Helldivers 2 Support Weapons: Pick by Ammo Economy

Three ammo economies

Backpack-fed weapons — recoilless rifle and autocannon — take both the support slot and the backpack slot, and reload from a limited pool of rounds you carry. They hit hard enough to remove heavy units in one or two shots, and they go dry exactly when the second heavy arrives. Self-feeding weapons — machine guns, heavy machine guns, the laser cannon, the arc thrower — draw on their own belts or heat, and can be topped up from resupply boxes. The laser cannon and arc thrower skip ammunition entirely, which makes them the only support weapons that never strand you. Expendable weapons — the disposable anti-tank tube — arrive loaded, fire once, and are gone. No reload, no backpack, no weight. What you trade is that the tube is a call-in, so the cooldown is your reload.

What that means in practice

If your squad already has one backpack-fed anti-tank, a second one doubles your burst and not your sustain. The better pairing is one burst answer and one sustain answer, because heavies arrive in waves and the second wave lands after the first has been reloaded once. Solo, the calculus flips. You cannot rely on a squadmate to cover the reload, so the expendable tube or a self-feeding weapon is worth more than the biggest number. The Hulk counter and Factory Strider counter pages assume exactly this split.

Against armor, the number on the card lies

Effective damage against a heavy unit is filtered through armor value and durable damage, so a weapon that reads higher can kill slower. The armor penetration rules and the durable damage page are the two pages that make the comparison honest. A rule of thumb that survives patches: if a weapon cannot penetrate the plate you are shooting, its damage number is irrelevant, and if it penetrates but deals little durable damage, it will strip armor slowly while the enemy keeps walking.

The slot cost nobody counts

A support weapon occupies a stratagem slot, and so does the resupply that keeps it fed. Two slots for one weapon is a fair trade only if that weapon answers the thing killing your squad. On Illuminate missions, where shields and flying units set the terms, the faction page argues for a different spend entirely.