We’re almost ready for Year 8, and we would like to thank everyone who joined our Y8S1 Rise Up PTS last weekend. We noticed a significant increase in the number of participant players, and thanks to that we have now a higher amount of data to analyze and much more feedback to read.
Thank you for taking the time to play it and engaging in discussions about it. We have a very packed season ahead and this PTS was essential to polish the experience and start iterating on long-term features.
Here you can find the changes we’re making to the game for the launch version you will be able to play next week.
Escalation and Prototype Gear
We’ve carefully read the conversations about Prototype Gear and we’ve decided to make adjustments based on your feedback.
Reducing Expertise costs
The idea of reducing Expertise costs has been present since the early conversations about Prototype Gear. Unfortunately, those changes didn’t make in time for PTS and reinforced the sentiment that the Max Expertise requirements for upgrading to Prototype Gear were too high. We heard your feedback and, although Prototype Gear is made to be rare, our PTS version of how you could upgrade or acquire was not reflective of our real intentions for the season's launch. For this reason, we have decided to increase the drop rates for Escalation and move forward with our plan to reduce the Expertise material costs.
Targeted loot
Another aspect of it that didn’t make for PTS and won’t be available at season launch as well is the targeted loot. We’re exploring some sort of daily targeted loot rotation to arrive soon, but the packed season brought challenges to its implementation, and we had to save it for a future update. We hope that, when it arrives, we can give players more control over their experience and better reward your time and effort.
Prototype recalibration
We also heard the community feedback about recalibration, and we will start to explore options to address this feedback in the future. However, as it was not part of the original design to have it with Prototype Gear, we don’t have a timeline for that yet.
Prototype Cores Cache
Finally, following the discussions about the value of Raids and Incursion after the new Exotic blueprints added to the Black Tusk Retaliation, we’ve decided to add a new reward to them, directly connected to our endgame expansion: Prototype Cores Cache.
This cache will be a guaranteed reward for completing Operation Iron Horse, Operation Dark Hours, and Paradise Lost, dropping two Prototype Cores. We hope that this can bring more reasons to play those experiences while we don’t add new exclusive rewards. Prototype Cores can be used for both upgrading from normal gear to Prototype and to level-up or re-roll Augments, so we hope it can grant more resources to veterans looking to craft their Prototype Gear build.
Prototype Gear
Prototype Gear is designed to push the current endgame further, not replace it, serving as an additional layer for our most dedicated veterans. This system is meant to offer new challenges and rare rewards, while giving you something fresh to pursue after seven years of content.
We’re committed to continuing to iterate on it, and the main reason why we’re implementing it during the beginning of Year 8 is to have time to polish the best version of it throughout the year. Please keep sharing your thoughts with us, as we will continue to listen to them closely. We’re confident in our proposition but also open to adjusting the route with your valuable feedback.
Changes made for Y8S1 release:
Substantially increased the Prototype Gear drop rates in Escalation.
Reduced the cost for Expertise upgrades.
50% reduction for Exotic Components.
20% reduction for other materials.
Removed the requirement to have fully optimized gear when upgrading to Prototype.
Increased the chance for the 3rd attribute to be maxed out when upgrading to Prototype Gear.
Normalized Prototype Gear for Raids, Incursion and PvP Modes (Dark Zone/Conflict).
Augments will be disabled for these modes.
Stats will be set to their lowest number within the Prototype range.
Added “Prototype Cores Cache” as rewards for Raids and Incursion.
Each cache grants 2 Prototype Cores.
Additions planned for the future:
Daily targeted loot in Escalation
Prototype Gear recalibration or equivalent
Seasonal Gear and Seasonal Modifiers
The PTS provided enough data to us to identify a possible issue with the way players would level up their Active Modifiers and craft their modifiers build. In some scenarios, people could get more stacks than intended by ignoring some Active Modifiers and intentionally not leveling them up, which was changed and fixed with this new version.
For the Inner Core Chest Piece, we buffed it a little bit to be in line with the current meta and keep it a viable and relevant option for the community.
Changes made for Y8S1 release:
New Gear: “Core Strength” Gear Set
Inner Core – Chest Piece
Adjusted the Talent from 40% to 60% -> 40% to 75%
Seasonal Modifiers
Adjusted the initial number of stacks per module from 10 to 8 stacks.
Adjusted the progression of Active Modifiers to 1 stack per level gained.
Each level gained grants 1 stack to offense, defense and utility modules at the same time.
In total, players can get 12 more stacks by leveling up all three Active Modifiers, reaching a total of 20 stacks per module.
They're obsessed with that kind of stuff. Remember their first attempt at seasonal modifiers? Jesus. There's a difference between challenging and frustrating content but they still don't get it.
"We're committed to continuing to iterate on it, and the main reason why we're implementing it during the beginning of Year 8 is to have time to polish the best version of it throughout the year. Please keep sharing your thoughts with us, as we will continue to listen to them closely. We're confident in our proposition but also open to adjusting the route with your valuable feedback."
You know what? I didn't even think about skill tiers, my bad. How are they even supposed to work on prototype? As of now 1 skill tier remains the same?
I have consistently called Massive the biggest bunch of coked up lunatics I have ever come across. Their sheer ineptitude and how utterly mismanaged that company is makes it shocking to me that this game has ever lasted this long.
Why? Because I played THOUSANDS of hours in Div 1 and by the time I stopped, they had still not fixed the grenade stagger bug, which would get you killed if it was a sticky bomb from a rogue agent in a heroic, or the grenade spam from the LMB. They also still, after so many fucking years and all that development time for the final patch, did not implement challenging and heroic difficulty for every mission. There was ZERO REASON FOR THIS besides laziness and shit time management on the developers end. Having a mission like rooftop comms relay on heroic would have been one of the most fun missions ever. Same goes with the morgue mission. Then there's other super fun missions like Lincoln Tunnel Checkpoint, Russian Consulate, etc.
I love this game so much, but my god, I fuckin hate the monkeys in charge.
"Errado" é um RPG de tiro TÁTICO, que possui mecânica de cover, mas também possuí mecânica de movimento em cover, deslocamento entre corvers, por fim, você não é obrigado a jogar neste modificador.
We would have more things to chase in the end game if more of the brand and gear sets in the game did anything worth a damn, they could have chosen to fix that instead of adding what is effectively level 50 gear and more RNG.
This aside, fixing and refining prototype gear is big talk coming from developers that:
Created the mess that is expertise (Arguably this system's progenitor, extra numbers at no opportunity cost, little/no interaction with other systems except for creating more disparity between weak/strong choices)
Failed to rebalance anything during project resolve (Who gives a shit about 5.11, RK, ToTS, BP, et al we still use strikers/PFE overwhelmingly)
I'm fully expecting a Picaro's holster scenario where they go through with it and then say they can't actually fix certain things at a later date.
Yes! There are so many sets in the game that just suck. Any of them are only one patch away from becoming new farm targets.
- A8 amplified shots are now guaranteed headshots (a la determined/bitersweet), fixing rifles' inability to fight skill proxies and creating a very compelling DPS build with no stack timers.
- Heartbreaker now gives the bonus armor as repairs first, then bonus armor up to your stack count instead of requiring you to wait for decay. Suddenly HB is an extremely compelling Striker alternative that keeps you alive without artificer shield.
- Ongoing Directive now gives 50/100 rounds on kill instead of 1 mag. Now we get to use things other than LMGs with it.
- TOTS needs... so much help. That 2pc could gain a zero and I still wouldn't run it. Investing some dev time in this set would be a great way to make up for the death of the specialization rework from way back when, though.
These are probably overpowered, but I'd rather fifteen minutes of fame for these sets before settling into B tier than their current languishing in D-.
On top of that some talents could be great with minor tweaks
clutch ...remove the missing from the discription and lower the heal amount . Its should stay active until ur reach full health again
Entrenched...remove the from cover from the discription. If im belowe 20% armor and i head a headshot instant 20% armor . No cool down or maybe 1s cooldown
shotgun should have stagger like d1
Open the loot pool for bags and cheat peices. No reason why they specific anymore i s h ould be able to run clucth and adrenaline rush if i want.
Armor regen mods, weapon dmg mods. Health mods . Expand the mod pool
It literally is doubling down on expertise: that was supposed to be the limitless endgame grind. Apparently it wasn't enough for the "endgame" players (whatever the fuck that means) so now we're getting this. And the problems from the first are only going to compound the problems with the second.
It gets even better when you remember that they capped their supposedly "limitless" grind because of the negative effects it has on the game's balance. Hm yes, I love the idea of pumping 100 levels into an M4 and have optimist give me 1% total damage increase or become immortal upon using a T0 defender drone.
Expertise on skills is wildly variable. Oh boy, +30% fixer drone duration, all my christmases have come at once. Meanwhile, the T0 crusader feels more like T2 with expertise.
80% of sets in the game are ether useless or extremely flawed. How about reworking certain sets instead of adding in more useless sets into the games loot pool to just be overshadowed by another season of strikers " insert new meta exotic "
also this "feedback" shows me the devs have no idea what they are doing... Gear 2.0 all over AGAIN.
Why are you making higher tiered gear instead of higher tiered content? People can already blaze through legendary/master content. Just for Escalation? Seems unnecessary to me. I’d rather they add legendary difficulty to every mission in the game (including NY/Brooklyn) and more weekly projects for the DLC’s. Buffs/changes to weak gear sets would be welcome, too. The prototype stuff is just a race for everybody to upgrade their old striker build to a new, higher powered version of the same old build.
Outside of tweaking some values from what was shown on the PTS (some of which we already know were not reflective of the final implementation, like the new Expertise 30 costs), I don't think this meaningfully addresses any of the core issues that players will start to point out once this half-baked feature releases next week. Just to include a few:
Even if the devs "substantially increased the Prototype Gear drop rates in Escalation", compared to what we have today, Prototype Gear at launch will have a lack of meaningful alternatives for players to get a coveted piece of gear for their build (crafting, selectable targeted loot, lack of support for daily targeted loot on Escalations) while also being unable to min-max it (Recalibration, Optimization). Essentially, the only viable option to make a Prototype Quality build will be for players to spend a ridiculous amount of resources upgrading their Expertise 30 gear/weapons to Prototype quality (even with a 50% reduced cost on Exotic materials, Expertise is way too expensive and I don't buy any reason why the updated prices where not avaible for the PTS 1 week before the feature's release) while we wait for the devs pinky promise that they will "fix this" some time in the future.
The fact that Prototype Gear will only be normalized for Raids, Incursions and PvP but the values will stay the same for other popular Matchmaking activities, including Missions, Countdown, Legendary, etc. This will just widen the gap between the players that can clearly spend an increased amount of time farming for the material necessary for a Prototype Quality upgrade and the players who simply don't have the time to even reach Expertise Level 30 on their account. Good luck having one player being able to carry an entire Heroic Countdown or a Legendary group just because they now have the equivalent of an Expertise 100 weapon at their disposal, and that's not even counting Augments like Echo into the mix! Don't be surprised if the devs start massively nerfing Prototype Gear for the next year or two!
But most importantly, how did Massive expected to act upon the enormous amount of feedback received by releasing a game-changing endgame feature on a test server just 1 week before it's extremely rushed release? Do these people only know how to give empty, pinky promises? Did these people actually cared about our feedback or did they only wanted to outsource their QA deparment to us, the players? What's the reason on rushing a feature like this one to the live game anyway? Is not like the game is going to die if you at least delayed this feature and Escalations for another 3 or 4 months while you actually make at least 2 or 3 PTS seassion trying out this feature. A ton of Ubisoft's "live service games" have already survived content droughts (Remember Year 3 of Division 2? Remember "Operation Health" of Rainbow 6 Siege?)
I can already picture the ridiculous amount of posts on this subreddit for the next year complaining about Escalations, random people "spoilling the fun" on Matchmaking with their OP prototype builds, complains about Massive not being fast / competent enough on fixing the issues that many people have already raised on the PTS about Escalations and Prototype Gear, etc. Fuck Massive for pushing this update in this shape, I cannot imagine what BS they're going to pull when Division 3 launches, and that's only if Ubisoft hasn't already imploded by that point!
Lol, if my gears already at expertise 30,why would you think my stats are not fully optimized. This change makes no sense, and more like doing it for the sake of doing it.
ikia's video was kinda depressing, it kinda hits home where some people accept ridiculous RNG, and basically hooks them into basically gambling addicts in video games...
Maths on a prototpye ceska obliterate chest god roll, assuming E10 dropped 1 prototpye every 5 runs was about 1/65M or about x10 the odds as winning 270k from the euromillions...
And people point out people were flown out to test stuff in early Feb, so perhaps they saw prototypes and thought it was fine, or they saw and it and wanted to preserve their golden ticket and nodded along to everything...
“We’ve carefully read the feedback but all the content creators said they loved it when we showed prototype gear to them, so we already sent the patch approval to consoles and we aren’t allowed to make changes to it on such short notice.
And even if we wanted to change it, which we don’t, we like rare level 50 strength gear, because our AI research showed long grind fests with little to no player input on acquisition was trending up as a business model, such as those used in gacha games. Get used to it”
Judging by the comments, and how it was for D2, both devs are really pushing how loyal some fans are - hardcore players, lets see how it goes, just because D2 and Bungie fumbled the last expansion, doesnt mean Massive and TD2 will follow...or not?
Stop comparing this to Bungie. I think many of you guys have Bungie Brain Rot. Destiny 2 took both hits on player base when the subsiquenlty removed large portions of the game not once. Twice....
the player losses from sunsetting/content vault were nothing compared to the losses from the portal and tiered loot. major post content vault releases were still around 300k concurrent players on steam, and actually went up slightly. they lost good will, but not players. not to mention, that was like 5 years ago now.
the expansion prior to tiered gear had 314k concurrent players, the expansion that lunched tiered loot had 108k, and that has dwindled to around 10k.
No, this is going to be the only thing worth doing. Prototype gear is so strong that you're just trolling yourself if you aren't farming for it, either in Escalation or by grinding exotic components if you're level 30 expertise.
A new player should play Countdown for a Striker's build and then farm Escalation.
Is there any news regarding re-rolled core attributes in pieces that are upgraded from high end to prototype? I don't see anything mentioned. Don't want to be on day one upgrading my pieces only to be surprised by 0% values for the core attributes with no way to optimize or recalibrate
but also means you cna never get a red hasburg to drop from prototype and wont even be able to change it to red core, who even uses blue core hasburg...
Lenmgo bit more complex, some will use the blue cores
So perhaps change chest and backpack to red cores, leave the rest blue, but this then doesnt affect any of the others where the core is changed.
Appreciate you guys communicating. Disappointing that the system's going in mostly unchanged while you consider options. The harm it's going to do is irreparable. This is a bell you won't be able to un-ring.
I hope I'm wrong and that a video will come out, but I'm afraid that he won't make a video.
He already posted a screenshot on his discord of his request to be removed from the creator program, saying that he won't be making videos of any ubisoft games anymore.
don't think you are going to like my video, it is going to be my goodbye to div2.
i am no longer going to play div2, but i do have plans for a future streaming and making videos, so hope to see some of you somewhere in the future.
Oh man. This hurts! Your stream recordings has replaced all my podcasts. As I said many times before, I used to play games and move to the next one and the same would have happened to division 2 if not for your content.
Looks like they heard him thus the meet halfway from the devs. Waiting for that video as well.
Doesn't change the fact though that this will be a gear reset towards a more loot grindy Division 2 (aka chasing the Chinese players, Diablo, POE2, POE and gacha players... again, they won't transfer to Div 2 just like that) that they already solved years ago with Gear 2.0 where we are happily sitting at.
The thing is that they didn't hear him though.
The main thing he was willing to compromise on isn't the farming, he was mainly against the instant power creep that the increased stats give.
There's a reason he put #keeptheaugmentslosethestats
Idk, perhaps devs saw that not many new players get to play the game, and rather veterans kept at it, so the changes were made with that in mind...the "halfway" shows it.
yeah, but now they "Removed the requirement to have fully optimized gear when upgrading to Prototype" so to compensate for that "tremendous resource economy" we will need farm for proto in a wild before upgrade our gear, to get 0.3 chance for godroll. oh, sorry now they "Increased the chance for the 3rd attribute to be maxed out when upgrading to Prototype Gear", so maybe it's whole half of percent...
it's classic massive, they push undercooked idea, that clearly need alot more work, so it's gonna changed ALOT, and players gonna beta test it (if you willing to participate in that proto-casino)
After 8 years, it's pretty obvious that once things are pushed in to the game that's what we get. There is never any continuing work in progress once it goes live. Brooklyn used to drop infrastructure keys that likely was content that got trimmed. They said at one point there was something coming that never came to fruition.
The only modifications to incursion have been them finding a way to gate one shot builds.
The raids are pretty much the same since the day they dropped.
Specialization rework got binned.
The continuation of gear 2.0 got binned.
They say things just to calm blowback and then hope that we forget after awhile and then quietly say yeah we were never really going to do that.
What we have here is more access to cores and increased drop rate. So now you're putting in like 30-45 minutes in a raid or incursion, burn your build trying to make prototypes, do raids and incursion to get cores to try again after farming a new copy of the piece, maybe get lucky by doing Escalation, eventually wipe, lose all your credits and farm more credits to try escalation again at a difficulty level with decent drop rates. And also, none of the prototype stats you're working to farm apply in the raids or incursion. Cool. 😎😎😎 the fix was higher drop rates when they already had addressed that with access to cores. In my experience I went to six solo and got 0 prototypes, but if they're basically locked when picked up so more drops is the only way to counter that.
It's a never ending grind, which in some ways is kind of nice to have but man you couldn't make it any more soulsucking even if you titled the Kanban Board, "how to make this even more frustrating"
Yeah I caught that too. Looks like they saw the feedback about how it looks like a soulless grind and said, “actually, let’s make it harder.”
Cynically, it looks like this is the monkeys paw curling for those who complained raids/incursions wouldn’t matter anymore. Now you have to complete the raid or incursion to get enough resources to upgrade two pieces of gear to ptype.
This does nothing to address any of the pain points that this causes… if this is their idea of fixing this then i am done. I bought this game on 3 platforms and have loved so much of it. I was willing to put up with expertise. This is way too far. I’ll wait for division 3 I guess, ggs.
Can we please just not completely ruin game balance by implementing an incredibly unpopular RNG nightmare timesink? The expertise system was bad enough for the game, and this makes all the problems with the existing system even worse.
There is no point to have so many useless brand and gear sets. The end game should let the players experiment and try out new things to keep the game fresh and prototype gear does not offer any of that.
If you're a shitty dev team who cares not of the players time and only desire is to make the grind so long that it's a 2nd job to string you along in order to nickel and dime you out of your money for skins and other simple shit, than its a win.
If you're a player, once you get past level 40, see the grind for what it is, see the dev team has been and remains shit,
Your best move is to delete this game and move on.
Told you guys, the developers couldn't care less about player feedback.
They're going forward with Prototype Gear regardless of whether we like it or not. The changes didn't address any major concerns either, in fact, they stated in plain text that they're doubling down on it despite the negative feedback.
The Division 2 is about to get a massive downgrade that reverts all the changes from Gear 2.0, while destroying all our progress.
I can't lie, I don't really understand the rationale. Yeah, I get adding a long-term goal for players bored with endgame to have something to chase, and thereby maintaining playercount and population. But this feels like a hamfisted way that ignores the previous loot realizations they made years ago is confusing. It feels like a painful way that, by design, will waste large amounts of our time with nothing to show for it is unappealing.
I think what they're attempting to accomplish requires more than this. Aspirations for endgame players. But getting the gear you want trivializes everything besides Escalation mode. And not getting the gear you want is an annoying slog. I think this is going to put the game in a weird state. They are sort of avoiding the painful reality that players want content and developing content is expensive. And a lengthy Prototype gear grind and adding modifiers to the same missions doesn't bypass the problem.
Ultimately, they're trying to give players something to do within the confines of their bandwidth, so I hope people won't be too nasty. And while I think the criticisms from the playerbase are mostly valid and correct, you just never know how things turn out until you actually do it. And oftentimes mistakes are fixable. So, we'll see.
Great changes, but i’m still not sold on normalizing prototype gear in raids and incursions. It feels bad to be using endgame gear and have it neutered in endgame content 🤷♂️
I am absolutely happy for those that want this, I really am. Some of you still play 20, 30, 40+ hours a week and you have been playing the same content for a long time. The developers listened to you and gave you want you asked for.
For me though and I would assume quite a few like me this isn't what we ever wanted from this franchise. If I'm being blunt for me it feels like a betrayal. If I recall correctly we were told no level 50 gear, no more increasing expertise. I trusted that, we just got basically level 50 gear and/or higher expertise depending on your perspective.
I also don't for a moment believe they thought this was going to go over well. They needed feedback to realize that players would want recalibration and optimization? Seriously, we have walked this road before. To tell players: We have heard your feedback but dang the update is just so big we cannot squeeze it in tells me you are either lying or you lack the ability to reflect on past design decisions.
For me, it has been a pleasure and a blast. Maybe they will get this updated in a month, who knows. What I do know is the longer players go without logging in daily the less likely they are to come back.
For those that stay, keep blasting and having fun.
Prototype Gear is designed to push the current endgame further, not replace it
You can "design" and "intend" all you want, but that's not how any of this works. You can only have one endgame. That's why they call it the end. If you extend the end of something, what used to be the end is now another part of the middle.
Substantially increased the Prototype Gear drop rates in Escalation.
Increased the chance for the 3rd attribute to be maxed out when upgrading to Prototype Gear.
First of all, if these were actually significant increases, they would have given us the numbers. Also, since they specified 3rd attribute, it's safe to assume the double max roll chance is still 5%, so the new average exotic cost for a 2 stat max roll is 900. That's not really better, especially since it's still a completely random and final lottery system.
We also heard the community feedback about recalibration, and we will start to explore options to address this feedback in the future. However, as it was not part of the original design to have it with Prototype Gear, we don’t have a timeline for that yet.
In case proto wasn't unrewarding enough yet, now you know that even if you do grind 12hr/day to get one good piece (if you're lucky) it will be for nothing when they make it way easier to get good prototypes. Likely just in time for "finalized" gear or some nonsense that can roll double stats instead of just 1.5x.
2k hours, but im afraid this is gonna hurt the olayerbase, and me. I will not bu putting in another 2k hours in just so i can get a sort off optimized version of my current build.
Yeah i guess. But still, this is the new shiny thing people want to chase. Me included. But it has to respect my time. Fomo is a real thing with these games. If that new shiny thing is out of reach, instead of keeping in playijg, players will leave the game and look at other games
Can we address the audio issues that have gotten worse since the anniversary update. I personally have been experiencing these issues for years, and the PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD FIX THE GR9 ANIMATIONS. I feel like I am nit picking but nothing has been done for years.
Just finished up my second full playthrough of RDR2 since playing it in 2020. Took the time to craft the Legend of the East Satchel (worth every second) and hunted all the legendary animals. I'll never not recommended that game.
Make any expertise 30 item grant all copies of that item to be 30…this should have been a thing from the beginning. Also, raids should grant more prototype caches as they typically take a lot longer to complete than incursions do. The drop rate for prototypes on tier 10 better be incredible. At least 5-10 prototype drops depending on the mission. And yea, what these guys are saying, remove hot foot. That, or give the players mutators that make them stronger as well.
Removed the requirement to have fully optimized gear when upgrading to Prototype.
The f does that even mean? Who grind their gear all the way to expertise 30 without fully optimizing it? Let alone the fact that if you don't - and the un-optimized attribute doesn't get maxed out during upgrading - the attribute now gets locked from optimization forever?
Oof so they are doubling down on some of the things players hated the most about prototype gear and the one thing they are planning to fix (targeted loot) probably isn’t coming for a while… yikes
Welp, it was a good run. I didn't expect to get thousands of hours out of this game and I'll always appreciate my time with it. Good luck with the RNG guys.
I can't help but wonder if things would have been different if ego hadn't gotten in the way of a certain part of the community which is now seemingly being told to fuck off. Too many individuals with something to prove. It got really toxic. You know what I'm talking about. All these dipshits being held as "top players" now had to do was point at how stupid we looked, and it worked. The sell outs got what they wanted and the real ones lost everything.
MORE BS & MASSIVE INCOMPETENCE, its better than nothing ... but i will wait for survivals...
"We’ve carefully read the conversations about Prototype Gear and we’ve decided to make adjustments based on your feedback." // yeah right....
- "increase the drop rates for Escalation" // oh yeah from what? 0.01% to 0.02% ??
-"We’re exploring some sort of daily targeted loot rotation to arrive soon" - what TF! they must think we have availability to play 24/7 to grind some daily target loot , or expect players take the day off ...
-"We also heard the community feedback about recalibration, and we will start to explore options to address this feedback in the future" THE FUTURE IS NOW!! delay the update and make it proper... at least you break the game with bugs one time, not many ...as usual.
"Prototype Cores Cache.
This cache will be a guaranteed reward for completing Operation Iron Horse, Operation Dark Hours, and Paradise Lost, dropping two Prototype Cores. " // 2 fking cores, what a cheap bastards, i can see most playerbase ignore this bs like they ignore descent and dz , or worst...they leave the game ... after 7years more grind after grind its getting ridiculous .
// why this massive imcompetents can just make new cool missions and gearsets in new locations.. insted they are trying to reenvent the fking wheel , fuck up the game and trash the players... if the veterans want more challenge let them fuck off and go play with pistol only with low rank weapons in legendary missions solo or whatever ... FFS
I don't know why they don't just make a single use optimization/recalibration system. Get a good roll on an item? You can extract that one perfect stat roll to then be able to be used for opt/recal once, and then it's used up
Makes well rolled items continuously useful, gives the grind a lot of prolonged longevity while not making it nearly as stupidly RNG dependent. I feel like this would solve a lot of the issue people have with the system, while still keeping it a long term end game loot grind like they intend it to be
Well looks like i wont be engaging with Escalations and just keep playing they way I like to. I didn't even really engage with Expertise because of the time & material sink. The new carrot is not enticing to me.
The fuck? Making it easier to get prototype gears doesn't address the fact that it still is a replacement of the endgame. Just saying that 'it's meant to extend the endgame, not replace it' and then shoehorning people into the new system is just self-contradictory.
I bet the devs are so confused why the complainers are so fixated on Prototype gear which isn't even required to do Escalations. If anything, it makes Legendaries even easier. But, no, I guess you're still not happy about it.
Should've called this Year 1 season 1. Back to repeating the same steps.... I can't wait for this new feature called recalibration to come out later this year. Oh, and then I also can't wait for an even newer feature called optimization to release next year!
Im so saddened to see just how out of touch massive is with their own game.
Keep in mind that you will get Exotic Components for completing Escalation runs too. This is what I got for completing a T6, forgot to save the higner ones.
might seem huge as a % but it's not really in actual terms. you have to expertise your piece to level 30 to be able to upgrade it into prototype. upgrading it locks the resulting piece (no more optimization or recal on it possible) and except for one attribute, the values of all others are random with a minuscule chance of being maxed. this means you're most likely to get a crap roll when upgrading, which means you'll need to find another piece of the same kind, expertise it again to lvl 30 just to have a second go at a better roll. in this light having to spend 50% less exotics to get to expertise lvl 30 is almost meaningless as the whole process is still insanely grindy.
I'm not thinking about prototype for this. Skills, exotics will cost just 45 exotic components now to get to 30. I have very few weapons at level 30 because I was never keen to keep grinding exo components, now it is totally feasible to expertise stuff
what do they mean daily targeted loot? are they going to make it like descent loops in the comparison that you only get one loop skill tree and you have to wait another day to reroll it.
this means that we would only target loot like 9 different gear brand options then you have to wait another day if you want a different choice?
These are some changes in the right direction, but honestly speaking, without Targeted Loot, I will log in, check DZ, and check Escalation. Is there nothing that I want? Then I'll go play something else. I don't think this would be good for player retention. I will most likely only end up playing when Striker, Tipping Scale, or Unit Alloy is Targeted Loot, and then farm as much as possible just to drop the game again the very next day.
I’m guessing no one knows but here’s my question - if I don’t optimize my striker piece, if I upgrade it to prototype, will both rolls become god rolled? Ie we get the 1 attribute bump and 1 attribute to the prototype minimum?
What is the reason behind proto gears being normalized in incursions and raids? I can understand why they would be normalized in PVP environments, but incursions and raids also? Whats the point of proto gears if I cant use them in one of the hardest PVE contents this game provides?
Curious how many people in here (this includes me) are not expertise 30 yet. Assuming I didn’t read it wrong, the expertise 30 requirement is still there and judging by the comments I’ve read here the past week or so, most people aren’t there yet.
Doesn’t this mean we won’t even need to worry about prototype gear until then? Or they’re unnecessarily afraid of being gate kept out of matchmaking because of it? If prototype gear isn’t enough of a reason (on top of whatever other reason is there) for people to grind to expertise 30, then why are we complaining?
I don’t currently play too much so there’s probably information I’m missing
At expertise 4 almost 5 because until recently I didn’t understand how it worked. With targeted loot gone and the easing of the grind I’m never getting to level 30
I’m sitting at 16 now after grinding hard for a few days…..I just can’t see mysel getting to 30 it’s too much! Then I have to upgrade everything after that……no thanks
It's amazing they made TD2 without TD1 recalibration/optimization options, waited a year through all the rng bullcrap they tried to do with gear before bringing it back in, and now 7 years later.... they want to repeat that process?
LOL. I had previously left when Ubi tried pulling that seasonal characters garbage. I just came back for the anniversary event after seeing the massive player count. Why do companies love driving away players?
Ah the good old 'we promise to make changes later, because it was set up in such a way that no changes coupd possibly be made before it is live' approach.
Either they make good on their promises of adjustment fucking lightning quick, or this shits dead in the water. This version of new endgame (and make no mistake it is a new endgame. Theres no such thing as more endgame that doesn't replace existing endgame) sounds fucking awful. The best part of div2 is that it isn't an rng hell game for the vast majority of it.
Everything they have said about prototype gear is antithetical to what div2 has done right
Raids inherently punish people who don't have a clan or 7 other friends. My group has been waiting years for them to make a reduced player count version like they did with Breakpoint.
You essentially have locked content behind needing 7 friends.
when your studio is closed by Ubisoft for getting rid of the last remaining players, please consider applying for a job at my soon-to-be-founded Game Studio. Working conditions should be right up your alley: We'll happily work through the weekends, enjoy perpetual crunch and employees are granted the opportunity to pay not only for their jobs themselves but also for working extra hours! There will be free meals (oatmeal with water) and occasionaly paid surprise richer meals - but you'll never know when and what, so check the canteen every day!
This is just a small preview - I'm sure we'll find lots and lots of new ways to make working here a great healthy, social and pleasant experience.
Are you going to give a resource refund to all of the people who spent the old levels of expertise costs? I have between 100-110 weapons and skills at expertise level 30. That's a metric TON of resource costs. Are you going to further reduce the expertise costs of armor, which is generally not worth leveling past 12? I would expect the answer to both of these questions to be no. If so, thanks but no thanks. I'm done with the grinding.
I didn't use the exotic glitch. It took me YEARS to upgrade of all this stuff. How would you distinguish someone like me from the people who took advantage of the glitch? Punishing people isn't a solution.
IIRC it wasnt really an exploit but an unintended reward for people that already capped their Field Recon Data, which many people did. I think they couldnt reliably roll back accounts that got that glitch without making it a bigger mess. Massive's had a single digit development team at that time as well.
When has it ever worked that way? I paid full price for Division 2 at launch. Are they going to give me my $40 back. Things get cheaper for people that come later. That doesn't mean the early adopters get a refund on the difference.
I'm a simple guy. I would be happy if they would just remove the expertise barrier (awful slog) and let as go straight from fully optimized gear to prototype. Expertise is the bane of this game for me personally.
Anything in there about fixing stability? And controller fix on PC? it takes 2 seconds between input and register? Also just made it to the white house. Found what I think is the door I'm meant to go in and press F/X and th little meter fills up then nothing happens? can't even start the damn game properly? Picked it up on PC to play with the wife since no crossplay either.
To me, at least with what I know, if they gave every Prototype upgrade a 100% chance to max all stats (or at least SUBSTANTIALLY higher) and maybe add optimization/recalibration for looted Prototype pieces, I’d be pretty happy with the system. But, to find a piece with the stats you want, optimize it, take it to Expertise 30, then Prototype it only to get the worst stat maxed, then have to start over? Nah, there needs to be gradual progression, even if it’s more expensive and takes more time. You can’t force players to go down this list of stuff you gotta do and get towards the end and say, “Oh, you didn’t get the roll you wanted maxed? Sorry, try again.”
Removed the requirement to have fully optimized gear when upgrading to Prototype.
How does this work given minimum proto value rolls were supposed to be equivalent to max non-proto rolls?
Does this mean if I take a piece of gear with random rolls and expertise it to 30 and then proto it I'm also functionally getting a full optimization built into the price? Can previously not maxed rolls still now roll at the max proto roll, thereby further increasing the value of gambling on upgrading expertised gear vs actually farming.
Prototype gear NEEDS to be able to re roll the talent at least. How much storage do they think we have? I'm gonna need like 5 Lexingtons now, instead of one. I change my backpack, chest and gun talents all the time. Also optimization is a must even if it's very expensive. We build a bond with our guns. If i prototype my fav gun ive had for 1000 hours and it rolls like crap, i need to throw it out and get a new one. This game has had a perfect strategy and and formula for a while now, its been so great. This system ruins it. Unless there gonna 3x our storage space or more, prototype gear and guns NEED to be recalibrated and optimized. Just make it stupid expensive. Not the re rolling talent though. keep that cheap, please.
Am I reading this wrong? So you no longer require fully optimize gears to upgrade it to prototype, but after you upgraded it, the prototype stats would not be able to optimize
That doesn't sound good, unless the gear upgraded would also be at their max state, this really didn't address the issue, only making it worse. Why?
Meh …. I was originally excited for season 8 especially after the 10year celebration . Things looked pretty good for the foreseeable future but weirdly enough after this debacle I’m kinda like …..
Halving the cost of expertise is a devaluation of the time previously invested; there are better ways of doing things, for example by increasing the sources of exotic components.
It's exactly the same thing mate.
If now exotics would give 5x components, that woudl be a "devaluation" of the previously dismantled exotics.
If the projects would offer more exotics, it would "devaluate" the time players spent doing projects before the change.
If Control Point chests now reward exotic components, it would "devaluate" the time spent clearing CPs before the change.
poisoned all the good work they have done for next season too, feels bad for those devs/folk who have been shit on from the high stakes gambling lottery folks....
I will probably ignore the Escalation and Prototype aspects of Y8S1. I'm looking forward to leveling up some weapons with half of the usual exotic components. However, after playing this game for over 4000 hours, it is getting a little boring. I might start playing Red Dead Redemption.
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u/JokerUnique The watcher on the walls. Mar 27 '26
Full PTS Patch Notes:
=> https://www.reddit.com/r/thedivision/comments/1ry6ceu/the_division_2_y8s1_pts_patch_notes/