The Division 2 addressed their community in this weeks “State of the Game”. The State of the Game stream on May 8, 2019 discussed many of the upcoming changes coming to the popular Division 2 title. The State of the Game is a live broadcast that The Division 2 does on Twitch, Mixer and YouTube. The main purpose is to brief players on upcoming changes, feedback received, things they are working on and more to help maintain The Division 2’s playability and balance.
Developers discussed the feedback they have been receiving on the test server and what their intentions are moving forward. One thing that players might not be too happy about is that the official date for the raid has not been released, however, they did announce they will be releasing “title update 3” which makes pretty big changes to agents gear score.
Title Update 3 Changes
Gear Score Changes
After reviewing feedback from the test servers developers decided it was time to make changes to the gear score. With title update 3, which is expected to be released in May 2019, they will be adjusting the PvE experience by changing the time to kill, NPCs, player survivability and the difficulty of missions and control points. Along with that comes changes to gear score, talents, mods and recalibration.
- Enemy NPCs will do less damage.
- Melee damage reduced for tank NPCs
- Grenade accuracy of enemy NPCs has been reduced.
- Friendly NPCs will now wear protective gear.
- Upgrading a settlement will increase friendly NPC damage.
- Hostages are now more protective of their lives.
With title update 3, gear score will not be updated beyond gear score 500. The main reason that they are not increasing the gear score past 500 is to improve on the dark zone, and to make it so that the time spent on min / maxing your gear for the raid isn’t wasted.
Gear Changes
Gear is set to undergo some changes. Some gear will now include better defensive rolls.
- Hard wired – Now grants skill damage instead of shock duration
- Ongoing Directive – Now grants special ammunition into any weapon, including the weapon that is currently equipped.
- True Patriot – Decreased the debuff cycle from 4 seconds to 2 seconds. Increased damage dealt to nearby targets when full flag is active to 50%.
Skill Changes
- Assault Drone – (PvE) The drone will now actively look for a new target once it loses it’s previous target.
- Defender Drone – Will drain more quickly once a shot has been deflected.
- Reinforcer Chem Launcher – Gas clouds will no longer stack.
- Reviver Hiver – Revive time has been slightly increased. Also fixed additional occurances of players not being revived.
- Riot Foam Chem Launcher – Increase stun duration of riot foam when used against an NPC.
- Scanner Pulse – Reduced the colldown from 120 to 90 seconds.
Dark Zone
- Bosses now guarantee contaminated loot.
- Default bag size is now 6. Tier 1 bag size will increase the bag size to 8. Tier 4 bounceback perk will now reduce the dark zone XP lost on death. Tier 10 perk increases bag size to 10.
- Dark zone brackets will now be 1-30 and players in world tiers.
- Seperate PvP modifiers have been added to the occupied dark zone.
- XP lost on death in the dark zone has been reduced to 35% of your current dark zone rank.
Post Mission Summary
After completing a mission agents will now be shown a post mission summary screen. The screen will include statistics based on a variety of performances.
Operation Dark Hours (8 Player Raid)
There is still no official release date for the Operation Dark Hours raid. The raid is expected to be released in May, 2019 – with no set date. It was announced that the raid will offer exclusive loot like new gear sets and an exotic weapon. The Division 2 will feature the first raid in the title, and they are prepared to take their time with it to do it right.
Game Play Changes
- Rewards have been increased for daily priority hard and challenging missions. If you are gear score 500, those activities will guarantee gear score 500 drops.
- Heroic mission bosses, stronghold bosses, bounty bosses along with level 4 control points will now guarantee gear score 500 items if your average gear score is 500.
- Dark zone contaminated loot will not drop below a player’s average gear score. If you are gear score 500 contaminated loot will now be guaranteed gear score 500 drops.
- Loot has been balanced across the board to reduce changes of getting drops below your characters gear score.
- Texture render / streaming time has been improved for console players.
For those of you that are hardcore Division 2 fans. Make sure to check out Division 2 wallpapers.
