[Megathread] The Division 2

[EyelessCrow]

Every new tier you need to adjust your playstyle a bit. The game is getting more difficult as you advance, after all.

I highly recommend using the Reviver Hive while solo. It might seem like a crutch, but you have to remember that, for the most part, the game's dynamic is built for a group. Even the rushing enemies wouldn't be so bad if you had a teammate.

To that effect, I also recommend using the basic turret to keep enemies a little distracted and to add a little more firepower. Granted, at WT4 and WT5 it won't do tremendous damage without mods or brand set bonuses, but it will help keep enemies from just rushing you.

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It's a known bug where the enemy AI is ignoring your damage and rushing you, which they're not supposed to do. They're supposed to act like they're being shot, not just bumrush you en-masse.

Oh lol, guess I haven't noticed this one. The only weird thing I've really ever noticed is enemies run up and past me, usually dead before they get to where they I assume they are trying to go unless the AI was just all "I'm done with this shit I'm going home" and the only way out was behind us.

[SirCowdog]

Oh lol, guess I haven't noticed this one. The only weird thing I've really ever noticed is enemies run up and past me, usually dead before they get to where they I assume they are trying to go unless the AI was just all "I'm done with this shit I'm going home" and the only way out was behind us.

Well, it's a little bit of a whack-a-mole game. I'm guessing here, but I think if you can kill enough NPCs fast enough, their AI will re-assess the situation. They clearly recognize when you take out one of their buddies, announcing it with things like "We've got a man down!" or "The fallen will be remembered!" The AI even recognizes when you use a shield or drop a chem-launcher heal.

So if your build is doing enough damage, and you can drop enemies before the AI decides its bumrush time, you might never notice the problem. Personally, the only time I've ever seen it is when a whole squad of yellow-bars spawns right on top me. That's a whole different problem in and of itself, but the AI definitely gets more aggressive when they know they can win by rushing.

[Adam Jensen]

Well, it's a little bit of a whack-a-mole game. I'm guessing here, but I think if you can kill enough NPCs fast enough, their AI will re-assess the situation. They clearly recognize when you take out one of their buddies, announcing it with things like "We've got a man down!" or "The fallen will be remembered!" The AI even recognizes when you use a shield or drop a chem-launcher heal.

So if your build is doing enough damage, and you can drop enemies before the AI decides its bumrush time, you might never notice the problem. Personally, the only time I've ever seen it is when a whole squad of yellow-bars spawns right on top me. That's a whole different problem in and of itself, but the AI definitely gets more aggressive when they know they can win by rushing.

And sometimes the AI is just stupid.

First, every single Black Tusk in this fire fight beelined straight for the same flanking cover:



And here every single spawn at a territory control run straight into my gun fire (and then I get stuck on a wall trying to engage the remaining sniper):



Sometimes I'm impressed by how smart the AI is and sometimes I'm impressed by how stupid the AI is.

[Alindra]

Run a chkdsk on your drive. It could be dying.

I can't believe I didn't think of that, thanks. While it did turn up a few errors, none of which pointed at the Division 2. I'll keep an eye on it, anyways, thanks.

Trying to be consistent, after running chkdsk, everything played just fine, even with Afterburner open from the start.

Gotcha, haven't completed the second stronghold yet. Best attempt was getting the two gas tanks down and couldn't figure out how to open the hatch, got overwhelmed trying to get it open. Thanks!

The trick to that mission is staying in control of the miniguns. You might have to stop using them to cover your flanks, but using a turret can help with that. Overall, the more you can stay on those guns, the easier that mission will be.

That mission was really weird for me. I went through most of the game without many issues (deaths, obviously, but no huge outliersthen I got to the last sequence in that mission and just got splattered time and again. I was trying different weapons, skills, strategies, and the furthest I got was blowing up the second tank, taking out the hammer bro, then getting killed by a wave spawning on top of me with no armor. (I swear the game decided I needed a break and disconnected me before I could complete it.)

Came back today and tried it, and I ripped through it first try. After blowing up the tank on the right, I ran over to the left minigun and got ready for the wave that spawned there and... nothing. They never came. It felt like there were fewer enemies in general, actually. Not sure what to make of that.

[SirCowdog]

Came back today and tried it, and I ripped through it first try. After blowing up the tank on the right, I ran over to the left minigun and got ready for the wave that spawned there and... nothing. They never came. It felt like there were fewer enemies in general, actually. Not sure what to make of that.

While leveling my second character, I've also noticed the game being a bit easier. I wonder if Massive applied a server-side patch or something? I know they said in the last State-of-the-Game that they wanted to even out the difficulty curve a bit.

[sibut]

Friend and I went to the DZ on a whim tonight and he got two Pestilence LMGs in the first six landmarks, one of which he gave to me. (Surprisingly we only saw other people at one landmark and they minded their own business and didn't show up at the extraction-a rarity in the DZ in TD2 in my experience.) It's truly an underwhelming gun, but +1 to exotic collection, I guess?

I'm still trying to figure out what the deal is with summoning hunters. Is it on a "once an (in game) day" timer or something? We summoned the 3 or 4 (different sites have different numbers of hunters that supposedly spawn there) hunters by the Christmas tree, killed one, got killed, and when we ran back only one other one was alive so we killed it. No clue what happened to the other ones or why the one stuck around, but can we summon them again? I'm 9/12 hunter masks and am still missing the one you have to salute the graves for (did they ever fix that one?) and I think I have 7/8 ivory keys.

Other than that I've pretty much run out of things to do in the game right now. Grinding gear seems kind of pointless, particularly since even at 508 I rarely get items that are 500 ilevel from anything but the chest from leveling. Gotta wait another 2 weeks to finish the exotic sniper rifle and I'd like to pick up the exotics I don't have (Just have Liberty, Chatterbox, and Pestilence) but I've run instances to death and my luck sucks; it's not really fun for me anymore. I'm not enough of a completionist to grind all the mods out, either. Looking forward to the raid but it's 10 days off so I might take a break for a bit. I'm also interested to see what the raid drops lootwise. I imagine it'll have a couple of new exotics and maybe a gear set or two? Not sure how much staying power/replayability it'll have for me.

[D3athsting]

Got all components for the exotic gun except the base gun, where do i get it?

[KrayZ33]

Did they mention anything about fixing the low level mods.
Or buffing the high end mods?

I really don't want to farm/level another character just so I can abuse it.
But the +dmg gain you get from that is ridicilious, it would be a waste to not use it if they only decide to fix this 2 years in.

[D3athsting]

Did they mention anything about fixing the low level mods.
Or buffing the high end mods?

I really don't want to farm/level another character just so I can abuse it.
But the +dmg gain you get from that is ridicilious, it would be a waste to not use it if they only decide to fix this 2 years in.

High level ability mods have excessive ability power requirements

[sibut]

Got all components for the exotic gun except the base gun, where do i get it?

The base gun is a random drop in the world. I’ve gotten one from a named mob during a bounty and another from the cache from clearing a control point. Got the second one while messing around waiting for a friend to log on who needed a d50 and if he had logged on 15 minutes earlier, I could’ve passed it to him. =(

[KrayZ33]

High level ability mods have excessive ability power requirements

Not just the ability mods, the gear mods you get from lvl 15-25 (somewhere around that) can have +6% weapon damage and fit on blue/yellow mod slots.

Blue/Yellow mod slots are currently only useful for activating certain talents
The low level mods count as Blue/Yellow ones but have 6% weapon damage instead of 100 Skillpower...

6% weapon damage on gear rolls is around 600 skillpower or something - to put that into perspective, not even counting the vastly superior stat by itself.
Even the defensive ones are better as they give you 5% total armor. Compared to the high end ones which tend to give around a ~3k total armor bonus.

5% would give me 12k bonus... and I get a 2% dmg buff per 10k armor after a kill.

[Adam Jensen]

Holy shit the last boss for Invaded Capital Building was hilarious. He pops out, pops his drones. I shoot the drones. His armor is gone. He pops his drones again. I shoot the drones, he's dead.

I know this is only normal difficulty since I've never done it before but jeeeeez. Make me at least try.

[Alindra]

While leveling my second character, I've also noticed the game being a bit easier. I wonder if Massive applied a server-side patch or something? I know they said in the last State-of-the-Game that they wanted to even out the difficulty curve a bit.

They could have, but the timing seems really weird. It was a meat grinder on Saturday at ~5pm, but I one shot it the next day. During the week maybe, but on a weekend?


Just finished the campaign and unlocked WT1, thoughts:


I know that the story isn't the biggest factor of the Division, but it felt like quite a step back from Division 1. There were more characters in the campaign, but they had less - well - character than in the first.

In the first game, we faced off against a damned helicopter. Here, just a named guy (I think? I honestly can't remember) with a rocket launcher and drones. Heck, I didn't even seen up close to know if he had a unique skin.

The final cutscene after getting the briefcase with the cure, we don't even get to see any resolution (even a presidential speech), it just jumps directly to "a new enemy faction shows up out of nowhere." Heck, reactivating the SHD network felt more impactful. Maybe in future content drops there is more story that fleshes out what's going on, but the finale was very underwhelming.

[everydaygamer]

Yeah, I wish they got more creative with the bosses, let's just hope they surprise us in the raid.

[Coldkil]

So I unlocked the black tusk uniform from the event and while I'm disappointed you cannot mix and match pieces to your choice it is still a pretty damned badass looking outfit.

yep, i have just tackled it and i unlocked some stuff, i don't really like that the complete outfits cannot be mixed with other stuff.

Oh well, i'll run around with my high-end red bowl cap.

[Coldkil]

Unrelated question: i am trying different stuff with the specialization - the "worst" part is that there are different cool things i'd like from each while no one actually has all the things i want, but i suppose it's cool this way

However, i like the grenade launcher and Demolitionist (especially the turret but i need to get good with it) but it seems that the damage is really low on armored targets - and i mean like 150 damage on yellows/bosses. I just unload 6 grenades on one and it just doesn't do shit, it's just better to use standard weapons like the SMG or AR, or grenades.
Is it normal?

Iìm trying the xbow now and it's really cool, especially coupled with the flame grenades.

[SirCowdog]

Just finished the campaign and unlocked WT1, thoughts:

Well, there's an explanation for that later on. I won't spoil it, but there is an explanation for it.

Also(and this is totally unrelated to anything you said, so no spoilers) if you managed to find any of Keener's phone messages along with a few others, it hints that he's still out there, and he's got Chernenko AND the Green Poison formula. They STRONGLY hint that a version of it could easily pop up again in the area. I'd be VERY surprised if we didn't see a plot twist like that in a later patch.

But I think you're right that the story so far isn't super great. It's more or less just random factions fighting for control over the capital by way of main force. Which is REALLY stupid when going up against the Division. Even if all we do is take a look at the absolute wrecking Division agents do to the other factions, the smart move would not be to try to fight them directly.

Given the history of Agents going rogue, and given the success of the "Good" agents in restoring order to the DC area, the smart move would be to JOIN the Division. Form an alliance, and slowly win them over to your way of thinking. Maybe even let them think they're the ones calling the shots. Either that, or just play it straight, and carve yourself out a big chunk of the pie.

Guess that wouldn't be quite as interesting, though.

[Puri]

Unrelated question: i am trying different stuff with the specialization - the "worst" part is that there are different cool things i'd like from each while no one actually has all the things i want, but i suppose it's cool this way

However, i like the grenade launcher and Demolitionist (especially the turret but i need to get good with it) but it seems that the damage is really low on armored targets - and i mean like 150 damage on yellows/bosses. I just unload 6 grenades on one and it just doesn't do shit, it's just better to use standard weapons like the SMG or AR, or grenades.
Is it normal?

Iìm trying the xbow now and it's really cool, especially coupled with the flame grenades.

The artillery turret (as all skills) does pityful damage and really is not worth using over the normal turret which at least gives some protection from rushers. And the normal turret is not really worth using over the default chem launcher/rezz hive combo.

The grenade launcher does indeed very inconsistent damage, and sometimes it kills 5 elite mobs in devastatinging blow each doing over a million damage, and next time I use it it barely scratches the enemy or literally does no damage at all. But for sure it's the best weapon to deal with "oh shit" situations that can (if it wants to) easily clear an entire room. The grenade launcher will also do significantly more damage to an enemy if you directly hit it, and will (again if it doesn't bug out) make quick work even of bosses.

The crossbow is my favourite specialization weapon, but people often mistake it for an ae weapon (which obviously is also possible with support of the burning or blinding grenade), but much more useful is it's usage as single target weapon. Targeting is significantly easier than with the sniper, it still does significant damage and even sets bosses on fire (very useful for hammer enemies), which forces them to stand up and hence being easy targets.

But in the end the passive talents of the sniper tree trumps the other specializations.

I hope they will look at the balance when they add the announced new specializations.

[SirCowdog]

Unrelated question: i am trying different stuff with the specialization - the "worst" part is that there are different cool things i'd like from each while no one actually has all the things i want, but i suppose it's cool this way

However, i like the grenade launcher and Demolitionist (especially the turret but i need to get good with it) but it seems that the damage is really low on armored targets - and i mean like 150 damage on yellows/bosses. I just unload 6 grenades on one and it just doesn't do shit, it's just better to use standard weapons like the SMG or AR, or grenades.
Is it normal?

Iìm trying the xbow now and it's really cool, especially coupled with the flame grenades.

From what I've been able to figure out, skill-based builds are still garbage, and haven't been truly fixed yet. That includes things like the mortar turret.

But the combo of Xbow + Flame nades is still really good, especially in a group where ammo for the xbow is going to be dropping left and right as more and more enemies die while under status effects.

Personally I'm still a fan of Sharpshooter. The passives are too good, and it improves my gameplay without relying on gimmicks or situational abilities. I just shoot things.

I wonder what the following specs will be later on this year? Probably a tanky, shield based spec would be my first guess, since most of the other weapon types are already covered. I almost feel like they'd need to introduce new base weapon types since the existing specs already cover the existing ones(SMG, Pistols, ARs, etc...). Not really sure what they could add. Melee weapons like knives and hammers, maybe? Doesn't seem like it would mesh well with the cover system, but who knows.

EDIT: Pet-based specialization. All skills/passives centered around drones and fireflies, with the signature ability summoning a robo-dog! yeah!

[Coldkil]

Ok, SO there are bugs and damage is all over the place. I don't really like sharpshooter but yes, passives are extra good - i suppose i'll just stay with my chem/seeker mines combo and MMR/AR/SMG. I'll swap to Demo when they fix it and if they go for a shield spec them i'm DEFINITELY going with that.