After getting dizzy, the six-shooter Bile Titan from Helldivers 2 sent the community through every step of the Kübler-Ross Model boost reaction

Helldivers 2’s latest update, patch 01.001.104, brought with it a slew of weapon tweaks, but few saw more talk this week than the buff to the P-4 Senator, a double-action revolver that – when supercharged – turned many Super Earthlings into wannabe John Waynes.

The patch increased gun armor penetration from 3 to 4, shell damage increased from 175 to 200, and sustained shell damage increased from 35 to 70. The result? Well, to be able to employ it blow up the Titan Yellow in just a few shots, take it out some hulks too while you’re at it, and cascade memes that it is high noon in the entire galaxy.

However, this was only the first stage. Over the past few days on the Helldivers 2 subreddit, players have been going through several other stages of what I call the Kübler-Ross reinforcement response model, or the four stages of grief.

The second phase began shortly after this initial outpouring of praise, with several people participating I’m starting to think – Well, hold your horses, maybe these changes calmed down the Senator a bit too overpowered’. “I love the feeling when you see the bile titan appear. This is the moment: “HOLY FUCK, WHAT ARE WE DOING, WHAT CAN WE THROW AT THIS MONSTER?!”, one of them wrote: “But now with because it’s a few shots away from death, I just don’t feel the same fear and admiration when I see the bile titan. It’s too fragile.”

Then stage three was the Reddit equivalent of Twitter’s “retweet the thing you think is stupid” (which, honestly, regularly generates some very comical posts), with posts informing those few who suggested that the gun might be too OP that in fact they were very wrong, thank you very much.

Step four – or four and five, depending on how you want to categorize things – comes from the last point. Should this change in the Senator’s position have any significance in the context of changes in other types of weapons and strategies in the future? Some thought so, arguing that primary weapons like the Slugger and Dominator should perhaps have their armor increased accordingly.

The end of this discussion, at least for now, seems to be that some people have concluded that the only primary weapons that should potentially receive tier four AP are Eruptor or maybe “something like a precision bolt-action sniper.”

And even though all this took place, it looks like the divers still managed to get the top spot on the main order that had just been completed. Pretty.