Helldivers 2: Best Warbond to Buy First & Order After

The short answer: buy Democratic Detonation first. On patch 7.0.0 it’s still the pick guides and long-time players point new Helldivers toward, because its Thermite grenades, the Adjudicator rifle and the Grenade Pistol let you clear bug holes and bot fabricators without burning a stratagem slot on it. This guide covers why that warbond wins the first-purchase debate, what order to take the rest in, and what the whole system actually costs you in Super Credits.

A Warbond is Helldivers 2’s version of a battle pass: a page of unlockable weapons, armor sets, boosters and cosmetics that you buy with Super Credits and then earn through pages using Medals. There’s one free Warbond every account gets automatically, plus a growing list of paid ones. Premium Warbonds never expire once released, and none of them are tied to a season — you can buy the very first one released the same day you buy the newest.

This isn’t an official Arrowhead ranking — it’s the answer you’ll see repeated across player guides and community threads on patch 7.0.0, and it holds up because of what the warbond actually does mechanically. The Grenade Pistol closes bug holes and bot fabricators on its own, which means you’re not spending a stratagem call just to finish a side objective. Thermite grenades stick to armored targets like Chargers and Hulks and can solo them without a support weapon. The Adjudicator rifle penetrates medium armor as a primary, which most starting loadouts lack. Stack those three together and you can clear objectives that would otherwise force you to burn stratagem cooldowns you’d rather save for the fight itself — the same logic that shapes which stratagems are worth unlocking early, covered in our stratagem unlock order guide.

The warbond also throws in the Eruptor and an explosive crossbow, both of which add area damage against groups — useful whether you’re running bugs or bots. The consensus isn’t unanimous on every single item in the pass, but the “utility that replaces a stratagem” argument is the one that keeps coming back.

Past the first purchase, the order gets less clean because it starts depending on what you actually fight. Bug-heavy players lean one way, bot-heavy players lean another. Here’s the order that shows up most often in current guides, with what each pass is actually for.

Beyond those three, the field opens up fast. Between the 20 Premium Warbonds and 3 Legendary Warbonds live on patch 7.0.0, you’re picking based on playstyle more than any objective ranking — someone running higher difficulty content might jump straight to a warbond with a specific support weapon they need, which ties into knowing when your difficulty ladder progression actually calls for it. At that point, order matters more than completeness — you’re never realistically owning all 23 on day one, so picking the next one that solves a problem you actually have beats chasing full collection.

Every Premium Warbond sits at the same flat Super Credit price, and with 20 of them live on patch 7.0.0, buying the full set at sticker price runs into the tens of thousands of Super Credits. Some of that comes back — each Premium Warbond includes a stack of Super Credits somewhere in its pages, which softens the total if you grind through them in order. Legendary Warbonds, like the Warhammer 40K crossover covered in our Castellan’s Creed breakdown, don’t include any Super Credits at all, so they’re a pure spend with no partial refund.

If you’re earning Super Credits without spending real money, that grind is its own topic with its own methods and rates — this piece isn’t going to re-walk that ground, but the honest version is that farming enough for even the first two or three recommended warbonds takes real, sustained playtime, not a couple of missions.

Myth: You need every warbond to be competitive

You don’t. A handful of items across two or three passes cover most of what a mission actually demands — the rest is playstyle preference and cosmetics. Even solo runs, which need more self-sufficient loadouts than squad play, only really lean on a small slice of any given warbond’s contents, something covered in more depth in our solo play breakdown.

Myth: Newer warbonds are always better than older ones

Some of the strongest, most-recommended items in the game — the Grenade Pistol, Thermite, the Sickle — sit in warbonds that have been out for a long time. Release date doesn’t track power level in this system; balance patches move individual weapons up and down independently of when their warbond launched.

Myth: You have to rush a purchase before it disappears

Premium and Legendary Warbonds don’t rotate out. Once a warbond releases, it stays purchasable indefinitely, so there’s no real urgency unless you’re prepping for a specific mission type or difficulty tier right now.