Without BOTH the UAV Recon Booster AND the Nuclear Radar Bridge upgrade, your map scan range is rougly 48 meters.
  
• Without UAV Recon Booster BUT having the Nuclear Radar Bridge upgrade, your map scan range is roughly 72 meters.
  
• With BOTH the UAV Recon booster and the Nuclear Radar Bridge upgrade, your map scan range is roughly 110 meters.

A 50% upgrade in UAV range.

Frankly, I think the range you get with Nuclear Radar upgrade (2/3 upgrade for the Bridge) is more than enough, as well as the fact some armor's have a passive that allows you to scan enemies on your map with your map markers. Useful but not something I would be taking unless me or my squad has taken the staple boosters first. I should mention however that at high difficulty, using your map to scan patrols during downtimes as well as when you are moving between objectives/extracts is paramount, as this gives you the opportunity to avoid engagements and save ammo, time and reinforcements.

INCREASED REINFORCEMENT BUDGET

 INCREASES THE NUMBER OF AVAILABLE REINFORCEMENTS
UNLOCKED ON PAGE 10 OF HELLDIVERS MOBILIZE WARBOND 

You get 5 reinforcements per helldiver, with a team of 4, thats 20 reinforcements. At higher difficulties, combined with more "accident" prone teammates, these can run out fast. What this booster does is give you 1 more reinforcement PER teammate in the active game. What that means is if you are solo, you get 6 instead of 5, but if you're in a full party and you have this booster, you get 24 instead of 20 reinforcements. In my opinion, EXTREMELY useful at high difficulties and some missions. Not necessarily needed for certain difficulties and mission types, so take something in lieu of it, but for level 7-9 difficulty missions I would definitely consider grabbing it.

FLEXIBLE REINFORCEMENT BUDGET

 REDUCES TIME UNTIL NEW REINFORCEMENTS ARE GRANTED ONCE THEY'VE BEEN DEPLETED
UNLOCKED ON PAGE 3 OF STEELED VETERANS WARBOND 

Once all reinforcements are depleted, you have a 2 minute cooldown for every 1 reinforcement, meaning if your entire team is dead besides you, and you call in a reinforcement, you will call in the NEXT helldiver (the first to die), and then reinforcements go on cooldown. This is a game mechanic meant to make sure you are both: playing smart and not wasting your team's lives, but also to punish you for making bad plays.

What does this all mean for this booster? It decreases the cooldown between depleted reinforcement callins by about 12-13 seconds. Yes, thats right, instead of 2 minutes, you only have to wait 1:48 seconds. Yeah, for the massive grind of getting to page 3 of the premium steeled veterans pass, you were hoping it did more. Useful? Likely. In my opinion, this is ONLY useful if you are finding yourself repeatedly having to call in reinforcements off cooldown, as this can potentially save you crucial seconds between being alone and being a duo, trio, quad, etc. However I would NOT take this if it meant I was giving up better, and arguably much more proactive choices, such as the next booster.

HELLPOD SPACE OPTIMIZATION

 HELLDIVERS COME OUT OF THE HELLPOD FULLY STOCKED ON AMMO, GRENADES AND STIMS
UNLOCKED ON PAGE 3 OF HELLDIVERS MOBILIZE WARBOND 

Last on the list of the launch boosters, but certainly not least. The first booster you (hopefully) unlocked and as such one you should be equipping every mission. This is quite frankly the best booster in the game hands down as it drastically increases your combat effectiveness straight out of the pod; you don't have to call in resupply as soon as you drop/go searching for POI's for ammo, you have all your grenades for closing bug holes/bot fabricators, and you have all your stims instead of half (they run out fast in high difficulty). If your team has not chosen this yet, THIS is the booster you should be taking, as in my opinion, this provides much more obvious and straight-forward benefits than any other booster does.

Available Boosters Pt. 2

LOCALIZATION BOOSTER

INCREASES THE TIME BETWEEN ENEMY ENCOUNTERS
UNLOCKED ON PAGE 1 OF THE CUTTING EDGE PREMIUM WARBOND

Cooldown on Bug Breaches and Bot Drops is increased by 10% give or take.

The singular booster that comes with the Cutting Edge Premium Warbond, the description is a bit confusing, but from what I've gathered it puts a cooldown between enemy's calling in reinforcements.

Say a patrol detects you and before you can put them down they call in reinforcements, be it a bug breach or a dropship. You put down the first patrol, and the reinforcements begin to engage you. Typically, this would lead to a reinforcement loop of one squad being called in, and that one calling in another, and so on; an endless reinforcement loop wasting your resources and time.

What this does, it increases the cooldown between reinforcement call-in's for the enemy, making it so they can't as easily call in back-to-back reinforcements. Extremely useful and most likely a must have in high difficulty play. Do keep in mind, this doesn't seem to impact the initial bug breaches or dropships you will have on you when starting an objective; these spawns are set.

EXPERT EXTRACTION PILOT

LOWERS THE TIME IT TAKES FOR THE EXTRACTION SHUTTLE TO REACH THE EXTRACTION BEACON.
UNLOCKED ON PAGE 2 OF THE DEMOCRATIC DETONATION PREMIUM WARBOND

The singular booster that comes with the Democratic Detonation Premium Warbond, the description bluntly states what it does but not exactly how much time it saves.

This gives you about 16.67%/20 seconds (based off a 2 minute extract time) off the time it takes for the extraction shuttle to arrive.

Speaking frankly, 20 seconds isnt all that much and by the time you call in the extraction, you have already completed the mission, meaning you get the rewards no matter what. This is solely useful if you have somebody in the party that REALLY needs to extract, say grinding samples for example. Otherwise, there are a bevy of other, more useful boosters to take.

MOTIVATIONAL SHOCKS

ALLOWS ALL HELLDIVERS TO RECOVER FASTER AFTER BEING SLOWED BY AN ATTACK, SUCH AS ACID. DOES NOT MITIGATE "AREA EFFECTS," SUCH AS EMS STRIKES.
UNLOCKED ON PAGE 1 OF THE POLAR PATRIOTS PREMIUM WARBOND

Once again the singular booster for the (arguably) worst warbond we've had, this booster decreases the slow down stun the helldiver receives after being attacked, as well as the slow down time you'd receive from acidic attacks. Potentially a big boon against the bugs?

This, in practice will give you about a 23-25% percent reduction in stun on attacks (based on a 3 second standard stun, reduced down to 2.30 with this booster on). However, most enemies are easy to take care of when they are alone, which is where you'll notice the reduction in stun duration. If attacked by multiple enemies (which if its the bugs, that's essentially all that will happen) you'll repeatedly be hit, getting slow and stunlocked.

The basis of this booster is that it "shocks" you back into action when slowed, but it doesn't seem to do that much when you're repeatedly being slowed, as if the shocks are on cooldown. As such, not recommended to take; just take Vitality Enhancement.

Available Boosters Pt. 3

EXPERIMENTAL INFUSION

IN ADDITION TO RESTORING HEALTH, STIMS TEMPORARILY INCREASE MOVEMENT SPEED AND DAMAGE REDUCTION. CAUSES TREMBLING.
UNLOCKS ON PAGE 3 OF THE VIPER COMMANDOS PREMIUM WARBOND.

An experimental cocktail of stimulants and battle chems, this booster augments your stimulants to further increase movement speed by 15% as well as damage reduction for roughly 10 seconds. As you may be aware, stims are incredibly powerful already, fully healing wounds, broken limbs, as well as refreshing your stamina back to full alongside some powerful invincibility frames. Adding this booster to the mix, well, you'll be VERY hard pressed to die while it's effects are active.

Your screen DOES glow green, you go into a mild hallucination (beer goggles almost), and you hands appear to shake resulting in your aim getting a bit tipsy, but that's a small price to pay when you're surrounded by gunfire/bugs.

FIREBOMB HELLPODS

LINES ALL HELLPODS WITH VOLATILE INCENDIARIES THAT DETONATE UPON IMPACT, IGNITING ANY UNITS IN VICINITY OF THE DROP SITE.
UNLOCKS ON PAGE 3 OF THE FREEDOM'S FLAME PREMIUM WARBOND.

Makes you and your squad's hellpods burst in fire upon landing, setting alight the immediate area around you while also dealing damage akin to a napalm grenade. Sounds good right? The problem is this impact's ALL stratagems that call in hellpod's, so your teammate's reinforcement hellpod's, your backpack and support weapon pods, even the resupply pods.

This is easily the best way to accidentally team kill your team, as the efficiency of throwing your stratagem calling in front of you and sprinting to its drop the second it lands will now be met with you catching on fire and dying a second later. The only benefits it does have is that it will kill all lesser enemies in the area around the hellpod, but you can already kill these chaff easily using your weapons. The only real game changing capability of this booster is that it guarantees a one tap kill on a bile titan if you hit it with a hellpod; but this tactic of dying and then using your reinforcement of taking out a SINGLE bile titan is frankly wasteful of your reinforcements, as well as a booster slot. Avoid.

DEAD SPRINT

 ALLOWS HELLDIVERS TO KEEP SPRINTING EVEN WHEN THEY ARE OUT OF STAMINA, DRAINING THEIR HEALTH INSTEAD
UNLOCKS ON PAGE 1 OF TRUTH ENFORCERS PREMIUM WARBOND.

What the description states, this will allow you to trade health for increased sprint. As unique as this is, I have to wonder the actual use case of this outside of speedrunning missions for super credits. In essence, you will trade 3.6% health per second of sprinting, to a maximum of around 25 seconds of sprinting. You are not capable of dying from using this booster, but you will make yourself 1 shot to pretty much every enemy if you do use the entire health bar for a run. Practicality wise, you are able to stim yourself to get your entire stamina bar back, as well as the fact the stamina enhancement booster not only nearly doubles your stamina but increases its recharge to be less than a few seconds.

Practical only when doing super credit runs.

Available Boosters Pt. 4

ARMED RESUPPLY PODS

 MOUNTS A MODIFIED AR-23 LIBERATOR TO ALL RESUPPLY PODS, ALLOWING THEM TO DOUBLE AS AUTOMATIC TURRETS.
UNLOCKS ON PAGE 2 OF THE URBAN LEGENDS PREMIUM WARBOND.

Puts the default Helldiver primary, the AR-23 Liberator, on top of the resupply pods, making the resupply pod (which mind you is on a 2 and a half minute cooldown) double as a mini sentry essentially. Is effective at dispatching light armored enemies, and about 15-20 at that.

Another meme addition booster, this is pretty useless and you shouldn't take this over literally anything else unless you're playing around with a premade team of friends or something. Mind you, the enemies of Super Earth do not target the resupply pod, but a single explosive or charge from a Terminid is enough to destroy the resupply pod, and thus, the mini sentry. At best, it will get 15-20 kills, at worst, it'll shoot you in the back and kill you.

SAMPLE EXTRICATOR

 LARGE ENEMIES NOW HAVE A SMALL CHANCE OF DROPPING SAMPLES ON DEATH. CAPPED AT 10 DROPS PER MISSION.
UNLOCKS ON PAGE 3 OF THE BORDERLINE JUSTICE PREMIUM WARBOND.

Large enemies (All charger breeds, impalers, bile titans, Hulks, Factory Striders, and Harvesters) have a chance to drop a common sample upon death. Found within their corpse, you are capped at 10 common sample drops per mission.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of drawbacks to this. New divers who would be the most appreciative of this booster would also mostly be dropping into missions that have a smaller spawn chance of large enemies, meaning less drops. They are also more appreciative of a booster that ACTUALLY would help them stay alive, meaning more samples recovered. I just can't figure out what purpose this is for; its not meant for quick fast sample farm missions because it relies on you getting tons of large enemy spawns to get that 10 sample cap.

My Recomendations

Must Haves:

• Hellpod Space Optimization: Full ammo, grenades and health right off spawn is great and saves you from having to call down a supply pod off rip, decreases the time in which you need to scavenge, and also means those using armor with the Engineering Kit and Med-Kit trait will spawn with THEIR full inventory of grenades/stims, respectively.
  
• Stamina Enhancement: 30% more stamina and 23% faster stamina recovery is insanely powerful and if someone isn't running this in a match of 3-4 players you will feel this tremendously, especially if you're running heavy armor.
  
• Vitality Enhancement: 30% more health for your entire squad plus higher limb break resistance. I'd go as far as to say that your arms getting injured isn't gonna be the death of you, your legs getting broken WILL be. The difference between getting one shotted, and hobbling away with a sliver of health; the difference between being able to shrug off a leg injury versus being a deer in headlights for a charger sprint.

For Snow/Sand/Muddy/Swampy/Rainy Planets AND/OR Planets with Planetary Effects like Blizzards or Rainstorms:

• Muscle Enhacement: With the new inclusion of Experimental Infusion, you can make a very solid argument against taking this on pretty much every planet EXCEPT Snow. Always take this as your fourth on snow; the effects are very noticeable.

Top Tier 4th Slot Pick:

• Experimental Infusion: You essentially become Max Payne and Usain Bolt, shrugging off injuries and speeding away from danger. It's ALMOST a get out of jail free card in bad situations, making kiting, retreating, and even just between locations quicker. Paired with Medic Passive Armor, this thing is just NUTS. This should frankly be the de facto 4th slot pick for every mission except for large AO snow/ice planet missions, where you would be better off taking the previous booster.

For Open Ended Missions on Large Maps:

• Localization Confusion: A viable choice on open ended large map missions. This includes ICBM, Destroy Hives/Fabricators, Eggs, Dropships, etc. Reducing the cooldown between reinforcements, especially back to back, can essentially turn a level 9 mission to a level 8. A booster than I don't mind having if all the essentials are chosen already.

Super Credit Farming:

• Dead Sprint: This is the only viable use case I see this booster being good at? Lets you just sprint around the entire match looking for super credits on low difficulty missions, but that's it to be honest.
  
  

  Maybe Viable...?:

  • Increased Reinforcement Budget: In public matches, where the variety of skill levels, builds, and squad cohesion can vary, this booster can be the difference between the whole squad wiping on the last objective, or completing it AND THEN wiping but at least getting the victory. Some people will say "if you squad burns 20 reinforcements, they're likely gonna burn those extra 4 too" of which, I agree with that sentiment, but if the option is failing an operation after 40 minutes or barely eking out a Pyrrhic victory, than I'll choose the latter.
  
  

  Don't Bother Taking:

  • UAV Recon Booster: In general I REALLY want to recommend this, but in practical purposes I've found public match players have little want or care to utilize their map for any purposes other than to find loot spots or the next objective, forgoing the patrol scanning utility of their map. This was a problem in HD1 but since you were forced to either all go together as a squad or not move at all, you'd generally either avoid patrols or stand and fight. In this game however, there is no such constraint; allowing a player off spawn to immediately high-tail in the opposite direction and aggro as many patrols as they want. Like I said, useful but I personally something much more active. Still viable for spotting POI's when farming credits/medals/samples, tho at high skill you can "read" the map on where POI's will be.
    
  • Flexible Reinforcement Budget: Frankly useless as it shaving off a meager 12 seconds on a single reinforcement cooldown is stunningly meager. You are better off taking literally anything else, which, considering where this booster is located in the premium pass, you should have unlocked. In my opinion this booster should be merged with Increased Reinforcement Budget by Arrowhead Studios so this is the go-to "throw Helldivers at a problem until its fixed" booster.
    
  • Expert Extraction Pilot: cuts down the time it takes for the extract to arrive by 16.67%, which is only a meager 20 seconds in most cases (2 minute extracts). There are a bevy of other much more viable boosters that will increased your squads capabilities, and the only way I can see this being useful at all is if you are sample farming.
    
  • Motivational Shocks: "It aint much but it's something" is the best way I've seen this described. It is something! Too bad you have better options vying for your booster slot, and getting a 23-25% reduction to your slowdown isn't helpful when you're being swarmed by 20 hunters or 2 stalkers.
    
  • Sample Extricator: If you somehow get to the 10 extra sample cap, you'd probably end up asking yourself why you even brought this when you couldve taken advantage of a real 4th booster that couldve made the mission easier. Skip.
  
  
  

  Meme Tier:

  • Firebomb Hellpods: you can kill lesser enemies in the splash area of your hellpods, and also one shot bile titans if you direct hit them. That's pretty much it; any enemies that are bigger than a helldiver will survive the splash damage of the firebomb, and any enemy smaller than a bile titan could already be one tapped by a hellpod direct hit to begin with. You on the flipside now have wasted a booster slot with a booster that will result in likely 1/4th of your team's reinforcements in dumb accidental teamkills. Avoid like the plague.
    
  • Armed Resupply Pods: Once again, just like Firebomb Hellpods, allows you to kill chaff enemies using your resupply pod, but it will only take out about 15-20 light armored enemies, at most, and then afterwards deactivates and becomes a normal resupply again. A meme, while definitely more viable than firebomb Hellpods, is still a meme nonetheless.
    
    

    Explanation:

    
    As of this patch and time frame (December 20, 2024), these are the current best choices in terms of boosters.
    
    When new boosters are added, I'll be sure to update this list as well as adjust which boosters you should be looking into taking on a mission.

Afterword, Thanks & My Other Work

Thanks for reading this simple guide, hopefully this helps you make a better decision at high level play as well as stop any questions you may have.

My other guide is listed below if you wish to also read that.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3159493752

Special thanks to Sony, Arrowhead, and all the people involved in making this fantastic game!

EXTREME THANKS TO CASHCROP_ FOR HIS VIDEO THAT HELPED EXPLAIN THE SPECIFICS OF SOME OF THE MORE STATISTIC HEAVY BOOSTERS. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND WATCHING HIS VIDEO BELOW!

https://youtu.be/PJnXFNEc-dg?si=2gJuFNCGFZ2u7i93

EXTREME THANKS TO u/Reydriar_ FOR COMPILING STATS ON EACH BOOSTER, HIS WORK HELPED ME BETTER UNDERSTAND SOME OF LEAST KNOWN FACTS ABOUT EACH.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1dhuzq7/a_guide_to_boosters/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

[Hijinks]

Added Sample Extricator

[Hijinks]

Update: Added armed resupply pods. will update the newly buffed boosters as info about them comes out.

[WarpedPerspectiv]

The muscle booster also lets you move through plants at regular speed instead of slowing down.

[Hijinks]

Update: added firebomb hellpods addition to the guide

[Hijinks]

Update: updated descriptions for muscle enhancement, as well as moved around some stuff and viability of boosters. Added special thanks for a reddit user's work on compiling and clarifying some boosters.

[0 X | Ɐ]

Hi, is there somewhere a spreadsheet or something that gives actual numbers of those boosters?

[Hijinks]

YW

[MrBoomZoom]

Finally, at least somewhere there are specific numbers that boosters add/subtract. Thanks for the helpful guide.

[Hijinks]

Updated to add new booster. Sorry not sorry for being late, this warbond being meh demotivated me from even bothering to update it lol

[dyll]

Should probably update this to include the new motivational shocks booster included in the Polar Patriots warbond, which is frankly completely useless and a waste of valuable space.