Helldivers 2 received a lot of new content this week as part of the Into the Unjust update, but if you’re a scoleciphobiac, you might want to steer clear of the Terminid Hive Worlds for now. As players have discovered, gigantic Hive Lords that can give Destiny 2’s Hive Worm gods a run for their money are lurking beneath the surface, and they’re the devil to kill.
Easily one of the biggest bosses to date in Helldivers 2, Hive Lords boast an incredible amount of health and are covered in rocky scales of armor. These bullet-sponges can shrug off just about anything you can throw at them, and while they aren’t unkillable, a Helldivers team is going to need to call in multiple drops of anti-tank weaponry and hellbombs to take down this skyscraper-sized titan.
Fighting a Hive Lord is challenging enough, but defending yourself from one is also a Herculean labor. The massive worms can burrow underground for surprise attacks, erupting to shower the battlefield with rocks or flatten you with their sheer mass. If that wasn’t bad enough, they can blanket the area in corrosive bile, forcing teams to stay on the move during these fights.
So far, the best strategy for dealing with a Hive Lord is a classic from Arthurian legend: run away. Sure, a Hive Lord has a few exposed areas under its armor and a mouth that an anti-tank rocket can comfortably fit inside of, but the best course of action here is to strategically retreat and carry on with your regular mission objectives.
Hive Lords require an absurd amount of resources to take down–one team says it used 10 Hellbombs, eight 500KG bombs, and several stratagems to get the job done–and so far it looks like there’s no reward for killing one, other than the sweet feeling of protecting democracy for another day from the monster.
